RIP

[Kobi]

Gerald S. O’Loughlin, a veteran character actor who was probably best known for playing Lieutenant Ryker on the 1970s ABC cop show "The Rookies," has died, according to the Hollywood Reporter. He was 93.

O’Loughlin appeared in Truman Capote’s "In Cold Blood" in 1967 and also in the movies "Ensign Pulver," "Ice Station Zebra" with Rock Hudson and "The Organization" opposite Sidney Poitier.

O’Loughlin also starred on television as neighbor Joe Kaplan in the 1980s NBC family drama "Our House," starring Wilford Brimley.

"The Rookies" ran on ABC from 1972 through 1976 and starred Georg Stanford Brown, Michael Ontkean and Kate Jackson. His character Ed Ryker guided his new troops with patience and a bit of resignation.
------------------------


I like the characters this guy played.

[Andrea]

Julian Bond, a former chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a charismatic figure of the 1960s civil rights movement, a lightning rod of the anti-Vietnam War campaign and a lifelong champion of equal rights for minorities, died on Saturday night, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was 75.

Mr. Bond died in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after a brief illness, the center said in a statement Sunday morning.

He was one of the original leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, while he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

He moved from the militancy of the student group to the top leadership of the establishmentarian N.A.A.C.P. Along the way, he was a writer, poet, television commentator, lecturer, college teacher, and persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy.

He also served for 20 years in the Georgia Legislature, mostly in conspicuous isolation from white colleagues who saw him as an interloper and a rabble-rouser.

Mr. Bond’s wit, cool personality and youthful face became familiar to millions of television viewers during the 1960s and 1970s; he was described as dashing, handsome and urbane.

On the strength of his personality and quick intellect, he moved to the center of the civil rights action in Atlanta, the unofficial capital of the movement, at the height of the struggle for racial equality in the early 1960s.

Moving beyond demonstrations, he became a founder, with Morris Dees, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization in Montgomery, Ala. Mr. Bond was its president from 1971 to 1979 and remained on its board for the rest of his life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/julian-bond-former-naacp-chairman-and-civil-rights-leader-dies-at-75.html?_r=0

[ProfPacker]

Annie in Imitation of Life. She was amazing. I just watched the 1959 movie and was shocked at how emotional it was still for me.

She was 99 years old. G-d Bless her

[JDeere]

Dr. "Red" Duke passed away.

http://www.click2houston.com/news/dr...at-86/34914850

I remember as a young one, watching him on the news doing medical segments.

[JDeere]

"Chocolate Thunder" passes away at age 58 of a heart attack.


http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nba-ba...ons&soc_trk=fb

[Orema]

Oliver Sacks, Casting Light on the Interconnectedness of Life



It’s no coincidence that so many of the qualities that made Oliver Sacks such a brilliant writer are the same qualities that made him an ideal doctor: keen powers of observation and a devotion to detail, deep reservoirs of sympathy, and an intuitive understanding of the fathomless mysteries of the human brain and the intricate connections between the body and the mind.

Dr. Sacks, who died on Sunday at 82, was a polymath and an ardent humanist, and whether he was writing about his patients, or his love of chemistry or the power of music, he leapfrogged among disciplines, shedding light on the strange and wonderful interconnectedness of life — the connections between science and art, physiology and psychology, the beauty and economy of the natural world and the magic of the human imagination.

In his writings, as he once said of his mentor, the great Soviet neuropsychologist and author A. R. Luria, “science became poetry.”

In describing his patients’ struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience.

In books like “Awakenings,” “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” Dr. Sacks — a longtime practicing doctor and a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine — gave us case studies of patients whose stories were so odd, so anomalous, so resonant that they read like tales by Borges or Calvino. A man, with acute amnesia, who loses three decades of his life and lives wholly in the immediate present, unable to remember anything for more than a minute or two. Idiot savant twins, who can’t deal with the most mundane tasks of daily life but can perform astonishing numerical tricks, like memorizing 300-digit numbers or rattling off 20-digit primes. A blind poet who suffers from — or is gifted with — extraordinarily complex hallucinations: a milkman in an azure cart with a golden horse; small flocks of birds wearing shoes that metamorphose into men and women in medieval clothes.

Dr. Sacks depicted such people not as scientific curiosities but as individuals who become as real to us as characters by Chekhov (another doctor who wrote with uncommon empathy and insight). He was concerned with the impact that his patients’ neurological disorders had on their day-to-day routines, their relationships and their inner lives. His case studies became literary narratives as dramatic, richly detailed and compelling as those by Freud and Luria — stories that underscored not the marginality of his patients’ experiences, but their part in the shared human endeavor and the flux and contingencies of life.

Those case studies captured the emotional and metaphysical, as well as physiological, dimensions of his patients’ conditions. While they tracked the costs and isolation these individuals often endured, they also emphasized people’s resilience — their ability to adapt to their “deficits,” enabling them to hold onto a sense of identity and agency. Some even find that their conditions spur them to startling creative achievement.

In fact, Dr. Sacks wrote in “An Anthropologist on Mars,” illnesses and disorders “can play a paradoxical role in bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life that might never be seen or even be imaginable in their absence.” A young woman with a low I.Q. learns to sing arias in more than 30 languages, and a Canadian physician with Tourette’s syndrome learns to perform long, complicated surgical procedures without a single tic or twitch. Some scholars believe, Dr. Sacks once wrote, that Dostoyevsky and van Gogh may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, that Bartok and Wittgenstein may have been autistic, and that Mozart and Samuel Johnson could have had Tourette’s syndrome.

In his later books, Dr. Sacks increasingly turned to chronicling his own life — from his deep love of chemistry as a boy in “Uncle Tungsten,” to his experiments with L.S.D. and amphetamines in “Hallucinations,” to his coming of age as a young man and as a doctor in “On the Move.” It was a life as eclectic and adventurous as his intellectual pursuits, taking him from medical school in England to a stint as a forest firefighter in British Columbia to medical residencies and fellowship work in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He held a weight-lifting record in California, and on weekends, sometimes drove hundreds of miles on his motorcycle, from California to Las Vegas or Death Valley or the Grand Canyon.

Animated by a self-deprecating sense of humor and set down in limber, pointillist prose, Dr. Sacks’s autobiographical accounts are as candid and searching as his writings about his patients, and they suggest just how rooted his compassion and intuitive understanding — as a doctor and a writer — were in his youthful feelings of fear and dislocation. He tells us about the lasting shock of being evacuated from London as a boy during the war, and being beaten and bullied at boarding school. The rest of his life, he writes, he would have trouble with the 3 B’s: “bonding, belonging, and believing.”

He also writes about the frightening psychotic episodes of his schizophrenic brother, Michael, and his own feelings of shame for not spending more time with him — and his simultaneous need to get away. Science, with its promise of order and logic, provided a refuge for young Oliver from the chaos of his brother’s madness, and medicine promised both family continuity (his father was a general practitioner; his mother, a surgeon) and a way to study and try to understand brain disorders like Michael’s.

From today's New York Times

[imperfect_cupcake]

Heart broken over Oliver sacks. What an incredible loss (