With winter now truly having arrived, the love of a good heater or fireplace (or lack thereof) is going to be a subject many can relate to. Carol and Les Shepherd of Watsons Bay wonder if anyone can match the performance and longevity of their Sunray single bar radiator/heater "which we received as a wedding present 53 years ago. It has never had any repairs, and never fails to turn on every winter morning and evening."
Speaking of radiators and bars, I was exposed to a colourful journalistic quilt of New York history courtesy of BC:
“Dunleavy was a sometimes drinker at the Bar I worked at on 59th Street, full of expat Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans and West Indians. He was Craggy, crusty, curmudgeonly, full of stories about his life and times around the world. Always friendly and entertaining. Remind me to tell you about the rumours about how he left Tokyo. Truly a good customer and tipper.”
Like most Rupert’s flock, Steve Dunleavy, the hard-hitting, hard-drinking journalist who helped define The New York Post as a crime reporter, editor and premier columnist, died Monday at his home on Long Island. He was 81.
Steve Dunleavy was one of the greatest reporters of all time,” said Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Post.
“Whether competing with his own father in the famous Sydney, Australia, tabloid wars, or over the last 40 years in New York, Steve’s life story is littered with great scoops. He was much loved by both his colleagues and editors.”
“His passing is the end of a great era,” Murdoch added
Over the course of his epic career, Dunleavy scored countless exclusives, including interviews with the mother of Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, and confessed “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo. The rapist also posed in the nude for Dunleavy, who had smuggled a camera into prison for the story.
Legendary NY Post columnist Steve Dunleavy dead at 81
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch said journalist Steve Dunleavy's passing, at age 81, marked 'the end of a great era'.
Legendary reporter Steve Dunleavy, who was the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr's tabloid television journalist in Natural Born Killers ...
“Mate, I’ve never had a bad day in journalism in my life,” he once said. “You win, you get drunk because you won. You lose, you get drunk because you lost.”
By his own metric, though, he never lost.
After the actress Ava Gardner rejected his invitation to be interviewed at a nightclub and threw a glass of champagne in his face, he wrote an article that began: “Last night, I shared a glass of champagne with Ava Gardner. She threw it; I wore it.”
* Tis 📚....Definitely recommended, talking to strangers is one of the most important things you do and it can even save your life. This book is the very best entry point for thinking about this topic. Here is a summary excerpt:
We have strategies for dealing with strangers that are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it — and, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with each other about just how terrible at it we are.
One recurring theme is just how bad we are at spotting liars. On another note, I found this interesting:
…the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of 50 years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, “Pft, that’s just getting started,'” the alcohol researcher Kim Fromme says. She says that the heavy binge drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently surveyed more than 700 students at Duke University. Of the drinkers in the group, over half had suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40 percent had had a blackout in the previous year, and almost one in ten had had a blackout in the previous two weeks.
And:
Poets die young. That is not just a cliche. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and non-fiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, they have far and away the highest suicide rates — as much as five times higher than the general population.
It also turns out that the immediate availability of particular methods of suicide significantly raises the suicide rate; it is not the case that an individual is committed to suicide regardless of the means available at hand.
Returning to the theme of talking with strangers, one approach I recommend is to apply a much higher degree of arbitrary specificity, when relating facts and details, than you would with someone you know.
In any case, self-recommending, this book shows that Malcolm Gladwell remains on an upward trajectory. You can pre-order it Talking to Strangers*, the new Malcolm Gladwell book via deep blogger 📚 marginal revolution
Giant Squid, Phantom of the Deep, Reappears on Video NYT. Just in time for Cephalopod Week!
