Rolling Obituary Thread 2022

Early SETI astronomer Frank Drake, 92.

On Friday, the family of astronomer Frank Drake announced that he passed away peacefully at 92 in his California home, near the site of his final academic position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Drake made a number of contributions to radio astronomy, including serving as director of the Arecibo radio telescope facility. But Drake is probably best known for an equation that bears his name and his subsequent involvement in SETI efforts. His equation was the first significant attempt to estimate the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Drake did his PhD in radio astronomy, and his academic career continued with astronomy as a focus. That eventually brought him to the Arecibo observatory. Drake was involved in the observatory's conversion from a military research site to a civilian, science-focused facility, and he later became its director.

But Drake always had a side hustle: the attempt to find other intelligent life in the Universe. His most prominent contribution in this area was the formulation of what's now known as the Drake equation. It's purportedly a calculation—plug in the probabilities of a handful of things like the frequency of exoplanets around stars and the probability of life forming spontaneously, and out would pop the overall number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

More realistically, however, the Drake equation is an effective way to organize our thinking about the question. For example, understanding the probability of life emerging spontaneously from chemicals is a hard problem, but it's a problem we can tackle because we understand a lot of chemistry. The probability of life being intelligent is essentially an impossible one to estimate given how poorly we understand the foundations of conscious thought.

Shreeve's "Legion" on Jive Electro was a club jam for a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkx75EzVTFs

This is what I'll mostly remember xpost Barbara E. for (within her range of interests and writing):

Barbara Ehrenreich is gone. I'd say "May her memory be a blessing" to those who were with her; may it be a scourge to those who were against her, as it was during her life. May she rest in power, may her words keep working pic.twitter.com/VDfk24r9pW

— Rebecca Solnit (@RebeccaSolnit) September 2, 2022

♥️ pic.twitter.com/2AX3dWqYCi

— Kenneth B. Haines (@Citoyen_Ken) September 3, 2022

Horror novelist Peter Straub
https://locusmag.com/2022/09/peter-straub-1943-2022/

aw man :(

I've only read two of his books — The Talisman (with King) and Koko. Koko remains one of the more skin-crawling things I've ever read, even though as I recall it wasn't exactly super gory, he was just really good at being creepy.

i read quite a few of his early novels as a teen - julia, shadowlands, ghost story, floating dragon, god i loved that stuff

i started w him as a go-to when all the stephen kings were checked out at the library & became a big fan.

rip

of course talisman & black house were great too

and yeah he was so good at the atmospheric horror, like a modern interpretation of victorian gothic … scary as hell

The cast of the film Ghost Story is just insane

Agreed. I really liked that one actually, maybe because I didn’t read anything about it beforehand, unlike every other movie I saw at the time.

Koko held up better than I expected when I reread it a few years ago ... all the books VG mentions and If You Could See Me Now hit a sweet spot between literary novel and Paperbacks from Hell exploitation that really works for me

he edited a very nice two-volume collection of American Fantastic Tales for Library of America

I've never read any of his stuff. I own that LoA anthology he edited, though, and it's great. Where should I start with his own work?

ghost story imo but you really cant go wrong with any of his early stuff

This is hitting me bad
I happen to be rereading koko right now
Wahhh

Unperson:
Ghost story or koko

lots of straub being mentioned that I'd forgotten i own

The cast of the film Ghost Story is just insane

Fun fact: the scene with the wedding was filmed in the Anglican church my family attended in Saratoga Springs when we lived there from 1982 to 1985 (various other external locations in the town appear throughout) and that's our parish priest Father Parke acting as said priest in the sequence.

!

neat

that's pretty cool, Ned

My uncle's car was in the old Salem's Lot mini series, which was filmed up in Humboldt county.. he was paid $15 to let them remove his California plate and put on a Massachusetts plate

Ghost story or koko

I agree these are the best places to start

it's kind of cool how different they are from one another: Ghost Story is just what it says on the label, thick with old-fashioned supernatural dread and New England atmosphere, while Koko is very much of a particular post-Vietnam moment, generating fear by non-supernatural means in contemporary urban settings

Sweet thread by Straub’s daughter

Ok this is going to be long and rambling but here goes. My father, Peter Straub, died on Sunday night. He was the fucking best, and here's why, with photos: pic.twitter.com/vR3gV1KZP2

— Emma Straub (@emmastraub) September 6, 2022

Good lord. If my children have anything even remotely like that to say about me when I die, I'll have done something right in my life.

ok crying for real now that was beautiful <3

Good lord. If my children have anything even remotely like that to say about me when I die, I'll have done something right in my life.

was thinking the exact same thing (along with, how to be more Peter Straub?)

Bernard Shaw

Murderer of Kitty Dukakis iirc

SACRAMENTO, CALIF. — Kitty Dukakis hated the first question posed to her husband, the one that made the audience gasp.
"It was theater and inappropriate," said the governor's wife, not concealing her anger over the personalized question as she chatted with reporters on the campaign plane.

"Governor," Bernard Shaw had asked, "if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1988-10-15/news/8802070550_1_kitty-dukakis-mrs-dukakis-death-penalty

lol that's like nothing nowadays.

Lou Reed had a much better answer when he was asked a similar question regarding the shooting of Andy Warhol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm6GiHomqG4

Liz

Ok

rip liz taylor

Truss gone already?

So does the king inherit the corgis, or do they throw them onto the burning longship with her?

The last compete piece Radio 3 played before the news broke was something called "The World Rejoices" lol

https://reductress.com/post/cute-queen-elizabeths-corgis-prepare-to-be-buried-alive-with-her/

xpost

Emmanuelle director Just Jaeckin.

Subject line of the day

Queens Daily Ticker Afternoon Buzz: Queen Elizabeth II dies at 96 after 70-year reign, Elderly Sikh man mugged in South Richmond Hill

This was a really good run for Just Jaeckin:

Emmanuelle(1974)
Histoire d'O (The Story of O) (1975)
Madame Claude (1977)

Murray Head is in the last one. Of all the Emmanuelle sequels and knock-offs, his first one is still the best. He had style.

RIP LA arts maven Virginia Dwan who channeled 3M money into kickstarting the conceptual land art movement, the careers of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and their works like Spiral Jetty, Double Negative, the Lightning Fields, etc.

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/virginia-dwan-dead-1234638393/

Rich people who did cool things with their money, a surprisingly short list

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/marsha-hunt-dead-blacklisted-actress-1235216286/

Actress Marsha Hunt, 104

Shichiro Kobayashi at 89, art director on old school anime classics like Castle of Cagliostro, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Berserk, Angel's Egg etc etc

Man for Castle alone, a legend.

I am incredibly sad to confirm that my grandmother Mavis Nicholson passed away on Thursday. She was a force of nature, an incredible broadcaster, so open-hearted and interested in everyone. She was also my Nana and I miss her like mad. Hope she’s with my granddad Geoff now. pic.twitter.com/DN7seKEx7T

— Ben Nicholson (@BRNicholson) September 10, 2022

Yes, she was very good, RIP Mavis.

https://content.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/1989/1101890724_400.jpg

https://content.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/1989/1101890724_400.jpg