Quips and Quotations (Theoretical Physics Edition)

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.


--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 

That Championship Season

1990: The jubilant-looking man on the left is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The equally jubilant-looking man on the right is Nelson Mandela. What's got them in such a good mood? Well, they're old pen pals who only very recently finally got to meet face to face. It's been about a week since Mandela was released from a 27-year prison stay for championing the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa. If you don't already know, apartheid was the white-implemented policy that all blacks in the country remain second-class citizens. Now, second-class citizenry is hardly something uncommon in world (or U.S.) history, but what made apartheid even more distressingly unjust was that the blacks constituted a majority of the population. How weird is that? Whole cities became exclusive country clubs, that's how weird. Disenfranchising nine out of ten people didn't make much economic sense, either. It's as if you dismantled the Eiffel Tower and then charged to use the observation deck. Anyway, in his time behind bars, Mandela himself became part of the cause he had fought for, and an inspiration for those outside the prison walls, such as Tutu, who helped turn what initially was seen as one nation-state's internal matter into an international outrage.

Apartheid came to an end not too long after Mandela was released, and the former political prisoner ascended to the presidency. As I wrote when he died in 2013, it's up to the South African people to decide how well he did in that job, but one thing is certain, the widespread retaliatory oppression of the white minority never came to pass, as so many in that white minority had feared.

As for Desmond Tutu, he turns 87 today. In recent years he's spoken out against LGBTQ discrimination, and was in attendance when his daughter married another woman in the Netherlands in 2016. He probably figured, enough with the second-class treatment already. 

Vital Viewing (Symbiotic Relationship Edition)

The man on the right, actor Walter Matthau, was born on this day in 1920 (he died in 2000.) In 1998, he and frequent costar Jack Lemmon talked with Jay Leno:

I think Matthau was being facetious when he suggested he and Lemmon might have ended up driving or unloading a truck if not for the 1968 film version of The Odd Couple. At that point in time, Lemmon had been a pretty bankable movie star ever since winning an Oscar for playing Ensign Pulver in 1955's Mister Roberts. Matthau had a much slower start, but by his late 40s, he, too, was starting to become well-known. Not only had he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1966's The Fortune Cookie (the first film he appeared in with Lemmon)...

...but originated the role of messy Oscar Madison in the stage version of The Odd Couple, a humongous Broadway hit (that's Art Carney as tidy Felix Ungar, which reminds me, if, as Matthau said, Paramount Pictures originally wanted Jackie Gleason as Oscar, wouldn't it have made sense to pair him with the guy who played Ed Norton on The Honeymooners rather than Frank Sinatra?)

In the Leno clip, Matthau talks about how when making The Bad News Bears in 1976, the child actors he was working with knew only the sitcom version of The Odd Couple and thus Tony Randall as Felix, and Jack Klugman as Oscar

TV's most recent Oscar and Felix. Were they to remake The Bad News Bears a third time (the second was in 2005), I'm sure the child actors would recognize the names of Matthew Perry (Chandler on Friends) and Thomas Lennon (Jim Dangle on Reno 911!) before they would Klugman or Randell.

In 1982, there was an African-American Odd Couple with Ron Glass (Harris on Barney Miller) as Felix and Demond Wilson (Lamont of Sanford and Son) as Oscar. Since this TV version and the earlier one with Randall and Klugman were both produced by Garry Marshall, scripts from the first series were often used (with some black slang thrown in for authenticity's sake.) It only lasted one season.

A Saturday morning Odd Couple.

They have yet to make a movie or TV series based on it, but in the 1980s there was a female Odd Couple in another Broadway version that ran for about a year. Sally Struthers (Gloria on All in the Family) played neat freak Florence Ungar and Rita Moreno (Anita in West Si--aw, c'mon, the woman's a living legend!) portrayed sloppy Olive Madison.

Some have argued that Jon Cryer and Charlie Sheen of Two and a Half Men were really just Felix and Oscar with different names.

In 1998, Neil Simon, the man who came up with the idea in the first place, wrote a movie sequel titled The Odd Couple 2 starring Matthau and Lemmon. It flopped at the box office, but I liked it anyway.

However, I like the 1968 movie version, which DIDN'T flop at the box office, much, much more:

Altogether, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon made 10 films together. One more and they would have tied with Fred and Ginger.

Team Players

The man on the left, Fred Astaire, was much better known as a dancer than a pianist, though I suppose if he wants to tickle the ivories, well, it's a free country. Meanwhile, the man in the middle, George Gershwin, was very well known as for his piano playing. He doesn't seem to mind Fred joining in (maybe he's giving him lessons.) The man on the right, George's lyricist brother Ira, is content just to watch. Since photographs are generally silent, I can't say what piece of music is emerging from that stringed instrument, but in 1937 the three of them (along with some blond chick named after a spice) came together for the film Shall We Dance:

They had three more films to go before they called the whole thing off.

Team Players

The man on the left, Fred Astaire, was much better known as a dancer than a pianist, though I suppose if he wants to tickle the ivories, well, it's a free country. Meanwhile, the man in the middle, George Gershwin, was very well known as for his piano playing. He doesn't seem to mind Fred joining in (maybe he's giving him lessons.) The man on the right, George's lyricist brother Ira, is content just to watch. Since photographs are generally silent, I can't say what piece of music is emerging from that stringed instrument, but in 1937 the three of them (along with some blond chick named after a spice) came together for the film Shall We Dance:

They had three more films to go before they called the whole thing off.

Eat, Sleep, Joke, Repeat

How's this for formal dining?

The photograph above was taken in May of 1939 in Los Angeles. A bit ironic that should be the location as the man in the middle with his eyes seemingly closed (probably the camera just caught him at an odd moment--we've all experienced that) was more well known as a New Yorker. In fact, he wrote for The New Yorker. That's Robert Benchley, the magazine's theater critic and a renowned wit (back in the 1920s and '30s, "theater critic" and "renowned wit" were practically synonyms.) So what's he doing in LA? In the last two decades of his life, Benchley was a movie star of sorts, best known for a series of comic shorts where he explained various facets of modern life--modern life as experienced in the 1930s and '40s. And, as a movie star, Benchley naturally got to hang around with other movie stars. The star closest to him on the left in the above picture is Herbert Marshall, who today is mostly forgotten. The closest star to Benchley on the right is debonair David Niven, perhaps not quite as forgotten as Marshall. On the far left is a man who was more a star of stage than screen, though one of the few movies he did appear in went on to become a classic. Don't recognize him yet? Imagine him with a mane and whiskers. That's right, it's Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, the debut of which was still about three months away. The man on the far right tried to be a star in vaudeville but had far more success as a Hollywood restaurateur. That's David Chasen, at whose eponymous eatery this top-hatted wingding is taking place.

Today happens to be Robert Benchley's birthday, one which he unfortunately won't be able to celebrate (he died in 1945 at the age of 56.) We the living have other options, but first the question must be asked, where exactly is he on the forgotten-remembered spectrum? Lately, when I've come across his name in print, it's usually as one of the wits (and critics) at the legendary Algonquin Round Table.  His many essays--he had a wonderfully droll style--can be found in various collections of pre-World War II humor writings, but back when he was still among the living, it was the film shorts as well as supporting roles in full-length motion pictures that eventually drowned everything else out (The New Yorker ultimately fired him because he spent so much time making movies he was missing all the Broadway openings.) Today the best of those film shorts can be found on the internet, proving that he still has a following. As you'll see in this example snagged from YouTube, that following even extends to those who do not speak Benchley's native tongue:

   
I bet all those subtitles would keep Donald Trump awake at night.

East Bound and Down, Loaded Up and Truckin'

Burt Reynolds 1936-2018

The 1970s good ol' boy heir to such dashing Old Hollywood screen idols as Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, and Cary Grant. In the era of the Brooding Method Actor--Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman--his smile, his laugh, his reckless driving, made him stand out. Reynold's own method of acting was to never venture too far outside his comfort zone, and he certainly never expected us audience members to venture outside of ours. No, all he ever asked of us as we sat there in that darkened theater, or even in the comfort of our own home (he was on Carson a lot) was to simply take in the charisma, of which he had a limitless supply. Of course, the 1970s is now as old as Old Hollywood once was (if not quite a myth-laden), and that begs the question, who today is the heir to Burt Reynolds?

Johnny Depp? Dwayne Johnson? Vin Diesel? Robert Downing Jr?

  Ryan Reynolds?

You don't have to answer that if you don't want to. Instead, you can just enjoy this updating of the Robin Hood legend. I'm serious. Burt is Robin, Sally Field is Maid Marian, Jackie Gleason is the Sheriff of Nottingham, and...

 ...the National Highway System is Sherwood Forest.