RIP 2019
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Thursday 23 May 2019 by Davytoast
But who will pour the tea now? asked Mog, sadlyThere’s an empty space at the table between a forgetful cat and a Tiger today.
Judith Kerr was very tired and went to sleep forever this morning, leaving a body of work which touched the lives of every child who read them in ways which are difficult to express but were lifelong.
Even a slightly bewildered and dozy cat couldn’t forget her simple tales, and she deserved a medal for helping entire families love books together – and got one, being awarded an OBE in 2012.
As well as creating a brace of daft but harmless felines, Judith worked tirelessly to ensure the world didn’t forget her own experiences as a refugee from Nazi Germany, writing books describing the experience from a child’s perspective, and travelling to speak widely about it.
When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit managed to maintain a childlike simplicity and view of the world whilst describing the effects of flight, confusion and fear in terms that were stark and understandable to junior readers, and may well be the first experience of a wider political world that many readers encounter.
In all of this, her message was always People do die, and you do lose them, but you should get on with your own lives.
“It’s a good thing I drank all the tea in the pot, and all the orange juice, and all of daddy’s beer, and all the water in the tap,” said the Tiger.
“Or I wouldn’t be full enough for all these tears.”
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Bill Buckner died today. Only 69. Of dementia.
It makes me really sad. The poor guy had to carry the legacy of the Boston Red Sox curse for decades, pretty much the poster-boy for the biggest boner in American sports history. He had to iive with it. This was a guy who was an All Star, played in the Big Leagues for 22 seasons, won a Batting Title (!!) ffs, and was forced to play out of position with destroyed knees and all anybody wants to remember is that play, even though it was pitcher Bob Stanley who rightly should have lived with the goat horns, he was the fuckup who blew the World Series, not Bill Buckner.
So, it’s a sad day. R.I.P. Bill. You were a great ballplayer, by all opinion a decent man, and you deserved better.
Bill Buckner’s legacy sadly took far too long to change
[...]
Buckner was chased out of Boston. He came back to Fenway for a Sox encore, to cheers, in 1990, briefly, but after he retired he had to seek asylum in Idaho to forsake the maddening crowd. He spoke later of a constant bitterness that filled him. Twenty-two years of elegant baseball service, reduced to 22 seconds, the worst 22 seconds of his career.
[...]
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Roky Erickson, the genius brains behind The 13th Floor Elevators and the birth of psychedelic music, died yesterday at the tender age of 71.
A good obit & backgrounder at the link below, with a nice testimony from ZZ Top ‘s Billy Gibbons.
We’re gonna miss him.
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From that obit:
[...]
A 2003 American-Statesman article by Andrea Ball recapped what happened in the late 1960s, after Erickson was arrested on marijuana charges: “He spent several years at Rusk State Hospital, which had a maximum-security unit for the criminally insane. While he was there, doctors gave him mood-stabilizing drugs and administered electroshock therapy. Roky spent the next three decades drifting between reality and insanity. During the good times, he married, had children and produced music. The bad times left him paralyzed by auditory hallucinations and paranoia.”
[...]
Different times.
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Despite being a kid brought up on the amazing special effects of Star Wars ( and lets be honest everything looked cheap and nasty in comparison ) I always quite enjoyed this show even though it had polystyrene monsters and cardboard walls. This guy always cracked me up with his cynical, dry wit. RIP Avon.
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Despite being a kid brought up on the amazing special effects of Star Wars ( and lets be honest everything looked cheap and nasty in comparison ) I always quite enjoyed this show even though it had polystyrene monsters and cardboard walls. This guy always cracked me up with his nasty, dry wit. RIP Avon.
I loved that show. I reckon Darrow was probably my favourite character, the smartest guy in that room
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Justin Raimondo, RIP (1951-2019)
My hero just passed away.
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Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, 27, found dead in hotel room
Skaggs, 27, was found unresponsive Monday afternoon at a Hilton hotel in Southlake, a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, police said in a statement.
He was pronounced dead at the scene. No foul play is suspected at this point, police said. [...]
Skaggs pitched Saturday for the Angels, completing 4 1/3 innings in the team's game against the Oakland A's at Angel Stadium, according to MLB.com. [...]
He had a 7-7 record this year. He was 28-38 for his Major League career, with a 4.41 ERA
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First MLB game I ever saw was Angels Stadium in 1978, it was the first home game a day after Lyman Bostock, a young star on the team, was shot & killed by a shotgun while he was seated in a car. I’d arrived from Auckland earlier in the day and had no idea what happened, then they did the minutes-of-silence that was eerily long and you could hear crying all through the stadium. It was heart-breaking, and I didn’t even know who Bostock was, ‘tho later learned he was an excellent ball player (lifetime batting-average .311 is all-star quality). (I think Don Aase started and they defeated the Orioles.)
According to the wikipedia entry, ‘His shooter was sentenced to a psychiatric hospital and released after seven months.“
It’s a crazy stupid story.
Shooting death
Following the game at Comiskey Park, as he regularly did when in Chicago, Bostock visited his uncle Thomas Turner in nearby Gary, Indiana.[1] After eating a meal with a group of relatives at Turner's home, Bostock and his uncle went to visit Joan Hawkins, a woman whom Bostock had tutored as a teenager, but had not seen for several years.[14] After the visit, Turner agreed to give Hawkins and her sister, Barbara Smith, a ride to their cousin's house. Turner drove his vehicle, with Hawkins seated in the front passenger's seat. Bostock and Barbara Smith rode in the vehicle's back seat.
Barbara Smith had been living with Hawkins while estranged from her husband, Leonard Smith. Unbeknownst to the group, Leonard Smith was outside Hawkins' home in his car, and observed the group's departure in Turner's car. According to Leonard Smith, his wife was frequently unfaithful to him, and though he did not know Bostock, he later said that upon seeing Bostock get into the back seat of Turner's vehicle with his wife, he concluded that the two were having an affair. In fact, however, Bostock had only met the woman 20 minutes previously, when he and his uncle arrived at Hawkins' home.
At 10:40 p.m. as Turner's vehicle was stopped at a traffic signal at the intersection of 5th and Jackson Streets, Leonard Smith's car pulled up alongside them.[18] Leonard Smith leaned out of his vehicle and fired one blast of a .410 caliber shotgun into the back seat of Turner's car, where Bostock and Barbara Smith were seated.[14] Leonard Smith said that his lethal wrath was intended for his estranged wife; however, Bostock was seated between Barbara Smith and the position from which Leonard Smith was firing. Instead of striking her, the blast caught Bostock squarely in the right temple.[14] At age 27, he died two hours later at a Gary hospital.[14] Barbara Smith was hospitalized in fair condition with pellet wounds to her face.[18]
Aftermath: trial
Smith was tried twice for murder, with his lawyers arguing that Barbara Smith's alleged infidelity had driven him insane. The first trial resulted in a hung jury. In the second trial, Smith was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed for psychiatric treatment. Within seven months, he was deemed no longer mentally ill by his psychiatrists and released. Including his time in jail awaiting and during trial, Smith's time in custody amounted to 21 months. In the aftermath of Smith's case, the legislature in Indiana changed the state's insanity laws. After the change, a person found to be insane at the time of the commission of a crime could still be found legally guilty, and thus could be sent to prison if and when he or she was released from psychiatric treatment.
Leonard Smith returned to Gary, Indiana, where he resided for the remainder of his life, moving in his later years in a high-rise apartment building for senior citizens. After his 1980 release from custody, he never again ran afoul of the law and he declined all requests to comment publicly about the killing of Bostock. In 2010, Smith died of natural causes at the age of 64.[19]
Bostock is interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California. "There were never enough hours in the day for Lyman," said Angels teammate Bobby Grich. "We called him 'Gibber-Jabber' because he was always talking. Everyone was crazy about him because he was so outgoing and friendly, always up, always looking on the bright side."[20]
Said Twins teammate Rod Carew: “Lyman Bostock was my teammate on the Twins for three years. I knew he was very close to an uncle who lived in Gary, Indiana. Lyman often visited him after games against the White Sox. How senseless. How horrible. I still can’t believe it happened. Everyone really liked Lyman. When we played the Angels [in 1978], he sent the batboy over to me with a newspaper photograph of himself wearing sunglasses with dollar signs on the lenses. Above the picture Lyman had written, Rod, I need help. His average was around .200. So I watched him in the game. I noticed he was lunging at pitches. He was too anxious. His swing wasn’t smooth, as it normally is. I told him I thought he was trying to hit the ball into “holes” between fielders instead of swinging with the pitch. No one can manipulate a bat so well that he can consistently hit the ball into holes. I don’t know if I helped or not, but Lyman picked up and was batting .296 when he died.[21]
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Glyn Houston
Check his bio
The very definition of a jobbing actor