Man, it got busy up in here all of the sudden.
Bob Rafelson. THR. Other credits include the “Poodle Springs” TV movie (with James Caan as Marlowe, based on Robert Parker’s continuation of an unfinished Chandler novel), “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, and “The King of Marvin Gardens”.
The Saturday Movie Group watched “Five Easy Pieces” not too long ago. I think I echo the general consensus when I say that it was very much like “The Last Picture Show”: a good movie that none of us want to see again.
David Warner, British actor. In case you were wondering, he’s the photographer who loses his head in “Omen”. Other credits include “TRON”, “Time Bandits”, the “Hogfather” TV movie, and lots of genre stuff, including some appearances on spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
Diana Kennedy. She was well known (at least to me and I think to other people who follow food) as the woman who introduced true Mexican cooking to the US.
At a time when most Americans’ concept of Mexican food was limited to tacos and enchiladas, Ms. Kennedy unfurled an ornate culinary tapestry, exploring the distinctly regional nature of Mexican cooking, defined, like the cuisines of Italy and China, by local geography, climate and ingredients.
“The regional dishes of Sonora, or Jalisco, have practically nothing in common with those of Yucatán and Campeche; neither have those of Nuevo León with those of Chiapas and Michoacán,” she wrote in the book’s first chapter. In Oaxaca, she explained, “certain chilies are grown and used that are found nowhere else in Mexico.”
The Mexican food known to most Americans, she wrote, was a travesty: “a crisp taco filled with ground meat heavily flavored with an all-purpose chili powder; a soggy tamal covered with a sauce that turns up on everything — too sweet and too overpoweringly onioned — a few fried beans and something else that looks and tastes like all the rest.” This state of affairs she hoped to correct.
…
In “The Tortilla Book” (1975) and “My Mexico” (1998), Ms. Kennedy continued the journey begun in “The Cuisines of Mexico,” elaborating on her findings as she roamed the country in her pickup truck, quizzing local cooks, taking notes and developing, as a side project, an atlas of indigenous herbs and plants.
Along the way, she clued readers in on the secrets of making wasp’s nest salsa, roasting a whole ox or cleaning black iguana for a special Oaxacán tamale.
“There is always someone who wants to know how to clean an iguana, so why not?” she told an interviewer for the journal Writing on the Edge in 2011. All three books were gathered in one volume in 2000 under the title “The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.”
…
Ms. Kennedy spared no effort to track down information. She served an apprenticeship in a bakery before writing her tortilla book. She traveled dusty back roads by bus or in her truck, sleeping in the back, en route to remote villages in search of obscure recipes, questioning saleswomen at local markets or wangling invitations to home kitchens.
“I’m out to report what is disappearing,” she told The Times in 2019. “I drive over mountains, I sit with families, and I record.”
She took a dim view of chefs and writers who did not do the same, and her criticism could be withering. “They’ve not done the travel and the research that I’ve done,” she told Saveur. “None of them, not one. I have traveled this country, wandering — it’s why I’m not rich! — and taking time, and nobody else has done that. Nobody else has seen a certain chile at a certain stage in a market in Chilapa, and then gone back in six months and seen other chiles.”
…
Johnny Egan, coach of the Houston Rockets from 1972-1976. He was 129-152 overall during his tenure.
Melanie Rauscher, who was on “Naked and Afraid”. She was 35, and the circumstances seem particularly sad.
Corey Kasun, a rep for the Prescott Police Department, confirmed to TMZ that the reality star was dog sitting in the city while the homeowners were out of town. Upon their return, they discovered Rauscher dead in their guest room, near several cans of dust cleaner containing compressed air.
It remains unclear if Rauscher consumed the cans’ contents.