Drowned in moonlight

Man—the loss of notables seems exceptionally high this year. The good, the bad—seems like Death was on a rampage in 2016. Here’s a sampling.

(The original list, obtained from this site, ran to ten letter-sized pages. I’ve limited it to people whose loss I personally felt in one way or another.)

David Bowie died Jan. 10, two days after his 69th birthday, after an 18-month secret battle with cancer. The music legend was well-known for his fashion, movie roles, Ziggy Stardust and hit songs like "Space Oddity," "Fame" and "Let's Dance."

Brian Bedford, best known for voicing the title character in Disney's 1973 animated film Robin Hood as a fox, died Jan. 13 at 80.

Alan Rickman, Harry Potter actor and Die Hard villain, died of cancer at 69 on Jan. 14.

The man stole every film he was ever in. He would have done that just as a voiced character. I adored him. He was the best thing in Sense and Sensibility, and put the romance in Truly, Madly, Deeply. And is there anyone who didn’t secretly wish that his Sheriff of Nottingham would prevail over Kevin Costner?

Dan Haggerty, "Grizzly Adams" actor and '70s star best-known for his beard and rugged looks, died of cancer at 74 on Jan. 15.

I have to say that I most remember Haggerty as the man responsible for getting flaming drinks banned for a while in LA after one of them set his beard on fire.

Glenn Frey, The Eagles guitarist and co-founder, died at 67 on Jan. 18. Frey co-wrote hits like "Hotel California" with Don Henley.

Abe Vigoda, character actor in The Godfather and Barney Miller, died at 94 on Jan. 26.

Finally those obits could be used.

Paul Kantner, Jefferson Airplane co-founder and guitarist, died at 74 on Jan. 28.

Signe Anderson, the original Jefferson Airplane singer who was replaced by Grace Slick, died at 74 on Jan. 28, the same day as Kantner.

Frank Finlay, Oscar-nominated actor who played Iago in Laurence Olivier's Othello, died Jan. 30 at 89.

Ever Porthos in my mind and heart. Just as Oliver Reed is forever Athos.

Maurice White, a founding member of disco-funk group Earth, Wind & Fire, died Feb. 3 at 74.

Vanity, '80s singer-actress and Prince protégée also known as Denise Katrina Matthews, died Feb. 15 at 57.

George Gaynes, who starred on "Punky Brewster" and played Commandant Lassard in all seven "Police Academy" movies, died Feb. 15 at 98.

Harper Lee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird, died Feb. 19 at age 89.

If you’re going to be essentially a one-book novelist, To Kill a Mockingbird is the way to do it. I can’t go south of the Mason-Dixon Line without channeling some part of her depiction of Maycomb County, which was a fictional name, but a true place.

I also love the fact that it looks like she cut her own bangs and didn’t care who knew it.

George Kennedy, tough-guy character actor best known for Cool Hand Luke and the Naked Gun movies, died Feb. 28 at 91.

Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, died March 4 at age 70.

Nancy Reagan, former film actress and First Lady of the United States from 1981-1989, died March 6 at 94.

Joe Santos, The Rockford Files and The Sopranos actor, died March 18 at 84.

Phife Dawg, Grammy-nominated A Tribe Called Quest rapper, died March 22 of diabetes at 45.

Ken Howard, White Shadow actor and SAG-AFTRA president, died March 23 at 71.

Garry Shandling, comedian and The Larry Sanders Show star, died March 24 at 66.

Earl Hamner Jr., The Waltons creator and Twilight Zone writer, died March 24 at 92.

Patty Duke, Oscar and Emmy-winning actress, former child star and mother of Lord of the Rings actor Sean Astin, died March 29 of sepsis from a ruptured intestine at 69.

Oscar winner at 16, she used her lifelong fame as a bully pulpit to advocate for women’s equality, AIDS treatment, nuclear disarmament and mental health.

Ronnie Corbett, British comedian and star of The Two Ronnies, died March 31 at age 85.

Erik Bauersfeld, the voice of Admiral Ackbar ("It's a trap!") in Star Wars films, died April 3 at age 93.

Merle Haggard, country music legend who had more than 30 No. 1 hits, died April 6 on his 79th birthday.

Doris Roberts, Emmy-winning actress on Everybody Loves Raymond, died April 18 at 90.

I loved her the minute she marched into a shot of Remington Steele as an IRS auditor. She also was a champion scene stealer, in both comedy and drama. One of the most expressive faces ever.

Victoria Wood, British comedian, singer and writer, died April 20 at 62.

Prince, music legend behind hits "Purple Rain," "When Doves Cry," "Batdance," "1999," "Kiss" and others, died April 21 at 57.

Madeleine LeBeau, best known in a supporting role as Yvonne in the 1942 film Casablanca, died May 1 at 92.

As Yvonne, she was essentially what the Brits would call no better than she should be, but the look on her face as the denizens of Rick’s Café Americain drown out “Die Wacht am Rhein” with “La Marseillaise” is amazing.

William Schallert, Patty Duke's TV dad and actors' union leader died May 8 at 93.

Morley Safer, CBS News correspondent, died at 84 on May 19, days after retiring from 60 Minutes.

Alan Young, star of TV's Mister Ed and the voice of Scrooge McDuck on Duck Tales, died May 19 at 96.

Angela Paton, who played the innkeeper in Groundhog Day, died May 26 at age 86.

Muhammad Ali, the boxing legend born Cassius Clay, died June 3 at 74 after a long battle with Parksinson's disease.

I am in no way a fan of boxing at all. But there was something about Ali that transcended all my revulsion. And the greatest summary of him came, for me, when Billy Crystal gave this tribute at the boxer’s funeral. Clearly he had the gift of friendship.

Theresa Saldana, Raging Bull and The Commish actress who became an advocate for stalker victims, died June 6 at 61.

Gordie Howe, the four-time Stanley Cup champion and NHL legend known as "Mr. Hockey," died June 10 at 88.

Anton Yelchin, actor in Star Trek, died June 18 at 27 after being crushed by his own car at his home.

Michael Herr, acclaimed author of Vietnam War memoir Dispatches, died June 23 at 76.

Dispatches is one of the seminal works to come out of that war.

Elie Wiesel, author, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, died July 2 at 87.

Whenever I hear someone described as “he speaks truth to power”, I prepare for a blowhard. But Wiesel’s experiences early in life gave him the eloquence and courage to do precisely that.

“That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.” Those words should be carved into whatever tombstone covers Ronald Reagan’s grave, even though he disregarded them completely.

Michael Cimino, Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter director, died July 2 at 77.

Garry Marshall, legendary writer, director and actor whose credits include Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Pretty Woman, died July 19 at 81.

Marni Nixon, The singer best known for dubbing vocals for Hollywood stars in The King and I, My Fair Lady and West Side Story, died July 24 at 86.

Jerry Doyle, Babylon 5 actor best known for playing Chief Warrant Officer Michael Garibaldi, died July 27 at 60.

Glenn Yarbrough, founding member of folk trio The Limeliters, died Aug. 11 at 86.

Kenny Baker, Star Wars actor who played R2-D2, died Aug. 13 at 81.

Fyvush Finkel, Emmy-winning stage and screen actor best known for playing lawyer David Wambaugh on Picket Fences, died Aug. 14 at 93.

John McLaughlin, political commentator and host of The McLaughlin Group, died Aug. 16 at 89.

Arthur Hiller, director of Love Story, The Out-of-Towners and See No Evil Hear No Evil, died Aug. 17 at 92.

Donald A. Henderson, M.D., the epidemiologist who was largely responsible for the global eradication of small pox, died Aug. 19, aged 87.

Steven Hill, Law & Order and Mission Impossible actor, died Aug. 23 at age 94.

Gene Wilder, comedy legend who starred in classic movies like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, died Aug. 28 at age 83.

And loving husband to Gilda Radner.

Jon Polito, character actor best known for roles in Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski, died Sept. 1 at 65.

But I knew him in Homicide: Life on the Street.

Hugh O'Brian, best known for starring on TV's The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, died Sept. 5 at 91.

Oddly, the thing I best remember O’Brian for was the acting award he founded at UCLA, to encourage young talent. Perhaps I was too young to have seen much of what he did, so I never thought of him as a great actor. But he was a great encourager of the craft.

The Lady Chablis, a transgender performer best known for her role in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, died of pneumonia Sept. 8 at 59.

Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? playwright, died Sept. 16 at 88.

Charmian Carr, who played Liesl von Trapp in The Sound of Music, died Sept. 17 at 73.

Neville Marriner, British conductor behind Oscar-winning "Amadeus" soundtrack, died Oct. 2 at 92.

I don’t think I ever actually saw Marriner, but I heard, “…And that was The Academy of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, with [Sir] Neville Marriner conducting” about three times a day every day of my life on any classical music station anywhere.

Janet Reno, first woman to serve as U.S. attorney general, died Nov. 7 at 78 after a battle with Parkinson's disease.

Leonard Cohen, singer-songwriter, died Nov. 7 at 82.

Yeah—I’ll give you “Hallelujah”. But it’s k.d. lang singing it at Cohen’s induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006, before it became bog-standard. And Cohen’s in the audience.

Robert Vaughn, Oscar-nominated actor who starred on TV's The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and was one of The Magnificent Seven, died Nov. 11 at 83.

I was more an Illya Kuryakin girl, but…

Leon Russell, influential singer-songwriter and all-star collaborator, died Nov. 13 at 74.

Gwen Ifill, "PBS NewsHour" anchor and vice presidential debate moderator, died Nov. 14 at 61 after a battle with cancer.

Such a loss to journalism, to political civility, to everyone.

Florence Henderson, beloved Brady Bunch mom, died Nov. 24 at 82.

Fidel Castro, revolutionary firebrand and dictator of Cuba for nearly 50 years, finally succumbed to the CIA’s slow-acting poisoned cigars on Nov. 25, aged 90. I personally would be inclined to stick a couple of pins in him just to verify death, but I suppose after the cremation, that would be a pointless exercise.

Ron Glass, actor from TV's Barney Miller and Firefly, died Nov. 26 at 71.

Glass did an episode of Major Crimes with Doris Roberts (among others) that was truly brilliant in its goofiness. (Okay, Tim Conway was in it, too. 'Nuff said.)

Fritz Weaver, Tony-winning character actor best known for "The Twilight Zone," "Holocaust" and "Fail Safe," died Nov. 26 at 90.

Grant Tinker, former NBC, MTM boss behind '70s, '80s TV hits like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, died Nov. 28 at 90.

He also brought back NBC from near extinction by fostering great writers of both comedy and drama and running ground-breaking series from Hill Street Blues to Golden Girls. He resigned after GE bought NBC, and long before the network was assimilated into Comcast.

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and a former U.S. senator, died Dec. 8 at 95.

Ah, Glenn needs no words from me. Except for these: I fear we shall not see his like again.

Bernard Fox, who played Dr. Bombay on Bewitched and appeared in Hogan's Heroes, The Mummy and Titanic, died Dec. 14 at 89.

Fox was also, for many years, the Master of Ceremonies at Santa Monica’s Mayfair Music Hall, a show I saw more than once during my Sherlockian days.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, actress, nine times married and most famous for being famous, died Dec. 18 at 99.

George Michael, former Wham! singer known for hits like "Faith," "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and "Freedom '90," died Dec. 25 of heart failure at 53.

Oh, such a blast from the past:

Carrie Fisher, actress who played Princess Leia/General Organa in Star Wars, died Dec. 27 at 60.

But Fisher was so much more than a pretty face on the big screen. She was extraordinarily candid about her many missteps during her career and in her private life. Like Patty Duke, she used her fame to educate on and advocate for mental health issues. She was a sassy, articulate, courageous and sardonic broad.

Which clip do I show of her? Oooohhhh…..

Okay—this was one of her last appearances, and she and Ellen DeGeneres are having such a great time with this that it seems like an appropriate finish.

Debbie Reynolds, 84, died Wednesday, just a day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher. Reynolds was an actress, singer, Vegas entertainer, businesswoman and humanitarian. Like the character she played in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Reynolds plowed through numerous setbacks—cheating and embezzling husbands, bankruptcies, illnesses—and reinvented herself again and again. In the end, her daughter's death was a calamity too far.

At the time of writing, this was the complete list for 2016. I hope to God we make it through the final two days without me having to go in and amend it. So I'll close with a song by someone who is, at this moment, still alive. And bring on 2017.

Strange commerce

Apparently 2016 is the Year of No Copy Editors. Although I suppose AOL in all its permutations can’t be considered the kind of media that cares about communications. Their primary focus is on getting clicks.

At any rate, here’s something from the landing page that I found…well, bizarre:

Which is what their headline writer should have used, because—even though I don’t give a toss about who this Krauthammer guy is, or what advice he might be giving the Kleptocrat—the advice was not, in fact, related to commerce.

Just more right-wing crackpottery.

As for the copy editors—wherever you are, I hope you’re enjoying your leisure. Some of us miss you sorely. Others, obviously, never knew you were around.

Seasons greetings

I picked up a holiday card yesterday at work. It was signed personally by our CEO, which is fine.

But it also had my name in his handwriting, along with the message, “Happy to have you at [place of employment].”

I have to say that, in this age of surveillance by everyone from the NSA to Facebook, this is just the tiniest bit disconcerting.

I guess if he just made one pass writing the “Happy to have you” message and signing his name 500 times, and then another pass adding name after name from a list of all employees, that would be okay.

What does this say about me, though?

Love in the news

Yeah, let’s take a swipe at one of the much-reviled mainstream media, but this time for good, solid reason.

Christmas Eve dinner and complex card game with friends, then Boxing Day party with a complex game of Catchphrase plus a 45-minute drive home late last night left me crawling into work this morning feeling a bit like Bob Cratchit telling Scrooge, “I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.”

So I was trawling Washington Post this morning, trying to ease myself back into work, and lookee what I found: a frisnic (well, I don’t think it really qualifies as a “story”) in their Style section about (and by) someone who used Tinder to find what appears to be more than a one-off hookup. 

Well, yippee.

However, what piqued my real interest was the headline in the left-hand rail teaser:

Fiancé, as you well know, is the male half of the betrothed couple. I looked at the writer’s name and thought, “Well, isn’t that very post-Obergefell v. Hodges?”

Okay, no, that’s not what I thought. I thought, “Oh, WaPo, WaPo—do you have no editors of any stripe who understand the whole fiancé-fiancée thing? Is your copy-editing algorithm so pig-ignorant that it doesn’t even flag this for a human?”

So I clicked on the link, because I wanted to see how many corrections appeared in the comments. As it happened, there were no comments, but here’s how someone or something “fixed” the head:

Well, what do I know—maybe “wifé” is a whole thing, and I’m just behind the times.

Thank you, WaPo. For I can now continue to make rather merry.

UPDATE: as of 1400 today, this is what has been showing for at least three hours (they changed the head, but didn't reload the article, because "wife" still shows in the URL): 

I may be making rather merry, but inside I'm weeping for civilization.

Gratitude Monday: Fine dining

If you think your holiday dinner conversation with the ‘Rents and Rels was awkward, be grateful that it wasn’t like this, from one of my friends:

Although, these days I’m guessing that parents are live-streaming these important events. But I’m grateful that so far, I haven’t come across one of them in my social media.

How shall I receive you?

Today’s the big finish, isn’t it? So even though we’ve already had one piece from Bach, I’m closing out my 2016 Advent with his Christmas Oratorio.

Well, Part 1, the “Early Morning” Nativity cantata, since it premiered on this day in 1734.

As I write this, I’m in my living room, the sun is out, and sparrows are ecstatic about the scone I put out there about 15 minutes ago. (Alas—a failed first try at a theme gift for a friend. I realized after I’d got them into the oven that I’d forgotten to add the salt, and these just didn’t rise, so I had to make another tray of them. The sparrows don’t seem to mind. There are 14 or 16 of them—they are hard to count, seeing as to how they all look alike and they hop about continuously.)

May your Christmas Day, your Hanukkah and/or your Sunday be all you could wish.

Happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, happy...

In addition to Christmas Eve, today is Erev Hanukkah. So I believe something a little less…orthodox is in order. And what’s less Orthodox than Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song”?

(Whatever that is, I don’t want to know about it.)

Sandler has updated the lyrics several times in the decades since he sprang this song on the world. He now recounts (among other things) that “Joseph Gordon-Levitt enjoys eating kugel; So does Stan Lee, Jake Gyllenhaal, and the two guys who founded Google.”

I've built my dreams around you

When it comes to classic Christmas films, there are plenty: Miracle on 34^th Street, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Christmas Story, Die Hard, about 235 versions of A Christmas Carol… But last year I stumbled upon one that’s become one of my holiday favorites: A Very Murray Christmas.

Yeah, it’s not for everyone, but I’ll pretty much watch Bill Murray in anything. Plus: Christmas.

The schtick is that on Christmas Eve, Murray’s in his hotel in Manhattan, waiting to broadcast a live show (hello? Scrooged?), which he needs to do for the money. But a blizzard of Biblical proportions strikes, screwing everything up. He can’t cancel, but…well, a whole lot happens (including a power failure) and he, his crew, a wedding party, and miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam end up in the hotel bar, doing what you might expect in a Manhattan bar during a blizzard on Christmas Eve.

There’s drinking, crying, fighting and singing. All the usual elements of holiday festivities.

The piece I truly love is the ensemble’s cover of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York”. There’s something about this collection odds and sods, primed by either tequila or slivovitz (or both), coming together to sing about broken dreams, lost opportunities and old drunks that just speaks to me.

Whaddaya think?

The first tree in the greenwood

The “Sans Day Carol” comes to us from 19^th Century Cornwall. It’s similar to “The Holly and the Ivy”, but I kind of like this variant better. Sometimes. Sometimes not. It depends.

Here’s the English early music group Carnival Band performing it. I like this version because it hasn’t been interfered with by John Rutter, and that’s hard to find these days.

Water like a stone

It’s the Winter Solstice today—the longest night and shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Humans have been marking the turning back of night around this time for millennia—celebrating the resurgence of light and hope over darkness and despair. Because no matter how black and cold it might seem at this moment, they know that the seasons will revolve; spring will follow winter; there is life beneath the frosted landscape.

The English poet Christina Rossetti wrote “In the Bleak Midwinter” in 1872, although it wasn’t published until 1904. A couple of years later it was set to music by Gustav Holst and became the carol we now know.

The imagery of the first stanza just makes you shiver—earth hard as iron; moaning, frosty wind; water like stone; snow piled deep on itself. It’s a frozen world, an absolutely perfect description of the Winter Solstice. As Rossetti goes on to describe the mother and child, the stable beasts and the angels, you can just about see their breaths billowing misty into the night air.

It seems appropriate for today, and here’s one of my favorite a capella groups, Chanticleer, singing it.