As part of my continuing effort to transform Jeremylott.net into an all-obit blog, let us mourn the passing of Alfred Shaheen, popularizer of the Hawaiian shirt. He died Dec. 22 and was presumably buried in a ceremony that involved tiki torches, drinks with umbrellas, roast pig and the playing of Don Ho records:

Shaheen was born Jan. 31, 1922, in New Jersey, where his father and grandfather owned textile mills and clothing stores. He moved to Compton with his family when his father decided to relocate. The elder Shaheen would travel to Guam to buy silk for the family’s custom women’s wear line, and after falling in love with Hawaii on stopovers, he moved the family again, this time to Honolulu in 1938.

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He struck out on his own in 1948, opening Shaheen’s of Honolulu with four seamstresses his mother had trained. In those days of relative isolation, clothing manufacturers in Hawaii had to store a year’s worth of fabric to guard against the vagaries of shipping delays, strikes and other unforeseen factors. And they had to settle for whatever fabric the textile mill sent them.

Using equipment he built himself, Shaheen started a silk-screen printing plant in a rented Quonset hut in 1952.

He didn’t create the shirts exactly; the basic style existed since at least the 1930s, although it was Shaheen who apparently came up with the now-familiar style involving flowers and other patterns inspired by Polynesian culture.

According to the L.A. Times, things really took off for Shaheen after Elvis wore his shirts in the film Blue Hawaii. By then Shaheen was employing 400 people and making $4 million annually.

As the owner of numerous Hawaiian shirts myself, it was cool to learn the story behind their creation. What I love the most about it is how this part of “native” Hawaiian culture was thought up by a kid from New Jersey. Ain’t that America … 

[M]ore Detroiters get killed before Christmas so the murderers can avoid buying Christmas gifts.

– Matt LaBash, The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep.

The Grim Reaper claimed one more film noir icon before the year ended. In this case it was the great crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, AKA Richard Stark.

I cannot improve on Terry Teachout’s praise so I won’t. I’ll just point out that Westlake was responsible for two of the best Noir films of the last twenty years. He adapted Jim Thompson’s novel The Grifters to the screen in 1991 — just about the only film adaption of that notoriously difficult novelist that actually worked – and wrote the novel that was the basis of Mel Gibson’s 1999 film Payback. Check both of the out if you haven’t seen them yet.

The most interesting detail from his New York Times obit: he used manual typewriters until the day he died according to his agent, Laurence Kirshbaum:

“They came in perfectly typed,” Mr. Kirshbaum said. “You felt like it was almost written by hand.”

Otto Penzler, a longtime friend of Mr. Westlake’s and the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in TriBeCa, said, “He hated the idea of an electric typewriter because, he said, ‘I don’t want to sit there while I am thinking and have something hum at me.’ ”

The Archbishop of Canterbury can always be depended upon to add to the world’s stock of harmless amusement.

– John Derbyshire.

Jeremy’s New Year’s resolution was to post more often.

Reflecting back on 2008 — a year in which my two or three week guest-hosting gig on Jeremylott.net went 12 months overschedule and counting — I have to say it was a mixed bag but generally pretty darned good.

On the plus side, I traveled a bit. In February, I went barnstorming through Ohio as part of the Obama traveling corps. That was an interesting experience to say the least. I got to watch as the junior senator from Illinois crushed the Clinton machine and began his confident stride to the presidency. So I got to witness history, which is cool I guess. I even got to exchange a few jokes with the now-president-elect during a plane flight.

On the same trip I also got to offend Jesse Jackson, hear Mike Gravel tell me how he was on drugs “right now”, get completely ignored by Obama during his (few) press conferences and watch the Oscars at a champagne party hosted by Dave Axelrod.

On the downside of that trip, I hitched a ride back to DC with AmSpec’s Philip Klein. Trust me, you have not known white-knuckled terror until you have been in the passenger seat of a rental car while Mr. Klein drives uphill through a snowstorm on a narrow, winding, single-lane West Virginia mountain road while dipping a calzone in the marinara sauce balanced in his lap and conducting a telephone interview on his headset at the same time.

(more…)

The Village Voice has fired jazz critic/civil liberties columnist/atheist anti-abortion activist Nat Hentoff.

Hentoff appropriately has the last word:

With all due immodesty, I think it doesn’t help to lose me because people have told me they read The Voice not only for me, but certainly for me.

Regret the Error has handy compilation of the year’s “best” corrections and plagiarism. I’ve already noted my favorite for 2008 which resulted in an amusing thank you to this blog.

 … And a whole lot more can be found here.

Newdow’s lawsuit over the inauguration is a lot like the streaker at the Super Bowl: a pale, self-absorbed distraction. And anybody who looks at it carefully can see there’s not much there.

– Scott Walter, executive director of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Walker was quoted in the Washington Post reacting to an effort by atheist/publicity whore Michael Newdow to prevent Barack Obama from saying “so help me God” when he takes the oath of office.