Catie Lazarus, Comedian With a Lot of Questions, Dies at 44

 I had never heard of her (which she probably would have remarked on). Saw her obituary today.

On her live show “Employee of the Month,” she got laughs by interrogating writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals and her fellow comics.

“I started hosting this show because I couldn’t quite figure out how to break in,” Ms. Lazarus told The New York Times in 2015. “I wanted to hear from people who, for the most part, love what they do and have carved out a niche for themselves. It wasn’t just about how they broke in, but what they continue to find worth struggling for, worth the heartache and the rejection and the economic toil and other types of losses that go along with it.”

Without being flip, this is the sort of detail I enjoy seeing about people, and often see in obits of people I knew nothing about: 

Catherine Simone Avnet Lazarus was born on April, 26, 1976, in Washington. Her father was a public policy lawyer who had been associate director of the White House domestic policy staff in the Carter administration. Her mother, Rosalind (Avnet) Lazarus, was a federal government lawyer. A great-great-great-grandfather was Simon Lazarus, founder of the Lazarus & Company department store chain, which later became Macy’s Inc.

What travels?

 Life changed in March of 2020. A pandemic changed how we live our lives, what we do, how we live every day. I stopped taking buses and trains, favorite modes of transportation. I left my home in Flushing for long periods, escaping to our little corner of the Catskills. I stopped going out to restaurants. I wore masks all the time, washed my hands often, cleaned incessantly, and kept my social distance from everyone. I stayed healthy. No one I know got the virus, though that was the exception locally and nationally. I fumed at the temerity and stupidity of people who refused to believe that the virus was real. Of course, those idiots had an example in the man with the fake tan and blonde hair and triple chins who kept ranting about law and order as he broke the law and threatened social order. Now, he is a loser, and soon will leave the public sphere (though he will rant and rave so the mainstream media he purports to hate will give him free coverage). At least responsible adults will be in charge of our wounded nation, and once again science will reign. Perhaps next year I will again travel. 

Deb Price, a First as a Columnist on Gay Life, Dies at 62

 I had never heard of her until I read her New York Times obituary. Now I know what an impact Deb Price made.

Ms. Price was working in the Washington bureau of The Detroit News, when she proposed a column from the gay perspective.

“I found the courage to ask for the column that I’d always wanted to read,” she said in a 1993 speech in New York to what is now called The Association of L.G.B.T.Q. Journalists.

“I wanted to be entertained, not offended,” she said. “Talked to, not about. Informed, not maligned. Inspired, not demoralized.”

Her publisher, Bob Giles, agreed and announced the column in a front-page letter to readers.

In her first column, Ms. Price asked how she should introduce Ms. Murdoch (girlfriend? lover?). Some readers were disgusted and offered their own choice suggestions of what Ms. Price could call Ms. Murdoch.

Mr. Giles said at the time that such bigotry only hardened his resolve to continue the column.

Ms. Price took the attacks in stride. “If there weren’t hostility and if there weren’t misunderstandings about gay people,” she told The Associated Press, “there would be no point in doing this column.”

Camilla Wicks, Dazzling Violinist From a Young Age, Dies at 92

 Hers is not one of the oft-repeated names of virtuosi.

She was a rare female soloist in a male-dominated era, but cut back on performing to raise her children. Howard Taubman, reviewing the violinist Camilla Wicks’s New York debut at Town Hall in The New York Times in 1942, had to admit that she had “a certain flair for the fiddle.” He was especially impressed by her handling of difficult passages in the Paganini D major Concerto, a work requiring an abundance of technical skill. By the way, Ms. Wicks at the time was, as the review’s opening sentence noted, “a pretty, flaxen-haired lass of thirteen and a half.”

With that attitude, it’s easy to understand why.

Dick Allen, 78, Dies; Baseball Slugger Withstood Bigotry

 Withstood is not the half of it . Had he been white, he would have been recognized as a great player. I once saw him hit a home run at Shea Stadium with one hand.

Erroll Garner

 

I don’t know why he isn’t more highly regarded, more famous. The influence of Art Tatum and Fats Waller on him are palpable. His talent was monumental.

Rumble: the Indians who rocked the world

 

A remarkable legacy.

The Supreme Court Is Picking a Fight It Is Destined to Lose

 Article from 27 October 2020: How to fix the Supreme Court, by Emily Bazelon. 

Emily Bazelon is an American journalist. She is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a senior research fellow at Yale Law School, and co-host of the Slate podcast Political Gabfest. She is a former senior editor of Slate. Her work as a writer focuses on law, women, and family issues.

 

Food for thought.

David N. Dinkins, New York’s First Black Mayor, Dies at 93

 Giuliani gets credit, and takes credit, for much that Mayor Dinkins started. This past month has shown what a buffoon Giuliani truly is, he of his three ex-wives and dubious conspiracy theories (and bleeding hair dye).

Trivia

The lint that collects in the bottom of your pockets has a name — gnurr.

There are more public libraries than McDonald's in the US.

A "butt load" is an actual unit of measurement, equivalent to 126 gallons.

Now I know.

What a loser!

 

Swing and a miss.

Who?

 

Help fight fraud (gimme money)

 

A gorgeous Catskills sunset

 

Cleaning up the swamp

 

Same old song

 

He said that?

 

Just won’t give up, but he’s a loser

 

America is great again

 

Reactions to Biden election victory

 Germany:

Brazil:

New York:

She was the first female star of jazz drumming.

Viola Smith, girl drummer, dies at 107.

When people called her the “female Gene Krupa,” she corrected them: Krupa, she said, was the male Viola Smith.

She played with Frances Carroll an the Coquettes in the 1940s. She shone in this video , which is (of course) on YouTube.

The Clocktower Lady

Elsa Raven, ‘Back to the Future’ Character Actress, Dies at 91. She built a steady career of Everywoman roles. Perhaps none of them made a bigger impression than her performance as “Clocktower Lady.”

Ms. Raven was not in the two “Back to the Future” sequels, but she did participate in reunions of the cast and crew from the original film, including one last year at the Hollywood Museum, at which she spoke about the lasting impact of the movie.

“We didn’t know how significant it was going to be,” she told United Press International then. “We knew it was a good, solid movie. Of course we were delighted when it was such a big success. It’s an evergreen. It’s not today. It’s any day.”

Changes, part 1

 From 1990, my Pioneer SX-2800 stereo tuner, which paired with Bose speakers:

Those speakers were great (arguments were had by partisans of different brands; I always favored Bose)

From 2020, a small Bluetooth speaker, which has excellent sound; I stream music from my iPhone to it:

I think the tuner cost a couple of hundred bucks back then; the speaker cost thirty five bucks.

Chess

 After watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix (which was terrific), I borrowed two films from the Phoenicia Library:

Bridges of Dutchess County

 Along back roads in Dutchess County (FDR’s home county):

On Salisbury Turnpike, a stone bridge:

Further along on Salisbury Pike:

  And on Willow Brook Road:

Getting cold early

 Thanks, Yogi.

What’s my elevation?

 

Weather changes quickly in the Catskills

 On Thursday early afternoon, sunny, in the high 40s:

9.09, Friday morning:

Saturday afternoon, 2.39:

An early taste of winter

 Delaware County is west, and a higher elevation, than Ulster County’s Phoenicia.

Dr. Joyce Wallace, Pioneering AIDS Physician, Dies at 79

From her New York Times obit, 10/27/2020:

Dr. Joyce Wallace, a Manhattan internist who treated prostitutes for AIDS, occasionally brought streetwalkers home with her when they had nowhere else to go.

Once, when her son, Ari Kahn, was about 12, Dr. Wallace, who had to get to the hospital to see her patients, left him at home with a prostitute who was H.I.V. positive and going through heroin withdrawal. It wasn’t clear who was to take care of whom. Ari ended up making pizza for them both. When Dr. Wallace returned, she took the prostitute to a drug-treatment center; the woman eventually overcame her addiction and got a job at a research foundation that Dr. Wallace had started.

“On one hand, it was grossly irresponsible,” Mr. Kahn said of the incident in an interview. On the other hand, he said, it was typical of his mother’s extraordinary capacity for empathy, and she helped a lot of people.

If the Shoe Floats

 Over the decades, a mass of flotsam from a freighter accident has inspired scientific discovery, urban legend and, now, an art exhibition commemorating the Great Sneaker Spill of 1990.

The Great Sneaker Spill might have gone unremembered had it not been for the enterprising scavengers who washed and resold the flotsam and Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who, alerted to the spill’s existence by his mother, later used it as the basis for a study of little-known currents. That bit of science earned Mr. Ebbesmeyer the sobriquet Doctor Ocean and, for a time, a guest spot on the couches of late-night talk shows.

Early this year, Andy Yoder, an artist in Washington, D.C., who specializes in repurposing everyday objects, happened upon the legend of the Great Sneaker Spill and decided to commemorate it as a means of highlighting the continuing degradation of our marine environment. Creating 250 Nike replicas from recycled trash, Mr. Yoder then arranged them on store shelves in an immersive installation, “Andy Yoder: Overboard,” that went on view on Oct. 24 at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont and also online.

Want some advice?

 

Balmy October day in the Catskills

 2.45 pm, on Friday 23 October 2020: (felt great):

You looking at me?

 

Traveling through Dutchess County, NY.

Happy Birthday, Rita Hayworth

Margarita Carmen Hayworth Casino (October 17, 1918 – May 14, 1987). Great dancer. Fine actress. Cultural icon. How many associate her with Shawshank?

Dancing with Fred Astaire, in You were never Lovelier (1942):

Autumn in New York State

 In Buttercup Preserve, Dutchess County:

Wild Turkey

 These are not domesticated birds. pair was by itself; earlier in the year, I saw a big brood.

Graham Hills

Found this park in Westchester County a few years ago. It became a rest stop on the drive upstate from Queens. Usually, it’s three quarters of an hour later, after dealing with traffic and aggressive drivers, a welcome respite.

This is on August 20th. Seven months earlier, it looked rather different:

And in November

Amigos, no?

 AMLO and his gringo pal.

Michael Hawley, Programmer, Professor, Pianist, Dies at 58

From his New York Times June 24, 2020 obit:

Mark Seiden, an independent computer security consultant who met Mr. Hawley in the early 1980s when they were both working at IRCAM, a music lab in Paris, and eventually hired him at Lucasfilm, compared Mr. Hawley’s exploits to those of George Plimpton, the writer whose participatory kind of journalism had him masquerading as a boxer, a professional football player, a circus performer and a stand-up comedian.

“Plimpton was a famous dilettante,” Mr. Seiden said. “Mike was just as a diverse as Plimpton — except he wasn’t a dilettante.”

I protest the status quo!

 

A big difference.

A spring snow dusting in the Catskills

 No year is devoid of surprises in the mountains, but 2020 was unusual in many ways.

Character witnesses

 A little over the top, maybe.

Maybe not.

A “gentle giant,” a 6-foot-4 internationally renowned musician

Lynn Harrell, Acclaimed American Cellist, Is Dead at 76

Beautiful sound.

“ Louis Armstrong,” Mr. Cogswell once said, “is endlessly interesting.”

Michael Cogswell, 66, Dies; Sustained Louis Armstrong’s Legacy

Going fishing

 On the Esopus, soon after trout fishing season opened.

NYC’s drinking water

 A hundred miles north of New York City: