RIP to the OG

Alas! Broadway star and legend Chita Rivera has died aged 91.

My cat is named for her, and it's a funny story I feel I should share. See, in 2007 or so, Dude was working for the local alt-newsweekly (remember those?) and during the time he was there, Chita Rivera was scheduled to come to Buffalo for a show. The theatre editor was so excited about this that he insisted on having a 52-week countdown on the theatre page, which annoyed the graphic design department enormously because that page otherwise had a static header.

But it became a running joke. "ONLY FORTY-NINE WEEKS UNTIL CHITA RIVERA!"

The theatre editor was so excited he commissioned a mural of her to be painted on his dining room wall.

I'm not sure how this came about, but somehow she was offered and accepted an invitation to come to his house to dine on the night she was in town. I cannot imagine painting someone on my dining room wall and then inviting her over, but I also have never been the theatre editor in an alt-newsweekly; there are many things I have not experienced in life.

In the midst of this, that's when Dude and I got our kitten. It was like-- of course we had to name her Chita. So we did. But not just Chita. She's Chita Rivera, which confuses the vet enormously, because neither of us have the last name Rivera. "She's not related to us," Dude explained patiently to the vet receptionist, who did not find this enlightening.

Anyway-- she was apparently a wonderful guest to dinner, the show she came to do was delightful, it all went swimmingly. She apparently was not at all disconcerted by the mural of herself, which I suppose if I were a legend I might also not find that disconcerting.

And while she was there, she told them her margarita recipe. I have made this recipe on several occasions and please serve it over a lot of ice because it will kill you otherwise. It is refreshing and actually really delightful to drink. It does not taste as strong as it is. It is incredibly strong.

Lo: The Chita Margarita, in memory of the realest of them all.

Take 1 can of limeade concentrate and empty it into a pitcher. Refill the empty can with tequila, and add that to the pitcher. Now refill the empty can with cheap beer-- Corona will do, something pale-- and add that to the pitcher.

Voila! No, this cannot be scaled down. Please serve it over ice.

Rest in peace, legend!

Words used for “dying” in Obituaries.

by u/languageseu

I work for a nonprofit that deals in terminal diseases, so I google a lot of obituaries, and obituaries are an insane part of the virtual world and the weird panopticon in which we’ve found ourselves. I’m not even counting the obits with autoplay midi files when you load the page, like some kind of morbid MySpace. 

Say I’m looking for the obituary of someone we know has passed, call him Joe Weston, that’s a relatively common name. If I google his name plus the disease we know he passed from, I’ll generally find any obituary that exists for him with relative speed. 

But if I just google his name and “obituary”, Google tends to show me obits in a virtual geographic plotting -- it starts with obits of people with that name who are closest to the location where Google thinks I am, and radiates outwards from there. So unless it’s a famous person, if Google senses via my IP address that I’m in Chicago, it starts with obits in Chicago, then gives me obituaries in the burbs, then Illinois and Wisconsin, then Michigan, and so forth. I almost never search just the name and “obituary”, so I only noticed this because my work’s VPN is located on the east coast and if I’m on the VPN it starts my treasure hunt in Connecticut. 

What I’m saying is that I, a researcher in death, am surrounded by ghosts, and Google knows where they are. 

CBS News:

Award-winning journalist Charles Osgood, who anchored "CBS Sunday Morning" for 22 years and was host of the long-running radio program "The Osgood File," died Tuesday at home in New Jersey.  He was 91.  The cause of death was dementia, his family said. Osgood, a gifted news writer, poet and author, spent 45 years at CBS News before retiring in September 2016. Osgood began anchoring "CBS Sunday Morning" in 1994. During his run on the show it reached its highest ratings levels in three decades, and three times earned the Daytime Emmy as Outstanding Morning Program.

[...]

Often referred to as CBS News' poet-in-residence, Osgood was called "one of the last great broadcast writers" by Charles Kuralt, whom Osgood succeeded as host of the Sunday morning magazine program in 1994. But he did more than carry on a great American oral tradition; he could also play piano, organ, banjo, violin, and was an accomplished composer and lyricist who could also sing along. He employed his many talents inside and outside CBS, sometimes performing with professional orchestras such as The New York Pops, The Boston Pops and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. 

"To say there's no one like Charles Osgood is an understatement," said "Sunday Morning" executive producer Rand Morrison. "He embodied the heart and soul of 'Sunday Morning.' His signature bow tie, his poetry … just his presence was special for the audience, and for those of us who worked with him. At the piano, Charlie put our lives to music. Truly, he was one of a kind – in every sense."  Veteran broadcaster Jane Pauley, who succeeded Osgood as host of "Sunday Morning" in 2016, said, "Watching him at work was a masterclass in communicating. I'll still think to myself, 'How would Charlie say it?', trying to capture the elusive warmth and intelligence of his voice and delivery. I expect I'll go on trying. He was one of the best broadcast stylists and one of the last. His style was so natural and unaffected it communicated his authenticity. He connected with people. Watching him  on TV, or listening on the radio, as I did for years, was to feel like you knew him, and he knew you. He brought a unique sensibility, curiosity and his trademark whimsy to 'Sunday Morning,' and it endures."

Former CBS Sunday Morning host Charles Osgood passed away at 91.

PAUL REUBENS WAS AN HONORARY PUNK

My earliest memory of Paul Reubens was his role in Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams where he played a coke dealer. Cheech and Chong give him all their money to buy some toot but Pee Wee disappears. They track him down, only to find he is a patient at a psychiatric hospital and they have to wander through a crowd of lunatics only to find that he is mentally too far gone to tell them what he did with their money. If you watch any DVD’s of this movie that were made after 1988, you will notice this scene has been permanently deleted.

So a few later, I was getting involved with the small but growing hardcore punk scene in my city. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure was released in the theaters around then. It was an instant success and I went to see it three times. By the second and third viewing I started to recognize that more and more audience members were people I knew from the punk scene.

Many of us in the counter-culture loved Pee Wee. For one thing, many of us rode bicycles. It was our second favorite form of transportation behind skateboards since most people we knew couldn’t afford cars back then. City buses were still the primary method of movement in a dark city where wind, rain, and snow were the norm. But when the sun came out, we rode around in packs on our bikes. Any time there was a show, you could see them chained up by the dozens somewhere near the venue. They were our vehicles out of our world. We rode them in the moonlit cemeteries. They were safer than public transport when we went off to buy drugs. Sometimes we rode out to the suburbs to go pool hopping; that meant skinny-dipping, uninvited of course, in people’s back yards while they slept comfortably in their beds. That stunt ended one night when some guy fired a shotgun at us from his bedroom window.

Being the city kids that we were, we got used to our bicycles disappearing. It was always the same. No matter what kind of lock we used, somebody from the deep inner city used their ingenuity to find some way to pick the lock or cut the chain and they always left a beat up old bike in its place, the kind of rickety thing that looked like it had been stripped of all its parts, beat down and battered to the point where some kid knew if he didn’t ride it one last time out to the edge of the city to steal a better one, he would be bikeless for a long time to come.

When Pee Wee Herman’s bike got stolen, it resonated with us punks like nothing else ever could.

Pee Wee was one of us. It wasn’t just that his bicycle got pinched in Pee Wee’s big Adventure, he was also an inherently subversive character. He lived in some nether-world where he was not quite a child but not quite a man. His friends were all unapologetically freaks and weirdos, some of which were of other races and some of which even had mohawks. When his bike got stolen, he lost his soul. It was a hero’s journey through the underworld of America, the story of a man who knew when he found that one missing piece all the magic would return to his life. Punks were often people who felt that same absence, When we spiked our hair, ripped out clothes, donned combat boots or Chuck Taylors, drove pins through our noses, and sliced up our arms with razors, we were embarking on our own journey through the underbelly of the world, one that involved drugs, alcohol, slam dancing, record collecting, and sex between cars in restaurant parking lots. If you ever wonder why your car door handle is sticky, I can tell you there is a sickly humorous reason for that. Sometimes we spent nights in jail and had fist fights on street corners with conservatives who didn’t approve of our way of living free in a supposedly free society. If you think the MAGA crowd is anything new, you are wrong; these Republican maggots started crawling out of the rotten woodwork all the way back in the 1980s. But our bikes were like magic carpets that, at times, could transport us to some place better.

It gets deeper than a stolen bike though. As punks we called ourselves anarchists. However wrongheaded and naive that might have been, it’s what we thought we were and we hated the establishment. Pee Wee’s bike was stolen by Francis, a perfect symbol of capitalist greed. Francis was an immature, trust-fund baby and a bully who could use his dorky father’s money to get anything he wanted. What he wanted was Pee Wee’s bike so he payed some 1950s rocker with a greasy DA and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the short sleeve of his undershirt to steal it. In the end, Francis didn’t really want the bike. What he really wanted was for Pee Wee NOT to have the bike. See, the bicycle is the one thing that made Pee Wee Herman happy and happiness was what Francis coul not have because, true to the nature of a capitalist pig, he always wants more than what he has. He dealt with his misery by making others miserable and so the bike got stolen and sent away. Pee Wee’s jounrey to find it began there. If there ever was a prototype of Rush Limbaugh, Francis was it. This movie came out four years into the Reagan administration so it doesn’t surprise me that it sticks a finger in the eye of Republican party economics. Seeing Francis get his come-uppance made us cream in our jeans.

Along the way to Hollywood via the Alamo, Pee Wee Herman made friends with a whole cast of characters and all of them were outsiders. He hitched a ride with an escaped convict, for instance, and together they outsmarted the police. ACAB. He shared an intimate moment with a waitress who dreamed of escaping from her marriage to a redneck and flying off to Paris the way Dorothy dreams about some where over the rainbow in the colorful land of Oz. (Try watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and The Wizard of Oz back to back and notice all the parallels). Pee Wee also got inducted into an outlaw motorcycle club.

Pee Wee even makes friends with a homeless man while train hopping, something us punks could relate to as well. We liked hanging out with the bums in our city. One of them used to shoplift porn magazines and sell them to us at discount prices so he could buy bottles of Thunderbird or Mad Dog. That’s the kind of $3 rotgut that will fuck you up even worse than a 40 oz. malt liquor. While no two bottles of Mad Dog ever taste the same, the flavor approximates some unholy combination of cough syrup, vomit, and rubbing alcohol. Some say that at higher quantities of consumption it can even be hallucinogenic. And then there was also an African-American guy with blue eyes named Ulysses; we used to drink Bully Hill with him in the alleyways and he was one of the most kind-hearted and humorous men we’ve ever met. We’d buy him food just to hear the stories he’d tell. Then one day I saw him well-dressed and selling newspapers on a street corner. The headlines said something about UFO’s coming to save Black people from white America. Ulysses had joined the Nation of Islam. Oh well, at least he is now sober and off the streets. I wish you the best, Ulysses.

And punks always loved animals. We loved our dogs. We loved our cats. Some of us kept rats, iguanas, and snakes as pets. So speaking of snakes, what did Pee Wee do when he saw the pet shop burning? He rescued all the animals and in the end he even rescued the snakes even though he obviously didn’t like them. Punks were the snakes of American society and Pee Wee was on our side.

Finally, what could be more punk than sticking your middle finger in the face of the Hollywood establishment? Pee Wee’s bike ends up as a prop in a Hollywood movie. He snatched it and rode away, wrecking movie sets as he went. Instead of arresting him, they decide to make a movie based on his life. But look at the movie they made. It is a pretentious, no-brain blockbuster with perfect looking actors that bear no resemblance to the real life events that inspired it. The movie uses postmodern framing by using the medium to critique the fake and shallow medium of the Hollywood film industry.

Then there is one final question. Who was Pee Wee’s family? Did he have any parents? How old was he anyways? Punks were part of the latchkey kid generation. We either grew up in a one-parent home or else both our parents were absent from our lives because it took two working adults to support a family with children. As teenagers we ran free and encountered the adult world at a very early age. Pee Wee Herman appeared to have no role models in his life and had to find his own way around. That was what hardcore punk was all about. We couldn’t fix the world’s problems so we created our own scene and did things our own way. FTW (fuck the world). If you didn’t like us you had best stay away.

Pee Wee’s Big Adventure become one of those movies you can watch over and over again without getting bored, making frequent appearances at cult classic film festivals, revival theaters, and occasional TV reruns. There were many times we watched it through the bleary haze of bong smoke and blurred whisky vision, maybe while coming down from an acid trip or two or three. It is like an old familiar friend that is always happy to see you for the sake of sharing old memories and telling half-forgotten jokes.

Pee Wee Herman’s next move as an honorary punk came in the late 1980s when his television show Pee Wee’s Playhouse went on the air. The Residents played the theme song. How cool was that for underground music fans? Although it was meant for kids, some of the jokes were a little bit naughty. Pee Wee and the genie’s head in a box sang a song about hiney-holes and a female dancer lifted one leg in the air while standing on the toes of her other foot and Pee Wee took a peak up her skirt, only to be given a reprimanding look from the dancer when she saw what he was up to.

A couple years later the big bombshell hit the news. Paul Reubens had been caught masturbating in an adult movie theater in Florida. My immediate reaction was not, “Oh my god, what a pervert.” Actually I was just shocked that they still had adult movie theaters in Florida while they had gone the way of the dodo bird everywhere else. Hadn’t people there ever heard of VCR’s? Florida must be a pretty fucked up place, I thought. I still think so to this day. The fact that Pee Wee played with himself in the porno playhouse never really phased me though I still wonder why it is a crime to whip it out while in a darkened theater, watching movies of people fucking. America sure does have some stupid laws. Don’t even get me going on the legality of drinking alcohol like how dumb it is to make the drinking age 21 thanks to that asshole Ronald Reagan or why we are obsessed with hating drunk driving while so few bars are within walking distance of people’s homes. Europeans sorted these kinds of things out centuries ago. It is like the government wants us to get caught screwing up. Rich capitalist pigs like Francis are getting their miserable way at our expense.

Soon after the arrest of Paul Reubens, I went to a punk show at a bar. The singer of the band called out, “I don’t know how many of you heard, but Pee Wee Herman got arrested for jerking off in a porn theater. How many of you hate him more know that you know this?” About half the audience cheered. Then he asked “How many of you love him more now?” Again, about half the audience cheered. Oh yeah, we loved him even more because his mugshot made him look like a Hells Angel. The biggest audible difference between the first and second cheers was that the former was mostly women and the latter was mostly men. By 1991, the mean-girl Andrea Dworkin style of anti-porn feminism had infected the punk scene like an STD. If you think polarization in America is a Trump-era phenomenon, guess again. It just seems that way because internet pundits and the media keep drawing our attention to it even though the hate has always been there.

Just a few years ago, I heard an interview with Paul Reubens on NPR. They asked the question of what message he wanted to send to the world. His answer, and I paraphrase, was “It’s OK to be different. You don’t have to be like everybody else.” It’s so simple, so true, and so sad that so few people understand what this means. And it's so "punk-is-an-attitude" up your fucking ass.

Good bye Paul Reubens and thank you for the memories. Thank you for the wisdom you shared. Thank you for being an inspiration, an idol and an icon for those of us who follow Jimi Hendrix’s advice and wave our freak flags high. You are forever an honorary member of the hardcore punk community.

In Memoriam: Comic artist and Crypto comic pioneer, José Delbo

We're sorry to report the passing of Argentinian-born artist José Delbo, whose many credits from the 1960s onwards included Billy the Kid, The Beatles "Yellow Submarine", Wonder Woman, Transformers and Thundercats

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Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100. Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose 4-year old McVeigh killed.  McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. 

— Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies by Spencer Ackerman

Rolling Stone article, at least temporarily unpaywalled because they want to celebrate i guess!!!! What a brutal, beautiful fucking lede.

As the editor has reportedly defeated Death in a series of games of skill, no further obituaries are expected.

Obituary Editor [Explained]

I'm hearing that @kontextmaschine seems to have passed. RIP dear mutual, you will be missed.

Nichelle Nichols has died.

Hailing frequencies closed.

story: X

her site has been updated, Uhura.com: X

Hummbirb the Volcanic, Dead.

Hummbirb the Volcanic, artificer, the only good member of the IWCRR in a very long time, is dead. They died bravely, fighting against the greatest and most condescending foe Wizardom has ever faced. They will be missed and avenged. They are on the reincarnation plan, so we hope to see them soon.

[Note: this obituary was found lying on the ground where the station once sat. The last line was still wet with ink.]

RIP to an absolute legend. Miyake’s talent helped turn Japan into a global fashion powerhouse.

Spending as much time as I do with obituaries really does get kind of bonkers. I was reflecting the other day that it’s not as depressing as one would think, because while they are all death announcements, they’re usually about what a happy and fulfilled life the person led. It’s not like you see many that talk about what a cranky, friendless asshole someone was. 

I read one the other day where the deceased had a passion for Dr. Pepper, and his last request, which was fulfilled, was to sit on his porch and have one final Dr. Pepper. That’s pretty delightful! And I’m always reading about people who loved cookouts and going to their kids’ ballgames and caring for their grandchildren and working at the community center. 

More and more, too, you see same-sex partners mentioned in ways you formerly really only saw with het couples. I’ve noticed it especially in the last two years, there are so many more than there used to be of “Her beloved wife and best friend” and “His husband of forty years”. 

But also, even getting inured to the grief that bleeds through them, you do occasionally get caught in the ribs by one. Today’s was “The youngest of five, she is survived by three brothers and a sister”. The obits I read are usually for people who have passed from a terminal illness that generally doesn’t hit until you’re over fifty, but it’s a short life expectancy once diagnosed, and often their siblings, and sometimes their parents, outlive them. That’s always rough.

I dunno, I wasn’t really working up to a point so concluding this NOT on the “wow that obit was sad” note is difficult, it’s just all grist for the mill. Death is perplexing but life comes in infinite variety.   

Patrick Smith at NBC News:

Country music icon Toby Keith has died, his official website and social media accounts said early Tuesday, 18 months after revealing he had stomach cancer. He was 62. The "Should've Been a Cowboy" singer died on Monday night surrounded by his family, a short statement said.

Country music star Toby Keith died at 62. During the 2000s, he started an infamous feud with Natalie Maines over her opinion against the Iraq War.

See Also:

HuffPost: Country Music Star Toby Keith Dead At 62

Some said he was at his funniest when he was angry, which was often. “He’s got to be somewhere where he hates the owner, hates the hotel,” the comedian Jack Carter once said, “so that he’s got something to go on.” He was at least as unpredictable off the stage as he was on it. He became famous not just for his act but also for his drinking binges, gambling sprees and erratic, often self-destructive behavior.“ I should have been fired maybe 150 times in Las Vegas,” Mr. Greene told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996. “I was only fired 130 times.” Probably the most famous Shecky Greene story involved the time he drove his car into the fountain in front of Caesars Palace. In a 2005 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he confirmed the story, but admitted that the way he told it in his act was slightly embellished: He did not really greet the police officers who rushed to the scene with the words “No spray wax, please.” That line, he said, was suggested to him after the fact by his friend and fellow comedian Buddy Hackett.

…

As amusing as the stories of Mr. Greene’s behavior were, the truth is that he had severe mental health problems, including bipolar disorder and panic attacks, which were apparently exacerbated when he developed a dependence on his prescription medication. He had other ailments as well, including cancer, and by the mid-1980s he had stopped performing. Mr. Greene, who had a family history of mental illness, went public with his condition in the 1990s and, with the help of a new therapist and new medication, gradually resumed his career. He even incorporated his illness into his shtick. “I’m bipolar,” he told a Las Vegas television interviewer in 2010. “I’m more than bipolar. I’m South Polar, North Polar. I’m every kind of polar there is. I even lived with a polar bear for about a year.”

In Memoriam: Comic Artist, Writer, Inspiration: Paul Neary

I'm very sad to report the passing of award-winning comic artist, writer and editor, and former Editorial Director of Marvel UK, Paul Neary, who has died after a long illness

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