RIP

[y66]

The Restaurants We've Lost

[shyams]

Tanya Roberts

 

I still remember her brilliantly funny lines in "That '70s Show".

[barmar]

If C-list celebrities are fair game, we lost Dawn Wells (Mary Anne from Gilligan's Island) last week.

 

The only remaining GI cast member still alive is Tina Louise, who played Ginger.

[y66]

Ted DeLaney, who began his nearly 60-year career at Washington and Lee University as a custodian, accumulated enough credits to graduate at 41, returned a decade later as a history professor, became the school’s first Black department head and later helped lead its reckoning with the Confederate general its very name honored, Robert E. Lee, died on Dec. 18 at his home in Lexington, Va. He was 77.

 

[Cyberyeti]

Mira Furlan, Croatian actress who played Delenn in Babylon 5 and was also in lost.

 

Her career was unremarkable, her life was not. She was a young actress acting in both Croatia and Serbia when Yugoslavia blew up, and this got her death threats from both sides and forced her to flee to the US.

 

This was Babylon 5 head honcho J Michael Straczynski's in memoriam

 

[mycroft]

"Only one human captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else."

Godspeed, Mira, and ware anyone who gets in her way.

[y66]

There Are Hall of Famers, and Then There’s Hank Aaron

[nullve]

SOPHIE

[y66]

Tom Moore, a 100-year-old World War II veteran, was propelled into superstardom last spring when he raised $45 million for Britain’s National Health Service by walking 100 laps around his brick patio outside of London during lockdown. At the time, he said he wanted to support Britain’s medical workers during the pandemic, just as the country had backed him during his army days.

[Lovera]

Remembering Mary Wilson, founding member of The Supremes.Ieri

The world lost an icon when it was confirmed that Mary Wilson had died, at the age of 76, Monday night at her home in Las Vegas. Friends and fans alike are paying tribute to the late singer with heartfelt messages on social media.

[0 carbon]

Tom Moore, a 100-year-old World War II veteran, was propelled into superstardom last spring when he raised $45 million for Britain's National Health Service by walking 100 laps around his brick patio outside of London during lockdown. At the time, he said he wanted to support Britain's medical workers during the pandemic, just as the country had backed him during his army days.

Alas, he succumbed to Covid-19. Maybe all those soldiers and others around him should have been wearing masks. He seems to have become a victim of his own celebrity 😢

[Cyberyeti]

Alas, he succumbed to Covid-19. Maybe all those soldiers and others around him should have been wearing masks. He seems to have become a victim of his own celebrity 😢

 

He had Covid, he was already in hospital with pneumonia, all the reports here pointedly said he died WITH Covid rather than OF it

[Winstonm]

Are you claiming his Covid was acquired in the hospital or are you trying to claim his pneumonia was not a complication of Covid?

[Cyberyeti]

Are you claiming his Covid was acquired in the hospital or are you trying to claim his pneumonia was not a complication of Covid?

 

He had the pneumonia for weeks before he got Covid (which I'm guessing he picked up in hospital, but no data on that).

[Winstonm]

A long term hospitalization would be a strong suspect for a secondary infection no doubt

[Cyberyeti]

A long term hospitalization would be a strong suspect for a secondary infection no doubt

 

Well I'm sure in the current climate they'd have tested any pneumonia patient for Covid at the start of treatment. I'm not sure if he was hospitalised for all the pneumonia treatment, the article I read wasn't clear.

[nullve]

Chick Corea

[y66]

Return to Forever, one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era, in 1976. From left: Lenny White, Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola and Mr. Corea.Credit...Dick Barnatt/Redferns, via Getty Images

 

Clear days feel so good and free

So light as a feather can be

 

Clear days feel so good and free

So light as a feather can be

 

There's a place so easy to be found

If you want I'll take you there right now

 

Come with me there's music all around

Can't you hear can't you see I am free

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/arts/music/chick-corea-dead.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20210211&instance_id=27043&nl=the-morning&regi_id=59211987&segment_id=51522&te=1&user_id=2d8b72dd84a9ff194896ed87b2d9c72a

 

Mr. Corea’s best-known band was Return to Forever, a collective with a rotating membership that nudged the genre of fusion into greater contact with Brazilian, Spanish and other global influences. It also provided Mr. Corea with a palette on which to experiment with a growing arsenal of new technologies.

 

But throughout his career he never abandoned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punctilious touch and crisp sense of harmony made his playing immediately distinctive.

 

A number of his compositions, including “Spain,” “500 Miles High” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” have become jazz standards, marked by his dreamy but brightly illuminated harmonies and ear-grabbing melodies.

 

By the late 1960s, Mr. Corea, still in his 20s, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned with. He gigged and recorded with some of the leading names in straight-ahead and Latin jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria and Sarah Vaughan. His first two albums as a leader, “Tones for Joan’s Bones” (1966) and “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” (1968), earned rave reviews. Both are now thought of as classics.

 

But it was playing in Miles Davis’s ensembles that set Mr. Corea on the path that would most define his role in jazz. He played the electric piano on Davis’s “In a Silent Way” (1969) and “Bitches Brew” (1970), the albums that sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.

 

Soon after leaving Davis’s group, he helped found Return to Forever, and he spent much of the 1970s touring and recording with the band, which became one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era.

 

Reviewing a performance at the Blue Note in New York in 2006, the critic Nate Chinen, writing in The New York Times, recalled the innovative sound that Mr. Corea had honed with Return to Forever three decades before: “His Fender Rhodes piano chimed and chirruped over Latin American rhythms; female vocals commingled with the soothing flutter of a flute. Then the ensemble muscled up and morphed into a hyperactive fusion band, establishing pop-chart presence and a fan base to match. To the extent that there is a Return to Forever legacy, it encompasses both these dynamic extremes, each a facet of Mr. Corea’s personality.”

[Winstonm]

It’s enough almost to make you wish Dante wrote non-fiction: Rush Limbaugh is dead

[y66]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the spiritual godfather of the Beat movement, inspired generations of artists and writers through his poetry and his celebrated San Francisco bookstore, City Lights.

 

Sometime During Eternity

 

Sometime during eternity

some guys show up

and one of them

who shows up real late

is a kind of carpenter

from some square-type place

like Galilee

and he starts wailing

and claiming he is hep

to who made heaven

and earth

and that the cat

who really laid it on us

is his Dad

 

And moreover

he adds

It's all writ down

on some scroll-type parchments

which some henchmen

leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres

a long time ago

and which you won't even find

for a coupla thousand years or so

or at least for

ninteen hundred and fortyseven

of them

to be exact

and even then

nobody really believes them

or me

for that matter

 

You're hot

they tell him

 

And they cool him

 

They stretch him on the Tree to cool

And everybody after that

is always making models

of this Tree

with Him hung up

and always crooning His name

and calling Him to come down

and sit in

on their combo

as if he is THE king cat

who's got to blow

or they can't quite make it

 

Only he don't come down

from His Tree

 

Him just hang there

on His Tree

looking real Petered out

and real cool

and also

according to a roundup

of late world news

from the usual unreliable sources

real dead

[PassedOut]

The World is a Beautiful Place by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

The world is a beautiful place

to be born into

if you don’t mind happiness

not always being

so very much fun

if you don’t mind a touch of hell

now and then

just when everything is fine

because even in heaven

they don’t sing

all the time

 

The world is a beautiful place

to be born into

if you don’t mind some people dying

all the time

or maybe only starving

some of the time

which isn’t half so bad

if it isn’t you

 

Oh the world is a beautiful place

to be born into

if you don’t much mind

a few dead minds

in the higher places

or a bomb or two

now and then

in your upturned faces

or such other improprieties

as our Name Brand society

is prey to

with its men of distinction

and its men of extinction

and its priests

and other patrolmen

and its various segregations

and congressional investigations

and other constipations

that our fool flesh

is heir to

 

Yes the world is the best place of all

for a lot of such things as

making the fun scene

and making the love scene

and making the sad scene

and singing low songs of having

inspirations

and walking around

looking at everything

and smelling flowers

and goosing statues

and even thinking

and kissing people and

making babies and wearing pants

and waving hats and

dancing

and going swimming in rivers

on picnics

in the middle of the summer

and just generally

‘living it up’

 

Yes

but then right in the middle of it

comes the smiling

mortician

Always loved to hear him recite his poems with his very distinctive and expressive voice. First heard him in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 1960s and was a fan ever since. Long life, well lived.

[pilowsky]

Allan McDonald engineer. (https://n.pr/2ObUD3N)

It is fitting in these times to remember the Engineers at Morton Thiokol who attempted to prevent the Challenger shuttle's launch. Boisjoly, McDonald and the other Engineers commented that “We all knew if the seals failed, the shuttle would blow up.".

NPR reports that: “McDonald and his team of Thiokol engineers had strenuously opposed the launch, arguing that freezing overnight temperatures, as low as 18 degrees F, meant that the O-rings at the booster rocket joints would likely stiffen and fail to contain the explosive fuel burning inside the rockets. They presented data showing O-rings had lost elasticity at a much warmer temperature, 53 degrees F, during an earlier launch.”

 

McDonald resisted intense political pressure and refused to sign off on the launch. The Morton Thiokol executives over-ruled him, and the rest is history.

 

At the time, I knew nothing of this. My clear (incorrect) recollection was that Richard (Surely you're joking, Mr) Feynman was the person that discovered what happened and demonstrated it to the commission by dropping an O-ring into liquid nitrogen.

If ever there was a system that was over-engineered to avoid catastrophic failure, it was meant to be NASA.

In the words of Seeger P., “When will we ever learn?”:http://bit.ly/SeegerLearning (in English with Swedish subtitles and a little German).

 

The more things change, the more they stay the same: scientiam veritatis vires.

Not as politicians might have it: qui curat

[Cyberyeti]

Murray Walker - THE voice of motorsport in the UK for my whole life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Walker

[y66]

Anne Beatts, Original ‘S.N.L.’ Writer, Dies at 74

 

From left, the writer Deanne Stillman, Anne Beatts and Gilda Radner in 1976. Ms. Beatts was one of “Saturday Night Live’s” original writers.Credit...Lynn Goldsmith

[y66]

Helen McCrory