Of Elephants and Castles

I was stationed in England from March 1967 to September 1971. I look at that time as a gift from the USAF. What a time it was! I saw so many beautiful places and met so many wonderful people.

I remember the first night in the barracks watching the telly with my 2 room-mates. One of them (let's call him John) was commenting on a news story. The story mentioned the town of Ipswich, Suffolk. "Typical *%&&$ bloke", he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Ipswich, Suffolk? How stupid. Just say Ipswich."

"Where are you from John?"

"Nashua, New Hampshire. Why?"

"How stupid! Why not just say Nashua?"

The conversation went downhill from there. This expert on all things British had been there for a whole two weeks. And for the remaining 3 years of his tour of duty he never once left the base to see this wonderful country he was living in. How truly sad.

I got off base as much as I could and saw quite a bit of this country. Surprisingly, one of the neatest places I found was less that a mile from the main gate. In a little town named Eyke (It's in Suffolk, John) there was a pub called "The Elephant & Castle". I spent many a night there and for the last year I was in England I rented a room upstairs. There was a lady artist that came in on occasion and she drew me and pen and ink picture of the pub that I eventually had many people sign. I still have it today and I still treasure it.

The owners of the pub (publicans) were Les and Ann Wallace. They, along with their daughters (Yes! PY Wallace - Yvonne - I remember you!) ran the pub each night with occasional assistance from a gentleman named Alan Varley. My mates and I never went in there as arrogant visitors but as folks just out to share a pint or two with the locals. Probably the wildest thing we ever did was to "re-tile the ceiling" We discovered that a British penny (then about the size of a fifty-cent piece) would stick quite nicely to the ceiling when properly applied. That meant dipping the coin into a pint and then snapping it flat against the ceiling. It stuck there quite nicely! We proceeded each night in our quest to cover the entire ceiling. Mr. Wallace's only comment (through a small smirk) was that "when they fall, they fall into my pocket". One particularly cold winter night one of the pennies leaped for its freedom and landed noisily on the floor. Others saw this bolt of courage and followed suit. Soon we were singing "Pennies From Heaven" amid a shower of copper and Mr. Wallace was about a pound richer.

I had a deep respect for Mr. Wallace that grew into a warm friendship. We enjoyed talking with each other and laughingly played with the differences between American and British English. I still laugh as I recall the day we went outside and he asked me to "pop the boot and grab a spanner whilst he lifted the bonnet so as to tighten a bolt holding the wing". When I stopped laughing he explained that he wanted me to go into the trunk and get a wrench while he lifted the hood to tighten a bolt that held the fender on. We also discussed the difference between kerb and curb. But the funniest of these word and expression exchanges happened the first night I stayed in my rented room upstairs. The pub had closed and I was making my way upstairs when Mr. Wallace called after me - "Would you like me to knock you up in the morning?". I laughed so hard I almost fell down the stairs and then Mr. Wallace started laughing so hard he almost fell up them. When we calmed down he patiently explained that he merely wanted to know if he should knock on my door to get me up in the morning.

I rarely called Mr. Wallace Les. He invited me to but I just felt more comfortable with Mr. Wallace. Perhaps this little story is part of the reason.

One night Les and Ann had decided to go to the movies. Mr. Wallace was a huge fan of westerns. He knew every John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper or Glenn Ford movie ever made. So Alan Varley took over the pub and off went Les and Ann. About 45 minutes later they were back and Mr. Wallace was incensed to say the least. I had never seen him like this - he was furious and ranting and raving. The movie they went to see? "Midnight Cowboy".

Les and Ann Wallace are no longer with us. But I treasure their friendship as much today as I did back then. They were two jewels that glistened in this life and for that I am very privileged.

Just a Bit of Fun Today

Just to have a bit of fun today, here are some movie marquee juxtapositions:

Hitchcock
Rope
Frenzy

One Fine Day
Mars Attacks
The Preacher's Wife

Men in Black
Contact
Batman & Robin

The Emperor & the Assassin
Now Hiring

Woman on Top
What Lies Beneath

What Lies Beneath
Space Cowboys

Is Paris Burning?
Paris Is Burning

Clue
Clueless
Without a Clue

Jaws
A Farewell to Arms

Dead Again
You Only Live Twice

Twister
Gone With The Wind

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?
The Incredible Hulk

I am sure readers can come up with many more!


Juxtapositions are not limited to movies. I once saw these two books sitting next to each other on a shelf at a kids' bookstore:

Where Do Babies Come From?
The Soles of Your Feet


How about removing a single letter from a book or movie or poem title?

Midnight in the Garden of Goo and Evil
The Brides of Madison County
Lice in Wonderland
The English Patent
The Princess Brie
The Love Son of J. Alfred Prufrock
A Wrinkle in Tim
The Hose at Pooh Corner
The Rave
"Once upon a midnight dreary, as I stumbled weak and weary
Over many a drugged delirious dancer passed out on the floor..."
One With The Wind
A Zen manual.


How well do you remember your Latin?

My Latin teacher back in the 9th grade gave us this piece and asked that those interested in laughing try to translate it. It read:

O sybile
si ergo!
Fortibus es in ero!
O nobile
deis trux!
Vadis indem?
Caus en dux!


Give up? Scroll down!
























Oh see Billy
see 'er go
Forty buses in a row!
Oh no Billy
they is trucks!
What is in them?
Cows and ducks!

Do You Feel The Breeze?

Some of the loveliest and most interesting words I know are wind-related words, from the hot humid desert-born sirocco to the gentle susurrus of the zephyr. We've gained quite a few such words from roots in other languages; people all over the world have names for their winds.

The word "zephyr," for instance, comes from Zephuros, the Greek god of the West wind, just as "boreal" (meaning northern in general, not the wind in particular) is derived from Boreas, the Latin north wind. The sirocco, from Arabic sarq (meaning "east") blows out of the Sahara, all the way to southern Europe. (I'm sure there are winds derived from words for "south," but I don't know of any offhand -- there's an aurora australis, but I don't know of an austral wind.)

Southern California has its own version of the sirocco, the Santa Ana (named, in Spanish, for the canyon it blows through), a hot winter wind that blows toward the coast from the desert. (Both the sirocco and the Santa Ana, by the way, contradict Herodotus, who wrote: "no wind is likely to arise in very hot countries, for breezes love to blow from some cold quarter." (History, book 2, trans. George Rawlinson) The Santa Ana tends to evoke strong feelings in those who experience it -- nobody seems to like it much.

In that regard it's in prestigious company. The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje, lists a dozen marvelous names for powerful and ill-liked winds, mostly from Arabic: aajej, africo, alm (from Yugoslavia), arifi (also aref or rifi), beshabar, bist roz (Afghanistan), datoo (Gibraltar), ghibli (from Tunis), haboob (a dust storm in the Sudan), harmattan (laden with blood-red dust), imbat, khamsin (an Egyptian dust storm, from, Ondaatje says, "fifty" in Arabic), mezzar-ifoullousen (which Ondaatje translates as "that which plucks the fowls"), nafhat, Samiel, simoom, solano (these last three being "poison winds"). (Ondaatje cites Herodotus as the source of information about the simoom, and the screenplay of The English Patient implicitly attributes even more information on winds to that classical writer, but a casual search of the History turns up no information at all on any named wind except "a wind which the people in those parts call Hellespontias," presumably named after the Hellespont strait, now known as the Dardanelles. (book 7) Nobody in Southern California, though, so far as I know, has gone so far as to declare war on the Santa Ana, as Ondaatje says various people have done against various of his listed winds...

Another American wind is the chinook, taking its name from the Native American peoples of the Pacific Northwest; since it's a warm dry wind that blows from the Rockies, the chinook is a foehn wind, a Swiss German word derived from Latin Favonius, "west wind." Other American winds blow through Alaska: knik, matanuska, pruga, stikine, taku, take, turnagain, williwaw. I assume some of those are Native American names and others (specifically "turnagain") local English names, but I'm not certain.

More widespread in English are loanwords for various kinds of storms. "Typhoon," for certain tropical cyclones, entered English from Cantonese (toi fung), and traces a long and multilingual descent prior to that. "Cyclone," of course, is from Greek kuklos, circle; "hurricane" comes from Carib huracan. "Tornado" is from Spanish tronada, meaning "thunderstorm." "Monsoon" is from Arabic again: mawsim, "season." "Tsunami" (which, despite the common phrase, is not a tidal wave at all) is Japanese; "blizzard" is of unknown origin. "Squall" is probably Scandinavian. And then there are plenty of weather terms that've been in English for a long time: "hail," "rain," "snow," and "wind" itself all come from Old English.

The effects of winds can have names every bit as nice as the wind names themselves; "sastruga," for instance, refers to a wind-shaped ridge of snow, sort of an elongated snow dune. You can almost hear the snow blowing across the ridge... I'm not sure what language "sastruga" is from, but you can bet it's not one of those "hundred words for snow" that "Eskimos" (formerly Esquimaux) supposedly have -- the various Inuit languages have various words relating to snow, but no more than any other language does.

And all this time I thought they called the wind Mariah.

Common Spelling Mistakes

I come across so many web pages with common spelling mistakes and misused phrases. Most of them – given the sites I frequent – are on writers’ articles, often about writing.

Here, for your personal edification, are some more of those that really set me off.

1. Buisness – yes, it’s obviously just a transposition of two letters, but that’s what the wiggly red spell-checker lines are for! FireFox has one built in!

2. Catergories – how can you spell this wrong? It’s on every single blog post entry screen.

3. for awhile now- “awhile” is an adverb and is only really used in poems. “Come, rest awhile” and all that. You have to wear flowery dresses or live in a dingy garret to write like that. Normal people don’t use it. “A while” is the noun. That’s the one you want.

4. easygoing – ever heard of a hyphen? You know, those little lines that have been around for about five hundred years and join words together? “Easy” and “going” are separate words.

5. my curiosity is peaked – so your curiosity is a physical object that has a pointed top? Eh? You mean “piqued”, I think.

6. everyday and anymore – “uuunnnnnnnnngggggghhhh!” That’s the sound of my love of language haemorrhaging violently. Both of these are adjectives – “an everyday event” – not adverbs. The adverb versions are two words: “I do this every day. I can’t take it any more.”

7. you looser – the oft-voiced retort to Grammar Nazis like myself pointing out spelling mistakes, this one really stands out. Who’s the “loser” now?

8. tollerance – repeatedly wrong in an article on – yes, you guessed it – tolerance for spelling mistakes in job applications! Come on, even the browser spell-checkers spot that one!

And finally, a couple of bonus items to make you laugh.

Firstly, we have a repost of a well-known email poem that points out just how useless a spell-checker is if you don’t apply a bit of common sense.

EYE HALVE A SPELLING CHEQUER
IT CAME WITH MY PEA SEA
IT PLAINLY MARQUES FOUR MY REVUE
MISS STEAKS EYE KIN KNOT SEA.
EYE STRIKE A KEY AND TYPE A WORD
AND WEIGHT FOUR IT TWO SAY
WEATHER EYE AM WRONG OAR WRITE
IT SHOWS ME STRAIT A WEIGH.
AS SOON AS A MIST ACHE IS MAID
IT NOSE BEE FORE TWO LONG
AND EYE CAN PUT THE ERROR RITE
ITS RARE LEA EVER WRONG.
EYE HAVE RUN THIS POEM THREW IT
I AM SHORE YOUR PLEASED TWO NO
ITS LETTER PERFECT AWL THE WEIGH
MY CHEQUER TOLLED ME SEW.

Secondly, we have possibly the best public spelling mistake ever. It is the picture back at the beginning of this post. Yes, it’s real. How sad.




So tell me, what are the mistakes that drive you crazy? Which ones do you always make yourself? (Mine is “independent” – for some reason, I want to put an “a” in the place of the last “e”.)

Would You? This Is Truly Scary

I treat good books as dear friends and often revisit them in the course of the year. So I reread a lot of Annie Dillard and Alistair MacLean. Recently I revisited another good book and found it as scary as I did when I first read it back in the 70's.

The book is "Obedience To Authority" by Dr. Stanley Milgram. Let me tell you about it. It concerns a series of psychological experiments that took place at Yale University in New Haven, CT back in the 60's.


Three people take part in the experiment: "experimenter", "learner" ("victim") and "teacher" (participant). Only the "teacher" is an actual participant, i.e. unaware about the actual setup, while the "learner" is a confederate of the experimenter. The role of the experimenter was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a grey technician's coat, and the victim (learner) was played by a 47 year old Irish-American accountant trained to act for the role. The participant and the learner were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations. The subject was given the title teacher, and the confederate, learner. The participants drew lots to 'determine' their roles. Unknown to them, both slips said "teacher," and the actor claimed to have the slip that read "learner," thus guaranteeing that the participant would always be the "teacher." At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.

The "teacher" was given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.



Now, before you read the results, stop and think. What percentage of people do you think would go all the way to the last 450 volt shock? Would you?

Results

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Only one participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level.

The experiment was repeated many times over in various locations, countries etc. The results are truly scary. In all cases the percentage of those willing to go the whole way was in the middle 60's! Wow!!

"It was a dark and stormy night."

Where did that sentence first appear? You may be sorry you asked!


The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an international literary parody contest. The competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel "Paul Clifford" (1830) with the immortal words that Snoopy used for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."



The winner of 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. A contest recidivist, he has formerly won the Western and Children's Literature categories.


David McKenzie is the 27th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982.


"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

David McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

Runner-Up

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor--the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn't use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

Warren Blair
Ashburn, VA

Grand Panjandrum's Special Award

Fleur looked down her nose at Guilliame, something she was accomplished at, being six foot three in her stocking feet, and having one of those long French noses, not pert like Bridget Bardot's, but more like the one that Charles De Gaulle had when he was still alive and President of France and he wore that cap that was shaped like a little hatbox with a bill in the front to offset his nose, but it didn't work.

Marguerite Ahl
Prescott valley, AZ

Winner: Adventure

How best to pluck the exquisite Toothpick of Ramses from between a pair of acrimonious vipers before the demonic Guards of Nicobar returned should have held Indy's full attention, but in the back of his mind he still wondered why all the others who had agreed to take part in his wife's holiday scavenger hunt had been assigned to find stuff like a Phillips screwdriver or blue masking tape.

Joe Wyatt
Amarillo, Texas

Winner: Detective

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida - the pink ones, not the white ones - except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't.

Eric Rice
Sun Prairie, WI

Runner-Up

The dame sauntered silently into Rocco's office, but she didn't need to speak; the blood-soaked gown hugging her ample curves said it all: "I am a shipping heiress whose second husband was just murdered by Albanian assassins trying to blackmail me for my rare opal collection," or maybe, "Do you know a good dry cleaner?"

Tony Alfieri
Los Angeles, CA

Dishonorable Mentions

The appearance of a thin red beam of light under my office door and the sound of one, then two pair of feet meant my demise was near, that my journey from gum-shoe detective to international agent had gone horribly wrong, until I realized it was my secretary teasing her cat with a laser pointer.

Steve Lynch
San Marcos, CA


I entered the bedroom again, looking for anything the killer might have missed in his obvious attempt to clean the crime scene, when it hit me, the victim hadn't been eating just any potato salad, it was German potato salad, the kind usually served warm, with bacon and although most people prefer the traditional American potato salad, it was clear that this victim didn't, oh no, he didn't prefer it at all.

Lisa Lindquist-Perez
Daytona Beach, FL

Winner: Fantasy Fiction

A quest is not to be undertaken lightly--or at all!--pondered Hlothgar, Thrag of the Western Boglands, son of Glothar, nephew of Garthol, known far and wide as Skull Dunker, as he wielded his chesty stallion Hralgoth through the ever-darkening Thlargwood, beyond which, if he survived its horrors and if Hroglath the royal spittle reader spoke true, his destiny awaited--all this though his years numbered but fourteen.

Stuart Greenman
Seattle, WA

Winner: Science Fiction

The golden, starry wonders of the dark universe unfurled before the brave interstellar vessel "Argus" like a black flag of victory with a whole bunch of holes in it as the mysterious mission buoyantly commenced that would one day resolve critical questions about space, time, and the appropriate ratio of nuts to chips in a perfect chocolate chip cookie.

Robert Friedman
Skillman, NJ

Runner-Up

George scratched his head in abject puzzlement as he tried to figure out where he'd parked the rocket this time in the 100-acre parking lot of Nallmart 75B, but then he remembered that a ship-boy had taken his DNA key-but which one, the kelly toned humanoid or the atmosphere-of-Rylak-hued android; scanning the horizon, he at last turned to Babs and asked "how green was my valet"?

Leigh A. Smith
New Douglas, IL

Winner: Vile Puns

Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.

Greg Homer
Placerville, CA

Runner-Up

Medusa stared at the two creatures approaching her across the Piazza and, instantly recognizing them as Spanish Gorgons, attempted to stall them by greeting them in their native tongue, "Gorgons, Hola!"

Eric Davies
Dunedin, New Zealand

Dishonorable Mention

Eyeing the towering stacks of food colouring that formed the secret to his billion-dollar batik textile empire, grumpy Old Man Griffington was forced to admit that dye mounds are a churl's best friend.

Janine Beacham
Busselton, Western Australia

Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions

"I want you to follow my husband," said my newest client, the enigmatic Mrs Yogi, estranged wife of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Steve Heckman
Taylors, SC


She expected a beautiful morning after the previous night's hard rain but instead stepped out her door to a horrible vision of drowned earthworms covering the walkway -- their bodies curled and swirled like limp confetti after a party crashed by firefighters.

Rita Hammett
Boca Raton, Florida


As Lieutenant Baker shrank his lips back to their normal size, he tried desperately to think of a situation in which his new-found power might be useful, as have I, your narrator.

Dan Blaufuss
Glenview, IL


Peter shaded his eyes from the brilliant April morning sunlight as it suddenly illuminated the Bunny Trail, contemplated his handiwork, (separating all of those pearly white chicks-to-be from their mothers) and prepared for the final task to complete his mission-yes, this was a good day to dye.

Trent Bristol
Mandan, ND


Grimly aware of the rapidly approaching disaster, Spiderman leaped from rooftop to flagpole, from flagpole to fire escape, hurling himself recklessly from building to building, darting glances through every window in his desperate search for one vital room, while silently cursing the fact that the last thing he had done before donning a one-piece skintight costume, was to eat a large bowl of hot chili.

David J Button
South Australia, Australia

A Volume Of Wordmakers?

The replies are in. Here are the best.......


A fraggle of rocks. A scuttle of butts. A trouble of Tribbles. A babble of brooks. A lynch of pins. A meow of Catscanners. a pipeful of organists, a pluck of harpists, a c(h)ord of guitarists, A hawking of physicists,

A screech of sopranos
A flat of altos
A strain of tenors
A grumble of basses
and–
A flail of conductors

A Quid of Pro-Quo’s

a sorrow of sword swallowers. Does alliteration magnify the effect?

A column of fifths.

A Pew of Preachers

A Wrath of Grapes

A Pen of Writers

A band of runners.

A thicket of plots.

An onslaught of butchers.

A quagmire of sticky subjects.

A coalition of miners.

“Death Comes In Threes”

“Death comes in threes” is a popular maxim. With the recent deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson it seemed that the maxim was once again making an appearance. Then Billy Mays died. Ooops!


In the world of fame and celebrity, however, it seems that death occasionally comes in twos. Some unusual duos have died on the same day: Mahatma Gandhi and Orville Wright, Jayne Mansfield and Primo Carnera, Luis Bunuel and David Niven. So I looked to see if I could find any other pairs that stood out. I was a liitle shocked at what I found. Here are some famous names linked by death.


John Adams & Thomas Jefferson (July 4, 1826)


John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of course, were among the greatest of America’s founding fathers. They worked together on the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and would become the second and third Presidents of the United States. Over the next few decades they would have a changing relationship, in which they frequently switched between close friendship and bitter political rivalry, before keeping an affable correspondence in their final years. In 1826, as he lay dying, 90-year-old Adams’ final words were: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” In fact, Jefferson had died, aged 83, only hours earlier. Significantly, it was July 4 – exactly 50 years since the Declaration of Independence was approved. (Another former president, Jefferson protégé James Monroe, would died on the same date in 1831 – suggesting that “died on the fourth of the July” might be a more fitting motto for patriots.)


Aldous Huxley, President John Kennedy & CS Lewis (November 22, 1963)


Despite all the tributes that are bestowed the newly departed, death can occasionally be very humbling. On any other day, the deaths of British authors like the beloved fantasy writer CS Lewis (best-known for the Narnia series) and novelist Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) would have been big news. However, the deaths of the two gentlemen were upstaged, like anything else that happened that week (or that year), by the shocking assassination of President Kennedy.


Jean Cocteau & Edith Piaf (October 11, 1963)


Of all modern French artistes, probably none have the same legendary status as songbird Edith Piaf and multifaceted genius (poet, novelist, artist, filmmaker, actor, singer, stage and fashion designer) Jean Cocteau. Fittingly, the two legends converged on a few occasions. In 1940 Cocteau wrote the play Le Bel Indifférent (The Beautiful Indifferent) for Piaf and her then husband, Paul Meurisse. (The play was credited with the end of their marriage, which perhaps was Cocteau’s plan.) In the early 1950s, after Piaf’s career had faded, Cocteau saw her singing in a Parisian dive, and wrote an article about her talents that revived her career. According to legend, Cocteau found out about Piaf’s death on the morning of October 11, said “Ah, la Piaf est morte. Je peux mourir aussi” [“Ah, Piaf’s dead. I can die too”], and promptly died of a heart attack. This might not have been his smartest move, as Piaf upstaged him, closing down the streets of Paris as 40,000 fans mobbed her funeral. Cocteau’s own passing could not compete with that. (He was 74, while she was a tragically young 47.)


Orson Welles & Yul Brynner (October 11, 1985)

The great actor and filmmaker Orson Welles was known for his mammoth ego – something he had no trouble admitting. “I wouldn’t act a role if it was not felt as dominating the whole story,” he once said. Chances are, he wouldn’t have been happy that his death didn’t take up the entire obituary sections, sharing them with another great Hollywood scene-stealer, Yul Brynner. To make things worse, Brynner continued to appear regularly on television, reminding everyone of his death. As he was dying of smoking-related cancer, he had recorded a public service announcement with a simple message: “Don’t smoke. Whatever you do, just don’t smoke.” As Welles famously enjoyed puffing on cigars, this would have annoyed him even more.


Milton Berle, Dudley Moore & Billy Wilder (March 27, 2002)


When legendary comedian Milton Berle died in 2002, it was a double bill with another theatre and television comedy star, British musician and actor Dudley Moore. To add even more misery for comedy fans, film director and writer Billy Wilder – not exclusively a humorist, but also known for great comedies like "Some Like It Hot" and "The Apartment" also died that day. “I hear you, Milton,” said comedy writer Larry Gelbart at Berle’s funeral. “Sorry, I know you work alone.”