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Register recordings, not guns!

Friday, May 15th, 2026

It would be impossible for me to care any less than I already do not care about Taylor Swift.

I’m not a big Beyoncé fan, either, though my opinion of her isn’t quite at the Swift level.

With that out of the way, some random thoughts about the other 23 new inductees to the National Recording Registry:

  • Weezer? Aren’t they one of those one-hit wonder college whimsy bands?
  • Nice to see Spike Jones and His City Slickers getting some love.
  • The guys get shirts!
  • I have never heard Brother Ray’s “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” but I have heard good things about it. Maybe I should purchase that.
  • I should also grab the “Chicago” original cast album, if I can find it. For those not familiar with “Chicago” or Broadway, the original cast included Gwen Verdon, Chita Rivera, and Jerry Orbach. And I like “Chicago”.
  • I loved “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” when I was a child. I still do: I think it would still go in my personal top ten songs list.
  • When I was younger, I thought Stevie Ray Vaughan was overrated. My opinion has softened some in the past few years, and I think “Texas Flood” isn’t a bad choice.
  • ““Doom” soundtrack by Bobby Prince, composer”. In case you were unclear (as I was), yes, this is the soundtrack for the video game.

Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 15, 2026.

Friday, May 15th, 2026

Joe Sedelmaier, commercial director.

Among his works:

And this one:

And this one:

I can’t embed it, but here’s a link to his Southern Airways “Steerage” commercial. For some reason, that commercial reminds me of…every Southwest flight I’ve been on.

Claudine Longet, actress and singer.

The enchanting, doe-eyed Longet recorded albums of breathy pop for A&M Records before she sang the Henry Mancini-Don Black song “Nothing to Lose” in Blake Edwards’ The Party (1968), in which she portrayed an aspiring actress alongside Peter Sellers.

I’ve heard this is actually a pretty good movie, but have never seen it.

A onetime Las Vegas showgirl, Longet had married “Moon River” crooner [Andy] Williams in December 1961 and appeared on his long-running NBC variety show and Christmas specials, often with their three children.

After she and Williams divorced (amicably), she took up with a skier named Vladimir “Spider” Sabich.

… Longet and the kids were living with the California-born Sabich at his chalet in Starwood, Colorado, when she shot him on March 21, 1976, in his bathroom with a .22-caliber German‐made gun that had been purchased by his father. She claimed the gun accidentally discharged as he was showing her how it worked.

He died on the way to the hospital. She was criminally charged, but local law enforcement completely botched the case. She ended up being convicted of “criminally negligent homicide”.

She was given two years’ probation, fined $250 and sentenced to 30 days in jail (she was able to serve most of her sentence on weekends).
The Sabich family later filed a civil suit against Longet for $1.3 million, but the case was settled out of court. Longet agreed not to speak publicly about Sabich or the murder and to never publish a book about her life and the trial, and her career as a singer and actress was done.

@jack.hutton

The Claudine Longet Ski Invitational 1976 SNL A classic. #SNL #classic #1976 —

♬ original sound – Jack Hutton

Edited to add: I know the NYT is watching this space. Because as soon as I put up my own obit for someone, the NYT puts up theirs. Guys, let’s not fight. I’d be willing to entertain a job offer, though I would insist on working remotely.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: April 30, 2026.

Thursday, April 30th, 2026

David Allan Coe, the man who wrote what should be our national anthem.

The first of those recordings, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” a droll sendup of honky-tonk clichés written by the folk singers Steve Goodman and John Prine, reached the country Top 10 in 1975.

…

Mr. Coe wrote or helped write most of his material, but had his greatest success with songs he wrote for others, notably Tanya Tucker’s “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” (1973) and Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” (1977). Both records were No. 1 country singles, and “Take This Job and Shove It” inspired a 1981 movie in which Mr. Coe had a minor role. He also wrote for the punk rock band Dead Kennedys and Johnny Cash.

…

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr. Coe released two albums — “Nothing Sacred” and “Underground Album” — that were later reissued as a compilation called “18 X-Rated Hits.” In 2000, the music writer Neil Strauss of The New York Times described the material as “among the most racist, misogynist, homophobic and obscene songs recorded by a popular songwriter.”
For years, Mr. Coe distanced himself from those songs. “Anyone that would look at me and say I was a racist would have to be out of their mind,” he insisted in a 2004 interview with the site Swampland.

J. Craig Venter, the guy who decoded the human genome.

In the 1990s, Dr. Venter, a risk-taker and intense competitor, made a bold move when he decided that the Human Genome Project, a $3 billion government program for decoding the human genome, was moving slowly enough that he could enter the race late and beat it with a much faster method.
His gamble paid off. In 2000, his company, Celera, made a joint announcement with a rival group saying that they had assembled the first human genomes, a landmark step toward uncovering the genetic basis of human disease and origins.

Posted in Music, Obits, Science | No Comments »

Obit watch: April 10, 2026.

Friday, April 10th, 2026

Afrika Bambaataa, early rap/hip-hop guy. (Edited to add: NYT (archived). This wasn’t working for me earlier today.)

(I actually asked ChatGPT to explain the difference between rap and hip-hop to me last night. I don’t trust the results.)

By way of Lawrence: Thomas Tessier, horror writer.

Jim Whittaker. He was the first American to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

On May 1, 1963, a decade after Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest, and at a time when fewer than 10 people were known to have matched that feat, Mr. Whittaker set out into a storm with his climbing partner, Nawang Gombu, a Sherpa guide.
The conditions on the South Col of Everest were less than ideal for a summit push, but Mr. Whittaker did not hesitate.
“You always start up,” he told The Seattle Times in 2013. “Because you can always turn around.”
Mr. Whittaker became the first American to top Everest at about 1 p.m. local time on May 1. He and Mr. Gombu were the 10th and 11th climbers known to have gotten there and part of the only expedition to reach the summit that season.

Posted in Music, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch: March 10, 2026.

Tuesday, March 10th, 2026

Bo Gritz.

Mr. Gritz served four tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret, during which he led a roving contingent of mostly Cambodian guerrillas deep behind enemy lines. He received more than 60 medals and commendations for his service.
But former comrades and journalists later raised questions about his record. In some cases, they said, his awards had come at his own recommendation.
In Mr. Gritz’s telling, he retired from the U.S. Army in 1978 at the request of a Pentagon intelligence official, who wanted him to develop a clandestine program to locate U.S. prisoners of war still alive in Southeast Asia. (It is unclear whether such a request was ever made.)
Just five years before, North Vietnam had released its remaining 591 American prisoners. But it became a matter of truth to some veterans, including Mr. Gritz, that hundreds had been left behind, primarily in Laos.
In 1981, Mr. Gritz put out a call for Special Forces veterans for a private rescue mission. They trained at a cheerleading camp in Central Florida. For guidance, he hired a psychic. Unsurprisingly, the plan fell apart after the volunteers soured on it.
A year later, thanks to money from the actors Clint Eastwood and William Shatner, Mr. Gritz and a small band of American civilians crossed from Thailand into Laos with a team of Lao guerrillas. A few days in, Laotian government forces attacked, killing two guerrillas and capturing an American.
Mr. Gritz returned to Thailand, paid a ransom to free the man and turned himself in to the Thai authorities. He and his accomplices were convicted of a long list of crimes, but were let go on the promise that they would not return.

He went on to become a survivalist, a presidential candidate on the Populist Party ticket, and “one of the best-known figures on the radical right”. He negotiated Randy Weaver’s surrender.

Alexander Butterfield. He was the guy who revealed to Congress Nixon’s secret taping system.

Mr. Butterfield had been in charge of White House security but had not been a member of Nixon’s inner circle and did not appear to be a major witness. But under questioning by Senator Fred D. Thompson, a Tennessee Republican who was chief minority counsel to the Watergate committee, Mr. Butterfield dropped a bombshell.
Q. Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?
A. I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir.
Under the folksy prodding of Mr. Thompson and of Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., a North Carolina Democrat who was the panel chairman, and Samuel Dash, the committee’s chief counsel, it all tumbled out — the story of a secret, sophisticated recording system that the president himself had authorized and that for more than two years had picked up virtually all of Nixon’s meetings and telephone conversations.

Monti Rock III. I’d never heard of him, either, but he was a frequent Carson guest, and this is one of the more entertaining obits I’ve read in a while.

It also gives me hope.

It was clear that Mr. Rock had few actual skills. He could not sing, dance or tell funny stories, as he was the first to admit. “I was a failure for 11 years on TV,” he said in a 1976 profile in The Province, a newspaper in Vancouver, British Columbia.

…

The details that Mr. Rock gave about his biography and career could not always be trusted. He claimed he was a guest of Mr. Carson’s 84 times, though the IMDb entertainment database says he was on 43 times. He also appeared on the talk shows of Merv Griffin, Joey Bishop and Mike Douglas. A 1966 singing performance on “The Merv Griffin Show,” available online, shows him in his flower.

He indeed fronted Disco-Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes, at the invitation of the songwriter and producer Bob Crewe. The group had a pair of hits, “Get Dancin’” in 1974 and “I Wanna Dance Wit’ Choo (Doo Dat Dance)” in 1975. Both reached the top 25 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
Mr. Rock, shouting the lyrics over the singing of four female Sex-O-Lettes, took that tongue-in-cheek act on the road. Not everyone got the joke.
“Not only does Monti Rock III have no discernible talent whatsoever,” an entertainment writer for The Fort Lauderdale News wrote in a 1975 review, “he also has a filthy mouth.”

So a guy who had no discernible talent had two Billboard top 25 singles? Like I said, this gives me hope. And remember, this was before auto tune.

Posted in History, Music, Nixon, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: March 9, 2026.

Monday, March 9th, 2026

Country Joe McDonald, of Country Joe McDonald and the Fish.

The YouTube link doesn’t seem to work in the archived version, so here it is, for the hysterical record:

It has been a bad time for screenwriters.

Alan Trustman. Other credits include “They Call Me Mister Tibbs!”, “Hit!”, and “Lady Ice”. The NYT obit makes it sound like his career pretty much came to a screeching halt after he and Steve McQueen got into it while writing “Le Mans”.

Their differences proved irreconcilable. “Thank God I wasn’t involved,” Mr. Trustman told Hagerty, the car site. “I think he went through 10 to 15 directors and 10 to 15 writers and fired pretty much everybody in his life.”

Jeremy Larner. I wasn’t originally going to note this, but his arc is mildly interesting.

He has a total of four credits in IMDB. Two of those are as “Self”. The other one is for “Drive, He Said”, which he wrote (and which was based on his novel) and which you can find in the “America Lost and Found: The BBS Story” box set from Criterion.

I intended to note this the other day, but it got past me: Bruce Froemming, major leage umpire.

Froemming was one of the most durable umpires of his time: a 5-foot-8, 250-pound autocrat who called 5,163 regular season games (exceeded only by Joe West and Bill Klem) over a record 37 consecutive seasons beginning in 1971. He worked nine division series, 10 league championship series, five World Series and three All-Star Games. In 1986, The Sporting News named him the National League’s best umpire.

…

Umpires are known for their accuracy — or lack thereof — in calling balls, strikes and outs, as well as for their on-field disputes and occasional ejections. Froemming gave the heave-ho to players, managers and coaches 125 times from 1971 to 2007, far fewer than Klem’s record of close to 300 ejections. Three managers were each thrown out by Froemming three times: Davey Johnson of the Mets, Bobby Cox of the Atlanta Braves and Joe Torre, once with the St. Louis Cardinals and twice when he skippered the Mets.
Froemming booted out his last man, Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon, in the waning days of his last season, in 2007, for arguing a check swing call.

He also booted Billy Martin (though, as far as I can tell, there was no fistfight involved).

In 1976, Froemming ejected the fiery Yankees manager Billy Martin in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the World Series for tossing a ball at Bill Deegan, the home plate umpire, from the dugout. Martin, claiming that Deegan had tossed three balls out of play in his direction, rushed onto the field to argue his ejection.
“It’s a touchy situation,” Froemming said afterward, “and to have Martin start something at this point is something we can’t tolerate.”

Jennifer Runyon, actress. Other credits include “Carnosaur”, “The Falcon and the Snowman”, and “The Master”.

Lawrence sent over a NotTheBee obit for Alvin Greene, “the most bizarre Senate candidate in United States history”.

Frequently, “his jokes were not well understood by the media, such as when he told British newspaper The Guardian that one way to create jobs was to employ people to make toys in his likeness.”

Posted in History, Movies, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 2, 2026.

Monday, March 2nd, 2026

Neil Sedaka. THR.

“I was the king of the tra-la-las and doo-be-do’s in the ’50s and ’60s,” he told Reuters in 2010. “It had to have a very catchy tune, with a catchy beat that you can dance to.”

Ed Iskenderian, “The Camfather”.

Mr. Iskenderian was best known for building or “grinding” camshafts, which are essentially an engine’s heartbeat. A camshaft consists of a rod and shaped lobes that synchronize the opening and closing of the engine’s air intake and exhaust valves. The size and shape of the lobes can be adjusted to affect power, torque, performance and fuel efficiency.

…

He started his own camshaft production company, as the sole employee, in 1946. A onetime apprentice tool-and-die maker, just back from wartime service in the Army Air Forces, he found the Los Angeles hot rod scene running at full throttle and the wait for high-performance camshafts to be a frustrating five months. He bought a grinding machine from a mentor and placed it on a dirt floor in a back room of a friend’s machine shop in Culver City, Calif.
His first major project was enhancing the performance of Ford Flathead V8s, a dominant racing engine of the 1940s and early ’50s. His solution was to create “fast action” cams that opened the intake valves earlier and held them open longer during the combustion process, allowing more air and fuel to flow into the cylinders, boosting horsepower.
Within a decade, he became the leading cam authority. His cams powered numerous iconic engines, including the four Pontiac V8s that fueled Mickey Thompson’s Challenger 1 when he became the first American driver to exceed 400 miles per hour, on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah in 1960.

…

The camshaft company, now in Gardena, Calif., south of Los Angeles, has expanded to 60 employees and 100,000 square feet of space. Mr. Iskenderian was considered among the first to use computers to design camshafts, though it was also said of his skill, with only mild hyperbole, that he could grind one out of a broomstick.

…

Mr. Iskenderian’s boyhood during the Depression left an indelible imprint. He seldom threw anything away, friends said. The Cadillacs that he preferred for daily driving were often filled, except for a small space behind the steering wheel, with soda bottles, books, magazines, camshafts and fishing gear. More than one visitor to his office failed at first glance to see him sitting behind the mountainous pile on his desk.

For the historical record: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is burning in Hell.

Posted in Cars, History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 12, 2026.

Thursday, February 12th, 2026

Bud Cort, actor. THR. Other credits include “Midnight Caller”, “The Chocolate War”, and “Sledge Hammer!”.

Lory Patrick, actress. She doesn’t have that long a list of credits, but this is interesting:

Her first husband was late science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison; they were married and divorced in 1966, and she was the second of his five wives.

She later married Dean Jones, and they stayed married for 42 years (until Mr. Jones died).

Andrew Ranken, drummer for The Pogues.

Among other contributions, the Pogues credited him with coming up with the title “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash,” based on a quotation attributed to Winston Churchill: “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.”
“It seemed to sum up life in our band,” Mr. Ranken once said.

Fred Smith, musician. Interesting story: he started out with Blondie, and then defected to Television. After he left, Blondie blew up into a huge success, while Television broke up after two albums.

James Van Der Beek. NYT (archived). Other credits include “CSI: Cyber”, “Law and Order: SVU”, “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, and “Walker” (not “Walker, Texas Ranger”, but the reboot).

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

Obit watch: February 4, 2026.

Wednesday, February 4th, 2026

Chuck Negron, of Three Dog Night.

Mr. Negron’s bandmates’ initially rejected “Joy to the World,” but he argued that the group needed a “silly song” to keep success rolling. His instincts proved correct, as the track shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971. That same year, his jaunty vocals on Paul Williams’s “An Old Fashioned Love Song” helped propel that song to No. 4.

…

The band splintered in 1976, and Mr. Negron sank further into the abyss, in large part because of heroin addiction. His millions in savings vanished and, before long, he was living in a Skid Row drug den in Los Angeles. The police often raided crack dealer neighbors but “never bothered us,” he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Las Vegas Sun. “That’s how pathetic we were.”
He hit a particular low one day when he was zonked out on a curb and noticed people gawking. “It’s really embarrassing,” he remembered telling a companion next to him, “these people want an autograph.”
“Chuck, you just peed in the street,” the friend responded. “They don’t know who you are.”

…

After 35 trips to rehab attempts in 13 years, Mr. Negron said he finally got clean in 1991, leading to an attempt to rekindle things with his bandmates. “They kind of went, ‘Get screwed,’” he told The Sun, “so I went, ‘OK, some things are too late — move on.’”

Virginia Oliver. I’m not exactly sure she qualifies as “notable”, outside of a small circle. But the obit is fun, she led a good life, and it lets me use a tag I don’t get to use as often as I’d like.

On the frigid and crustacean-filled waters of Penobscot Bay, Mrs. Oliver was known as the Lobster Lady. She was a folk hero to Mainers — an enduring, if fading, emblem of the state’s hardy, matter-of-fact work ethic.
“She represented that no-nonsense Mainer who just got up every day and did what they had to do,” Barbara A. Walsh, the author of a children’s book about Mrs. Oliver, said in an interview. “It’s grit and determination.”
During lobster season — from June to December — Mrs. Oliver would wake up at 2:45 a.m., put on overalls and drive her four-wheel-drive pickup truck to the dock. After loading her boat, the Virginia, with bait and gas, she would head to sea before sunrise, hauling lobster pots until lunchtime.

…

Mrs. Oliver fished for more than 60 years with her husband, Maxwell Oliver Sr., known as Bill. After he died in 2006, Max Jr. took his spot. “I’m the boss,” she would occasionally remind both of them.
As a general rule, her authority was not to be questioned on land or at sea.
“She was a hard worker, a lovely lady, but you definitely didn’t mess around with her,” Dave Cousens, a lobsterman who knew Mrs. Oliver for several decades, said in an interview. “She had a mouth like a sailor. A lot of things she said you couldn’t print in a newspaper.”

…

A few years back, she needed stitches after a particularly obstreperous lobster sliced her finger.
“What are you out there lobstering for?” the doctor asked.
“Because I want to,” she replied.

She was 103 when a fall forced her to give up lobstering. She was 105 when she passed away.

Mickey Lolich, of the Detroit Tigers.

Pitching in the major leagues for 16 seasons, mostly with the Tigers, Lolich won 217 games and struck out 2,832 batters, posting more than 200 strikeouts in a single season seven times.

…

The Tigers finished 12 games ahead of the Baltimore Orioles as they won the 1968 American League pennant, led by the right-hander Denny McLain, who won 31 games and lost only 6 that season in becoming the first pitcher to reach the 30-game milestone in 34 years, a feat that hasn’t been matched since. Lolich, meanwhile, compiled a laudable 17-9 record.
McClain was bested by the future Hall of Famer Bob Gibson in the World Series opener, at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Despite battling a groin infection that had developed overnight, Lolich pitched the Tigers to an 8-1 victory in Game 2 and hit the only home run of his career, a drive down the left-field line off the Cardinal starter, Nelson Briles.
The Tigers lost the next two games at home and were facing elimination when Lolich took the mound again, once more against Briles, but this time at Tiger Stadium. Lolich yielded three runs in the first inning, but the Tigers managed to rally for a 5-3 victory.
They won again in Game 6, in St. Louis, behind solid pitching by McLain and a 10-run third inning.
The durable Lolich was called on again for Game 7, when he faced Gibson.
With the game scoreless in the seventh inning, the Tiger outfielder Jim Northrup connected on a liner over the head of Curt Flood, the Cardinals’ center fielder, for a two-run, two-out triple. Detroit went on to a 4-1 victory, giving the Tigers their first World Series championship since they defeated the Chicago Cubs in seven games in 1945.

…

With that final out — a foul pop-up by Tim McCarver of the Cardinals that spurred Tiger catcher Bill Freehan to leap into Lolich’s arms — Lolich became the only left-handed pitcher in American League history to win three complete games in a World Series.

ESPN. Baseball Reference.

Posted in Lobsters, Music, Obits, Sports | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 30, 2026.

Friday, January 30th, 2026

I’m going to do a round-up from the past couple of days. I’m also going to draw heavily on the NYT since we’re reaching the end of the month, and I have a bunch of share links to burn off before February.

Sly Dunbar, of Sly and Robbie.

For nearly 50 years, Mr. Dunbar and his partner, the bassist Robbie Shakespeare, who died in 2021, single-handedly shaped the various music styles — ska, reggae, rocksteady, dancehall — coming out of Jamaica’s heady cultural ferment of the 1960s.

…

Mr. Dunbar was known for his precise, propellant and somehow also relaxed drumming. After mastering the one-drop rhythm, a reggae standard that leaves out the kick drum on the first beat of a 4/4 measure, he pioneered the rockers rhythm, which deploys the drum on the first and third beats, and the snare on the second and fourth, making it even more danceable and energetic.
The rockers rhythm challenged the reggae orthodoxy of the 1970s. It fostered new genres like dancehall and made it easier for adjacent styles, like R&B, funk and rock, to incorporate reggae influences.

John L. Allen Jr., prominent Catholic journalist and author. I haven’t read any of his books, but I should probably at least buy the Opus Dei one. (Lawrence likes to give me a hard time about my Opus Dei membership.)

Johnny Legend, a polymath of the perverse who became something of a cult hero as — among other outré personas — a punk-rock wrestling impresario, an accomplice to the comedian Andy Kaufman, a B-movie archivist and erotic film auteur, and, with his flowing beard, a recording curiosity known as the Rockabilly Rasputin, died on Jan. 2 in South Beach, Ore. He was 77.

He’s not someone I’d ever heard of, but the obit is mildly interesting, so I’m just going to quote the first paragraph and send you over to the paper of record if it grabs you.

Finally, Dr. Peter H. Duesberg. That name may ring a bell for some people.

He did important early work on cancer.

In the late 1960s, when scientists had little understanding of what caused cancer, Dr. Duesberg studied a virus called Rous sarcoma, which had been associated with malignant tumors in chickens. He published the results of his experiments in 1970, showing that the virus carried a gene, known as Src, that triggered cancer in the birds.
It turned out to be the first known cancer-causing gene, or oncogene.
Dr. Duesberg’s work, at the University of California, Berkeley, set the stage for other researchers who were able to show that normal cells in many animals, including humans, carry a version of this gene, known as a proto-oncogene. Modern cancer treatments are based in part on the understanding that those proto-oncogenes can turn into cancer-spawning oncogenes when damaged over time by carcinogens, radiation or random mutations.

…

But he didn’t pursue his research on oncogenes. Instead, in his work at Berkeley and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, where he held an appointment starting in 1997, he focused on the more established theory that cancer is caused by damage to the chromosomes, the structures that carry our genetic material.
And in a startling about-face, he inexplicably contradicted his own research, insisting that oncogenes didn’t, in fact, cause cancer; he even went so far as to heckle colleagues at scientific meetings if they supported that idea.

He became more famous as an H.I.V. denialist.

In the 1980s, Dr. Duesberg adopted another contrarian view, publicly rejecting the theory that the newly discovered disease known as AIDS was caused by human immunodeficiency virus, or H.I.V., a link that is widely accepted today. The theory he promoted was that AIDS was caused by poverty, malnutrition, the use of recreational drugs and azidothymidine, or AZT, an early antiviral drug used to treat the disease.

…

Throughout his life, Dr. Duesberg maintained his position that H.I.V. does not cause AIDS, a contention that raised questions about the perils of undermining public trust in established scientists during an epidemic.

…

By 1987, when Dr. Duesberg published his theory about AIDS in the journal Cancer Research, a consensus had formed around H.I.V. as the cause of the disease. Eventually, scientists figured out how H.I.V. caused AIDS — through the slow destruction of a white blood cell known as CD4, which is essential for the maintenance of the immune system. None of the factors Dr. Duesberg had proposed as the cause of AIDS led to this immune collapse.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 23, 2026.

Friday, January 23rd, 2026

James Bernard, “founding editor and star writer” of the hip-hop magazine “The Source”.

His sister, Emily Bernard, who confirmed the death, said he died by suicide. His body was discovered on Dec. 29 in a wooded area in Pemberton Township, N.J., near his home.
Mr. Bernard is believed to have died around the time he was reported missing, in March 2024. He would have turned 60 last August.

…

His career at The Source unraveled in 1994, when he and other staff members organized a walkout after Mr. Mays published a laudatory article about the little-known group Almighty RSO, with which he was close, without consulting other editors. When calls for Mr. Mays’s resignation went nowhere, Mr. Bernard and others left the magazine.
In 1997, he and Mr. Dennis started a rival magazine, XXL. The founders conceived the quarterly as both a hip-hop tastemaker and a broader lifestyle magazine, like Playboy in its 1960s and ’70s heyday.

The Wikipedia entry on ‘The Source” goes into more detail about this and other issues.

Posted in Media, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 21, 2026.

Wednesday, January 21st, 2026

This isn’t quite an obit, but Mike the Musicologist sent it to me a few days ago, and I’ve been waiting for a chance to use it: a tribute to Phil Schreier. (Previously.)

His character was unlike anyone I’ve ever known. Smart, funny and stubborn. Whatever standard an organization or the world imposed, his own was higher. He was a public face of NRA, not because he sought fame and fortune; the latter is extremely unlikely as an NRA employee of 36 years. He took that role on as not only his vocation but as a responsibility. Most of NRA’s millions of members will never meet an NRA staffer, one of the dedicated people that goes to work for them every day, so you better leave a good impression. Phil had the Cal Ripken attitude: No matter what’s going on in your life, you stay and sign the last baseball. At the thousands of gun shows he attended, and the dozens of NRA Annual Meetings, he would always make time to answer a question or shake a hand, much to his own peril when seeking to reach the bathroom on time. He once told me that if you’re on TV enough, you’ll never make it to the men’s room alone again. There was simply no quit in him.

Rob Hirst, drummer for Midnight Oil.

As I’ve observed before, if our Earth isn’t turning, our ability to dance will be the smallest of our possible problems. And if our beds are burning and we want to sleep…maybe get a hotel room? Or a fire extinguisher?

Posted in Guns, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 11, 2026.

Sunday, January 11th, 2026

Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead.

(the sound of eight confused men getting paid)

Stewart Cheifet. My older readers may remember him from back in the day as the host of “Computer Chronicles” on PBS.

Hessy Levinsons Taft. I confess she wasn’t that notable, but this is a fun story in historical retrospect.

When she was six months old, in 1934, her family hired a photographer to take a portrait of her. The photographer, feeling whimsical, submitted the photo as an entry for a contest “to find a baby representing the epitome of the Aryan race”.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, chose the winner.

She won the contest. Which made things rather complicated, as she and her family were Jewish.

T.K. Carter, actor. Other credits include “The Corner” (For those of you who have read the book or watched the mini-series, he was Gary McCullough. For those of you who haven’t read the book, I commend it to your attention.), “A Rage In Harlem” (1991), “Runaway Train”, and “Quincy, M.E.”.

Erich von Däniken, crank.

Mr. von Däniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, “Chariots of the Gods,” in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” Mr. von Däniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.
With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. (“Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million — 98,000,000 miles — corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” he wrote.)
The birdman cult of Easter Island, Mr. von Däniken declared, developed as a way to honor the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.
Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted. Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.

It sounds ridiculous, but people bought into this [stuff]. Including me. In my defense, I was left unsupervised. Also, I was very young at the time. (See also.)

Over the next half century, he published over 40 more books, which were translated into some 30 languages, and though none of them offered much variation from his original themes or ideas — subsequent titles included “Gods From Outer Space,” “The Gods Were Astronauts” and “Arrival of the Gods” — they collectively sold more than 70 million copies.

…

Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
Critics pointed to Mr. von Däniken’s criminal history as proof of a penchant for deception. But Mr. von Däniken seemed unfazed, even comparing himself to Jesus. “People don’t ask if Christ was convicted of a crime,” he told Playboy in 1974. “What has that to do with the message Christ brought?”

Posted in Books, Geek, History, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

I Ran (So Far Away)

Friday, January 9th, 2026

(Did you know that “A Flock of Seagulls” (the first album) was a concept album about alien abduction? At least, that’s what Genius says.)

I am not an expert in geopolitics. I am especially not an expert in Iranian politics. Lawrence can probably point you in the right direction on that front.

But, back when I was attending St. Ed’s and studying “Modern Revolutions” with Dr. Sanchez, she had us read Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country by Shirin Ebadi.

(Actually, Dr. Sanchez just asked us to read the first half of the book. I read the whole thing, because I’m an overachiever. Also, I liked Dr. Sanchez – not in that way, she was already married – and wanted to impress her.)

Anyway, one thing vividly stood out to me from that book.

Dr. Ebadi was a judge form 1969 forward, during the reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi. She describes the elation she, and her friends, felt at the Revolution, and how happy they were to see the Shah deposed and the new regime come in.

A week later, the new bosses called her into the office.

They told her, “Women can’t be judges in Islam. You can either be a janitor or a librarian.”

Point being: be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.

Posted in Birds, Books, History, Music, School | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 23, 2025.

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025

This is a couple of days old, but it got past me because the weekend was busy: May Britt.

She had a career as an actress, including the original “Mission: Impossible” and the 1959 “The Blue Angel”. She married Sammy Davis Jr. in 1960.

The couple planned their wedding for that October but ended up pushing it back to November. It took place in Hollywood; Frank Sinatra served as best man, and several other members of the Rat Pack were in attendance — including Peter Lawford, who was married to Kennedy’s sister Patricia. (Mr. Davis was a core member of the group, known for performing in Las Vegas together.)

There was a lot of backlash at the time, and the marriage pretty much cost Ms. Britt her career.

Chris Rea, musician. I wouldn’t say I was a big fan of his work, but back in the day when I listened to the radio, KGSR would play “Texas”. I thought that was a pretty swell song.

And it is Christmas, right?

Posted in Christmas, Music, Obits | 2 Comments »

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