I missed this until yesterday (his funeral):
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I always enjoyed how he would often make a surprise appearance in Star Wars-themed AMA on Reddit.
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And it was so, quaint, how he ended each post with “Cheers, Peter Mayhew”
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The people who formed the background of my generation’s youth are dropping like flies <sigh>…
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That makes me sad.
Doris Day was my mom’s favorite, and she was good to dogs.
I’ll leave this here.
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He is in a poem I wrote:
It’s about the West Wing of the Smithsonian Gallery of American Art, and visiting it with a friend who I was secretly in love with and it was going nowhere.
You and I,
and I.M. Pei
Picasso, Picabia, La Douanier
The long stairless escalator.
Thiebald cake
Manmade waterfall
Calder mobile shadow wall
The long, stairless escalator.
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RIP Tardar Sauce
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This is a blow. My heart is broken for the family and all of us.
Grumpy Cat is my spirit animal
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It is scary how much this era is like the 1930s.
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How so?
I mean, beyond the obvious political similarities…
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1930s:
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People monetizing whatever they can get their hands on, including reality-show stuff like dance endurance contests… and funny pets. A millionaire held a fancy dinner for dogs and photographed the whole thing – sounds like a YouTube stunt to me.
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This monetization of cheap spectacle being both embraced and denounced (depending on the type of spectacle and who’s making it) by populists.
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People who are famous and rich for being famous and rich, and the whole idea this is aspirational, instead of, as more usually happens, inherited.
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As @knoxblox just pointed out in another thread, lots of people now are one paycheque away from disaster – yet the wealthy are the wealthiest they’ve been since WWI. The Depression only lasted until WWII for working people. The wealthy who managed to stay wealthy after the crash recovered by the mid-thirties.
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Zero hour contracts and the gig economy sure as hell looks like 1930s piece work to me.
Sure, it’s in other eras as well, but the flavour and intensity now are closer to the 30s.
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I know this is more local in scope, but Bookie was an amazing person. He’s the main reason I didn’t commit road rage when I had a horrible commute back in the early 2000s. He’d remind all the commuters we were all in this together, there was nothing to get upset about, and he was going to make sure we had good music to listen to. And he did, every freaking day.
We’ve got a major highway exit in the extreme east end of the Greater Toronto Area called Liverpool Road. Every day there was backed up traffic (it’s Toronto; there’s always backed up traffic), he’d announce, “to the east, traffic is heavy to Liverpool – wow, that’s bad.” with the implication it was Liverpool the city not the road, and I’d giggle. It was so lame but he delivered it so well I never got tired of it.
I miss him. I miss my radio announcer friend I never met and didn’t actually know.
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Well, chances are good that it was backed up to at least Bowmanville. 
The 401 is the world’s largest parking lot.
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“You’ve got a car?” they say.
“Why don’t you use it to drive around town?” they say.
I try to explain it takes longer and I don’t want to be part of the problem, but the “cars are freedom” message is so ingrained.
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Well, I’m an ex-Montrealer, so you know my feelings about that. This was reinforced by the fact that, depending on the generation, Montreal drivers all think that they’re Gilles or Jacques Villeneuve (and those two are a’ deid, a fact that may have an object lesson attached somewhere).
To some extent, I can understand Torontonians wanting a car - it is much less of a pedestrian-scaled city than Montreal - but therein lies a plaint against modern urban planning.
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