Bob Wall, noted ass kicker.
He was in three out of five Bruce Lee films post 1968: “The Way of the Dragon”, “Enter the Dragon” and “Game of Death”. (He played O’Hara, the bad guy’s bodyguard, in “Enter the Dragon”.)
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Monica Vitti, Italian actress. She was in Michelangelo Antonioni’s movies (“L’Avventura”, “La Notte”, “L’Eclisse”).
She was also “Modesty Blaise” in the 1966 movie.
By way of great and good Friend of the Blog (and official trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn, we have learned that Hookers & Blow are touring.
As you may recall, Hookers & Blow is a band formed by Dizzy Reed (former Guns ‘N Roses keyboard player) and Alex Grossi (former Quiet Riot guitarist). I assume their March 2020 tour went the way of so many other things during the early days of the Chinese Rabies, but they’re back now.
Even better, they’re getting out of California, but only to Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Utah. No Texas shows. Yet.
Also unfortunately, there does not seem to be a Hookers & Blow t-shirt. Yet.
But the eponymous Hookers & Blow album is available from Amazon as a MP3 download, CD, or vinyl (affiliate link).
Thanks to Karl for the heads-up on this. We will be waiting eagerly for news of Texas tour dates.
Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub (United States Army – ret.) has died. He was 100.
General Singlaub trained resistance fighters in German-occupied France and rescued Allied prisoners of war held by the Japanese during World War II. He conducted intelligence operations during the Chinese Civil War and in the Korean War while assigned to the C.I.A., and he commanded secret Army forays into North Vietnam and neutral Laos and Cambodia during the 1960s to ambush Communist troops.
A sturdy 5-foot-7 with an enduring military brush haircut, General Singlaub seemed fit for combat long after his last war. He was “the kind of guy you’d like to have on your side in a barroom brawl,” Pat Murphy, an acquaintance and the publisher of The Arizona Republic at the time, told The New York Times in 1986.
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But for all his military feats, General Singlaub’s career ended over issues of grand strategy.Mr. Carter removed him as the military’s chief of staff in South Korea in May 1977 after he told a reporter for The Washington Post that the president’s plan to withdraw American troops there could lead to another North Korean invasion.
General Singlaub later maintained that his remarks were off the record, an assertion disputed by The Post. But Mr. Carter was outraged at what he perceived as a challenge to civilian authority.
His order recalling General Singlaub from Korea was the first action of its type since President Harry S. Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the Pacific commander when MacArthur advocated extending the Korean War into China.
After being reassigned to Fort McPherson in Georgia, General Singlaub criticized the Carter administration’s military policies again in April 1978, in a talk before R.O.T.C. cadets at Georgia Tech. He called Mr. Carter’s decision not to produce a neutron bomb “ridiculous” and “militarily unsound” and criticized the administration’s efforts to give up control of the Panama Canal.
The Army ordered him to report to the Pentagon immediately, announcing a day later that it had accepted his request to retire.
He was also involved (as a private citizen) in the “Iran-Contra affair”.
General Singlaub told Congress that Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, while a National Security Council staff aide, had approved of his being highly visible in his support for the contras. The goal, General Singlaub testified, was to take public attention away from the secret government program. Colonel North was eventually convicted of obstructing Congress, destroying official documents and accepting an illegal gift, but the convictions were later overturned on appeal.
General Singlaub, who acted as a private citizen in helping the contras, was never accused of wrongdoing in the investigation. But in his 1991 memoir, “Hazardous Duty,” written with Malcolm McConnell, he bristled at what he considered the defaming of his character.
“For a decade I’d been smeared as a right-wing fanatic, even a crypto-fascist, by some members of the media,” he wrote. “I’d always found this ironic, considering the fact that I was one of a handful of American soldiers who had risked torture and execution by both German and Japanese fascists while serving behind enemy lines in Europe and the Far East.”
Moses J. Moseley, actor. He was a “pet zombie” in “The Walking Dead”.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
NYT obit for Howard Hesseman, which was not up when I posted yesterday.
Mike the Musicologist sent this over, with the observation that it had been posted yesterday:
Cheslie Kryst. She was Miss USA 2019, and worked as a lawyer and a correspondent on “Extra”.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Hargus Robbins, noted session pianist in Nashville.
A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio musicians, Mr. Robbins appeared on thousands of popular recordings made here between the late 1950s and mid-2010s.
Many became No. 1 country singles, including Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1962), Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (1966) and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (1974). Several also crossed over to become major pop hits, Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” (1961) and Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978) among them.
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Mr. Robbins’s influence was maybe most pronounced as the Nashville Sound evolved into the more soul-steeped “countrypolitan” style heard on records like George Jones’s 1980 blockbuster single, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
Mr. Robbins’s rippling, jazz-inflected intros to Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) became enduring expressions of the Southern musical vernacular of their era. Both records were No. 1 country and crossover pop singles.
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Booger.
I didn’t watch “Head of the Class”, and, while I may have watched the original “One Day at a Time”, I’m pretty sure I had checked out by season 9. (We were actually discussing that show last night at dinner: I believe we all watched it, but with the mitigating excuse that there were only three channels at the time.)
I can’t find my favorite Dr. Johnny Fever moment online. (Johnny takes a sobriety test, and the drunker he gets, the better his reaction time gets. This is the kind of humor you could get away with in the late 1970s/early 1980s, before joyless fun suckers sucked all the fun out of everything.) And I don’t want to use the turkey drop stuff, because overused and it isn’t Thanksgiving.
So here’s a nice golden moment for you.
Edited to add 2/7: Lawrence pointed out something over the weekend that was quite a surprise to me (I should have checked his credits more closely): Howard Hessman did a “Mannix”. (“A Ransom for Yesterday“, season 8, episode 17. We watched it Saturday night: given that it was so close to the end of the series, it is actually a pretty good episode, and Hessman’s role is substantial. It also isn’t an old Army buddy episode, thank Ghu.)
Four Arizona State coaches are no longer with the program.
According to reports, offensive coordinator Zak Hill and tight ends coach Adam Breneman “resigned”: wide receivers coach Prentice Gill and secondary coach Chris Hawkins were fired.
Why? Everybody’s favorite reason: recruiting violations.
Damien Hirst has done other works than “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living“.
One of those was a diamond encrusted skull called “For the Love of God”.
Hirst has claimed for a while now that he sold the work for $100 million in 2007.
Turns out…
In a profile published in the New York Times on the occasion of his first New York show in four years, Hirst said the work, titled For the Love of God and allegedly made from more than 8,600 diamonds, was sitting in a storage facility in Hatton Garden, London’s jewelry district.
According to Hirst, he still owns the bauble in partnership with his gallery, White Cube, and a group of unnamed investors.
More:
In the recent Hirst New York Times profile, the newspaper took at face value the artist’s claim that he sold around 80 new works for between $750,000 and $3.5 million each.
“We could have sold many, many more,” Larry Gagosian told the Times. “People were literally begging to buy these paintings.”
ArtNet article. Some people have told me they have trouble with this link, so here’s an archive.is version.
Today is just quick follow ups from the paper of record:
And, astonishingly (to me), the NYT actually ran an obit for Ron Goulart. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but this is the same paper that still (to the best of my knowledge) has never run an obit for Gardner Dozois.
Shot:
Chaser:
Dr. Johan Hultin. He was 97.
Back in 1950, Dr. Hultin, a pathologist, was having lunch with William Hale, a microbiologist. As the conversation often does, it turned to the 1918 flu pandemic.
Dr. Hale mentioned that there was just one way to figure out what caused the 1918 pandemic: finding victims buried in permafrost and isolating the virus from lungs that might be still frozen and preserved.
Dr. Hultin, a medical student in Sweden who was spending six months at the university, immediately realized that he was uniquely positioned to do just that. The previous summer, he and his first wife, Gunvor, spent weeks assisting a German paleontologist, Otto Geist, on a dig in Alaska. Dr. Geist could help him find villages in areas of permafrost that also had good records of deaths from the 1918 flu.
So Dr. Hultin went north to Alaska in 1951.
Three villages seemed like they might have what he wanted, but when he arrived at the first two, the victims’ graves were no longer in permafrost.
The third village on his list, Brevig Mission, was different. The flu had devastated the village, killing 72 out of 80 Inuit residents. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave with a large wooden cross at either end.
When Dr. Hultin arrived and politely explained his mission, the village council agreed to let him dig. Four days later, he saw his first victim.
“She was a little girl, about 6 to 10 years old. She was wearing a dove gray dress, the one she had died in,” he recalled in an interview in the late 1990s. The child’s hair was braided and tied with bright red ribbons. Dr. Hultin called for help from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the group eventually found four more bodies.
They stopped digging. “We had enough,” Dr. Hultin said.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Dr. Hultin wasn’t able to culture virus from the samples he collected at the time. But in 1997:
…sitting by a pool on vacation with his wife in Costa Rica, he noticed a paper published in Science by Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, now chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It reported a remarkable discovery. Dr. Taubenberger had searched a federal repository of pathology samples dating to the 1860s and found fragments of the 1918 virus in snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers who had died in that pandemic. The tissue had been removed at autopsy, wrapped in paraffin and stored in the warehouse.
Dr. Hultin got in touch with Dr. Taubenberger.
“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” he told Dr. Taubenberger.
He went back and recovered more samples.
Dr. Taubenberger got all of the packages. The lung tissue from the Brevig woman was invaluable, he said, because the snippets of lung from the soldiers had so little virus that, with the technology at the time, the effort to get the complete viral sequence would have been delayed by at least a decade.
Using the tissue Dr. Hultin provided, Dr. Taubenberger’s group published a paper that provided the genetic sequence of a crucial gene, hemagglutinin, which the virus had used to enter cells. The group subsequently used that tissue to determine the complete sequence of all eight of the virus’s genes.
One of the things that truly impresses me about this story (besides the scientific angle) is Dr. Hultin’s interactions with the villagers of Brevig Mission. They let him dig up the graves and take samples: and they let him do this because he treated the bodies with honor and respect.
Don Wilson, of the Ventures.
In addition to their success in the United States (where their other hits included “Walk — Don’t Run, ’64,” a remake of their own hit that also made Billboard’s Top 10), the Ventures became wildly popular in Japan — so much so, Mr. Wilson said, that numerous bands there took to imitating them. That led to an uncomfortable surprise when the band made its second trip there, its first as headliners, in 1965.
“We had an opening group,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, “and they played all of our songs before we went on.”
We’re talking about the Ventures, so you know what that means, right?
Jim Drake, one of the old time Sports Illustrated photographers. I wanted to mention this here because there’s a lot of classic Drake photos reproduced in the obit, including the one of Broadway Joe in Times Square.
Morgan Stevens, actor. He was “Nick Diamond” on “Melrose Place”. He was also “David Reardon” in “Fame” and did other TV guest spots.
Kevin Ward, the mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland, which is a DC suburb. He was found dead in a park: his death is suspected to have been a suicide.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
A few weeks ago, I wrote up an after-action report on John Hearne’s classes at KR Training.
Michael Bane was also in Mr. Hearne’s class, and recorded an interview with him. That interview is now posted on his web site, for your information and edification.
The whole thing is a little over 20 minutes, but not all of that is Mr. Hearne, so you can probably fit this in to a coffee break.
Hattip: KR Training on the book of face.
Personal note: Mr. Hearne and I have corresponded a bit by email since I wrote that after action report, and our correspondence just confirms my original opinion: he’s a swell guy, who went out of his way to answer my questions. Again, if you have the chance, take his courses.
He voiced Charlie Brown in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”. According to reports, he was 65 years old, and died by suicide.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Kathryn Kates, actress. Roles include “Seinfeld”, “Orange Is the New Black”, and “Law and Order: Sport Utility Vehicle”.
This got past me yesterday, though I did intend to mention it: Sheldon Silver, former leader of the New York State Assembly who was serving time in prison on corruption charges.
She was “Harriet Conklin” in “Our Miss Brooks”, a series I hate to say was before my time. Other credits are pretty limited: she appeared in the “Centennial” mini-series, Michael Ritchie’s “Smile”, and some TV guest shots.
