Enotes

I know this: our hot pepper plants aren't enjoying the cool summer we're having in Metro Detroit. But fie on them. The mercury hasn't scraped much past the mid-80s so far, and we're in mid-July. I couldn't be happier. I don't do well with the heat. The pepper plants do, however, and ours have been struggling to bear fruit, but like I said, fie on them. I can buy hot peppers at the market, although there is a charm to growing your own. But if that's the trade off---store-bought hot peppers in exchange for summer days in which I can breathe without an oxygen mask, then I'll take it and run. Normally by now, we would have suffered through oppressive heat, with temps in the high-80s and low-90s, with enough humidity to curl you from hair to toe. But this year? So far, so good. Cool evenings, enabling you to sleep with the windows open, and is there anything better than breathing in fresh night air as you slumber? Pleasant daytime temps, w...

Which Dick Van Patten would you like to remember and mourn today? Is it the actor Van Patten, who most famously seeped into our consciousness as Tom Bradford, the patriarch of the TV family on ABC's "Eight is Enough" from 1977-81? Is it the tennis player Van Patten, whose sons got some of the old man's genes and did pretty good on the court as well? Is it the animal activist Van Patten, who worked tirelessly for our furried and feathered friends, including founding National Guide Dog Month in 2008? Is it the entrepreneur Van Patten, who co-founded Natural Balance Pet Foods in 1989? Take your pick---or take them all, if you'd like. Van Patten passed away on Tuesday at age 86. Some reports blame the cause of death on complications related to diabetes. There was some juice to the Van Patten name in the entertainment industry. There was Dick, of course, and there was his younger sister Joyce, a fellow actor. There were the Van Patten boys---Vincent, Nels...

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm 51 years old. I only tell you this because, when she was my age, Jeralean Talley was living in the year 1950. And she continued to live, some 65 more years, until passing peacefully the other day in her home in Inkster . Jeralean was 116 years, 25 days old when she slipped away, ending her two-month reign as the world's oldest living person. I wonder what it would have been like to be my age now, in 1950. Harry S. Truman was president. Television was still a relatively new thing and lots of folks didn't even own one. And if they did. it broadcast everything in beautiful, gorgeous, vivid...black and white. The NHL had six teams. Major League Baseball had all of 16. The NFL was still finding its audience as teams were experimenting with something called the forward pass. The NBA was four years old. The only phones we had were mounted on our kitchen walls. You had to actually read the hands of a clock or wristwatch to tell ...

Comedians/actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were married for 61 years, but had they not heeded warning signs, the marriage might have ended some 44 years ago. The comedy team of Stiller & Meara was seemingly cruising along in 1970, having just enjoyed a nice run of 36 appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show"   in the 1960s, when both members of the team/marriage sensed that something was amiss. With an act based largely on their real-life domestic trials and tribulations, Stiller and Meara found that despite their success---or maybe because of it---the line between life at home and life on stage was getting further blurred as the years went on. "I didn't know where the act ended and our marriage began," Meara told People  magazine in 1977 . "We were like two guys," Stiller said in the same article. With Meara questioning things and Stiller worried that he might lose his wife, the act was disbanded in 1970. But they never stopped working ...

The only thing that is certain in the road rage trial of Martin Zale is that it was tragic. A wife widowed. Children growing up father-less. After that, it gets tricky. Zale is the motorist who is accused of murder in the fatal shooting of Derek Flemming last September 2 in Genoa Township, at Grand River Avenue and Chilson Road. Zale was allegedly driving recklessly and Flemming, on a beautiful afternoon after having lunch with his wife, didn't appreciate it. The vehicles stopped at a red light---Zale's in front of Flemming's---and Flemming got out of his vehicle to confront Zale. Witnesses say that Flemming looked very angry and had both fists clenched as he approached Zale's truck. Moments later, Flemming was dead---shot once in the face. He died instantly. Zale didn't flee; rather, he pulled off to the side of the road and called his lawyer. Those are the basic facts. Zale's trial is happening now, and I think it's going to be fascinating ...

As if suicide isn't rotten enough, it invariably raises more questions than it answers. That's because suicide often doesn't answer any questions at all. Even a note left behind won't necessarily satisfy all the curiosity. In fact, suicide notes are likely to create more questions than they answer, as well. A suicide note is like a press conference where a statement is issued and the issuer scrambles away, without taking any queries. Sawyer Sweeten is dead. Apparently it's suicide. Sawyer, on the verge of turning 20, was one-half of the identical twin actors who played Ray and Debra Barone's twin boys on "Everybody Loves Raymond" (1996-2005). Sawyer played Geoffrey and Sullivan Sweeten played Michael. The twins' older sister Madylin played older sister Ally on the TV show. According to reports, Sawyer was visiting family in Texas when he apparently shot himself on the front porch of the house where he was staying. In the early years of ...

They were television advertising icons who resided on the banks of our cultural consciousness. Mr. Whipple (Charmin bathroom tissue). Madge the manicurist (Palmolive dish detergent). The Maytag Repair Man. Even the Qantas koala bear. Those were just a few commercial characters who invaded our living rooms in the 1970s and '80s. Their ads---usually 60 seconds in length or even longer---were rarely the same. The format might have been nearly identical, and of course the tag lines were ("DON'T squeeze the Charmin!"), but each appearance by Mr. Whipple or Madge usually had them interacting with different customers. The actors behind the characters were often nameless, as it should have been, but I'm sure their paychecks weren't nameless---or paltry. The pitchman on TV these days is usually a local litigator or a voice-over hawking prescription meds. There isn't really any character that is iconic---no one who, when they appear on the screen, instantl...