From his 1992New York Times obituary: “Benny Hill, the English television comedian whose mischievous grin and cherubic looks somehow made him a master of double-entendre, British bawdy style, and ultimately gained him a kind of international cult status, was found dead last night at his home in southwest London. He was 67 years old.
While the cause of death was not determined, Mr. Hill’s chronic heart condition had been well publicized in the London newspapers. The police in Teddington, his hometown, discovered the body after neighbors grew concerned after not seeing Mr. Hill for two days, a spokeswoman for Scotland Yard said last night.
Mr. Hill’s humor, a cross between a leer from W. C. Fields and the naivete of Charlie Chaplin, with a large dose of the Keystone Kops thrown in, found a devoted audience in England, at least among those who confessed to having an appetite for his madcap sight gags and for the young women in skimpy outfits in most of his routines. Though he became a television star in England in the 1950’s, it was not until 1979, when a series of variety specials appeared as a half-hour series in the United States, that Mr. Hill gained worldwide acclaim.”
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"The curiosity was bagged for further use in the dime show."
Manhattan’s Grace Church has had some unusual eventsin its storied history, but the Grace Church in Providence, Rhode Island, had a strange one of its own in 1887. On February 6 of that year, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reprinted the following story about the house of worship from the Providence Journal:
“One of the early occupants of Grace Church on Sunday afternoon fit in in an unusual and surprising way, although common to its kind. When the janitor had about prepared the house of worship for the reception of the rector and the congregation he was startled by something aloft–a something that made his eyes open and caused wonder in his mind. There was a wide range, and a most propitious one, for the fancy of a sprightly monkey up in the high cornices, arches and the extensive organ loft that mark the architectural beauties of the edifice. The janitor was in a quandary. It was about church time, just before 10:30, when the morning service is celebrated by Rev. Dr. Greer.
The lively brute would not ‘come down,’ as he was commanded, and he took advantage of his short spell of liberty. He swung from one arch to the next, and when his would be captor had bestirred himself and succeeded to frightening the fugitive from one place to another, a quick, silent contemplation of the scene below would follow. The janitor grew angry as the minutes flew by and the time was approaching for the hour of worship. Then he bethought himself of the police, and he resolved to call for an officer. That was done and more than one came. That janitor was fully confident that it would take more men and a good deal of coaxing to rid the church of the unwelcome visitor before Dr. Greer opened morning prayer.
"Constable Handy proposed that he should try his skill at marksmanship right in Grace Church and with the elusive monkey for a target, but the police officers suggested cookies and coaxing."
The fugitive curiosity stayed on high; he’d swing this way and that by his prehensile tail, and jumped from one place to another, always going in the direction where least expected, and usually going higher up when the officers expected him to come down. His antics were well calculated to vex all his pursuers, and it was thought that every plan, of which the officers had but one or two, was useless. Constable Handy proposed that he should try his skill at marksmanship right in Grace Church and with the elusive monkey for a target, but the police officers suggested cookies and coaxing. No shooting was done and no bloodshed was caused. Then the crowd of the pursuers took up a retreat and the fugitive monkey swooped down from a lofty pier in a rectangular course and seemed to seek a closer inspection of the operations of the police. The monkey came down closer and closer, and finally, by strategy and an adroit movement of the whole force of captors moving in a semi circle, the curiosity was bagged for further use in the dime show. It was an exciting hunt, and it is admitted by all the pursuing party that the unwelcome visitor at the Grace Church just slightly escaped being present at divine service, when doubtless he would have caused great consternation in the congregation, if he did not disperse the whole gathering.”
The best science book I read during the aughts was Alan Weisman’s 2007 theoretical tome, The World Without Us. Weisman, a journalist not a scientist, imagines what would happen to all we’ve built if human beings suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth. What would become of oil wells and subways and bridges and apartment buildings if they were untended? Weisman’s findings are fascinating.
mmmmm
An excerpt about New York City sans people from the book: “In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycles move indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate. Buildings groan as their innards expand and contract; joints between walls and rooflines separate. Where they do, rain leaks in, bolts rust, and facing pops off, exposing insulation. If the city hasn’t burned yet, it will now. Collectively, New York architecture isn’t as combustible as, say, San Francisco’s incendiary rows of clapboard Victorians. But with no firemen to answer the call, a dry lightning strike that ignites a decade of dead branches and leaves piling up in Central Park will spread flames through the streets. Within two decades, lightning rods have begun to rust and snap, and roof fires leap among buildings, entering panel offices, filled with paper fuel. Gas lines ignite with a rush of flames that blows out windows. Rain and snow blow in, and soon even poured concrete floors are freezing, thawing, and starting to buckle. Burnt insulation and charred wood add nutrients to Manhattan’s growing soil cap. Native Virginia creeper and poison ivy claw at walls covered with lichens, which thrive in the absence of air pollution. Red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons nest in increasingly skeletal high-rise structures.”
I never knew until recently that astronaut Frank Borman, after completing his Apollo 8 mission in 1968, became a target of anti-authority campus radicals. A post-mission tour of American universities didn’t go splendidly for Borman, and Carl Sagan apparently didn’t help matters when the spaceman made his way to Cornell. An excerpt from Collect Space about the ill-fated meeting:
“After Borman returned from Apollo 8 NASA sent him on a good will tour of colleges and universities across the country. Borman took his wife Susan along so she could share in the event. At Columbia no sooner than Borman started to talk, the audience started pelting him with marshmallows and two students dressed in gorilla costumes climbed onto stage with him to reenactthe opening of the movie 2001.
But as Borman said, ‘Then there was Cornell.’
At Cornell Borman and his wife Susan were guests of Carl Sagan. Sagan invited them to his house for the evening so that they could meet some of the students from Students for a Democratic Society. Sagan explained that he was their faculty advisor.
As Borman explains it, they spent the evening sitting on the floor of Sagan’s living room where Sagan orchestrated an attack, egging the students on when they asked questions such as, ‘Col. Borman, were you aware that on such and such a date American troops massacred hundreds of helpless Vietnamese woman and children? Just what is your opinion of this heinous atrocity? Surely you must have some thoughts on the subject!’
I always wondered why Sagan (a very well-loved man) set Borman and his wife up like that. The best answer I have been able to come up with is Sagan saw Borman as a trespasser. Sagan made no secret of the fact that as a university professor he saw himself as superior to any military officer.”
••••••••••
Apollo 8 crew reads biblical passages from space on Christmas Day 1968:
From “First at Ninety,” a 2007 New Yorker article about the debut novel of nonagenarian Millard Kaufman, by the always excellent Rebecca Mead:
“Kaufman grew up in Baltimore. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, he moved to New York and became a copyboy at the Daily News for thirteen dollars and seventy cents a week. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted in the Marines, with whom he participated in the campaign to win Guadalcanal and landed at Guam and Okinawa. ‘I weighed a hundred and eighty-two pounds when I went overseas, and when my wife met me afterward she didn’t recognize me—I weighed a hundred and twenty-eight,’ Kaufman said. ‘I had dengue fever and malaria, and I didn’t really feel like I could spend the heat of the summer or the cold of the winter in New York anymore.’
He moved to California, where he took up screenwriting, winning an Oscar nomination in 1953 for a movie called Take the High Ground. (He was nominated again two years later, for Bad Day at Black Rock.) He lent his name to Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted, for a movie called Gun Crazy. ‘The only time I ever met him was at a meeting of the Writers Guild,’ Kaufman said. ‘It was such a bore, and I left and went into a bar at the hotel, and Trumbo was there. We met because some guy was standing between us who was fairly drunk, and he said, ‘What’s all that noise?’ One of us said, ‘It’s a writers’ meeting.’ He said, ‘What do they write?’ and we said, ‘Movies.’ He looked aghast and said, ‘You mean they write that stuff?” Kaufman’s most enduring contribution to entertainment, at least thus far in his career, is as co-creator of Mr. Magoo, whom he modelled in part on an uncle. ‘That is what we thought the character was based on until, twenty years later, we were accused of being nasty about people with bad eyesight,’ he said.
Kaufman began the novel after his most recent screenplay, which he undertook at the age of eighty-six, came to nothing. His alliance with McSweeney’s was a product of circumstance. ‘My literary agent, who was younger than me, had died suddenly, and I had nobody,’ Kaufman said. He is now writing a second novel. ‘Years ago, I was working in Italy, and Charlie Chaplin and his family came from Switzerland,’ he recalled. ‘We were at a beach north of Rome, and it was a very foggy day and the beach was lousy. At about three o’clock it cleared up, and Chaplin said, ‘I’m going back to the hotel. Unless I write every day, I don’t feel I deserve my dinner.’ That made an impression on me.’
Kaufman writes longhand and has a secretary type up his work. ‘The only promise to myself that I have ever kept was no more typewriters,’ he said. ‘I hate the damn thing.’ (When it was suggested to Kaufman that he might want to check his Amazon ratings after Bowl of Cherries comes out, he said that he wasn’t sure what Amazon ratings were.)”
"If you have 3 puppies only I will pay 75$." (Image by Cartman0052007.)
Rent your Puppies for a Day $100 – $100 (Queens)
Hi,
My Girlfriends Birthday is coming up and I want to do something special for her. She is a huge animal lover and shes crazy about puppies. I’m looking to rent your puppy litter ( 3puppies or more) for a few hours in a day. I will pick them up and drop them off if that is convenient for you. I will probably pick them up in the AM and drop them off before it gets dark. Any food and supplies I will provide with your advise.
Im looking to Pay a Max of 100$ for a litter of 4 or more. if you have 3 puppies only I will pay 75$.
Orson Welles picked up some wine money for his participation in the 1975 documentary, “Who’s Out There.” It features cool interviews with Americans who were scared to death by Welles’ famous radio hoax about an alien invasion, War of the Worlds. Welles also explores, with the help of Carl Sagan, among others, whether actual extraterrestrials exist.
Sign: "Frank Lava Gunsmith. Revolvers Bought Sold Repaired."
The apartment above the Frank Lava Gunsmith shop on Centre Market Place was pretty much the perfect locale to live in if you were New York City’s leading crime photographer, as Arthur “Weegee” Fellig was from the 1930s through the 1950s. This classic 1937 photo of Weegee (photographer unidentified) shows the street-smart shutterbug during the daytime, but it was the graveyard shift when he worked and dominated. From a 2008New York Times pieceabout Weegee by John Strausbaugh:
“Weegee’s peak period as a freelance crime and street photographer was a whirl of perpetual motion running from the mid-1930s into the postwar years. Ceaselessly prowling the streets during the graveyard shift, he took thousands of photographs that defined Manhattan as a film noir nightscape of hoodlums and gangsters, Bowery bums and slumming swells, tenement dwellers and victims of domestic brawls, fires and car crashes. He gave it its enduring nickname, the Naked City.
‘Weegee captured night in New York back when it was lonely and desolate and scary,’ said Tim McLoughlin, editor of the Brooklyn Noir anthology series, the third volume of which has just been published by Akashic Books. ‘He once said he wanted to show that in New York millions of people lived together in a state of total loneliness.’”
••••••••••
“You push the button and it gives you the things you want.”
“The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt.
Far safer than the Hindenburg, whose tragic 1937 docking remains an icon of aerospace gone wrong, these modern airships are a hybrid of lighter-than-air and fixed-wing aircraft. They can loft enormous payloads without requiring the acres of tarmac or miles of roadway necessary for conventional air and truck transport. And they do so at a fraction of the fuel and cost of aircraft.
Airships ‘give you access and much larger payloads at much lower costs,’ said Peter DeRobertis, project leader for commercial hybrid air vehicles at Lockheed Martin’s Aeronautics and Skunk Works division in Fort Worth, Texas. ‘It’s also a green aircraft; you’re not polluting.'”
••••••••••
Famously haunting summation by Herbert Morrison: “Oh, the humanity.”
Millions of tons of plastic recyclables fall into our oceans from barges each year, sinking beneath the water’s surface, out of sight and out of mind. But what about plastic encroaching on nature in plain sight, why don’t we take notice of that? The always observant Ian Frazier, a proud tree hugger, does. In “Tilting at Tree Bags,” his 2001 Mother Jones article, Frazier tells of his very personal quest to relieve New York City trees of plastic bags that attached to their branches, An excerpt:
“Sometimes when we snagged an unusually pesky high bag, windows at a nearby apartment house would fly open and people would stick their heads out and applaud. Once an old woman invited us in and gave us lunch. Sometimes people came up to us and thanked us, and once a guy handed me a dollar bill. Mostly, though, people looked at us with mystication, or smiled and shook their heads in a ‘what a crazy city’ way. Once, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a jogger stopped and watched us for a minute or two as we tried to remove a complicatedly entangled bag. ‘That’s a lot of trouble to go through for just a bag,’ he said. I said to him, “Is it any more pointless than running in a big circle back to your apartment?’
Bag snagging was our exercise, our companionship, our hobby, our impromptu community action program. Its aesthetic pleasures were large: A tree from which one or more plastic bags has been removed is, oddly, more beautiful than a tree which never had any bags in it to begin with. In the past, some of our outdoor activities — hitting golf balls at passing ships — had bordered on vandalism, but bag snagging gave some of vandalism’s thrill while actually being its opposite. Throughout the city we went where we wanted without asking permission, improving the landscape. Now I understood, a bit, how people felt who had worked on the construction of some major public landmark like the Empire State Building. Sometimes when I’d go by a park in a taxicab I would point out the window and say with pride, ‘You see that tree? We took an extra-large pair of green stretch pants out of it the other day.'” (ThanksKevin Kelly.)
"I gathered a large cup of dust." (Image by Jonathunder.)
mason jar of twin towers dust (tennessee)
While visiting the site of the twin towers collapse a little over a month after the 911 attacks I gathered a large cup of dust that was sitting on the top of a door header from a vacant building a few buildings down from the burger king. I’ve kept this dust over the years as I believed it to be a very collectible item, an historic item and a item of of great significance. If you are interested in owning this most unusual collectible please contact me at the email above. Thank you! Randall
A product of the Watergate decade, an era when spying and snooping at least gave us pause, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation was made before ubiquitous public security cameras were watching us, phones were tracking us and seemingly everyone was living in public. A lack of privacy has never been as well-regarded as it is today nor have the perils of such actions, which are investigated in this film, been so invisible.
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a jazz loving San Franciscan who earns his living as a surveillance expert, stealthily recording private conversations with an elaborate array of mikes of his own making. Caul is top dog in the trade, and he’s paid handsomely to find answers for his bosses and not ask them any questions. A devout Catholic, the wire tapper has moral issues with his work, especially since information he culled in a past case led to murder. But it’s hard for Caul to stop doing what he’s doing because he’s so damn good at it, something of an artist.
While he may be an artist, Caul is definitely a hypocrite. He keeps everything about himself strictly private, even from his girlfriend (Teri Garr) and point man (John Cazale). He rationalizes he’s doing it for safety reasons, but it’s also in his nature. This delicate balance is thrown off-kilter when Caul believes his latest assignment, in which a wealthy man is paying for info about his young wife, may also lead to murder. Caul can’t head down that road again and a crisis of conscience makes him go rogue. Soon he himself is the target of surveillance, a probing that he can’t withstand.
In the era that saw the downfall of an American President who listened to the tapes of others and erased his own, The Conversation was amazingly relevant, but in some ways it may be even more meaningful in this exhibitionist age, in which we gleefully hand over our privacy to satisfy our egos. As Caul and Nixon learned, and as we may yet, those who press PLAY don’t always get to choose when to press STOP.•
Vital info about a California rat-killing contest couldn’t be kept from those newshounds at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, as the June 22 edition of the paper carried a reprinted article about the topic from the Sacramento Record-Union:
“There is at present in the County Hospital a professional rat catcher, named Angel. He is a half witted, low browed fellow, and his looks indicate that he is anything but what his name would imply. As a rat catcher, however, he is a success, and late yesterday afternoon he gave an exhibition of his powers that was simply wonderful. Several of the best rat terriers in the city were procured, and against these Angel was pitted. The first exhibition of his beastly work was at the hospital, where twenty-five rodents were dispatched, Angel killing a majority.
"Angel, with the rapidity of lightning, would grasp a rat with his left hand, and with his right give the rodent's head a quick twist that would break its neck instantly."
The party then went over to the Gerber Bros. slaughter house, where the ‘game’ was found to be more plentiful. The rodents had congregated by the score under bales of hay, and the exciting contest was kept up for over an hour. The dogs and man would gather about a bale, some one would give the hay a sudden flip, and the rat catchers would rush in. Angel, with the rapidity of lightning, would grasp a rat with his left hand, and with his right give the rodent’s head a quick twist that would break its neck instantly. At other times he would grasp a rat in each hand, dash them together, and both would fall to the ground lifeless. Over 100 were killed here, and Angel killed two to the dog’s one. Prior to Angel going to the hospital, he gained a living solely by killing rats, and on one occasion slaughtered forty-five in one hour in the basement of a K street establishment.”
From “Manson: An Oral History,” Los Angeles Magazine‘s 2009 recollection of the man behind the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, which rocked Hollywood and shocked a nation:
Bill Gleason, Los AngelesCountydeputy sheriff assigned to probe auto thefts. He is 77 and retired.
Charles Manson and some of his group just showed up at the Spahn Ranch and started living in the movie sets. Most of the buildings were false fronts, but they made them into rooms. I thought they were just a bunch of hippies, but we started getting reports that members of the Straight Satans, a motorcycle gang from Venice, were going to the ranch on weekends and partying. The word was that they were trading drugs for sex with the women there. Some of the women were runaway juveniles who provided Manson with cash and credit cards stolen from their homes. We also had reports that members of the group were shooting a machine gun. The Manson people were also stealing and building dune buggies and driving them onto adjoining properties, creating a nuisance. A couple of nights before the raid, we hiked into the ranch and found a stolen, brand-new 1969 Ford and a stolen Volkswagen. That was the main basis for our search warrant—to recover these vehicles and try to identify who stole them.
I really didn’t pay much attention to Manson. We’d already taken most of the adults out, and everyone was saying, “Where’s Charlie.” He was hiding under one of the buildings. The deputies had to go in and forcibly remove him. I arrested them one week after the Tate murders, but none of them said anything. Everybody just sat there.”
“The Family” is arrested, December 2, 1969. Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who is interviewed in this report. tried to assassinate President Ford in 1975.
I am looking for a way to build a fence that is indestructible. I have about 50 foot of driveway that someone is constantly abusing. I was thinking guardrail or something this next door jerk cannot destroy. If you have stone debris or something of that sort hit me up.
