Howard Stern pays tribute to Richard Simmons.

"I have some news to tell you. Please don’t be sad. I am ….dying.... The truth is we all are dying. Every day we live we are getting closer to our death."

"Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to enjoy your life to the fullest every single day. Get up in the morning and look at the sky… count your blessings and enjoy.  Start with a healthy breakfast.... Then there is lunch. How about a nice salad? Don’t eat your dinner too late.... Every day that you are alive you have got to move.... I have a lot of workout videos on YouTube that you can use....Tell the ones that you love that you love them... If you have time I want you to listen to a terrific song. It is by Tim McGraw it is called Live Like You Were Dying. Live today and don’t forget to pray."

Wrote Richard Simmons, on Facebook last March.

I clicked there from Richard Simmons, legendary fitness personality, dies at 76/Simmons was found unresponsive Saturday at his Hollywood Hills home, one day after his 76th birthday, two law enforcement sources said" (NBC News).

"I like Cali sober because for me it means that even though I’m getting older, and I take monthlong breaks from drinking occasionally, it doesn’t mean that my life can’t still be enjoyable."

"It’s sort of equivalent to being a silver fox: your hair might be gray, and you might be taking it a little slower, but you can still be hot!"

Says Naomi Fry, a staff writer at The New Yorker, quoted in "What Does It Mean to Be ‘Cali Sober’?" (NY Magazine). NY Magazine defines "Cali sober" as abstaining from alcohol but smoking marijuana.

Every Urban Dictionary definition for "silver fox" says it's a sexy older man.

Wikipedia has a list of famous people who have been nicknamed "silver fox" — and all are men (George Clooney,  Anderson Cooper, Charlie Rich, Duke Snider, Eduard Shevardnadze...).

The Merriam-Webster website defines the "silver fox" as "generally meaning 'an attractive middle-aged man having mostly gray or white hair'" and gives a history of the term going back to a 1920s baseball player, Jess Petty, who had gray hair. But...

Silver fox is sometimes used to refer to women with gray or white hair as well (in fact, the bestselling exercise video Richard Simmons and the Silver Foxes from 1987 clearly meant both men and women, since they perform the workout together behind the fitness guru), but many uses make clear reference to the fact that the term usually designates men...

I don't think Naomi Fry is very old herself. I was reading her Twitter feed...

it's like he's clamping down on a piece of bark https://t.co/56iHvAcHPk

— Naomi Fry (@frynaomifry) October 28, 2019

... but it strikes me as really unattractive for an older women to proclaim that she's sexually attractive. And I feel completely alienated from the idea that you're "hot" and preserving your last chance to have an "enjoyable" life because you smoke weed. And I see no equivalence between leaving your head in its naturally gray condition and infusing your natural head with an intoxicating substance.

"Richard Simmons must pay National Enquirer, Radar nearly $130,000, judge rules."

He sued them for defamation after they wrote that he was transitioning to female. The judge dismissed the lawsuit last year on the ground that it doesn't necessarily hurt one's reputation to be known as transgender, and now Simmons is ordered pay the defendants' attorneys' fees, the LA Times reports.

I don't remember reading about the judge's decision (in September), but last May I'd blogged "Richard Simmons sues The National Enquirer for defamation — but is saying that someone has had sex reassignment surgery defamatory?" At the time, I wrote:

I notice the difficulty — if one wants to maintain pro-transgender values — of arguing that it hurts one's reputation to be known to have had what the NYT calls "a sex change." The Times serves up a lawprof quote: "I think it would be an open question as to whether or not it’s capable of a defamatory meaning."

I'm trying to decide if I'm surprised at the outcome of the case. It seems that Simmons will appeal the decision.

Richard Simmons sues The National Enquirer for defamation — but is saying that someone has had sex reassignment surgery defamatory?

The NYT explains the lawsuit and the National Enquirer's response:

“For decades, Richard Simmons has used his outrageous behavior to build his brand and his bank account,” the [National Enquirer's] statement said. “For Mr. Simmons to now claim that his privacy has been invaded is hypocritical when his entire livelihood is based upon the public consumption of his image.”

The statement, published alongside photos of Mr. Simmons in a wig, necklace and dress, described his life as a “legitimate news story that demands coverage.”

Mr. Simmons’s lawyers acknowledge in the lawsuit that he has dressed in costume as a woman as part of his persona, but they suggest that is a far cry from a sex change.

Since Simmons is a public figure, he will need to prove that the statement was published with a reckless disregard of the truth. But the National Review seems to be suggesting that the statement isn't even defamatory, that is, it doesn't harm his reputation. I notice the difficulty — if one wants to maintain pro-transgender values — of arguing that it hurts one's reputation to be known to have had what the NYT calls "a sex change."

The Times serves up a lawprof quote: "I think it would be an open question as to whether or not it’s capable of a defamatory meaning."

"The Missing Richard Simmons Creator Left a Boom Box on Simmons’s Stoop..."

"... a Gesture That Did Not Move Simmons to Talk to Him."

Dan Taberski spent six episodes of his morally suspect podcast Missing Richard Simmons slowly coming to terms with [the conclusion that Simmons didn't want to talk to anyone outside of his close circle of intimates]...  Taberski decided to make Missing Richard Simmons readily available to the potential Luddite with an instance of door-to-door delivery. “Sometimes I think of Richard Simmons like my grandmother, like I’m not quite sure if he knows how the internet works… So it was literally just putting what we had done into a boom box and putting it on his stoop, and to get his reaction so that we would know that he had heard it,” he explained.

You can listen — without the assistance of a boombox — to the whole 6-episode show here. The first 2 episodes are great. It goes interestingly to hell in episode 3, and after that it never redeems itself. Taberski's continued groping for attention — with this boombox business — squicks me out.

"But as unsatisfying as the show was as a mystery, it was fascinating as a study of what we ask of public figures — of what we feel entitled to ask of them."

"If there's one thing that the podcast showed, and in fact if there's one thing on which Taberski rested his thesis that Simmons' withdrawal was worthy of further investigation, it's that Richard Simmons gave a preposterous amount of himself away to the people who bought his products, came to his classes, went on his cruises, and simply told him how much pain they were in because they thought he would understand. The thesis of the show is largely that a man who was so close to people and loved being close to people would never just stop doing it.... The sad thing about Missing Richard Simmons is that if Richard Simmons finally decided to drop all of those rocks and rest — whatever state he was in when he did — then nothing makes it clearer how he got to that point than someone making a hit out of demanding over and over some kind of explanation. Perhaps he finally drew a boundary."

Writes Linda Holmes at NPR now that "Missing Richard Simmons" has released its 6th a final episode.

You can listen to all 6 episodes here. The first 3 episodes are excellent, setting up the mystery. The last 3 are less good, because Taberski is too wedded to his own ideas of why it's a mystery... and that it is a mystery. How can he just come out and say actually it's not a mystery? If it's not, what's the point of the podcast? If Richard Simmons doesn't need help, then why are you pestering him?

I think Richard Simmons put immense energy and emotion into playing the character he inhabited in public. He decided the show was over for whatever personal reasons he had, and he's gone private. That's his point: He's private now, and his reasons are private. Accept it!

"'Missing Richard Simmons' speaks to both the possibilities and the limits of the emerging prestige podcast form."

"Many of the podcast’s tropes — the mystery framing, the crowdsourcing of clues from the audience and a format that focuses on the narrator as much as his subject — are borrowed directly from 'Serial.' By turning a journalist into a friend and casting a man’s personal life as a mystery, 'Missing Richard Simmons' has retooled the stale Hollywood documentary as an addictive media sensation. But it’s also turned it into a morally suspect exercise: An invasion of privacy masquerading as a love letter. Mr. Simmons is a public figure, and that gives journalists a lot of latitude to pry. But a friend who claims to want to help Mr. Simmons should probably just leave him alone."

Writes Amanda Hess in "'Missing Richard Simmons,' the Morally Suspect Podcast" at the NYT.

I've listened to all the as-yet available episodes of "Missing Richard Simmons" and I'm not so negative about it. I think the podcaster, Dan Taberski, continually examines the morality of his project and exhibits kindness and empathy toward Simmons. The podcast has greatly increased my respect and good feeling toward Simmons — to the point where I could even suspect Taberski of being in cahoots with Simmons in some extremely clever PR project. Simmons has spent decades promoting himself one way or another. Why wouldn't he retool his fame like this?

I guess I should send my theory in for Taberski to examine. It could be whole episode!

Speaking of men in shorts...

Here's a NYT article about how Richard Simmons has gotten a new lease on fame through the internet, even though he's 65 years old and like "a lot of older people in show business, Mr. Simmons has been slow to fully grasp social media."

In late July, Mr. Simmons started a weekly YouTube series called “Workout Wednesdays,” with theAudience pairing him with young Web celebrities like Cassey Ho, whose YouTube fitness channel has more than 800,000 subscribers. Coming soon is a separate video series involving the D.J. Steve Aoki, who has 2.4 million Facebook fans. Mr. Aoki will go teach at Slimmons; Mr. Simmons plans to go crowd-surfing at a concert.

“There’s just something so cool about the way he does his thing, it’s punk rock,” Mr. Aoki said. “I’m definitely wearing a pair of those super-short shorts when I go. Those are dope, man!”

So... we's got Steve Aoki vouching for him... and his shorts. Your logical fallacy is: appeal to authority.

Macho Jesus for men.

"God called [Mark] Driscoll to preach to men — particularly young men — to save them from an American Protestantism that has emasculated Christ and driven men from church pews with praise music that sounds more like boy-band ballads crooned to Jesus than 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' What bothers Driscoll — and the growing number of evangelical pastors who agree with him — is not the trope of Jesus-as-lover. After all, St. Paul tells us that the Church is the bride of Christ. What really grates is the portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into 'a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,' a 'neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.'"