Whipped Cream Difficulties

For the historical record: NYT obit for Mark White.

Ernst Zündel, scummy Nazi Holocaust denier and the center of two criminal trials in Canada.

Richard Dudman passed away at the age of 99, surprisingly. I say “surprisingly” because, as a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he led an interesting and dangerous life:

Mr. Dudman’s career in journalism lasted more than three quarters of a century. He was in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and, after oversleeping and missing a flight back to Washington, dropped by the police station where Lee Harvey Oswald was being held and watched as he was gunned down by Jack Ruby.

He covered other wars all over the world, including Vietman. He was responsible for the P-D publishing part of the Pentagon Papers. In 1970, he and two other journalists were taken hostage by the Vietcong and spent 40 days as prisoners before being released.

In 1978, he and two other journalists got an “interview” with Pol Pot (though the “interview” was more like Pol Pot haranguing them through translators for several hours). Then someone tried to kill the three journalists.

He had a motto: “Reporter who sits on hot story gets ass burned.”

David E. H. Jones passed away a few weeks ago. That name may ring a small bell for some of you: he was a chemist and professor, as well as a professional writer.

Dr. Jones, who died at 79 on July 19 in Newcastle upon Tyne in northeastern England, wrote hundreds of irreverent columns about Daedalus for two sacrosanct journals: New Scientist, in a column named for Ariadne, the mistress of the labyrinth, and Nature, in a column called Daedalus.

Back in the old days, I used to spend time in the university library reading New Scientist, and Dr. Jones’s column was always the first thing I flipped to.