Obit watch: February 19, 2019.

February 19th, 2019

George Mendonsa has passed away at the age of 95.

Mr. Mendonsa was the man in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after the Japanese surrender.

At least, maybe he was. Eisenstaedt didn’t record the names of the sailor or nurse, and at least three women and 11 men have claimed they were one or the other.

But Mr. Mendonsa was adamant that he was the one. He sued Life in the 1980s when the magazine would not definitively acknowledge that he was the sailor, though nothing came of the lawsuit.

…

Mr. Mendonsa eventually received recognition from most parties after extensive testing. Among other efforts, in 2005, Richard Benson, a photographer and printmaker at Yale, scrutinized the photographs in the early 1980s and determined that Mr. Mendonsa’s specific features, like a cyst on his left arm and a dark patch on his right, matched those of the sailor in the photo.
Mr. Mendonsa’s face was painstakingly 3-D mapped, then reverse-aged, to show that it matched the sailor’s in Eisenstaedt’s picture. Four years later Norman Sauer, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, analyzed the photo and said he could not find a single inconsistency between Mr. Mendonsa’s face and the sailor’s.

Greta Friedman, who may have been the nurse, passed away in 2016.

Posted in History, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2019.

February 18th, 2019

From the Department of Brief Round-Ups, a couple of obits that people mentioned to me over the weekend:

Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Patrick Caddell, prominent political pollster.

Betty Ballantine, wife of Ian Ballantine. The Ballantines basically pioneered paperbacks in this country:

With a $500 wedding dowry from Ms. Ballantine’s father, the couple established Penguin U.S.A. by importing British editions of Penguin paperbacks, starting with “The Invisible Man” by H. G. Wells and “My Man Jeeves” by P. G. Wodehouse.

…

They left Penguin in 1945 to start Bantam Books, a reprint house. Having purchased the paperback rights for 20 hardcovers, their first round of titles included Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
They started Ballantine Books in 1952, publishing reprints as well as original works in paperback.

And:

While Ian Ballantine, who died in 1995, was the better known of the publishing duo, Betty Ballantine, who was British, quietly devoted herself to the editorial side. She nurtured authors, edited manuscripts and helped promote certain genres — Westerns, mysteries, romance novels and, perhaps most significantly, science fiction and fantasy.
Her love for that genre and knowledge of it helped put it on the map.
“She birthed the science fiction novel,” said Tad Wise, a nephew of Ms. Ballantine’s by marriage. With the help of Frederik Pohl, a science fiction writer, editor and agent, Mr. Wise said, “She sought out the pulp writers of science fiction who were writing for magazines and said she wanted them to write novels, and she would publish them.”
In doing so she helped a wave of science fiction and fantasy writers emerge. They included Joanna Russ, author of “The Female Man” (1975), a landmark novel of feminist science fiction, and Samuel R. Delany, whose “Dhalgren” (1975) was one of the best-selling science fiction novels of its time.
The Ballantines also published paperback fiction by Ray Bradbury, whose books include “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451”; Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey”; and J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 16, 2019.

February 16th, 2019

The late great Bruno Ganz.

In the Wim Wenders drama “Wings of Desire” (1987), he played an angel whose job was to spend time on earth, make himself visible to the dying and to comfort them. But the character saw such beauty in human life that he wanted it for himself.

…

Most of Mr. Ganz’s more than 80 films and television movies were European productions, among them Mr. Wenders’s film noir hommage “The American Friend” (1977), with Dennis Hopper, in which he played a German with a terminal-illness diagnosis who agrees to be a hit man; Volker Schlöndorff’s “Circle of Deceit” (1981), as a war correspondent in Beirut; Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu” (1979), as the innocent Jonathan Harker; and Barbet Schroeder’s “Amnesia” (2017).
But he did appear in American films, including “The Boys From Brazil” (1978), the drama about Nazi war criminals starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier; Jonathan Demme’s all-star 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate”; and “The Reader” (2008), with Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

A wonderful team is the Pelicans…

February 15th, 2019

Dell Demps out as GM of the New Orleans Pelicans.

I don’t follow the NBA much, so I’m missing a lot of what’s going on here. (Then again, I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been “missing” it, Bob.) The sources I read say this is fallout from Anthony Davis wanting to be traded, and New Orleans pushing back on offers from the Lakers.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Principles.

February 14th, 2019

The anarcho-capitalist side of me thinks Alexandra Occasional Cortex is an idiot.

The less anarcho-capitalist side of me thinks a 100% marginal tax rate sounds like a great idea, as long as it’s applied only to people who purchase $1,475 sterling silver weed grinders and $950 bongs.

Posted in Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 14, 2019.

February 14th, 2019

Lyndon LaRouche, one of the 20th Century’s greatest cranks. LaRouche PAC.

Defining what Mr. LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, the composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.

…

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — he saw rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

…

In Mr. LaRouche’s view, Mr. Johnson continued, “true Platonists believe that industrialization, technology and classical music should be used to bring wealth and enlightenment to the citizens of the world.”
He added: “The Aristotelians are trying to stop them by using not only sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll but also environmentalism and quantum theory. With their bag of brainwashing techniques, they hope to trick civilization into destroying itself, bringing on a new dark ages in which the world’s riches will be firmly in the hands of the oligarchs.”

…

After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Mr. LaRouche warned that the new president was in “grave and imminent danger” of being assassinated by the “British Empire,” a familiar target of Mr. LaRouche’s.

…

But Mr. LaRouche was heartened by the election of President Trump, though he perceived a British conspiratorial hand reaching into the United States to foment efforts to “politically paralyze” the president and bring about his impeachment.

He was rather oddly obsessed with the British royal family. From a recent editorial on the LaRouche PAC web site calling for his exoneration:

The frame-up and jailing of LaRouche, facilitated by years of lying media vilification of LaRouche and his movement, which continues to this day, was carried out by the same British-run political apparatus—in many cases, by the same individual hit-men, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller—that today is out to topple the President of the United States.

…

Because LaRouche’s proposed war on drugs against London’s Dope, Inc. banking apparatus was never implemented, a drug epidemic today is poisoning our nation and the world.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Posted in Law, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

February 14th, 2019

Technically, from last night:

Posted in Music | Comments Closed

Flaming hyenas update.

February 13th, 2019

Good news: Carlos Uresti has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for bribery.

Bad news: this sentence will run concurrently with his existing 12 year sentence from last year, so he won’t actually be doing any additional time.

Posted in Law, Politics, Texas | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 13, 2019.

February 13th, 2019

Rick Schmidt, former owner of Kruez Market in Lockhart.

Kreuz Market first opened in 1900. Rick’s father, Edgar “Smitty” Schmidt, purchased it in 1948, and Rick and his brother Don Schmidt bought the legendary Lockhart barbecue restaurant from their father in 1984. Don retired from the family business in 1997, and in 1999, Austin-native Rick relocated Kreuz Market from its previous location on Main Street to Colorado Street, near Town Branch creek, following a public dispute with his sister, Nina Sells, who inherited the old brick building on Main Street.
Sells converted the original Kreuz Market location into Smitty’s Market, while Schmidt opened his massive, red-brick building about a mile up the road. The family feud made headlines in Austin and landed the family on an episode of the CBS newsmagazine “48 Hours.″

Posted in Beef, Food, Obits | Comments Closed

Brief notes on film: February 2019.

February 11th, 2019

Over the weekend, Lawrence and I went to see “They Shall Not Grow Old“.

Quick hot take: go see this movie. Take your teenage children.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the movie: Peter Jackson went through about 100 hours of vintage WWI footage at the Imperial War Museum and selected portions which he enhanced (removing scratches and other artifacts of old age, as well as adjusting exposures), adjusted the film speed to contemporary standards, colorized it, and edited it into a narrative of the war.

Almost all of the voices you hear in the film are actual veterans of WWI (taken from 1950s-1960s oral histories recorded by the BBC). There are some places where Jackson actually hired professional lip readers to determine what the people in the film were saying, and then had professional actors dub the lines.

It doesn’t concentrate on one major battle, or the larger scale strategy of the war: it’s more like “this is what the typical experience of a soldier on the Western Front was like”, from the pre-war mobilization through training to trench combat and finally the end of the war.

IMDB lists the movie as 99 minutes long. In the showing we saw, there was also a 30-minute post credit documentary narrated by Jackson explaining some of the technical aspects. (It isn’t clear to me if that’s the case for all showings.)

I could not be more enthusiastic about recommending this movie: if I had the money, I would rent out movie theaters for showings of this, and give out free tickets in schools. (Yes, it is kind of a hard “R”, mostly for realistic depictions of the effects of war. There’s also some brief shots of male butts in a non-sexual context.)

Of course, I do have a couple of minor notes…

  • We saw the 2D version. It looks like there’s also a 3D version, but that wasn’t playing in our location.
  • Jackson’s grandfather was a WWI vet, and Jackson has been interested in the war for most of his life. Apparently, he has a rather large collection of WWI artifacts…including artillery. As he puts it at one point, “I sort of accumulated some artillery pieces, the way one does.”
  • He talks at one point in the documentary about sound design for the artillery: the actual firing and explosions were based on recordings of contemporary 105mm howitzers with the cooperation of the New Zealand military. It’s interesting to me, though, to compare this with “All Quiet on the Western Front”: one of the things that stood out to me in the latter movie was that the bursting shells all sounded different depending on what type of shell they were. It’s not that you could tell a French 75 from a German gun by sight: more, “that shell sounded different than the last one. Oh, there’s another one. Oh, there’s that first one again.” That seems to me to be somehow more realistic. But I don’t know how Jackson could have gotten around that: explosive shells for vintage WWI guns are probably hard to come by, even if you do have all that “Lord of the Rings” money.
  • Jackson talks about there being about 100 hours of Imperial War Museum footage that he cut down to about 100 minutes, and how many aspects of the war he had to leave out. I’m wondering: have Jackson and his team made any efforts to process the rest of the footage and make it available to other filmmakers, or to the IWM? I don’t expect him to go back and do a second WWI documentary (unless this is one is massively successful, and I hope it is) but I’d love it if Jackson’s production company worked with another director on a similar film about the air war, or the Navy, or any of the other aspects of the war he had to leave out.
  • For that matter, is anyone in the US doing something like this with US WWI footage?
  • I haven’t been able to find the soundtrack for this film on Apple Music or Amazon. And I want it. If you search, though, you can find the closing credits on YouTube (at least until there’s a copyright strike.)

Repeating myself: go. See. It’s not “fun”, but it’s an extraordinary piece of work.

Posted in History, Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 11, 2019.

February 11th, 2019

Great and good friend of the blog Borepatch, who has probably forgotten more about popular music than I know, sent over a couple of obits that I missed.

Bonnie Guitar passed away in January at the age of 95.

Ms. Guitar was best known for her recording of “Dark Moon,” a Top 20 country single on the Dot label that crossed over to the pop Top 10 in 1957. The record, a haunting nocturne sung in a clear-toned alto, was, along with Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” — which reached the pop Top 40 the same year — one of the earliest records by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart.

…

But the achievement for which Ms. Guitar never really received her due, perhaps because she decided to remain in her native Washington instead of resettling in a major recording center like Los Angeles or Nashville, was her trailblazing work as a studio maven and entrepreneur. Over seven decades she did everything from engineer recordings to scout talent and run a record label.

And Sanger D. “Whitey” Shafer also died in January. He was perhaps most famous for writing “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” and “Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind”.

In 2004, Shafer earned a different kind of hit, as his own recording of “All My Ex’s” appeared on the soundtrack of the hit video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Few country songwriters of his generation can claim that, and it’s one of many reasons we’ll not see his like again.

Tribute from “Austin City Limits”. Obit from Saving Country Music. Obit from WFAA.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 8, 2019.

February 8th, 2019

Albert Finney.

Mr. Finney was nominated five times for an Oscar, four for best actor: as the title character in “Tom Jones,” Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel; as Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express”; as an aging, embittered actor in Peter Yates’s 1983 version of “The Dresser”; and as an alcoholic British consul in a small town in Mexico in John Huston’s “Under the Volcano,” based on the Malcolm Lowry novel. His performance in “Erin Brockovich” earned him a supporting actor nomination.

Frank Robinson, who became the first black manager in MLB when he took over the Cleveland Indians:

Robinson made his debut as the majors’ first black manager with the Cleveland Indians on April 8, 1975, 28 years after Jackie Robinson (no relation) first took the field with the Dodgers. Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s widow, threw out the ceremonial first ball.
Frank Robinson, who was still an active player, punctuated the historic occasion by hitting a home run in his first at-bat, as the designated hitter, leading the Indians to a 5-3 victory over the Yankees.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Pork chop sandwiches!

February 8th, 2019

A Florida Woman is facing a domestic battery charge after allegedly clobbering her boyfriend in the face with a frozen pork chop during a dispute Friday night in their residence.

Remember, folks: when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have frozen pork chops.

(Hattip for the submission: Mike the Musicologist. We also would have accepted his suggested title: “Roald Dahl, call your office, please.” even though that’s not quite technically accurate. Hattip for the title.)

Also by way of Mike:

Boston cop on leave after service weapon allegedly stolen by strippers

Strippers. Always the strippers.

A Boston cop who had his city-issued gun allegedly stolen by two strippers after a night out bar-hopping last week in Rhode Island is not being identified because he is “a victim,” police told the Herald today.

Note that the arrest report values the Glock at $5,000. Should we be calling the unnamed police officer “The Man With the Golden Gun” from now on?

Posted in Food, Guns, Law, Rhode Island | Comments Closed

Headline of the day.

February 6th, 2019

Autopsy: Man died of meth overdose before being eaten by bear at national park

Drugs are bad, kids. Mm’kay?

(Obligatory.)

Posted in Bagatelle, Food, Mammals | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 5, 2019.

February 5th, 2019

This one goes out to Borepatch and Weer’d Beard: Jacqueline Steiner, who co-wrote “M.T.A.”. That song (also known as “Charlie on the M.T.A.”) later became a huge hit for the Kingston Trio:

The song remains embedded in Boston’s collective unconscious and is something of an unofficial city anthem.

Thing I did not know: it was originally written for a guy running for mayor in 1949. He only got one percent of the vote, and was later blacklisted as a Communist.

Also among the dead: Albert J. “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, notorious corporate raider.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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