My wife once asked me to help my daughter with the perspective on a diorama she was making for school.
I said, "Maddy, in 20 years nobody will give a shit about your diorama" https://t.co/cMpmFrmgmy
— Robert Kroese (@robkroese) September 23, 2021
And speaking of my odd sense of humor…
September 25th, 2021Obit watch: September 25, 2021.
September 25th, 2021Cliff Freeman, advertising guy.
Among his credits: “Where’s the beef?”
In 1984, Wendy’s was looking to differentiate its burger, the modestly named Single, from McDonald’s Big Mac and Burger King’s Whopper. Research found that the Wendy’s Single patty was larger than the patties of the Big Mac and Whopper.
Working with the director Joe Sedelmaier, Mr. Freeman created separate commercials, one with three old women and one with three old men, scrutinizing the fluffy hamburger bun before seeing the tiny patty inside. The breakout version was the one with the women, specifically the squawky octogenarian Clara Peller, who demands to know where the beef is.
…
Mr. Freeman was still at Dancer Fitzgerald a year later when he wrote another popular Wendy’s commercial, which promoted the chain’s breadth of food choices by parodying the lack of choices in Soviet society. In a faux Russian fashion show, a heavyset woman struts on a runway, modeling the same shapeless dress for day wear, evening wear (accessorized with a flashlight) and swimwear (with a beach ball).
Mr. Freeman said it was his favorite ad, in part because of the response.
“The entire Russian government protested it,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2003. “How much more reaction can you get than that?”
I know it is advertising, and I know my sense of humor is sometimes lowbrow, but I think that’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on television. (I’m also a sucker for jokes about Communism.)
He also did commercials for Little Caesars, Outpost.com, and Fox Sports.
Obit watch: September 24, 2021.
September 24th, 2021He was also in “Hail, Caesar!” and had parts on a few cop shows, including “Columbo” among other credits.
I’m cold, and there are wolves after me.
September 23rd, 2021Obit watch: September 23, 2021.
September 23rd, 2021…
In addition to making movies, Mr. Van Peebles published novels, in French as well as in English; wrote two Broadway musicals and produced them simultaneously; and wrote and performed spoken-word albums that many have called forebears of rap.
Over the course of his life he was also a cable-car driver in San Francisco, a portrait painter in Mexico City, a street performer in Paris, a stock options trader in New York, the navigator of an Air Force bomber, a postal worker, a visual artist and, by his own account, a very successful gigolo.
…
…Columbia Pictures then hired him to direct “Watermelon Man” (1970), a satirical comedy about a white bigot, played by Godfrey Cambridge, who turns into a Black man.
Columbia wanted Mr. Van Peebles to shoot alternative endings — one in which the protagonist becomes a Black militant, and another in which he discovers that it was all a dream. Mr. Van Peebles said he “forgot” to shoot the second ending.
Disliking working for a studio, he set out to be an independent filmmaker. To make “Sweetback,” for $500,000, he combined his $70,000 savings with loans, used a nonunion crew and persuaded a film lab to extend him credit.
The plot of the movie concerns a man who attacks two crooked police officers and then escapes as a fugitive to Mexico, vowing to return and “collect some dues.” Only two theaters, in Detroit and Atlanta, would show the movie at first, but it caught fire and for several weeks outgrossed “Love Story.” Its American box office exceeded $15 million (about $100 million in today’s money), a bonanza for an independent film at the time.
Barbara Campbell Cooke. She actually passed away in April at 85, but her family didn’t make an announcement until recently.
She married Sam Cooke in 1959 (or 1958, according to Wikipedia). When he died in 1964, she married Bobby Womack (who worked with Sam Cooke) three months later. He was 19, she was 29, and a lot of fans were not happy.
The sad goes on. The Cookes had a son who died at 18 months. Ms. Cooke and Mr. Womack also had a son who strugged with addiction and killed himself at 21.
Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.
“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”
Al Harrington. He was “Ben Kokua” in the good 5-0 (his character replaced Kono), and was a surf shop owner in the bad 5-0. Also a couple of appearances on “Jake and the Fatman”, among other credits.
Roger Michell, director. Most of his films were British, but he’s perhaps best known for “Notting Hill” (that Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant movie) and “Changing Lanes” (the Ben Affleck/Samuel L. Jackson movie).
Obit watch: September 22, 2021.
September 22nd, 2021Loral I Delaney, well known dog trainer…and legendary trapshooter.
An animal lover who as a young girl kept as pets every creature from raccoons to skunks, Delaney at age 5 headlined her first dog act in 1943 at the Northwest Sportshow in Minneapolis.
When she returned to the same stage a year later, the Minneapolis Tribune gushed, “The tiny daughter of Fred Armstrong put her two beautiful black Labradors through a retrieving act that literally brought down the house.”
In the nearly six decades that followed, Delaney and her dogs would appear at sports shows from New York to Los Angeles. She often drove herself, pulling a trailer full of Labradors, setters, pointers and Chesapeake Bay retrievers.
…
Trapshooting brought Delaney still wider acclaim. The first time she competed at the Minnesota State Trapshoot at age 19, she won the women’s title, breaking 197×200. At the same competition, she won the handicap in a shoot-off with five men.
A member of the National Trapshooting Hall of Fame, Delaney was named to every All-American Trapshooting team from 1966 to 1981, with the exception of one year. She won the Women’s World Flyer Championships four times. She shot on the U.S. Women’s Trapshooting Team before women’s trapshooting was included in the Olympics. And she and Chuck won the husband-wife U.S. trapshooting title four times.
Delaney also won seven Grand American World Trapshooting Championships, include five years consecutively, and was the only woman to win more than two in a row and more than four total.
Bennie Pete, leader of the New Orleans brass band, the Hot 8.
The Hot 8 began playing for tips on Bourbon Street and in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter. They performed outside a housing project in the Central City neighborhood, where people sat down with bags of crawfish and bottles of Abita beer to listen. Mr. Pete once found himself leading a jazz funeral for a dog.
“He was a popular dog for one of the popular musicians,” he told Esquire magazine in 2014, “and they threw a big second-line parade through the streets for him. They’d make a reason to party.”
By 2000, the Hot 8 had established itself as part of a vanguard of young brass bands that were upholding the jazz and funk traditions of New Orleans yet playing with a contemporary sound. The Hot 8’s repertoire included songs by the Specials and Marvin Gaye, and the band incorporated rap and hip-hop into its style. The musicians led second lines on Sundays for social aid and pleasure clubs; crowds formed at night to watch them play in bars in the Treme neighborhood.
Post Katrina, the Hot 8 led the effort to keep New Orleans’s musical heritage intact.
Two months later, the Hot 8 regrouped to lead the first jazz funeral in New Orleans after the storm. The band played with donated instruments, and members of the procession wore salvaged pieces of finery. The parade, which honored a celebrated chef, Austin Leslie, started at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen in the Seventh Ward before ambling to the former site of Chez Helene, where a sign greeted the marchers: “We won’t bow down. Save our soul.”
As despair weighed on the city, the Hot 8 began performing at evacuation shelters and emergency medical centers. They drove around in a van, stopping to jam for crowds until little second lines formed, before heading to another part of town. It wasn’t long before they became local heroes.
“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”
They were featured in Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” and got a record deal.
Released in 2012, “The Life & Times Of …” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best regional roots music album. The group released “Tombstone,” a sister album also based on the theme of remembrance, the next year. The Hot 8 was also featured on a 2015 compilation album, “New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City,” on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.
“Everything kind of worked,” Mr. Pete told Esquire. “Yeah, we are the Hot 8 who went through these things, but we’re still here, and this is who we are after the storm.”
…
But even as music returned to New Orleans after the storm, the Hot 8 endured more misfortune. Their snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was shot dead in his car in December 2006. It was only the latest in a series of tragedies for the band.
In 1996, the trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot in the head at his home. In 2004, the trombonist Joseph Williams was killed in an encounter with the police. And just after Katrina, the trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in a road accident.
Mr. Pete was 45 years old. He died from complications of COVID and sarcoidosis, according to his family.
Willie Garson, from “Sex and the City”.
In addition to the “Sex and the City” movies, Mr. Garson worked with the Farrelly brothers in some of their films, including “Kingpin” (1996), “There’s Something About Mary” (1998) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).
He also played Lee Harvey Oswald three times, in the film “Ruby” (1992) and on the TV shows “Quantum Leap” and “MADtv.”
Saadi Yacef. He was a major figure in the Algerian revolt.
Mr. Yacef became involved in opposition movements while still a teenager and in 1954 joined the Front de Libération Nationale, the F.L.N., the leading nationalist organization during the war for independence. The war lasted from 1954 to 1962, ending with the country’s liberation from France.
He became the organization’s military chief in Algiers in 1956, ordering bombings and other guerrilla attacks until his arrest by French paratroopers the next year in the part of the city known as the casbah. He was sentenced to death.
“While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he told The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”
Charles de Gaulle eventually freed him. And then he went on to act in Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers”.
With a script based on his book, he met with Mr. Pontecorvo, who was said to have been considering his own movie about the Algerian War, one that he hoped would star Paul Newman as a French paratrooper turned journalist. Mr. Yacef and his backers nixed that idea, and Mr. Pontecorvo found Mr. Yacef’s script propagandistic, but they continued to talk. Mr. Yacef arranged to bring Mr. Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, to Algiers for an extended stay so they could study up on the revolution, see locations where the fighting had occurred and meet people who had fought.
The resulting movie, filmed in Algeria with Mr. Yacef as a producer, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and caused a sensation for its startling realism. Some scenes, especially of bombings, looked so authentic that the film in its initial showings was preceded by a disclaimer saying that no newsreel footage had been used.
I have “The Battle of Algiers” but haven’t watched it yet. It is a tough sell for the Saturday Night Movie Group, especially since I sort of forced them to watch another movie about the Algerian revolt (“Lost Command“, based on The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy).
Obit watch: September 21, 2021.
September 21st, 2021Lawrence sent over an obit from – I kid you not – the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services” for actor Tim Donnelly.
He only has 19 credits in IMDB. No “Mannix” but he did appear on the 1960s “Dragnet” multiple times, and also did a guest shot on the good “Hawaii 5-0”. Other credits include “Adam-12”, “Parts: The Clonus Horror”, and “Project U.F.O.”
Why the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services”, though? Mr. Donnelly’s most famous role was “Chet Kelly” in “Emergency”.
That was one of the great ‘staches in 1970s TV.
More seriously, I loved “Emergency” as a child, and I’m sad to see him go. (Kevin Tighe and Randolph Mantooth are both still alive, though.)
FotB RoadRich sent over the obit for George Holliday. Mr. Holliday was the man who filmed the Rodney King beating.
Reuben Klamer. Mr. Klamer was an inventor and toy creator: among other things, he invented “The Game of Life”.
His creations included his own version of the hula hoop and a variation on the Erector Set. He came up with a Pink Panther show car built on an Oldsmobile chassis and rode around in it to promote the “Pink Panther” cartoon series.
He also worked closely with television producers and built props for popular shows, including the Starfleet phaser rifle, which could stun or disintegrate living creatures, for the original “Star Trek” series. (He said he had an agreement for the toy rights to the rifle, but it fell apart and his toy phaser was never produced.) He made a special Napoleon Solo gun for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” that was so popular, the gun itself received fan mail. (He successfully created a toy version of that one.)
Anthony Johnson, “Ezal” in “Friday”.
This isn’t exactly an obit, but I think it’s worth noting.
Your loser update: week 2, 2021.
September 21st, 2021NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
New York Football Giants
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Still early enough in the season that I don’t have much to say yet. Perhaps by next week the picture will come into greater focus.
Obit watch: September 17, 2021.
September 17th, 2021She was one of the old time greats: she co-starred with Fred Astaire in “Royal Wedding”, and also had a starring role in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. Unfortunately, she had trouble finding good roles after that. She did some TV work, including appearances on “Fantasy Island” and “The Love Boat”, and was a semi-regular on “Growing Pains”.
She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”
She never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)
I don’t intend for this to be all Norm Macdonald all the time, and I know “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. But this is a cool story, and I believe this person is telling the truth.
story about norm found in youtube comments pic.twitter.com/Hvp8pd5iz9
— Syloson (@SylosonsCloak) September 17, 2021
Brief memos from the legal beat.
September 15th, 2021Well. Well well well. Well.
…
The former client, Curtis Edward Smith, 61, of Walterboro, S.C., was arrested and charged with assisted suicide, aggravated assault and battery, and insurance fraud in connection with the shooting on Sept. 4, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said.
The state police agency said that Mr. Murdaugh, 53, had admitted to the scheme on Monday and that Mr. Smith had admitted to being at the scene and getting rid of the gun. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer did not respond to inquiries about the arrest, and it was not clear if Mr. Smith, who was booked in the Colleton County jail, had a lawyer.
…
I haven’t written a lot about the Backpage trial, though I have been following it from a distance. Yesterday’s development: the judge declared a mistrial. Why? Grotesque misconduct by the prosecution.
The government’s goal with prosecution is “not to win at any cost” but to “win by the rules, to see that justice is done,” [U.S. District Judge Susan] Brnovich pointed out. “If the government can prove that the defendants … knowingly facilitated prostitution, then they will be punished. But it should be done correctly.”
In her view, that hasn’t happened. The opening statement from federal prosecutor Reggie Jones “was close to causing mistrial,” she said. Then, despite agreeing “to minimize the focus on child sex trafficking” from then on out, the government continued to harp on it. And despite being told that witnesses could only talk about Backpage’s general reputation if it was tied to communication with specific defendants in this case, government witnesses like Sharon Cooper “talked about the reputation of Backpage untethered from communications with the defendants,” Brnovich pointed out.
This is a kind of long, but interesting (to me, anyway) piece about how corrupt San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection is.
Infamous engineer and permit expediter Rodrigo Santos has been hit with a bevy of both federal and local charges. Former DBI senior inspector Bernie Curran has resigned after being suspended for taking an undisclosed “loan” from a developer and then traveling out of his district to sign off that developer’s projects.
The feds on Friday announced fraud charges, in fact, against both Santos and Curran. The former is accused of expediting his permits by instructing his clients (in writing, and captured by the feds) to write charitable checks to Curran’s preferred youth hockey and rugby organizations. Curran then returned the favor by issuing certificates of final completion on these projects, however shoddy or incomplete they may be.
…
Obit watch: September 15, 2021.
September 15th, 2021Norm Macdonald. THR. Variety. Lawrence. Ben Sixsmith.
(If there are any of my readers who are unfamiliar with Albert Fish, he was a real jerk, and I strongly encourage you to think twice before you DuckDuckGo him.)
Hacker News thread (pretty respectful, and lots of links).
https://t.co/xeBTkWrGV1 pic.twitter.com/1qaiGpPmzg
— shoe (@shoe0nhead) September 14, 2021
I thought about embedding some of his bits from YouTube, but Variety already pulled a bunch of those together (including OJ).
Obit watch update.
September 14th, 2021Obit watch: September 14, 2021.
September 14th, 2021This one goes out to FotB Dave: Don Collier. He did a lot of work on Westerns: “The High Chaparral”, “Bonanza”, “Death Valley Days”, “Branded”, and so on. He also did some movie work, including “Seven Ways from Sundown” (with Audie Murphy) and “Tombstone” (credited as “High Roller”).
Your loser update: week 1, 2021.
September 14th, 2021We’re back, baby!
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
Chicago
Green Bay
Dallas
Washington
New York Football Giants
Baltimore
Cleveland
New England
Buffalo
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Tennessee
Firings watch.
September 13th, 2021Well, how about that?
We have our first college football firing, two games into the season.
Clay Helton out at the University of Southern California.
The precipitating incident seems to have been losing to Stanford on Saturday. Helton was 46-24 overall. But his record since 2018 was 19-15, and apparently the usual suspects (boosters) felt like they were consistently underperforming.
Interesting note: Ivan Jasper is going to coach quarterbacks for Navy. Why is this interesting? Jasper was fired as offensive coordinator on Saturday, but Navy’s head coach (Ken Niumatalolo) persuaded the athletic director (Chet Gladchuk) to re-instate him.
Also fired: assistant Billy Ray Stutzmann, who is being let go after his request for a religious exemption to getting the COVID vaccine was rejected.