See actor Peter Graves died a couple of months ago. One interesting tidbit I learned in reading about his passing was that he and James Arness (of Gunsmoke fame) were brothers. As Johnny Carson (or at least Dana Carvey in his famous SNL impression of him) was fond of saying “I did not know that.”
In the obits I read, he was usually lauded for his role as creepy Captain Clarence Oveur in Airplane. It’s probably just a generational thing, but for me Graves’ definitive role was as Jim Phelps in the popular espionage show Mission Impossible that ran on CBS from 1966-73. Other featured actors who appeared on the show as Phelps’ crack team of secret agents who deployed all sorts of gizmos (my favourite was the rubber masks that they’d pull off after they’d defied the odds and completed the mission) included Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, Greg Morris, Leonard Nimoy, Lesley Anne Warren and Lee Meriweather.
I mention all this now because of the subject of this lecture by Sydney Griffith at the University of Regina (Rm 207, Luther College). At this point in history, unfortunately, getting Christians and Muslims to live together in harmony in Baghdad, or anywhere else in the Middle East for that matter, truly does seem like Mission Impossible.
That’s at 2:30 p.m. Then at 7 p.m., Tracy Hamon is launching her new poetry collection Interuptions In Glass at Aegean Coast (1901 Hamilton). April, by the way, is National Poetry Month.
I know you want it, so here is. (YouTube)
And geez, is it long. It clocks in at two freaking minutes and 32 seconds. Life sure moved at a slower pace back then.
