[mycroft]

"Only one human captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else."
Godspeed, Mira, and ware anyone who gets in her way.

[y66]

There Are Hall of Famers, and Then There’s Hank Aaron

[nullve]

SOPHIE

[y66]

Tom Moore, a 100-year-old World War II veteran, was propelled into superstardom last spring when he raised $45 million for Britain’s National Health Service by walking 100 laps around his brick patio outside of London during lockdown. At the time, he said he wanted to support Britain’s medical workers during the pandemic, just as the country had backed him during his army days.

[Lovera]

Remembering Mary Wilson, founding member of The Supremes.Ieri
The world lost an icon when it was confirmed that Mary Wilson had died, at the age of 76, Monday night at her home in Las Vegas. Friends and fans alike are paying tribute to the late singer with heartfelt messages on social media.

[0 carbon]

y66, on 2021-February-02, 17:31, said:

Tom Moore, a 100-year-old World War II veteran, was propelled into superstardom last spring when he raised $45 million for Britain's National Health Service by walking 100 laps around his brick patio outside of London during lockdown. At the time, he said he wanted to support Britain's medical workers during the pandemic, just as the country had backed him during his army days.

Alas, he succumbed to Covid-19. Maybe all those soldiers and others around him should have been wearing masks. He seems to have become a victim of his own celebrity 😢

[Cyberyeti]

0 carbon, on 2021-February-10, 14:48, said:

Alas, he succumbed to Covid-19. Maybe all those soldiers and others around him should have been wearing masks. He seems to have become a victim of his own celebrity 😢

He had Covid, he was already in hospital with pneumonia, all the reports here pointedly said he died WITH Covid rather than OF it

[Winstonm]

Are you claiming his Covid was acquired in the hospital or are you trying to claim his pneumonia was not a complication of Covid?

[Cyberyeti]

Winstonm, on 2021-February-10, 17:06, said:

Are you claiming his Covid was acquired in the hospital or are you trying to claim his pneumonia was not a complication of Covid?

He had the pneumonia for weeks before he got Covid (which I'm guessing he picked up in hospital, but no data on that).

[Winstonm]

A long term hospitalization would be a strong suspect for a secondary infection no doubt

[Cyberyeti]

Winstonm, on 2021-February-10, 19:30, said:

A long term hospitalization would be a strong suspect for a secondary infection no doubt

Well I'm sure in the current climate they'd have tested any pneumonia patient for Covid at the start of treatment. I'm not sure if he was hospitalised for all the pneumonia treatment, the article I read wasn't clear.

[nullve]

Chick Corea

[y66]

Return to Forever, one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era, in 1976. From left: Lenny White, Stanley Clarke, Al Di Meola and Mr. Corea.Credit...Dick Barnatt/Redferns, via Getty Images

Quote

Clear days feel so good and free
So light as a feather can be

Clear days feel so good and free
So light as a feather can be

There's a place so easy to be found
If you want I'll take you there right now

Come with me there's music all around
Can't you hear can't you see I am free

Giovanni Russonello at NYT: said:

https://www.nytimes....896ed87b2d9c72a

Mr. Corea’s best-known band was Return to Forever, a collective with a rotating membership that nudged the genre of fusion into greater contact with Brazilian, Spanish and other global influences. It also provided Mr. Corea with a palette on which to experiment with a growing arsenal of new technologies.

But throughout his career he never abandoned his first love, the acoustic piano, on which his punctilious touch and crisp sense of harmony made his playing immediately distinctive.

A number of his compositions, including “Spain,” “500 Miles High” and “Tones for Joan’s Bones,” have become jazz standards, marked by his dreamy but brightly illuminated harmonies and ear-grabbing melodies.

By the late 1960s, Mr. Corea, still in his 20s, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned with. He gigged and recorded with some of the leading names in straight-ahead and Latin jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Mongo Santamaria and Sarah Vaughan. His first two albums as a leader, “Tones for Joan’s Bones” (1966) and “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” (1968), earned rave reviews. Both are now thought of as classics.

But it was playing in Miles Davis’s ensembles that set Mr. Corea on the path that would most define his role in jazz. He played the electric piano on Davis’s “In a Silent Way” (1969) and “Bitches Brew” (1970), the albums that sounded the opening bell for the fusion era.

Soon after leaving Davis’s group, he helped found Return to Forever, and he spent much of the 1970s touring and recording with the band, which became one of the most popular instrumental ensembles of its era.

Reviewing a performance at the Blue Note in New York in 2006, the critic Nate Chinen, writing in The New York Times, recalled the innovative sound that Mr. Corea had honed with Return to Forever three decades before: “His Fender Rhodes piano chimed and chirruped over Latin American rhythms; female vocals commingled with the soothing flutter of a flute. Then the ensemble muscled up and morphed into a hyperactive fusion band, establishing pop-chart presence and a fan base to match. To the extent that there is a Return to Forever legacy, it encompasses both these dynamic extremes, each a facet of Mr. Corea’s personality.”

[Winstonm]

It’s enough almost to make you wish Dante wrote non-fiction: Rush Limbaugh is dead

[y66]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the spiritual godfather of the Beat movement, inspired generations of artists and writers through his poetry and his celebrated San Francisco bookstore, City Lights.

Quote

Sometime During Eternity

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hep
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds
It's all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won't even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
ninteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter

You're hot
they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is THE king cat
who's got to blow
or they can't quite make it

Only he don't come down
from His Tree

Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead

[PassedOut]

Quote

The World is a Beautiful Place by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn’t half so bad
if it isn’t you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs of having
inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
‘living it up’

Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician

Always loved to hear him recite his poems with his very distinctive and expressive voice. First heard him in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 1960s and was a fan ever since. Long life, well lived.

[pilowsky]

Allan McDonald engineer. (https://n.pr/2ObUD3N)
It is fitting in these times to remember the Engineers at Morton Thiokol who attempted to prevent the Challenger shuttle's launch. Boisjoly, McDonald and the other Engineers commented that “We all knew if the seals failed, the shuttle would blow up.".
NPR reports that: “McDonald and his team of Thiokol engineers had strenuously opposed the launch, arguing that freezing overnight temperatures, as low as 18 degrees F, meant that the O-rings at the booster rocket joints would likely stiffen and fail to contain the explosive fuel burning inside the rockets. They presented data showing O-rings had lost elasticity at a much warmer temperature, 53 degrees F, during an earlier launch.”

McDonald resisted intense political pressure and refused to sign off on the launch. The Morton Thiokol executives over-ruled him, and the rest is history.

At the time, I knew nothing of this. My clear (incorrect) recollection was that Richard (Surely you're joking, Mr) Feynman was the person that discovered what happened and demonstrated it to the commission by dropping an O-ring into liquid nitrogen.
If ever there was a system that was over-engineered to avoid catastrophic failure, it was meant to be NASA.
In the words of Seeger P., “When will we ever learn?”:http://bit.ly/SeegerLearning (in English with Swedish subtitles and a little German).

The more things change, the more they stay the same: scientiam veritatis vires.
Not as politicians might have it: qui curat

[Cyberyeti]

Murray Walker - THE voice of motorsport in the UK for my whole life https://en.wikipedia...i/Murray_Walker

[y66]

Anne Beatts, Original ‘S.N.L.’ Writer, Dies at 74


From left, the writer Deanne Stillman, Anne Beatts and Gilda Radner in 1976. Ms. Beatts was one of “Saturday Night Live’s” original writers.Credit...Lynn Goldsmith

[y66]

Helen McCrory