RIP Penelope Keith

To the Manor Born: Nation’s Heritage
  - Buying a horse

On Parkinson, in 1977: link

When a bank rep hung up on the Pope…

It’s a story that was narrated by Rev. Tom McCarthy—a friend of Pope Leo XIV—at a recent talk titled ‘Pope Fiction.’  This is how one report summarized it:

Two months into his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV called his bank in South Chicago to change his phone number and address.

The former Robert Prevost answered all his security questions posed by the teller, but there was still a problem.

To change his phone number and address, he was told he’d have to show up in person.

“‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do that,’” said Pope Leo, according to his longtime friend, the Rev. Tom McCarthy, who told the story April 29 to the Fishers of Men at Saints Peter and Paul in Naperville.

“‘We can’t do it over the phone?’” the pope asked, according to McCarthy. “‘I already gave you all the security questions.’”

After that, he tried pulling rank.

“Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” the pope apparently asked.

Click.

“She hung up on him,” McCarthy said. “Could you imagine being known as the woman who hung up on the pope?”

So, the pope made some more phone calls.

He reached McCarthy’s classmate, the Rev. Bernie Scianna, who “somehow” got someone who reached the bank’s president, McCarthy said. The bank’s president reiterated the bank’s policy: Customers must change their phone number or address in person, not over the phone.

When Scianna threatened to move Pope Leo’s account to a different bank, the president said the bank didn’t want to lose the pope’s account.

Shortly after that, the bank followed through, and changed the information on Pope Leo’s account.

Link to video

Coyote ugly, explained

That is, as explained by the inimitable Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, Florida, at a recent news conference.

Link to video

RIP Graham Greene

To quote from one tribute:

He used his body and voice to inhabit the characters and roles he was playing, almost disappearing within them to create someone (or something) wholly original and unseen before. Yet that classic Greene presence remained, with long hair cascading past his shoulders, and a grin so infatuating that it was hard to look away from.

Here’s some of what the man himself had to say about his early impressions of being an actor (after having worked as an audio technician):

I changed into the costume, and they put me in the shade in a nice chair. They brought me food and water. Yeah, not bad. Then somebody came and got me and walked me over to an X on the ground, and I stood there and said what they told me to say. Then they took me back to the chair in the shade and gave me more food, more water. And I thought, geez, I'm living the life of a dog. This is great. I don't have to carry anybody's amplifiers anymore. I don't have to do lights. I don't have to drive halfway across the country for nothing.

With Mel Gibson in Maverick (1994)

RIP Mark Snow

How The X-Files theme music came about

The X-Files opening credits (Season 1)

RIP George Foreman

From a 2023 interview with Boxing News:

Q: What was the favourite stage of your career? Being a heavyweight wrecking ball in the 1970s, or when you came back in the 80s and 90s?

A: In the 10 years out of the ring [1977-1987] I became a minister. Sometimes my car would need a booster, and a stranger would stop by to help me out. I asked how much I owed him. He said, ‘Get out of here, big ‘un.’ He didn’t even realise I was once heavyweight champion of the world but he was so kind to me. Everyone was so kind to me and I used to think, ‘I wish I could be champion again because I should have been nicer to people.’ When I came back I built my profile up again and I repaid all the people I had been unkind to. The comeback was my way of saying sorry for being so unkind the first time round. That was the best time of my whole boxing career, when I came back because I gave back. When I was in Reno, Nevada I couldn’t sign autographs or shake people’s hand because I had sprained my hand, so I just sat by a post and let anyone come over and talk, or take a picture. They did. I was there for three hours, and it was the nicest time of my life as a boxer. Nothing compared to that moment – not even beating Frazier, or being with Ali in Zaire.

From a CBS News remembrance:

What he leaves is a legacy of rumbles, redemptions, and ribs.

RIP Boris Spassky

From Garry Kasparov’s tribute:

His rise as a prodigy, conquest of the crown against the invincible Petrosian on the second attempt, and decades of elite play are too often lost in the shadow of his dramatic title loss to Bobby Fischer in 1972 and the circus Fischer turned it into. But Spassky always wanted to play, and he handled the situation with impressive dignity. While his chess justified the "universal" label that frequently follows his name, his aggressive gambiteering style produced countless masterpieces.

Link to AP Archive interview clip after his loss to Fischer in 1972

Trump’s thoughts on air traffic control

From his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, with reference to the recent mid-air collision over Washington DC:

We should have had the proper control.  We should have had better equipment.  We don’t.  We have obsolete equipment.  They were understaffed, for whatever reason.  I guess the helicopter was high, and we’ll find out exactly what happened.  But the odds, even if you had nothing — if you had nobody, the odds of that happening are extremely small.

It’s like, did you ever see — you go to a driving range in golf and you’re hitting balls, hundreds of balls, thousands of hours.  I never see a ball hit another ball.  Balls going up all over the place.  You never see them hit.

It was amazing that that could happen.  There was a lot of mistakes made, and it should have never happened.  But regardless of that, it’s amazing that it happened.

And I think that’s going to be used for good.  I think what is going to happen is we’re all going to sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers, brand-new — not pieced together, obsolete, like it is — land-based — trying to hook up a land-based system to a satellite system.

And the first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites, and you can’t hook up satellites to land.  It doesn’t work.  And we spent billions and billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying, “Cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system.”  Done by two or three companies — very s- — good companies, specialists.  That’s all it is.

They used 39 companies.  That means that 39 different hookups have to happen.  And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all of the kind of things necessary for that — and it’s very complex stuff — but when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities and different people — you need one company with one set of equipment.

And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems, and they would have — bells would have gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height, because it traveled a long distance before it hit.  It was just like — just wouldn’t stop — you follow the line.  But bells and whistles would have gone off.  They have them where it actually could virtually turn the thing around.  It would have just never happened if we had the right equipment.

And one of the things that’s going to be — I’m going to be speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and to everybody.  We have to get together and just — as a single bill, just pass where we get the — the best control system.

When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country, because my captain tells me — I’m landing in New York, and I’m using — I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country, because the captain says, “This thing is so bad.  It’s so obsolete.”  And we can’t have that.

So, we’re going to have the best system and it’s a lot of money, but it’s not that much money.  And it’ll happen fast, and it’ll be done by total professionals.  And when it’s done, you’re not going to have accidents.  It’s just not — they’re not — they’re virtually not possible to have.

RIP Jimmy Carter

An interview from 1982 with Peter Sissons that shines light on Carter’s vision, thoughtfulness, reflectiveness, and morality.

RIP Teri Garr

Unmatched sparkle, and smart and witty to boot.

Tootsie (1982)
   - Sandy freaks out

From her Letterman appearances: Academy Awards dilemma

On Conan: Nudity differences

On Multiple Sclerosis, and living with it (from her autobiography):

MS is a sneaky disease. Like some of my boyfriends, it has a tendency to show up at the most awkward times and then to disappear entirely.

I like to say MS is to disease what Enron is to accounting. No rules. It’s a big fat cheater.

I really do count my blessings. At least I used to; now I get so tired, I have a woman come in once a week and count them for me.

Will Smith’s Farts

The topic came up on the latest episode of Kelly Ripa’s podcast, where she had director Barry Sonnenfeld as her guest.  Ripa asked Sonnenfeld for his “number one crazy story” from the ‘Men in Black’ franchise.  He went on to talk about an instance when filming had to be suspended after Will Smith farted while in a “hermetically sealed” contraption with Tommy Lee Jones.  This is part of what he said:

Will Smith is a farter. It’s just some people are. And you really don’t wanna be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even wanna be sitting next to him at the Disney ranch.

Notably, after he had narrated this incident, Ripa had this to ask:

Did the stench emit out, like, were you able to smell it?

And this:

You think he’s, like, on one of those high protein diets?

RIP James Earl Jones

From AFI Movie Club: On being the voice of Darth Vader

The Sandlot (1993)
  - Ball trade

From his Letterman appearances: Top 10 effects of Y2K

Trump on… child care legislation?

Well, that’s what he was asked about.  His response, in the words of the questioner, was “incomprehensible at best”.

Q: If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable? And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

A: Well, I would do that, and we're sitting down, you know, I was somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that  I'm talking about that, because the child care is child care, couldn't, you know, there's something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it, but when  you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking  about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to, but they'll get used  to it very quickly, and it's not going to stop them from doing business with us, but  they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including child care, that it's going to take care we're going to have, I look forward to having  no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I'm  talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that, I just that, I just told you about, we're going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and  as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking,  not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we'll be taking in. We're going  to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let's help other people, but we're going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. Its about make  America great again. We have to do it because right now we're a failing nation, so we'll take care of it. Thank you, very good question. Thank you.

Link to video

Transcript and punctuation credit: @BGrueskin

Gutter Talk, Literally

Tim Walz has a lot to say about gutters, and quite eloquently too.

Link to video

RIP Daniel Kahneman

Probably the best written tribute that I can think of, is a ~3000 words piece by Jason Zweig, from way back in 2001— before Kahneman won the Nobel Prize, and much before his 2011 bestselling book.  A few excerpts:

When people ask me which investment thinker I’ve learned the most from, they expect names like Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch and John Bogle. But I always give the same answer: Daniel Kahneman.

He’s not a great stock picker like Buffett, a masterful fund manager like Lynch or a crusader for investors’ rights like Bogle. Instead, Kahneman is a psychologist at Princeton University who studies how people estimate odds and calculate risks--the very essence of investing. To my mind, Kahneman has done more than anyone else alive to shed light on how to improve our investing judgment and manage risk intelligently.

For each of us, risk doesn't reside only in the market. It lurks inside ourselves--in the way we misinterpret information, fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we do or overreact to the market’s swings. By teaching me the paradox that the most powerful thing I can learn is how little I can ever possibly know, Danny Kahneman has set me free.

And here’s the man  himself, talking about overconfidence: link to video

RIP Richard Lewis

From a 2012 tweet:

Life is a myth. Death is real. Orgasms rule.

With Dr. Ruth: link

Tom Hollander on being mistaken for Tom Holland

From his appearance on Last Night with Seth Meyers: an absolute pleasure to listen to, and watch.

Link to video

RIP Charlie Munger

Excerpts from his talk on how to guarantee a life of misery, to the Harvard School graduating class of 1986.

I was puffed up when invited to speak. While not having significant public-speaking experience, I do hold a black belt in chutzpah, and, I immediately considered Demosthenes and Cicero as role models and anticipated trying to earn a compliment like Cicero gave when asked which was his favourite among the orations of Demosthenes. Cicero replied: ‘The longest one.”

However, fortunately for this audience, I also thought of Samuel Johnson’s famous comment when he addressed Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost, and correctly said: “No one ever wished it longer.” And that made me consider which of all the twenty Harvard School graduation speeches I had heard that I wished longer. There was only one such speech, that given by Johnny Carson, specifying Carson’s prescriptions for guaranteed misery in life. I therefore decided to repeat Carson’s speech but in expanded form with some added prescriptions of my own.

First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great. If you like being distrusted and excluded from the best human contribution and company, this prescription is for you. Master this one habit and you can always play the role of the hare in the fable, except that instead of being outrun by one fine turtle you will be outrun by hordes and hordes of mediocre turtles and even by some mediocre turtles on crutches.

My second prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead. This prescription is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.

You can see the results of not learning from others’ mistakes by simply looking about you. How little originality there is in the common disasters of mankind -drunk driving deaths, reckless driving maimings, incurable venereal diseases, conversion of bright college students into brainwashed zombies as members of destructive cults, business failures through repetition of obvious mistakes made by predecessors, various forms of crowd folly, and so on. I recommend as a memory clue to finding the way to real trouble from heedless, unoriginal error the modern saying: “If at first you don’t succeed, well, so much for hang gliding.”

And there’s that memorable closing line:

Gentlemen, may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming low.

RIP Michael Gambon

So many mesmerising performances…

A very short selection — for those who remember him (or would like to) as much more than being a part of the Harry Potter movies.

Page Eight (2011)
  - ‘What are you thinking, Johnny?’

The Good Shepherd (2006)
  - ‘Bootmakers to kings’

The Insider (1999)
  - ‘Supplement to agreement’ scene

And here’s him on Top Gear in 2002.

Piers Morgan questions Hans Niemann on sex toy use

An excerpt from US chess grandmaster Hans Niemann’s interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored in which he addresses the allegation of using a sex toy to cheat.

Piers Morgan: But again, to be clear on the specific allegation — have you ever used anal beads while playing chess?  Not a question I ever thought I'd ask a guest, to be honest, but —

Hans Niemann: Well, you know, your curiosity is a bit concerning, you know. Maybe you're personally interested, but I can tell you, no.

PM: Okay, categoric no —

HN: Of course, yes, categorically, no.

Link to video