Archive for May, 2022

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Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop making “Airplane!” references…

Wednesday, May 11th, 2022

Bob Lanier has passed away at 73.

Lanier played 14 seasons with the Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks and averaged 20.1 points and 10.1 rebounds per game. He is third on the Pistons’ career list in both points and rebounds. Detroit drafted Lanier with the No. 1 overall pick in 1970 after he led St. Bonaventure to the Final Four.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Lanier was among the most talented centers in league history and added that his accomplishments went far beyond what he did on the court.
“For more than 30 years, Bob served as our global ambassador and as a special assistant to David Stern and then me, traveling the world to teach the game’s values and make a positive impact on young people everywhere,” Silver said in a statement. “It was a labor of love for Bob, who was one of the kindest and most genuine people I have ever been around.”

While this is sad and tragic, and I don’t want to minimize it, at least Kareem Abdul-Jabbar no longer has to drag him up and down the court for 48 minutes.

(Too soon?)

“I’ve got a serious situation here,” the Cessna Caravan passenger was reportedly heard telling air traffic control about 70 miles north of his final destination. “My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.”
“Roger. What’s your position?” a dispatcher responded, according to the outlet.
“I have no idea,” the passenger reportedly said. “I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”

Spoiler:

“You just witnessed a couple passengers land that plane,” a controller reportedly said over the radio when the nail-biting saga came to an end.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2022.

Tuesday, May 10th, 2022

Lawrence sent over an obit for James R. Olson. He passed away on April 17th, but I haven’t seen anybody else cover this. (THR put up a story literally as I was writing this.) Which is odd, because he had a pretty interesting career before he retired in 1990.

After serving in the U.S. Army, Olson moved to New York to study in Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. He subsequently starred in several Broadway productions in the 1950s and 1960s, including J.B. (1958), Romulus (1962), The Three Sisters (1964), and Of Love and Remembrance (1967). He also appeared in numerous touring productions throughout North America.

He also did a lot of TV and movie work. He was another one of those actors who hit the NBC Mystery Movie trifecta: appearances on all three of the original series (“McCloud”, “Columbo”, “McMillan and Wife”). Other credits include “Moon Zero Two”, “The Andromeda Strain”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, “Lancer”, “Ironside”, “The Rookies”, “Police Story”, “The F.B.I.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Game Plan“, season 8, episode 2. “Odds Against Donald Jordan“, season 2, episode 21.)

Jack Kehler. Other credits include “Karen Sisco”, “NYPD Blue”, “NCIS: Original Recipe”, “NCIS: Los Angeles”, and something called “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”.

Midge Decter.

Ms. Decter was in the forefront of an ideologically evolving generation of public intellectuals. Cutting their teeth on leftist politics in the 1930s and ’40s, they settled into anti-communist liberalism in the 1950s and early ’60s. Jolted by the turbulence of the student and women’s movements, they later broke from liberals to embrace a new form of conservatism — championing traditional social values, limited free-market economics and muscular American foreign policies — that reached its zenith in the early 21st century in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Ms. Decter wielded her influence as editor of Harper’s and other magazines, as an author and book editor, and as a political organizer and frequent speaker.

…

Ms. Decter’s ideological shift in the late ’60s stemmed from a rising concern that she expressed in her 2001 memoir, “An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War.” Liberalism, she said, rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into “a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live.”
She and her husband, the writer and fellow former liberal Norman Podhoretz, worried about the effect the new thinking, particularly that of the counterculture, might have on their children and succeeding generations.

Also by way of Lawrence: Adreian Payne, basketball star at Michigan State.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

No man is an Islander.

Monday, May 9th, 2022

Well, that’s not true. Some men are Islanders.

Not, however, Barry Trotz, who got fired this morning as head coach.

Trotz’s record as Islanders coach was 152-102-34 in the regular season and 28-21 in the playoffs.
The Islanders (37-35-10) had a disastrous season in 2021-22, prompted by a poorly timed COVID-19 outbreak that derailed them following a season-opening 13-game road trip.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 9, 2022.

Monday, May 9th, 2022

This was another one of those weekends where I got behind the power curve and am playing catch-up. I expect that next weekend will be closer to what passes for normal around here.

Mickey Gilley.

A honey-toned singer with a warm, unhurried delivery, Mr. Gilley had 17 No. 1 country singles from 1974 to 1983, including “I Overlooked an Orchid” and “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.”
He placed 34 singles in the country Top Ten during his two decades on the charts. But he was ultimately best known as the proprietor, with Sherwood Cryer, of Gilley’s, the honky-tonk in Pasadena, Texas, that became one of the most storied nightspots in country music.

…

“There wasn’t anything nice about that club,” he said in a 2019 interview with The Santa Fe New Mexican. “I mean, Gilley’s was a joint. But it worked because of what it represented — country music and the cowboy image.”

Interesting fact #1 which may not be generally known: Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart were cousins of Mr. Gilley.

Interesting fact #2 for the benefit of FotB RoadRich:

Gilley was a licensed pilot, holding an instrument rating with commercial pilot privileges for multi-engine airplanes, as well as private pilot privileges for single engine aircraft.

George Pérez, comics guy. (“Wonder Woman”, “Avengers”, “The New Teen Titans”)

For the record, NYT obits for Kevin Samuels and Ric Parnell.

Dennis Waterman, British actor. Credits other than “The Sweeney” include “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil”, “Tube Mice”, and “Stay Lucky”.

Kenneth Welsh. 242 credits in IMDB, which is pretty impressive (Clint Howard has 253). Other credits include one of the spinoffs of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, “Perfect Storms: Disasters That Changed the World”, “Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer”, “Due South”, and “The X-Files”.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

Las Vegas Raiders interim president Dan Ventrelle is out.

This is kind of interesting because of the circumstances. The Raiders put out a tweet:

And that’s all. No press conference, nothing else. Kinda makes you wonder…

Edited to add 5/7: Former interim president Ventrelle is saying that his firing was retaliatory.

…alleging he was fired in retaliation for bringing concerns by multiple employees about hostile workplace conditions within the organization to the NFL.
“I take that responsibility very seriously, which is why multiple written complaints from employees that Mark [Davis] created a hostile work environment and engaged in other potential misconduct caused me grave concern,” Ventrelle said in a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “When Mark was confronted about these issues he was dismissive and did not demonstrate the warranted level of concern.
“Soon thereafter, I was fired in retaliation for raising these concerns. I firmly stand by my decision to elevate these issues to protect the organization and its female employees.”

He also said he’s hired lawyers and “would not provide further comment at this time”.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 6, 2022.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

Mike Hagerty, character actor. Credits other than “Friends” include “Space Truckers”, two episodes of a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, and “Speed 2: Cruise Control”.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Kevin Samuels, a YouTuber I’d never heard of but who was apparently followed avidly by some and hated by others.

Edited to add: better writeup from NBC News.

Domino, popular and beloved University of Texas cat. (Hattip: FotB RoadRich.)

Posted in Mammals, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Threads from Twitter that amused me.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

By way of President Dawg, a long thread on “Convoy” (the song and the movie) and the ’70s trucker/CB culture:

Includes bonus “Phantom 309”, MST3K, and “B.J. and the Bear” references.

I’m a little old for this, but:

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

More things I did not know.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

I was reading an article on Damn Interesting the other night, and it set me on a wiki wander.

1. The Damon Runyon Cancer Fund still exists, but it is now known as the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. And it has a four star Charity Navigator rating.

2. You can buy Broadway tickets through the foundation.

How it works: Tickets go on sale on the first business day of each month for performances taking place the following month (for example, our June tickets go on sale May 1). The ticket price is typically twice the box office price, half of which is a tax-deductible donation. You will receive an email voucher to present at the theater box office on the day of the performance.

3. “Runyon died in New York City from throat cancer in late 1946, at age 66. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered from a DC-3 airplane over Broadway in Manhattan by Eddie Rickenbacker on December 18, 1946. This was an infringement of the law, but widely approved.”

I like the way they put that: “an infringement of the law, but widely approved”. (Also: Eddie Rickenbacker for the win.)

4. Jackie Chan’s “Miracles” is an adaptation of “Lady for a Day” and “Pocketful of Miracles” (both directed by Frank Capra), which in turn were based on Runyon’s story “Madame La Gimp”. According to Wikipedia, Chan added “several of his trademark stunt sequences”.

5. I don’t remember the 1980 remake of “Little Miss Marker”, and if I did, it probably would have made me gag when it came out. But: Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis, Julie Andrews, and Bob Newhart?

6. We should probably watch both “A Slight Case of Murder” (Edward G. Robinson!) and “Stop, You’re Killing Me” (the remake with Broderick Crawford and Margaret Dumont).

Posted in History, Movies, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 4, 2022.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2022

David Walden. There may be some folks out there for whom that rings a bell. For the rest of the crowd, he was one of the pioneers of the early Internet.

In 1969, Mr. Walden was part of a small team of talented young engineers whose mission was to build the Interface Message Processor. Its function was to switch data among computers linked to the nascent Arpanet, the precursor to the internet. The first I.M.P. was installed that year at the University of California, Los Angeles. The I.M.P.s would be crucial to the internet until the Arpanet was decommissioned in 1989.
Mr. Walden was the first computer programmer to work with the team. “The I.M.P. guys,” as they came to call themselves, developed the computer in nine frenetic months under a contract secured by Bolt Beranek and Newman (now Raytheon BBN), a technology company in Cambridge, Mass.
The I.M.P.s served as translators between mainframe computers at different locations and the network itself. Each I.M.P. translated what came over the network into the particular language of that location’s main computer. The translation work of the I.M.P. evolved into today’s network routers.
The work of Mr. Walden and his colleagues was unprecedented. “They had no models to draw on,” said Marc Weber, a curatorial director at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “They were creating out of whole cloth a new class of machine.”
He added, “They took a very new idea at the time and turned it into a living, breathing, working machine with its own software and protocols that became an essential component of the network that grew to connect all of us.”

Noted: the NYT obit is by Katie Hafner. Her book with Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet (affiliate link) covers this and lots of other early Internet history, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Kailia Posey, who was on “Toddlers & Tiaras” as a child. She was 16 years old, and according to her family, 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.

Posted in Geek, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Three things I’m kind of looking forward to.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

1. The Bunk lies down on Broadway.

Wendell Pierce is ready for another run as Willy Loman.
The American actor, best known for his work in “The Wire,” first took on the titanic title role in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019, and even then he hungered to bring the performance to New York.

Rod Dreher and his family saw the London production, and he raved about it. This might actually be enough to get me to go to NYC. (Also, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew the Colossus of Roads were talking about Peter Luger on Saturday, and I’d like to take a shot at that.)

2.

(The Last Dangerous Visions explained, for those of my readers who are not SF fans.)

3. There’s a movie tentatively scheduled for February 2023. It sounds like trash, but fun trash.

Cocaine Bear follows an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converging in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of the white powder and goes on a coke-fueled rampage seeking more blow — and blood.

That’s right, a movie inspired by the true story of Cocaine Bear. How can you not be entertained?

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Mammals, Movies, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 3, 2022.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

I know this sounds like the setup to a joke, but it isn’t: Ric Parnell has passed away.

Mr. Parnell was perhaps best known as “Mick Shrimpton”, one of Spinal Tap’s many drummers.

Parnell played in multiple bands, including Horse, Atomic Rooster, Nova and Stars. He claimed he declined invitations to play in Journey and Whitesnake, but is credited with playing drums on Toni Basil’s song “Hey Mickey” in 1981.

David Birney.

Mr. Birney’s theater career began in earnest in 1965, when he won the Barter Theater Award, enabling him to spend a season acting in shows at the prestigious Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. He moved on to the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and in 1967 he played Antipholus of Syracuse in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “A Comedy of Errors.”
Mr. Birney made his Broadway debut two years later in Molière’s “The Miser.” And in 1971 he starred in a Broadway production of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Mr. Birney played Christy Mahon, who enters an Irish pub in the early 1900s telling a story about killing his father.

…

Over the rest of his theatrical career, Mr. Birney played a wide variety of roles, including Antonio Salieri, as a replacement, in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” on Broadway; Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; Hamlet at the PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, Calif.; and James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at the Miniature Theater of Chester, Mass.

He also did a lot of TV work, including a recurring role on the first season of “St. Elsewhere”. Credits other than “Bridget Loves Bernie” include one of the spin-offs of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, “FBI: The Untold Stories”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, Serpico on the “Serpico” TV series, “McMillan & Wife”, and “The F.B.I.”

Ron Galella, photographer and historical footnote. He was one of the early “paparazzi” – indeed, it seems to me that he was one before the term came into common use.

He was perhaps most famous for relentlessly photographing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Mrs. Onassis waged a running court battle with him throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, testifying in one court hearing that he had made her life “intolerable, almost unlivable, with his constant surveillance.” Mr. Galella in turn claimed the right to earn a living by taking pictures of famous people in public places.
In 1972, a judge ordered him to keep 25 feet away from Mrs. Onassis and 30 feet away from her children. A decade later, facing jail time for violating the order — hundreds of times — Mr. Galella agreed never to take another picture of them. And he never did.

…

Reviewing “Smash His Camera,” a 2010 documentary about Mr. Galella, the critic Roger Ebert articulated the ambivalence many felt toward him, whether or not they knew the name of the photographer behind the memorable pictures he took. “I disapproved of him,” Mr. Ebert said, “and enjoyed his work.”

Posted in 1970s, History, Law, Movies, Obits, Photography, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 2, 2022.

Monday, May 2nd, 2022

It was a busy weekend, so I’m playing catch-up on a lot of stuff here.

For the record: Naomi Judd. THR.

Klaus Schulze, musician.

He played drums on the debut albums of the German bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before starting a prodigiously prolific solo career. In 2000, he released a 50-CD retrospective set of studio and live recordings, “The Ultimate Edition.” But he was far from finished.

Jacques Perrin, French actor. Credits include “Z”, “Cinema Paradiso”, and “The Young Girls of Rochefort”.

Neal Adams, comics guy.

During his Batman run, Adams and writer Dennis O’Neil brought a revolutionary change to the hero and the comics, delivering realism, kineticism and a sense of menace to their storytelling in the wake of the campy Adam West-starring ’60s ABC series and years of the hero being aimed at kiddie readers.
He created new villains for the rogue’s gallery — the Man-Bat and Ra’s al Ghul as well as the latter’s daughter, Talia, who became Batman’s lover. The father and daughter, played by Liam Neeson and Marion Cotillard, were key characters in the trilogy of Batman movies directed by Christopher Nolan.

Joanna Barnes. Beyond “Parent Trap” and “Auntie Mame”, she had a fair number of 70s TV credits, including “The Name of the Game”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “McCloud” (and, interestingly, “Cool Million”, a short-lived show in the “Mystery Movie” wheel), “Quincy M.E.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Fear I to Fall“, season 2, episode 12.)

Jossara Jinaro. Credits other than “ER” include “Doctor Who: Alternate Empire” and “The Devil’s Rejects”.

Rachelle Zylberberg, aka “Régine“, disco entrepreneur. At one point, she supposedly owned 23 clubs. (“Some of her clubs, she explained, were franchises owned by local entrepreneurs who paid up to $500,000 and gave her cuts of the action to use her name.”)

Régine made exclusivity an art form. She attracted privileged classes by selling 2,000 club memberships for $600 each, and by requiring tuxedos and evening gowns to get in. She installed a flashing “disco full” sign outside to discourage the hoi polloi and a slide-back peephole at the door to inspect supplicants for admission to the pounding music and gold-plated glamour of her Valhalla.

…

Saluting Bastille Day in New York, the patriots included Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Ethel Kennedy, Margaux Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner (at the time, the chairman of the United States Bicentennial Commission), and Senator George S. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate.
“If anyone had second thoughts about celebrating an event that theoretically ended the privileged class, in a room some 40 times as crowded as the Bastille dungeon on that fateful day, no one made them audible,” The New York Times reported. “To be fair, it was somewhat difficult to make anything other than isolated words audible.”

Kathy Boudin is burning in Hell. Peter Paige, Edward J. O’Grady, and Waverly L. Brown were unavailable for comment.

Posted in 1970s, Law, Mannix, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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