Category / Obits
RIP Elizabeth Hardwick
I am awake at an ungodly hour — no coffee, just a crazy work ethic — to beat a deadline, which is roughly around dawn. Actually last night, but I told the editor I wasn’t going to sleep until this was done. Two computers decided to expire on me today (the third computer, on which I’m typing these words, remains robust, which I am thankful for, because this is somebody else’s). This has never happened to me before. In fact, I haven’t seen it happen to anybody. And I once worked at a computer magazine. Do you know anybody who saw all of their computers putz out on them in one day? I don’t. I mean, these are, for the most part, durable little machines.
I’ve told people not to give me their computers, because I am apparently the Grim Reaper of Technology. Touch me and machine will die. (As to the machines’s collective resuscitation, the problems were troubleshooted after pleas and profanity, both directed to the machines. It was bad DDR2 and a bad drive, respectively. Alas, deadlines being what they are, I can do nothing but write. I remain convinced that I’ll still be writing twelve hours from now.)
But seeing as how I’m working on a literary essay right now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t observe the passing of Ms. Elizabeth Hardwick, who I sadly never got the chance to meet.
RIP Evel Knievel
RIP Kevin Dubrow
Yes, it’s hair band day here at Return of the Reluctant. But that’s only because the dubious winds of news have breezed along a strange tendentious trajectory after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Quiet Riot singer Kevin Dubrow has been found dead in Vegas — a place where his services were, I hope, appreciated. Nevertheless, “Cum On Feel the Noize,” despite its crude mangling of monosyllabic words, did blast many a time on my speakers over the years. (And in Quiet Riot’s defense, it was Slade who first performed the song and first butchered the English language.) As did “Metal Health” — again, hardly the most graceful bon mot. But Quiet Riot was the first heavy metal group to have a #1 album on the Billboard charts, until it was ignobly unseated by the likes of Lionel Richie. This demonstrates that there is indeed no justice in the universe, whatever your positions on either Quiet Riot or Lionel Ritchie.
RIP Verity Lambert
“Just let me get this right. A thing that looks like a police box, stuck in a junkyard, can move anywhere in time and space?”
And Part 2 and Part 3. This version, incidentally, is the original pilot that was refilmed later because the Doctor was perceived as too unlikable. He became slightly less unlikable, but still very much an antihero in the final product. And it was this new version which aired forty-four years ago on this very day.
The person who produced this was Verity Lambert, who passed away this afternoon. One of the few women television producers working in the 1960s, Lambert envisioned an exciting program for children mixing a space adventure with an educational program. She was only 28 at the time. What she didn’t count upon was the Daleks becoming a major success in the second serial. The results go on to this very day. Not counting Spanish or Indian television or American soap operas, Doctor Who is the longest-running television serial that is still active today.
But it took Verity Lambert, who had a very forward-thinking and unusual vision of how to entertain, to make this happen. And this was only one of her many credits.