Arlene Dahl, actress, “author, beauty expert, astrologist, and fashion and cosmetics entrepreneur”.
47 credits in IMDB, but I wanted to call this out because of her resume, and because that’s a nice photo at the top of the NYT obit.
Tommy Lane, actor and stuntman. Acting credits include the original “Shaft” “Live and Let Die”, and “Cotton Comes to Harlem”.
David Gulpilil, Australian actor. (“Crocodile Dundee”, “Walkabout”, “The Right Stuff”, among other credits.)
He was a Hall of Fame player, first with the Kansas City Chiefs (in both the AFL and NFL) then with the Houston Oilers (1974-1980) and finally with Detroit.
…
Local authorities said it was not safe to travel, so 61 stranded pub-goers and employees hunkered down and spent the night, the paper said.
The conditions did not improve, so the shut-ins also slept in the pub on Saturday and were preparing to sleep over again on Sunday amid howling winds and swirling snow, according to the report.
Off-roaders and a mountain rescue group were able to transport several people out of the bar to attend to medical and family situations, but most patrons didn’t look back in anger and made the best of the situation with cold beer, a warm fire and plenty of “Wonderwall” singalongs, the article said.
Stephen Sondheim. THR (I love the Meryl Streep “don’t f–k it up” story). Variety.
I am not the person who should be writing this. I am hoping that the person who should be writing this will send me something I can use here.
But what little I know about musical theater, I know because Mike the Musicologist introduced me to it…by playing me lots of Sondheim’s work.
NYT interview conducted last Sunday. It sounds like he was in full possession of his facilities until the end, and didn’t have any more complaints than the average 91 year old would.
MtM sent me this last night. I confess, I haven’t watched all of it yet (it is over two hours). But: this is the complete original production of “Pacific Overtures“, recorded on June 9, 1976 for broadcast in Japan.
“Pacific is, I think, the least appreciated of Sondheim’s shows, and is probably his most brilliant one.”
I often say, when people die, that the world is a smaller, colder, lesser place. I mean that: there are people whose contributions are so great or important or enlightening or just so much damn fun that, when they die, they leave a hole in the world. Richard Feynman. Ricky Jay. Stephen Sondheim.
He was an American writer. His first book, The Rabbi, was on the NYT bestseller list for 26 weeks in the 1960s. His other books didn’t do as well, in the United States…
…but he was a huge bestseller overseas.
Mr. Gordon’s “The Physician” (1986) — the first book in a dynastic trilogy that began in 11th-century Persia, continued during the American Civil War with “Shaman” (1992) and ended with a modern woman doctor dealing with the morality of abortion in “Matters of Choice” (1996) — had an initial print run of only 10,000 copies in the United States.
But it eventually sold some 10 million copies, including more than six million in Germany, where, in the 1990s, six of Mr. Gordon’s novels were on best-seller lists simultaneously.
In 2013, “The Physician” was adapted into a German film, in English, starring Tom Payne, Stellan Skarsgard and Ben Kingsley. An award-winning musical based on the book is about to tour Spain.
…
“While Gordon has been published in 38 countries, Spain and Germany, where he is most popular, are two countries that grapple with a history of anti-Semitism,” Andrew Silverstein wrote in The Forward this year. “While not all of Gordon’s eight books have Jewish themes, most do, and his Jewishness is well known, which may play a role in his popularity in these two countries.”
Mr. Gordon won Spain’s Silver Basque Prize twice for best-selling book, in 1992 and 1995. His novels were also popular in Italy and Brazil.
I read the Kindle sample of The Death Committee before I went to bed last night, and…it was interesting enough that I’m tempted to purchase the book.
With all due respect to my friends and readers who are Lions fans, as I always say, “It’s just not Thanksgiving until Detroit loses.”
(Just kidding. I’m fond of all of you.)
(According to the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, Detroit’s Thanksgiving day record is 37-42-2, though that does not include yesterday’s game. That’s better than I would have thunk. For the record, Dallas is 31-21-1, again not including yesterday’s game.)
Anyway, NFL teams that still have a chance to go without a win this year:
Detroit
Next week: Minnesota in Detroit on Sunday, December 5th. The Vikings are currently 5-5.
(Dallas and New Orleans, both of whom played yesterday, play on Thursday, December 2nd next week. Nothing wrong with that, I just find the scheduling interesting.)
Last year, some jerk wrote:
I was hoping that Pan Am would have done “Wings to Turkey”, or something similar. But, alas, no.
From those wonderful folks at Pan Am, by way of Periscope Films, “Wings to Turkey”.
This has a date stamp of January 2018 in the ‘Tube, but I swear it was not there when I went looking last year.
Also, please note that the 707 lands in Istanbul, not Constantinople.
Speaking of Turkish delight:
“C.S. Lewis’s Greatest Fiction Was Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight“.
And I don’t want to skip the significance of this holiday, so:
(Explained.)
Ian Fishback. He was 42.
I wanted to note this because the circumstances seem particularly sad to me:
I’m reminded of a story I read several years ago about a young Green Beret who had a distinguished service record. Until he started going downhill: showing up late, not showing up at all, other issues which ultimately led to him being dishonorably discharged from the Army. He kept going downhill, was eventually institutionalized, and finally died. After his death, it was determined that he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (possibly picked up from eating sheep brains and eyeballs in the field with indigenous personnel). His family petitioned to have his discharge upgraded to honorable, and I believe they were eventually successful.
Peter Buck, co-founder of Subway.
Margo Guryan. I’d never heard of her, but this is another one of those stories with a hook. She was a talented musician and songwriter who, in 1968, released an album called “Take a Picture”. The album tanked, in large part because she wouldn’t tour…
Yet somehow decades later, with the digital age facilitating both word of mouth and the sharing of music, adventurous listeners discovered it — first in Japan, then in Europe, and finally in the United States, where in 2000 Franklin Castle Recordings rereleased it, followed the next year by “25 Demos,” a collection of other recordings of hers. Ms. Guryan, who by then was in her 60s and had settled into an anonymous career teaching music, had an unexpected burst of something resembling fame.
“It’s still amazing to me to have something resurface after 30 years,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2002. “People say I’ve been rediscovered. It’s not true — I’ve been discovered.”
I feel like I have to write about this story, since I don’t think it has received much attention, and it sits at the odd intersection of crime and publishing. I’m trying to step lightly here, because what happened to both of the people involved is horrible, and I hope they are able to find some measure of peace.
Anthony J. Broadwater was exonerated on Monday. He was convicted of rape and spent 16 years in prison, but his conviction was thrown out:
…a state judge, his defense lawyers and the Onondaga County district attorney agreed that the case against him had been woefully flawed.
What makes this story slightly more significant than many of these cases is: the victim was Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky, a non-fiction book about the attack.
Ms. Sebold identified Mr. Broadwater as her attacker, but it seems like there were problems, even at the time:
After evidence was collected from a rape kit, she described her assailant’s features to the police, but the resulting composite sketch didn’t resemble him, she wrote.
Mr. Broadwater was arrested five months later, after Ms. Sebold passed him on the street and contacted the police, saying she may have seen her attacker.
But she identified a different man as her attacker in a police lineup. In her memoir, she writes that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him looked alike and that moments after she made her choice, she felt she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Mr. Broadwater in court.
…
In their motion to vacate the conviction, the defense lawyers J. David Hammond and Melissa K. Swartz wrote that the case had relied solely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of Mr. Broadwater in the courtroom and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
They also argued that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor during the police lineup — that the prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her — and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s later testimony.
Kind of interestingly, this whole thing was triggered by a planned film version of the book:
Timothy Mucciante was working as executive producer of the adaptation of “Lucky,” but began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.
“I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together,” Mr. Mucciante said in an interview.
Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed.
He hired a PI, they gathered evidence, they approached a lawyer (and, coincidentally, Mr. Broadwater hired the same lawyer), one thing led to another which led to the motion to vacate the conviction, and Mr. Broadwater is no longer a sex offender.
Lou Cutell, actor. Other than “Seinfeld” and “Gray’s Anatomy”, he did a few cop shows, including “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “T.J. Hooker”, “Barney Miller”, and the really obscure 1989 “Dragnet”. He also appeared on “Alice” and “The Bob Newhart Show”.
Malikah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter. She was only 56.
Bill Virdon, noted player and manager.
He also managed the Yankees for a time, until he was fired by Steinbrenner (“…though he was not supposed to be involved with running the team”, being under suspension at the time) in favor of…Billy Martin.
Well, okay, just one Giant.
Jason Garrett, who you may remember for his time coaching the Dallas Cowboys, out as offensive coordinator of the New York Football Giants.
Bob Bondurant, legendary racer and founder of The Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.
Mr. Bondurant began attracting attention in the racing world in 1959, when he won 18 of the 20 races he entered behind the wheel of a Corvette.
“I am an original California hot rodder turned white hot when I started winning everything in my Corvettes,” he was quoted as saying by the National Corvette Museum, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2016.
He continued to win races regularly in Corvettes in the 1960s, but he also began to race successfully in other sports cars and open-wheeled Formula 1 machines, including for the elite Ferrari team from 1965 to 1966.
“He was top of the line,” said Peter Brock, who designed the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe that Mr. Bondurant raced with Dan Gurney to first place in the GT, or Grand Touring, class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in 1964.
…
Even before opening the school, Mr. Bondurant had some well-known students. He had coached James Garner and Yves Montand in driving Formula 1 cars for John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film, “Grand Prix.” Mr. Bondurant, who was a stunt man and technical adviser to the film, wore 16-millimeter cameras on the sides of his helmet to record racing action on the track while moving at 150 miles per hour.
Soon after Mr. Bondurant opened the school, Mr. Newman and Robert Wagner signed up as students. They had been cast as racecar drivers in the film “Winning” (1969), in which Mr. Newman’s character dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500.
“Paul has a knack of knowing how to learn,” Mr. Bondurant told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1988. “He’s like most actors — they know how to listen. He would move at his own pace, and wouldn’t go too quick. He took it step by step, and it came naturally to him.”
One of my lifetime ambitions has been to attend the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, though apparently it went bankrupt in 2018 and is now known as the Radford Racing School.
Robert Bly, the Iron John guy. Anyone else remember when Iron John was a thing? I do, though I never actually read it: I just remember a time when people talked about books, instead of what the Kardasians were doing yesterday.
Carolyn Watjen, aka “Caroline Todd“. You wouldn’t know her under that name: she and her son, David Watjen, write (wrote?) mystery novels under the pseudonym “Charles Todd”. I haven’t read any of them yet, but the Ian Rutledge novels sound interesting.
Jay Last. He was an early semi-conductor pioneer: specifically, he was one of the “traitorous eight” who left William Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. His death leaves Gordon Moore (yes, that Moore) as the last surviving member of the group.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Mick Rock, photographer of musicians.
Peter Aykroyd, Dan’s brother and “Saturday Night Live” cast member.
Art LaFleur, actor. Other than “The Sandlot”, his credits include episodes of “The John Larroquette Show”, two different remakes of television series that should never have been remade and which failed miserably (not due to Mr. LaFleur, they were just bad ideas), “Matlock”, “Field of Dreams”, and “Wizards and Warriors”.
KXAN has thoughtfully informed us that “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” will be airing tonight on CBS at 7 PM Central (8 PM Eastern).
That soft wet sound you heard is the sound of Gregg Easterbrook’s head exploding, as, once again, “Rudolph” airs before Thanksgiving.
In case you were wondering, “Frosty the Snowman” will be on Friday night at 7 Central (8 Eastern) immediately followed by “Frosty Returns”, also on CBS.
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” will supposedly be on PBS Sunday, December 19th, at 6:30 Central (7:30 Eastern).
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (the real one) will be on NBC Friday night at 7 Central (8 Eastern).
“Annie Live!” will be on NBC Thursday, December 2nd, at 7 Central (8 Eastern). Unfortunately, I have other plans that evening that involve stabbing myself in the thigh repeatedly with a titanium spork.
And, finally, “It’s a Wonderful Life” will be on December 4th at 7 Central (8 Eastern) and will repeat Christmas Eve at 7 Central (8 Eastern).
Here’s what purports to be a complete list of holiday films on broadcast, streaming, and cable. No, don’t thank me: I run a full service blog here.
Sorry. I’m running a little behind, as I was tied up much of yesterday with various things, including going to see “Dune”.
(Random thought: it is refreshing to know that, thousands of years in the future, even on desert planets, there will be coffee.)
Anyway, NFL teams that still have a chance of going without a win this season:
Detroit.
The Lions play the semi-hapless (3-7) Bears on Thanksgiving Day. I’m thinking this is a toss-up, though ESPN seems to favor the Bears.
In firings news: Dan Mullen out at Florida. 34-15 in four seasons and they were in the national championship game last year, but (as Easterbrook often says) “what have you done for me lately?” (Answer: gone 5-6 this year and 2-6 in conference.)
Chip Lindsey out at Troy. 15-19 in three seasons, and 5-6 this one. Sensing a trend?
Wilbur Smith, author. He was another one of those guys whose books I often see in racks at the grocery store, which is a pretty good sign.
“I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women,” Mr. Smith said.
…
…
Mr. Smith had his detractors, who saw some of his writing as glorifying colonialism and furthering racial and gender stereotypes. And he was not always a favorite of critics.
He maintained, as he told the Australian publication The Age, that he paid little attention. “The snootiness of critics is so silly,” he said. “They’re judging Great Danes against Pekingese. I’m not writing that literature — I’ve never set out to write it. I’m writing stories.”
Lawrence sent over Ann Althouse’s obit for Justus Rosenberg yesterday. I can’t really do the man the justice she did, so I’ll just point you over there.
…how far did it go?
This is something I hadn’t really thought about until this Smithsonian article came across Hacker News: how far can you shoot an arrow? The current record is apparently 2,028 yards.
“The Quest to Shoot an Arrow Farther Than Anyone Has Before“.
As you might have picked up from previous posts, Mike the Musicologist, myself, and some other friends who shall remain anonymous went up to Tulsa this past weekend for Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show. We generally try to go to every third one, but what with the Wuhan Flu et al, this is the first one we’ve been to since November of 2018.
I’m working on a longer post about some of the things I picked up during the show and around Tulsa, but I have to wait until one item arrives at my FFL. (On a related note, I am thinking more seriously about getting a C&R license. The problem is: I am already supposed to get one colonoscopy a year. I don’t need BATFE giving me a second one.)
A few things I noticed:
Spotted at a grocery store in Tulsa:
“…the man who holds the complete works of Aristotle in one hand, and a delicious sandwich in the other”. Well, who doesn’t love a delicious sandwich? But I think the Swagger I’m familiar with is more likely to have a .38 Super in the other hand.
(Swagger explained, for those who are unfamiliar with the works of Stephen Hunter. Those people should fix that soon: I’m personally fond of Pale Horse Coming, for reasons.)
Also spotted: Old Spice Krakengard. Which actually makes sense to me: if I can get a body wash that protects me from kraken, I am there, man.
…
Philip Margo and some of the others in the group didn’t have a lot of confidence in the resulting recording.
“We were embarrassed by it and tried to convince Hugo and Luigi not to release it,” he said in an interview quoted in “The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits” by Fred Bronson. “They said it would be a big record and it was going out.”
They were right. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart in December 1961, remained there for three weeks and became a cultural touchstone. A whole new generation was introduced to it in 1994 when a version turned up in the Disney movie “The Lion King.”
“Now that it’s current, we’re current,” Mr. Margo said at the time. “I am thrilled.”
Mr. Frishberg, who also played piano and sang, was an anomaly, if not an anachronism, in American popular music: an accomplished, unregenerate jazz pianist who managed to outrun the eras of rock, soul, disco, punk and hip-hop by writing hyper-literate songs that harked back to Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, by way of Stephen Sondheim.
His songwriting wit was for grown-ups, yet he reached his widest audience with sharpshooting ditties for kids as a regular musical contributor to ABC-TV’s long-running Saturday morning animated show “Schoolhouse Rock!”
Among his credits: “I’m Just a Bill”.
Lawrence sent over an obit from Slam Wrestling for Joe Cornelius. In addition to his wrestling work, he helped with fight coordinating on “The Avengers” and also made some uncredited movie appearances. Perhaps his best known work was as the titular character in “Trog”.
Heath Freeman. He had some roles on “Bones” and “NCIS”. According to THR, he was only 41.
Still playing catch up on obits. Please to excuse the shortness here.
Terence Wilson, of UB40.
Graeme Edge, of the Moody Blues.
Clifford Rose, noted actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He also did some movie and TV work, including “Doctor Who”.
Geir Vegar Hoel, Norwegian actor. Lawrence and I knew him from “Dead Snow“, a fun little horror movie about Nazi zombies.
I’m back home, but playing catch-up. In the meantime, Justin Fuente out as Virginia Tech head coach.
43-31 overall and 28-20 in the ACC over six seasons.
Riding shotgun on the way home. In haste: Butch Davis out at Florida International.
Even better: it’s sabotage!
Heading home. Light blogging ahead. Some patchy fog. Otherwise clear and cold.
Another quick obit roundup while I’m still on the road.
Sam Huff, linebacker for the New York Football Giants.
Playing for the Giants in their glory years of the late 1950s and early ’60s, Huff came out of the West Virginia coal country to anchor a defense that gained the kind of renown that had previously been reserved for strong-armed quarterbacks and elusive runners.
He played in six N.F.L. championship games in his eight seasons with the Giants. He was named to the all-league team three times and played in five Pro Bowls.
Huff was remembered for his head-on duels with two of the game’s greatest fullbacks — the Cleveland Browns’ Jim Brown and the Green Bay Packers’ Jim Taylor — but he also had 30 career interceptions. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1982.
Jonathan Reynolds. He was a playwright and wrote a food column for the NYT. I wanted to note his passing because he was also a screenwriter. His first script was “Micki + Maude”, a Blake Edwards/Dudley Moore movie that I was unfamiliar with, but which was apparently well received. But…
He also did “Switching Channels”, “My Stepmother Is An Alien”, and “The Distinguished Gentleman”.
Gavan O’Herlihy. He had a fair number of credits, including “Willow” and “Lonesome Dove”, but seems to be most famous for playing “Chuck Cunningham” in nine episodes of “Happy Days”.