Legacy Matters
For so long, she was such an icon of glowing health with her million dollar smile and tousled hair that every girl wanted and so did every guy, that it was shocking to learn that she had cancer. Now she's dead at 52.
CNN
Farrah Fawcett, the blonde-maned actress whose best-selling poster and "Charlie's Angels" stardom made her one of the most famous faces in the world, died Thursday. She was 62....Ryan O'Neal, Fawcett's romantic partner since the mid-1980s, and her friend Alana Stewart were with Fawcett at Saint John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, when she died.
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New York Times obituary
To an extraordinary degree, Ms. Fawcett’s cancer battle was played out in public, generating enormous interest worldwide. Her face, often showing the ravages of cancer, became a tabloid fixture, and updates on her health became staples of television entertainment news.
In May, that battle was chronicled in a prime-time NBC documentary, “Farrah’s Story,” some of it shot with her own home video recorder. An estimated nine million people viewed it. Ms. Fawcett had initiated the project with a friend, the actress Alana Stewart, after she first learned of her cancer.
Ms. Fawcett’s career was a patchwork of positives and negatives, fine dramatic performances on television and stage as well as missed opportunities.
She first became famous when a poster of her in a red bathing suit, leonine mane flying, sold more than twice as many copies as posters of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable combined. No poster like it has achieved anywhere near its popularity since, and, arriving before the Internet era, in which the most widely disseminated images are now digital, it may have been the last of its kind.
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The poster that ignited Ms. Fawcett’s career was shot at the Bel Air home she shared with Mr. Majors. “She was just this sweet, innocent, beautiful young girl,” said Bruce McBroom, who took the photograph. Searching for a backdrop to Ms. Fawcett in her one-piece red swimsuit (which she chose instead of a bikini because of a childhood scar on her stomach), he grabbed an old Navajo blanket from the front seat of his 1937 pickup.
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Ms. Fawcett herself described her career succinctly. “I became famous,” she said in her 1986 Times interview, “almost before I had a craft.”
The Guardian has the best obituary by far.
Fawcett herself recognised this when she commented about Charlie's Angels, the crime-busting TV series that made her a star: "When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra."
Consequently, Fawcett was mostly given roles where her trend-setting hairstyle was the most dramatic part of the film. However, when she was later offered meatier parts, she proved herself up to the task, and was nominated for three Emmy awards and five Golden Globes, though the juries always held back from giving her the actual prize.
The Telegraph
In the 1980s Farrah Fawcett bravely tried to reassert herself as a serious actress — no easy task with her teeth still gleaming on several million bedsit walls — and took hard-edged parts in made-for-television films.
Neda Agha Soltan, a 27-year-old student of philosophy, became known around the world in a matter of hours through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube because a video captured her death on a street in Tehran
Neda falls in the street, shot in the heart by a Basiji sniper. She is laid down by her companions when blood begins pouring from her mouth then across her face and it becomes clear that, in a matter of moments, she is dead The very graphic YouTube video is here.
Some 19 people were killed on June 20, but Neda is the one who has come to symbolize the crisis in Iran. One university student describes the difference between the generations, How Neda Divided My Family.
Neda’s name means “voice” in Farsi. Even though she has been silenced by a Basiji bullet, her death has given new voice to our generation’s demand for reform. Our parents may not understand it yet, but soon they will have to come to terms with the fact that our voices are the future. They can no longer make decisions for their children—or for the Iranian nation yet to come.
photos from LA Times
In an interview with the BBC, her fiancee said (scroll down to 1:03 pm)
Neda was not a firm backer of either Mousavi or Ahmadinejad -- she simply "wanted freedom and freedom for all."
From the LA Times, an a obituary for the young woman as Family, friends mourn Iranian woman whose death was caught on video
Her friends say Panahi, Neda and two others were stuck in traffic on Karegar Street, east of Tehran's Azadi Square, on their way to the demonstration sometime after 6:30 p.m. After stepping out of the car to get some fresh air and crane their necks over the jumble of cars, Panahi heard a crack from the distance. Within a blink of the eye, he realized Neda had collapsed to the ground.
"We were stuck in traffic and we got out and stood to watch, and without her throwing a rock or anything they shot her," he said. "It was just one bullet."
Blood poured out of the right side of her chest and began bubbling out of her mouth and nose as her lungs filled up.
"I'm burning, I'm burning!" he recalled her saying, her final words.
Neda in an undated photo
"She was a person full of joy," said her music teacher and close friend Hamid Panahi, who was among the mourners at her family home on Sunday, awaiting word of her burial. "She was a beam of light. I'm so sorry. I was so hopeful for this woman."
Security forces urged Neda's friends and family not to hold memorial services for her at a mosque and asked them not to speak publicly about her, associates of the family said. Authorities even asked the family to take down the black mourning banners in front of their house, aware of the potent symbol she has become.
But some insisted on speaking out anyway, hoping to make sure the world would not forget her.Neda Agha-Soltan was born in Tehran, they said, to a father who worked for the government and a mother who was a housewife. They were a family of modest means, part of the country's emerging middle class who built their lives in rapidly developing neighborhoods on the eastern and western outskirts of the city.
Like many in her neighborhood, Neda was loyal to the country's Islamic roots and traditional values, friends say, but also curious about the outside world, which is easily accessed through satellite television, the Internet and occasional trips abroad.
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"All she wanted was the proper vote of the people to be counted."
Private William Long, newly out of basic training was on a short-term assignment as a military recruiter, was shot three times and killed outside the Army-Navy Career Center in Little Rock Arkansas by a domestic jihadist who also wounded another soldier.
The alleged killer Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 23, was born in Tennessee as Carlos Leon Bledsoe and converted to Islam as a teen-ager. He just opened fire on the soldiers with an SKS assault rifle and he said he fully intended to kill them, in fact, he would have killed more if he could, he told police.
From Maggie's Notebook
He had been under FBI investigation - - the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force - since he returned from a trip to Yemen.
He was carrying a false Somali passport and was arrested at that time. The same report says Muhammad had "ties to a number of global locations linked to extremists, including Yemen, Somalia and Columbus, OH..
Atlas Shrugs reports that he was arrested for serious weapons possession and gun running, but prosecutors filed only a single charge that was dismissed four months later.
In an interview with the Associated Press, the suspect said he didn't think the shooting was murder because U.S. military action in the MIddle East made the killing justified- "Islamic justified".
"I do feel I'm not guilty," Abdulhakim Muhammad told The Associated Press in a collect call from the Pulaski County jail. "I don't think it was murder, because murder is when a person kills another person without justified reason...what I did is Islamic justified"
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"Yes, I did tell the police upon my arrest that this was an act of retaliation, and not a reaction on the soldiers personally," Muhammad said. He called it "a act, for the sake of God, for the sake of Allah, the Lord of all the world, and also a retaliation on U.S. military."
Private Long was laid to rest as a Soldier, Hero
The day before he died, U.S. Army Pvt. William Andrew "Andy" Long floated the Buffalo River with his sister, Vanessa Rice. If he had his way, she said, the pair would have gone skydiving.
"I'm so blessed to have had that day with Andy," Rice tearfully told guests at her brother's funeral Monday at Harlan Park Baptist Church in Conway. "My brother meant the world to me. Andy loved to be outdoors, to travel, and he couldn't wait to get to Korea to serve his country."
The service was followed by a burial with full military honors Monday at the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery in North Little Rock.
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Pastor Johnny Harrington of Long's church, Sunny Gap Baptist Church in Conway, praised Long's commitment to the Army and recent appointment to the Army's Hometown Recruiter Assistance Program in Little Rock. He said Long is a fourth-generation armed services member. Long's father, Daris Long, is retired from the U.S. Marine Corps.
"No one is more military, no one is more patriotic than this family right here," Harrington said. "Military runs through their hearts and their blood. No one is more dedicated to it than they, and I know that they couldn't be prouder of Andy and his desire to serve his country.
"I asked Daris what's the one word he'd use to describe Andy, and he said two: soldier and hero."
Private Long's father was at work when he got the call; his mother was in the center's parking lot waiting to give their son a ride home. She heard the shots.
Most moving of all is the interview of Darius Long, father of the slain soldier, gracious and grateful in his grief. (HT Ace). My condolences to all his family.
Killed on Mission: An Oblate "Saint"
long known for "taking risks" to aid those in need, Oblate of Mary Immaculate Fr Larry Rosebaugh was shot and killed in a carjacking last week in Guatemala, where he lived and worked with the poor for the better part of three decades.
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Rosebaugh lived through two civil wars, and most of his days were marked by the violence of the Latin America slums where he worked, ate and slept. And yet his life was dedicated to nonviolence and peace. For those who loved Rosebaugh, that made the end of his life all the more poignant.
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Linking Rosebaugh's murder to his political advocacy for the poor came naturally for those who knew the skinny, soft-spoken, bespectacled man, who sported thrift-store clothes and a huge, bushy white beard, and whose life thoroughly blended the political and the holy.
"He was driven by his desire to be with the poor," said Mary Lou Pedersen, a friend from Chicago. "That's where he wanted to be and that's where he went."
Among tributes to Rosebaugh came one from his Oblate confrere and seminary classmate, now Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.
The murdered priest's work "was not just philanthropy," the USCCB chief told the St Louis Post-Dispatch.
"He was a voice for Christ among the poor."
Matthew of the Shrine of the Holy Whapping delivers the sad news that Msgr William Kerr who baptized him in 1983, was felled by a massive stroke while in the pulpit last week at the co-cathedral of St. Thomas More.
There is a fascinating connection to Ted Bundy, the story of which you click the link to read. I want to focus on his last remarkable and unfinished homily.
Today, I want to share with you an anniversary that is important to me. I speak of the anniversary of my ordination as a deacon and of my first assignment. On my way to receiving that first assignment, I stopped by the chapel to go over my resume with God. This was in St. Louis and ten parishes and a hospital were to be assigned to deacons. I told God, "I would do well in a parish. You know I'm not good with hospitals."
After that, I stepped over to the bishop's office. I met with the bishop and received my assignment – it was the hospital.
When I arrived at the hospital, I was immediately directed to the burn unit. This particular hospital was famous for its burn unit and very gravely injured burn patients were brought here. I learned that the chaplain was out for the day and I was faced with this daunting task without any instructions. It was the doctor and me. He advised me to look in the patients' eyes and not at their disfiguring injuries.
My first patient was a young man who had been burned by an explosion. He was in critical condition. This young man, who came to have a tremendous influence on my life, worked in a factory. He had been tasked with picking up rags and spent containers. He disposed of them in an incinerator. This was a chemical factory and unfortunately the containers held chemicals that exploded, seriously burning him in the process.
His name was Michael, Michael Anderson, and he said, "'Father,'" (he called me 'Father,') I always wanted to be a priest, and now I won't get to – so I am offering my suffering to strengthen you in your ministry.
Amazed and almost at a loss for words, I said to him, "Now, Michael, we will get through this, together." But Michael, who probably had a better sense of his situation than I did, responded by insisting he would offer his suffering for me and my ministry.
Next to Michael was another patient who was well known in the area. He heard Michael's conversation with me and told him to put in a good word for him in heaven.
The doctor told me it was important for the patients to scream, to help them relieve their agonizing pain. But Michael never screamed. He held his suffering to himself until he died.
During the next few hours, I got to know Michael. The singular circumstances of our meeting led to friendship, and a special bond between us. And, over the course of my life, I have repeatedly felt that bond and that friendship. Many times I have asked Michael to pray for me to strengthen me in my ministry.
I often think about the priceless blessings I received from being assigned to that hospital and from meeting Michael. God knows us and he knows where we belong, even if we do not know ourselves. We must pray… we must pray…Michael…
R.I.P. Requiescat in pace
Whether he was visiting refugees in Rwanda or Bosnia or sharing Thanksgiving dinner each year with his longtime friend Roger Staubach , the former Dallas Cowboys and Navy star quarterback, Kerr touched lives, his friends say.
"He was as good a person as you would ever want to meet," Staubach told The Associated Press on Wednesday night. "He was always dedicated to others."
Monsignor William Kerr, a former president of La Roche College whose pursuit of peace touched presidents and prisoners, died Wednesday after suffering a stroke May 3 during Mass in a Florida cathedral. He was 68.
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When serial killer Ted Bundy murdered two women and severely injured two others in a sorority house in 1978, Monsignor Kerr was called to give last rites. Mr. Bundy sought counseling from Monsignor Kerr, who last visited him two days before his 1989 execution.
By then, Monsignor Kerr had spent five years as vice president for university relations at Catholic University. In 1992 he became president of La Roche.
"Under his leadership, La Roche College was transformed from a regional coeducational, liberal arts college into a global community of learners with a burgeoning international presence," said Sister Candace Introcaso, the current president.
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"For a man who gave his life to the church delivering the word, that's a pretty sweet way to go," he said.
David Goldman's appreciation in First Things
Former vice-presidential candidate, congressman, and Housing secretary, he was the most improbable and the most important hero of the Reagan Revolution after the Gipper himself. Without Jack’s true-believer’s passion for tax cuts as a remedy for the stagflation of the 1970s, Reagan would not have staked his presidency on an untested and controversial theory.
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It was impossible to be cynical in Jack’s vicinity. He radiated sincerity and optimism. Corny as it sounds, Jack was the real thing, an all-American true believer in this country and in the capacity of its people to overcome any obstacle once given the chance.
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Jack was a leader who loved his country and put it before personal gain. When he left office he had the equity in his house and not much else. But he had four children, including two sons who played professional football, and seventeen grandchildren. By the time I got to know him he was full time on the lecture circuit, putting his family finances in order before joining the Washington thinktank Empower America. He considered a run for president in 1996 but deferred to Steve Forbes, then running as the tax-cutting candidate. His outstanding career as a Republican leader was coming to an end, but what a glorious run it was.
A devout Christian, Jack made far more of a difference than an ex-quarterback with a physical education degree from Occidental College had a right to. He earned our gratitude not only for what he accomplished, but for what he proved about the character of the United States.
New York Times obit
Jack Kemp, the former football star turned congressman who with an evangelist’s fervor moved the Republican Party to a commitment to tax cuts as the central focus of economic policy, died Saturday evening at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 73.
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Mr. Kemp was an unlikely leader for a political cause based on a theory of economics. He had majored in physical education while playing football at Occidental College in Los Angeles. When he entered politics, many Washington veterans dismissed him as a “dumb jock,” and as a junior House member in 1977, he did not even serve on the tax-writing Committee on Ways and Means.
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Mr. Kemp had also convinced Bill Brock, chairman of the Republican National Committee, that the issue was political gold. “He said, in effect, we need to restore the essence of our party, which is growth, which is jobs, which is creativity,” Mr. Brock said in an interview this year. “And the way to do that is to free people of the burden of excessive taxes.”
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“Jack Kemp is the indispensable political leader of the modern conservative economic revival,” Edwin J. Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research institution in Washington, said recently, adding, “Jack’s role in developing and exploring the potential of supply-side economics in the late 1970s laid the groundwork for Reagan’s economic program.”
Kemp was an autodidact. He focused on sports in his early life, becoming quarterback of the Buffalo Bills in the old AFL. Yet he nourished a nascent interest in politics by reading, reading, reading — WFB, Ayn Rand, economics, history. He honored ideas with the fervor of a young lover. His second passion, equal to his devotion to tax cuts, was his concern for black advancement. This was part conviction, part experience: As his friend Newt Gingrich liked to say, Jack had showered with people that most Republicans never meet. Kemp believed that the party of Lincoln had to regain its role as the champion of black America. The welfare state had not completed the civil-rights revolution; free-enterprise programs targeted at the inner city (such as enterprise zones) would do the trick instead.
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Churchill said that being with FDR was like having a glass of champagne. Being with Jack Kemp was like chugging a can of Red Bull. How could someone so alive be gone? And yet it is so. R.I.P.
From the Anchoress, a 7 year old's incredible legacy
That was Catie O’Brien, 7, then a patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., where she was undergoing treatment for a rare type of pediatric cancer called Atypical Teratoid Rhabdoid Tumor. After her diagnosis last June, Catie spent most of the latter half of 2008 in the hospital’s care. She returned home to Mechanicsburg, Pa., in December after doctors discovered her tumor was back, despite aggressive radiation, chemotherapy and stem-cell recovery treatments.
Catie died Jan. 25, surrounded by family, including parents Kevin and Christine and five siblings, all members of St. Joseph Parish in Mechanicsburg. The last two months of her life were jam-packed with holiday celebrations and a family trip to the waters in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes in France, made possible by the Make-a-Wish Foundation. The little girl’s dying wish, according to Kevin, was for her friends and family to raise enough money to cover all of the operating costs for St. Jude Hospital for one day a year in her name, preferably her April 23 birthday.
“That was her wish,” Kevin said. “After she had found out that her tumor had come back, she wanted to leave a legacy.”
As of last week, Kevin reported that donors had already contributed $930,000 toward her first $1.4 million birthday present.
Christopher Buckley on Growing Up the Only Child of the Charismatic and Complicated Buckleys
One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you’ve now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You’re next. Another thing about parental mortality: No matter how much you’ve prepared for the moment, when it comes, it comes at you hot, hard and unrehearsed.
This excerpt in the New York Times Magazine is part of Chris Buckley's New Book "Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir"
I wrote about Taking Chance Home back in 2004. I was immensely moved then and again when I watched Taking Chance last month on HBO. I meant to write about it, but I got distracted and didn't. What is most impressive is the respect, even reverence, the Army takes every step of the way and the manner in which Americans meet that respect with their own.
But I must say I was surprised at the size of the audience. Today in the Wall St Journal on 'Taking Chance'.
It's been widely observed that movies about the Iraq war have tended to bomb at the box office. One newspaper report speculated that films like "Home of the Brave" and "Stop-Loss" failed because "the audience might prefer a longer interval before viewing events as troubling as war."
"Taking Chance" refutes this notion. When it debuted February 21 on HBO, it became the network's most-watched original movie in five years, drawing two million viewers -- especially impressive given that it aired on Saturday, traditionally not a big TV-watching night. An HBO spokesman estimates that another 5.5 million have watched subsequent airings of the film, and that doesn't count DVR viewers.
What makes "Taking Chance" different from the other Iraq movies is that it is all realism and no cynicism. It dramatizes the 2004 journey of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, played by Kevin Bacon, as he escorts the remains of a 19-year-old Marine private, Chance Phelps, from Dover Air Force Base to Phelps's Wyoming hometown, where Strobl meets the family and attends the funeral.
"Taking Chance" does not glorify the war. It takes no discernable position on whether America should be in Iraq, although a few people Colonel Strobl meets along the way express their view, pro and con. But almost without exception, the Americans he encounters are respectful, patriotic, grateful for his service and for Private Phelps's. If Hollywood wants to make war movies that appeal to a broad audience, it could do worse than to take in "Taking Chance." The Americans who show Colonel Strobl such reverence as he makes his way west are the very audience Hollywood wishes it could reach.
ABC News - Radio Legend Paul Harvey Dies
The "most listened to man" in broadcasting passed away Saturday. After more than seven decades on the air, venerable radioman Paul Harvey's folksy speech and plain talk are no more.
Harvey died at the age of 90 at a hospital near his winter home in Phoenix.
His death came nine months after that of his wife, Lynne Cooper Harvey, whom he often called "Angel" on air, and who was also his business partner and the first producer ever inducted in the the Radio Hall of Fame. She died in May 2008 at age 92.
"My father and mother created from thin air what one day became radio and television news," Paul Harvey Jr. said Saturday. "So, in the past year, an industry has lost its godparents. And, today millions have lost a friend."
Harvey's career in radio spanned more than 70 years, and his shows "News & Comment" and "Rest of the Story" made him a familiar voice in Americans' homes across the country.
If you didn't know Paul Harvey, you missed out on an extraordinary storyteller. Here's an example.
CNN
"Paul Harvey was one of the most gifted and beloved broadcasters in our nation's history," ABC Radio Networks President Jim Robinson said in a written statement. "As he delivered the news each day with his own unique style and commentary, his voice became a trusted friend in American households."
Washington Post , Beloved Radio Broadcaster Paul Harvey Dies at 90
Mr. Harvey was the voice of the American heartland, offering to millions his trademark greeting: "Hello Americans! This is Paul Harvey. Stand by! For news!"
For millions, Paul Harvey in the morning or at noon was as much a part of daily routine as morning coffee.
"Paul Harvey News and Comment" was a distinctive blend of rip-and-read headline news, quirky feature stories and, usually, a quick congratulation to a couple who had been married for 75 years or so. The news stories, and Harvey's distinctive take on them -- usually, but not always, from a conservative political perspective -- flowed seamlessly into commercial messages for products Mr. Harvey endorsed.
One of radio's most effective pitchmen, he kept sponsors for decades, attracted by such features as "The Rest of the Story," mesmerizing little tales, cleverly written, that featured a surprising O Henry-style twist to stories listeners thought they already knew.
Rocco Palmo over at Whispers in the Loggia has the story of the funeral of Seoul's Cardinal Stephen Kim.
The first Korean cardinal, Kim -- who led the Seoul church for three decades, watching it grow sixfold in the process -- died Monday at 86. Including the country's current and former presidents, some 400,000 mourners of all faiths were said to have filed past his coffin over its four-day lying in state in the city's Myeongdong Cathedral.
Hailed as a "true guiding light" and the last "reliable leader in Korean society" despite the church's minority status -- around 15% of South Korea's 38 million citizens are Catholic -- the outpouring of reaction at the cardinal's death moved one newspaper to lead its coverage with a headline asking "Have We Mourned Like This Before?"
Religious leaders from Protestantism, Buddhism, Won-Buddhism and Cheondoism took up the first-row at the funeral Mass.
As one editorial said
The mourning transcended age, social status and political ideology.
People gathered at the cathedral from 2 to 3 a.m., and by 6 a.m., when people were allowed in to pay their condolences, a line stretching for 3 km had already formed, while people continued to pour in until midnight when the cathedral closed its doors. Mourners had to wait three to four hours in the freezing cold, but there was no jostling, shouting or cutting in line. Rather, people yielded their spots to let the elderly go first.
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A wise society uses the deaths of great people to mark the era that preceded that event and to prepare for the next one. The 58 years that transpired from 1951, when Cardinal Kim was ordained as a priest, until his death in 2009, were a microcosm of Korea’s history of trials and accomplishments, ranging from war and devastation, the division of a nation, dictatorship, industrialization and democratization to social polarization. Cardinal Kim embraced all Koreans living in such difficult times, consistently urging us to be patient. He told us that there is an end to pain. And in doing so, he gave us both courage and hope.
To understand his Great Legacy, read Called Home from Korea
Pat McNamara, a church historian, gives us the eulogy to the first president by the first Roman Catholic bishop, John Carroll.
The last act of his supreme magistracy was to inculcate in most impressive language on his countrymen… his deliberate and solemn advice; to bear incessantly in their minds that nations and individuals are under the moral government of an infinitely wise and just Providence; that the foundations of their happiness are morality and religion; and their union among themselves their rock of safety… May these United States flourish in pure and undefiled religion, in morality, peace, union, liberty, and the enjoyment of their excellent Constitution, as long as respect, honor, and veneration shall gather around the name of Washington; that is, whilst there still shall be any surviving record of human events!
An American literary giant, John Updike died at 76, after a long bout with lung cancer.
New York Times obituary, a "prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventure in the postwar prime of the American empire."
John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76. Updike, best known for his four ''Rabbit'' novels, died of lung cancer at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass., according to his longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir ''Self-Consciousness'' and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.
He released more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s, winning virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for ''Rabbit Is Rich'' and ''Rabbit at Rest,'' and two National Book Awards.
His settings ranged from the court of ''Hamlet'' to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb, the great new territory of mid-century fiction.
Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by ''penny-pinching parents,'' united by ''the patriotic cohesion of World War II'' and blessed by a ''disproportionate share of the world's resources,'' the postwar, suburban boom of ''idealistic careers and early marriages.''
He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment.
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Updike learned to write about everyday life by, in part, living it. In 1957, he left New York, with its ''cultural hassle'' and melting pot of ''agents and wisenheimers,'' and settled with his first wife and four kids in Ipswich, Mass, a ''rather out-of-the-way town'' about 30 miles north of Boston.
''The real America seemed to me 'out there,' too heterogeneous and electrified by now to pose much threat of the provinciality that people used to come to New York to escape,'' Updike later wrote.
''There were also practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange.''
An appreciation by Thomas Mallon
Perhaps the keenest compliment one can pay him as a man is to say that his life will make for a lousy biography: Just about no scandal; precious little feuding; almost no phony contretemps and posturing. He was deeply interested in sex and God, but more than anything he was interested in working—steadily and prodigiously. The Rabbit books, taken together, are the great American novel of the second half of the twentieth century. Even when he was through with them, he kept writing fiction as if, culturally, it still counted—as if it could still land a writer on the cover of Time. He loved his country, avoided political faddishness, was a devoted Democrat and got both of his national medals—one in the arts and another in the humanities—from Republican presidents.
In the Boston Globe, Mark Feeney eulogizes his "jeweled prose and quicksilver intellect"
"He was obviously among the best writers in the world," said David Remnick, editor the New Yorker, Mr. Updike's literary home for more than half a century.
A master of many authorial trades, Mr. Updike was novelist, short story writer, critic, poet - and in each role as prolific as he was gifted. He aimed to produce a book a year. Easily meeting that goal, Mr. Updike published some 60 volumes.
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Mr. Updike could be brilliant even about his own diligence, writing in his memoir "Self-Consciousness" (1989) of "my ponderously growing oeuvre, dragging behind me like an ever-heavier tail." Or there was the description of Fenway Park, "a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark," in Mr. Updike's classic account of Ted Williams's final game, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu."
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Yet beneath the comfortableness of the affluent, suburban settings Mr. Updike most often wrote about, and the glittering surface of his prose, were profound and piercing concerns. One was an ongoing examination of his native land. "America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy," he wrote in the 1980 story collection "Problems."
A link to his fabled essay "Hub fans bid Kid Adieu"
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg
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The affair between Boston and Ted Williams was no mere summer romance; it was a marriage composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories.
An interview last fall with Mark Brown of the London Telegraph
Among the many wise observations that John Updike has made in a career spanning more than 50 years, few can compare with his remark - made in his memoirs, Self-Consciousness - that 'Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face'.
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This is how it goes with Updike. He is a ruminative man, fond of digression, whose conversation ambles through literature, politics, film, but who wears his erudition lightly - a rare combination of formidable intelligence and lightness of being, whose abiding sense is of astonishment and gratitude not only for being a successful author, but also for having the extreme good fortune to be an author at all.
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Updike once described his task as a writer 'to give the mundane its beautiful due'.
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Family, Updike seems to be saying, is the point of it all. 'The genes living on… the tussle of family life, the clumsy accommodations and forgiveness of it, the comedy of membership of a club that has to take you in at the moment of birth.'
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It is a fact of ageing, he says, that life seems to grow lighter rather than heavier.
'Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know… you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
'If you've had the Biblical three score and 10, and then a bit more on top of it - and I've already outlived my father - then you certainly should be content. As you get closer, as death becomes more real, so it becomes friendlier. I say this as a man who still wakes up at three in the morning horrified at my cosmic position. But in the daytime, sitting here, I'm able to see it.'
Update: A lovely vignette by David Pryce Jones
One fine summer day, I was walking home through the park. When I sat down on a bench, I noticed that the man already on it was wearing khaki fatigues and heavy combat boots. He had a huge notebook on his knee, and was writing in it in green ink, very very very carefully, one word at a time—a long pause, pen in air—and then one more word. The whole page was entirely free from erasures. This procedure was fascinating. I squinted in order to read what he could possibly be writing. It was pure vituperation against his wife and his marriage by someone staying in a Holiday Inn. I shrank away, and looked at this man next to me on the bench. He had a nose as shaped and individual as the nose of Federico di Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, in Piero della Francesca's magnificent portrait. The penny dropped. The boots and fatigues were misleading. I had had the privilege of catching John Updike in the midst of his astonishing method of composition. It happened that Updike had not long before reviewed very generously a book of mine. I was just working out how to introduce myself without seeming a Peeping Tom when a beautiful woman arrived, he folded his notebook and off they sauntered arm in arm under the evening sun. Oh, the style of the man and the writer!
Sir John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, dies at 85. I loved Rumpole and consider his adaption of Brideshead Revisted, one of the greatest programs ever to be shown on television.
From the National Portrait Gallery, by Mark Tillie
From the New York Times obituary
John Mortimer, barrister, author, playwright and creator of Horace Rumpole, the cunning defender of the British criminal classes...
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Mr. Mortimer is known best in this country for creating the Rumpole character, an endearing and enduring relic of the British legal system who became a television hero of the courtroom comedy.
To read Rumpole, or watch the episodes is to enter not only Rumpole’s stuffy flat or crowded legal chambers, but to feel the itch of his yellowing court wig and the flapping of his disheveled, cigar ash-dusted courtroom gown.
Rumpole spends his days quoting Keats and his nights quaffing claret at Pommeroy’s wine bar, putting off the time that he must return to his wife, Hilda, more commonly known as She Who Must Be Obeyed.
Using his wit and low-comedy distractions, Rumpole sees that justice is done, more often than not by outsmarting the ‘’old sweethearts” and “old darlings” of the bench and revealing the inner good — or at least integrity and inconsistency — of the accused, including clans like the Timsons, whose crimes have kept generations of police officers busy.
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Mr. Mortimer also adapted Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” for television, years after he became enthralled with the book as a young man. Somehow, despite the demands of his chosen careers, a “schizoid business of being a writer who had barristering as a day job,” Mr. Mortimer also found time to pursue his lifelong interest in women, do some writing for newspapers and keep up the garden nurtured by his father, whose outsized shadow remained with him all his life.
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“Dying is a matter of slapstick and pratfalls,” he wrote in “The Summer of a Dormouse: A Year of Growing Old Disgracefully” (2000). “The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over and runs off laughing. No one should grow old who isn’t ready to appear ridiculous.”
U.K. Telegraph obituary
Sir John's agent, Anthony Jones, said: "He died at home, surrounded by his family. He had been unwell for some time."
A trained lawyer, Sir John drew on his experience to create Rumpole, the shambolic barrister who became one of the best-loved characters on British television. His extensive writing career included the acclaimed adaptation of Brideshead Revisited in 1981. He was knighted in 1998.
Sir John had four children from his two marriages, including the actress, Emily Mortimer. In 2004, it emerged that he had a another child, of whom he never knew, by the actress Wendy Craig. Their son was the product of an affair in the early 1960s. Although the discovery came as a shock, he professed himself "very happy" with the news.
Although wheelchair-bound towards the end of his life, Sir John gleefully defied health edicts and continued to enjoy fine wine and good living, beginning each day with a glass of champagne for breakfast.
In one of his last interviews, given in July 2008, he said: "I drink brandy and soda, and I don't eat a meal without drinking white wine. I've smoked all my life and, although I'd given up a bit, I now force myself to smoke because of the ban."
Obituary Boston Globe
Patrick McGoohan, an Emmy-winning actor who created and starred in the cult classic television show "The Prisoner," has died. He was 80.
Mr. McGoohan died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a short illness, his son-in-law, film producer Cleve Landsberg, said.
Mr. McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama "Columbo" and more recently appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film "Braveheart."
But he was most famous as the character known only as Number Six in "The Prisoner," a 1960s British series in which a former spy is held captive in a small enclave known only as the Village, where a mysterious authority named Number One constantly prevents his escape.
Mr. McGoohan came up with the concept and wrote and directed several episodes of the show, which has kept a devoted following in the United States and Europe for four decades.
"His creation of 'The Prisoner' made an indelible mark on the sci-fi, fantasy, and political thriller genres, creating one of the most iconic characters of all time," AMC said in a statement. "AMC hopes to honor his legacy in our reimagining of 'The Prisoner.' "
"Arrows cost money, Use up the Irish" from Big Hollywood
McGoohan was married to the same woman for 57 years, and included in the contract for his first TV series, “Danger Man,” three special clauses: 1) no kissing, 2) each fight had to be different, and 3) his character must always try to use his brains before resorting to a gun.
JOHN Pryor would have frowned at all the attention
Like so many truly good men, he was humble. While so many athletes and movie stars give little and claim much, he gave life with his hands and claimed nothing in return.
This was a person you encounter once or twice in a lifetime if you're lucky. Fortunately, many Philadelphians were.
And because they had the privilege of knowing him, they gathered at the cathedral this week to mourn. But, mostly, they were there to celebrate a luminous soul that burned brightly among them all too briefly.
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Pryor was the leader of the trauma team at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where he'd worked since 1999.
He was married to Carmela, a pediatrician, and they had three young children. He was from Albany, N.Y., a Boy Scout, a Catholic, a teacher, a soldier. A healer. A man who would have laughed at the idea of being thought special, but who was clearly better than most of us will ever be.
After the Twin Towers crashed on 9/11, he rushed to New York and worked through the night at Ground Zero. He wanted to be in the thick of it, healing wounds and grieving for those he couldn't save.
He wasn't a mere observer but the most compassionate of participants. He was also angered by the carnage in Philadelphia, having watched too many young men die "without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one," as he wrote in a poignant essay in the Washington Post.
He joined the Army Reserve Medical Corps and went to Iraq in 2006, and then again on Dec. 6, to care for those who, contrary to the fallen in our own streets, did have honor, purpose and country.
He was killed by an enemy mortar on Christmas Day. He was 42.
His funeral filled the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia
Joseph Bottum quite movingly announced the death of Fr. Neuhaus.
Our great, good friend is gone.
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus slipped away January 8, shortly before 10 o’clock, at the age of seventy-two. He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering. He lost consciousness Tuesday evening after a collapse in his heart rate, and soon after, in the company of friends, he died.
My tears are not for him—for he knew, all his life, that his Redeemer lives, and he has now been gathered by the Lord in whom he trusted.
I weep, rather, for all the rest of us. As a priest, as a writer, as a public leader in so many struggles, and as a friend, no one can take his place. The fabric of life has been torn by his death, and it will not be repaired, for those of us who knew him, until that time when everything is mended and all our tears are wiped away.
New York Times obit by Laurie Goodstein
The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a theologian who transformed himself from a liberal Lutheran leader of the civil rights and antiwar struggles in the 1960s to a Roman Catholic beacon of the neoconservative movement of today, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 72 and lived in Manhattan.
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Father Neuhaus’s best-known book, “The Naked Public Square,” argued that American democracy must not be stripped of religious morality. Published in 1984, it provoked a debate about the role of religion in affairs of state and was embraced by the growing Christian conservative movement.
In the last 20 years, Father Neuhaus helped give evangelical Protestants and Catholics a theological framework for joining forces in the nation’s culture wars.
The Associated Press
A native of Canada and the son of a Lutheran pastor, Neuhaus began his own work as a Lutheran minister at St. John the Evangelist Lutheran Church in a predominantly African-American Brooklyn neighborhood. He was active in the civil rights movement and other liberal causes. In 1964, he joined the Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan as the first co-chairmen of the anti-war group Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. But he eventually broke with the left, partly over the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion.
In 1990, he converted to Catholicism and a year later was ordained by New York Cardinal John O'Connor. "I was thirty years a Lutheran pastor, and after thirty years of asking myself why I was not a Roman Catholic I finally ran out of answers that were convincing either to me or to others," he wrote.
Father Raymond de Souza on Neuhaus as a Catholic intellectual.
With the death of Father Richard John Neuhaus on Jan. 8, the Catholic Church lost one of its greatest public intellectuals, a theologian who brought the light of the Gospel to the world of public life.
More than that, though, Father Neuhaus made possible a new world of intellectual engagement with the culture.
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By the 1990s, Father Neuhaus had, along with his friends George Weigel and Michael Novak, wrought a sea change in Catholic intellectual life. With the obvious favor of Pope John Paul II, Father Neuhaus and his colleagues articulated a new, confident Catholicism which sought less to adapt to the secular culture as it did to challenge it with a fresh application of the Catholic tradition
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A few months before his reception into the Catholic Church, Richard John Neuhaus launched a new journal, First Things, which became the most prominent and influential “journal of religion and public life” in America.
Read by religious leaders both Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, influential figures in theology, law and politics, and bright students in universities all over, First Things made widely available the thought of its editor in chief, but also a whole cadre of established Catholic thinkers: Avery Dulles, George Weigel, Mary Ann Glendon, Russell Hittinger, as well as new voices such as the current editor, Jody Bottum.
A generation of orthodox, engaged Christian writers was launched by First Things.
‘First Blog’
Yet, it remains true that for most readers, the first thing about First Things was Father Neuhaus himself, who pioneered in print what today might be called the first blog.
Death on a Thursday Morning by the editors of the National Review
Richard John Neuhaus, who died earlier today in New York, was the most influential Catholic and Christian theologian and writer in America during the second half of the 20th century. His influence can be compared to that of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, with one important distinction: Fulton Sheen exercised his sway over the public directly, through his radio and television sermons. Father Neuhaus did so less directly, through his books and articles, through his editorship of two important magazines devoted to religion and politics, through his friendship with Pope John Paul II, and through his impact on other theologians both in the Catholic Church and in other Christian congregations. Partly for those reasons, however, Neuhaus’s influence is likely to be the deeper, longer-lasting and more extensive one.
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Neuhaus began his adult life as a Canadian, a left-winger, and a Lutheran. He never lost his love for his country of birth — he spent six weeks of every year vacationing, reading, and reflecting in the Quebec countryside — his respect for a liberalism shaped by charity, or his admiration for the Lutheran tradition. He became nonetheless an American, a conservative, and a Catholic. And from these three conversions he forged for himself a distinctive religious identity that was conservative and generous, traditional and open, charitable and — yes — combative.
Reflections by Raymond Arroyo in the Wall St Journal
Of his work with Martin Luther King Jr., he once wrote that God "used his most unworthy servant Martin to create in our public life a luminous moment of moral truth about what Gunnar Myrdal rightly called 'the America dilemma,' racial justice. It seems a long time ago now, but there is no decline in the frequency of my thanking God for his witness and for having been touched, however briefly, by his friendship, praying that he may rest in peace, and that his cause may yet be vindicated."
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And though he enjoyed a series of presidential appointments, in the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administration, he never lost sight of his role as a priest. He would write: "Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion."
Avery Cardinal Dulles, R.I.P.
New York Times obit
Cardinal Avery Dulles, a scion of diplomats and Presbyterians who converted to Roman Catholicism, rose to pre-eminence in Catholic theology and became the only American theologian ever appointed to the College of Cardinals, died today died Friday morning at Fordham University in the Bronx. He was 90. ..
Cardinal Dulles, a professor of religion at Fordham University for the last 20 years, was a prolific author and lecturer and an elder statesman of Catholic theology in America. He was also the son of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the nephew of Allen Dulles, who guided European espionage during World War II and later directed the Central Intelligence Agency.
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His spiritual passage to Catholicism was like a fable. A young scholar with a searching mind, he stirred from his establishment Presbyterian family to face questions of faith and dogma. By the time he entered Harvard in 1936, he was an agnostic.
In his second book, “A Testimonial to Grace,” a 1946 account of his conversion, Cardinal Dulles said his doubts about God on entering Harvard were not diminished by his studies of medieval art, philosophy and theology. But on a gray February day in 1939, strolling along the Charles River in Cambridge, he saw a tree in bud and experienced a profound moment.
“The thought came to me suddenly, with all the strength and novelty of a revelation, that these little buds in their innocence and meekness followed a rule, a law of which I as yet knew nothing,” he wrote. “That night, for the first time in years, I prayed.”
His conversion in 1940, the year he graduated from Harvard, shocked his family and friends, he said, but he called it the best and most important decision of his life.
From a 2001 interview with Avery Cardinal Dulles by Michael Paulson in the Boston Globe. (He came to faith in my parish, St Paul's in Cambridge.)
Dulles, a brilliant student passionate about learning, found himself ravenously consuming the new works of French Catholic theologians, and one day he marched into a Catholic bookstore and asked, "How do I get into your church?"
Q. What drew you to Catholicism?
A. Perhaps it was the studies of the Reformation period. We had to read Luther and Calvin and the decrees of the Council and Trent and all those sorts of things, and I just found myself resonating with the Catholic positions in all those controversies, and also feeling that the culture of Europe was destroyed or ruptured by the Reformation in a way that was unfortunate. And then I discovered the Catholic Church as it existed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was a very vital, vibrant thing. St. Paul's parish there - the liturgy was very well performed, and Sunday evening they were having benediction, they were all singing the hymns of Thomas Aquinas in Latin, and I said, `This is the church for me.'
Q. Your journey to Catholicism strikes me as having been more intellectual than spiritual.
A. I think that's probably true. I hope there was some spiritual aspect to it, but I've never had any great taste for what's called spirituality. I think it deals so much with emotions and feelings. I don't have many emotions or feelings. I tend to have ideas. I was interested in Catholicism ideally, intellectually. I was convinced that it was true. I was interested in truth.
His obituary by Joseph Bottum at First Things
By the time of death, from the after-effects of the polio that he had contracted during the war, Dulles had published more than 700 theological articles and 27 books, becoming, along the way, the most important American Catholic theologian of the twentieth century.
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“Christian tradition is marked by a deep reverence for its own content, which it strives to protect against any dilution or distortion,” he once wrote, and he saw that the purpose of theological writing is not intellectual surprise or verbal fireworks. It is, rather, “to impart a tacit, lived awareness of the God to whom the Christian Scriptures and symbols point.”
This anecodote comes from the London Timesonline
After his consecration as a cardinal in Rome on February 21, 2001, the Gregorian University hosted a meal in his honor. Over the rattle of after-dinner coffee cups, various high-ranking ecclesial figures rose to praise Dulles’s life and work. The most revealing moment, however, may have come when, unexpectedly, one of his Dulles cousins stepped to the podium. An aristocrat of that strange, old American variety — tall and puritanically thin, well but primly dressed, a daughter of stern Protestant New England — she explained that she had overheard as a child the outraged family discussions of the young Avery’s conversion. Uncle Allen, Aunt Eleanor, John Foster, all the senior family members gathered around to complain that the best and brightest of the family’s next generation seemed determined to throw his promising life away. “And, of course, they were right,” she said. “He did throw that life away. He threw it away for God.”
As heirs to Western civilization, our common legacy as is so vast and so great, we can not take it all in. At best, we dip into it from time to time, sometimes as a citizen when we vote or speak against the government without any fear ; sometimes as believers when we gather in faith communities to worship God without any thought that we may be endangering our lives. Other times we are transported in a museum before a Renaissance painting or a Greek sculpture or in a symphony hall listening to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion.
But often we depend on others to communicate the greatness of someone long dead but whose legacy still nourishes minds and hearts. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was such a man.
According to George Eliot, Goethe was "Germany's greatest man of letters. —poet, critic, playwright, and novelist—and the last true polymath to walk the earth." I suppose he holds a similar position in the German imagination as Thomas Jefferson, another polymath, holds in the American imagination.
The Reader's Companion to World Literature says
Goethe comes as close to deserving the title of a universal genius as any man who has ever lived. though he will be considered here as a man of letters, it is important to remember that he had an intelligent grasp of all the arts, that he successfully carried burdensome responsibilities as a public administrator, and that his scientific interests led him to make significant contributions to mineralogy, optics, comparative anatomy and plant morphology.
Today we look to bloggers who write about what they love. Elizabeth Powers is the Goethe girl, a writer and literary scholar with a Ph.D in German literature and a consultant to the Metropolitan Museum. She loves Goethe and has begun a blog Goethe Etc. that vibrates with sympathy with this great man and, like him, is interested and learned about many things.
Maybe that's how we ordinary people can preserve Western civilization. By writing about what we love and value, sharing our appreciation with the world and passing it on to the people we love.
Maybe we only have time for quick bites of what we most need - the accumulated wisdom of the past. For me, quick bites are quotes and here are some:
On Character: Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.
On Courtesy: There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love.—From it springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior....There is no outward sign of true courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation.
On Happiness: The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and the beginning of his life. One has only to grow older to become more tolerant. I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.
On Kindness: Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
On Life: Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character. Life is the childhood of our immortality.
On Love: We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
On Immortality: Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
On Architecture: I call architecture frozen music.
On Nature: Nature is the living, visible garment of God.
On Riches: Riches amassed in haste will diminish, but those collected by little and little will multiply.
On the Bible: It is a belief in the Bible, the fruit of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life.—I have found it a capital safely invested, and richly productive of interest.
And others I liked
Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.
Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
He started off as a window washer and later founded a maintenance company with his brother-in-law
Hyman Golden, Co-Founder of Snapple, Dies at 85
Then, in 1972, Mr. Marsh introduced Mr. Golden to Arnold Greenberg, a childhood friend who ran a health food store in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The three decided to join forces and founded a company — called Unadulterated Food Products — selling juices to health-food stores.
In 1980, the company introduced a line of all-natural juices with the Snapple name, which came from one of its first products, a carbonated apple juice that had a “snappy apple taste.”
“When it first came out,” Mr. Greenberg told The New York Times in July 1994, “we sold 500 cases. The next month we sold 500 more cases and got some calls from distributors. ‘You’ve changed your formula,’ they said. ‘This Snapple’s tasting better and better.’ Then one day in our warehouse the tops of the bottles started shooting off. Bang! Pop! We found out it was fermenting. We’d made Champagne.”
The company enjoyed modest success with its natural sodas in the early 1980s, but it was when it introduced its iced tea in 1987 that sales began to skyrocket. Amid a nationwide boom in health consciousness, Snapple became perhaps the only ready-to-drink iced tea promoted as having natural ingredients and being made from real brewed tea. Consumers increasingly chose it over its carbonated competitors.
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By the time the company was purchased by Quaker Oats Company for about $1.7 billion in 1994, it had annual sales of $700 million, and its bottles of juices with their familiar blue-and-white logos could be found in delis, supermarkets, vending machines and homes across the country.
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“He accomplished the American dream,” she said. “When he and his partners would get together for events and celebrations, their favorite song to sing was ‘God Bless America,’ because they were so appreciative.”
“In their wildest dreams,” she added, “they never thought that this would be the end result.”
Scientific American on the death of Robert Furman, atom bomb spy leader, at 93
Robert Furman, a civil engineer who helped round up German scientists suspected of building the atomic bomb for the Nazis during World War II, has died. He was 93.
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As chief of foreign intelligence for the U.S. bomb project in the last two years of the war, Furman coordinated the kidnapping of German scientists, including physicist Werner Heisenberg. Eventually, Heisenberg and nine other scientists were spirited out of Soviet reach and into a detention center in France called the Dustbin, according to the Times.
Under German sniper fire, Furman and his team also seized 31 tons of uranium ore in Belgium that was eventually shipped to the U.S.
Furman worked closely with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez to track down German nuclear activity. They searched for “heavy water” – water containing a heavy isotope of hydrogen used in the making of bombs – in the Upper Rhine and Lake Constance between Germany, Switzerland and Austria, Los Alamos lab historian emeritus Roger Meade told the Times.
Furman’s spy team, code-named Alsos, ultimately found that Germany’s bomb project wasn’t as advanced as the U.S. had believed. “Instead of being two years ahead, they were two years behind,” historian Robert S. Norris wrote in Racing for the Bomb, according to the Times.
New York Times obituary
Robert R. Furman, a former Army major who as chief of foreign intelligence for the American atomic bomb project in World War II coordinated and often joined harrowing espionage missions to kidnap German scientists, seize uranium ore in Europe and determine the extent of Nazi efforts to build the bomb, died Oct. 14 at his home in Adamstown, Md. He was 93.
Dean Barnett, a well-known conservative columnist and blogger, died too young at 41 but lived longer than he expected since he was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.
Living with a fatal disease can embitter one or make one more joyful for the life still left to live. Tributes around the blogosphere attest to Dean's joy and high spirits, great wit and good humor.
Boston Globe obit
"All his life he's been aware that he had this terminal disease but it never stopped him from doing everything and enjoying life to the fullest," his brother said. "Whether it was writing about politics, or working on his golf game, or spending time with friends and family."
"He very much enjoyed that he touched people, inspired people, provoked thoughts. It was perhaps the most fulfilling thing he did professionally," Keith Barnett said. "Although he didn't set out to do this, he was an example to the entire cystic fibrosis community that one could still build a life with meaning and I think he took pride in that."
From his book, The Plucky Smart Kid with the Fatal Disease comes these wise words
As I grew sicker, I had what for me was an extremely comforting insight. I came to view serious and progressive illness as an ever constricting circle with oneself at the center. The interior of the circle represents the contents of one’s life. As the circle gets smaller, things that were inside get forced out. Some of these things are dearly missed; others that were once thought precious get forced to the exterior and turn out to go surprisingly unlamented.
At the innermost point of the circle are the things that really matter: family, faith, love. These things stay with you until the day you die. At the very end, because the circle has shrunk down to its center, they’re all you have left. But as we approach that end, we finally realize that all along, they were what mattered most. As a consequence, life often remains beautiful and worthwhile right up until the end.
Here a column about Heroes Among Us
At one point during my interview, the questioner asked me if I expected to see a cure to CF in my lifetime. I answered no, but that it doesn’t really matter. When you see death up close, a couple of things become clear. One is that we all die, and that death is just part of the deal. The other is that life is such a blessing, that’s it just so great, even though you know the inevitable might be near you still want as many bites of the apple as possible.
When I was at the Department of the Interior, I was fortunate to spend some time with Tony Hillerman, a lovely man who was simply delighted to receive a special departmental award for his novel, "A Thief of Time) and the pubic awareness he created about theft of Indian relics from public land.
At that time, he was recovering from a heart attack and still a bit weak. Fortunately, he lived many more years and wrote several more books to the delight of his fans.
Boston Globe obituary
Tony Hillerman, author of the acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels and creator of two of the unlikeliest of literary heroes, Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, died Sunday of pulmonary failure. He was 83.
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His daughter said the Navajo values of family, community, generosity, and enjoying the beauty of the world, resonated with her father's own Catholic values. He felt blessed in his life and saw the needs of the Navajo Nation and responded, she said.
"He was a storyteller at heart, and so when people started buying his books and he didn't have to struggle so hard financially, he felt it was a good way to share the blessings," she said.
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"I want Americans to stop thinking of Navajos as primitive persons, to understand that they are sophisticated and complicated," Mr. Hillerman once said.
New York Times obit
In the world of mystery fiction, Mr. Hillerman was that rare figure: a best-selling author who was adored by fans, admired by fellow authors and respected by critics. Though the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with an avowed purpose: to instill in his readers a respect for Native American culture.
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“It’s always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures,” Mr. Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. “I think it’s important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways.”
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Mr. Hillerman wrote with intimate knowledge of the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes; he grew up with people very much like them. “I recognized kindred spirits” in the Navajo, he wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1986. “Country boys. Folks among whom I felt at ease.”
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For all the recognition he received, Mr. Hillerman once said, he was most gladdened by the status of Special Friend of the Dineh (the Navajo people) conferred on him in 1987 by the Navajo Nation. He was also proud that his books were taught at reservation schools and colleges.
“Good reviews delight me when I get them,” he said. “But I am far more delighted by being voted the most popular author by the students of St. Catherine Indian school, and even more by middle-aged Navajos who tell me that reading my mysteries revived their children’s interest in the Navajo Way.”
Read the whole obit to learn more about his remarkable life.
May he rest in peace surrounded by beauty.
Sister Emmanuelle, France's "Mother Teresa," dies aged 99.
Sister Emmanuelle, France's answer to Mother Teresa, who has died aged 99 was an unorthodox nun who spent 20 years helping the poor in a Cairo slum before returning to France to defend the homeless.
The diminutive Roman Catholic nun, whose real name was Madeleine Cinquin, was best known in France for her frequent appearances on television to campaign passionately for the poor and homeless.
She came to media attention with her work with some of the world's poorest people, the residents of the Ezbet El-Nakhl slum in Cairo who eke out their living by scavenging in the garbage produced in the giant city.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Sister Emmanuelle was a woman who "touched our hearts," a "woman of action for whom charity meant concrete actions of solidarity and fraternity."
The Vatican said her work, like that of Nobel peace laureate Mother Teresa, "showed how Christian charity was able to go beyond differences of nationality, race, religion."
Rocco Palmo writes about her funeral in "Life Does Not End For Those Who Know to Love"
Sent off by her expressed request from the small-town convent where she spent her last years, Paris came to a halt yesterday to commemorate Soeur Emmanuelle -- the "French Mother Teresa" who died Monday at 99.
Following her private funeral liturgy and burial at Callian in the country's southeast, the capital's Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois celebrated a nationally-televised memorial Mass in Notre-Dame, its high-watt congregation led by President Nicolas Sarkozy, his predecessor Jacques Chirac and -- in a tribute to the two decades the self-described "rag woman with the rag pickers" spent working among the poor in Cairo -- Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, as a crowd of thousands packed the square outside.
She left a message with her publishers.
"When you hear this message, I will no longer be there. In telling of my life -- all of my life -- I wanted to bear witness that love is more powerful than death," she said, according to the text.
"I have confessed everything, the good and the less good, and I can tell you about it. Where I am now, life does not end for those who know how to love."...
When I heard about Paul Newman's death, I was away for the weekend for my high school reunion so I didn't have a chance to what others had written, but then I already knew he was a remarkable man. I had already written about the legacies he was creating. Paul Newman's Legacies
"If I leave a legacy, it will be the camps," Newman says.
Breitbart obit
Paul Newman, known for his piercing blue eyes, boyish good looks and stellar performances in scores of hit Hollywood movies, has died, his foundation said Saturday. He was 83.
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"Paul Newman's craft was acting. His passion was racing. His love was his family and friends. And his heart and soul were dedicated to helping make the world a better place for all," Foundation Vice-Chairman Robert Forrester said.
Newman played youthful rebels, charming rogues, golden-hearted drunks and amoral opportunists in a career that encompassed more than 50 movies. He was one of the most popular and consistently bankable Hollywood stars in the second half of the 20th century. Two of his most popular movies included "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) and "The Sting" (1973), in which he co-starred with an equally popular and handsome actor, Robert Redford.
Newman was also a philanthropist, a health food mogul -- he once quipped that his salad dressing was making more money than his movies -- a race car enthusiast and a leftist political activist.
New York Times, Paul Newman, a Magnetic Titan of Hollywood
If Marlon Brando and James Dean defined the defiant American male as a sullen rebel, Paul Newman recreated him as a likable renegade, a strikingly handsome figure of animal high spirits and blue-eyed candor whose magnetism was almost impossible to resist, whether the character was Hud, Cool Hand Luke or Butch Cassidy.
He acted in more than 65 movies over more than 50 years, drawing on a physical grace, unassuming intelligence and good humor that made it all seem effortless.
Yet he was also an ambitious, intellectual actor and a passionate student of his craft, and he achieved what most of his peers find impossible: remaining a major star into a craggy, charismatic old age even as he redefined himself as more than Hollywood star. He raced cars, opened summer camps for ailing children and became a nonprofit entrepreneur with a line of foods that put his picture on supermarket shelves around the world.
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he remained fulfilled by his charitable work, saying it was his greatest legacy, particularly in giving ailing children a camp at which to play.
“We are such spendthrifts with our lives,” Mr. Newman once told a reporter. “The trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.”
Newman's own departure was long and gentle, until cancer took hold. By choice, he faded from films gradually, taking fewer and fewer major roles - a diminuendo that was all the more striking when compared with Redford's sustained career as an actor-director.
In truth, though he had major roles in more than 50 motion pictures Newman preferred his private life to the feverish fakery of Hollywood.
The Boston Globe Blue-eyed idol put an indelible stamp on movies, philanthropy
Burial plans are unknown, although Newman expressed a desire to have his ashes strewn across the lake where he built the first Hole in the Wall Camp.
"I always admired the fish," he said.
Neoneocon didn't need to remind me of how sexy he was and how he aged awfully well. She found the YouTube videos, only one of which I borrowed
He was a Man of Natural Virtue.
Gerard Vanderleun in A Life and a Love Less Ordinary pays tribute to the Newmans' marriage
I watch this montage and I think of the old 60s poem that ends, "With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world." And I also think that sometimes, if you are careful and keep your vows, love can endure. All in all, it would seem that Newman's life and love and marriage were, in the end, his greatest achievement. His films were merely the means.
An appreciation in the New York Times,
Paul Newman wore his fame lightly, his beauty too.
My favorite may be Dahlia Lithwick's piece on Slate
One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman's Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, "Are you lost?" Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, "Are you really Paul Human?"
Paul Newman left a Great Legacy of how to be a great man even if a movie star. Thankfully, we'll always have his movies and by buying his salad dressings, his lemonade and his popcorn, we can support his legacy.
2000 people packed the pews for the funeral of Thomas S. Vander Woude, the Father who died saving his son
Among the attendees were his wife of 43 years, Mary Ellen, more than 70 priests, including the bishop of Arlington, and the friends accrued over decades who came to pay respects to a man who inspired them, right up until his final breath.
If Vander Woude saw the throng, he'd say, "Are you kidding me? . . . Don't waste your gas," said one of his sons, Steve Vander Woude of Nokesville, after the service. But "this guy did something saintly, and they wanted to come be a part of it."
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Another of Thomas S. Vander Woude's sons, Tom Vander Woude, pastor at Queen of Apostles Catholic Church in Alexandria, gave the homily. In it, he likened his father to Saint Joseph, a man who patiently and quietly supported his family, did odd jobs for those in need and was content to worship God and not seek the limelight, Tom Vander Woude said.
At a reception at Seton School in Manassas, where six of Thomas S. Vander Woude's sons went to school, friends and neighbors traded stories about how Vander Woude had gone out of his way to help them. Fittingly, Tom Vander Woude observed, they were standing on the gym floor that his father had installed.
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His dying act was, "truly saintly" and "the crown of a whole life of self-giving," Bishop Paul S. Loverde said at the Mass. "May we find in his life inspiration and strength."
He was one of the unknown saints among us.
In the Washington Post, Jonathan Mummolo writes that the Father Who Died Saving Son Known for Sacrifice
If you ever ran into Nokesville dad Thomas S. Vander Woude, chances are you would also see his son Joseph. Whether Vander Woude was volunteering at church, coaching basketball or working on his farm, Joseph was often right there with him, pitching in with a smile, friends and neighbors said yesterday.
When Joseph, 20, who has Down syndrome, fell into a septic tank Monday in his back yard, Vander Woude jumped in after him. He saved him. And he died where he spent so much time living: at his son's side.
"That's how he lived," Vander Woude's daughter-in-law and neighbor, Maryan Vander Woude, said yesterday. "He lived sacrificing his life, everything, for his family."
Vander Woude, 66, had gone to Mass at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Gainesville on Monday, just as he did every day, and then worked in the yard with Joseph, the youngest of his seven sons, affectionately known as Josie. Joseph apparently fell through a piece of metal that covered a 2-by-2-foot opening in the septic tank, according to Prince William County police and family members.
Vander Woude rushed to the tank; a workman at the house saw what was happening and told Vander Woude's wife, Mary Ellen, police said. They called 911 about 12 p.m. and tried to help the father and son in the meantime.
At some point, Vander Woude jumped in the tank, submerging himself in sewage so he could push his son up from below and keep his head above the muck, while Joseph's mom and the workman pulled from above.
For those who knew him, Vander Woude's sacrifice was in keeping with a lifetime of giving.
"He's the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back," said neighbor Lee DeBrish. "And if he didn't have one, he'd buy one for you."
Vander Woude was a pilot in Vietnam, a daughter-in-law said. After the war, he worked as a commercial airline pilot and in the early 1980s moved his family to Prince William from Georgia. In the years to come, he would wear many hats: farmer, athletic director, volunteer coach, parishioner, handy neighbor, grandfather of 24, husband for 43 years.
What a remarkable man. May he rest in peace.
We all know and will all miss Don LaFonaine: The Voice
AP Obit
- The omnipresent baritone and gravely bass undertones of Don LaFontaine's distinctive voice had the unique ability to seamlessly embellish big-screen kisses, slice through over-the-top explosions, perfectly pair with robust musical scores, glide alongside car chases and effortlessly co-star with any A-list talent in Hollywood.
''He was the originator of the modern voiceover for movie trailers,'' said voiceover artist Jim Tasker. ''He is the standard for which all other voiceovers for movie trailers are measured. For the past 30 years, his voice has been the gauge for all of us in the industry.'
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'When you die, the voice you hear in heaven is not Don's. It's God trying to sound like Don.''
Washington Post a clever appreciation by Hank Stuever, In a World of Don LaFontaine.
In a world where marketing is far more important than content . . . came one man . . . with a Voice....
In a world that believed deeply in the potency of the words Coming Soon. . .
In a world where eyewitnesses describe real things, real events as being "like, in a movie" .
In a world suddenly without Don LaFontaine, who died Monday at 68 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, of lung failure, brought on by undetermined causes . . . (Cedars-Sinai being a world where the famous newly dead go on to other coming attractions).
He was one of the four soldiers first sent into the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, but when he returned to Iowa, he rarely spoke of it.
Even 63 years after the liberation, Hoyt suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and attended a weekly group therapy session at a Veterans Affairs facility.
"Seeing these things, it changes you. I was a kid," he said. "Des Moines had been the furthest I'd ever been from home. I still have horrific dreams. Usually someone needs help and I can't help them. I'm in a situation where I'm trapped and I can't get out."
James Hoyt , mail carrier, spelling bee champion and liberator of Buchenwald died at 83.
At Hoyt's graveside Thursday, a 12-veteran color guard gave him a traditional 21-gun salute. Hoyt's casket was draped with the American flag, and that flag was folded, as is tradition, 12 times.
Retired Gen. Robert Sentman gave the flag to Doris Hoyt. Sentman had earlier told mourners about the Buchenwald liberation.
"When the prisoners saw Jim, they picked him up and threw him in the air, that's how happy they were after seeing such horrors. Prisoners had been hung from hooks to die. He saw a lampshade made from a prisoner's tattoo. Jim carried those horrors with him forever. He never got what he had seen out of his mind. If you ever wondered about Jim, think about what he saw."
"When you were discharged, no one really gave a hoot about you. It was difficult for a compassionate person like Jim to forget what he saw. He was a hero.
I was away and offline when Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. which is the only reason why I didn't write any posts about him.
Some are still reflecting on his great legacy. Theodore Dalrymple writes in Seer of Evil that Solzhenitsyn rendered illusion not just stupid, but wicked.
Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens.
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Still, a man of Solzhenitsyn’s enormous stature deserves to be remembered for his greatest achievements. His efforts to memorize, and memorialize, what he had experienced in the harshest circumstances are sufficient on their own to render the rest of us humble. No writer of the second half of the twentieth century has had so profound an effect on history, and that effect was overwhelmingly beneficial. And when he reminded us that the line dividing good from evil passes through every human heart, he said something that no human being should ever forget.
Carmelite priest massacred in Andhar Pradesh
“Father Thomas is a martyr: he sacrificed his life for the poor and marginalised. But he did not die in vain, because his body and his blood enrich the Church in India, particularly the Church in Andhra Pradesh”. Those are the words of Msgr. Marampudi Joji, archbishop of Hyderabad and secretary of the bishops’ conference of Andhra Pradesh (a state in South East India), commenting the barbarous killing of the Carmelite priest Thomas Pandippallyil, 38, assassinated on the night of August 16th in Mosalikunta, on the road between Lingampet and Yellareddy, 90 km from the regional capital.
On the night of August 16th his body was found on the roadside by a group of people, not far from the village of Balampilly; the body of the Carmelite of Mary Immaculate carried wounds to the face while the hands and legs had been crushed and the eyes gouged out. His motorbike was found one kilometre on from the body. According to witnesses, Saturday afternoon Fr. Thomas celebrated mass in Burgida, before setting out for another village in the district where he was to have celebrated Sunday mass. The last people to have seen him alive were religious sisters from Lingapetta convent, where the priest had stopped for supper before continuing his journey.
The archbishop forcefully denied accusations of proselytism and forced conversion and pointed out that there were only five Catholic families in the parish.
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“Priests and nuns – continues the archbishop of Hyderabad – have for decades been at the service of the least fortunate in India, and this makes them targets of forces of evil who do not want the marginalized and impoverished to become empowered”.
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Father Thomas Pandippallyil was ordained a priest in 2002. He was the rector for the Chanda mission province of the CMI, and also worked as hospital administrator, school manager and mission centre director.
Coming back from the weekend, I was shocked to hear that Tony Snow had died. Of course, I knew he had colon cancer, but death, especially sudden death, is always shocking. He was a good and decent man who became great by force of his character. He will be missed by many but no one will miss him more than his wife and three children. To them, the deepest condolences.
There are a score and many more personal recollections online about the force of his character.
Yuval Levin writes about his "deep and intensely cheerful curiosity."
Bill Kristol marvels at his calm courage and cheerful optimism
His deep Christian faith combined with his natural exuberance to give him an upbeat world view. Watching him, and so admiring his remarkable strength of character in the last phase of his life, I came to wonder: Could it be that a stance of faith-grounded optimism is in fact superior to one of worldly pessimism or sophisticated fatalism?
President Bush said
It was a joy to watch Tony at the podium each day,” the president said in a statement from Camp David, where he is spending the weekend. “He brought wit, grace and a great love of country to his work. His colleagues will cherish memories of his energetic personality and relentless good humor.”
Gaghdad Bob says
The essence of his soul comes through quite vividly -- his decency, his passion, his generosity, his desire to help lift mankind. ....
I don't know why there aren't more people who are able to convey the joy, excitement, creativity, expansiveness, optimism, hope, compassion, decency, humor, spirituality, and love that animate conservatism. Maybe they just don't get it the way Snow did, and connect all the dots, both horizontal and vertical.
Mark Steyn on his grace, affability and generous advice.
An NRO symposium on Tony Snow, Happy Warrior
Susan Estrich says Tony Snow was a Gem
Tony had a sweetness about him, a sweetness that, in the mean world that Washington and the media can be, sometimes led him to believe that everyone operated from the same place he did...
He was so earnest, so dear, he liked everyone and assumed the same about everyone else; he was honorable and honest, and assumed it about others.
Kurtz wrote an appreciation of Snow called As Good as His Words.
Here's a David Gregory interview with Snow talking about living and working with cancer. Kathryn Jean Lopez says it's impossible not to cry to hear Snow talk about his family and the 'depth of happiness' that cancer made possible in his life.
New York Times obituary
Mr. Snow’s death was announced by the White House. When a recurrence of the cancer interrupted his tenure there, he chose to talk about it openly, saying he wanted to offer hope to other patients. His message to them, he said, was: “Don’t think about dying. Think about living.”
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His snappy sound bites made Mr. Snow an instant hit among Republicans. “It’s like Mick Jagger at a rock concert,” Karl Rove, the president’s former political strategist, once said.
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He also had a musical flair; he grew up playing the flute, taught himself the acoustic guitar and played in an amateur rock ’n’ roll band, Beats Workin’. When they performed at the White House Congressional picnic, Mr. Bush jokingly called them “a bunch of, well, mediocre musicians.”
Washington Post obituary
In his brief tenure as Bush's public advocate, Snow became perhaps the best-known face of the administration after the president, vice president and secretary of state. Parlaying skills honed during years at Fox News, he offered a daily televised defense of the embattled president that was robust and at times even combative while repairing strained relations with a press corps frustrated by years of rote talking points.
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ABC News correspondent Ann Compton, president of the White House Correspondents Association, said yesterday that Snow was "the first press secretary who chose to use the podium as a way to argue the president's case -- not just in the president's words, but in his own."
There is a new, disturbing and completely uncivil tendency for some to make partisan remarks, often quite vile, when a person dies. Ben Johnson describes some of them in "Goebbels With Better Hair." No one is above criticism, but people who make crude and hateful remarks about someone who has just died should be shunned says Howard Kurtz. Amen to that. Fortunately, they are a tiny minority, but shunned they should be.
Better than any words about him are his own and none are better than his commencement address last year to the graduates of Catholic University. If you read nothing else, read his address, "Reason, Faith, Vocation."
At Freedom of Iran, Amil Imani writes of the Angel of Iran who was hanged for teaching love.
She is called the Angel of Iran, because she lived her short life angelically. The demonic Islamist Mullahs, true to their nature, couldn’t bear an angel in their midst. On June 18, 1983, they hanged the young woman, barely past childhood, for refusing to renounce her belief: the belief in love, justice, and equality for all children of God.
Her name was Mona, a 17-year old Baha’i Character School (Sunday school) teacher. Her pupils loved the indescribably gentle loving teacher who taught them to grow up as exemplary humans with hearts brimming with the love of God, all his people and his creation.
"I focus on spiritual wealth now, and I'm busier, more enthusiastic, and more joyful than I have ever been."
"The question is not is there a God, but is there anything else except God? God is everyone and each of us is a little bit."
"Work at being a humble person."
The above quotes are from John Templeton who died yesterday in Nassau, the Bahamas, at 95.
Boston Globe/New York Times obit
John M. Templeton, a Tennessee-born investor and philanthropist who amassed a fortune as a pioneer in global mutual funds, then gave away hundreds of millions of dollars to foster understanding of what he called "spiritual realities,"
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In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Templeton dazzled Wall Street, organized some of the most successful mutual funds of his time, led investors into foreign markets, established charities that now give away $70 million a year, wrote books on finance and spirituality, and promoted a search for answers to what he called the "Big Questions" in the realms of science, faith, God, and the purpose of humanity.
Along the way, he became one of the world's richest men, gave up American citizenship, moved to the Bahamas, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and bestowed much of his fortune on spiritual thinkers and innovators: Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the physicist Freeman Dyson, the philosopher Charles Taylor, and an array of prominent Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus.
Telegraph obit
Templeton boasted one of the longest and most successful track records on Wall Street. From its foundation in 1954, his Templeton Growth Fund grew at an astonishing rate of nearly 16 per cent a year until Templeton’s retirement in 1992, making it the top performing growth fund in the second half of the 20th century
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The Templeton formula was simple in theory, though not easily achieved in practice.
He looked for bargains — shares selling well below their asset values due to temporary circumstances — and would usually hold on to them for five years or more until they reached what he considered to be their true worth.
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He was one of the first to invest in post-war Japan, and one of the first to sell Japanese stocks in the mid-1980s before the bear market set in.
Templeton once described his speculative activities as a “ministry”, and saw the workings of the money market as part of God’s plan for His creation.
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In 1973 he inaugurated the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, an annual award to remedy the Nobel Foundation’s omission of religion from its prizes.
A brilliant publicist, Templeton guaranteed that his prize would always be worth more than the Nobel, and arranged for the Duke of Edinburgh to present the award at Buckingham Palace, thus ensuring full press coverage.
She fought against those who would say her life was not worth living. Hers certainly was.
When Harriet McBryde Johnson died earlier this month at the age of 50 from a congenital neuromuscular disease, obituaries called her a "disability-rights activist." This is far too narrow a description of her life. She was less a traditional activist than an acute social conscience. Ms. Johnson forced us to look at disability in a different way -- not as something that we should seek to eradicate, but as something that is integral to the human condition, a "natural part of the human experience," as the American Association of People With Disabilities puts it.
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She was brutally direct when she talked about disabilities, including her own. "Most people don't know how to look at me," she wrote, describing her severely twisted spine and her "jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin." But she abhorred the "veneer of beneficence" that overlay the arguments of those who said she would be "better off" without her disability. "The presence or absence of a disability doesn't predict quality of life," she argued, challenging Mr. Singer's support of what she called "disability-based infanticide."
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People with disabilities, she said, "have something the world needs."
Like everyone who was familiar with him on television, I was shocked at the sudden death of Tim Russert and then surprised at the outpouring of affection for him. But I shouldn't have been surprised, I loved him and everyone who knew him and millions who didn't loved him too. He was fair, tough, passionate and ebullient.
Tom Brokaw broke the news.
My friend and colleague collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work at NBC News...
Tim loved his family, his faith, his country, politics, the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yankees, and the Washington Nationals.
Tributes pour in from people in the media, collected at MediaBistro's TV Newser.
New York Times
Tim Russert, a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and election nights since becoming moderator of “Meet the Press” nearly 17 years ago, died Friday after collapsing at the Washington bureau of NBC News. He was 58 and lived in Northwest Washington.
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Mr. Russert, who was also the Washington bureau chief and a senior vice president of NBC News, had just returned in the last couple of days from a trip to Italy, where his family had celebrated the recent graduation of his son, Luke, from Boston College. When stricken, he was recording voice-overs for this Sunday’s program.
With his plain-spoken explanations and hard-hitting questions, Mr. Russert played an increasingly outsize role in the news media’s coverage of politics. The elegantly simple white memo board he used on election night in 2000 to explain the deadlock in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore — “Florida, Florida, Florida,” he had scribbled in red marker — became an enduring image in the history of American television coverage of the road to the White House.
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Behind the scenes, Mr. Russert’s colleagues at NBC News soon learned that he had a gift for making the most complex political machinations understandable and compelling.
“He had a better political insight than anyone else in the room, period,” said Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, who was then an up-and-coming producer.
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He really was the best political journalist in America, not just the best television journalist in America,” said Al Hunt, the Washington executive editor of Bloomberg News and former Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal
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In the Boston Globe, Mike Barnicle said
"Tim was uniquely without a mean bone in his body," Barnicle said last night. "He had a joy about him that was nearly unmatched. At the end of the day or the end of the week, there was a part of him that would pinch himself: 'Can you believe I'm allowed to do this show?' "
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Russert was shaped by his own father, known as "Big Russ," and by his childhood in Buffalo. The city remained his emotional touchstone for his entire life. "He's better able than anybody I know to live in two worlds," Brokaw told the Globe in 1997. "He has a house in a tony neighborhood in Washington, and his heart's in Buffalo." Byron Brown, the mayor of Buffalo, yesterday ordered all flags at city buildings lowered to half-staff in Russert's honor.
Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post
Russert wore many hats -- onetime Democratic operative, Washington insider, NBC bureau chief, MSNBC commentator, sports fanatic, committed Roman Catholic, biographer of his father, dubbed "Big Russ" -- but his greatest legacy was his sustained style of interrogation. Grounded in prodigious research, Russert would press his guests on past statements and contradictions, often for a full hour, spawning legions of imitators.
Friends were stunned by the news. "I just loved him," said Bob Schieffer, host of CBS's "Face the Nation." "When I scooped old Tim, I felt like I'd hit a home run off the best pitcher in the league."
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Despite his eventual wealth and house on Nantucket, Russert never seemed to forget the summers he spent emptying pails of spoiled food into a garbage truck. His patter was filled with average-Joe lingo and constant references to his beloved the Buffalo Bills. Russert viewed himself as a translator who made politics accessible to the average voter.
Russert wrote two best-selling books, "Big Russ & Me" and "Wisdom of Our Fathers," which brought fame to his working-class dad and enshrined Russert's reputation as a man of modest western New York roots.
Joe Klein in Time
Back when he was just starting in television — and ever since but particularly back then — Tim Russert was astounded by the joys of the job. Early on, he helped arrange an interview with the Pope for the Today Show — and Tim did it up right: He brought along red NBC News baseball caps for the Cardinals and a white one for the Holy Father. "He put it on!" Tim told me when he came home. "We have pictures!" Then he said, more quietly, "But, you know, it was really something being in his presence. You felt something holy. It was almost as if the air was different." And that was Tim — exuberant, irreverent, brilliant and devout, a thrilling jolt of humanity.
He will be missed. Condolences to all his family and friends
Gerard Vanderleun in a terrific essay "Ain't It Cool?" writes
The American culture of cool has become a nation apart, an alternate-America that looks to the real America as merely some mechanism set up to deliver the many features and benefits of America to the culture of cool without question, by divine right of media.
The American culture of cool is not into giving back anything they have taken from the culture at large. The culture of cool is not a giving culture, it is an taking culture. --
The American culture of cool sees itself as the real soul and real intelligence of America, even as it actually rides on the broad shoulders of America like some strangling old man of the sea that, once taken up, refuses to get down.
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The culture of Camp Pendleton despises the culture of cool. The culture here is composed of deeper, abiding and more fundamental things: Duty, Honor, God, Country and The Corps.
While we're at the mall, some men are exemplifying the best of humanity and performing extraordinary acts of valor, the indifference to which is another example as Robert Kaplan points out that
separates an all-volunteer military from the public it defends
Kaplan tells us what it takes to win a Medal of Honor in No Greater Honor
Over the decades, the Medal of Honor—the highest award for valor—has evolved into the U.S. military equivalent of sainthood. Only eight Medals of Honor have been awarded since the Vietnam War, all posthumously. “You don’t have to die to win it, but it helps,” says Army Colonel Thomas P. Smith
Here are the Medal of Honor Recipients from the War in Iraq. Inspiring examples of courage, valor and love.
The jazz, blues, folk, country, pop vocalist Eva Cassidy died in 1996 at 33 after she noticed a pain in her hip that turned out to be melanoma that had metastatasized.
Her final public performance was Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World."
Unknown outside Washington, D.C. at her death, her posthumously released recordings have sold about six million copies.
ABC's Nightline's documentary on Eva has been rebroadcast three times and is, by one account, the most popular Nightline ever.
Now a film is being produced on her life by Amy Redford, daughter of Robert Redford.
Only because of recordings can people like me who didn't know her when she was alive experience her extraordinary voice.
The Eva Cassidy website.
Echoes of a Voice Stilled Too Early. Richard Harrington in the Washington Post
She was, for sure a diamond no longer in the rough but not yet in the proper setting that would showcase a voice so pure, so strong, so passionate that it should have found a home just about anywhere.
I bet there's not a person over 30 who doesn't know Bo Diddley, doesn't like Bo Diddley, and isn't sad that he's gone.
Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.
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In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.
His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.
Telegraph obituary
Had Diddley been able to copyright the hypnotic and highly distinctive rhumba-like beat that was his musical trademark he might have been able to retire many years ago as a very wealthy man, rather than having to eke out a living in his old age, playing night-clubs, as his health deteriorated.
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It was a mark of his standing as one of the founding fathers of pop music that he would become one of the first performers to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1987.
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For all his success, Diddley always maintained that like so many artists of his generation he had never received his just desserts, receiving only a flat fee for his early recordings and no royalty payments on sales. "I am owed. I've never got paid," he said. "A dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun."
"Bo Diddley is one of the seminal American guitarists and an architect of the rock 'n' roll sound," said Terry Stewart, president and chief executive of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. "His unique guitar work, indelible rhythms, inventive songwriting, and larger-than-life personality make him an immortal author of the American songbook."
Singer Mick Jagger has paid tribute to singer-guitarist Bo Diddley as an "enormous force in music" and "a big influence on the Rolling Stones".
Jagger said the US rock 'n' roll pioneer, who has died at the age of 79, was "a wonderful, original musician".
Jagger, whose band recorded cover versions of Mona and Crackin' Up, said: "He was very generous to us in our early years and we learned a lot from him.
"We will never see his like again."
Sydney Pollack, who died on May 26 aged 73, was an eclectic director of Hollywood movies, who lacked a recognisable stylistic signature but made films that were often extremely successful at the box office; his 1985 production Out of Africa, based on the life of Isak Dinesen, was named best film in the annual Oscars and earned him a personal award as best director.
He had planned to become an actor and still appeared periodically in films made by himself and others He was best remembered as Dustin Hoffman's agent in his own film Tootsie (1982) - a part he undertook at the actor’s request.
Telegraph Obituary
The open secret about Sydney Pollack was that he was the go-to guy in Hollywood for a filmmaker in a bind.
Remembering Sydney Pollack by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone
New York Times obituary
Mr. Pollack reached perhaps his pinnacle with “Out of Africa.” The film, based on the memoirs of Isak Dinesen, paired Ms. Streep and Mr. Redford in a drama that reworked one of the director’s favorite themes, that of star-crossed lovers. It captured Oscars for best picture and best director.
Still, Mr. Pollack remained uneasy about his cinematic skills. “I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist,” he told an interviewer for American Cinematographer last year.
AP obituary
In a tireless career spanning nearly five decades, Pollack distinguished himself as a true professional: a director, a producer and an actor. His greatest successes as a director — 1982's "Tootsie" and 1985's "Out of Africa" — came years ago, but he showed no signs of slowing down.
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"Sydney's and my relationship both professionally and personally covers 40 years," Redford said. "It's too personal to express in a sound bite."
Barbra Streisand, who starred alongside Redford in "The Way We Were," said: "He knew how to tell a love story. He was a great actor's director because he was a great actor."
A selected filmography
A selected filmography: “The Slender Thread” (1965)
“This Property Is Condemned” (1966)
“The Scalphunters” (1968)
“The Swimmer” (1968) (uncredited)
“Castle Keep” (1969)
“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969)
“Jeremiah Johnson” (1972)
“The Way We Were” (1973)
“The Yakuza” (1974)
“Three Days of the Condor” (1975)
“Bobby Deerfield” (1977)
“The Electric Horseman” (1979)
“Absence of Malice” (1981)
“Tootsie” (1982)
“Out of Africa” (1985)
“Havana” (1990)
“The Firm” (1993)
“Sabrina” (1995)
“Random Hearts” (1999)
“The Interpreter” (2005)
“Sketches of Frank Gehry” (2005)
The highest ranking African prelate Cardinal Bernardin Gantin died last week in Paris at 86. His body was taken back to his native Benin where he was given A Hero's Sendoff. Rocco Palmo tells the story.
Earlier, a Memorial Mass was held at St. Peter's where Pope Benedict gave the homily.
A railway worker's son, Benedict said that "his personality, human and priestly, made for a magnificent synthesis of the qualities of the African soul with those of the Christian spirit, of the culture and identity of Africa and the values of the Gospel." Despite being, at age 38, the first native-born African archbishop and the continent's first son to assume a top role in the Roman Curia, the Pope said that Gantin never let the accolades get to his head, adding that the "secret" to his humility likely lay in "the wise words that his mother repeated when he became a cardinal... 'Never forget the little faraway village from which you came.'"
On Veterans Day, we recognize in gratitude all those who served in the armed forces. On Memorial Day, we remember those who died in our wars, fighting for liberty.
Wikipedia lists the deaths in each of our wars. ( Click on the image for full size.)
Memorial Day used to be known as Decoration Day when graves of the fallen would be cleaned and decorated with flowers and flags, in small acts of respect and honor .
We remember to make their sacrifices real to us, to recall the losses so many families endured, to realize that the past is with us and their legacies live on in the freedom we enjoy today.
It's hard to imagine how great the sacrifices were but Tom Mountain looks at those died in Newton in the Second World War in We are their children.
Unfortunately, as Mac Owens writes
The sad reality is that Americans have forgotten how to honor their war heroes and to remember their war dead. ... stories of soldierly courage deserve “to be recorded and read by the next generation. Unsung, the noblest deed will die.”
The posture Americans took toward Memorial Day started to go awry with Vietnam. The press, if not the American people, began to treat soldiers as moral monsters, victims, or both. The “dysfunctional Vietnam vet” became a staple of popular culture. Despite the fact that atrocities were rare, My Lai came to symbolize the entire war. ...The honorable and heroic performance of the vast majority of those who served in Vietnam went largely unrecognized.
Abraham Lincoln knew how to honor war heroes in his Gettysburg Address
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth
I'm sad to hear of Hamilton Jordan's death.
I never much liked him when he was chief of staff to President Jimmy Carter, but I was much impressed with his attitude when he was first diagnosed with lymphoma some 22 years ago, followed by bouts with melanoma and prostate cancer.
Hamilton Jordan dies at 63, AP obituary
Hamilton Jordan, the architect of Jimmy Carter's presidency, leaves behind a towering political legacy that may be exceeded by contributions to a field far from the campaign arena: cancer research.
Jordan, who died Tuesday at age 63, made his private medical battles public with the same passion he brought to the Carter White House.
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But he made his main post-White House mark in the world of medicine, as a renowned and animated anti-cancer voice.
With his wife, Dorothy, he founded Camp Sunshine, a summer camp for kids with cancer that has grown to serve more than 700 families a year in Georgia. Largely outside the national spotlight, he lobbied for billions of dollars in federal and state cancer research -- and freely dispensed volumes of advice to all who sought him out, and many whom he sought out.
"There was no better spokesperson for us nationally," said Vicki Riedel, a board member of Camp Sunshine, who first met Jordan in the early 1990s, when her daughter was diagnosed with leukemia.
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Jordan's mantra was embodied in the title of his best-selling 2000 book, "No Such Thing as a Bad Day," autographed copies of which he would hand out to newly diagnosed cancer patients.
The title reflects the optimistic, active approach he considered critical to fighting a deadly disease, he explained in an interview with the Web site WebMD.
"When you have a diagnosis of cancer, or any serious illness, your choices are basically to be passive, and kind of accept whatever is offered you, or to be active and to learn about your disease, and understand your options, and be an active partner with your doctor," Jordan explained. "That's the course I took with all three of my cancers."
Photo: Reuters/Katerina Stoltz
Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic, saved some 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto before she was captured by the Gestapo and tortured. Her legs and feet were broken, but she refused to identify the children or the people who helped her. A guard was bribed, she escaped and returned to work using a different identity.
From the Telegraph obituary
She immediately returned to her work using a new identity. Having retrieved her list of names, she buried it in a jar beneath an apple tree in a friend's garden.
In the end it provided a record of some 2,500 names, and after the war she attempted to keep her promise to reunite the children with their families. Most of the parents, however, had been gassed at Treblinka.
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In later life Irena Sendler recalled the heartbreak of Jewish mothers having to part from their children: "We witnessed terrible scenes. Father agreed, but mother didn't. We sometimes had to leave those unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I'd go back there the next day and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to the death camps."
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Her father was a physician who ran a hospital at the suburb of Otwock, and a number of his patients were impoverished Jews.
Although he died of typhus in 1917, his example was of profound importance to Irena, who later said: "I was taught that if you see a person drowning, you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not."
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In 1965 she became one of the first Righteous Gentiles to be honoured by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. At that time Poland's Communist leaders would not allow her to travel to Israel, and she was unable to collect the award until 1983.
In 2003 she was awarded Poland's highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle; and last year she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, eventually won by Al Gore.
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In 2005 Irena Sendler reflected: "We who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. That term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true – I continue to have qualms of conscience that I did so little. I could have done more. This regret will follow me to my death."
A great legacy indeed.
After the extraordinary reception to the Beloved Professor Delivering His Last Lecture Jeffrey Zaslow teamed up with Randy Pausch to co-write the new book,
"The Last Lecture" (Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow)
Zaslow reports that Pausch is finding more difficult to say goodbye to his family than he did to his colleagues at work.
Zaslow asks "When death is near, how do we show our love?" in A Final Farwell
For many of us, his lecture has become a reminder that our own futures are similarly -- if not as drastically -- brief. His fate is ours, sped up.
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People wrote about how his lecture had inspired them to spend more time with loved ones, to quit pitying themselves, or even to shake off suicidal urges. Terminally ill people said the lecture had persuaded them to embrace their own goodbyes, and as Randy said, "to keep having fun every day I have left, because there's no other way to play it."
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Years ago, Jai had suggested that Randy compile his advice into a book for her and the kids. She wanted to call it "The Manual." Now, in the wake of the lecture, others were also telling Randy that he had a book in him--
"Well, you also need emotional insurance," the minister explained. The premiums for that insurance would be paid for with Randy's time, not his money. The minister suggested that Randy spend hours making videotapes of himself with the kids. Years from now, they will be able to see how easily they touched each other and laughed together.
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Randy also made a point of talking to people who lost parents when they were very young. They told him they found it consoling to learn about how much their mothers and fathers loved them. The more they knew, the more they could still feel that love. To that end, Randy built separate lists of his memories of each child. He also has written down his advice for them, things like: "If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, 'Tell the truth.' If I got three more words, I'd add, 'All the time.' "
The advice he's leaving for Chloe includes this: "When men are romantically interested in you, it's really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do." Chloe, not yet 2 years old, may end up having no memory of her father. "But I want her to grow up knowing," Randy said, "that I was the first man ever to fall in love with her."
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As he later explained it: "I am maintaining my clear-eyed sense of the inevitable. I'm living like I'm dying. But at the same time, I'm very much living like I'm still living."
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And so despite all his goodbyes, he has found solace in the idea that he'll remain a presence. "Kids, more than anything else, need to know their parents love them," he said. "Their parents don't have to be alive for that to happen."
The Last Lecture website.
Cross-posted at Business of Life
"The Medal of Honor is awarded for an act of such courage that no one could rightly be expected to undertake it. Yet those who knew Michael Monsoor were not surprised when he did".
From the remarks of President Bush on awarding a posthumous medal of honor to MIchael Monsoor "for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life and beyond the call of duty". The medal was presented to his parents on behalf of a grateful nation in a ceremony at the White House.
Monsoor was a Navy Seal who on September 29, 2006 made the ultimate sacrifice.
Mike and two teammates had taken position on the outcropping of a rooftop when an insurgent grenade bounced off Mike’s chest and landed on the roof. Mike had a clear chance to escape, but he realized that the other two SEALs did not. In that terrible moment, he had two options — to save himself, or to save his friends. For Mike, this was no choice at all. He threw himself onto the grenade, and absorbed the blast with his body. One of the survivors puts it this way: “Mikey looked death in the face that day and said, ‘You cannot take my brothers. I will go in their stead.’”
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Mike’s life is the way different service members all across the world responded to his death. Army soldiers in Ramadi hosted a memorial service for the valiant man who had fought beside them. Iraqi Army scouts — whom Mike helped train — lowered their flag, and sent it to his parents. Nearly every SEAL on the West Coast turned out for Mike’s funeral in California. As the SEALs filed past the casket, they removed their golden tridents from their uniforms, pressed them onto the walls of the coffin. The procession went on nearly half an hour. And when it was all over, the simple wooden coffin had become a gold-plated memorial to a hero who will never be forgotten.
From the citation
Although only he could have escaped the blast, Petty Officer Monsoor chose instead to protect his teammates. Instantly and without regard for his own safety, he threw himself onto the grenade to absorb the force of the explosion with his body, saving the lives of his two teammates.
By his undaunted courage, fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty in the face of certain death, Petty Officer Monsoor gallantly gave his life for his country, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
A remarkable man, a grateful nation, may his sacrifice never be forgotten and may he rest in peace.
Born with the rare disorder of tyrosinemia which prevents the body from breaking down an amino acid,
Laura Linehan received a new liver when she was only 2. Ten years later, she learned that she had hepatitis C, infected by the blood transfusion during transplant surgery. She needed another liver.
She moved from Melrose, Massachusetts to Jacksonville, Florida where she would have a better chance on the regional waiting list.
I keep telling myself I'm not going to give up," Miss Linehan wrote on her website. "This is my chance to live and that's why I am down in Florida, so that I can have a third chance at life."
A match was found Friday, but she had weakened during the wait. When doctors began operating, they found she would not survive transplant surgery, and she died that evening in the Mayo Clinic. Miss Linehan was 20.
Using the example of her own life, Miss Linehan had tried to raise awareness about the need for more organ donors, and the crucial role expediency plays in transplants. In Miss Linehan's case, her mother said, a day or two sooner might have made a difference.
"She had a job to do, and she finished it a littler earlier," Ann Linehan said. "She set her mind to it and now she's done, her time is through. I just like to think that she's in a better place, and she's no longer suffering, because she suffered terribly."
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"She was the most courageous person I've ever known, read about, or encountered. She was incredibly brave; she was resilient. It seemed as though anything that could go wrong, went wrong, and she would just come back for more. And she was never discouraged."
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"She had a lot of good years," her mother said of her daughter's childhood and youth. "I could not be more proud of her if she was a Harvard graduate than I am with her fight with liver disease. She worked so hard to overcome, she worked so hard to get awareness out there of the need for liver donors. I just want people to know that she was extremely successful. She certainly brought a community together - Melrose will never be the same."
Laura Linehan, at 20, used illness to boost organ donation.
Laura's website is provided by Caring Bridge which offers free personalized websites that support and connect loved ones during critical illness, treatment and recovery.
How Siegfried Woldhek discovered the true faces of Leonardo DaVinci at Ted Talks.
A brilliant piece of detective work by Woldhelk, a portraitist himself.
Killing Fields photographer, Dith Pran, dies at 65 of pancreatic cancer.
The New York Times obit
Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday.
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Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.
He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.
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Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.
In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.
He escaped, and was reunited with his wife and family in San Francisco. In 1980 he became a photographer at the New York Times and six years later became a U.S. citizen beside his wife.
Along with the above photographs, The Times has a wonderful 6 minute multimedia piece called The Last Word: Dith Pran combining clips from the Killing Fields, interviews with Pran and Schanberg and photographs that tells his extraordinary life story.
"I promised myself that if I survived, I wouldn't stop talking about the killing fields..My people are suffering and this is their story.
From the London Telegraph obit
"I am a one-person crusade," he once said. "I must speak for those who did not survive and for those who still suffer… Like one of my heroes, Elie Wiesel, who alerts the world to the horrors of the Jewish holocaust, I try to awaken the world to the holocaust of Cambodia, for all tragedies have universal implications."
In his journal while imprisoned, Pran wrote
The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angka are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive.
He survived and his words, his actions and his photos live on.
Visionary science fiction writer Arthur Clarke has died at 90 in his home in Sri Lanka.
Associated Press obituary by Ravi Nessman
Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.
He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.
Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
New York Times obituary by Gerald Jonas
the formative event of his childhood was his discovery, at age 13 — the year his father died — of a copy of “Astounding Stories of Super-Science,” then the leading American science fiction magazine. He found its mix of boyish adventure and far-out (sometimes bogus) science intoxicating.
While still in school, Mr. Clarke joined the newly formed British Interplanetary Society, a small band of sci-fi enthusiasts who held the controversial view that space travel was not only possible but could be achieved in the not-so-distant future
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All told, he wrote or collaborated on close to 100 books, some of which, like “Childhood’s End,” have been in print continuously. His works have been translated into some 40 languages, and worldwide sales have been estimated at more than $25 million.
In 1962 he suffered a severe attack of poliomyelitis. His apparently complete recovery was marked by a return to top form at his favorite sport, table tennis. But in 1984 he developed post-polio syndrome, a progressive condition characterized by muscle weakness and extreme fatigue. He spent the last years of his life in a wheelchair.
Among his legacies are Clarke’s Three Laws, provocative observations on science, science fiction and society that were published in his “Profiles of the Future” (1962):
¶“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
¶“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
¶“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
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Mr. Clarke’s reputation as a prophet of the space age rests on more than a few accurate predictions. His visions helped bring about the future he longed to see.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit remembers Clarke.
I nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, but Yasser Arafat got it instead. I think it's pretty clear that Clarke would have been a better choice . . . .
The man who shot Antoine de Saint-Expery out of the sky has come forward.
Sainte Exupery was a celebrated French aviator and writer who, a year before his death, wrote the book beloved by millions, Le Petit Prince, "The Little Prince". who so famously said,
Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Saint-Exupery was 44 when he flew for the last time over the Mediterranean until his plane was shot down on July 31, 1944.
His plane was never recovered and considered lost until a French fisherman pulling up his nets
discovered an identity bracelet engraved with the name of Saint-Exupéry's wife, Consuelo, and that of his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock.
Mr Vanrell, a local deep sea diver, then began searching the Marseilles coastline for the remains of the writer's aircraft. In 2000 he discovered pieces of Saint-Exupéry's plane lying on the sea bed 80 metres deep near the Ile de Riou. The plane wreck was formally identified in 2004 as being Saint-Exupéry's by its serial number.
The investigation continued and as it happens, Horst Rippert, the German pilot was still alive.
So when Mr von Gartzen called Mr Rippert he was astounded by his immediate confession. "He replied straight away: 'You can stop searching, it was I who shot down Exupéry'."
Mr Rippert recounted how he had been surprised to see the French pilot's Lightning flying alone and too low in his sector near Toulouse.
"Like me, he was over the sea and flying toward the mainland. I said to myself: 'My boy, if you don't get lost, I'm going to shoot you," said Mr Rippert, who was 25 at the time. "I dived in his direction and I fired, not at the fuselage, but at the wings. I hit him. The plane crashed into the sea. No-one jumped.
"I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn't have fired. Not at him."
The New York Times reports that the archbishop, just after he was kidnapped and while in the trunk of his own car
In the darkness, he managed to pull out his cellphone and call the church, telling officials not to pay a ransom for his release, they said.
“He believed that this money would not be paid for good works and would be used for killing and more evil actions,” the officials said.
The Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was buried Friday, two weeks after he was kidnapped in the troubled northern city of Mosul, two days after he was found dead.
The body was found buried in the ground in Al Intessar, a residential area near the city known as a haven for gangs and criminal activity. Iraqi officials in Mosul said that the church had received a phone call telling them where to find the body, and church officials dug up the body with the help of the local police.
It was not immediately clear how the archbishop died. However, Shlemon Warduni, the auxiliary bishop of Baghdad, ..said that the body showed no sign of gunshot wounds or other violence. He said the archbishop was in precarious health and his kidnapping could have aggravated his condition. He said the kidnappers had called on Wednesday to say that the archbishop was ill and later that he had died.
A morgue official in Mosul also said the body showed no signs of violence and that the archbishop had apparently died from natural causes. The archbishop had suffered from high blood pressure and had a heart condition.
Hundreds of Iraqi Christians mourn archbishop throwing flowers on his wooden coffin while women wailed.
Rahho's body was found a day earlier in Mosul, where his religious community has faced attacks from Sunni Arab extremists and criminal gangs.
Gunmen grabbed Rahho Feb. 29 outside his church after he had finished celebrating a prayer service. His driver and two guards were shot dead in the abduction.
According to police and church officials, the archbishop, who suffered from heart disease and diabetes, died because his captors failed to provide him his regular medications. Initially, Nineveh province police chief Gen. Wathiq Hamdani said he believed Rahho had been shot when kidnapped and died of his injuries.
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Another martyr for the faith and one who will be deeply missed,
Christians remembered Rahho, who was in his 60s, for having continued to give hope to their dwindling numbers. In June, the archbishop's confidant, Father Ragheed Aziz Ganni, was shot dead along with three deacons outside the Church of the Holy Spirit, where Rahho was kidnapped last month. On one occasion, Rahho was accosted by gunmen, but he walked on, daring them to shoot him, said Nabil Kashat, an advisor to the Chaldean Charity Assn.
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He was encouraging Christians to stay in Mosul. He was pushing for tolerance among all factions. His loss is a big loss for all the Christians and Muslims of Mosul. It is a real shock for everyone. The Christians of Mosul will not be in a good position to believe that the city is safe for them," Kashat said.
A woman from Mosul, who identified herself as Rayat, said by phone that Rahho's death was the last straw for her. "After our holy man was killed, I don't want to stay in Mosul. Our good men are gone. When there are holy days, where will we go now?" she said.
I've written Legacy Matters for several years now and I've never seen so many encomiums following a death of a great figure as I have read following the death of William F. Buckley.
The New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin, Sesquipedalian Spark of Right, tells the story of his remarkable life and achievements.
Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964 and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
President George W. Bush said Wednesday that Mr. Buckley “brought conservative thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America’s victory in the Cold War.”
In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan
You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.
“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”
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“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”
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At the age of 50, Mr. Buckley crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his sailboat and became a novelist. Eleven of his novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and beds the Queen of England in the first book.
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Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.
John Tierney on A Giant of Conservatism
Simply Superlative by George Nash focuses on his enormous productivity.
During his nearly 60 years in the public eye, William F. Buckley Jr. published 55 books (both fiction and nonfiction); dozens of book reviews; at least 56 introductions, prefaces, and forewords to other peoples’ books; more than 225 obituary essays; more than 800 editorials, articles, and remarks in National Review; several hundred articles in periodicals other than National Review; and approximately 5,600 newspaper columns. He gave hundreds of lectures around the world, hosted 1,429 separate Firing Line shows, and may well have composed more letters than any American who has ever lived.
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William F. Buckley Jr. was arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century. For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure. He changed minds, he changed lives, and he helped to change the direction of American politics.
But it is the personal memories that are the most telling of his incredible generosity of spirit. Nyron Magnet writes The Unbought Grace of Life
his whole being provided an answer to that ultimate question, How then should we live?
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I saw his character become ever more clearly the unmistakable, irreplaceable Buckley: witty, cultivated, playful, urbane, gracious, brave, zestful, life-affirming, tireless, and gallant—the incarnation of grace. He taught many not only how to think but also how to be.
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He did all this with singular flair and joie de vivre. Moreover, he did it with a welcoming spirit which earned the gratitude of those whose lives he touched.
While at college, David Brooks wrote a smart-aleck parody of WFB's book Overdrive and when Buckley came to the University of Chicago to deliver a lecture, he said
“David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.”
That was the big break of my professional life.
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Buckley’s greatest talent was friendship. The historian George Nash once postulated that he wrote more personal letters than any other American, and that is entirely believable. He showered affection on his friends, and he had an endless stream of them, old and young.
Peggy Noonan writes May We Not Lose His Kind.
Buckley was a one-man refutation of Hollywood's idea of a conservative.... Bill Buckley's persona, as the first famous conservative of the modern media age, said no to all that. Conservatives are brilliant, capacious, full of delight at the world and full of mischief, too. That's what he was. He upended old clichés.
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With the loss of Bill Buckley we are, as a nation, losing not only a great man. When Jackie Onassis died, a friend of mine who knew her called me and said, with such woe, "Oh, we are losing her kind." He meant the elegant, the cultivated, the refined. I thought of this with Bill's passing, that we are losing his kind--people who were deeply, broadly educated in great universities when they taught deeply and broadly, who held deep views of life and the world and art and all the things that make life more delicious and more meaningful.
Larry Perelman, American born son of Russian Jewish refugees when 18 wrote to Buckley to thank him for emboldening Soviet Jews to come to this great nation and asked for the opportunity to express his gratitude by playing for him. Fourteen years later, he had The Last Supper with WFB on the last night of his life
it was just like any other Buckley dinner — i.e., it started with cocktails and ended with cognac.
He knew well that he was the most important person in my life after the two people who had actually given me life. I will cherish hundreds of memories of his boundless acts of generosity, which changed my life forever.
Christina Galbraith, daughter of Evan Galbraith, WFB's best friend, writes in Ember
He was a truly kind man, genuinely caring to anyone in his company. His kindness was not for show. It was discreet. He drove an hour every Sunday to take his house staff to Mass in Spanish; he opened his home to practicing musicians and supported innumerable young scholars.
Ed Capano, former publisher of the National Review, tells of his perfect charity
He practiced what I consider perfect charity: doing things for others that no one knew about. The Vietnam vet blinded in action who wrote to Bill asking if NR came out in Braille. NR didn't so Bill did the next best thing, he helped the vet get some of his eyesight restored by flying him to N.Y. and having a personal friend who happened to be one of the best ophthalmologists in N.Y. examine him and then successfully operate on him. Oh, and the vet married the nurse who took care of him. Or the time at a cover conference when I told him that a house I liked just came on the market and he asked me if I was going to buy it. I sheepishly told him that I couldn't afford the down payment. A few days later his secretary brought me a personal check from Bill for the down payment with a promissory note to pay him back whenever.
"The Sacred Elixir of Life" and Facing Death
Bill was philosophical — or better, religious — about death. His gleaming eyes, when I last saw him, seemed, at times, to look beyond you; it reminded me of what Robert E. Lee said of his own gaze in his last years: “My interest in Time and its concerns is daily fading away, and I am trying to keep my eyes and thoughts fixed on those eternal shores to which I am fast hastening.” Bill knew that he, too, was hastening towards those shores, as, of course, are we all. Not for him the megalomaniac egotism of Stalin, preposterously trying to bargain with the creator he had denied. Bill thought deeply about death; how else could he have achieved such a surpassing mastery of the obituary notice, that form which, in his hands, was not only a minor art, but also a means of understanding the value of life, even though it is lived in the shadow of death?
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Bill taught us much about what Auchincloss called “the sacred elixir of life.” In the last lines of his elegy of his wife, he taught us, too, something about how to die. He spoke then of the condolence he received from “a confirmed nonbeliever,” who for once would have liked to be mistaken, and hoped that, “for you, this is not goodbye, but hasta luego.” Bill said: “No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable.”
Charlie Rose's moving appreciation of William Buckley who talks about growing older and facing death.
A longer Rose tribute here where he realizes, "There is not always a tomorrow."
Andrew Malcolm at the LA Times gives us a private memory of WFB
And, Buckley recounted, instead of the outside scenery, he ended up that night in the dark cockpit watching instead his dying friend in admiration, still excited, still himself, exulting at the world's beauty as he came down slowly for a landing at the end of a long trip.
Then, Buckley looked at me and took a sip of his drink. "I hope at the end," he said, "I come in for my last landing the same way."
And so he did, after a last supper that started with cocktails and ended with cognac, he went to his desk to write and there he was found the next morning, that great generous spirit gone.
Five months after disappearing while flying over the Nevada desert, Steve Fossett was declared dead by a Chicago court.
Dozens of planes and helicopters spent more than a month searching 20,000 square miles of the western Nevada mountains, one of the most remote and uninhabited regions of the US.
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Throughout his life Mr Fosset had set more than 90 aviation records in balloons, fixed-wing aircraft, gliders and airships and 23 sailing records. Some 60 still stand.
On his sixth attempt, in 2002, he became the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon - in one unsuccessful bid he plunged five miles into the sea off Australia.
Three years later made the first solo, non-stop, non-refuelled flight around the globe in the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer.
He also swam the English Channel, completed the Ironman Triathlon and the Iditarod dog sled race and climbed the Matterhorn in Switzerland and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Everest, however, eluded him.
Mr Fossett, who earned his fortune as a financial trader, broke the round-the-world sailing record by six days in 2004 and even set world records for cross-country skiing.
The Telegraph obituary
Steve Fossett, who has been declared dead aged 63, made his fortune on the Chicago futures exchange and embarked on a dogged campaign to break more world records than any other sportsman in history; he set 116 records in hot air balloons, sailing boats, gliders and powered aircraft, getting into numerous scrapes and surviving several brushes with death.
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He was known in Britain for his friendship with Sir Richard Branson, an erstwhile rival balloonist who became a co-sponsor.
Branson once described Fossett as "a loner: half-Forrest Gump, half android" and suggested that he was not so much interested in sport for its own sake as in testing the limits of his own endurance: "If there's an ocean to swim, he'll choose Christmas Day and it must be snowing and, if possible, the only day in the last decade when the channel ices over," Branson observed. "That's Steve for you."
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At some point in his thirties Fossett typed out a list of his lifetime sporting goals. These included swimming the English Channel, climbing the highest mountains on six continents, establishing eight world records in sailing, and flying non-stop around the world in a balloon. Once his business was firmly established he set out to tick items off the list. He achieved them all - and more. He became a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Explorers' Club, and in 2002 won the Gold Medal of the Fédération Aeronautique Internationale.
Roy Scheider conveyed "an accelerated metabolism" in Jaws, Klute, The French Connection and All That Jazz.
Who knew he was a history major that planned on going to law school and served three years in the United States Air Force before he turned to acting?
For several years he suffered from multiple myeloma and died of complications from a staph infection at 75.
At the time of his death, Mr. Scheider was involved in a project to build a film studio in Florence, Italy, for a series about the history of the Renaissance.
Ann Althouse found the video Bye, bye my life good-bye where Scheider plays Joe Gideon in All That Jazz.
How surpassingly strange for his widow and family to have this video so widely available.
Ernie Pyle was a war correspondent who reported the stories of ordinary soldiers in the U.S., Europe, Africa and the Pacific and won a Pulitzer Prize. Beloved by soldiers and generals alike, he was killed instantly by enemy machine gun fire on Okinawa in 1944.
On April 16, the Army's 77th Infantry Division landed on Ie Shima, a small island off Okinawa, to capture an airfield. Although a sideshow to the main battle, it was "warfare in its worst form," photographer Roberts wrote later. "Not one Japanese soldier surrendered, he killed until he was killed."
All these years later, his death photo was discovered.
"It's a striking and painful image, but Ernie Pyle wanted people to see and understand the sacrifices that soldiers had to make, so it's fitting, in a way, that this photo of his own death ... drives home the reality and the finality of that sacrifice," said James E. Tobin, a professor at Miami University of Ohio.
The mother of three didn't know that she had bowel cancer probably for years. Not until she was four months pregnant with her fourth child did she learn that she had cancer, it had spread to her liver and doctors gave her little hope for recovery.
She refused to terminate her pregnancy and delayed her chemotherapy to give her baby the best chance of life.
Mom makes ultimate sacrifice for her new baby
She told her husband: "If I am going to die, my baby is going to live."
Mrs Allard, of St Olaves, near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, spent just two months with her son before losing her fight for life eight days ago.
Her husband Martyn, an oil field technician, yesterday paid tribute to her as the "best wife and mum in the world".
"Lorraine was so brave. I can't begin to describe how brave she was," 34-year-old Mr Allard said.
"She knew all too well she didn't have long to live. So she put little Liam's life before her own."
Immediately after Liam was born, she began chemotherapy but to no avail. Her husband was with her when she died.
On the day Lorraine died, she hadn't eaten for two weeks and couldn't drink.
"I laid beside her and she was gripping my hand quite tight.
"We were like that for about half an hour. I could feel against my chest that her heart was slowing down. She just slipped away after that. It was very peaceful.
"When Liam is old enough, I won't tell him that Lorraine gave her life for him, but I will say she made sure he had a good chance of life.
"She told me she didn't want him to feel bad about it."
A remarkable woman.
Every so often, we get a glimpse of someone who shows us how great and good a human being can be. Sir Edmund Hillary, the beekeeper and the first man to reach the summit of Mt Everest along with his Sherpa guide Norgay Tenzing was such a man. His life is a model of inspiration for accomplishment and humility.
Sir Edmund Hillary, who died late yesterday aged 88, made his name as the first conqueror (with Norgay Tenzing) of Everest; just as impressive, though, was the use he made of his renown over the remainder of his life.
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Hillary developed a deep admiration for the Sherpa people, and through the Himalayan Trust which he established in the 1960s oversaw the building of 25 schools, two hospitals and a dozen medical clinics, as well as bridges and airfields.
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James (now Jan) Morris, who covered the expedition for The Times, wrote of Hillary working in the half-light, "huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous, bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some bright, burly diesel express pounding across America."
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Hillary remained determinedly low-key. "Having paid my respects to the highest mountain in the world," he recalled 46 years later in his autobiography View from the Summit (1999), "I had no choice but to urinate on it." Though he took Tenzing's photograph he did not bother to organise one of himself. And when he met Lowe at Camp VIII on the way down, he delivered the great news in a laconic fashion deemed too shocking for publication at that epoch: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Hillary's death at 88 calling it a "profound loss to New Zealand."
Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In reality, he was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only 'knocked off' Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity.
The legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived. But most of all he was a quintessential Kiwi. He was ours - from his craggy appearance and laconic style to his directness and honesty. All New Zealanders will deeply mourn his passing.
"Sir Ed's 1953 ascent of Mt Everest brought him world-wide fame. Thereafter he set out to support development for the Sherpa people of the Himalayas. His lifetime's humanitarian work there is of huge significance and lasting benefit.
New York Times
Standing atop that pinnacle in 1953 was an experience Sir Hillary would recollect many times in lectures and quiet conversations.
“The whole world around us lay spread out like a giant relief map,” he told one interviewer. “I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.”
"We drew closer together as Tenzing brought in the slack on the rope. I continued cutting a line of steps upwards. Next moment I had moved onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing by space in every direction," Hillary wrote.
"Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense satisfaction we realized with had reached the top of the world."
Before Norgay's death in 1986, Hillary consistently refused to confirm he was first, saying he and the Sherpa had climbed as a team to the top. It was a measure of his personal modesty, and of his commitment to his colleagues.
London Times
From this moment of glory, Hillary’s career opened out into a lifetime of adventure and of widening interest. His own laconic summary of his active life as merely a “constant battle against boredom" gave part of the picture and was typical of his innate modesty and of his dislike of cant.
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Hillary’s achievement was crowned not only by a knighthood and by much public acclaim, by an exceptionally happy marriage to Louise Mary Rose of Auckland. They had a son and two daughters. Lady Hillary was an accomplished violinist and a woman of great vitality and goodness. Her death in 1975 in an aeroplane accident with their younger daughter was a tragedy that hit her husband very hard.
He is survived by his second wife, June Mulgrew, whom he married in 1990, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, a fellow adventurer who died in a passenger plane crash over Antartica.
New Zealand news We will not see his kind again
He died peacefully when his heart gave out.
"He retained his sense of humour right to the end. He was cheerful and joking...I suspect he knew his time was coming to an end," his friend Tom Scott says.
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A practical man, he knew only too well that death was not too far away.
In 2002 he said: "I don't think it particularly frightens me. I have had a long haul...I have had a marvellous life...I have had two wonderful wives...you can't do better than that...I have a very good life, an exciting one, many good adventures."
Army Major Andrew Olmstead, a veteran blogger, was a soldier his entire life, so when ordered to Iraq to teach members of the Iraqi Army, he went; but not before entrusting a just in case post to a friend.
I am leaving this message for you because it appears I must leave sooner than I intended. I would have preferred to say this in person, but since I cannot, let me say it here."
"Only the dead have seen the end of war."
Plato*
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Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven't agreed with them.
Olmstead was killed in an ambush by insurgents.
Godspeed to a brave man who walked the walk and blogged about it.
Many bloggers weigh in with their appreciation for his character and his writings and condolences to his family here.
R.I.P.
"I viewed my mission as one to save lives. I didn't bomb Pearl Harbor.
I didn't start the war. But I was going to finish it."
Paul Tibbets Jr, pilot of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb at Hiroshima, died at his home in Columbus, Ohio at 92.
Gen. Tibbets became a national hero with the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a historical turning point of the last century. He said he had no regrets over the more than 100,000 Japanese killed and wounded at Hiroshima, and made a point of saying he slept easily at night.
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In a public television documentary, "The Men Who Brought the Dawn," that aired on the 50th anniversary of the bombings, Gen. Tibbets said the bomb "saved more lives than we took" because an alternative would have been an invasion of mainland Japan.
"It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die," he said.
If you think that the bombing of Hiroshima was a mistake I urge you to read Charles McCarry, Hiroshima and the Firebombing of Tokyo.
"An artist of impeccable grace and beauty" read the citation for Deborah Kerr's honorary Oscar in 1994 awarded after she was nominated six times as Best Actress, never winning one.
She died at 86 after suffering many years with Parkinson's disease.
Heaven Knows Mr. Allison with Robert Mitchum
London Telegraph obituary
Kerr was the unfadingly ladylike and prototypical English rose whose red-haired, angular beauty and self-possessed femininity distinguished more than 50 films in four decades of cinema.
She made serenity dramatic; and though her poise might be ruffled at critical moments in scenes of passion (most famously exemplified by her encounter on the beach with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity in 1953), her well-bred airs and social graces made her a model of British womanhood in Hollywood.
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......her type of refined sensuality proved refreshingly attractive, since it hinted at hidden desires and forbidden feelings, giving her acting an extra edge and interest.
You can see a clip of the famous kiss on the beach on YouTube.
Ann Althouse quotes from a New York Times piece that has since disappeared in the best summary of all.
She could be virginal, ethereal, gossamer and fragile, or earthy, spicy and suggestive, and sometimes she managed to display all her skills at the same time.
What an amazing, remarkable woman, Countess Andree de Jongh obituary in the London Telegraph.
She founded and organised the Comet Escape Line, the route from Belgium through France to Spain used by hundreds of Allied airmen to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe.
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Dédée de Jongh made more than 30 double crossings and escorted 116 evaders, including more than 80 aircrew. But on the night of January 15 1943 she was sheltering at Urrugne with three RAF evaders when she was betrayed. The house was stormed and she was captured. When interrogated under torture by the Gestapo, in order to save others she admitted being the leader of Le Reseau Comète.
The Gestapo, however, refused to believe that such a young and innocent girl could be in charge of an underground movement whose compass stretched from from Belgium to Spain.
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Dédée de Jongh was sent to Mauthausen and Ravensbruck concentration camps. For two years she lived on a diet of dirty potato and turnip soup, practising her nursing skills and trying to avoid being singled out. Although she survived, she had become gravely ill and undernourished by the time she was released by the advancing Allied armies in April 1945.
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After recovering her health Dédée de Jongh went to Buckingham Palace, in 1946, to receive the George Medal — the highest civilian award for bravery available to a foreigner. After the ceremony the RAF Escaping Society gave a dinner in her honour hosted by Air Chief Marshal Sir Basil Embry. The Americans awarded her the Medal of Freedom and the French appointed her a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. The Belgians appointed her a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold and awarded her the Croix de Guerre with palm. In 1985 she was created a countess by King Baudouin.
Then she went to the Belgian Congo to work in a leper colony and from there to Ethiopia.
Her philosophy was simple.
In 2000 she recalled: "When war was declared I knew what needed to be done. There was no hesitation. We could not stop what we had to do although we knew the cost. Even if it was at the expense of our lives, we had to fight until the last breath."
Brother Thomas Bezanson lived for 25 years a sa monk at Weston Priory in New York where he spent most of his time when not praying making small ceramics - mugs and teapots which the monastery sold to support the monastery.
So talented was he, that In 1985 he moved to become the artist in residence at Mount Saint Benedict, a convent in Erie Pennsylvania where he was the only man among a community of 140 nuns. As he become more skilled in ceramics, using rich glazes and unexpected textures, he attracted the attention of the Pucker Gallery on Newbury St. in Boston and many other collectors. His work is exhibited in more than 80 museums around the world.
Last December, Benzanson was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer.
In a letter he wrote to Pucker when he learned he was dying, Bezanson said, "My thought is simply to help other artists as I have been helped. I am not thinking of recognizing or rewarding successful artists but to give a 'leg-up' to artists in need. I am not thinking specifically of any one medium, although I certainly have a bias towards those working in the art of fire-and-clay, the potter. . . . It is good work in the world to support what is Good, True and Beautiful."
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After spending more than 50 years making pottery that earned him acclaim from museum curators around the world, the Benedictine monk - whose ceramics have sold for as much as $60,000 apiece - wanted to support artists in need.
His wish is becoming a reality.
The Newbury Street gallery that owns the largest collection of Bezanson's work - $15 million worth - is joining with the Boston Foundation, which distributes millions of dollars in grants each year, to use proceeds from the sale of his ceramics to create a fund that would support struggling artists in Boston.
Sale of monk's art will aid city's struggling artists.
A moment of silence
Mime Legend Marcel Marceau Dies at 84
Offstage, he was famously chatty. "Never get a mime talking. He won't stop," he once said.
A French Jew, Marceau escaped deportation to a Nazi death camp during World War II, unlike his father who died in Auschwitz. Marceau worked with the French Resistance to protect Jewish children, and later used the memories of his own life to feed his art.
He gave life to a wide spectrum of characters, from a peevish waiter to a lion tamer to an old woman knitting, and to the best-known Bip.
His biggest inspiration was Charlie Chaplin. In turn, Marceau inspired countless young performers — Michael Jackson borrowed his famous "moonwalk" from a Marceau sketch, "Walking Against the Wind."
From the New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin.
Madeleine L'Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.
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“Why does anybody tell a story?” she once asked, even though she knew the answer.
“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
Terry Mattingly has a lovely tribute to Madeleine L'Engle, entitled Tesser well
The goal, said L’Engle, was to create fiction that was unmistakably Christian, while writing to an audience that included all kinds of believers and unbelievers.
“I have been brought up to believe that the Gospel is to be spread, it is to be shared — not kept for those who already have it,” she said. “Well, ‘Christian novels’ reach Christians. They don’t reach out. . . . I am not a ‘Christian writer.’ I am a writer who is a Christian. I think that you have to be the best writer that you can be. Now, if I am truly a Christian, then that will show in my work.”
I never read her, but so many people love her work like John Podhoretz who writes another lovely appreciation of the woman who lived in the same New York building whom he got to know because the elevator kept breaking down, that I must read at least one of them. Wrinkle in Time I think.
Excerpted from the Wikipedia entry
A shy, clumsy child, she was branded as stupid by some of her teachers. Unable to please them, she retreated into her own world of books and writing. Her parents often disagreed about how to raise her and as a result she went to a number of boarding schools and had many governesses....
She was best known for her Young Adult fiction, particularly the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters. Her works reflect her strong interest in modern science: tesseracts, for example, are featured prominently in A Wrinkle in Time, mitochondrial DNA in A Wind in the Door, organ regeneration in The Arm of the Starfish, and so forth.
In addition to the numerous awards, medals and prizes won by individual books L'Engle wrote, she personally received many honors over the years and received over a dozen honorary degrees from as many colleges and universities, such as Haverford College. Many of these name her as a Doctor of Humane Letters, but she was also made a Doctor of Literature and a Doctor of Sacred Theology, the latter at Berkeley Divinity School in 1984. ...In 2004 she received the National Humanities Medal, but could not attend the ceremony due to poor health.
New York Times obituary by Richard Severo
Jane Wyman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of a victimized deaf woman in the 1948 movie “Johnny Belinda,” played a fierce matriarch in the 1980s television series “Falcon Crest” and was the first wife of President Ronald Reagan, died Monday at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 90.
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Their daughter, Maureen, was born in 1941. She died of cancer in 2001. They adopted Michael in 1945. Another daughter, Christine, died the day after she was born premature, in 1947. The marriage ended in divorce in 1949, and afterward neither Mr. Reagan nor Ms. Wyman spoke publicly at any length about their years together.
But she broke her silence about him after he died in 2004, saying “America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle man.”
A son's farewell to 'a great heart'. Michael Reagan's eulogy for his mother Jane Wyman who died Monday at age 90.
"A lot of people talk about my father," the syndicated radio talk show host said of the late President Ronald Reagan, "but I am who I am today because of my mother. She told me at the age of 10, she built men, not boys."
A Resurrection Mass was held for the devout convert to Catholicism who was interred in a modest wooden casket in a Third Order Dominican habit.
Wyman won an Oscar and Golden Globes and was nominated for two Emmys, but her friend Mary Farrell said her proudest achievement was being named to the Dominican Third Order, a Catholic fellowship of preachers and nuns said to "live in, but are not of the world."
Luciano Pavarotti died, a great voice will sing no more
Associated Press.
Luciano Pavarotti, opera's biggest superstar of the late 20th century, died Thursday. He was 71. He was the son of a singing baker and became the king of the high C's. Pavarotti, who had been diagnosed last year with pancreatic cancer and underwent treatment last month, died at his home in his native Modena ...His wife, Nicoletta, four daughters and sister were among family and friends at his side.
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For serious fans, the unforced beauty and thrilling urgency of Pavarotti's voice made him the ideal interpreter of the Italian lyric repertory, especially in the 1960s and '70s when he first achieved stardom. For millions more, his thrilling performances of standards like "Nessun Dorma" from Puccini's "Turandot" came to represent what opera is all about.
"Nessun Dorma" turned out to be Pavarotti's last aria, sung at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Turin in February 2006.
Thanks to YouTube, you can hear him sing Nessun Dorma
Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe
There were many great tenors active in the second half of the 20th century, but for millions of people Luciano Pavarotti was the main man, the only one. His singing gave more pleasure to more people for a longer period of time than any other classical singer in history
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A New York Times critic once wrote that Mr. Pavarotti's vocal cords were "kissed by God." When television interviewer Pia Lindstrom repeated this remark to him, Mr. Pavarotti replied, "God kissed you all over." The tenor's gregarious personality was as endearing as his voice, and he was a good colleague onstage, always willing to help a younger singer.
New York Post
Like most Italian boys, he had dreams of being a soccer player. When that failed, Pavarotti's parents urged him to find a job. For a short time, he worked as an insurance salesman and teacher.
After taking on singing as a hobby, Pavarotti caught his big break thanks to another Italian opera great, Giuseppe di Stefano, who dropped out of a London performance of "La Boheme" in 1963.
Pavarotti served as a stand-in - and a star, the likes not seen since Enrico Caruso, was born.
Pavarotti was known as the "King of the High C's" for the ease in which he tossed off difficult notes. In fact, it was his ability to hit nine glorious high C's in quick succession that first turned him into an international superstar singing the aria "Ah! Mes amis," in Donizetti's "La Fille du Regiment" at the Metropolitan Opera in 1972.
Rick Moran at American Thinker
His voice - a creamy and powerful instrument that soared majestically when the Maestro used it to interpret opera's most beautiful and difficult arias - has now been stilled forever:
Some critics savaged him for "going commercial." Pavarotti's response to that was simple; if "commercial" means many millions more people see and enjoy opera, give me "commercial everyday.
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Notoriously tempermental, Pavarotti will be remembered for his generosity of spirit rather than his tantrums. His numerous performances for worthy causes through the years (at times appearing with rock and pop stars) are a testament to his dedication to both his art and humanity. There wasn't a nation on earth where he was not instantly recognizable. A truly remarkable fact considering the limited fan base for opera.
Thankfully, his voice will live forever thanks to his recordings. For that, future generations will be grateful when listening to perhaps the most unique song artist the 20th century produced.
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He started out as a game show host, first Jeopardy, then Wheel of Fortune, sold them while retained part of the profits, when on the become even richer through his h shrewd investing and by all accounts and was an all-around great guy.
Pat Sajak on Merv Griffin
No one could make you feel more alive than Merv Griffin.
Tom Shales, TV critic for the Washington Post calls him The Host Who Was Everyone's Guest.
He was fun to have around, and so the news of his death yesterday, at 82, was poignantly dispiriting. Especially considering he was that form of celebrity unique to television: a professional personality, someone whose singing (despite a big-band career in the '40s) was unexceptional, whose dancing was limited to ballrooms at haute blowouts, and whose major talent may have been his prowess at dealmaking behind the scenes.
AP Obituary by Bob Thomas
From his beginning as a $100-a-week San Francisco radio singer, Griffin moved on as vocalist for Freddy Martin's band, sometime film actor in films and TV game and talk show host. His "The Merv Griffin Show" lasted more than 20 years, and Griffin's said his capacity to listen contributed to his success.
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He made Forbes' list of richest Americans several times and started putting money in treasury bonds, stocks and other investments. But he went into real estate and other ventures because "I was never so bored in my life."
"I said, `I'm not going to sit around and clip coupons for the rest of my life,' " he recalled in 1989. "That's when Barron Hilton said, `Merv, do you want to buy the Beverly Hilton?' I couldn't believe it.
New York Times obit by Richard Severo and Edward Wyatt.
With his easy smile and low-key manner, he seemed the eternally jovial Irishman; few of those around him, much less his fans, thought of him as the entrepreneur he was. “I was buying things and nobody knew,” he said. “I never told anybody, because I noticed that when you walk down the street and everybody knows you’re rich, they don’t talk to you.”
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When he was creating “Jeopardy!,” he realized the show needed some music to fill the time while contestants were puzzling out a question. Sitting at a piano, he plunked out a few notes, then a repetitive melody, and within about a half-hour had the show’s familiar theme music. He retained the rights to the song even after selling the shows, and royalties from the ditty “made me a fortune, millions,” he said in 2005.
How much? he was asked. “Probably close to $70-80 million.”
Fling, helper of poor, sick and blind dies at 86
John Fling, who ran a one-man ministry out of a Chevy truck with a cell phone, would deliver hearty meals to others and then fold bologna inside a slice of bread for himself.
His mission — helping the poor, the sick and the blind — carried him from luckless S.C. streets to lavish awards banquets in the nation’s capital.
Through it all, friends said, the son of Georgia sharecroppers gave away what he didn’t need
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“This guy went from early in the morning to late in the evening, seven days a week, for 45 years,” said David Houck, executive director of the Federation Center of the Blind. “When he had to slow down, it was probably the hardest thing he ever had to do.”
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Having lost the sight in one eye during a childhood hunting accident, Fling gave special care to blind people, running errands for them or shuttling them to appointments.
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“He was a very, very simple man,” said company president Michael Love. “The most unselfish man I’ve ever met.”
What a good man. May he rest in peace.
Born to Polish Jews (his mother died in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz), converted to Roman Catholicism as a boy, Lustiger became a leader of the French church, the archbishop of Paris for 24 years and an advisor to Pope John Paul II, died at age 80.
After the German occupation of France, he was sent with his sister to live with a Catholic woman in Orleans. Born Aaron, he changed his name to Jean Marie after converting to Catholicism at age 13, against the wishes of his parents. He always insisted he remained a Jew.
“To say that I am no longer a Jew is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers. I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.”
"Christianity is the fruit of Judaism," he once said.
New York Times obituary
The pope appointed him archbishop of Paris in January 1981, and if the French clergy were surprised, the appointee felt burdened. “For me,” he told an interviewer, “this nomination was as if, all of a sudden, the crucifix began to wear a yellow star.”
In an early interview as archbishop, he said: “I was born Jewish, and so I remain, even if that is unacceptable for many. For me, the vocation of Israel is bringing light to the goyim. That is my hope, and I believe that Christianity is the means for achieving it.”
French President Nicholas Sarkozy said France had "lost a great figure of spiritual, moral, intellectual, and naturally religious life."
Associated Press obituary by Elaine Ganley
Andre Vingt-Trois, archbishop of Paris, said Cardinal Lustiger's "reflections, and his personal history, led him to play an important role in the evolution of relations between Jews and Christians."
A confidante of the late Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Lustiger represented the pontiff at January 2005 commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where his mother died.
"I don't want to return because it is a place of death and destruction," said Cardinal Lustiger, who had previously visited the camp in 1983. "If I am going, it is because the pope asked me."
Cardinal Lustiger never publicly addressed the tragedy of his mother, Gisele. But during France's National Day of Remembrance to commemorate the deportation and death of French Jews during World War II, Cardinal Lustiger, taking part in the reading of names in 1999, came to his mother's.
''Gisele Lustiger,'' he intoned, then added, ''ma maman'' (my mama), before continuing, Catholic World News reported.
''The strength of evil can only be answered with an even greater strength of love,'' Cardinal Lustiger said at a 2005 mass in Lodz, Poland, in memory of the more than 200,000 Jews deported from there to Nazi death camps.
In an appreciation George Wiegel compares two students in the same Poly Sci course at the Sorbonne, one Listiger, the other Pol Pot and wonders how different the world would be if Pol Pot had taken Pascal's Wager.
He continues
To meet Jean-Marie Lustiger was to meet a man of God: He was a wonderful human being—intelligent, caring, funny in a wry way—because he had been transformed by the power of God, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. His great desire was that others might share in the gift that he had been given, the gift of faith. That gift led him to read situations in their true depth, often against the grain of the conventional wisdom. And this was another quality he shared with the late John Paul II—the quality of reading the dynamics of history in depth. Like the man who took a great risk in appointing him archbishop of Paris, Lustiger (who took no less a risk in accepting John Paul’s appointment) understood that the most dynamic force in history over time is neither politics nor economics but rather culture: what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; what men and women are willing to stake their lives on.
And at the heart of culture, Lustiger knew, is cult: the act of worship. Everyone worships; the only question is whether the object of our worship is worthy. Jean-Marie Lustiger lived, led, and died in the conviction that the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus is true worship, worship that can shape a truly liberating humanism. That is why everyone whose life he touched was the richer for the encounter.
Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century is dead at 89.
AP obit
Through more than 50 films, Bergman's vision encompassed all the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, the gentle merriment of glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the island where he spent his last years.
Bergman, who approached difficult subjects such as plague and madness with inventive technique and carefully honed writing, became one of the towering figures of serious filmmaking.
He was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988.
His masterpiece was the Seventh Seal wherein a knight with his squire returns from the Crusades to find his country ravaged by the Plague. To buy time, he challenges Death to a game of chess.
From the Wikipedia synopsis
the Squire (...) treats death as a bitter and hopeless joke. Since we all play chess with death, and since we all must suffer through that hopeless joke, the only question about the game is how long it will last and how well we will play it. To play it well, to live, is to love and not to hate the body and the mortal
Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian
Was Bergman in touch with the European mind of his generation? Perhaps he simply was the mind of his generation. Of the great post-war directors, he was the one who shouldered the burden of moral questions: is there a God? Is there a God who is exists, but is absent? Should we behave as if God exists, if we suspect he doesn't? If he is merely absent for some unknowable millennial span, then how should we interpret this indifference, or this rebuke? And why, finally, does anything exist at all?
Her caretaker nurse thought the little toddler, Claudia Alta Taylor, was a "purty as a lady bird".
“I was a baby and in no position to protest,” Mrs. Johnson said of her nickname.
So Ladybird was how she was known all her life. As a young girl in a one room schoolhouse, as the 21-year-old bride of Lyndon Johnson whose first campaign for Congress she helped finance with a loan from her father against her inheritance and later as a businesswoman using part of her inheritance to buy a KTBC, a small radio station in Austin, Texas.
Her investments were sound. When sold in 2003 (they were in a blind trust when Johnson was President) they reaped about $105 million making Ladybird, the first wife of a president to become a millionaire in her own right.
Dallas News obituary
"Mrs. Johnson is every bit as complex a character as Lyndon Johnson," said her biographer, Jan Jarboe Russell of San Antonio. "Future historians will find her to be a treasure house" once her unedited diaries and tapes are made public.
As both a contrast and a complement to her husband, Mrs. Johnson used the mostly social position of first lady as a meaningful vehicle for change, embracing leadership roles to beautify America, win acceptance of racial equality in her native South and nurture children's early learning through the Head Start program.
"She's really a breakaway first lady ... she's a precursor to feminism," said Ms. Russell, who spent four years on her 1999 book, Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson. "She was a strong and persistent American woman who helped us say goodbye to the '50s."
No one alive at the time can forget that she was in the motorcade when President John Kennedy was shot or the photograph of her standing beside her husband as he took the oath of office.
"I feel like I am suddenly on stage for a part I never rehearsed," she told Texas first lady Nellie Connally at the time.
Aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field, Mrs. Johnson tried to express her feelings. "I said, 'Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, you know we never even wanted to be vice president, and now, dear God, it's come to this.' "
Following the assassination, the country was turbulent with racial unrest, the Vietnam war and convulsive social change, yet Ladybird as First Lady was a soothing presence with her grace and a gentle touch and a far more influential advisor to her husband than we ever knew.
Robert Caro, the biographer of her husband said, "She conducted herself, often in the most difficult circumstances, with a graciousness and dignity and total devotion to her husband that was heroic,"
Her greatest legacy was the beauty she brought to the roadsides and highways of America. Her love of the wildflowers of Texas, her commitment to natural beauty became a national cause for conservation as she championed the Highway Beautification Act.
Washington Post obituary, Champion of Conservation, Loyal Force Behind LBJ, photo by David Kennedy.
She died at 94 at home of natural causes.
New York Times obituary by Enid Nemy
“It has been a wonderful life,” she told Ms. Carpenter in 1992. “I feel like a jug into which wine is poured until it overflows.”
Via Kathryn Jean Lopez, I learned that Bill Pinkney, the last of the original Drifters, died in Florida at 81 yesterday. She also highlights a lovely story about how the famous song by the Drifters, Save the Last Dance for Me which was played at almost school dance when I was a teen-ager.
Brooklyn-born, America's diva, Beverly Sills died in Manhattan at 78 of lung cancer.
Her final performance on YouTube
New York Times obituary
Ms. Sills was America’s idea of a prima donna. Her plain-spoken manner and telegenic vitality made her a genuine celebrity and an invaluable advocate for the fine arts. Her life embodied an archetypal American story of humble origins, years of struggle, family tragedy and artistic triumph.
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During her performing career, with her combination of brilliant singing, ebullience and self-deprecating humor, Ms. Sills demystified opera — and the fine arts in general — in a way that a general public audience responded to. Asked about the ecstatic reception she received when she made a belated debut at La Scala in Milan in 1969, Ms. Sills told the press, “It’s probably because Italians like big women, big bosoms and big backsides.”
Her husband Greenough died last year after a long illness. The first of their children was born deaf, the second so severely retarded he had to be placed in an institution.
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In a conversation with a Times reporter in 2005, reflecting on her challenging life and triumphant career, Ms. Sills said, “Man plans and God laughs.” She added: “I have often said I’ve never considered myself a happy woman. How could I, with all that’s happened to me. But I’m a cheerful woman. Work kept me going.”
VIa RIP Lucky Fluckey by Jules Crittenden, I learned about Rear Admiral Eugene Fluckey, one of the greatest naval heroes of World War II whose daring submarine attacks completely disrupted the entire Japanese shipping system .
It's a terrific story of courage and derring-do that would serve as far better plot for a Hollywood action movie than we usually get, in the words of his Medal of Honor citation "an exceptional feat of brilliant deduction and bold tracking."
The Galloping Ghost of the China Coast
In addition to the Medal of Honor and Navy Crosses (second only to the Medal of Honor), Adm. Fluckey received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit and a host of lesser decorations. His greatest achievement, he often said, was that no one under his command ever received another well-known medal: the Purple Heart.
Rear Adm. Eugene B. Fluckey, who was awarded the Medal of Honor and four Navy Crosses, was among the most highly decorated of any military veterans. (Navy Department)
"He was absolutely confident and absolutely fearless, but fearless with good judgment," McNitt said. "He brought his ship and his people home."
An extraordinary life, an extraordinary man, the sort you want young boys to read all about.
Father Laurence Mancuso, the founding abbot of The Monks of New Skete, who won fame for their sane and loving way of training dogs, died at 72.
New Skete is a contemplative monastic community of men and women living their Easter Orthodox Christian faith while breeding German shepherds, smoking hams and making cheesecakes to support themselves.
The Deacon's Bench has more at Man's best friend loses a friend.
New York Times obit.
I liked this image, imagining the love bond created
At New Skete, when the monks and nuns go about their daily chores, sit for meals or wander through the woods in silent meditation, they usually have their dogs leashed to their belts. So, too, did Father Laurence.
In the Boston Globe, The Rose We Hardly Knew reveals through diaries and letters a far more complex Rose Kennedy.
"Well, I am just an old-fashioned girl," Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy would say when someone offered a cigarette or a drink. "I don't drink and I don't smoke and I have a lot of children."
12 years after her death, Rose Kennedy's recently released diaries, letters, and personal papers reveal a more complex figure than she sometimes styled herself. An educated, ambitious woman, she struggled to maintain a sense of individuality in a culture that frowned upon independent women, in a family that considered everything a team sport, in which the women were expected to suppress their ambitions for the team.
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Rose Kennedy has been the victim of a kind of affectionate type-casting -- the self-effacing spouse, the proud and grieving mother at the center of, but not quite central to, the iconic family scenes. A face in the frame more than a character in her own right.
Turns out there are a lot of things you don't know about Rose you will learn in a slide gallery that accompanies the piece.
"She was an intellectual, she didn't spare the rod, she played through pain, she was precise with money, she was image conscious, she was a woman of faith, she worried about Jack, she found peace later on in life."
The legacy of the openly gay, charismatic, capitalistic, popular right-wing Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn who was murdered five years ago Sunday is examined by Pieter Dorsman in Dutch Martyrs.
When asked in an interview about death Fortuyn emphatically stated that you can influence the way in which you die and that most people more or less die the way they lived. Being shot in broad daylight shortly after another media appearance does indeed seem to reflect the controversies he caused while he was alive. His mother had presaged events almost four decades earlier shortly after JFK’s death by informing the young Pim that he might one day die as tragically as his political hero.
Jack Valenti died at 85, an unforgettable man.
From an Appreciation by Paul Farhi in the Washington Post.
Hollywood would never have cast Jack Valenti in the role he played in real life, which was as the film industry's man in Washington. Valenti was too florid in speech, too grandiose in manner, too much of a wit to fit the cinematic archetype of the conniving Washington fixer and shadowy string-puller.
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Hollywood will sorely miss Valenti's battlefield smarts and insider skills. His most famous creation was the industry's movie-rating system -- a marketing masterstroke that substituted "self-regulation" for the threatened legislative kind
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But Valenti's single greatest professional coup was an obscure one.
It's worth reading the entire thing to appreciate how wired Valenti was and how cleverly he used his juice.
His obituary, A Hollywood Promoter on Both Coasts by Adam Bernstein
With an instinctive showman's flair -- notably his grandiloquent speaking style and access to movie stars -- Valenti became the dominant power broker connecting Capitol Hill and the film colony. Besides his work on the ratings system in the late 1960s, he helped open up world markets for American-made films and secured passage of copyright legislation to protect movies into the digital age, which led to the proliferation of DVDs.
I knew he worked for President Johnson, but I never knew he married Johnson's personal secretary. His grandiloquent prose was often over the top, as when he declaimed before a congressional panel in 1982, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
But I'm charmed by his description of a movie audience as "unknown but enthusiastic companions of a single night."
He lived through horror of the holocaust. He refused to swear allegiance to and then escaped from Communist Romania. When horror came to Virginia Tech, he saw it for the evil it was and sacrificed his life to save his students.
Liviu Librescu, 76, a professor of aerospace and ocean engineering, died holding the door against horror. He saved a classroom of students, giving them time to jump out the window, while he held the door shut with his body until the gunman, Seung-hui Cho, forced it open and shot him dead.
My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Librescu's son, Joe Librescu, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home outside Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping.
Librescu emigrated to Israel, then to the United States where he and his wife enjoyed two decades of peace and prosperity.
The story of his heroic act shot around the world. But he is mourned by those who knew him and those who loved him, from the academic community in Romania where he was recognized with honorary degrees for his academic work, to his friends in Israel, and to his wife and son who, in their grief, must be immensely proud.
Our deep condolences and our salute to a brave hero.
Update. Joe Katzman writes
In the Jewish community, the response to hearing of a loved one's death is "may his memory be a blessing." Prof. Librescu's clearly is, demonstrating what real matryrdom is about - dying not to kill others, but to save them.
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at 84 in New York city, after suffering brain injuries from a fall several weeks ago.
A writer who dealt with metaphysical questions about human existence, Vonnegut was a profound pessimist who published 19 books, most of them a whimsical sort of science fiction and many more short stories and essays, often satirical and darkly funny, of worlds gone mad.
From his NYTimes obituary by Dinitia Smith
The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”
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After the wild success of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut became severely depressed and attempted for the first time to commit suicide.
The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote.
Divorced from his first wife with whom he had three children, he married photographer Jill Krementz and together they adopted a child. When his sister died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train accident, he adopted three of his nephews. From the Wall St Journal
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."
I was affected by two of his books. After reading Cat's Cradle where ice-nine was loosed upon the world by rearranging the crystalline structure of ice causing liquid water to turn to ice and eventually the freezing of the entire world. I never looked at the memorial displays of stacked cannonballs in small New England towns the same way again. The different pattern of one such display lead to the inspiration of ice-nine.
Slaughter-house Nine has a most affecting scene wherein Billy Pilgrim who's become unstuck in time, watches the bombing of Dresden backwards as planes suck up the dangerous bombs to return home where the bombs are carefully disassembled and their ingredients buried in the earth.
I liked this part from the New York Times obituary
To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
Cathy Seipp, a non-smoker, a complete original with an unorthodox sensibility and take on the world, died yesterday after a five year battle with lung cancer, at the age of 49.
As a blogger, she would have been delighted that she was number 1at Technorati in the list of top searches. The sendoff she's received from bloggers is quite extraordinary with hundreds writing posts.
Susan Estrich remembers her special friend in a lovely column and quotes what Cathy herself wrote about lung cancer.
Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, a close friend who was with Cathy at the end, writes how Cathy's kindness and generosity and enormous capacity for friendship through the years was returned by a great outpouring by all her friends, part of team Cathy, who made sure she was never alone, that there was plenty of food and always company for her chemo sessions.
Kathryn Jean Lopez calls her Fearlessly Independent. As editor of the National Review, she put together a symposium of friends and fans for a fond farewell. Some selections:
Charlotte Hays: "lovely in person and wicked in print."
Mickey Kaus: "I liked her for another reason: She was so grouchy! She just wouldn’t take any s**t at all."
Mark Steyn "loved the great brio of her writing...she also communicated a great joy and relish in writing, and you’d be surprised how few writers do that. I also liked the way you never quite knew where the next paragraph would lead."
John O'Sullivan calls her An Unorthodox Talent
If Raymond Chandler had been reincarnated in 1990s L.A. as a girl with a can-do attitude, the result would have been someone like Cathy Seipp
Rob Long, a longtime friend, writes that last Friday at the hospital, he watched Cathy
Cathy methodically rip out the ads from Vogue and Vanity Fair. “I’m not going to be lugging these huge things around,” she said. “Seriously. They make these magazines so heavy. Life is too short.”
Too short doesn’t begin to describe it. I go to her website. I look at her picture. I hit refresh.
These things take a while, I’m told, to sink in.
Cathy, a single mom, devoted to her 17-year-old daughter Maia, was able to see her off to college, and living an independent life. Maia, by all accounts, a precociously mature girl who takes after her mother, must be tremendously heartened by the river of tributes to Cathy, even buoyed by the outpouring of affection and love.
Still, sorrow will mark her in the months and years to come. It was Oscar Wilde of all people who wrote, "Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground,"
On that holy ground, she will learn what Cormac McCarthy wrote
The closest bonds we will ever know are the bonds of grief. The deepest community is one of sorrow.
Technorati Tags: Cathy Seipp
As of 7:45am this morning she is still breathing and pulsing but is passing peacefully.”
— Maia Lazar, her daughter on Cathy's blog.
Almost 600 comments and counting. If you read her and loved her writing as I did, please add your own
Sissy calls it a Blogospheric Irish Wake for a beloved free spirit and, stopped short by the news of Cathy's impending death, spent the day reading tributes "which were like a river at flood tide".
I wrote about her in The Upside of Cancer in 2005. The upside?
One is that you can put the fear of God into people with hardly any effort at all,
and The other advantage is people reveal themselves to you as they really are – it’s almost like a solution for invisible ink.
I met her only once at the Pajamas Media inaugural in NYC. She was small, thin, blond, with a glass of wine, greeting one blogger journalist after another with warm smiles and big hugs and still kind and welcoming to me, who didn't make the first cut, but was just another groovy blogger
Mary Madigan quotes from her Normblog profile
Norm: What would you call your autobiography?
Cathy: For many years as a journalist who spent a lot of time interviewing people, I imagined writing a book or column called What About ME and MY Feelings?!?. But now that I have a blog, that's handled.
Norm: What would be your most important piece of advice about life?
Cathy: I've always been a big believer in the importance of kicking your own ass. That is, forcing yourself to do what you don't necessarily feel like doing at the time.
She wore discount and offended fashion editors in the "bitch pits" on both coasts, called a young women a "girl" thereby shocking the panelists and audience at a Times Book Festival, thought that health insurance should be unbundled from employment so people could take responsibility for themselves as she herself did with the government providing only a safety net, pointed out that Mean Old Republicans Care, skewered the media for its self-important pompous moments, wondered why in California child molesters and sex offenders were a protected class , pricked the Hip Hypocrites who claim to support free speech unless they disagree with it, defended C.S. Lewis against those who called Narnia, sexist, racist and intolerant, all while battling lung cancer and she never smoked!
Life's not fair and she will be missed. The only comfort is the imminence of her arrival at the pearly gates will be heralded by the ululation by all the bloggers acutely conscious of her last moments on this side, her transitus, her passing over.
Technorati Tags: Cathy Seipp
Operation Mincemeat, a covert counter-intelligence operation of the British government during the Second World War, began with the Lt. Cmdr Ewen Montague's idea to plant secret documents on a dead man and have the corpse discovered by the Germans.
"Mincemeat Swallowed Whole" said the cable to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The Allies then went on to capture Sicily. Montague was awarded the Military Order of the British Empire and went on to write about the operation in his book, The Man Who Never Was.
The dead man family's gave permission to use his body as a ruse on the condition that the man's identity never be revealed.
The whole story is at Damn Interesting, called Mincemeat and the imaginary man
Just two months after his father shot his mother to death and then killed himself, Ernest Gallo got a wine recipe from the public library and took $5900 to begin making and selling wine for 50 cents a gallon.
Little did he know that the E&J Gallo Winery would become an empire selling 75 million cases of wine and changing the way ordinary Americans drank wine. Nor did he imagine that drinking his own wine help him live until age 97, or that he would become immensely wealthy and die peacefully surrounded by his family.
"My father died knowing that he had lived life to its fullest," his son said in a statement.
AP
Ernest Gallo, the marketing genius who parlayed $5,900 and a wine recipe from the Modesto Public Library into the world's largest winemaking empire, died Tuesday at his home in Modesto. He was 97.
"He passed away peacefully this afternoon surrounded by his family," said Susan Hensley, vice president of public relations for E.& J. Gallo Winery.
LA Times
"No one worked harder to build the base of American wine drinkers that we have today," Joseph Ciatti, owner of the nation's largest grape and bulk wine broker, said Tuesday. "Ernest made quality wine for the masses at a good price."
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When the Gallo brothers started the business, the joke was that Ernest's goal was to sell more wine than Julio could make, and Julio's was to make more wine than Ernest could sell.
Washington Post
If some Americans were uncertain about placing a bottle of wine on their table or of opening one at their parties, Mr. Gallo allayed their fears and stimulated their desires with his advertising, using billboards and later television. From 1948 to 1955, Gallo sales grew almost fourfold.
The brothers' winery, which began with a staff of three -- Mr. Gallo, his wife, Amelia, and his brother -- grew to have more than 4,600 employees and a presence in more than 90 countries
He wrote his family that he had the best job in the world - transporting wounded marines and that's what 25-year-old Jared Landaker was doing when his CH-46 was hit by a surface to air missile in Iraq.
Blackfive tells the story of The Last Flight of Lieutenant Landaker
Chief Warrant Officer Frank Kovacs writes about one of the most emotional moments of his life.
On board, 0600: "Good morning folks this is the Captain. ...This morning it is my sad pleasure to announce that 1st LT Jared Landaker USMC will be flying with us to his Big Bear home in Southern California . Jared lost his life over the sky's of Iraq earlier this month and today we have the honor of returning him home along with his Mother, Father, Brother and uncles.
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On roll out, I notice red lights, emergency vehicles everywhere. We are being escorted directly to our gate, no waiting anywhere, not even a pause. Out the left window, a dozen Marines in full dress blues. Highway Patrol, Police, Fire crews all in full dress with lights on. A true class act by everyone, down to a person from coast to coast. Way to go United Airlines for doing the little things RIGHT, because they are the big things; Air Traffic Control for getting the message, to all law enforcement for your display of brotherhood.
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I have finally seen the silent majority. It is deep within us all. Black, Brown, White, Yellow, Red, Purple, we are all children, parents, brothers, sisters, etc. We are an American family.
R.I. P. with our grateful thanks to Lt. Landaker.
The New York Times, Historian of Power
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian whose more than 20 books shaped discussions for two generations about America’s past and who himself was a provocative, unabashedly liberal partisan, most notably in serving in the Kennedy White House, died last night in Manhattan. He was 89.
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The notes he took for President John F. Kennedy to use in writing his own history, became, after the president’s assassination, grist for Mr. Schlesinger’s own “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House,” winner of both the Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966.
Mr. Schlesinger wore a trademark dotted bowtie, showed an acid wit and had a magnificent bounce to his step. Between marathons of writing as much as 5,000 words a day, he was a fixture at Georgetown salons when Washington was clubbier and more elitist, a lifelong aficionado of perfectly-blended martinis and a man about New York, whether at Truman Capote’s famous parties or escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies.
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History and its telling, quite literally, ran in Mr. Schlesinger’s blood. One of his reputed ancestors was George Bancroft, who over 40 years starting in 1834 wrote the monumental 12-volume “History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent.” His father, Arthur M. Schlesinger, was an immensely influential historian who led the way in making social history a genuine discipline.
The Washington Post, Kennedy Insider
Schlesinger was among the most famous historians of his time, and was widely respected as learned and readable, with a panoramic vision of American culture and politics. He received a National Book Award for "Robert Kennedy and His Times" and both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for "A Thousand Days," his memoir/chronicle of President Kennedy's administration. He also won a Pulitzer, in 1946, for "The Age of Jackson," his landmark chronicle of Andrew Jackson's administration.
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With his bow ties and horn-rimmed glasses, Schlesinger seemed the very image of a reserved, tweedy scholar. But he was an assured member of the so-called Eastern elite, friendly with everyone from Mary McCarthy to Katherine Graham and enough of a sport to swim fully clothed in the pool of then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
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Liberals were wary of Kennedy, but Schlesinger, tired of Stevenson's dreamy detachment, was drawn to Kennedy's "cool, measured, intelligent concern." Over time, he came to embody Schlesinger's ideal for a head of state: charismatic but not dogmatic; progressive yet practical; a realist, he once observed, brilliantly disguised as a romantic.
To say that our lives are immeasurably enriched by people we don't know is to say what's not obvious but clearly true when we think about it. Everything we eat or use or read was first an idea in someone's mind and that someone than worked hard, alone or with others, to bring it to us.
On Thursday, Robert Adler, inventor of the TV remote, died at 93.
He worked for six decades at Zenith and won an Emmy in 1997 for his invention. He never stopped thinking about new advances - his most recent patent application was just published Feb 1.
Hit the mute button for a moment of silence.
Update. Here's an appreciation in The Washington Post, The Inventor Who Deserves a Sitting Ovation by Paul Farhi.
Robert Adler, a prolific inventor, received more than 180 U.S. patents during a lifetime of dreaming and tinkering. But only one of his creations revolutionized an industry, changed the face of modern life
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As the columnist Ellen Goodman once noted, the remote control had to have been invented by men because there is nothing more male than the concepts "remote" and "control."
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As triumphant and pervasive as his vision was, Adler's mission was incomplete. If only he had invented a way to find the darn thing.
"The Italians are very unmusical. If I go to a Protestant church in London or Amsterdam or listen to a black choir, I hear four-part harmony. Italians could never do that. In Italy we all have to sing the melody because we cannot harmonise."
That is a remark of Gian Carlo Menotti who died yesterday in Monaco at 97.
His next opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, was the first to be written specifically for television in America.
It was shown by NBC on Christmas Eve 1951 — the Night Visitors are the Magi —and became an annual seasonal favourite. He wrote it with the stage always in mind. "On television you're lucky if they ever repeat anything. Writing an opera is a big effort and to give it away for one performance is stupid."
Amahl, he boasted: "introduced so many people to music. I get hundreds of letters about it to this day."
According the International Herald Tribune, Menotti died peacefully, in his son's arms.
Even though I often disagreed with her politics, no one was a funnier political writer than Molly Ivins. I had the good fortune of living in the same house at Smith as Molly and many were the late nights when I and many other girls gathered in a single bedroom arguing, talking and laughing with Molly.
Molly Ivins dies of breast cancer at 62
More than 400 newspapers subscribed to her nationally syndicated column, which combined strong liberal views and populist-toned humor. Ivins' illness did not seem to hurt her ability to deliver biting one-liners.
"I'm sorry to say (cancer) can kill you but it doesn't make you a better person," she said in an interview.
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Born Mary Tyler Ivins, the California native grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University's journalism school. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.
Boston Globe
She described herself as "a left-wing, aging-Bohemian journalist, who never made a shrewd career move, never dressed for success, never got married, and isn't even a lesbian, which at least would be interesting.
New York Times
“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”
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Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was “reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its Legislature was “reporter heaven.” When the Legislature is set to convene, she warned her readers, “every village is about to lose its idiot.”
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While she drew important writing assignments, like covering the Son of Sam killings and Elvis Presley’s death, she sensed she did not fit in and complained that Times editors drained the life from her prose. “Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she later wrote. “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.”
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Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”
From a tribute by Anthony Zurcher
For me, Molly's greatest words of wisdom came with three children's books she gave my son when he was born. In her inimitable way, she captured the spirit of each in one-sentence inscriptions. In "Alice in Wonderland," she offered, "Here's to six impossible things before breakfast." For "The Wind in the Willows," it was, "May you have Toad's zest for life." And in "The Little Prince," she wrote, "May your heart always see clearly."
So worried was the KGB about Catholic opposition to communism, they tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II, corrupted many of the Polish clergy into collaboration with the secret police, they also deliberately tried to smear the Vatican by portraying Pope Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer.
Ion Michai Pacepa who was there before he became the highest ranking intelligence office to defect to the West, tells the amazing story never before told how the Kremlin decided to undermine the moral authority of the Church by attacking a dead man who could not defend himself.
Moscow's Assault on the Vatican - The KGB made corrupting the Church a priority.
They pilfered documents from the Vatican archives that formed the basis for a play by an unknown playwright called The Deputy that caused a sensation around the world. I remember being shocked at the implication that the Pope hated the Jews and was Hitler's Pope. Today, that's what most people think.
Today, many people who have never heard of The Deputy are sincerely convinced that Pius XII was a cold and evil man who hated the Jews and helped Hitler do away with them. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov, the unparalleled master of Soviet deception, used to tell me, people are more ready to believe smut than holiness.
Turns out the play was all based on lies.
A few years later, Pope John Paul II started the process of sanctifying Pius XII, and witnesses from all over the world have compellingly proved that Pius XII was an enemy, not a friend, of Hitler. Israel Zoller, the chief rabbi of Rome between 1943-44, when Hitler took over that city, devoted an entire chapter of his memoirs to praising the leadership of Pius XII. “The Holy Father sent by hand a letter to the bishops instructing them to lift the enclosure from convents and monasteries, so that they could become refuges for the Jews. I know of one convent where the Sisters slept in the basement, giving up their beds to Jewish refugees.”
"For most people, dying is a milestone. For Buchwald, it was fresh material."
Art Buchwald's Moveable Feast. From Paris to D.C. He lived by his wit.
Washington Post obit by Patricia Sullivan
Buchwald, an owlish, cigar-chomping extrovert whose column won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982, teased death for the past year, after kidney and vascular problems forced doctors to amputate one of his legs just below the knee. Refusing dialysis, in February he entered the Washington Home and Community Hospices, which he described as "a place where you go when you want to go."
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"I just don't want to die the same day Castro dies," Buchwald told his friends, Bradlee said.
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"I have no idea where I'm going, but here's the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?" he wrote in one of his columns.
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Buchwald reveled in organizing his last hurrah. He called gossip columnists and radio talk show hosts to declare, "I'm still alive!" He talked on national television about planning his funeral, covering his bets by inviting ministers of different denominations.
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In December, he told admirers at Wesley United Methodist Church in the District that he did not want to be remembered as dying after a long illness. "I want to die at 95 playing tennis against Agassi -- because he couldn't handle my serve," he told the crowd.
Apart from being funny, although after 30 years of rereading his famous Thanksgiving column, I am finally tired of it, I most admired the jauntiness of his farewell tour, in and out of hospice, ending at his most beloved Martha's Vineyard.
He died, dubbed Secret Santa, known for his generosity.
Larry Stewart Secret Santa dead at 58
Mr. Stewart, who spent 26 years giving a total $1.3 million, gained international attention in November when he revealed himself as Secret Santa. He was diagnosed in April with cancer and said he wanted to use his celebrity to inspire other people to take random kindness seriously.
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"That's what we're here for," Mr. Stewart said in a November interview, "to help other people out."
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Mr. Stewart said he offered the simple gifts of cash every year because it was something people didn't have to "beg for, get in line for, or apply for."
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind, Henri Frederik Amiel.
The ramen noodle, a dish of "effortless purity" that attains a "state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water" and satisfies more than 100 million people every day was invented by a single man who died last week at 96 in Japan.
Mr. Noodle is appreciated in the New York Times.
Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything.
His Times obituary is here
Momofuku Ando, who — to the delight of dormitory students and other kitchen-resistant customers worldwide — invented those small packets of preflavored dried noodles that require just a three-minute boil, died Friday at a hospital in Osaka, Japan. Mr. Ando, the founder of the Nissin Food Products Company, was 96.
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In July 2005, the company vacuum-packed portions of instant noodles so that a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi, could have them on the space shuttle Discovery. Mr. Ando said at the time, “I’ve realized my dream that noodles can go into space.”
Update: There's an unofficial ramen website here whose founder Matt Fischer says,
Instant Ramen is more than a food for cash-strapped college students (although thats where many of us “picked up the habit”). My neighbor’s health-conscious (and pregnant) wife has gone back to ramen as a comfort food. I offer my final proof of the widespread consumption of ramen, with this data from the Wikipedia: an estimated 70 Billion servings were sold in 2004. That’s enough ramen for about 11 servings per person per year! So, when you consider that ramen is just a simple food or a minor invention, think of what other things in the world have grown from 1 to 70,000,000 servings in the past 49 years.
From the Wall St Journal,
History dealt him a weak hand; he played it well.
Perhaps President Ford's greatest achievement was in demonstrating to a nation angry and dispirited over Watergate and Vietnam that its political system was resilient and the Office of the Presidency still worthy of respect. In that sense his Presidency was a triumph of Ford's personal character--not the first, or last, time America has been fortunate in the leaders our democracy has produced.
How he wished to be remembered
Mark Updegrove interviewed Ford in 2004 for his book "Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House,
" I asked him how he wished to be remembered. "That's easy, Mark," was his quick reply. "I was a healer and a builder. And if I am remembered that way, I would be most grateful."
The healing Ford offered in the form of the presidential pardon of Richard Nixon and the limited pardon of Vietnam War draft dodgers was acutely unpopular at the time, and the pardon of Nixon almost certainly cost him the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter. But he never doubted then or later that it was the right thing to do. Ford thought that those pardons were the price the divided country -- and ultimately he -- needed to pay in order to put the past behind and move forward.
Mark Steyn
Understanding the enduring damage Vietnam and Watergate would do to the body politic, Ford attempted to lance the boils. He failed, but it was an honorable effort by an honorable man.
Bob Dole, A Profile in Decency
... the right person in the right place at the right time. ...He was a principled partisan...He was never a person to nurse a grudge....In defeat he was gracious....Gerald Ford had never sought the presidency and thus was obligated to no group or individual. His legacy will be that he stopped the national hemorrhaging over Watergate. A man of courage and integrity, he made the tough choice of pardoning Richard Nixon, which helped heal the nation but very likely cost him the 1976 election. He showed his willingness to put the country's interest first.
Ben Stein, A Ford not a Lincoln.
Defeated for election, Ford went peacefully into elder statesman mode, helped his noble wife dignify the fight against alcoholism and addiction, and stood for decades as a figure of grace and humility. Five miles east of the lovely home that Ford lived and died in in the California desert, there is a simple cottage where men and women go to attend meetings to bring peace and sobriety. On one wall there is a list of the people who have been coming frequently, just by first name and last initial. Two of those names are "Gerald and Betty F." Not President. Not Minority Leader. Just "Gerald and Betty F." Just two people trying to spread oil on the troubled waters of human existence. A Ford, not a Lincoln, but what a glorious Michigan-made vehicle of the human spirit
I was one of the few I knew who thought President Ford did the absolutely right thing in pardoning President Nixon. We needed to get over "our long national nightmare" and get on with it, the business of life and living. It was comforting to have a decent man as President, one who didn't seek the office and who was free of the psychological hangups that bedeviled his predecessor and successor.
That he sacrificed his political future to do the right thing is to me his greatest legacy.
James Brown died on Christmas morning at 73, in what Jesse Jackson called "almost a dramatic, poetic moment. He'll be all over the news all over the world."
A.P. obituary, "Godfather of Soul"
He was an innovator, he was an emancipator, he was an originator. Rap music, all that stuff came from James Brown," entertainer Little Richard, a longtime friend of Brown's, told MSNBC. "A great treasure is gone."
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Brown won a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (best R&B recording) and for "Living In America" in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.) He had a brief but memorable role on the big screen as a manic preacher in the 1980's movie "The Blues Brothers."
From the London Times
...as the American critic Dave Marsh put it: “He invented the rhythmic future in which we live today”. The record with which James performed this unlikely feat was called Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag (1965) and what he created was the dance-soul hybrid known as funk.
Authoritatively described by Billboard magazine as black music’s all-time No 1 artist, Brown was a performer of colossal and enduring influence. He will be remembered as a dynamic inspiration to those who followed him and as one of the most important popular music entertainers ever.
The London Telegraph
His energy appeared boundless: Brown often played 350 concerts in a year, soon earning himself the title of "the hardest working man in showbusiness". For his concerts he wrote all his own songs and personally organised all the choreography and costume design — including his own wardrobe of 150 suits and 80 pairs of shoes.
His hair was attended to daily by two hairdressers. He was a strict disciplinarian, fining his dancers or musicians if they underperformed or were incorrectly dressed. Throughout his career Brown had brushes with the law, culminating in a six-year jail sentence in 1988 for assault with intent to kill, drunken driving and other traffic offences.
He had burst into a business conference at a hotel in which he had an office, toting a shotgun and accusing someone of having used his private bathroom. There followed a 100 mph police chase which ended with the police shooting out the tyres of his pick-up truck.
Looks as if the legal troubles will continue after his death. His last wife, backup dancer Tomi Rae Hynie, mother of his 5 year old son, returned to Brown's South Carolina home on Beech Island to find it padlocked. Brown's lawyer said she and the late singer were not legally married and she was locked out of Brown's home for estate legal reasons. When Hynie married Brown in 2001, she was already married to a Texas man, making the Brown marriage null and void. Hynie did get the first marriage annulled later, but she never "remarried" Brown, so before the law, she was single.
Uri Dan, the kind of reporter you don't see anymore, died last week at 71. Eric Fettmann writes about the greatest journalist he has ever seen in Reporting Legend.
... in the course of a journalism career that spanned 55 years, he broke hundreds of exclusive stories. He was an old-fashioned reporter - a whirlwind of energy, a perpetual motion machine who was constantly digging, questioning and probing until he got the story he was after.
He was fearless: He was in West Berlin when the Soviet wall dividing the city was built. He managed to slip across to the communist sector, bribed a Russian soldier to lend him his uniform and paraded around the streets, taking photos, before slipping back to safety.
Uri, it seemed, never slept. He would be up every night till dawn, working the phones and writing his stories and columns in longhand (he never even used a typewriter, let alone a computer). That was one secret of his success. The other was that Uri was genuinely interested in people - famous or not - and what they had to say. Uri was a listener as well as a questioner; people instinctively trusted him and confided in him. He had friends everywhere, in the most far-flung places.
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To the end, Uri remained tireless. Diagnosed with lung cancer, he covered last summer's war in Lebanon from his hospital bed while undergoing intensive chemotherapy
I've set up a new category for particularly fitting deaths, people dying while they were doing what they loved.
Steve Erwin, the Australian conservationist who was fatally pierced by a stingray comes first to mind, so does the Snake king Ali Khan who died from a cobra bite.
Definitely in that category is Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun who died yesterday following a head injury he got while attending a Rolling Stones concert and 60th birthday party for former president Bill Clinton. He was 83.
From USA Today
By the 1960s, Ertegun was nurturing soul stars such as Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack and Wilson Pickett. He helped usher in the invasion of such British rockers as the Rolling Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin, and oversaw an American pop explosion, with acts such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Sonny and Cher, and Bette Midler. And the label is now home to such diverse acts as Missy Elliott, James Blunt, Stone Temple Pilots, Jewel, Death Cab for Cutie and Kid Rock.
Ertegun, who was born in Istanbul in 1923 and was the son of a Turkish diplomat, was a moving force in the founding of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1985 in Cleveland. He was himself inducted two years later, and its main exhibition hall is named for him. He never lost his passion for music. He was still chairman of Atlantic Records when he died.
From an interview he gave to Slate
Slate: What do you want for your legacy?
AE: I'd be happy if people said that I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.
My admiration for Jeane Kirkpatrick grows the more I read about her in tributes that pour after she died in her sleep last week, aged 80.
She was a professor of political science at Georgetown, the first woman to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and was the woman of whom Bill Buckley said, "She ought to be woven into the flag as the 51st star."
I loved this story that Jay Nordlinger tells
My favorite story about her involves Sakharov. Facing a group of visiting American dignitaries, he said, “Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski, which of you is Kirkpatski?” Others gestured to Jeane. He said, “Your name is known in every cell in the Gulag.” The reason was, she had named the names of Soviet political prisoners, on the floor of the U.N.
In the Washington Post obituary by Joe Holley, I learned she had been widowed since 1995 and lost one son last year. Two sons survive her, one a Buddhist monk, Traktung Rinpoche, the other a lawyer in Miami.
The Wall St Journal says her blunt style and strong defense of liberty will be missed.
The mind's eye recalls the televised image in the early 1980s of Ambassador Kirkpatrick, a Democrat then, seated at the U.N. Security Council table and publicly defending U.S. interests against the Soviet Union with an articulate, no-nonsense bluntness that makes Mr. Bolton sound like Little Bo-Peep by comparison. That style--American interests made perfectly clear--will be missed.
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No one ever doubted Jeane Kirkpatrick's will or courage. Among those who most appreciated her determination to speak truth to totalitarian power was the celebrated Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov. Exiled by the Soviet government to Gorky, Sakharov said later how important it was to have a person of Jeane Kirkpatrick's stature publicly identify jailed Soviet dissidents by name.
A liberal hawk, a Democrat turned Republican, she explained why in her 1984 speech to the Republican Convention in San Diego where she coined two phrases still used today, "San Francisco Democrats" and "Blame America First."
A recent article in The New York Times noted that "the foreign policy line that emerged from the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco is a distinct shift from the policies of such [Democratic] presidents as Harry S Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson."
I agree.
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When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.
This is what she had to say about the power of the media
"Some people believe, and I am among them, that the power of the media today constitutes the most significant exercise of unaccountable power in our society. It is unaccountable to anyone, except for those who exercise the power. I believe that the domain of culture is as important as the domain of government or the economy
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It is very important to realize that the electronic media, which provide mass audiences, have made our culture much more manipulable than it ever was in the past. Typically, historically, cultures have been slow to change. Ideas about what's real, what's important, and what causes what, change very slowly in history. They are grounded in the experience of peoples, and respond only to additional, cumulative experiences of peoples. With the rise of electronic media, the possibility of deliberate manipulation of culture has been magnified ten zillion fold."
Other obits and reflections.
I particularly liked this from Michael Novak
Aristotle wrote that the criterion of good moral action is not a principle or a law so much as “the man of practical wisdom”—that is, the person in your environment who habitually makes the wisest and bravest decisions of anyone else you know. Aristotle mentions, in his context, Pericles. In my circle, I always wanted to ask Jeane Kirkpatrick for advice and counsel. I wanted to watch what she did. I guess nowadays they call persons of this type “role models.” But that term doesn’t quite get the whole idea. It misses the interiority of the thing, the inner life, the fount of the wisdom one is seeking. Not a role player but a person who has lived through a lot, learned from it, and has a burning desire to get things right, circumstance by circumstance. That was Jeane.
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Jeane Kirkpatrick was an enormous force for honesty, liberty, candor, straightforwardness, and sheer moral bravery. She was a valiant woman and a gallant soul. She was a thoughtful and gentle colleague; a very warm, generous, and open friend; and a great, brave American heroine.
Update: Reader Dan Diaz points out that Jean Kirkpatrick's son Traktung Rinpoche is not a monk, but a lama. He is married with children
Cartoonist Don Trachte was also expert and ingenious forger as well as a bit of a prankster.
In the process of a bitter divorce action, Trachte duplicated five paintings he owned and hung the real paintings on a sliding track hidden in a secret compartment he built in a trick bookcase which shielded the paintings from "light, dust, grime and mice". He wanted to protect his children's inheritance
But he forgot to tell his children before his death last year in Vermont.
One of the paintings was painted by his friend Norman Rockwell and called "Breaking Home Ties".
It was Trachte's prized possession that he bought for $900 in 1960 and lent generously to a number of national and international exhibitions in the succeeding years, knowing full well it was a duplicate because he had painted it.
Under the terms of the divorce agreement,
the paintings were given to the children, however the parents could hang the paintings in their respective homes. Trachte kept the Rockwell painting and his wife kept the additional seven paintings
At a recent exhibition, one art expert questioned the painting's authenticity, calling it a "third-rate replica" because it didn't match the Saturday Evening Post cover.
it was up to his sons, matching wits with their father, to hunt for a treasure they had to determine existed
Rockewell revelation: Sons' search solves mystery
Yesterday, it was sold at Sotheby's for a record $15.4 million.
More details of this improbable story can be found at The Norman Rockwell Museum
Rose Mattus, co-founder with her husband of Haagan Das ice cream, , died Tuesday, age 90
Her parents were Jewish tailors from Poland who moved first to Englad, then to New York in the early 20s.
From the London Telegraph,
By the 1950s most supermarket ice cream was made with artificial flavouring and non-fat dry milk. The Mattuses saw the potential for a luxury ice cream high in butterfat, but without the usual fillers and stabilisers and containing the minimum amount of air.
In a masterstroke of marketing, Rose and Reuben Mattus pulled the name Häagen-Dazs out of nowhere. They put a map of Denmark on the carton, and an umlaut over the first "a" in Häagen (even though no such device exists in Danish). Reuben Mattus claimed the faux Scandinavian name conveyed an aura of old-world tradition and craftsmanship.
While her husband worried about quality, taste and texture, Rose Mattus was company controller of Häagen-Dazs Inc, the business brain and the product's principal promoter.
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"Our early clients were a motley assortment of oddballs with long hair, fringe tastes, and decidedly eccentric business styles." But once rooted in the subculture, the brand quickly boomed in mainstream markets.
By 1983, when the Pillsbury company bought the brand, Häagen-Dazs had its own shops and was selling more than $100 million worth of ice cream a year. The brand is now part of the Nestlé empire.
The company prospered by selling unashamedly fat-friendly ice cream laden with egg yolk and real cream, as well as such toothsome flavourings as Belgian chocolate, Madagascan vanilla beans and Colombian coffee. In 1992 the Mattus family introduced a lower fat, lower calorie ice cream called Mattus.
Yahoo News
Even though she had diabetes, Rose Mattus was a fan of her product, particularly vanilla, said her daughter Doris Mattus Hurley.
"If it was anywhere in sight, she would sneak it," Hurley told The Record of Bergen County. "My dad was always yelling, 'Rose, get out of the ice cream!' But she lived to be 90, so I guess it didn't do her too much harm."
After a long battle with diabetes, the comic book illustrator Dave Cockrum died Sunday, at 63, wearing Superman pajamas and covered with a Batman blanket. His body, dressed in a Green Lantern shirt, will be cremated.
X-Men Illustrator dies in Superman pajamas.
The 63-year-old overhauled the X-Men comic and helped popularize the relatively obscure Marvel Comics in the 1970s. He helped turn the title into a publishing sensation and major film franchise.
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Many signature characters Cockrum designed and co-created -- such as Storm, Mystique, Nightcrawler and Colossus -- went on to become part of the "X-Men" films starring Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry.
Cockrum received no movie royalties, said family friend Clifford Meth, who organized efforts to help Cockrum and his family during his protracted medical care.
"Dave saw the movie and he cried -- not because he was bitter," Meth said. "He cried because his characters were on screen and they were living."
I presume his wife picked out his last outfit.
Jack Kerouac lived and wrote before my time, still when I finally read Dharma Bums. I was as entranced with the sweetness of the man as I was with his zest for life and search for truth, not to mention his sheer good looks.
Dharma Bums is an autobiographical novel, set in California, following the publication and amazing success of On the Road of which he said, "I wrote the book because we're all going to die."
Here's a video of Jack reading from On the Road.
But the best place to see that sweetness is in Steve Allen's interview of Jack on YouTube
via Boing Boing
Some of my favorite Kerouac quotes.
“All of life is a foreign country.”
“I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.”
Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, estabilished-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.
“Write in recollection and amazement for yourself”
His estate on his death in 1969 was worth $91. By 2004, it was worth an estimated $20 million.
Jack Boulware writes about the unbelievable complexities of his literary estate in The Kerouac Obssession
The legal situation surrounding the Kerouac estate is so mysterious and confusing as to be almost impenetrable. These, however, are the basic facts: When Jack Kerouac died, he left everything to his mother, Gabrielle. When she died, her will left her entire estate, including Jack Kerouac’s literary materials, to Stella Sampas, Jack’s third wife. In 1994, Kerouac’s only daughter, Jan, contended this will was a forgery, and filed an action in Florida, the state in which Gabrielle died, contesting the probate of her grandmother’s will. This is the action that Nicosia has championed, as an heir and literary representative of Jan Kerouac, even after her death.
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Jan met her father for the first time in 1962, when her mother’s efforts to gain child support finally forced Kerouac to take a paternity blood test. (The result was positive.) As a 9-year-old, she nervously accompanied him to the liquor store for a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream sherry, and saved the cork as a reminder that she did indeed have a father.
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Johnny Depp's purchase invoice of Kerouac memorabilia
The Kerouac raincoat, $15,000; suitcase, $10,000; travel bag, $5,000; sweat shirt, $2,000; rain hat, $3,000; tweed coat, $10,000; a letter to fellow road-tripper Neal Cassady, $5,000; and a canceled check to a liquor store, $350.
The total is $50,640, including tax.
The "inventor" and developer of Lexis Nexis, the vast electronic database used by law firms, the news industry and libraries, died November 12.
H. Donald Wilson, 82, died of a heart attack in front of his computer at his home.
From the Washington Post.
"He was essentially a practical visionary," said Paul G. Zurkowski, president of the Information Industry Association from 1969 to 1989. "At the time, the technologies were just emerging and people were focusing on the technology, but Don focused on their application to publishing."
Mr. Wilson started by developing a business plan for an engineer's invention of how to better search text for certain words or phrases. That plan became a company that started LexisNexis, now the world's largest online electronic library of legal opinions, public records, news and business information.
The most important economist of the 20th century, Milton Friedman a man of genius and common sense, died Friday at 94.
He won the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economic Science
Thomas Sowell calls him Freedom Man.
He could express himself at the highest analytical levels to his fellow economists in academic publications and still write popular books such as "Capitalism and Freedom" and "Free to Choose" that could be understood by people who knew nothing about economics. Indeed, his television series, "Free to Choose," was readily understandable even by people who don’t read books.
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As the central figure in the "Chicago School" of economists, and an outstanding teacher, Friedman over the years sent forth into the world--overseas as well as in the U.S.--a stream of economists who influenced the thinking, and in some cases the policies, of countries all around the world. These students, along with his writings, are part of his enduring legacy. His popular writings, speeches and television appearances spread his ideas through successively wider circles of people, who passed these ideas on to others, many of whom may never had known where these ideas originated.
New York Times obituary
The grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward less government and greater reliance on individual responsibility,
Mr. Friedman had made a broader political argument: that you have to have economic freedom to have political freedom.
He attributed his success as a series of accidents: his parents immigrating from Czechoslovakia, a high school geometry teacher, the receipt of a scholarship and his last name beginning with F because that's how he met his wife.
From the Associated Press
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who championed individual freedom, influenced the economic policies of three presidents and befriended world leaders, died Thursday. He was 94.
President Bush said in 2002
He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision _ the vision of a society where men and women are free, free to choose, but where government is not as free to override their decisions. That vision has changed America, and it is changing the world."
Said former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten. He was an intellectual freedom fighter. Never was there a less dismal practitioner of a dismal science."
From the Financial Times
Both his admirers and his detractors have pointed out that his world view was essentially simple: a passionate belief in personal freedom combined with a conviction that free markets were the best way of co-ordinating the activities of dispersed individuals to their mutual enrichment. Where he shone was in his ability to derive interesting and unexpected consequences from simple ideas. As I knew from my postbag, part of his appeal lay in his willingness to come out with home truths which had occurred to many other people who had not dared to utter them. Friedman would then go on, however, to defend these maxims against the massed forces of economic correctness; and in the course of those defences he, almost unintentionally, added to knowledge.
Friedman himself On the Free Market
What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.
The person who buys bread doesn't know whether the wheat from which it was made was grown by a pleader of the Fifth Amendment or a McCarthyite, by person whose skin is black or whose skin is white. The market is an impersonal mechanism that separates economic activities of individual from their personal characteristics. It enables people to cooperate in the economic realm regardless of any differences of opinion or views or attitudes they may have in other areas.
His full biography here.
Many years ago I heard a speech by Isaac Asimov when he spoke about the Manhattan Project, the highly classified, highly secret work to build the first atomic bomb. The Germans, Asimov said, knew that some big project was underway, but they didn't know where.
If they had only thought to ask themselves what were all the best scientists reading, they would have answered, science fiction.
Science fiction, according to science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, is "realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method."
If the Germans then had taken themselves to New York and looked at the subscriber lists of the most popular science fiction pulp magazines like "Astounding", and "Amazing Stories " and "Super Science Stories", they would have found the majority of subscribers coming from two American towns that nobody had ever heard of, Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Los Alamos in New Mexico.
Jack Williamson, born in Arizona Territory before it was admitted as a state, died in New Mexico last week at 98. He was one of the earliest sci fi writers, beginning before the term science fiction was coined and lived to be the "longest-serving" science fiction writer in America.
The London Telegraph has a terrific obituary.
On this Veterans Day, we stop to remember the service and sacrifice of our nation's veterans in all the wars and to express our gratitude.
The President at Arlington National Cemetery today.
On this Veterans Day, we give thanks for the 24 million Americans who strengthen our nation with their example of service and sacrifice. Our veterans are drawn from many generations and from many backgrounds. Some charged across great battlefields. Some fought on the high seas. Some patrolled the open skies. And all contributed to the character and to the greatness of America.
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As we raise our flag and as the bugle sounds taps, we remember that the men and women of America's Armed Forces serve a great cause. They follow in a great tradition, handed down to them by America's veterans. And in public ceremonies and in private prayer, we give thanks for the freedom we enjoy because of their willingness to serve.
From Demosophist at Winds of Change
I'm Sitting Here on Veterans Day which is also the 231st anniversary of the birth of the Marine Corps, after watching Rummy's talk at Kansas State in the Landon Lecture. I'm now watching the Military Channel's documentary on the Battle of Brittain, and I'm wondering why we don't have a similar spirit now? I've been thinking that my mother's generation are hanging around for no other reason than that we haven't "figured it out" yet.
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They're preserving something priceless: a living memory that leapt over my generation. My mother can literally tell me what it was like during those years from 1941 to 1945. It was the defining event of her life, her "coming of age" experience, and it's what made her the kind of person she is. On the one hand it scared her in a way that made her a little less certain that mankind is reliably "good", but on the other it gave her a kind of pragmatic wisdom about what sorts of things are important.
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the coming of age of my generation was conditioned by the "body count", that dishonorable tally that had no purpose but to demoralize, and by a public attitude that saw more honor in draft evasion than service.
From the Boston Globe on the bonds of service, Bonded in Life and Death
They called themselves the Seven, and the name stuck. Even after the war. Even after there were five.
They were Ricky, Jimmy, Howie, Bobby, Bruce, Skip, and Neal. They met at Dedham High School, and they considered themselves brothers. When one joined the Marines and went to Vietnam, the rest followed.
Two of them died in the war in 1967; their worn, white gravestones stand side by side on a windswept hilltop in Brookdale Cemetery. Now, as the four surviving friends approach 60, they say that they want to stick together even after death. They are seeking special permission from town officials to have their ashes scattered on the hilltop near their brothers when the time comes and to share a single stone on the adjacent empty plot.
"My blood family is down the hill, but I want to be right here," said Howie Howe, 57, one of the seven, as he stood on Veterans Hill on a recent Sunday. "Most families you're born into, but we chose our family."
Ed Bradley was one of those people I liked that I thought would always be there until he wasn't. He died Thursday from leukemia that I didn't know he had. I will miss him.
Twenty five years with 60 minutes made him a familiar figure in millions of homes across America.
Some tributes to the trailblazer from CBS News.
President Bush and Laura Bush remembered him for producing "distinctive investigative reports that inspired action and cemented his reputation as one of the most accomplished journalists of our time."
Mike Wallace
Bradley was "a kind, gentle, strong man. A first-rate reporter and a first-rate human being. When he laughed, he laughed whole-heartedly from down deep. He was just an absolutely delightful man."
CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer
Bradley "was simply the coolest person I have ever known. He was a great observer of the American scene with a shrewd eye and a terrific sense of humor. And let me tell you, no one ever put one over on Ed Bradley."
The New York Times obituary
Even many close colleagues had not known that his health had been deteriorating precipitously for several weeks. On the day that last segment was broadcast, he was admitted to Mt. Sinai. He remained there until his death. “This has been a long battle which he fought silently and courageously,” said Charlayne Hunter-Gault of the “News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” who was one of several close friends at Mr. Bradley’s side when he died this morning. “He didn’t want people to know that this was a part of his struggle. He didn’t want people feeling sorry for him. And for a good part of his life, he managed it.”
To generations of television viewers, Mr. Bradley was a sober presence — albeit one who occasionally wore a stud in one ear — whose reporting across four decades ranged from the Vietnam War and Cambodian refugee crisis to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the Oklahoma City bombing (his was the only television interview with Timothy McVeigh). He won 19 Emmy awards, including one for “lifetime achievement” in 2003.
Who knew he was such a good friend to Jimmy Buffett.
“I made the mistake once of letting him get onstage with my band, and he never stopped doing it,” the singer Jimmy Buffett, a friend of Mr. Bradley’s for 30 years who was also with him when he died, said in a telephone interview today.
The Washington Post obituary
Ed Bradley had cool like a vault has money.
R.I.P. Edward Rudolph Bradley, Jr. 1941-2006
When emails home become the archives of your legacy to family, friends and country. Iraq through the eyes of a Marine captain on the front line.
Robert Secher had a passion for history. Until his death in Iraq on Oct. 8, the 33-year-old Marine could recount all the major battles of the Civil War. He studied the Holocaust, in which members of his father's family lost their lives. In recent e-mails home, he said he was reading about Vietnam and the Mexican civil war. But his favorite books were on ancient Rome: he was captivated by the centurions, who commanded from the front and led by example. "He talked about being a soldier since he was 6 years old," his mother, Elke Morris, told NEWSWEEK last week. "He wanted to be tested in battle." Secher signed up for the Marines when he was 17. He served on the Afghan border after the attacks of September 11 and later pressed for a transfer to the front lines in Iraq. He ended up in the insurgents' largest stronghold, Anbar province.
R.I.P. Captain Secher
Dear readers of this blog know that I have a profound respect and deep fondness for Oriana Fallaci.
My Personal Day of Rage for the Pope
Now comes news that the Fallaci, the self-described atheist, has left most of her books and notes to the Pontifical University in Rome.
In one of her final interviews, Fallaci told The Wall Street Journal: "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true."
Benedict was surprised by the gift of the books, which dated back as far as the 17th century and included volumes about the formation of modern-day Italy, American history, philosophy and theology, said Monsignor Rino Fisichella, rector of the Pontifical Lateranense University in Rome.
"The veneration that she had for you, Holy Father, persuaded her to make this donation, which will be known as the Oriana Fallaci Archives," Fisichella said during a ceremony at the university Saturday to announce the gift of the books.
An American expatriate, Rosamond Carr transformed her Rwandan flower shed into a refuge for children, orphaned by genocide.
When the Rwanda genocide began, she was forcibly convinced to leave.
From the Washington Post obituary by Joe Holley
Back in the United States, Mrs. Carr watched the violence on television and determined that she had to help the orphaned and abandoned, some 300,000 in all.
After four months away, she returned to her farm, and at age 82 she converted a flower-drying shed into an orphanage for 40 children. She called it Imbabazi, meaning ``a place where you will receive all the love and care a mother would give."
She embodied that care, running the orphanage for the last dozen years of her life.
Sometime, you discover your life's purpose at a late age.
All that chicken chili, chicken sausage, chicken hotdogs, yes, even chicken nuggets ever eaten were all due to the work of one man, Robert C. Baker, food scientist , who died at 84.
I missed the New York Times obit here when it first came out. Fortunately, the Obituaries Editor of the Times, Robert McDonald, answered readers' questions here and drew my attention to Mr. Baker and his singular contribution to American dining with this quote.
"Robert C. Baker, an agricultural scientist who looked at chickens and envisioned chicken nuggets, not to mention chicken hotdogs, helping transform what is now a $29 billion poultry industry, died on Monday at his home in North Lansing, N.Y. He was 84.
In her time, she was the most famous journalist in the world, interviewing Henry Kissinger, Willy Brandt, the Ayatollah Khomeni and Yasser Arafat.
Francine du Plessix Gray wrote Fallaci combines "the psychological insight of a great novelist and the irreverence of a bratty quiz kid."
She wrote about herself in the preface to Interview with History
I do not feel myself to be, nor will I ever succeed in feeling like, a cold recorder of what I see and hear, On every professional experience I leave shreds of my heart and soul; and I participate in what I see or hear as though the matter concerned me personally and were one on which I ought to take a stand (in fact I always take one, based on a specific moral choice).
A former Resistance Fighter and war correspondent, she lived for years in New York City but, approaching death, she returned to her beloved Italy where she died in Florence of breast cancer at age 76.
Report from the International Herald Tribune
she broke a decade-long, self-imposed silence with a long, brash essay published in Corriere della Sera, Italy's leading newspaper, shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The essay was turned into a book, "The Rage and The Pride," which sold over 1 million copies in Italy and found a large audience elsewhere in Europe
In her next book, The Force of Reason, she wrote that Europe is "on the verge of becoming a dominion of Islam, and that the people of the West have surrendered themselves fecklessly to the "sons of Allah." For that book, she was indicted and faced jail in Italy for the "vilification" of "any religion admitted by the state," in this case Islam.
From an interview in Opinion Journal by Tunku Varadarahan.
"When I was given the news," Ms. Fallaci says of her recent indictment, "I laughed. Bitterly, of course, but I laughed. No amusement, no surprise, because the trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true." An activist judge in Bergamo, in northern Italy, took it upon himself to admit a complaint against Ms. Fallaci that even the local prosecutors would not touch.
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Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." Such words--"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites).
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Ms. Fallaci speaks in a passionate growl: "Europe is no longer Europe, it is 'Eurabia,' a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty." Such words--"invaders," "invasion," "colony," "Eurabia"--are deeply, immensely, Politically Incorrect; and one is tempted to believe that it is her tone, her vocabulary, and not necessarily her substance or basic message, that has attracted the ire of the judge in Bergamo (and has made her so radioactive in the eyes of Europe's cultural elites).
Asked whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, she replied,
"I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger." Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion."
On political correctness which she calls the Modern Inquisition that keeps individuals in fear of expressing what they believe.
"If you are a Westerner and you say that your civilization is superior, the most developed that this planet has ever seen, you go to the stake. But if you are a son of Allah or one of their collaborationists and you say that Islam has always been a superior civilization, a ray of light...nobody touches you. Nobody sues you. Nobody condemns you."
She railed against Moslem aggression which threatened her beloved Europe as Lorenzo Vidino writes
Fallaci has her own interpretation of the massive Islamic immigration that is rapidly changing the face of European cities. She sees it as part of the expansionism that has characterized Islam since its birth. After reminding the reader how Islamic armies have aimed for centuries at the heart of Europe (a part of history that is not taught anymore in Europe, since it would offend the sensitivity of Muslim pupils), reaching France, Poland, and Vienna, she lays out her case, claiming that the current flood of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa is part of a carefully planned strategy. Fallaci uses the words of Muslim leaders to support this thesis.
The "sons of Allah," as Fallaci calls them, do not make a secret of their plans. A Catholic bishop recounted that, during an interfaith meeting in Turkey, a respected Muslim cleric told the crowd: "Thanks to your democratic laws we will invade you. Thanks to our Islamic laws we will conquer you." But what really makes Fallaci's blood boil is the West's inability to even acknowledge this aggression
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Proud to honor itself, young and determined, America is perceived by Fallaci as the only hope for the West.
Childless, she wrote Letter to a Child Never Born, which one reviewer considered to be "one of the finest feminist writings about pregnancy, abortion, and emotional torture."
The great love of her life was the martyred poet and Greek resistance leader Alekos Panagoulis about whom she wrote a novel, A Man, which was hailed in Europe as a masterpiece, garnering many prizes.
UPDATE: The best quote I've read: "The darkness came and yet the darkness claimed her not" from the Belmont Club. The full paragraph
.......a warrior in the fullness of her strength. At the time of her death Oriana Fallaci was facing a suit in Italy for daring to suggest that her country and culture were under threat from radical Islam. In her youth she did not bow to Hitler; and in her old age she hurled defiance at yet another tyranny. The darkness came and yet the darkness claimed her not.
UPDATE 2 Her friend, Michael Leeden writes
Hell of a lady....Hell of a writer...Hell of a woman. I only knew her when she was older, and marked with the deep lines of her long fight against the “alien,” but she was still a vivacious and flirtatious gal who delighted in the flow of her powerful pheremones and very much enjoyed being around men who appreciated her considerable charms. Just look at some of those photos from her younger days. Wow.
a freedom fighter to the core.. She was one of the all-time great nonconformists, she fought tyranny wherever she saw it and she challenged evil, especially in the hands of hypocrites, as soon as she detected its rotten odor. She had a rare mixture of that amazing feminine sixth sense for phonies, and a ruthless objectivity that forced her to recognize positive qualities in even the most evil people, as when she spotted a kind of elegance and brilliance in the Ayatollah Khomeini.
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Orianna’s cause was the pursuit of truth, whatever the political and social consequences. Once considered a fashionable leftists, she positively reveled in her ostracism in later years by her old admirers. She immersed herself in the words of her critics much more than in those of her allies, because she wanted to be able to demolish the criticism.
FROM her last interview, published in The New Yorker
You’ve got to get old, because you have nothing to lose,” she said over lunch that afternoon. “You have this respectability that is given to you, more or less. But you don’t give a damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom. And things that I didn’t used to say before—you know, there is in each of us a form of timidity, of cautiousness—now I open my big mouth. I say, ‘What are you going to do to me? You go fuck yourself—I say what I want.’ ”
From another friend, Robert Spencer
She was one of the most fearless and courageous defenders Western civilization had in these latter days, and the West rewarded her by hounding, persecuting and vilifying her.
I invite you, then, on this day of sadness and loss, to pay tribute to Oriana. There is no way we can make up for what we have lost in her. But the best way we can pay tribute to Oriana is by becoming Oriana. Let there be a hundred new Orianas today, a thousand new passionate and articulate and absolutely unbowed defenders of Western culture and civilization, with a fine contempt for all the many weapons of physical and psychological intimidation that the jihadists and their non-Muslim allies and tools in the Western media and government establishments use to try to silence and discredit us.
I admired this woman so much for her fierce courage, impassioned writing, total integrity and the bright light she gave. I will miss her voice for years to come, in the same way I have missed Michael Kelly these past few years.
If you've ever drunk Australian wine and enjoyed it, you have Len Evans to thank.
When asked what his greatest achievement was, Evans replied, "To make people want to drink wine for the sheer fun of it. To show the enjoyment in wine. You know, wine's a bloody drink. It's just a lovely drink."
Steve Waterson pens a wonderful tribute to his father-in-law, Len Evans in A Man in Full.
One summer evening 15 years ago Len Evans grabbed a good bottle of burgundy and led me out to his veranda for the would-be son-in-law conversation. As the sun fell behind the Hunter Valley's Brokenback range, we got to the part where he gauged my prospects. I was struggling with some banal career decision: one path boring but financially secure, the other much more interesting but relatively poorly paid. Seeking approval, I ventured that the sensible thing might be to go dull and safe. Len thought for a moment, turned to me and asked: "How many lives are you planning to have?"
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Most of the time, the expression "living life to the full" is a platitude. Len turned it into a masterclass, and we were his students. His professional face was that of the wine man, and according to those equipped to judge, he had few rivals in the world for depth of knowledge. Fewer still could match his palate; none could equal his contribution to Australia's wine industry. But to celebrate that expertise alone is to limit him. To my eye, his greatest love was people. His adored wife Trish, his children and grandchildren came first, without question, but I know of no one who took more energetic pleasure in friends and strangers, entertaining them with wine, song, fine food and, above all, laughter.
Via Tim Blair, Len Remembered.
The obituary for the man who put Australian wine on the map
He didn't think that he had captured anything special when he sent in his film to the AP bureau in Guam but the photo published on the front page of newspapers across the land was a sensation and became the most reproduced photograph in history.
Said the editors of US Camera magazine, "In that moment, Rosenthal's camera recorded the soul of a nation."
Other photos from the same roll and the story of the famous one.
Charges that this perfectly composed photograph was faked were disproved when color movies taken at the same time exonerated him.
Joe Rosenthal: Shot Flag-Raising at Iwo Jima
On Feb. 19, 1945, he landed at Iwo Jima several hours after the first wave of Marines had come ashore. Four days later, he and several other cameramen ran into Louis Lowery, a photographer for the Marine publication Leatherneck who had shot the first raising of the flag atop Suribachi. Lowery recommended that they hike to the peak for the view alone.
"The 550-foot climb took us a half-hour," Mr. Rosenthal told The Washington Post in 1945. "We had to sidestep Jap mines and circle the pillboxes the Marines were still clearing out." (The combat continued on Iwo Jima through March, ending with nearly 7,000 Americans and 20,000 Japanese dead.)
In the time it took for Mr. Rosenthal and his companions to scale Suribachi, Marine Corps commanders decided to replace the initial flag with a much larger one that could be viewed from offshore.
"The Marines on top were still looking for the best place to plant the flag when I got there, with my Speed Graphic," Mr. Rosenthal told The Post. "I'm too short to get the full picture, so they waited until I piled up rocks and sandbags" from a pillbox, or bunker, "and shot from the top of the pile. Then they stuck her in, in the face of a breeze. That's all there was."
His father was a pack rat but he left behind an immaculate collection of comic books worth more than the house he died in.
His father had indeed left his family a legacy -- a legacy that he had started to build when he was an eight-year-old boy in Washington. For reasons known only to himself, Davis Crippen soon decided to buy and save every comic book that came out, and he didn't let up for 15 years.
He got his mother to continue the purchases when he headed off for graduate work at the London School of Economics, and didn't stop himself until he was drafted into the army. By the time he was through, Mr. Crippen, who edited technical manuals for a living, had stashed away a gold mine.
Appraised at $2.5 million, the comics are now being auctioned in batches in Dallas.
After the movies and with the popcorn and salad dressing, Paul Newman gets it right.
Paul Newman's idea in the 1980s to start a camp in Connecticut for critically ill children has grown into an international phenomenon with a ninth "Hole in the Wall" camp opening soon. The camps will host thousands of children, for free, well after the 81-year-old actor speaks his last line before a camera.
"If I leave a legacy, it will be the camps," Newman says.
Newman couldn't possibly have imagined such an outcome when he and his pal A.E. Hotchner, stirred up oil and vinegar with canoe paddles in a barn back in 1980.
They wanted to pass out bottles of homemade salad dressing during a round of Christmas caroling. As the pair explains in their book, ``Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good,'' Newman thought of selling the leftover dressing. That idea spawned the now ubiquitous Newman's Own brand of dressings, pasta sauces, popcorn and salsa, which have raised some $200 million for charities.
Announcing plans for the original Hole in the Wall Gang camp in 1986, Newman said it was made possible by salad dressing, ``and the people who buy the damn stuff.'' Newman has remained fuzzy on his inspiration, saying he just woke up with the idea.
Of course, those of us besotted for decades by Paul Newman's blue eyes, think his movies will stand up as a fine legacy themselves.
As will the Paul Newman stories. Here's one I received in the mail from Phoebe Ann.
A Michigan woman and her family were vacationing in a small New England town where Paul Newman and his family often visited.
One Sunday morning, the woman got up early to take a long walk. After a brisk five-mile hike, she decided to treat herself to a double-dip chocolate ice cream cone. She hopped in the car, drove to the center of the village and went straight to the combination bakery/ice cream parlor.
There was only one other patron in the store: Paul Newman, sitting at the counter having a doughnut and coffee. The woman's heart skipped a beat as her eyes made contact with those famous baby-blue eyes. The actor nodded graciously and the star-struck woman smiled demurely.
Pull yourself together! she chides herself. You're a happily married woman with three children; you're forty-five years old, not a teenager! The clerk filled her order and she took the double-dip chocolate ice cream cone in one hand and her change in the other. Then when she went out the door, avoiding even a glance in Paul Newman's direction.
When she reached her car, she realized that she had a handful of change - but her other hand was empty. Where's my ice cream cone? Did I leave it in the store?
Back into the shop she went, expecting to see the cone still in the clerk's hand or in a holder on the counter or something. But no ice cream cone was in sight. With that, she happened to look over at Paul Newman. His face broke into his familiar warm, friendly grin and he said to the woman, "You put it in your purse."
Govindappa Venkataswamy, 1918-2006
With 2.4 million served, the Aravind Eye Care System in India is in a way the McDonald's of cataract surgery: efficient, effective, influential and -- rare for health care in the developing world -- a clear financial success.
It began with one man, Govindappa Venkataswamy, an ophthalmologist who died July 7 at age 87 after a long illness. Dr. V, as he was universally known, created one of the largest eye-care systems in the world, catering largely to the poor in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India. He was inspired, Aravind says, by the assembly-line model of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc -- learned during a visit to Hamburger University in Oak Brook, Ill.
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Its rapid expansion over three decades was not built through government grants, aid-agency donations or bank loans. Instead, Dr. V took the unusual step of asking even poor patients to pay whenever they could, believing the volume of paying business would sustain the rest. Poor people with cataracts in Tamil Nadu can get their sight restored for about $40. If they can't afford that, it's free.
If you know what the Iditarod is, you can credit Susan Butcher.
She died at 51 in a Seattle hospital after a recurrence of leukemia after a recent stem-cell transplant.
Iditarod Legend Dies of Leukemia.
"What she did is brought this race to an audience that had never been aware of it before simply because of her personality," Iditarod spokesman Chas St. George said.
Condolences to her husband and two daughters.
R.I.P.
Raised Lutheran, Pamela Waechter converted to Judaism of her own accord, a few years after marrying Bill Waechter.
A prominent and effective leader in the Jewish community, she was described as calm, balanced, positive, optimistic, a woman who believed in the basic goodness of people.
How ironic that in her death, she's become an American Jewish martyr, dying for and as a representative of her faith, at the hands of a crazed, Muslim loner Naveed Afzal Haq who told a 911 dispatcher : "These are Jews and I'm tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East."
Navad Haq ambushed a 12-year-old girl and pointing a gun to her head, gained entrance through a door locked for security at the Jewish Federation building in Seattle. Once in he shot and seriously wounded 5 Jewish women and killed Pamela Waechter, 58.
One of the women wounded in Friday's shooting -- hit in the arm as she shielded her pregnant belly -- helped bring the crisis to an end by crawling into her office, calling 911, and convincing her assailant to talk to dispatchers, Kerlikowske said.
"She's a hero in my eyes," he said at a news conference.
I never knew that Jewish tradition believes that messianic redemption will enter the world through the good deeds of women converts to Judaism, beginning with Ruth, the ancestor of King David.
Obituary from the Seattle Times
Pamela Waechter was buried yesterday. R.I.P.
In the dizzying, despairing vortex that is the world today, many quote William Butler Yeats, particularly his poem, The Second Coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I love Yeats, but never knew His legacy had the help of angels
Blake believed much of his inspiration came from his lifetime encounters with angels. Born in London in November 1757, young William was only 10 years old when he saw a vision of angels clustered in the branches of a tree near his home. From then on, wherever he went, Blake saw visions from the other world, from angels in a hayfield, to apparitions of monks in Westminster Abbey. He talked with the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary as well as other historical figures.
Attention and respect must be paid to Henry Olivieri, co-inventor of the Philly cheese steak sandwich who died last week at 90.
The Book of Joe does a bang-up job
He led the 9th Parachute Division to take out the coastal batteries ahead of the Normandy invasion on D-Day, losing half his men and winning the British Distinguished Service Order medal.
Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway dead at 92.
Milena Delvalle died on her way to the airport in the connector tunnel from the Mass Pike (1-90) to the Ted Williams tunnel at 11 o'clock at night when four massive concrete ceiling tiles weighing at least 12 tons fell and crashed into the passenger side of the car her husband was driving. He crawled out of the car alive.
Not a person who has used the tunnel, as I have many times, could escape the thought that it could been me.
I am impressed with her husband Angel Del Valle who married her 16 months ago in the same church where her funeral was held. He will be bringing her body to Costa Rica to be buried where her children are.
At the funeral, he said
“I don’t know why I didn’t die in that car. I don’t understand why her, but maybe God has some plan for me.”
He tells her children
“Every day I tell them to be patient. I tell them that I am coming. They are not alone, they have me,” said Del Valle, who said his wife “worked hard” to be able to bring her children to the United States one day.
“I am going to do everything I can to protect them, to give them everything she could not give them,” Del Valle said.
Del Valle hopes "these mistakes" don't happen again and expressed thanks to state officials for their support.
“I hope, at least, that what happened sets an example, so these mistakes don’t happen again. “I am very thankful to the authorities, of the way they are treating us. I feel fine. They are offering us cooperation."
He thanked everyone who expressed concern.
“I am very well, thanks. I am receiving a lot of help. Thanks to all of you
Such a sad death but it could have been much worse. Looked at from one perspective, Milena's death saved untold lives.
Milena's legacy. Other lives saved
Now we know that more than 1100 bolt assemblies that used epoxy and more that 300 other areas in the connector tunnel complex are unreliable. All will have to be reinforced.
"People should not have to drive through the Turnpike tunnels with their fingers crossed"
In Iraq, young men say goodbye to Specialist Ben Slaven, a brother they have come to love.
Through it all, most have kept their composure, but none are prepared for the final roll call.
Farewell
R.I.P.
The Self-portrait of Hananuma Maskichi
Amazingly weird. Via the Utility Fog Blog comes new of the Anthanasius Kircher Society. Chartered to perpetuate the interests of Athanasius Kircher, SJ. which I'm pretty sure means the Society of Jesus, so Anathasius was a Jesuit priest whose interests in the wondrous, the curious, the arcane and the esoteric are being carried today.
When the renowned Japanese sculptor Hananuma Masakichi learned that he was dying of tuberculosis, he vowed to leave behind a life-like portrait of himself for his beloved. He carved his likeness out of wood while studying himself with an adjustable mirror. The hair, fingernails, teeth, and toenails of the sculpture were all pulled from his own body. From the caption to the above postcard:
The statue is composed of over 2000 seperate pieces being hollow with the exception of the feet. The head, thighs, calves, and every member of the anatomy was carved separately and the whole put together. The joints were perfectly made, dovetailed, and glued together — no metal nails, only wooden pegs or pins beings used to fasten where necessary. After putting all the members together and finishing as for as the woodwork was concerned, he painted and lacquered the statue to give it the flesh and blood appareance; The hairs which adorn the figure belong to himself. He used clippings of his head and ears and each and every hair is bored for and put in one by one. The body hairs were actually pulled from his own body and put in exectly the same position as they occupied on himself. The eyes were also made by the artist and are the wonder of the oculist and optical precision.
Grover was an eccentric teacher. Grover is the skeleton everyone loves.
Grover, an anthropologist, gave his skeleton to the Smithsonian on condition that his dogs stayed with him. And they did. Clyde, Krantz, Icky and Yahoo.
Don't miss the delightful piece Using His Cranium by Peter Carlson in the Washington Post.
We are hopelessly entangled and wondrously connected to every person on earth and every person who ever lived through one common ancestor.
Roots of Human Family Tree Are Shallow
Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia - Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He - or she - did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die.
Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth - the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today.
That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There's even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ.
"It's a mathematical certainty that that person existed," said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book "Mapping Human History" traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago.
We're all brothers and sisters.
The first large scale 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero, The Firefighters' Monument at "10 house" can be seen at a wonderful interactive display the New York Times presents.
It's a 56-foot-long bronze bas relief that weighs about 7000 pounds. Martin Rambusch of Rambusch Decorating Company, the firm that designed and fabricated the monument, narrates and describes the work and the monument.
Take back the memorial has more including this quote from Mayor Giuliani at the unveiling.
He later blasted city, state and federal officials for failing to build a memorial at Ground Zero nearly five years after the terrorist attacks… “Forget about the buildings, the office space - that should all come second,” he said. “The focus has to be on the memorial. Get it right. Future generations will respect us for that.”
While politicians continue to dicker over the Ground Zero memorial, firefighters quietly built their own tribute to their 343 fallen brothers. Money was raised by law firm Holland & Knight, which lost one of its partners, volunteer firefighter Glenn Winuk, in the World Trade Center.
Take Back the Memorial is doing yeoman's work in keeping the true aims of a non-political memorial, telling the story of that fateful day at Ground Zero in clear view.
You can sign their online petition or submit your own comments through June 27.
I have been distressed and horrified at the treatment of the bodies of Army Pfc. Thomas Tucker and Pfc Kristian Menchaca. They were found mutilated and booby-trapped.
The sources said the two men had suffered severe trauma. The bodies also had been desecrated and a visual identification was impossible -- part of the reason DNA testing was being conducted to verify their identities.
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Not only were the bodies booby-trapped, but homemade bombs also lined the road leading to the victims, an apparent effort to complicate recovery efforts and target recovery teams, the sources said.
It took troops 12 hours to clear the area of roadside bombs. One of the bombs exploded, but there were no injuries.
Michael Yon in Brave Men and Demons
Our people who fight in these lands face an often savage enemy. How else to describe people who resort to barbarism to assert a claim to power for which their very barbarism declares them unfit? If cutting off a child’s head will get attention for thirty seconds, they’ll do it. If cutting out a child’s intestines and sticking a bomb in her belly to kill her mom or dad will send a message of fear to other moms and dads, they’ll do it.
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there is a huge difference between Coalition forces and the wanton, sociopath terrorist with no vestige of honor, who knows nothing but destruction and has no plan for the future other than the subjugation of others while on the path to some psychotic pathology inured by tribal culture and carcinogenic beliefs that will, if left untouched, leave people living in mud huts and slitting throats of historical enemies for another thousand years, or, if slightly more science — minded, leave them seeking nuclear weapons to reach out and destroy the world.
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Our people who have truly stared into the face of this terrorist demon have seen the ruby glow in its eyes. This is not a myth. This is not a politically contrived caricature, this demon is real. It usually stalks the easy prey — children, women in crowds, families focused on prayer, rescue workers responding to people in need. Some terrorists manage to get our soldiers.
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Let our brave men be remembered with dignity and great honor, for they died in hell while fighting the devil himself.
Neo-neocon calls them barbarians and sadists
As one of her commenters points out, these barbarians have induced suicide bombers to destroy a home for the elderly, a pet market, the clothes market, a candy line and people wearing tennis shorts.
All to induce fear.
R.I. P.Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca and in glory for your bravery and sacrifice.
In Maryland, a special memorial honors those men and women who donate their bodies to science.
Those Who Serve Medicine in Death
It's been five years now, so where is the memorial to the fateful and tragic day asks Debra Burlinggame in Ground Zero.
They came and would not leave, an army of ironworkers and heavy-equipment operators, stopping only when the scent-trained dogs barked out a signal. They cut and moved twisted steel and steaming concrete, clearing an astonishing 1.8 million tons in a continuous convoy of trucks and a 20,000-barge armada. The last steel beam, covered from top to bottom with handwritten prayers and messages of hope from those who worked the site, was hauled away in a solemn site-closing ceremony that left grown men weeping quietly. "The Pile" was cleared in eight-and-a-half months. Only then did they go home, different men. Who will tell their story?
The answer depends on whether we believe we have a stake in a future we will not live to see. Today, a handful of people are considering how the history of 9/11 will be preserved for future generations. Will it be scattered all over the globe, eroded by small museums, cannibalized by private collectors, or simply lost forever?
Thankfully, it's not going to be housed in the lobby of a commercial office building like Mayor Bloomberg suggested, part of the Freedom Center and its exhibits on slavery around the world.
Thankfully, the New York Times editorial last fall that a 9/11 museum is not necessary because "most of us remember that day very clearly" has been ignored.
Thankfully, it will not be part of the Freedom Center with its exhibits on slavery.
The decision lies in one man's hands: New York Gov. George E. Pataki. It is that simple. Advisory councils, stakeholder meetings and a public comment period notwithstanding, if Gov. Pataki agrees with 87% of the respondents in last year's Zogby poll, stating that 9/11 was "the most historic event of their lifetime" that "changed the way Americans live and view the world," then he will step up and mark that history--or answer to those same people.
What Governor Pataki does will either be his Great Legacy or his great shame.
the photo has been removed at the request of the photographer
I've been thinking all weekend about Memorial Day and what it means. I don't know anyone in the military or anyone who's been in Iraq. I'm a step removed from those who've died in wars.
But I sense them. Henry Ward Beecher wrote, "They hover as a cloud of witnesses above this Nation."
I know that I would not, could not, live the life I do had brave men not given their lives to win a Revolution against Great Britain, to preserve a nation and end slavery, to defeat fascism and communism and today against those who would impose a 12th century Caliphate over the world. I am humbled and profoundly grateful.
War is a terrible thing, awesome in its awfulness. You do not have to glorify war to have profound gratitude for those who died fighting. They did it for us. We are the country and the future they were fighting for. We are living the legacies of their lives.
Christopher Hitchens has the last word
"Always think of it: never speak of it." That was the stoic French injunction during the time when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost. This resolution might serve us well at the present time, when we are in midconflict with a hideous foe, and when it is too soon to be thinking of memorials to a war not yet won. This Memorial Day, one might think particularly of those of our fallen who also guarded polling-places, opened schools and clinics, and excavated mass graves. They represent the highest form of the citizen, and every man and woman among them was a volunteer. This plain statement requires no further rhetoric.
Memorial kept by a Korean war veteran, a volunteer who welcomes almost every military plane that lands in Bangor.
Tears, tributes and a simple memorial
As war memorials go, this one is modest to the point of starkness: A white plastic binder, stuffed with hundreds of pages, rests on a wobbly lectern, in a small, unpretentious regional airport terminal.
But for the hundreds of US troops who stream through Bangor International Airport every month, on military flights into and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, the notebook has become an almost sacred object.
It contains the name of every US soldier, sailor, flyer, and Marine killed in the conflicts in the Middle East.
Vicky Armel, 40 years old, a loving wife and mother of two, took a job that put her life on the line.
A police officer and a detective, she was murdered last week in a shootout in Fairfax VA. Her killer was a mentally disturbed teen-ager who had recently been arrested for car-jacking.
Villainous Company reports on her funeral.
And as we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the highway, I couldn't help noticing that the road was lined with cars. And people. Lots of people.
Lines of police officers, EMTs, and firemen standing at attention by their vehicles. That was moving.
But what really astonished me was car after carful of ordinary families who turned out to pay homage to a slain Fairfax County police detective. These people had to have been standing by the side of the road for hours. We were late getting out of the service. Many had flags or homemade signs or stood silently with hands or caps over their hearts.
Some were saluting, at full attention, ramrod straight.
For mile after mile as we drove, literally every overpass we went under was filled with people, and every single one sported a fire truck, often with an American flag hoisted between two cranes. It is a long, long way from Vienna to Warrenton. I have never seen anything like it - as the landscape slowly changed from concrete highways and skyscrapers to rolling green pastures and horse farms, the only constant was the silent embrace of a community that turned out by the thousands to say goodbye to a fallen officer: black, white, brown, professionals, civilians, young and old. It was something I didn't think existed in this jaded world anymore: a sense of community.
Last week, a friend asked me who I thought was the greatest living American. Without a single conscious thought, the words that came out of my mouth said those whose jobs require them to risk their lives for strangers because they let me live the life I enjoy so much.
After reading about the funeral of Vicky Armel, I realize how many people think the same.
