If you have nothing nice to say, come sit next to me.

Andrew Breitbart is dead at the age of 43.  That is stunningly young.  From what I have seen of his life, he earned it.

There is a custom that you are not supposed to speak ill of the dead.  This is not a custom I follow.  One of my first stops on the very old World Wide Web was a newsgroup called alt.obituaries, where people from all English speaking nations shared the stories of the recently dead, some you knew and some you didn't. Sometimes we praised, sometimes we buried.  Sometimes we dug the corpse up and pissed on it for a while, then re-buried it.

All this was permitted.  It was not permitted to harp on the living, unless there was solid evidence that they might not be living for long.

Several stories about Breitbart written today say he was fearless.  This is an obvious fucking lie.  He was shameless and there is a world of difference.  When you lie about someone and that person loses their job and the lie is proven a dozen times over to be a lie, holding to your version of events is not brave, it is obscene. Shirley Sherrod still has a court suit against him.  Whether she pursues it now that he is dead and she is taking money from his heirs is completely up to her in my book.  I will not think less of her one way or the other.

Breitbart lived on booze and vitriol.  I rather like the former but I am doing my best to cut back on the latter. In some ways, I look at the modern conservative movement and the Republican Party/Tea Party as I would look on an infectious disease, interested in its progress (or lack of same) but doing my best not to turn to anger as I watch it eat everything in its path, including its own fellow travelers.

For me, Breitbart is like Christopher Hitchens without the talent. I won't miss either of them very much. I am much heartened by how many people assumed that the first reports were a hoax, some attempt to goad his political opponents into action his political allies could find objectionable.

If one ally of the happily now dead scumbag Breitbart shows up here, I challenge them to find an untrue sentence in what I wrote.  It may not be true for his immediate family, but for the vast majority of humanity, it is a blessing he was erased so quickly.

Here endeth the lesson.

Dory Previn 1925-2012

Singer-songwriter Dory Previn has died at the age of 86.  She co-wrote some Oscar nominated songs with her then husband André and started a solo career in her late forties after her marriage broke up, destroyed by Mia Farrow, who had a habit of intruding on relationships between men much older than herself and their age appropriate sweethearts. The song Beware of Young Girls is clearly written about Farrow. 

Reading some of the comments on the YouTube page of this song, some people think Farrow's later romantic troubles are karma. I would say it was more cause and effect.  When you seek relationships with men who show no loyalty, you shouldn't be surprised to be on the receiving end of that disloyalty later in the game when you are the faithful wife and some younger woman becomes available.

The difference between The New York Times and The Huffington Post

Ben Gazzara has died at the age of 81.  Long career, lots of movies and TV shows. His big early break is in Anatomy of a Murder with Jimmy Stewart and Lee Remick.  Baby boomers might remember his TV show Run For Your Life.

The teaser sentence from the New York Times obituary says he was Brick in the original Broadway cast of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This I did not know. They also mention his roles in the influential movies of John Cassavetes in the 1970s, which film buffs will know are a very important part of his career.

The Huffington Post has his picture on the front page with the headline "Big Lebowski actor dies".  Gazzara was in The Big Lebowski, but it was a tiny role. I swear, if the HuffPo had been around when Laurence Olivier died, the headline would have read "Polaroid spokesman passes away".

I shouldn't let stuff like this get under my skin, but it feels like we are handing the keys to our culture over to young people who can't find their well toned butts with both hands and a flashlight.

Dick Tufeld 1926-2012

Dick Tufeld, best known as the voice of the Robot on Lost In Space has died at the age of 85.  Bill Mumy, the actor who played Will Robinson, posted the sad news on his Facebook page today.  Good on Bill Mumy for staying in touch all these years.

Tufeld did many other things to keep a roof over his head, but to have a place in the hearts of people my age, he never had to do anything else besides say "Danger, Will Robinson!" and give serious portions of crap to that creepy Dr. Smith.

Best wishes to the family and friends of Dick Tufeld, from a fan.

You smiled... you smiled...And then the spell was cast...

And here we are in heaven
'Cause you are mine at last.

Ladies and gentlemen, the one, the only, the incomparable...
Miss Etta James.

Joe Frazier, 1944-2011

Joe Frazier, who won the undisputed heavyweight crown by beating Muhammad Ali in Madison Square Garden in 1971, has died at the age of 67 of liver cancer.

I will readily admit my money was on Ali that night and for many years I thought Frazier was ungracious towards Ali. In retrospect, it was Ali who treated Frazier unfairly, labeling Joe an Uncle Tom when he was anything but.  It wasn't Frazier's fault that the people who hated Ali needed someone to root for and their was no Great White Hope on the horizon, so many bigots had to pin their hopes on Frazier.  Frazier had also given Ali financial help earlier in their careers, so Ali's taunts were a very personal betrayal to Joe.

There's a line in the movie Gattaca about a competition between a genetically engineered man and his normal brother.  They are swimming out from the shore and the normal brother leads his allegedly superior sibling all the way.  When the genetically engineered brother finally gives up and asks how he lost, the normal one answers "I had no plan to swim back to shore."  This is a metaphor for Ali-Frazier I.  Frazier won a very hard fought battle that night and was never quite the same. Joe beat guys like Jerry Quarry, Ron Stander and Jimmy Ellis after this, but the rest of his career is defined by losing to both George Foreman and Ali twice.

Many boxing fans now consider Ali "The Greatest", his nickname for himself. This is in large part because Ali was lucky enough to be in his prime at a time when there were other great fighters at their peak who could test him.  When I was a kid, Rocky Marciano was revered because he retired undefeated.  Nowadays, Marciano is usually ranked under Ali even though Ali lost several times, largely because Marciano never had that great fight against another top boxer in his prime.

In the beginning of his career when he was still Cassius Clay, he faced a hard hitting Englishman named Henry Cooper who decked him. He also fought some underrated fighters who were tough as nails like George Chuvalo and Oscar Bonavena. (Frazier beat Chuvalo despite being decked twice in the second round.)  But if Ali is The Greatest, it's because he proved it against great fighters in their prime, most notably two other deserving champions, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.

Best wishes to the friends and family of Smokin' Joe Frazier, one of the toughest and hardest hitting heavyweights who ever lived, from a fan.

Let me repeat: The Rule of Three is crap.

People love the Rule of Three. If two people the public have heard of die within a few days, someone will invoke the Rule of Three, the idea that important people die in trios.

It's nonsense.

That said, wandering around the Internet I saw three obits on Saturday, Oct. 8, of people whose claims to fame were well known to me.


The first is Raiders' owner Al Davis, who died today. Davis has looked like a walking corpse for most of this century. He was a great leader in his day, but that day is long gone. I called him Kim Jong Al because he was the dictator of a failed organization. Now that he's dead, there is once again a glimmer of hope for the long term prospects of the Raiders.



The second is Roger Williams, a pianist who had hits with Born Free and Autumn Leaves way back in the day. When I learned to play by ear, Born Free is the first song where I figured out the melody and chord progression on my own. Wikipedia says he died today, one week after his 87th birthday.


And the third is Australian actress Diane Cilento, who died on the 6th but her New York Times obit was only published today. Her two main claims to fame outside her native land are the Oscar she won for Tom Jones, seen here with her co-star, the always wonderful Albert Finney, and she was married for a time to Sean Connery.

These people have nothing to do with one another, but their deaths were reported in the same news cycle.

There is no Rule of Three. It's all random.

Please go on with your lives, happy in the new knowledge you gained today.

Borrowing from other writers. Also known as stealing from the best.

Mark Hatfield died last month. he was a Republican senator from Oregon. Your typical pro-social services, pro-education, pro-civil rights, anti-defense buildup Republican.

In other words, an extinct kind of Republican.

My friend Amelia wrote his obituary for our deadpool page. It's pretty terrific from top to bottom, but if you don't have the extra minute to read the whole thing, here are the last few lines.

=========

Visko Hatfield sat down with his father a few months ago as his health grew more fragile, he said. At the time, Visko asked what he could do for him.

"You need to save a life," said his father, who lived a life of public service.

"Whose life should I save?" Visko asked.

Hatfield's answer: "The first one you can."

Build a better box corner and change the world.

Some people find the obituaries morbid, but I often find out fascinating stuff there. Keith W. Tantlinger died last month at the age of 92. His invention of a box corner that led to containers that could be loaded into stacks on large ships is essential to the globalization of commerce, for good or for ill, often for both. This technological advancement means that shipping costs for ocean voyages covering thousands of miles add only pennies to the cost of goods from China or Australia across the Pacific, or from Europe to the eastern U.S. and those containers can then be put on trucks or trains and moved long distances on land at relatively low costs. Click on the link to read his New York Times obituary.

The credit for the 1958 picture of Mr. Tantlinger is from Pan-Atlantic/Maersk, his former employers.

Gene Colan, 1926-2011

Gene Colan, an artist born in the Bronx who became best known for his work for Marvel and DC comics, has died at the age of 84. The writer Clifford Meth has devoted a blog to Colan's work where original drawings are for sale. The proceeds went to Mr. Colan's care in his final days and works sold now will be the start of a scholarship in his name.

Colan worked on a lot of titles, as did all of the artists back then. I was amazed at how much work these guys did every month and missing few deadlines. In later years, Colan admitted to abusing amphetamines to keep up with the schedule.

He worked on some titles I didn't regularly read, like Iron Man and Captain America, but he was also the artist on Daredevil, Howard the Duck and others.

When he started, Stan Lee told him what he told all the new artists. Draw like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko or John Romita or some other established artist. Colan refused, saying wasn't physically capable of doing that. He got to work in his own style and it worked very well for him.



Some of my favorite work of his was in Dr. Strange. There was another artist coming up in the late 1960s named Barry Windsor-Smith, who drew very intricately but much too slowly. There were several titles that Smith was supposed to draw, but because of missed deadlines, other artists would be forced to fill in. As I became obsessed with Windsor-Smith's work, I considered it a letdown when someone else had to fill in for him on an issue, but over the years I came to appreciate Colan's work on its own merits and stopped wondering what a story would have looked like if Barry Windsor-Smith had just been fast enough. Colan's work with the inker Tom Palmer was especially remarkable.

Best wishes to the friends and family of Gene Colan, from a formerly fickle fan.

Rule of Three? It's more like a guideline.

People have this superstition about the Rule of Threes, that famous people die in groups of three over a short period of time.

Of course, "Short period of time" is incredibly vague, but how about a single 24 hour news cycle?

Since yesterday, we have had the obituaries of four people whose names I recognized immediately. James Arness of Gunsmoke is likely the best known name, especially to older people. Also dying since yesterday are wrongly imprisoned Black Panther member Geronimo Pratt, assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian and former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleberger.

If anyone wants to quibble, I will admit Pratt's name is better known in the San Francisco Bay Area than it is known nationwide. In any case, deaths happen when they happen, and quite often a famous person will die and no one else of nearly the same level of fame will die within a week, and conversely, a passel of famous folks might all die in a couple of days.

A passel is not always three.

Just sayin'.

Sidney Lumet, 1924-2011

Sidney Lumet has died at the age of 86. He was one of the greatest directors of the past fifty years, and I would argue one of the best of all time.

I saw the last two movies he made, Find Me Guilty starring Vin Diesel and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke and Albert Finney. He was over 80 when he made these. Men half his age would be hard pressed to do as well.

I've read a few of the obituaries, and the idea people are trying to push is that he was one of the great New York City film directors. While some of his best work is based there (Serpico, The Pawnbroker, Prince of the City, Night Falls On Manhattan), what really impresses me about his career is his ability to hit to all fields. Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese are more highly thought of in some circles, but there are movies on Lumet's list they couldn't possibly make.

How about Network? Fail-Safe? Could Scorsese or Allen make The Group or Long Day's Journey Into Night?

They could, but they would suck at it.


His big break after working on TV was the film version of Twelve Angry Men in 1957. I've heard some directors whine about not having enough locations, of a movie looking like a filmed play.

Ever since I was a kid, I thought about Twelve Angry Men when I heard this lament. If you aren't as good as Sidney Lumet, either shut up or get off the field.

I loved this movie when I was young. This is the movie that turned me into a trivia nerd. I knew I had to remember the whole cast. Left to right: Jack Warden, Edward Binns (hidden), E.G. Marshall, John Fielder (hidden), Henry Fonda, Ed Begley, Robert Webber, Jack Klugman, George Voscovec, Martin Balsam, Joseph Sweeney. That's eleven guys. They are all looking at the last holdout, played by Lee J. Cobb.

Hope that wasn't a spoiler, but the movie is 54 years old, so I'm going to say it's your fault if you didn't know that by now. I've had those names in my head for over four decades now, and I didn't have to check out imdb.com to see if I was right.


Lumet wasn't perfect. He made The Wiz, to give just one example. He did a remake of John Cassavetes' Gloria starring Sharon Stone to name another.

He directed 72 projects. They can't all be masterpieces.

But he also directed possibly my favorite all-star cast of all time, Murder On The Orient Express, starring Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. I'm going to put in the the DVD player tonight and enjoy it one more time, just because it's time to remind myself how good Sidney Lumet really was.

Best wishes to the family and friends of Sidney Lumet, from a devoted fan.

The speed of the Internet.

Former major league player and manager Chuck Tanner died today. He is best known for managing the Pirates to the World Series championship in 1979. The message on MLB.com is dated 25 minutes ago. A.P. obituaries is not carrying the story yet.

His Wikipedia page has already been updated.

God bless the nerds who work for free.

My connection to John Barry, 1933-2011

Composer John Barry died this week at the age of 77. He was famous for his film scores, notably several James Bond films as well as Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves, and unlike some film score masters, he could also write pop tunes. My blog buddy Abu Scooter has a nice tribute. Actor Alec Baldwin put up a good essay on the Huffington Post.

For me, I started teaching myself piano many years ago. The first tune I remember figuring out all the chords and changes for was the theme from Born Free, one of Barry's great pop tunes. I played it over and over again until I felt I got it right, playing the melody with my right hand in octaves and breaking the chords into simple arpeggios with my left. No one was in the piano room with me, but it could be heard all over the house. When I got up and went to the kitchen, my mom asked why Chris, one of my older brother's musical friends and a much better pianist than I was, was playing Born Free over and over. I told her it was me, I had just learned it. I still remember feeling proud about the comparison.

Best wishes to the family and friends of John Barry, from a fan.

Carlton Chester "Cookie" Gilchrist, 1935-2011

"Cookie" Gilchrist, one of the premier running backs in the Canadian Football League, then the American Football League, has died from cancer at the age of 75. His obituary in the New York Times tells of his remarkable life.

I knew the name when I was a kid, a really great sports nickname, but I knew little about the man. He was one of the few players to speak out about the racism he encountered, and his biggest success in that part of his life was as the leader of a threatened boycott of all black players from the AFL All-Star game if it was held in New Orleans, after days of mistreatment of those players in that city, denied service in restaurants, nightclubs and taxis. The boycott did not take place because the league decided to move the game to Houston.

Besides his stands against racism, Gilchrist was one hell of a tough running back. At 6'3" and 250 pounds, he was one of the most bruising fullbacks of his era and the first AFL running back to pass the 1,000 yard mark for a season.

I know some readers may find my interest in obituaries morbid, but my view is different. Well written obituaries celebrate a person's life, and often remind up how much the world has changed since we were young. Writing The Other Blog, I sometimes get weary with America's new obsession with instant celebrity, and to read about people like Cookie Gilchrist is a reminder of a time when people achieved success the hard way, when success in sports was not a ticket to untold wealth but just a little more than the folks who sat in the stands.

Best wishes to the family and friends of Cookie Gilchrist, from a fan.

Don Meredith, 1938-2010

Don Meredith, the great Dallas Cowboy quarterback who became one of the three guys in the booth during the glory days of Monday Night Football, has died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 72 in Santa Fe.

The original team in the booth was Keith Jackson, Howard Cosell and Meredith, but Jackson was moved back to college football where he was outstanding for decades to come, to be replaced by an ex-jock, Frank Gifford.

Howard was hated for many reasons. He was a know-it-all, he was homely, he was Jewish and he had an irritating voice. But the good old boy Dandy Don made it clear that he actually liked Howard, and the good natured tension between them made it the best broadcast team in football for many years. Personally, I think Frank Gifford is, was and always will be a completely useless idiot, but Don and Howard were broadcasting gold.

He said a lot of funny things in the booth, but my favorite was this about two incredibly successful head coaches of the day: "If Tom Landry and Bud Grant had a personality contest, no one would win."

While I usually end my obituary tributes with best wishes to Don Meredith's family and friends, from a fan, all fans of Dandy Don know how this one has to end, sung by Willie Nelson.

"Turn out the lights, the party's over..."

Gil McDougald 1928-2010

One of my favorite trivia questions of all time is this.

"How many times did Mickey Mantle win Rookie of the Year and why not?"

Since you can only win this award once in your career at most, the obvious answer to the first part is zero. The second part is that his teammate Gil McDougald had a much better year in 1951. Mantle struggled some and was sent down to the minors for a while. McDougald became a regular in the Yankees' line-up that year, alternating between second and third base and batting .306 with 14 homers in the regular season and one in the World Series.

For all his talent, bad luck followed McDougald around. In 1955, he was struck by a ball during batting practice and lost much of his hearing, which is at least part of the reason he retired young in 1960. In 1957, he hit a line drive that broke the skull around the eye of Cleveland pitcher Herb Score, who had been Rookie of the Year in 1955. Score missed the rest of the 1957 season and much of 1958 as well, and never returned to his dominant form before the injury. McDougald promised to retire if Score went blind, but fortunately for both men, that didn't happen.

The idea of "the rule of threes" is popular superstition when it comes to celebrities dying, but in the past news cycle, there were five people who died whose claims to fame I knew: McDougald, Leslie Nielsen, congressman Steven Solarz, famous for investigating the corruption of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, and two film directors, Irvin Kershner, who was a professor of George Lucas' at USC and later directed The Empire Strikes Back, and the Italian comedy writer-director Mario Monicelli.

Best wishes to the family and friends of all these men, from a fan.

Surely, you can't be serious!

Sadly, I am. Leslie Neilsen is dead at the age of 84.

And don't call me Shirley.

Wednesday Math, Vol. 130: Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924-2010

Benoit Mandelbrot coined the word fractal. Even non-mathematicians might remember fractals. They were a popular culture fad about thirty years ago, fading from view around the same time as sociobiology and Gödel Escher Bach. Fractals may not be bandied about in coffee shops anymore, but the idea is still bearing fruit in computer science, math and biology.

What is a fractal? Is it a noun or an adjective, like in the title of Mandelbrot’s most famous book The Fractal Geometry of Nature?

Mandelbrot was vague at first. Without a definitive statement, some wag declared “fractals are the mathematical proof for the existence of paisley.”

By the time of his death last Thursday, the definition had been refined to self-similarity, systems with small pieces that look like the whole. Think of tree branches or blood vessels. A nautilus shell, if shrunken and rotated just the right amount, will be almost identical to removing the last chamber the critter inhabited.

Benoit Mandelbrot is considered a French or Franco-American mathematician, but he was born in Warsaw in 1927 into a family of Lithuanian Jews, the family name Yiddish for “almond bread”. They left Warsaw in 1936 for Paris. When the war came, they moved again, leaving their son in the care of a rabbi. He spent much of the war in hiding.

After the war, he attended colleges studying math and aeronautics in France and the U.S., getting a Ph.D at the University of Paris. Instead of the teaching route, Mandelbrot took work at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkton Heights, New York. The standard mathematical path to glory is solving some open problem that has stumped the finest minds for decades or centuries. Mandelbrot found fame pondering a poorly defined concept of his own making for a very long time, usually a one-way ticket to Eccentric Palookaville. Could math replicate the messy shapes and patterns created by living things that grew following instructions stored in self-replicating cells?

Jonathan Miller said in The Body In Question everything must be understood first in metaphor. The heart was a drum until someone invented the pump, and no one could have dreamed the better metaphor before the pump’s invention. The computer was both Mandelbrot’s metaphor and major tool. Mandelbrot didn’t so much “prove” his main thesis as show it was plausible. Computer graphics took huge strides forward in creating natural looking landscapes and biological textures based on simple instructions repeated at different scales many, many times.


On self-similarity, the last word goes to Sally Draper, precocious daughter of Don Draper of Mad Men, from an episode this season, discussing eternity with her creepy friend Glenn.

Sally Draper: “When I think about forever I get upset. Like the Land O Lakes butter has that Indian girl, sitting holding a box? And it has a picture of her on it, holding a box, with a picture of her on it, holding a box. Have you ever noticed that?”

Creepy Glenn: “I wish you wouldn’t have said that.”

Simon McCorkindale has died.

This bad news makes it official.

Manimal, on hiatus lo these 27 years, is now canceled.