Archive for January, 2022

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Obit watch: January 31. 2022.

Monday, January 31st, 2022

NYT obit for Howard Hesseman, which was not up when I posted yesterday.

Mike the Musicologist sent this over, with the observation that it had been posted yesterday:

Cheslie Kryst. She was Miss USA 2019, and worked as a lawyer and a correspondent on “Extra”.

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 good page of additional resources.

Hargus Robbins, noted session pianist in Nashville.

A longtime member of Nashville’s so-called A-Team of first-call studio musicians, Mr. Robbins appeared on thousands of popular recordings made here between the late 1950s and mid-2010s.
Many became No. 1 country singles, including Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” (1962), Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” (1966) and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (1974). Several also crossed over to become major pop hits, Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” (1961) and Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978) among them.

…

Mr. Robbins’s influence was maybe most pronounced as the Nashville Sound evolved into the more soul-steeped “countrypolitan” style heard on records like George Jones’s 1980 blockbuster single, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
Mr. Robbins’s rippling, jazz-inflected intros to Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” (1973) and Crystal Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” (1977) became enduring expressions of the Southern musical vernacular of their era. Both records were No. 1 country and crossover pop singles.

…

Afforded the chance to stretch out stylistically on “Blonde on Blonde,” Mr. Robbins played with raucous abandon on “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” the woozy, carnivalesque No. 2 pop hit hooked by the tagline “Everybody must get stoned.” He employed a tender lyricism, by contrast, on elegiac ballads like “Just Like a Woman” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”

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

Obit watch: January 30, 2022.

Sunday, January 30th, 2022

Booger.

Howard Hesseman.

In other eccentric turns, Hesseman played hippies in Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) and on NBC’s Dragnet (he was billed as Don Sturdy back then); a patient suffering from writer’s block on The Bob Newhart Show; a psychiatrist on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; a pimp opposite Dan Aykroyd in Doctor Detroit (1983); and a shock rocker in This Is Spinal Tap (1984).

I didn’t watch “Head of the Class”, and, while I may have watched the original “One Day at a Time”, I’m pretty sure I had checked out by season 9. (We were actually discussing that show last night at dinner: I believe we all watched it, but with the mitigating excuse that there were only three channels at the time.)

I can’t find my favorite Dr. Johnny Fever moment online. (Johnny takes a sobriety test, and the drunker he gets, the better his reaction time gets. This is the kind of humor you could get away with in the late 1970s/early 1980s, before joyless fun suckers sucked all the fun out of everything.) And I don’t want to use the turkey drop stuff, because overused and it isn’t Thanksgiving.

So here’s a nice golden moment for you.

Edited to add 2/7: Lawrence pointed out something over the weekend that was quite a surprise to me (I should have checked his credits more closely): Howard Hessman did a “Mannix”. (“A Ransom for Yesterday“, season 8, episode 17. We watched it Saturday night: given that it was so close to the end of the series, it is actually a pretty good episode, and Hessman’s role is substantial. It also isn’t an old Army buddy episode, thank Ghu.)

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

That old devil is at it again.

Saturday, January 29th, 2022

Four Arizona State coaches are no longer with the program.

According to reports, offensive coordinator Zak Hill and tight ends coach Adam Breneman “resigned”: wide receivers coach Prentice Gill and secondary coach Chris Hawkins were fired.

Why? Everybody’s favorite reason: recruiting violations.

Sources told ESPN that part of the NCAA’s investigation involves Arizona State hosting prospects during the recruiting dead period, which lasted from March 2020 to June 1, 2021. FBS programs were prohibited from having recruits on campus during that period. Several sources in the Pac-12 told ESPN that Arizona State also faces allegations about recruiting practices that occurred when the dead period ended, including possible improper contact with prospects at an off-campus recruiting camp in June.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#61 in a series)

Saturday, January 29th, 2022

Damien Hirst has done other works than “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living“.

One of those was a diamond encrusted skull called “For the Love of God”.

Back in 2007, Hirst’s market was exploding. The same year he said he sold For the Love of God, his work made a total of $86.3 million at auction, according to the Artnet Price Database. The following year, he notoriously sold his work directly through Sotheby’s for a whopping $201 million. But his auction sales never approached those heights again. (Last year, his work generated $38 million, a 13-year high.)

Hirst has claimed for a while now that he sold the work for $100 million in 2007.

Turns out…

In a profile published in the New York Times on the occasion of his first New York show in four years, Hirst said the work, titled For the Love of God and allegedly made from more than 8,600 diamonds, was sitting in a storage facility in Hatton Garden, London’s jewelry district.
According to Hirst, he still owns the bauble in partnership with his gallery, White Cube, and a group of unnamed investors.

More:

In the recent Hirst New York Times profile, the newspaper took at face value the artist’s claim that he sold around 80 new works for between $750,000 and $3.5 million each.
“We could have sold many, many more,” Larry Gagosian told the Times. “People were literally begging to buy these paintings.”

ArtNet article. Some people have told me they have trouble with this link, so here’s an archive.is version.

NYT profile.

“He’s a talented artist, but this? Really?” said Alan Baldwin, an art collector, looking down recently at a fluffy black sculpture of a spider with bow legs and googly eyes. Back in 1992, three years before winning the prestigious Turner Prize, its creator had astounded the art world by displaying a real 14-foot tiger shark embalmed in a tank of formaldehyde.

Archive version of the NYT profile.

Posted in Art | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 29, 2022.

Saturday, January 29th, 2022

Today is just quick follow ups from the paper of record:

Carol Speed.

Peter Robbins.

And, astonishingly (to me), the NYT actually ran an obit for Ron Goulart. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but this is the same paper that still (to the best of my knowledge) has never run an obit for Gardner Dozois.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#55 in a series).

Friday, January 28th, 2022

Shot:

Chaser:

In a visit to Swiss military maneuvers just before World War I, the German Kaiser asked a Swiss militiaman what he would do if a German invasion force of a half-million attached the Swiss militia of a quarter-million. His reply: “Shoot twice and go home.”

Refreshing glass of ice water.

Posted in Bagatelle | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 28, 2022.

Friday, January 28th, 2022

Dr. Johan Hultin. He was 97.

Back in 1950, Dr. Hultin, a pathologist, was having lunch with William Hale, a microbiologist. As the conversation often does, it turned to the 1918 flu pandemic.

Dr. Hale mentioned that there was just one way to figure out what caused the 1918 pandemic: finding victims buried in permafrost and isolating the virus from lungs that might be still frozen and preserved.
Dr. Hultin, a medical student in Sweden who was spending six months at the university, immediately realized that he was uniquely positioned to do just that. The previous summer, he and his first wife, Gunvor, spent weeks assisting a German paleontologist, Otto Geist, on a dig in Alaska. Dr. Geist could help him find villages in areas of permafrost that also had good records of deaths from the 1918 flu.

So Dr. Hultin went north to Alaska in 1951.

Three villages seemed like they might have what he wanted, but when he arrived at the first two, the victims’ graves were no longer in permafrost.
The third village on his list, Brevig Mission, was different. The flu had devastated the village, killing 72 out of 80 Inuit residents. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave with a large wooden cross at either end.
When Dr. Hultin arrived and politely explained his mission, the village council agreed to let him dig. Four days later, he saw his first victim.
“She was a little girl, about 6 to 10 years old. She was wearing a dove gray dress, the one she had died in,” he recalled in an interview in the late 1990s. The child’s hair was braided and tied with bright red ribbons. Dr. Hultin called for help from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the group eventually found four more bodies.
They stopped digging. “We had enough,” Dr. Hultin said.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Dr. Hultin wasn’t able to culture virus from the samples he collected at the time. But in 1997:

…sitting by a pool on vacation with his wife in Costa Rica, he noticed a paper published in Science by Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, now chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It reported a remarkable discovery. Dr. Taubenberger had searched a federal repository of pathology samples dating to the 1860s and found fragments of the 1918 virus in snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers who had died in that pandemic. The tissue had been removed at autopsy, wrapped in paraffin and stored in the warehouse.

Dr. Hultin got in touch with Dr. Taubenberger.

“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” he told Dr. Taubenberger.

He went back and recovered more samples.

Dr. Taubenberger got all of the packages. The lung tissue from the Brevig woman was invaluable, he said, because the snippets of lung from the soldiers had so little virus that, with the technology at the time, the effort to get the complete viral sequence would have been delayed by at least a decade.
Using the tissue Dr. Hultin provided, Dr. Taubenberger’s group published a paper that provided the genetic sequence of a crucial gene, hemagglutinin, which the virus had used to enter cells. The group subsequently used that tissue to determine the complete sequence of all eight of the virus’s genes.

One of the things that truly impresses me about this story (besides the scientific angle) is Dr. Hultin’s interactions with the villagers of Brevig Mission. They let him dig up the graves and take samples: and they let him do this because he treated the bodies with honor and respect.

After closing the grave, he made two wooden crosses to replace the original ones, which had rotted. Later, he had two brass plaques made with the names of the Brevig flu victims, which had been recorded, and returned to the village to attach them to the new crosses flanking the grave.

Posted in Geek, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 27, 2022.

Thursday, January 27th, 2022

Don Wilson, of the Ventures.

In addition to their success in the United States (where their other hits included “Walk — Don’t Run, ’64,” a remake of their own hit that also made Billboard’s Top 10), the Ventures became wildly popular in Japan — so much so, Mr. Wilson said, that numerous bands there took to imitating them. That led to an uncomfortable surprise when the band made its second trip there, its first as headliners, in 1965.
“We had an opening group,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, “and they played all of our songs before we went on.”

We’re talking about the Ventures, so you know what that means, right?

Jim Drake, one of the old time Sports Illustrated photographers. I wanted to mention this here because there’s a lot of classic Drake photos reproduced in the obit, including the one of Broadway Joe in Times Square.

Morgan Stevens, actor. He was “Nick Diamond” on “Melrose Place”. He was also “David Reardon” in “Fame” and did other TV guest spots.

Kevin Ward, the mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland, which is a DC suburb. He was found dead in a park: his death is suspected to have been a 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 good page of additional resources.

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

Dr. Rockzo, call your office, please.

Thursday, January 27th, 2022

NYPost headline, noted because this is also hookersnblow.com:

(Actual article.)

Posted in Bagatelle | Comments Closed

Followup.

Thursday, January 27th, 2022

A few weeks ago, I wrote up an after-action report on John Hearne’s classes at KR Training.

Michael Bane was also in Mr. Hearne’s class, and recorded an interview with him. That interview is now posted on his web site, for your information and edification.

The whole thing is a little over 20 minutes, but not all of that is Mr. Hearne, so you can probably fit this in to a coffee break.

Hattip: KR Training on the book of face.

Personal note: Mr. Hearne and I have corresponded a bit by email since I wrote that after action report, and our correspondence just confirms my original opinion: he’s a swell guy, who went out of his way to answer my questions. Again, if you have the chance, take his courses.

Posted in Guns, Safety | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 26, 2022.

Wednesday, January 26th, 2022

Peter Robbins. THR.

He voiced Charlie Brown in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”. According to reports, he was 65 years old, and 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 good page of additional resources.

Kathryn Kates, actress. Roles include “Seinfeld”, “Orange Is the New Black”, and “Law and Order: Sport Utility Vehicle”.

This got past me yesterday, though I did intend to mention it: Sheldon Silver, former leader of the New York State Assembly who was serving time in prison on corruption charges.

Posted in Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 25, 2022.

Tuesday, January 25th, 2022

Gloria McMillan.

She was “Harriet Conklin” in “Our Miss Brooks”, a series I hate to say was before my time. Other credits are pretty limited: she appeared in the “Centennial” mini-series, Michael Ritchie’s “Smile”, and some TV guest shots.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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