RIP [Archive] - Page 2 - Butch Femme Planet

Kobi

07-13-2012, 06:17 PM

Born December 13, 1934, Zanuck, was the son of legendary producer and studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, and amassed his own impressive resume of notable films going back several decades. Zanuck gave a young TV director named Steven Spielberg his entrée into features with the low-budget road adventure “The Sugarland Express,” which was well-reviewed but only modestly successful financially. Their next collaboration, “Jaws,” fared somewhat better. That movie virtually invented the summer blockbuster and changed the movie industry forever.

That kicked off a wild run of movies, good, bad and indifferent, that made Zanuck a force to be reckoned with during the seventies and eighties. Zanuck is a credited producer or executive producer on titles such as Clint Eastwood's “The Eiger Sanction,” the biopic“MacArthur,” which starred Gregory Peck, “Jaws 2,” Sidney Lumet's “The Verdict” with Paul Newman and James Mason, Ron Howard's “Cocoon” and “Driving Miss Daisy.

In the nineties he produced some forgettable commercial fare, ranging from “Chain Reaction” to “Deep Impact,” and Lee Tamahori’s “Mulholland Falls,” with Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith, Chazz Palminteri, Chris Penn, Jennifer Connelly and Treat Williams.

He also produced “Road to Perdition,” hands-down the best gangster movie since “The Godfather.” That movie was directed by Sam Mendes, and starred Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Daniel Craig.

More recently he emerged as the producer of most of Tim Burton’s output, including “Big Fish,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” “Alice in Wonderland” and this summer’s “Dark Shadows.”

http://www.examiner.com/article/producer-richard-d-zanuck-inventor-of-the-summer-blockbuster-dies-at-age-77-2

Kobi

07-15-2012, 12:24 PM

http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/news/photos/2012/07/15/celeste-holm-220-rtrkpex.jpg

Celeste Holm, a versatile, bright-eyed blonde who soared to Broadway fame in Oklahoma! and won an Oscar in Gentleman's Agreement died Sunday. She was 95.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Holm played everyone from Ado Annie — the girl who just can't say no in Oklahoma! — to a worldly theatrical agent in the 1991 comedy I Hate Hamlet to guest star turns on TV shows such as Fantasy Island to Bette Davis' best friend in All About Eve.

She won the Academy Award in 1947 for best supporting actress for her performance in Gentlemen's Agreement and received Oscar nominations for Come to the Stable (1949) and All About Eve (1950).

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2012/07/15/celeste-holm.html?cmp=rss

Kobi

07-16-2012, 04:15 PM

Singer Kitty Wells, whose hits such as Making Believe and It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels made her the first female superstar of country music, died Monday. She was 92.

Her solo recording career lasted from 1952 to the late 1970s and she made concert tours from the late 1930s until 2000.

She recorded approximately 50 albums, had 25 Top 10 country hits and went around the world several times. From 1953 to 1968, various polls listed Wells as the No. 1 female country singer.

In 1976, she was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame and 10 years later received the Pioneer Award from the Academy of Country Music. In 1991 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences — the group that presents the Grammy Awards.

Her 1955 hit Making Believe was on the movie soundtrack of Mississippi Burning that was released 33 years later. Among her other hits were The Things I Might Have Been, Release Me, Amigo's Guitar, Heartbreak USA, Left to Right and a version of I Can't Stop Loving You.

In 1989, Wells collaborated with Brenda Lee, Loretta Lynn and k.d. lang on the record The Honky Tonk Angels Medley.

Her songs tended to treasure devotion and home life, with titles like Searching (For Someone Like You) and Three Ways (To Love You). But her It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels gave the woman's point of view about the wild side of life. The song opened the way for women to present their view of life and love in country music. It also encouraged Nashville songwriters to begin writing from a woman's perspective.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/obit/story/2012-07-16/kitty-wells-queen-of-country-music/56256608/1

Kobi

07-16-2012, 04:34 PM

LONDON (AP) — British rocker Jon Lord, the keyboardist whose powerful, driving tones helped turn Deep Purple and Whitesnake into two of the most popular hard rock acts in a generation, died Monday. He was 71.

Lord co-wrote some of Deep Purple's most famous tunes, including "Smoke on the Water," and later had a successful solo career following his retirement from the band in 2002.

Lord got his musical start playing piano, first taking classical music lessons before shifting to rock and roll.

After moving to London to attend drama school, he joined blues band the Artwoods in 1964 and later toured with The Flowerpot Men — known for their hit "Let's Go To San Francisco" — before joining Deep Purple in 1968.

Deep Purple — which featured Lord along with singer Ian Gillan, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, drummer Ian Paice and bassist Roger Glover — was one of the top hard rock bands of the '70s. Influenced by classical music, blues and jazz, Lord took his Hammond organ and distorted its sound to powerful effect on songs including "Hush," ''Highway Star," ''Lazy" and "Child in Time."

The group went on to sell more than 100 million albums before splitting in 1976.

Lord went on to play with hard rock group Whitesnake in the late 1970s and early 1980s and later, a re-formed Deep Purple.

http://news.yahoo.com/deep-purples-jon-lord-dies-age-71-181213090.html

Kobi

07-16-2012, 04:38 PM

Donald J. Sobol, the author who dreamed up the kid sleuth Encyclopedia Brown and wrote dozens of books that sold millions of copies, has died at age 87.

His series featured amateur investigator Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, who would unravel local mysteries with the help of his encyclopedic knowledge of facts great and small. The books, first published in the early 1960s, became staples in classrooms and libraries nationwide. They were translated into 12 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.

The Encyclopedia Brown books also featured Brown's friend and detective partner, the tough and athletic Sally Kimball. John Sobol said his dad was ahead of his times in creating a strong female character.

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Encyclopedia Brown series. Donald Sobol's latest adventure, Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Soccer Scheme, will be published in October, according to a release from Penguin.

Born in New York City, Sobol served in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II and graduated from Oberlin College. He later worked as a copywriter at the New York Sun, where he eventually became a reporter. His first book was rejected two dozen times before it was published, his son said.

In 1958, Sobol became a successful syndicated columnist with his "Two Minute Mystery" series before publishing Encyclopedia Brown Boy Detective five years later to launch the most popular series of his career.

The Encyclopedia Brown concept, in which the solutions to the mysteries are shown after the story, came to Sobol while he was researching an article at the New York Public Library. A clerk mistakenly handed him a game book, with puzzles on one side and the solutions on the other.

Sobol decided to write a mystery series with the same premise. He earned an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America award for the series.

John Sobol said his father would frequently test out story ideas on his four children. "We would talk about it sitting around dinner," he said, adding, "My mom also helped inject humor into the stories."

The series inevitably attracted Hollywood, which tried for decades to adapt the books for the big screen, with Anthony Hopkins, Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn among those interested in the project. But legal disputes over who controls film rights have prevented any feature film from being made.

Sobol's work never brought him the financial success of blockbusters like the Harry Potter series, his son said, but his father loved hearing from countless librarians and parents about children who hated to read until they picked up an Encyclopedia Brown book.

Sobol wrote more than 80 books, working daily until the very end.

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/16/156860357/encyclopedia-brown-author-donald-sobol-dies-at-87

Kobi

07-16-2012, 04:45 PM

Stephen R. Covey, author of the bestselling self-help book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," died Monday, his family announced. Covey, 79, had been injured in a major bicycle accident in April.

Covey's signature work was published in 1989 and became a lasting bestseller — in 1994, it had been on the New York Times bestseller list for 220 weeks. Currently its sales are tallied at more than 20 million copies. He went on to write a number of sequels and spinoffs, including "The Third Alternative" (2011) and "The Eighth Habit" (2005). He was also a sought-after management advisor.

Covey was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He got an MBA at Harvard, then returned to Utah to get a doctorate from Brigham Young University, where he taught business management.

The Salt Lake Tribune writes:

Covey’s management post at BYU led to "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which launched a second career as management guru for companies and government agencies, among them Saturn, Ritz Carlton, Proctor & Gamble, Sears Roebuck and Co., NASA, Black & Decker, Public Broadcasting Service, Amway, American Cancer Society and the Internal Revenue Service.

The books have legions of adherents in corporate America who swear by its principles. But critics tend to see it as part of a cult of the self-help American frenzy of past decades or so that tends to trivialize big problems.

Covey founded a Utah-based management training center that sold books and videos and held training seminars. In 1997 it merged with FranklinQuest, a deal from which Covey was said to have made about $27 million in cash and stock.

"We believe that organizational behavior is individual behavior collectivized," he told Fortune magazine in 1994. "We want to take this to the whole world."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/07/stephen-covey-7-highly-effective-habits-author-has-died.html

Kobi

07-17-2012, 12:48 AM

PALM DESERT, Calif. — The director and producer behind the television classics "I Love Lucy" and "Bewitched" has died. Bill Asher was 90.

His wife, Meredith, says he died Monday at a facility in Palm Desert, Calif., of complications from Alzheimer's disease.

Asher was best known for his work on "I Love Lucy," where he directed Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz for 100 of the show's 181 episodes between 1952 and 1957.

He also produced and directed "The Patty Duke Show" and "Bewitched," which starred his then-wife Elizabeth Montgomery. Montgomery and Asher had three children together.

Asher brought Sally Field to TV screens in "Gidget," and took the same sensibility to movies as director of the teen romps "Beach Blanket Bingo" and "Beach Party," starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501368_162-57473510/i-love-lucy-director-bill-asher-dies-at-90/

Kobi

07-17-2012, 12:49 AM

Ya know with the multitude of deaths over the last week, my childhood is flashing before my eyes. :blink:

Kobi

07-20-2012, 07:43 AM

http://img2-3.timeinc.net/people/i/2012/news/120730/sylvia-woods-440.jpg

Sylvia Woods, whose namesake soul-food restaurant has been a Harlem landmark for nearly half a century, died Thursday at her home in Westchester County, N.Y., only hours before she was to receive a special award from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, reports The New York Times.

She was 86, and although no cause of death was announced, Woods had been suffering with Alzheimer's disease the past few years. Her family said she was surrounded by loved ones at the time of her death.

"We lost a legend today," Bloomberg said Thursday, reports New York's Daily News. "Generations of family and friends have come together at what became a New York institution."

Sylvia's Restaurant, at Lenox Avenue near 127th Street (and the main thoroughfare of 125th Street), opened its doors on Aug. 1, 1962, after Woods, a former beautician from South Carolina, and her husband Herbert bought the tiny luncheonette where she had worked as a waitress. Money for the enterprise came from Sylvia's mother, who mortgaged the family farm for the purchase.

"I know I had to make it or else my mama was gonna lose her farm. So I gave it all that I had to give," Woods is quoted as once telling Nation's Restaurant News.

Starting with six booths and 15 stools, Sylvia's served ribs, hot cakes, corn bread and fried chicken, along with candied yams, collard greens and black-eyed peas with rice.

The restaurant eventually expanded to 250 seats and became the unofficial social center of Harlem, with a clientele that included Roberta Flack, Quincy Jones, Diana Ross, Muhammad Ali, Bill Clinton, Robert F. Kennedy and every New York City mayor, notes The Times – citing, too, Woods's "effusive warmth."

Known for personally placing the napkins in her customers' laps, Sylvia – as everyone called her – mothered them all, and earned the affectionate nickname "The Queen of Soul Food." (When she once attempted a healthier menu, no one ordered from it.)

"I keep pressing on,” she told The Times when she was 68. "I can't give up. I've been struggling too long to stop now."

She retired six years ago, at 80, and her children – sons Van and Kenneth, and daughters Bedelia and Crizette – and numerous grandchildren took over the business.

Herbert Woods died in 2001. Her four children, 18 grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren survive Sylvia – as does the Sylvia and Herbert Woods Scholarship Endowment Foundation, established in 2001 to provide scholarships to Harlem students.

"Even as her brand became a nationwide success," said Mayor Bloomberg, "she never forgot to give back to the community that helped make it all possible."

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20613522,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+people%2Fheadlines+%28PEOPLE. com%3A+Top+Headlines%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

Kobi

07-22-2012, 10:11 AM

Alexander J. Boik

Jonathan T. Blunk

Sgt. Jesse Childress, 29, USAF

Gordon Cowden, 51

Jessica Ghawi, 24

John Larimer, 27, USN

Micayla Medek, 23,

Matthew McQuinn

Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6

Alex Sullivan, 27

Alexander C. Teves

Rebecca Ann Wingo

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/21/names-of-victims-emerge-in-colo-theater-rampage/#ixzz21MseHo00

Soft*Silver

07-22-2012, 08:25 PM

Jon..........

Arwen

07-23-2012, 04:20 PM

Ride, Sally Ride.
(http://news.yahoo.com/sally-ride-first-us-woman-space-dead-61-212809122.html)

Parker

07-24-2012, 03:50 PM

Jefferson Cleaners is now closed.

RIP Sherman Hemsley (http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20614528,00.html) :candle:

Kobi

07-24-2012, 06:17 PM

Jefferson Cleaners is now closed.

RIP Sherman Hemsley (http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20614528,00.html) :candle:

MYcqToQzzGY

Jesse

07-24-2012, 07:56 PM

'Medical Center' star Chad Everett dies at 75 after a year and a half battle with lung cancer.

Kobi

07-24-2012, 09:00 PM

'Medical Center' star Chad Everett dies at 75 after a year and a half battle with lung cancer.

http://i1207.photobucket.com/albums/bb464/kobi2/beaches/thumbnailCAJ77TI2.jpg

http://i1207.photobucket.com/albums/bb464/kobi2/beaches/thumbnail-1.jpg

Chad Everett was one hunk of man.

Arwen

07-24-2012, 11:09 PM

He was the original Dr. McDreamy to me.
http://i.usatoday.net/life/_photos/2012/07/24/Chad-Everett-star-of-Medical-Center-dies-UP1U4K6V-x-large.jpg
And baby, I had a mad crush on him.

Rockinonahigh

07-25-2012, 03:01 AM

My loed,so many people I grew up watching on tv or reading about in books or news papers.May they rest in in the hands of peace and love..

*Anya*

07-25-2012, 03:18 AM

He was the original Dr. McDreamy to me.
http://i.usatoday.net/life/_photos/2012/07/24/Chad-Everett-star-of-Medical-Center-dies-UP1U4K6V-x-large.jpg
And baby, I had a mad crush on him.

I agree Arwen. He was such a handsome man and one of those men that was just as handsome as an older man, as he was as a young one.

Every time I see that there is a new entry in this RIP thread, I say to myself, "Darn, who died now" and I half-hate to look.

It does feel strange to see so many folks pass that were famous, or at least known to me through TV or movies, when I was younger; pass on lately.

Kobi

07-30-2012, 09:54 PM

Best-selling Irish author Maeve Binchy has died aged 72 after a short illness.

Binchy, born in Dalkey, Co Dublin, has sold more than 40 million books. Her works were often set in Ireland and have been translated into 37 languages.

They include The Lilac Bus as well as Tara Road and Circle of Friends, which were both adapted for screen.

Binchy trained as a teacher before moving into journalism and writing, publishing her first novel - Light a Penny Candle - in 1982.

She had written the novel in her spare time from her day job as a journalist at The Irish Times.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19057922

Kobi

07-30-2012, 09:59 PM

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tony Martin, the romantic singer who appeared in movie musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s and sustained a career in records, television and nightclubs from the Depression era into the 21st century, has died. He was 98.

A peer of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Martin sang full voice in a warm baritone that carried special appeal for his female audience. Among his hit recordings were "I Get Ideas," ''To Each His Own," ''Begin the Beguine" and "There's No Tomorrow."

Although he never became a full-fledged movie star, he was featured in 25 films, most of them made during the heyday of the Hollywood musicals. A husky 6 feet tall and dashingly handsome, he was often cast as the romantic lead.

He also married two movie musical superstars, Alice Faye and Cyd Charisse, and the latter union lasted 60 years, until her death in 2008.

http://news.yahoo.com/romantic-crooner-tony-martin-dies-98-172647928.html

Kobi

07-30-2012, 10:07 PM

DALLAS (AP) -- Suzy Gershman, whose "Born to Shop" travel guides have helped readers find where to browse and buy from Paris to Hong Kong, has died. She was 64.

Gershman died July 25 in San Antonio after being diagnosed about a year ago with brain cancer, said her son, Aaron Gershman, and her co-author, Sarah Lahey.

Since its launch in the mid-1980s, "Born to Shop" series has been translated into a half-dozen languages and sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, Lahey said. Sixteen of the books have been published, and some were revised every other year. Frommer's acquired the rights for the books in 1995.

"They were for people who were as passionate about shopping as Suzy," said Kelly Regan, editorial director for Frommer's Travel Guides.

With a focus on good value and high quality, Gershman was just as comfortable looking for bargains at flea markets as she was at high-end stores like Hermes, said Regan. She said Gershman was also "particularly incisive" on what outlet centers were worth the trip, and could cover all areas of shopping, from clothing to home goods to pet gear.

Lahey, who worked with Gershman for the last eight years, said Gershman liked to focus on the "hidden gems in each city," including markets or boutiques that could offer a shopper something they couldn't get back home. Lahey said that Gershman was a big gift-giver whose "theory was that you should bring back a gift that was unique to the area."

"She loved what she did," Lahey said. "She loved exploring new places."

Her son, 32-year-old Aaron Gershman of Los Angeles, who can remember traveling "everywhere" with his globe-trotting mother, said he always admired that she turned a love of shopping and travel into a career.

"From before I could walk, I remember being in a stroller on the big shopping streets of Paris," he said.

After Gershman's husband, Michael Gershman, died in 2000, she decided to move to Paris. Her book "C'est la Vie," detailed her first year of widowhood.

After about a decade in France, Gershman decided to return to San Antonio, where she had grown up and graduated from high school.

Aaron Gershman said that his mother, who has a large extended family in San Antonio, had started to miss the "little things," including everything from American commercials to "real guacamole."

Gershman was born on April 13, 1948, in Syracuse, N.Y. While attending the University of Texas at Austin, Gershman worked for the San Antonio Express-News. After graduating from UT in 1969, Gershman moved to New York, working in advertising and public relations before beginning a career in magazines as a freelance journalist. Gershman and her husband then moved to Los Angeles, where she became the West Coast style editor in People magazine's Beverly Hills offices.

Her first television job was a stint on the style show "PM Magazine." She later would frequently appear on television programs talking about her shopping expertise and contributed to various magazines.

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=NEWS

Kobi

08-01-2012, 04:36 AM

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Writer Gore Vidal, who filled his novels and essays with acerbic observations on politics, sex and American culture while carrying on feuds with big-name literary rivals, died on Tuesday at home in Los Angeles of complications from pneumonia, age 86.

Vidal's literary legacy includes a series of historical novels - "Burr," "1876," "Lincoln" and "The Golden Age" among them - as well as the campy transsexual comedy "Myra Breckinridge".

He started writing as a 19-year-old soldier stationed in Alaska, basing "Williwaw" on his World War Two experiences. His third book, "The City and the Pillar," created a sensation in 1948 because it was one of the first open portrayals of a homosexual main character.

He referred to himself as a "gentleman bitch" and was as egotistical and caustic as he was elegant and brilliant.

In addition to rubbing shoulders with the great writers of his time, he banged heads with many of them. Vidal considered Ernest Hemingway a joke and compared Truman Capote to a "filthy animal that has found its way into the house".

His most famous literary enemies were conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. and writer Norman Mailer, who Vidal once likened to cult killer Charles Manson.

Mailer head-butted Vidal before a television appearance and on another occasion knocked him to the ground.

Vidal and Buckley took their feud to live national television while serving as commentators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vidal accused Buckley of being a "pro-crypto-Nazi" while Buckley called Vidal a "queer" and threatened to punch him.

Vidal seemed to make no effort to curb his abundant ego.

In a 2008 interview with Esquire magazine Vidal said people always seemed impressed that he had met so many famous people, such as Jacqueline Kennedy and William Burroughs.

"People always put that sentence the wrong way around," he said. "I mean, why not put it the true way - that these people got to meet me, and wanted to?"

NEPHEW OF SENATOR

Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. was born on October 3, 1925 in West Point, New York, and eventually took his mother's surname as his first name. He grew up in Washington, D.C., where his grandfather, Democratic U.S. Sen. Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, had a strong influence on the boy.

The young Vidal developed an interest in politics as he read to the blind senator and led him about town. A distant cousin is former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.

He went to exclusive private secondary schools but did not attend college.

After his parents divorced, Vidal's mother married Hugh Auchincloss, who later also became the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy. That connection gave Vidal access to the Kennedy White House before a falling out with the family.

After early success, his literary career stalled - perhaps because of the controversy of "The City and the Pillar" - and he concentrated on television and movie scripts.

Vidal got back on track in the 1960s with "Julian," about a Roman emperor; "Washington, D.C.," the tale of a political family; and "Myra Breckenridge."

Bigger success followed with recreations of historical U.S. figures - such as Aaron Burr and Abraham Lincoln - that analyze where Vidal thought the United States fell from grace.

Vidal also was known for his sharp essays on society, sex, literature and politics. He was fervent about politics and what he considered to be the death of "the American Empire".

"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return," he once said.

In 1960 Vidal ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in New York and in 1982 failed in a bid for a California Senate seat.

He once described the United States as "the land of the dull and the home of the literal" and starting in the 1960s lived much of the time in a seaside Italian villa. He moved back permanently in 2003, shortly before Howard Austen, his companion of more than 50 years, died of cancer

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/american-author-gore-vidal-dead-86-l-times-043207888.html

Kobi

08-07-2012, 12:53 PM

Marvin Hamlisch, who composed or arranged the scores for dozens of movies including "The Sting" and the Broadway smash "A Chorus Line," has died in Los Angeles.

Hamlisch's career included composing, conducting and arranging music from Broadway to Hollywood, from symphonies to R&B hits. He won every major award in his career, including three Academy Awards, four Emmys, four Grammys, a Tony and three Golden Globes.

His music colored some of Hollywood and Broadway's most important works.

Hamlisch composed more than 40 film scores, including "Sophie's Choice," ''Ordinary People," ''The Way We Were" and "Take the Money and Run." He won his third Oscar for his adaptation of Scott Joplin's music for "The Sting." His latest work came for Steven Soderbergh's "The Informant!"

On Broadway, Hamlisch received both a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for the long-running favorite "A Chorus Line" and wrote the music for "The Goodbye Girl" and "Sweet Smell of Success." He was scheduled to fly to Nashville, Tenn., this week to see a production of his musical "The Nutty Professor," according to his publicist.

He even reached into the pop world, writing the No. 1 R&B hit "Break It to Me Gently" with Carole Bayer Sager for Aretha Franklin. He won the 1974 Grammys for best new artist and song of the year, "The Way We Were," performed by Barbra Streisand.

Although he was one of the youngest students ever at the Juilliard School of Music, he never studied conducting. "I remember somebody told me, 'Earn while you learn,' " he told The Associated Press in 1996.

"The Way We Were" exemplified Hamlisch's old-fashioned appeal — it was a big, sentimental movie ballad that brought huge success in the rock era. He was extremely versatile, able to write for stage and screen, for soundtracks ranging from Woody Allen comedies to a somber drama like "Ordinary People."

He was perhaps even better known for his work adapting Joplin on "The Sting." In the mid-'70s, it seemed everybody with a piano had the sheet music to "The Entertainer," the movie's theme song. To this day, it's blasted by ice cream trucks.

Hamlisch's place in popular culture reached beyond his music. Known for his nerdy look, complete with thick eyeglasses, that image was sealed on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" during Gilda Radner's "Nerd" sketches. Radner, playing Lisa Loopner, would swoon over Hamlisch.

Hamlisch was principal pops conductor for symphony orchestras in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Dallas, Pasadena, Seattle and San Diego at the time of his death. He was to be announced to the same position with the Philadelphia Orchestra and also was due to lead the New York Philharmonic during its upcoming New Year's Eve concert.

He was working on a new musical, "Gotta Dance," at the time of his death and was scheduled to write the score for a new film on Liberace, "Behind the Candelabra."

He leaves behind a legacy in film and music that transcended notes on the page. As illustrative as the scenes playing out in front of the music, his scores helped define some of Hollywood's most iconic works.

http://news.yahoo.com/composer-marvin-hamlisch-dies-68-los-angeles-131751829.html

Kobi

08-07-2012, 03:06 PM

Judith Crist (born Judith Klein; May 22, 1922 – August 7, 2012) was an American film critic. She appeared regularly on the Today show from 1964 to 1973 and was the first full-time female critic for a major American newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune.

She was the founding film critic at New York Magazine and become known to most Americans as a critic at TV Guide. She appeared in one film, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, and was the author of The Private Eye, The Cowboy and the Very Naked Girl; Judith Crist's TV Guide to the Movies and Take 22: Moviemakers on Moviemaking.

Kobi

08-11-2012, 06:47 AM

Albert Cornelius "Al" Freeman, Jr. (March 21, 1934 – August 9, 2012) was an American actor and director. Freeman has made appearances in many films, such as My Sweet Charlie, Finian's Rainbow, and Malcolm X, and television series such as The Cosby Show, Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, Hot L. Baltimore, and The Edge of Night.

He is mostly recognized for his portrayal of Police Captain Ed Hall on the ABC soap opera, One Life to Live, a role he played from 1972 through 1987, with recurring roles in 1988 and 2000. He won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor for that role in 1979, the first actor from the show as well as the first African American actor to earn the award. He was also a director of One Life to Live, and was one of the first African Americans to direct a soap opera.

After leaving One Life to Live, Freeman appeared in the motion picture Down in the Delta. His Broadway theatre credits include Look to the Lilies, Blues for Mister Charlie, and Medea. His portrayal of NOI leader Elijah Muhammad in the motion picture Malcolm X earned him the 1995 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture. Coincidently, he had previously played Malcolm X in the 1979 miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations.

Freeman taught acting at Howard University in Washington, D.C..

Kobi

08-13-2012, 02:53 PM

Helen Gurley Brown, the groundbreaking editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine and the bestselling author of Sex and the Single Girl, died Monday in New York. She was 90.

An outspoken advocate of women's sexual freedom, Brown clashed with both feminists and conservatives as she helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s with her monthly magazine that became the bible for "fun, fearless females."

"Helen Gurley Brown was an icon. Her formula for honest and straightforward advice about relationships, career and beauty revolutionized the magazine industry," said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation.

"She lived every day of her life to the fullest and will always be remembered as the quintessential 'Cosmo girl.' She will be greatly missed."

Brown died at McKeen Pavilion at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia after a brief hospitalization, according to the Hearst Corp.

Sex and the Single Girl, published in 1962 and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists, encouraged women to take pleasure in sex and enjoy their work and relationships even if they weren't married.

She headed Cosmo from 1965 to 1997, delivering a magazine known for its risqué cleavage-baring cover photos and blunt and sassy headlines about "how to find a man, keep a man and be sexually fulfilled along the way."

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20620726,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+people%2Fheadlines+%28PEOPLE. com%3A+Top+Headlines%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

Kobi

08-13-2012, 03:11 PM

http://ts1.mm.bing.net/images/thumbnail.aspx?q=4527282770346388&id=34645a08423f394f42156244f35c06c7

Johnny Pesky, a member of the Red Sox as a player, manager, coach, broadcaster and beloved team ambassador, has passed away at the age of 92.

Pesky played for the Sox from 1942-52, missing three seasons serving in the military during World War II. He managed the team from 1963-64 and briefly again in 1980.

This season Pesky’s 61st season with the club in some capacity and 44th in a row.

Born John Michael Paveskovich in Portland, Ore., Pesky was signed by the Red Sox in 1940 and made his major league debut in 1942, hitting .331 and finishing third in the MVP voting.

Pesky was a career .313 hitter with the Red Sox before playing for the Tigers and Senators. In all, he played in 1,270 major league games and hit .307 with a .394 on-base percentage. He was an All-Star in 1946.

A left-handed hitter who threw right-handed, Pesky was a tough man for pitchers to strike out. He was the first AL player to score 6 runs in a 9 inning game. As a hitter, he specialized in getting on base, leading the American League in base hits three times - his first three seasons in the majors, in which he collected over 200 hits each year — and was among the top ten in on base percentage six times while batting .307 in 4,745 at bats as a Major Leaguer. He was also an excellent bunter who led the league in sacrifice hits in 1942.

Pesky has his No. 6 retired by the Red Sox in 2008. He appeared regularly at team events, including the 100th anniversary of Fenway Parks opening in April.

Pesky was a close friend of Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio and Ted Williams. A statue of those four men called “Teammates” is outside of Fenway Park’s Gate B.

---------------------------------------

Wont be the same without you dude. Thanks for the memories.

Parker

08-14-2012, 02:59 PM

Ron Palillo, Arnold Horshack on 'Welcome Back, Kotter,' dies at age 63 in Palm Beach Gardens home

Posted: 11:24 AM
Last Updated: 1 hour and 4 minutes ago

By: Allison Ross and Leslie Gray Streeter, Palm Beach Post Staff

Ron Palillo, best known as mouthy classroom goofball Arnold Horshack on the 1970s TV series Welcome Back, Kotter, died at his Palm Beach Gardens home early this morning, according to Stacy Sacco, Palillo’s friend.

Sacco said Palillo passed away suddenly at 4:30 a.m.

He was 63.

Read the rest of the article here: Ron Palillo dies at 63 (http://www.wptv.com/dpp/entertainment/ron-palillo-arnold-horshack-on-welcome-back-kotter-dies-at-age-63).

Kobi

08-15-2012, 04:18 PM

Harrison started in the science fiction field as an illustrator, notably with EC Comics' two science fiction comic books, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science. He has used house names such as Wade Kaempfert and Philip St. John to edit magazines, and has published other fictions under the names Felix Boyd, Leslie Charteris, and Hank Dempsey. Harrison also wrote for syndicated comic strips, creating the Rick Random character. Harrison is now much better known for his writing, particularly his humorous and satirical science fiction, such as the Stainless Steel Rat series and the novel Bill, the Galactic Hero (which satirises Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers).

During the 1950s and 1960s, he was the main writer of the Flash Gordon newspaper strip. One of his Flash Gordon scripts was serialized in Comics Revue magazine. Harrison drew sketches to help the artist be more scientifically accurate, which the artist largely ignored.

Not all of Harrison's writing was comic, though. He has written many stories on serious themes, of which by far the best known is the novel about overpopulation and consumption of the world's resources Make Room! Make Room! which was used as a basis for the science fiction film Soylent Green (though the film changed the plot and theme).

Harrison for a time was closely associated with Brian Aldiss. The pair collaborated on a series of anthology projects. Harrison and Aldiss did much in the 1970s to raise the standards of criticism in the field.[citation needed] In particular, the two edited nine volumes of The Year's Best Science Fiction anthology series as well as three volumes of the Decade series, collecting science fiction of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s respectively.

In 1990, Harrison was professional Guest of Honour at ConFiction, the 48th World SF Convention, in The Hague, Netherlands, together with Joe Haldeman and Wolfgang Jeschke.

Harrison was a writer of fairly liberal worldview. Harrison's work often hinges around the contrast between the thinking man and the man of force, although the "Thinking Man" often needs ultimately to employ force himself.

Harrison was selected by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as the 2009 recipient of their Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harrison

Arwen

08-15-2012, 06:17 PM

the Stainless Steel Rat series and the novel Bill, the Galactic Hero (which satirises Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers).

Ahhh
Dammit. He was a wonderful writer. Piers will be next. :( You mark my words.

princessbelle

08-15-2012, 06:27 PM

Kobi

08-20-2012, 06:08 AM

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Tony Scott, director of such Hollywood hits as "Top Gun," ''Days of Thunder" and "Beverly Hills Cop II," died Sunday after jumping from a Los Angeles County bridge, authorities said.

The British-born Scott was known for hyper-kinetic action and editing on such films as his most recent, the runaway train thriller "Unstoppable," starring regular collaborator Denzel Washington.

Besides "Unstoppable," Scott worked with Washington on four other movies: "Crimson Tide," ''Man on Fire," Deja Vu" and "The Taking of Pelham 123."

Other Scott films include "True Romance," written by Quentin Tarantino, "The Fan," with Robert De Niro, and "Enemy of the State," starring Will Smith, and 1983's supernatural romance "The Hunger," with David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve.

Tony was producer and director Ridley Scott's younger brother. The two brothers ran Scott Free Productions and were working jointly on a film called "Killing Lincoln," based on the best seller by Bill O'Reilly. Along with countless commercials, their company produced the CBS dramas "NUMB3RS" and "The Good Wife" as well as a 2011 documentary about the Battle of Gettysburg for the History Channel.

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/top-gun-director-dies-jumping-off-bridge-041553449.html

girl_dee

08-20-2012, 06:14 AM

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120816053130-louisiana-officer-3-story-body.jpg
Deputy Michael Scott Boyington was shot and wounded while directing traffic early Thursday.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120816052734-louisiana-officer-1-story-body.jpg
Deputy Brandon Nielsen, 34, died in a shooting Thursday. He is survived by a wife and five children.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120816053030-louisiana-officer-2-story-body.jpg
Sheriff's Deputy Jeremy Triche, 28, is survived by his wife and 2-year-old son.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120816053246-louisiana-officer-4-story-body.jpg
Deputy Jason Triche was wounded in the ambush that left Nielsen and Jeremy Triche dead.

(CNN) -- Four men and three women have been arrested in connection with shootings that left two Louisiana sheriff's deputies dead and two others wounded, police said Friday.
Their arrests, and the preliminary charges they are facing, follow a pair of allegedly linked shootings early Thursday in LaPlace, a community of about 30,000 people located roughly 25 miles west of New Orleans.
Five of those arrested are now in jail, while the two others remain hospitalized for treatment of gunshot wounds, Louisiana State Police spokesman Melissa Matey said Friday.
St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff Michael Tregre called the slain and wounded deputies "heroes" and described those arrested as "some very violent individuals."
"The people that (the deputies) lost their lives for, that we have in custody, I believe are some of the most violent, evil people on the planet," Tregre said Friday.
All the charges levied against the suspects, thus far, apply to the first shooting that occurred around 5 a.m. in a parking lot near the Bayou Steel plant in LaPlace, according to police.

Deputy Michael Scott Boyington was shot and wounded while directing traffic early Thursday.

Deputy Brandon Nielsen, 34, died in a shooting Thursday. He is survived by a wife and five children.

Sheriff's Deputy Jeremy Triche, 28, is survived by his wife and 2-year-old son.

Deputy Jason Triche was wounded in the ambush that left Nielsen and Jeremy Triche dead.
A man there shot Deputy Michael Boyington from the St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff's Office -- who was directing traffic at the time -- several times, Tregre said Thursday. Despite his injuries, Boyington told dispatchers about the suspect. His description, along with a civilian report of a speeding car, led responding officers to a nearby trailer park, the sheriff said.
Col. Michael Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said Friday that investigators have determined that five of those under arrest were in the car that sped from the scene.
Boyington is at University Hospital in New Orleans, where Tregre said he had visited him and found him to be "very good, upbeat, very positive, very strong." A law enforcement source who was not authorized to speak on the record said Thursday that the deputy had been shot in the shoulder and is expected to survive.
"He just wanted me to tell everyone that he'll be back to work Monday," Tregre said Friday.
Brian Lyn Smith, 24, will be charged with attempted first-degree murder of a police officer tied to Boyington's shooting, police said.
Four others -- 44-year-old Terry Smith, 22-year-old Derrick Smith, 28-year-old Kyle David Joekel and 21-year-old Teniecha Bright -- each face charges of being a principal to attempted first-degree murder of a police officer. Chanel Skains, 37, and Brittney Keith, 23, have been charged with being an accessory after the fact to attempted first-degree murder of a police officer, authorities said.
Brian Smith and Joekel will be formally charged after their release from the hospital, according to information released Friday by the parish sheriff's office.
"Once ... the hospital says, they're OK and they can leave the hospital, believe me, they're going straight to jail," Edmonson said of the two hospitalized suspects.
All those facing charges lived in one of three nearby addresses on the same street in LaPlace. And they could face additional charges tied to the second shooting later Thursday at a trailer park in that same city.
In that incident, deputies who had gone there to investigate the initial shooting were questioning two people when a man ambushed them, Tregre said.
Multiple weapons were used and at least 20 shots were fired in this shooting, according to Edmonson.
St. John the Baptist Sheriff's Deputies Brandon Nielsen, 34, and Jeremy Triche, 28, were killed in the gunfire. Nielsen was married with five children and Triche had a wife and a 2-year-old son, Tregre told reporters.
Deputy Jason Triche -- who is not related to Jeremy Triche -- was wounded in that shooting, according to Louisiana State Trooper Evan Harrell.
Jason Triche is "recovering very, very well" at LaPlace's River Parishes Hospital, where Tregre visited him and said he believes that he was taken off a ventilator Friday and "couldn't really speak, but he could write."
As to the overall investigation, the state police superintendent stressed Friday that "there are a lot of things that we don't know and that we will find out," vowing that authorities will "very tediously, very delicately" compile evidence and interview witnesses.
"We'll build our case on what we know now, (including about) the individuals in the car. And now we are going to work our way back to the scene where those two deputies were killed," Edmonson said. "It's going to take us a while to do that."
The slain and wounded sheriff's deputies will be honored Friday at a candlelight vigil, which starts at 8 p.m. (9 p.m. ET) in front of the Percy Hebert Building in LaPlace, Tregre said.
In addition, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans will be lit in blue Friday night and there will be a moment of silence to remember Nielsen and Jeremy Triche before the New Orleans Saints take on the Jacksonville Jaguars in an NFL pre-season game, according to the sheriff.

Kobi

08-20-2012, 06:20 AM

It's the song that drew thousands of hippie kids to a chilly San Francisco summer 45 years ago, when an unpopular war was raging in Vietnam and our city by the Bay was the primary mecca of LSD fans, music fans, and gentle people with flowers in their hair. It's the song they played to summarize the Summer of Love, 1967, in the 20th Century music montage known as Forrest Gump. It's the song that helped defined the late sixties two full years before Woodstock. And the man who originally sang it is now dead.

Scott MacKenzie was a friend of John Phillips, the man who went on to form The Mamas and the Papas, and MacKenzie turned down an offer to become an original member of the group, opting instead to be a solo artist. The song that made him famous, and remains the song that defines him as an artist, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)," was written by Phillips, as was MacKenzie's second hit, "Like an Old Time Movie." And later in life, MacKenzie toured with a new version of The Mamas and the Papas with Terry Melcher, Mike Love (of the Beach Boys), and Phillips, and MacKenzie helped write the Cocktail theme song that made a hit for the Beach Boys in the 80s, "Kokomo." He stopped touring with Phillips in 1998.

MacKenzie was born Philip Wallach Blondheim in 1939, and later changed his name to Scott MacKenzie after Warhol superstar Jackie Curtis told him he looked like a Scottie dog, and because other people at parties in New York told him they couldn't understand his name.

In the last two years, MacKenzie suffered from Guillain-Barre Syndrome. He died in his home in Los Angeles.

mJ_WG3d3GL8

http://sfist.com/2012/08/19/san_francisco_anthem_writer_scott_m.php

Nomad

08-20-2012, 06:48 AM

Death Penalty Opponent and Philosopher Hugo Bedau Dies (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/us/hugo-bedau-philosopher-who-opposed-death-penalty-dies-at-85.html?ref=obituaries)

excerpt from obit: ' Professor Bedau (pronounced beh-DOUGH) took up the issue as well in “The Case Against the Death Penalty,” a pamphlet distributed widely for many years by the American Civil Liberties Union. Written with the help of Henry Schwarzschild, a former director of the group’s Capital Punishment Project, the publication brought together a number of arguments against the death penalty: that it failed to deter crime (using supporting data); that it was fraught with racial bias, wrongful convictions and excessive financial costs; and that it was ultimately an act of “barbarity.”

“The history of capital punishment in American society clearly shows the desire to mitigate the harshness of this penalty by narrowing its scope,” the pamphlet said in a section titled “Unfairness.” “Discretion, whether authorized by statutes or by their silence, has been the main vehicle to this end. But when discretion is used, as it always has been, to mark for death the poor, the friendless, the uneducated, the members of racial minorities and the despised, then discretion becomes injustice. Thoughtful citizens, who in contemplating capital punishment in the abstract might support it, must condemn it in actual practice". '

Kobi

08-20-2012, 01:56 PM

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Phyllis Diller, the housewife turned humorist who aimed some of her sharpest barbs at herself, punctuating her jokes with her trademark cackle, died Monday morning in her Los Angeles home at age 95.

She was a staple of nightclubs and television from the 1950s — when female comics were rare indeed — until her retirement in 2002. Diller built her stand-up act around the persona of the corner-cutting housewife ("I bury a lot of my ironing in the back yard") with bizarre looks, a wardrobe to match (by "Omar of Omaha") and a husband named "Fang."

She didn't get into comedy until she was nearly 40, after her first husband, Sherwood Diller, prodded her for two years to give up a successful career as an advertising and radio writer. Through it all, she was also a busy mother.

She also appeared in movies, including "Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number" and "Eight on the Lam" with Bob Hope.

In 1966-67, she was the star of an ABC sitcom about a society family trying to stave off bankruptcy, "The Pruitts of Southampton." Gypsy Rose Lee played a nosy neighbor. In 1968, she was host of a short-lived variety series, "The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show."

But standup comedy was her first love, and when she broke into the business in 1956 it was a field she had largely to herself because female comics weren't widely accepted then.

After retiring from standup, Diller continued to take occasional small parts in movies and TV shows ("Family Guy") and pursued painting as a serious hobby. She published her autobiography, "Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse," in 2005. The 2006 film "Goodnight, We Love You" documented her career.

Her other books included "Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints" and "Phyllis Diller's Marriage Manual."

http://news.yahoo.com/humorist-phyllis-diller-dies-95-los-angeles-192854743.html

Kobi

08-21-2012, 10:09 AM

http://ts2.mm.bing.net/images/thumbnail.aspx?q=138302721857&id=3fc7e7709b9d87a101fcc2204de05bfa&index=sf&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.trbimg.com%2fimg-50319045%2fturbine%2fla-vc-970220-b-windom.jpg-20120819%2f600

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - William Windom, a 1970 Emmy Award winner for his show "My World and Welcome to It," died on Thursday at home in Woodacre, Calif. He was 88.

He may have been at least as well known for his numerous guest appearances on several TV shows, including "Star Trek," "The Twilight Zone" and "Night Gallery." He co-starred with Inger Stevens from 1963-1966 on "The Farmer's Daughter."

But it was a recurring role that began in 1998 and lasted for a decade on the CBS mystery "Murder, She Wrote" that may have brought him the most fame.

He played a doctor, Seth Hazlitt, n the imaginary town of Cabot Cove, Me., who was best friends with Jessica Fletcher, the show's star played by Angela Lansbury.

While Windom made his mark in TV, he played the prosecutor in 1962's Academy Award-winning film "To Kill a Mockingbird," and in 1968 starred in "The Detective" with Frank Sinatra.Sci-fi fans would remember Windom as Commodore Decker in the "Star Trek" TV episode "The Doomsday Machine." He reprised the role four decades later for "Star Trek New Voyages."

http://news.yahoo.com/william-windom-emmy-winning-tv-actor-dead-88-174633851.html

Kobi

08-21-2012, 03:23 PM

http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/D7r_EPMEVtHkjmooCF2XyA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Y2g9MjE2Njtjcj0xO2N3PTI5ODg7ZHg9MD tkeT0wO2ZpPXVsY3JvcDtoPTQ1NztxPTg1O3c9NjMw/http://l.yimg.com/os/152/2012/08/20/AP315157009778-jpg_195936.jpg

SEATTLE (AP) — George Hickman, one of the original Tuskegee airmen and a longtime usher at University of Washington and Seattle Seahawks games, has died at age 88.

Hickman was one of the country's first black military pilots and ground crew members who fought in World War II.

In 2007, he and other Tuskegee airmen traveled to Washington, D.C., to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor that Congress can give. In 2009, he attended President Barack Obama's inauguration as a special guest.

Hickman was a beloved figure at Seattle sporting events. Hickman worked a number of posts, including usher and press box attendant, at Huskies games for several decades. He also served as a press box greeter at Seahawks games. He raised the 12th Man flag before the Seahawks game against the Baltimore Ravens last

The grandson of slaves, Hickman nurtured an interest in aviation as a curious boy gazing up at the sky above St. Louis.

That passion evolved from buying model airplanes to joining the segregated pilot training program in Tuskegee, Ala., and later to a nearly three-decade long career at Boeing in Seattle where he was a B-52 engineering training instructor and executive in the aerospace division.

He served in the Army Air Corps from 1943-45, which trained African Americans to fly and maintain combat aircraft, and was part of the graduating class of 1944, according to a 2012 Army profile.

He was initially eliminated from pilot training in 1943. As a cadet captain, he was effectively blocked from flying when he called out white superior officers for the mistreatment of a fellow black cadet. "I felt like I had really been mistreated," he told the AP in 2009. But undeterred, he graduated from the program as a crewman.

http://news.yahoo.com/tuskegee-airman-g-hickman-dies-seattle-88-172629646.html?_esi=0&ugccmtnav=v1%2Fcomments%2Fcontext%2Ffad1b91e-2822-3af2-828d-98e8ec8c34d9%2Fcomments%3Fcount%3D20%26sortBy%3Dhi ghestRated%26isNext%3Dtrue%26offset%3D20%26pageNum ber%3D1

Kobi

08-24-2012, 01:01 PM

Jerry Nelson, the puppeteer known for playing the instructional Count von Count on Sesame Street, died Thursday. He was 78.

Besides the non-threatening vampire, Nelson, a Tulsa native who grew up in Washington, D.C., also performed Gobo Fraggle on Fraggle Rock and The Muppet Show's Sgt. Floyd Pepper of the Electric Mayhem band; "Pigs in Space" stalwart Dr. Julius Strangepork; Kermit the Frog's nephew Robin; and Gonzo's girlfriend Camilla the Chicken, among other roles, says the site.

He first trained with American puppeteer Bil Baird, who was responsible for the lively "Lonely Goatherd" marionette sequence in the 1965 movie blockbuster The Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews.

That same year, Nelson worked with Muppet creator Jim Henson on TV's The Jimmy Dean Show, a variety program on which Kermit and the gang first became popular with American audiences.

Nelson's Sesame Street stint began in the '70s, and he continued to be the Count until his retirement in 2004.

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20624075,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+people%2Fheadlines+%28PEOPLE. com%3A+Top+Headlines%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

Kobi

08-25-2012, 04:00 PM

http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/UoxQVdN5GUDHO8VpEeVyRw--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Y2g9MzAwMDtjcj0xO2N3PTI3ODk7ZHg9MD tkeT0wO2ZpPXVsY3JvcDtoPTQ3MjtxPTg1O3c9NDM5/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ap_webfeeds/47c4b70bf4f74d17190f6a706700ec50.jpg

Neil Armstrong was a soft-spoken engineer who became a global hero when as a steely-nerved pilot he made "one giant leap for mankind" with a small step onto the moon. The modest man, who had people on Earth entranced and awed from almost a quarter-million miles away, but credited others for the feat.

Armstrong commanded the Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the moon July 20, 1969, capping the most daring of the 20th century's scientific expeditions. His first words after becoming the first person to set foot on the surface are etched in history books and the memories of those who heard them in a live broadcast.

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong said.

In those first few moments on the moon, during the climax of a heated space race with the then-Soviet Union, Armstrong stopped in what he called "a tender moment" and left a patch to commemorate NASA astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts who had died in action.

Although he had been a Navy fighter pilot, a test pilot for NASA's forerunner and an astronaut, Armstrong never allowed himself to be caught up in the celebrity and glamour of the space program.

"I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer," he said in February 2000 in one of his rare public appearances. "And I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession."

http://news.yahoo.com/neil-armstrong-1st-man-moon-dies-82-200215442--finance.html

princessbelle

08-25-2012, 04:05 PM

Kobi, i can't thank you enough for keeping this thread going. I think i told you this in a rep but you are like my CNN. I don't watch the news and i get real updates here.

However, when i see you've posted something new and this thread comes up on the front page, i sorta cringe and am afraid to look and see who passed.

I want to know though. It's just so sad the older *we* get more and more peeps that had tremendous impact on our lives, or those that remind us of a time in our lives, have left us.

Such is life i suppose.

When Armstrong landed on the moon, i believe i was about 6 or 7. Such an amazing televised event. One i will never forget. The whole family gathered around the TV in utter amazement.

Thank you Neil Armstrong for changing our world, our universe and our lives.

BullDog

08-25-2012, 04:26 PM

I remember watching him step out onto the moon. I watched on a small black and white tv. I was 7 I think. I wanted to be an astronaut after that.

RIP Mr. Armstrong

princessbelle

08-25-2012, 07:14 PM

I remember watching him step out onto the moon. I watched on a small black and white tv. I was 7 I think. I wanted to be an astronaut after that.

RIP Mr. Armstrong

It's not too late to be an astronaut. Be the first butch in space. *be still my heart.

And if you were 7, i must have been about 4. :rrose:

girl_dee

08-29-2012, 05:16 PM

On this 7th anniversary of Katrina, you were euthanized in the group home where we left you to be safe in. The world is a sadder place without you. All of your *kids* miss you everyday. So many owe their lives to you!

Hurricane Isaac is reminding me of that tragic day, hopefully what happened to you will never happen to another, you deserved better.

PINO Rosemary Pino ""Mama'' tragically departed this world to meet her Heavenly Father on Monday, August 29, 2005 during Hurricane Katrina. Throughout her life, Mama was a pioneer for rights of the gay and lesbian community. In addition, she worked diligently for human rights and AIDS. With her beloved business partner and devoted friend of 56 years, Margie Normand, they owned and operated numerous gay bars including, The Grog, De Ja Vu', Pino's, The Blue Odyssey, and Club 621. Prior to the bar business, Pino worked for Hibernia Bank and Camp Leroy Johnston. Mama was heavily involved with the gay carnival organizations. A member of A.G.G.I., honorary mom for the Krewe of Polythemus and the Krewe of Armenius, she also served as a board member for the Krewe of Ishtar (an all women's gay club). Standing only five feet high, Mama's distinctive laugh and bubbly personality made her appear to be six feet tall. She volunteered for The Lighthouse for the Blind and taught blind children to swim. She loved to swim and played softball until she was forty years old. Mama fought for the underdog and often adopted gay kids whose parents had disowned them. She supported her friends and everyone who ever met her adored her and her fun loving spirit. Mama enriched other's lives and will be sadly missed by her surviving sister, Joyce Pino Cantrell; business partner, Margie Normand; close personal friends, Bonnie, Kathy, Sis, Cindy, Dee, Sue, Judy, Rusty, Mark, Keith, Linda, Beverly, and Anisha; and countless other friends. A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at 11:00 AM on Tuesday, December 20, 2005 at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, 448 Metairie, Road, Metairie, LA. Visitation will begin at 10:00 AM at the church. Burial will follow in Metairie Cemetery. LAKE LAWN METAIRIE FUNERAL HOME is in charge of arrangements.

Kobi

08-30-2012, 02:06 PM

http://ts2.mm.bing.net/images/thumbnail.aspx?q=4998075605648257&id=bb6dcab692d0da99d8a3c407534b3e1f

Steve Franken's first screen role was in 1958 as "Willie" in CBS' Playhouse 90 dramatic series. He was then cast as playboy dilettante Chatsworth Osborne, Jr., on the CBS series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

Franken also appeared in The Lieutenant, The Rat Patrol, Bewitched, Love American Style, and Adam 12.

He also appeared in the films Follow Me Boys! , The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, The Party, and The North Avenue Irregulars.

~ocean

08-30-2012, 02:13 PM

ty kobi .. did he play a nerd on Dobie Gillis too ?

Kobi

08-30-2012, 03:55 PM

ty kobi .. did he play a nerd on Dobie Gillis too ?

I am not that familiar with Dobie Gillis but I did find a web site that said Franken initially played the role of the rich spoiled preppy Milton Armitage ( a role originally played by Warren Beatty) before slipping into the role of spoiled schoolboy Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. from 1960-63, bringing to life one of the most memorable TV characters of all time.

I remember this guy from Bewitched where he played George Barkley; Juke, the Carlotta-domineered son; Orvis the poodle-like alien; Cousin Henry (Uncle Arthur's son Henry), and other characters.

Kobi

08-30-2012, 07:06 PM

Chris Lighty, a hip-hop mogul who helped the likes of Sean "Diddy" Combs, 50 Cent and Mariah Carey attain not only hit records, but also lucrative careers outside music, was found dead in his New York City apartment Thursday in an apparent suicide. He was 44.

Lighty had been a part of the scene for decades, working with pioneers like LL Cool J before starting his own management company, Violator. But he was in the midst of a divorce and had been having recent financial and personal troubles.

Lighty's roster ranged from Academy Award-winners Three 6 Mafia to maverick Missy Elliott to up-and-comer Papoose and perpetual star Carey. He made it his mission not so much to make musical superstars, but rather multifaceted entertainers who could be marketed in an array of ways: a sneaker deal here, a soft drink partnership there, a movie role down the road.

http://seattletimes.com/html/entertainment/2019027807_apusobitchrislighty.html?syndication=rs s

The_Lady_Snow

08-31-2012, 12:37 PM

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/752542/thumbs/s-CHRIS-LIGHTY-DEAD-DIED-DEATH-SUICIDE-large.jpg

:candle:

CherylNYC

08-31-2012, 03:17 PM

Feminist Icon Shulamith Firestone dead at 67.

From the New York Times:

Shulamith Firestone, a widely quoted feminist writer who published her arresting first book, “The Dialectic of Sex,” at 25, only to withdraw from public life soon afterward, was found dead on Tuesday in her apartment in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. She was 67.

Ms. Firestone apparently died of natural causes, her sister Laya Firestone Seghi said.

Subtitled “The Case for Feminist Revolution,” “The Dialectic of Sex” was published by William Morrow & Company in 1970. In it, Ms. Firestone extended Marxist theories of class oppression to offer a radical analysis of the oppression of women, arguing that sexual inequity springs from the onus of childbearing, which devolves on women by pure biological happenstance.

“Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself,” Ms. Firestone wrote, “so the end goal of feminist revolution must be ... not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”

In the utopian future Ms. Firestone envisioned, reproduction would be utterly divorced from sex: conception would be accomplished through artificial insemination, with gestation taking place outside the body in an artificial womb. While some critics found her proposals visionary, others deemed them quixotic at best.

Reviewing “The Dialectic of Sex” in The New York Times, John Leonard wrote, “A sharp and often brilliant mind is at work here.” But, he added, “Miss Firestone is preposterous in asserting that ‘men can’t love.’ ”

The book, which was translated into several languages, hurtled Ms. Firestone into the front ranks of second-wave feminists, alongside women like Betty Friedan, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer. It remains widely taught in college women’s-studies courses.

A painter by training, Ms. Firestone never anticipated a high-profile career as a writer; she had come to writing through preparing manifestoes for several feminist organizations she had helped found.

The crush of attention, positive and negative, that her book engendered soon proved unbearable, her sister said. In the years that followed, Ms. Firestone retreated into a quiet, largely solitary life of painting and writing, though she published little.

Her only other book, “Airless Spaces,” was issued in 1998 by the experimental publisher Semiotext(e). A memoir-in-stories that employs fictional forms to recount real-life events, it describes Ms. Firestone’s hospitalization with schizophrenia, which by the 1980s had overtaken her.

The second of six children of Orthodox Jewish parents, Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein was born in Ottawa on Jan. 7, 1945, and reared in Kansas City, Mo., and St. Louis.

The family Americanized its surname to Firestone when Shulamith was a child; Ms. Firestone pronounced her first name shoo-LAH-mith but was familiarly known as Shuley or Shulie.

After attending Washington University in St. Louis, Ms. Firestone earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967. Around that time she helped found the Westside Group, a Chicago feminist organization, before moving to New York.

There, she was a founder of three feminist organizations — New York Radical Women, the Redstockings and New York Radical Feminists — begun as alternatives to mainstream groups like the National Organization for Women.

Ms. Firestone came to renewed attention in 1997 with the release of “Shulie,” an independent film by Elisabeth Subrin. Ms. Subrin’s 37-minute film is a shot-for-shot remake of an earlier, little-seen documentary, also titled “Shulie,” made in 1967 by four male graduate students at Northwestern University.

The 1967 film, part of a documentary series on the younger generation, profiles Ms. Firestone, then an unknown art student, as she paints, talks about her life as a young woman and undergoes a grueling review of her work by a panel of male professors.

In the 1997 remake, conceived as a backward look at a social landscape that seemed to have changed strikingly little in 30 years, Ms. Firestone is portrayed by an actress, Kim Soss. Her dialogue is uttered verbatim from the original documentary.

Ms. Subrin’s film, which was shown at the New York Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial and elsewhere, was well received by critics. But it distressed Ms. Firestone, who said she was upset that she had not been consulted in the course of its creation, her sister said this week.

In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Subrin said that she had sent Ms. Firestone a rough cut of her film through an intermediary. The intermediary later told her, she said, that Ms. Firestone “could appreciate it as a labor of love, but she hated the original film and didn’t see how my film was different.”

Besides her sister Laya, Ms. Firestone is survived by her mother, Kate Firestone Shiftan; two brothers, Ezra and Nechemia; and another sister, Miriam Tirzah Firestone.

In “Airless Spaces,” Ms. Firestone writes of life after hospitalization, on psychiatric medication. The account is in the third person, but the story is her own:

“She had been reading Dante’s ‘Inferno’ when first she went into the hospital, she remembered, and at quite a good clip too, but when she came out she couldn’t even get down a fashion rag. ... That left getting through the blank days as comfortably as possible, trying not to sink under the boredom and total loss of hope.”

The story continues: “She was lucid, yes, at what price. She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.”

chefhmboyrd

08-31-2012, 03:30 PM

I remember watching him step out onto the moon. I watched on a small black and white tv. I was 7 I think. I wanted to be an astronaut after that.

RIP Mr. Armstrong

I remember my dad sat me in front of the TV, I was barely 4.
He said "you will remember this day for the rest of your life. Watch history in the making"
I rememeber.......

Kobi

08-31-2012, 03:55 PM

Born on Feb. 15, 1927, in Turin, Martini was ordained a priest in the Society of Jesus in 1952. After terms as rector at the Gregorian and Biblical Institute, he was named archbishop of Milan in 1979 and held the post until his retirement in 2002; within that time he was also head of the European Bishops’ Conference for six years, until 1993.

Martini frequently voiced openness to discuss divisive issues for the church, such as priestly celibacy, homosexuality and using condoms to fight HIV transmission. While not at odds with church teaching, his views nevertheless showed his progressive bent. He was an intellectual and a noted biblical scholar, yet he had a warm and personable style and seemed to connect with his flock like few high-ranking prelates.

Martini was well known and well-liked by Italians, many of whom got to know him by his frequent contributions to leading daily Corriere della Sera, which for three years ran a popular column “Letters to Cardinal Martini,” in which Martini would respond directly to questions submitted by readers.

The topics covered everything from the clerical sex abuse scandal to whether it was morally acceptable for a Catholic to be cremated (”it’s possible and allowed,” he wrote). His responses were filled with Biblical citations and references to church teachings, but were accessible as well, written as if he were chatting with his readers rather than preaching to them.

Martini also wasn’t afraid to discuss issues that, while important to many lay Catholics, are usually considered off-limits by his colleagues.

In 2006, he raised eyebrows at the Vatican when he told the Italian weekly L’Espresso that condoms could be considered a “lesser evil” in combating AIDS, particularly for a married couple. While somewhat revolutionary at the time, his views seem to have struck a chord: Four years later, Benedict himself came close to echoing Martini’s sentiment when he said a male prostitute who intends to use a condom might be taking a step toward a more responsible sexuality because he was looking out for the welfare of his partner.

In 2009, Martini insisted he was misquoted by a German publication as calling for a re-evaluation of priestly celibacy as a means to combat pedophilia among priests.

But he returned to the topic of priestly celibacy earlier this year— as well as a host of other thorny issues like artificial procreation, embryo donation and euthanasia — in his last book “Believe and Know,” a conversation with a left-leaning Italian politician and doctor who had been his same interviewer for the 2006 Espresso article.

Martini retired as Milan archbishop in 2002 and moved to Jerusalem to devote himself to prayer and study. He had long established relations with the Jewish community, writing books and articles on the relations between Christianity and Judaism.

“Without a sincere feeling for the Jewish world, and a direct experience of it, one cannot fully understand Christianity,” he wrote in the book “Christianity and Judaism: A Historical and Theological Overview.” ‘’Jesus is fully Jewish, the apostles are Jewish, and one cannot doubt their attachment to the traditions of their forefathers.”

In a statement Friday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi paid tribute to his fellow Jesuit, saying his style as a pastor set him apart. He quoted Martini as writing in his book “The Bishop” that a bishop can’t guide his flock with decrees and prohibitions alone.

“Instead point to the interior formation, on the love and fascination with the Sacred Scripture, present the positive reasons for what we do according to the Gospel,” Martini wrote. “You will obtain much more than with rigid calls to observe norms.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/cardinal-martini-a-rare-liberal-who-was-a-papal-contender-in-2005-conclave-dies-at-age-85/2012/08/31/0da73e84-f37a-11e1-b74c-84ed55e0300b_story_1.html

Gráinne

08-31-2012, 04:32 PM

I remember my dad sat me in front of the TV, I was barely 4.
He said "you will remember this day for the rest of your life. Watch history in the making"
I rememeber.......

I remember my dad snapping pictures of the TV set as we watched. He said the same thing: "This is something you will tell your children and grandchildren".

It's amazing to me that my dad was born when aviation alone was in its infancy, and he lived to see the Moon landing and the space shuttle.

Kobi

09-01-2012, 04:28 PM

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Hal David, who along with partner Burt Bacharach penned dozens of timeless songs for movies, television and a variety of recording artists in the 1960s and beyond, has died. He was 91.

Bacharach and David wrote many top 40 hits including "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," ''Close to You" and "That's What Friends Are For."

"As a lyric writer, Hal was simple, concise and poetic -- conveying volumes of meaning in fewest possible words and always in service to the music," ASCAP's current president, the songwriter Paul Williams, said in a statement. "It is no wonder that so many of his lyrics have become part of our everyday vocabulary and his songs... the backdrop of our lives."

Many lyrics and tunes from Bacharach and David continue to resonate in pop culture, including "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" and "I Say A Little Prayer" to "What The World Needs Now Is Love." Their music was recorded by legendary singers including The Beatles, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond and their longtime partner Dionne Warwick.

David and Bacharach met when both worked in the Brill Building, New York's legendary Tin Pan Alley song factory where writers cranked out songs and attempted to sell them to music publishers. They scored their first big hit with "Magic Moments," a million-selling record for Perry Como.

In 1962 they began writing for a young singer named Dionne Warwick, whose versatile voice conveyed the emotion of David's lyrics and easily handled the changing patterns of Bacharach's melodies. Together the trio created a succession of popular songs including "Don't Make Me Over," ''Walk On By," ''I Say a Little Prayer." ''Do You Know the Way to San Jose," ''Trains and Boats and Planes," ''Anyone Who Has a Heart," ''You'll Never Get to Heaven" and "Always Something There to Remind Me."

B acharach and David also wrote hit songs for numerous other singers: "This Guy's in Love with You" (trumpeter Herb Alpert in his vocal debut), "Make It Easy on Yourself" (Jerry Butler), "What the World Needs Now is Love" (Jackie DeShannon) and "Wishin' and Hopin'" (Dusty Springfield). They also turned out title songs for the movies "What's New, Pussycat" (Tom Jones), "Wives and Lovers" (Jack Jones) and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" (Gene Pitney).

The hit-making t eam broke up after the 1973 musical remake of "Lost Horizon." They had devoted two years to the movie, only to see it scorned by critics and audiences alike. David, meanwhile, went on to collaborate successfully with several other composers: John Barry with the title song of the James Bond film "Moonraker;" Albert Hammond with "To All the Girls I've Loved Before," which Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson dueted on; and Henry Mancini with "The Greatest Gift" in "The Return of the Pink Panther."

Kobi

09-02-2012, 03:35 PM

GAPYEONG, South Korea (AP) - Officials say the religious leader who founded the Unification Church and built it into a multibillion-dollar business empire has died in South Korea at age 92.

Church officials said Monday that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon died at a hospital the church owns near his home in Gapyeong (GAHP' young) after being hospitalized with pneumonia last month.

The patriarch and founder of the controversial Unification Church gained fame in the 1970s and 1980s for pairing up and marrying off thousands of followers at elaborate mass weddings. Critics accused the church of demanding cult-like devotion from its followers.

The church also built a business empire that included newspapers, schools, a ski resort and dozens of other ventures in several countries, including a peace institute, carmaker and hotel in North Korea.

http://www.legacy.com/ns/obituary.aspx?n=sun-moon&pid=159618713

clay

09-03-2012, 05:28 PM

We have lost such a gentle giant among us. Michael was a truly beautiful soul!!! May you rest peacefully now, Michael!!!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/03/michael-clarke-duncan-dead-green-mile-dies_n_1852744.html

chefhmboyrd

09-03-2012, 05:30 PM

Kobi

09-03-2012, 05:42 PM

http://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20120903&t=2&i=649003418&w=460&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&r=CBRE8821Q3P00

I thought he did one heck of a job in The Green Mile.

Leigh

09-03-2012, 10:17 PM

I loved him in Green Mile and the Scorpion King with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson ~ I cried abit when I heard he died, it sucks he went too soon!

R.I.P. Michael :(

macele

09-03-2012, 10:25 PM

Melinda: What's your name?
John Coffey: John Coffey, ma'am.
Melinda: Like the drink, only not spelled the same.
John Coffey: No, ma'am. Not spelt the same at all.

what a handsome man! he walked the green mile. rest in peace.

Martina

09-03-2012, 11:21 PM

I watched all the episodes of The Finder and was sad when I heard it wasn't renewed in part because Michael Duncan Clarke was so wonderful in it. I really enjoyed watching him. Very sad.

Kobi

09-06-2012, 05:35 AM

PojXf-spKKM

Joe South, a singer-songwriter who wove confrontational lyrics into bouncy pop hits of the late 1960s and early ’70s, including “Games People Play,” “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” and “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” died on Wednesday at home in Flowery Branch, Ga., north of Atlanta. He was 72.

Mr. South’s best-known song became a hit when it was recorded by someone else. “Rose Garden,” sung by Lynn Anderson, reached No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart in 1971, four years after Mr. South wrote it. The chorus — “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden/Along with the sunshine there’s gotta be a little rain sometime” — reflected a world-weariness characteristic of his writing.

In 1969 he targeted religion and insincerity in “Games People Play,” which thrust him toward stardom:

People walking up to you

Singing glory hallelujah,

And they’re tryin’ to sock it to you

In the name of the Lord.

It won a Grammy for song of the year in 1970.

In 1958 Mr. South had a modest novelty hit, “The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor.” He played guitar for recording sessions in Nashville, Muscle Shoals, Ala., and elsewhere with a range of artists, including Bob Dylan (on his album “Blonde on Blonde”) and Aretha Franklin. Billy Joe Royal recorded several of his songs in the 1960s, including “Down in the Boondocks” and “I Knew You When,” before Mr. South established himself as a performer with some of the same songs. Elvis Presley played “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” in concert.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/arts/music/joe-south-singer-and-songwriter-dies-at-72.html

Kobi

09-06-2012, 11:46 AM

http://mi-cache.legacy.com/legacy/images/Portraits/Art-Modell-dead-159689056port.jpgx?w=117&h=151&option=1

BALTIMORE (AP)

Art Modell was among the most important figures in the NFL as owner of the Cleveland Browns, who became the Ravens after he took the team to Baltimore in 1996. The Ravens replaced the Baltimore Colts, who moved to Indianapolis in 1984.

During his four decades as an NFL owner, Modell helped negotiate the league's lucrative contracts with television networks, served as president of the NFL from 1967 to 1969, and chaired the negotiations for the first the collective bargaining agreement with the players in 1968.

He also was the driving force behind the 1970 contract between the NFL and ABC to televise games on Monday night.

Few people did more to help the NFL become what it is today.

Modell's Browns were among the best teams of the 1960s, led during his first few years as owner by legendary running back Jim Brown. Cleveland won the NFL championship in 1964 - Modell's only title with the Browns - and played in the title game in 1965, 1968 and 1969.

Modell wasn't the kind of owner who operated his team from an office. He mingled with the players and often watched every minute of practice.

"Art talked with me every day when I played in Baltimore," former Ravens tight end Shannon Sharpe said. "He knew everything about what was going on in my life. He showed real concern. But, it wasn't just me. He knew the practice squad players' names. He treated them the same. He was out at practice when it was 100 degrees and when the December snows came. I loved playing for him."

Born June 23, 1925, in Brooklyn, N.Y., Modell dropped out of high school at age 15 and worked in the Broo klyn Navy Yard cleaning out the hulls of ships to help out his financially strapped family after the death of his father.

He completed high school in night class, joined the Air Force in 1943, and then enrolled in a television school after World War II. He used that education to produce one of the first regular daytime television programs before moving into the advertising business in 1954.

A group of friends led by Modell purchased the Browns in 1961 for $4 million - a figure he called "totally excessive."

Aside from his work with the Browns, Modell became a leader in the Cleveland community. He served on the board of directors of a number of large companies, including the Ohio Bell Telephone Co., the Higbee Co. and the 20th Century-Fox Film Corp.

Modell and his wife, Patricia, continued their charitable ways in Baltimore, donating millions of dollars to The Seed School of Maryland, a boarding school in Maryland for disadvantaged youths; Johns Hopkins Hospital; and the Kennedy Krieger Institute. The couple also gave $3.5 million to the Lyric, which was renamed the Patricia & Art Modell Performing Arts Center at The Lyric.

http://www.legacy.com/ns/obituary.aspx?n=art-modell&pid=159689056

Kobi

09-09-2012, 03:35 PM

PHOENIX (AP) - Dorothy McGuire Williamson, who teamed with sisters Christine and Phyllis for a string of hits in the 50s and 60s as the popular McGuire Sisters singing group, has died.

The McGuire Sisters earned six gold records for hits including 1954's "Sincerely" and 1957's "Sugartime." The sisters were known for their sweet harmonies and identical hairdos and outfits.

They began singing together as children at their mother's Ohio church and then performed at weddings and church revivals. They got their big break on the show "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts" in 1952 where they continued to perform for seven years.

The group made numerous appearances on television and toured into the late 1960s, making a last performance together on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1968. Dorothy stepped back to raise her two sons. Christine also raised a family while Phyllis pursued a solo career, according to a 1986 profile in People Magazine after the trio reunited and began doing nightclub and Las Vegas performances again.

The sisters last performed together in the mid-2000s, and are featured on a 2004 PBS show called "Magic Moments - Best of 50s Pop."

The group performed for five presidents and Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. They were inducted into the National Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 2001.

GscELYBLOBE

Kätzchen

09-11-2012, 07:51 AM

New Yorkers and people who volunteered during the WTC attacks are dying with cancer linked to exposure to the scene of the crime that happened that day. I share in their grief that still today, people can hardly move on with life due to extensive factors linked to that day.

:candle::candle::candle::candle::candle::candle:

By NBC News and wire services
September 11, 2012, 6:44 am
NBCNews.com

Updated at 5:15 p.m. ET: The federal government on Monday added 14 categories of cancer to the list of illnesses linked to the 9/11 terror attacks, which brings added coverage to rescue workers and people living near ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health approved the additions to the list of illnesses covered in the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which were proposed in June. The updated regulations take effect 30 days after the ruling is published in the Federal Register.

The decision "marks an important step in the effort to provide needed treatment and care to 9/11 responders and survivors," said Dr. John Howard, administrator of the World Trade Center Health Program established by the Zadroga law.

The Zadroga Act — named after NYPD Detective James Zadroga, who died at age 34 after working at ground zero — was signed into law nearly two years ago. Despite the hundreds of sick responders, the act did not cover cancer because of a supposed lack of scientific evidence linking cancer to ground zero toxins.

"We are getting sick in record numbers," said Ray Pfeiffer, a first responder who was diagnosed three years ago with kidney cancer. He said it has been a struggle to pay for expensive medications not fully covered by his insurance.

"It's fantastic news," he said of the expanded list of covered illnesses.
About 400 residents and rescue workers have died from cancer since 9/11, according to the New York Post.

With cancer included in the program more victims are likely to seek compensation, which could cause individual awards to be reduced as officials divide up the $2.77 billion fund.

"They’re going to add cancers, but are they going to add more money to the fund?" Thomas "T.J." Gilmartin, who suffers from lung disease and sleep apnea, said to the Post. "It’s crazy. Every time, we gotta fight. It’s two years since Obama signed that bill, and nobody’s got 10 cents."
"We fought long and hard to make sure that our 9/11 heroes suffering from cancers obtained from their work at ground zero get the help they deserve," U.S. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles E. Schumer, both of New York, said in a statement. "Today's announcement is a huge step forward that will provide justice and support to so many who are now suffering from cancer and other illnesses. We will press on - with advocates, the community, and our partners in government - to ensure that all those who suffered harm from 9/11 and its aftermath get the access to the program they so desperately need."
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/120910-james-zadroga-kb-1130a.380;380;7;70;0.jpgFamily photo via NY Daily News / AP File In this undated file photo, New York City Police Det. James Zadroga, left, holds his daughter Tylerann. Fifty cancers will be added to the Zadroga Act, which was named after the detective--who died of respiratory failure in Jan. 2006 after working at ground zero.

Last week, the New York City Fire Department added nine names to the 55 already etched on a wall honoring members who have died of illnesses related to ground zero rescue and recovery work, Reuters reported.
Some estimates put the overall death toll from 9/11-related illness at more than 1,000, according to Reuters. At least 20,000 ground zero workers are being treated across the country and 40,000 are being monitored by the World Trade Center Health Program, Reuters reported.

Tuesday marks the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.
Last fall, the September 11 Memorial at ground zero finally opened in the footprints of the original towers. Since then, more than 4 million people have visited.

Financial, security and design setbacks have delayed the redevelopment of the World Trade Center in the past decade. A recent project audit indicates that overall site redevelopment costs have grown to nearly $15 billion.

One World Trade Center is nearing completion and is expected to open in 2014.

NBCNewYork.com's Brynn Gingras and Reuters contributed to this report.

Scorp

09-11-2012, 08:21 AM

To those who innocently lost their lives. Rest In Peace.

http://www.britishrose.synthasite.com/resources/WTC%20Graphics.gif?timestamp=1235594020229

Kobi

09-12-2012, 03:36 PM

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/09/12/timestopics/J-Christopher-Stevens/J-Christopher-Stevens-articleInline.jpg

J. Christopher Stevens was the American ambassador to Libya when he was killed on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, when an armed mob attacked and burned the American Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Three of his staff members were also killed.

The violence appeared to be part of riots that had broken out in Benghazi and Cairo that day over a short American-made video mocking Islam’s founding prophet.

But the next day, American officials said they suspected the Benghazi attack may have been planned rather than a spontaneous mob getting out of control.

Mr. Stevens, a career diplomat, previously served in Iraq, Canada and the Netherlands. A veteran of American diplomatic missions in Libya, he had served in Benghazi during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi, and he was widely admired by the Libyan rebels for his support of their struggle.

Mr. Stevens, a fluent Arabic speaker, knew better than most diplomats in the American Foreign Service the opportunities and travails facing Libya after the fall of Colonel Qaddafi.

Having served as the deputy ambassador during Colonel Qaddafi’s rule, he acted as the Obama administration’s main interlocutor to the rebels based in Benghazi who ultimately overthrew him while NATO conducted airstrike missions. Mr. Obama rewarded him with the nomination to become the first ambassador in a post-Qaddafi Libya, and he arrived in May with indefatigable enthusiasm for the country’s prospects as a free, Western-friendly democracy.

For those who knew him, Mr. Stevens was an easygoing, accessible, candid and at times irreverent diplomat, with a deep understanding of Arab culture and politics that began when he was a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.

Mr. Stevens, a native of California and graduate of Berkeley, joined the Foreign Service in 1991 after working as a trade lawyer. He spent much of his career in the Middle East, serving in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel, where he focused on the Palestinian territories, and in State Department offices overseeing policy in the region. He served as the deputy chief of mission in the capital, Tripoli, from 2007 to 2009 during the relatively brief easing of tensions with Colonel Qaddafi’s government.

After the Arab Spring uprisings spread, first to Benghazi, then across Libya, he came back to the country in circumstances that would challenge any diplomat. Then, as he prepared to return this year as ambassador, he appeared in an introductory video, subtitled in Arabic, earnestly recalling the United States’ own Civil War as an example of overcoming internal strife.

“We know that Libya is still recovering from an intense period of conflict,” he said. “And there are many courageous Libyans who bear the scars of that battle.”

He developed a reputation as a keen observer of Libya’s politics, and, as Ms. Kwiram noted, a patient listener who eagerly sought out Libyan activists, diplomats and journalists to meet in his offices in a hotel and later in a rented villa on the edge of Tripoli. He also kept up his routine of daily runs through goat farms, olive groves and vineyards nearby. In his e-mail to family in friends, he joked about the Embassy’s Fourth of July party.

“Somehow our clever staff located a Libyan band that specializes in 1980s soft rock,” he wrote, “so I felt very much at home.”

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/j_christopher_stevens/index.html?ref=topics

CherylNYC

09-20-2012, 11:05 PM

Who knew? Miss Monitor was a lesbian. Last line in the obit: "She is survived by her longtime companion, Elke Schliwa."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/arts/tedi-thurman-miss-monitor-weather-girl-dies-at-89.html?ref=todayspaper

Tedi Thurman Dies at 89; Radio’s Miss Monitor
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: September 20, 2012

At 5-foot-7, with sea-blue eyes, flowing red hair, chiseled cheeks and a shapely figure, Tedi Thurman was a stunner. But it was her breathy, alluring voice that brought her fame.

Tedi Thurman, who, in one writer's estimation, very shortly had "the most recognizable female voice in the country."

The “weather girl” on the long-running NBC radio show “Monitor” in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Ms. Thurman would take over the mike and in soft, sultry tones — with lush music in the background — virtually drawl, “Cleveland, 34, snow; Boston, 41, cloudy; Phoenix, 62, fair; New York City, 43, sunny; Paris, 38, cloudy.”

But she would always lead with Atlanta, “because Georgia was her home state,” said Dennis Hart, the author of “Monitor: The Last Great Radio Show” (2002), a history of the program, which Pat Weaver, the president of NBC, created in 1955. Starting at 8 a.m. on Saturdays, it originally stayed on the air till midnight on Sundays.

Ms. Thurman, who died on Monday at 89, made the forecasts “sound like an irresistible invitation to an unforgettable evening,” Jack Gould wrote in The New York Times shortly after the show’s premiere.

In Mr. Hart’s estimation, Ms. Thurman “probably became the most recognizable female voice in the country within a few short months.”

With hosts like Dave Garroway, Hugh Downs, Frank Blair, Gene Rayburn, Henry Morgan and Bill Cullen, “Monitor” was a hit, offering an array of news, sports, comedy, variety, music and live remote pickups from around the nation and the world. It lasted 20 years, the first six of which featured Ms. Thurman as the so-called Miss Monitor, updating the weather hour after hour.

In 1957, while working virtually around the weekend clock on radio, Ms. Thurman was also a television regular, spoofing herself on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.” In sleek dresses and high heels, she would saucily deliver lines like: “I know what you want. You want me to tell you about the weather. In New York it’s 74. And me, I’m 36-26-36.”

Dorothy Ruth Thurman (she later took the name Tedi) was born in Midville, Ga., on June 23, 1923, one of four children of Ben and Para Thurman. Her father was president of the local bank.

She wanted to be an artist and studied at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Design in Washington. But, she told Mr. Hart, “People were always painting me, telling me I should become a model.” Soon after moving to New York, she was on the covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan and appearing on television shows like “Studio One.” That led to her audition for “Monitor.”

If Ms. Thurman’s fame was brief, it had a long afterlife. “Tedi told me,” Mr. Hart said, “that decades after she’d left the show, people at parties and gatherings would still ask her to do the weather in that sexy Miss Monitor voice.”

She died at her home in Palm Springs, Calif., after a brief illness, Mr. Hart said. She is survived by her longtime companion, Elke Schliwa.

CharmingButch25

09-20-2012, 11:11 PM

I know this is totally for famous folk but I just wanted to say r.i.p grandma

Kobi

09-21-2012, 03:21 PM

NEW YORK (AP) — Dorothy Carter, a former stage actress who starred in the adaptation of the groundbreaking novel ‘‘Strange Fruit’’ on Broadway and later became an educator and a children’s book author, died Sept 14th.

Carter, born in 1918 in Kissimee, Fla., studied drama at Spelman College and later was taught by Stella Adler in New York. She made her Broadway debut in 1945 in Lillian Smith’s adaptation of her novel ‘‘Strange Fruit,’’ an interracial love story.

The show, directed by Jose Ferrer and starring Jane White and Earl Jones, closed after 60 performances but got a positive write-up by then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated column.

Carter, who was black, became part of the American Negro Theater under the direction of Abe Hill and played Ruth Lawson in its 1946 Broadway production of ‘‘Walk Hard.’’ She also appeared in Lou Peterson’s ‘‘Take a Giant Step’’ in 1953.

After moving to Milwaukee, she enrolled in the Wisconsin State Teachers College and later earned her master’s degree. She taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and became the first female African-American professor at Bank Street College of Education in New York City in 1981.

In her 80s, she wrote three children’s books inspired by her childhood: ‘‘Bye, Mis’ Lela’’, ‘‘Wilhe'mina Miles: After the Stork Night’’ and ‘‘Grandma’s General Store — the Ark.’’

http://www.boston.com/news/education/2012/09/21/actress-teacher-author-dorothy-carter-dies/7KcALzpoy3p9ur9xPMP2jK/story.html

Kobi

09-26-2012, 10:13 AM

dmfJJrldFeg

ST. LOUIS (AP) - With a string of gold albums, a hit TV series and the signature "Moon River," Andy Williams was a voice of the 1960s, although not the '60s we usually hear about.

Williams' plaintive tenor, boyish features and easy demeanor helped him outlast many of the rock stars who had displaced him and such fellow crooners as Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. He remained on the charts into the 1970s, and continued to perform in his 80s at the Moon River Theatre he built in Branson, Mo. In November 2011, when Williams announced that he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer, he vowed to return to performing the following year: His 75th in show business.

He became a major star the same year as Elvis Presley, 1956, with the Sinatra-like swing "Canadian Sunset," and for a time he was pushed into such Presley imitations as "Lips of Wine" and the No. 1 smash "Butterfly." But he mostly stuck to what he called his "natural style," and kept it up throughout his career. In 1970, when even Sinatra had given up and (temporarily) retired, Williams was in the top 10 with the theme from "Love Story," the Oscar-winning tearjerker. He had 18 gold records and three platinum, was nominated for five Grammy awards and hosted the Grammy ceremonies for several years.

Movie songs became a specialty, from "Love Story" and "Days of Wine and Roses" to "Moon River." The longing Johnny Mercer-Henry Mancini ballad was his most famous song, even though he never released it as a single because his record company feare d such lines as "my huckleberry friend" were too confusing and old-fashioned for teens. The song was first performed by Audrey Hepburn in the beloved 1961 film "Breakfast at Tiffany's," but Mancini thought "Moon River" ideal for Williams, who recorded it in "pretty much one take" and also sang it at the 1962 Academy Awards. Although "Moon River" was covered by countless artists and became a hit single for Jerry Butler, Williams made the song his personal brand. In fact, he insisted on it.

The Andy Williams Show," which lasted in various formats through the 1960s and into 1971, won three Emmys and featured Williams alternately performing his stable of hits and bantering casually with his guest stars. It was on that show that Williams - who launched his own care er as part of an all-brother quartet - introduced the world to another clean-cut act - the original four singing Osmond Brothers of Utah. Their younger sibling Donny also made his debut on Williams' show, in 1963 when he was 6 years old. Four decades later, the Osmonds and Williams would find themselves in close proximity again, sharing Williams' theater in Branson, Mo.

Kobi

09-27-2012, 08:41 AM

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LONDON (Reuters) - Czech-born film star Herbert Lom, best known as the deranged Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus in the "Pink Panther" comedies, has died, according to British media.

He portrayed Napoleon Bonaparte twice, including in "War and Peace" in 1956 alongside Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn, and the King of Siam in the first London production of the stage musical "The King and I" in 1953.

Two years later he collaborated with Peter Sellers in the dark comedy "The Ladykillers", and they would work together again in the 1960s and 1970s on the Pink Panther series.

In them Lom played the increasingly crazed Dreyfus alongside Seller's hapless Inspector Clouseau, and the success of his character owed much to Lom's own improvisations.

He also wrote two novels, "Enter A Spy" published in 1971 and "Dr Guillotine" in 1993.

----------

Never really understood the popularity of the Pink Panther films.

LeftWriteFemme

09-28-2012, 09:07 PM

This is a favorite clip of mine....made all the dearer since the death of Andy Williams

ybluokhhRP0

lusciouskiwi

09-29-2012, 07:17 PM

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/397195_4621648977352_688286899_n.jpg Tereska Torres, a convent-educated French writer who quite by accident wrote America's first lesbian pulp novel, and is best known for her 1950's Women's Barracks, died on Thursday at her home in Paris...She was 92.

Kobi

10-03-2012, 05:46 AM

http://mi-cache.legacy.com/legacy/images/Portraits/Antoine-Ashley-dead-160248726port.jpgx?w=117&h=151&option=1

The Logo TV channel says that a contestant who competed on "RuPaul's Drag Race" as Sahara Davenport has died. Antoine Ashley was 27.

A channel spokesman says the cause of Ashley's death Monday was not immediately released. His manager, David Charpentier, says a statement is being planned by his family.

He was a contestant on "RuPaul's Drag Race" in 2010. The classically trained dancer also released a dance single, "Go Off," this year.

Kobi

10-03-2012, 02:28 PM

http://ts3.mm.bing.net/images/thumbnail.aspx?q=4559963232077834&id=6f76e6c7fee47600ee3e3e09f10c2ea0

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Yvonne Mounsey, who danced major roles for George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins with the New York City Ballet in the 1950s and went on to found an influential West Coast ballet school, has died. She was 93.

Mounsey danced with the City Ballet from 1948 to 1958, rising from soloist to principal dancer.

She was the Dark Angel in Balanchine's "Serenade" and Siren in his 1950 revival of "Prodigal Son," which were among her favorite roles, her daughter said.

For Robbins, she originated the roles of the Queen in "The Cage," the Harp in "Fanfare" and the Wife in "The Concert."

In 1966, Mounsey moved to Los Angeles and opened the Westside School of Ballet, teaching the neoclassical Balanchine technique, which has become a signature style of ballet in America. The Santa Monica school became influential and its students have included former City Ballet star Jock Soto and current company principal dancers Andrew Veyette and Tiler Peck. The school also counts Joy Womack, the first American woman to dance with the Bolshoi Ballet, among the world-class dancers it has trained.

http://news.yahoo.com/ny-ballet-star-yvonne-mounsey-dies-la-195815752.html

Kobi

10-03-2012, 02:40 PM

http://ts3.mm.bing.net/images/thumbnail.aspx?q=5061812961018470&id=f88b0af086010cbb75be189315506489

Frank Wilson, the legendary producer for Motown who worked on music for The Supremes, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, and more recently John Legend, died Thursday after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 71.

He churned out several hits, writing and producing songs such as Stevie Wonder's "Castles In the Sand;" Diana Ross and The Supremes' "Love Child," "I'm Living in Shame," "Up the Ladder to the Roof," and "Stone Love;" The Temptations' "All I Need;" Marvin Gaye's "Chained;" and Four Tops' "Still Water (Love)."

Wilson also helped write "You've Made Me So Very Happy," a 1967 Top 40 single for Motown's Brenda Holloway that soon became an even bigger hit for Blood, Sweat and Tears.

In 1976, Wilson left Motown to become a born-again Christian, according to AllMusic.com, though his song credits have continued up until present day, the most prominent of his recent music work being John Legend's "Each Day Gets Better."

Instead of music, Wilson began writing books. Before his death, Wilson became ordained as a minister and wrote two books: The Master's Degree--Majoring in Your Marriage and Unmasking the Lone Ranger. He also appeared on numerous talk shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, and spoke at several churches and conferences worldwide.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/frank-wilson-dies-motown-obituary-supremes-marvin-gaye-375190

Kobi

10-04-2012, 04:12 PM

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R. B. Greaves, an R&B singer whose 1969 hit “Take a Letter, Maria” reached No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 68.

Ronald Bertram Aloysius Greaves was born on Nov. 28, 1943, at an Air Force base in Georgetown in what was then British Guyana. He was raised on a Seminole reservation in California. In 1963 Mr. Greaves moved to England to perform and record as the frontman for Sonny Childe and the TNT’s.

He returned to America to record “Take a Letter, Maria” on Atco Records and “Always Something There to Remind Me,” both of which appeared on his album “R.B. Greaves.”

Mr. Greaves’s 1970 version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Always Something There to Remind Me” reached No. 27 on the Billboard chart. (A version by the synth-pop group Naked Eyes hit No. 8 on the chart in 1983.) Among his other recordings were covers of James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Mr. Greaves moved to Los Angeles and began to work in the technology industry after a failed attempt to revive his recording career in the late 1970s.

WM1abTKsAhc

Martina

10-06-2012, 01:07 PM

He sure paid the price for freedom of speech. Another reason to treasure it.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-nguyen-chi-thien-20121005,0,3519449.story

Nguyen Chi Thien dies at 73; poet, Vietnamese prisoner
Poet Nguyen Chi Thien, a familiar figure in Orange County's Little Saigon, wrote about democracy and his persecution in North Vietnam. He died Tuesday at 73.

By Anh Do, Los Angeles Times

October 5, 2012
Advertisement

The poet was a familiar figure, striding through Little Saigon, sipping tea, sharing wisdom, his head covered with his trademark fedora. He liked to read through the night, not too tired to dissect a bit of homeland politics.

He lived simply, renting rooms in other people's homes, wearing the same suits for appearances, offering thanks for gifts of fruit and books. Early Tuesday, he died just as quietly in a Santa Ana hospital after suffering chest pain. Nguyen Chi Thien, 73, the acclaimed author of "Flowers From Hell," was revered for his modesty and creativity, thriving through 27 years of imprisonment, much of it in isolation.

"For him to live that long, in an existence that dramatic, is precious," said Doan Viet Hoat, a friend and fellow democracy activist.

"I think his whole life has been a lonely life, and it touched his thinking," he said. "It made him the person he is. And he is someone who understands humanity, society and the regime" in Hanoi.

In 1960, while working as a substitute teacher at a high school in his homeland, he opened a textbook stating that the Soviet Union triumphed over the Imperial Army of Japan in Manchuria, bringing an end to World War II. That's not true, he explained to students. The United States defeated Japan when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nguyen, born in Hanoi on Feb. 27, 1939, paid for his remark with three years and six months in labor camps, charged with spreading propaganda, according to the online Viet Nam Literature Project.

In jail, Nguyen began composing poems in his head, memorizing them. Police arrested him again in 1966, condemning his politically irreverent verses, distributed in Hanoi and Haiphong, and sending him back to prison, this time for more than 11 years. He was released in 1977, two years after the fall of Saigon.

In 1979, he walked into the British Embassy in Hanoi with a manuscript of 400 poems, according to the Viet Nam Literature Project. British diplomats promised to ferry his poetry out of the country.

Jailed again, he spent the next 12 years at Hoa Lo prison — infamous as the Hanoi Hilton.

While he was locked up, his collected writings were published as "Flowers From Hell," initially in Vietnamese, then translated into English, which helped him win the International Poetry Award in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in 1985. An anthology of his poems later became available in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese and Korean.

"He represents a devotion to imagination and to intellect. He was very concerned with what I consider to be a great theme of Vietnamese literature — piercing beyond illusion," said Dan Duffy, founder of the Viet Nam Literature Project.

"He not only survived all those years" in captivity, Duffy added, "he glowed with special insight."

By 1991, as socialism crumbled in Europe, Nguyen emerged from prison with a worldwide following. Human Rights Watch honored him in 1995 — the same year he resettled in the United States.

"He couldn't sit still too long, for he had been forced to be still. His life became his work. He's still here. He's immortal," said Jean Libby, who launched vietamreview.net and who edited Nguyen's prison prose, "Hoa Lo/Hanoi Hilton Stories."

Nguyen was hospitalized at Western Medical Center in Santa Ana and underwent testing for lung cancer when he died. He had tuberculosis as a youth.

"He accepted the coming death. His mind and his spirit were always open," said author and human rights activist Tran Phong Vu, who remained at his friend's hospital bedside. The men had taped a TV cable show together on Vietnamese current events, sharing a final meal of My Tho noodles, just days before Nguyen's passing.

Nguyen never married and had no children.

But his work, stanzas that became as familiar as songs, keeping his soul alive in the darkness of confinement, continue to move the Vietnamese immigrant generation — and their sons and daughters. As translated by the journalist Nguyen Ngoc Bich, he wrote:

There is nothing beautiful about my poetry

It's like highway robbery, oppression, TB blood cough

There is nothing noble about my poetry

It's like death, perspiration, and rifle butts

My poetry is made up of horrible images

Like the Party, the Youth Union, our leaders, the Central Committee

My poetry is somewhat weak in imagination

Being true like jail, hunger, suffering

My poetry is simply for common folks

To read and see through the red demons' black hearts.

Kobi

10-10-2012, 11:55 AM

http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=I.4834862611761835&pid=15.1

DETROIT (AP) — Alex Karras was one of the NFL's most feared defensive tackles throughout the 1960s, a player who hounded quarterbacks and bulled past opposing linemen.

And yet, to many people he will always be the lovable dad from the 1980s sitcom "Webster" or the big cowboy who famously punched out a horse in "Blazing Saddles"and delivered the classic line: "Mongo only pawn in game of life."

The rugged player, who anchored the Detroit Lions' defense and then made a successful transition to an acting career, with a stint along the way as a commentator on "Monday Night Football," died Wednesday. He was 77.

His death also will be tied to the NFL's conflict with former players over concussions. Karras in April joined the more than 3,500 football veterans suing the league for not protecting them better from head injuries, immediately becoming one of the best-known names in the legal fight. The family had not yet decided whether to donate Karras' brain for study, as other families have done.

Recently, his wife said Karras' quality of life had deteriorated because of head injuries sustained during his playing career. He was formally diagnosed with dementia several years ago and has had symptoms for more than a dozen years.

For all his prowess on the field, Karras may have gained more fame when he turned to acting in the movies and on television.

Aside from Blazing Saddles and Webster, Karras also appeared in the movies Paper Lion, Porky's, Victor/Victoria, Against All Odds, and portrayed the husband of famed female athlete "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias in the TV movie that starred Susan Clark, who later became his wife.

Arwen

10-11-2012, 08:30 AM

http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=I.4834862611761835&pid=15.1

I loved his role in Victor/Victoria. Really did a fine job of coming out and making it a sensitive thing even in the middle of the comedy.

Kobi

10-13-2012, 02:16 PM

http://ts3.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4591930678249554&pid=15.1

Gary Collins co-starred, with Jack Warden and Mark Slade, in the 1965 series The Wackiest Ship in the Army. He starred in the 1972 television series The Sixth Sense as parapsychologist Dr. Michael Rhodes and in the 1974 series Born Free as wildlife conservationist George Adamson.

Collins guest-starred on dozens of television shows since the 1960s, including Perry Mason, The Virginian, Hawaii Five-O, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Love Boat, Charlie's Angels, Friends, and JAG. He had roles in the 1969 Andy Griffith film Angel in My Pocket, and in the 1970 film Airport. He also played the heroic co-pilot in the 1977 film The Night They Took Miss Beautiful.

Collins hosted the television talk show Hour Magazine from 1980 to 1988, and co-hosted the ABC television series The Home Show from 1989 to 1994. He was the host of the Miss America Pageant from 1982 to 1990.

Collins was married to former Miss America, Mary Ann Mobley, from 1967 until his death.

Stud_puppy1991

10-13-2012, 03:58 PM

Rest In Peace to Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes who died earlier this April

Arwen

10-14-2012, 03:13 PM

Kobi

10-14-2012, 03:41 PM

Arlen Specter, a gruff, independent-minded moderate who spent three decades in the U.S. Senate but was spurned by Pennsylvania voters after switching in 2009 from Republican to Democrat, died on Sunday of cancer, his family said. He was 82.

Specter rose to prominence in the 1960s as an aggressive Philadelphia prosecutor and as an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, developing the single-bullet theory that posited just one bullet struck both President Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally - an assumption critical to the argument that presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The theory remains contro versial and was the focus of Oliver Stone's 1991 movie "JFK."

In 1987, Specter helped thwart the Supreme Court nomination of former federal appeals Judge Robert H. Bork - earning him conservative enemies who still bitterly refer to such rejections as being "borked."

But four years later, Specter was criticized by liberals for his tough questioning of Anita Hill at Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court nomination hearings and for accusing her of committing "flat-out perjury." The nationally televised interrogation incensed women's groups and nearly cost him his seat in 1992.

He took credit for helping to defeat President Clinton's national health care plan - the complexities of which he highlighted in a gigantic chart that hung on his office wall for years afterward - and helped lead the investigation into Gulf War syndrome. Following the Iran-Contra scandal, he pushed legislation that created the inspectors general of the CIA.

As a senior member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Specter pushed for increased funding for stem-cell research, breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease, and supported several labor-backed initiatives in a GOP-led Congress. He also doggedly sought federal funds for local projects in his home state.

Specter was a colorful and interesting pita. I will never forget how he and Orrin Hatch bullied and belittled Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings in a disgusting display of male arrogance.

Kobi

10-18-2012, 05:35 AM

http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=I.4894536896807735&pid=15.1

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Actress Sylvia Kristel, the Dutch star of the hit 1970s erotic movie "Emmanuelle," has died of cancer at age 60.

Her agent, Features Creative Management, said in a statement Thursday that Kristel died in her sleep Wednesday night. Kristel, a model who turned to acting in the 1970s, had been fighting cancer for several years.

Her breakthrough came in "Emmanuelle," an erotic tale directed by Frenchman Just Jaeckin, about the sexual adventures of a man and his beautiful young wife, played by Kristel, in Thailand.

She went on to star in several sequels to "Emmanuelle," as well as in Hollywood movies including "Private Lessons" in 1981.

Kobi

10-21-2012, 07:50 AM

http://mi-cache.legacy.com/legacy/images/Portraits/George-McGovern-dead-160585994port.jpgx?w=117&h=151&option=1

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — George McGovern once joked that he had wanted to run for president in the worst way — and that he had done so.

It was a campaign in 1972 dishonored by Watergate, a scandal that fully unfurled too late to knock Republican President Richard M. Nixon from his place as a commanding favorite for re-election. The South Dakota senator tried to make an issue out of the bungled attempt to wiretap the offices of the Democratic National Committee, calling Nixon the most corrupt president in history.

McGovern could not escape the embarrassing missteps of his own campaign of 1972. The most torturous was the selection of Missouri Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton as the vice presidential nominee and, 18 days later, following the disclosure that Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy for depression, the decision to drop him from the ticket despite having pledged to back him "1,000 percent."

After a hard day's campaigning — Nixon did virtually none — McGovern would complain to those around him that nobody was paying attention. With R. Sargent Shriver as his running mate, he went on to carry only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, winning just 38 percent of the popular vote in one of the biggest landslides losses in American presidential history.

A decorated World War II bomber pilot, McGovern said learned to hate war by waging it. In his disastrous race against Nixon, he promised to end the Vietnam War and cut defense spending by billions of dollars. He helped create the Food for Peace program and spent much of his career believing the United States should be more accommodating to the former Soviet Union.

Never a showman, he made his case with a style as plain as the prairies where he grew up, sounding often more like the Methodist minister he'd once studied to become than longtime U.S. senator and three-time candidate for president he became.

And he never shied from the word "liberal," even as other Democrats blanched at the word and Republicans used it as an epithet.

Defeated by Nixon, McGovern returned to the Senate and pressed there to end the Vietnam war while championing agriculture, anti-hunger and food stamp programs in the United States and food programs abroad. He won re-election to the Senate in 1974, by which point he could make wry jokes about his presidential defeat.

"After losing his bid for a fourth Senate term in the 1980 Republican landslide that made Ronald Reagan president, McGovern went on to teach and lecture at universities, and found a liberal political action committee. McGovern served as U.S. ambassador to the Rome-based United Nation's food agencies from 1998 to 2001 and spent his later years working to feed needy children around the world. He and former Republican Sen. Bob Dole collaborated to create an international food for education and child nutrition program, for which they shared the 2008 World Food Prize.

http://www.legacy.com/ns/obituary.aspx?n=george-mcgovern&pid=160585994

--------------------------

Worked on this guys presidential campaign while in high school. He was definately a different - in a good way - politician. And, one of the few willing to speak out about the Vietnam war.

Always liked him and often wondered where the country would have gone with him at the helm.

Gráinne

10-21-2012, 08:54 AM

I would have voted for him, had I been old enough. He was ahead of his time. One wonders what he thought of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kobi

10-22-2012, 03:52 PM

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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- Russell Means spent a lifetime as a modern American Indian warrior. He railed against broken treaties, fought for the return of stolen land and even took up arms against the federal government.

A onetime leader of the American Indian Movement, he called national attention to the plight of impoverished tribes and often lamented the waning of Indian culture. After leaving the movement in the 1980s, the handsome, braided activist was still a cultural presence, appearing in several movies.

Means, who died Monday from throat cancer at age 72, helped lead the 1973 uprising at Wounded Knee - a bloody confrontation that raised America's awareness about the struggles of Indians and gave rise to a wider protest movement that lasted for the rest of the decade.

Before AIM, there were few national advocates for American Indians. Means was one of the first to emerge. He sought to restore Indians' pride in their culture and to challenge a government that had paid little attention to tribes in generations. He was also one of the first to urge sports teams to do away with Indian names and mascots.

Means said his most important accomplishment was the proposal for the Republic of Lakotah, a plan to carve out a sovereign Indian nation inside the United States. He took the idea all the way to the United Nations, even though it was ignored by tribal governments closer to home, including his own Oglala Sioux leaders, with whom he often clashed.

His activism extended to tribes beyond the United States. In the mid-1980s, Means traveled to Nicaragua to support indigenous Miskito Indians who were fighting the Sandinista government.

With his rugged good looks and long, dark braids, he also was known for a handful of Hollywood roles, most notably in the 1992 movie "The Last of the Mohicans," in which he portrayed Chingachgook alongside Daniel Day-Lewis' Hawkeye.

He also appeared in the 1994 film "Natural Born Killers," voiced Chief Powhatan in the 1995 animated film "Pocahontas" and guest starred in 2004 on the HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Means also ran unsuccessfully for the Libertarian nomination for president in 1988 and briefly served as a vice presidential candidate in 1984 on the ticket of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBIT_MEANS?SITE=MAHYC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Kobi

10-22-2012, 03:57 PM

AMHERST, N.Y. (AP) -- Paul Kurtz, who founded an international center devoted to debunking psychics and UFOs and promoting science and reason over what he viewed as religious myths, has died. He was 86.

A prolific author and organizer, Kurtz also founded the not-for-profit Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and Council for Secular Humanism, as well as the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which takes on such topics as alien sightings, paranormal claims and homeopathic remedies. Most recently, he formed the Institute for Science and Human Values.

"He was without question a remarkable visionary and the scope of his accomplishments is truly staggering," said Nathan Bupp, who was mentored by Kurtz before going on to work for him, currently at the ISHV. "His lasting legacy will be as a builder of institutions and a purveyor of ideas. ... He had an intense interest in the power of ideas and how ideas came to permeate and influence the culture at large."

A compilation of Kurtz essays published by Bupp in June describes Kurtz's theory of eupraxsophy, which he first envisioned in 1988 as a secular moral alternative to religion that met some of the social needs served by religions without the supernaturalism or authoritarianism of traditional faiths.

At a January UNESCO conference in Paris, Kurtz spoke on "neo-humanism" and the positives of unbelief. Kurtz wasn't anti-religious, Bupp said, but nonreligious.

"Neo-humanists do not believe in God, yet they wish to do good. But if this moral outlook is to prevail, then neo-humanisms need to concentrate on improving the things of this world rather than simply combating the illusions of supernaturalism," Kurtz said at the conference.

A World War II veteran, Kurtz fought in the Battle of the Bulge and served in a unit that liberated the Dachau concentration camp, according to a biography provided by the Center for Inquiry. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University in 1952 and taught philosophy at several colleges, arriving at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1965 and remaining there until his retirement from teaching in 1991.

All the while, he was active in the humanist movement. He served from 1967-1978 as editor of The Humanist, published by the American Humanist Association. He joined the board of directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in 1969 and served as co-chairman of that organization from 1986 to 1994. He founded what would become the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in 1976 and Council for Secular Humanism in 1980.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBIT_KURTZ?SITE=MAHYC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

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Have to admit, I have no clue who this man was but the obit has me curious to learn more about his beliefs.

Kobi

11-10-2012, 02:09 AM

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Major Harris, a former member of the "Philadelphia sound" soul group the Delfonics and singer of the 1975 hit "Love Won't Let Me Wait," has died in Richmond. He was 65.

Harris made the rounds with several music groups in the 1960s, including the Charmers, Frankie Lymo n's Teenagers and Nat Turner's Rebellion.

He then joined the Delfonics in the early 1970s, replacing Randy Cain in the group known for their hits "La-La (Means I Love You)" and "Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time)."

Harris left the group in 1974 to pursue a solo career. He recorded a string of R&B singles, including "Love Won't Let Me Wait," which peaked at No. 5 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart and was certified as a gold record by the Recording Industry Association of America. The song was covered by Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams in 1994 and again by Luther Vandross on his 1988 album "Any Love."

Harris last performed in 2011 at a reunion show with some of the members of the Delfonics, Thomas said.

BQAFluMiwIo

Kobi

11-16-2012, 01:27 PM

Lucille Bliss, the voice of Smurfette and several other iconic cartoon characters, died last week at the age of 96 from natural causes. Katy Perry played Smurfette in the feature film, but Bliss was the original blue-hued babe.

According to her obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Bliss went to Los Angeles as a young woman trying to break into show business. She borrowed $50 from a friend to make the trip. She auditioned for the role of cruel stepsister Anastasia in Disney's "Cinderella." Six months later, she got the role. Years later, she recalled hearing the good news. "I almost dropped the phone. I was delirious. That is the way it all began."

And it never really stopped. All told, Bliss worked in movies and television for more than 60 years. In addition to her work on the long-running "The Smurfs," Bliss provided the voice of Elroy Jetson on "The Jetsons" and Crusader Rabbit, star of one of TV's first successful animated programs. Other notable credits, according to IMDb, include a small part in "101 Dalmatians," the role of Mrs. Fitzgibbons in "The Secret of NIMH," and turns in the hit anime series "Avatar: The Last Airbender."

Bliss also did non-animation work. She had a one-episode role in the Don Johnson TV series "Nash Bridges" and she hosted "The Happy Birthday To You Show" in San Francisco during the 1950s, according to Animation World Network.

In an interview with Emmy TV Legends, Bliss spoke about her connection to Smurfette. "She had a lot of animation and a lot of personality. And she was lovable and she was a little feisty at times, too. And she loved animals… She felt so real to me because I created her voice. I could feel her emotions. It may sound strange, but it’s true."

Kobi

11-16-2012, 01:33 PM

DETROIT (AP) — Early in her husband's political career, Helen Milliken dutifully played the role of unassuming, supportive spouse. But she evolved into an outspoken advocate of women's rights, the environment and other issues close to her heart during her record 14 years as Michigan's first lady.

Milliken campaigned vigorously for abortion rights and the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment, which stated equality of rights "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

She drew the wrath of the outdoor advertising industry shortly after her husband, Republican William Milliken, became governor in 1969, when she criticized highway billboards as unsightly clutter. And at her urging, her husband hiked the Pigeon River State Forest while governor and later decided to limit oil and gas development in the scenic forest.

It was the couple's daughter, Elaine, a lawyer and feminist, who died of cancer in 1993, who influenced her mother to take a stand for women's equality. Helen Milliken served as national co-chair of ERAmerica and was a delegate to the International Women's Year conference in Houston. Her other board memberships included the Women's Resource Center and the Michigan Land Use Institute.

Even into her 80s, she remained active in community affairs and as an environmentalist. Milliken helped organize a foreign policy lecture series at Northwest Michigan College and took a course on the life of Mozart.

Milliken co-founded ArtrainUSA, an art museum housed in rail cars that visited more than 850 communities across the U.S. since 1971.

She told The Associated Press in 2006 about her concerns that many younger women were shying away from political activism and the "feminist" label.

"They don't know their history," she said at the time. "Young women take so much for granted now."

Feminism, she said, had "been redefined and misinterpreted" by conservatives as wild-eyed radicalism.

"Nobody ever saw anybody burn a bra; they're too expensive," she said. "But the myth has survived. There have been excesses, but the goal has always remained the same: equal opportunity for women."

___

Kobi

11-20-2012, 12:44 PM

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CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - Former Sen. Warren B. Rudman, who co-authored a ground-breaking budget balancing law, championed ethics and led a commission that predicted the danger of homeland terrorist attacks before 9/11, has died. He was 82.

The feisty New Hampshire Republican went to the Senate in 1981 with a reputation as a tough prosecutor, and was called on by Senate leaders, and later by presidents of both parties, to tackle tough assignments.

He is perhaps most well-known from his Senate years as co-sponsor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-cutting law. He left the Senate in 1993, frustrated that the law never reached its potential because Congress, President Ronald Reagan and the President George H.W. Bush played politics instead of insisting on spending.

In 2001, before the 9/11 attacks, he co-authored a report on national security with former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart that said a major terrorist attack on American soil was likely within 25 years.

The report went into a dustbin in the White House. It was revived after the Sept. 11 attacks, and one suggestion, forming a Homeland Security Department, was adopted. Six years later, Rudman said the sprawling department wasn't functioning well and the country would be hit again.

A former New Hampshire attorney general, Rudman was named chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee in 1985, a sensitive job that many colleagues avoided.

Throughout his Senate career, Rudman was cited for his work on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, where he supported a strong national defense but opposed expensive, high-tech weaponry.

The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act was approved in 1985. It was designed to end federal deficits by 1991 and required automatic spending cuts if annual deficit targets were missed.

Congress rolled back the timetable each year, and the 1991 budget that was supposed to be balanced carried the second-highest deficit in history. In 1995, 10 years after the law went on the books, Rudman lamented what could have been.

"Had we stuck to that plan, had the Congress not failed to follow it through - in fact, had presidents not failed to follow through - we would not be where we are today," Rudman said.

He said balancing the budget would require making wealthy retirees pay more of their medical costs, slowing the growth of discretionary spending, cutting waste in some agencies and eliminating unnecessary agencies.

He continued the fight after leaving the Senate. He and former Democratic Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts founded the Concord Coalition, which campaigns for a balanced budget.

During the biggest scandal of the Reagan years, Rudman, an outspoken member of the Senate's Iran-Contra Committee, said key administration officials had showed "pervasive dishonesty" and disdain for the law by selling weapons to Nicaraguan rebels.

During the 1987 hearings, he lectured Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, the operation's key figure, about helping to hide the sale from Congress for fear it would have been rejected.

"Rudman also served on the committee that investigated the "Keating Five," senators with ties to the savings and loan debacle in 1991. The committee found California Democrat Alan Cranston had improperly aided former savings and loan executive Charles Keating Jr. When Cranston said he only did what others did, Rudman called the defense "arrogant, unrepentant, and a smear on this institution."

As a private citizen after leaving office he also led or was a member of investigative teams or federal commissions that looked into:

- An $11 billion accounting failure scandal at Fannie Mae, the mortgage company.

- Allegations that major dealers on the Nasdaq stock market colluded to fix prices.

- Violence between Israel and Palestinians.

- Ailments affecting veterans of the first Gulf War. The panel drew criticism from veterans' groups by concluding that stress was the most likely cause of some illnesses suffered by thousands of veterans, not exposure to chemical warfare or smoke and dust from depleted uranium ammunition.

In a 1996 memoir, Rudman wrote of behind-the-scenes drama involving two high-profile Supreme Court nominees.

He confessed that he voted to confirm Clarence Thomas to preserve his ability to influence the appointment of federal judges and to get federal money for his home state.

"It isn 't a vote I'm proud of, but it's a textbook example of how our system works," Rudman wrote in "Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate." He said he didn't think Thomas was "even close to being" the best candidate for the job.

Thomas won confirmation in 1991 by a 52-48 vote after a showdown hearing with former colleague Anita Hill, who accused him of sexual harassment.

"If my vote had been the deciding one, I would have voted against Thomas, no matter what the consequences," he wrote. "But once it was clear that he would be confirmed, I made a political decision."

He said that partly because he hadn't opposed Thomas, he was able to get the first President Bush to nominate three candidates for federal judgeships.

In the book, Rudman also wrote of another Supreme Court nomination that was much closer to his heart, that of his long-time friend and former deputy in the state attorney general's office, David Souter.

He wrote that the very private Soute r appeared ready to walk away from the nomination before confirmation hearings because he was being portrayed in news stories as a wierdo or possible gay because he was 50, single and lived in a little farmhouse crammed with books.

"Finally, I grabbed his shoulders," Rudman wrote. "'David, I know what you're going through,' I declared. 'It's outrageous what they're doing to you. But it's your destiny to serve on the Supreme Court. I've believed in that for a long time. Don't let them get to you.'"

After five hours of emotional conversation, Souter decided to push on.

------------

Always liked this guy. Have a thing for ethics and people who espouse them.

Kobi

11-21-2012, 10:49 AM

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Art Ginsburg, the delightfully dorky television chef known as Mr. Food, died at his home in Weston, Fla., Wednesday following a struggle with pancreatic cancer. He was 81.

Ginsburg - who enticed viewers for decades with a can-do focus on easy weeknight cooking and the tagline "Ooh! It's so good!" - was diagnosed just over a year ago. The cancer had gone into remission following early treatments and surgery, but returned earlier this month.

Ginsburg had an unlikely formula for success in this era of reality cooking shows, flashy chefs and artisanal foods. With a pleasantly goofy, grandfatherly manner and a willingness to embrace processed foods, Ginsburg endeared himself to millions of home cooks via 90-second segments syndicated to 125 local television stations around the country.

And though he published 52 Mr. Food-related cookbooks, selling more than 8 million copies, he was little known to the nation's foodies and mostly ignored by the glossy magazines. That was the way he liked it.

"They're on the Food Network. They're getting a lot of national publicity. And they're getting big money," he said of fellow food celebrities during a 2010 interview with The Associated Press. "I was always the hometown guy. I don't want to be the super celebrity. When you need bodyguards, that's not my deal."

Ginsburg grew up in the meat business, and eventually started his own catering company. He made his television debut in 1975 in upstate New York on a local morning program. His Mr. Food vignettes were syndicated in nine television markets by 1980. His popularity peaked in 2007, when he was appearing on 168 stations.

He also was generous with the enviably broad reach of his culinary pulpit, frequently inviting up-and-coming celebrities to do guest appearances with him.

"Art Ginsberg was a warm, gregarious man who knew food is more about love and sharing than a fancy ingredient list," said Rachael Ray, who Ginsburg invited on air long before she was a huge celebrity. "He was a supportive and loyal friend and I'll miss his smile and warm hugs. This Thanksgiving I'm thankful I knew him."

In recent years, Ginsburg eased his involvement in the day-to-day operations of the company he founded, Ginsburg Enterprises Incorporated, which produces the television segments and oversees his many other ventures, including a line of housewares. The company also produced television segments that did not star Ginsburg, billing them as the "Mr. Food Test Kitchen." It plans to continue producing and syndicating those segments.

Soft*Silver

11-21-2012, 10:55 AM

oh no! I have many of his cookbooks! I loved his banter!!!

Kobi

11-22-2012, 11:04 PM

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Best-selling Australian author Bryce Courtenay, who wrote about the struggles of life in Australia and South Africa, died Thursday.

Known for his dedication to work and prolific output, often writing for 12 hours a day, Courtenay sold more than 20 million books. He turned to writing in the late 1980s after a 30-year career in advertising.

His first novel, "The Power of One", the story of a child growing up under apartheid in South Africa, was an instant hit, selling more than 8 million copies and later made into a movie.

Born into poverty in South Africa, Courtenay studied journalism in London and then settled in Australia with his first wife, Benita, in 1958.

In 1993, he turned to non-fiction with "April Fool's Day", a personal account of his son Damon's death after he contracted the AIDS virus from a routine blood transfusion.

He usually wrote a book each year. His final novel, "Jack of Diamonds", was published in early November, and featured a farewell from Courtenay to his readers.

"It's been a privilege to write for you and to have you accept me as a storyteller in your lives. Now, as my story draws to an end, may I say only, 'Thank you. You have been simply wonderful'."

Parker

11-23-2012, 11:32 PM

Oh Larry Hagman ... RIP :(

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(Reuters) - Larry Hagman, who created one of American television's most supreme villains in the conniving, amoral oilman J.R. Ewing of "Dallas," died on Friday, the Dallas Morning News reported. He was 81.

Hagman died at a Dallas hospital of complications from his battle with throat cancer, the newspaper said, quoting a statement from his family. He had suffered from liver cancer and cirrhosis of the liver in the 1990s after decades of drinking.
Hagman's mother was stage and movie star Mary Martin and he became a star himself in 1965 on "I Dream of Jeannie," a popular television sitcom in which he played Major Anthony Nelson, an astronaut who discovers a beautiful genie in a bottle.

"Dallas," which made its premiere on the CBS network in 1978, made Hagman a superstar. The show quickly became one of the network's top-rated programs, built an international following and inspired a spin-off, imitators and a revival in 2012.
"Dallas" was the night-time soap-opera story of a Texas family, fabulously wealthy from oil and cattle, and its plot brimmed with back-stabbing, double-dealing, family feuds, violence, adultery and other bad behavior.

In the middle of it all stood Hagman's black-hearted J.R. Ewing - grinning wickedly in a broad cowboy hat and boots, plotting how to cheat his business competitors and cheat on his wife. He was the villain TV viewers loved to despise during the show's 356-episode run from 1978 to 1991.

"I really can't remember half of the people I've slept with, stabbed in the back or driven to suicide," Hagman said of his character in Time magazine.
In his autobiography, "Hello Darlin': Tall (and Absolutely True) Tales About My Life," Hagman wrote that J.R. originally was not to be the focus of "Dallas" but that changed when he began ad-libbing on the set to make his character more outrageous and compelling.

'WHO SHOT J.R.?'

To conclude its second season, the "Dallas" producers put together one of U.S. television's most memorable episodes in which Ewing was shot by an unseen assailant. That gave fans months to fret over whether J.R. would survive and who had pulled the trigger. In the show's opening the following season, it was revealed that J.R.'s sister-in-law, Kristin, with whom he had been having an affair, was behind the gun.

Hagman said an international publisher offered him $250,000 to reveal who had shot J.R. and he considered giving the wrong information and taking the money, but in the end, "I decided not to be so like J.R. in real life."

The popularity of "Dallas" made Hagman one of the best-paid actors in television and earned him a fortune that even a Ewing would have coveted. He lost some of it, however, in bad oil investments before turning to real estate.
"I have an apartment in New York, a ranch in Santa Fe, a castle in Ojai outside of L.A., a beach house in Malibu and thinking of buying a place in Santa Monica," Hagman said in a Chicago Tribune interview.

An updated "Dallas" series began in June 2012 on the TNT network with Hagman reprising his J.R. role with original cast members Linda Gray, who played J.R.'s long-suffering wife, Sue Ellen, and Patrick Duffy, who was his brother Bobby. The show was to focus on the sons of J.R. and Bobby.

Hagman had a wide eccentric streak. When he first met actress Lauren Bacall, he licked her arm because he had been told she did not like to be touched and he was known for leading parades on the Malibu beach and showing up at a grocery store in a gorilla suit. Above his Malibu home flew a flag with the credo "Vita Celebratio Est (Life Is a Celebration)" and he lived hard for many years.

In 1967, rock musician David Crosby turned him on to LSD, which Hagman said took away his fear of death, and Jack Nicholson introduced him to marijuana because Nicholson thought he was drinking too much.

Hagman had started drinking as a teenager and said he did not stop until the moment in 1992 when his doctor told him he had cirrhosis of the liver and could die within six months. Hagman wrote that for the past 15 years he had been drinking about four bottles of champagne a day, including while on the "Dallas" set.

LIVER TRANSPLANT

In July 1995, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, which led him to quit smoking, and a month later he underwent a liver transplant.

After giving up his vices, Hagman said he did not lose his zest for life.

"It's the same old Larry Hagman," he told a reporter. "He's just a littler sober-er."
Hagman was born on September 21, 1931, in Weatherford, Texas, and his father was a lawyer who dealt with the Texas oil barons Hagman would later come to portray. He was still a boy when his parents divorced and he went to Los Angeles with Martin, who would become a Broadway and Hollywood musical star.

Hagman eventually landed in New York to pursue acting, making his stage debut there in "The Taming of the Shrew." In New York, he married Maj Axelsson in 1954 while they were in a production of "South Pacific. The marriage produced two children, Heidi and Preston.

Hagman served in the Air Force, spending five years in Europe as the director of USO shows, and on his return to New York he took a starring role in the daytime soap "The Edge of Night." His breakthrough came in 1965 when he landed the "I Dream of Jeannie" role opposite Barbara Eden.

In his later years, Hagman became an advocate for organ transplants and an anti-smoking campaigner. He also was devoted to solar energy, telling the New York Times he had a $750,000 solar panel system at his Ojai estate, and made a commercial in which he portrayed a J.R. Ewing who had forsaken oil for solar power. He was a longtime member of the Peace and Freedom Party, a minor leftist organization in California.

Hagman told the Times that after death he wanted his remains to be "spread over a field and have marijuana and wheat planted and harvest it in a couple of years and then have a big marijuana cake, enough for 200 to 300 people. People would eat a little of Larry."

(Writing by Bill Trott in Washington; Additional reporting by Alex Dobuszinkis in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Teddybear

11-24-2012, 10:54 AM

Kobi

11-24-2012, 01:10 PM

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Hector ''Macho'' Camacho was a brash fighter with a mean jab and an aggressive style, launching himself furiously against some of the biggest names in boxing. And his bad-boy persona was not entirely an act, with a history of legal scrapes that began in his teens and continued throughout his life.

The man who once starred at the pinnacle of boxing, winning several world titles, died Saturday back in the Puerto Rican town of Bayamon where he was born, ambushed in a parking lot in a car where packets of cocaine were found.

Camacho, 50, left behind a reputation for flamboyance - leading fans in cheers of ''It's Macho time!'' before fights - and for fearsome skills as one of the top fighters of his generation.

Camacho fought professionally for three decades, from his humble debut against David Brown at New York's Felt Forum in 1980 to an equally forgettable swansong against Saul Duran in Kissimmee, Florida, in 2010.

In between, he fought some of the biggest stars spanning two eras, including Sugar Ray Leonard, Felix Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya and Roberto Duran.

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Kobi

11-24-2012, 01:36 PM

Most people remember him as JR, I remember him as Major Anthony Nelson, master to a genie in a bottle.

It was the master thing that always stuck with me.

princessbelle

11-24-2012, 02:12 PM

Most people remember him as JR, I remember him as Major Anthony Nelson, master to a genie in a bottle.

It was the master thing that always stuck with me.

Loved these shows. Grew up watching them both. He was a brilliant performer and will be missed.

http://i449.photobucket.com/albums/qq215/Tera_Monceret/TV%20Shows/jeanie.jpg

http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m220/micovwar/jrewing.jpg

Kobi

11-24-2012, 02:31 PM

JwpH_IYg0N8

Parker

11-24-2012, 03:13 PM

Parker

11-24-2012, 03:14 PM

Most people remember him as JR, I remember him as Major Anthony Nelson, master to a genie in a bottle.

It was the master thing that always stuck with me.

I know - the article said he became a superstar hen he was on Dallas, but I always remembered him as Major Nelson.....

thedivahrrrself

11-24-2012, 03:19 PM

RIP Macy's Parade Clown (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/tears_for_clown_woJZ2Sgu3CQ6xkG30n967O)

puddin'

11-24-2012, 03:24 PM

I know - the article said he became a superstar when he was on Dallas, but I always remembered him as Major Nelson.....

me, too. i loved "i dream of genie".

Kobi

11-25-2012, 06:41 AM

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawrence Guyot, a civil rights leader who survived jailhouse beatings in the Deep South in the 1960s and went on to encourage generations to get involved, has died.

Mississippi native, Guyot (pronounced GHEE-ott) worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and served as director of the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, which brought thousands of young people to the state to register blacks to vote despite a history of violence and intimidation by authorities. He also chaired the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to have blacks included among the state's delegates to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. The bid was rejected, but another civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, addressed the convention during a nationally televised appearance.

Guyot was severely beaten several times, including at the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary known as Parchman Farm. He continued to speak on voting rights until his death, including encouraging people to cast ballots for President Barack Obama.

Guyot participated in the 40th anniversary of the Freedom Summer Project to make sure a new generation could learn about the civil rights movement.

There is nothing like having risked your life with people over something immensely important to you," he told The Clarion-Ledger in 2004. "As Churchill said, there's nothing more exhilarating than to have been shot at — and missed."

His daughter said she recently saw him on a bus encouraging people to register to vote and asking about their political views. She said he was an early backer of gay marriage, noting that when he married a white woman, interracial marriage was illegal in some states. He met his wife Monica while they both worked for racial equality.

"He followed justice," his daughter said. "He followed what was consistent with his values, not what was fashionable. He just pushed people along with him."

Susan Glisson, executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, called Guyot "a towering figure, a real warrior for freedom and justice."

When she attended Ole Miss, students reached out to civil rights activists and Guyot responded.

"He was very opinionated," she said. "But always — he always backed up his opinions with detailed facts. He always pushed you to think more deeply and to be more strategic. It could be long days of debate about the way forward. But once the path was set, there was nobody more committed to the path."

Glisson said Guyot's efforts helped lay the groundwork for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"Mississippi has more black elected officials than any other state in the country, and that's a direct tribute to his work," she said.

Guyot was born in Pass Christian, Miss., on July 17, 1939. He became active in civil rights while attending Tougaloo College in Mississippi, and graduated in 1963. Guyot received a law degree in 1971 from Rutgers University, and then moved to Washington, where he worked to elect fellow Mississippian and civil rights activist Marion Barry as mayor in 1978.

"When he came to Washington, he continued his revolutionary zeal," Barry told The Washington Post on Friday. "He was always busy working for the people."

Guyot worked for the District of Columbia government in various capacities and as a neighborhood advisory commissioner.

D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton told The Post in 2007 that she first met Guyot within days of his beating at a jail in Winona, Miss. "Because of Larry Guyot, I understood what it meant to live with terror and to walk straight into it," she told the newspaper. On Friday, she called Guyot "an unsung hero" of the civil rights movement.

"Very few Mississippians were willing to risk their lives at that time," she said. "But Guyot did."

In recent months, his daughter said he was concerned about what he said were Republican efforts to limit access to the polls. As his health was failing, he voted early because he wanted to make sure his vote was counted, he told the AFRO newspaper.

macele

11-25-2012, 07:24 AM

Most people remember him as JR, I remember him as Major Anthony Nelson, master to a genie in a bottle.

It was the master thing that always stuck with me.

i still have the 45 record of song Who Shot J.R., ... i remember buying it in alabama on summer vacation. Dallas was televised on friday nights. during football season, i'd come home from the game hoping to watch at least some of the show.

Kobi

11-25-2012, 05:52 PM

Just one week and a half into the NBA's 2012-13 season, Rockets coach Kevin McHale took leave of his crew on Nov. 10 to attend to what the team at the time called a personal family matter. A few weeks later, we've learned the sad truth of what forced the Basketball Hall of Famer to step away from the group he's coached since 2011.

McHale's daughter, Alexandra ''Sasha'' McHale, passed away at age 23 on Saturday. The team did not announce the reason behind her untimely passing, but longtime Houston Chronicle beat writer Jonathan Feigen is reporting that Sasha McHale had long been suffering from lupus, and was hospitalized recently with a condition unfortunately spurred on by the autoimmune disease.

The Rocket coach's daughter passed away in Minnesota — Kevin McHale was raised in the area, played at the University of Minnesota, and returned to the NBA in 1995 after retirement from the Boston Celtics as a longtime executive and eventual coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Kobi

11-27-2012, 03:36 AM

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Deborah Raffin,59, who had brief but successful careers both as an actress – 7th Heaven, among other shows – and a book publisher, died of leukemia.

Through no fault of her own, Raffin made a string of bad movies in the '70s, including 40 Carats and Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough. Nevertheless, she cannily kept her face and figure before the public modeling for fashion magazines.

She and her husband, Michael Viner, founded the L.A.-based Dove Books-on-Tape, which they eventually expanded into a highly successful book publishing and movie and TV production. Among their authors were Amy Tan and Sidney Sheldon.

Before her prolific publishing career – Raffin served as co-executive producer on 1,600 titles and line-produced more than 400 audio books – she also played what remained her meatiest role, as the real-life Brooke Hayward, daughter of legendary Hollywood agent and producer Leland Hayward and troubled screen star Margaret Sullavan. The highly rated CBS TV movie was 1980's Haywire, based on Brooke's best-selling memoir.

On the CW's 7th Heaven, she played Aunt Julie for 11 years, from 1996 to 2007.

Kobi

12-04-2012, 04:35 PM

http://img2-3.timeinc.net/people/i/2012/news/121217/david-oliver-relin-300.jpg

David Oliver Relin, a journalist who co-authored the controversial best-selling book Three Cups of Tea, has committed suicide, the New York Times reports. He was 49.

Relin, who co-wrote the 2006 book with Greg Mortenson about how Mortenson, a former mountain climber, started building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, "suffered emotionally and financially as basic facts in the book were called into question," the Times says.

His family said Relin "suffered from depression" but would not give further details surrounding his death.

As a journalist during the '90s, Relin focused on telling humanitarian stories including articles about child soldiers and traveling to Vietnam. This work was what led Viking Books to pair him with Mortenson.

Three Cups of Tea sold over four million copies, but in 2011 60 Minutes and author Jon Krakauer – who released an E-book titled Three Cups of Deceit – both questioned the validity of major points in the book.

Relin did not speak publicly about the accusations, but hired a lawyer to defend him in a federal lawsuit that claimed he and Mortenson defrauded readers. The suit was dismissed earlier this year.

Kelt

12-05-2012, 05:51 PM

PHdU5sHigYQ

LA Times
By Chris Barton
December 5, 2012, 1:33 p.m.
When thinking about Dave Brubeck, you can't help but also consider time, and not just how much of it fans received from the prolific jazz pianist up to his death Wednesday at age 91.

A titan of West Coast jazz, Brubeck was linked with California for much of his career. He was born in Concord, studied at what is now is the University of the Pacific in Stockton and recorded for Berkeley-based Fantasy Records, which helped forge the Bay Area's sound in the '50s. But regardless of where a listener was based, the Dave Brubeck catalog was an inevitable destination.

Part of the reason is "Time Out," the aptly named 1959 recording that stands with Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," Charles Mingus' "Mingus Ah Um" and Ornette Coleman's "Shape of Jazz to Come" as a groundbreaking album during a pivotal year in the evolution of jazz. Where Davis explored modal structures and Coleman blazed into a new world of saxophone, Brubeck was equally inventive for his experimentation with jazz's heartbeat.

Kobi

12-10-2012, 01:07 PM

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MEXICO CITY (AP) - Jenni Rivera, the California-born singer who rose through personal adversity to become a superstar adored by millions in a male-dominated genre of Mexican-American music, was confirmed dead in a plane crash in northern Mexico, the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed Monday.

Rivera, 43, began her career working in the office of her father's small Mexican music label in Long Beach, California. Gifted with a powerful, soulful voice, she recorded her first album, "Chacalosa," in 1995. It was a hit, and she followed it with two other independent albums, one a tribute to slain Mexican-American singer Selena that helped expand her following.

A mother of five children and grandmother of two, the woman known as the "Diva de la Banda" was known for frank talk about her struggles to give a good life to her children despite a series of setbacks.

Her parents were Mexicans who had migrated to the United States. Two of her five brothers, Lupillo and Juan Rivera, are also well-known singers of grupero music.

She studied business administration and formally debuted on the music scene in 1995 with the release of her album "Chacalosa". Due to its success, she recorded two more independent albums, "We Are Rivera" and "Farewell to Selena.

At the end of the 1990s, Rivera was signed by Sony Music and released two more albums. Widespread success came when she joined Fonovisa and released her 2005 album titled "Partier, Rebellious and Daring."

She was also an actress, appearing in the indie film Filly Brown, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, as the incarcerated mother of Filly Brown.

She was filming the third season of "I love Jenni," which followed her as she shared special moments with her children and as she toured through Mexico and the United States. She also has the reality shows: "Jenni Rivera Presents: Chiquis and Raq-C" and her daughter's "Chiquis 'n Control."

Kobi

12-11-2012, 01:31 PM

MOSCOW (AP) - Russian opera diva Galina Vishnevskaya, who conquered audiences all over the world with her rich soprano, has died. Vishenvskaya, widow of famed cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, was 86.

She made her professional stage debut in 1944 singing operetta. After a year studying with Vera Nikolayevna Garina, she won a competition held by the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow (with Rachmaninoff's song "O, Do Not Grieve" and Verdi's aria "O patria mia" from Aida) in 1952. The next year, she became a member of the Bolshoi Theatre.

On 9 May 1960, she made her first appearance in Sarajevo at the National Theatre, as Aida. In 1961, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Aida; the following year she made her debut at the Royal Opera House with the same role. For her La Scala debut in 1964, she sang Liù in Turandot, opposite Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli.

In addition to the roles in the Russian operatic repertoire, Vishnevskaya has also sung roles such as Violetta, Tosca, Cio-cio-san, Leonore, and Cherubino.

Benjamin Britten wrote the soprano role in his War Requiem (completed 1962) specially for her.

Vishnevskaya was married to the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich from 1955 until his death in 2007; they performed together regularly (he on piano or on the podium). Both she and Rostropovich were friends of Dmitri Shostakovich, and they made an electrifying recording of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for EMI. According to Robert Conquest, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stayed at their dacha from 1968 while writing much of The Gulag Archipelago.[2]

In 1974, the couple asked the Soviet government for an extended leave and left the Soviet Union. Eventually they settled in the United States and Paris. In 1982, the soprano bade farewell to the opera stage, in Paris, as Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. In 1987, she stage directed Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride in Washington, D.C. In 1984, Vishnevskaya published a memoir, Galina: A Russian Story, and in 2002, she opened her own opera theatre in Moscow, the "Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Centre".

In 2006, she was featured in Alexander Sokurov's documentary Elegy of a life: Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya. In 2007, she starred in his film Aleksandra, playing the role of a grandmother coming to see her grandson in the Second Chechen War. The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

GA0vW9cNsgE

Lasiurus_cinereus

12-12-2012, 12:33 AM

"LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar, who helped introduce the sitar to the Western world through his collaborations with The Beatles, died near his home in Southern California on Tuesday, his family said. He was 92.

Shankar, a three-time Grammy winner with legendary appearances at the 1967 Monterey Festival and Woodstock, had been in fragile health for several years and last Thursday underwent surgery, his family said in a statement.

"Although it is a time for sorrow and sadness, it is also a time for all of us to give thanks and to be grateful that we were able to have him as a part of our lives," the family said. "He will live forever in our hearts and in his music."

The statement said Shankar had suffered from upper respiratory and heart issues over the past year and underwent heart-valve replacement surgery last week.

The surgery was successful but he was unable to recover.

"Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the surgeons and doctors taking care of him, his body was not able to withstand the strain of the surgery. We were at his side when he passed away," his wife Sukanya and daughter Anoushka said.

Shankar lived in both India and the United States. He is also survived by his daughter, Grammy-winning singer Norah Jones, three grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Shankar performed his last concert with his daughter Anoushka Shankar on November 4 in Long Beach, California, the statement said. The night before he underwent surgery, he was nominated for a Grammy for his latest album "The Living Room Sessions, Part 1."

Shankar is credited with popularizing Indian music through his work with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and The Beatles in the late 1960s.

(Reporting by Elaine Lies and Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Eric Walsh)"

source: http://ca.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idCABRE8BB08420121212

Canela

12-12-2012, 01:21 AM

En paz descanse, Linda madre, Diva y Reina...Gracias Kobi, for sharing this. I'm still in disbelief.

Su amiga, Canela

http://mi-cache.legacy.com/legacy/images/Portraits/Jenni-Rivera-dead-161630997port.jpgx?w=117&h=151&option=1

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Jenni Rivera, the California-born singer who rose through personal adversity to become a superstar adored by millions in a male-dominated genre of Mexican-American music, was confirmed dead in a plane crash in northern Mexico, the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed Monday.

Rivera, 43, began her career working in the office of her father's small Mexican music label in Long Beach, California. Gifted with a powerful, soulful voice, she recorded her first album, "Chacalosa," in 1995. It was a hit, and she followed it with two other independent albums, one a tribute to slain Mexican-American singer Selena that helped expand her following.

A mother of five children and grandmother of two, the woman known as the "Diva de la Banda" was known for frank talk about her struggles to give a good life to her children despite a series of setbacks.

Her parents were Mexicans who had migrated to the United States. Two of her five brothers, Lupillo and Juan Rivera, are also well-known singers of grupero music.

She studied business administration and formally debuted on the music scene in 1995 with the release of her album "Chacalosa". Due to its success, she recorded two more independent albums, "We Are Rivera" and "Farewell to Selena.

At the end of the 1990s, Rivera was signed by Sony Music and released two more albums. Widespread success came when she joined Fonovisa and released her 2005 album titled "Partier, Rebellious and Daring."

She was also an actress, appearing in the indie film Filly Brown, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, as the incarcerated mother of Filly Brown.

She was filming the third season of "I love Jenni," which followed her as she shared special moments with her children and as she toured through Mexico and the United States. She also has the reality shows: "Jenni Rivera Presents: Chiquis and Raq-C" and her daughter's "Chiquis 'n Control."

Kobi

12-12-2012, 05:33 AM

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Colleen Walker, the former LPGA Tour player who won nine times during her 23-year career, died Tuesday night after her second battle with cancer. She was 56.

Walker played the LPGA Tour from 1982 to 2004. She had a career-high three victories in 1992 and won her lone major title in 1997 in the du Maurier Classic in Canada. In 1998, she won the Vare Trophy for the lowest scoring average and finished a career-high fifth on the money list.

Kobi

12-12-2012, 05:48 AM

Swiss-born soprano Lisa Della Casa, a member of the Vienna State Opera whose performances of Mozart and Richard Strauss won her wide acclaim as one of the finest sopranos of her generation, has died at the age of 93.

Della Casa was born near the Swiss capital Bern in 1919 and later trained in Zurich. She first performed in 1941 in the Swiss town of Solothurn-Biel, in the title role of Madame Butterfly, and went on to perform on many of the world's great opera stages including the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House and La Scala.

With her Covent Garden debut as Richard Strauss's Arabella in 1953, she became identified for the role because of her singing and her beauty. That same year she debuted as Countess Almaviva at the Metropolitan in New York in 1953, where she also was a favorite.

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weatherboi

12-12-2012, 07:13 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ravi-shankar-grammy-winning-indian-sitar-virtuoso-dies-at-92/2012/12/12/3f4ae71a-c5dc-11df-94e1-c5afa35a9e59_story.html

http://www.trbimg.com/img-50c80d2c/turbine/la-famed-sitarist-ravi-shankar-dies-at-92-2012-001/600

Kobi

12-12-2012, 01:35 PM

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Gloria Davy, a Brooklyn-born soprano who was the first African-American to sing Aida with the Metropolitan Opera, died on Nov. 28 in Geneva. She was 81.

A lirico-spinto (the term denotes a high voice that is darker and more forceful than a lyric soprano’s), Ms. Davy performed mainly in Europe from the 1960s onward. She was equally, if not better, known as a recitalist.

In particular, she was an interpreter of 20th-century music, including the work of Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Paul Hindemith.

Though she was praised by critics for the beauty of her voice, the sensitivity of her musicianship and the perfection of her pianissimos — the elusive art of attaining maximum audibility at minimum volume — Ms. Davy sang with the Met just 15 times over four seasons, from her debut in the title role of Verdi’s “Aida,” opposite Leonard Warren, in 1958 to her final performance, as Leonora in Verdi’s “Trovatore,” opposite Giulio Gari, in 1961. She also sang Pamina in Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and Nedda in Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” with the company. In concert, she appeared with the New York Philharmonic and at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York.

The daughter of parents who had come to the United States from St. Vincent, in the Windward Islands, Gloria Davy was born on March 29, 1931. Her father, according to a 1959 article about her in Ebony magazine, worked as a token clerk in the New York City subway system.

She graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and in 1951 and 1952 received the Marian Anderson Award. The prize, for young singers, was established in 1943 by Ms. Anderson, the first black singer to appear at the Met.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1953 from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Belle Julie Soudent, Ms. Davy embarked on a career as a concert singer.

In January 1954, as a prize for having won a vocal competition sponsored by the Music Education League, Ms. Davy appeared at Town Hall with the Little Orchestra Society, singing Britten’s song cycle “Les Illuminations,” a rigorous undertaking for even a seasoned singer.

That May, Ms. Davy replaced Leontyne Price as Bess in an international tour of “Porgy and Bess,” providing her with her first significant stage experience.

When Ms. Davy first sang at the Met, she was only the fourth African-American to appear there, after Ms. Anderson, a contralto, and Robert McFerrin, a baritone, both of whom made their debuts in 1955, and the soprano Mattiwilda Dobbs, who first sang there the next year. (The African-American soprano Camilla Williams, who died this year, had made her debut with the New York City Opera in 1946.)

Before Ms. Davy was cast in the role, Aida, an Ethiopian princess, was perennially sung by white singers in dark makeup.

Ms. Davy’s other opera work includes appearances with the American Opera Society, a midcentury ensemble in New York, with which she sang the title role in Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena.” In Europe, she appeared at the Vienna Staatsoper and at Covent Garden in London.

For decades Ms. Davy had made her home in Geneva, returning to the United States periodically to perform and teach: she was on the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University from 1984 to 1997.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/arts/music/gloria-davy-first-african-american-to-sing-aida-at-the-met-dies-at-81.html?_r=0

Kobi

12-15-2012, 05:27 PM

Children:
Charlotte Bacon, 6
Daniel Barden, 7
Olivia Engel, 6
Josephine Gay, 7
Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6
Dylan Hockley, 6
Madeleine F. Hsu, 6
Catherine V. Hubbard, 6
Chase Kowalski, 7
Jesse Lewis, 6
James Mattioli, 6
Grace McDonnell, 7
Emilie Parker, 6
Jack Pinto, 6
Noah Pozner, 6
Caroline Previdi, 6
Jessica Rekos, 6
Avielle Richman, 6
Benjamin Wheeler, 6
Allison N. Wyatt, 6

ADULTS
Mary Sherlach, 56
Victoria Soto, 27
Anne Marie Murphy, 52
Lauren Rousseau, 30
Dawn Hocksprung, 47
Rachel Davino, 29

The_Lady_Snow

12-15-2012, 06:09 PM

Charlotte Bacon, 6, Daniel Barden, 7, Olivia Engel, 6, Josephine Gay, 7, Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6, Dylan Hockley, 6, Madeleine F. Hsu, 6, Catherine V. Hubbard, 6, Chase Kowalski, 7, Jesse Lewis, 6, James Mattioli, 6, Grace McDonnell, 7, Emilie Parker, 6, Jack Pinto, 6, Noah Pozner, 6, Caroline Previdi, 6, Jessica Rekos, 6, Avielle Richman, 6, Benjamin Wheeler, 6, Allison N. Wyatt, 6.

Rachel Davino, 29, Dawn Hochsprung, 47, Anne Marie Murphy, 52, Lauren Rousseau, 30, Mary Sherlach, 56, Victoria Soto, 27.
__________________

(w)

Kobi

12-17-2012, 07:02 AM

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Jack Hanlon, who had roles in the 1926 silent classic "The General" and in two 1927 "Our Gang" comedies, died Thursday in Las Vegas.

After a small role with Buster Keaton in "The General," he played mischievous kids in two of Hal Roach's "Our Gang/Little Rascals" films: "The Glorious Fourth" and "Olympic Games."

Hanlon also played an orphan in the 1929 drama "The Shakedown," and got an on-screen kiss from Greta Garbo in the 1930 film "Romance."

He appeared in eight more "talkies," including "Big Money" with Clark Gable, in the 1930s before calling it a career at the age of 16. He rarely made more than $5 a day.

Kobi

12-17-2012, 06:44 PM

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the influential Democrat who broke racial barriers on Capitol Hill and played key roles in congressional investigations of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, died Monday. He was 88.

Inouye, a senator since January 1963, was currently the longest serving senator and was president pro tempore of the Senate, third in the line presidential succession. His office said Monday that he died of respiratory complications at a Washington-area hospital.

Inouye was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor winner who lost an arm to a German hand grenade during a battle in Italy. He became the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress, when he was elected to the House in 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. He won election to the Senate three years later and served there longer than anyone in American history except Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who died in 2010 after 51 years in the Senate.

After Byrd's death, Inouye became president pro tem of the Senate, a largely ceremonial post that also placed him in the line of succession to the presidency, after the vice president and the speaker of the House.

Although tremendously popular in his home state, Inouye actively avoided the national spotlight until he was thrust into it. He was the keynote speaker at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and later reluctantly joined the Senate's select committee on the Watergate scandal. The panel's investigation led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Inouye also served as chairman of the committee that investigated the Iran-Contra arms and money affair, which rocked Ronald Reagan's presidency.

A quiet but powerful lawmaker, Inouye ran for Senate majority leader several times without success. He gained power as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee before Republicans took control of the Senate in 1994.

When the Democrats regained control in the 2006 elections, Inouye became chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. He left that post two years later to become chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.

Inouye also chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee for many years. He was made an honorary member of the Navajo nation and given the name "The Leader Who Has Returned With a Plan."

In 2000, Inouye was one of 22 Asian-American World War II veterans who belatedly received the nation's top honor for bravery on the battlefield, the Medal of Honor. The junior senator from Hawaii at the time, Daniel Akaka, had worked for years to get officials to review records to determine if some soldiers had been denied the honor because of racial bias.

Kobi

12-20-2012, 06:55 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Robert Bork, an American symbol of conservative judicial activism who played pivotal roles in Washington dramas around the Supreme Court and Watergate and whose name became a verb, died on Wednesday at age 85.

Nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork was rejected by the Democratic-led U.S. Senate over his conservative judicial philosophy. He became a potent symbol to conservatives.

"To bork" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002 with the definition, "To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, especially in the mass media, usually with the aim of preventing his or her appointment to public office; to obstruct or thwart (a person) in this way."

Bork was already known to Americans as a figure in the Watergate scandal - the man who carried out Richard Nixon's order to fire the special prosecutor in 1973's "Saturday Night Massacre" - when he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

Within 45 minutes of his nomination on July 1, 1987, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy took to the Senate floor to denounce him as a man who wanted to outlaw abortion, ban the teaching of evolution and revive racial segregation. Bork said not a line of the speech was accurate.

After a fierce confirmation fight, the Senate in October rejected Bork 58-42, the largest margin of defeat for any Supreme Court nominee and a big loss for Reagan.

JUDICIAL CONSERVATIVE

Bork's judicial conservatism, and especially fears he might vote to overturn abortion rights, led liberal, civil rights and feminist groups to join ranks against him.

They charged that the burly, goateed Bork, then a federal judge, held views too extreme for the highest court. They warned he might cast the decisive vote to overturn the court's 1973 abortion rights decision and endanger anti-segregation rulings of the 1950s and 1960S, despite Bork's assurances he would not disturb "settled law."

His supporters saw a political witch hunt. In later court fights, they used memories of the Bork hearings to rally their conservative supporters.

Like many other conservative justices - although more outspoken and in great recorded detail - Bork held that judges should interpret the law narrowly according to the "original intent" of the Constitution's framers rather than making new law, which they called judicial activism.

At his confirmation hearings, Bork's long record of writings and decisions as an active jurist made him vulnerable to attack. Among the most controversial were his views that the Constitution contained no generalized right to privacy nor unlimited authorization of free speech.

He did little to help himself in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, appearing cold and ideological.

But he fired back at critics, denying he wanted to "turn back the clock" and saying he was the victim of a liberal public relations campaign that distorted his record.

He admitted the White House was caught by surprise by the intense opposition and echoed complaints by conservatives that Reagan should have done more to fight for the nomination. Justice Anthony Kennedy ended up being confirmed to the court in February 1988.

Bork's defeat for confirmation to the Supreme Court was "the decisive moment in politicizing the process of judicial selection," said Michael McConnell, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former federal judge who testified on Bork's behalf at the 1987 hearings. "The scurrilous attacks on his views and his character set a new low for the process, and has poisoned the atmosphere for judicial confirmations ever since."

Bork was bitter for years afterward and conservatives regarded him as a martyr to liberal activism and unreason.

Three months after the Senate quashed his nomination, Bork resigned as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit after six years of service and went into private law, scholarship and commentary, supporting conservative causes for years to come.

One stint was as an "expert consultant" to television broadcasters covering the 1991 confirmation hearings for another controversial Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas.

Bork was also active in the background during the attempt the impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, lending his expertise and support to the impeachment process.

Before his nomination debacle, Bork had been best known for the brief role he had played as U.S. solicitor general at the Justice Department in a notorious 1973 Watergate episode.

He carried out Nixon's order to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was demanding the release of Oval Office tape recordings Nixon wanted kept secret.

Bork's immediate superiors - Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy - quit rather than fire Cox, stirring public outrage in what became known as "The Saturday Night Massacre."

The backlash ultimately led to Nixon's resignation, under threat of impeachment, in August 1974.

Bork later said he followed Nixon's order to prevent "massive resignations" at the Justice Department and restore order there.

Bork remained outspoken on judicial nominations. In 2005, when President George W. Bush nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Bork was a leader among conservatives in opposing Miers.

In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appointed Bork co-chair of his Judicial Advisory Committee, to advise the campaign on judicial nominations and legal policy questions.

Kobi

12-24-2012, 01:24 PM

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MIAMI (AP) -- Ryan Freel, a former Major League Baseball player known for his fearless play but whose career was cut short after eight seasons by a series of head and other injuries, was found dead Saturday in Jacksonville, Fla. Freel, who was 36, died of what appeared to be a self-inflicted shotgun wound.

The speedy Freel spent six of his eight big league seasons with the Reds and finished his career in 2009 with a .268 average and 143 steals.

The Jacksonville native thrilled fans with his all-out style, yet it took a toll on his career. During his playing days, he once estimated he had sustained up to 10 concussions. Freel missed 30 games in 2007 after a collision with a teammate caused a concussion.

Freel showed no fear as he ran into walls, hurtled into the seats and crashed into other players trying to make catches. His jarring, diving grabs often made the highlight reels, and he was praised by those he played with and against for always having a dirt-stained uniform.

Freel also had trouble related to alcohol.

Kobi

12-24-2012, 05:46 PM

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jack Klugman, the prolific, craggy-faced character actor and regular guy who was loved by millions as the messy one in TV's "The Odd Couple" and the crime-fighting coroner in "Quincy, M.E.," died Monday.

Never anyone's idea of a matinee idol, Klugman remained a popular star for decades simply by playing the type of man you could imagine running into at a bar or riding on a subway with — gruff, but down to earth, his tie stained and a little loose, a racing form under his arm, a cigar in hand during the days when smoking was permitted.

His was a city actor ideal for "The Odd Couple," which ran from 1970 to 1975 and was based on Neil Simon's play about mismatched roommates, divorced New Yorkers who end up living together. The show teamed Klugman — the sloppy sports writer Oscar Madison — and Tony Randall — the fussy photographer Felix Unger — in the roles played by Walter Matthau and Art Carney on Broadway and Matthau and Jack Lemmon in the 1968 film. Klugman had already had a taste of the show when he replaced Matthau on Broadway and he learned to roll with the quick-thinking Randall, with whom he had worked in 1955 on the CBS series "Appointment with Adventure."

In "Quincy, M.E.," which ran from 1976 to 1983, Klugman played an idealistic, tough-minded medical examiner who tussled with his boss by uncovering evidence of murder in cases where others saw natural causes.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born in Philadelphia and began his acting career in college drama (Carnegie Institute of Technology). After serving in the Army during World War I, he went on to summer stock and off-Broadway, rooming with fellow actor Charles Bronson as both looked for paying jobs. He made his Broadway debut in 1952 in a revival of "Golden Boy." His film credits included Sidney Lumet's "12 Angry Men" and Blake Edwards' "Days of Wine and Roses" and an early television highlight was appearing with Humphrey Bogart and Henry Fonda in a production of "The Petrified Forest." His performance in the classic 1959 musical "Gypsy" brought him a Tony nomination for best featured (supporting) actor in a musical.

He also appeared in several episodes of "The Twilight Zone," including a memorable 1963 one in which he played a negligent father whose son is seriously wounded in Vietnam. His other TV shows included "The Defenders" and the soap opera "The Greatest Gift."

Af1h4ibpKJA

Kobi

12-25-2012, 05:10 AM

http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.5002065756686587&pid=15.1

Charles Durning, the two-time Oscar nominee who was dubbed the king of the character actors for his skill in playing everything from a Nazi colonel to the pope, died Monday. He was 89.

Durning may be best remembered by movie audiences for his Oscar-nominated, over-the-top role as a comically corrupt governor in 1982's "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas."

Durning received another Oscar nomination, for his portrayal of a bumbling Nazi officer in Mel Brooks' "To Be or Not to Be." He was also nominated for a Golden Globe as the harried police lieutenant in 1975's "Dog Day Afternoon."

He won a Golden Globe as best supporting TV actor in 1991 for his portrayal of John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald in the TV film "The Kennedys of Massachusetts" and a Tony in 1990 as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

He quickly made an impression on movie audiences the following year as the crooked cop stalking con men Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the Oscar-winning comedy "The Sting."

Dozens of notable portrayals followed. He was the would-be suitor of Dustin Hoffman, posing as a female soap opera star in "Tootsie;" the infamous seller of frog legs in "The Muppet Movie;" and Chief Brandon in Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy." He played Santa Claus in four different movies made for television and was the pope in the TV film "I Would be Called John: Pope John XXIII."

Other films included "The Front Page," ''The Hindenburg," ''Breakheart Pass," ''North Dallas Forty," ''Starting Over," ''Tough Guys," ''Home for the Holidays," ''Spy Hard" and 'O Brother Where Art Thou?"

Durning also did well in television as a featured performer as well as a guest star. He appeared in the short-lived series "The Cop and the Kid" (1975), "Eye to Eye" (1985) and "First Monday" (2002) as well as the four-season "Evening Shade" in the 1990s.

Parker

12-26-2012, 02:51 AM

I was coming here to post about Charles Durning and saw that you already did, Kobi - then I saw your post about Jack Klugman ... damn, they're both gone ... :(

:candle:

eta: I learned a little something about Charles Durning that I didnt know when I read a USA Today article about him:

He was among the first wave of U.S. soldiers to land at Normandy during the D-Day invasion and the only member of his Army unit to survive. He killed several Germans and was wounded in the leg. Later he was bayoneted by a young German soldier whom he killed with a rock. He was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and survived a massacre of prisoners.

"They train you to do awful things, then they release you and wonder why you are so bitter and angry," Durning told USA TODAY in 1994, when he narrated the Discovery Channel's Normandy: The Great Crusade. "Scars that you have from wounds heal. Scars that you have mentally never heal."

"There's no nobility with war. It's tear-'em-up destruction that leaves you frustrated, bitter and angry. ... If you really knew what it was like for an hour, you wouldn't want anyone to go through it."

In later years, he refused to discuss the military service for which he was awarded the Silver Star and three Purple Hearts.

"Too many bad memories," he told an interviewer in 1997. "I don't want you to see me crying."

Incredible .....

Miss Scarlett

12-28-2012, 05:13 AM

Desert Storm Commander Norman Schwarzkopf Dies

By MITCH STACY and LOLITA C. BALDOR Associated Press
Dec 28, 2012, 4:17 AM

Truth is, retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf didn't care much for his popular "Stormin' Norman" nickname.

The seemingly no-nonsense Desert Storm commander's reputed temper with aides and subordinates supposedly earned him that rough-and-ready moniker. But others around the general, who died Thursday in Tampa, Fla., at age 78 of complications from pneumonia, knew him as a friendly, talkative and even jovial figure who preferred the somewhat milder sobriquet given by his troops: "The Bear."

That one perhaps suited him better later in his life, when he supported various national causes and children's charities while eschewing the spotlight and resisting efforts to draft him to run for political office.

He lived out a quiet retirement in Tampa, where he'd served his last military assignment and where an elementary school bearing his name is testament to his standing in the community.

Schwarzkopf capped an illustrious military career by commanding the U.S.-led international coalition that drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in 1991 — but he'd managed to keep a low profile in the public debate over the second Gulf War against Iraq, saying at one point that he doubted victory would be as easy as the White House and the Pentagon predicted.

Schwarzkopf was named commander in chief of U.S. Central Command at Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base in 1988, overseeing the headquarters for U.S. military and security concerns in nearly two dozen countries stretching across the Middle East to Afghanistan and the rest of central Asia, plus Pakistan.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait two years later to punish it for allegedly stealing Iraqi oil reserves, Schwarzkopf commanded Operation Desert Storm, the coalition of some 30 countries organized by President George H.W. Bush that succeeded in driving the Iraqis out.

At the peak of his postwar national celebrity, Schwarzkopf — a self-proclaimed political independent — rejected suggestions that he run for office, and remained far more private than other generals, although he did serve briefly as a military commentator for NBC.

While focused primarily on charitable enterprises in his later years, he campaigned for President George W. Bush in 2000, but was ambivalent about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In early 2003 he told The Washington Post that the outcome was an unknown: "What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan."

Initially Schwarzkopf had endorsed the invasion, saying he was convinced that Secretary of State Colin Powell had given the United Nations powerful evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. After that proved false, he said decisions to go to war should depend on what U.N. weapons inspectors found.

He seldom spoke up during the conflict, but in late 2004 he sharply criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon for mistakes that included erroneous judgments about Iraq and inadequate training for Army reservists sent there.

"In the final analysis I think we are behind schedule. ... I don't think we counted on it turning into jihad (holy war)," he said in an NBC interview.

Schwarzkopf was born Aug. 24, 1934, in Trenton, N.J., where his father, Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, founder and commander of the New Jersey State Police, was then leading the investigation of the Lindbergh kidnap case. That investigation ended with the arrest and 1936 execution of German-born carpenter Richard Hauptmann for murdering famed aviator Charles Lindbergh's infant son.

The elder Schwarzkopf was named Herbert, but when the son was asked what his "H'' stood for, he would reply, "H."

As a teenager Norman accompanied his father to Iran, where the elder Schwarzkopf trained the Iran's national police force and was an adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the young Shah of Iran.

Young Norman studied there and in Switzerland, Germany and Italy, then followed in his father's footsteps to West Point, graduating in 1956 with an engineering degree. After stints in the U.S. and abroad, he earned a master's degree in engineering at the University of Southern California and later taught missile engineering at West Point.

In 1966 he volunteered for Vietnam and served two tours, first as a U.S. adviser to South Vietnamese paratroops and later as a battalion commander in the U.S. Army's Americal Division. He earned three Silver Stars for valor — including one for saving troops from a minefield — plus a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart and three Distinguished Service Medals.

While many career officers left military service embittered by Vietnam, Schwarzkopf was among those who opted to stay and help rebuild the tattered Army into a potent, modernized all-volunteer force.

After Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Schwarzkopf played a key diplomatic role by helping persuade Saudi Arabia's King Fahd to allow U.S. and other foreign troops to deploy on Saudi territory as a staging area for the war to come.

On Jan. 17, 1991, a five-month buildup called Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm as allied aircraft attacked Iraqi bases and Baghdad government facilities. The six-week aerial campaign climaxed with a massive ground offensive on Feb. 24-28, routing the Iraqis from Kuwait in 100 hours before U.S. officials called a halt.

Schwarzkopf said afterward he agreed with Bush's decision to stop the war rather than drive to Baghdad to capture Saddam, as his mission had been only to oust the Iraqis from Kuwait.

But in a desert tent meeting with vanquished Iraqi generals, he allowed a key concession on Iraq's use of helicopters, which later backfired by enabling Saddam to crack down more easily on rebellious Shiites and Kurds.

While he later avoided the public second-guessing by academics and think tank experts over the ambiguous outcome of the first Gulf War and its impact on the second Gulf War, he told The Washington Post in 2003, "You can't help but ... with 20/20 hindsight, go back and say, 'Look, had we done something different, we probably wouldn't be facing what we are facing today.'"

After retiring from the Army in 1992, Schwarzkopf wrote a best-selling autobiography, "It Doesn't Take A Hero." Of his Gulf War role, he said: "I like to say I'm not a hero. I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war." He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and honored with decorations from France, Britain, Belgium, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain.

Schwarzkopf was a national spokesman for prostate cancer awareness and for Recovery of the Grizzly Bear, served on the Nature Conservancy board of governors and was active in various charities for chronically ill children.

"I may have made my reputation as a general in the Army and I'm very proud of that," he once told The Associated Press. "But I've always felt that I was more than one-dimensional. I'd like to think I'm a caring human being. ... It's nice to feel that you have a purpose."

Schwarzkopf and his wife, Brenda, had three children: Cynthia, Jessica and Christian.

Arwen

12-28-2012, 08:20 PM

I'm not sure if this is even true , but hopefully not.......Actor - Eddie Murphy Dies In Snowboard Accident

THIS STORY IS STILL DEVELOPING...

Actor Eddie Murphy is reported to have died shortly after a snowboard accident earlier today - December 28, 2012.

The actor & novice snowboarder was vacationing at the Zermatt ski resort in Zermatt, Switzerland with family and friends. Witnesses indicate that Eddie Murphy lost control of his snowboard and struck a tree at a high rate of speed.

Eddie Murphy was air lifted by ski patrol teams to a local hospital, however, it is believed that the actor died instantly from the impact of the crash. The actor was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident and drugs and alcohol do not appear to have played any part in his death.

RIP "Eddie"

Most likely a hoax. Google this.

Jesse

12-28-2012, 08:35 PM

Most likely a hoax. Google this.

According to Snopes (http://www.snopes.com), it is yet another of the many "Eddie Murphy is dead from snowboarding accident" hoaxes.

Kobi

12-28-2012, 08:36 PM

http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/cbSyHo4XrX9B5SMyai5y3w--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Y2g9MjAwMDtjcj0xO2N3PTE2MTI7ZHg9MD tkeT0wO2ZpPXVsY3JvcDtoPTIzNjtxPTg1O3c9MTkw/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/ap_webfeeds/ec9d634f877a0524250f6a706700992d.jpg

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Jean Harris, the patrician girls' school headmistress who spent 12 years in prison for the 1980 killing of her longtime lover, "Scarsdale Diet" doctor Herman Tarnower, in a case that rallied feminists and inspired television movies, has died. She was 89.

She had claimed the shooting of Tarnower, 69, was an accident. Convicted of murder in 1981, Harris suffered two heart attacks while serving her sentence in the Bedford Hills women's prison north of New York City. She was granted clemency by then-Gov. Mario Cuomo when she underwent heart bypass surgery in December 1992 and was released on parole three weeks later.

She later founded Children of Bedford Inc., a nonprofit organization to provide scholarships and tutoring for children of female prison inmates.

Her trial for shooting Tarnower, the millionaire cardiologist famous for devising the Scarsdale Diet — a weight-loss book and sensation of the 1970s named for the New York suburb where he practiced — brought feminists rallying to her defense.

They pictured her as a woman victimized by a male-dominated society, adrift because she was getting older and her lover of 14 years was brushing her off in favor of his younger office assistant. In addition, they said, she was in the thrall of antidepressant drugs Tarnower had prescribed for her.

Harris always maintained that she went armed to Tarnower's Westchester County estate in Purchase on March 10, 1980, to confront him over his womanizing and kill herself, but unintentionally shot him four times in a struggle over the gun. She later acknowledged at a parole hearing that she was "certainly guilty of something. I caused the man's death."

A jury convicted her of murder, and she was sentenced to 15 years to life.

Her lawyer had unsuccessfully gambled on an all-or-nothing strategy that eschewed an "extreme emotional disturbance" defense and did not allow the jury to consider a lesser charge such as manslaughter.

"As an inmate, Harris criticized authority, chafing under what she saw as arbitrary, counterproductive rules. In books and articles she wrote and in interviews, she advocated reform, both for her own benefit and that of other imprisoned women.

Housed in the prison's honor wing, she taught mothering skills to expectant inmates and worked in the Bedford Hills children's center.

alexri

12-30-2012, 05:07 PM

I just found the story of this woman, who went from a makeshift lab in her bedroom to winning the Nobel prize for medicine, amazing.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/nobel-scientist-rita-levi-montalcini-dies-rome-18095001#.UODHXXf9xXI

By By FRANCES D'EMILIO Associated Press
ROME December 30, 2012 (AP)

Rita Levi-Montalcini, a biologist who conducted underground research in defiance of Fascist persecution and went on to win a Nobel Prize for helping unlock the mysteries of the cell, died at her home in Rome on Sunday. She was 103 and had worked well into her final years.

Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, announcing her death in a statement, called it a great loss "for all of humanity." He praised her as someone who represented "civic conscience, culture and the spirit of research of our time."

Italy's so-called "Lady of the Cells," a Jew who lived through anti-Semitic discrimination and the Nazi invasion, became one of her country's leading scientists and shared the Nobel medicine prize in 1986 with American biochemist Stanley Cohen for their groundbreaking research carried out in the United States. Her research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia.

Italy honored Levi-Montalcini in 2001 by making her a senator-for-life.

A petite woman with upswept white hair, she kept an intensive work schedule well into old age. "At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she said in 2009.

"A beacon of life is extinguished" with her death, said a niece, Piera Levi-Montalcini, who is a city councilwoman in Turin. The ANSA news agency quoted her as saying her aunt didn't suffer.

Levi-Montalcini was born April 22, 1909, to a Jewish family in the northern city of Turin. At age 20 she overcame her father's objections that women should not study and obtained a degree in medicine and surgery from Turin University in 1936.

She studied under top anatomist Giuseppe Levi, whom she often credited for her own success and for that of two fellow students and close friends, Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco, who also became separate Nobel Prize winners. Levi and Levi-Montalcini were not related.

After graduating, Levi-Montalcini began working as a research assistant in neurobiology but lost her job in 1938 when Italy's Fascist regime passed laws barring Jews from universities and major professions.

Her family decided to stay in Italy and, as World War II neared, Levi-Montalcini created a makeshift lab in her bedroom where she began studying the development of chicken embryos, which would later lead to her major discovery of mechanisms that regulate growth of cells and organs.

With eggs becoming a rarity due to the war, the young scientist biked around the countryside to buy them from farmers. She was soon joined in her secret research by Levi, her university mentor, who was also Jewish and who became her assistant.

"She worked in primitive conditions," Italian astrophysicist Margherita Hack told Sky TG24 TV in a tribute to her fellow scientist. "She is really someone to be admired."

Another Italian scientist, who worked for some 40 years with Levi-Montalcini, including in the United States, said the work the Nobel laureate did on nerve growth factor was continuing. The protein assists portions of the central nervous system that have been damaged by disease or injury.

"Over the years, this field of investigation has become ever more important in the world of neuroscience," Pietro Calissano was quoted by ANSA as saying. Calissano began studying under Levi-Montalcini in 1965 and recalled her ability to relate to students on a very human level, with none of the elite airs that often characterize Italian professors.

"I remember we were in a closet with cell cultures when she offered me a fellowship," Calissano said. He added that research building on Levi-Montalcini's pioneering work continues. "We are working on a possible application in the treatment of Alzheimer's," he added.

The 1943 German invasion of Italy forced the Levi-Montalcini family to flee to Florence and live underground. After the Allies liberated the city, she worked as a doctor at a center for refugees.

In 1947 Levi-Montalcini was invited to the United States, where she remained for more than 20 years, which she called "the happiest and most productive" of her life. She held dual Italian-U.S. citizenship.

During her research at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, she discovered nerve growth factor, the first substance known to regulate the growth of cells. She showed that when tumors from mice were transplanted to chicken embryos they induced rapid growth of the embryonic nervous system. She concluded that the tumor released a nerve growth-promoting factor that affected certain types of cells.

The research increased the understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia. It also led to the discovery by Stanley Cohen of another substance, epidermal growth factor, which stimulates the proliferation of epithelial cells.

The two shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986.

Levi-Montalcini returned to Italy to become the director of the laboratory of cell biology of the National Council of Scientific Research in Rome in 1969.

After retiring in the late 1970s, she continued to work as a guest professor and wrote several books to popularize science. She created the Levi-Montalcini Foundation to grant scholarships and promote educational programs worldwide, particularly for women in Africa.

In 2001 Levi-Montalcini was made a senator for life, one of the country's highest honors.

She then became active in Parliament, especially between 2006 and 2008, when she and other life senators would cast their votes to back the thin majority of center-left Premier Romano Prodi.

Levi-Montalcini had no children and never married, fearing such ties would undercut her independence.

"I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense," she said in a 2006 interview. "My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely."

Kobi

01-02-2013, 04:17 PM

Unforgettable songs like "Tennessee Waltz" and "(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window" made Patti Page the best-selling female singer of the 1950s and a star who would spend much of the rest of her life traveling the world.

Page died on New Year's Day in Encinitas, Calif., according to publicist Schatzi Hageman, ending one of pop music's most diverse careers. She was 85 and just five weeks away from being honored at the Grammy Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Recording Academy.

Page achieved several career milestones in American pop culture, but she'll be remembered for indelible hits that crossed the artificial categorizations of music and remained atop the charts for months to reach a truly national audience.

"Tennessee Waltz" scored the rare achievement of reaching No. 1 on the pop, country and R&B charts simultaneously and was officially adopted as one of two official songs by the state of Tennessee. Its reach was so powerful, six other artists reached the charts the following year with covers.

Two other hits, "I Went To Your Wedding" and "Doggie in the Window," which had a second life for decades as a children's song, each spent more than two months at No. 1. Other hits included "Mockin' Bird Hill," "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," and "Allegheny Moon." She teamed with George Jones on "You Never Looked That Good When You Were Mine."

Page was one of the last surviving American singers who was popular in the pre-Elvis Presley era when songs on the pop charts leaned more toward innocence than rock `n' roll's overt obsession with sex. Page proved herself something of a match for the rockers, continuing to place songs on the charts into the 1960s.

Her popularity transcended music. She became the first singer to have television programs on all three major networks, including "The Patti Page Show" on ABC.

She was popular in pop music and country and became the first singer to have television programs on all three major networks, including "The Patti Page Show" on ABC. In films Page co-starred with Burt Lancaster in his Oscar-winning appearance of "Elmer Gantry," and she appeared in "Dondi" with David Janssen and in "Boy's Night Out" with James Garner and Kim Novak.

She also starred on stage in the musical comedy "Annie Get Your Gun."

In 1999, after 51 years of performing, Page won her first Grammy for traditional pop vocal performance for "Live at Carnegie Hall -- The 50th Anniversary Concert." Page was planning to attend a special ceremony on Feb. 9 in Los Angeles where she was to receive a lifetime achievement award from The Recording Academy.

_Ek3eCbfqp0

Cape Codders, like me, remember her for this:
rM2Xa4RUBCk

Kobi

01-04-2013, 06:19 AM

http://hosted.ap.org/photos/D/d941fcf1-6b2c-4c24-b732-b19dfdcdc69a-small.jpg

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Gerda Lerner spent her 18th birthday in a Nazi prison, sharing a cell with two gentile women arrested for political work who shared their food with the Jewish teenager because jailers restricted rations for Jews.

Lerner would say years later that the woman taught her during those six weeks how to survive and that the experience taught her how society can manipulate people. It was a lesson that the women's history pioneer, who died Wednesday at age 92, said she saw reinforced in American academia by history professors who taught as though only the men were worth studying.

"When I was faced with noticing that half the population has no history and I was told that that's normal, I was able to resist the pressure" to accept that conclusion, Lerner told the Wisconsin Academic Review in 2002.

The author was a founding member of the National Organization for Women and is credited with creating the nation's first graduate program in women's history, in the 1970s in New York.

Her son said she died peacefully of apparent old age at an assisted-living facility in Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.

"She was always a very strong-willed and opinionated woman," her son, Dan Lerner, told The Associated Press late Thursday. "I think those are the hallmarks of great people, people that have strong points of view and firmly held convictions."

She was born into a privileged Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, in 1920. When the Nazis rose to power, she was imprisoned alongside the two other young women.

"They taught me how to survive," Lerner wrote in "Fireweed: a Political Autobiography." "Everything I needed to get through the rest of my life I learned in jail in those six weeks."

She became impassioned about the issue of gender equality. As a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., she founded a women's studies program - including the first graduate program in women's history in the U.S.

She later moved to Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.

Her daughter, Stephanie Lerner, said her mother earned a reputation as a no-nonsense professor who held her students to rigorous standards that some may not have appreciated at the time. One former student wrote to Gerda Lerner 30 years later saying no one had been more influential in her life.

"She said, `I thought you were impossible, difficult, not understanding, but you gave me a model of commitment that I've never had before,'" Stephanie Lerner recalled. "That's just how she was."

Even as Gerda Lerner held others to high standards, she took no shortcuts herself. For example, Stephanie Lerner said her mother loved hiking in the mountains, even as she got older and her mobility was challenged.

Stephanie Lerner recalled one particular hike with her mother about 30 years ago on a steamy California day. Stephanie Lerner brought a light day-pack, but Gerda Lerner toted a hefty 50-pound sack because she wanted to train for future hikes.

"I was much younger and very in shape. But at a certain point I said I couldn't do it anymore," Stephanie Lerner said. "She just went on ahead. That was her joy, her determination."

Gerda Lerner wrote several textbooks on women's history, including "The Creation of Patriarchy" and "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness." She also edited "Black Women in White America," one of the first books to document the struggles and contributions of black women in American history.

She married Carl Lerner, a respected film editor, in 1941. They lived in Hollywood for a few years before returning to New York.

The couple were involved in activism that ranged from attempting to unionize the film industry to working in the civil rights movement.

When asked how she developed such a strong sense of justice and fairness, she told the Wisconsin Academy Review that the feeling started in childhood. She recalled watching her mother drop items on the floor and walk away, leaving servants to clean up her mess.

"I wanted the world to be a just and fair place, and it obviously wasn't - and that disturbed me right from the beginning," she said.

She became determined to fight for equality, and she encouraged others to take up their own fights against inequality. She said people who want to change the world don't need to be part of a large organized group - they just have to find a cause they believe in and never stop fighting for it.

She credited that philosophy for helping her remain happy despite the horrors she lived through as a young woman.

"I am happy because I found the balance between adjusting, or surviving what I was put through, and acting for what I believed in," she said in 2002. "That's the key."

---

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBIT_LERNER?SITE=MAHYC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Greyson

01-04-2013, 10:22 AM

http://hosted.ap.org/photos/D/d941fcf1-6b2c-4c24-b732-b19dfdcdc69a-small.jpg

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Gerda Lerner spent her 18th birthday in a Nazi prison, sharing a cell with two gentile women arrested for political work who shared their food with the Jewish teenager because jailers restricted rations for Jews.

Lerner would say years later that the woman taught her during those six weeks how to survive and that the experience taught her how society can manipulate people. It was a lesson that the women's history pioneer, who died Wednesday at age 92, said she saw reinforced in American academia by history professors who taught as though only the men were worth studying.

"When I was faced with noticing that half the population has no history and I was told that that's normal, I was able to resist the pressure" to accept that conclusion, Lerner told the Wisconsin Academic Review in 2002.

The author was a founding member of the National Organization for Women and is credited with creating the nation's first graduate program in women's history, in the 1970s in New York.

Her son said she died peacefully of apparent old age at an assisted-living facility in Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.

"She was always a very strong-willed and opinionated woman," her son, Dan Lerner, told The Associated Press late Thursday. "I think those are the hallmarks of great people, people that have strong points of view and firmly held convictions."

She was born into a privileged Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, in 1920. When the Nazis rose to power, she was imprisoned alongside the two other young women.

"They taught me how to survive," Lerner wrote in "Fireweed: a Political Autobiography." "Everything I needed to get through the rest of my life I learned in jail in those six weeks."

She became impassioned about the issue of gender equality. As a professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., she founded a women's studies program - including the first graduate program in women's history in the U.S.

She later moved to Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.

Her daughter, Stephanie Lerner, said her mother earned a reputation as a no-nonsense professor who held her students to rigorous standards that some may not have appreciated at the time. One former student wrote to Gerda Lerner 30 years later saying no one had been more influential in her life.

"She said, `I thought you were impossible, difficult, not understanding, but you gave me a model of commitment that I've never had before,'" Stephanie Lerner recalled. "That's just how she was."

Even as Gerda Lerner held others to high standards, she took no shortcuts herself. For example, Stephanie Lerner said her mother loved hiking in the mountains, even as she got older and her mobility was challenged.

Stephanie Lerner recalled one particular hike with her mother about 30 years ago on a steamy California day. Stephanie Lerner brought a light day-pack, but Gerda Lerner toted a hefty 50-pound sack because she wanted to train for future hikes.

"I was much younger and very in shape. But at a certain point I said I couldn't do it anymore," Stephanie Lerner said. "She just went on ahead. That was her joy, her determination."

Gerda Lerner wrote several textbooks on women's history, including "The Creation of Patriarchy" and "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness." She also edited "Black Women in White America," one of the first books to document the struggles and contributions of black women in American history.

She married Carl Lerner, a respected film editor, in 1941. They lived in Hollywood for a few years before returning to New York.

The couple were involved in activism that ranged from attempting to unionize the film industry to working in the civil rights movement.

When asked how she developed such a strong sense of justice and fairness, she told the Wisconsin Academy Review that the feeling started in childhood. She recalled watching her mother drop items on the floor and walk away, leaving servants to clean up her mess.

"I wanted the world to be a just and fair place, and it obviously wasn't - and that disturbed me right from the beginning," she said.

She became determined to fight for equality, and she encouraged others to take up their own fights against inequality. She said people who want to change the world don't need to be part of a large organized group - they just have to find a cause they believe in and never stop fighting for it.She credited that philosophy for helping her remain happy despite the horrors she lived through as a young woman.

"I am happy because I found the balance between adjusting, or surviving what I was put through, and acting for what I believed in," she said in 2002. "That's the key."

---

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBIT_LERNER?SITE=MAHYC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Let it sink into your conciousness, your heart, your will, your values, your actions.

Kobi

01-14-2013, 07:15 PM

http://mi-cache.legacy.com/legacy/images/Portraits/Rex-Trailer-dead-162271140port.jpgx?w=117&h=151&option=1

BOSTON (AP) - Rex Trailer, the native Texan beloved by a generation of New England children for the cowboy skills he demonstrated on the Boston-based television show "Boomtown," has died. He was 84.

"Boomtown" ran on Boston television from 1956 until 1974. Trailer hosted the show, singing, playing guitar and showing off the horse-riding, roping and other cowboy skills he had learned as a boy on his grandfather's ranch in Texas.

The show was an instant success when it first aired, the live studio audience enraptured by Trailer's Texas twang. It aired live every Saturday and Sunday morning for three hours. More than 250,000 kids appeared on "Boomtown" over the years and more than 4 million watched from home, according to the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame. Trailer was inducted in 2007.

In addition to the cowboy action, the show offered educational games and films, cartoons and outdoor adventure.

He was a visionary in a lot of ways. He was doing educational children's television before there was educational children's television.

The show was one of the first where mentally and physically disabled children were prominent in the audience, a conscious decision by Trailer.

In 1961, he led a wagon train across the state to raise awareness about children with disabilities.

Trailer has been honored for his lifetime commitment to disabled children, especially muscular dystrophy.

He taught on-camera performance and production at Emerson College in Boston since the mid-1970s, and ran his own production company based in Waltham that produced commercials, industrial films and documentaries. Trailer was also an accomplished pilot and recording artist, who even wrote the theme music to "Boomtown."

Trailer got into show business on the advice of the ranch hands on his grandfather's farm in Thurber, Texas. He got a job as a production coordinator with the Dumont Network in New York and worked his way up to producer and director. It was in New York where he first became an on-air talent as host of the "Oky Doky Ranch."

He hosted western-themed TV shows in Philadelphia for five years before landing in Boston in 1955. His original 13-week contr act with WBZ-TV lasted nearly 20 years. When "Boomtown" went off the air, Trailer doffed his cowboy hat and hosted a science-themed children's show for several years called "Earth Lab."

His reach was so wide that in 2011 a state senator introduced legislation to make Trailer the "Official Cowboy of Massachusetts."

Kobi

01-14-2013, 07:20 PM

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NEW YORK (AP) - A co-founder of the social news website Reddit and activist who fought to make online content free to the public has been found dead, authorities confirmed Saturday, prompting an outpouring of grief from prominent voices on the intersection of free speech and the Web.

Aaron Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment weeks before he was to go on trial on accusations that he stole millions of journal articles from an electronic archive in an attempt to make them freely available.

Swartz was a prodigy who as a young teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users. He later co-founded Reddit, which ended up being sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Dema nd Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.

In 2011, he was arrested in Boston and charged with stealing millions of articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prosecutors said he broke into a computer wiring closet on campus and used his laptop for the downloads.

Swartz pleaded not guilty to charges including wire fraud. His federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.

Some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics, was a guest.

According to a federal indictment, Swartz stole the documents from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from academic journals. Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.

He faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.

JSTOR did not press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Swartz.

The prosecution "makes no sense," Demand Progress Executive Director David Segar said in a statement at the time. "It's like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library."

Criticizing the government's actions in seeking to prosecute Swartz, Harvard law professor and Safra Center faculty director Lawrence Lessig called himself a friend of Swartz's and wrote Saturday that "we need a better sense of justice. ... The question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a 'felon.'"

Among Internet gurus, Swartz was considered a pioneer of efforts to make online information freely available.

"Playing Mozart's Requiem in honor of a brave and brilliant man," tweeted Carl Malamud, an Internet public domain advocate who believes in free access to legally obtained files.

Swartz aided Malamud's effort to post federal court documents for free online, rather than the few cents per page that the government charges through its electronic archive, PACER. In 2008, The New York Times reported, Swartz wrote a program to legally download the files using free access via public libraries. About 20 percent of all the court papers were made available until the government shut down the library access.

Kobi

01-16-2013, 02:05 PM

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NEW YORK (AP) - Conrad Bain, a veteran stage and film actor who became a star in middle age as the kindly white adoptive father of two young African-American brothers in the TV sitcom "Diff'rent Strokes," has died.

The show that made him famous debuted on NBC in 1978, an era when television comedies tackled relevant social issues. "Diff'rent Strokes" touched on serious themes but was known better as a family comedy that drew most of its laughs from its standout child actor, Gary Coleman.

Bain played wealthy Manhattan widower Philip Drummond, who promised his dying housekeeper he would raise her sons, played by Coleman and Todd Bridges. Race and class relations became topics on the show as much as the typical trials of growing up.

Coleman, with his sparkling eyes and perfect comic timing, became an immediate star , and Bain, with his long training as a theater actor, proved an ideal straight man. The series lasted six seasons on NBC and two on ABC.

Bain went directly into "Diff'rent Strokes" from another comedy, "Maude," which aired on CBS from 1972 to 1978.

As Dr. Arthur Harmon, the conservative neighbor often zinged by Bea Arthur's liberal feminist, Bain became so convincing as a doctor that a woman once stopped him in an airport seeking medical advice.

Before those television roles, Bain had appeared occasionally in films, including "A Lovely Way to Die," ''Coogan's Bluff," ''The Anderson Tapes," ''I Never Sang for My Father" and Woody Allen's "Bananas." He also played the clerk at the Collinsport Inn in the 1960s television show "Dark Shadows."

A native of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, Bain arrived in New York in 1948 after serving in the Canadian army during World War II. He was still studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts when he acquired his first role on television's "Studio One."

A quick study who could play anything from Shakespeare to O'Neill, he found work in stock companies in the United States and the Bahamas, making his New York debut in 1956 as Larry Slade in "The Iceman Cometh" at the Circle in the Square.

With his plain looks and down-to-earth manner, he was always cast as a character actor.

Parker

01-17-2013, 01:03 PM

'Dear Abby' advice columnist dies at age 94 (http://news.yahoo.com/dear-abby-advice-columnist-dies-age-94-184114087.html)

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Pauline Friedman Phillips, who under the name of Abigail Van Buren, wrote the long-running "Dear Abby" advice column that was followed by millions of newspaper readers throughout the world, has died. She was 94.

Publicist Gene Willis of Universal Uclick said Phillips died Wednesday after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Phillips' column competed for decades with the advice column of Ann Landers, written by her twin sister, Esther Friedman Lederer. Their relationship was stormy in their early adult years, but later they regained the close relationship they had growing up in Sioux City, Iowa.

The two columns differed in style. Ann Landers responded to questioners with homey, detailed advice. Abby's replies were often flippant one-liners.
Phillips admitted that her advice changed over the years. When she started writing the column, she was reluctant to advocate divorce:
"I always thought that marriage should be forever," she explained. "I found out through my readers that sometimes the best thing they can do is part. If a man or woman is a constant cheater, the situation can be intolerable. Especially if they have children. When kids see parents fighting, or even sniping at each other, I think it is terribly damaging."

She willingly expressed views that she realized would bring protests. In a 1998 interview she remarked: "Whenever I say a kind word about gays, I hear from people, and some of them are damn mad. People throw Leviticus, Deuteronomy and other parts of the Bible to me. It doesn't bother me. I've always been compassionate toward gay people."

If the letters sounded suicidal, she took a personal approach: "I'll call them. I say, 'This is Abby. How are you feeling? You sounded awfully low.' And they say, 'You're calling me?' After they start talking, you can suggest that they get professional help."
Asked about Viagra, she replied: "It's wonderful. Men who can't perform feel less than manly, and Viagra takes them right off the spot."

About working mothers: "I think it's good to have a woman work if she wants to and doesn't leave her children unattended — if she has a reliable person to care for them. Kids still need someone to watch them until they are mature enough to make responsible decisions."

One trend Phillips adamantly opposed: children having sex as early as 12 years old.
"Kids grow up awfully fast these days," she said. "You should try to have a good relationship with your kids, no matter what they do."

The woman known to the world as Ann Landers died in June 2002. Later that year, the family revealed that Phillips had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. By then Phillips' daughter, Jeanne Phillips, who had helped her mother with the Dear Abby column for years, was its sole author.

Pauline Esther Friedman, known as Popo, was born on Independence Day 1918 in Sioux City, Iowa, 17 minutes after her identical twin, Esther Pauline (Eppie.). Their father was a well-off owner of a movie theater chain. Their mother took care of the home. Both were immigrants from Russia who had fled their native land in 1905 because of the persecution of Jews.

"My parents came with nothing. They all came with nothing," Phillips said in a 1986 Associated Press interview. She recalled that her parents always remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty: "It's amazing the impact the lady of the harbor had on them. They always held her dear, all their lives."

The twins spent their growing-up years together. They dressed alike, they both played the violin, they wrote gossip columns for their high school and college newspapers. They attended Morningside College in Sioux Falls. Two days before their 21st birthday, they had a double wedding. Pauline married Morton Phillips, a businessman, Esther married Jules Lederer, a business executive and later founder of Budget Rent-a-Car. The twins' lives diverged as they followed their husbands to different cities.

The Phillipses lived in Minneapolis, Eau Claire, Wis., and San Francisco, and had a son and daughter, Edward Jay and Jeanne. Esther lived in Chicago, had a daughter, Margo, and in 1955 she applied for and was given the job of writing the advice column. She adopted the existing column's name, Ann Landers.
Pauline, who had been working for philanthropies and the Democratic Party, followed her sister's lead, though she insisted it wasn't the reason for her decision. She arranged for an interview with an editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and presented sample columns, arguing that the paper's lovelorn column was boring. The editors admired her breezy style, and she was hired.

Searching for a name for the column, Pauline chose Abigail from the Bible and Van Buren from the eighth American president. Within a year she signed a 10-year contract with the McNaught Syndicate, which spread her column across the country.

"I was cocky," she admitted in 1998. "My contemporaries would come to me for advice. I got that from my mother: the ability to listen and to help other people with their problems. I also got Daddy's sense of humor."

Pauline applied for the advice column without notifying her sister, and that reportedly resulted in bad feelings. For a long time they did not speak to each other, but their differences were patched up. In June 2001, the twins, 83, attended the 90th birthday party in Omaha, Neb., of their sister Helen Brodkey.

The advice business extended to the second generation of the Friedmans. Phillips had announced in 2000 that her daughter would share her byline. Her sister's daughter, Margo Howard, wrote an advice column for the online magazine Slate.

Aside from the Dear Abby column, which appeared in 1,000 newspapers as far off as Brazil and Thailand, Phillips conducted a radio version of "Dear Abby" from 1963 to 1975 and wrote best-selling books about her life and advice.

In her book "The Best of Abby," Phillips commented that her years writing the column "have been fulfilling, exciting and incredibly rewarding. ... My readers have told me that they've learned from me. But it's the other way around. I've learned from them. Has it been a lot of work? Not really. It's only work if you'd rather be doing something else."

___
Associated Press writer Bob Thomas in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Lady Pamela

01-17-2013, 06:08 PM

Greyson

01-19-2013, 01:03 PM

Navy WAVE eulogized: 'Amazing example of the greatest generation'

ALAMEDA -- Marilyn York was remembered Saturday as both a groundbreaking woman who helped make the Alameda Naval Air Station fly, and as the tenacious curator of its legacy.

Most people who live in Alameda today don't understand the role this facility played at a time when the world was at risk," said Kim Robles, president of the board directors for the Alameda Naval Air Museum, which owes its existence to the tireless efforts of York and her longtime friend Barbara Baack. "She never thought about why something can't happen. She was always about 'How can we make this happen?' Marilyn was an amazing example of the greatest generation."

"She was one of very few (women) who became a journeyman," noted Baack, a former public affairs specialist who got to know York after photographing her receiving an award from the base's commanding officer.

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I came upon this story by accident. I suspect the two women were lesbians, B-F and partners. They met in 1965 and were "friends" until Ms. York's death in October of 2012. Her life story IMO is an example of how many lesbians from that era lived a under the radar closeted life. I respect their choices. It was another time.

If you choose to read this article the 22 photographs offer more insight to who Ms.York was. The final photo is of York, Baack and their dogs on the front of their Christmas card sent out in recent years.

Kobi

01-20-2013, 06:59 AM

A slew of batting titles. Corkscrew stance. Humble. A gentleman. All-around good guy.

Stan the Man.

Stanley Frank Musial, the St. Louis Cardinals star who was one of the greatest players in the history of baseball, died Saturday. He was 92.

Musial, the Midwest icon with too many batting records to fit on his Hall of Fame plaque, was so revered in St. Louis that two statues in his honor stand outside Busch Stadium - one just wouldn't do him justice. He was one of baseball's greatest hitters, every bit the equal of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio even without the bright lights of the big city.

Musial won seven National League batting crowns, was a three-time MVP and helped the Cardinals capture three World Series championships in the 1940s.

He spent his entire 22-year career with the Cardinals and made the All-Star team 24 times - baseball held two All-Star games each summer for a few seasons. He had been the longest-tenured living Hall of Famer.

Kobi

01-20-2013, 07:07 AM

BALTIMORE (AP) — Loved in Baltimore long after he ended his Hall of Fame career, Earl Weaver remained an Oriole to the end.

The notoriously peppery Hall of Fame manager died at age 82 on a Caribbean cruise associated with the Orioles, his marketing agent said Saturday.

The Duke of Earl, as he was affectionately known in Baltimore, took the Orioles to the World Series four times over 17 seasons but won only one title, in 1970. His .583 winning percentage ranks fifth among managers who served 10 or more seasons in the 20th century.

Weaver was a salty-tongued manager who preferred to wait for a three-run homer rather than manufacture a run with a stolen base or a bunt. While some baseball purists argued that strategy, no one could dispute the results.
Weaver had a reputation as a winner, but umpires knew him as a hothead. Weaver would often turn his hat backward and yell directly into an umpire's face to argue a call or a rule, and after the inevitable ejection he would more often than not kick dirt on home plate or on the umpire's shoes.

He was ejected 91 times, including once in both games of a doubleheader.

Weaver finished with a 1,480-1,060 record. He won Manager of the Year three times.

He knew almost everything about the game. He was also a great judge of human character, and that's one of the main reasons why he was loved by a vast majority of his players even though he often rode them mercilessly from spring training into October.

---------------------------

I loved this guy. He was such a competitor and a character. Fiery. Steadfast. Not quite as colorful as Billy Martin but definately in the same league.

Kobi

02-03-2013, 07:19 PM

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lavonne "Pepper" Paire-Davis, a star of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1940s and an inspiration for the movie "A League of Their Own," has died. She was 88.

Paire-Davis was a model for the character played by Geena Davis and served as a consultant on the 1992 film.

In 1944, she joined the women's baseball league, created in fear that World War II would interrupt Major League Baseball, and played for 10 seasons. She was a catcher and shortstop, and helped her teams win five championships. She chronicled her baseball adventures in the 2009 book "Dirt in the Skirt."

Kobi

02-15-2013, 07:31 PM

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BOSTON (AP) -- William Watts Biggers, the co-creator of the cartoon "Underdog," the mild-mannered canine shoeshine boy who turned into a caped superhero to rescue his girlfriend, Sweet Polly Purebred, has died. He was 85.

Family friend Derek Tague says Biggers, who went by "Buck," died unexpectedly at his Plymouth, Mass., home on Sunday.

The native of Avondale Estates, Ga., worked for the New York City advertising firm DFS when he accepted an assignment from the agency's largest client, General Mills, to create television cartoons to promote its breakfast cereals. The most famous was "Underdog," which debuted on NBC in 1964.

The canine superhero, voiced by comic actor Wally Cox, also battled villains including mad scientist Simon Bar Sinister, and a gangster wolf Riff Raff.

Upon hearing the cries of Sweet Polly Purebred, Underdog would rush into a telephone booth and transform into the hero.

He spoke in simple rhymes, his most famous probably "There's no need to fear, Underdog is here."

Biggers also helped create "King Leonardo and His Short Subjects" and "Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales."

After General Mills pulled out of the animation business, Biggers became vice president of promotion and creative services at NBC.

The family said Biggers "delighted in the enduring appeal of his `Underdog' franchise," including the balloon that appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the 2007 live-action film.

Biggers also wrote for publications including TV Guide, Family Circle and Reader's Digest, and wrote several novels, including "The Man Inside" and "Hold Back the Tide."
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Loved Underdog and Miss Polly was hot.

Kobi

02-17-2013, 09:56 PM

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(CNN) -- Country music star Mindy McCready was found dead Sunday at her home in Arkansas from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, the local sheriff's office said in a statement. She was 37.

McCready leaves behind two boys, one of whom is 10 months old. The infant's father, record producer David Wilson, killed himself last month.

The singer struggled with addiction and mental illness, often publicly.

McCready burst onto the music scene in 1996 with her debut album "10,000 Angels" and the chart-topping hit "Guys Do It All the Time."

Kobi

02-26-2013, 12:55 PM

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C. Everett Koop, the former surgeon general of the United States who started the government’s public discussion of AIDS during the Reagan administration, died Feb. 25 at his home in Hanover, N.H. He was 96.

Dr. Koop was the most recognized surgeon general of the 20th century. He almost always appeared in the epauleted and ribboned blue or white uniform denoting his leadership of the commissioned corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. With his mustacheless beard, deep voice and grim expression, he looked like a Civil War admiral or, as some cartoonists suggested, a refugee from a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.

The theatrical appearance, however, masked a fierce self-confidence, an unyielding commitment to professional excellence and a willingness to challenge the expectations of his patrons.

A 64-year-old retired pediatric surgeon at the time Ronald Reagan nominated him in 1981, Dr. Koop had no formal public-health training. His chief credential was that he was a socially conservative, Christian physician who had written a popular treatise against abortion. His confirmation took eight months. Few people expected him to talk about homosexuality, anal intercourse, condoms and intravenous drug use when almost nobody else in the Reagan administration would even utter the word “AIDS.”

Dr. Koop, however, believed information was the most useful weapon against HIV at a time when there was little treatment for the infection and widespread fear that it might soon threaten the general population. In May 1988, he mailed a seven-page brochure, “Understanding AIDS,” to all 107 million households in the country.

“Kessler recalled Dr. Koop’s refreshing lack of ideology, which sometimes perplexed those inside the Beltway.

“He knew very little about Washington when he arrived, and he developed political instincts that were very attuned to what the country expected,” Kessler said. “It’s really proof that you can’t really label anyone.”

Among AIDS activists Dr. Koop became an unlikely hero, although some came to think that his sexually explicit talk tended to further stigmatize gay men.

“Most of us thought that a huge part of how the crisis grew exponentially was that those in power chose to ignore it for as long as they could,” recalled Peter Staley, a founding member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. “He was the only person in that administration who spoke the truth when it came to AIDS.”

Dr. Koop was also a tireless campaigner against tobacco. As surgeon general, he released a report in 1982 that attributed 30 percent of all cancer deaths to smoking. He wrote that nicotine was as addictive as heroin, warned against the hazards of secondhand smoke and updated the warning labels on cigarette packs.

Kobi

02-27-2013, 01:04 PM

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FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- Van Cliburn, the internationally celebrated pianist whose triumph at a 1958 Moscow competition helped thaw the Cold War and launched a spectacular career that made him the rare classical musician to enjoy rock-star status, died Wednesday after a fight with bone cancer. He was 78.

Cliburn made what would be his last public appearance in September at the 50th anniversary of the prestigious piano competition named for him. Speaking to the audience in Fort Worth, he saluted the many past contestants, the orchestra and the city.

"Never forget: I love you all from the bottom of my heart, forever," he said to a roaring standing ovation.

Cliburn skyrocketed to fame when he won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at age 23 in 1958, six months after the Soviets' launch of Sputnik embarrassed the U.S. and propelled the world into the space age. He triumphantly returned to a New York City ticker tape parade - the first ever for a classical musician - and a Time magazine cover proclaimed him "The Texan Who Conquered Russia."

But the win also proved the power of the arts, bringing unity in the midst of strong rivalry. Despite the tension between the nations, Cliburn became a hero to music-loving Soviets who clamored to see him perform and Premier Nikita Khrushchev reportedly gave the go-ahead for the judges to honor a foreigner: "Is Cliburn the best? Then give him first prize."

In the years that followed, Cliburn's popularity soared, and the young man from the small east Texas town of Kilgore sold out concerts, caused riots when spotted in public and even prompted an Elvis Presley fan club to change its name to his. His recording of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 with Russian conductor Kirill Kondrashin became the first classical album to reach platinum status.

Time magazine's 1958 cover story quoted a friend as saying Cliburn could become "the first man in history to be a Horowitz, Liberace and Presley all rolled into one."

Cliburn performed for royalty, heads of state in Europe, Asia and South America, and for every U.S. president since Harry Truman.

"Since we know that classical music is timeless and everlasting, it is precisely the eternal verities inherent in classical music that remain a spiritual beacon for people all over the world," Cliburn once said.

But he also used his skill and fame to help other young musicians through the Van Cliburn International Music Competition.

Created by a group of Fort Worth teachers and citizens in 1962, the competition, held every four years, remains a pre-eminent showcase for the world's top pianists. An amateur contest was added in 1999.

"It is a forum for young artists to celebrate the great works of the piano literature and an opportunity to expose their talents to a wide-ranging international audience," Cliburn said during the 10th competition in 1997. The 14th competition is to be held in May and June.

President George W. Bush presented Cliburn with the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the nation's highest civilian honor - in 2003. In 2004, he received the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The 13th Cliburn competition, held in 2009, made history when a blind pianist from Japan, Nobuyuki Tsujii, and a teenager from China, Haochen Zhang, both won gold medals. They were the first winners from any Asian country, and Tsujii was the first blind pianist to win. And it was only the second time there were dual first place winners.

Cliburn was born Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. on July 12, 1934, in Shreveport, La., the son of oilman Harvey Cliburn Sr. and Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn. At age 3, he began studying piano with his mother, herself an accomplished pianist who had studied with a pupil of the great 19th century Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt.

The family moved back to Kilgore, Texas, within a few years of his birth.

Cliburn won his first Texas competition when he was 12, and two years later he played in Carnegie Hall as the winner of the National Music Festival Award.

At 17, Cliburn attended the Juilliard School in New York, where fellow students marveled at his marathon practice sessions that stretched until 3 a.m. He studied under the famed Russian-born pianist Rosina Lhevinne.

Between 1952 and 1958, he won all but one competition he entered, including the G.B. Dealey Award from the Dallas Symphony, the Kosciusko Foundation Chopin Scholarship and the prestigious Leventritt. By age 20, he had played with the New York Philharmonic and the symphonies of most major cities.

Cliburn's career seemed ready to take off until his name came up for the draft. Cliburn had to cancel all shows but was eventually excused from duty due to chronic nosebleeds.

Over the next few years, Cliburn's international popularity continued as he recorded pieces ranging from Mozart to a concerto by American Edward McDowell. Still, having been trained by arguably the best Russian teachers in the world, Cliburn's heart was Russian, with the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff concertos.

Cliburn made his home in Fort Worth, where in 1998 he appeared at the opening of the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall, both in recital and as soloist with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. He endowed scholarships at many schools, including Juilliard, which gave him an honorary doctorate, and the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories.

In December 2001, Cliburn was presented with the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors Medallion at the televised tribute held in Washington.

Until only recently, Cliburn practiced daily and performed limited engagements.

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Kobi

02-28-2013, 02:13 AM

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Dale Robertson, an Oklahoma native who became a star of television and movie Westerns during the genre's heyday, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Dale Robertson had bit parts in films including "The Boy with the Green Hair" and the Joan Crawford vehicle "Flamingo Road" before landing more high-profile roles such as Jesse James in "Fighting Man of the Plains."

In the 1950s, he moved into television, starring in series such as "Tales of Wells Fargo" (1957-62), "Iron Horse" (1966) and "Death Valley Days" (1968-70).

Robertson continued to work in TV in the 1970s, and in the 1980s he landed roles in the popular night-time soap operas "Dallas" and "Dynasty."

In 1993, he took what would be his final role, as Zeke in the show "Harts of the West," before retiring from acting to spend more time at his ranch in Yukon, Okla., where he lived until moving to the San Diego area in recent months.

Kobi

03-01-2013, 01:55 PM

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Actress Bonnie Franklin, known to TV fans as divorced mom Ann Romano on the '70s sitcom "One Day at a Time," has died at age 69. Her family says her death was due to complications from pancreatic cancer, which Franklin revealed she was battling back in September.

Franklin earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for her lead role on "One Day at a Time," the groundbreaking 1975-1984 comedy from producer Norman Lear which tackled hard-hitting issues like sexual harrassment, suicide, and premarital sex. The show was a Top 20 hit and made stars of Franklin and her TV daughters, Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli. In 2011, Franklin and Bertinelli reunited on the latter's TV Land sitcom "Hot in Cleveland."

Kobi

04-04-2013, 03:44 PM

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CHICAGO (AP) — Roger Ebert, the most famous and most popular film reviewer of his time who became the first journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for movie criticism and, on his long-running TV program, wielded the nation's most influential thumb, died Thursday. He was 70.

Ebert, who had been a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, died early Thursday afternoon at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. He had announced on his blog Wednesday that he was undergoing radiation treatment after a recurrence of cancer.

He had no grand theories or special agendas, but millions recognized the chatty, heavy-set man with wavy hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Above all, they followed the thumb — pointing up or down. It was the main logo of the televised shows Ebert co-hosted, first with the late Gene Siskel of the rival Chicago Tribune and — after Siskel's death in 1999 — with his Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper. Although criticized as gimmicky and simplistic, a "two thumbs up" accolade was sure to find its way into the advertising for the movie in question.

Despite his power with the movie-going public, Ebert wrote in his 2011 autobiography "Life Itself," that he considered himself "beneath everything else a fan."

"I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind," Ebert wrote in his 2011 memoir, "Life Itself."

He was teased for years about his weight, but the jokes stopped abruptly when Ebert lost portions of his jaw and the ability to speak, eat and drink after cancer surgeries in 2006. But he overcame his health problems to resume writing full-time and eventually even returned to television. In addition to his work for the Sun-Times, Ebert became a prolific user of social media, connecting with fans on Facebook and Twitter.

The thumb logo remained the property of Ebert and Siskel's widow, and in early 2011, Ebert launched his new show, "Ebert Presents At the Movies." The show had new hosts, but featured Ebert in his own segment, "Roger's Office." He used a chin prosthesis and enlisted voice-over guests to read his reviews.

While some called Ebert a brave inspiration, he told The Associated Press in an email in January 2011 that bravery and courage "have little to do with it."

"You play the cards you're dealt," Ebert wrote. "What's your choice? I have no pain, I enjoy life, and why should I complain?"

Ebert joined the Sun-Times part time in 1966 while pursuing graduate study at the University of Chicago, and got the reviewing job the following year. His reviews were eventually syndicated to several hundred other newspapers, collected in books and repeated on innumerable websites, which would have made him one of the most influential film critics in the nation even without his television fame.

His 1975 Pulitzer for distinguished criticism was the first, and one of only three, given to a film reviewer since the category was created in 1970. In 2005, he received another honor when he became the first critic to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Ebert's breezy and quotable style, as well as his knowledge of film technique and the business side of the industry, made him an almost instant success.

He soon began doing interviews and profiles of notable actors and directors in addition to his film reviews — celebrating such legends as Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne and Robert Mitchum and offering words of encouragement for then-newcomer Martin Scorsese.

In 1969, he took a leave of absence from the Sun-Times to write the screenplay for "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." The movie got an "X'' rating and became somewhat of a cult film.

Ebert's television career began the year he won the Pulitzer, first on WTTW-TV, the Chicago PBS station, then nationwide on PBS and later on several commercial syndication services. Ebert and Siskel even trademarked the "two thumbs up" phrase.

And while the pair may have sparred on air, they were close off camera. Siskel's daughters were flower girls when Ebert married his wife, Chaz, in 1992.

Ebert was also an author, writing more than 20 books that included two volumes of essays on classic movies and the popular "I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie," a collection of some of his most scathing reviews.

___

Parker

04-08-2013, 06:09 AM

Margaret Thatcher Dies at 87 (http://news.yahoo.com/margaret-thatcher-dies-87-115951002.html)

Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to ever serve as prime minister of the United Kingdom, has died at the age of 87. A spokesperson announced that she had a stroke, though she had been in poor health in recent years and was reportedly suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

A family statement (via the BBC) said "It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning."

Kobi

04-08-2013, 01:27 PM

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=CC&Date=20130408&Category=NEWS11&ArtNo=130409707&Ref=AR&maxH=230&maxW=370&border=0&Q=80&cb=20130408145100

NEW YORK — Annette Funicello, who became a child star as a perky, cute-as-a-button Mouseketeer on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s, then teamed up with Frankie Avalon on a string of '60s fun-in-the-sun movies with names like "Beach Blanket Bingo" and "Bikini Beach," died Monday. She was 70.

The pretty, dark-haired Funicello was just 13 when she gained fame on Walt Disney's television kiddie "club," an amalgam of stories, songs and dance routines that ran from 1955 to 1959.

Cast after Disney saw her at a dance recital, she appeared in mouse ears, a pleated skirt and a turtleneck sweater emblazoned with her first name. She soon became the most popular Mouseketeer in the cast, receiving 8,000 fan letters a month, 10 times more than any of the 23 other young performers.

When "The Mickey Mouse Club" ended, Annette (as she was often billed) was the only club member to remain under contract to the studio. She appeared in such Disney movies as "Johnny Tremain," ''The Shaggy Dog," ''The Horsemasters," ''Babes in Toyland," ''The Misadventures of Merlin Jones" and "The Monkey's Uncle."

She also became a recording star, singing on 15 albums and hit singles such as "Tall Paul" and "Pineapple Princess."

Outgrowing the kid roles by the early '60s, Annette teamed with Avalon in a series of movies for American-International, the first film company to exploit the burgeoning teen market.

The shift in teen tastes begun by the Beatles in 1964 and Funicello's first marriage the following year pretty much killed off the beach-movie genre.

But she was somehow never forgotten though mostly out of the public eye for years. She and Avalon staged a reunion in 1987 with "Back to the Beach." It was during the filming that she noticed she had trouble walking — the first insidious sign of MS.

When it was finally diagnosed, she later recalled, "I knew nothing about (MS), and you are always afraid of the unknown. I plowed into books."

Her symptoms were relatively mild at first, but gradually she lost control of her legs, and she feared people might think she was drunk. So she went public with her ordeal in 1992.

She wrote of her triumphs and struggles in her 1994 autobiography, "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" — the title taken from a Disney song. In 1995, she appeared briefly in a television docudrama based on her book. And she spoke openly about the degenerative effects of MS.

----------------------------

She was one of my crushes early in life. Loved the beach movies but Ski Party was my favorite. Wonder what ever happened to Eric Von Zipper? Thanks for the memories.

Kobi

04-12-2013, 12:48 PM

http://img2-3.timeinc.net/people/i/2013/news/130422/jonathan-winters-300.jpg

Jonathan Winters – an improvisational genius and the comedic spiritual godfather to a generation of younger comics, including Robin Williams, Jim Carrey and the late Andy Kaufman – died of natural causes Thursday night.

Known for the wild array of characters he could create in a flash – his naughty old lady Maude Frickert was a Tonight Show headliner who routinely broke up hosts Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson – Winters, playing doltish truck driver Lennie Pike, stole the all-star 1963 movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World out from every name comedian who was breathing at the time.

Dayton, Ohio, native, Winters dropped out of high school to join the Marines, with whom he served in the Pacific during World War II. After the war he deejayed on radio station back in his hometown, where he could never quite deliver the weather in a straight fashion.

"About the third day, I decided that I'd interview myself," he recalled years later for a PBS special, Pioneers of Television, saying he wished "to gamble a little bit with this so-called career. So I said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we have a wonderful gentleman here … Sir Edmund Denler. [He's] flown a secret flight aircraft all the way from London to Labrador, Labrador here to Dayton, and just wonderful to have you here, sir …' "

The radio station owner was not amused. The radio audience was.

A shot on CBS's Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts led to other spots on network TV and then on Broadway, in the revue Almanac. His true launching pad, in 1956, was the weekly TV variety The Jonathan Winters Show. And though it was hard to contain him on the small screen – records and clubs were his forte – Winters returned the medium back in 1981, to play Robin William's son on the last season of ABC's Mork and Mindy.

Truly a comedian's comedian, Winters received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1999. On a personal level, his wife of 60 years, Eileen, died, age 84, in early 2009, according to a friend's published remembrance. He is survived by two children, Lucinda Winters and Jay Winters.

Later in life, Winters credited much of his early success to the savvy TV hosts who grabbed him and put him on the air in the early '60s. According to Winters, they would say: "One thing about Winters, you never knew what he's going to say or do."

He added: "I don't think they sweated my being dirty … or embarrassing … they knew I would be funny."

And was he ever.

lZ9N7oCKC1E

Kobi

04-15-2013, 10:34 AM

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Frank Bank, who played the clumsy bully Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford on the popular 1957-1963 series Leave It to Beaver, died Saturday, one day after his 71st birthday.

Born in Los Angeles, Bank first appeared on screen as the very young Will Rogers in the 1952 Warner Bros. biopic The Will Rogers Story, and then managed to deliver other TV roles at the same time he was appearing on Leave It to Beaver.

Once the gentle sitcom about childhood was canceled, Bank continued to make sporadic TV appearances, including those on The Hollywood Squares, Family Feud, the 1983 TV movie Still The Beaver (it spawned The New Leave It to Beaver series, which ran four years) – although, in 1972, he had entered an entirely different profession: as a stock-and-bond broker.

According to a 1998 PEOPLE profile, Bank learned to handicap horses and read The Wall Street Journal during breaks on the Beaver set, where he taught himself "everything there was to know about tax-free bonds." Within three years of getting started, he says, he was earning $300,000 a year at an L.A.-based company.

puddin'

04-15-2013, 12:52 PM

an ordinary man who did extraordinary things. this is what a hero looks like. i had da honour o' callin' him a friend.

r.i.p. mr. betts... you are well loved and truly missed.

http://www.examiner.com/article/brian-betts-fallen-star-part-3-the-leader

Greyson

04-16-2013, 09:44 AM

Sal Castro, teacher who led '68 Chicano student walkouts, dies at 79

By Teresa Watanabe

April 15, 2013

Salvador Castro, a social studies teacher who played a leading role in the historic 1968 Chicano student walkouts protesting rampant bias and inequalities in the Los Angeles Unified School District, died Monday, the district announced. He was 79.

Castro, known as “Sal,” was a Lincoln High School teacher who guided student walkouts at five predominantly Mexican American schools on the Eastside in what came to be seen as a milestone in community activism. The students demanded bilingual education, ethnic studies and other changes at a time when the curriculum largely ignored Mexican American history and educators forbid Chicano students to speak Spanish and often steered them toward menial jobs rather than college despite strong academic abilities, according to the district.

Castro was arrested and charged with conspiracy to disrupt public schools and disturb the peace for his alleged role in guiding the “blowouts.” But the charges were eventually dropped and he came to be hailed as a courageous civil rights leader. Salvador B. Castro Middle School was named after him several years ago.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-sal-castro-teacher-who-led-68-chicano-student-walkouts-dies-at-79-20130415,0,4019352.story

Many of you know I got my K-12 education in the L.A. Unified School District. What I have highlighted above I experienced it personally. My High School counselor, Mr. Cole, flat out told me this when I told him I wanted to take some classes to prepare for college. "You are a Mexican. You are good with your hands. You should look at a vocation, not college." I share many things with all of you about discrimination I have experienced in my life. I do this not because I am competing in the "Opression Olympics" but because I hope you have found me to be credible through the years and you realize a fellow traveler, me, is sharing with you, it really did and does happen.

I am thankful for many activist that came before me and my generation and the ones that will follow us. There is crossover for many of us in the complexity of who we are and there are commonalities. We all know happiness and sorrow. I really believe most of us want to do better for our world, planet.

Kobi

04-16-2013, 03:45 PM

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DALLAS (AP) -- Pat Summerall, the NFL player-turned-broadcaster whose deep, resonant voice called games for more than 40 years, has died at the age of 82.

Summerall was part of network television broadcasts for 16 Super Bowls. His last championship game was for Fox on Feb. 3, 2002, also his last game with longtime partner John Madden. The popular duo worked together for 21 years, moving to Fox in 1994 after years as the lead team for CBS.

Summerall played 10 NFL seasons (1952-61) with the Chicago Cardinals and New York Giants. He started doing NFL games for CBS in 1964. He also covered the PGA Tour and tennis.

Glenn

04-22-2013, 06:29 PM

Richie Havens has passed:praying:!

Kobi

04-23-2013, 12:03 PM

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Allan Arbus, best known for his dozen appearances as the sarcastic psychiatrist Maj. Sidney Freedman on the '70s series M*A*S*H, died Friday. He was 95.

Mr. Arbus appeared in films like “Coffy” and “Crossroads” and was a TV regular during the 1970s and ’80s, appearing on “Taxi,” “Starsky & Hutch,” “Matlock” and other shows.

Kobi

04-26-2013, 12:47 PM

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — George Jones, the peerless, hard-living country singer who recorded dozens of hits about good times and regrets and peaked with the heartbreaking classic "He Stopped Loving Her Today," has died.

Known for his clenched, precise baritone, Jones had No. 1 songs in five separate decades, 1950s to 1990s, and was idolized not just by fellow country singers, but by Frank Sinatra, Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, James Taylor and countless others.

In a career that lasted more than 50 years, "Possum" recorded more than 150 albums and became the champion and symbol of traditional country music, a well-lined link to his hero, Hank Williams.

Kobi

04-27-2013, 08:31 PM

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/page/-/images/authors/Thom_Mary.jpg/@mx_250

YONKERS, N.Y. — Prominent feminist Mary Thom, a writer and former editor of Ms. magazine who also was an avid motorcyclist, crashed while riding on a highway and was killed, her nephew said Saturday. She was 68.

Thom was one of Ms. magazine’s founding members and served as an editor there for about 20 years, leaving in 1992. She also was an author who wrote a book about the history of Ms. and was a co-author, with Suzanne Braun Levine, of an oral history of former congresswoman and activist Bella Abzug.

Most recently, Thom was the editor-in-chief of the Women’s Media Center’s features department, which produces reports and commentaries by national and international contributors.

Kobi

05-13-2013, 06:08 PM

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Joyce Brothers, a former academic psychologist who long before Drs. Ruth, Phil and Laura was counseling millions over the airwaves, died on Monday at her home in Fort Lee, N.J. She was 85.

Dr. Joyce Brothers, as she was always known professionally — a full-name hallmark of the more formal times in which she began her career — was widely described as the mother of mass-media psychology because of the firm, pragmatic and homiletic guidance she administered for decades via radio and television.

Historically, she was a bridge between advice columnists like Dear Abby and Ann Landers, who got their start in the mid-1950s, and the self-help advocates of the 1970s and afterward.

Throughout the 1960s, and long beyond, one could scarcely turn on the television or open a newspaper without encountering her. She was the host of her own nationally syndicated TV shows, starting in the late 1950s with “The Dr. Joyce Brothers Show” and over the years including “Ask Dr. Brothers,” “Consult Dr. Brothers” and “Living Easy With Dr. Joyce Brothers.”

She was also a ubiquitous guest on talk shows like “The Tonight Show” and on variety shows like “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”

She was a panelist on many game shows, including “What’s My Line?” and “The Hollywood Squares.” These appearances had a fitting symmetry: It was as a game-show contestant that Dr. Brothers had received her first television exposure.

Playing herself, or a character very much like herself, she had guest roles on a blizzard of TV series, from “The Jack Benny Program” to “Happy Days,” “Taxi,” “Baywatch,” “Entourage” and “The Simpsons.”

She also lectured widely; had a call-in radio show, a syndicated newspaper column and a regular column in Good Housekeeping magazine; and wrote books.

Dr. Brothers arrived in the American consciousness (or, more precisely, the American unconscious) at a serendipitous time: the exact historical moment when cold war anxiety, a greater acceptance of talk therapy and the widespread ownership of television sets converged. Looking crisply capable yet eminently approachable in her pastel suits and pale blond pageboy, she offered gentle, nonthreatening advice on sex, relationships, parenting and all manner of decent behavior.

--------

One of my childhood crushes.

DapperButch

05-13-2013, 06:24 PM

Crap. :vigil:

Kobi

05-29-2013, 03:39 PM

TORONTO (AP) -- Abortion rights activist Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who helped overturn Canada's abortion law 25 years ago, died Wednesday at age 90 at his Toronto home.

The Polish-born Morgentaler emerged in 1967 as an advocate for a woman's right to have an abortion, at a time when attempting to induce one was a crime punishable by life in prison.

Morgentaler later said his five-year stay in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau prepared him for his showdown with Canada's legal system, saying that in his mind, laws can be wrong.

Morgentaler opened the first abortion clinic in Montreal in 1970, followed by more clinics across the country, and he fought Canada's abortion law, which ultimately resulted in the Supreme Court's landmark 1988 decision declaring it unconstitutional.

Carolyn Egan, director of the Ontario Coalition of Abortion Clinics, said Wednesday that Morgentaler had a huge impact on the lives of women in Canada. Joyce Arthur, executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, said he saved the lives of countless women.

In 2008, Morgentaler received the Order of Canada, the country's highest recognition award.

Morgentaler's work also earned him many opponents, and the national coordinator of the anti-abortion group Campaign Life Coalition, Mary Ellen Douglas, said she hopes Morgentaler repented before his death and that his death marks what she called "an end to the killing in Canada."

There are no longer crowds of protesters outside the clinics Morgentaler opened.

"It's because of the debate, people have changed their minds. Now they have the additional knowledge and experience that women no longer die as a result of abortions," Morgentaler said in a 2004 interview. "We've come to a situation where women accept (abortion on demand) as part of their rights."

Kobi

06-01-2013, 03:59 PM

http://img2-3.timeinc.net/people/i/2012/news/120813/jean-stapleton-300.jpg

Jean Stapleton, the versatile actress who will forever be remembered for her long-running role as the dim-witted but deep-hearted Edith Bunker on the groundbreaking 1970s sitcom All in the Family, died Friday.

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20705565,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+people%2Fheadlines+%28PEOPLE. com%3A+Top+Headlines%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

Kobi

06-02-2013, 12:13 PM

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While following a tornado in El Reno, Okla. on Friday, Storm Chasers' star Tim Samaras, his son Paul and colleague Carl Young lost their lives.

CNN reports they were among the nine people killed by storms that night.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of Tim Samaras, his son Paul and their colleague Carl Young. Our thoughts and prayers go out to their families," Discovery Channel said in a statement.

According to their website, Samaras founded TWISTEX, the Tactical Weather Instrumented Sampling in Tornadoes Experiment, to learn more about tornadoes and increase time for warnings.

This is a devastating loss to the meteorological, research, and storm chasing communities. I ask that you keep the families in your thoughts and prayers during this very difficult time. There is some comfort in knowing these men passed on doing what they loved..."

Daktari

06-10-2013, 06:25 AM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/09/iain-banks-dies-59-cancer

http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q8/scoobs63/v2-Iain-Banks-GETTY_zps2fb6df69.jpg (http://s132.photobucket.com/user/scoobs63/media/v2-Iain-Banks-GETTY_zps2fb6df69.jpg.html)

DapperButch

06-10-2013, 07:45 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/movies/esther-williams-who-swam-to-movie-fame-dies-at-91.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-nyad/esther-williams-memories_b_3413456.html

Kobi

06-11-2013, 03:25 AM

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - Allen Derr, an Idaho lawyer who won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling to bolster anti-discrimination protections for women, died Monday in Boise. He was 85.

On Nov. 22, 1971, the Supreme Court justices issued their Reed vs. Reed decision, holding states cannot discriminate against people because of their gender. It marked a departure from the era when courts often excluded women from full participation in important civil affairs.

His client, Sally Reed, a woman challenging her estranged husband over which of them should be appointed to oversee their son's estate following his suicide, was fighting to overturn an Idaho courts' decision based on an 1864 Idaho law: If more than one person claimed to be equally entitled to be trustee, "males must be preferred to females."

Characteristically humble, Derr described his role in the case in 2011 as nothing extraordinary.

"I was just doing my job," he said two years ago, on the 40th anniversary of the decision when he was honored by at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., alongside the lawyer who wrote Reed's legal brief: Current Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The decision in Reed vs. Reed has been celebrated in the 2001 book by historians Alan Brinkley and James McPherson, "Days of Destiny," as among a handful of uncelebrated events that nonetheless changed the course of history.

Derr remembered clearly Sally Reed's frustration when she came into his office in Boise, seeking help.

"When she came to me, she'd just been turned down by the probate court, in a very short, one-page decision," he said. "She was hurt and outraged."

Derr's basic argument was simple. The U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment forbade such discrimination.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing the unanimous decision, agreed.

"To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," Burger wrote.

Kobi

06-19-2013, 08:16 PM

http://mi-cache.legacy.com/legacy/images/Portraits/James-Gandolfini-dead-165421824port.jpgx?w=117&h=151&option=1

James Gandolfini, whose portrayal of a brutal, emotionally fragile mob boss in HBO's "The Sopranos" helped create one of TV's greatest drama series and turned the mobster stereotype on its head, died Wednesday in Italy. He was 51.

Gandolfini played mob boss Tony Soprano in the groundbreaking series that aired from 1999 to 2007. His performance was indelible and career-making, but he refused to be stereotyped in other roles as the bulky mobster who was a therapy patient, family man and cold-blooded killer.

After the series concluded with its breathtaking ending that left viewers guessing, Gandolfini's varied film work included "Zero Dark Thirty" and comedies such as "In the Loop," a political satire. He voiced the Wild Thing Carol in "Where the Wild Things Are."

Gandolfini also shared a Broadway stage in 2009 with Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis and Marcia Gay Harden in a celebrated production of "God of Carnage," where he earned a Tony Award nomination for best actor. He also was in "On the Waterfront" with David Morse.

----------------------

Loved this guy as Tony. Loved the Soprano's.

Daktari

06-20-2013, 05:14 AM

RIP Mr.Gandolfini...you will be missed (w)

Kobi

06-30-2013, 11:16 AM

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1219084/thumbs/r-MARGHERITA-HACK-DEAD-large570.jpg?6

ROME (AP) -- Margherita Hack, an astrophysicist who explained her research on the stars in plain language for the public and who championed civil rights in her native Italy, died on Saturday in the Adriatic Sea town of Trieste, where she had headed an astronomical observatory. She was 91.

President Giorgio Napolitano's condolence message hailed her as a "high-level personality in the world of scientific culture."

`'At the same time, she represented a strong example of civil passion, leaving a noble fingerprint in public debate and in the dialogue with citizens," Napolitano said.

Hack headed the observatory in Trieste, the first woman to hold that post, from 1964 to 1987, and was a popular and frequent commentator in Italian media about discoveries in astronomy and physics.

The current director of the observatory, Stefano Borgani, told Sky TG24 TV that Hack was one of the first astronomers to `'have the intuition" that the future of astronomical observation lay in using space satellites.

An atheist who decried Vatican influence on Italian politicians, Hack helped fight a successful battle to legalize abortion in Italy. She unsuccessfully lobbied for the right to euthanasia and also championed gay rights. Among her victories was a campaign against construction of nuclear reactors in Italy.

A vegetarian since childhood, she also was an advocate for animal protection and lived with eight cats and a dog.

Hack, an optimist with a cheerful disposition, studied the heavens in the firm belief there was no after-life.

`'I have no fear of death," Hack once said in a TV interview. "While we are here, death isn't" with us.

`'When there is death, I won't be here," she said.

She liked to joke that the `'first and last" time she was in a church was for her marriage to fellow native Florentine Aldo De Rosa, in 1944. She agreed to a church ceremony only because the groom's parents were very religious. Hack dressed simply in life, including for her own wedding, when she wore an overcoat-turned-inside out for a bridal gown.

Hack enrolled at the University of Florence as a student of literature, but after one class, switched to physics. By the early 1950s, she was an astronomer at the Tuscan city's astronomical observatory.

She was also an athlete, excelling in track. Specializing in the long jump and high jump from 1939 to 1943, she won national university championships and placed high in national championships.

Hack was active in left-wing politics, including most recently supporting the governor of southern Puglia, Nichi Vendola, one of Italy's few openly gay politicians.

`'With Margherita Hack's passing, we lose an authoritative voice in favor of civil rights and equality," said Fabrizio Marrazzo, a spokesman for a gay advocacy group, Gay Center. `'More than once, Hack came out in favor of gay rights, civil unions and the dignity of gay families."

FemmeItalian

07-02-2013, 11:23 PM

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/s403x403/1013992_482834498468121_1340020426_n.jpg

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc1/s403x403/999319_589637431076201_223779131_n.jpg

Kobi

07-10-2013, 05:29 AM

http://d3.yimg.com/sr/img/1/f5999176-e34e-3936-903f-cc20165bc256

Joe Conley, an actor best known as the small town storekeeper on the TV series "The Waltons," has died at age 85.

The Los Angeles Times reports Tuesday that according to wife Louise Conley, Joe Conley died at a care facility in Southern California on Sunday. She says he had suffered from dementia.

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Conley had bit parts on 1960s series like "Green Acres" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" before he landed the role on CBS's "The Waltons" in 1972 that would last nearly a decade.

Conley played Ike Godsey, postmaster and owner of the Jefferson County general store frequented by the Walton family in Depression-era Virginia. He would appear in 172 episodes over nine seasons and in TV movie reunions that lasted into the 1990s.

Kobi

07-14-2013, 07:11 AM

http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4817700200646564&pid=15.1

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Cory Monteith, the handsome young actor who shot to fame in the hit TV series "Glee" but was beset by addiction struggles so fierce that he once said he was lucky to be alive, was found dead in a hotel room, police said. He was 31.

Monteith, who played the character Finn Hudson on the Fox TV series about a high school glee club, was found dead in his room on the 21st floor of the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel on Vancouver's waterfront at about noon Saturday, according to police.

Deputy Police Chief Doug Lepard said there was no indication of foul play. Monteith's body was found by hotel staff after he missed his check-out time, Lepard said.

In April, Monteith admitted himself to a treatment facility for "substance addiction" and asked for privacy as he took steps toward recovery, a representative said at the time.

Monteith's TV credits included roles on the series "Kaya" and "Kyle XY" and guest appearances on "Smallville," ''Supernatural," ''Stargate," ''Flash Gordon" and "Interns." His film credits included "Final Destination 3," ''The Invisible," ''Deck the Halls" and "Whisper."

DapperButch

07-14-2013, 07:57 AM

CRAP!!! Really bummed to hear about Cory Monteith. I was a Glee fan that first season. I feel really bad for his girlfriend (Lea Michele). This sucks. I was really hopeful he was going to make it.

Kobi

07-16-2013, 07:47 AM

http://76crimes.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/eric-o-lembembe.jpg

LGBT activist and reporter Eric Ohena Lembembe was beaten to death over the weekend, LGBT activists in Cameroon announced today.

Fellow activists said they found his bloody, lifeless body early today at his home in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

Investigations by human rights defenders are under way to discover who was responsible for the crime.

At his death, he was serving as the local executive director of the Cameroonian Foundation For AIDS (Camfaids), an advocacy group fighting against AIDS and for human rights of LGBT people in Cameroon, which is one of the world’s most violently anti-gay nations.

Lembembe, a regular contributor to the Erasing 76 Crimes blog, was the author of one of the blog’s most popular articles, “What traditional African homosexuality learned from the West.”

That article is included in the book From Wrongs to Gay Rights, along with his articles about Roger Mbede, who was imprisoned because of an amorous text message to a man; Franky Djome and Jonas Kumie, who were imprisoned because they are a transgender couple; anti-gay blackmailer/extortioner Albert Edward Ekobo Samba; and the homophobic attack on last year’s IDAHO celebration in Yaoundé.

He formerly worked as a writer and editor for the monthly Tribune du Citoyen in Cameroon.

http://76crimes.com/2013/07/15/beating-death-of-lgbt-activist-eric-lembembe-in-cameroon/

Queenie

07-16-2013, 09:30 AM

CRAP!!! Really bummed to hear about Cory Monteith. I was a Glee fan that first season. I feel really bad for his girlfriend (Lea Michele). This sucks. I was really hopeful he was going to make it.

It's heartbreaking! I read that he was going to move in with his girlfriend when he got back to LA. She just must be devastated! I wonder how he will be written out of, Glee...

*Anya*

07-17-2013, 10:18 PM

The adamantly homophobic Westboro Baptist Church has announced plans to picket the funeral of deceased Glee star Cory Monteith.

The church, which often pickets the funerals of those seen to be pro-gay or accepting of LGBT people, tweeted to say that it would picket Monteith’s funeral because he supported openly-gay co-star Chris Colfer.

The organisation also went on to suggest that Monteith’s girlfriend Lea Michele – also a Glee actor- should kill herself.

The straight star played Finn Hudson in the popular US TV series Glee, and was found dead in a Vancouver hotel room at the weekend, aged 31.

“Westboro praises God for his righteous judgments. Hell won’t be gleeful for #CoryMonteith – he taught millions to sin,” the group tweeted, in a string of tweets about the late star.

Another tweet read: “Hell won’t be gleeful for Cory Monteith.”

Last month the church took umbrage at a pink lemonade stand run by a 5-year-old in the name of an anti-bullying campaign, and told her she would “burn in hell”.

The church previously tweeted PinkNews to say that God sent the killers in the suspected terror killing in Woolwich, London, because the equal marriage bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons.

It previously thanked God for a lethal tornado that ripped through Moore, Oklahoma, leaving at least 24 people dead, saying it’s because of gay basketball player Jason Collins.

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/07/16/us-church-announces-plans-to-picket-funeral-of-deceased-glee-star-cory-monteith/

mustangjeano

07-17-2013, 11:44 PM

Kobi

07-18-2013, 12:07 AM

*Anya*

07-18-2013, 05:53 AM

I am speachless--will the hating ever stop?

Both People and TMZ are reporting Cory Monteith was privately cremated Tuesday in Canada.

Sometimes hatred is perpetuated based on inaccuracies and the subsequent reactions to them.

Sometimes, we need to take a step back, breathe, wait for the facts to sort themselves out.

"“PRAISE GOD ALMIGHTY for killing Cory Monteith — a wicked f**-enabling sinner! Westboro Baptist Church to picket his funeral,” the church wrote to Chris Colfer, who plays gay chorus member Kurt Hummel, as well as several other cast members."

http://legalpronews.findlaw.com/article/08081dCdlj1jA

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/15/westboro-baptist-church-cory-monteith_n_3598346.html

Yes it is hard to believe, but true.

Multiple legitimate sources, including GLADD, have documented Westboro's tweets.

I am glad to read that the family averted anything of the sort from occurring by cremation (which may have been his expressed preference previously).

Words

07-18-2013, 07:37 AM

On a side note...

I just took a look - my first - at the Westboro Baptist Church website.

I literally feel sick.

Words

CherylNYC

07-18-2013, 09:13 PM

From the New York Times:

Laurie Frink,Trumpeter and Brass Instructor to Many, Dies at 61
By NATE CHINEN
Published: July 17, 2013

Laurie Frink, an accomplished trumpeter who became a brass instructor of widespread influence and high regard, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 61.

The cause was cancer of the bile duct, said the classical violist Lois Martin, her partner of 25 years.

Ms. Frink built her trumpet career as a section player, starting when few women were accepted in those ranks. She worked extensively on Broadway and with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the Mel Lewis Orchestra and Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band, often playing lead...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/arts/music/laurie-frinktrumpeter-and-brass-instructor-to-many-dies-at-61.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

Greyson

07-20-2013, 10:07 AM

Pioneering journalist Helen Thomas dies at 92

By CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press
Published: Saturday, Jul. 20, 2013 - 7:47 am

Thomas was at the forefront of women's achievements in journalism. She was one of the first female reporters to break out of the White House "women's beat" — the soft stories about presidents' kids, wives, their teas and their hairdos — and cover the hard news on an equal footing with men.

She became the first female White House bureau chief for a wire service when UPI named her to the position in 1974. She was also the first female officer at the National Press Club, where women had once been barred as members and she had to fight for admission into the 1959 luncheon speech where Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned: "We will bury you."

The belligerent Khrushchev was an unlikely ally in one sense. He had refused to speak at any Washington venue that excluded women, she said.

Thomas fought, too, for a more open presidency, resisting all moves by a succession of administrations to restrict press access.

"People will never know how hard it is to get information," Thomas told an interviewer, "especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp TOP SECRET on the color of the walls."

Born in Winchester, Ky., to Lebanese immigrants, Thomas was the seventh of nine children. It was in high school, after working on the student newspaper, that she decided she wanted to become a reporter.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/20/5581910/pioneering-journalist-helen-thomas.html#storylink=cpy

Kobi

07-20-2013, 10:48 AM

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I grew up watching Helen Thomas. She was a unique character and well respected by her peers and the politicians she covered. I had a deep respect for her diplomacy, honesty, and way with words when asking leading questions.

She was a pioneer and role model for women of my era.

Kobi

07-20-2013, 11:54 AM

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LONDON (Reuters) - British comedian Mel Smith, who became a household name for a series of television sketch shows in the 1970s and 80s which colleagues said had inspired a generation of comics, has died of a heart attack, his agent said on Saturday.

Smith, who died on Friday aged 60, found fame starring in hugely popular shows "Not The Nine O'clock News" and "Alas Smith and Jones" and went on to direct the films "Bean" and "The Tall Guy".

"I still can't believe this has happened," said Griff Rhys Jones, his comedy partner in his best-known TV shows. "To everybody who ever met him, Mel was a force for life. He was a gentleman and a scholar, a gambler and a wit."

Together, they formed Talkback, a highly successful independent TV production house that spawned many hit British comedies including the "Ali G" series, which gave Sacha Baron Cohen his first big television break.

Talkback was sold to Pearson TV in 2000 for 62 million pounds ($95 million).

"Mel Smith's contribution to British comedy cannot be overstated," said Tony Hall, the Director General of the BBC.

"On screen he helped to define a new style of comedy from the late 1970s that continues to influence people to this day."

He played The Albino in The Princess Bride.

Kobi

07-22-2013, 01:01 PM

http://ts3.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4754255021605414&pid=15.1

NEW YORK (AP) — Dennis Farina, a onetime Chicago cop who as a popular actor played a cop on "Law & Order," has died.

Farina died Monday morning in a Scottsdale, Ariz., hospital after suffering a blood clot in his lung, according to his publicist, Lori De Waal. He was 69.

For three decades, Farina was a character actor who displayed remarkable dexterity, charm and, when called for, toughness, making effective use of his craggy face, steel-gray hair, ivory smile and ample mustache.

Farina appeared in films including "Get Shorty," ''Saving Private Ryan," ''Midnight Run" and "Out Of Sight."

Among his many TV portrayals was Detective Joe Fontana on "Law & Order" during the 2004-06 seasons. He starred in the 1980s cult favorite "Crime Story" and was a regular in the 2011-12 HBO drama "Luck."

He recently completed shooting a comedy, "Lucky Stiff."

A veteran of the Chicago theater, Farina appeared in Joseph Mantegna's "Bleacher Bums" and "Streamers," directed by Terry Kinney, among other productions.

Born Feb. 29, 1944, in Chicago, he was a city detective before he found his way into the acting profession as he neared his forties.

His first film was the 1981 action drama "Thief," directed by Michael Mann, whom he had met through a mutual friend while still working for the Chicago Police Department.

"I remember going to the set that day and being intrigued by the whole thing," Farina recalled in a 2004 interview with The Associated Press. "I liked it. And everybody was extremely nice to me. If the people were rude and didn't treat me right, things could have gone the other way."

http://news.yahoo.com/dennis-farina-star-law-order-dead-69-172640962.html

Kobi

07-26-2013, 05:00 AM

Virginia Johnson, part of the husband-wife research team that transformed the study of sex in the 1960s and wrote two best-selling books on sexuality, has died in St. Louis. She was 88.

Johnson, who grew up in rural Missouri near the small town of Golden City, was a twice-divorced mother in her 30s when she went job-hunting at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1950s. She was trying to support her young family while she pursued a college degree.

She soon became an assistant to obstetrician-gynecologist William Masters, and later his lover and co-collaborator on a large-scale human sexuality experiments.

Johnson recruited graduate students, nurses, faculty wives and other participants for what was described as the "biggest sex experiment in U.S. histor y." The after-hours research, first on the medical school campus at Washington University and later at a nearby building, shattered basic perceptions about female sexuality, including Freud's concept that vaginal - rather than clitoral - orgasm was the more mature sexual response for women. She took the case studies - and asked the uncomfortable questions.

Hundreds of couples, not all of them married, would participate in the observed research, later discussed in their 1966 book, "Human Sexual Response." That book and their second, 1970's "Human Sexual Inadequacy," were both best-sellers.

For the next 20 years, Masters and Johnson were celebrities, the topic of late-night talk show hosts and on the cover of news magazines. "The family feeling was they changed the study of sex with the landmark publishing of their books," Scott Johnson said.

Masters and Johnson married in 1971 and divorced after 20 years. The Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis closed in 1994. Masters died in 2001.

Kobi

07-27-2013, 10:54 AM

http://ts2.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4991302811976225&pid=15.1

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lindy Boggs, who took over her husband's congressional seat to become a crusader for women's equality and civil rights, died Saturday at 97. Her death was confirmed by ABC News, where Boggs' daughter, Cokie Roberts, is a journalist.

The matriarch of a powerful Washington family, Boggs served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Louisiana Democrat for 18 years, beginning in 1973, when she become the first woman elected to Congress from her state.

She was a permanent chairwoman of the 1976 Democratic National Convention and also served as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican from 1997 to 2001.

The Boggs children came to prominence in politics, law and the media. In addition to Roberts, an author and journalist at National Public Radio as well as ABC TV, Boggs' son Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. is an influential Washington lawyer. Another daughter, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, died of cancer in 1990 while she was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey.

Boggs won a special election to Congress six months after the death of her husband, House Majority Leader Thomas Hale Boggs. He was presumed to have died in a plane crash in a remote part of Alaska, although his body was never found.

In Congress, Mrs. Boggs was elected to her first full term in 1974 and re-elected seven times after that, always by wide margins, and four times unopposed in a district that after the 1980 census was redrawn to include an African American majority.

Born Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne in Brunswick Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Boggs attended Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane University, a premier institution of higher education for young Louisiana women.

With a political family pedigree that stretched back to George Washington's day and included governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, Boggs came to Washington at 24 with her newly elected husband to exert behind-the-scenes influence until she herself was elected to office.

In her 1994 memoir, "Washington Through a Purple Veil," Boggs described her attempt to enter the 1941 House of Representatives to hear her husband deliver a speech. She was so simply dressed that the guard kept her out until she returned, draped in a purple veil. She recalled that a friend had told her that "the most sophisticated and becoming thing a woman could wear was a purple veil."

She worked for the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968, Head Start and other programs to help minorities, the poor and women.

Boggs used her seat on the House Appropriations Committee to steer money to New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana, and on the House Banking and Currency Committee managed to include women in the Equal Credit and Opportunity Act of 1974.

A strong Southern "steel magnolia" before that term entered the vernacular, Boggs recalled how she managed to include women in the credit act by writing in that the law should help people regardless of "sex and marital status" on the bill and making a copy for all of the committee's members.

"Knowing the members composing this committee as well as I do, I'm sure it was just an oversight that we didn't have 'sex' or 'marital status' included," she said she told her congressional colleagues. "I've taken care of that, and I trust it meets with the committee's approval."

After her political and ambassadorial service, Boggs returned to New Orleans, where her Bourbon Street home was damaged in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She later moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland

Kobi

07-30-2013, 03:56 PM

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Eileen Brennan, who went from musical comedy on Broadway to wringing laughs out of memorable movie characters, died Sunday in Burbank, Calif. She was 80.

Brennan got her first big role on the New York stage in Little Mary Sunshine, a musical comedy that won her the 1960 Obie award for best actress. Along with her "excellent singing voice," her performance was "radiant and comic," said a New York Times review.

She went on to win fans for her sharp-tongued roles on television and in movies, including gruff Army Capt. Doreen Lewis in 1980's Private Benjamin, aloof Mrs. Peacock in 1985's Clue, and mean orphanage superintendent Miss Bannister in 1988's The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking.

Private Benjamin brought her a Best Supporting Actress nomination for an Oscar. She won an Emmy for repeating her Private Benjamin role in the TV version, and was nominated six other times for guest roles on such shows as Newhart, thirtysomething, Taxi and Will & Grace.

Soft*Silver

08-08-2013, 10:29 PM

Actor Adam Sandler is reported to have died shortly after a snowboard accident earlier today - August 9, 2013.

The actor & novice snowboarder was vacationing at the Zermatt ski resort in Zermatt, Switzerland with family and friends. Witnesses indicate that Adam Sandler lost control of his snowboard and struck a tree at a high rate of speed.

Adam Sandler was air lifted by ski patrol teams to a local hospital, however, it is believed that the actor died instantly from the impact of the crash. The actor was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident and drugs and alcohol do not appear to have played any part in his death.

Parker

08-08-2013, 10:36 PM

The Adam Sandler snow boarding thing is actually a hoax. There are "reports" of it dating back into early 2012. It is unfounded and he is not dead.

Same goes for Mickey Roarke, George Clooney, and Jim Carey.

Please see:
Snopes.com: Snowboard Death Hoax (http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/snowboarddeath.asp)

Adam Sandler is NOT Dead - 98FM Article (http://98fm.com/2013/category-entertainment/gossipgirl/category-showbiz/adam-sandler-is-not-dead/)

Adam Sandler Fake Snowboarding Death Story Returns, Actor Not Dead - LaLateNews Article (http://news.lalate.com/2013/07/28/adam-sandler-fake-snowboarding-death-story-returns-actor-not-dead-13/)

Kobi

08-08-2013, 11:32 PM

http://mi-cache.legacy.com/legacy/images/Portraits/Karen-Black-dead-166325119port.jpgx?w=117&h=151&option=1

Karen Black, the prolific actress who appeared in more than 100 movies and was featured in such counterculture favorites as "Easy Rider," ''Five Easy Pieces" and "Nashville," has died. She was 74.

Known for her full lips and thick, wavy hair that seemed to change color from film to film, Black often portrayed women who were quirky, troubled or threatened. She was a prostitute who takes LSD with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in 1969's "Easy Rider," a breakthrough that helped get her the role as a waitress who dates an upper-class dropout played by Jack Nicholson in 1970's "Five Easy Pieces." Black won an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award for that performance.

Cited by The New York Times as a "pathetically appealing vulgarian," Black's performance won her an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award. She would recall that playing Rayette really was acting: The well-read, cerebral Black, raised in a comfortable Chicago suburb, had little in common with her relatively simple-minded character.

"If you look through the eyes of Rayette, it looks nice, really beautiful, light, not heavy, not serious. A very affectionate woman who would look upon things with love, and longing," Black told Venice Magazine in 2007. "A completely uncritical person, and in that sense, a beautiful person. When (director) Bob Rafelson called me to his office to discuss the part he said, 'Karen, I'm worried you can't play this role because you're too smart.' I said 'Bob, when you call "action," I will stop thinking,' because that's how Rayette is.'"

In 1971, Black starred with Nicholson again in "Drive, He Said," which Nicholson also directed. Over the next few years, she worked with such top actors and directors as Richard Benjamin ("Portnoy's Complaint"), Robert Redford and Mia Farrow ("The Great Gatsby") and Charlton Heston ("Airport 1975"). She was nominated for a Grammy Award after writing and performing songs for "Nashville," in which she played a country singer in Robert Altman's 1975 ensemble epic. Black also starred as a jewel thief in Alfred Hitchcock's last movie, "Family Plot," released in 1976.

"We used to read each other poems and limericks and tried to catch me on my vocabulary," she later said of Hitchcock. "He once said, 'You seem very perspicacious today, Miss Black.' I said, 'Oh, you mean "keenly perceptive?" 'Yes.' So I got him this huge, gold-embossed dictionary that said 'Diction-Harry,' at the end of the shoot."

The actress would claim that her career as an A-list actress was ruined by "The Day of the Locust," a troubled 1975 production of the Nathanael West novel that brought her a Golden Globe nomination but left Black struggling to find quality roles. By the end of the '70s, she was appearing in television and in low-budget productions. Black received strong reviews in 1982 as a transsexual in Altman's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." But despite working constantly over the next 30 years, she was more a cult idol than a major Hollywood star. Her credits included guest appearances on such TV series as "Law & Order" and "Party of Five" and enough horror movies, notably "Trilogy of Terror," that a punk band named itself "The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black."

Black was also a screenwriter and a playwright whose credits included the musical "Missouri Waltz" and "A View of the Heart," a one-woman show in which she starred.

Soft*Silver

08-09-2013, 10:01 AM

oh man...I verified it with two seperate articles before I posted this. Hahahah..they got me! But I am SO glad he is alive!!!

The Adam Sandler snow boarding thing is actually a hoax. There are "reports" of it dating back into early 2012. It is unfounded and he is not dead.

Same goes for Mickey Roarke, George Clooney, and Jim Carey.

Please see:
Snopes.com: Snowboard Death Hoax (http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/snowboarddeath.asp)

Adam Sandler is NOT Dead - 98FM Article (http://98fm.com/2013/category-entertainment/gossipgirl/category-showbiz/adam-sandler-is-not-dead/)

Adam Sandler Fake Snowboarding Death Story Returns, Actor Not Dead - LaLateNews Article (http://news.lalate.com/2013/07/28/adam-sandler-fake-snowboarding-death-story-returns-actor-not-dead-13/)

Kobi

08-11-2013, 08:23 PM

http://mi-cache.legacy.com/legacy/images/Portraits/Eydie-Gorme-dead-166351562port.jpgx?w=117&h=151&option=1

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Eydie Gorme, a popular nightclub and television singer as a solo act and as a team with her husband, Steve Lawrence, has died. She was 84.

Gorme, who also had a huge solo hit in 1963 with "Blame it on the Bossa Nova," died Saturday. Gorme was a successful band singer and nightclub entertainer when she was invited to join the cast of Steve Allen's local New York television show in 1953.

She sang solos and also did duets and comedy skits with Lawrence, a rising young singer who had joined the show a year earlier. When the program became NBC's "Tonight Show" in 1954, the young couple went with it.

They married in Las Vegas in 1957 and later performed for audiences there.

"Eydie has been my partner on stage and in life for more than 55 years," Lawrence said in a statement. "I fell in love with her the moment I saw her and even more the first time I heard her sing. While my personal loss is unimaginable, the world has lost one of the greatest pop vocalists of all time."

Although usually recognized for her musical partnership with Lawrence, Gorme broke through on her own with the Grammy-nominated "Blame it on the Bossa Nova." The bouncy tune about a dance craze of the time was written by the Tin Pan Alley songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Her husband had had an equally huge solo hit in 1962 with "Go Away Little Girl," written by the songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King.

Gorme would score another solo hit in 1964, but this time for a Spanish-language recording. Gorme, who was born in New York City to Sephardic Jewish parents, grew up speaking both English and Spanish.

When she and her husband were at the height of their career as a team in 1964, Columbia Records President Goddard Lieberson suggested she put that Spanish to use in the recording studio. The result was "Amor," recorded with the Mexican combo Trio Los Panchos.

The song became a hit throughout Latin America, which resulted in more recordings for the Latino market, and Lawrence and Gorme performed as a duo throughout Latin America. "Our Spanish stuff outsells our English recordings," Lawrence said in 2004. "She's like a diva to the Spanish world."

Gorme and Lawrence, meanwhile, had an impressive, long-lasting career in English-language music as well, encompassing recordings and appearances on TV, in nightclubs and in concert halls.

Throughout it, they stuck for the most part with the music of classic composers like Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and other giants of Broadway and Hollywood musicals. They eschewed rock 'n' roll and made no apologies for it.

Soon after their marriage, the pair had landed their own TV program, "The Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme Show," which was a summer replacement for Allen.

Not long after that, however, Lawrence entered the Army, and Gorme went on the nightclub circuit as a soloist until his return to civilian life two years later.

After his discharge, Lawrence and Gorme quickly reteamed, and their careers took off. They appeared at leading nightclubs in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Las Vegas, combining music with the comedy bits they had learned during their apprenticeship on Allen's show. With nightclubs dwindling in popularity in the 1980s, they moved their act to large theaters and auditoriums, drawing not only older audiences but also the Baby Boomers who had grown up on rock 'n' roll.

Gorme, who was born Aug. 16, 1928, began to seriously consider a music career while still a student at William Taft High School in New York City's borough of the Bronx, where she had been voted the "Prettiest, Peppiest Cheerleader."

After graduation, she worked as a Spanish interpreter for a time but also sang on weekends with the band of Ken Greenglass, who encouraged her and eventually became her manager.

Her first big break came when she landed a tour with the Tommy Tucker band, and she followed that up with gigs with Tex Beneke, Ray Eberle and on radio and television.

Among her radio appearances was one on a Spanish language show, "Cita Con Eydie ("A Date with Eydie"), which was beamed to Latin America by Voice of America. Early in her career, Gorme considered changing her name, but her mother protested. "It's bad enough that you're in show business. How will the neighbors know if you're ever a success?" she told her, so Gorme decided to keep the family name but changed her given name from Edith to Edie. Later, having grown tired of people mistaking it for Eddie, she changed the spelling to Eydie.

Parker

08-19-2013, 02:53 PM

http://l2.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/Yb03zgZEXZvM2x6XPE0RKA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTIxMA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/TVGuideTV/130819lee-thompson-young1_210x305.jpg

Lee Thompson Young, a former Disney Channel star who appeared on "Rizzoli & Isles," was found dead this morning at the age of 29. (http://tv.yahoo.com/blogs/tv-news/report--former-disney-channel-star-lee-thompson-young-found-dead-182359895.html)

Police confirmed that the versatile young actor died in an apparent suicide of a gunshot wound. TMZ reports that Young’s landlord found him when he did not report to the set of the TNT drama this morning.

When officers arrived to his apartment at the 5000 block of Tujunga Avenue, they pronounced him dead at the scene. There is no word on whether Young left a note, and the coroner is taking over the case.

"It is with great sadness that I announce that Lee Thompson Young tragically took his own life this morning," said Young's long-time manager Jonathan Baruch in a statement.

"Lee was more than just a brilliant young actor, he was a wonderful and gentle soul who will be truly missed. We ask that you please respect the privacy of his family and friends as this very difficult time."

Martina

08-19-2013, 04:53 PM

OH no! That's heartbreaking. I loved his character on Rizzoli and Isles. He was a good actor. He did a lot with a small but regular part. So appealing as an actor. I just hate to hear that.

http://l2.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/Yb03zgZEXZvM2x6XPE0RKA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTIxMA--/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/TVGuideTV/130819lee-thompson-young1_210x305.jpg

Lee Thompson Young, a former Disney Channel star who appeared on "Rizzoli & Isles," was found dead this morning at the age of 29. (http://tv.yahoo.com/blogs/tv-news/report--former-disney-channel-star-lee-thompson-young-found-dead-182359895.html)

Police confirmed that the versatile young actor died in an apparent suicide of a gunshot wound. TMZ reports that Young’s landlord found him when he did not report to the set of the TNT drama this morning.

When officers arrived to his apartment at the 5000 block of Tujunga Avenue, they pronounced him dead at the scene. There is no word on whether Young left a note, and the coroner is taking over the case.

"It is with great sadness that I announce that Lee Thompson Young tragically took his own life this morning," said Young's long-time manager Jonathan Baruch in a statement.

"Lee was more than just a brilliant young actor, he was a wonderful and gentle soul who will be truly missed. We ask that you please respect the privacy of his family and friends as this very difficult time."

Kelt

08-23-2013, 06:55 PM

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Marian McPartland, Jazz Pianist and NPR Radio Staple, Dies at 95

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By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: August 21, 2013

Marian McPartland, the genteel Englishwoman who became a fixture of the American jazz scene as a pianist and, later in life, hosted the internationally syndicated and immensely popular public radio show “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz,” died on Tuesday at her home in Port Washington, N.Y. She was 95.

Ms. McPartland was a gifted musician but an unlikely candidate for jazz stardom. She recalled in a 1998 interview for National Public Radio that shortly after she arrived in the United States in 1946, the influential jazz critic Leonard Feather, who himself was born in England and who began his career as a pianist, said, “Oh, she’ll never make it: she’s English, white and a woman.”

Mr. Feather, she added, “always used to tell me it was a joke, but I don’t think he meant it as a joke.”

The odds against any woman finding success as a jazz musician in the late 1940s and early ’50s were formidable, but Ms. McPartland overcame them with grace. Listeners were charmed by her Old World stage presence and captivated by her elegant, harmonically lush improvisations, which reflected both her classical training and her fascination with modern jazz.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/08/22/arts/MCPARTLAND-2-obit/MCPARTLAND-2-obit-articleInline.jpg

By 1958 she was well enough known to be included in Art Kane’s famous Esquire magazine group photograph of jazz musicians, the subject of Jean Bach’s 1994 documentary, “A Great Day in Harlem.” One of the few women in the picture, she stood next to her friend and fellow pianist Mary Lou Williams.

Ms. McPartland’s contributions to jazz were not limited to her piano playing. An enthusiastic and articulate spokeswoman for the music, she lectured at schools and colleges and wrote for Down Beat, Melody Maker and other publications. (A collection of her essays, “All in Good Time,” was published in 1987 and reissued in 2003.) Most notably, for more than 30 years her “Piano Jazz” was one of the most popular jazz shows ever on the radio.

The show, produced by South Carolina’s public radio network, made its debut on NPR in 1978. The format was simple: an informal interview interspersed with extemporaneous duets.

“I didn’t have any idea I’d be good at something like this,” Ms. McPartland told The Associated Press in 2000. “I certainly never thought people would know me because of my voice.” But she proved a natural.

As its title suggests, “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz” was originally a show about piano players. But the guest list came to include vocalists, among them Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett and even Willie Nelson and Elvis Costello, as well as trumpeters, saxophonists and other instrumentalists.

Jazz pianists remained the focus, however, and over the years Ms. McPartland played host to some of the most famous, from the ragtime pioneer Eubie Blake to the uncompromising avant-gardist Cecil Taylor. She gamely played duets with all of them, even Mr. Taylor, whose aggressively dissonant approach was far removed from Ms. McPartland’s refined melodicism.

“I just did the kind of thing he does,” she said. “Or else I went in the opposite direction, and that sounded fairly interesting too.”

“Piano Jazz” was heard on more than 200 radio stations all over the world. It received a Peabody Award in 1983.

Ms. McPartland recorded her last show in September 2010, although she did not officially step down as host until November 2011; “Piano Jazz” has continued with reruns and guest hosts.

Marian McPartland was born Margaret Marian Turner in Windsor, England, on March 20, 1918. She began picking out melodies on the family piano when she was 3, and at 17 she entered the Guildhall School of Music in London.

In 1938, over her parents’ strong objections, she left school to go on tour with a four-piano vaudeville act. “My mother said, ‘Oh, you’ll come to no good, you’ll marry a musician and live in an attic,’ ” she recalled in 1998. “Of course, that did happen.”

While on a U.S.O. tour in 1944 she met the American jazz cornetist Jimmy McPartland in Belgium; they married in early 1946, and she moved with him to Chicago later that year.

Ms. McPartland worked for a while in her husband’s group, but he was a tradition-loving Dixieland musician and she was more interested in the harmonically sophisticated new sounds coming from New York City, where the McPartlands moved in 1949.

Encouraged by her husband, she formed a trio and found work at the Embers, an East Side nightclub, in 1950. Two years later she began what was supposed to be a brief engagement at the Hickory House, one of the last surviving jazz rooms on the city’s once-thriving 52nd Street nightclub row. That booking turned into an eight-year residency.

The McPartlands’ marriage ended after two decades, but they remained close friends and continued to work together occasionally. The divorce, she was fond of saying, did not take. She helped care for him when he had lung cancer, and they remarried shortly before he died in 1991.

Her survivors include two grandchildren.

Ms. McPartland recorded for Savoy, Capitol and other labels in the 1950s and ’60s, but in 1969, disenchanted with the business, she formed her own record company, Halcyon. “It was quite a job,” she told one interviewer. “I used to actually go to a record store like Sam Goody and tell them, ‘I need that money you owe me.’ ”

Halcyon released 18 albums in 10 years and had a roster that included her fellow pianists Teddy Wilson and Earl Hines as well as Ms. McPartland herself, but her career as an executive ended when she signed with Concord Jazz in 1979. She remained a Concord artist until she stopped recording, just a few years before her death.

The bare-bones accompaniment of bass and drums was always Ms. McPartland’s preferred format, but she also appeared in concert with symphony orchestras, and in 1996 she recorded an album of her own compositions, “Silent Pool,” on which she was accompanied by a string orchestra.

That album provided a rare showcase for an underappreciated aspect of her talent: although she told The New York Times in 1998 that she “never had all that much faith in myself as a composer,” she was a prolific songwriter whose work was recorded by Peggy Lee, Mr. Bennett, Sarah Vaughan and others. She performed her symphonic work “A Portrait of Rachel Carson” with the University of South Carolina Symphony Orchestra in 2007.

In her last years Ms. McPartland received numerous honors. She was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2000, given a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2004, inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2007 and named a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2010.

And she continued playing almost to the end. Reviewing her appearance at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan the night before her 90th birthday in 2008, Nate Chinen wrote in The Times, “Ms. McPartland still has her pellucid touch and her careful yet comfortable style.”

Unlike some jazz musicians of her generation, Ms. McPartland never became set in her ways; her playing grew denser and more complex with time, and even late in life she was experimenting with new harmonic ideas. “I’ve become a bit more — reckless, maybe,” she said in 1998. “I’m getting to the point where I can smash down a chord and not know what it’s going to be, and make it work.”

Kobi

08-25-2013, 04:06 AM

http://ts2.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4676606360028369&pid=15.1

Julie Harris, 87, one of the great stage actresses of the last half-century who amassed five Tony awards and was also renowned for her film work, died Aug. 24 at her home in West Chatham, Mass.

In a career of durability, longevity and versatility, time and her own gifts transmuted her roles from troubled tomboy to appealing ingénue to scheming older woman. Presidential wife Mary Todd Lincoln, poet Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare’s Ophelia were all portrayed with panache and verve by Julie Harris.

She was the wistful, lonesome pre-adolescent Frankie in Carson McCullers’s “The Member of the Wedding” on Broadway and in Hollywood. The film performance more than 60 years ago earned her an Academy Award nomination.

The year the movie came out, 1952, she created the devil-may-care Sally Bowles on Broadway in “I Am a Camera,” winning the first of her Tony awards.

Broadway appearances also included “The Lark” in 1955, in which she played Joan of Arc and appeared as Joan on the cover of Time magazine. She was in “Forty Carats” in 1968 and “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln” in 1972. She played Mrs. Lincoln in the stage and film versions.

In the movies, her work on “East of Eden” with James Dean was credited by director Elia Kazan with bringing out the best in her often difficult co-star. She was in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” and she and Paul Newman acted in “Harper,” a private-eye drama. She was also known for “Reflections in a Golden Eye.”

A Tony recognized her portrayal of the reclusive New England poet Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst.” An audio recording of that role won her a Grammy Award for best spoken-word recording.

She was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005.

At a ceremony in the White House, President George W. Bush said: “It’s hard to imagine the American stage without the face, the voice and the limitless talent of Julie Harris. She has found happiness in her life’s work, and we thank her for sharing that happiness with the whole world.”

That work also included many television appearances, most notably in “Knots Landing,” in which she was a scheming Southern belle.

Known for her sensitivity, she was quoted as saying that “God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other. . . . It’s a way of expressing our humanity.” She was also a gritty survivor of surgery after a backstage fall, of at least one stroke, and of breast cancer. Chemotherapy continued while she played in the long-running “Knots Landing.”

In the Ken Burns series “The Civil War,” she gave voice to diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut.

Julia Ann Harris was born in the prosperous Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Mich., on Dec. 2, 1925. Her father, William Pickett Harris, was an investment banker. Her mother, Elsie, was a nurse. She was impressed by plays they saw in Detroit, and in her teens , unwilling to remain at home and do what was expected of a young woman of her background, she enrolled in the Yale School of Drama. In 1945 she left in mid-semester for a role in a Broadway show, which flopped, sending her back to New Haven.

She made her home on Cape Cod. Reference works indicated that three marriages ended in divorce. She had one son.

Kobi

08-26-2013, 02:04 AM

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Muriel Siebert, who became a legend on Wall Street as the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to head one of the exchange’s member firms, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80.

Ms. Siebert, known to all as Mickie, cultivated the same brash attitude that characterized Wall Street’s most successful men. She bought her seat on the exchange in 1967, but to her immense anger, she remained the only woman admitted to membership for almost a decade.

She was one of the pioneers in the discount brokerage field, as she transformed Muriel Siebert & Company (now a subsidiary of Siebert Financial) into a discount brokerage in 1975, on the first day that Big Board members were allowed to negotiate commissions.

She also was the first woman to be superintendent of banking for New York State, appointed by Gov. Hugh Carey in 1977. She served five years during a rocky time when banks were tottering and interest rates were skyrocketing.

Ms. Siebert was known, to her delight, as a scrapper who refused to acknowledge defeat. She donated millions of dollars from her brokerage and securities underwriting business to help other women get their start in business and finance.

When she was honored for her efforts in 1992, Ms. Siebert used the luncheon celebration to warn that it was still too soon for women to declare victory in the battle for equality on Wall Street.

“Firms are doing what they have to do, legally,” she said. “But women are coming into Wall Street in large numbers — and they still are not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There’s still an old-boy network. You just have to keep fighting.”

She continued fighting the old-boy network all her life. She was one of the first women, in the early 1970s, to fight to end the sexist practices then prevalent in Manhattan social clubs, spurred by an experience she had at the Union League Club. She had arrived there for a board luncheon meeting of the Sales Executive Club and was not allowed in the elevator.

“I had to go through the kitchen and walk up the back stairs,” she recalled. She was so angry during the meeting that her male colleagues asked what was wrong. When the lunch was finished, they tried to take her down in the elevator with them. When she was again rebuffed, they joined her in walking down the stairs and through the kitchen.

That experience, and other similar episodes, led her to testify before government bodies about the discriminatory policies of many New York clubs. In time, women were permitted to become members. This was particularly important because of the deal-making and networking done at these clubs.

Ms. Siebert also successfully lobbied in 1987 to get a ladies’ room on the seventh floor of the New York Stock Exchange, near the entrance to the luncheon club she frequented. She accomplished this in her typical fashion. She warned the exchange’s chairman that if a ladies’ room was not on the floor by the end of the year, she would arrange for a portable toilet to be delivered. The room was installed, and women no longer had to trek down a flight of stairs.

She once explained her strategy for dealing with obstacles: “I put my head down and charge.”

Muriel Faye Siebert was born in Cleveland on Sept. 12, 1932, the second of two daughters of Irwin Siebert, a dentist, and his wife, Margaret. She attended Western Reserve University for two years but left in 1952 before graduating because her father became ill.

She came to New York in 1954, she once said, “with $500, a Studebaker and a dream.” She was hired as a $65-a-week trainee in the research department at Bache & Company.

“The way it worked, everybody who was already there got to give the new kid one of their junk industries,” she told The New York Times in 1992. “I got airlines, I got motion pictures — things nobody wanted in those days.”

She changed jobs three times because she said men doing the same work were being paid more than she was. She also discovered when job hunting that when the New York Society of Security Analysts sent out her résumé under the name Muriel Siebert, she received no inquiries, but when the society later distributed it under the name M.F. Siebert, the results were quite different.

She eventually decided to strike out on her own and become the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She was turned down by the first nine men she asked to sponsor her application before a 10th agreed.

The exchange told her that if she was admitted, her seat would cost $445,000, and in an unprecedented move, the exchange insisted that she get a bank to lend her $300,000 of the total price. The banks, in turn, refused to lend her the money unless the exchange admitted her. “There would be no loan until I was accepted, and I couldn’t be accepted without the loan,” she said.

After nearly two years she got the loan, from Chase Manhattan, and she was elected to the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 28, 1967. It proved to be a historic day but one that was not soon repeated. “For 10 years,” Ms. Siebert said, “it was 1,365 men and me.”

She continued to encounter resistance, and not only because she was a woman. Ms. Siebert also encountered anti-Semitism, which at the time, she said, was not uncommon in the trust departments she dealt with.

In 1969, she founded Muriel Siebert & Company, becoming the first woman to own and operate a brokerage firm that was a member of the New York Stock Exchange. On May 1, 1975, after the federal government did away with fixed commissions for brokers, Ms. Siebert declared her company a discount brokerage firm.

Two years later she put her company in a blind trust and accepted Governor Carey’s appointment as state superintendent of banking. Her five-year term was controversial, as she took the lead in engineering mergers and acquisitions. But in the end she liked to say that no New York bank failed during her tenure.

In addition to the Albany post, she directed New York City’s Municipal Credit Union, its Urban Development Corporation and its Job Development Authority.

In 1983, Ms. Siebert returned to Muriel Siebert & Company after losing a bid for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate; she was beaten by Assemblywoman Florence M. Sullivan, who was then defeated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic candidate.

In 1996, she took her firm public through an unorthodox merger with J. Michaels, a Brooklyn chain of furniture stores. As part of the arrangement, she liquidated the assets of J. Michaels and named the holding company the Siebert Financial Corporation, of which she owned a 97.5 percent share; the remaining 2.5 percent was former J. Michaels stock and was publicly held.

Ms. Siebert, who never married or had children, is survived by a sister, Elaine Siebert.

Ms. Siebert, who was often sought out for pungent quotes as a market pundit and occasional critic of Wall Street practices, produced an autobiography in 2002, “Changing the Rules: Adventures of a Wall Street Maverick.”

In 2007, she celebrated the 40th anniversary of buying a seat on the New York Stock Exchange by ringing the closing bell.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/business/muriel-siebert-first-woman-to-own-a-seat-on-wall-st-dies-at-80.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0

Kobi

08-30-2013, 10:14 PM

Darren Manzella, a gay combat medic discharged from the Army after criticizing the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy in a 2007 television interview, has died in a traffic accident in western New York. He was 36.

The Monroe County Sheriff's Office said Manzella was driving on Interstate 490 in suburban Rochester about 8:30 p.m. Thursday when his vehicle sideswiped a car. Deputies said he stopped his vehicle, got out and began pushing the car from behind. He was then hit by an SUV, pinning him between the two vehicles.

Manzella's appearance on "60 Minutes" from the combat zone in Iraq was followed by his discharge in 2008 for violating the since-rescinded policy prohibiting service members from openly acknowledging they're gay.

After the television appearance and his return from Iraq, Manzella did media interviews, each a potential violation of the policy.

"This is who I am. This is my life," Manzella said at a Washington news conference before his discharge. "It has never affected my job performance before. I don't think it will make a difference now. And to be honest since then, I don't see a difference because of my homosexuality."

Manzella said he first told a military supervisor about his sexual orientation in August 2006, while working in a division headquarters at Fort Hood, Texas. Three weeks later, his battalion commander told him an investigation had been closed without finding "proof of homosexuality." A month later, he was sent to Iraq.

His supporters said the overseas assignment demonstrated how the military was arbitrarily enforcing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy during the war.

Manzella enlisted in the Army in 2002. He was awarded the Combat Medical Badge for service in Iraq. When he was discharged, he was a sergeant serving at Fort Hood with the 1st Cavalry Division.

Manzella lived in the Chautauqua County town of Portland; he and his partner were married in July.

Kobi

09-01-2013, 07:21 AM

http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4605013536016172&pid=15.1

LONDON (AP) — Veteran British journalist and broadcaster David Frost, who won fame around the world for his TV interviews with former President Richard Nixon, has died, his family told the BBC. He was 74.

Frost died of a suspected heart attack on Saturday night aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship, where he was due to give a speech, the family said.

Known both for an amiable personality and incisive interviews with leading public figures, Frost's career in television news and entertainment spanned almost half a century. He was the only person to have interviewed all six British prime ministers serving between 1964 and 2007 and the seven U.S. presidents in office between 1969 and 2008. Outside world affairs, his roster ranged from Orson Welles to Muhammad Ali to Clint Eastwood.

Frost began television hosting while still a student at Cambridge University. He went on to host the BBC's satirical news show "The Week That Was" in the early 1960s, and, later, a sketch show called "The Frost Report" and a long-running BBC Sunday show, "Breakfast with Frost." His signature, "Hello, good evening and welcome" was often mimicked.

While popular in Britain and beginning to launch a career on U.S. television, Frost did not become internationally known until 1977, when he secured a series of television interviews with Nixon.

The dramatic face-to-face was make-or-break both for him and for the ex-president, who was trying to salvage his reputation after resigning from the White House in disgrace following the Watergate scandal three years earlier. At the time, it was the most widely watched news interview in the history of TV.

The interviewer and his subject sparred through the first part of the interview, but Frost later said he realized he didn't have what he wanted as it wound down.

Nixon had acknowledged mistakes, but Frost pressed him on whether that was enough. Americans, he said, wanted to hear him own up to wrongdoing and acknowledge abuse of power — and "unless you say it, you're going to be haunted for the rest of your life."

"That was totally off-the-cuff," Frost later said. "That was totally ad-lib. In fact, I threw my clipboard down just to indicate that it was not prepared in any way ... I just knew at that moment that Richard Nixon was more vulnerable than he'd ever be in his life. And I knew I had to get it right."

After more pressing, Nixon relented. "I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life," he said.

The dramatic face-off went on to spawn a hit play. And in 2008, a new generation was introduced to Frost's work with the Oscar-nominated movie "Frost/Nixon," starring Michael Sheen as Frost and Frank Langella as Nixon.

Frost was born on Apr. 7, 1939, the son of a Methodist preacher. Besides hosting, he set up his own company, which gave birth to many more popular British programs.

"Breakfast with Frost" ran on the BBC for 12 years until 2005, and the game show "Through the Keyhole" from 1987 to 2008. He had recently been working for Al Jazeera International.

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Deliberately used an old pic of him cuz this is how I remember him.

Hollylane

09-01-2013, 08:17 AM

Seamus Heaney, acclaimed by many as the best Irish poet since WB Yeats, has died aged 74. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23898891)

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/52885475/Seamus+Heaney+sh3.png

Blackberry-Picking
by Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Kobi

09-06-2013, 03:26 AM

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) -- Jessie Lopez De La Cruz, a longtime leader in the national farmworker movement, has died. She was 93.

The United Farmworkers of America says De La Cruz died in Kingsburg, Calif., on Labor Day. She was one of the union's first female members and organizers in the Fresno area.

De La Cruz organized workers in the fields, participated in grape boycotts and testified on outlawing the short-handled hoe, which required workers to bend over at the waist for the entire day.

She also worked with the UFW in campaigns across the state and with the union Cesar Chavez at his office at La Paz in Keene. She also became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

Born in Anaheim, Calif., she became part of the UFW in her 40s, after Chavez visited her Parlier home to speak with farmworkers about forming a union and invited her to join.

In addition to her work as a union organizer, De La Cruz taught English to migrant workers and served on the executive board of the California Rural Legal Assistance, which provides legal services.

Friends and family say De La Cruz was known for her humility and devotion to improving the lives of farmworkers. Even in her 90's, De La Cruz would often ask to be taken to political rallies.

Her life has been documented in books, news articles and in a 1998 miniseries titled, "A Will of Their Own."

"Jessie De La Cruz was an icon of the farm worker movement," the UFW said in a statement. She "embodied Cesar Chavez's conviction that ordinary people have within them the ability to do extraordinary things."

Kobi

09-06-2013, 08:33 AM

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UNION, Maine (AP) — Judith Glassman Daniels, who blazed a trail for women in the publishing world and became the first woman to serve as top editor of Life magazine, has died at the age of 74.

Daniels served in senior editing positions at The Village Voice, New York magazine, Time Inc. and Conde Naste over a career that spanned 35 years in New York before she retired with her husband to Maine in 2004.

During her career, Daniels oversaw creation of a magazine for executive women called Savvy at a time when magazines catered to stay-at-home moms, and she helped to found the Women's Media Group in New York. At Life, she oversaw the publication's 50th anniversary.

Her husband called her "a real pioneer."

"She really was one of the women who broke the glass ceiling that allowed women to rise high in the publishing world," Webb said from their home on Tuesday.

Daniels was born in Cambridge, Mass., and was raised in Brookline, Mass. She set off for New York after getting her English degree from Smith College, rising through the ranks in magazines.

Patricia O'Toole, who worked for Daniels as a writer and editor at Savvy, said Daniels was naturally curious and loved writing and editing. And writers loved to work for her, she said.

"Everybody wanted to please Judy," said O'Toole, a biographer and professor in New York. "Sometimes when there's a boss like that it's because they have to please them because otherwise there's going to be hell to pay. But Judy wasn't like that at all. You wanted to please her because she was such a good coach. She had very high editorial standards, and she'd help you measure up."

John MacMillan, editorial director at Smith College, where Daniels was a longtime member of the Smith Alumnae Council, called Daniels a "change-maker" who was helped the next generation of women get ahead.

"She was thinking about the issues facing successful professional women long before they were trendy, like work-life balance and the pressure that women face to get ideas heard," he said. "She was thinking about those way back in the 1970s and '80s."

Daniels and Webb had ties to Maine before moving to the state permanently.

Daniels became active in the Maine Women's Policy Center, the Women's Lobby and the Maine Humanities Council. She also served as chairwoman of Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport.

Kobi

10-02-2013, 10:33 AM

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NEW YORK (AP) - Tom Clancy, whose high-tech, Cold War thrillers such as "The Hunt for Red October" and "Patriot Games" made him the most widely read and influential military novelist of his time, has died. He was 66.

Clancy arrived on best-seller lists in 1984 with "The Hunt for Red October." He sold the manuscript to the first publisher he tried, the Naval Institute Press, which had never bought original fiction.

A string of other best-sellers soon followed, including "Red Storm Rising," ''Patriot Games," ''The Cardinal of the Kremlin," ''Clear and Present Danger," ''The Sum of All Fears," and "Without Remorse."

Luv

10-03-2013, 08:12 AM

RIP Chuck Smith ..pastor of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa..Author,Speaker,father,grandfather.pastor..he moved from an old tent to a mansion today.

Kobi

10-26-2013, 05:27 PM

http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?id=H.4581455706850428&pid=15.1

As Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons, Marcia Wallace may be the only 4th-grade teacher to have the same student for 24 years. Before that, she was beloved as Carol Kester, the lovelorn, wisecracking secretary on The Bob Newhart Show.

Wallace’s work as the cynical, abused, and sarcastic Mrs. Krabappel won her an Emmy for outstanding voice actress in 1992, and was nominated for outstanding guest actress in a comedy for Murphy Brown, playing the most efficient of the journalist’s constantly changing secretaries — reprising her role as Carol Kester. Adding to the joke, Newhart also made an appearance on that episode.

Born and raised in Creston, Iowa, the daughter of a shopkeeper, she moved to New York after college to pursue stage acting. She started her onscreen career making regular appearances on The Merv Griffin Show, and in 1971 had bit parts on Bewitched, Columbo, and The Brady Bunch.

A year later, The Bob Newhart Show made her a star. Her flame-haired, feisty, and free-spirited receptionist was a counterpoint to Newhart’s buttoned-down psychiatrist. She played the role of Carol Kester in 139 episodes from 1972-1978.

After that, Wallace became a regular on a litany of gameshows such as Match Game, Hollywood Squares, and The $25,000 Pyramid. She guest starred on single episodes of Magnum, P.I., Gimme a Break!, and Murder, She Wrote, among many others, and had a recurring role as Mrs. Caruthers on Full House. She also had a small role in the 1989 film Teen Witch and became a popular voice-over actress in animated shows, playing characters on Darkwing Duck and Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Later, she also co-starred as the housekeeper on the short-lived 2001 Comedy Central spoof of President George W. Bush That’s My Bush!

But it was the droll, chain-smoking, semi-defeated Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons that would give Wallace her defining role. Originally set up as a Nurse Ratched-like nemesis of trouble student Bart Simpson, she evolved into one of the richest, and most nuanced characters on the series.

The actress was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985 but fought it back and became a prominent activist and advocate for early detection procedures. In 2007, she won the Gilda Radner Courage Award from Roswell Park Cancer Institute for her decades of work for the cause.

She was married for six years to hotel owner Dennis Hawley, until his death in 1992 from pancreatic cancer. The couple had one son, Michael Hawley, and Wallace wrote about her illness, the loss of her husband, and the challenges of motherhood in her 2004 autobiography Don’t Look Back, We’re Not Going That Way. Despite tackling dark issues, readers acclaimed the book for its sense of humor and optimism.

The subtitle for the book was “How I overcame a rocky childhood, a nervous breakdown, breast cancer, widowhood, fat, fire and menopausal motherhood and still manage to count my lucky chickens.”
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This woman was one of my early crushes. Sigh.

Daktari

11-17-2013, 08:09 AM

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/17/doris-lessing-dies-94

Doris Lessing, the Nobel prize-winning author of The Golden Notebook and The Grass is Singing, among more than 50 other novels ranging from political to science fiction, has died aged 94.

Twitter reacted quickly to the news, a shock to many despite her great age. The author and critic Lisa Jardine described it as "a huge loss"; the agent Carole Blake described her as an "amazing writer and woman"; and the writer Lisa Appignanesi wrote: "One of our very greatest writers has left us this past night, RIP."

The writer Bidisha tweeted: "Doris Lessing: prolific multi-genre genius dies in sleep after writing world-changing novels and winning Nobel. Not bad at all."

Born in Iran, brought up in the African bush in Zimbabwe – where her 1950 first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was set – Lessing had been a London resident for more than half a century. In 2007 she arrived back to West Hampstead, north London, by taxi, carrying heavy bags of shopping, to find the doorstep besieged by reporters and camera crews. "Oh Christ," she said, on learning that their excitement was because at 88 she had just become the oldest author to win the Nobel prize in literature. Only the 11th woman to win the honour, she had beaten that year's favourite, the American author Philip Roth.

Pausing rather crossly on her front path, she said "one can get more excited", and went on to observe that since she had already won all the other prizes in Europe, this was "a royal flush".

Later she remarked: "I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."

The citation from the Swedish Academy called her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".

Her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook was described as "a feminist bible", and her fellow laureate J M Coetzee called her "one of the great visionary novelists of our time" .

Kobi

11-21-2013, 11:06 AM

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Sylvia Browne, a psychic whose frequent appearances on shows such as "Larry King Live" and "The Montel Williams Show" made her a popular personality, has died at a hospital in San Jose, Calif., hospital officials confirmed on Thursday. She was 77.

Browne said she believed in reincarnation and could help people communicate with their dead loved ones as well as see the future. She was a regular on "The Montel Williams Show," where she fielded questions on topics ranging from marriage and careers to ghosts.

Browne was criticized after telling the mother of Ohio kidnapping victim Amanda Berry on the show in 2004 that her daughter was dead. Berry and two other women were later found alive. They had been held captive for years.

Browne grew up in Kansas City, Mo., where her psychic abilities began to manifest themselves at the age of 3, according to an obituary on her website.

She founded two nonprofits, The Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research and the Society of Novus Spiritus, and was the author of dozens of books, many of which appeared on the New York Times Bestsellers list, according to the obituary.

Her 2009 book, "Temples on the Other Side," was intended to help people understand where they go after they die, she told Montel Williams.

"So you just don't float around," she said. "You can go to the Hall of Messengers, where you can talk to Jesus ... You can go to the Hall of Reconnection, where you can connect with someone you love."

In a statement included in the obituary on Browne's website, Williams called her a friend. "A beacon that shined for so many was extinguished today, but its brightness was relit and will now shine forever for many of us from above," he said.

Browne is survived by her husband, Michael Ulery, two sons and a sister, according to the obituary.

-------------

I liked watching this woman on Montel. Very colorful personality.

The_Lady_Snow

12-05-2013, 04:11 PM

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear".

http://img3.allvoices.com/thumbs/image/609/480/37341170-nelson.jpg

1918-2013

hagster

12-05-2013, 04:20 PM

I thought I'd be prepared for this day but I find I'm just not.

Words

12-05-2013, 04:44 PM

This was once attributed to Mandela, but apparently, it was written by someone else. Either way, when I think of Mandela, I think of this. (I once taught it to a class of 10-11 year olds when I was working as a volunteer teacher at the Waldorf Steiner school in Jerusalem. My son was the only Palestinian student amongst 20 or so Israeli kids, so it's always had a special place in my heart.)

RIP.

Our Deepest Fear
By Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness
That most frightens us.

We ask ourselves
Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small
Does not serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking
So that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine,
As children do.
We were born to make manifest
The glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us;
It's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we're liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

Red Dirt Girl

12-06-2013, 08:46 AM

I am so grateful for the gain, and so sorrowful for the loss. I'm choosing to focus on the gains, with tremendous love, hope and respect.

I don't know how to attach an actual link but this is a beautiful song with its message realized.

Hugh Masekela Bring Back Nelson Mandela - YouTube

Parker

12-15-2013, 02:21 PM

'Lawrence of Arabia' Star and Hollywood Icon Peter O'Toole Dies (http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-news/lawrence-arabia-star-hollywood-icon-peter-o-toole-190049803.html)

In one of his best and best-known roles, Peter O'Toole got a big laugh by declaring, "I'm not an actor! I'm a movie star!"

O'Toole, of course, was both.

The honorary Oscar winner passed away at age 81 after a long illness on Saturday at the Wellington Hospital in London, his agent Steve Kenis reports.

O'Toole was one of the most gifted performers of his generation, rising to fame almost with his starring role in "Lawrence of Arabia" and appearing in a variety of screen classics like, "Beckett," "The Lion in Winter," "My Favorite Year," "The Last Emperor" — and cult favorites like, "What's New Pussycat," "The Ruling Class," and "The Stunt Man."

He was also a larger-than-life personality whose hard drinking, outspoken nature, and romantic escapades were nearly as well known as his movies.

O'Toole, the actor, won international acclaim, and O'Toole, the movie star, was dependable tabloid fodder.

Luv

12-15-2013, 08:36 PM

RIP Tom Laughlin..aka..Billy Jack

Kobi

12-15-2013, 09:11 PM

Hollywood stalwart Joan Fontaine, best known for her roles in director Alfred Hitchcock's 1939 Rebecca and her Best Actress Oscar-winning role in his 1940 film Suspicion, died Sunday at her northern California home, according to several reports. She was 96.

In addition to playing a mousey spouse in both the Hitchcock films, first alongside Laurence Olivier and then to Cary Grant, Fontaine's other well-known movies included 1943's The Constant Nymph, which got her a third Oscar nomination, 1944's Jane Eyre with Orson Welles, 1952's Ivanhoe with Robert Taylor, and 1957's controversial Island in the Sun with Harry Belafonte.

Her final role was in a 1994 TV movie.

Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland in Tokyo to British parents, Fontaine recalled for PEOPLE in 1978: "My mother, Lilian de Havilland ... was beautiful, gracious and a talented actress. My father was an English professor at Waseda and Imperial universities in Tokyo who left Mother for our Japanese maid when I was 2. My mother later married a department store manager, George Milan Fontaine, but she remained the dominant figure in our lives."

While her older (by one year) sister, Olivia de Havilland, best known for playing Melanie in Gone with the Wind, sought an acting career, Joan studied at the American School in Tokyo before joining de Havilland in Los Angeles, where she too got a screen test.

Among Fontaine's earliest roles were in 1939's all-star The Women at MGM, with Cary Grant that same year, in RKO's Gunga Din.

Fontaine lived out her days in Carmel, Calif. She had two children from her four marriages. Her husbands were actor Brian Aherne, TV producer William Dozier, producer Collier Young and journalist Alfred Wright Jr.

In her PEOPLE interview, Fontaine, who now leaves her sister as one of the last survivors of Hollywood's Golden Age, spoke of how she wanted to die.

"At age 108," she said, "flying around the stage in Peter Pan, as a result of my sister cutting the wires. Olivia has always said I was first at everything – I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first. If I die, she'll be furious, because again I'll have got there first!"

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20766598,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+people%2Fheadlines+%28PEOPLE. com%3A+Top+Headlines%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

The_Lady_Snow

01-01-2014, 01:35 PM

http://a.abcnews.com/images/Entertainment/gty_james_avery_kb_140101_16x9_992.jpg

>linkyloo< (http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/fresh-prince-star-james-avery-died-65/story?id=21391201)

Kobi

01-03-2014, 10:40 PM

LOS ANGELES - Phil Everly, who with his brother Don formed an influential harmony duo that touched the hearts and sparked the imaginations of rock 'n' roll singers for decades, including the Beatles and Bob Dylan, died Friday. He was 74.

Phil and Don Everly helped draw the blueprint of rock 'n' roll in the late 1950s and 1960s with a high harmony that captured the yearning and angst of a nation of teenage baby boomers looking for a way to express themselves beyond the simple platitudes of the pop music of the day.

The Beatles, early in their career, once referred to themselves as "the English Everly Brothers." And Bob Dylan once said, "We owe these guys everything. They started it all."

The Everlys' hit records included the then-titillating "Wake Up Little Susie" and the universally identifiable "Bye Bye Love," each featuring their twined voices with lyrics that mirrored the fatalism of country music and a rocking backbeat that more upbeat pop. These sounds and ideas would be warped by their devotees into a new kind of music that would ricochet around the world.

In all, their career spanned five decades, although they performed separately from 1973 to 1983. In their heyday between 1957 and 1962, they had 19 top 40 hits.

The two broke up amid quarrelling in 1973 after 16 years of hits, then reunited in 1983, "sealing it with a hug," Phil Everly said.

Although their number of hit records declined in the late 1980s, they made successful concert tours in this country and Europe.

They were inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, the same year they had a hit pop-country record, "Born Yesterday."

Don Everly was born in 1937 in Brownie, Kentucky, to Ike and Margaret Everly, who were folk and country music singers. Phil Everly was born to the couple on Jan. 19, 1939, in Chicago where the Everlys moved to from Brownie when Ike grew tired of working in the coal mines.

The brothers began singing country music in 1945 on their family's radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa.

Their career breakthrough came when they moved to Nashville in the mid-1950s and signed a recording contract with New York-based Cadence Records.

Their breakup came dramatically during a concert at Knott's Berry Farm in California. Phil Everly threw his guitar down and walked off, prompting Don Everly to tell the crowd, "The Everly Brothers died 10 years ago."

During their breakup, they pursued solo singing careers with little fanfare. Phil also appeared in the Clint Eastwood movie "Every Which Way but Loose." Don made a couple of records with friends in Nashville, performed in local nightclubs and played guitar and sang background vocals on recording sessions.

Don Everly said in a 1986 Associated Press interview that the two were successful because "we never followed trends. We did what we liked and followed our instincts. Rock 'n' roll did survive, and we were right about that. Country did survive, and we were right about that. You can mix the two but people said we couldn't."

In 1988, the brothers began hosting an annual homecoming benefit concert in Central City, Kentucky, to raise money for the area.

DapperButch

01-04-2014, 10:17 AM

Man. My sister and I used to love to sing to the Everly Brothers when we were kids. Mom and Dad used to play the tapes in the car.

PearlsNLace

01-07-2014, 12:08 AM

Carl Goodman

Co-founder of Act Up

http://oblogdeeoblogda.me/2014/01/06/co-founder-of-act-up-commits-suicide/

Kobi

01-16-2014, 04:02 PM

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Russell Johnson, who played Professor Roy Hinkley on Gilligan's Island, has passed away at age 89.

Johnson was a busy but little-known character actor when he was cast in the slapstick 1960s comedy about seven people marooned on an uncharted Pacific island.

His character, high school science teacher Roy Hinkley, built generators and other gadgets out of scraps of junk found on the island. Johnson later joked that the one thing The Professor never figured out how to do was to fix the leaky boat so the group could get back to civilization.

Kobi

01-16-2014, 09:48 PM

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NEW YORK (AP) — The actor who played the agent on the hit 1970s sitcom "The Partridge Family" has died in Florida. Dave Madden was 82.

Madden was best known for his role as Reuben Kinkaid, who managed the family band and clashed with the precocious pre-teen bassist played by Danny Bonaduce (bahn-uh-DOO'-chee).

Before "The Partridge Family," Madden was part of the comedy ensemble on the "Laugh-In" variety series.

He later had a recurring role as a customer at Mel's Diner on the long-running sitcom "Alice."

Madden was born in Ontario, Canada, and grew up in Terre Haute, Ind.

He began show business as a nightclub comic and landed his first acting job on the short-lived sitcom "Camp Runamuck" in the mid-1960s.

Jesse

01-16-2014, 10:07 PM

RIP

Geez, I remember him from all three of those shows. I don't feel old until I have a moment like this.

http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/40/e7/61/40e761e2145d0aac3e5c209cf7141db0.jpg

NEW YORK (AP) — The actor who played the agent on the hit 1970s sitcom "The Partridge Family" has died in Florida. Dave Madden was 82.

Madden was best known for his role as Reuben Kinkaid, who managed the family band and clashed with the precocious pre-teen bassist played by Danny Bonaduce (bahn-uh-DOO'-chee).

Before "The Partridge Family," Madden was part of the comedy ensemble on the "Laugh-In" variety series.

He later had a recurring role as a customer at Mel's Diner on the long-running sitcom "Alice."

Madden was born in Ontario, Canada, and grew up in Terre Haute, Ind.

He began show business as a nightclub comic and landed his first acting job on the short-lived sitcom "Camp Runamuck" in the mid-1960s.

Jesse

01-16-2014, 10:31 PM

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'Wizard of Oz' Munchkin dies

The Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Ruth Robinson Duccini, the last of the original female Munchkins from the 1939 movie "The Wizard of Oz," has died. She was 95.
With her death, only one actor who played one of the original 124 Munchkins in the movie remains alive.

Duccini died of natural causes in Solari Hospice (http://www.nationalhospicefoundation.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=748) Care Center (http://www.nationalhospicefoundation.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=748) in Las Vegas on Thursday. Her death was confirmed by Stephen Cox, author of "The Munchkins of Oz." He says he learned of it from Duccini's son.
Duccini, born in Rush City, Minn., traveled to California with a troupe little people, and was cast in the MGM fantasy movie starring Judy Garland. Duccini was 4 feet tall. Cox provided a recent statement made by Duccini about her time on the movie set.
"It was long hours and heavy costumes. We didn't have much time for ourselves. It was all new to me then, and I loved being a part of what is now a classic," she said.

Duccini met her husband while working at MGM, and the two had a son and daughter. She worked as a "Rosie the Riveter" in Santa Monica, California, during World War II, using her short stature to squeeze into hard-to-reach parts of planes. She also appeared in the spoof "Under the Rainbow" starring Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher.

In her later years, Duccini appeared at festivals and screenings celebrating "The Wizard of Oz."

The only surviving original Munchkin is Jerry Maren, 93, of Los Angeles, who portrayed a member of the Lollipop Guild.

Kobi

01-28-2014, 06:02 AM

Pete Seeger, the banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk music heritage, died on Monday at the age of 94.

Seeger – with his a lanky frame, banjo and full white beard – was an iconic figure in folk music. He performed with the great minstrel Woody Guthrie in his younger days and marched with Occupy Wall Street protesters in his 90s, leaning on two canes.

He wrote or co-wrote "If I Had a Hammer," "Turn, Turn, Turn," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." He lent his voice against Hitler and nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with an affable air and his banjo strapped on.

"Be wary of great leaders," he told the Associated Press two days after a 2011 Manhattan Occupy march. "Hope that there are many, many small leaders."

With The Weavers, a quartet organized in 1948, Seeger helped set the stage for a national folk revival. The group – Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman – churned out hit recordings of "Goodnight Irene," "Tzena, Tzena" and "On Top of Old Smokey."

Seeger also was credited with popularizing "We Shall Overcome," which he printed in his publication People's Song, in 1948. He later said his only contribution to the anthem of the civil rights movement was changing the second word from "will" to "shall," which he said "opens up the mouth better."

"Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger," Arlo Guthrie once said.

Pete and Toshi Seeger were married July 20, 1943. The couple built their cabin in Beacon, N.Y., after World War II and stayed on the high spot of land by the Hudson River for the rest of their lives together. The couple raised three children. Toshi Seeger died in July at age 91.

His musical career was always braided tightly with his political activism, in which he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the cleanup of his beloved Hudson River. Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20780750,00.html?xid=rss-topheadlines

The_Lady_Snow

02-02-2014, 12:48 PM

Award-winning Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman Found Dead in Manhattan

http://halloweenhoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/psh.jpg

Seems it was a drug over dose

>linkyloo< (http://nypost.com/2014/02/02/philip-seymour-hoffman-found-dead-in-his-apartment/)

Mopsie

02-02-2014, 12:53 PM

Award-winning Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman Found Dead in Manhattan

http://halloweenhoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/psh.jpg

Seems it was a drug over dose

No!!! I love him! :(

Arwen

02-02-2014, 01:01 PM

musicman

02-02-2014, 01:21 PM

I loved his portrayal of Truman Capote. He did a fantastic job. Was a gifted actor.

Leigh

02-02-2014, 01:28 PM

So sad to know Philip died ~ very gifted actor

C0LLETTE

02-02-2014, 02:04 PM

aaaargh...

hagster

02-02-2014, 02:07 PM

I don't read this thread; I've been here once before and don't know why I poked my head in today. I'm literally in the middle of The Master, I pulled it up this morning because of him. I still have his imdb.com tab up because I was searching for the name of this movie. I had paused it to talk with a friend and jumped here to the planet before resuming.

WTF? I read Snow's headline, set the laptop aside before even knowing details and ran upstairs repeating, "No, no, no, no, no..." I'm beside myself right now. He's one of my favorites and once the denial wears off I'm really going to freak. Herion? God damm it!

nanners

02-02-2014, 02:09 PM

Gwen Avery, singer/songwriter/musician, has died at the age of 71. Avery was best known for her composition “Sugar Mama”, which was featured on Olivia Records’ groundbreaking collection, Lesbian Concentrate, in 1977. Originally slated to release a solo album on Olivia, she toured with her labelmates Linda Tillery and Mary Watkins on the Varied Voices of Black Women Tour, which also featured poet Pat Parker and Vicki Randle providing supporting vocals and percussion.

Avery stood apart in the Women’s Music Movement: a woman of color who understood the connection between her grandmother’s juke joint and the women’s music movement that Olivia Records was at the center of. Avery was quoted as saying “I dressed differently. I would wear satin suits and platform shoes with an afro with neckties and beautiful silk shirts. They were wearing plaid shirts and blue jeans.“ In an interview with the San Francisco Gate in 2002, she maintained that “the same issues of race and classism that confounded the early feminist and gay rights movements also infected the women’s music scene. I’ve always felt like a warrior or soldier. I’ve learned to deal with separation, isolation in the crowd, rejection in the abandonment.”

Her solo album never came to be via Olivia Records, but she continued to work on the road until her debut solo album, Sugar Mama, was released independently in 2001.

She spent the last decade of her life performing in the Bay Area’s Russian River region, bridging the gap between the blues and gospel, continuing to thrill audiences with her distinct interpretation of the rich heritage of black music. She performed numerous times at June Millington’s Institute for the Musical Art as well. Millington recalls “Gwen used to come to IMA to hang and rest her weary bones. We’d laugh—a lot! Then we’d jam and she’d let me play bass. She’d look at me and say ‘Wow! You can really play this!’ I didn’t even hear the blues until I was 19 or so, certainly not growing up in the Phillipines, but somewhere we met and knew without words. It was strong and true.”

Grammy nominated singer/songwriter/producer Linda Tillery reflects:

Gwen Avery was an authentic blues and gospel singer. She was raised in a juke joint, where from an early age, she heard first hand, the sounds of Black Troubadors weaving tales of love, passion, frustration and pleas to God - any god, for release from Jim Crow, segregation and the horrible legacy of racism in America.

Lesbian yes, Black woman yes, real deal soulful singer, yes. Yet I wonder how many people really understood her gift? You would have had to listen to Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Mahalia to recognize the "time stamp" that marked her unique style. She became the "Sugar Mama" of Women's Music, no longer a prisoner of love denied but a champion of love out in the open - raw and unashamed. That was her gift to us all.

Jazz vocalist Rhiannon describes her as “a tough, fragile woman..an open book in a way, with such tender passion for music and life. Vulnerable, flawed, capable of singing all that complex, powerful feeling. Not easy for her, and what she gave us was unique.”

By Tim Dillinger