Tribute Thread for the Recently Passed Greats

So does any competent con man.

On Sirius XM Progress Radio today, a caller made the observation that the Republicans would even vote Charles Manson into office. Though Hitler would have come up a very close second.How much does it cost to support a prisoner? What a waste of money that was.

OK, Della Reese, David Cassidy, and Charles Manson. Does that meet our quota? Or does Manson not count?Frankly, I'm pushing for Donald Trump to round out this troika.Except for his funeral. As I understand, each president can make arrangements for his own funeral ahead of time. And, as I understand, Trump has already made his own arrangements which include the massive display of military hardware in a massive parade patterned after the massive Red Square parades in his boyfriend's country. Edited by dwise1, : Added a happy thought

Ironically, it was Billy Graham who over half a century ago changed my life for the best.As a child, I attended our neighbors' Protestant church. One Sunday, a group from church took me to a Billy Graham revival. That motivated me to be baptized, and then to get serious and learn just exactly what I was supposed to believe. So I started reading the Bible, through which I discovered that I just could not possibly believe that stuff. Since I couldn't believe what I was supposed to, I left. Even though I was still a bit below the traditional age of confirmation, I present myself as a "confirmed atheist."Everything I've encountered since then has confirmed my decision: learning the history of Christianity, learning fundamentalist theology as a fellow traveler of the Jesus Freak Movement, studying "creation science", decades of repeated encounters with creationists and with "true Christians."If not for Billy Graham, I would very likely have not found my path.

Somewhen around 2013 he participated in a prank with a long-standing German program (kind of akin to "Candid Camera"), "Verstehen Sie Spa?"(Do You Understand Funny?) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzjL-txuGcw .. Verzeihung, aber alles auf Deutsch.He came on a standard show for a standard interview, but when he opened his violin case, it was not there. The entire scene devolved into "Wo ist meine Geige?"(where is my (extremely expensive) violin?). At one point, they even bring in a security man still wrapped up in duct tape. He had been hit on the head, but André still wanted to know, "But where is my violin?"("Aber wo ist meine Geige?"). Finally, a violin case arrives, but the "extremely expansive violin" is utterly destroyed. But the show's host recognizes the agent delivering the violin case as being from the "Verstehen Sie Spa?" show and the entire deception falls apart at that point.

Yes. Numb skull!

I think that's his final "out".He's not going to have to face the consequences of his actions. "Screw the future; I got mine!"

Star Trek (1966-1969). The one with CAPT Kirk.

Funny story, that.Lost in Space premiered a year before Star Trek (1965 for LiS, 1966 for ST), also lasted three seasons and went off the air a year before Star Trek (1968 for LiS, 1969 for ST). After a year of silliness and the "Monster of the Week", the critics had low expectations for Star Trek, assuming that it would just be another Lost in Space.To fight that prejudgement, the producers invited critics to tour the set and see for themselves that this was going to be a serious and adult science fiction show. This was before the show hit the air and they were filming the first episode to air, "The Man Trap", on the day of the tour. There they saw a pointy-eared alien bleeding green blood basically saying, "The monster attacked me, Captain." Everybody on the tour went away thinking, "Not another Lost in Space. No Monster of the Week. Yeah, right! In a pig's eye!"

I think they translated a lot of those, though I'm not familiar with the English version.I discovered Asterix in Germany in 1973, so I had the German version. They even had some incidental characters speak in Dialekt.The main problem I had were the popular culture references. Some characters were drawn meticulously (as opposed to cartoonish) so I had to assume they were French celebrities. An MC at a gladiator game was one such. I assumed he was drawn after a TV variety show host, kind of like an American cartoon using a character resembling Ed Sullivan.I did also pick up a French copy at the airport on my way home.Obelix' catch phrase (pardon my French):
French: "Ils sont fous, ces romaines."
English: "They're crazy, those Romans."
German: "Die spinnen die Rmer."
Italian: "Sono Pazzi Questi Romani." (SPQR)So then Italian added its own pun, though the Wikipedia page on SPQR ("Sentus Populusque Rmnus", "The Roman Senate and People" -- that "que" postfix to "Poplulus" means "and" and hence the third letter of the acronym) says:

quote:

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The Italians have long used a different and humorous expansion of this acronym, "Sono Pazzi Questi Romani" (literally: "They're crazy, these Romans"). In the Asterix and Obelix comics, Obelix often uses the French translation of this phrase, "Ils sont fous ces Romains", and in the Italian editions, the original phrase is used.

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Edited by dwise1, : Dialekt, not dialect.Edited by dwise1, : Latin grammar man-splaining about "-que"

I first heard of Glenn R. Morton from Robert Schadewald's report on his presentation at the 1986 International Conference on Creationism (ICC). Here is what I wrote about him on my site (No webpage found at provided URL: http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/links.html#MORTON):

quote:

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It was Glenn R. Morton's story that first made me aware of the deliterious effects of "creation science" on its followers' faith and how it can literally destroy their faith. Glenn R. Morton used to be a young-earth creationist and had originally learned geology through creationist sources. Then when he started working as a petroleum geologist he had to deal daily with rock-hard geological facts that directly contradicted what creation science had taught him and that he had been taught could not exist if Scripture were to have any meaning. This drove him to the brink of becoming an atheist and he would have gone over that brink if he hadn't arrived at an approach to attempt a scientifically accurate harmonization.

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Morton had created a fairly extensive web site which contained many articles about geological evidence and how it relates to what "creation science" claims (ie, the evidence disproves those claims) as well as testimonials from people whose faith was either lost or nearly lost because of creation science and some reports from "intelligent design" conferences. That site was an excellent resource, but then he took it down when he became upset that some atheists were using it to attack Christianity.

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Fortunately, a number of his pages were archived by other sites and reposted, though finding a specific one can be something of a scavanger hunt. For example:

• providing a short bio followed by several links to some of his articles which OEM archived on their site.
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  That includes Morton's two personal testimonials detailing his deconversion from young-earth creationism:
  • Why I Left Young-Earth Creationism
    
  • The Transformation of a Young Earth Creationist
    
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• Young-Earth Arguments: A Second Look. Courtesy of the WayBackMachine web archive, it's a good article from 1998 which counters a number of claims despite being short: "Are Radioactive Dates Wrong?", "Varves", "Pollen in the varves", "Carbon 14 and Varves", "Buried River Channel", "THE SHRINKING SUN", "Supernova 1987A proves the speed of light has been constant for 170,000 years", "10 years of Root Growth from 7,000 feet down".
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  Second, it has a list of about 50 links to his other articles, almost all of them dealing with the Flood and the actual geological evidence. Unfortunately, not all of them work.
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• The WayBackMachine web archive's copy of Morton's site from 2010 August 11. Although it looks promising, not all the links work (eg, his reporting of the "intelligent design" Nature of Nature conference in Waco, TX). Fortunately, the index page for testimonials, Personal Stories of the Creation/Evolution Struggle does work and makes for eye-opening reading.
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• Talk Origins Archive, for which Morton had written several articles. Follow the link above and do a search on his name.

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Edited by dwise1, : corrected typo

Sorry, not Christopher Plummer, though I remember him fondly as a great and accessible actor.Decades ago, I watched Grard Depardieu's 1990 performance in that role of Cyrano de Bergerac -- I assume that that was a standard script. At the end as Cyrano is dying, there in the full presence of Roxanne, he declares that that one shining thing that kept him striving on was his ... panache.

In the mid/late 90's, Rush also took his shtick to TV with a half-hour show. When it came on, my then-wife and I decided to watch it in order to see what he and the Right (AKA "the Wrong") had to say. Don't depend on their critics for all your information about their policies and beliefs, but rather also go straight to the source and hear them for yourself. For decades, I'd been doing the same with creationists.That show was horrendously devoid of any content. Rush had nothing to say, but rather just mocked everybody he didn't like and edited video to mock them in the most idiotic manner. For example, he took a video clip Maxine Waters, chose two words out of context, and looped the video to repeatedly rewind and replay those two words over and over and over and over again. I don't know what adjective applies to Rush, but whatever it is it makes puerile appear sophisticated and erudite in comparison.We tried to give his show another chance, a couple times maybe (it's been more than two decades and the experience was not memorable). Those shows were no better and were even worse than the first.This morning on the radio, I heard the comment about Rush: "Don't celebrate his death. Rather, mourn his life."A few months ago, PBS played Rick Steves' special on the rise of fascism in 20th Century Europe -- yes, that Rick Steves. After describing how rambling and unreadable Mein Kampf is, he showed two small bookshelves, one for Nazis and the other for their opponents the Communists. Communists had to do a ton of reading and studying of the 20+ books on their shelf, while Nazis only had that one book, Mein Kampf, which virtually nobody ever read because it is virtually impossible to read (rather like the Bible for "true believers").Similarly, one to two decades ago I tried to research into Nazi doctrine in order to understand what they believed. What I found is that there was no actual doctrine outside of "follow the leader" (dem Führer, hence his title -- BTW, folgen takes the dative, hence that declension). And that makes current events more revealing as the GOP is transforming itself into a fascist movement, it is losing any and all semblance of its former ideals, replacing them with blind obedience to mindlessly follow their new Führer.The only praise Rush rightfully receives is for his genius in creating and manipulating a movement. Unfortunately he chose to use it for evil instead of for good.

Barricades! The 19th Century ruling classes of Europe had some thoughts about those!1848. Present an American with that date and the only history he can think of is the discovery of gold in California which led to the flood of immigrants the next year to that region, the "Forty-niners". Even though it also marked the end of the Mexican-American War (US Marine Corps hymn: "From the halls of Montezuma ... ") -- just mentioning that war in class resulted in widespread snorts of derision from so many students ignorant of it.But that year marked widespread revolutions throughout Europe ... or at least throughout the Continent (maybe the British are almost as insular as the Yanks). Germany almost united then -- a British historian writing a history of Germany at the end of WWII (mainly trying to figure out how they had failed) described 1848 as the turning point in German history where they failed to turn.In France, the citizenry (or at least the students) erected barricades blocking the streets. After that, an architect whose name I forget completely changed the face of Paris replacing historic neighborhoods with wide boulevards. For a very good reason.Before going there, I downloaded a 1850's map of Vienna, pre-Ringstraße ("ring street", a rather common feature in German cities around the old inner-city defensive wall). The entire area of the Ringstraße was a glacis, an open park area around the inner city's fortified wall kept open for defensive purposes -- old siege tactics would involve your combat engineers, AKA "sappers", digging trenches just to get close to the defensive wall (hence moats to prevent that) which an urbanized area would make unnecessary, hence no urbanized area in the old defense. It even showed the Vienna River flowing through (and it still flows under Karlsplatz).Now to my point. I read that when Vienna was thinking of the Ringstraße in the latter half of the 19th Century (post-1848), French advisors recommended broad boulevards which were largely immune to the barricades that would be erected whenever your people might revolt against you.  One of the habits I picked up in West Germany (c. 1973) was the French graphic novels of Asterix, a short Gaelic hero in Roman times. His village was never conquered by the Romans (the common refrain of "they're crazy, those Romans" translates to Italian as "Sono pazzi questi Romani", SPQR, the standard of "For the Senate and People of Rome" that the Roman legions marched under). In Asterix among the Britains, They brought their druid's herbs to their Breton brethren to use against the Romans, but not without typical British grumblings (mind you, I'm translating from my memory of the "original" German text). "I do so distrust foreign cooking." And "Could I please have two drops of milk in my magic potion?"An anecdote from WWI was that the British could always be counted on to fire off their machine guns in the late afternoon. In order to heat up the machine gun coolant water to the brewing temperature of tea. 
J. R. R. Tolkien's "Hobbitses" are far more British than his fans could possibly imagine. In "Lord of the Rings" the Hobbits are complaining that they're not stopping for "Elevenses". That is an actual British thing!

Around 1970, there was a hypnotist, Dr. Michael Dean (as I seem to recall the name), who was the resident act in the upstairs lounge of the "Gaslight Lounge" (again AISTR the name) on Midway Drive near Rosecrans Street in San Diego -- by 1990 the building had been torn down and replaced by a Sizzler's, as I recall.Part of his act was to have a subject display musical talent that subject didn't even know he had -- his entire backup band consisted of such subjects. The way he did it was to give a subject a trigger phrase at which he would become a famous singer (one that the subject liked) and would then sing one of the singer's songs, which Dr. Dean would have told him to sing.Of course, since he was at least well into his 50's at the time, he wasn't up on current popular music. One female subject became Janis Joplin who was to sing "Bobby McGee", the only popular song of hers he knew about. But when she came up on the stage, she instead sang "Mercedes Benz". Though I would have loved for it to have been "Piece of My Heart".One night, the accordionist of his band hijacked that part of the act. While trying to think of who a subject would be: Since most in the audience were college students, we all knew what was coming even though Dr. Dean didn't. When "Arlo" came up on the stage and started "Alice's Restaurant", Dr. Dean kept looking at his accordionist ("What's going on here?") while the accordionist just grinned and kept grinding out "Alice's Restaurant". And when "Arlo" switched over to his story about the draft with "I've been talking to you for 20 minutes now", Dr. Dean looked at his watch panicked and glared at his accordionist who just kept grinding out "Alice's Restaurant". And "Arlo" knew the entire Alice's Restaurant Massacree perfectly, though about two-thirds of the way through he hesitated for a moment.

Edited by dwise1, : song title correction