Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Charles David Keeling, the climate scientist whose precise, meticulous measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for nearly half a century warned humans that we are changing the composition of the global atmosphere, has died. He was 77.

Keeling suffered a heart attack Monday while hiking with one of his sons near the family’s summer home in Montana, according to a spokesman for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he spent virtually his entire professional career.

Keeling’s studies showed that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide — a so-called greenhouse gas that traps energy from sunlight and prevents it from radiating back into space — has been rising steadily since the onset of the Industrial Age, and he linked that growth conclusively to the increased consumption of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide when they are burned.

The graph showing that increase, known as the Keeling curve, is one of the best-known anywhere. “During the early 1990s, it was said that the only scientific data on display at the White House was [the Keeling curve],” said Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences.

Politicians and scientists may disagree over whether the increased carbon dioxide concentrations are causing the planet to heat up, but no one questions the accuracy of Keeling’s data and its link to human activities.

Even President George W. Bush, who has repeatedly discounted the possibility of global warming, recognized the importance of Keeling’s work by awarding him the National Medal of Science in 2002. In April, Keeling received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the most prestigious award for environmental research.

Keeling’s records of carbon dioxide concentrations “are the single most important environmental data set taken in the 20th century,” said Charles F. Kennel, the director of Scripps. “Dave Keeling was living proof that a scientist could, by sticking close to his laboratory bench, change the world.”

NY Times
Charlie Saikley, who ran the Manhattan Beach Open volleyball tournament for decades and whose nickname was the Godfather of Beach Volleyball, died on June 17 at his home here. He was 69.

The cause was multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, the city parks and recreation director, Richard A. Gill, said.

Saikley worked for the parks department for more than 40 years, leaving last month, Gill said. He was involved with tennis, swimming and other recreation programs, but was known worldwide for organizing beach volleyball tournaments .

“He took an indoor sport and took it outdoors,” Gill said.

Steve Napolitan, a former city councilman who is also a beach volleyball player, said, “Charlie did it first and did it right, whether it was amateur or professional tournaments.”

Charlie Siekley and Charles Keeling make up the list for today. It is said of the former that he was the grandfather beach volleyball - a game that increases the temperature of participants and fans alike.

The latter is the father of the Keeling Curve which is an oscillating line that measures the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere - a device that some insist measures the agent responsible for the increase in global temperatures.

Most folks outside of certain overdressing cultures would likely agree on the appeal of beach volleyball - both men’s and women’s of course. There seems to be vastly less agreement on global warming - yes it is, no its not, get rid of your SUV, its my own Private Idaho I’ll do what I want, humanity faces a serious survival issue here, God and Buddha say it will be OK, and so on, and so on, and so on. We suppose its time to change out our beloved hairspray for gel.

By the way the volleyball Charlie made rounds in Manhatten Beach and the deep thinking Charles hunkered down around La Jolla. Two superb beachy towns if you need a fine dose of Cali Dreamin’.

Note to ODDSelf: Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright
ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

NY Times
Billy Bauer, one of the first modern jazz guitarists and later a renowned guitar teacher, died on Friday in Melville, N.Y. He was 89 and lived in Albertson, N.Y. The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his daughter, Pamela.

Mr. Bauer first gained national attention in 1944 for his work with Woody Herman’s big band, an ambitious ensemble with a repertory including Igor Stravinsky’s “Ebony Concerto.” He later performed and recorded with Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker and many others. But he was best known for his association with the pianist and composer Lennie Tristano, whose idiosyncratic, harmonically complex brand of modern jazz was considered challenging even by his fellow modernists.

Mr. Bauer had been primarily a rhythm guitarist before joining Tristano’s group in 1946. But he quickly mastered Tristano’s distinctively serpentine melody lines, and under the pianist’s guidance he developed into a compelling soloist.

“Lennie was a strong player,” Mr. Bauer recalled in 2000. “Even though I didn’t know what he was doing all the time, I had to follow him. With a player that strong, you had no choice!”

Mr. Bauer took part in some of Tristano’s most celebrated recordings, including an experiment in spontaneous improvisation in 1949 that presaged the so-called free jazz of a decade later. He also worked frequently with two other members of Tristano’s group, the saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. In 1958 he formed a music publishing company, William H. Bauer Inc., which published all three musicians’ compositions as well as his own.

William Henry Bauer was born in the Bronx on Nov. 14, 1915. His first instruments were banjo and ukulele, and he began his career at 14 playing banjo on the radio, but he soon switched to guitar. He was playing electric guitar in dance bands by 1940.

Although he established himself as a leading voice on his instrument in the late 40’s, Mr. Bauer - who called his autobiography “Sideman” - always said he preferred to work in support of other musicians. He recorded only one album as a leader, the 1956 quartet session “Plectrist.” And by the mid-70’s, after several years in recording and broadcast studios, he had virtually abandoned performing to become a full-time teacher.
Sideman: The Autobiography of Billy Bauer

The Independant
John Adams (Jonathan Adams), artist and actor: born Northampton 14 February 1931; married 1969 Julia Vezza (marriage dissolved 1976); died London 13 June 2005.

As a boy in Northampton Jonathan Adams happened to see the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and he decided there and then he wanted to be an actor or an artist. In the event he became both. Art and acting struggled for supremacy for much of his early life but eventually complemented one another - and he was never a bored “rester”. As an actor he is best remembered for creating the part of the Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show. As an artist, his last exhibition, “Jonathan Adams in Wonderland”, opened in London at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, in April.

It all began in his Northampton Grammar School days when he set up the “Ramblers Acting Company” (with himself in the lead roles) and published a short-lived Boy’s Own-type magazine in which his own stories owe much to Edgar Allan Poe. He also fabricated a sort of camera obscura through which he beamed images on to paper which then served as a base for his first, surreal drawings and paintings.

At last in 1972 the call that mattered came and he found himself engaged to play the Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show.

The show began its tumultuous life in June 1973 as a six-week project at the Royal Court’s humble Theatre Upstairs. Adams helped to develop his part during rehearsals with the author, Richard O’Brien, and director, Jim Sharman, and none of them had any idea what a wild success it would be. Two years later it was filmed as The Rocky Horror Picture Show with Adams, who by this time had become bored with the Narrator role, taking on instead the rather larger part of the weird professor Dr Everett Scott (a Rival Scientist). In 1990 he resumed the Narrator role for a revival at the Piccadilly Theatre. Both film and play drew a cult following, especially in the United States, and for some years Adams attended the annual convention there and was feted by his fans.

ODD public service announcement: use this email address - Real4400@uniquegroup.co.uk - just in case you were abducted by aliens in the past and want to be part of an alien abduction TV documentary. Please make sure you visit the ODD General Store before you appear on camera.

Happy Birthday to one noted ODDman. You can drive all you want, but you still end up with a birthday in Can-tuck-ee. Let’s see if we can’t find you nice Sin Zin or perhaps a Big Ass Cab - for medicinal purposes only of course.

Jonathan Adams (Rocky Horror’s Dr. Everett Scott) left the stage recently. He originally started out as the Narrator for the show, but by the time filming for the movie started he had graduated to the larger role of Dr. Everett Scott. Rocky Horror and its pelvic thrusts was not his only work of course as we note he played a lead role in a British production called ‘Tomfoolery’, at least “…until the nightly gyrations of “The Masochism Tango” did for him and he had to leave the cast to have a hernia operation.” ‘Tomfoolery’ (1980) was based on a selection of Tom Lehrer’s morbid songs. Tangos and Jumps to the Left - Mr. Adams had a busy life.

Also in the lists today we have the ultimate sideman Billy Bauer who changed recording studios recently. We hope he didn’t have to trade in his guitar for a harp as part of the deal. You will see that he released only a single album, but has a Who’s Who list of credits.

And of course you knew this: Thursday derives from Middle English influenced by Old Norse thōrsdagr or Thor’s Day. Some parts of the country are experiencing Thor’s Day everyday lately - have you seen the thunderstorms the Rockies have tossed up this past week? Could this be related in any way to Annika being in Denver? And in case you were really, really worried about Thor’s Days in general remember that in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the character Arthur Dent says “This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays”. A few minutes later the planet Earth is destroyed.”

LA Times
Gene Ford, 77, a wine writer and educator who wrote extensively about the health benefits of moderate drinking, died June 10 of complications from heart surgery at a hospital in Seattle.

Ford was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and graduated from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He first got interested in wine when he began working for a wine producer in the mid-1960s. He educated himself on wine and later wrote several books on wine and drinking, including “The French Paradox & Drinking for Health” (1993) and “The Science of Healthy Drinking” (2003).

The latter book argued that, as Ford told an interviewer in 2004, “the healthiest people on the face of the Earth are people who drink moderately.” Although he acknowledged that bingeing, alcoholism and drunk driving were serious problems, he said he believed that 15 million to 20 million people in the U.S. could derive benefits from drinking as long as they did not overdo it.

“Drinking is not for everyone, but those who exercise moderation and discretion can reap significant health benefits,” he wrote in a recent essay for the Catholic University magazine.

NY Times
Lon McCallister, whose brief but prolific acting career started with small roles, including the part of a schoolboy in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” and developed into supporting roles in popular movies, like “Winged Victory,” died on June 11 at his home in the Lake Tahoe area. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, said his brother, Lynn.

After appearing in more than 40 films, Mr. McCallister left acting at the age of 30 to invest in real estate. He owned homes and apartment buildings in the Los Angeles area, and recently bought property in Lake Tahoe.

“Being a movie star was great, but I never considered doing it for a lifetime,” he said in an interview for the 1992 edition of “Who’s Who in Hollywood.” He added, “I wanted to be myself, to go where I pleased without causing a traffic jam. I’ve succeeded in this, and I’m happy.”

Mr. McCallister - born Herbert Alonzo McCallister Jr. in Los Angeles in 1923 - was just a dimpled teenager starting out in show business when he appeared in films alongside some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

At 13 he had an uncredited role in “Romeo and Juliet” (1936) with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. The film’s director, George Cukor, became a close friend and later gave Mr. McCallister a supporting role as a pilot in “Winged Victory” (1944).

Mr. McCallister’s boyish looks earned him many roles playing wholesome characters, including one of the schoolboys in the Tom Sawyer film in 1938, when he was just 15. That same year, he had a small role in “Judge Hardy’s Children,” with Mickey Rooney. In “Stage Door Canteen” (1943) he played a shy soldier opposite Katharine Hepburn and many other stars.
Lon McCallister memorabilia at eBay.com

NY Times
Jack S. Kilby, an electrical engineer whose invention of the integrated circuit gave rise to the information age and heralded an explosion of consumer electronics products in the last 50 years, from personal computers to cellphones, died Monday in Dallas. He was 81.

His death, after a brief battle with cancer, was announced yesterday by Texas Instruments, the Dallas-based electronics company where he worked for a quarter-century.

The integrated circuit that Mr. Kilby designed shortly after arriving at Texas Instruments in 1958 served as the basis for modern microelectronics, transforming a technology that permitted the simultaneous manufacturing of a mere handful of transistors into a chip industry that routinely places billions of Lilliputian switches in the area of a fingernail.

His achievement - the integration - yielded a thin chip of crystal connecting previously separate components like transistors, resistors and capacitors within a single device. For that creation, commonly called the microchip, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.

During his career at Texas Instruments he claimed more than 60 patents and was also one of the inventors of the hand-held calculator and the thermal printer. But it was Mr. Kilby’s invention of the integrated circuit that most broadly shaped the electronic era.

“It’s hard to find a place where the integrated circuit doesn’t affect your life today,” Richard K. Templeton, Texas Instruments’ president and chief executive officer, said in an interview yesterday. “That’s how broad its impact is.”

It is an impact, Mr. Kilby said, that was largely unexpected. “We expected to reduce the cost of electronics, but I don’t think anybody was thinking in terms of factors of a million,” he said in an undated interview cited by Texas Instruments.

The remarkable acceleration of the manufacturing process based on the integrated circuit was later described by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of the Intel Corporation, whose partner, Robert N. Noyce, invented another version of the integrated circuit just months after Mr. Kilby.

In 1965, three years after the first commercial integrated circuits came to market, Dr. Moore observed that the number of transistors on a circuit was doubling at regular intervals and would do so far into the future. The observation, which came to be known as Moore’s law, became the defining attribute of the chip-making industry, centered in what is now known as Silicon Valley, where Intel was based, rather than in Dallas.

That was partly because Dr. Noyce’s version of the integrated circuit, using silicon and based on a photolithographic printing technology known as the planar process, was easier to manufacture than Mr. Kilby’s original invention, which employed germanium and used individual wires.

Thanks to those ODDreaders who sent us missives about Mr. Kilby. Perhaps we could say that without Mr. Kilby we’d all be doing jack or at least we’d be doing it papered. Except of course that there was also a Mr. Noyce. Much like Newton and Liebniz or perhaps the Sumerians and the Babylonians or even Luther Haws and Halsey W. Taylor, eh?

Just in case there is a quiz later: ‘Lon’ means fierce in Gaelic. This is a touch different from Mr. McCallister’s normal wholesome character roles. And since we’re here, McCallister purportedly means the son of Alister, also Gaelic, for Alexander. That’s a lot of Gaelic in one sitting we know, but we’re still having Dingle flashbacks so we thought to just carry all y’all along.

And speaking of drinking research we note the passing of Mr. Gene Ford. ‘Nuff said.

We’re feeling ODDly liquid today and have the urge to run, but let us pool our thoughts and remind you ODDchildren to wash your cares away with your Daily OM.