[pilowsky]

Today I'm gonna make you understand.




Spencer Davis died today, so this one's for Lamford and the other leek lovers. Davis was 81 and was carried away by pneumonia.

Musicians, like Bridge-players, have rules and scores. They also have a Bridge in their songs, and Spencer Davis had one on his guitar.

[y66]

Connery ... Sean Connery

[barmar]

Alex Trebek, the long-time host of Jeopardy, finally succumbed to the cancer that he's been fighting for the past few years.

[pilowsky]

barmar, on 2020-November-08, 20:21, said:

Alex Trebek, the long-time host of Jeopardy, finally succumbed to the cancer that he's been fighting for the past few years.

I noticed it was pancreatic - like RBG, Steve Jobs and Patrick Swayze amongst many other people I've known. A surprisingly common cancer that hits people in their 50's. Along with primary brain cancer and a number of other lesser-known but common problems.

A very unpleasant illness.

May his relatives have a long life.

[gordontd]

Jan Morris

[diana_eva]

Removed a series of offtopic posts and insults.

[diana_eva]

I'm not even a football fan, but seriously, nobody posted Maradona?

I saw a kusturica film about him, absolutely loved it.

[thepossum]

I posted about Maradona in other forums. I wasn't sure that many here would have heard of him. He broke many English people's hearts many years ago but it's hard to argue how great a footballer he was for his country

[y66]

Suhaila Siddiq

Quote

KABUL, Afghanistan — Suhaila Siddiq, Afghanistan’s first female lieutenant general, who was also a renowned surgeon and unknowingly became a feminist role model in a largely patriarchal society, died here on Friday, at the same hospital where she had treated the wounded and weary of her country’s unending war for decades. She was thought to be 81 or 82, though her exact birth date is unknown.

General Siddiq, who had Alzheimer’s disease for several years, died from complications of the coronavirus at the Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan military hospital in Kabul, one of her doctors, Amanullah Aman, said. It was her second battle with the virus; she had contracted it earlier this year.

General Siddiq rose through the ranks of the Afghan Army during the Cold War and went on to run the Daud Khan hospital through the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Afghan civil war and the Taliban’s rule. She was also one of Afghanistan’s few female ministers, overseeing the public health ministry until 2004 under the transitional government led by Hamid Karzai, following the U.S. invasion. In that role, she helped implement polio vaccinations across the country after the disease had become endemic following years of instability and violence. She went back to her job as a surgeon after she left her government position.

General Siddiq “dedicated herself to serving her country,” Mr. Karzai said Friday on Twitter. President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan paid his respects during a memorial ceremony at the hospital on Saturday.

As a surgeon, General Siddiq was known for her deft hand, and despite her unassuming stature she was described by those who knew her as self-possessed and unintimidated by people around her, especially men.

In the mid-1980s, at the height of the Soviet-Afghan war, the Communist-backed government in Kabul promoted her to surgeon general of the Afghan Army after she had distinguished herself by tirelessly saving the lives of the hundreds of wounded soldiers and civilians who poured in through the doors of the 400-bed Daud Khan hospital. She was known as “General Suhaila.”

“She was much better than any men I’ve ever worked with,” said Atiqullah Amarkhel, a retired Afghan general, who had been promoted to his position within months of General Siddiq. “She wouldn’t go home for days.”

General Siddiq was born in Kabul, probably in 1938. She attended high school and then Kabul University as her country was quietly changing under the weight of the Cold War. She studied in Moscow for several years on scholarship and then returned to Afghanistan with her doctorate. In the years before the Soviet invasion in 1979, when she was a lieutenant colonel, she worked as a surgeon at the Daud Khan hospital.

One of six sisters, General Siddiq was the daughter of a man who was once the governor of Kandahar, and who was supportive of her education. She traced her ancestry to the Barakzai dynasty, which ruled Afghanistan for more than 100 years during the 19th and 20th centuries.

General Siddiq never married. Information about survivors was not immediately available.

After the collapse of the Communist government in 1992, General Siddiq retained her position in the hospital under the interim government established at the outset of the Afghan civil war.

Kabul was soon split as competing factions vied for control. Ahmad Shah Massoud, then the defense minister, personally asked General Siddiq to run the hospital, as civilian casualties mounted in the capital following incessant rocket attacks by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the appointed prime minister, against his adversaries, said Sher Ahmad, a close family friend. The city was ultimately torn apart by attacks from all sides, including by Mr. Massoud.

“She believed in her job, not in any regime,” Mr. Ahmad said.

But in 1996 the Taliban took Kabul, and they quickly enforced draconian rule under a harsh interpretation of Islamic law. Women were not allowed to hold most jobs and were required to cover their faces in public.

Kathy Gannon, a reporter for The Associated Press, was in Kabul as the city fell and the new Taliban government began to send women home from their jobs, including General Siddiq, prompting Ms. Gannon to write an article about her.

General Siddiq and her sister Shafiqa, a professor at Kabul Polytechnic University, “were smart and funny and they weren’t going to be intimidated,” Ms. Gannon said. “But also, the Taliban learned quickly that they needed her.”

Within months, the Taliban, already trying to retain people with sought-after technical abilities and higher education, asked General Siddiq to return to her job at the hospital, where she tended to many of the regime’s wounded fighters. She performed many operations under the flickering light of a lantern, Mr. Ahmad recalled.

“They needed me and they asked me to come back,” General Siddiq said in a 2002 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. “It is a matter of pride for me. I stayed in my country, and I served my people. I never fled abroad.”

General Siddiq and her sister were among the few women who walked around Kabul without face coverings or a burqa — a bold statement against the Taliban, who left her unscathed because of her position at the hospital.

At the same time, General Siddiq taught medicine to female university students whose academic careers had swiftly ended under Taliban rule. On at least one occasion, the government tried to crack down on her teaching, but General Siddiq pushed back, said Makai Siawash, a close friend who lived with General Siddiq for a brief time.

“She was ready to get whipped by them, but she didn’t let the Taliban fighters in,” Ms. Siawash said.

One of her students was Sayeda Amarkhel, the daughter of retired General Amarkhel, who studied under General Siddiq at the hospital after her time at university was cut short under the Taliban.

“She fought the Taliban for us,” Dr. Amarkhel said. “Today I am a gynecologist, and I owe it to her.”

[y66]

Chuck Yeager

Quote

Chuck Yeager, the most famous test pilot of his generation who was the first to break the sound barrier, and, thanks to Tom Wolfe, came to personify the death-defying aviator who possessed the elusive yet unmistakable “right stuff,” died on Monday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 97.

His death was announced via his official Twitter account, which cited his wife, Victoria, and confirmed by John Nicoletti, a family friend, by phone.

General Yeager came out of the West Virginia hills with only a high school education and with a drawl that left many a fellow pilot bewildered. The first time he went up in a plane, he was sick to his stomach.

But he became a fighter ace in World War II, shooting down five German planes in a single day and 13 over all. In the decade that followed, he helped usher in the age of military jets and spaceflight. He flew more than 150 military aircraft, logging more than 10,000 hours in the air.

His signal achievement came on Oct. 14, 1947, when he climbed out of a B-29 bomber as it ascended over California’s Mojave Desert from what was then known as Muroc Air Force Base, and entered the cockpit of an orange, bullet-shaped, rocket-powered experimental plane attached to the bomb bay.

An Air Force captain at the time, he zoomed off in the plane, a Bell Aircraft X-1, at an altitude of 23,000 feet, and when he reached about 43,000 feet above the desert, history’s first sonic boom reverberated across the floor of the dry lake beds. He had reached a speed of 700 miles an hour, breaking the sound barrier and dispelling the long-held fear that any plane flying at or beyond the speed of sound would be torn apart by shock waves.

“After all the anticipation to achieve this moment, it really was a letdown,” he wrote in his best-selling memoir “Yeager” (1985), a collaboration with Leo Janos. “There should’ve been a bump in the road, something to let you know that you had just punched a nice, clean hole through the sonic barrier. The Ughknown was a poke through Jell-O. Later on, I realized that this mission had to end in a letdown because the real barrier wasn’t in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.”

[kenberg]

y66, on 2020-December-08, 06:17, said:

Chuck Yeager

Like everyone, I have random memories from childhood. One of them is learning that someone had broken something called the "sound barrier". I see that this happened in 1947, but announced in 1948, so I was 9 at the time I heard of it. The right age for finding it exciting without having much of any idea idea of what it actually meant.

The Wikipedia article is terrific. It mentions one of his lesser known accomplishments " Having unusually sharp vision (a visual acuity rated 20/10), which once enabled him to shoot a deer at 600 yards..."

I'll have to wait a day or two to read the full NYT article. My computer is giving me trouble and I can't access full NYT stuff from Becky's.

[y66]

Go Nakamura/Getty Images

A doctor comforting a Covid-19 patient in an intensive care unit in Houston in November. I hope he made it. May those who didn't rest in peace.

[thepossum]

John Le Carre

I never knew if it was my academic ability, mathematical knowledge, my ability to think quickly about problems, or that I could talk intelligently about Le Carre novels that gave me an offer at my college.

[y66]

From The Economist:

Quote

THE HOUSE in Gainsborough Gardens was tall and elegant in the red-brick Hampstead manner, with a background of old trees. In front of the houses stretched a dank lawn strewn with leaves. He walked across it quickly to the locked gate on the Well Walk side, which preserved the hidden feel of the place. He might have been going to lunch at the Wells, where the rhubarb crumble was reliably good. But too many people knew John le Carré there, spotted his upright stance and far-sighted gaze, the fine greying head, and might start conversations. Today he had a different assignation. He turned not left but right, towards the Heath.

A weather-boarded barn stood by East Heath Road, with a bench on which it was said that Keats had sat and wept. On the other side of the road, a gravel track curved down through an avenue of trees. A few dog-walkers wandered on it. It was here, in “Smiley’s People”, the third part of his George Smiley trilogy, that General Vladimir had been shot in the face by Moscow agents. And there, just off the path, lodged in a crevice where a tree forked, Smiley had found the cigarette packet that held the proof he needed.

On the avenue, his own pace slowed. Instinctively he began to practise tradecraft, or writing craft. He became observant, guarded, watchful, keeping to the edge of the path where the limes slightly obscured him. Writers and spies shared the same “corrosive eye”, as Graham Greene put it: that wish to penetrate the surface to the centre and truth of things.

In fact he had not been in “the circus” for long; just a few years, running low-grade agents into eastern Europe and then working out of the British embassy in Bonn, before Kim Philby, a celebrated double agent, exposed him. He was a writer who, very briefly, had been a spy. Yet he felt he had been recruited to the secret world from childhood, as Conrad was to the sea. He had acquired the comforting habit of cover-stories to try to account for a father who was in jail one moment and at Ascot the next: an epic conman from whom his mother bolted when he was five. He had joined the secret service for all kinds of romantic reasons, to do some good for society, and to discover how the world was really run; but also because he felt corporate attachment offered him a family’s protection. To some extent it did. But he soon found with Alec Leamas, the pretend defector whom Smiley in “The Spy who Came in From the Cold” sent into East Germany and ultimately to his death, that spies were not priests or saints, but “a squalid procession of vain fools…sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives”. In the cold war Western agents, aping Soviet ones, walked on the thinnest moral ice. It often broke.

At the end of the avenue lay a games field, with a goalpost askew and a few boys playing. Their bicycles were sprawled by the path. Across the field stood a small green tin pavilion, like a bus shelter. There Smiley had found, at head-height, the shiny MI6 drawing pin whose message was Proceed to the rendezvous, no danger sighted, together with Vladimir’s chalked reply. Here, too, Smiley’s shadow walked. A plump figure, balding, bespectacled and breathtakingly ordinary; keenly observant, wise, cunning, yet also shy, embarrassed by life, convinced that his clothes were wrong. He had emerged in 1961, in “Call for the Dead”, a fully-fledged combination of several people from the le Carré past; he took his bow in 2017, giving lectures in “A Legacy of Spies”. And he had exposed his creator, through the books and films and especially the tv series of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, to the full force of literary fame.

It was not anything he wanted. “John le Carré” was a mask for a man, as much as a necessity for an author in the intelligence service. As a writer, like a spy, he needed to go incognito, sit at a back table, slip through doors, avoid the crowd. If he wanted he could unleash in a warm, military tone a fund of good stories, such as his near-seduction at 16, in front of her husband, by a countess at dinner in Panama, which drew him to the country later to set another novel. Telling stories was what he did. Now he was pumped for information which his vestigial loyalty to the service forbade him to speak of, as well as the mysteries he knew nothing about. (“Who killed Robert Maxwell?” Rupert Murdoch asked him, suddenly, when they lunched together.) And he was presumed to be at a loss when the cold war ended, with his great preoccupying subject gone.

On the contrary, its end delighted him. And history was far from over. The players changed, the game went on. He had focused on the cold war from the 1960s because it was the overriding drama of the age. Others quickly succeeded it: the arms trade (“The Night Manager”), the war on terror (“Absolute Friends”), Big Pharma’s misdeeds in Africa (“The Constant Gardener”). Trump’s America and Johnson’s Britain, with their spoon-fed media and nationalistic duping of the public, appalled him equally. Each deserved excoriation in a book in which the characters acted out a global argument, just as the closed society of spies had been, for him, a theatre of the world.

So there could be no end to writing, and that, on this gradually clearing morning, was his purpose on the Heath. Notebooks weighed down his pockets; no laptop for him, but the unmechanised thrill of shaping the words with his pen. He had other scribbling places, particularly his seaside house at St Buryan in Cornwall, where no one knew who he was. North London was more difficult, as joggers panted past and trains rattled distantly on the Overground. He was making for a particular bench that stood separate from its companions, tucked under a spreading tree.

There he worked away. And it seemed to him from time to time, as he looked up, that a figure observed him. Balding, plump, quite unlike him physically, but with the same tendency to want to hide, and the same occasional sharp pain from seeing too much. Even at a distance he could spot him, from the way he thoughtfully cleaned his glasses with the fat end of his tie. A large part of himself, too, had gone to make up Smiley. He was now walking towards him, his lenses gleaming like mirrors.

[y66]

Klara Kasparova

[y66]

The Restaurants We've Lost

[shyams]

Tanya Roberts

I still remember her brilliantly funny lines in "That '70s Show".

[barmar]

If C-list celebrities are fair game, we lost Dawn Wells (Mary Anne from Gilligan's Island) last week.

The only remaining GI cast member still alive is Tina Louise, who played Ginger.

[y66]

Ted DeLaney, who began his nearly 60-year career at Washington and Lee University as a custodian, accumulated enough credits to graduate at 41, returned a decade later as a history professor, became the school’s first Black department head and later helped lead its reckoning with the Confederate general its very name honored, Robert E. Lee, died on Dec. 18 at his home in Lexington, Va. He was 77.

[Cyberyeti]

Mira Furlan, Croatian actress who played Delenn in Babylon 5 and was also in lost.

Her career was unremarkable, her life was not. She was a young actress acting in both Croatia and Serbia when Yugoslavia blew up, and this got her death threats from both sides and forced her to flee to the US.

This was Babylon 5 head honcho J Michael Straczynski's in memoriam

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