Thor He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and Other Reader Mail June 19, 2000January 28, 2017 David D’Antonio: “As I’m sure others will tell you, its a mean trick to have ‘fake’ links. Both of the ‘here‘s in your final sentence Thursday weren’t links, they were in fact, just blue-colored words! Bad author, no biscuit!” George: “The other day you wrote a bit about Thor, the Viking who stood around 53rd Street. I also remember seeing him quite a few times on 6th Ave. He was actually known as Moondog and his real name was Louis Hardin. He passed away last year. here’s part of the obit from The New York Times.” By GLENN COLLINS The gaunt, blind musician known as Moondog, who was celebrated among New Yorkers for two decades as a mysterious and extravagantly garbed street performer but who went on to win acclaim in Europe as an avant-garde composer, conducting orchestras before royalty, died Wednesday in a hospital in Munster, Germany. He was 83. Day in and day out, the man who was originally named Louis T. Hardin was as taciturn and unchanging a landmark of the midtown Manhattan streetscape as the George M. Cohan statue in Duffy Square. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s, Hardin stood at attention like a sentinel on Avenue of the Americas around 54th Street. No matter the weather, he invariably dressed in a homemade robe, sandals, a flowing cape and a horned Viking helmet, the tangible expression of what he referred to as his “Nordic philosophy.” At his side he clutched a long spear of his own manufacture. Most of the passers-by who dismissed him as “the Viking of Sixth Avenue,” offering him contributions and buying copies of his music and poetry, were unaware that he had recorded his music on the CBS, Prestige, Epic, Angel and Mars labels. Hardin’s jazz-accented compositions, generally scored for small wind and percussion ensembles, often achieved a flowing, tonal symphonic style. One of his songs, “All Is Loneliness,” became a hit when recorded by Janis Joplin. Poor old Thor. Amazing! I had no idea! Live long enough, as they say, and all shall be revealed. (Especially when you have as eclectic and astute a readership as mine.) Esther: “Enough fluff. How about a stock tip?” Oh, gosh, another stock tip. Don’t you know you are supposed to put $250 a month into each of three index funds for the rest of your life and just leave it at that? Don’t you listen? Well, here is one I bought because, as usual, someone much smarter than me, who’s looked at it much more closely than I have, thinks it will do very well over the next couple of years: McKesson (MCK).