Rip 2020 take 2.

<insert joke about 2019 being the first victim of 2020>

Uch, do I have to move my Neil Innes obit? So much work. I am still aware that he died in 2019.

So to atone for my unrelated snarky comment, I did hear on the radio that ex-Yankee pitcher Don Larsen died Jan 1. He was notedly the only pitcher to throw a perfect World Series game (game 5, 1956), pitching to one of my other favorite MLB characters, Yogi Berra.
NYT obit

One of the all-time greatest moments in baseball

Another great shot:

Buck Henry, the Hollywood screenwriter known for “The Graduate” and “What’s Up, Doc?” and who co-created the TV comedy series “Get Smart,” died Wednesday night in Los Angeles after suffering a heart attack, according to reports. He was 89 years old.
Many fans also know Henry for his frequent appearances on “Saturday Night Live” during its early years. For example, Henry was the sandwich-buying customer who appeared in the “Samurai Delicatessen” sketch with the late John Belushi.

what?

Very sad news to announce

Rush drummer Neil Peart dead at 67

Peart died on Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif., after battling brain cancer, family spokesperson Elliot Mintz said in a statement obtained by Fox News.

A statement posted on the band’s official Twitter page said: “It is with broken hearts and the deepest sadness that we must share the terrible news that on Tuesday our friend, soul brother and bandmate of over 45 years, Neil, has lost his incredibly brave three and a half year battle with brain cancer …”

Mike Resnick, a major figure in science fiction, has died after a brief battle with “a very aggressive form of lymphoma” that was diagnosed in November. He was 77.

Resnick had a well-deserved reputation as a mentor and editor, as well as being a prolific writer. As Michael Swanwick notes in his remembrance of Resnick, he was “the man with a thousand little rockets” – a reference to how he would stud each year’s World Science Fiction Convention badge with rows of Hugo Award nominee pins, a tribute to both how much work he produced and how well-received it was by his legion of fans.

Resnick launched a Gofundme campaign in November to help pay for his medical expenses. Today, that campaign is being used by his family to defray his medical debt and to help his widow Carol with her ongoing living costs.

Resnick’s daughter, the writer Laura Resnick, added this in her remembrance of her father: “His connection to his friends, his readers, and his colleagues enriched his life, and he never stopped being delighted to meet people who read his work, who were interested in writing, who loved books and stories, and who shared his sense of wonder. He remained enthusiastic about his craft and devoted to his writing to the end of his life, and was always thrilled to be part of the science fiction community, as both a fan and a pro. He taught me a lot about being a writer and a professional.”

John Scalzi’s obit for Resnick emphasizes Resnick’s pay-it-forward attitude: “what I think you will see most in the tributes that will be coming out about in the next few days is the fact he was a teacher and mentor to a great number of writers in the science fiction community, sharing advice about writing and the writing life over decades.” (Scalzi also remembers Resnick’s part in the publication of a controversial column he co-wrote for the Science Fiction Writers of America’s magazine while Scalzi was President of SFWA).

As I wrote when I contributed to his medical expenses crowdfunder, medical debt is particularly oppressive for self-employed artists, and science fiction circles are perpetually fundraising for some ill or injured writer whose lack of insurance endangers their own ability to work and provide for their families. This is partially why I donated to both the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom advocated Medicare for All. There are untold mountains of brilliant books, paintings, songs and other art that were never produced because the artists who would have made them were either so burdened with medical debt that they couldn’t find the time or mental space to produce them; or because they were so scared of accruing medical debt that they abandoned the idea of a career in the arts.

Pop chose not to tell anyone how ill he was, because he was so convinced he'd get better and soon be his old self again. He mostly slept during his final days, but when awake he was in good spirits. He passed away quietly in his sleep, without pain or further suffering.

His connection to his friends, his readers, and his colleagues enriched his life, and he never stopped being delighted to meet people who read his work, who were interested in writing, who loved books and stories, and who shared his sense of wonder. He remained enthusiastic about his craft and devoted to his writing to the end of his life, and was always thrilled to be part of the science fiction community, as both a fan and a pro. He taught me a lot about being a writer and a professional.

My dad met my mom nearly 60 years ago and has been devoted to her ever since. She said to me this morning that no one could have had a better husband. My mom will miss him more than anyone, but we know he will be missed by many people.

He will be cremated, as per his wishes, in a private family service. We will plan a memorial/remembrance gathering for him later this year, at a location where we hope many of his friends can be present--maybe a convention. 

This one is personal. My friend, Chef George Beaird, passed away suddenly yesterday after having a stroke closing his restaurant the night before.

He was a no nonsense, foulmouthed redneck with formal training in the culinary arts and a passion for feeding people damn good food. Back in culinary school he created an award winning Jack Daniels based sauce that you have probably tasted if you ate at quick service chains in the 2000s. He finally got to open his own restaurant in 2017, and burst onto the culinary scene in town with significant notice from his new exposure to the local fooderati and built himself a dedicated following.

He occasionally called himself the Vulgar Chef, and Carl669 would approve greatly of many of his sayings. He taught me how to hold a knife and chop an onion correctly. How to make paella and other things I would never have had without dinners at his house. We kicked around making him a YouTube channel where he could share his knowledge with the world, and I couldn’t wait to learn so much more from him by producing it. That got put on hold when he got his chance at his own restaurant. I hooked him up with sous vide stuff and discussed cooking stuff at a level I had no business knowing about, much less discussing with a pro.

I met him more than a decade ago through my ex. He showed me that I wasn’t happy when I didn’t even know that myself and helped me through the experience of learning that the love of my life was not the right one. I got to keep him in the split. I’ll always be grateful for the time we spent, the many hours of stories we shared, and the value of spending time with someone who truly loved what he did and got to live his dream.

So much to say, but it’s not relevant, really. All I have to say is what I said to him at the end of many times we spent together. Thanks, George, for the good food and the good times. We’ll all miss having your meat in our mouths.

Christopher Tolkein, son of JRR Tolkein, steward of LOTR lore, and author of the maps of Middle Earth, has passed away.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/797110141/christopher-tolkien-middle-earth-s-first-scholar-dies-at-95

Terry Jones of Monty Python has passed away from complications of dementia. I don’t have time to do a whole write-up, but if you watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or any of the movies, you know who he was and his legacy to comedy.
/image terry jones monty python

/giphy terry jones monty python

** Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen Turned His Life Into a Case Study**

Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and management guru, was an authority on what he called disruptive technologies who became more widely known for offering his life as a case study.

Dr. Christensen, whose books included “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” died Thursday in Boston. He was 67 and had leukemia.

In the 1990s, he warned entrepreneurs against being so focused on pleasing their current customers that they missed shifts in technology that could render their firms obsolete. “To remain at the top of their industries, managers must first be able to spot disruptive technologies,” he wrote. Doing that, he said, required creating organizations independent of the mainstream business.

In a 2010 article and lecture, “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” later expanded into a book, he advised business-school students to devote part of their time to creating a strategy for living a good life. Having a clear purpose mattered more than mastering core competence and disruptive innovations, he said.

A lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he recounted a tough decision he made while playing basketball for a team at Oxford University. He outraged teammates by refusing to participate in a championship game on a Sunday. “Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed,” he wrote.

As a consultant and professor, Dr. Christensen saw his role as telling people how to think rather than what to do. He urged students to look beyond profit margins and near-term results.

“More and more M.B.A. students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies,” he wrote. “That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.”

Dr. Christensen put his faith at the center of his messages but said his prescriptions for leading a successful life applied to everyone.

Clayton Magleby Christensen, the second of eight children, was born April 6, 1952, in Salt Lake City. His father managed a grocery department in a department store. His mother was a high school English teacher and wrote for radio programs.

In sixth grade, he read the entire World Book encyclopedia, according to his family. Around the same age, he became a regular reader of the Congressional Record and made charts of the voting records of members of Congress. One early ambition was to become editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Standing 6-foot-8, he played basketball in high school and college. Following the tradition of his church, he worked as a missionary in South Korea in the early 1970s.

While studying economics at Brigham Young University, he met Christine Quinn, who was studying English there. They married in 1976.

After graduating from Brigham Young, he studied econometrics at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In 1979, he received an M.B.A. degree at Harvard Business School, where he was a George F. Baker Scholar.

He then went to work for Boston Consulting Group as a management consultant. He took a sabbatical in 1982 to be a White House Fellow and served as an assistant to U.S. Transportation Secretaries Drew Lewis and Elizabeth Dole.

In the mid-1980s, he helped found Ceramics Process Systems Corp., a Cambridge, Mass.-based maker of materials used in microelectronics and other industries.

He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1992. One of his goals was to explain why business success was hard to sustain over long periods.

In his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he wrote that companies could lose their way by doing two things managers were taught to do in business school: listening to their best customers and focusing investments on innovations promising the highest returns. Those practices could be disastrous if they prevented executives from spotting the potential for disruptive technologies arising from the low end of the market.

Kobe Bryant. 1978- 2020 https://www.tmz.com/2020/01/26/kobe-bryant-killed-dead-helicopter-crash-in-calabasas/
Pending confirmation from other news sources.

My heart has just been ripped from my chest. Bill Manning has died (Saturday morning, January 25, 2020). You probably don’t know him, but he was a good and generous human being, and I’m astonished at how sad it makes me.

https://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2020/01/bill-manning.html

Kirk Douglas made it to 103!
He made some epic movies back in the day.

ASHEBORO, N.C. (Tribune News Service) — John McGlohon, the WWII veteran known for taking a photo of the Hiroshima bomb, died Sunday, Feb. 2. He was 96 years old
I don’t know how to link but there are a couple of articles about his life. He went on to do much more with his life, but this was certainly noteworthy.

Sad story. Veteran actor Orson Bean, 91, struck and killed by vehicle in Venice, California.

https://abc7.com/veteran-actor-orson-bean-91-struck-and-killed-by-vehicle-in-venice-friends-say/5912587/

Robert Conrad, Star of Television Series The Wild Wild West, Dies at 84
Robert Conrad starred in movies and television shows including The Wild Wild West, Baa Baa Black Sheep and Hawaiian Eye.

https://people.com/tv/robert-conrad-dead-at-84/

Larry Tesler

The UI pioneer responsible for cut, copy, and paste, dies at 74.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/19/21144516/larry-tesler-cut-copy-paste-dies-at-74-apple-xerox-amazon-obituary

Select this “F” and press Ctrl-C
Press Ctrl-V to pay respect

No one’s going to eulogize the flat-earth jackass who killed himself in his homemade rocket?

Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA
She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures.”

Using a slide rule, she did the calculations for the trajectory of the moon landing (among other achievements).

From NYT:

They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.

Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, whose death at 101 was announced on Monday by NASA, calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.

A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961.

The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division — the office from which the American space program sprang — and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name.

But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American.

In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women — perhaps three dozen — who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film “Hidden Figures,” based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film’s central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as her real-life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.

In January 2017 “Hidden Figures” received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.

The film was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture. Though it won none, the 98½-year-old Mrs. Johnson received a sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage with the cast at the Academy Awards ceremony that February.

Of the black women at the center of the film, Mrs. Johnson was the only one still living at the time of its release. By then, she had become the best-known member of her formerly unknown cohort.

In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, proclaiming, “Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.”

In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

That year, The Washington Post described her as “the most high-profile of the computers” — “computers” being the term originally used to designate Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues, much as “typewriters” was used in the 19th century to denote professional typists.

She “helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space,” NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said in a statement on Monday, “even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space.”

As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley — from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 — was “a time when computers wore skirts.”

For some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as “computers” were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency’s male mathematicians and engineers.

But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues — myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering desktop calculating machines — won them a level of acceptance that for the most part transcended race.

“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.”

Nor, she said, did she.

“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority,” Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. “Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”

To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson deflected praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home.

“I was just doing my job,” Ms. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book.

But what a job it was — done, no less, by a woman born at a time, Ms. Shetterly wrote, “when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school.”

The youngest of four children of Joshua Coleman, a farmer, and Joylette Coleman, a schoolteacher, Creola Katherine Coleman was born on Aug. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.

From her earliest childhood Katherine counted things: the number of dishes in the cupboard, the number of steps on the way to church and, as insurmountable a task as it might pose for one old enough to be daunted, the number of stars in the sky.

“I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry,” Mrs. Johnson told The Associated Press in 1999.

But for black children, the town’s segregated educational system went as far as only sixth grade. Thus, every fall, Joshua Coleman moved his family 125 miles away to Institute, W.Va.

In Institute, Katherine’s older siblings, and then Katherine, attended the high school associated with the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a historically black institution that became West Virginia State College and is now West Virginia State University.

Mr. Coleman remained in White Sulphur Springs to farm, and, when the Depression made farming untenable, to work as a bellman at the Greenbrier, a world-renowned resort there.

Katherine entered high school at 10 and graduated at 14. The next year she entered West Virginia State. By her junior year, she had taken all the math courses the college had to offer.

Her mentor there, William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, only the third black person to earn a doctorate in mathematics from an American university, conceived special classes just for her.

“You would make a good research mathematician,” he told his 17-year-old charge. “And I am going to prepare you for this career.”

“Where will I find a job?” Katherine asked.

“That,” he replied, “will be your problem.”

After graduating summa cum laude in 1937 with a double major in mathematics and French, she found, unsurprisingly, that research opportunities for black female teenage mathematicians were negligible. She took a job as a schoolteacher in Marion, Va.

In 1940, she was chosen by the president of West Virginia State to be one of three black graduate students to integrate West Virginia University, the all-white institution in Morgantown.

Two years earlier, ruling in the civil-rights case Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the United States Supreme Court held that where comparable graduate programs did not exist at black universities in Missouri, the state was obliged to admit black graduate students to its white state universities. In the wake of that decision, West Virginia’s governor, Homer Holt, chose to desegregate public graduate schools in his state.

Now married to James Francis Goble, a chemistry teacher, she entered West Virginia University in the summer of 1940, studying advanced mathematics.

“The greatest challenge she faced,” Ms. Shetterly wrote, “was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage.”

But after that summer session, on discovering she was pregnant with her first child, she withdrew from the university. She returned with her husband to Marion and was occupied with marriage, motherhood and teaching for more than a decade.

Then, in 1952, Katherine Goble heard that Langley was hiring black women as mathematicians.

The oldest of NASA’s field centers, Langley had been established by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1917. In 1935, it began hiring white women with mathematics degrees to relieve its male engineers of the tedious work of crunching numbers by hand.

Within a decade, several hundred white women had been employed as computers there. Most, unlike the male scientists at the agency, were classified as subprofessionals, paid less than their male counterparts.

In June 1941, as the nation prepared for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, barring racial discrimination in the defense industry. In 1943, with the wartime need for human computers greater than ever, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, as the research facility was then known, began advertising for black women trained in mathematics.

Among the first hired was Dorothy Vaughan who began work that year. In 1951, Mrs. Vaughan became the first black section head at NACA, as the advisory committee was known, when she was officially placed in charge of Langley’s West Area Computing Unit, the segregated office to which the black women were relegated.

It was in this unit that Katherine Goble began work in June 1953, tabulating sheets of data for the agency’s engineers.

By the time she arrived, the company cafeteria had already undergone de facto desegregation: Its “Colored Computers” sign, designating a table in the back for the women, had been a salubrious casualty of the war years. But the separate bathrooms remained.

Quite by accident, Katherine Goble broke that color line herself. While the agency’s bathrooms for black employees were marked as such, many bathrooms for whites were unmarked.

Without realizing it, she had been using a white women’s restroom since her arrival. By the time she became aware of her error, she was set in her routine and disinclined to change. No one took her to task, and she used the white bathrooms from then on.

Two weeks into her new job, she was borrowed by the Flight Research Division, which occupied an immense hangar on the Langley grounds.

There, the only black member of the staff, she helped calculate the aerodynamic forces on airplanes. For that task, as she quickly demonstrated, she came armed with an invaluable asset.

“The guys all had graduate degrees in mathematics; they had forgotten all the geometry they ever knew,” Mrs. Johnson said in the Fayetteville Observer interview. “I still remembered mine.”

She remained in the division for the rest of her career.

By the early 1960s, with the United States provoked by Soviet prowess in space, NASA was under great pressure to launch an astronaut. It fell to the Flight Research Division to do many of the associated calculations.

“Our assignment was the trajectory,” Mrs. Johnson explained to The Associated Press. “As NASA got ready to put someone in space, they needed to know what the launch conditions were. It was our assignment to develop the launch window and determine where it was going to land.”

Clandestine Calculations

Their work was secret — at times even from the mathematicians themselves.

“We were the pioneers of the space era,” Mrs. Johnson told The Daily Press, a Virginia newspaper, in 1990. “You had to read Aviation Week to find out what you’d done.”

She routinely logged 16-hour days, once falling asleep at the wheel of her car and waking up — safe, providentially — at the side of the road.

But the work engaged her deeply.

“I loved every single day of it,” she told Ms. Shetterly. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.”

It helped sustain her through the death of her first husband from brain cancer in 1956, leaving her, at 38, a widow with three adolescent daughters. She married James A. Johnson, a United States Army captain, in 1959.

Over the years, Mrs. Johnson published more than two dozen technical papers. She was among the first women at NASA to be a named author or co-author on an agency report.

Ceaselessly curious about the aerospace technology that underpinned her work, she made it possible for women to attend the agency’s scientific briefings, formerly closed-door affairs reserved for male staff members. (“Is there a law against it?” Mrs. Johnson asked, and when her male colleagues, after some head-scratching, concluded that, no, there was no law, they let her in.)

After retiring from NASA, Mrs. Johnson became a public advocate for mathematics education, speaking widely and visiting schools.

Mrs. Johnson’s colleague Mary Jackson died in 2005; Dorothy Vaughn died in 2008.

In 2016, Mrs. Johnson, self-effacing as ever at 98, seemed somewhat indifferent to the fuss surrounding the feature film about her life.

“I shudder,” she told The New York Times that September, some three months before the film’s release, having heard that the screenwriters might have made her character seem a tiny bit aggressive. “I was never aggressive.” (As things transpired, Mrs. Johnson liked the finished film very much, Ms. Shetterly said in an interview for this obituary in 2017.)

Mrs. Johnson may not have been aggressive, but she was assuredly esteemed. An index of just how esteemed she was came from Mr. Glenn, Mercury astronaut and future United States senator, who died in 2016.

In early 1962, a few days before he prepared to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7, Mr. Glenn made a final check of his planned orbital trajectory. The trajectory had been generated by a computer — not the flesh-and-blood kind, but the electronic sort, which were starting to supplant the agency’s human calculators.

Electronic computation was still something of a novelty at NASA, and Mr. Glenn was unsettled by the use of a soulless mass of metal to divine something on which his life depended.

He asked that Mrs. Johnson double-check the machine’s figures by hand.

“If she says the numbers are good,” he declared, “I’m ready to go.”

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography/

A second NYT article, with more reporting in the NASA years, is here.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/02/24/us/ap-us-obit-katherine-johnson.html

Jens Knudsen, the creator of the Lego mini figure has passed.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/02/24/jens-nygaard-knudsen-designer-lego-minifigure-has-died/4854849002/

Freeman Dyson
Futurist inventor of the Dyson Sphere, passes away at 96.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/freeman-dyson-physicist-with-a-sci-fi-bent-has-died-at-96/

“James Lipton, Creator and Host of ‘Inside the Actors Studio,’ Dies at 93”

James Lipton, the elegant, articulate wordsmith and theater academic whose desire to give his acting students a greater insight into their art led to the popular Bravo series Inside the Actors Studio, has died. He was 93.
Lipton passed away early Monday at his home in Manhattan from bladder cancer, his wife, Kedakai Mercedes Lipton, told The Hollywood Reporter.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/james-lipton-dead-actors-studio-909382

Damn. Kenny Rogers has died.

Country singer Joe Diffie passed away today from complications of Covid-19.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/joe-diffie-country-singer-dead-obituary-974556/

Fred “Curly” Neal of the Harlem Globetrotters passed away two days ago.

We saw the Globetrotters play at the Las Vegas Convention Center Rotunda when we were young. I don’t remember if Curly Neal was on the team we saw (they had west and east coast; Meadowlark Lemon was on the East Coast team and Showboat Hall was on the West Coast…) they were amazing.

Curly was my favorite from the shows.

Rest in peace.

Fountains Of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger Dies At 52 After Contracting COVID-19

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/01/824683454/fountains-of-waynes-adam-schlesinger-dies-at-52-after-contracting-covid-19?fbclid=IwAR0ewN0fbiFpL3qdw0dP5yBMEzMmVBZyPSSbRdLHOAV-coz5yE8F1gpuzC0

Ellis Marsalis, 85, died of complications from Covid-19.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/02/825717204/ellis-marsalis-patriarch-of-new-orleans-most-famous-musical-family-has-died

Dammit.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bill-withers-obituary-977929/
You might not recognize his name but I guarantee you know at least some of his songs very well.
I only recently started adding his music to my collection and even learning to play and sing a couple of them.
Here are my two favorites:

(^^this song is very easy to play on the guitar - lmk if anyone wants a link to a tutorial)

Honor Blackman, Star of ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Goldfinger,’ Dies at 94

The judo expert shockingly quit the popular British TV series after two seasons to star as Bond girl Pussy Galore in the third 007 film.
Honor Blackman, the beguiling British actress who portrayed the leather-clad Cathy Gale on TV’s The Avengers and then Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, has died. She was 94.
Blackman, who first won recognition for her performance as Elizabeth Taylor’s friend in the MGM spy tale Conspirator (1949), died at her home in Lewes, Sussex, of natural causes unrelated to the coronavirus, her family told The Guardian.

/youtube Goldfinger Pussy Galore

From the Hollywood Reporter
More of the story here
https://apple.news/APLoIBhuORduQ98HRJv96nA

Well, damn.

John Prine, Who Chronicled the Human Condition in Song, Dies at 73

The folk singer and songwriter with a raspy voice and an offbeat humor was revered by peers including Bob Dylan.

/youtube Bonnie Raitt Angel From Montgomery.

…
The cause was complications from Covid-19, his family said.
…
Mr. Prine was a relative unknown in 1970 when Mr. Kristofferson heard him play one night at a small Chicago club called the Fifth Peg, dragged there by the singer-songwriter Steve Goodman. Mr. Kristofferson was performing in Chicago at the time at the Quiet Knight. At the Fifth Peg, Mr. Prine treated him to a brief after-hours performance of material that, Mr. Kristofferson later wrote, “was unlike anything I’d heard before.”
A few weeks later, when Mr. Prine was in New York, Mr. Kristofferson invited him onstage at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where he was appearing with Carly Simon, and introduced him to the audience.

“No way somebody this young can be writing so heavy,” he said. “John Prine is so good, we may have to break his thumbs.”
The record executive Jerry Wexler, who was in the audience, signed Mr. Prine to a contract with Atlantic Records the next day.
Music writers at the time were eager to crown a successor to Mr. Dylan, and Mr. Prine, with his nasal, sandpapery voice and literate way with a song, came ready to order. His debut album, called simply “John Prine” and released in 1971, included songs that became his signatures. Some gained wider fame after being recorded by other artists.

“He’s a true folk singer in the best folk tradition, cutting right to the heart of things, as pure and simple as rain,” Ms. Raitt told Rolling Stone in 1992.
Mr. Dylan, listing his favorite songwriters for The Huffington Post in 2009, put Mr. Prine front and center. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” he said. “Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree. And he writes beautiful songs.”

/image John Prine

The rest of the NYT article is here
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/music/john-prine-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare

dang… I never thought it would blow up like this…

John Horton Conway, an English mathematician who worked on numerous mathematical theories but was perhaps best known for developing the Game of Life on computers; a cellular automaton emulator.

He passed away April 11th at the age of 82 due, reportedly, to complications caused by the Covid-19 virus.

Article here

Info about the Game of Life

Conway’s feelings about the Game of Life

Brian Dennehy
Passed April 15, 2020. A talented actor in too many performances to note here. I remember him best from his role in the movie Cocoon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Dennehy

: (

Little Richard has died, age 87, cause of death unknown.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/little-richard-dead-48505/

Actor and comedian Jerry Stiller has died due to natural causes, his son, actor Ben Stiller said in a tweet. He was 92.

Festivus will never be the same!

/giphy festivus

Comic actor Fred Willard has died at the age of 86.

The beloved star with several acting credits – including “Best in Show,” “This is Spinal Tap” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” – died of natural causes, his daughter confirmed to Fox News.

https://apple.news/APNNrE2U9RI2k5x5dbgiD0w
Hollywood Reporter

https://apple.news/A2PTJC1A_SFC7BbtIAk6xcg
Variety.

Ken Osmond Dead: ‘Leave It To Beaver’s’ Eddie Haskell Was 76

Ken Osmond, best known for his role as the troublemaker Eddie Haskell on the television comedy “Leave It to Beaver,” died on Monday morning. He was 76.

https://www.nytimes.com/

Apparently we skipped over Max Von Sydow passing on March 9th.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/movies/max-von-sydow-dead.amp.html

/image Max Von Sydow

/image Max Von Sydow minority report 2

George Perry Floyd Jr.
May 25, 2020

On May 25, 2020, Floyd was arrested for passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a grocery store in Minneapolis.

He was killed after Derek Chauvin, a highly trained and decorated white police officer with 19 years of experience with the Minneapolis Police, pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds; for the last three of those minutes, Floyd was motionless and had no pulse, and none of the officers present made no attempt to revive him.

Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck as arriving emergency medical technicians attempted to treat him.

Floyd was handcuffed face down in the street, while two rookie officers in their first week on the job further restrained Floyd at the direction of Chauvin, the senior officer present, and a fourth prevented onlookers from intervening.

His five children, the youngest a 6-year old daughter, will forever know the image below as the last image of their father alive.

Ian Holm, star of Lord of the Rings, Alien and Chariots of Fire, dies aged 88

May he rest in the undying lands.

Milton Glaser has died. Icon designer, co-founder of New York Magazine

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/obituaries/milton-glaser-dead.html
/image dylan psychedelic

Carl Reiner
March 20, 1922 - June 29, 2020

"Carl Reiner, the writer, producer, director and actor who was part of Sid Caesar’s legendary team and went on to create “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and direct several hit films, has died. He was 98.

He died of natural causes on Monday night at his home in Beverly Hills, his assistant Judy Nagy confirmed to Variety."

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/carl-reiner-dead-died-dick-van-dyke-1234694208/

Such a funny, funny man who has left quite a legacy. RIP Carl

Charlie Daniels
October 28, 1936 - July 6, 2020
“Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie Daniels died Monday in Tennessee, according to a statement from his publicist. He was 83.
Daniels died of a hemorrhagic stroke at Summit Medical Center in Hermitage.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/country-music-hall-famer-charlie-daniels-dies-83-n1232985

Is there anyone that doesn’t absolutely love The Devil Went Down to Georgia? RIP Charlie - Thanks for the tunes.

Nick Cordero, a ‘Bright Light,’ Remembered by Broadway After COVID-19 Death at 41

Cordero’s heartbreaking journey as his family and medical team tried to keep him alive was chronicled by his wife for months on Twitter.

Family, friends, co-workers all seem to see him as having been a most generous and positive person.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/nick-cordero-a-bright-light-remembered-by-broadway-after-covid-19-death-at-41

After a months-long, grueling public battle with COVID-19, Broadway actor Nick Cordero died Sunday at the age of 41. His wife, fellow theater performer Amanda Kloots, shared a tribute on Instagram, noting that Cordero passed “surrounded in love by his family, singing and praying as he gently left this earth.”

”I am in disbelief and hurting everywhere,” Kloots continued. “My heart is broken as I cannot imagine our lives without him. Nick was such a bright light. He was everyone’s friend, loved to listen, help and especially talk. He was an incredible actor and musician. He loved his family and loved being a father and husband.”

…

Following Kloots’ announcement of Cordero’s death, tributes have poured in from all corners of the Broadway world, from performers and writers including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Josh Gad, Ben Platt, and several of Cordero’s former co-stars, all of whom mourned the tremendous loss.

In a statement posted to Instagram, Cordero’s longtime friend Zach Braff wrote, “I have honestly never known a kinder person. But Covid doesn’t care about the purity of your soul, or the goodness in your heart. The last thing he ever texted me was to look out for his wife and one year old son, Elvis. I promise the world they will never want for anything. I feel so incredibly grateful I got to have Nick Cordero enter my life. Rest In Peace. Rest in Power.”

The article continues with many remembrances from co-workers and friends, and a history of his career.

Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning Composer of Film Scores, Dies at 91

His vast output included atmospheric music for spaghetti westerns in his native Italy and scores for some 500 movies by a Who’s Who of directors.

A few paragraphs from a long and detailed NYT article:
…

To many cineastes, Maestro Morricone (pronounced (mo-ree-CONE-eh) was a unique talent, composing melodic accompaniments to comedies, thrillers and historical dramas by Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malick, Roland Joffé, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino and other filmmakers.

He scored many popular films of the past 40 years: Édouard Molinaro’s “La Cage aux Folles” (1978), Mr. Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), Mr. De Palma’s “The Untouchables” (1987), Roman Polanski’s “Frantic” (1988), Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” (1988), Wolfgang Petersen’s “In the Line of Fire” (1993), and Mr. Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” (2015).
Mr. Morricone won his first competitive Academy Award for his score for “The Hateful Eight,” an American western mystery thriller for which he also won a Golden Globe. In a career showered with honors, he had previously won an Oscar for lifetime achievement (2007) and was nominated for five other Academy Awards; in addition, he won two Golden Globes, four Grammys and dozens of international awards.

…

But the work that made him world famous, and that was best known to moviegoers, was his blend of music and sound effects for Sergio Leone’s so-called spaghetti westerns of the 1960s: a ticking pocket watch, a sign creaking in the wind, buzzing flies, a twanging Jew’s harp, haunting whistles, cracking whips, gunshots and a bizarre, wailing “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah,” played on a sweet potato-shaped wind instrument called an ocarina.

…

The trilogy’s Italian dialogue was dubbed for the English-speaking market, and the action was brooding and slow, with clichéd close-ups of gunfighters’ eyes. But Mr. Morricone, breaking the unwritten rule never to upstage actors with music, infused it all with wry sonic weirdness and melodramatic strains that many fans embraced with cultlike devotion and that critics called viscerally true to Mr. Leone’s vision of the Old West.
“In the films that established his reputation in the 1960s, the series of spaghetti westerns he scored for Mr. Leone, Mr. Morricone’s music is anything but a backdrop,” The New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in 2007. “It’s sometimes a conspirator, sometimes a lampoon, with tunes that are as vividly in the foreground as any of the actors’ faces.”

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/movies/ennio-morricone-dead.html

/youtube osr “once upon a time in the West”

/youtube “the ecstasy of gold”

At the 2007 Oscars

Actor Kelly Preston died Sunday after a long battle with cancer, her family announced. She was 57.

Naya Rivera - age 33 - actress probably most known for her role as Santana in the TV show Glee, went missing from a rented pontoon boat with her 4 year old son on July 8th in Lake Peru. Her son was found in the boat, however she was not in it. Her body was found today, exactly 7 years to the day after her former co-star Cory Monteith died from suicide.

https://www.tmz.com/2020/07/13/naya-rivera-body-found-lake-piru-disappearance-drowning-dead-dies-33-glee/

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/grant-imahara-dead-mythbusters-host-was-49-1303101

Grant Imahara, Host of ‘MythBusters’ and ‘White Rabbit Project,’ Dies at 49

An electrical engineer and roboticist by training, he worked for a long time at Lucasfilm’s THX and Industrial Light and Magic divisions.

Grant Imahara, an electrical engineer and roboticist who hosted the popular science show MythBusters and Netflix’s White Rabbit Project, has died. He was 49.

Imahara died suddenly following a brain aneurysm, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

John Lewis
Rest In Power

Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) died on Friday, July 18, 2020 at the age of 80 after battling with pancreatic cancer.

Why it matters:
Lewis, one of the organizers and speakers for the infamous 1963 March on Washington and led the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, served in the House of Representatives since 1987 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011." (Axios)

NOT OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND! CURSE YOU, 2020!

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

/image olivia de havilland

“Wilford Brimley, ‘Cocoon’ actor who appeared in Quaker Oats commercials, dies at 85”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/02/entertainment/wilford-brimley-actor-dies/index.html

Avi, a 27-day-old male Asian elephant calf died Sunday at the St. Louis Zoo. He had been in poor health (developmental impairments that interfered with his ability to feed) since birth and his condition took such a turn for the worst that he had to be euthanized.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/03/us/st-louis-zoo-baby-elephant-death-trnd/index.html

‘Black Panther’ star Chadwick Boseman dies of cancer at 43.

Actor Chadwick Boseman, who played Black icons Jackie Robinson and James Brown before finding fame as the regal Black Panther in the Marvel cinematic universe, died Friday of cancer, his representative said. He was 43.
Boseman died at his home in the Los Angeles area with his wife and family by his side, his publicist Nicki Fioravante told The Associated Press.

Boseman was diagnosed with colon cancer four years ago, his family said in a statement.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/national/story/2020-08-28/black-panther-star-chadwick-boseman-dies-of-cancer-at-43

I should have added these last week or the week previous. But it’s been busy in my life recently.

Angela Buxton, Half of an “Outcast Duo” in Tennis History, Dies at 85

She was Jewish, and the great Althea Gibson was Black, and in the segregated world of 1950s tennis they forged a remarkable friendship as champion doubles partners

They were both outsiders in the starched white world of elite 1950s tennis, superb players but excluded from tournaments and clubs and shunned on the circuit because of their heritage. Angela Buxton, a white, Jewish Englishwoman, was a granddaughter of Russian Jews who had fled the pogroms in the early 1900s; Althea Gibson, a Black American, was born in a sharecropper’s shack in South Carolina and grew up in Harlem.

They eventually found each other and forged a powerful doubles partnership. In 1956, they won the French Championships and Wimbledon, the jewel in the crown of a sport that had hardly welcomed them.

But for all Ms. Buxton’s prowess on the court — she was ranked in the women’s top 10 in the mid-1950s — she is best remembered for the long-lasting support and encouragement she gave Ms. Gibson, the first great Black player in women’s tennis, the first Black to win Wimbledon and, for a time, the No. 1 ranked female player in the world.

Ms. Buxton died at 85 on Aug. 14 at her home in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., the International Tennis Federation announced. No cause was given.
When Ms. Buxton and Ms. Gibson met at a tournament in New Delhi in 1955, Ms. Gibson was so discouraged by the barriers she faced as the only Black player in the top echelons of tennis that she was ready to give up the game.

“When I came on the scene, the other players wouldn’t speak to Althea much less play with her quite simply because she was Black,” Ms. Buxton told Sally Jacobs, author of a forthcoming biography of Ms. Gibson. “She was completely isolated,” she added. “I was, too, because of being Jewish. So it was a good thing we found one another.”

Ms. Buxton’s coach paired the two as doubles partners. In 1956, the same year they won in Paris and at Wimbledon, Ms. Buxton reached the singles finals at Wimbledon, losing to Shirley Fry. When Ms. Gibson won Wimbledon the following year, Ms. Buxton made the floral dress that Ms. Gibson wore to the winners’ ball.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/sports/tennis/angela-buxton-dead.html

There’s a bunch more and it’s pretty interesting.

Ms Buxton grew up bouncing between England and South Africa during the war years. Her family then moved to LA. There she was denied access to club courts, due to anti-semitism; but she eventually got invited to train on Charlie Chaplin’s private courts, where she also had the chance to play with various Hollywood greats like Katharine Hepburn amd Walter Pidgeon.

St. Louis Cardinals’ Hall of Famer Lou Brock, who had fought through a number of medical conditions in recent years, died Sunday afternoon. He was 81.

’Avengers’ Star Diana Rigg Dead at Age 82

Diana Rigg, a commanding British actress whose career stretched from iconic 1960s spy series “The Avengers” to fantasy juggernaut “Game of Thrones,” has died. She was 82.

Rigg’s agent, Simon Beresford, said she died Thursday morning at home with her family.

Daughter Rachael Stirling said she died of cancer that was diagnosed in March.

R.I.P. Frederick Nathaniel ‘Toots’ Hibbert.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/toots-hibbert-maytals-dead-1053716/

One of my all time favorite albums has always been the soundtrack to the film “The Harder They Come”.
Because the CD, when imported into iTunes, listed all the tracks as being by Jimmy Cliff, it took me ~20 years to realize that most of my favorite songs from the album were actually Toots & the Maytals.
Finally saw them live in 2013 and it was awesome.

Another tragic milestone re the pandemic today

Legendary running back Gale Sayers has died at age 77.

Gale Sayers, the Chicago Bears’ Hall of Fame running back, dies at 77: ‘He was poetry in motion. His like will never be seen again.’

(Chicago Tribune)

Gale Sayers, the dazzling Chicago Bears running back and kick returner whose injury-shortened career made him the youngest player ever inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, died after a yearslong decline in health that included dementia. He was 77.

The “Kansas Comet,” as Sayers was nicknamed, was one of the most agile and elusive ball carriers ever.
“If you wish to see perfection as a running back, you had best get a hold of a film of Gale Sayers,” Bears founder George Halas said in 1977 when he presented Sayers for Hall of Fame enshrinement. “He was poetry in motion. His like will never be seen again.”
Sayers’ dynamic running ability helped him earn All-Pro recognition in each of his five full seasons. It also left teammates, coaches, fans and pundits to wonder what he might have accomplished in football had knee injuries not ended his career in 1971 after only seven seasons (68 games).
In fact, Sayers’ legendary athleticism was a bittersweet topic at the Bears100 Celebration in June 2019, as former teammates tried to make sense of how the electric running back they revered could be the same frail, wheelchair-bound man who appeared on stage.
“If I wanted one (running back) for a season, I’d take Walter Payton. But if I wanted a player for one play, I’ll take Gale Sayers above every running back I’ve seen — whether it be Jim Brown or O.J. Simpson or anybody” said Johnny Morris, a teammate of Sayers’ for three seasons in the mid-1960s.
“He had a knack of being in the air and he’d swing his leg over and come down in a different direction. That’s the best way I can put it.”

Helen Reddy, 1942-2020. “I Am Woman”

Within about half a week, my small town has lost 3 people.

Saturday, my assistant manager’s dad passed away. He was an ornery old coot. He and I would always stick our tongues out at each other whenever we saw one another.

Monday, a ~25-year-old committed suicide (possibly suicide-by-cop). I’m not sure if I knew him as I haven’t seen a picture and I don’t always know people’s names.

Tuesday, one of the town’s bankers was killed in a car vs semi accident. I’ve known his family since I was in kindergarten.

Clark Middleton
Actor, director and producer Clark Middleton, who appeared in “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” “The Blacklist” and “Snowpiercer,” died Sunday as a result of West Nile Virus, his wife Elissa confirmed. He was 63.

Johnny Nash
August 19, 1940 - October 6, 2020

Conchata Ferrell
The three-time Emmy nominee who appeared in more than 200 episodes of Two and a Half Men, died Monday, October 12, 2020 from complications following a heart attack. She was 77. She died peacefully surrounded by family.

Jerry Jeff Walker, a country music singer and writer also known as “Gypsy Songman”, who is probably best known for writing “Mister Bojangles” passed away yesterday at the age of 78 after suffering from throat cancer.