Supplemental: NYT obit for Dusty Hill.
City Journal tribute to Jackie Mason. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
The quirky products certainly sounded like inventions Americans could live without — an Inside-the-Shell Electric Egg Scrambler, spray-on fake hair in a can, the Pocket Fisherman (“the biggest fishing invention since the hook … and still only $19.95!”), and the counter-size Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ (“Set it and forget it!”), one of his biggest successes.
His redesigned 1975 Veg-O-Matic is enshrined in the Smithsonian’s American Legacies collection alongside the Barbie doll, and comedian Dan Aykroyd vigorously parodied both salesman and machine in Bass-O-Matic skits on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1970s.
George Rhoads. I had not heard of him previously, but his work sounds really cool.
Mr. Rhoads’s colorful “audio-kinetic ball machines,” which evoked the workings of watches and roller coasters, were built of comically designed tracks and devices like loop-the-loops and helical ramps, and were usually six- to 10-feet high. Scores of the machines have been installed in children’s hospitals, malls, science museums and airports and elsewhere in a dozen countries, but mostly in the United States and Japan.
“Each pathway that the ball takes is a different drama, as I call it, because the events happen in a certain sequence, analogous to drama,” he said in an interview in 2014 with Creative Machines, which makes ball machines based on and inspired by his designs. “The ball gets into certain difficulties. It does a few things. Maybe there’s some conflict. They hit or they wander, whatever it is and then there’s some kind of dramatic conclusion.”
One of his most frequently viewed machines, “42nd Street Ballroom,” was installed in 1983 in the lobby of Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where it remained. Eight feet tall and eight feet wide, the sculpture shows its plates spin, its levers flip and its 24 billiard balls roll down ramps. As was typical of his machines, numerous balls move independently, letting gravity guide them and, when they reach the bottom, they are returned to the top by a motorized hoist.
Joey Jordison, drummer and founding member of Slipknot.
Rick Aiello, actor. (“Do The Right Thing”, lots of TV credits including “18 Wheels of Justice”)
For the record, he was Danny Aiello’s son.