This is possibly the most fun I’ve ever had reading an obituary. This guy sounds like possibly the most glorious fuckup who ever lived, and the NYT obituarist seems barely able to contain his tone of gleeful derision.

Huntington Hartford, who inherited a fortune from the A. & P. grocery business and lost most of it chasing his dreams as an entrepreneur, arts patron and man of leisure, died Monday at his home in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. He was 97.

There were some major failures:

…he set about developing a resort with the construction of the Ocean Club and other amenities. Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, overextended and unable to get a gambling license, he wound up losing an estimated $25 million to $30 million.

There were many lesser ventures that either bombed or fizzled, among them an automated parking garage in Manhattan, a handwriting institute, a modeling agency and his own disastrous stage adaptation of “Jane Eyre.” He inherited an estimated $90 million and lost an estimated $80 million of it.

But no task seems too varied or small for this guy to fail:

In 1940, Mr. Hartford tried being a reporter for the New York newspaper PM, after putting up $100,000 to help get the paper started. If nothing else, the experience produced one of the all-time great excuses for missing deadline: he once sailed his yacht to cover an assignment on Long Island, and upon returning to the city could find no place to tie up and come ashore with the story.

With the start of World War II, he donated the yacht to the Coast Guard. In return he was given the command of a modest supply ship in the Pacific. He ran it aground twice — once, he said later, because his navigational charts were out of date, the other time because “I mistook feet for fathoms.”

And he also did not fare quite so well in love. Here’s how things ended with wife #4:

In 1974 Mr. Hartford married Elaine Kay, a former hairdresser more than 40 years his junior. They, too, were divorced, in 1981, but continued to live together in Mr. Hartford’s 20-room duplex apartment at 1 Beekman Place in Manhattan. In 1984, Ms. Kay and a friend were arrested and charged with tying up a teenage secretary to Mr. Hartford and shaving her head. The directors of the building voted for eviction.

Terri has posted some items pertaining to things mentioned here, namely Alice vs. Dorothy and many wonderful pictures from the show we went to Monday night.

At the risk of becoming nothing but a YouTube link blog, here are two or three more minutes of your life that you’re never getting back.

I love when he does the David Byrne “slicing the sausage on my arm” dance move.

Achewood has been totally brilliant for the last few weeks. Start here and work your way up to the present.

A favorite blog closes shop. Grazie for all the great stuff I found through you over the years.

Moderately interesting reading here, and here.

More academic reading here.

It was always bogus, though, right? I mean, how do you quantify the value of a network? It was only ever something that made intuitive, poetic sense.

Aside: I like Facebook better than a lot of other of the big social networking sites, but LinkedIn got me a new job, I like simple old Flickr better, and I like my blog the best.

Posts like this are why I keep Unremitting Failure in my RSS reader.