Over at the New York Review of Books, Frank Rich weighs in on Richard Zoglin’s new Bob Hope biography:

When Bob Hope died in 2003 at the age of one hundred, attention was not widely paid. The “entertainer of the century,” as his biographer Richard Zoglin calls him, had long been regarded by many Americans (if they regarded him at all) “as a cue-card-reading antique, cracking dated jokes about buxom beauty queens and Gerald Ford’s golf game.” A year before his death, The Onion had published the fake headline “World’s Last Bob Hope Fan Dies of Old Age.” Though Hope still had champions among comedy luminaries who had grown up idolizing him—Woody Allen and Dick Cavett, most prominently—Christopher Hitchens was in sync with the new century’s consensus when he memorialized him as “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny.”

Zoglin, a longtime editor and writer for Time, tells Hope’s story in authoritative detail. But his real mission is to explain and to counter the collapse of Hope’s cultural status, a decline that began well before his death and accelerated posthumously. The book is not a hagiography, however. While Zoglin seems to have received unstinting cooperation from the keepers of Hope’s flame, including his eldest daughter, Linda, he did so without strings of editorial approval attached. Hope’s compulsive womanizing, which spanned most of his sixty-nine-year marriage to the former nightclub singer Dolores Reade (who died at 102, in 2011), is addressed unblinkingly. And with good reason—it was no joke. At least three of his longer-term companions, including the film noir femme fatale Barbara Payton and a Miss World named Rosemarie Frankland whom Hope first met when she was eighteen and he was fifty-eight, died of drug or alcohol abuse.

[AP Photo via NPR]

Hey there folks, I haven’t gone away as some of you may have noticed on some of the recent threads, I’ve just been warming up (or trying to stay warm as the case may be).  Welcome back to Where & When! As you also may have noticed, I’ve taken the liberty of readjusting the game chronology to a single, progressive line of games in order to keep a better account of which challenge we happen to be up to (thus Season 2 is now incorporated to the original timeline, and I’ll get around to renaming those games shortly).  It’s been a harsh winter here in the outskirts of The Big Apple, and I’ve managed not to destroy anything that anyone would miss in between working outside in Frigidaire temps and recovering from non-flu like symptoms, but as our fearless leader Alex would most likely say, “Never mind that s***, here comes Game 68!“ :

Another easy (if you’re from the area) one to figure out, along with some embedded nostalgia if you really are familiar with it.  The good news is that it looks pretty much the same today; the buildings are all still around, that is.  Of course, it’s not as tidy as this seems to be, but time and cleanliness wait for no man.  So you’re job, as usual, is to track down the where and when of this picture and report back to us in the comments. This may be easier than I think as I look at the numerous clues in this one, so don’t pop a vessel if you get stuck.  Winner (and we know how to become a winner, eh?) gets the golden mug of our customary hot chocolate with whipped cream for the cold weather (though it is gonna be a bit nicer this week supposedly), and the rest of us will share a spot of tea for our efforts.  Bonus? Tell us what big store is off-screen to the left at the time this picture was likely taken and you’ll get a few warm brownies with whatever you’re drinking.  Tell us a neat story about this area and I might sprinkle a dash of brandy to sweeten your experience >;)

So, let’s all get on this and have some fun, eh? I can’t make any promises on how soon I will return, but hopefully there will be more opportunities to play again soon. In he meantime, discuss, enjoy and don’t peek at the photo credit!

Photo Credit: Al Ponte’s Time Machine

Couple of fun mixes from the one and only Prince Paul to keep you warm:

Prince Paul's " Its Not the size of your Mix Its how you use it " Mix Tape Vol 1 (Obscure Series) by Prince Paul on Mixcloud

Prince Paul's " Its Not the size of your Mix Its how you use it " Mix Tape Vol 2 (Obscure Series) by Prince Paul on Mixcloud

Picture by Bags.

I have a friend who’ll watch the NFL and occasionally check in on a hockey or basketball game but who really sits around all winter waiting for baseball to return. He’d watch a channel that just showed a still picture of a baseball; that’d be enough to keep him warm.

I spoke to him  yesterday and he was so excited to see an exhibition game on TV.

So happy, in fact, he got busy with photoshop and sent this.

Ah, baseball.

Curt Schilling kicks ’em in the Grill. 

…But keep in mind, this is Curt Schilling.

Today gives the first spring training game for the Yanks.

Chad Jennings has the latest. 

[Image via Muskegon Big Red Baseball via It’s a Long Season]

These Michael Caine impressions are funny.

The great Saturnino Orestes Arrieta, aka Minnie Minoso, is dead.

One of my favorite players in history, he was bona fide even if the Hall snubbed him.

Thank you, Papi.

Rest in Peace, Holmes.

Okay, random question of the day: Who were the most Internationally famous athletes of the 20th Century? I’ve got Ruth, Ali, Pele and Jordan.

It doesn’t matter if people around the world knew or cared about baseball or boxing or basketball. Just that these guys were recognized as being famous.

Who else? Tiger, Lance? I don’t know anything about cricket and little about soccer–Maradona, perhaps?

Pre-WWII is harder to figure: Jesse Owens, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis? DiMaggio because of Marilyn–and even Hemingway? There’s no right answer, I’m just throwing it out there.

Whadda ya hear, whadda ya say?

Master Class. 

“There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements, and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics, but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.”–Flannery O’Connor

Our man Ken Arneson has a thoughtful and intriguing post over at his site. It’s involved and absolutely rewarding.

[Image Via: Toile in the Family]

I’ll never forget the number. Sports Phone. Man, I used to sneak calls as much as I could in the early-mid-Eighties. I had to sneak them because the calls were expensive and if too many showed up on the phone bill my ass was new mown grass. But still, in those days I’d do whatever I could to get an up-to-date score so the risk was worth it.

For a good time, head on over to Grantland and check out this history of Sports Phone by the talented Joe Delessio.

[Photo Via: No Mas]

You guys know all about the great Lo Hud Yankee blog. Pete Abraham started it and Chad Jennings keeps it purring along. For all the latest spring training whatnot, look no further than your one-stop shop for Yankeeness. 

[Picture by Lucy Eldridge via It’s a Long Season]

C.C. weighs in.

The sun is out. Roll along.

Picture by Bags.

Pitchers n catchers and dreams of someplace warm. 

[Photo Credit: Francis Miller via It’s a Long Season]

Okay, so this is from the movie, but how you gonna complain about Cyd Charisse? Still, check out Terry Teachout’s review of The Library Of America’s 2-volume tribute to the golden age of the American musical:

What is America’s greatest contribution to the arts? Time was when many, perhaps most, people would have pointed to the Broadway musical as the likeliest candidate for admission to the pantheon. Theatergoers around the world have long rejoiced in the delights of the genre, including some whom one might well have thought too snobbish to admit its excellence. (Evelyn Waugh, who had next to no use for anything made in America, saw the London production of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate a half-dozen times, pronouncing it, according to one biographer, “ingenious and admirable.”) But big-budget musical comedy has been in increasingly steep decline since the 1970s, and 10 long years have gone by since The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the last homegrown musical to be wholeheartedly embraced by audiences and critics alike, made it to Broadway.

…That’s what makes the publication of American Musicals so timely. These two volumes contain the unabridged scripts of 16 “classic” shows written between 1927 and 1969, the period now usually regarded as the “golden age” of the Broadway musical. The table of contents is itself a capsule history of the genre at its peak: Show Boat (1927), As Thousands Cheer (1933), Pal Joey (1940), Oklahoma! (1943), On the Town (1944), Finian’s Rainbow (1947), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), The Pajama Game (1954), My Fair Lady (1956), Gypsy (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Cabaret (1966), and 1776 (1969). Unlike their successors, these shows have retained their popularity. Twelve have returned to Broadway in the past decade, and two are playing there as I write. If there is a core musical-comedy repertory, this is it.

This is goodness. 

Oliver Sacks, writing in the Times, on learning he has terminal cancer:

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

What would you do if you knew you had 2 years left, or less? Would you live your life differently from how you’re living it now? I know I probably would–clear away the clutter, the neurosis, and savor life as much as possible. The trick, of course, is to try and live life as if you knew it was going to end soon.

In the early nineties, I went to the Museum of Broadcasting with a friend to watch Dennis Potter’s final TV interview with Melyn Bragg. Potter was dying and during the interview, he drank liquid morphine to numb the pain. There was no telling if he’d be able to remain lucid but he did and he was beautiful. This is what I remember most:

We all, we’re the one animal that knows that we’re going to die, and yet we carry on paying our mortgages, doing our jobs, moving about, behaving as though there’s eternity in a sense. And we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is is, and it is now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can’t. It’s in us, but we can’t actually; it’s not there in front of us. However predictable tomorrow is, and unfortunately for most people, most of the time, it’s too predictable, they’re locked into whatever situation they’re locked into … Even so, no matter how predictable it is, there’s the element of the unpredictable, of the you don’t know. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.

Below my window in Ross, when I’m working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people – bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.