RIP Willie Mays

I didn’t go baseball crazy until the late 1970s, so I missed all the hoopla by a handful of years. But anyone who knows a little about the game knows that one highlight of Willie Mays sprinting straight towards the outfield wall with the #24 on his back facing directly to home plate. The ball somehow magically drops in straight over the back of his head and into his waist-high glove.

Perhaps most pertinent here, Mays was a fixture in pop-culture commentary, by the likes of Woody Allen, Peanuts, and songs “Say Hey (the Willie Mays Song)” in 1954 by the Treniers and “Talkin’ Baseball (Willie, Mickey, and The Duke)” in 1981 by Terry Cashman.

Here’s the line on Mays, who has passed away at the age of 93 in Palo Alto, California, from heart failure:

• He played in the Negro League as a teen and then from 1951 to 1973 for the Giants, first in New York and then when the team moved to San Francisco. He missed time from 1952 to 1954 for his stint in the Army.
• A case can be made that he’s the greatest baseball player ever, including the full package of speed, arm strength, excellent fielding, home-run hitting, and hitting for average.
• He was the oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• His nickname, “The Say Hey Kid,” was based on his optimism and his love for the game.
• Mays had a lifetime .301 average, with 660 homers and 3,293 hits. He was named to 24 All-Star teams and awarded 12 Gold Gloves. Ridiculous numbers.
• He finished his career third overall in home runs at the time behind only Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron.
• He made more than a few of those over-the-shoulder catches but that famous one was in the 1954 World Series against Cleveland, and that was his only championship.
• Mays came along four years after color-barrier-breaking Jackie Robinson, which was fortuitous for Mays because Americans were getting TVs en masse so he became an even more massive superstar than would have been possible just a few years earlier.
• While Robinson became an outspoken hero of civil-rights causes, Mays laid low on that front and, in a different way, did his part to bring whites and Blacks together, if only because so many white fans enjoyed watching him play so much.

RIP Bill Walton

Bill Walton was mostly before my time in the worlds of college and pro basketball, but he was so much bigger than life that it was impossible not to feel his presence long after his playing days.

Memories of Walton for me were mostly when I was obsessed with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s and his playing days were winding down and he was starting anew as an NBA color commentator. He would always do hilariously weird things in his tie-die shirts like rubbing dirt all over his body, making casual references to how much he liked doing drugs, being part of the Grateful Dead culture, eating birthday cakes and cupcakes with the candles still lit, and bringing fun-hearted spiritual-hippie presents to his colleagues.

Walton, who passed away this week from cancer at age 71, was a winner. He won 49 straight games and two high-school championships in California. He won 88 straight games at UCLA and national championships in 1972 and 1973. He was picked first in 1974 by the Portland Trail Blazers. He was league MVP in 1978 and won championships with the Blazers in 1977 and Boston Celtics in 1986.

Also passing away this week was Amy Winslow, who was once the manager of my second-favorite band Guided by Voices. She also worked with Yoko Ono, Surfer Blood, Kiwi Jr., and helped launch the Rachel Maddow Show. The cause was breast cancer at age 59.

And Tony Scott, who played for six years through the end of the 1970s into the 1980s for the St. Louis Cardinals, passed away at age 72. He stole 87 bases during that period as the Cards' centerfielder. 

RIP Morgan Spurlock (but not fast food)

Maybe it’s just a matter of getting older and wiser, but it seems like the movie Super Size Me was the point in my life when I went from regularly devouring Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with Cheese and Fish Filets to only very rarely (usually on long road trips) having a meal at McDonald’s. 

The small documentary (a $65,000 production) turned into a massive hit ($22 million at the box office) and seemed to be a bad sign for the restaurant chain and possibly all fast food. It was released in May 2004, but a month of eating McDonald’s (the plot), in the end, didn’t kill director and star Morgan Spurlock. Who’s to say it didn’t shorten his life, but he did live until passing away from cancer this week at the age of 53, exactly 20 years after the movie’s release.

I think my decision to cut back on fast food was even more influenced by reading the excellent Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. The book was a slightly more intellectual indictment of fast food than the movie, but they did work powerfully in tandem. 

What seemed like the progress of the human species back then to taking steps for health improvement now only looks like a small blip on the radar, as parents allowing their children to regularly eat fast food continues to climb back to near universal numbers. 

The fast-food scare did, however, mostly end marketing directly to children, but now most of the publicity is done by celebrity spokespeople who draw kids into eating what used to be considered the adult food (only 2 percent of McDonald’s marketing budget is focused on Happy Meals).

During the month-long experiment that was Super Size Me, Spurlock gained a whopping 25 pounds as well as a slew of maladies including depression, fatigue, headaches, and liver and heart damage. He went on to have an impressive body of work in documentary filmmaking, including a follow up to Super Size Me about McDonald’s since-incorporated healthier food options, the pop band One Direction, male masculinity (in partnership with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett), and the only other one I’ve actually seen, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? (which many critics said made too much light of a serious story).

RIP Alice Munro, whose stories perhaps got better as she got older

Western Ontario may not have been the best place to grow up for a kid, but for Alice Munro, it provided a fertile ground of small-town characters to spread throughout her lifetime of writing. She is renowned as a master of the short story, compared often to William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Somehow I had never read any of her work, but when she passed away on May 13, it spurred me to delve into some of the stories regarded as her finest.

“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” from the collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968): The young girl narrator describes a walk with her father through her small town anmed Tuppertown on Lake Huron. Then later, the mother isn’t feeling so well so the dad, daughter narrator, and younger brother go for a car ride and, oddly, stop at a woman’s house where there is whiskey and dancing - two things that definitely don’t happen at their own family’s home.

There really is not much that happens in this story, although Munro artfully describes what typical life must have been like for people in Depression Era-ravaged households where better times were still a memory and current times were very rough going. 3 out of 5 stars

“Age of Faith,” from the collection Lives of Girls and Women (1971): A 12-year-old girl with the family name of Jordan attends various churches in her rural community in order to get an understanding of whether God is real. She gets no help trying to understand from her younger brother, who has absolutely no need for religion. She gets no help from her mother, who yells at her that man created God, not the other way around. By the end, after their dad is looking for their dog because it has killed a sheep and the dad is now going to kill the dog, the previously ambivalent younger brother is attempting to pray to keep him from doing it. Meanwhile the protagonist girl still has lots of questions about God’s existence and how difficult it is to watch her brother show this display of faith.

Munro’s writing is all over the place, and despite an excellent concept or idea for a short story, I think she only half pulls it off. The story is profound, but it’s also not that interesting. 2.5 out of 5 stars

“How I Met My Husband,” from the collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974): A plane lands in the field across from the wealthy Peebles property, where the not-wealthy 15-year-old protagonist named Edie works, having dropped out of school because of bad grades and disinterest. She imagines that it must be harder for the rich people to picture what the poor people’s houses and lives were like than the other way around. The pilot has been camping out in the field and comes over for water then catches her wearing one of Ms. Peebles’ dresses, but the two spark a bit of a friendship or at least curiosity of each other. Then Alice, the fiancée of the pilot Chris arrives. But she leaves with Ms. Pebbles for a picnic and Edie takes a cake to Chris. They get intimate in his tent and he says he’s leaving and will write her a letter. Alice finds out and is furious but Edie is allowed to stay on working for Ms. Peebles. She waits for the letter for a long time, but it never comes. In the meantime, she builds up a relationship with the postman and they eventually get married. 

Now this is more like it. A great and entertaining story and a deep dive into the loneliness and sexual awakening many - all? - women face. 5 out of 5 stars

“Dimensions,” from the collection Too Much Happiness (2009): Doree is 23 and riding a bus to visit her husband in a home for the criminally insane. Then shifting back to when she was 16, her mother dies in the hospital from a botched operation and Doree moves in with a hospital orderly she has started a relationship with named Lloyd. They move across the country, get married, and have three kids named Sasha, Barbara Ann, and Dimitri. Doree and Lloyd homeschool the kids but increasingly he gets mad at her. One night she buys a dented can of pasta and he accuses her of wanting to poison him and the kids. She leaves and spends the night at the house of an another homeschooling mom. She comes back the next morning and he has murdered all three children because “how could they suffer the shame of knowing their mom had walked out on them?” She works at a job cleaning a motel and sometimes goes to visit Lloyd, who assures her the kids are happy and doing well. She continues to not find meaning in her life.

I found this one to be the most page-turning of these four Munro stories, but the ending is strange and a little unfulfilling. Doree was on her way to see Lloyd again when she witnesses a young man fly out of his pickup truck. Doree breathes life back into the man but it’s unclear if this is a sign to give up on Lloyd or continue to include him in her life. Perhaps Lloyd provides the only happy memory she can imagine about her kids. 4.5 out of 5 stars

RIP Steve Albini, Bob Avellini, and ELO guy

I know a lot of rock'n'roll hipsters like to proclaim the greatness of producer/musician Steve Albini, and while I can appreciate a certain rawness in music, his style bordered on overly abrasive - in both production and commentary - for me. Even when I was younger and way more snarky, Albini's snark was too much for me. For years, I thought he probably held back Nirvana's In Utero from being as great an album that I thought it could have been.

In hindsight, he probably made that band's farewell as great as it was supposed to be. But I’ll never be totally sure about that. Albini, who passed away at age 61 this week from a heart attack, worked with some of my favorite bands, including Pixies, the Breeders, Urge Overkill, Slint, King Kong, Superchunk, the Cribs, and even Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. But his work for all those outfits was oddly and consistently among my least favorite stuff by them all.

But come on, what kind of person do you have to be to turn on a band that made your name - Nirvana - by calling it "R.E.M. with a fuzzbox." I'm not sure if he meant that as an insult, but it actually sounds like the second-best thing to R.E.M., which to me would be a high compliment. I think I never forgave him for saying that one of my favorite album's, The Replacements’ Let It Be, was "a sad, pathetic end to a long downhill slide." If Albini's bands like Big Black and Rapeman could hold a candle to the innumerable great bands he loved to trash, then I might have taken him and his artistry a little more seriously. 

Also lost too soon at the age of 70 from cancer was Bob Avellini, who I profess to having been too young to see much at all on TV. But I still own many of his football cards. His biggest claim to fame may be that his 75-yard pass to Walter Payton was the legendary running back's longest career touchdown.

Another notable death this week was Richard Tandy, who was hardly Jeff Lynne in terms of importance to Electric Light Orchestra. However, notable about Tandy, who passed away at age 76, was that he rocked the protagonist's voice in perhaps my favorite ELO tune "Mr. Blue Sky." His wild keyboard playing helped anchor that song and many others with the band's signature Beatles-meets-disco brilliance.

RIP Dickey Betts and Pooch Tavares and welcome to more Taylor Swift music

I don't go super deep with Southern Rock. Sure, I love Lynyrd Skynyrd, Drive-by Truckers, The Black Crowes, and Jason Isbell. And I can't even remember which Allman Brothers show I saw way back when. The band played each year in 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992 at the Fabulous Fox Theater in St. Louis.

I was definitely at one of those shows and it was definitely awesome. One of the best parts was the lead-guitar mastery of Dickey Betts, who passed away this week at age 80 in Florida from cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Beyond his head-shredding guitar licks, Betts wrote the masterpieces "Ramblin' Man," "Blue Sky," "Revival," and "Jessica."  

Arguably not nearly as monumental of a performer but still important in musical history is Arthur “Pooch” Tavares, who also passed away this week. He was the lead singer of the Tavares and that song on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack - oh my gosh, that song! - was "More Than a Woman" and it's one of my favorite disco songs. I'm not quite sure why there is a version by the Bee Gees and Tavares on the album, and the Bee Gees' rendition is frankly better, but Taveres and his smooth voice also makes it a magical tune. Pooch was 81 years old.

And of course, things always happen in threes, so I would be remiss not to mention that Taylor Swift's new album was released today. It's her eleventh studio release, it's called The Dead Poets Department, and it includes a whopping 31 songs. Looks like my weekend is booked!

RIP Whitey Herzog

If you grew up in the St. Louis area in the 1980s like I did, then chances are you'll never have a more favorite Major League Baseball team than those St. Louis Cardinals ones from the early to the middle part of the decade. Likewise, you probably don't have a more cherished manager than Whitey Herzog.

"The White Rat" took the "Runnin' Redbirds" to three World Series over a span of six years and while he only one won of them, he was the perfect mix of old-school militant leader - with a perfectly square head and buzzcut - and innovative playcaller of "Whiteyball" who valued offensive speed and defensive craftiness over brute home-run power. 

Whitey Herzog has passed away at age 92. 

His Cardinals won the World Series in 1982 and those were some thrilling games. Even though they weren't champions, the 1985 and 1987 teams may have been my favorite teams. I don't think I ever watched more baseball that I did in 1985 with Jack Clark, Tommy Herr, Vince Coleman, Willie McGee, Terry Pendleton, Ozzie Smith, Andy Van Slyke, Joaquín Andújar, John Tudor, Bob Forsch, and Todd Worrell. Meanwhile, the 1987 team with many of the same players went back-and-forth until the very end in losing to the Minnesota Twins in seven games.

Whitey always felt like one of Cardinal Nation's own, which may have helped because he grew up near St. Louis in New Athens, Illinois.

Some interesting facts about Herzog:

• His real name was Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog.
• A broadcaster covering his games in the minor leagues nicknamed him "Whitey" because of his light blond hair. 
• He was in the Army Corps of Engineers for two years.
• Herzog was mentored by iconic New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel as a Yankee minor leaguer and said, "Instead of thinking about girls, I would be thinking about what the hell he talked about all day. Casey broke it down into the hundred little things that would make the difference. Once I began coaching and managing, I kept passing them along to my own players. In Casey, I had an Einstein."
• He played eight seasons in the majors, with the Washington Senators, Kansas City Athletics, Baltimore Orioles, and Detroit Tigers.
• He didn't last a full season in his first MLB managerial stint with the Texas Rangers in 1973.
• Before joining the Cards, he was hired to manage the Kansas City Royals and lost to the New York Yankees three years in a row in the AL Championship Series.
• Royals fans are not likely to forget Whitey either. He surpringly called his 1977 team the best he ever coached, and they finished 102-60 in the regular season and featured Darrell Porter, Frank White, Amos Otis, George Brett, and Dennis Leonard.
• Bruce Sutter, the Hall of Fame closer on that 1982 Cardinals team, told The New York Times, "How many managers can you blow a game for and go out fishing with him the next morning?"
• He was the second-oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame behind Willie Mays.

RIP Hall and Oates (and my favorite 14 H2O albums ranked)

It was 41 years ago - on March 2, 1983 - that I saw my first real rock n' roll concert. My dad and his girlfriend took me and my new junior-high friend Mark to see Daryl Hall and John Oates on the H2O tour at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. Mark and I were in the second row and it was epic.

I was already a huge music lover thanks to my older brothers' Beatles, Stones, Who, Jam, Cars, and many other albums in the house. But they weren't Hall and Oates people. This was all mine. This felt like my area in which I could excel, be an expert in, and mostly just love.

I don't remember what was played that night. There are no setlists online. Surely there was "Kiss on My List," "You Make My Dreams," "Maneater," "Rich Girl," "Sarah Smile," "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)," "Family Man," and the list goes on.

I still love Hall and Oates and it was sad to wake up this morning and realize that something that's been around my whole life if apparently around no more. The writing has been on the wall for many months, as the two have been bickering over business matters, but Oates has now told Rolling Stone that the musical relationship is kaput.

I understand why people come and want to hear the big hits. Those songs are going to live forever. But I wanted to relegate them to the classic file that they’re in. And I wanted them to be heard in the best possible light, the way they were when the spark was on fire in the ’70s and ’80. That’s when those songs really resonated. To keep playing them, for me, was no longer interesting. I just wanted to do something else.

We have a different strategy for our lives, and we have a different strategy for our business lives as well as our personal lives. And that’s that, so be it. We’re old guys. We deserve to be allowed to do whatever we want to do.

I mention Hall and Oates quite a bit here at the Lunch Box, and they remain one of my favorites, but the three times I've seen them since have been far inferior performances. The show at Wolftrap in Virginia in 2009 was really good but the show just a few years ago at the Capitol One Center in Washington D.C. was kind of a stinker (with Tears for Fears opening and being, I thought, the best band of the night, and Squeeze may have been better as an separate opener as well).

One thing I haven't touched on yet: everyone knows about H2O's 1980s content, but should you decide to dig deeper, they had amazing music in the 1970s before their Beatlemania-like MTV era. These are my 14 favorite Hall and Oates albums ranked, all of which I consider valuable parts of my overall record collection:

14. Do It for Love (2003)

13. War Babies (1974)

12. Whole Oats (1972)

11. Along the Red Ledge (1978)

10. Beauty on a Back Street (1977)

09. Sacred Songs (Daryl Hall solo) (1977)

08. X-Static (1979)

07. Bigger Than Both of Us (1976)

06. Daryl Hall and John Oates (1975)

05. Abandoned Luncheonette (1973)

04. Big Bam Boom (1984)

03. Private Eyes (1981)

02. Voices (1980)

01. H2O (1982)

Listen to especially those top 10 albums on the list and try to tell me these two musicians weren't masters of creating perfect power pop.

RIP (sorta) O.J. Simpson

I was just a little too young to watch O.J. Simpson during his prime Buffalo Bills era, although I still have some cards from when he was on that team. But from a very early age - while I might not have seen him running wild in his white, blue, and red uniform - I distinctly recall Simpson in his fancy suits flying through the airport walkways in his Hertz rental-car ads.

I did eventually see plenty of football highlights of "The Juice" and, wow, was he great. He also had an infectious personality later on as an NBC Sports game-time announcer and the detective who flies out of his wheelchair from the upper deck of a stadium in the first of three Naked Gun films in which he appeared.

But those were just the bright-side warmup to O.J.'s approaching dark-side pop-culture legacy. I can still remember being on vacation near the beach in Alabama when my eyes were glued to the TV on June 17, 1994 as that white Ford Bronco led the police on a chase across Los Angeles. It would be the beginning of the entire nation getting more O.J. than they had ever wanted. It took me a long time to finally see him as the cold-blooded murderer of his wife rather than the friendly-eyed TV personality I had grown to love.The drama took us all the way to the innocent verdict date of October 3, 1995 and way beyond. In fact, I can't believe the car chase and the trial took less than a year-and-a-half. It seemed like forever. Of course, Simpson was found liable in civil court in 1997 for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. 

O.J. Simpson has died of prostate cancer at the age of 76.

Some other interesting Simpson nuggets of note:

• He was born in a housing project in San Francisco.
• He blamed a lot of his later troubles on having an absent father after his parents separated when he was 5.
• When he was little, he had rickets and bowed legs that caused other kids to make fun of him.
• He won the Heisman trophy as college football's top player while at USC.
• Simpson was the first NFL player to surpass 2,000 yards rushing, which he did in 1973.
• He met Nicole Brown way back in 1977 at a Beverly Hills nightclub.
• He spent nine years in prison for trying in 2007 to steal O.J. Simpson memorabilia.
• He had clearly started to lose his mind in his last years with his rambling video posts on X but to his credit at least he mostly stuck to football commentary.

What a run he had!

RIP Joe Lieberman

Back at the dawn of the modern election-conspiracy era, Al Gore and his running mate Joe Lieberman, despite winning a half-million more votes than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, suffered defeat at the hands of a clearly biased Supreme Court.

He told The New York Times in 2023, “It was a miscarriage of justice on two levels. One was that the Florida Supreme Court had already ruled in our favor to continue the recounts, and the other was that it was an extrajudicial political decision made in the crisis of a transition of power, and out of line with precedents of the Supreme Court.”

Lieberman passed away this week at age 82 after injuries from a fall at his Bronx home.

Instead of becoming vice president, Lieberman began a retreat from a long and impressive career of public service. He was about as centrist as a politician got and his style has not exactly translated to our era of maximum fringe and infighting. 

But Lieberman had a truly impressive record of work on social causes to better the world, starting with his earliest efforts in civil rights. He went on to be a major player in the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security after the September 11 terrorist attacks, led the fight against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and provided the tie-breaking vote to pass Obama’s Affordable Care Act. 

His descent was spurred by losing in the Democratic primaries for president in 2004 and losing his Senate seat for Connecticut in 2006. Even since leaving politics - when I hadn’t really thought about him for years beca,use I assumed he had retired from public life - Lieberman worked at a lawyer, as chair of No Labels and was even surprisingly considered for a short time by Trump to lead the F.B.I. 

The Times added:

At his political peak, on the threshold of the vice presidency, Mr. Lieberman — a national voice of morality as the first major Democrat to rebuke President Bill Clinton for his sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky — was named Mr. Gore’s running mate at the Democratic National Convention that August in Los Angeles. He became the nation’s first Jewish candidate on a major-party presidential ticket.

“It was a very hard thing for me to do because I liked him,” he told Bill Kristol, the neoconservative commentator. “But I really felt what he did was awful.”

RIP Karl "World Party" Wallinger

I've always loved the Beatles, but in college I was absolutely nutso for them. It was also a time I was deeply exploring anything in the post-psychedelic-Beatles genre, and World Party rose to the very upper echelon of that category. The band's classic is 1990's Goodbye Jumbo, and it was on constant rewind throughout the early 1990s for me.

Karl Wallinger was the leader and often sole member of World Party. He passed away March 20 at the age of 66. The band never truly hit it big, despite decent-sized alterna-hits in "Way Down Now" and "Put the Message in the Box," possibly because grunge came along to wipe out many of the era's more melodic pop groups. Wallinger remained relevant, serving as the musical director of Ben Stiller's 1994 Gen X classic movie Reality Bites.

Growing up, he attended the same school in Wales as all the members of Genesis and later collaborated with Peter Gabriel, who is perhaps World Party's most famous fan. After the success of Goodbye Jumbo, World Party's audience dwindled and Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm in 2000 and had a long recovery. But he was working on his first song in more than two decades and planning a tour at the time of his death.

The rock-music world also recently lost Eric Carmen, who sang "Go All the Way" by the Raspberries, one of the top songs of the power-pop genre. He also scored big with solo ballads "All By Myself" and of course Dirty Dancing's "Hungry Eyes."

RIP Ali Hassan Mwinyi and remembering the good life in Tanzania

Mwinyi with Michael Jackson

Tanzania became independent from Great Britain in 1961 and Ali Hassan Mwinyi became the East African nation's second president, serving from 1985 to 1995. It was during that time that Tanzania made many of the reforms and economic leaps that made it possible for me to honeymoon for three weeks there in Fall 2005. For that, I'm thankful to Mwinyi, who has passed away from lung cancer at the age of 98 in Dar es Salaam.

He also led the effort to bring sanctions again South Africa for its apartheid and he called out the U.S. for being so weak on South Africa's dictatorial government of that time. Mwinyi had been president of Zanzibar and helped transition that island to be more fully integrated into the country. Before becoming the president of all of Tanzania, he had also serves as minister of tourism and helped transition the country into being a tourist destination His death got me thinking about that amazing 24-day trip-of-a-lifetime I got to take to Tanzania. Here are some excerpts from what I wrote about it nearly 20 years ago.

We landed at Kilimanjaro International Airport in northern Tanzania three days after our wedding. We had a welcome chance to recover from the weekend of festivities at Camp Greenkill, New York and the long flight with a three-night stay at Moivaro Coffee Lodge outside of Arusha, a town of about 300,000 residents that serves as the launching point of nearly all safari expeditions. We lounged by day at the lodge's pool and enjoyed Tanzania's fine selection of beers by night on the deck of the lodge, gazing out at the dark night and brilliant stars. When we weren't battling the huge brown spider that took up residence in our room, we were ingesting what would become the staples of our diet for the next three weeks: excellent coffee, rice and curries, eggs, and fruit. We also took a walk in a local village that is located in a crater and supplies fairly fertile ground for terrace farming of crops such as coffee and banana trees. Then we took a taxi into Arusha and walked around the markets, which sell items ranging from spices to Masaii medicine to crafts and carvings to dried fish.

After finally being rested up, we got picked up and traveled by Land Rover through many dusty villages and over bumpy roads to Kibo Hotel, at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. We met the eight people who would join us on the climb: Thomas from Switzerland, Eva from Germany, Jen from Nottingham (UK), Mike and Steve from Manchester (UK), Jeremy from Scotland, Matt from Portsmouth (UK), and Claire from Dublin (Ireland). Kili is 19,800 feet tall, is Africa's highest point, and is the tallest free-standing mountain in the world, so we knew it wouldn't be easy. And it wasn't. Kili also features five different ecosystems, so each day, the views and terrain were very different. We started our six-day climb in the tropical rainforest, and we hadn't been hiking for 10 minutes when we spotted several blueface monkeys (similar to baboons) in the trees above the trail. Even though we carried our own daypacks, there were 33 porters, guides and cooks to carry our supplies, such as tents, water, outhouse-cleaning supplies, and buckets of meat. The food was really good and plentiful. The porters set up our mess tent each morning and evening, and the 10 of us enjoyed instant coffee, fruits, bacon and eggs, soup, breads, fish, potatoes, meat curries, and veggie curries. Our three main guides were great – Pashion, Danny, and Strato. Their four rules for a successful climb into the high altitude: be positive, acclimatize by hiking further up the mountain before going back down to sleep each night, walk slowly slowly ("poley poley") behind the guides, and drink at least five liters of water each day. The climb was more or less an easy hike each day, until the summit day. After a five-hour walk across alpine desert (very Star Wars-like), we ate and had three hours to sleep. We woke at 11 p.m. and started the 5,000-foot ascent straight up Kili's peak. At 6 a.m., we reached Gilman's Point to watch the sunrise, and continued on around the volcano's crater rim for another two-plus hours to Uhuru Peak, the top of Africa. It was beautiful and well worth it, despite the rapidly growing blisters on my feet and my sunburned, windswept, frosted-over face. Rachel was dehydrated and hearing echoes every time I spoke, but we made it back down the summit in one piece at noon. We napped for an hour, then ate and hiked back across the desert for six more hours to camp. We took a different route down on the last day, a rapid and sublime hike through the mountain's lush eastern rainforest, where we saw monkeys, a dik dik (mini deer), and a civet (wild cat). Eight of the 10 of us made it to the peak, and we celebrated with lots of Safari and Tusker beer the night we returned to Kibo Hotel, not to mention some long, hot showers.

The next morning, the two of us said farewell to our crew and rode with our driver back to Arusha to meet up with our safari guide. Cyst, a member of the Barabiac tribe, must be the most knowledgeable and friendly guide in all of Tanzania. He supplied us with endless knowledge about the dozens of animals we viewed during our six-day safari. We saw two very rare animals: the black rhino and two leopards. However, we probably enjoyed the elephants, giraffes, and lions the most. They were plentiful and would often walk right past our Land Rover. The bush of the Serengeti and the vast wildlife of the Ngorongoro Crater were endlessly fascinating and emotion-stirring. For example, one group of elephants had some fun with us by pretending to charge our vehicle and moments later, we spotted an elephant that had hurt itself and was dying in a pond with a crocodile circling it ready for some lunch. The animals we saw included ostriches, baboons, vervet monkeys, jackals, badgers, hyenas, genets, mongoose, hyraxes, zebras, warthogs, hippos, cape buffaloes, hartebeests, wildebeests, topis, Grant's gazelles, Thomson's gazelles, impalas, waterbucks, and bushbucks. The only major animals we didn't see were the cheetah and the python. The lodgings were great too. We knew we were staying in tents, but we had no idea tents could be so nice. The Masaii warriors were our hosts each night. They wear all red, have big piercings in their ears, and have a strict diet of milk, blood, and meat from the cows and goats that they herd. Another nice treat: our company booked a really couple from L.A., Jill and Aaron, in nearly all the same lodgings each night for the last two weeks of our honeymoon. Not only were they also on their honeymoon, but Aaron plays in a rock band that I know and like. Small world.

The last seven nights of our trip were spent on the island of Zanzibar, right off the coast of Tanzania. Considering that the guidebooks noted how this is one of the most exotic places on Earth, it was pretty surprising to leave the airport and see trash everywhere for miles and miles. On the other hand, we got to the east side of the island and stayed for four nights in the thatched-roof huts of Matemwe Beach, a gorgeous stretch of white sand, blue/green water surrounded by coral reefs along the Indian Ocean. One day we snorkeled with a group of scuba divers next to "Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt's private island" and saw plenty of striking and unusually colored and shaped fish among the reefs. After three nights of beach bumming, we headed back across the island to Stone Town, a small touristy area along the Zanzibar Sound in the 400,000-population (and 95 percent Muslim) Zanzibar Town. We saw a house that Dr. Livingston "I presume" lived in, and we visited a spice farm. We spent most days wandering through the markets in the narrow alleyways of Stone Town, which Rachel said reminded her of the Arab Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem. Each night, we met up with our honeymooning friends and even dared to eat at the risky fish market along the water one evening. The hotel workers had told us to stay away. They had a point. After a couple of bites of my shrimp and lobster on skewers, I set the food down and watched as the street kids of the area made a beeline to my plate. This was certainly the low-point of the African meals, the rest was pretty good, but we were still more than happy to find a couple of pizza places in Stone Town. That's all we ate for the last two days of our time there. There was also a nice coffee shop that afforded us a view of the water and the dangerous road crossing at the center of town. We ended our trip with 30-plus-hours of flights. And, more importantly, we were malaria and yellow fever and typhoid free, and more happily married than ever!

RIP Golden Richards and more

For me, Golden Richards was the epitome of the pretty-boy Dallas Cowboys of the 1970s. I also think Richards, the talented wide receiver who passed away in Utah this week at the age of 73, played a role in helping my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers become the team of that decade.

Seems like a funny thing to say, right, about someone who caught a total of zero catches in the four Super Bowls the Steelers won, and the Cowboys were the victims in two of those championships? 

Let me explain. Richards' best years were 1974 through 1976, when he consistently averaged about 450 yards and four touchdowns per season. Not bad for the pre-fantasy, pre-pass-happy NFL. But even though the Cowboys made the playoffs all four seasons from 1974 to 1977, he didn't catch any passes in two of those four playoff runs. 

Richards had a good playoff stretch in the 1975 season, but didn't have any catches in the loss to the Steelers in Super Bowl X. His Cowboys won Super Bowl XII against Denver, and Richards had his career highlight in that game, catching a fourth-quarter, 29-yard touchdown pass from fullback Robert Newhouse. 

Early the next season, Tony Hill essentially took Richards' job and the golden one was traded to the Chicago Bears. A few months later, the Cowboys lost Super Bowl XIII to the Steelers.

Hence, Golden Richards played a bit of a role in helping the Steelers become so dominant. For that, I will always be grateful.

It's been a tough week in the obituary department:

Comedian Richard Lewis, who has been a valuable contributor to Curb Your Enthusiasm, died at age 76 of a heart attack.

Jose DeLeón was one of my favorite St. Louis Cardinals for a while, especially in 1999 when he led the National League with 201 strikeouts. He finished with a career record of 86-119, but he was an electric and entertaining performer much of the time. He passed away from cancer at age 63 in his native Dominican Republic.

RIP William "Pop-Tarts" Post

"Two thin layers of dry, rectangular pastry with a sweet filling and frosting" doesn't necessarily sound like something that would become a taste sensation. But William Post, who died from heart failure this week in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the age of 96, was able to sell the idea and turn it into the now-ubiquitous Pop-Tarts breakfast (or anytime) snack.

I have to admit these are one of my favorite things in the world to eat. They have 60 flavors now, after starting out with just four: strawberry, blueberry, brown sugar cinnamon, and apple-currant. Heat them up in the toaster oven and spread a little butter on top to make it even more disgustingly delicious. That said, I almost never eat them these days because, whenever I do, I get a brief and minor case of the queasies.

According to the New York Times, Post "led the bakery plant that developed the first Pop-Tarts for Kellogg’s in 1964." He developed the product in just two weeks, with the help of his own kids as taste testers. When they gave the experiment the thumb's up, Post ignored the advice of many others who said it was not a good idea.

Pop-Tarts were going to be called fruit scones but a Kellogg’s executive riffed off the Pop Art movement of the time to coin the related name. Post also had the idea later in the 1960s to brilliantly add frosting on top. There's nothing worse than a frosting-less Pop-Tart. Those should never be on store shelves! That said, there was some concern that the frosting would melt in the toaster. I've always wondered why that doesn't happen. Perhaps best not to know!

Pop-Tarts continues to sell in massive amounts and the product stays very relevant on the pop-culture landscape. Look out later this year for the movie called Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story, directed by Jerry Seinfeld, and this Saturday Night Live skit shows just how darn distracting it can be to have a box of Pop-Tarts in front of you:

RIP Aston "Family Man" Barrett, plus my 30 favorite Bob Marley songs

Marley and Barrett

Anyone who has ever listened to a lot of Bob Marley and the Wailers knows that sound. That bounce. That groove. That skronk. Much of that sound was supplied by one of my favorite bassists of all-time, Aston Barrett. He has passed away in Miami at the age of 77 after a long illness.

Barrett joined the Wailers with his brother, Carlton, who died back in 1987 and was the drummer. The two provided a formidable backdrop to Marley's iconic singing and guitar playing. Aston Barrett was nicknamed Family Man because he was the father of 41 children. That feat alone was clearly a form of exercise, but that was one of the reasons he loved playing bass. He said it was like going to the gym for exercise.

I've been revisiting Bob Marley over the last few days and my 30 favorites are:

30. Crazy Baldhead

29. Real Situation
28. Coming in from the Cold
27. Stop the Train
26. Burnin' and Lootin'
25. Concrete Jungle
24. No More Trouble
23. Slave Driver
22. Jammin'
21. Keep on Moving

20. Satisfy My Soul
19. Johnny Was
18. Talkin' Blues
17. Who the Cap Fit
16. Them Belly Full
15. High Tide or Low Tide
14. Lively Up Yourself
13. One Love/People Get Ready
12. Stir It Up

11. Bend Down Low
10. Kinky Reggae
09. Buffalo Soldier
08. Get Up, Stand Up
07. I Shot the Sheriff
06. Waiting in Vain
05. No Woman No Cry
04. Three Little Birds
03. Redemption Song
02. Is This Love
01. Could You Be Loved (that little squiggle in the background kills me every time)

RIP Purty Mouth Man

Herbert Coward is not a name anyone knows. But his short, albeit horrifying, performance is one of the most memorable ones I can think of in cinema history. Upon stumbling across four Atlanta businessmen on a white-water rafting trip set in Georgia in the 1972 classic Deliverance, Coward, playing the character listed in the credits as Toothless Man, and his mountain buddy force Ned Beatty’s character to strip to his underwear and “squeal like a pig” while he’s violently sexually assaulted. Meanwhile Jon Voigt’s character is tied to a nearby tree and, as they figure out what to do with him, Toothless Man says, “He got a real purty mouth, ain’t he?”

Coward died this week at age 85 when his vehicle was hit by a truck in western North Carolina. Also deceased alongside him were his girlfriend Bertha Brooks, a chihuahua, and his pet squirrel. The truck driver survived.

Coward was interviewed in recent years and noted that he was illiterate and could only write his name. He said he learned his lines for Deliverance by listening to them on a tape recorder. Star Burt Reynolds had remembered seeing Coward working at an Old West-themed amusement park in North Carolina and suggested he have a role in the movie. 

RIP Lacey Underall

When I was a kid, my friends and I watched Caddyshack over and over again. We must have watched it 10 times at my friend Dewey's house alone. Sure, Chevy Chase, Ted Knight, Bill Murray, and Rodney Dangerfield were the main draws. But there's no doubt Cindy Morgan, who died recently in Florida at the age of 69, played a role in bringing us back to our repeat viewings of the classic 1980 comedy.

I have to admit I haven't thought of her name as an actor in a very long time, if hardly ever at all. But I've never forgotten her character's name. As the niece of the stuffy and out-of-touch Judge Smails (Knight), Lacey Underall struts around Bushwood Country Club with an air of youthful freshness and dangerous (at least to the judge and his friends) sex appeal. Of course the judge would never suspect his perfect niece of being the wild child he eventually discovers her to be. Some of her scenes are the most iconic ones from the movie: emerging from the pool in her white bikini, verbally sparring with new-age golfer Ty Webb (Chase), and the flings and flirtations she has with young Danny and others at the club.

Legacy.com quoted Morgan: “We were absolutely having the best time possible. It was a challenge certainly working with four of the funniest men on the planet, and there was quite of bit of improvisation. It was the longest and best party I’ve ever attended.”

I was never much of a fan of her biggest other role, Tron, but many people share an equal amount of praise for that Jeff Bridges' flick as I do for Caddyshack.

RIP Ryan O’Neal, influential romantic lead touchstone from Love Story

I mostly remembered hearing about Ryan O’Neal because I’m a lifelong tennis fan and his daughter, Tatum O’Neal, was married to John McEnroe. It always sounded like the O’Neal household was a hot mess. And it mostly was, but I then realized I didn't actually have a very educated opinion on the matter because I had never even seen any of Ryan O’Neal's movies So I dove in last night and watched 1970’s top-grossing movie Love Story.

The film is somewhat slow-moving by today’s standards, but it still is powerfully sad (as well as powerfully sentimental), with several innovative elements. Aly MacGraw was certainly a mesmerizing presence. And O’Neal, who was 29 at the time and was finally about to become a next-level movie star after a decade dwelling on various TV shows, is a suitable equal to her. If not for MacGraw’s urging, the part would have surely gone to others in the running like Jon Voigt and Beau Bridges. But the part really helped define the story of O’Neal, who died this month at age 82.

O’Neal would go on to have a son with Farrah Fawcett, and later got busted for drugs with that son and for assaulting another son. Tatum, who would herself become a massive star with The Bad News Bears series of movies, later said her dad physically abused her as a child.

All that aside, Love Story remains worth a watch for a variety of reasons. The non-linear storytelling works well in showing how deep their characters are falling in love, and remaining in love, through some pretty bleak challenges.

The music, by Francis Lai, is unforgettable and often emotionally swells while it seems like almost nothing is happening, creating what seems like the sounds and thoughts in MacGraw and O'Neal's heads.

Perhaps the most famous line in the movie was "Love means never having to say you're sorry" and was taken to heart by millions as a relationship motto in the 1970s and beyond.

Social topics were explored throughout Love Story in ways that never really had been in movies, with O'Neal (his character's name is Oliver) and MacGraw (Jenny) coming from the wealthy class and the working class respectively. Oliver's relationship with his father is an interesting study on formal coldness as well. And how to deal with illness is touchingly and somewhat - for the time - unusually explored.

Of course, the chemistry of the two leads - not to mention the picturesque backgrounds and highly influential fashion of MacGraw - is the most memorable element and was trendsetting for how romances would play out going forward in movie history.

Love Story: 4 out of 5 stars

RIP Eric Montross

The years 1993 to 1997 were my most sports-crazed years as an adult. I worked as the sports editor at The Alestle, the student newspaper of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. I also was a frequent guest on my buddy Wayne Frazer’s local-cable TV college basketball and baseball shows. Then I went on to be a sports reporter for two years at the daily newspaper the Centralia (Illinois) Morning Sentinel.

I couldn’t get enough of sports, and I couldn’t really get away from sports either. I eventually decided I couldn’t be a sports reporter if I was going to continue loving following sports. Since I was about 12, I had loved college basketball, namely the North Carolina Tarheels. So when center Eric Montross led them to the national championship in 1993, I was deep into my sports love affair, so those Heels will always hold a special place for me. It’s really sad that Montross had recently been diagnosed with cancer and died this week at the age of 52.

His Tarheels team is among my all-time favorites, led by Coach Dean Smith, forward George Lynch, and sharp-shooting guard Donald Williams. North Carolina knocked off #3 Michigan 77-71 in the NCAA championship in part due to a timeout called by Michigan’s Chris Webber when his team didn’t have any timeouts. 

Another memorable game (pictured above) was when Montross played Duke with blood streaming down his face, leading to his nickname Bloody Montross. That made sense because he really did fight tooth and nail for his team at all times. The 7-footer went on to be drafted by the Boston Celtics and played eight years in the NBA.

Bonus basketball RIP also goes to former Philadelphia 76er George McGinnis, who died this week at 73 and helped usher in a trend of big men being able to handle the ball throughout the rest of the court.

RIP Norman Lear

When little Norman Lear was a kid growing up in Connecticut, his dad Herman would say “stifle!” to his mom Jeanette when he didn’t like what she was trying to say to him. But her advice, in reality, had usually been wise and he, in turn, had ended up going off to jail for the things she had tried to dissuade him from doing. No longer would Norman’s dad be sitting in his “throne” chair controlling the radio, much as Archie Bunker would do with his own chair and TV some 40 years later.

These are some of the opening anecdotes from Even This I Get to Experience, the 2014 autobiography from Norman Lear, who died this week at the age of 101 as perhaps my favorite producer in TV history. He was able to turn these seemingly minor slices of everyday life into monumental TV moments and brought TV comedy sitcoms to a whole new level of societal importance throughout the 1970s and 80s.

All in the Family is my fourth favorite show of all time. And while The Jeffersons, Maude, One Day at a Time, and Good Times, didn't make my top-TV list (but Sanford and Son did - at #59), they paint a portrait of a legendary, storied career of amazing work. Using his dad as an inspiration for Archie, Lear was able to somehow find lovability and occasional redeeming qualities in a massive bigot. I somehow never really saw his other major sitcom Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, possibly because I grew up in a market (St. Louis) that might not have wanted to air the controversial show. It was shown more prominently in some places bcause Lear personally footed the expenses to run it.