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Nov 25, 2016 17:58:10 GMT -5
Post by BoatBabe on Nov 25, 2016 17:58:10 GMT -5
And Leonard Cohen. Godspeed, My Love:
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Nov 25, 2016 17:59:54 GMT -5
Post by BoatBabe on Nov 25, 2016 17:59:54 GMT -5
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Nov 25, 2016 18:01:33 GMT -5
Post by BoatBabe on Nov 25, 2016 18:01:33 GMT -5
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Post by doctork on Dec 9, 2016 16:06:44 GMT -5
My internet went out abruptly on Wednesday night, which was December 7, 2016 and the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. I had been about to post a remembrance of that event. But better late than never so here I am posting now, and I was definitely thinking about it on Wednesday, since we lived in Honolulu 1962 - 1965 when the attack on Pearl Harbor was a relatively recent event. Now living in Washington the State, of which Gary Lock was the first Asian-American governor in the US, we remember here too. Governor Lock was a boy when he and his family were interned in one of those prison camps during the war years.
Late in 1962 in Honolulu when I was just a sixth grade kid, I was surprised to receive a letter addressed to me from NASA. Earlier that year when John Glenn had made his first space orbit, my 5th grade teacher in Virginia had suggested that we write letters to John Glenn, congratulating him on his bravery and his successful space flight. It took a few months and some US Post Office wizardry, but Mr. Glenn sent me a personally signed letter to thank me for writing. I cherished that letter and certainly never threw it away, but things disappear over many moves and years, so I do not know where the letter is now.
I really cried when I heard the news of his passing. It was not a surprise, as he was 95 years old and his life was one well-lived, contributing greatly to mankind for every single one of those 95 years. No, I cried because they really do not make them like him any more, and that is a shame. We sure could use more heroes like John Glenn.
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Dec 30, 2016 0:48:25 GMT -5
Post by doctork on Dec 30, 2016 0:48:25 GMT -5
I think Debbie Reynolds must have died of a broken heart.
So sad, mother and daughter dying within one day of each other.
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Dec 31, 2016 20:04:22 GMT -5
Post by BoatBabe on Dec 31, 2016 20:04:22 GMT -5
I think Debbie Reynolds must have died of a broken heart. So sad, mother and daughter dying within one day of each other. I think that is beautiful. I wouldn't want to go to my child's funeral either. They are together, and blessedly so. God Speed.
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Oct 3, 2017 8:42:26 GMT -5
Post by doctork on Oct 3, 2017 8:42:26 GMT -5
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Post by doctork on Aug 16, 2018 23:55:18 GMT -5
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Aretha, RIP.
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Post by Jane on Aug 17, 2018 6:23:21 GMT -5
She was Detroit.
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Post by doctork on Nov 11, 2018 15:20:10 GMT -5
November 11, 1918 - the first Armistice Day
Today is the centennial of that event.
It was the War To End All Wars.
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Post by doctork on Feb 5, 2021 2:57:20 GMT -5
Y'all know I watch TCM a lot, and we have gone on most of the TCM cruises, including the most recent one in 2019 (the 2020 cruise having been rescheduled to October 2021) which included Cecily Tyson. I have always thought she was one of the greatest American actresses ever, and a principled woman to boot. She was very impressive in person - so elegant, well-spoken, bearing the aura of such a strong persona.
She was an inspiration to me in my efforts to become a doctor. I took note that female medical students were around 12% of medical students, and African Americans were around 12% of the US population. I could feel what it was like to be "the only one in the room" and not particularly wanted there either, though at least my skin is white even if I am a female. She demonstrated how was crucial it is to maintain one's convictions and speak up when indicated, don't get steamrolled. Her breakout memorable films were "Sounder" in 1972 (she and Paul Winfield were both nominated, first time for two Black nominees in the key leading roles), and then "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" in 1974 on TV - she won an Emmy for that. Those films were when I was pre-med and then starting medical school.
TCM is featuring some of her films for Black History Month and featuring many brief vignettes of her life and career. I get tears in my eyes and cry every single time one of those is shown.
Of course I had ordered her book, published just a couple days before she died I think it is due to be delivered tomorrow.
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Post by doctork on Aug 25, 2021 0:23:22 GMT -5
One less Stone to roll - RIP Charlie Watts. www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/arts/music/charlie-watts-dead.html?smid=url-shareI don't usually "do" stadium concerts, but after all those years, I'd never seen the Rolling Stones, so I bought myself a ticket and went to see them in Seattle on the "No Filter" tour in August 2019. What a great show!! I was conscious of that feeling "Well, this could be the last time..." The Stones are continuing the second portion of their North American "No Filter" tour but it won't be the same without Charlie Watts.
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Post by booklady on Aug 25, 2021 7:50:56 GMT -5
Very nice obit, very interesting. What a solid man he seems to have been. I love his face in the photo on "Between the Buttons." So solidly "there." Thanks for posting the link. I was never a Stones fan, so I knew nothing about him other than his primary job. I love that he sketched every bed in every hotel he ever stayed in.
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Post by booklady on Aug 30, 2021 16:06:46 GMT -5
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Aug 30, 2021 19:46:51 GMT -5
Post by BoatBabe on Aug 30, 2021 19:46:51 GMT -5
Ed Asner. I loved him, after I figured out that he was just a blustery-blowhard boss with a soft inner filling on The Mary Tyler Moore Show when I was in high school.
He played a great cranky old man in a wheelchair a couple years ago on Blue Bloods. Excellent acting!
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Post by booklady on Aug 31, 2021 5:03:33 GMT -5
Yes, BoatBabe. So sorry to see the passing of Ed Asner. He was terrific in the MTMS. Remember the episode where he and Mary thought they might get romantically involved? LOL. Also terrific in Rich Man, Poor Man, and Up. So great in Up.
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Post by doctork on Aug 31, 2021 14:14:51 GMT -5
UP - that's what I remember him for more recently, though memories of The Mary Tyler Moore Show remain too. Plus, his name "Asner" is common is crossword puzzles.
Charlie Watts as a Civil War collector - I NEVER would have thought of that. I wonder why that never showed up as an aside to the Stones' US tours - all that time I lived in Virginia, NC, PA, WV but never once saw a mention even though the Stones toured regularly and generated plenty of news coverage. He could easily have tucked in a visit to Civil War historical sites.
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Post by booklady on Aug 31, 2021 15:56:17 GMT -5
Apparently he did visit the battlefields. From the ACW post: Charlie Watts, the now late drummer for the Rolling Stones was a avid Civil War Collector and relic hunter. He would find time to tour the battlefields whenever he got the chance to come to the States and loved US Civil War history. Who would have thought that? He was once quoted as saying his Civil War Collection and his horses on his farm in England were his most important possessions.This article from 1969 is also linked: www.rayconnolly.co.uk/charlie-watts/Charlie Watts Charlie Watts Posted on July 17, 1969 Evening Standard, July 1969 There are two brands of Rolling Stones: there are the big, bad ones, who sometimes appear to have been created for the specific benefit of the Sunday newspapers; and there are the others. Brian Jones appeared, I suppose, to be the baddest of them all, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richard are cast in the same die. But that image doesn’t fit the new Stone, Mick Taylor, or Bill Wyman or Charlie Watts at all. Bill is a member of the Royal Horticultural Society, has an enormous butterfly collection and is, in effect, a virtual recluse in his Suffolk castle. And Charlie – well, Charlie’s Charlie, the man who commutes to his job as a Rolling Stone on the Southern Region – Lewes to Victoria Station: Charlie, the happy family man (‘although I have my days’), the artist, the jazz fanatic and the obsessional collector. ‘What I like about money,’ says Charlie, in his slow and slightly lugubrious way, ‘is that if I want to buy a pound of peaches I don’t have to buy half a pound. I can have a pound. And that’s nice, isn’t it? I don’t spend a lot really, apart from on things I’m collecting, but it’s just nice to know I can if I want to.’ He is not the most publicity conscious rock and roll star in the world. Rather he is shy and reserved, and it came as a total shock this week when he rang the Rolling Stones’ office and said wasn’t it about time someone interviewed him. ‘He’s never done it before. We can’t think what’s got into him,’ said the Stones’ publicist. ‘Maybe he feels he’s doing his bit for the them, while Mick is away in Australia.’ Charlie and Shirley Watts and their baby Serafina live in what in the thirteenth century was a hunting lodge for the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a higgledy-piggledy smallholding of nine hundred years of different architectural styles, one bit having been added as another was knocked down. At the back there are various barns and a cottage and walled gardens so that it’s rather difficult to tell exactly where the house ends and the outbuildings begin. A couple of friends are living in the cottage part of the house. There are more than forty acres in all, some of it farmed, some of it as pasture for Shirley’s six horses and donkey, and then there’s a very big garden which keeps one man busy full time. It’s an exceptional home, where every day you’re likely to discover something new. If you can imagine a place where a thousand years of English culture and architectural style has all been accumulated on one plot then this is it. Charlie doesn’t drive so Shirley brought him to meet me at the local pub. Alcohol gives him a headache, so he drank tomato juice, chatting with the landlord and me about the Test score. ‘Fancy the Kiwis doing so well,’ he kept saying over and over all day. Back at his home he took me on a guided tour. He’s strangely embarrassed by the whole affair of being interviewed because he doesn’t want to appear flash. ‘I suppose I ought to say that Princess Margaret or someone comes to see me,’ he jokes. ‘I always seem to give the wrong impressions. I don’t want people saying, “See what he’s done with his money.” I don’t really think it concerns them. So you won’t write too much about the house, will you? ‘I’m an obsessional collector. If I were Paul Getty I’d just keep buying things. My favourite collection is my guns.’ (They’re mainly from the American Civil War.) ‘But I collect everything.’ And to prove it he takes me off to a sale in Lewes in the afternoon. It’s his first time at a sale as he usually buys from antique shops, and he is mortified about having to share his new experience with a reporter. In a month or so it will be time for the Rolling Stones to go back on the road after a break of more than two years, performances all over Europe and America having been lined up. ‘Until the last two weeks or so we’d been recording practically every day all this year. I’m not really looking forward to going back on the road because I never ever liked it. I used to enjoy playing in clubs best. When we decided to make our comeback, Mick wanted three hundred thousand in Hyde Park and I wanted to play in Ken Collyer’s to about twelve hundred. ‘I like the actual playing but I hate the living out of suitcases that goes into it. Before the Hyde Park concert I was only nervous that the band would fall apart at some time, not nervous at all about playing in front of all those people. I used to like it when there were riots. We’ve always been a crash and wallop group, and I used to get excited when we weren’t able to carry on after three numbers.’ Before he became a Rolling Stone, he and his wife (who is a sculptor) were at Hornsey Art College, and some years ago he drew and wrote an excellent little book as a tribute to his idol Charlie Parker – Ode to a High Flying Bird. Was he ever sorry, I asked, that he hadn’t continued his career in art? ‘No, never. I can do all that now. We have our own studio here and we can do what we want. I work at it in phases. I’m not doing much now. But I have my drums in the studio, too, and I practise on them just about every day. Being a drummer with the Stones is much more creative than a lot of people think. If Keith writes a song then I can turn it into a samba, maybe, or a waltz or anything. And if he likes it then that’s fine. But in some other types of music if a song is a waltz then you can’t do anything about it. The dots are there on the paper and you just have to play it as it’s written. ‘I suppose I find it difficult to justify to myself everything I have, and because of this I’m at a crossroads between grandeur and straight living. Everything I have means a lot to me, of course, but it’s not really as good as a good laugh, is it?’
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Dec 28, 2021 21:16:10 GMT -5
slb2 likes this
Post by doctork on Dec 28, 2021 21:16:10 GMT -5
It's been a long Christmas weekend with some big losses. Desmond Tutu, then just now watching the evening news reporting the death of NFL icon John Madden and former Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
Howard and I were fortunate enough to briefly meet Desmond Tutu when he was in BC with the Dalai Lama and Shirin Ebadi (Iranian attorney) - the three Nobel Peace Prize winners were in Canada to receive honorary doctorates and celebrate the opening and dedication of a new Center for Peace Studies at Simon Fraser University. Prior to the celebration itself, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama held a wonderful speech-with-Q&A session in Vancouver.
Incredibly, a co-worker of mine had two extra tickets and asked me if I would like to go! Of course I would! See and hear two great men on the stage together in a rather impromptu session? Shirin Ebadi hadn't yet arrived in Vancouver, and the Dalai Lama was across the hall, but Howard and I were able to shake hands and greet Archbishop (?His Eminency? I don't know the proper title) Desmond Tutu. I will never for get that evening and the generosity of the person who gave me the tickets. He said "I thought you might be the kind of person who would want to see Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama."
He will be missed.
In a different way, so will John Madden.
Harry Reid? There is so much water running under the bridge, and so fast, it's hard to assess. Anything pre-Trump seems ancient even though it was not quite 5 years ago.
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Jan 1, 2022 13:40:29 GMT -5
Post by doctork on Jan 1, 2022 13:40:29 GMT -5
When I woke up this morning I had the feeling that there was something sad that I just didn't want to think about. Well, of course I thought about it anyway. Betty White is gone, just a few days before her 100th birthday. Somehow I thought she would go on forever.
Admittedly bittersweet - I am sad, but on the other hand, what a great life she lived! So many great memories and shows that she has left us that we'll be re-watching forever; if you have any doubts, think "I Love Lucy."
And amazing in this time of divisiveness, she was someone that everybody loved! My kids - and today's kids - loved her re-reruns. The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Sue Ann were a theme for our youth. My mother loved The Golden Girls and wanted to be Rose. Octogenarians and nonagenarians admired her and were awed by her.
The world is a little less golden today.
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Post by doctork on Nov 18, 2022 12:54:20 GMT -5
Conservative columnist Michael Gerson died yesterday from cancer at age 58. He was a speech writer, a commentator on PBS Newshour, and wrote a twice-weekly column for the Washington Post. An old-fashioned Republican and so very eloquent. He will be missed.
ETA: When my husband asked me "Who was this Michael Gerson? I never heard of him" I responded that he was a writer - for WaPo and for President Bush 43. He sneered and opined that if he worked for George Bush, that says it all. Why would Judy Woodruff waste 5 minutes on him?
Not so fast. As I always say, Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and in retrospect, compared to 45, 43 looks good. He did give a moving and reassuring speech at the National Cathedral on Sept 14, 2001. I remember thinking "Wow! We are so lucky he was elected rather than Al Gore." Michael Gerson wrote that speech and was also the person who persuaded the president to support the PEPFAR project, the President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, which has saved tens of millions of lives, many/most in Africa.
So here's a reminder of Gerson's ability with words (and Bush 43 could even read them impactfully):
THE PRESIDENT: We are here in the middle hour of our grief. So many have suffered so great a loss, and today we express our nation's sorrow. We come before God to pray for the missing and the dead, and for those who love them.
On Tuesday, our country was attacked with deliberate and massive cruelty. We have seen the images of fire and ashes, and bent steel.
Now come the names, the list of casualties we are only beginning to read. They are the names of men and women who began their day at a desk or in an airport, busy with life. They are the names of people who faced death, and in their last moments called home to say, be brave, and I love you.
They are the names of passengers who defied their murderers, and prevented the murder of others on the ground. They are the names of men and women who wore the uniform of the United States, and died at their posts.
They are the names of rescuers, the ones whom death found running up the stairs and into the fires to help others. We will read all these names. We will linger over them, and learn their stories, and many Americans will weep.
To the children and parents and spouses and families and friends of the lost, we offer the deepest sympathy of the nation. And I assure you, you are not alone.
Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.
War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.
Our purpose as a nation is firm. Yet our wounds as a people are recent and unhealed, and lead us to pray. In many of our prayers this week, there is a searching, and an honesty. At St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York on Tuesday, a woman said, "I prayed to God to give us a sign that He is still here." Others have prayed for the same, searching hospital to hospital, carrying pictures of those still missing.
God's signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own. Yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral, are known and heard, and understood.
There are prayers that help us last through the day, or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers, that give us strength for the journey. And there are prayers that yield our will to a will greater than our own.
This world He created is of moral design. Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn.
It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. This is true of a nation as well. In this trial, we have been reminded, and the world has seen, that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave. We see our national character in rescuers working past exhaustion; in long lines of blood donors; in thousands of citizens who have asked to work and serve in any way possible.
And we have seen our national character in eloquent acts of sacrifice. Inside the World Trade Center, one man who could have saved himself stayed until the end at the side of his quadriplegic friend. A beloved priest died giving the last rites to a firefighter. Two office workers, finding a disabled stranger, carried her down sixty-eight floors to safety. A group of men drove through the night from Dallas to Washington to bring skin grafts for burn victims.
In these acts, and in many others, Americans showed a deep commitment to one another, and an abiding love for our country. Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called the warm courage of national unity. This is a unity of every faith, and every background.
It has joined together political parties in both houses of Congress. It is evident in services of prayer and candlelight vigils, and American flags, which are displayed in pride, and wave in defiance.
Our unity is a kinship of grief, and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies. And this unity against terror is now extending across the world.
America is a nation full of good fortune, with so much to be grateful for. But we are not spared from suffering. In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America, because we are freedom's home and defender. And the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time.
On this national day of prayer and remembrance, we ask almighty God to watch over our nation, and grant us patience and resolve in all that is to come. We pray that He will comfort and console those who now walk in sorrow. We thank Him for each life we now must mourn, and the promise of a life to come.
As we have been assured, neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, can separate us from God's love. May He bless the souls of the departed. May He comfort our own. And may He always guide our country.
God bless America.
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