The St. Louis Blues, who are a professional hockey team in the NHL, fired Hitchcock.
Actually, that would be Ken Hitchcock.
(Subject line hattip. You know, for a while I thought many of the songs on Brothers In Arms were massively overplayed. I’m starting to come around to the idea that it may be a classic now.)
I have been somewhat negligent about posting reminders recently, since pretty much every day during the current administration has been like this.
But while I’m thinking about it, let me just remind everyone that Friday is national “Buy an AK Day”. Please note that the timing is just a coincidence, and has nothing to do with recent events. (A more complete explanation of the reasons why January 20th is national “Buy an AK Day” is at the link.)
(I’m not sure I’m going to actually purchase an AK, as I haven’t really found one I like at a good price, and there’s much less pressure to do so now. However, I may go out and pick up 100 rounds of 7.62×39, just to have it around.)
Tommy Allsup, guitarist, producer, and historical footnote.
As a guitarist, he was touring as a part of Buddy Holly’s band in February of 1959. This is the same tour that Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson were on…
Mr. Allsup flipped a coin to see whether he or Valens would get a seat on the plane. He lost and took a bus to the next stop on the tour.
Holly, Valens, the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson) and the pilot, Roger Peterson, died when the plane crashed in the Iowa countryside. Their deaths were recalled as “the day the music died” in Don McLean’s 1971 hit song, “American Pie.”
For the record: William Peter “The Exorcist” Blatty. NYT. WP.
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. I’m torn about this. On the one hand, I hate to see nearly 150 years of history flushed down the drain, and I’m sad for the circus population that’s going to lose their jobs (and possibly, for some of them, homes). I’m also sad that this decision appears to have some roots in the organized campaigns by various “animal welfare” organizations. (Remember, when you see those sad animals on TV and Sarah McLachlan in the backgrond: that money’s going to pay Ringling’s legal fees.)
On the other hand…the last time I went to a Ringling Circus was over 30 years ago, before my first attempt at college. And what I remember most about it from that time was that I found it kind of sad and depressing. It isn’t that I’m some sort of crypto-animal-rights activist; it just felt like there was something sad and wrong about the whole thing. I guess I’m sad for the people, and sad for the lost history, but I’m not so sad for the institution itself. (And as the article notes, Feld Entertainment has a bunch of other stuff going on, much of which appears to contain the phrase “…On Ice!” so they’ll probably do okay for a while longer.)
Nat Hentoff has passed away at the age of 91. NYT. Reason. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. I can’t link to them directly, but Popehat has been retweeting a lot of very good tributes to Mr. Hentoff.
Mr. Hentoff was a personal hero of mine (who I never met). Stipulated: he was a liberal, and we probably would have disagreed on many of the social issues of the day. But there was one thing we agreed on: freedom of speech. Mr. Hentoff was an absolutist. He didn’t care if you were left, right, a student, or even a Nazi. If someone was trying to stop you from speaking, he was against it. He wrote eloquently and well for many years for the Village Voice in opposition to censors and censorship. He didn’t just limit himself to government action, though there was plenty of fertile ground there. He also spoke out against private censors. I particularly remember his condemnations of CBS for suspending Andy Rooney
(I don’t know how long he’d been ill, but I wonder what, if anything, he would have said about Milo Yiannopoulos and Simon & Schuster.)
One of the things I respected about him was his intellectual consistency. That didn’t just apply to freedom of speech. He was opposed to the death penalty. But he was also opposed to abortion (he was the only anti-abortion voice in the Voice, and he wasn’t shy about expressing his views) and euthanasia. I like the way Wikipedia summarizes his view:
When I was a young lad in middle school and high school, Hentoff’s books on free speech were in the school library, and my high school had a subscription to the Voice. Nat Hentoff shaped my views on freedom of speech, and inspired me (in my own small way) to be a first amendment advocate and activist.
I’m reminded of that quote from Melville Davisson Post that I often use: “He stood up as though he stood alone, with no glance about him to see what other men would do…No one of them believed in what the other taught; but they all believed in justice, and when the line was drawn, there was but one side for them all.” That was Nat Hentoff.
(He also was a pretty prominent writer on jazz, though I was born without the jazz appreciation gene and am not as well read in his jazz writings.)
91 is a good run, but the world is still a lesser place today.
The Grim Reaper finally caught up with Vesna Vulovic (or Vesna Vulović). She was 66 years old, and had managed to outrun him for nearly 45 of those years.
If that sounds callous, well, Ms. Vulovic had an amazing story. You might even remember it if you were an obsessive reader of the Guinness Book of World Records when you were young.
Ms. Vulovic was a flight attendant on JAT Flight 367 between Stockholm and Belgrade on January 26, 1972. She had actually swapped places with another girl and wasn’t originally scheduled to work this flight. As we see so often in movies and television, this never ends well…
An hour into the flight, the plane, a DC-9, blew up over the Czech village of Srbska Kamenice. As others were believed to have been sucked out of the jet into subfreezing temperatures, Ms. Vulovic remained inside part of the shattered fuselage, wedged in by a food cart, as it plunged.
Trees broke the fall of the fuselage section and snow on the hill cushioned its landing.
Ms. Vulovic is believed to have fallen 33,000 feet, which (according to Guinness, at least) is the longest documented fall survived without a parachute. She was badly injured, but Ms. Vulovic was the only survivor of Flight 367. It is generally believed that the plane was blown up by a terrorist bomb in the forward cargo hold.
I think the Wikipedia page (I know, I know) on Flight 367 has a fairly good explanation of why this theory is bolshie bushwa. Here’s a hint: the black boxes…
I could buy a couple of Communist countries being in on the conspiracy. But the Dutch?
Sometimes there’s just nothing you can say. Debbie Reynolds: NYT. LAT. A/V Club.
Greg Lake, noted prog-rock guy. (King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer)
Fritz Weaver, noted character actor. He won a Tony for “Child’s Play” in 1974, and was in “Fali-Safe” and the “Holocaust” mini-series, among other credits. (Edited to add 11/29: A/V Club.)
For the love of God, don’t go swimming in a Yellowstone hot spring.
First of all, it will kill you.
Second of all, those springs are acid, and will dissolve your dead body.
We haven’t had a musical interlude in a while. Let’s fix that. Besides, this is a rather catchy little ditty,
Leonard Cohen. NYT. A/V Club to come. LAT. WP.
So much for that Nobel Prize in Literature.
More seriously: I was not one of those people who worshipped Mr. Cohen and his work. But I do like quite a bit of it, some of it in covers by other people (for example, “Closing Time” as covered by the Fairport Convention), some of it on his own. He had that kind of gravelly voice that worked really well for some things.
This is one of my favorite songs, period. Sorry I can’t embed, but that doesn’t seem to work on mobile.
Revelation 8, verses 1-5:
When He opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and to them were given seven trumpets. Then another angel, having a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, ascended before God from the angel’s hand. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and threw it to the earth. And there were noises, thunderings, lightnings, and an earthquake.
You know, I kind of like Steve Goodman. I think we can do with one more musical interlude, before we retire this song for another 100 years.
And I hope he’s smiling somewhere in heaven.
Edited to add: Tam. Office seems kind of dusty this morning.
Edited to add 2: I had no idea Bob Newhart was on Twitter.
The fella at the next table was nice enough to help me hold the flag after the Cubs won!!! Go Cubs and fly the W!!#GoCubsGo #FlytheW #Game7 pic.twitter.com/QJVaPgOTDH
— Bob Newhart (@BobNewhart) November 2, 2016
The billy goat is dead!! As I've said, from the beginning, I'm getting too old for this! #GoCubsGo #FlytheW pic.twitter.com/iCOL6A3s1i
— Bob Newhart (@BobNewhart) November 3, 2016
(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.)
It has been a while since I’ve done one of these, so why not now?
But it does bother me a little that I can’t find a version of the song with the original lyrics.
