He also turned up to a meeting over dinner with the boss of his record company in Germany so wasted that he climbed on the table, disrobed to do a naked goose-step and concluded the performance by urinating in the chief executive’s wine glass.
Haven’t well wanted to do that?
Vale.
Heh:
He later studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, before starting out as a journalist with the Press Association, a job he soon quit after falling asleep listening to the state budget.
Could happen to any of us.
Smith promptly resold Gorky Park to Random House for $1 million and then earned a further $1 million for the film rights.
Apart from the labyrinthine plot, the chief interest of the book lay in its detailed and utterly convincing picture of Moscow low life, of the seamy underworld of petty crooks and informers, dingy bars and the sleazy suburbs, and of the daily routine of the Moscow police force.
First read it when living there in 1990/1. Not far from Gorky Park in fact. The description of that underlife was ptich perfect. There’s one particular line/event. So, bird runs the sandwich bar inside the Intourist. One day she got a double delivery of bread. Ever since she’s been worried that perhaps there will be a day with no delivery. So, she keeps today’s bread back and makes the sandwiches out of yesterday’s. Always.
Sure, a throwaway line. But so, so Soviet.
He did, however, send me what is perhaps the greatest letter I have ever received. The programme was examining religious belief among politicians and I sent Norman a letter asking if he believed in a literal hell.
His reply, beautiful in its brevity, was this: “Dear Liddle. I do not know if Hell exists. But if it does, I trust that you will burn in it for eternity.”
However, his homosexuality came as no surprise to his family because, according to his daughter Lou, “he had brought us up on a diet of Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbra Streisand”.
In the event both were rescued. He said they were saved by Fred Bishop, a fireman, who told his team before rushing into the hotel: “Chaps, you know the rules. If that was a bomb we can’t go in until the bomb squad have cleared it of booby traps. I think it was a fire in the kitchen, don’t you?”
The IMF refused to change its rules and the role went to a Frenchwoman, Christine Lagarde, who was well connected politically but not a trained economist.
Even the technocratic roles get subsumed into politics at some point…..
Yet it was Hang On Sloopy that remained Derringer’s signature tune and when he was touring with Starr’s band he would introduce the song by pointing out that when it was No 1 in the American charts, the Beatles’ Yesterday was stuck at No 2. What he omitted to point out was that McCartney’s song subsequently supplanted the McCoys’ hit and stayed at No 1 for a month, but it was a great story. “They don’t have to know which one was going which direction,” Derringer joked.
After he’d told the story on stage a few times it occurred to him that perhaps he should ask his band leader if he minded the impertinent swank. “It’s fine,” Starr told him. “I didn’t play on either of them.”
Tho’, to be fair, best version of that song is Basie:
As well as being a tough and principled negotiator, she was known for her gravel-voiced charm and wit, and for going to great lengths for her clients, including risking a prison sentence when Kenneth Tynan’s erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! — directed in the nude by her client Clifford Williams — faced prosecution by the attorney-general under the provisions of the Theatres Act of 1968.
Clifford wasn’t – necessarily – in the nude nor prosecuted for being so
He successfully defended his middleweight title four times before meeting the unknown Carlos Monzón. His younger opponent finally won in the 12th round in what was regarded as the fight of the year in 1970. “From the opening bell, it was clear: this was going to be war,” Boxing News reported. “Benvenuti fought smart, calm, and collected — his trademark style — but Monzón’s stoic aggression and relentless pressure gave him the edge. Though Benvenuti was narrowly ahead on some scorecards, the tide turned decisively in round 12. Monzón launched a ferocious two-handed attack that ended with a thunderous right hand, dropping the champion flat. The referee counted ten, but the outcome was never in doubt. Benvenuti was done.”
Benvenuti retired after losing to Monzón a second time the following year, but did not hold a grudge. He would visit the Argentinian in jail — Monzón was convicted of killing his wife — and was a pallbearer at his funeral.
Is that not holding a grudge or is that revelling in one?
She received 10 Emmy nominations for her performance as Major Houlihan, twice winning the award for best supporting actress in a comedy series. She was also nominated for four Golden Globes.
Pretty good. Not wholly top notch but pretty good.
In 1969, she arrived in Hollywood and appeared in the series Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-O, Mission Impossible and Bonanza.
Swit would regularly return to theatre, starring on Broadway in 1975 in Same Time, Next Year and The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1986.
She appeared in Amorous Crossing, a romantic comedy, at Alhambra Theatre & Dining in 2010
Ah, back to dinner theatre by the end. Possibly unkind to mention that really….
Jim Dent obituary: Caddy turned millionaire golfer
Player in racially segregated Georgia who moved from assisting amateurs to become a professional and making it big on the senior circuit, dies aged 85
OK.
The Augusta municipal course, known as The Patch, was not desegregated until 1964
Right
He is survived by Charlene, a daughter from his first marriage; Radiah and Jim, a daughter and a son from his second; and three adopted children, Victoria, Joshua and Joseph, from his third. Jim is head professional at The Patch.
Sure, sure, sure, it should never have happaned, it should have changed earlier and faster. But it still did change which is good.
“I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed being an anonymous housewife later on in my life.”
Cora Sue Collins obituary: child actor in 1930s Hollywood
More hits followed including Biljo (1969), Everybody Go Home the Party’s Over (1970) and Lady Love Bug (1971). These brought her appearances on Top of the Pops. “I’d be in those BBC corridors and I’d meet the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac and Jethro Tull. I’d be there chatting away with Mick Jagger,” she said. “I always found him a bit stupid, actually.”
Now my acquaintance who used to sub the obituaries page has retired it’s all going down hill of course.
Jonathan Trelawny Morshead was born in 1942 in Calcutta during the rise of India’s independence movement. When he was three years old his parents sent him back to England to enrol at boarding school. Descended from Cornish gentry, he joined Morshead’s House — named after its founder, his grandfather Frederick Morshead — at Winchester College.
I think that’s extremely unlikely. 13, not 3. And describing 1942 as the rise of the indie movement has a certain oddity to it….
Dunlop with Lorenzo Montesini, who had claimed to be an Ottoman prince, before running off with the best man ahead of their planned wedding
That’s the photo caption. The fuller details:
After Venice entered the solemnities of Holy Week in 1990, the city’s canals rippled to a sensation as intriguing as any of its pre-Lenten medieval masquerades. The unlikely protagonist was a 36-year-old Australian called Primrose Dunlop, about to be elevated to the status of Ottoman princess after her marriage to Prince Giustiniani, aka Lorenzo Montesini, at the Basilica di San Pietro di Castello. Thereafter the couple would be borne triumphantly, the bride resplendent in a diadem of gold oak leaves, at the head of a regatta of gondolas to a candelit reception in the long marble hall of the Palazzetto Pisani.
Yet just before this fairytale could be played out, the groom and his lover (who was also the best man) absconded before Dunlop could slip into her Balenciaga wedding dress, making their exit to Paris pursued by the paparazzi, who could not believe their luck. The treasurer of the Conservative Party, Lord McAlpine, and the bestselling British novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford were among the 70 guests left looking at the moonlit waters in bewilderment. Yet before too many tears were shed, the reality of the proposed match came to light — though accounts differ.
Add to National Service:
Called up for National Service, he trained as a cook and won five RAF boxing titles and four UK armed forces championships.
Olympic gold followed etc.
Being based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire meant he was billed as an English boxer and did not fight for Scotland until 1958, when he picked up another gold at the Empire Games in Cardiff. Yet anyone who questioned his allegiance had to contend with two of his brothers, Army and Navy boxing champions, who rarely hesitated to defend the family honour.
Genetics, eh?
….there’s a certain truth to it:
“When Paddy moved to the Sunday Telegraph after 25 years working for supposedly liberal papers, he said he had to join a right-wing paper in order to meet a working-class journalist,” said Henderson.
So John Prescott has left us and as I’ve said a number of times there was much to admire – and Fatty Soames c’n fuck off ‘n’ all.
I did have one online interaction. Which was to create the “fuckwit” GoggleBomb which led to the page of the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK. That Pathfinder idea was just so insane that I did.
And here’s the thing. I know it ended up in a column in the Telegraph. I know there are references to it out there even as the bomb itself (20 years or whatever later) doesn’t work.
But Google seems to have memory holed it. The only even references I can find to it are in US publications. Nothing at all from the UK, not even my own blog….weird, eh?
Ted Honderich took the “moral” out of “moral philosophy”. He may have had a strict and uncompromising view of morality, declaring: “You can be as amoral or internationally realist as you want, but it can’t save you from moral judgment.” Yet matters were different in his own world: he slept with his students, made repeated marital vows and enjoyed at least one “open marriage”.
We know at least one like that, don’t we children? The arena of the morality might be different but tax laws, tax morals, are for thee, not me, we know someone like that, right?
Re One Direction:
In some ways the laddish image wasn’t really that calculated; give a bunch of testosterone-fuelled teenage boys more money than they can spend and an army of adoring girls and they are unlikely to behave like ascetic monks.