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Archive for July, 2025
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Friday, July 4th, 2025Obit watch: July 4th, 2025.
Friday, July 4th, 2025Happy Independence Day, everyone. Today marks 249 years of not giving a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what the British royal family thinks.
It is going to be a busy three-day weekend, but I did want to quickly note the death of Michael Madsen. NYT (archived).
Kenneth Colley. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “The Bill”, and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (credited as “Jesus”).
Obit watch: July 3, 2025.
Thursday, July 3rd, 2025Robert Holton, big damn hero. He was 81.
Taxol is a hugely important drug in cancer treatment. It was originally isolated from the yew tree, but there just aren’t enough yew trees to go around. In order to isolate the drug, the trees had to be stripped of their bark, which killed them.
Dr. Holton was the first person to figure out how to synthesize Taxol in a lab, without killing yew trees.
“I have always been drawn to difficult problems, and synthesizing Taxol was a big one,” Dr. Holton said in 2018 during remarks at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Inventors in Washington, D.C. He was elected an academy fellow that year. “Seeing the drug’s success in treating so many patients has been an incredibly gratifying experience.”
The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than one million patients have been treated with Taxol. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992 for ovarian cancer and, in 1994, for advanced breast cancer. The chemo agent is also used for the treatment of lung cancer and Kaposi’s sarcoma, among other malignancies, Dr. Boyd said.
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Barry Longyear, SF writer. I don’t have a formal obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick put up a tribute/obit on his blog.
Diddy squat.
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025I won’t say that I didn’t care about Diddy. I did care, to the extent that it was a mildly interesting true crime story, and this is hookersnblow.com. Beyond that, meh.
But: the Wikipedia entry on the Mann Act is interesting, especially the section on “Notable prosecutions under the Mann Act“.
I’m sure everyone remembers Jack Johnson (though I didn’t remember Donald Trump pardoned him in 2018). Others: Frank Lloyd Wright (charges dropped), Charlie Chaplin (acquitted), Charles Manson (charges dropped), and Chuck Berry (convicted, sentenced to three years, served one and half).
Obit watch: July 2, 2025.
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025Jim Shooter, Marvel comics guy.
Shooter professionalized what had been a loose company in an even looser industry, making sure books were published on time, artists were paid on time and even given royalties and health insurance.
He also had a flair for developing talent, and under his aegis Marvel put out now-classic stories from writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne on Uncanny X-Men, Frank Miller on Daredevil and Walt Simonson on Thor, among others. While the artists became among the biggest names in the industry, X-Men became not only the most dominant and influential comic of the decade and beyond, but one of the first true franchises of the industry.
With 1984’s Secret Wars, a 12-issue miniseries that Shooter, Mike Zeck and John Beatty drew, he instituted the concept of publishing crossover events, a companywide initiative that saw one main story play out and influence many of the other titles coming out for months on end. Secret Wars was a massive publishing success and a toy bonanza. It’s a concept that is still being used by Marvel and DC to this day, in varying degrees.
He took fans seriously, and just like Weisinger, called and wrote readers out of the blue. Carter Beats the Devil author Glen David Gold wrote in his 2018 memoir, I Will Be Complete, of how in the summer before he entered high school in the late 1970s, Shooter phoned after reading a SHIELD story he had sent in. Perhaps seeing something of himself in a teen writing superhero stories, Shooter was encouraging, telling the auspicious writer to read as much as he could in high school and to study science.
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Still, while many call Shooter a “complicated man,” Larry Hama, who was writing G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero for Marvel as well as editing titles, said that he believed Shooter was always trying to do the right thing. Hama recalled on Facebook how Shooter put a writer-artist on the company’s insurance plan the day after he died in order to help out his widow. (The talent had qualified for the health and insurance plan and wanted to sign up, but Marvel policy only allowed for sign-ups on Wednesdays. The man had died on the Tuesday.)
Hama wrote, “Without hesitation, Jim took the paperwork from me and went upstairs to push it through. He said, ‘They owe it to him, we just won’t mention that he already passed.’ I witnessed him doing stuff like that several times. None of it was made public for obvious reasons. It could have cost him his job, but he did the right thing.”
Obit watch: July 1, 2025.
Tuesday, July 1st, 2025The last of the cousins has died.
As Jimmy Lee grew older and more certain that he was on the path of the righteous, he prayed for the salvation of his first cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, the early wild man of rock ’n’ roll who married several times (one bride was his 13-year-old cousin) and who thumbed his nose at conventional morality, as the writer Nick Tosches recounted in “Hellfire,” his biography of Mr. Lewis.
The country singer Mickey Gilley was also a first cousin to both Mr. Swaggart and Mr. Lewis. About the same age, the three boys were childhood companions. They learned to play an uncle’s piano and occasionally disobeyed their parents by going to a Black nightclub, where they were entranced by the music and dancing, Mr. Tosches wrote.
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Back to back to back.
Tuesday, July 1st, 2025Holidays, that is. This is one of those times of the year when we have a whole string of them in a short time.
Happy Bobby Bonilla Day, everyone!