No, Alan Alda did not get picked up by MASH co-star Mike Farrell for a warm-hearted reunion ride on a motorcycle for his 90th birthday. Nor did Alda have a warm-hearted reunion on a beach with fellow MASH alumni.
I can’t share a news story about this birthday party on Facebook, because I live in Canada and Meta — the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and more — does not permit the sharing of news stories inside the country. (Meta refuses to comply with Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which aims to divert revenues from tech giants that aggregate news toward local journalism.)
Facebook though has no problem at all with fake stories about Alan Alda being shared, and widely. I’ve seen versions in the last week that just make me groan.
“In the ’80s, there was a certain freedom, and a sense of immortality, that ended with that decade. AIDS cracked the earth. With everyone dying, everything shifted. Our history got cut off. We lost a whole generation. We lost a culture. We didn’t just lose the actors, we lost the audience.” — Nan Goldin, photographer, from a piece on her work in the Guardian
Curtis Mayfield’s Move On Up is a firecracker in every iteration, but you need to hear the album version — volume up, please — to get the full effect.
Decades on, it still gets me. It’s almost nine minutes, and worth every moment.
What drives this song? Maybe it’s simply the pitch of Mayfield’s voice, or the rousingly optimistic lyrics. Maybe it’s the seven-piece horn section, which is relentless. Then there’s the rhythm, powered by guitars played by Mayfield and two others.
“This thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” — Mary Pickford
Today’s quote o’ the day is from the Toronto-born actor and producer who became one of America’s biggest stars. It originates from this synidcated essay Pickford wrote in 1936, extolling religious belief. (It must have a year of searching for Pickford, a massive star in the silent movie era; her divorce from Douglas Fairbanks went through earlier that year.)
Let’s look at the quote in a fuller context. Here’s the start of the paragraph it comes from:
It’s been a month since New Year’s Day, and while it’s a bit late to add a chip to the pile of year-end retrospectives, I’ve been looking back at books I’ve read over the last year.
In this case, I wanted to look at books that made an impression on me. I hesitate to describe them all as great books; rather, they’re books that I enjoyed, or appreciated deeply.
The ones below, though, are generally at the other end of the spectrum: I not only recall them, but remember that satisfaction that comes when you read something hearty. I’m also tossing in some books that were just plain fun.
Here are some recommendations, in no particular order:
I reacted with disbelief yesterday afternoon when I saw the first push notification that Catherine O’Hara had died, at only 71. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” I uttered as I opened the story.
It says something that international media (the BBC, the New York Times, CNN) all saw fit to send push notifications about O’Hara’s death. She had been a Canadian star for almost five decades, but she made an impression — time and again, through a long and wonderful career — everywhere.
SCTV was a fixture for me when I was an adolescent. Produced first on a shoestring in Toronto, the show was kept alive by ITV in Edmonton, where the cast and crew remained to shoot the show through a rocky financing history, even when NBC bailed out and upgraded the show as a complement to the much-better-known Saturday Night Live.
“I’ve always been in the right place and time. Of course, I steered myself there.” — Bob Hope
This quote, taken from comedian Bob Hope’s memoir Don’t Shoot, It’s Always Me, speaks to working hard and keeping your eyes out for a good opportunity. Making your own luck, as it were.
I took this photo — of a bronze sculpture of Hope performing in front of an old-timey microphone — in San Diego during a visit there in 2011. It’s a city filled with public art, and there is also a huge navy presence, so it was not surprising to see both combine in a war memorial. You can find it near the USS Midway Museum.
Last week, the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra achieved a key performing goal — putting bums in seats — with three consecutive Winter Pops concerts at the Arts & Culture Centre in St. John’s.
It was 70s night. Cynically, I’m tempted to say it described the audience … but I’m going to park the cynicism, even though, well, I’m not wrong. (I felt like I was in the younger part of the demographic, honest.)
Powerhouse singer Dana Parsons was at the mic for many of these tunes, including the Thelma Houston barnburner that opened the show.
Taking all the politics and curious real estate backstory out of it, the proposed site for a new hospital in the St. John’s area made sense.
Kenmount Crossing, as it’s called, nears the end of Kenmount Road in St. John’s — or it could be at the beginning, if you’re driving into the city. Three decades or so ago, when I lived in Paradise, all of that land was the woods, the trees you drove past as you went to work or the movies.
It’s all getting filled in now, and the land is between rapidly growing subdivisions from each direction, with industrial and commercial development thrown in there too. The proposed hospital site would have linked to the Trans-Canada Highway through the Outer Ring Road, and would put acute health care much closer to a bigger and growing population.
“Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded as the heavy petting of literature.” — Fran Lebowitz
The quote of today comes from Fran Lebowitz’s debut book Metropolitan Life, which established her in 1978 as a great wit and a barbed observer of how people live their lives. I read it a few years later in university, as well as her followup, Social Studies, and then I waited and waited (and waited some more) for the next collection of essays. Apart from an anthology that combined the two, she has not yet written it.
In June 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released a searing single called Ohio, just a few weeks after the shootings in Kent State, when the National Guard opened fire and killed students. “Four dead in Ohio,” as Neil Young’s lyrics put it.
It was a fast response to a horrifying news event.
On Wednesday, Bruce Springsteen released Streets of Minneapolis, just four days after Border Patrol offices shot and killed Alex Pretti, who was using a phone to record ICE activity in the city.
Springsteen won an Oscar for the similarly named Streets of Philadelphia, which helped force reluctant fans to confront the reality and ravages of the AIDS epidemic.
When the philanthropist and businessman Paul Johnson died in 2015, he left behind a mighty physical legacy, especially in the St. John’s area.
Now, one of his favourite projects is in doubt, as Newfoundland and Labrador’s only university grapples with a financial crisis, declining enrolment and other infrastructure badly in need of repair.
Through the Johnson Family Foundation, Johnson spearheaded a number of projects close to his heart. The Grand Concourse, which upgraded and extended a network of walking trails throughout the city, is one of the most obvious. It’s an amazing thing: you can walk from the most easterly points of Canada’s most easterly city for hours and hours and not repeat a step.
Johnson kept a low public profile during his life. I talked with him only once; when we were introduced earlier that evening (it was at a fundraiser), he was so quiet that it took me a minute or three to clock that I was standing next to the Paul Johnson.
“Science is a co-operative enterprise, spanning the generations. It’s the passing of a torch from teacher, to student, to teacher. A community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson remains a voice of clarity in a weird time. We live in a time when expertise is now often dismissed; when attaining knowledge is confused with “doing my own research” and ignoring science in favour of comforting beliefs.
Tyson inherited the mantle of Carl Sagan when the groundbreaking series Cosmos was followed in 2014 by Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Have a peek at this episode.
An heir to Carl Sagan and himself now one of the best-known scientists in the world, Tyson in this video explains why he’s prepared to do things like appear on funny talk shows to help elevate scientific knowledge:
My favourite version of A Foggy Day — a 1937 film tune from George and Ira that was introduced by Fred Astaire — was made about two decades later, by Billie Holiday.
It appears in Songs from Distingue Lovers, a Verve album from 1958, in which the label was hoping for the same sort of American songbook success as it had had with Ella Fitzgerald.
I bought the album when Verve issued it on CD. Part of becoming a mature young adult, I guess. More recently, I bought a fine reproduction on vinyl, and it’s one of the ones I never tire of when I want to read on the couch.
My love of the song may also have been connected to my fascination with London, a city I was so curious about as a kid and yet never got to visit until my 40s. The song’s line about the British Museum losing its charm made sense once I actually visited it: it’s surely impossible for such a thing to happen. The famous glass lattice roof did not exist in Holiday’s time, of course, but it comes to mind when I hear the song.
Last year, as I was nursing some ideas about having a digital sandbox of my own, I got in touch with Matthew Hollett. I had not yet met Matthew, but we had some mutual contacts, and a look at his design portfolio was enough to tell me a coffee chat would be worth it.
I wrote to him in August, introduced myself, and told him I was interested in having a website where could I post some things I wanted to write. I mentioned a revived blog, and a possible interest in a Substack, too. That would be fine, he said, but he cautioned he couldn’t take on another project until October or November.
Seeing as I was planning to clew up work around then before I retired in late November, the timetable sounded just fine.
On the Tuesday after my last day in the office, Matthew and I met for the first time at Bannerman Brewing on Duckworth Street in downtown St. John’s. Despite what its name implies, it is a grand place in the morning to get a coffee and have a meeting. I think Matthew and I chatted for a couple of hours that morning, back and forth from the website I had in mind to a whole manner of subjects and mutual enthusiasms. (The photo above by the way is of the two of us, at our latest Bannerman coffee and chat a couple of days ago.)
