Saturday Night on the Obituary Page

 Yes, I knew about the death of singer/musician/songwriter Neil Sedaka yesterday, but I had a lot of stuff to deal with late in the afternoon, so I decided not to post anything online about anything yesterday.

Anyway, Neil died at the age of 86, so he had a good, long life. Perhaps his most famous recording was "Breaking Up is Hard to Do."  He wrote and performed not only his own hits, he also wrote songs for others:

Snip:

Sedaka's songwriting prowess extended beyond his own career. He and Greenfield wrote the perky pop tune "Love Will Keep Us Together" in 1973, which Sedaka recorded. But it was the 1975 version by Captain & Tennille that made the song a worldwide smash and karaoke favorite.

Sedaka's work also infiltrated the catalogs of Elvis Presley ("Solitaire"), Frank Sinatra ("The Hungry Years"), Tom Jones ("Puppet Man") and The Monkees ("When Love Comes Knockin' At Your Door").

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Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been confirmed dead, now that the US, with Israel, has decided to pull bullshit in the Middle East.  

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I missed this obituary of former child actress Lauren Chapin, best known for playing the youngest daughter, Kitten, on the 1950s classic sitcom Father Knows Best.  She was 80 years old and passed away from cancer on February 24.

She had been an ordained minister and often appeared on religious talk shows like PTL.  As a young woman, she had some substance abuse issues.

As noted in the link, she got the part on Father Knows Best because she strongly resembled one of Young's four daughters.

Snip:

Chapin’s older TV siblings were Betty “Princess” Anderson (Elinor Donahue) and James “Bud” Anderson Jr. (Billy Gray), and their mom was the level-headed homemaker Margaret Anderson (Jane Wyatt). Young played Jim Anderson, an insurance salesman.

She had brothers who were also actors.

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I

returned to Reno from going the "long way" through Sacramento and up I80 over Donner Summit. It takes two hours longer than going the shortcut through McCloud and Susanville, but I felt like going that way.

I somehow managed to get up enough energy to go down to Best Buy and pick up the first season set of Father Knows Best, a show I haven't seen since it was syndicated in the 1960s. I have heard some of the episodes are edited ones because the available unedited prints were not very good. I guess Sony owns the rights to the original prints, but it won't release them, so we consumers are stuck with imperfect copies. Still, this is the only way to get it.

One of the actors in the show, Lauren Chapin, who became a born-again Christian quite a few years ago after having many personal problems, has an official website up on the series.

I also spent some time picking up some compilations of 1950s and 1960s hits. I have tons of CDs, which I won't get rid of, and I intend on continuing to buy them even as I do have iPods and such. I like the tangible. Anyway, there were some songs I wanted on them, including "Time Won't Let Me," by the Outsiders; "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," by Manfred Mann; "It's Only Make Believe" by Conway Twitty; and both hit versions of "Young Love" by Sonny James and Tab Hunter. Since I have a wide variety of songs and genres on my iPod, I thought by having both versions of "Young Love" would cover both kinds of young love, though Hunter's version didn't change the lyrics of James' version. If I have to explain this, well, shit, take a look at this site.

Anyway, that's about it for me. I am feeling pretty faint.