RIP

[y66]

When Mick sings ‘It’s only rock ’n’ roll but I like it’, Charlie’s in back showing you why!

 

nytimes.com/2021/08/24/arts/music/charlie-watts-dead.html?te=1&nl=the-morning&emc=edit_nn_20210825

 

The newly formed Rolling Stones (then called the Rollin’ Stones) knew they needed a good drummer but could not afford Mr. Watts, who was already drawing a regular salary from his various gigs. “We starved ourselves to pay for him!” Mr. Richards wrote. “Literally. We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”

 

In early 1963, when they could finally guarantee five pounds a week, Mr. Watts joined the band, completing the canonical lineup of Mr. Richards, Mr. Jagger, the guitarist Brian Jones, the bassist Bill Wyman and the pianist Ian Stewart. He moved in with his bandmates and immersed himself in Chicago blues records.

The Rolling Stones in 1967. From left: Mr. Watts, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones.Credit...Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis, via Getty Images

[SamLeopold]

Monty Hall, whose game show inspired a problem that is often used to illustrate the principle of restricted choice. Although he didn't just pass on (it was in 2017), he didn't get a post here at the time, and he would have turned 100 today. 100 is what the defenders score when the K-Q or the Q-J are doubleton.

[y66]

David Roberts, accomplished mountain climber and writer

[y66]

Michael Kenneth Williams known in the WC as Omar

[nige1]

Clive Sinclair

[y66]

From the link above:

 

Despite his involvement in computing, Sinclair did not use the Internet, stating that he does not like to have "technical or mechanical things around me" as it distracts from the process of invention.[34][35] In 2010, he stated that he did not use computers himself, and prefers using the telephone rather than email.[

Sinclair has stated that it is unavoidable that artificial general intelligence will someday lead to human extinction: "Once you start to make machines that are rivalling and surpassing humans with intelligence, it's going to be very difficult for us to survive. It's just an inevitability."

[Cyberyeti]

Jimmy Greaves, one of the greatest goalscorers in English football. Was in the squad but not the team for the 1966 world cup final having been injured in one of the group games and the coach decided not to change a winning team. His replacement Geoff Hurst scored a hat-trick.

 

I saw him right at the end of his career playing for Barnet, but with very little televising of games in those days, never saw a whole game of him in his heyday.

 

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

[paulg]

I know we normally post famous people in this thread, but I thought I'd pay tribute to a regular club bridge player.

 

 

George Martin died peacefully on Tuesday, 28 September, just a month after his 90th birthday.

 

For all my time at the club [15 years], and I expect for most of his time there, George has been a fearsome competitor. His desire to win was never diminished by age or by his worsening hearing, as everyone in the club could attest whenever his partner did anything that he did not agree with.

 

George often wrote to me with contributions to the club's history. He said, "I joined the Club in 1974/5. My wife, Val, joined the Club before me and said that I should go to David's bridge classes, which I would enjoy, which I did! In those early days we played a lot of friendly bridge at different houses on the weekend. Also many members went to the Aviemore Congress. I was the member who first directed the Individual Competition of the Club for the Lindsay Trophy. The scoring of this was a nightmare, doing it manually! I took the Advanced Directors Course and ran the No Fear at Peebles for many years."

 

In September 1981, George proposed holding a mini-congress in Berwick and it was held the following April with 38 pairs participating at the Headland Ballroom. He explained, "I was the member of the Club who proposed and directed the very first Berwick Bridge Congress. We had to manually score up from the travelling score sheets from 3 sections.

 

"I can remember that certain members took on the task of scoring each section and then pulling them all together! If they didn't balance we had to go over them again!"

 

George was the club's Press Officer for many years. I believe many thought that these reports focused a little too much on his own achievements but, to be fair, he was a prodigious winner.

 

George was Secretary of the club in the early 1980s and President from 1998-2000.

 

In 2001 George started the first website for the club and this continued until we switched to BridgeWebs. He also started running the summer bridge at the U3A at The Maltings in 2005.

 

After Robin Pearson's death, George became the regular partner of Brian Thomas and they dominated the club's events in the 21st century. They won the Royal Bank Trophy ten times together and the Scott Cup eleven times: George also won the Scott Cup four times with David Elder.

 

Many pairs in the Scottish Borders will be pleased that they will stand some chance of winning the Border Pairs in the future. I can see that Thomas-Martin won the trophy at least nine times and, if you did manage to finish above them, then you probably won.

 

In 2017 I made the mistake of telling him that he won the most master points at the club over the previous season. This clearly appealed to his competitive instincts and an offer to buy a trophy for such a competition was quickly made. He lost the battle to win the George Martin Trophy to Colin in the first year, but made no mistake over the 2018-19 season: there were 66 sessions at the club and George played in 62 of them.

 

Unsurprisingly for someone who created a website, he adapted well to playing online bridge during the pandemic and it provided him with a lifeline as his health started to fail. He knew that he would not be able to return to the club but was keen that online competitions should be run so that he could continue to compete. During September he played in our Open Swiss Teams, my Saturday morning event, the Wilf White pairs and the Tom Woodman teams: like any true bridge player wants, he played until the end.

 

It has occurred to me that I know nothing non-bridge-related about George, aside from his marriage to Val. I didn't even know he had a bridge-playing daughter until he wanted to organise an online match against her club during the pandemic. I think this is typical of bridge players.

 

The bridge club will be a quieter place without George, but we'll all miss him.

[y66]

Iohan Gueorguiev, ‘Bike Wanderer’

[y66]

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on the benefits of intense focus — a mental state he called “flow” — led to a global best seller and new ideas about the path to happiness.

[y66]

Dr. Aaron T. Beck, Developer of Cognitive Therapy

 

It was an answer to Freudian analysis: a pragmatic, thought-monitoring approach to treating anxiety, depression and other mental disorders, and it changed psychiatry.

Smiling softly beneath a rich sweep of white hair, wearing a bright bow tie and tailored suit, he engaged patients gently, chipping away at self-defeating beliefs with Socratic questions: Would you agree it is against your interests to have this belief? Do you think it’s possible to ignore these thoughts?

In the first chapter of his classic 1967 book, “Depression: Causes and Treatment,” he observed: “There is an astonishing contrast between the depressed person’s image of himself and the objective facts. A wealthy man moans that he doesn’t have the financial resources to feed his children. A widely acclaimed beauty begs for plastic surgery in the belief that she is ugly. An eminent physicist berates himself ‘for being stupid.’”

[y66]

Anthony Downs

 

Anthony Downs majored in political theory along with international relations at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., but by the time he graduated in 1952 the most enduring lesson he had learned about democracy had come from his fellow students rather than his professors.

 

A dexterous debater, Mr. Downs was elected president of the Carleton Student Association at the end of his junior year. During his term in office, he delivered on all of his campaign promises. But, as he later wrote, the other 2,000 or so Carls couldn’t have cared less. He concluded that their indifference was completely rational because his platform as president was “mostly irrelevant to their lives.”

 

That insight into why people vote, and for whom, propelled Mr. Downs toward his doctoral thesis, which became the foundation for the first of his two dozen books, titled “An Economic Theory of Democracy” (1957), and shaped his career as a iconoclastic economist.

In 1967, Mr. Downs stirred the all-white Commercial Club of Chicago by declaring in a speech that “our entire social structure is fundamentally racist” and “shaped by a pervasive anti-Negro prejudice that influences almost every one of us in this room far more than we care to admit.”

 

One week later, the club voted to admit its first Black members.

[y66]

Walter Gratzer

[paulg]

Victor Silverstone, one of the legends of Scottish and British bridge, passed away this morning. Barnet Shenkin has posted this obituary and the EBU has some of his achievements in his biography.

 

I didn't know him well but my last interaction with him was in April, wishing him luck in the Teltscher Trophy being played on RealBridge.

 

I said, "Hopefully playing online is becoming more natural and you will be able to focus on the bridge rather than technology."

 

His response was, "WILL NEED TO LIVE TO 200 AND THAT MAY NOT BE ENOUGH".

[y66]

Mick Rock

 

Mr. Rock was often called “the man who shot the ’70s” because of his photographs that captured the rock stars of that flamboyant decade, both in his native England and in New York. He lived the rock lifestyle as he was photographing it, becoming part of the scene inhabited by Mr. Bowie, Mr. Reed and the rest.

 

“I was drawn to the good, the bad and the wicked,” he said in “Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock,” a 2016 documentary about him directed by Barney Clay.

 

“I’ve lived a very wild life because I’ve been hanging out with a lot of very wild people,” he added. “And the camera just kind of led me by the nose.”

Mr. Rock often said he was fated to have the career he had because of his name: He was born Michael David Rock on Nov. 21, 1948, in London to David and Joan (Gibbs) Rock.

 

He graduated from Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages. While a student there, as he put it in the documentary, “photography wandered idly into my life.” He was hanging out in a friend’s room with a companion, and the friend had left a 35-milimeter camera lying about (which turned out to have no film in it, though Mr. Rock didn’t realize that).

 

“I was with a young lady in a state of — I think chemical inebriation is probably the best way of putting it,” he told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2010, “when I started snapping away. I was just playing, but there was something about it that I really liked.”

[barmar]

Stephen Sondheim. Is a link necessary?

[kenberg]

Absolutely right, no link is necessary. 91 very good years.

[y66]

Susan Rosenblatt, who with her husband and law partner, Stanley Rosenblatt, took on Big Tobacco in a Florida case that seemed an absurd mismatch for their small firm, but that resulted in a record $144.8 billion jury award in favor of people sickened by cigarettes.

[y66]

Fred Hiatt, longtime leader of The Washington Post’s opinion section.

[y66]

Dr. Margaret Giannini, a pioneer in treating developmental and physical disabilities.

 

She received scores of honors and awards throughout her life before retiring from federal service in 2009 at age 88. But she never really stopped working. A week before she died, she was pressing Congress to establish a federal holiday for people with disabilities.

[pilowsky]

Joan Didion. 23 Dec 2021 age 87.

Her time come round at last.

Slouching towards Bethlehem.

[barmar]

E.O. Wilson

 

Considered the Darwin of the 21st century.

[Lovera]

David Sassoli: protection declaration.

Advertisement

NEWS

 

European Parliament President David Sassoli dies after hospitalization

The 65-year-old had been seriously ill in hospital for more than two weeks. He died at a hospital in Aviano in northern Italy.

 

 

Sassoli had spent more than two weeks in hospital

 

The president of the European Parliament David Sassoli has died, his office announced early on Tuesday morning.

 

He passed away after a "serious complication" related to his immune system.

 

"The president of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, passed away at 1.15 a.m. on January 11 at the hospital in Aviano, Italy," his spokesman, Roberto Cuillo said on Twitter.

 

"The date and place of the funeral will be communicated in the next few hours," he added.

 

On Monday, the EU parliament confirmed he had been admitted to hospital in Italy on December 26.

 

In September 2021, during a plenary session of the parliament, the 65-year-old came down with a bad case of pneumonia.

 

He was married with two children.

 

 

Tributes to David Sassoli

Tributes soon poured in for Sassoli, an Italian social democrat.

 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz lamented his loss, saying "Europe has lost a dedicated parliament president, Italy a shrewd politician, and Germany a good friend."

 

Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock praised Sassoli for "always

succeeding in bridging divides."

 

She wrote on Twitter that "we will not forget his commitment to dealing humanely with

refugees,"

 

 

 

EU Council President Charles Michel called the fellow politician a "sincere and passionate European. We already miss his human warmth, his generosity, his friendliness and his smile.''

 

President of the Euopean Commission Ursula von der Leyen said she was "deeply saddened by the terrible loss of a great European and proud Italian." In a post on Twitter, she described Sassoli as a "compassionate journalist, an outstanding President of the European Parliament and a dear friend."

 

"What a big shock and a big loss. I am deeply saddened. He left us too early. My condolences to his family! Dear David, Rest In Peace," tweeted German MEP Ismail Ertug.

 

Another MEP, Italian Paolo Borchia, said he was "stunned" by the news as it was so "sudden."

 

A former journalist, Sassoli was first elected as a member of the European Parliament in 2009. He won another term in 2014 and served as the Parliament's vice-president.

 

He then became president of the 705-seat legislature in 2019.

 

The parliament sits for a five-year term between elections, but the president of the body serves for half that time, and Sassoli had indicated he would not seek reelection.

 

jsi/aw (EFE, dpa, AFP, Reuters)

 

[Winstonm]

Ronnie Spector, be my baby now.

[Cyberyeti]

Meat loaf, one of the voices of my teenage years. It's unclear but I really hope we don't have to add him to the "Parade of morons" thread, but I'm fearing the worst. Wish I could play the 7" vinyl copy I have of Dead ringer for love really loud right now.