RIP

[mycroft]

Probably not appropriate, but certainly my first reaction to the above:

 

EDDIE!

 

(maybe now there are those who know more about how I spent a number of midnights in my growing up years than they did before, or wanted to).

 

More seriously, this is a blow. From what I heard, one of the people who always ensure the rest of the team was being considered, even if he did believe his own hype more than he should have.

[Cyberyeti]

Probably not appropriate, but certainly my first reaction to the above:

 

 

 

(maybe now there are those who know more about how I spent a number of midnights in my growing up years than they did before, or wanted to).

 

More seriously, this is a blow. From what I heard, one of the people who always ensure the rest of the team was being considered, even if he did believe his own hype more than he should have.

 

I spent many nights at college watching RHPS. Can remember going tooled up with all the gear to the city centre cinema in Cambridge (no longer there) where more people queued for RHPS than for the first night of Ghostbusters. I also remember the (new) manager in tears, head in his hands saying "What have they done to my cinema" as the staff who'd seen it before were quietly laughing at him.

 

A huge loss.

[mycroft]

Yep. Plaza theatre in Calgary, long weekend (bank holiday weekend for you) midnight shows.

 

Had a wheelchair for about 5 years back in Ontario (no points for working out who I came as). Got it for free from a bridge partner who really didn't want it in her house any more (it wasn't a *good* wheelchair - even before it had been used to let her maintain her garden for a few years). Donated it to a local theatre company, on the rule that "if it isn't being used for a show, and mycroft wants it, he gets it, no rental fee." They used it for shows, I used it a couple more times before I moved back.

 

All the shows I was at had a props policy made *very clear* in advance; with bag searches to ensure compliance. And there was compliance - we all knew that we were there on sufferance, and if a full house on a midnight show *still* lost money from the cleanup, they wouldn't run it again.

[barmar]

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.

He was outspoken against vaccine and mask mandates, but his actual vaccination status doesn't seem to have been made public. That suggests the worst.

[y66]

Jason Epstein

 

Mr. Epstein could be described as a man of letters with a feel for commerce or as a man of business with a taste for fine literature, and both would be correct. His major publishing achievements owed much to an uncommon mix of literary and marketing instincts.

 

They came together momentously in the winter of 1962-63, when he and his first wife, the editor Barbara Epstein, had the poet Robert Lowell and his wife, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, over for dinner one evening at their Upper West Side apartment.

 

At the time, Mr. Epstein was a top editor at Random House, where he was guiding and helping to shape the work of a formidable roster of writers, among them Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Jean Strouse, E.L. Doctorow, W.H. Auden and Jane Jacobs. Newspapers had all but disappeared from the streets because of a grueling strike that had shut down The New York Times and six other New York papers.

 

Mr. Epstein observed to his guests that in the absence of The New York Times Book Review on Sundays, the book-reading public was being underserved. It was a familiar theme for him. He had long seen a potential market for an American version of The Times Literary Supplement of London (now known as TLS), an independent weekly publication.

 

“There’s only one person in the country who could do it,” he had been fond of saying, “and I’m busy.”

 

But at the dinner table that night, he revived the idea. The time was ripe, he proposed, to introduce a new book review. His guests agreed.

 

“Jason was, like, ‘Kids, let’s put on a show,’ ” Ms. Epstein later recalled.

 

The next morning, Mr. Lowell took out a $4,000 bank loan, secured by his own trust fund, and cajoled his moneyed friends into investing in the project. Ms. Epstein and the editor Robert B. Silvers, who was persuaded to leave his job at Harper’s Magazine, became co-editors. Ms. Hardwick took the title of editorial adviser.

 

The first issue of The New York Review of Books, dated Feb. 1, 1963, was star-studded. There were articles by Dwight Macdonald (reviewing Arthur Schlesinger Jr.), Mary McCarthy (on William S. Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”), Philip Rahv (on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), Susan Sontag (on Simone Weil), Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Nathan Glazer, Midge Decter, Ms. Hardwick and Mr. Epstein. There were poems by Mr. Lowell, W.H. Auden, John Ashbery, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich and Robert Penn Warren.

Mr. Epstein saw the digital universe as a potential ally in that pursuit, whether through electronic books or on-demand printing. In 2000, he said in an interview on the PBS program “The Open Mind” that publishers “throw a book out into the retail marketplace without any idea where it’s going to go.”

 

“Barnes & Noble orders a book from Random House, we print 10, 15, 20 thousand copies,” he continued, “but who knows where and on what shelf and what clerks are going to open the package and whether they’re going to know what the books are about or whom they’re intended for? We don’t know that.

 

“That explains,” he continued, “why so many books are returned unsold from booksellers to publishers. And why it’s so hard, sometimes, to find the book you’re looking for in a bookstore. And why it’s so hard for authors to find their way to their appropriate readers. But in this other system, you will have targeted markets for each author. The technology makes that possible, and therefore it’s going to happen. Not today, but eventually. That’s going to make a whole new world.”

 

Mr. Epstein saw book publishing as more than a business, though. For him it was almost a calling, one that might struggle to turn a profit. Publishing, he said in the same interview, was “more comparable to what priests and teachers and some doctors do than to what people who become lawyers or businessmen or Wall Street brokers — what they do.

 

“It is a vocation, you feel you’re doing something extremely important, and it’s worth sacrificing for, because without books we wouldn’t know who we were.”

[y66]

Patrick Jake O’Rourke

[kenberg]

Patrick Jake O’Rourke

 

My reaction was: Patrick Jake who? Oh, P. J. O'rourke.

The cited obit ends with a quote from Michael Kinsley

“He’s an anarchist with a heart of gold.”

I rarely read obits, I am glad I saw this.

[y66]

Paul Farmer

[paulg]

Two legends of the game, from different eras.

Rod Marsh

 

Shane Warne

[eagles123]

Totally shocking about Warne, the greatest bowler in cricket history. Absolute genius.

[thepossum]

Two legends of the game, from different eras.

Rod Marsh

 

Shane Warne

 

I'm starting to feel old as an English born person having to live through two whole eras like that. There will never be another one though. How could there be

[y66]

Walter Mears

 

Mr. Mears became “moderately famous,” as he put it, thanks to “The Boys on the Bus,” written by the journalist Timothy Crouse. For an American public that had largely accepted the omniscient posture of mainstream political reporters, the book provided a messy but savory view of journalistic sausage making.

 

Mr. Crouse quoted Mr. Mears, then only 37, calling himself an “old fart” and fretting that practitioners of the ascendant style of New Journalism had skipped over essentials of reportorial training, like “how to write an eight-car fatal on Route 128.”

 

Yet Mr. Crouse’s description of reporters covering a debate between George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey during the Democratic primary race showed how much Mr. Mears’s colleagues respected him.

 

As other journalists treated the occasion like a social event, Mr. Crouse wrote, Mr. Mears typed “like a madman,” writing for as long as an hour without pause, transcribing each politician’s statements while inserting a descriptive phrase every four or five lines. Then the debate ended, and Mr. Mears’s fellow reporters began crowding around him, shouting “Lead? Lead?” and “Walter, Walter, what’s our lead?”

 

The “lead” — in a straight news article, the opening line that distills its significance — was Mr. Mears’s specialty. Half the men in the press room wound up copying his approach to the debate.

 

It was a memorable scene, and, in several “Doonesbury” comics that named Mr. Mears in the years after “The Boys on the Bus,” he was presented in the same light — as an archetypal just-the-facts-ma’am reporter.

 

In his memoir, Mr. Mears formulated his own description of his job: “to get past the managers and spinners to assess the strengths the candidates claim as well as the failures and flaws they try to conceal.”

The afternoon before he died, Susan Mears said, his daughters were keeping him company, along with a Methodist pastor who had long known him. The pastor, describing Mr. Mears’s expertise in American politics, recalled a conversation many years earlier during which he had been amazed at how much Mr. Mears knew about the 1936 presidential election, which took place when he was 1 year old.

 

As Mr. Mears appeared to sleep, the pastor tried to remember the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Republican challenger.

 

Before either of the Mears daughters had a chance to reply, they heard a familiar voice — softer and slower than they were accustomed to, but with the speed, authoritative tone and factual command that had for decades guided America’s leading political reporters.

 

“Alf Landon,” Mr. Mears said.

[y66]

Maggy Hurchalla

[pilowsky]

Madeleine Albright - CNN obit.

[y66]

Joan Joyce

 

On a warm August night in 1961, Ted Williams, the “Splendid Splinter” who had finished his Hall of Fame baseball career the year before as the last hitter to bat .400 in a single season, strode to the plate before an overflow crowd at Municipal Stadium in Waterbury, Conn., to face a young softball pitching phenom by the name of Joan Joyce.

 

The occasion was a charity fund-raising exhibition. Williams was in his Boston Red Sox uniform, No. 9. Joyce stood on the mound 40 feet away (regulation in women’s softball, as opposed to 60 feet 6 inches in major-league baseball), clad in the red-and-white jersey and shorts she wore as the premier pitcher for the Raybestos Brakettes, one of the top teams in the women’s game, with its home field 30 miles to the south in suburban Stratford, Conn.

 

Joan Joyce pitching in the Women’s Softball World Championship in 1974 in Stratford, Conn. With her leading the way, her Raybestos Brakettes became the first United States team to win the title. Credit...Joan Chandler

 

It was one of several such exhibitions in which Williams and Joyce faced off in the early 1960s, but the one in Waterbury — Joyce’s hometown, where the fans were chanting “Joanie, Joanie Joanie!” — proved to be the most memorable. It would become an oft-told tale in the lore that enveloped Joyce over her long career as, many would say, the most dominant player in the history of women’s fast-pitch softball and — given her prowess in basketball, volleyball and golf as well — as one of the greatest female athletes of her generation.

 

With a slingshot-like underhanded delivery, Joyce, a couple of weeks shy of her 21st birthday, took her full arsenal of blazing pitches to the mound that night: curveballs, sliders, fastballs and her trademark “drop ball,” which sunk over the plate. And while she warmed up, Williams, who was approaching 43 but coming off a sterling, age-defying final season in Boston (hitting .316 and swatting 29 home runs), studied the movement of her ball.

 

To no avail, as it turned out.

 

For 10 to 15 minutes, Williams, a left-handed hitter, swung at and missed almost everything Joyce, a right-hander, threw at him (save for a couple of foul tips).

 

“Finally,” Joyce later recalled, “he threw the bat down and said, ‘I can’t hit her’” and walked away.

 

Mighty Williams had struck out.

 

Years later, Joyce would tell her biographer, Tony Renzoni, how she once met a man who had fished with Williams off the Florida Keys. The man told her that he had asked Williams to name the toughest pitcher he had ever faced. “And he said,” she recalled, “‘You won’t believe this, but it was a teenage girl.’”

[sfi]

Chris Bailey, singer and leader of the seminal punk band The Saints, passed away two days ago.

 

For your listening pleasure,

[Lovera]

I was reading Switzerland wins (in Bridge d'Italia Online) when i read:"Unfortunately, these memories must be tinged with a sad note: just a few days ago Edwin Kantar, one of the greatest players of all time, who was the protagonist in both finals that I mentioned above, passed away. Kantar was also a great writer and teacher, and we all learned a lot from him. Goodbye Eddie, we will meet again at some table of the great afterlife tournaments."

[pilowsky]

Gilbert Gottfried - too soon.

[y66]

Kathy Boudin

[kenberg]

Kathy Boudin

 

I thank you for this.

This is not the right thread for a long discussion of her life but I read the article with great interest. I'm 83, she was about to turn 79, we were very different.

Best to leave it at that.

Thanks again.

[thepossum]

Chris Bailey, singer and leader of the seminal punk band The Saints, passed away two days ago.

 

For your listening pleasure,

 

Thx for posting this. Couldn't be a more appropriate song (or singer/writer/band) for how I feel at home in Brisbane or overseas away from Brisbane

 

Sad I missed the news

[y66]

Dervla Murphy

 

From Rose Baring's description of her visit to Murphy's home in Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland in 2018:

 

Dervla Murphy’s home is at once the most hospitable and the most inhospitable of places. As you would expect of a woman who has made a living from talking with anyone and everyone around the globe – and writing about it – good conversation, and friends, are plentiful. In summer there’s a table in the cobbled courtyard, hewn from a single tree trunk. Alcohol lubricates and conversation gambols from one topic to the next late into the warm, light night – the Catholic Church, events in Israel/Palestine, animal behaviour, news of mutual friends. In winter, things move indoors, where a small fire tries valiantly to heat a building to which the concept of insulation is a stranger. Only the conviviality is warm.

 

Dervla is oblivious to the cold. She sleeps in a converted cowshed, and eats one meal a day, at 5.30am. Homemade muesli and yoghurt gives way to home-baked bread and cheese, or sometimes sausages. From midday, the only sustenance is beer. Guests are housed in the pigsty, where the only gadget in the house, an electric blanket, has recently made an appearance. Before that, it was a question of piling on all available bedding and praying that the damp would be gone after a couple of nights. Never have I appreciated the charms of my perennially warm husband more. In the evening, guests are fed delicious stews while Dervla downs another pint. For a woman who shows so little interest in eating, she’s a very good cook.

 

There’s something reassuring about someone who lives as they write. In her books, Dervla is never bothered by where she will sleep at night, or what she will eat. What she cares about is what a place is like, why, and what the people there think and feel about it. How many eighty-year-olds do you know who would happily spend three months in a refugee camp, living in a single concrete room with a hole in one corner as a loo? For her, understanding the experience of the Palestinians in Balata Camp was her duty as a fellow human. Nothing in the world would make me want to change that, for out of it has come some of the most exhilarating and honest travel writing of the century. But I would sometimes like a bit more heat.

[y66]

Sgt. Nicole Gee and Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, two Marines killed while helping evacuate Kabul last year.

[y66]

Sean Thackrey

[Cyberyeti]

Deborah James, somebody who raised millions of pounds and will have saved a lot of lives by doing a podcast on having cancer. 2 of the 3 presenters now gone.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_James_(journalist)

 

Her fund I believe stands at something like £7M and will no doubt explode now she's died