RIP

[Kobi]

Ken Taylor, Canada's ambassador to Iran who sheltered Americans at his residence during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis has died.

Taylor kept the Americans hidden at his residence and at the home of his deputy, John Sheardown, in Tehran for three months. Taylor facilitated their escape by arranging plane tickets and persuading the Ottawa government to issue fake passports.

Born in 1934 in Calgary, Taylor was heralded as a hero for helping save the Americans — a clandestine operation that had the full support of then Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark's government.

Some of Taylor's exploits in Iran in 1979 were later portrayed in the 2012 Hollywood film, "Argo." Taylor and others felt the film underplayed the role he and Canada played.

The six U.S. diplomats managed to slip away when their embassy was overrun in 1979. They spent five days on the move, then took refuge at the Canadian Embassy for the next three months. Taylor immediately agreed to take them in without checking with the Canadian government.

The CIA consulted with Canadian officials on how to organize a rescue, and Canada gave permission for the diplomats to be issued fake Canadian passports.

After returning from Iran, Taylor was appointed Canadian Consul-General to New York City. In 1980, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada along with his wife Pat and other Canadian personnel involved in the escape, and was also awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal that same year.

He returned to the University of Toronto for several years as the Chancellor of Victoria College.

Taylor left the foreign service in 1984 and served as Senior Vice-President of Nabisco from 1984 to 1989.

He was the founder and chairman of public consulting firm Taylor and Ryan.

Taylor moved the United States and lived in New York City until his death.

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Thank you Mr. Ambassador.

[Kobi]

Marty Ingels, a comedian, actor and talent agent who was married to actress Shirley Jones for nearly 40 years, has died in Los Angeles. He was 79.

Beginning in the 1960s Ingels appeared in episodes of several TV shows, including "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "Bewitched" and co-starred in the 1962 series "I'm Dickens, He's Fenster."

He also had small movie roles.

The raspy-voiced actor later did voice work for hundreds of cartoons, commercials and video games. He voiced Pac-Man in the 1982 animated series.

Ingels also ran a talent agency that booked movie stars such as John Wayne and Cary Grant for TV commercials.

[Kobi]

Robert Loggia, gravelly-voiced character actor from "Scarface," "The Sopranos," and "Big," has died of Alzheimer's disease according to The Associated Press. He was 85.

Loggia's gruff voice and tough-guy looks found him plenty of work in the movies and on TV as both criminal and crime-fighter. He played a Miami drug lord usurped by Al Pacino in "Scarface" (1983), a sadistic crime boss in David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (1997), and as violent ex-con Feech La Manna in several episodes of "The Sopranos."

He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor playing hard-nosed private detective Sam Ransom in "Jagged Edge" (1985). He was nominated for an Emmy in 1989 when he starred in the series, "Mancuso, FBI."

In "Big" (1988) he showed off his lighter side, famously dancing on a foot-operated keyboard with Tom Hanks. He was also nominated for another Emmy as a guest star on the sitcom "Malcolm in the Middle," which referenced his humorous turn as the celebrity endorser of Minute Maid orange tangerine juice in the late 1990s.

His iconic voice found its way into Disney's "Oliver & Company" (1988) as well as the hit video game "Grand Theft Auto III." He also voiced himself in an animated appearance on "Family Guy" among countless other roles.

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My favorite Robert Loggia memory:

[storyspinner70]

Scott Weiland - former frontman for Stone Temple Pilots and current lead of Velvet Revolver passed away Thursday in his sleep on a tour stop. He was 48.

[Kobi]

Adrianna Vorderbruggen, 36, a major in the Air Force who is known as one of the first openly gay service members since "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was repealed in 2011, was killed in action along with six of her fellow service members in Afghanistan on Monday.

She was on a security patrol on foot near Bagram Air Base when an explosive-laden motorbike rammed into the patrol and detonated.

Major Vorderbruggen had served as a special agent with the Office of Special Investigations at a number of duty stations including McCord's Air Force Base in Washington and Joint Base Andrews in Maryland before joining her unit at Eglin Air Force Base. From Eglin Air Force Base, she was deployed to Afghanistan. She was the first female OSI agent killed in the line of duty.

Facebook postings on Tuesday by Vorderbruggen's loved ones mourned her death and offered condolences to her wife, Heather, and their son, Jacob. The family lives near Washington, D.C., where the couple was married in June 2012, the year after the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays was repealed.

"We do find comfort in knowing that Heather and Jacob are no longer in the shadows and will be extended the rights and protections due any American military family as they move through this incredibly difficult period in their lives," said the posting from Military Partners and Families Coalition.

[cinnamongrrl]

Originally Posted by storyspinner70

Scott Weiland - former frontman for Stone Temple Pilots and current lead of Velvet Revolver passed away Thursday in his sleep on a tour stop. He was 48.

Omg I did not know this. I just saw him in concert with STP over the summer....and I remarked to my daughter how wonderful the concert was and how he was one of very few lead singers of my favorite bands who had avoided death by drug overdose.

[Kobi]

Dec 27 (Reuters) - Dave Henderson, an outfielder whose home run for the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 American League Championship Series ignited one of baseball's most dramatic playoff comebacks, died of a heart attack on Sunday at age 57.

Henderson's 14-year career began with the Mariners and he later played for Red Sox, San Francisco Giants, Oakland A's and Kansas City Royals, hitting 197 home runs and driving in 708 runs during his MLB tenure. He was a member of the 1991 American League All-Star team and played in four World Series.

He is best known for hitting a two-run home run with the Red Sox facing elimination and down to their last out in the ninth inning of the fifth game of the 1986 American League playoffs against the California Angels.

Henderson's homer gave Boston the lead in a game it eventually won in extra innings. The team also won the next two games and advanced to the World Series against the New York Mets.

Henderson was almost the hero again in Game 6 of the World Series when he hit the go-ahead homer in the 10th inning to help put the Red Sox on the brink of their first World Series championship since 1918. But the Mets staged a furious rally to win in the bottom of the inning and then won Game
Henderson played on three straight American League pennant winners in Oakland from 1988 to 1990, winning the World Series with the A's in 1989.
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Thanks for the memories Dave.

[Orema]

Meadowlark Lemon, Harlem Globetrotter Who Played Basketball and Pranks With Virtuosity, Dies at 83



George "Meadowlark" Lemon, whose halfcourt hook shots, no-look behind-the-back passes and vivid clowning were marquee features of the feel-good traveling basketball show known as the Harlem Globetrotters for nearly a quarter-century, died on Sunday in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he lived. He was 83.

The death was confirmed by his wife, Cynthia Lemon.

A gifted athlete with an entertainer’s hunger for the spotlight, Lemon, who dreamed of playing for the Globetrotters as a boy in North Carolina, joined the team in 1954, not long after leaving the Army. Within a few years, he had assumed the central role of showman, taking over from Reece Tatum, whom everyone called Goose, the Trotters’ long-reigning clown prince. Tatum was a superb ballplayer whose on-court gags — or reams, as the players called them — had established the team’s reputation for laugh-inducing wizardry at a championship level.

This was a time, however, when the Trotters were known not merely for their comedy routines and basketball legerdemain; they were also a formidable competitive team. Their victory over the Minneapolis Lakers in 1948 was instrumental in integrating the National Basketball Association, and a decade later their owner, Abe Saperstein, signed a 7-footer out of the University of Kansas to a one-year contract before he was eligible for the N.B.A.: Wilt Chamberlain.

Lemon was a slick ballhandler and a virtuoso passer, and he specialized in the long-distance hook, a trick shot he made with remarkable regularity. But it was his charisma and comic bravado that made him perhaps the most famous Globetrotter. For 22 years, until he left the team in 1978, Lemon was the Trotters’ ringmaster, directing their basketball circus from the pivot. He imitated Tatum’s reams, like spying on the opposition’s huddle, and added his own.

He chased referees with a bucket and surprised them with a shower of confetti instead of water. He dribbled above his head and walked with exaggerated steps. He mimicked a hitter in the batter’s box and, with teammates, pantomimed a baseball game. And both to torment the opposing team — as time went on, it was often a hired squad of foils — and to amuse the appreciative spectators, he laughed and he teased and he chattered and he smiled; like Tatum, he talked most of the time he was on the court.

The Trotters played in mammoth arenas and on dirt courts in African villages. They played in Rome before the pope; they played in Moscow during the Cold War before the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In the United States, they played in small towns and big cities, in Madison Square Garden, in high school gyms, in cleared-out auditoriums — even on the floor of a drained swimming pool. They performed their most entertaining ball-handling tricks, accompanied by their signature tune “Sweet Georgia Brown,” on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Through it all, Lemon became “an American institution like the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty” whose “uniform will one day hang in the Smithsonian right next to Lindbergh’s airplane,” as the Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray once described him.

Significantly, Lemon’s time with the Globetrotters paralleled the rise of the N.B.A. When he joined the team, the Globetrotters were still better known than, and played for bigger crowds than, the Knicks and the Boston Celtics. When he left, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were about to enter the N.B.A. and propel it to worldwide popularity. In between, the league became thoroughly accommodating to black players, competing with the Globetrotters for their services and eventually usurping the Trotters as the most viable employer of top black basketball talent.

Partly as a result, the Globetrotters became less of a competitive basketball team and more of an entertainment troupe through the 1960s and ’70s. They became television stars, hosting variety specials and playing themselves on shows like “The White Shadow” and a made-for-TV “Gilligan’s Island” movie; they inspired a Saturday morning cartoon show.

In Lemon’s early years with the team, as the Globetrotters took on local teams and challenged college all-star squads, they played to win, generally using straight basketball skills until the outcome was no longer in doubt. But as time went on, for the fans who came to see them, the outcome was no longer the point.

On Jan. 5, 1971, the Globetrotters were beaten in Martin, Tenn., by an ordinarily more obliging team called the New Jersey Reds. It was the first time they had lost a game in almost nine years, the end of a 2,495-game winning streak. But perhaps more remarkable than the streak itself was the fact that it ended at all, given that the Trotters’ opponents by then were generally forbidden to interfere with passes to Lemon in the middle or to interrupt the familiar reams.

Lemon, as the stellar attraction, thrived in this environment, but he also became a lightning rod for troubles within the Globetrotter organization. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, the players’ antics on the court drew criticism from outside for reinforcing what many considered to be demeaning black stereotypes, and Lemon drew criticism from inside.

Not only was he the leading figure in what some thought to be a discomforting resurrection of the minstrel show; he was also, by far, the highest-paid Globetrotter, and his teammates associated him more with management than with themselves. When the players went on strike for higher pay in 1971, Lemon, who negotiated his own salary, did not join them.

After Saperstein died in 1965, the team changed hands several times, and in 1978, according to “Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters” (2005), by Ben Green, Lemon was dismissed after a salary dispute. He subsequently formed his own traveling teams — Meadowlark Lemon’s Bucketeers, the Shooting Stars and Meadowlark Lemon’s Harlem All-Stars — and continued performing into his 70s.

His website says he played in 16,000 games, an astonishing claim — it breaks down to more than 300 games a year for 50 years — and in 100 countries, which, give or take a few, is probably true.

And whatever ill feelings arose during his Globetrotter days, they were drowned out by his international celebrity and the affection he received all over the world. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003.

“Meadowlark was the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen,” Chamberlain said in a television interview not long before he died in 1999. “People would say it would be Dr. J or even Jordan. For me, it would be Meadowlark Lemon.”

The facts of his early life are hazy, and evidently he wanted it that way. His birth date, birthplace and birth name have all been variously reported. The date most frequently cited — and the likeliest — is April 25, 1932. Many sources say he was born in Wilmington, N.C., but The Wilmington Star-News reported in 1996 that he was born in Lexington County, S.C., and moved to Wilmington in 1938. His website says he was born Meadow Lemon, though many other sources say his name at birth was George Meadow Lemon or Meadow George Lemon. The Star-News said it was George Meadow Lemon III. He became known as Meadowlark after he joined the Globetrotters.

As a boy in Wilmington, he learned basketball at a local boys’ club; he told The Hartford Courant in 1999 that he was so poor that he practiced by using a coat hanger for a basket, an onion sack for a net and a Carnation milk can for a ball. After high school, he briefly attended Florida A&M University before spending two years in the Army.

Stationed in Austria, he played a few games with the Trotters, who were then touring Europe, and he performed well enough to earn a tryout after he mustered out. He was assigned to a Globetrotters developmental team, the Kansas City Stars, before joining the Globetrotters in 1954.

Asked about never having played in the N.B.A., Lemon told Sports Illustrated in 2010, “I don’t worry that I never played against some of those guys.”

“I’ll put it this way,” he added. “When you go to the Ice Capades, you see all these beautiful skaters, and then you see the clown come out on the ice, stumbling and pretending like he can hardly stay up on his skates, just to make you laugh. A lot of times that clown is the best skater of the bunch.”

Lemon’s first marriage, to the former Willye Maultsby, ended in divorce. (In 1978, she was arrested after stabbing him on a Manhattan street.) Information on survivors was not immediately available.

In 1986, Lemon became an ordained Christian minister; he and his wife founded a nonprofit evangelistic organization, Meadowlark Lemon Ministries, in 1994.

“Man, I’ve had a good run,” he said at his Hall of Famåe induction ceremony, recalling the first time he saw the Globetrotters play, in a newsreel in a movie theater in Wilmington when he was 11.

"When they got to the basketball court, they seemed to make that ball talk,” he said. “I said, ‘That’s mine; this is for me.’ I was receiving a vision. I was receiving a dream in my heart.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/sp...ies-at-83.html