Obit watch: March 24, 2020.

March 24th, 2020

Lawrence sent over an obit for prolific British actor David Collings, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation from another site.

Eric Weissberg, multi-instrumentalist musician, but perhaps most famous as a banjo guy. Specifically, “Dueling Banjos”.

As a session player he appeared on Judy Collins’s “Fifth Album,” contributing guitar to her 1965 version of “Pack Up Your Sorrows.” He played banjo on John Denver’s 1971 Top 10 pop hit, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” His fretwork was heard on albums like Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” (1974), Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) and the Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures” (1985). He collaborated with jazz musicians like Bob James and Herbie Mann as well.
“Dueling Banjos” did not, as the song’s title suggests, involve two banjoists pitting their skills against each other. Instead it showcased Mr. Weissberg’s three-finger Earl Scruggs-style banjo in a sprightly call-and-response — more of a dance than a fight — with the flat-picked acoustic guitar of his collaborator, Steve Mandell.

…

When it appeared on the soundtrack for “Deliverance,” a movie based on the James Dickey novel of the same name, it was mistakenly copyrighted to Mr. Weissberg.
A lawsuit was settled in Mr. Smith’s favor. Mr. Weissberg always maintained that Warner Bros. had credited him as the song’s composer without his knowledge or consent.

Eli Miller. No, you probably never heard of him. He was one of the last of New York City’s door to door seltzer delivery men, who worked “from 1960 until he retired in 2017.”

When Mr. Miller started his business, hundreds of seltzer men plied the streets; when he retired, there were only a handful. Through all of the intervening decades, he appeared at his customers’ homes bearing a wooden box of pewter-topped bottles filled with authentic seltzer.
“It’s not the stuff you buy in the plastic bottles in the store, which has about five pounds of pressure,” Mr. Miller said in a video that accompanied an article about him in The New York Times in 2013.
What Mr. Miller brought customers, he said, was triple-filtered New York City water, without salt, sugar or other additives, pressurized to about 60 to 80 pounds per square inch — perfect for enjoying plain or spritzing into an egg cream.

…

Mr. Miller was inducted into the Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame in 2017. His fellow inductees that year included the television personality Judge Judy Sheindlin and Ira Glasser, a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 21, 2020.

March 21st, 2020

Kenny Rogers. Borepatch.

He was an avid photographer as well. He published two volumes of his work: “Kenny Rogers’ America” (1986), an assortment of photos of national landmarks and other places of interest, and “Your Friends and Mine” (1987), a collection of portraits of fellow celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.

…

Mr. Rogers was also a successful entrepreneur. His best-known enterprise was Kenny Rogers Roasters, a chain of chicken restaurants he opened with John Y. Brown Jr., the former governor of Kentucky and chief executive of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Opened in 1991, the chain — which was, among other things, the subject of a memorable episode of “Seinfeld” — closed in the United States 20 years later but has continued to prosper overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Boris Yaro, LAT photographer. He famously took multiple photos of Robert Kennedy immediately after the shooting.

There’s another story about Mr. Yaro’s photography: that one involves a suicidal man and Muhammad Ali, but you’ll have to read the obit for that one.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 20, 2020.

March 20th, 2020

Molly Brodak. She was a poet, and wrote a book about her childhood, Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir.

“Bandit,” her first published nonfiction work, was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager.
Mr. Brodak robbed 11 banks in and around Detroit that summer. He would hand a teller a note demanding cash and gesture that he had a gun in his jacket pocket (he didn’t). He wore a floppy hat and a fake mustache that earned him the sobriquet “the Super Mario Brothers Bandit,” after the similarly attired video game character. He was caught, spent seven years in prison and was released in 2001, then served another prison sentence for robbing more banks in 2009.

She was only 39 years old. The NYT quotes her husband as stating she 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 surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Roy Hudd, prominent British actor. He played “Archie Shuttleworth” on “Coronation Street”, and, according to Lawrence, did a fair amount of horror.

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Obit watch: March 19, 2020.

March 19th, 2020

Alfred M. Worden, Apollo 15 astronaut. NASA tribute page.

Apollo 15 was NASA’s first moon mission devoted mainly to science. The flight of Apollo 11 in July 1969 had fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s call for America to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s. But the three lunar landings that preceded Apollo 15 had yielded relatively modest insight into the moon’s origin and composition.
Major Worden, of the Air Force, spent three days in orbit operating a pair of cameras in his space capsule Endeavour.
Those photos provided the sharpest images ever taken of the moon, an achievement that led to the mapping of its rugged terrain. Major Worden also operated an extensive package of instruments to enhance knowledge of space and the moon itself.
En route home, he released a “sub-satellite” — carried by Endeavour and weighing about 78 pounds — that was designed to orbit the moon for at least a year and radio back data on its gravitational field and other technical information. It was the first time such a space vehicle had been deployed.
He also undertook the first walk in deep space, spending 38 minutes tethered to Endeavour while more than 196,000 miles from Earth as he retrieved canisters of film attached to the skin of the craft.
The other Apollo 15 crewmen — Col. David R. Scott and Lt. Col. James B. Irwin, also Air Force officers — became the seventh and eighth men to land on the moon, having descended in their Lunar Module, Falcon, from the space capsule piloted by Major Worden. They spent 18½ hours exploring its surface and covered about 17½ miles in their rover — both NASA records — and returned to the capsule for the flight home with some 170 pounds of rock and soil samples.

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Obit watch: March 18, 2020.

March 18th, 2020

Stuart Whitman, another one of those knock-around TV and movie actors. THR.

He was “Marshal Jim Crown” on “Cimarron Strip”, played a child molester in a British movie called “The Mark”, was “Sergeant Walters” on “Highway Patrol”, and did guest shots on a whole lot of 70’s TV. (No “Mannix”, though.)

Lyle Waggoner. Things I didn’t know: he tried out for “Batman”. He was the first “Playgirl” centerfold. He did guest shots on “Lost in Space” (the original) and “Supertrain”. And he was in “Catalina Caper“.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

The return of hoplobibliophilia.

March 17th, 2020

Half-Price Books had another coupon sale last week (before everything went to heck in a handbasket), and I managed to hit most of the sale days. (I missed Monday and Thursday, for reasons.)

On the non-gun book front, I picked up mostly small beer: a copy of Laura Shapiro’s What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories for $8.49 plus tax. I know it sounds awfully feminist, but I’m interested in food history and food anthropology, and I’ve enjoyed Shapiro’s other books.

My other non-gun book purchase was the three volume non-abridged (I’m pretty sure) Modern Library edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (in the ugly brown covers) which I got on Sunday using a 50% off coupon: originally $40 for the set, so $20 plus tax. It seems to be in at least good, if not very good, condition, and I probably could have gotten it for about that price plus shipping through Amazon’s used market, but this was just easier. (Yes, I could also have downloaded it for free from Project Gutenberg: indeed, I actually have. But I’ve found it hard to read the PG edition, and it was worth $20 to me to have a printed copy.)

And what of gun books? Well, I did find a few of those…

Read the rest of this entry »

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Obit watch: March 17, 2020.

March 17th, 2020

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge:

Genesis led the influential British rock bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, dabbled as a dominatrix in New York, ran a soup kitchen in Kathmandu, hid out from Scotland Yard, organized a cultlike fan club that asked initiates to send in their bodily fluids, and undertook a long-running surgical project to merge identities with her wife, Jacqueline Mary Breyer, in a single nongendered being they called a “pandrogyne.”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Apropos of nothing in particular…

March 16th, 2020

“The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster.

“A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe from Project Gutenberg.

I’m not sure I’ve ever linked this before: the diary of Samuel Pepys in blog form.

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Stuff’s getting serious watch: part II

March 14th, 2020

The April Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show has been cancelled.

In light of current events, we do not want to put our exhibitors, spectators or employees at risk. For over 65 years we have held two shows a year without exception until now. For the safety of everyone involved, this is the right thing to do.
Additionally, we are very concerned that the Governor of Oklahoma will follow the example of other states and limit the number of people allowed to gather in one space. Should this happen, we want to give everyone as much time as possible to change their travel plans.

Again, I don’t think this is any vast conspiracy: I think, as the Wanenmacher people say, they are just being cautious.

(And I can’t get that upset: Mike the Musicologist and I had put off going until November of this year, even though the April show is normally the one we’d go to in our rotation. This year, though, the S&WCA Symposium is in Tulsa in June, so we decided to push Wanenmacher’s out to November so my wallet would have time to recover.)

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Happy Pi Day!

March 14th, 2020

Sadly, the celebration this year is more than a little subdued, and not just because Pi Day falls on a Saturday.

I had actually planned to do Pi Day (observed) on Monday at work. I’d even ordered pies six days in advance. Unfortunately, that was overtaken by events.

So, in lieu of pie, have some Pi: a blog post from Timothy Mullican about his record-setting calculation of Pi to 50 trillion digits, on what’s basically commodity hardware.

(Wikipedia’s chronology of Pi computations.)

(y-cruncher homepage.)

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My culture!

March 13th, 2020

They are appropriating it!

Seen at the HEB in Lakeway last night.

In other news, stuff’s getting serious: Buzzard Day in Hinkley, Ohio, has been “postponed”. It is not clear to me if anybody has conveyed this message to the buzzards.

Also, by way of Mike the Musicologist: the High Caliber gun show this weekend in Conroe has been cancelled by the city. I checked the Premier and Saxet web sites, and don’t see anything there about those shows. But none of these organizations is really good about updating their websites, in my opinion.

(For the record, I don’t see any grand conspiracy here to run gun shows out of business. I think it’s just precautionary. But I’m open to evidence otherwise.)

Also by way of MtM: Blue Bell has closed their “Visitor Center, Ice Cream Parlor, Country Store and Observation Deck” until further notice. The ice cream parlor and country store in Sylacauga are also closed until further notice.

And. of course, no bet with Lawrence on Gonzaga this year. That’s a shame, as I was pretty sure this was Gonzaga’s year.

Posted in Food, Geek, Guns | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 11, 2020.

March 11th, 2020

Great and good FOTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl sent us a note yesterday: Hookers & Blow are touring.

Or is it “Hookers and Blow is touring”? “Hookers and Blow” is a singular collective noun, so it seems like it should be “is”, but somehow that rings false to my ear.

ANYWAY, “Hookers & Blow” is a band. Specifically, “the now legendary project formed by long time Guns N’ Roses keyboardist Dizzy Reed and Quiet Riot guitarist Alex Grossi”. Sadly, their tour is not taking them out of California: but they do have a new single coming out on March 23rd, which I’ve already pre-ordered.

Thanks, Karl! Looking forward to seeing you on the 29th!

In related news: 23 years for Harvey “I’m going to give the NRA my full attention” Weinstein. This is actually buried pretty far down the NYT front page: though, to be fair, the stuff above it is all corona virus or election news.

Interestingly:

In the days following news reports about how he used his power to sexually assault women, Harvey Weinstein made a desperate plea for help in emails to two dozen influential people, including the billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos.

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Obit watch: March 10, 2020.

March 10th, 2020

Max von Sydow. Variety. THR.

Man classed up everything he was in.

R.D. Call, movie and TV character actor. He was in “Born On the Fourth of July”, “Last Man Standing”, and “Waterworld”, as well as a fair amount of TV. Of particular note: he was in “L.A. Takedown”, the TV movie that later became “Heat”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 4, 2020.

March 4th, 2020

I’m dropping into the obscure here, but I have reasons.

Rafael Cancel Miranda. Mr. Miranda was one of the four men who shot up the US Capital on March 1, 1954.

Mr. Cancel Miranda, a hero to many who favor independence for Puerto Rico but a terrorist to many others, was 23 when he and three companions attacked the Capitol, spraying gunfire from the gallery into the House chamber and injuring five congressmen as 243 House members were debating a bill involving migrant workers from Mexico.
The four — the others were Lolita Lebrón, Irvin Flores Rodríguez and Andres Figueroa Cordero — were not satisfied with the agreement that had made Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth in 1952, believing that it was a sham and that the island essentially remained an occupied colony.
Ms. Lebrón waved a Puerto Rican flag briefly and shouted about independence as the attack unfolded and House members sought cover. The four were overpowered and arrested.
Although the scene was chaotic, Mr. Cancel Miranda, at least, was convinced that most of those injured “got hurt by my gun,” as he put it when he was freed in 1979.
“No congressman in particular was the target,” he said then. “It was just an effort to shoot up the place. If we aimed to kill, believe me, that would have happened.”

All four men served “lengthy prison sentences”, at least by NYT standards. Wikipedia says that Mr. Miranda was sentenced to 85 years.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter commuted the sentence of Mr. Figueroa Cordero, who had cancer and died in 1979. President Carter freed the other three in 1979, though they had never sought clemency, considering themselves political prisoners.

Mr. Miranda was the last surviving member of the quartet.

I’ve been going back and forth about this one, and came down on the side of inclusion. Not because this person was famous, but because this is another example of the kind of thing the paper of record does well: the obit for the person who was important to the community in some way, without necessarily being famous.

In this case, Matvey “Falafel” Natanzon, backgammon player.

His illness prematurely ended a roller-coaster career during which he went from sleeping under a bench in Washington Square Park, where he lived for nearly six months after college, to mastering backgammon, a board game that combines rolls of the dice with strategic checker moves.

…

In his short pants, sweatshirt and knitted wool hat, Mr. Natanzon could look like an amiable loser to his easy marks, as he baited them with his nonstop babble and swaggering hubris.
He would graduate to winning (and, on rarer occasions, losing) tens of thousands of dollars in as little as an hour; achieve celebrity status in a game that had migrated from black-tie casino tables to cheesy hotel ballrooms, where baseball caps worn backward were de rigeur; and be named the top player in an unofficial ranking by his peers, known as the Giants of Backgammon.
“Falafel is, without a doubt, backgammon’s No. 1 commentator and is probably its best-known celebrity,” Joe Russell, the chairman of the backgammon federation’s board, said when he awarded Mr. Natanzon the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. “He has been in the top 10 of the Giants list seven straight times, and has been voted No. 1 twice and No. 2 once.”

He was 51. A brain tumor got him.

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Obit watch: March 3, 2020.

March 3rd, 2020

James Lipton. THR. I wish I had more to say about him, but my anti-cable TV policy means that I never saw an episode of “Inside the Actor’s Studio”, and I’m way too young to remember “The Lone Ranger” on the radio.

One thing I don’t think I was consciously aware of until I read his obit: he also wrote An Exaltation of Larks.

Claudette Nevins. She was one of those knock-around actresses: she was in the original production of “Plaza Suite” and toured nationally with “The Great White Hope”. She also did a lot of TV, especially in the 70s: “Barnaby Jones”, “M*A*S*H” (she was the woman Charles Emerson Winchester “married” while drunk in Tokyo), “Mrs. Colombo”, “Switch”, “Lou Grant”, “The Rockford Files”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, “The F.B.I.”…and the list goes on. (She even did an episode of “Police Squad“. (“In Color”!)) Never did a “Mannix”, though, at least per IMDB.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Movies, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

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