Phil Spector held in murder – body found at home.
Spector is the legendary – and legendarily volatile – record producer behind “Be My Baby”, the Righteous Brothers, and the classic Ramones album, “End of the Century.”
Tales have circulated since the Ramones gig of his holding singer Joey at gunpoint in the studio until the lanky frontman delivered a take to Spector’s taste. These tales may have been exaggerated, but Spector’s temper is a matter of record.
As regulars wil be aware, my site inadvertently became a clearinghouse for messages to Bill Mauldin and for messages of condolence in the past few days. Mauldin family members found the site via Google and correspondents requested information regarding the cartoonists’s funeral.
His grandson, Bruce Mauldin, has asked me to post the following information. I’ll add it here and in the comments on the original entry as well as emailing the people who commented originally.
Here’s Bruce’s information concerning services, donations, and so forth.
Mike:
Thank you for allowing my grandfather’s “friends” to accidentally post their thoughts on your web page. It really does mean a lot to see them.
I have actually received several emails since posting to your site. Interestingly enough, my father Bruce [Sr.] (Bill’s son) was a Colonel in the Army, and his Executive Officer from his assignment in Savannah, GA from 1976-1979 contacted me (I was just 13, but do remember him well). It really is a small world!
To answer your question, flower arrangements can be sent directly to Arlington Cemetery. The information is as follows:
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington, Virginia
Wednesday, January 29th
Bill Mauldin Funeral at 2 PMIf anyone wants to contribute monetarily, it would have meant a lot to Bill (and Charles Schulz, god bless them both) if donations could be made to the Bill Mauldin Wing at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA. The address is as follows, as well as their website:
National D-Day Memorial Foundation
202 East Main Street
Bedford, VA 24523
http://www.dday.org/Please make sure that the donations are earmarked specifically for the Bill Mauldin Wing, and not the general construction fund.
Again, Mike, thank you for keeping your site up, and making it available. I’m sure your bandwidth is being stretched to it’s limits!
Take care, and best regards!
Bruce P. Mauldin, II
Allow me to summarize:
Our current administration does not inspire in me feelings of trust or confidence, but rather profanity-inducing ill-humor.
Said profanity and ill-humor does not mesh with my editorial goals. My apologies to any readers with blistered eyeballs. I’ll think once, think twice, think chicken soup with rice before I pop off so colorfully next time.
Bottled Baby Octopuses Turn Out to Be Pygmies (NYT)
Oh, wait, technically, I AM a sleepy headline writer.
You’d think the lack of tentacles would have given it away.
Maya Carvings Tell of 2 Superpowers. At the NYT.
Fascinating. The article notes that the full story is coming out in the next ish of National Geographic, which probably means lotsa cool pix too.
I studied the heck outta mesoamerican culture and history (what was known at the time) at the end of college, around ’89 or so; back then they were just beginning to conclude that the collapse of the Maya economy which largely ended the imperial culture that built the great pyramids was the result of some terrible interregnum of war.
I remember writing a paper hypothesizing that whatever intensified the conflicts between the various city-states (warfare was embedded in most of the mesoamerican culture’s religious practices, which required high-ranking captives for various purposes, among them sacrifice), the intensification had resulted in the implementation of a “total war” footing, in which the food-growing populace, apparently not always required to participate in wafare because combat was a restricted perogative of the aristocracy, was mobilized and used to attack and destroy the food producing resources of an enemy state.
I was just speculating after some of the first lay-press publications of findings associated with Caracol and Dos Pilas, if memory serves.
See, here’s the thing I’m not sure about. Historically, the people that make war get to write about it, and they kinda neglect the people who provide the real body of the forces employed. Thus, it’s Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and Hannibal crossing the Alps and Alexander in India.
We know that Caesar and Hannibal and Alexander had many thousands of people with them, so it’s OK to leave them out, in shorthand. I wonder if my assumption in that old paper, that poor people were added to the war in a racheting up of the warfare’s intensity, might not be based in part on taking the Mayan kings’ words about themselves and their conflicts at face value.
I don’t know for sure; but I do know that since I was in school, Central American pot and hut archaeology has increased partly because certain governments, such as Guatemala’s, have ceased to actively discourage it.
In my understanding of the situation, that is because the Guatemalan government of the 1980s saw hut archaeology as an activity with dangerous revolutionary undertones. Don’t want to educate the peasants about how well off they were before Columbus, no sir. And we sure don’t want to uncover archeological evidence of either warfare in which farmers led the way or of rebellions in which they changed the kings. No sir.
No coverage yet, but a radio traffic reporter who works out of the tallest building in downtown Seattle just informed her audience (on KUOW, the local NPR station) that the building is being evacuated… More as soon as I hear about it.
Apparently it’s some sort of bomb threat.
UPDATE: an apparent false alarm, thankfully.
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The Seattle Times: Bumbershoot favorite busted, then banned
A brief article on Jason’s banishment from Bumbershoot. You know, the reasons to live here are thinning out.
I sent a note to the address provided here expressing my disappointment in the situation, but someone’s having DNS trouble, it bounced from the info@onereel.org address.
Just to add insult to injury: I COMPLETELY forgot that Jason was playing a couple of shows this weekend. Dammit. So I missed them.
(The DNS trouble was local: there’s some sort of persistent problem in Apple’s implementation of lookupd and DNSAgent that causes it to just stop looking when it gets a timeout from a domain name server instead of continuing to query the next server on the list, or restarting the query at the top of the list.)
As the Portly Texan points out, it’s Buddy Holly‘s birthday, a distinction shared with Ken.
I thought perhaps despair.com might have a nice e-card, but no; so I sent a condolences card from Apple’s soon-to-be-no-longer-free dot-Mac services (which, is, um, the second time I’ve used that service in two years? But enough about me).
What really would like, though, would be a nice Edward Gorey e-card. Alas, none were found, but this was. Via this links list. Heh heh heh. Nothin’ makes me happier than a refreshing Gorey book.
FREE ZILLA personnel may be interested in this.
No really. Just like you are. But the inevitable anniversary media coverage is not helping me reflect, come to terms with, or otherwise cope with it. It’s just making me irritated with the media. Which means I suppose I’ll be listening to more music than usual.