Fakir says he can recall missing only one performance, when he was recovering from a successful hip replacement. But in 2018, prior to appearing in a combined Temptations/Four Tops concert in Pennsylvania, Fakir slipped in his hotel room and fractured his other hip.
âWe couldnât get him to go to the hospital,â Payton recalls. âHe did the show, got on the tour bus, went back home, then went to the doctor. Iâve never seen anything like it. He is a role model for what an entertainer should be.â
Fred Potter, Hereford Unitedâs giant-killing goalkeeper who suffered the indignity of being replaced by some conspiracy theorist arsehole.
(excerpt) News that the U.S. Navy had exonerated 256 Black sailors who were unjustly court-martialed in 1944 following the Port Chicago explosion in California was all the alert I needed to contact my friend and co-editor, Robert Allen. I wanted to chat with him about the news since it was his 1989 book The Port Chicago Mutiny that enlightened me about the incident. I was curious if the news reports would mention his account and ask him for a quote. It was merely by chance that in seeking that information I learned Robert had died on July 10, a week before the sailors were exonerated. One piece of good news led me to some bad news. He was 82.
Michael Palin, in the second episode of his Sahara journey series, got to interview Toumani at a club in Mali and listen to him play the kora. Call it kismet, pure coincidence, whatever, we happened to watch that episode of the series on dvd last Saturday, just a couple of days after Toumani passed away. Always experimenting, he composed music that incorporated rap, encouraging young people to stay in school.
If your a Stern fan you will be familiar with Buchwald, heâs been Howardâs agent since the 80s and helped negotiate the ginormous satellite contract.
But, he was a lot more than just Sternâs agent.
This is a fitting send off. The first funeral to be held at the Motown Museum right nextdoor to Hitsville, the original studio where he recorded the hits.
In part:
Laphamâs is the case of an American leadership that could have been, that might have helped make a better world, or that might have failed in the effort for being too genuinely civilized. His role instead, like Montaine, Twain and Mencken, was as a witty and worthy and acute curmudgeon, a chain-smoker of high conscience to the end.
Having been hired to edit the venerable and declining Harperâs in the years before it was rescued and converted into a non-profit by the MacArthur Foundation and a philanthropic oil company,(!) Lapham was bounced out again in 1981-1983 for being too âharshly critical of American society,â according to John Otis in the Washington Post.[6] It may not be incidental that those years corresponded to the Reagan-Thatcher-Volcker ârevolution,â when almost every major periodical in the Anglo-American world that was not already on the right just happened to adopt a neocon or neoliberal editorial line.
Harperâs sales numbers tanked, and Lapham, who turned out to be the favorite among the subscribers after all, was brought back to save it, this time with carte blanche. Ten years before the World Wide Web would initiate the mass Internet revolution, he introduced a set of snappy, short-form collage features like the famed Harperâs Index, Annotations, and Readings (a variety of documentary excerpts), making for unpredictable, often brilliant and drily humorous opening pages that usually served also as an oblique rundown of enough of the recent news fit to think about.
But Harperâs never seemed to skimp on writersâ fees, or on allocating adequate space for the long-form investigative journalism, essays, âforumsâ (debate rounds among big thinkers and scoundrels), and short stories that still filled most of the magazine.
The overall formula worked, at least well enough that despite serious crises the magazine has survived the first 30 years of the Internet maelstrom, did not fall to enshittification, and is still in print today. Iâm not sure if the latter can be said of certain American Pravdas that once seemed to be eternal fixtures of the newsstand and the mailbox, like Time and Newsweek.
There has never been a time when Edna OâBrien wasnât the grande dame of Irish letters. At least for me and probably almost everyone alive. A real trailblazer. Her two fingers to censorship were success, sales, annd international recognition. And dignity and poise and more and more work and outlasting the bastards and still going on because thatâs what she did.
Okay she gave the fuckers a lot more than two fingers!
She has left Irish womenâs writing in rude health. We were blessed to have her, we didnât deserve her.
COPD + asthma.
Sadly, given how she smoked like a chimney, Iâm not surprised she had CPODâŚ
It is a horrible way to go. I really hope she was unconscious as quickly as possible.
Heâs probably more familiar to British people as the referee on Gladiators.
