This is breaking news, but: David Lynch. I wouldn’t ordinarily post anything this early, but I happened to be writing this obit watch when the news broke. Expect more tomorrow.
Bob Uecker. ESPN. IMDB. Baseball Reference.
Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category
Obit watch: January 16, 2025.
Thursday, January 16th, 2025Obit watch: December 30, 2024.
Monday, December 30th, 2024I have been running around with Mike the Musicologist, and will be continuing to do so through the first of the year. So I’m a little behind in obits, but I’m trying to catch up.
Warren Upton. He was 105.
Mr. Upton was the oldest living Pearl Harbor survivor, and the last remaining survivor of the Utah.
Mr. Upton was serving as a radioman aboard the U.S.S. Utah on Dec. 7, 1941. He was below deck, reaching for his shaving kit, when the Utah was struck in quick succession by two torpedoes at about 8 a.m.
“It was quite an inferno,” Mr. Upton, a resident of San Jose, Calif., told the San Francisco TV station KTVU in 2021. “I went over the side then,” he added, “and slid down the side of the ship as she rolled over.”
The ship began capsizing within minutes. Mr. Upton and others left the ship and swam to Ford Island, adjacent to the row of battleships in Pearl Harbor. Along the way, he helped another shipmate who couldn’t swim.
The NYT quotes the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors as stating there are 15 remaining survivors.
Former president Jimmy Carter, for the historical record: NYT. WP. I don’t have a lot to say about this, and it has been thoroughly covered elsewhere. But: I am excited that we’re going to get a new stamp.
Linda Lavin. I don’t know how many people realize she had a considerable Broadway career in addition to “Alice”. Other credits include “Harry O”, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”, and “The Muppets Take Manhattan”.
Olivia Hussey. Other credits include voice work in “Pinky and the Brain”, “Death on the Nile”, and “Black Christmas”.
Have yourself a merry little…
Tuesday, December 24th, 2024…Vincent Price Christmas.
Victoria Price told Fox News Digital that her father, the star of classic horror movies like “House on Haunted Hill” and “Edward Scissorhands,” had a “weakness for large jewelry that he loved buying his wives,” and after going to Poland in 1974 he gifted her stepmother a chunky bone butterfly necklace.
“My stepmother hated it,” Price said. “That wasn’t her cup of tea. And unlike us, she just said it. ‘I will never wear this. I hate it.’”
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This also gives me a chance to vent mildly about one of my disappointments this year. Vincent Price’s cooking show, “Cooking Price-Wise” is being reissued on blu-ray…
…but it is a region B/2 blu-ray that won’t play in the US, and I don’t have a region-free blu-ray player, alas.
Obit watch: December 24, 2024.
Tuesday, December 24th, 2024Col. Perry Dahl (USAF – ret.). He was 101.
Col. Dahl shot down nine planes during the Pacific campaign in WWII.
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He scored his first aerial victory in November 1943 when he shot down a Zero fighter plane while escorting bombers on a strike against a Japanese airfield.
In April 1944 he downed his fifth plane, achieving the minimum required to become an ace, and was promoted to the rank of captain.
In November, during the Philippines campaign, he notched his seventh “kill” while escorting American B-25 bombers that were attacking Japanese shipping. Moments later, Japanese fire forced him to bail out of his plane, which he ditched in Ormoc Bay. But his co-pilot was unable to bail out and perished. Captain Dahl was initially captured by a Japanese Army patrol before being rescued by Philippine resistance forces, who hid him.
He later shot down another Japanese plane. His ninth and final aerial victory came on March 28, 1945, while he was escorting bombers attacking a Japanese naval convoy off the coast of French Indochina, earning him the Silver Star.
He lost four of his P-38s to Japanese fire and midair collisions.
“One more destroyed P-38 and you’ll be a Japanese ace,” the 475th Squadron commander Charles MacDonald once remarked, according to the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum.
Colonel Dahl had flown 158 combat missions by the time the war ended.
He also served honorably during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts before his retirement in 1978.
Art Evans, actor. Other credits include the original “Fun with Dick and Jane”, the original “Death Wish”, and “The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again”.
Lawrence sent me an obit a few days ago for writer Barry Malzberg. I couldn’t do anything with it, because it was on Facebook and wouldn’t even come up for me unless I signed in with my (non-existent) Facebook account. None of the usual sources has published an obit yet, but Michael Swanwick put up a tribute at his blog.
Sophie Hediger, Swiss snowboarder and member of their Olympic team. She was 26, and was killed in an avalanche.
Burt, the crocodile from “Crocodile Dundee”.
The 1986 movie stars Paul Hogan as the rugged crocodile hunter Mick Dundee. In the movie, American Sue Charlton, played by actress Linda Kozlowski, goes to fill her canteen in a watering hole when she is attacked by a crocodile before being saved by Dundee.
Burt is briefly shown lunging out of the water.
But the creature shown in more detail as Dundee saves the day is apparently something else. The Internet Movie Database says the movie goofed by depicting an American alligator, which has a blunter snout.
Update to my Party City obit: while Part City as a chain is shutting down, there are at least two stores in Austin that are independent franchises, and those stores are planning to stay open.
Things you may have wondered about. (#7 in a series)
Thursday, December 19th, 2024This is another one of those “okay, maybe not”: I certainly wasn’t wondering. But in case someone else was:
Spoiler:
This is assuming that they used standard incandescent lights, and that the lights worked:
Most electricity experts and dedicated fans who have tried to calculate how much power and money all those lights would have required 35 years ago have come to a similar, sobering conclusion.
There’s no way a typical 1989 home could have powered 25,000 incandescent lightbulbs.
One Reddit user laid out a theory, solved through various equations and simulations on a spreadsheet, that determined if Clark bypassed the home’s circuit breaker, the house’s copper wires would vaporize and “every wire in the house will immediately ignite.”
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Also, just for the record, there is no “auxilliary nuclear” switch. Though if I was a president with ComEd, I’d have my people wire one up…that does absolutely nothing. Except maybe light an LED. It’d have to be one of those giant knife switches, though, like something out of “Frankenstein”.
Speaking of LEDs…
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About 360 miles east of Chicago, a family in Wadsworth, Ohio, has been lighting up their home in almost the exact Clark Griswold-fashion — without breaking the bank each year, causing brownouts or bothering their neighbors.
For over a decade, Greg and Rachel Osterland, along with their two children, have decorated their home with 25,000 lightbulbs (not one more or less, according to Mr. Osterland) to raise money for cystic fibrosis research. Hundreds of people went to watch the house’s lighting this year, complete with audience drumrolls and a rendition of “Joy to the World,” just like Clark sings in the movie.
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As a lifelong fan of the movie, Mr. Osterland has done the math quite a few times. He determined that if the Griswolds lived in his area in 2024 and used the C9 incandescent bulbs, they would have paid about $4,656 a month for 175,000 watts of electricity. Although, like others, Mr. Osterland realized that there’s no way a regular house could have taken on that much power without some kind of a boost.
So instead of Clark’s imported Italian twinkle lights that are likely incandescent bulbs, Mr. Osterland uses LED lights that all plug into one outlet. After buying their home in 2008 the couple saved up for years to buy the lights to replicate the Griswold house, which cost them about $12,500.
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Frustration…
Friday, December 13th, 2024I was going to post a short video that was relevant to Lawrence’s interests, but I can’t get it to display properly here. The first five or so seconds are cut off, and since it is only a 14 second long video, that just doesn’t work.
I was going to post a short note on a movie we recently watched, but there are no good videos of the bridge bombing from “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” on YouTube. At least, none that I can find, and I wanted to use that to illustrate my point. (I found one of the fuel dump scene, but that really doesn’t do a good job of showing what I wanted to talk about.)
Edited to add: Okay, I found one that gives a good illustration of what I’m talking about.
This is clips of aircraft footage from “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”. I’ve set it to start with the bridge attack at 8:41.
“Bridges” won an Academy Award for special effects in 1955. Interestingly, the other nominees were “The Rains of Ranchipur“…
…and “The Dam Busters“. We’ve seen “Dam Busters”, but not “Rains”. I may try to sell that to the Saturday Movie Group. On the one hand, it seems like one of those typical potboiler romantic melodramas, with a natural disaster thrown in. On the other hand, that cast: Lana Turner, Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, and Michael Rennie (among others). On the gripping hand, the blu-ray is pricy.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…
Tuesday, December 10th, 2024For another year, Daddy didn’t spend the Christmas money on brakes or other car repairs. Daddy actually got his car inspected with no trouble, and his registration sticker is on the way.
Daddy also got a Christmas tree up this year. Granted, it looks and feels a lot like a toilet bowl brush, but it is the sentiment that counts. Heck, we even have lights on the tree. We also got the mailing labels for our Christmas cards printed without very much trouble, for once.
And Daddy got an early Christmas present this year. Somebody saved us a bit of trouble by putting a bunch of stuff in one place…
“The Guns of ‘Die Hard'” by Will Dabbs, MD.
Because it’s just not Christmas until I see Hans Gruber fall from the Nakatomi Tower.
(While we’re on the subject of Christmas movies, I’d like to put in a plug for another good Christmas movie: “Invasion U.S.A.”. Yes, the one with Chuck Norris. Yes, it is a Christmas movie. Yes, it is kind of silly and stupid and cheesy. But I thought it was a lot of fun.)
Obit watch: December 2, 2024.
Monday, December 2nd, 2024Hal Lindsey, of The Late Great Planet Earth fame. He was 95.
Mr. Lindsey took the book world by storm with “The Late Great Planet Earth,” released in 1970 by Zondervan, a small religious publisher in Grand Rapids, Mich. Written with C.C. Carlson (some Lindsey followers said it was ghostwritten by her), the book is a breezy blend of history and apocalyptic predictions based on biblical interpretations and actual events of the time.
An editor at Bantam Books thought the book, Mr. Lindsey’s first, had sales potential, so she acquired the mass-market paperback rights. “The Late Great Planet Earth” became the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. By some estimates, it sold about 35 million copies by 1999, and was translated into about 50 languages.
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The Middle East, and Israel in particular, were central to Mr. Lindsey’s predictions. “The Late Great Planet Earth” was published just three years after Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War of June 1967. Mr. Lindsey was on safe ground in predicting that Israel’s victory would not bring peace, but he envisioned events far worse than the violence and tensions that plague the region.
The book forecast a war that would end all wars, with a huge Russian army invading Israel by land and sea. The Russians were in turn expected to battle a horde of soldiers, led by the Chinese. Naturally, a conflict of this magnitude could not be contained.
World leaders would send armies to the Middle East to fight under the command of a Rome-based Antichrist against “the kings of the east.”
“Western Europe, the United States, Canada, South America and Australia will undoubtedly be represented,” Mr. Lindsey predicted, and the conflict would not be confined to the Middle East. Hundreds of millions of people would perish in the ashes of New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and other metropolises. Then, finally, the return of Jesus Christ would bring everlasting joy to the faithful and eternal dismay to those who refused to be saved, Mr. Lindsey wrote.
Melani McAlister, a professor of American studies at George Washington University who followed Mr. Lindsey’s career, said in an interview that she found Mr. Lindsey’s tone “weirdly gleeful” considering its central notion, “that there are going to be rivers of blood everywhere.”
“Dear boss: I was late for work this morning because rivers of blood were blocking my driveway.”
We had the book, but I never saw the movie. In double checking the dates on IMDB, I find that Norman Borlaug appears in it as himself. You know what that means, right?
Actually, the Oracle of Bacon claims “Norman Borlaug cannot be linked to Kevin Bacon using only feature films.” I think this is wrong, assuming you count “Earth” as a feature film. (I do.) “Orson Welles has a Bacon number of 2” and, since Welles was in “Earth” with Norman Borlaug, that would make his Bacon number 3, at the most. Right?
Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen collaborator.
Peter Westbrook, Olympic fencer.
A saber fencer with a graceful and agile style in an event reliant on ballistic thrusting and slashing maneuvers, Westbrook won 13 United States championships and qualified for every U.S. Olympic team from 1976 through 1996.
His Olympic medal, a bronze one, came in the individual saber competition at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. He also served as flag-bearer for the American team at the closing ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and was inducted into the national fencing Hall of Fame in 1996.
Obit watch: November 27, 2024.
Wednesday, November 27th, 2024Jim Abrahams, of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker (ZAZ), the people who brought you “Airplane!”, “Police Squad!” (In color), and “Top Secret!”
I know I’ve mentioned this, but: I enthusiastically endorse Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! by ZAZ, and think it would make a great Christmas present for someone in your family.
Earl Holliman. He had an interesting lineup of other credits, including “Forbidden Planet”, “The F.B.I.”, and “The Sons of Katie Elder”.
Helen Gallagher, actress. Other credits include “The Cosby Mysteries”, “Law and Order”, and “Roseland”.
Obit watch: November 15, 2024.
Friday, November 15th, 2024Theodore B. Olson, noted lawyer. I sort of vaguely remember him from the Reagan administration:
Later on, he became involved in the effort to overturn California’s gay marriage ban, and opposed the first Trump administration’s efforts to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
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Mr. Olson worked on the White House’s behalf during the initial stages of the Iran-contra affair, Congress’s investigation into the illegal arms sales to Iran to support right-wing rebels in Nicaragua. He was also accused of committing perjury during a congressional investigation into the White House’s withholding of environmental records.
That investigation, which lasted five years and personally cost Mr. Olson $1.5 million, ended without charges. It made him a darling among conservative commentators, but left many Democrats convinced that he was dangerously partisan.
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His third wife, the conservative commentator Barbara (Bracher) Olson, was aboard American Airlines Flight 77 to Los Angeles from Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked it, crashing it into the Pentagon and killing everyone aboard.
She had planned to leave the day before, but had stayed an extra day to be with Mr. Olson on the morning of his birthday. As the plane veered back toward Northern Virginia, where they lived, she called him from a bathroom, and Mr. Olson was able to record some of the call. His telephone is now in the collection of the National Museum of American History.
Gerry Faust, former coach at Notre Dame.
John Robinson, former coach at the Universty of Southern California and of the Rams.
…Attending Our Lady of Perpetual Help School, he met a fellow fifth-grader, John Madden, the future Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster, and they became lifelong friends.
“Just two doofuses from Daly City,” Robinson told The Los Angeles Times in 2021.
Timothy West, noted British actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Nicholas and Alexandra”, “Crime and Punishment” (the 1979 TV miniseries)…
…and what was, according to the obit, a disastrous production of “Macbeth” with Peter O’Toole.
Mr. O’Toole, who had not appeared on the London stage for 15 years, had insisted on complete artistic control over the production, Mr. West wrote in a memoir — “a sure recipe for dissent if not disaster” — and refused to make any suggested changes.
The first night was a critical failure (“Not so much downright bad as heroically ludicrous,” The Daily Mail wrote), and ignited a public war of words (“West Disowns MacBeth,” one headline blared). But the play drew so many curious theatergoers that it became a box office hit.
He was also married to Prunella “Sybil Fawlty” Scales, who I did not know (until I read the obit) has Alzheimer’s. Damn.
Obit watch: November 11, 2024.
Monday, November 11th, 2024Playing catch-up here:
Tony Todd, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Cop Rock”, “Jake and the Fatman”, and multiple spinoffs of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
This is a little old, but as I recall, it came up while Mike the Musicologist and I were wandering around: Jonathan Haze, actor. Other credits include OG “Dragnet”, “Highway Patrol”, “The Fast and the Furious” (1954), and “The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent”.
Finally, Baltazar Ushca has passed away at 80. He is believed to have been the last of the Andean ice harvesters.
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Obit watch: October 30, 2024.
Wednesday, October 30th, 2024…
Other credits include “One from the Heart”, “Honky Tonk Freeway”, “McCloud”, “Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood”, and an episode of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
John Gierach, author and fly fisherman. I recognized the name, probably because I’ve seen some of his books around. (Half-Price Books puts the fishing books right above the firearms books.)
Charles Brandt, former prosecutor and author.
But [“The Irishman”] was fiercely criticized by journalists and Mafia experts, who said Mr. Sheeran had exaggerated (at best) or fabricated (at worst) his role in Mr. Hoffa’s death.
“Frank Sheeran never killed a fly,” John Carlyle Berkery, an Irish mob figure in Philadelphia, was quoted as saying in a 2019 Slate article with the headline “The Lies of the Irishman.” “The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine.”
Selwyn Raab, who wrote about the Mafia for The Times for more than two decades, told Slate: “I know Sheeran didn’t kill Hoffa. I’m as confident about that as you can be. There are 14 people who claim to have killed Hoffa. There’s an inexhaustible supply of them.”
I read I Heard You Paint Houses and I think Frank Sheeran’s claim that he killed Hoffa is B.S. Sheeran even admitted to the author at one point that he’d lied about an easily checkable point: if he lied about that, why should we believe the rest of what he said?