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Obit watch: October 14, 2020.

Wednesday, October 14th, 2020

Conchata Ferrell.

Yes, yes, “Two and a Half Men”, but she did a lot of other work too.

Ms. Ferrell had achieved acclaim decades earlier in New York theater, appearing as the prostitute April in Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot L Baltimore” (1973), a role he wrote for her. The play won multiple awards, including an Obie for best Off Broadway play, and ran for three years.
Ms. Ferrell collected her own Off Broadway prizes, including the Drama Desk Award for best actress in a play and an Obie, for her performance as a disillusioned waterfront-bar owner in “The Sea Horse” (1973).
She received her first Emmy nomination in 1992 for a recurring role as Susan Bloom, a ruthless entertainment lawyer with more money than manners, on “L.A. Law.”
She later said the three favorite characters she had played were Berta, April and Susan Bloom. What they had in common, she said in a 2018 interview with The Huntington Quarterly, a West Virginia magazine, was “a zest for living life to the fullest in the best way available to them.”

…

She notably played the judge who refused to annul Ross and Rachel’s Las Vegas marriage on “Friends” (1999). But she often went dramatic too, playing a homesteader’s wife in the 1979 movie “Heartland” and appearing on series including “Knots Landing,” “Lou Grant” and “Touched by an Angel.” In a 1986 television version (and Los Angeles stage version) of William Inge’s heart-wrenching drama “Picnic,” she played the kind widow who hires a dangerous drifter.
Ms. Ferrell also had small roles in big movies, including “Network” (1976), as a television executive appalled by Faye Dunaway’s series ideas, and “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), as a neighborhood lady in pink hair rollers. She starred as a pizzeria owner in “Mystic Pizza” (1988), with a cast that included a young Julia Roberts. The two reunited in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), with Ms. Ferrell as Albert Finney’s secretary.

She never did a “Mannix”, but she did appear on “The Rockford Files” and “Quincy, M.E”, and had a recurring role as “The Fox” on both “B.J. and the Bear” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, along with a bunch of other guest shots.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 196

Monday, October 12th, 2020

I had a late night last night, and I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, so I’m being a little lazy today.

“Magic Highway, USA”, an episode of “Wonderful World of Disney” from 1958.

This episode from 1958 mostly looks back at the history of roads and travel in America, from the time that America was discovered right up through the creation of the super highways in the 1950s. It shows how slow progress was back when pioneers such as Daniel Boone moved west in the 19th century, how the railroad nearly sounded the deathnell of the highway, and how the creation of the automobile and it’s popularity just after the dawn of the 20th century changed things.

Bonus: the reason I had a late night last night was that Andrew and I went to see Greg Gutfeld at the HEB Center in Cedar Park. Spoiler: it was a lot of fun, like a giant tailgate party. But the staff (the HEB Center staff, not Mr. Gutfeld’s staff) were curiously obsessed with “the box”. You had to park squarely in the box. You had to back into the box (even though that put your car facing away from the stage, so you couldn’t sit in the front seats and watch). You could take off your mask if you were in the box, but if you left the box you had to mask up. You couldn’t jump boxes (move up to a closer box if your friends were there). You couldn’t get too close to the box surrounding the stage or they’d chase you back.

But I did get a free book and an autographed coffee pod out of it.

Why do I bring this up? No particular reason…

Posted in History, Movies, Roads | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 12, 2020.

Monday, October 12th, 2020

It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.

Margaret Nolan. She was “Dink” in “Goldfinger” (she was also the model in the title sequence), appeared (uncredited) in “A Hard Day’s Night”, and appeared in various other UK movies and TV shows (including “Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?” and some of the “Carry On” series). She has a small role in Edgar Wright’s upcoming “Last Night in Soho”, and the THR obit reprints some of his tweets.

Tom Kennedy, most famous as a game show host. He doesn’t have many non-game show credits, but he did appear on both “Cannon” and “Hardcastle and McCormick”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 7, 2020.

Wednesday, October 7th, 2020

A lot of folks told me about Eddie Van Halen: I decided to hold the obit until today because, when I looked, the NYT only had their preliminary obit up.

I know a lot of folks who I respect liked Van Halen, but I really don’t have anything to add to what’s out there already.

Thomas Jefferson Byrd. He was in several Spike Lee films, and also did some theater:

Mr. Byrd was a regular on Off Broadway and regional stages, appearing frequently in August Wilson plays, among them “The Piano Lesson” at San Jose Repertory Theater in California in 2001, “Seven Guitars” with the St. Louis Black Repertory Company in 2002 and “Gem of the Ocean” at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky in 2006.
He was a late addition to the Broadway cast of Mr. Wilson’s “Ma Rainey,” taking over the role of Toledo, the reflective, philosophizing piano player in the title character’s band. The cast was headed by Whoopi Goldberg in the title role and Charles S. Dutton as the trumpeter Levee. Though the production, which ran for 68 performances, drew mixed reviews, Mr. Byrd and the actors playing two other musicians, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Carl Gordon, drew widespread praise. Mr. Byrd was nominated for the Tony for best featured actor in a play.

Murray Newman posted a very nice obit a few days ago for Harris County legal figure Mike Hinton, which I encourage folks to go read. Mr. Hinton sounds like an amazing gentleman who I would have enjoyed knowing.

Seasonally appropriate note: Mr. Hinton prosecuted Ronald Clark O’Bryan.

Posted in HCDA, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

The Greatest Cellar on Earth.

Thursday, October 1st, 2020

Well, not really. But this is a surprisingly non-annoying NYT article from a few days ago about “dusty hunters”: people who search for unopened bottles of vintage liquor.

The most well-known dusty hunter today might be Eric Witz, 42, a senior production editor at the MIT Press, who posts his scores on Instagram at @aphonik, often with detailed analysis of the origins of each bottle. A lover of antiques and enthusiast of cocktail history, he began dusty hunting around 2010 with the purchase of a 1940s bottle of Forbidden Fruit, a strange grapefruit-and-honey liqueur which has not been on the market for decades. Mr. Witz collects not just whiskey, the obsession of most current dusty hunters, but vintage rum, brandy and Chartreuse, all of which are soaring in value at the moment.
“I love the idea of being able to taste something that was made a few generations ago,” he said. Spirits have a higher alcohol proof than wine, so they don’t really age in the bottle or go bad; in that way, they are like drinkable time capsules. In fact, most all dusty hunters believe vintage spirits are superior in taste to what is being made today, even if they can’t quite explain why. Maybe better quality materials and more artisanal production methods were being used back then, maybe international beverage conglomerates weren’t yet mucking up quality, or maybe something magical is happening in the glass over all these years.

Tying the article together is a guy who bought the contents of Cecil B. DeMille’s cellar.

There were 10 bottles of Old Overholt Rye barreled in 1936, five bottles of 1930s Belmont Bottled in Bond, bottles of Kentucky Tavern, J.W. Dant and Old Taylor bourbons, some 1930s Jameson Irish whiskey, Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin champagne from 1929, and a near-flawless case of extremely rare Green River Straight Bourbon Whiskey from 1936.

…

DeMille’s longtime neighbor in Little Tujunga Canyon was Jean-Baptiste “J.B.” Leonis, a banker and liquor importer who founded the city of Vernon. Sensing that Prohibition was on the horizon, in the early 1920s he began to stash booze in a 10-bolt bank vault behind a trick bookcase. In 2017, upon the death of Leonis’ grandson, Leonis C. Malburg, the collection was finally unearthed, featuring numerous pint bottles of Old Crow distilled in 1912, Hermitage Bottled in Bond whiskey distilled in 1914, and rye bottled specifically for the iconic Biltmore Hotel. Staff members at Christie’s Auction House were stunned when it sold at auction for $640,000 in 2018.

Posted in History, Mixology, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 30, 2020.

Wednesday, September 30th, 2020

Bad day for music.

Helen Reddy.

Ms. Reddy’s first hit was a 1971 cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a hit from the award-winning stage show “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The success of “I Am Woman,” with Ms. Reddy’s lyrics and Ray Burton’s music, came a year later.
Ms. Reddy was a frequent guest in the early ’70s on variety, music and talk shows like “The Mike Douglas Show,” “The Carol Burnett Show,” “The David Frost Show,” “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.” “The Helen Reddy Show” (1973) was an eight-episode summer replacement series on NBC.
She made her big-screen debut in the disaster movie “Airport 1975” (released in 1974) as a guitar-playing nun who comforts a sick little girl (Linda Blair) on an almost certainly doomed 747. Ms. Reddy always liked to point out that Gloria Swanson and Myrna Loy were also in the cast.

,,,

Ms. Reddy’s Broadway career consisted of replacing the lead in “Blood Brothers,” a musical set in Liverpool, for a few months in 1995. But she had a busy stage career elsewhere, starring in productions of “Anything Goes,” “Call Me Madam” and “Shirley Valentine” in England and in the United States, from Provincetown to Sacramento.

Mac Davis, good Lubbock boy.

Mr. Davis enjoyed early success as a songwriter in the late 1960s, supplying Presley with Top 10 pop hits like “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy” after spending much of the decade working in sales and publishing for independent record companies.
He also wrote “Something’s Burning,” a Top 20 pop single in 1970 for Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, and “I Believe in Music,” which was recorded by the Detroit pop group Gallery, reaching the Top 40 in 1972.
“I Believe in Music” was recorded by scores of artists and became Mr. Davis’s signature song; he closed his concerts with it for decades. “Watching Scotty Grow,” another of his best-known compositions, stalled just outside the pop Top 10 for Bobby Goldsboro in 1971.

…

Genial, photogenic and fit, Mr. Davis had his own television variety hour, “The Mac Davis Show,” from 1974 to 1976 on NBC and was a regular guest on “The Tonight Show” and other talk shows in those years. He made his acting debut in the 1979 movie “North Dallas Forty,” a comedy that starred Nick Nolte as an aging football star and Mr. Davis as a calculating quarterback.
More recently, after years of inactivity on the charts, Mr. Davis enjoyed a revival as a songwriter, collaborating with latter-day pop artists like Avicii, the Swedish D.J. with whom he wrote the 2014 global pop hit “Addicted to You.” (Avicii died at 28 in 2018.)
He also wrote “Young Girls” with the pop star Bruno Mars; a version released by Mr. Mars in 2012 was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Mr. Davis’s other projects over the last few years included collaborations with the country star Keith Urban and the singer Rivers Cuomo of the band Weezer.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: September 28, 2020.

Monday, September 28th, 2020

A quick round-up of obits I’ve been meaning to make note of over the past few days.

Michael Lonsdale, actor. He was “Hugo Drax” in “Moonraker”, but he did a whole bunch of other work. Some of it was in “avant-garde” films, but he also played “Lebel” in the original “Day of the Jackel”, “Jean-Pierre” in “Ronin”, and a long list of other work “with a Who’s Who of directors, including Mr. Spielberg, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and James Ivory”.

Pierre Troisgros, famous French chef.

The Troisgros brothers eventually took charge of their parent’s restaurant and transformed it into a gastronomic destination, at the cutting edge of the culinary revolution known as la nouvelle cuisine. That style was influenced by the austere finesse of Japanese cooking and known, at its extreme, for tiny portions on huge white plates, a caricature in which the Troisgros brothers never indulged.
Their contribution was to showcase the innate flavors of seasonal ingredients, and to pare down some of the overblown creations buried in thick sauces that had come to represent French haute-cuisine.
It earned them Michelin stars and top ratings from other guides. And it put the restaurant high on the list for tourists starting in the 1970s, many of whom, like safari-goers ticking off the “big five,” went to France mainly to experience its top restaurants, collecting souvenir menus along the way.

…

The restaurant’s most famous dish was salmon with sorrel sauce (saumon à l’oseille). In the Troisgros kitchen the sauce was not thickened with starch but depended on well-reduced sauce ingredients and a touch of cream. Mr. Boulud pointed out that the dish was cooked in a nonstick pan, noting that Mr. Troisgros was among the first chefs to use one.
Alain Ducasse, the chef and restaurateur who is part of a generation that followed in the footsteps of Mr. Troisgros, Mr. Bocuse and others, said in a statement that the Troisgros brothers had developed the basis for nouvelle cuisine, but that their food was never austere or posed.

Robert Gore, inventor of Gore-Tex.

Mr. Gore’s billion-dollar invention was born out of failure and frustration. In 1969, as head of research and development for W.L. Gore & Associates, the manufacturing company founded by his parents, he was tasked with creating an inexpensive form of plumber’s tape for a client. The tape was made from polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, known commonly by the brand name Teflon.
Mr. Gore sought to make more efficient use of the material by stretching it, not unlike Silly Putty. But each time he heated and stretched a rod of PTFE in his lab, it broke in two.
“Everything I seemed to do worked worse than what we were already doing,” he told the Science History Institute in a short film. “So I decided to give one of these rods a huge stretch, fast — a jerk. I gave it a huge jerk and it stretched 1,000 percent. I was stunned.”

…

Mr. Gore became president and chief executive of W.L. Gore & Associates in 1976 and pursued new applications for his invention. He would stand in a rainstorm to check garments and footwear for waterproofness, and he filled his home with prototypes. He called the company’s 800 numbers to make sure the customer service was up to par.
“Bob was the guy who made things happen,” Bret Snyder, the chairman of W.L. Gore & Associates and Mr. Gore’s nephew, said in a phone interview. “He had a passion not just for the theoretical, but how the products worked in customers’ hands.”

Posted in Food, Geek, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2020.

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020

Gale Sayers, one of the great NFL players.

A consensus all-American at the University of Kansas — where he was called “the Kansas Comet” — Sayers chose to play for the Bears of the established N.F.L. over the Kansas City Chiefs of the upstart American Football League in 1965. He went on to have one of the greatest rookie seasons ever.
He led the league in all-purpose yards (rushing, receiving and runbacks) with 2,272 yards, scored 22 touchdowns, six of them in one game, and was named to the all-league team for the first of five consecutive years.

He was injured in 1968, went through knee surgery, and came back in 1969.

But 1969 became a somber season. For two years the Bears had matched players by position when they shared hotel rooms on the road. Sayers, who was Black, was paired with his backup, Brian Piccolo, who was white — apparently the first time a Black and white player had shared a hotel room for an N.F.L. team. The two men bonded, partly through racial jokes.
But in November that year Piccolo was found to have embryonic cell carcinoma of the lungs. Sent to the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he underwent surgery to remove a malignant tumor, but doctors found that the disease had spread to other organs.
The following May, Sayers was given the George S. Halas Award for the Most Courageous Player. In his acceptance speech, he said: “I love Brian Piccolo. I might have received this award tonight, but tomorrow I will take it to Brian Piccolo at Sloan Kettering. When you hit your knees tonight, please pray for Brian Piccolo.”
Piccolo died on June 16, 1970, at 26. Sayers was a pallbearer at his funeral.

…

An injury to his left knee held Sayers to only two games in both 1970 and 1971. After fumbling twice in three carries in an exhibition game in 1972, he retired. He had scored 39 touchdowns in only 68 pro games and compiled a career average of 5.0 yards per carry.
In 1977, Sayers was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at 34; he remains the youngest person to receive the honor. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame the same year.

Tommy DeVito, one of the original members of the Four Seasons. Interesting fact:

The actor Joe Pesci, a friend since childhood (whose character in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” is named for Mr. DeVito), had lived with Mr. DeVito for a time before he was famous, and once Mr. Pesci broke through, he repaid the favor, helping Mr. DeVito out and getting him bit parts in movies, including “Casino” (1995), also directed by Mr. Scorsese.

Ron Cobb, noted production designer and artist for SF films.

He created some creatures that appeared in the cantina scene of “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” in 1977. He was also asked to help with spaceship illustrations for a movie pitch that would eventually become the 1979 blockbuster “Alien,” starring Sigourney Weaver.
Mr. Cobb’s work has appeared in several movies that have become classics of science fiction and fantasy. He designed scenes and costumes for the 1982 movie “Conan the Barbarian.” And he was a consultant for “Back to the Future” in 1985, helping to design the famous DeLorean time machine that transported Marty McFly, the character played by Michael J. Fox, back and forth through time.

…

“He was passionate about making the science correct,” Ms. Love said. “He wanted accurate science, and he wanted great design.”
Mr. Bissell said Mr. Cobb devoured knowledge wherever he could find it and shared books on subjects including philosophy, technology and evolution. “Here’s a guy who actually just never cared about money,” Mr. Bissell said. “He always just cared about his work.”

Posted in Movies, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 21, 2020.

Monday, September 21st, 2020

There were some obits that got kind of buried in the shuffle of events over the weekend. Here’s a round-up:

Winston Groom, noted author. He is perhaps most famous for Forrest Gump, but he did a lot of other work:

“‘Forrest Gump’ is not the only reason to celebrate him as a great writer,” P.J. O’Rourke, the political satirist and journalist who knew Mr. Groom for decades, wrote in an email.
In Mr. O’Rourke’s view, Mr. Groom’s debut novel, “Better Times Than These” (1978), “was the best novel written about the Vietnam War.”
“And this is not even to mention Winston’s extraordinary historical and nonfiction works,” he added.
Those books include the Pulitzer Prize finalist (for general nonfiction), “Conversations With the Enemy” (1983), an account of a Vietnam-era prisoner of war written with Duncan Spencer; “Shrouds of Glory” (1995), about the Civil War; and “Patriotic Fire” (2006), about the Battle of New Orleans.
At his death, Mr. Groom was awaiting the publication of “The Patriots,” a combined biography of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; it is to be published in November by National Geographic.

I have not seen, and have no interest in seeing, “Forrest Gump”. However, I recall reading some years back that the book is much more vicious and satirical than the movie, and that Mr. Groom somewhat resented how the movie watered down his work. I might have to seek out some of his non-fiction, especially if P.J. O’Rourke endorses it.

Anne Stevenson, poet. She was also famous, perhaps more so, as the author of a biography of Sylvia Plath.

Ms. Plath committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, and many of her admirers blamed her husband, Mr. Hughes, who was having an affair with a woman named Assia Wevill (who herself would commit suicide in 1969). But Ms. Stevenson’s book painted a different picture, portraying Ms. Plath as “a wall of unrelenting rage” prone to outrageous behavior, while depicting Mr. Hughes as generous and caring.
The book was written with the cooperation of Ms. Plath’s literary estate, which was controlled by Mr. Hughes and his sister, Olwyn Hughes. Ms. Stevenson wrote in the preface that she “received a great deal of help from Olwyn Hughes,” so much so that “Ms. Hughes’s contributions to the text have made it almost a work of dual authorship.”
That did not give “Bitter Fame” much credibility in some critics’ eyes. The poet Robert Pinsky, reviewing it in The New York Times, called out a bias in the presentation.
“Since Ms. Stevenson’s book is, as it had to be, largely about a marriage, the tilting of viewpoint toward one side is a difficult problem for the biographer,” he wrote. “Marriages are complex and mysterious stories, each with a minimum of two sides. Writing about a marriage demands tact, respect for the unknowable and more acknowledgment of a limited viewpoint than I think Ms. Stevenson provides.”
In the British newspaper The Independent, Ronald Hayman was even harsher, calling “Bitter Fame” a “vindictive book” that sought not only to blame Ms. Plath for the failed marriage but also “to undermine her poetic achievement by representing her verse as negative, sick, death-oriented, and comparing it unfavorably with his.”

Great and good FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Long Cat (aka Nobiko) the subject of Internet memes.

Posted in Books, Mammals, Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 10, 2020.

Thursday, September 10th, 2020

It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.

But that doesn’t matter, because Diana Rigg would have gotten one no matter what. THR. Variety. BBC.

Rigg was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1959-64, touring Europe and the U.S. as Cordelia in a RSC production of “King Lear” (she revisited the play in 1983, when she was Regan to Laurence Olivier’s Lear); she was also Viola in a 1966 RSC staging of “Twelfth Night.”
Rigg appeared on Broadway three times, starring in “Abelard and Heloise” in 1971 (her nude scene in the play and critic John Simon’s tart assessment of her body generated publicity); a revival of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope” in 1975; and a staging of “Medea” in 1994 — drawing a Tony nomination each time for best actress in a play and winning for “Medea.”

…

She continued working in theater well into her 70s, starring in “The Cherry Orchard” in 2008 and “Hay Fever” in 2009, both at the Chichester Festival Theater. One of her final stage roles was as Mrs. Higgins, the protagonist’s imperious but sensible mother, in a 2011 production of “Pygmalion” at the Garrick Theater in London. Thirty-seven years before, at what was then the Albery Theater, a few streets away, she had been the play’s ingénue, Eliza Doolittle. (She played Mrs. Higgins again in the 2018 Lincoln Center Theater revival of “My Fair Lady.”)

…

As the third of four female sidekicks to Patrick Macnee’s dapper John Steed on ITV’s The Avengers, Rigg’s Peel became an icon in England and the U.S. The show centered on the duo — Steed with a bowler hat and umbrella, Peel in cutting-edge mod fashions — working as partners for a secret British intelligence agency in an over-the-top, sometimes surrealist England.
“She was ahead of her time,” Rigg said at a 50-year anniversary tribute to her character hosted by the British Film Institute. “Quite by accident she became this avant-garde woman, and dear God, was I lucky to get the chance to play this woman. For years afterward, people came up to me and said, ‘You were my heroine’ — not me, Emma — ‘and encouraged me to do this and that.’ Without overembellishing her influence, I do think she was a very, very potent influence in women claiming their place in this world.”

…

The actress also starred with George C. Scott in the Arthur Hiller-directed, Paddy Chayefsky-penned satire “The Hospital” (1971); the classic Vincent Price horror film “Theatre of Blood” (1973); the 1982 Agatha Christie adaptation “Evil Under the Sun,” in which she played the despised and thus dispatched Arlena Marshall; and most recently 2006’s “The Painted Veil,” in which she played the Mother Superior.
Other film credits include “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1968), “The Assassination Bureau” (1969), “Julius Caesar,” starring Charlton Heston (1970), “A Little Night Music,” with Elizabeth Taylor (1977), “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981), “Snow White,” as the Evil Queen (1987), Bruce Beresford’s “A Good Man in Africa,” starring Sean Connery (1994), “Parting Shots” (1998) and “Heidi.”

What a life.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 158

Friday, September 4th, 2020

Another dose of random for today.

How could I not post this?

“The Poisonous History of Tomatoes”.

(Obligatory.)

Bonus, slightly longer, video, which you would not see on television today. Or any time after about 1965, I’d guess.

A 1950s episode of “Bold Journey” featuring the editor of True magazine, Douglas Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy goes to Africa…to hunt rhino.

This is within a few years of Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter: that was published in 1953, so I think (but can’t confirm) that Ruark’s safari was 1951 or 1952. According to the YouTube notes, this aired in the third season of “Bold Journey” which ran from 1956-1959.

Bonus #2: as a hattip to ASM826, I thought I’d post this one: “YOJIMBO & A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS – How The Western Was Changed Forever”.

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, History, Movies, Ruark | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 29, 2020.

Saturday, August 29th, 2020

Chadwick Boseman. Variety. THR.

This is one of those cases where I don’t have much to say: his death at 43 is shocking and is being covered pretty much everywhere by everybody, and I really have nothing to add.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 20, 2020.

Thursday, August 20th, 2020

Ben Cross. He was “Harold Abrahams”, one of the two runners in “Chariots of Fire”. He also had a part in the 2009 movie reboot of a second-rate SF TV series from the late 1960s.

Mary Hartline. My mother actually mentioned this to me the other day. She was one of the very early TV stars:

“Super Circus,” a live Sunday afternoon series on ABC, began in early 1949, when the television industry was still laying its coaxial cables. Ms. Hartline was a striking presence with her long, wavy hair, her majorette-style costumes — including her signature uniform, with musical notes on the thigh-high hemline — and white tasseled boots.
Between the show’s death-defying circus acts, she conducted the band’s lively musical numbers, performed comedy sketches with the clowns, guided young audience members through contest segments and delivered live commercials. (Everybody did it. The future newsman Mike Wallace, also a cast member, pushed peanut butter.)
Ms. Hartline, often called television’s first sex symbol (a lot of fathers, it seems, were watching, alongside their offspring), was a master of promotion. In addition to having her face on Kellogg’s cereal boxes, representing Canada Dry beverages and demonstrating the joys of the newest Dixie Cup dispenser, she had her own merchandise line.
Those three dozen products included the Mary Hartline doll (“all hard plastic with socket head, jointed arms and legs, sleep eyes, blond wig,” according to a recent auction-lot description), which can still bring hundreds of dollars at auction.

Dr. Jay Galst. Interesting sounding guy: he was professionally an ophthalmologist. But he grew up with a dad who brought bags of coins home from the grocery store for him to sift through (pulling out the rare ones), and he continued pursuing numismatics into his adulthood and professional career.

He specialized in coins and coin adjacent objects (“…tokens, medals and similar artifacts”) that were in some way related to eyes, and co-wrote a book on the subject with Peter van Alfen.

The volume, “Ophthalmologia, Optica et Visio in Nummis,” which translates as Ophthalmology, Optics and Vision in Numismatics, was 574 pages and had some 1,700 entries.

He also specialized in coins from ancient Judea.

“The last time we were together, back in pre-pandemic February, we were in the A.N.S.’s vault looking through trays and trays of 17th-century British farthing and halfpenny tokens,” Dr. van Alfen said by email, “trying to find an example produced by a London optician who also produced a different token he had just purchased in order to compare the two. I knew very little about 17th-century British tokens before that morning. In the hour it took to find the token, I received a crash course. His pure joy in such numismatic arcana was always irresistible.”

Marvin Creamer, who sounds like another interesting guy, and died at 104. He:

…taught geography for many years at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J.
His expertise helped him become a history-making mariner, the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments. His 30,000-mile odyssey, in a 36-foot cutter with a small crew, made headlines worldwide on its completion in 1984.

…

It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.
But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch. He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.
Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.

…

…when the 66-year-old Professor Creamer set sail from Cape May, N.J., in his cutter, the Globe Star, in late 1982, he was widely considered unhinged: No mariner in recorded history had traversed the globe without at least a compass, used by sailors since the 12th century if not before, or a sextant, introduced in the 18th.
His 513-day journey would entail nearly a year on the sea, plus time in ports for repairs and reprovisioning. It would take the Globe Star to Capetown, South Africa; Hobart and Sydney, Australia; Whangara, New Zealand; and the Falkland Islands off Argentina before its triumphant return to Cape May on May 17, 1984 — an event that Professor Creamer gleefully described as “one small step back for mankind.”

Posted in Boats, Coins, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 138

Saturday, August 15th, 2020

I thought perhaps I could do something on the lighter, cheerier side for Saturday.

The late John Hillerman tells the funniest joke he’d ever heard. As an admirer of Churchill myself, I approve of this joke, even though I have heard it before. Really, Hillerman’s delivery makes up for it being oft cited.

I don’t want to post a bunch of these, but just one more that I couldn’t pass up. Because: Shatner.

(“There’s no rule that says a mule horse can’t play football baseball!” My DuckDuckGo-fu may be weak, but I looked through the 2019 MLB rulebook, and I actually do not see any requirement that players be human. I guess as long as your horse isn’t on baseball’s permanently ineligible list…)

(“Bojack Horseman, call the commissioner, please.”)

Anyway, I actually had not heard that one. And it gives me a nice transition into this video, which I thought I’d post since Eddie Gaedel was mentioned earlier in the week:

One thing that’s been popping up in my recommendations recently is “STEP promotion” videos. Now, we’ve already established that I never served, and there’s probably a few (okay, more than a few) people who think I place an awful lot of emphasis on military stuff, military history, and military leadership for someone who didn’t serve.

There may be some truth to that. But the STEP videos reinforce something that’s important to me where I am now, and where I hope to be in the future: immediate public praise and reward for exceptional performance.

And finally, someone commented earlier this week: “Veronica Lake always gets the thumbs-up seal of approval.” I usually don’t like linking fiction or movie clips here, unless I’m using them to illustrate a throwaway joke or a larger point.

I’m making an exception in this case to give you something even better than Veronica Lake: Veronica Lake, wet.

Posted in History, Leadership, Movies, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 13, 2020.

Thursday, August 13th, 2020

Sumner Redstone, media mogul.

Beginning with a modest chain of drive-in movie theaters, Mr. Redstone negotiated, sued and otherwise fought to amass holdings that over time included CBS, the Paramount film and television studios, the publisher Simon & Schuster, the video retail giant Blockbuster and a host of cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. At their peak, the businesses were worth more than $80 billion.
Toward the end of his life, he controlled about 80 percent of the voting stock in Viacom and CBS, presiding over both through National Amusements. And almost to the end, his grip was tight and his enthusiasm undiminished.

I’d heard of the man, in the context of his recent legal struggles, but this was something I did not know:

It was in 1979 that Mr. Redstone almost died in a fire at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, started by a disgruntled former hotel employee late at night, when most guests, including Mr. Redstone, were asleep.
“I was enveloped in flames,” he wrote. “The fire shot up my legs. The pain was searing.” He staggered to the window and hung from a ledge on an upper floor until firefighters rescued him. He suffered third-degree burns over 45 percent of his body, and it took five operations over several months to restore him to health.

He was 97.

Kurt Luedtke. He was a journalist with the Detroit Free Press:

At The Free Press, Mr. Luedtke became the first writer of Action Line, a column that cut through red tape and helped solve readers’ problems. It ran on the front page for 14 years and was copied throughout the newspaper industry.
By 1967, he had been named assistant city editor. That summer, Detroit exploded in one of the most destructive periods of civil unrest in the nation’s history. Five days of violence, fueled by deep frustration with racism, unemployment and police brutality, left 43 people dead, most of them African-American. More than 1,300 buildings were burned, and the National Guard and Army were called in.
Mr. Luedtke joined his reporters on the streets, dodging bullets and bayonets. After the riots, he assembled notes from other reporters, who had conducted more than 300 interviews, and wrote a hard-hitting article that concluded that few of the 43 who died had been rioters and that their deaths had mostly been avoidable. The article was part of a Free Press package that won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.
He also wrote about how, during the rioting, the police had stormed the Algiers Hotel and killed three young Black men who were staying there. That infamous episode became the subject of a book, “The Algiers Motel Incident” (1968), by John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima” (1946), and of a critically acclaimed movie, “Detroit” (2017), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

He left the newspaper and went into screenwriting. His first produced screenplay was “Absence of Malice”, which you may remember for Wilford Brimley’s short but significant appearance. He was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, but lost to “Chariots of Fire”. He did win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “Out Of Africa”.

At the movie’s Detroit premiere, he was interviewed by an old friend, Mort Crim, a local television anchor. In an online tribute on Monday, Mr. Crim recalled their conversation:
“He said, ‘Crim, you and I both went to journalism school; I ended up kissing Meryl Streep, and you end up interviewing me. Where did you go wrong?’”

Bill Yeoman, noted University of Houston football coach.

Yeoman was the man responsible for turning the University of Houston football program from relative obscurity into national prominence in two-and-a-half decades. He guided the Cougars to four Southwest Conference championships and 11 bowl games, posting a 6-4-1 mark in postseason competition.
Off the field, Yeoman played a key role early in the integration of college athletics with the signing of running back Warren McVea in 1964 as the Cougars’ first African-American Football student-athlete.
The Cougars had 17 winning seasons under Yeoman, including nine campaigns with at least eight victories. UH finished nationally ranked 11 times, concluding the 1976 season with its highest national ranking at No. 4 by both the Associated Press and United Press International.

Posted in Media, Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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