Obituary

I heard via Desmond Carrington that Dick Vosburgh died several weeks ago. He wrote for…well, just about everyone, even, it turns out, John Cleese. In recent years his voice has become familiar to listeners to all those cheap documentaries about the Comedy Greats that Radios 2 and 4 put out. There’s a nice obit in the Independent here. I liked these bits:

Only occasionally did Vosburgh perform himself. “I was cast in a TV series,” he said in a 1960s interview, “as an obnoxious comedian, very vulgar and unfunny. That was OK until I saw the cast list. It said ” Dick Vosburgh as himself”.

and

Dick was the warmest and most generous of men, but occasionally there would be someone who was difficult to work with – [the notoriously difficult and ungenerous — HB] Arthur Askey for instance. If you told Dick later that you were going to be working with such a person again, he would say, “Be sure to give them my loathe.”

Guardian has an obituary here.

I can’t resist one comment. As a kid I didn’t care so much for Are You Being Served? Apart from Mr. Humphreys. When, later, I became aware that he was despised by some gay activists, I always guessed that his critics (mentioned in the obit) didn’t actually watch the show. What was portrayed on the screen was a genuinely decent and kind man with a (somewhat) naughty sense of humour, around whom idiocy prevailed. It was, at the time, the central portrayal of a poof on TV. But far from a negative one, and personally, if I can point to a single influence on my own positive attitudes to homsoexuality and homosexuals in my pre-teen and early teen years, it was probably Inman’s character. I’m sad to see him go.

For my current, much more positive, attitude to AYBS?, here.

I’m very sorry to see, via “the Virtual Stoa”:http://virtualstoa.net/2007/03/05/in-memoriam/ , that “Chris Lightfoot”:http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/ , blogger, coder and social entrepreneur “has died suddenly”:http://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/rip-chris-lightfoot-1978-to-2007/ . My own knowledge of Chris was limited to reading his blog, exchanging the odd email, and sometimes visiting the various projects he helped create (such as “Pledgebank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ ). But I read enough to notice that he was one of the few really individual voices on the interwebs: quirky, stubborn, idiosyncratic and pretty determined about the things he cared about – such as government and commercial threats to privacy.

Anatol Rapoport has died at the age of 95. Among many contributions, perhaps his most widely-known was the Tit-for-Tat rule for repeated games of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, embodied in a four-line program Rapaport successfully entered in a contest run by Robert Axelrod. Rapoport’s program co-operates inititially, and thereafter matches the other player’s last action, defecting in response to a defection, and returning to co-operation if the other player does so. There’s more here from Tom Slee.

UPDATE: See Phil Ford’s response, on “Hot Pants,” at Dial “M”

******

While taking in the news that James Brown has died, I’ve been in transit — far away from my CDs, and unable to celebrate his life in fitting manner. It sounds like a joke in really bad taste, but in fact what I most want to hear is the album called Dead on the Heavy Funk 1974-’76. I used to have it on tape but am not sure if it’s still in print. There’s another compilation with a similar title released as part of what sounds like a worthy archival edition covering Brown’s entire career.
[click to continue…]

Sorry, I’m nearly a month late, but better late than never to have mourned his passing. A lovely Guardian obit here. A couple of nice letters here. Full text of Hungarian Tragedy here. I note that Chris Brooke has not yet added him to the DSW. A further note for Oxford-connected people — this Peter Fryer is no relation to the Pete Fryer who works for Unison (nor, interestingly, the late Bobby Fryer of Bobby Fryer Close. The Healyites just had lots of Fryers, I guess).

Ferenc Puskás, whose Hungarian team thrashed England at Wembley in 1953 with tactics that anticipated “total football”, and who is widely considered to have been one of the great talents of all time, has died. Obits and articles: “Brian Glanville in the Guardian”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,1950662,00.html, “Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2006/11/17/best_beckenbauer_platini_zidan.html, “Soccernet”:http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=392277&cc=5739, “Football365”:http://www.football365.com/story/0,17033,8750_1694091,00.html, “Simon Barnes in the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,27-2458213,00.html, “Times obituary”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,27-2458262,00.html .

A tribute to the wonderful, wonderful Linda Smith, by her friends. Here till Friday.

About 23 years and 3 weeks ago You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new undergraduates to understand what the first few weeks of University was going to be like. Although fitting in one of those categories, I only listened because at the time You and Yours was among my regular listening. One comment has stayed with me ever since then. A woman in her thirties, commenting on Fresher’s Weeks, said that “in that first week of college you meet people who will be your friends for the rest of your life”.

I was skeptical. And it turned out to be untrue for me. I’m in closer touch with several friends from secondary school than anyone from college (I did meet CB sometime in 1984, but only for a few minutes, and not again till Sept 12, 2001, so he doesn’t count). My first day was spent almost entirely with a girl who decided the next day to leave (not because she spent the first day with me, but because she was trying to escape her home town of Egham, to which my college suddenly announced it was moving). I’m still in touch with two other people I met that week, but I’ve seen them each only once in the past ten years, and have spoken to them only once or twice more.

But it was also that week that I met Adrian.

[click to continue…]

BBC obit here.

This post is reproduced from September 13, 2004. I don’t think I have anything better to say, but I wanted to say something. My thoughts are with the families of all those who perished five years ago. [click to continue…]

Steve Irwin, famous as the Crocodile Hunter died today while diving near Port Douglas, after being stung through the heart by a stingray. According to the report I saw, only two people have ever died from stingray attacks in Australia before, so this was an exceptionally unlucky accident. Playing the Aussie image to the full and beyond, Irwin did a great deal to promote conservation. He was only 44 and leaves a wife and two young children.

My colleague Ellery Eells died this week. His health had been deteriorating for some time, and last Friday he slipped into a coma from which he did not recover.

When I came to Madison I knew Ellery’s work just well enough to be entirely intimidated by it — the combination of technical complexity with real philosophical depth was unnerving. But as a person he was whatever the reverse is of intimidating: kind, gentle, and shy. A sad loss for my department and for the profession, but most of all our hearts go out to his wife, Joanne, and his children.

Via “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/2006/08/iris_marion_you.html, Iris Marion Young died two days ago, on July 31. I had known that she was ill with cancer over the last couple of years – it doesn’t seem to have slowed her writing down. She criticized liberal theory from a perspective that seemed to me to be both tougher and more attractive than communitarianism, focusing on the ways in which liberal remedies failed to address enduring structural inequalities. She liked the ways in which cities fostered diversity – her best book, _Justice and the Politics of Difference_, drew as much on sociologists of the city like Richard Sennett as on political theory. I don’t have any personal anecdotes – I never met her – but I liked and admired her work very much indeed.

Update: obituary “here”:http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060802.young.shtml (thanks to David Kahane in comments)