Those UK shipmates of a certain age, especially fans of shows with the word "clue" in the title will be sad to learn that Lionel Blair is no longer with us.
No, you're right. Lionel Blair choreographed Help! and some other films around that time, but not Oliver!. He spent more time being famous for being famous recently, than his original careers of acting, dancing and choreography. But he was in The Real Marigold Hotel in one of the earlier series.
Clarissa Eden has died, aged 101. Widow of Anthony Eden, she was really the last link to the Waugh/Berners/Mitford set. The character Emmeline Pocock in Far From the Madding War was said to be based on her.
Just found out that David Longdon, singer with my favourite band, Big Big Train has died at 56 from an accident. Too talented to go so young. Really sad.
I got in the car earlier today and the radio was set to the Broadway channel on SiriusXM. When I turned the car on, Glynis Johns was singing “Send In the Clowns” from A Little Night Music. Beautiful!
David Dalaithngu, pioneering indigenous dancer, actor, singer and artist has just died from lung cancer. His film about his life - My Name Is Gulpilil had been released this year.
Phil Saviano, who dedicated the last several decades of his life to exposing child abuse within the Catholic church (and the church's efforts at concealing that abuse) has died at age 69. Neal Huff played him in the film Spotlight.
David Dalaithngu, pioneering indigenous dancer, actor, singer and artist has just died from lung cancer. His film about his life - My Name Is Gulpilil had been released this year.
Also a very nice chap - the only time I ever met him I was on a history walk, on the way we passed someone mowing the churchyard. On the way back he cheerily asked who we were and what we were doing, and promptly invited all 30-odd of us in for a cuppa!
I got in the car earlier today and the radio was set to the Broadway channel on SiriusXM. When I turned the car on, Glynis Johns was singing “Send In the Clowns” from A Little Night Music. Beautiful!
as an aside, not only is Glynis Johns still alive and well, but at 98, she's 7 years older than Sondheim was.
David Dalaithngu, pioneering indigenous dancer, actor, singer and artist has just died from lung cancer. His film about his life - My Name Is Gulpilil had been released this year.
Rest In Peace, David. May all mourn you be comforted.
Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post's Opinion section since 2000, has died. He was noted for moving the Opinion pages of the WaPo in a rightward political direction, particularly when it came to questions of war.
Mel Lastman, flamboyant mayor of Toronto between 1998 and 2003, dead at 88.
(Racist comments behind Hidden Text icon.)
Off the top of my head, I can think of about a half-dozen gaffes or controversies he was involved in, the most notorious being when he said that
he was scared to go to Kenya to promote Toronto's Olympics bid, for fear that the "natives" would cook him in a pot. (Toronto didn't get the Olympics, go figure.)
But I think my personal favorite was when he was mayor of North York(prior to that city merging with Toronto), and my hometown of Edmonton got ranked higher than North York on one of those quality-of-life surveys, and Lastman made some crack about Edmonton and outhouses.
In response, our equally tacky mayor Bill Smith invited Lastman to tour Edmonton, culminating with Lastman standing in the rotunda of our city hall with his posterior protruding out, in case any civic-minded Edmontonians wanted to kick him in the butt. A passing council member obliged, and everyone involved looked like absolute yokels in the media.
In fairness, I will read into the record that he was an enthusiastic participant in Pride Parades, even though that probably wasn't a huge vote-getter among his electoral base. And at a time when it wasn't neccessarily de rigeur for a politician to attend. (Rob Ford, elected mayor seven years AFTER Lastman left office, made a point of never attending.)
When the World Health Organization put Toronto on some shit-list during the SARS crisis, he claimed never to have heard of the organization. There was some debate over whether this was a deliberate attempt to boost civic morale via flipping the bird to a perceived nemesis, or if he really had never heard of the group. I could go either way on that one.
@stetson I was never a political fan of Lastman (his becoming mayor of the enlarged, amalgamated Toronto was the combined revenge of the 'burbs and revenge of of rural Tories of Mike Harris, who was explicit in his hatred of Toronto), and he often made me cringe (you omitted his calling in the army to clear the snow during at a period during which the city failed to perform its function), but I had a grudging admiration of his chutzpah. Alas, his reach exceeded his grasp.
She was one of my favorite essayists, for reasons I can't quite verbalize. Slouching Toward Bethlehem was probably the most interesting take on the Summer Of Love written by an outsider, with numerous vignettes which, to say the least, portrayed the counterculture in an unflattering light.
Her later political writing, starting in the late 80s, was interesting in that it was from someone who had started paying close attention to politics late in life. As such, she sometimes seemed to be covering ground that her readers might have had more familiarity with than she did, but this brought a fresh perspective to the issues and events described.
And for the Ship, I'll mention her Episcopalian background, and her rather endearing tendency to drop references to that throughout her writing.
(you omitted his calling in the army to clear the snow during at a period during which the city failed to perform its function)
I could understand Toronto calling in the army to shovel snow, as I think any city can eff up on its responsibilities now and then. But holy cow, did that ever activate every negative stereotype about cloistered, entitled Hogtowners!
And Mel going on TV and practically bragging about having sent in the troops didn't help matters. I know he was just trying to sound patriotic(something about how great a country Canada is that he can do this), but he really seemed oblivious to all the bad PR that the city was getting right at that exact moment.
And I have over the years encountered the odd Torontonian who defends the militarized snow-removal not just as an unfortunate but neccessary response to civic incompetence, but as a brilliant stroke of statecraft. Uh no, you screwed up, we helped you out, glad to do it, but it's nothing at all for TORONTO to be bragging about.
Canadian publisher Ted Byfield has died. His Alberta Report(later morphed into Western Report) railed against the supposedly left-wing Central Canadian establishment for decades.
The magazine was decidedly a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's impossible to overlook the constant onslaught of homophobia and anti-feminism that permeated its pages, and I spent many years boycotting the rag, in the fervent hope it would go bankrupt.
But that doesn't mean I stopped reading it, since they did manage to have some fairly intetesting articles, most notably on the local arts scene. This included at least one pretty positive review for an artist whose work could be fairly described as homoerotic(they had a bias against non-representational art, and his stuff was pretty representational), plus I became acquainted with two interesting local avant-garde artists, ManWoman and John Hoyt, in their pages.
Several of the Report's editors and writers later founded the National Post, a national daily bearing some ideological overlap, though not entirely, with the older publication.
Before converting to Orthodoxy, Byfield was either the founder or a prominent member of The Company Of The Cross, a conservative Anglican lay order which I believe is known to some Canadian shipmates. He was also something of an avatar for G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, quoting them frequently in his columns.
The Report survived for a few decades off of donations from right-wing oil executives, before going belly-up in the early 2000s. I like to think it was because people were repelled by their bigoted social conservativism, though I suspect it was more just apathy.
Comments
You will know him for, amongst other things, a barnstorming turn as the Chaplain in if....
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59171576
I'll fetch my coat.
No, ‘Give Us A Clue’ was a completely different show.
Are you sure you're not thinking of Lionel Bart, who wrote the music and lyrics of Oliver!?
That's what I thought - he'd have definitely been in the "I thought he'd been dead for years" file!
May he rest in peace and make wonderful music in Heaven.
RIP David
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-59476257
Also a very nice chap - the only time I ever met him I was on a history walk, on the way we passed someone mowing the churchyard. On the way back he cheerily asked who we were and what we were doing, and promptly invited all 30-odd of us in for a cuppa!
Karma?
Surely that's the "Can you be a Christian and a Buddhist?" thread?
as an aside, not only is Glynis Johns still alive and well, but at 98, she's 7 years older than Sondheim was.
(Racist comments behind Hidden Text icon.)
Off the top of my head, I can think of about a half-dozen gaffes or controversies he was involved in, the most notorious being when he said that
But I think my personal favorite was when he was mayor of North York(prior to that city merging with Toronto), and my hometown of Edmonton got ranked higher than North York on one of those quality-of-life surveys, and Lastman made some crack about Edmonton and outhouses.
In response, our equally tacky mayor Bill Smith invited Lastman to tour Edmonton, culminating with Lastman standing in the rotunda of our city hall with his posterior protruding out, in case any civic-minded Edmontonians wanted to kick him in the butt. A passing council member obliged, and everyone involved looked like absolute yokels in the media.
In fairness, I will read into the record that he was an enthusiastic participant in Pride Parades, even though that probably wasn't a huge vote-getter among his electoral base. And at a time when it wasn't neccessarily de rigeur for a politician to attend. (Rob Ford, elected mayor seven years AFTER Lastman left office, made a point of never attending.)
When the World Health Organization put Toronto on some shit-list during the SARS crisis, he claimed never to have heard of the organization. There was some debate over whether this was a deliberate attempt to boost civic morale via flipping the bird to a perceived nemesis, or if he really had never heard of the group. I could go either way on that one.
“One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”
She was one of my favorite essayists, for reasons I can't quite verbalize. Slouching Toward Bethlehem was probably the most interesting take on the Summer Of Love written by an outsider, with numerous vignettes which, to say the least, portrayed the counterculture in an unflattering light.
Her later political writing, starting in the late 80s, was interesting in that it was from someone who had started paying close attention to politics late in life. As such, she sometimes seemed to be covering ground that her readers might have had more familiarity with than she did, but this brought a fresh perspective to the issues and events described.
And for the Ship, I'll mention her Episcopalian background, and her rather endearing tendency to drop references to that throughout her writing.
I could understand Toronto calling in the army to shovel snow, as I think any city can eff up on its responsibilities now and then. But holy cow, did that ever activate every negative stereotype about cloistered, entitled Hogtowners!
And Mel going on TV and practically bragging about having sent in the troops didn't help matters. I know he was just trying to sound patriotic(something about how great a country Canada is that he can do this), but he really seemed oblivious to all the bad PR that the city was getting right at that exact moment.
And I have over the years encountered the odd Torontonian who defends the militarized snow-removal not just as an unfortunate but neccessary response to civic incompetence, but as a brilliant stroke of statecraft. Uh no, you screwed up, we helped you out, glad to do it, but it's nothing at all for TORONTO to be bragging about.
Canadian publisher Ted Byfield has died. His Alberta Report(later morphed into Western Report) railed against the supposedly left-wing Central Canadian establishment for decades.
The magazine was decidedly a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's impossible to overlook the constant onslaught of homophobia and anti-feminism that permeated its pages, and I spent many years boycotting the rag, in the fervent hope it would go bankrupt.
But that doesn't mean I stopped reading it, since they did manage to have some fairly intetesting articles, most notably on the local arts scene. This included at least one pretty positive review for an artist whose work could be fairly described as homoerotic(they had a bias against non-representational art, and his stuff was pretty representational), plus I became acquainted with two interesting local avant-garde artists, ManWoman and John Hoyt, in their pages.
Several of the Report's editors and writers later founded the National Post, a national daily bearing some ideological overlap, though not entirely, with the older publication.
Before converting to Orthodoxy, Byfield was either the founder or a prominent member of The Company Of The Cross, a conservative Anglican lay order which I believe is known to some Canadian shipmates. He was also something of an avatar for G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, quoting them frequently in his columns.
The Report survived for a few decades off of donations from right-wing oil executives, before going belly-up in the early 2000s. I like to think it was because people were repelled by their bigoted social conservativism, though I suspect it was more just apathy.