Odds & Ends: News/Humor (with a "Who Lost the Week?" poll)

I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".

OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.

CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.

ART NOTES — an exhibition (covering 1956-1962) of the offbeat photographer in an exhibition entitled Diane Arbus: In the Beginning— many of which were scorned when first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965, and most of which have never been shown in Europe — will be at the Hayward Gallery in London, England through May 6th.

  Hayward Gallery, Southbanke Centre

HAIL and FAREWELL to several lesser-known people from the entertainment world …. first the influential jazz writer Ira Gitler— an editor for Down Beat for a time, and who coined the phrase “sheets of sound” to describe the style of saxophonist John Coltrane — who has died at the age of 90 …. to the original drummer in The Who, Doug Sandom— who was much older than his bandmates, leading him to leave in 1964 (when he was replaced by Keith Moon) — who has died at the age of 89 …. to Beverley Owen, the first to play the role of Marilyn in The Munsters  (who left the show to marry, replaced by Pat Priest) — who has died at the age of 81 …. and to Nathaniel Taylor, who played the role of Rollo in Sanford & Son — Lamont Sanford’s best friend, and the frequent target of barbs by Fred Sanford — who has died at the age of 80.

THURSDAY's CHILD is named Boccy the Hero Cat— an Australian kitteh who awoke a family at 2:00 AM … by battling a tiger snake that had entered their home, enabling the parents to corral it before it could enter the room where the children were sleeping. 

      Boccy the Hero Cat

FOR AN OVERVIEW of what has gone wrong in Venezuela (with some graphic photos) have a look at Jon Lee Anderson’s account in the New Yorker.

IN THE WORLD of coffee, one place that may not come to mind is the small European nation of Luxembourg …. yet its JAB Holding has by recent acquisitions (Douwe Egberts Coffee, the Peets chain of shops and also the Pret a Manger chain) now become the world’s second-largest coffee roaster and retailer (trailing only Nestlé’s).

FRIDAY's CHILD is a kitteh who was rescued from a tree by the Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue team.

Rescued from a 50-foot tree

BRAIN TEASER - try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC.

x

Since others were comparing my testimony with Michael Cohen’s, and I felt missing the overarching matter, I decided to explain how I view it. https://t.co/vvxKC41wsg

— John Dean (@JohnWDean) March 3, 2019

SEPARATED at BIRTH — Tyler Linfesty, the “Plaid Shirt Guy” who was removed from a Trumpster rally last September for his disbelieving facial expressions ..

 Tyler Linfesty, at a Billings, Montana rally

… and Thomas Connelly, a Georgetown University student dubbed “Pizza Intern Guy” for scarfing down a slice (outside the Michael Cohen hearing) in the background of CBS reporter Ed O’Keefe’s live broadcast reporting … and whose friend started a GoFundMe page dubbed Buy the Pizza Intern More Pizza… which as of today, has raised $305. (For the record, he is not actually an intern).

Thomas Connelly, caught on CBS camera

...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… this week, a pair of mini-profiles of two music business figures (one living, one not) that have as a common denominator: the radio. Their names the general public may/may not not know, but are huge in their fields.

As a child in the NYC metro area in the late 1960’s, there used to be saturation advertising for various summer attractions, and I heard a voice-over saying “This is Hal Jackson”  — whom I had no clue about. It turned out that this was a pioneering radio man who was on-air … for seventy-three years.

Born in South Carolina in 1915, he lost both his parents at a young age and was raised by relatives before moving to Washington D.C. He attended Howard University but left to take a job as a sportswriter for a local paper, the Afro-American. He segued into radio as a baseball play-by-play man: first for Howard University’s games and also the Homestead Grays of the Negro baseball league.

In 1939 he transitioned into a nightly interview show at WINX called The Bronze Review — and later, as a disk jockey for a jazz-and-blues program called The House that Jack Built (which became the title of his later autobiography).

 Autobiography (pub. 2001)

Moving to NYC in 1954, he became the first radio personality to host three different shows on three different stations: covering music as well as interviews with jazz musicians and others in show business.

Then in 1971, he was part of a consortium that founded the Inner City Broadcasting Corp. — which launched WBLS, the first African-American owned station in NYC — and the ICBC owned various stations around the country until its recent dissolution. All along, he continued to be a working DJ into the beginning of this decade, when he “cut back” to hosting a Sunday oldies show (until just three weeks before his death).

He received numerous inductions into Halls of Fame: the first African-American in the Nat’l Association of Broadcasters (in 1990) and the National Radio Hall (in 1995), plus the Broadcasting & Cable Hall (in 2011) and was also awarded a Pioneer Award by Rhythm & Blues Foundation (in 2003). Finally, he is widely believed to be the creator of the idea to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

Hal Jackson died in May, 2012 at the age of ninety-six — and often signed-off by telling his listeners, “It’s nice to be important ….. but it’s important to be nice”.

   Hal Jackson (in his later years)

Greater metro Philadelphia has long been a home for famous jazz bassists, including Stanley Clarke, Jimmy Garrison, Alphonso Johnson, Jaco Pastorius, Percy Heath …. and Christian McBride (whose father was a bassist for the Delfonics and Mongo Santamaria). Born in 1972, he briefly attended Julliard before finding his way in the jazz world and leading his own bands by age twenty-three.

He has become one of the most visible faces in the jazz world: named a co-director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the second Creative Chairman for jazz programming at the Los Angeles Philharmonic (succeeded at the end of his five-year term by Herbie Hancock), is the creative director for jazz at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark and in 2016: he succeeded George Wein as artistic director of the world-renowned Newport Jazz Festival, which Wein had founded and ran since 1954. And at only age forty-six, Christian McBride has won …... six Grammy Awards.

Even with all of that, you may be unfamiliar with him. Yet he has also recorded with many in the R&B world (Isaac Hayes, Chaka Khan, Natalie Cole and even his idol James Brown) plus rock (Bruce Hornsby, Carly Simon and Don Henley).

He has his own satellite radio program and also serves as the host of National Public Radio’s Jazz Night in America…. and so if All Things Considered ever has a story about the jazz world …. chances are, you’ll hear his voice.

 Christian McBride recently

Someone he has often worked with is Sting ….. and here they reprise an old song of his, Consider Me Gone (not the Reba McEntire song).

There were rooms of forgiveness In the house that we share But the space has been emptied Of whatever was there There were cupboards of patience There were shelf loads of care But whoever came calling Found nobody there Roses have thorns and shining waters mud And cancer lurks deep in the sweetest bud Clouds and eclipses stain the moon and the sun And history reeks of the wrongs we have done   After today …. consider me gone x xYouTube Video