RIP

[Cyberyeti]

Albert Uderzo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52016721?SThisFB&fbclid=IwAR3JcSJZGJEgWS_gwufM0lVWXi1634PzVv6N7oJy8o3e7xx5DRf1NwCEzW8

[barmar]

Albert Uderzo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-52016721?SThisFB&fbclid=IwAR3JcSJZGJEgWS_gwufM0lVWXi1634PzVv6N7oJy8o3e7xx5DRf1NwCEzW8

Isn't it sad that now death notices have to say that it was not linked to COVID-19? He was 92, it was just his time to go.

[Cyberyeti]

Two very different British icons https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/52261216 and https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52262490

[PeterAlan]

The mathematician John Horton Conway died on Saturday.

 

The link covers his well-known work, and I won't elaborate on that. He taught me two courses - Graph Theory and his own Number system (later popularised as 'Surreal Numbers' by Donald Knuth) - more than 40 years ago, and I have great memories of them, in particular the second: it was late 1974, whilst the theory was still being developed in certain respects.

[mycroft]

-*-

--*

***

 

Godspeed, sir.

[PeterAlan]

Robert May.

[PassedOut]

Richard Penniman

 

By 1956, he was washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station in Macon (a job he had first taken a few years earlier after his father was murdered and Little Richard had to support his family). By then,;only one track he’d cut, “Little Richard’s Boogie,” hinted at the musical tornado to come. “I put that little thing in it,” he told RS in 1970 of the way he tweaked with his gospel roots. “I always did have that thing, but I didn’t know what to do with the thing I had.”

 

During this low point, he sent a tape with a rough version of a bawdy novelty song called “Tutti Frutti” to Specialty Records in Chicago. He came up with the song’s famed chorus — “a wop bob alu bob a wop bam boom” — while bored washing dishes. (He also wrote “Long Tall Sally” and “Good Golly Miss Molly” while working that same job.)

[kenberg]

Richard Penniman

 

 

 

I was at a Little Richard concert in my youth, it was before concerts became such huge affairs. IIt was on the upper floor of a firehouse. there was a stage area where he and his group were playing, the rest of the floor was either for dancing or standing at the edge. It was terrific. The numbers went on as long as the musicians wanted them to go on, played in whatever way they wanted to play them

 

The social environment was informal, to put it mildly. I was well under 21, the legal drinking age, and I rarely drank. Somewhere along the way I went over to a small booth and ordered a 7-up. I was asked what I wanted in it. I said 7-up. The server looked at me as if I was hopeless and poured me a 7-up. Another guy was wandering around, asking if I wanted to buy a half pint of whiskey for a buck "Good stuff, I drink it myself" he assured me. I declined.

 

Did I say the music was great? The music was great.

 

I sort of missed the 60s, studying math and all that, but the 50s could be good as well.

 

I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight

I asked my friends about her but all their lips were tight

Lucille, please come back where you belong

 

Rest in peace

[y66]

Annie Glenn

[hrothgar]

Roland Wald has passed away

 

Roland's work in promoting high quality free vugraph's via BBO can not be over emphasized.

 

He provided an incredibly valuable service to the game and the community.

[y66]

Larry Kramer

[y66]

Dennis Nagle

 

In his youth, Dennis Nagle resembled Dennis Hopper’s character in “Easy Rider”: same bushy counterculture mustache and long hair, same pirate’s smile and wild glint in his eyes. And like the film character, Mr. Nagle embraced 1960s-style hedonism full on.

 

He was a big proponent of marijuana and psychedelics. He spent the ’70s living in England, where he ran with a fast crowd in London and, his oldest son, Alex, said, made his living in the illegal drug trade. By the time the ’80s rolled around, he had fathered four children with four women.

 

As disorganized as his personal life was, Mr. Nagle had the focused technical mind of an engineer. He could fix anything. He loved visual art, and throughout his life he built light boxes, attaching LEDs to tiny motors to create hypnotic patterns of light. A wellspring of knowledge lived within him.

 

“He taught me how to change the brakes on my car and told me all about Andy Warhol’s Factory,” said Alex Nagle, who knew his father only as a mythic character until, at 18, he tracked him down in Los Angeles. Dennis Nagle had moved there from England and was working for a company that did sound and lighting for rock concerts.

 

Mr. Nagle died on April 24 at the Bedford Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Mass. He was 78. The cause was complications of the novel coronavirus, his youngest son, Michael, said.

 

It was while living in Los Angeles and raising Michael that Mr. Nagle began to settle down. When Michael enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, Mr. Nagle followed him east to Cambridge, Mass. Father and son roomed together there.

 

In 2007, Mr. Nagle found a job as workshop manager and instructor at M.I.T.’s D-Lab, which uses design and technology to assist people in the developing world. Mr. Nagle, still a character (now with long, lush white hair), became the “shop gnome,” as he called himself. He brought order to the lab, made colorful tool boards and used his mechanical skills to teach students how to build things. He retired in 2015.

 

In an online tribute to him, Amy Smith, the founding director of D-Lab, described Mr. Nagle as “a fiercely loyal mentor to many students over the years and was a staunch supporter of the need to balance creativity and order, fun and work and anarchy and kindness.”

[Cyberyeti]

A sad loss, somebody who was an international bridge player, but that was not his major claim to fame, he was one of the all time great West Indian cricketers, Sir Everton Weekes. I met him at the bridge table, absolute gent.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everton_Weekes

[Aberlour10]

Ennio Morricone, influential composer of music for the international cinema, over 50 years, from "For the Few Dollars More" to "The Hateful Eight"......

[Cyberyeti]

Another musician, best known for the devil went down to Georgia in this country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Daniels

[y66]

John Lewis

 

John Robert Lewis grew up with all the humiliations imposed by segregated rural Alabama. He was born on Feb. 21, 1940, to Eddie and Willie Mae (Carter) Lewis near the town of Troy on a sharecropping farm owned by a white man. After his parents bought their own farm — 110 acres for $300 — John, the third of 10 children, shared in the farm work, leaving school at harvest time to pick cotton, peanuts and corn. Their house had no plumbing or electricity. In the outhouse, they used the pages of an old Sears catalog as toilet paper.

 

John was responsible for taking care of the chickens. He fed them and read to them from the Bible. He baptized them when they were born and staged elaborate funerals when they died.

 

“I was truly intent on saving the little birds’ souls,” he wrote in his memoir, “Walking With the Wind” (1998). “I could imagine that they were my congregation. And me, I was a preacher.”

 

His family called him “Preacher,” and becoming one seemed to be his destiny. He drew inspiration by listening to a young minister named Martin Luther King on the radio and reading about the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. He finally wrote a letter to Dr. King, who sent him a round-trip bus ticket to visit him in Montgomery, in 1958.

 

By then, Mr. Lewis had begun his studies at American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, where he worked as a dishwasher and janitor to pay for his education.

 

In Nashville, Mr. Lewis met many of the civil rights activists who would stage the lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns. They included the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., who was one of the nation’s most prominent scholars of civil disobedience and who led workshops on Gandhi and nonviolence. He mentored a generation of civil rights organizers, including Mr. Lewis.

 

Mr. Lewis’s first arrest came in February 1960, when he and other students demanded service at whites-only lunch counters in Nashville. It was the first prolonged battle of the movement that evolved into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

 

David Halberstam, then a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean, later described the scene: “The protests had been conducted with exceptional dignity, and gradually one image had come to prevail — that of elegant, courteous young Black people, holding to their Gandhian principles, seeking the most elemental of rights, while being assaulted by young white hoodlums who beat them up and on occasion extinguished cigarettes on their bodies.”

 

In three months, after repeated well-publicized sit-ins, the city’s political and business communities gave in to the pressure, and Nashville became the first major Southern city to begin desegregating public facilities.

 

But Mr. Lewis lost his family’s good will. When his parents learned that he had been arrested in Nashville, he wrote, they were ashamed. They had taught him as a child to accept the world as he found it. When he asked them about signs saying “Colored Only,” they told him, “That’s the way it is, don’t get in trouble.”

 

But as an adult, he said, after he met Dr. King and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man was a flash point for the civil rights movement, he was inspired to “get into trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”

 

Getting into “good trouble” became his motto for life. A documentary film, “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” was released this month.

 

Despite the disgrace he had brought on his family, he felt that he had been “involved in a holy crusade” and that getting arrested had been “a badge of honor,” he said in a 1979 oral history interview housed at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

In 1961, when he graduated from the seminary, he joined a Freedom Ride organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE. He and others were beaten bloody when they tried to enter a whites-only waiting room at the bus station in Rock Hill, S.C. Later, he was jailed in Birmingham, Ala., and beaten again in Montgomery, where several others were badly injured and one was paralyzed for life.

 

“If there was anything I learned on that long, bloody bus trip of 1961,” he wrote in his memoir, “it was this — that we were in for a long, bloody fight here in the American South. And I intended to stay in the middle of it.”

[gwnn]

Justin Lall, my #1 bridge hero and BBF's GOAT for all eternity (all his usernames).

[shyams]

Justin Lall, my #1 bridge hero and BBF's GOAT for all eternity (all his usernames).

I am stunned and truly saddened to read about this. I never met him in-person but I used to read his blogs and posts very diligently. I also used to occasionally get to play against him when BBF used to have those Sunday individuals.

 

Oh, this is tragic. My heartfelt condolences to all who were dear to him.

[hrothgar]

Justin Lall, my #1 bridge hero and BBF's GOAT for all eternity (all his usernames).

 

Say what?

 

I only meet him a few times, but he was a great guy.

 

I HATE 2020

[Winstonm]

I remember Justin playing when he was around 12 years old, and I often played against his brilliant father, Hemant Lall. Justin was one of the most pleasant persons I ever met. So sad and such a shock.

[Phil]

Seemed appropriate I come over and pay my respects.

 

I wrote a few stories on BridgeWinners - hopefully you got to read them.

 

We moved to Dallas a few years ago. Never, ever bumped into him but know Hemant and his SO very well. A few of Justin's friends came into town earlier this week.

 

I ordered them Chuy's last night. That was Justin's favorite Tex-Mex.

 

Never check this so if you want to say hi, PM me on Bridgewinners or BBO.

[y66]

I enjoyed the hilarious stories about jlall by jdonn, clee and others at bridgewinners. Good job trying to lift everyone's spirits on what has been the saddest day in the history of this forum for me. What an incredible human being we have lost.

[barmar]

There's a thread in the General Bridge Forum about Justin

 

https://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/83682-justin-lall-rip/

 

Since this is a bridge-related death, let's continue to use that one.

[y66]

Larry Pardey, Mariner Who Sailed the World Engineless, Dies at 80

 

Mr. Pardey in 1982 building his 29-foot boat, Taleisin, an engineless wooden yacht.Credit...Lin Pardey

 

Life aboard their boats, first the 24-foot Seraffyn, then the Taleisin, was simple. They had a compass, a sextant and a radio transmitter but used no GPS. systems, and no engines.The lack of complexity suited Mr. Pardey’s facility for navigation and reduced their costs.

 

“When we first set off, we could live in Mexico for $200 a month,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “The way we looked at it, a $3,000 engine cost 14 months of freedom. We never dreamed of going cruising and being comfortable, we just dreamed of going.”

 

They fulfilled that dream many times over. Their first circumnavigation, starting in 1968 on an eastward route, spanned 11 years and took them to 47 countries. Beginning in 1984, they spent 25 years traveling west on their second circumnavigation, touching land in 30 more countries.

 

Their final big voyage in 2009 took them from Southern California to New Zealand, via the Line Islands and Tonga, where they met a goddaughter named Linlarry.

 

“Although he was aware of his diminishing physical abilities, he attributed this all to normal aging, saying, ‘What do you expect after you’ve used your body so hard for 70 years?’” Ms. Pardey said of her husband. “‘Boats wear out. So do people!’”

[kenberg]

That is one terrific article about the Pardeys. At first I was wondering how Ms. Pardey felt about all of tihs nut then I got to:

 

"He was soon skippering a ketch and, in May 1965, meeting his future wife, Lin Zatkin, in a bar. She was working at the time in the corporate office of the Bob's Big Boy restaurant chain in Pasadena but craving adventure, Ms. Pardey said. Sailing, she felt, would satisfy her wanderlust.

 

Three days after they met, they were together for good."

 

Ok, that explains that!

 

Congratulations to them both. Maybe "congratulations" is a strange comment at the end of life, but here it seems just right.