Whipped Cream Difficulties

Seriously, yesterday afternoon and last night were incredibly hectic. Let’s start at the top and work our way down.

Neil Peart, drummer for Rush.

Okay, that was a cheat. How about this?

Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman.

Qaboos’s decades as an absolute monarch who used oil wealth to pull his country from poverty made him a towering figure at home, with roads, a port, a university, a sports stadium and other facilities bearing his name. Internationally, as the longest-serving leader in the Arab world, he used Oman’s place in a turbulent region, next to one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, to become a discreet but essential diplomatic player.

Georges Duboeuf, wine guy.

Mr. Duboeuf was already a successful Beaujolais merchant in the 1970s when he set out to mass-market the local tradition of making primeur, a quick, joyous wine born of the year’s new grapes.
Many wine regions enjoyed a similar harvest ritual, a festive local practice among friends and colleagues. Beaujolais was an especially enjoyable wine to drink young. It was fresh and easy in a way that, say, young Bordeaux, with tannins that could be unpleasantly astringent, was not.
A thriving local market existed for the young wine. It expanded to the Paris bistros in the 1950s, when distributors began to compete in a race to see who could deliver the first bottles to the capital.
Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the mid-November day that it became legal to ship the new wine, cartons were loaded onto trucks, and off they went as eager revelers waited. The official release date shifted from year to year, but the authorities eventually settled on the third Thursday of November.
Mr. Duboeuf took this annual race and, through energetic and endless promotion, turned it into much more. He enlisted countless French chefs, restaurants and celebrities to the cause.
A crucial ingredient in the promotion was a dollop of suspense. As the clock struck 12:01, Mr. Duboeuf made sure that cases and cases of the wine were loaded onto trucks, ships and eventually jets for shipment around the world, all duly recorded by cameras. The fact that much of the wine had been shipped in advance was irrelevant to the fun.
“Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” became an exultant international catchphrase. Television commercials would show the wine being delivered to, by Beaujolais standards, the remotest corners of the earth.

Alasdair Gray, Scottish novelist.

Mr. Gray’s first novel, “Lanark: A Life in Four Books” (1981), wasn’t published until he was 46, but it came to be hailed as a masterpiece. He wrote six more novels and six collections of short stories, influencing a generation of writers. In a wide-ranging career, he also created artwork, much of it seen in the streets of Glasgow.

By way of Lawrence, Ken Fuson. Not a particularly famous guy, but this is one of those funny and touching self-written obits.

In his newspaper work, Ken won several national feature-writing awards, including the Ernie Pyle Award, ASNE Distinguished Writing Award, National Headliner Award, Missouri Award (twice) and Distinguished Writing Award in the Best of Gannett contest (five times, but who’s counting?). No, he didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize, but he’s dead now, so get off his back.

Harry Hains, actor. (“American Horror Story”, “The OA”.)

Also by way of Lawrence (as was the Harry Haines obit): Shozo Uehara.

Uehara is best remembered as the main writer for Ultraman and one of the original writers on Ultra Q, the series that preceded Ultraman. He was later contracted by Toei Productions and created his first Super Sentai series, Himitsu Sentai Goranger (known as Five Rangers in the West).

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 11th, 2020 at 9:46 am and is filed under Books, Music, Obits, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.