Collateral Damage

I guess what was 31 is now down to 30 at Baskin-Robbins — nope 29, Mr. Baskins predeceased Mr. Robbins.

Robbins opened his first ice cream store in Glendale, Calif., in December 1945, following his discharge from the Army. Robbins offered 21 flavors at that store. His brother-in-law, the late Burton Baskin, opened his own ice cream store in neighboring Pasadena a year later. The two eventually joined forces.

Coolest. Family. Ever. But did they split the profits 21/10?

Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End are just flat out great novels. Got that? The short story “The Sentinel” that the movie 2001 was based on was better than the book 2001 that was based on the movie. Got that?

It is odd — as a friend noted just last weekend — how the great humanist Clarke will always be inextricably linked with Kubrick who seemed to value distance above all else. I like to think that it was the opposition of their temperaments that made 2001 such a great movie. Just as Terry Southern’s joi de vivre was Kubrick’s balance in Strangelove.

Clarke was credited with inventing the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits. … an RAF memo he wrote in 1945 about the future of communications described the possibility of using satellites to revolutionize communications — an idea whose time had decidedly not come. Clarke later sent it to a publication called Wireless World, which almost rejected it as too far-fetched.

He and the game became true badges of nerdidty (that’s him between Stephan Hawking and Nichelle Nichols as part of Al Gore’s uber nerd squad on Futurama). I discovered D&D long enough ago that I once looked suspiciously on the advent of Advance D&D. It was and is a game that managed to be collaborative and competitive. Mostly D&D taught me that games are really just long periods of laughter punctuated by periodic bouts of dice rolling. When I was in high school, Bill Kenower, Peter Kang, Evan Schrier, Dave Gray and the other members of the Birds of Prey even put together a session so my mom could find out what this was all about. I don’t remember if she was an elf or a hobbit, but I do remember she had fun. (I was a half-orc with impressive personality issues. Like you had to ask?) Someone needs to write a cultural history of the impact of D&D, for it is truly huge.

Also at some other time I will tell you the story of how Mrs. Collateral Damage got me to come out of the geek closet. The punch line, though, “How many Friday nights do the you have to spend playing D&D with the guys from Worcester Poly before you admit you’re a nerd?”

In the words of one of my favorite t-shirts: I am not a nerd. I am a 12th level paladin.

Go with grace Gary. You always rolled 20s in my book.

UPDATE: Just because he helped invent D&D doesn’t mean Gygax knew from dice.  BoingBoing has this from an interview with the man:

Q. As far as you know, what was the basic evolution of polyhedral dice? If they existed prior to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, what were they used for?To the best of my knowledge I introduced them to gaming, en masse, with D&D in 1974. I found sets of the five platonic solids for sale in a school supply catalog back in 1972, and of course ordered them, used them in creating the D&D game.

Actually 20-sided dice were being used by the ancient Egyptians. I got a copy of one at the Louvre gift shop.

Sometimes it seemed like all she ever did was say, “Oh, Bob.” What was really impressive was all the laughs she got with so few lines. Bob Newhart is one of my all time comic heroes but without Pleshette his first great TV show would have been half as good. It’s actually easier to be the one with the punch lines, being the set-up takes more work. Don’t think so?  In vaudeville the funny guys like Lou Costello got the laughs but the straight men like Bud Abbot got the bigger pay check.

Mr. DeDomenico was co-inventor of Rice-A-Roni. Great name. Greater jingle. Any readers actually either purchased or consumed Rice-A-Roni? Mrs. CD and I never have. It’s one of those things that’s always around but we’ve never used. The stuff must be health food, Mr. D was 92.

Mr. K was 75 and died from lung cancer about a year after a dispute with the landlord forced him to close the club which brought us the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith: aka 75% of the music of my adolescence. To my everlasting regret despite living in New York from ‘81 to ‘85 I never got to the club. At least I made it to Max’s Kansas City before it closed. And to kill whatever chance I might have had of actually having any cool cred let me say that I made it to Max’s for lunch. Yeah, I’m hardcore.

FYI: The complete name was CBGB & OMFUG which stood for Country, Bluegrass and Blues & Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandisers.

Until I saw Fanny & Alexander I couldn’t stand him. Fanny & Alexander was the first movie I ever saw that had the depth and complexity of a novel. My only exposure to his work before that was Cries and Whispers which I admired but didn’t like or enjoy. Fanny & Alexander leavened all that angst with a deep underlying joy.

BTW, my favorite odd bergman reference is in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey where Death, having grown tired of chess, tries other board games.

Want to stump someone with a trivia question? In about a month, ask them what Bergman, Tom Snyder & Bill Walsh have in common.

A moment of silence please for the man who opened the first Saab dealership in the US. Now that’s quixotic.

To be honest, I prefer God Bless You Mr. Rosewater to the more canonical Slaughterhouse Five but then I’m a sucker for stories about volunteer firemen.

What I remember best about him was his smile. I saw it in action at a workshop he gave at the University of Rhode Island in the late ’70s. For the most part the room was filled with writer-wannabees, the folks who show up asking about agents and trying to find out “the secret” to writing. (The secret is to write. A lot.) Vonnegut showed a wonderful amount of patience through it all, even when he had to explain to one participant who Iago was. He laughed frequently and not at other people. When he smiled he did it with his whole body, bending so he resembled a tall, thin question mark — which is really what he actually was.

The only piece of advice he gave that I remember was throw out the first ten pages of your novel. He said it’s the part that you fall in love with because of the writing and the real book starts on (approximately) page 11. There you have it. The secret. 

The image above is from an exhibit whose description opens: “Kurt Vonnegut writes about this sort of art in ‘God Bless You Mr. Rosewater,’ and maybe you’ve seen some of it yourself?“

Collateral Damage Sr. knew the redoubtable Ms. Ivins and kicked around with her a bit. Over the weekend he told me of a multi-hour ride with her in Texas. She was driving and had a beer and a cigarette going the entire time. Despite this, he says, her driving was perfect. (Later in life, she would put down all those beers and other stuff.)

He also told the story of going to give a speech to some Rotarians in Keokuk, Iowa*. A couple of weeks earlier Ms. Ivins had given a talk to the same group a few weeks prior and the Rotarians were a bit nervous to be encountering another one of these liberal media types. Turns out one of the things Molly had said was, “Everyone knows the three most overrated things in this country are Mack trucks, teen-age pussy and the FBI.”

Apparently she had stumbled into a hotbed of Mack truck fans.

*It was probably a different group somewhere else in the Midwest. I generally don’t take notes when speaking with family. Sometimes they wish I did, though. “I said I was going to do what?”

It is somehow fitting that she died on the day that Aqua Teen Hunger Force terrorized the city of Boston. Her stories about the Texas legislature alone guaranteed her a place in the comedy and journalism halls of fame. The only thing that rivals them for both humor and reportage is Mencken at the tent revival during the Scopes monkey trial.

• “It’s hard to argue against cynics - they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side.”
• “As they say around the [Texas] Legislature, if you can’t drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against ‘em anyway, you don’t belong in office.”
• “Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.”
• “I am not anti-gun. I’m pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.”

One of the greats doesn’t even begin to come close. He was wilder and weirder and smarter and more driven and totally uncompromising. He said it very, very, very loud that he was black and he was damn proud. He practically taught popular music that there was a lot more than 4/4 and 3/4 time signatures. (OK, this is a gross overstatement, but Mr. Brown deserves an overstatement or two just to come close to the truth.)

“He was an innovator, he was an emancipator, he was an originator. Rap music, all that stuff came from James Brown.” — Little Richard

In addition to his incredible, boundary-shattering skills as a composer and musician he was one of the greatest performers ever. Live at the Apollo is one of the all time most amazing performances ever recorded. (Boing Boing has links to some great videos of him burning down the house.) His bands were where George Clinton and others honed their craft before the great funk explosion of the 70s (and yes, that is different than disco). Another way to know how great Mr. Brown remains is the number of artists who are still stealing and/or sampling what he did.

I feel bad.

So bad.

Cuz I ain’t got you.

While Joseph Barbera’s death is getting all the press, the real loss in the world of animation is Hayward who gave us Dudley Do-Right and much of the wonderful world of Rocky & Bullwinkle. R&B was brilliant, clever and worked just as well for adults as for kids. It channeled the spirit of Mad Magazine and remains one of the best examples of satire ever broadcast. Furthermore it has held up very well. Whatsamatta U. and Fractured Fairy tales are still funny and relevant. Let us remember for a moment Snidely Whiplash, Dudley’s love interest Nell and Nell’s strange fascination with Dudley’s horse who was named Horse.

Although Mr. Barbera gave us Tom & Jerry, I think that accomplishment is severely overshadowed by the incredibly horrible worked churned out by his Hanna-Barbera Studios. I can’t think of a single cartoon HB did that was even vaguely funny (and all those of you who want to argue for the Flintstones clearly haven’t seen it in a while). Hanna-Barbera cartoons were remarkable for their consistency: They were consistently ugly and stupid. I hated them when I was a kid and nothing I’ve seen since has given me a reason to change that opinion.

Ray Charles, Aretha, The Platters, Chuck Willis, LaVern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, Professor Longhair, The Coasters, The Drifters, Ben E. King, Carla Thomas, Solomon Burke, Booker T. & The MGs, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Rufus Thomas, Sam & Dave, King Curtis, Eddie Harris & Les McCann … and that’s just for starters.

Ertegun is Turkish for cool.

They weren’t all great, but they were all interesting. There were some stinkers — The Long Goodbye, some over-rated crap — Nashville, some under-rated masterpieces — Popeye, and not a single “he did it for the money.”

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Dika Newlin, a composer and musicologist who was deeply influenced by avant-garde master Arnold Schoenberg and brought his style into the punk rock era, has died. She was 82.

A composer of several operas and chamber works, Ms. Newlin began exploring popular music in the mid-1980s. Inspired by her college students, she sang and played keyboards in a band called Apocowlypso. More recently she performed as a flame-haired punk rocker and performance artist, singing works such as “Murder Kitty,” composed solely of meows.

I think we can say with some certainty that she did not go quietly into that good night.