Rolling Obituary Thread: 2019

A photo I'd not seen before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ruby#/media/File:Lee_Harvey_Oswald_being_shot_by_Jack_Ruby_as_Oswald_is_being_moved_by_police,_1963.jpg

Valerie Harper dies at the age of 80.

#BREAKING Actress Valerie Harper, known for 'Rhoda," 'Mary Tyler Moore Show," dies at 80, family sayshttps://t.co/ker20tZqPf

— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) August 30, 2019

DJ Arafat, 33, one of the giants of the Ivorian coupé-decalé genre and one of the biggest stars of francophone Afropop, buried today after he died two weeks ago in a motorcycle accident in Abidjan.

https://www.france24.com/en/20190831-ivorian-music-star-dj-arafat-gets-royal-send-off-with-grand-funeral-concert

22 y/o French F2 driver Anthoine Hubert, in a crash at the Belgian Grand Prix.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/motorsport/49537761

I stopped watching motor racing when Jules Bianchi died. This poor boy was just over a year older than my son.

tragic

A photo I'd not seen before:

wow, he shot Dan Clowes too?

Night in the Woods developer Alec Holowka

the guy who took that second oswald picture never got over having missed the moment of the shooting by a split second:

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2002/06/30/photographer-snapped-oswald-s-murder-a-hair-too-soon-lost-pulitzer-place-in-history-to-rival/

o snap

I’ll bet it took you six-tenths of a second to come up with that.

i am just a paparazzi

Terrance Dicks.

I'm willing to bet I've read more books by him than anybody else. RIP my childhood.

Les Adams, veteran U.K. DJ who also recorded as L.A. Mix.

aw me too aldo, I always looked for the ones by him because I knew they were the good ones

RIP blessed Terrance, but in his efficiency at crafting a compelling first chapter & then knocking a story of whatever length down to 112 pages of uncomplicated prose over a weekend, he wrote dozens more not-good ones than anyone else wrote in total (and Whitaker, Marter, Hulke, Cotton and Aaronovitch all wrote far better ones).

His streamlining and plot-hole-patching, even when he was cracking out nine slightly-arsed Who novelisations a year alongside his own books and a day job, speak to how great he was as a script editor, though.

np LA Mix's off-the-back-of-a-truck no-questions-asked classic Check This Out

Quite right sic, I was speaking only of my nine year old tastes, the Whitaker and Hulke books are immensely better (and I liked Gerry Davis too). But some of the Dicks ones were the definitive imaginings for stories I assumed I would never see, back in the 70s, and the official books of my favourite Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker stories.

Having gone on a Target re-read last year thanks to far too many long flights I have to agree but Auton Invasion is all-time (also the Moff's childhood pick according to his Insta).

(adding after the below - just realised, for regular people reading this thread: Terrance Dicks was an occasional writer for Doctor Who from 1969 to 1983, assistant script editor in 1968-69, and Script Editor - effectively a head writer / showrunner type role in today's terms - for Jon Pertwee's entire run as the lead character from 1970-74. He adapted dozens of young-readers-friendly novelisations of Dr Who TV serials, co-wrote a behind-the-scenes book using Who as an example to teach children about TV production generally, and generated several original Who-related novels for adults and kids circa 1993-2007. He also wrote over a hundred other kids books, and wrote & script edited & produced other TV, after his full-time era on Who.

(His first, co-written, original story for the show introduced the concept that the Doctor was part of a group of aliens called The Time Lords, from a planet called Gallifrey, and that he had spent the first six years of the show on the run from them, breaking the laws of time by travelling around and helping threatened or oppressed people.)

Dicks certainly did as much as the TV show overall did to make me a fan, and it took years (& decades in some cases) for me to learn how rubbish the visuals on many serials were. Perhaps Auton Invasion, being his first, is one of the best, but I might re-read Invasion Of Time in tribute - that's the first one I can recall being stunned by the cheapness of a story I loved & re-re-read, once I saw a repeat. I think he also added set-up for Leela's inexplicable-on-screen heterosexual subservience & departure at the end?

For extra, extra context these novelisations were of programmes that had already been broadcast and therefore you were never going to be able to see - the odd clip on, say, Blue Peter, almost made it worse - and some of them you still can't. Despite the Cushing film existing, it was his version of DIoE that colours my mind and still is (no matter how good the first couple of EPs are).

Horror of Fang Rock is frequently my favourite serial, and the Five Doctors often ends up being a Flu Day watch. And of course the story of the writing credit on Brian of Morbius.

(Xpost to sic, it's my recollection too that the reasons for Leela and Andred make sense in the Target book.)

On the commentary track for Horror of Fang Rock, Dicks merrily drops the N bomb when referring to Agatha Christie's most notorious whodunnit.

Franco Columbu, bodybuilder who played second fiddle in Pumping Iron

Peter Lindbergh

LaShawn Daniels, in a car accident.

Ivo Malec, French-Croatian composer, professor and noted practitioner of musique concrète, 94. RIP.

RIP, I was listening to some of his stuff last week!

Talking of emigrant combiners of live and electroacoustic sound: Mario Davidovsky, Argentine-US composer and 1971 Pulitzer winner for <i>Synchronism No. 6</i>, 85. RIP.

gnaaah html detected warning -> ideas for ilx

Session Legend Jimmy Johnson

https://pitchfork.com/news/jimmy-johnson-muscle-shoals-session-guitarist-for-aretha-franklin-and-more-dead-at-76/

RIP

Carol Lynley

https://variety.com/2019/film/obituaries-people-news/carol-lynley-dead-dies-the-poseidon-adventure-1203325524/

She was in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal, which is an incredible film I just saw recently but can't recall who she played in it

robert mugabe

future generations will never know what a philtrum is

wow, I’m reading a dissection of his reign just this week

(for the record, I dearly hope the sack of shit suffered like every one of his fucking victims)

Chester Williams, member of South Africa's 1995 rugby World Cup winning squad, heart attack at 49. Now the *fifth* member of that squad, if you include the coach, to die.

Abdul Qadir, Pakistani leg-spinner legend

Bummer, RIP AQ.

had to google what a leg spinner was. first thought involved double-jointedness.

rip AQ

Google googly next (xp)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVG7wo4YWiA

Can it really be called a sport if there are a dozen seagulls on the pitch and nobody is bothered by that?

They're incredibly excited - each seagull is worth 10 goals - but the rules strictly penalise showing it.

You don't get seagulls on the pitch in snooker

I've seen Cliff Thorburn

Peter Nichols, playwright.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/sep/09/peter-nichols-playwright-joe-egg-dies-aged-92

Rod Coneybeare, who played the giraffe and the rooster on Canadian kids' show The Friendly Giant.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/obit-coneybeare-cbc-friendly-giant-1.5275900

RIP Jerome and Rusty, touchstones of my childhood.