[PassedOut]

Nicolas Roeg

In 1980 I was dating Constance and Walkabout was coming to a small art theater in Atlanta, so I told her that it was a must-see and we should get there early to be sure of getting seats. When the movie started, we were the only viewers, although one more came in after about ten minutes. She married me in 1982 anyway.

[The_Badger]

I'm a film buff, and whilst some of Roeg's films seem a little bit dated these days, many were produced in the experimental years of the late 1960s/ early 1970s. I watched Performance recently and thought 'If he cut out all the unnecessary sex - I'm not a prude by the way - and the arty-farty pretentiousness of it all, it could actually be a good movie'. My favourite Roeg film is Castaway, with Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohue, that sticks very closely to Lucy Irvine's book.

[The_Badger]

Ricky Jay, the card illusionist, magician and actor. I remember watching him on TV when I was a very young man and thinking 'Wow'. What he could do with playing cards...

https://youtu.be/k1ZGIN0UqJE

And what a showman too. Very funny.

[barmar]

I can't believe no one has posted about President George H W. Bush. Or is it there no point in mentioning it here?

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2018-December-02, 05:45, said:

I can't believe no one has posted about President George H W. Bush. Or is it there no point in mentioning it here?

I was thinking the same, including that maybe it is superfluous to mention it. I was also wondering just what to say. The RIP thread probably should not be given over to extensive discussion of my views, or anyone's views, of his strengths and weaknesses, or of how the world has changed, etc. etc. But maybe I can say this much. I voted for Dukakis, but I very much felt that the country was in good hands with GHWB as president. Bush's note to Bill Clinton as Clinton took office is a stunning example of grace and generosity, and the two were later to become good friends. At a young age he made an excellent choice of a life partner. More knowledgeable people have said much more.

[TaylorSp]

Peggy Dunkle (Slamdunk7)has passed away, and I feel the need to say something here about such a wonderful person, friend, and mentor.

I met Peggy on BBO in 2012, when I was in a nowhere job and really unhappy. I met her somehow on BBO, and she offered to teach me and play with me. She was always so patient, kind, and welcoming, and it was through her that I met so many nice bridge players. Also, my game greatly improved. She was an excellent player and teacher. Over the past 6 years I moved all around the world, and would always check in with her on BBO. She was unfailingly positive, kind, and so fun! Such a lovely human being! In 2014 I visited her in southern Indiana and we played in a sectional and earned some gold points and then went and celebrated at a local Cracker Barrel! We had a lovely day! I always promised myself and her I would return and visit her again, but I was never able to do so and now she is gone. I am very sad, and I know her many, many friends on BBO and in her local club will miss her.

Make sure you tell your loved ones you love them and often! I wish I would have had a chance to say that to my friend Peggy!

Best wishes,

Taylor Spence (TaylorSp)

[Chas_P]

 kenberg, on 2018-December-02, 08:37, said:

I was thinking the same, including that maybe it is superfluous to mention it. I was also wondering just what to say. The RIP thread probably should not be given over to extensive discussion of my views, or anyone's views, of his strengths and weaknesses, or of how the world has changed, etc. etc. But maybe I can say this much. I voted for Dukakis, but I very much felt that the country was in good hands with GHWB as president. Bush's note to Bill Clinton as Clinton took office is a stunning example of grace and generosity, and the two were later to become good friends. At a young age he made an excellent choice of a life partner. More knowledgeable people have said much more.

He was a true statesman. We need more like him.

[The_Badger]

 kenberg, on 2018-December-02, 08:37, said:

I was thinking the same, including that maybe it is superfluous to mention it. I was also wondering just what to say. The RIP thread probably should not be given over to extensive discussion of my views, or anyone's views, of his strengths and weaknesses, or of how the world has changed, etc. etc. But maybe I can say this much. I voted for Dukakis, but I very much felt that the country was in good hands with GHWB as president. Bush's note to Bill Clinton as Clinton took office is a stunning example of grace and generosity, and the two were later to become good friends. At a young age he made an excellent choice of a life partner. More knowledgeable people have said much more.

But there again, Ken, diplomacy hasn't always been a George H. W. Bush trait. Months before the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, where a Pan Am plane had been brought down by a bomb over Scotland with the loss of life of over 250 passengers and crew, Bush had said this about a similar incident (where a passenger plane had been misidentified and a similar number of innocent people killed.)

Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, who was running for president in 1988, said at the time of the U.S.S. Vincennes incident that he would “never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” (reported in The Washington Post)

That to me summed up the bellicose, over-patriotic rhetoric of a man obsessed with power.

[Al_U_Card]

 The_Badger, on 2018-December-06, 02:21, said:

But there again, Ken, diplomacy hasn't always been a George H. W. Bush trait. Months before the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, where a Pan Am plane had been brought down by a bomb over Scotland with the loss of life of over 250 passengers and crew, Bush had said this about a similar incident (where a passenger plane had been misidentified and a similar number of innocent people killed.)

Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, who was running for president in 1988, said at the time of the U.S.S. Vincennes incident that he would “never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.” (reported in The Washington Post)

That to me summed up the bellicose, over-patriotic rhetoric of a man obsessed with power.

And spoken like the true "company" man that he was from the very start.

[Cyberyeti]

To go back to somebody of less import to the world, but a big impact on my teenage years, Pete Shelley, lead singer of the Buzzcocks

https://www.youtube....h?v=51OB2YoC4sg

[y66]

Sister Wendy

Quote

From an early age she intended to become a nun, and at 16 she joined the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, a teaching order, as Sister Michael of St. Peter. She became Sister Wendy after Vatican reforms relaxed formalities.

She studied literature at Oxford in the early 1950s, living in a convent and observing its strict code of silence for four years. She graduated at the top of her class. Returning to South Africa, she taught for 15 years at a Cape Town convent and later lectured at Johannesburg’s University of Witwatersrand.

After suffering three grand mal seizures and learning that she had a form of epilepsy, she received Vatican consent to give up teaching for a life of solitude. In 1970, she returned to England and moved into the trailer at the Carmelite Monastery.

“I really didn’t think it was anything,” Sister Wendy recalled of her decision to talk about art on television in her book “Sister Wendy on Prayer” (2006). “I thought it was just a weekend here or there.”

Sister Wendy eventually wrote some 25 books, including collections of poetry and meditations, and made a dozen documentaries, many released on DVD. She always returned to the austere seclusion that was her home for nearly a half-century, although her trailer was upgraded in 1994.

“The sisters worried about the lack of insulation, so they put up a small mobile home, which has a lavatory, bathroom and light fittings,” she told The Telegraph of London in 2010. “I have an electric kettle, fridge, warming oven and night storage heater, so my life is as comfortable as it needs to be.”

[y66]

Jessica Tcherepine

Quote

Her portraits — of pumpkins and peppers, mushrooms and morels, coconuts and quinces and more — combined a delicate artistic sensibility with superb technique, and scientific accuracy with a passion for nearly anything that grows out of the ground.

..Ms. Tcherepnine was also a longtime board member of the Horticultural Society of New York, for whom she taught botanical drawing to prisoners at Rikers Island, the city’s main jail.

“She’d come out several times a year and talk to the inmates about the colors and elements of a flower,” Sara Hobel, the society’s executive director, said in a telephone interview. “Once, she conducted a fantastic discussion with them about pepper plants.”

..“When I am doing a painting, my subject is the last thing I look at before I go to bed and the first thing I look at when I get up in the morning,” Ms. Tcherepnine wrote in the article for the American Society of Botanical Artists. “And I am thinking about it in between.”

[paulg]

Gerald Haase, 1950-2019
BBO: blooddoc

From the SBU website:

"We are sorry to report the death of Gerald Haase, one of our most successful players.

"He learned bridge at University, and soon became proficient. He played his first Camrose match in 1973, aged 23, with Michael Rosenberg, aged 19. Scotland won that series. Later he played with George Cuthbertson, and it is a matter of record that the partnership never lost a Camrose match. Gerald moved to England, but remained steadfastly Scottish. He played two more Camrose matches, with Victor Goldberg in 2003, and John Murdoch in 2015.

"He also enjoyed considerable success in the Junior Camrose, winning in 1973 and 1975.

"Gerald was one of the select band of Scots who have won the Gold Cup twice: in 1977 and 1982.

"Recently he has been one of our reliable Seniors. He was a member of the Scottish Senior team that played in the World Championships in Bali in 2013. He represented Scotland as a Senior in Budapest (2016) and Ostend (2018). He played for Scotland in the Teltscher Trophy (Senior Camrose) in 2016, 2017 and 2018 with John Murdoch. Last year, Scotland recorded one of the most convincing wins ever.

"Gerald was a medical doctor whose speciality was blood transfusions. He suffered a head injury following a heart attack/stroke towards the end of 2018, and sadly never came out of the induced coma.

"To quote John Murdoch: 'His heart was only flawed in the medical sense.' He is remembered by our organisers and TDs as one who always remembered to thank the staff.

I didn't know Gerald as well as many but met him often at events that I was helping to run, such as the Senior trials, Camrose matches, Senior Camrose matches, and when I was watching the Scottish National League. I found him much more amiable and pleasant than his NPCs, teammates, and opponents had suggested! He took an interest in what we were doing with the juniors and how things had changed since his day.

He was still very active and intended to play in the SBU Winter Foursomes this weekend and the Senior trials at the end of this month.

RIP

[barmar]

Goodbye, Dolly!

[y66]

John C. Bogle

Quote

John C. Bogle, 89, who revolutionized the way Americans save for the future, championed the interests of the small investor, and railed against corporate greed and the excesses of Wall Street, died of cancer Wednesday at his home in Bryn Mawr, his family confirmed.

Mr. Bogle, a chipper and unpretentious man who invited everyone to call him “Jack,” was founder and for many years chairman of the Vanguard Group, the Malvern-based mutual-fund company, where he pioneered low-cost, low-fee investing and mutual funds tied to stock-market indexes. These innovations, reviled and ridiculed at first, enabled millions of ordinary Americans to build wealth to buy a home, pay for college, and retire comfortably.

Along the way, Vanguard, which Mr. Bogle launched in 1974, became a titan in the financial-services industry, with 16,600 employees and over $5 trillion in assets by the end of 2018, and Mr. Bogle earned a reputation as not only an investing sage but a maverick whose integrity and old-fashioned values set an example that many admired and few could match.

“Jack could have been a multibillionaire on a par with Gates and Buffett,” said William Bernstein, an Oregon investment manager and author of 12 books on finance and economic history. Instead, he turned his company into one owned by its mutual funds, and in turn their investors, "that exists to provide its customers the lowest price. He basically chose to forgo an enormous fortune to do something right for millions of people. I don’t know any other story like it in American business history.”

Quote

In his 70s, he displayed the energy of men half his age, and his pace and ambition were the more remarkable because of his lifelong battle with heart disease, the result of a congenital defect that affected the heart’s electrical current.

Mr. Bogle had his first heart attack in 1960, when he was only 30, and his heart stopped numerous times thereafter. When he was 37, his doctor advised him to retire. Mr. Bogle’s response was to switch doctors.

Mr. Bogle outlived three pacemakers, and kept a gym bag with a squash racket by his desk. In 1996, surgeons at Hahnemann University Hospital replaced his faulty heart with a strong one, ending a 128-day wait in the hospital. He reunited with his doctors years later.

“He was fiercely competitive when it counted, more intellectually alert than any person I’ve ever met, willing to face — indeed, almost court — controversy and criticism, stubborn but willing to compromise when absolutely necessary, and most importantly, loving, sentimental, kind, charitable, and courageous."
.
Mr. Bogle was proud of the many jobs he held in his youth — newspaper delivery boy, waiter, ticket seller, mail clerk, cub reporter, runner for a brokerage house, pinsetter in a bowling alley.

“I grew up in the best possible way,” Mr. Bogle said in 2008, “because we had social standing — I never thought I was inferior to anybody because we didn’t have any money — but I had to work for everything I got.”

“When he had the heart transplant, it changed him dramatically. He became much more connected to the family. He was very emotional, and teared up easily over things. He was literally reborn, and he really appreciated the chance of having a second go at life.”

“In a lot of ways, the last decade, an extra decade of my life, has been the happiest of my life,” Mr. Bogle said in 2008. “I’m contributing to society. I’m doing what I want to do. I’m writing what I want and saying what I want, and I think my name and reputation, for whatever that’s worth, have been enhanced.”

A man who believed in the value of introspection and who was always questioning his own motives and behavior, Mr. Bogle sought to define what it means to lead a good life. It was not about wealth, power, fame and other conventional notions of success, he concluded. “It’s about being a good husband, a good father, a good colleague, a good member of the community. Everything else pales by comparison.”

[barmar]

 y66, on 2019-January-17, 06:04, said:

John C. Bogle

This is coincidentally BBO-related, as we use Vanguard for our 401(k) retirement plan.

[y66]

From Remembering Nathan Glazer at The Bulwark:

Quote

Nathan Glazer, the preeminent sociologist and a pioneering neoconservative critic of progressive social reforms, died Saturday at the age of 95. A child of Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Glazer began his career sympathetic to socialism before becoming disillusioned with the effects of the policies he once championed. He joined other former liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz as one of the originators of the neoconservative movement. We’ve collected remembrances and homages to him here.

Quote

In 2017, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an interview of Glazer by John Kaag. The last question is perhaps the most illuminating about the breadth of his curiosity and the flexibility of his intelligence — all without arrogance or complacency:

When you think about your career, what are you most proud of?

Quote

Maybe I should leave this out, but I’ve been thinking of my past and not thinking about it as large and significant. I had some fortunate accidents, which gave me a prominence I probably don’t deserve. I worked on a book that became The Lonely Crowd, and it became the biggest best seller in American sociology. I was supposed to write the great book on American ethnicity, and eventually, I didn’t. I’d collect essays and think about it, but then I thought there were enough good people saying good things about the issue. Sometimes I think that I wasn’t self-directed enough, that I got diverted into too many different topics.

Of course American Judaism — that was really my first book. And it became a kind of semi-classic in this little field, so that commits you in a way to go to conferences and so on. And then there is the second edition, the third edition, and eventually you lose touch since so much keeps happening. Like I said, I got diverted.

I was interested in architecture always. And when I came to Harvard I was into art. I had a connection to the architecture school at Berkeley, and at Harvard they offered me a similar opportunity.

My interests were diverse, and I’m pleased that despite how diverse they were I was able to achieve a reputation in sociology. I certainly don’t regret not having made a fuller commitment to the discipline, because I had these interests. What could I do?

With Glazer’s passing, the last of a generation of critics of progressivism has gone. The entire conservative movement is indebted to them for their intellectual honesty, unquenchable curiosity, and rigor. Their shadows, Glazer’s included, seem only to grow longer as the virtues they embodied seem to grow rarer.

[kenberg]

 y66, on 2019-January-21, 09:13, said:

From Remembering Nathan Glazer at The Bulwark:

Although I have "always" known the name Nathan Glazer I don't think I have ever read anything he wrote. The above makes me think that was my error.

I grew up Protestant in Minnesota in the 1940s-50s, which is, or at least can be, a lot different from growing up Jewish in New York in the 1920s-30s but academic life tends to throw people of different backgrounds together. Last night I had a long chat on the phone with a childhood friend who lives on (well, on the edge of) a lake in northern Minnesota. I also had an email chat with a mathematician friend, Jewish and only a little younger than Glazer, who grew up in New York and whose father went to jail during the HUAC days. The world is an interesting place. Maybe I will read some Glazer.

Thanks for posting this.

[barmar]

 kenberg, on 2019-January-21, 10:10, said:

Although I have "always" known the name Nathan Glazer I don't think I have ever read anything he wrote. The above makes me think that was my error.

I'd never heard of him, but I have a bridge friend named Nathan Glasser, and I momentarily had a scare when I read the first line.

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2019-January-22, 12:14, said:

I'd never heard of him, but I have a bridge friend named Nathan Glasser, and I momentarily had a scare when I read the first line.

I just looked him up on the Wik and they mention "Beyond the Melting Pot" was published in 1963. This seems right. I was young and interested in such things, so that's why I recall the name, and I was in grad student and my daughter turned 2 that year, which pretty much explains why I didn't read that or much of anything other than math books..