RIP

[eagles123]

RIP to one of my dogs (twin border terriers) who had to be put down last week a month short of his 14th birthday. I know it's "just a dog" but at the same time it's really not.

[Winstonm]

RIP to one of my dogs (twin border terriers) who had to be put down last week a month short of his 14th birthday. I know it's "just a dog" but at the same time it's really not.

 

No, it is clearly not. My total empathy is with you as I dread this time myself with a 13-year-old dachshund.

[Winstonm]

Roy Halladay

[rmnka447]

RIP to one of my dogs (twin border terriers) who had to be put down last week a month short of his 14th birthday. I know it's "just a dog" but at the same time it's really not.

Completely understand -- more like a member of the family. I had to carry our 12 YO family dog into the vets when I was 16 to be put to sleep. She was just suffering too much. My older brother and I bawled for quite while afterward as we both grew up with her.

[Winstonm]

Completely understand -- more like a member of the family. I had to carry our 12 YO family dog into the vets when I was 16 to be put to sleep. She was just suffering too much. My older brother and I bawled for quite while afterward as we both grew up with her.

 

Here, you and I are in agreement.

[y66]

From Uwe Reinhardt, 80, Dies; a Listened-to Voice on Health Care Policy:

 

Uwe Reinhardt, an economist whose keen, caustic and unconventional insights cast him as what colleagues called a national conscience in policy debates about health care, died on Monday in Princeton, N.J. He was 80.

 

...In 2015, the Republic of China awarded Professor Reinhardt its Presidential Prize for having devised Taiwan’s single-payer National Health Insurance program. The system now provides virtually the entire population with common benefits and costs 6.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (about one-third the share that the United States spends).

 

Just last month, he received the 2017 Bipartisan Health Policy Leadership Award from the Alliance for Health Policy, a nonpartisan research and educational group in Washington.

 

Professor Reinhardt argued that what drove up the singularly high cost of health care in the United States was not the country’s aging population or a surplus of physicians or even Americans’ self-indulgent visits to doctors and hospitals.

 

“I’m just an immigrant, so maybe I am missing something about the curious American health care system,” he would often say, recalling his childhood in Germany and flight to Canada and apologizing that English was only his second language.

 

Then he would succinctly answer the cost question by quoting the title of an article he wrote with several colleagues in 2003 for the journal Health Affairs: “It’s the Prices, Stupid.”

 

What propelled those prices most, he said, was a chaotic market that operates “behind a veil of secrecy.”

 

That market, he said, is one in which employers “become the sloppiest purchasers of health care anywhere in the world,” as he wrote in the Economix blog in The New York Times in 2013.

[barmar]

Charles Manson is not going to make his next parole hearing, which was scheduled for 10 years from now.

[Cyberyeti]

Jana Novotna, at only 49.

[gwnn]

Jana Novotna, at only 49.

:(

[Winstonm]

Jana Novotna, at only 49.

Game, set, and match, and a pity, too, as her life was well-played.

[ggwhiz]

Charles Manson is not going to make his next parole hearing, which was scheduled for 10 years from now.

 

Chuckles is the reason there is a Highway to Hell (an autobahn with no speed limit) and only a Stairway to Heaven

[Lovera]

Johnny Hallyday : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Hallyday Edited December 7, 2017 by barmar
change to desktop wikipedia link

[Cyberyeti]

We lost 2 more today:

 

Cyrille Regis, one of the pioneering black footballers of the 1970s who most of those who came later acknowledge as changing the climate of racism

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/42687285

 

And an enchanting voice, Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries

 

[y66]

From Keith Jackson's obit at NYT:

 

Look around the Big House in the early morn, Keith Jackson said. Feel its emptiness. Then hunker down a while, watch the crowd fill Michigan Stadium, a sea of maize and blue washing over 92 rows of backless benches. Watch the players burst ebulliently from the tunnel. Watch the Michigan Marching Band warm up. They’ve got mommas and daddies as proud as if they were Big Uglies opening holes for scatbacks. Listen to them belt out “Hail! to the conq’ring heroes!” and get chills like those that made Jackson shiver 40 years ago on his first trip here as the University of Washington’s football announcer, a half-dozen years before he went big-time at ABC Sports.

 

“This is no doubt my favorite place, to see four generations rise up and appreciate it, for the pageantry, the ambience,” said Jackson, standing inside the stadium’s broadcast booth before last Saturday’s game against Penn State. “Michigan has such grandiosity. It has all those all-Americans. You can’t go anywhere without finding a Michigan graduate.”

 

With retirement from ABC looming after the season, this was the 70-year-old Jackson’s last sojourn to Ann Arbor to call a Michigan game. Nearly three decades since redefining the sound of televised college football with an evocative idiom and a storyteller’s brio, he insists that it is time to see whether the young bucks in his shadow are as talented as they think. “You want to go when it’s time,” he said. “You’re better off if you go a little early.”

 

Impending retirement has not altered his routine: He studied tape and game notes at home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., wrote in pencil the teaser for the game’s opening sequence, arrived here late Thursday and met the coaches Friday. At one point during Michigan Coach Lloyd Carr’s low-key meeting with Jackson, his booth mate Bob Griese and the sideline reporter Lynn Swann, Carr said, “I don’t see any merit in losing.”

 

The remark provided Jackson with a chance to quote Fritz Crisler, the former Michigan coach who mentored the young sportscaster. His bourbon-smooth voice mimicking Crisler’s baritone, Jackson said, “Old Fritz, his neck swelling and eyes flashing, would say, ‘What do you propose to do — teach them to lose?’”

 

The next morning, Jackson drove from his Ypsilanti hotel in a white rental car more than three hours before the noon game time.

 

“Whoa, it’s a cool day and I’ve never seen this,” he said, seeing traffic back up a quarter-mile from the Interstate 94 exit ramp leading to the stadium.

 

“Your moment of stress comes when you’re trying to get to the game,” he said. “Last week in Bloomington, we had a blue parking pass to go to the ABC trucks, but this highway patrolman wouldn’t … let … us … go … that … way. I said, ‘I think we’re going — even if we have to run over you.’ ”

 

Finding the parking lot closest to Michigan Stadium, he prepared to make a left turn. “I’m going in here, so hold your damned taters!” he said.

 

When he left the car, he clamped a black cap over his silver hair, hoping not to be recognized. He strode along Main Street toward the stadium, wearing a black overcoat, bulling into the breeze like a Big Ugly trampling a nose tackle. His leave-taking was widely noted by fans walking with him or tailgating in the parking lots.

 

“You are college football to me!” shouted one fan.

 

“You’re what the game is all about!” called out a second.

 

“Take a picture with me!” pleaded a third.

 

“You and I are both retiring,” a policeman told him as he stood at a red light at East Stadium Boulevard. “I’ve got two more weeks.”

 

“And I’ve got six,” Jackson said.

 

Jackson quietly offered his gratitude, looking a bit abashed. If he had planned his retirement more meticulously — and not confirmed it publicly before the season — he would have said, “Folks, I’ll see you,” and vanished from public view as soon as he signed off at the conclusion of the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 4.

[hrothgar]

 

And an enchanting voice, Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries

 

Shite!

 

Got to talk to her briefly a few years back. Lovely woman. Love her music

 

[y66]

Ursula K. Le Guin

 

Image credit via Universe

[barmar]

Ursula K. Le Guin

The thing I found weird about the reports of her death was how many reporters left out the "K".

[y66]

Xerox

[y66]

Nicanor Parra, Chilean Voice in an ‘Anti-Poet’ Movement

[blackshoe]

Xerox

Adapt or die. Xerox couldn't adapt.

[Cyberyeti]

Adapt or die. Xerox couldn't adapt.

 

I worked as an IT contractor for Xerox 1995-2001. In 1995 they had only just switched over from their own operating system to Windows (and still used the old one for some internal email because it was better). They seemed to have great research and product, but their vision and marketing left a lot to be desired. I left when the project I was on ended and they fired all their contractors. Apparently this coincided with them finding out one of their most successful executives in a Latin American country was making up his sales figures and everything wasn't as rosy as they thought.

[y66]

Gavin Stamp 1948-2017

 

There are millions of people who feel deeply about the depredations of the construction industry; who feel deeply about architects wantonly exposing themselves like red-rumped macaques in the hope of attracting central Asian tyrants; who feel deeply about the environmental, social and aesthetic iniquities visited on this increasingly sick, increasingly corrupt little country.

 

But, as Thom Gunn noted, ‘Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of a help.’ Most of the millions do not have a way with language. Gavin did have. For poetry substitute polemic; substitute philippic; history; panegyric.

 

Gavin tirelessly articulated the discontents of the many whose lives are screwed by the cupidity of the few. Architecture and buildings are political. And Gavin was, among much else, a political writer – a political writer in disguise, but a supremely political writer.

 

Architecture is evidence by which our forebears and their civilisations can be assessed, evidence which the present whiggishly destroys because it believes that it will necessarily do better precisely because it has progressed to become the present. Gavin abhorred this fallacious smugness and fought it as it should be fought – ad hominem. For architecture is not some parthenogenetic miracle. It is the creation of humans – who are to be taken to task. Humans who hide behind wretched ishoos – a gambit by which they unwittingly reduce themselves to automata or even deny their being while at the same time loudly asserting themselves as tectonic Ubermenschen. He was aware that friendship is the greatest corruptor. He didn’t care whether he was liked – which was one of the qualities that made him so likable. He had a duty to himself, a moral as much as an aesthetic duty, to get personal.

 

...

 

His voice remains. His literal voice is unforgettable. His figurative voice – the style, which is the man himself in Buffon’s apothegm – is stalled but it is vitally there to be heeded so long as we retain an appetite for scholarship, an appreciation of justified indignation, and a taste for scrupulous adherence to the truth.

[barmar]

Evangelical minister Billy Graham

[RedSpawn]

Evangelical minister Billy Graham

Billy Graham was against segregation but it makes one wonder does one really think heaven has a Jim Crow feel to it?

[kenberg]

Evangelical minister Billy Graham

I remember watching his television sermons in the 1950s. A WaPo obit cleared up some confusion for me. Back then I first thought that it was a local program, but soon I heard that it was national. From the WaPo article I see that he was based in Minneapolis (I was in St. Paul) so he was, I guess, a locally based person with a national show. The article also mentions that he was connected to The First Baptist church Minneapolis. I have been in that church. Some Christmas choral program, Bach I suppose. Very good, as I recall.

 

I was amused to find other connections. He was raised as a Presbyterian, as was I. In his younger years he sold Fuller brushes door to door, when I was 17 I sold Watkins products door to door. Our adult paths took different directions. Obviously.