RIP [Archive] - Page 4 - Butch Femme Planet

Kobi

06-30-2016, 05:51 AM

NEW YORK (AP) — Alvin Toffler, a guru of the post-industrial age whose million-selling "Future Shock" and other books anticipated the disruptions and transformations brought about by the rise of digital technology, has died. He was 87.

One of the world's most famous "futurists," Toffler was far from alone in seeing the economy shift from manufacturing and mass production to a computerized and information-based model. But few were more effective at popularizing the concept, predicting the effects and assuring the public that the traumatic upheavals of modern times were part of a larger and more hopeful story.

"Future Shock," a term he first used in a 1965 magazine article, was how Toffler defined the growing feeling of anxiety brought on by the sense that life was changing at a bewildering and ever-accelerating pace. His book combined an understanding tone and page-turning urgency as he diagnosed contemporary trends and headlines, from war protests to the rising divorce rate, as symptoms of a historical cycle overturning every facet of life.

"We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots — religion, nation, community, family, or profession — are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust," he wrote.

Toffler offered a wide range of predictions and prescriptions, some more accurate than others. He forecast "a new frontier spirit" that could well lead to underwater communities, "artificial cities beneath the waves," and also anticipated the founding of space colonies — a concept that fascinated Toffler admirer Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and presidential candidate. In "Future Shock," released in 1970, he also presumed that the rising general prosperity of the 1960s would continue indefinitely.

"We made the mistake of believing the economists of the time," Toffler told Wired magazine in 1993. "They were saying, as you may recall, we've got this problem of economic growth licked. All we need to do is fine-tune the system. And we bought it."

But Toffler attracted millions of followers, including many in the business community, and the book's title became part of the general culture. Curtis Mayfield and Herbie Hancock were among the musicians who wrote songs called "Future Shock" and the book influenced such science fiction novels as John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider." More recently, Samantha Bee hosted a recurring "Future Shock" segment on Comedy Central.

Toffler is credited with another common expression, defining the feeling of being overrun with data and knowledge as "information overload."

In the decades following "Future Shock," Toffler wrote such books as "Powershift" and "The Adaptive Corporation," lectured worldwide, taught at several schools and met with everyone from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to network executives and military officials. China cited him along with Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Gates and others as the Westerners who most influenced the country even as Communist officials censored his work.

In 2002, the management consultant organization Accenture ranked him No. 8 on its list of the top 50 business intellectuals.

His most famous observation: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

After "Future Shock," Toffler also continued to sketch out how the world was changing and how to respond. In "The Third Wave," a 1980 best-seller that AOL founder Steve Case would cite as a formative influence, he looked to a high-tech society that Case, Steve Jobs and others were just starting to put in place. He forecast the spread of email, telecommuting, teleconferences, interactive media, devices that remind you "of your own appointments" and online chat rooms.

Overall, he pronounced the downfall of the old centralized hierarchy and looked forward to a more dispersed and responsive society, populated by a hybrid of consumer and producer he called "the prosumer."

Toffler collaborated on many of his books and other projects with his wife, Heidi, who survives him. He is also survived by a sister, Caroline Sitter. Toffler's daughter, Karen, died in 2000.

Toffler, a native of New York City, was born Oct. 4, 1928 to Jewish Polish immigrants. A graduate of New York University, he was a Marxist and union activist in his youth, and continued to question the fundamentals of the market economy long after his politics moderated. He knew the industrial life firsthand through his years as a factory worker in Ohio.

"I got a realistic picture of how things really are made — the energy, love and rage that are poured into ordinary things we take for granted," he later wrote.

He had dreamed of being the next John Steinbeck, but found his talents were better suited for journalism. He wrote for the pro-union publication Labor's Daily and in the 1950s was hired by Fortune magazine to be its labor columnist. The origins of "Future Shock" began in the 1960s when Toffler worked as a researcher for IBM and other technology companies.

"Much of what Toffler wrote in 'Future Shock' is now accepted common sense, but at the time it defied conventional views of reality," John Judis wrote in The New Republic in 1995.

"Americans' deepest fears of the future were expressed by George Orwell's lockstep world of 1984. But Toffler, who had spent five years in a factory, understood that Americans' greatest problem was not being consigned to the tedium of the assembly line or the office. As he put it: 'The problem is not whether man can survive regimentation and standardization. The problem ... is whether he can survive freedom.'"

https://www.yahoo.com/news/alvin-toffler-author-future-shock-dead-87-112235148.html?ref=gs
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C0LLETTE

07-02-2016, 03:43 PM

Rest in Peace Elie Wiesel.

July 2, 2016

"Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate and author Elie Wiesel has died at the age of 87.

Wiesel survived the World War II Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. After liberation, he went to France, then Israel and the United States, where he advocated on behalf of victims of hate and persecution around the world.

Elie Wiesel was called many things during his life: a messenger of peace, a humanitarian, a survivor. He liked to call himself simply a witness. And as a witness, he said, it was his duty to never let those who suffered be forgotten.

To forget the victims means to kill them a second time," he told NPR in April 2012. "So I couldn't prevent the first death. I surely must be capable of saving them from a second death.....

..Wiesel said the world should never remain silent while humans suffer, for neutrality, he said, only aids the oppressor, never the victim."

NPR

Kobi

07-07-2016, 08:30 PM

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John McMartin, the Broadway veteran who created roles in landmark musicals including “Sweet Charity” and “Follies,” had died.

The death of the longtime actor, whose face was familiar to TV audiences from roles on “The Golden Girls,” “Murder, She Wrote” and, most recently, “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” was attributed to cancer in a paid obituary announcement in the New York Times.

On Broadway, he’d been seen in “All the Way,” the Tony winning 2014 production that starred Bryan Cranston, as well as musicals “Anything Goes” (2011) and “Grey Gardens” (2006).

McMartin, who was nominated for five Tony Awards over the course of his career, made his Broadway debut in 1961 play “The Conquering Hero,” but his first signature role came in 1966 Neil Simon-Cy Coleman musical “Sweet Charity,” in which he played the nebbishy accountant Oscar, a Tony-nominated performance he reprised in the 1969 movie version opposite Shirley MacLaine.

His association with composer Stephen Sondheim began with the short-lived but legendary 1971 premiere production of “Follies,” and he went on to star in a 1991 staging of “A Little Night Music” at the L.A.’s Ahmanson Theater, as well as a 2002 Broadway revival of “Into The Woods.”

In the early 1970s, he was a member of the New Phoenix Repertory Company during the troupe’s season on Broadway, in plays including Moliere’s “Don Juan,” O’Neill’s “The Great God Brown” and Durrenmatt’s “The Visit.” In 2001, he starred opposite Chita Rivera in the original Chicago production of Kander and Ebb’s musical adaptation of “The Visit.”

His TV credits included “Cheers” and “Frasier” as well as “The Partridge Family.” His film work included parts in “All the President’s Men,” “Blow Out” and “Kinsey.”

Kobi

07-20-2016, 04:52 AM

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Garry Marshall, the director, writer, and producer who developed such television shows as The Odd Couple and Happy Days and who helmed 18 films, including Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries, died Tuesday evening from complications of pneumonia following a stroke at a hospital in Burbank, California. He was 81.

A towering figure in the world of TV comedy, Marshall wrote for The Joey Bishop Show, The Lucy Show, and The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s and went on to create and executive produce several popular sitcoms in the ’70s, including The Odd Couple, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, and Mork & Mindy.

He earned five Emmy nominations over the course of his career: four for The Odd Couple and one for Mork & Mindy.

Marshall began directing films in the ’80s, and scored his breakthrough with the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman. The movie grossed $463 million at the worldwide box office and vaulted Julia Roberts to stardom. Marshall and Roberts would reunite on 1999’s Runaway Bride and Marshall’s most recent movie, Mother’s Day.

Marshall’s other directing credits included Beaches, two Princess Diaries movies, Overboard, Valentine’s Day, and New Year’s Eve. He also compiled dozens of acting credits over the years, on the big and small screens.

A native of the Bronx, New York, Marshall was the son of an industrial filmmaker and a dance instructor. He studied journalism at Northwestern University, served a stint in the army, and worked as a reporter for the New York Daily News before entering into show business.

Marshall remained active even in his final days. He recently finished a rewrite of the book for a Broadway adaptation of Pretty Woman, and Mother’s Day hit theaters in April.

He was the brother of actress/director Penny Marshall.

Gemme

07-20-2016, 06:10 AM

I am so, so sad. Garry was truly one of the good guys in Hollywood. They aren't many left.

Virago

07-25-2016, 10:01 AM

The real voice behind so many 'Singers' in hollywood musicals of the 50's, 60's and 70's. The real voice doing the singing in "The King And I", "My Fair Lady," "West Side Story" and so many others. Such a wonderful voice

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/arts/music/marni-nixon-singer-soprano-dies-86.html?_r=0

vixenagogo

08-29-2016, 02:58 PM

“On stage or in the movies I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.”
-Gene Wilder
(11 June 1933- 28 August 2016

http://www.dclibrary.org/sites/default/files/styles/new_large__480x480_/public/Corbis-42-16000164.jpg?itok=5Dg8xgMz

Lyte

08-29-2016, 03:07 PM

Sad! He was a favy of mine. :(

*Anya*

09-09-2016, 09:27 AM

August 29, 2016

Ice Road Truckers star Darrell Ward died in a plane crash on his way to shoot a TV series in Montana, according to US Weekly. The news came in the form of a tragic press release written on Ward’s Facebook page on Sunday. The reality TV star recently finished filming season 10 of the hit series, Ice Road Truckers. He was 52.

According to KPAX, Darrell and his co-pilot, Mark Milotz, were attempting to land on a private airstrip in Rock Creek when the Cessna 182 went down. The news outlet writes, “Witnesses who were watching and waiting for the plane to land say the plane went into a stall as it pulled up and the pilot never regained control.” The aircraft hit the south shoulder of the Interstate 90 near the Rock Creed exit at about 3pm before catching fire near mile marker 126.

Ward was about to begin filming a documentary-style TV show about plane wreck recoveries, according to Fox News. He and Milotz were declared dead at the scene. A rep for the show told Fox411, “We are saddened by the tragic loss of Darrell Ward, a beloved member of the HISTORY family. He will be greatly missed and our thoughts are with his family during this difficult time.”

A close friend of Ward, named Chuck Campbell, told Fox411, “To know Darrell Ward is an honor and a privilege that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. We say good bye to an amazing man who made everyone around him feel special. Part of me died with him.”

Facebook Press Release:

Press Release: It’s with great sadness to report we have lost our Montana Legend at the young age of 52.

Darrell Ward had just left The Great American Truck Show in Dallas, Texas where he enjoyed meeting numerous fans and friends and was heading to Missoula to begin filming a pilot for his new documentary style show involving the recovery of plane wrecks when he and his co-pilot crashed and lost their lives. An investigation is ongoing and more information will be made available at a later time as the National Transportation Safety Board will be handling they investigation.

They things Darrell loved most were his family including his kids and grand-kids & trucking.

Darrell Ward rose to fame with his role on the extremely popular History Channel’s reality show, Ice Road Truckers. Darrell just finished filming Season X earlier this year for the show and had just learned that he had a green light this past weekend for an additional season on the show originally slated to begin filming in the winter of 2017. When Darrell wasn’t hitting the Ice Roads he would be back in Montana doing what Darrel loved best as a log hauler and occasionally helped local authorities fight forest fires.

Trucking has always been a large part of Darrell’s life; from running the harvest rigs with his grandparents and family, to driving trucks from Montana to Alaska and all roads in between. In his free time, you could usually find Darrell giving back to the community any chance he got, he had promoted the most recent food drive to help victims in the Louisiana Floods and was scheduled to appear as the grand marshal for the Truck Convoy for Special Olympics in Nova Scotia.
In his free time, Darrell enjoyed hunting, fishing, camping, dirt bike riding and all things outdoors. A self-proclaimed “ADRENALINE JUNKIE”, Darrell was up for any adventure.

http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/darrell-ward-cause-of-death-dead-dies-plane-crash-ice-road-truckers-trucking-age/

Virago

09-17-2016, 09:34 AM

Legendary playwright Edward Albee dead at 88

(CNN) — Legendary playwright Edward Albee, widely considered one of the greats of his generation, has died at the age of 88, according to his personal assistant Jakob Holder.

Albee, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, died Friday afternoon at his home in Montauk, New York. Albee died after a short illness, according to Holder.

Albee's career spanned five decades. His first play, "The Zoo Story," came out in the late '50s and centered on two men who have a chance encounter on a New York City park bench. It has a violent conclusion but helped set the tone for Albee's raw and uncompromising works to come.

His best known work is arguably "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" an intimate portrait of a volatile marriage.

It was after that play that Albee began drawing comparisons to the likes of August Wilson, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

The play was adapted into a film in 1966. It starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who both went on to be nominated for Academy Awards.

Though the play had been out for years, the film itself was the subject of controversy due to its use of profanity — like "screw you." Warner Bros. agreed to put a warning on the film that moviegoers under the age of 18 would not be admitted without an adult. R ratings did not exist at the time.

Albee's work could hit nerves like no other.

"If you're going to spend $100 or more to go to the theater, something should happen to you," he told Charlie Rose in 2008. "Maybe somebody should be asking you some questions about your values or the way you think about things and maybe you should come out of the theater (with) something having happened to you. Maybe you should be changing or thinking about change. But if you go there and the only thing you worry about is where you left the damn car, then you wasted your $100."

He was also known for the plays "A Delicate Balance" and "Seascape," among others.

Notable figures in theater have already begun to mourn Albee's passing.

Kobi

09-26-2016, 05:22 AM

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Arnold Palmer, one of the greatest golfers ever to pick up a club and the object of a massive fan base that called itself “Arnie’s Army” as he recorded seven major victories, died Sunday at 87 in Pittsburgh.

Born in Latrobe, Pa., Palmer’s endearing personality and skill on the links earned him the nickname “The King,” during a career whose beginning coincided with the birth of television sports. Along the way, he became one of the wealthiest celebrity endorsers, a philanthropist, golf course designer and pilot.

Palmer’s long string of victories on the PGA tour began in 1955, and he became one of the sport’s most recognizable personalities, along with Jack Nicklaus. Palmer’s charismatic personality also made him a sought after pitchman, for several products, perhaps most famously Quaker State motor oil.

"Arnold Palmer was the everyday man's hero," Nicklaus said. "From the modest upbringing, Arnold embodied the hard-working strength of America."

Palmer’s importance to subsequent generations of golfers was evident Sunday, as tributes poured in via social media.

Palmer won the PGA Tour Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, and in 1974 was one of the 13 original inductees into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

Palmer learned to play from his father, Milfred "Deacon" Palmer, who the club pro and greenskeeper at Latrobe Country Club. It was ten that he developed his trademark pigeon-toed putting stance.

He earned a scholarship to Wake Forest, but left to join the U.S. Coast Guard in the late 1940s. He returned to school three years later, and won the 1954 U.S. Amateur championship.

Palmer turned pro a year later, winning the1955 Canadian Open the first of a string of championships. Three years later, he won the Masters Tournament, cementing his place among the sport’s greats.

Palmer won 62 titles on the PGA Tour, with the final one coming in the 1973 Bob Hope Desert Classic. Among his wins were four at the Masters, two at the British Open and one at the U.S. Open. He finished second in the U.S. Open four times, was runner-up three times in the PGA Championship.

Palmer’s best years were in the early 1960s, but he remained an immensely popular figure for the rest of his life. In 2000, Golf Digest raked him the sixth greatest player of all time. Although his biggest purse, $50,000, came when he won the Westchester Classic in 1971, Palmer’s popularity allowed him to earn as much as $30 million per year in endorsements and business deals as recently as a few years ago.

Palmer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.

Palmer’s friendly and folksy manner made him a favorite of the press, and his quips and quotes were as legendary as his short game.

not2shygrrl

09-26-2016, 06:41 PM

This link is all I have found on Amanda and I feel it is quite appropriate here. So sad at such a young, promising and impressionist style to now be gone.

Editor’s Note: We are deeply saddened by the passing of Amanda Arkansassy Harris. Amanda was a talented artist, a beacon for the queer femme community and an absolute joy to work with. Our hearts go out to everyone in mourning.

https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2016/07/12/women-to-watch-amanda-arkansassy-harris/

Kobi

09-28-2016, 05:24 PM

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The grand dame of daytime television drama, Agnes Nixon liked to say that “everyone's life is a soap opera.” For proof, she offered up her own.

She had an “abandonment complex” because her parents divorced soon after she was born. Growing up in an Irish-Catholic enclave in Nashville in the 1930s and 1940s, she felt painfully different because the other children all seemed to have fathers. Hers was “nearly psychotic” and schemed to crush her post-collegiate dream of being a writer.

He wanted his daughter to follow him into his burial garments business and arranged for her to meet Irna Phillips, a pioneering writer of radio serials her father was certain would “set me straight” regarding the foolishness of a writing career, Nixon often said.

And then Nixon invariably inserted a soap opera staple into the story — the plot twist. During the meeting, Phillips looked up from reading the sample script that was Nixon's resume and asked, “How would you like to work for me?”

"It was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Nixon later said. “It was freedom.”

Although her characters were inevitably embroiled in melodrama, Nixon was repeatedly honored for elevating soaps during a television career that spanned more than 60 years. She pioneered socially relevant themes and dealt with them seriously, bringing attention to such once-taboo topics as racism, AIDS, lesbian relationships and teenage prostitution.

In 1962, Nixon wrote a story line for “The Guiding Light” on CBS about a character who develops uterine cancer and has a life-saving hysterectomy. The network and show sponsor Proctor & Gamble agreed to the plot only if the words “cancer,” “uterus” and “hysterectomy” were not used.

When “One Life to Live” debuted in 1968, it featured a complicated story aimed at making viewers confront their prejudices, Nixon later said. It involved a young black woman that the audience is led to believe is white; she plans to marry a white doctor, but later falls in love with a black resident.

When Nixon was recognized in 2010 with a Daytime Emmy for lifetime achievement, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences said that she had “totally changed the traditionally escapist nature of daytime serials while straining to make the world a better place.”

She wasn’t trying to “break barriers,” Nixon said in 1999 on the TV biography “Intimate Portraits,” but thought it was insane “to say that entertainment and public service can never be in the same story.”

In 1981, the television academy had given Nixon its highest honor, the Trustees Award, for “distinguished service to television and the public.” She was the first woman to receive the distinction, joining an elite group that includes Edward R. Murrow and Bob Hope.

After writing the initial weeks of “Search for Tomorrow” for CBS in 1951, she played a role in the success of six other soap operas.

She helped Phillips launch “As the World Turns” on CBS in 1956 and, two years later, joined the network’s “Guiding Light” as head writer. In 1964, she took charge of NBC’s ratings-challenged “Another World” and turned it around.

Within four years, ABC came calling with a powerful enticement — creative control. Her husband, Robert Nixon, left his job as a Chrysler Corp. executive, and the couple formed a company to produce her first solo effort, “One Life to Live.”

The show quickly won praise for realism after premiering in 1968. A story on teenage venereal disease caused 50,000 viewers to write in, and an official at the Centers for Disease Control told Nixon: “You've shown us how to reach the teenagers of America,” the Los Angeles Times said in 1991.

When ABC wanted a second daytime drama, Nixon came up with “All My Children” in 1970. She also co-created a third soap for the network, “Loving,” that aired from 1983 to 1995.

Nixon readily acknowledged “All My Children” as her favorite dramatic offspring. The show was set in Pine Valley, the presumptive dramatic equivalent of Rosemont, the Philadelphia suburb where Nixon lived in a pre-Revolutionary War home. She based archvillain Adam Chandler, who didn't “know how to love,” on her father and gave her favorite character, wickedly manipulative Erica Kane, abandonment issues.

Susan Lucci became one of daytime’s most popular stars playing Erica from the show’s earliest days until the program’s end in September 2011. She repeatedly called Nixon “a genius as a storyteller.”

When “One Life to Live” left the air in early 2012, few network soap operas remained. As women increasingly entered the workforce, viewership eroded and the genre continued to lose ground to cable and offerings on the Internet.

“The name of entertainment is escape,” Nixon said in 1981 in People magazine, and it made her wealthy, one excruciatingly slow plot turn at a time. In the mid-1970s, Nixon had sold both “One Life” and “All My Children” to ABC for an undisclosed sum.

“I loved the writing and I hated the business,” Nixon told The Times in 1998, when it was reported that she earned more than $1 million a year.

She was born Agnes Eckhardt on Dec. 10, 1922, in Chicago, to Harry and Agnes Eckhardt and grew up in Nashville living with her bookkeeper mother and extended family. Previous reports put her year of birth as 1927 but the announcement of her funeral Mass said she was born five years earlier.

At Northwestern University, she studied drama alongside Charlton Heston and Patricia Neal but felt “outclassed,” as an actor, Nixon later said, and turned to writing.

Days after earning a bachelor's degree in the late 1940s, Nixon was writing for Phillips on a radio soap. When Phillips headed west to work in television, Nixon moved to New York to write for early prime-time TV dramas.

On a blind date in 1950, she met her future husband and soon agreed to marry him on one condition — that she could continue her career. They settled in the Philadelphia area and had four children in five years. With no time to travel to New York City for work, she returned to Phillips and soaps, writing at home and mailing in her scripts.

Having a bustling career in the “pre-Betty Friedan days” was tough and made her feel like a misfit, she told the Washington Post in 1983.

For years, she and her husband split their time between the Philadelphia area and New York City. After he died in 1996, Nixon said she found writing “All My Children” therapeutic.

By then, she had long devoted herself to long-range plotting and still followed her mentor’s maxim: “We don’t just live the high points and low points, we live minute by minute.”

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-agnes-nixon-snap-story.html

Kobi

10-04-2016, 01:13 PM

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Gloria Naylor, whose debut novel "The Women of Brewster Place," became a bestseller, a National Book Award winner and a TV miniseries released through Oprah Winfrey's production company, has died at the age of 66.

Naylor's other books included "Linden Hills," ''Mama Day" and "Bailey's Cafe."

"The Women of Brewster Place" is Naylor's self-described "love letter" to a determined community of seven African American women in a decaying housing project, the exact location unspecified. It was published in 1982 and praised by the New York Times as "emotionally satisfying and technically accomplished," with Brewster Place itself the narrative's star. "Brewster Place" won the National Book Award for best first fiction and was often likened to novels by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker among others as landmark books by black women.

Naylor, who grew up in New York City, would credit her mother for making "Brewster Place" possible.

"Realizing that I was a painfully shy child, she gave me my first diary and told me to write my feelings down in there," Naylor said in her National Book Award acceptance speech. "Over the years that diary was followed by reams and reams of paper that eventually culminated into 'The Women of Brewster Place.' And I wrote that book as a tribute to her and other black woman who, in spite of the very limited personal circumstances, somehow manage to hold a fierce belief in the limitless possibilities of the human spirit."

Winfrey was among the novel's many fans and the miniseries came out in 1989, with a cast including Winfrey, Cicely Tyson and Robin Givens. "The Women of Brewster of Place" was also adapted into a musical, and Naylor revisited the setting in her 1998 novel "The Men of Brewster Place."

Naylor was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College and received a master's from Yale University in African American studies, a degree earned around the time "Women of Brewster Place" was published. By the late 1970s, she had published stories in Essence magazine that would later become part of "Brewster Place."

In college, she had vowed to write at least four novels, and at least one that would outlast her. Her fiction often centered on a common meeting place, like the diner in "Bailey's Cafe," and her characters tended to be dreamers whose fantasies reflected Naylor's early love for fairy tales.

"It runs throughout my work, the theme of dreaming," she told The Associated Press in 1992. "I ask myself why it always seems important. I am a daydreamer and I once was an avid daydreamer. I would dream in serials, the daydreams would start where the others left off."

"I was still reading (fairy tales) ... at age 16. You wanted Prince Charming and I looked too long. At some point, an adult woman has to wake up and smell the coffee."

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-gloria-naylor-20161003-snap-story.html

Kobi

10-06-2016, 09:42 AM

Joan Marie Johnson Faust, one of the founding members of the New Orleans girl group the Dixie Cups, died Oct. 5, 2016, according to multiple news sources. She was 72.

Sisters Barbara Ann and Rosa Lee Hawkins formed the Dixie Cups along with Faust, their cousin. In June 1964, the trio famously kicked the Beatles out of the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with the song “Chapel of Love.” It proved to be their biggest hit, selling more than 1 million copies.

Faust and her cousins had several other hits including 1964’s “People Say,” which reached No. 12, and “You Should Have Seen the Way He Looked at Me,” which made it into the Top 40. In 1965, the Dixie Cups had a top-20 hit with their version of a traditional New Orleans song “Iko Iko.”

Faust became a member of the Jehovah’s Witness religious denomination and left the Dixie Cups after the trio stopped recording temporarily in 1966.

In 2007, the Dixie Cups were inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

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Kobi

10-24-2016, 02:14 PM

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Tom Hayden, an activist, politician, and author who was one of the famed "Chicago Seven" who protested the 1968 Democratic National Convention, died Oct. 23, according to his wife, Barbara Williams. He was 76.

The former husband of actress and fellow activist Jane Fonda, Hayden was one of the giants of the counterculture in the 1960s, a radical anti-war protester who advocated for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War. Later in life, he developed a career in California politics and wrote a number of books.

Hayden's activism began in the 1950s as he attended the University of Michigan, where in 1960 he was among the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As a member of SDS, Hayden wrote the Port Huron Statement, the group's manifesto, in which he railed against U.S. foreign policy and politics, racial discrimination, and business, while advocating for civil disobedience and political reform.

Hayden would become president of the SDS in 1962 after returning from a trip south as one of the Freedom Riders who challenged the legitimacy of segregation on buses. In 1965, he took his activism even further afield, traveling for the first time to North Vietnam, where he toured villages and met with an American POW. About his experiences, Hayden wrote the 1966 book "The Other Side," the first of his publications.

The fight to end the Vietnam War took place at home, too, and it was there that Hayden and a number of his fellow activists rose up in protest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. With the goal of protesting President Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam War policies, Hayden and the rest of the Chicago Seven organized a rally in Grant Park – a rally that ended up playing host to 15,000 protesters who turned it into a riot.

Hayden, along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner, was charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot for his actions in organizing the DNC protest. The men became known as the Chicago Seven as they fought their case to federal court, where it dragged on for months as many counterculture icons of the day were called upon to testify and the defendants pulled stunts including appearing in judicial robes with police uniforms underneath.

In the end, all seven of the defendants were acquitted of the conspiracy charge, though Hayden and four others were convicted of inciting a riot, sentenced to five years in prison and fines of $5,000 each. Upon appeal, the convictions were reversed.

It was 1972 before the appeals of the Chicago Seven trial were complete. That same year, Hayden and Fonda traveled to Vietnam in a highly controversial visit that left her dubbed "Hanoi Jane" and angered many in the U.S. But it would only be a few years before Hayden began to tone down his rhetoric as a budding politician.

Hayden's first political run came in 1976, when he made a bid for the U.S. Senate and came in second in the primary. In 1982, he was successfully elected to the California State Assembly, where he served until 1992, when he was elected to the California State Senate. He served through 2000, during which time he attempted runs for California Governor and Mayor of Los Angeles, both of which were unsuccessful.

In 1998, Hayden wrote the Hayden Act, am animal welfare act that extends the minimum amount of time an animal in a public pound or shelter has before being euthanized. The act was made California law in 1999.

Hayden taught at a number of colleges and universities, including UCLA and Harvard, and he wrote books including "Reunion: A Memoir" (1988), "Ending the War in Iraq" (2007), and "The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama" (2009).

Kobi

10-24-2016, 02:18 PM

http://www.recordsale.de/cdpix/b/bobbyvee-theverybestofbobbyvee.jpg

Bobby Vee, the 1960s pop singer whose hits inlcuded "Take Good Care of My Baby" and "Run to Him," has died at 73 from complications of Alzheimer's disease.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota, as Robert Velline, Vee's big break came on the heels of a tragedy: he was hired at 15 to fill a concert bill in Moorhead, Minnesota, for what had been intended to be the next show on the 1959 Winter Dance Party Tour after the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens.

Following the exposure he received from that performance, Vee recorded a single, Suzie Baby, that did well in the upper Midwest and landed him a contract with Liberty Records. Vee reached the top ten in 1960 with "Rubber Ball" and "Devil or Angel," and 1961 saw him notch a number one hit with "Take Good Care of My Baby" and a number two hit with "Run to Him."

Vee continued to release hits through the 1960s, more than three dozen in the top 100 in total, including "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes," "Come Back When You Grow Up" and "Charms."

Though his run of hits ended after 1970, Vee performed until 2011, when he announced his retirement due to a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

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ProfPacker

10-24-2016, 07:49 PM

Omg, Tom Hayden and Bobby Vee in one day? Having spent my college years in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor was very involved with the war and civil rights movement. Our campus SDS rep. was Diana Orton who died in a townhouse that blew up in Greenwich Village.

We learned so much from Tom Hayden. Thank you Tom for being brave and true, you opened up an entire generation to owning and having agency in our lives.

Tom Hayden started by speaking and organizing at Univ of Mich. It was the time that formed me at someone with a social conscience and possibly a future social worker who never gave up the concept of social justice for psychotherapy.

Very sad day indeed.

Bobby Vee was part of my initial music way before the Beatles and Stones.

Gemme

11-07-2016, 07:52 PM

Janet Reno passed away this morning due to complications from Parkinson's.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/janet-reno-former-us-attorney-general-has-died/ar-AAjZqRu?OCID=ansmsnnews11

Cin

11-10-2016, 08:07 PM

Leonard Cohen died. I really will miss his poetry, his lyrics, his golden voice. He was something special. I didn't know I could be much sadder than I already was these past couple of days. I was wrong.

Stone-Butch

11-10-2016, 08:25 PM

Cin

11-10-2016, 08:33 PM

OMG Leonard is gone? I loved his music and lyrics more than any singer of his genre. I own most of his music and listen often. Bless you Leonard for all you have given in your career of all your music and that wonderful voice.

Me too. I will miss him so much. He just put out a new dvd titled "You Want It Darker". Here's some of the words from the title track. I think he was ready.

If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
There's a lover in the story
But the story's still the same
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idle claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame
They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord
Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the love that never came
You want it darker
We kill the flame
If you are the dealer, let me out of the game
If you are the healer, I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame
You want it darker
Hineni, hineni
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord

CherryWine

11-10-2016, 08:57 PM

The man was brilliant.

Aside from the original, I've heard many beautiful renditions of his most well-known song, "Hallelujah", but I recently discovered this one. It's incredibly moving.

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May his soul rest in peace.

~ocean

11-10-2016, 10:19 PM

RIP Leonard , amazing artist ~ on your behalf I am going to sleep to your music :)

Orema

11-14-2016, 01:58 PM

Gwen Ifill (https://www.google.com/search?q=gwen+ifill&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8), an award-winning television journalist for NBC and PBS, former reporter for The New York Times and author who moderated vice-presidential debates in 2004 and 2008, died on Monday in Washington. She was 61.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/11/14/obituaries/15IFILL-obit/15IFILL-obit-blog427.jpg

Her death, at a hospice facility, was announced by Sara Just, executive producer of “PBS NewsHour.” The cause was cancer, PBS said.

Ms. Ifill was the moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and the co-anchor and co-managing editor, with Judy Woodruff, of PBS NewsHour, the culmination of a career that began in 1981 at The Baltimore Evening Sun. Both she and Ms. Woodruff moderated a Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in February.

Ms. Ifill later reported for The Washington Post and The Times, covering Congress, presidential campaigns and national political conventions.

She is also the author of “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” which was published on inauguration day in 2009.

A full obituary will appear soon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/business/media/gwen-ifill-dies.html

clay

11-14-2016, 02:13 PM

I just saw news headline that Leon Russell has passed away...74 I think it said. OMG I LOVE his music.... RIP Leon

Kobi

11-15-2016, 06:06 PM

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Actor Robert Vaughn, known for roles on television's "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and movies such as "The Magnificent Seven" and "Superman III," died Friday, Nov. 11, 2016, of leukemia. He was 83.

Vaughn began his acting career in the 1950s, his first film role an uncredited appearance in "The Ten Commandments" in 1956. In 1959, he was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role in "The Young Philadelphians." The next year, he appeared as Lee in "The Magnificent Seven." Before his death, Vaughn was the last surviving actor of those who portrayed the movie's seven main characters.

But it was Vaughn's role as Napoleon Solo on the TV spy drama "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." that cemented his fame. Running for four seasons, from 1964 to 1968, the show was instantly popular and spawned numerous spy genre copycat shows.

In the 1980s, Vaughn appeared in a recurring role on the final season of "The A-Team," and as villain Ross Webster in the movie "Superman III." Continuing to act late in life, he co-starred as a grifter on the British television show "Hustle" from 2004 to 2012.

Kobi

11-15-2016, 06:10 PM

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Dawn Coe-Jones, a Canadian professional golfer, died Saturday, Nov. 12, 2016, after a battle with brain cancer. She was 56.

Dawn Coe was born Oct. 19, 1960, in Campbell River, British Columbia. As a teenager, she worked at a nearby golf course as a groundskeeper. She attended Lamar University, where she was an All-American golfer, and graduated with a degree in elementary education. She won several amateur events, including the Canadian Women’s Amateur in 1983.

She joined the LPGA tour in 1984 and would continue to tour until 2008. During that time, she won three events: the 1992 Women’s Kemper Open, the 1994 HealthSouth Palm Beach Classic, and the 1995 Chrysler-Plymouth Tournament of Champions. She amassed more than $3.3 million in winnings during her career.

Coe-Jones was inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame in 2003.

Orema

11-19-2016, 04:22 AM

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/11/19/arts/music/19jones_web1/19jones_web1-master768.jpg
(Sharon Jones performing at Radio City Music Hall in 2009. Credit Nicholas Roberts for the New York Times)

Sharon Jones, the soul singer and powerful voice of the band the Dap-Kings, died on Friday of pancreatic cancer that had been in remission but returned last year. She was 60.

Ms. Jones’s death was confirmed by Judy Miller Silverman, her publicist. She said Ms. Jones was surrounded by members of the Dap-Kings and other loved ones when she died.

She continued performing throughout the summer, even while undergoing chemotherapy that she said caused neuropathy in her feet and legs and restricted her movements onstage. But Ms. Jones remained undeterred.

“Getting out on that stage, that’s my therapy,” Ms. Jones said in a New York Times interview published in July. “You have to look at life the way it is. No one knows how long I have. But I have the strength now, and I want to continue.”

The summer tour promoted “I’m Still Here,” a single with the Dap-Kings that detailed Ms. Jones’s birth in a brutally segregated South, a childhood in the burned-out Bronx, and a career hampered by record executives who considered her “too short, too fat, too black and too old.”

Ms. Jones was that rare music star who found fame in middle age, when she was in her 40s.

In addition to working as a correction officer at Rikers Island and an armed guard for Wells Fargo, Ms. Jones, who had grown up singing gospel in church choirs, initially dabbled in professional music as a session singer and the vocalist in a wedding band, Good N Plenty.

After meeting Gabriel Roth, the producer and songwriter also known as Bosco Mann, Ms. Jones made the leap from backup singer to main attraction. Desco Records released her debut 7-inch vinyl single, “Damn It’s Hot,” in 1996. She was 40.

With the encouragement and songwriting of Mr. Roth, who co-founded the Brooklyn soul and funk revival label Daptone Records and serves as the bandleader of the Dap-Kings, Ms. Jones’s full-length debut, “Dap Dippin’ with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings,” came out in 2002. She would go on to release four more studio albums and two compilations on the small label, a point of pride for the fiercely independent Ms. Jones.

“A major label’s going to do what?” she said to Billboard last year. “I sing one or two songs, they give me a few million dollars, which they’re going to want back, and then the next thing you know, the next record don’t sell, and then they’re kicking me to the curb. With us, this is our label, this is our project.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/11/19/arts/music/19jones_web2/19jones_web2-blog427.jpg
(Ms. Jones in 2007. She fought pancreatic cancer after a 2013 diagnosis. Chester Higgins, Jr. for the New York Times)

Sharon Lafaye Jones was born on May 4, 1956, in Augusta, Ga., though her family lived just across the border in North Augusta, S.C. In “Miss Sharon Jones!” the singer recalled that her mother had needed a cesarean section, but because of segregation in the Jim Crow south, she was not allowed in the hospital’s main unit and was instead relegated to a storage room.

After her parents separated, Ms. Jones, the youngest of six children, moved with her mother to New York and was raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. “But New York in 1960, no peace to be found,” she sang on “I’m Still Here.” “Segregation, drugs and violence was all around.”

She went on to attend Brooklyn College and acted in “Sister Salvation,” an Off-Broadway play, before turning her focus to music.

With her late start, Ms. Jones recorded and performed at an unrelenting pace, and in the last year and a half of her life she made two albums, opened two national tours for Hall & Oates, was featured in a television commercial for Lincoln (performing the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider”) and starred in “Miss Sharon Jones!,” a documentary about her life.

The film traced her life from the diagnosis of Stage 2 pancreatic cancer in 2013 through her triumphant return to the stage in 2015. Ms. Jones is survived by four siblings, seven nieces and three nephews.

“Sharon is always up,” the film’s director, Barbara Kopple, said at the time of its release. “Even when she’s in the room where people are getting chemo, she’s the sunshine.”

During her illness, Ms. Jones and the Dap-Kings earned a Grammy nomination in 2015 for best R&B album with “Give the People What They Want.” (“Why is there not a category for soul?” Ms. Jones told Billboard at the time. “That’s my goal. Put me in the right category.”)

The singer, who also collaborated live and on tour with Lou Reed, Phish, Michael Bublé and David Byrne, publicly announced the return of her cancer in September 2015 at the film’s first showing at the Toronto International Film Festival. Doctors, she said, had found a spot on her liver. “I didn’t want people to come up and congratulate me on beating cancer when it’s back,” she said.

That recurrence was treated with radiation. But in May, while she was on tour, cancer cells were found in her stomach, lymph nodes and lungs. Chemotherapy was required, although Ms. Jones changed the regimen to give her greater freedom of movement.

“I need to dance onstage,” she said. “I don’t want something that makes me bedridden. I want to live my life to the fullest.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/arts/music/sharon-jones-dap-kings-dies.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

kittygrrl

11-19-2016, 06:39 AM

lIjus1mwEMU
:heartbeat:

Kätzchen

11-19-2016, 10:07 AM

I watched a very nice group presentation of Gwen's peers processing shock over her death, a couple days ago. Gwen was just 4 years older than I, but she died from complications associated with her spiraling case of Endometrial cancer. Gwen was 61. She was on the job, fearless in all she did, was not only well informed on most political subjects, but like her peers discussed on the TV show, Gwen always came to the table with an open mind and looked for other ways in which subject matter could be explored via other points of view or by building in-roads toward discovery of anything controversial or the mundane. Truly a very kind and caring peer in the field of communication (Journalism ). Rest in peace. :rrose:

Kobi

11-25-2016, 03:46 AM

https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.M997cb0d4427c89c6830a0b7b77c2db51o1&pid=15.1&P=0&w=300&h=300

Florence Henderson, who went from a Broadway star to become one of America's most beloved television moms in "The Brady Bunch, " has died. She was 82.

On the surface, "The Brady Bunch," with Ms. Henderson as its ever-cheerful matriarch Carol Brady, resembled just another TV sitcom about a family living in suburban America and getting into a different wacky situation each week.

But well after it ended its initial run, in 1974, the show resonated with audiences, and it returned to television in various forms again and again, including "The Brady Bunch Hour" in 1977, "The Brady Brides" in 1981 and "The Bradys" in 1990. It was also seen endlessly in reruns.

Premiering in 1969, it also was among the first shows to introduce to television the blended family.

Early in her career, Henderson appeared in the title role of the musical Fanny, and Rodgers and Hammerstein made her the female lead in a 1952 tour of Oklahoma!, a role she reprised for a Broadway revival in 1954, earning critical plaudits along the way. In a career spanning six decades, Henderson's many credits include playing Maria in a road production of The Sound of Music, Nellie Forbush in a revival of South Pacific, and Mary Morgan in The Girl Who Came to Supper.

A winner of two Gracie Awards, the stage and screen performer's one and only hit on the Billboard charts came in 1970 with the Decca Records release "Conversations," which reached No. 25 on the Adult Contemporary chart.

Kobi

11-26-2016, 02:29 AM

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/c8/4b/89/c84b890a33343a6e1904f87da60e6ca9.jpg

Fidel Castro, Cuba’s revolutionary leader and former president, has died at 90, his brother Raul Castro announced on Friday night.

Castro was president of Cuba from 1976 to 2008, when he stepped down to allow his brother to take power. He was previously prime minister from the Communist revolution in 1959 to 1976.

Kobi

11-26-2016, 08:29 PM

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Ron Glass, the actor best known for his work on “Barney Miller” and “Firefly,” died Friday, November 26. He was 71.

Glass played the intellectual Det. Ron Harris on the sitcom “Barney Miller” from 1975 – 1982. The show was hailed by critics and police officers for its realistic depiction of police work while also delivering consistent laughs. Much of the humor for his character stemmed from his dapper fashion sense and dreams of becoming a writer. He was nominated for an Emmy for supporting actor in 1982.

Years later he was part of another ensemble show, the sci-fi adventure series “Firefly” (2002). Although the series lasted less than one season it developed a cult following and a film, “Serenity” was released in 2005. Glass played Shepherd Derrial Book, a spiritual leader and moral guide to the rest of the crew of the spaceship Serenity. However, there are frequent references to the character’s less wholesome past.

Glass was born July 10, 1945 in Evansville, Indiana. He studied Drama and Literature at the University of Evansville and made his stage debut at the famed Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He then moved to Los Angeles where he made his first television appearance in an episode of “Sanford and Son” in 1972.

After “Barney Miller” Glass was tapped in 1982 to play neat-freak Felix Unger in an updated version of “The Odd Couple” called “The New Odd Couple.” The series featured an African-American cast and often re-used scripts from earlier Tony Randall/Jack Klugman series. It lasted for one season.

Glass worked consistently in film and television and was a frequent guest star on many popular shows. He played Ross Geller’s divorce lawyer, Russell, on “Friends” and made recent appearances on “CSI” and “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Kobi

11-28-2016, 08:10 AM

http://movie-dude.co.uk/Fritz%20Weaver%20%20'Wonder%20Woman'%20(1977).jpg

Fritz Weaver, a stage, film, and television actor whose credits include the TV miniseries "Holocaust," died Saturday. Weaver was 90.

Weaver's earliest acting roles were on TV during the 1950s. He appeared on "The Twilight Zone," both in the original series and the 1985 reboot, and he played characters on "Dr. Kildare," "Mission: Impossible," "Rawhide," and "The Big Valley." Fans of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" may remember Weaver's role in "Tribunal," an episode of the show.

In the 1970s, Weaver acted in the made-for-TV movies "The Legend of Lizzie Borden" and "Holocaust," receiving an Emmy Award nomination for the latter.

Although he was a frequent character actor on TV, Weaver showed theatrical talent as well. He won a Tony Award for the 1970 Broadway play "Child's Play." He received a second Tony nomination for "The Chalk Garden." His theater credits also include "Baker Street," "Love Letters," and "The Crucible."

girlin2une

11-28-2016, 09:11 AM

~ocean

11-28-2016, 11:37 AM

CherylNYC

11-29-2016, 09:17 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/arts/music/pauline-oliveros-composer-who-championed-deep-listening-dies-at-84.html

Pauline Oliveros, Composer Who Championed ‘Deep Listening,’ Dies at 84
By STEVE SMITHNOV. 27, 2016

"Pauline Oliveros, a composer whose life’s work aspired to enhance sensory perception through what she called “deep listening,” died on Thursday at her home in Kingston, N.Y. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by her spouse, Carole Ione Lewis, a writer and performance artist known as Ione.

Early in her career in the 1960s, Ms. Oliveros avidly adopted cutting-edge technologies, working with magnetic tape and prototype synthesizers at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Already active as an improviser, she approached electronic music with a performer’s instincts; to make “Bye Bye Butterfly” (1965), which John Rockwell, The New York Times music critic, called “one of the most beautiful pieces of electronic music to emerge from the 60s,” she manipulated a recording of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly” on a turntable, augmenting its sounds with oscillators and tape delay.

The resulting piece, Ms. Oliveros wrote, “bids farewell not only to the music of the 19th century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex.”

Gender inequality would be a theme that she addressed repeatedly and tenaciously. An essay she wrote for The Times in 1970 started with a provocative question – “Why have there been no ‘great’ women composers?” – and then enumerated reasons, including gender bias and societal expectations of domestic compliancy.

Ms. Oliveros said in a 2012 Times profile that in 1971, after a period of intense introspection prompted by the Vietnam War, she changed creative course, eventually producing “Sonic Meditations,” a set of 25 text-based instructions meant to provoke thoughtful, creative responses.

“Native,” the most commonly cited example, is also the most succinct: “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

Embedded within that poetic instruction and the other meditations was a substantial proposition: a total inclusivity, meant to free music from elite specialists and open it up to everyone, regardless of status, experience, or ability.

“All societies admit the power of music or sound. Attempts to control what is heard in the community are universal,” Ms. Oliveros wrote in a preface to the meditations. “Sonic Meditations are an attempt to return the control of sound to the individual alone, and within groups especially for humanitarian purposes; specifically healing.”

Ms. Oliveros never quit composing, but from the 1970s favored improvisation, adapted elements of ceremonies and rituals encountered in her studies of Native American lore and Eastern religion, and conducted meditative retreats to share her artistic discipline.

One more turning point came in 1988, when Ms. Oliveros and two colleagues — the trombonist, didgeridoo player and composer Stuart Dempster and the vocalist and composer Panaiotis — descended into an extraordinarily resonant disused cistern in Port Townsend, Wash. Their drone-based improvisations were recorded, and selections issued on CD under the title “Deep Listening” in 1989.

Beyond a self-evident pun referring to music played 14 feet underground, “Deep Listening” signified Ms. Oliveros’s emerging aural discipline: a practice that compelled listening not just to the conventional details of a given musical performance — melody, harmony, rhythm, intonation — but also to sounds surrounding that performance, including acoustic space and extra-musical noise.

The process lent its name to a working ensemble, Deep Listening Band, for much of its duration a trio comprising Ms. Oliveros, Mr. Dempster and the keyboardist and composer David Gamper, who died in 2011. Over time, the Deep Listening banner would extend to cover retreats, workshops and lectures in which Ms. Oliveros shared her artistic discipline.

In 2005 Ms. Oliveros rechristened her Pauline Oliveros Foundation the Deep Listening Institute, defining as its mission “creative innovation across boundaries and across abilities, among artists and audience, musicians and nonmusicians, healers and the physically or cognitively challenged, and children of all ages.”

Among other projects, the institute supported the design of software that would allow children with severe physical or cognitive disabilities to improvise music. In 2014, the institute merged with the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

In her final decades Ms. Oliveros formed close bonds with groups like the International Contemporary Ensemble, which brought her work closer to the mainstream canon with performances at Lincoln Center, Miller Theater at Columbia University and elsewhere.

“I’m not dismissive of classical music and the Western canon,” Ms. Oliveros said in 2012. “It’s simply that I can’t be bound by it. I’ve been jumping out of categories all my life.”

Pauline Oliveros was born on May 30, 1932, in Houston to John Oliveros and Edith Gutierrez. Her childhood was accompanied by the sounds of piano lessons taught by her mother and grandmother, bird song and buzzing cicadas, and the curious special effects used on favorite radio serials like “Buck Rogers” and “The Shadow.”

Taking up the accordion as her principal instrument, she also learned to play violin, piano, French horn and tuba.

At 20 Ms. Oliveros moved to California in search of a compositional mentor. She found one in Robert Erickson, a prominent composer, who as the music director of KPFA-FM, a Berkeley radio station, introduced Bay Area listeners to the latest trends in European avant-garde composition.

She explored free improvisation with colleagues like the composer Terry Riley and the bassist and koto player Loren Rush in the late 1950s, and joined Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick at the trailblazing San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded in 1962.

When the center was absorbed by Mills College in 1966, Ms. Oliveros served for a year as its director. In 1967 she joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught until 1981. From 2001 she served as distinguished research professor of music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her honors include a John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

In addition to her spouse, Ms. Oliveros is survived by three stepchildren, Alessandro Bovoso, Nico Bovoso and Antonio Bovoso; a brother, John Oliveros, and eight grandchildren.

Correction: November 30, 2016
An obituary on Monday about the composer Pauline Oliveros misstated part of the name of the organization that presented her with the John Cage Award. It is the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, not the Foundation of Contemporary Arts."

************************************************** ***************************************

Pauline Oliveros was an out lesbian throughout her long musical career. She was a very courageous artist. I heard her work in performance several times here in NYC. I once spied her hanging out at the back of the concert hall and got up the nerve to introduce myself, but I got anxious and promptly beat a hasty retreat after she smilingly gave me her attention. I'm quite sad to read that she passed.

Kobi

11-30-2016, 11:40 AM

http://www.emmytvlegends.org/files/tinkergrant.jpg

Grant Tinker, who brought new polish to the TV world and beloved shows to the audience as both a producer and a network boss, has died. He was 90.

Though he had three tours of duty with NBC, the last as its chairman, Tinker was perhaps best-known as the nurturing hand at MTM Enterprises, the production company he founded in 1970 and ran for a decade.

Nothing less than a creative salon, MTM scored with some TV's most respected and best-loved programs, including "Lou Grant," ''Rhoda," ''The Bob Newhart Show" and, of course, the series that starred his business partner and then-wife, Mary Tyler Moore.

In 1981, Tinker flourished with that low-key approach in a last-ditch effort to save NBC, which was scraping bottom with its earnings, ratings, programs and morale. Five years later, when Tinker left to return to independent production, the network was flush thanks to hits such as "The Cosby Show" and "Hill Street Blues."

Tinker, who had come to NBC as a management trainee in 1949 with legendary founder David Sarnoff still in charge, left the company for the last time at the end of an era, as NBC, along with its parent RCA, was about to be swallowed by General Electric.

In 2005, he won a prestigious Peabody Award honoring his overall career. In receiving his medallion, he called himself "a guy of no distinct or specific skills (who) always needed a lot of help." He also had received the Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Born in 1926, the son of a lumber supplier, Tinker had grown up in Stamford, Connecticut, and graduated from Dartmouth College before his first short stint at NBC.

Then he moved into advertising. At a time when ad agencies were heavily responsible for crafting programs its clients would sponsor, Tinker was a vice president at the Benton & Bowles agency when he helped develop "The Dick Van Dyke Show" for Procter & Gamble. There he met, and fell for, the young actress the whole country was about to fall in love with: Mary Tyler Moore.

Soon after the new CBS sitcom had begun its five-season run in fall 1961, Tinker returned to NBC, this time as vice president of West Coast programming.

Meanwhile, he and Moore became TV's golden couple and, in 1962, they wed.

Tinker stayed at NBC until 1967, after which he had brief stays at Universal and Twentieth Century Fox.

Then, with an itch to run his own shop, Tinker founded MTM and began developing its first series: a comedy to revive the flagging career of his wife.

The pilot for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" rated poorly with test audiences. The heroine was dismissed for being over 30 and unmarried. Neighbor Phyllis (Cloris Leachman) was deemed too annoying, best friend Rhoda (Valerie Harper) "too New Yorky and brassy (read: Jewish)," as Tinker wrote in his 1994 memoir, "Tinker in Television."

But the show, which premiered on CBS in fall 1970, was a critical and popular smash for seven seasons and became the flagship series of a studio whose mewing kitten (parodying the MGM lion) came to signify some of TV's best.

Along the way, MTM became an incubator for some of TV's best writers and producers, many of whom — like Steven Bochco, James L. Brooks and Tom Fontana — continue to excel in TV and films.

By 1981, Tinker's stewardship of MTM had ended (as had his marriage to Moore) when he returned to NBC, where, he recalled in his book, "the company had lost its credibility with every important constituency — affiliates, advertisers, the press, the general public and its own employees."

Under Tinker's regime, NBC enjoyed a remarkable recovery. "The Cosby Show" was an overnight hit, but thanks to Tinker, slow starters such as "Hill Street Blues" (which was from MTM), "Family Ties" and "Cheers" were allowed to find their audience and became hits, too.

Tinker left NBC in 1986, shortly after the announcement of its purchase by G.E.

He formed another independent studio, GTG Entertainment, in partnership with Gannett Newspaper Corporation, but its few series flopped and the company was dissolved.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-grant-tinker-dead-20161130-story.html

Kobi

12-01-2016, 02:49 PM

Michael "Jim" Delligatti, who created McDonald's iconic Big Mac sandwich, died Monday. He was 98.

Delligatti invented the sandwich in 1967 at one of his McDonald’s franchise restaurants in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He decided that his customers would like to eat a larger sandwich. He was right, and the sandwich became hugely popular at all of his 48 locations.

Delligatti said he labored for two years to come up with the right combination for his "special sauce." The burger with two beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame seed bun was added to McDonald’s menu nationwide in 1968. McDonald’s has never changed the recipe for his Big Mac.

-----------
I miss being able to eat Big Macs.

Kobi

12-02-2016, 06:28 PM

https://www.picsofcelebrities.com/celebrity/don-calfa/pictures/featured/don-calfa-pictures.jpg

Don Calfa, a prolific character actor who appeared in “Weekend at Bernie’s,” died Thursday, December 1, 2016, of natural causes in Palm Springs, California, according to The Associated Press. He was 76.

Calfa appeared in dozens of films and TV shows over the course of his more than 40-year career. One of the most successful was the 1989 comedy “Weekend at Bernie’s,” in which he played Paulie the hitman.

Perhaps his most beloved role was as mortician Ernie Kaltenbrunner in the 1985 cult film “The Return of the Living Dead.” The horror-comedy helped to popularize the idea of zombies feeding on brains. Of all the roles he played, that one seemed to resonate the most with audiences and he made appearances at fan conventions for many years.

Born in Brooklyn, New York on December 3, 1939, Calfa dropped out of high school to join a theater workshop and pursue his love of acting. He got his first professional work on the New York stage, eventually appearing on Broadway in “Mating Dance” in 1965.

He made his screen debut for underground director Robert Downey, Sr. in “No More Excuses” (1968). He played small roles in the films of several notable directors, including Martin Scorsese’s “New York, New York” (1977), Blake Edwards’ “10” (1979), and Seven Spielberg’s “1941” (1979).

On television he appeared as a number of different characters over the run of “Barney Miller,” and had short recurring roles on “Doogie Howser, M.D.” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

Kobi

12-03-2016, 09:06 AM

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/4b/4e/f0/4b4ef08318e34299433c64af8aa06f54.jpg

Alice Drummond, a prolific character actress nominated for a Best Featured Actress Tony in 1970 and known for appearances in films like Awakenings, Synecdoche, New York, and Ghostbusters among many others died on November 30 from complications following a fall in her home. She was 88.

Born in 1928 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Drummond was a 1950 graduate of Pembroke College (now Brown University). She began her acting career following a move to New York with her husband, Paul Drummond whom she married in 1951. (The couple divorced in 1976). A regular on Broadway in the 1960s and 1970s, Drummond was nominated for a Tony for her performance in Murray Schisgal’s The Chinese.

Drummond also held a slew of memorable and sometimes iconic character roles on film and television. Among them, in the 1960s she appeared on the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows, in the role of Nurse Jackson; as a New York City librarian in the beginning of the original Ghostbusters; and as a a patient in the 1990 Robin Williams film Awakenings. She was a regular on the CBS soap Where the Heart Is, appearing on the show until it ended its run in 1973, and later appeared briefly on As the World Turns, another CBS soap.

Among many television guest spots, she appeared on Spin City, Boston Legal, Ed, Law & Order, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and Grace Under Fire.

Her most recent film appearance was in the family comedy Furry Vengeance in 2010.

--------------
Wonderful and versatile actress.....and fellow native Rhode Islander.

Gemme

12-03-2016, 09:02 PM

Kobi

12-08-2016, 04:23 PM

http://www.red-dragon-books.com/ebaypics12/JohnGlennEaston20120518-2.jpg

John Glenn, the NASA astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth and went on to serve in the U.S. Senate, has died at the age of 95.

Born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, Glenn was a veteran of both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as a fighter pilot in World War II and the Korean War. After Korea, he became a test pilot, and when the newly formed NASA began recruiting astronauts in 1958, Glenn applied and was selected as one of an elite corps of astronauts: the Mercury Seven, pioneers of U.S. space flight.

On Feb. 20, 1962, Glenn became the third American in space and the first to orbit the Earth when he lifted off in Friendship 7. His observations of the journey fascinated watchers at home, particularly his description of "little specks, brilliant specks, floating around outside the capsule." When he returned from the five-hour spaceflight after touching down in the Atlantic Ocean, he was honored as a national hero, meeting President John F. Kennedy and riding in a New York City ticker-tape parade.

Glenn left NASA in 1964 and retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1965, aiming for a career in politics. His first campaign, running in 1964 for U.S. Senate as a Democrat to represent Ohio, was aborted early when he slipped and fell at home, sustaining a concussion. Glenn chose to withdraw from the race while he recovered. But when he ran again 10 years later, he was elected, and he went on to represent Ohio in the U.S. Senate until his retirement in 1999.

Glenn sat on committees including the Committee on Governmental Affairs and the Special Committee on Aging, and he was the chief author of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978, which President Jimmy Carter signed into law. He sought the Democratic nomination in the 1984 presidential election, polling in second place behind eventual nominee Walter Mondale.

As Glenn's political career drew to a close, he returned to space at age 77 in 1998, serving as a payload specialist on the space shuttle Discovery. Glenn lobbied hard to be included in the mission, citing the important work that could be done to research the effects of spaceflight and weightlessness on older adults.

In the years after his final space flight, Glenn founded the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy at The Ohio State University, now known as the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. He taught at the school as an adjunct professor.

Glenn's many honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Congressional Gold Medal and six Distinguished Flying Crosses. A number of schools and roads are named after him, as well as a U.S. Navy mobile landing platform ship. Before his death, he was the oldest living former U.S. senator.

~ocean

12-13-2016, 10:19 PM

RIP Allen Thicke 69 yrs.old died today playing hockey with his son.

Kobi

12-15-2016, 04:14 PM

http://harpiesbizarre.com/bombay/bombay244.jpg

Fox was born May 11, 1927, in Wales and was the son of two stage actors. His acting career started when he was 18 months old. His acting was interrupted when he served in the Royal Navy during World War II.

Fox appeared in an uncredited role in the 1958 movie “A Night To Remember,” which was about the Titanic tragedy of April 15, 1912. Thirty-nine years later, he played the role of Colonel Gracie in the James Cameron movie “Titanic.”

Fans probably best remember Fox for his appearances on two beloved 1960s sitcoms, “Bewitched” and “Hogan’s Heroes.”

Fox played the womanizing witch doctor Dr. Bombay in 19 episodes of “Bewitched.” He was the bumbling Colonel Crittendon on “Hogan’s Heroes.” Another memorable guest appearance was on “The Andy Griffith Show” as English valet Malcolm Meriweather.

firegal

12-18-2016, 12:28 AM

I must say due to my 30 plus year as a emergency medicine tech/paramedic i must bring up Henry Heimlich died yesterday ....i have seen many lives saved by that simple action.....he actually desserves more news than what he got.

I have been schooled and recertified in his creation for all of my years of training.

Adults and even infants have been given life due to his world wide known action/creation/name of......'HEIMLICH MANUVER"

Gemme

12-18-2016, 05:52 PM

Zsa Zsa Gabor dies at 99 (http://www.aol.com/article/entertainment/2016/12/18/hollywood-legend-zsa-zsa-gabor-dies-at-99/21630437/)

Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose 60-year career of playing herself helped paved the way for today's celebrity-obsessed culture, has died. She was 99.

Publicist Ed Lozzi confirmed to Variety that Gabor died Sunday in her Bel Air mansion. She had been on life support for the last five years, and according to TMZ, which first reported the news, she died of a heart attack.

While Gabor had multiple acting credits, her greatest performance was playing herself: She was famous for her accented English (calling everyone "darling," which came out "dah-link"), eccentric name, offscreen antics (including a 1989 incident in which she slapped a Beverly Hills cop) and one-liners about her jewels, nine marriages and ex-husbands. Despite her glamorous image, her life, especially in later years, was marred by battles between her much-younger husband Frederic Prinz von Anhalt and her daughter.

tantalizingfemme

12-25-2016, 05:08 PM

George Michael died. At 53. There goes part of my teenage years...

[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diYAc7gB-0A[url][/

Gemme

12-25-2016, 05:35 PM

George Michael died. At 53. There goes part of my teenage years...

I just heard.

Wow.

m_9hfHvQSNo

cinnamongrrl

12-25-2016, 07:14 PM

I just heard.

Wow.

m_9hfHvQSNo

Omg. Fucking 2016....are you done yet???

cricket26

12-25-2016, 09:39 PM

bG5N3GC-m20

candy_coated_bitch

12-26-2016, 12:01 AM

I'm heartbroken over this one.

cathexis

12-26-2016, 05:24 AM

_Father Figure_ by George Michael was on my list of top 5 erotic songs. This has been a very sad year!

Prince did 3 of rest of my top 5. Wahhh, etc.

Think 2016 has been bad enough!

Teddybear

12-26-2016, 07:37 AM

RIP......my dad. He wasn't famous except to us. He died suddenly yesterday. We didn't see eye to eye on most everything however that never stopped me from trying to repair that relationship

C0LLETTE

12-26-2016, 07:48 AM

RIP......my dad. He wasn't famous except to us. He died suddenly yesterday. We didn't see eye to eye on most everything however that never stopped me from trying to repair that relationship

Heartfelt condolences to you and your family, Teddy.

What marks his place here is not that he was famous but that he was important and mattered to you, an integral part of this Community. May he rest in peace and may you find comfort in knowing you never gave up.

Jesse

12-26-2016, 10:38 AM

Sincerest condolences, Teddybear. It hurts to lose a parent regardless of the condition of the relationship prior to losing them. My thoughts are with you and your family during this painful time.

ProfPacker

12-27-2016, 12:10 PM

This is so hard...more tragedy for 2016. Sad News

Gemme

12-27-2016, 12:13 PM

This is so hard...more tragedy for 2016. Sad News

I just heard this. I saw her doing press for Rogue One recently. It's surreal.

You are right; 2016 has been a year of loss, in nearly every way possible.

Shystonefem

12-27-2016, 01:40 PM

This is so hard...more tragedy for 2016. Sad News

I was really hoping that she would pull through. I can't wait until 2016 is over.

cinnamongrrl

12-27-2016, 01:51 PM

No.way

She was a childhood icon..I wanted to BE Princess Leia. And I was many times for Halloween...I'm beyond sad...

Gemme

12-27-2016, 10:01 PM

The 80s are keeling over, one by one.

BullDog

12-27-2016, 10:52 PM

The writer Richard Adams - author of Watership Down - died today too. :( At least he lived to 96 years old.

Jedi

12-28-2016, 05:12 AM

This is so hard...more tragedy for 2016. Sad News

I am still numb and without words. She was such a role model as Princess Leia. And then, to the mentally ill community.

Jesse

12-28-2016, 10:08 AM

https://www.spacegrant.org/system/files/Vera.jpg

(CNN)Vera Rubin, a pioneering astrophysicist who proved the existence of dark matter, had a gift for overcoming daunting challenges.

In the 1960s, she became the first woman to observe at the legendary Caltech's Palomar Observatory. But the boys club that ran the place had some bad news for her.
"They told her, 'It's a real problem because we don't have a ladies room,' so she went back to her room and took out a little piece of paper and cut it into a skirt and went to the bathroom door and stuck it on the men's figure on the door.
"She said, 'Look, now you have a ladies room.'"
"She could do anything of that nature, yet she was extremely kind and warm and positively, amazingly so," said Neta Bahcall, an astrophysicist who oversees Princeton's undergraduate astronomy program at 74 years old. "Vera never gave up on anything."
Rubin died on Sunday at the age of 88, the Carnegie Institution of Science said. Her colleagues and those who admired her spirit remember her as someone who revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos by confirming the existence of dark matter, invisible material that comprises more than 90% of the universe...

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/27/us/vera-rubin-dark-matter-astronomy-obit-trnd/

legally_b10nde

12-28-2016, 10:20 AM

PQ6WPo-oW5Q

Fuck you 2016! No more sad news!!!

GeorgiaMa'am

12-28-2016, 08:03 PM

Debbie Reynolds has passed away at the age of 84. She starred in many films, perhaps the most famous of which was "Singin' in the Rain", with Gene Kelly.

More recently, she played Grace's mother in "Will & Grace".

She passed away just one day after the death of her daughter, Carrie Fisher.

RIP, Debbie Reynolds. You were one of the last great legends of the silver screen.

Jesse

12-28-2016, 08:14 PM

WHAT?????! Too many taken from us this way...way too many!

Debbie Reynolds has passed away at the age of 84. She starred in many films, perhaps the most famous of which was "Singin' in the Rain", with Gene Kelly.

More recently, she played Grace's mother in "Will & Grace".

She passed away just one day after the death of her daughter, Carrie Fisher.

RIP, Debbie Reynolds. You were one of the last great legends of the silver screen.

ProfPacker

12-28-2016, 08:18 PM

This makes me sad and scared because my sister isn't doing well and I have a feeling if she should die before my mother, my mother will not be far behind.

Gemme

12-28-2016, 08:52 PM

~ocean

12-28-2016, 11:09 PM

Debbie Reynolds played the part or Grace Adlers mom on Will & Grace ~ she made the expression "Told You So" dance popular lol

Kelt

12-30-2016, 08:13 PM

This has been a year of extraordinary loss in fields as divergent as celebrity, music, acting, science, politics and others.

The one that I will miss the most has been my voice of reason for years. The one person who could possibly ask the right questions and answer mine in this next year as the world unfolds as it will, not to mention my 6pm dinner companion on PBS for years as well.

You will be missed Gwen Ifill. 1955-2016

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn04.cdn.justjared.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fheadlines%2F2016%2F11%2Fgwen-ifill-dead.jpg&f=1

MsTinkerbelly

12-31-2016, 07:49 PM

RIP William Christopher aka Father Mulcahy from *MASH*

He was 84 and died from lung cancer(f)

Jesse

12-31-2016, 08:02 PM

Ricky Harris, comedian and actor died Dec.26, 2016. He was 54. (http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/ricky-harris-dead-everybody-hates-chris-actor-was-54-1.12812897)

http://cdn.newsday.com/polopoly_fs/1.12812896.1482936065!/httpImage/image.jpeg_gen/derivatives/display_600/image.jpeg

Kobi

01-11-2017, 10:52 AM

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a9/e9/91/a9e991e166d4b10f114c34263ffaab01.jpg

Clare Hollingworth, who was the first to break the news that World War II had started, died Tuesday at the age of 105.

Known as the “doyenne of war correspondents,” Hollingworth’s career took her to Palestine, Iraq and Iran, where she was the first to interview 21-year-old shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who was overthrown by revolutionaries in February 1979.

As correspondent for the Economist and the Observer, Hollingworth was in Jerusalem in July 1946 when the King David hotel where she was staying was bombed by Zionist paramilitaries led by future Israeli prime minister Menachim Begin, the only man who’s hand she refused to shake. “I would not shake a hand with so much blood on it,” she told the Guardian in 2004.
From the Middle East, Hollingworth switched to covering the conflict in Vietnam, where she scored a scoop in 1968 that peace talks would shortly begin between Hanoi and Washington.

Another scoop she was ahead of was the defection of British spy Kim Philby, who Hollingworth knew personally. She reported in the Guardian that Philby had fled to Russia, but the story was largely buried by her editors, fearing a libel suit. Philby was later awarded the Order of Lenin and made a KGB general. He died in Moscow in 1988.

In 1972, Hollingworth, then 61, became the Telegraph’s first Beijing correspondent since 1949.

She reported from China during the Cultural Revolution — a decade of violence and civil war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands — rapprochement with the West, and the death of Mao Zedong.

After a stint back in the UK as defense correspondent, she traveled to Hong Kong to cover the colony’s handover to Chinese control in 1997.

She would become an institution there, a frequent sight in the city’s Foreign Correspondent’s Club.

In a statement Tuesday, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club praised Hollingworth’s “remarkable career as a foreign correspondent.”
“We are very sad to hear about Clare’s passing,” said Hong Kong club President Tara Joseph. “She was a tremendous inspiration to us all and a treasured member of our club. We were so pleased that we could celebrate her 105th birthday with her this past year.”
Hollingworth died Tuesday in her flat on Glenealy in Hong Kong’s Central district.
Her passing was announced in a statement by her family published on the Celebrate Clare Hollingworth Facebook group.

“Although Clare made her name by getting the scoop on WWII … that event arguably overshadowed some equally impressive achievements,” they said.
“During the war Clare was all over the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa. She was in Palestine for the final run-up to the foundation of Israel. She covered the civil war in Algeria, and was in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam during their conflicts.”

“Clare pushed the boundaries for women in journalism, and though she has gone, her legacy will certainly live on.”

Kobi

01-15-2017, 09:25 AM

http://www.aveleyman.com/Gallery/ActorsG/tve6379-856-19731121-0.jpg

The good-looking actor may be best remembered by audiences as Hymie the Robot from 1960s TV spy spoof “Get Smart.” Although he only appeared in six episodes over the course of four seasons, the literal-minded automaton was a hit with fans and served as best man at Max’s wedding to Agent 99.

Gautier had a lengthy career with other notable comedic roles, including the Elvis Presley-inspired Conrad Birdie in the original Broadway production of “Bye, Bye Birdie.” He was nominated for a Tony award in 1960.

He later went on to star as Robin Hood in “Get Smart” co-creator Mel Brooks’ 1975 TV series, “When Things Were Rotten.” Although the series was critically acclaimed it was not popular, and was canceled after 13 episodes.

In addition to guest appearances on sitcoms, he was a frequent game show panelist. Beginning in the 1980s he became involved with voice-over work, playing the part of Rodimus Prime in “Transformers” and Serpentor in “G.I. Joe” animated series.

Before and throughout his acting career he was also a successful cartoonist, known for celebrity caricatures, and author of several instructional drawing books.

Kobi

01-20-2017, 01:47 PM

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/97/4d/ab/974dabbb41c8bf0c62303bdc150b39b6.jpg

Miguel Ferrer, the actor best known for starring as Owen Granger on “NCIS: Los Angeles,” died Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017, of cancer. He was 61.

Ferrer launched his career in the early 1980s with small guest shots on such series as Magnum, P.I., CHiPS and Cagney & Lacey and features including Heartbreaker, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Star Trek: III: The Search for Spock. He would go on to focus mostly on TV throughout that decade before landing the Twin Peaks role in 1990.

The Santa Monica native toplined the short-lived Stephen J. Cannell-creator cop drama Broken Badges in 1991 and also starred in Lynch’s 1950s romp On the Air the following year. He appeared in a number of features during the 1990s but continued to star on short-run TV series including Fallen Angels and Al Franken’s LateLine.

In 2001, Ferrer landed a role in the NBC drama Crossing Jordan, starring opposite Hennessy’s Boston medical examiner. The show was among the top 20 in the year-end ratings for 2001-02 and remained on the air until 2007.

After that series wrapped, Ferrer starred opposite Michelle Ryan in Bionic Woman, which lasted nine episodes, co-starred with Ally Walker and Tisha Campbell-Martin in the LAPD drama The Protector in 2011. But his next role would be his biggest.

In 2012, Ferrer joined the cast of CBS’ popular spinoff NCIS: Los Angeles, opposite Chris O’Donnell, LL Cool J, Linda Hunt and others. He came in early on as the assistant director of NCIS and at first was a hard-as-nails unpleasant sort to the team. But during the course of the ensuing seasons, his Owen Granger warmed up to them and became a friend. There has been an ongoing mole-hunt storyline in the current eighth season of NCIS: LA, and Granger was stabbed while in police custody in the most recent episode that aired Sunday.

Ferrer was the oldest of the five children of singer Rosemary Clooney and Academy Award-winning actor Jose Ferrer. He is a first cousin of actor George Clooney. He started his career as a drummer and played the drums on a cover of the Beach Boys' “Don’t Worry Baby” for Keith Moon’s solo album, “Two Sides of the Moon.”

Ferrer will be seen reprising his role as Rosenfield in the upcoming “Twin Peaks” reboot for Showtime. The series has already finished filming and will debut this summer.

~ocean

01-25-2017, 02:02 PM

Mary Tyler Moore just died at the age of 80.

GeorgiaMa'am

01-25-2017, 04:47 PM

Butch Trucks, who co-founded the Allman Brothers Band, has died. He and Gregg and Duane Allman and three other musicians formed the band in Macon, Georgia. Butch was the drummer. He was 69 years old.

cricket26

01-25-2017, 06:02 PM

http://www.notesontheroad.com/images/stories/yings_links/Today_In/marytm.jpg

Kobi

02-15-2017, 12:47 PM

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/4d/1c/ba/4d1cba5df53e97cb5fd2749179dc5fd2.jpg

Mike Connors, the B-movie actor who found stardom on the long-running detective series "Mannix," has died. He was 91.

Connors played the private investigator Joe Mannix on the CBS television series that ran from 1967 to 1975.

Connors was born Krekor Ohanian Aug. 15, 1925, in Fresno, California. He was of Armenian descent. He served during World War II in the U.S. Army Air Forces. After the war, he attended the University of California at Los Angeles on a basketball scholarship. His basketball coach was the legendary UCLA coach John Wooden.

It was during his college basketball career that a director, William Wellman, noticed Connors' strong facial expressions and encouraged him to start an acting career.

After the actor had played a character named Touch Connors on a TV show and in movies during the 1950s, a talent agent suggested that name as his stage name -- so as not to be confused with the actor George O'Hanlon.

Connors' early film credits included "Island in the Sky," which starred John Wayne, and Cecil B. DeMille's blockbuster "The Ten Commandments," in which he played a shepherd alongside Charlton Heston.

During the mid-to-late '50s, Connors turned to television, appearing on such TV series as "Frontier," "City Detective," "State Trooper," and "Maverick."

He later had a starring role on "Tightrope!" from 1959 to 1960, which led to "Mannix" beginning in 1967. After "Mannix," he starred on the short-lived "Today's F.B.I.," which ran from 1981 to 1982.

Connors continued to act on TV as well as in films from the 1985 to 2003 including the films "Too Scared To Scream" (1985), "Fist Fighter" (1989), "Downtown Heat" (1994), "Gideon" (1998) and "The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave" (2000). He reprised his role as Joe Mannix in the 2003 comedy film "Nobody Knows Anything!"

Connors returned to TV in 2007 to appear in an episode of "Two and a Half Men."

Kobi

02-15-2017, 12:51 PM

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/4a/43/cd/4a43cde7ad0cc03e42829c791b77c60f.jpg

Actress Barbara Hale, who won an Emmy Award for playing legal secretary Della Street on the long-running "Perry Mason" television series, has died. She was 94.

Hale signed on with "Perry Mason" when the series began in 1957, playing the secretary to lawyer Perry Mason, played by Raymond Burr. Hale played Della as a quiet, devoted employee, a classic girl Friday. She was capable and professional, and she looked the part, dressed in timeless business wear that avoided following trends, her hair perfectly coifed. While she wasn't out there winning cases herself, it was clear that Della was the backbone that made her boss' success possible.

For fans of the "Perry Mason" series of novels, begun in 1933 by Erle Stanley Gardner, Hale became the unmistakable face of Della. She wasn't the first actress to play the secretary – five others portrayed Della in early movie adaptations – but Hale did it so well, and for so long, that she became the standard. Her portrayal won her an Emmy Award for best supporting actress in a dramatic series in 1959, as well as another nomination in 1961. When the series was canceled in 1966, she remained in fans' minds as the epitome of Della, and when it was revived for a series of 30 "Perry Mason" TV movies beginning in 1985, she was back.

Those movies also starred Burr as Mason – until his 1993 death. Four more movies were made with other lawyers standing in for Mason, thanks in part to Hale's reassuring continuity, with the final installment coming in 1995. Hale and Burr worked together for decades, and the two became good friends during their long time as colleagues. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times a few years after Burr's death, Hale said, "If anybody had a hero, I did. And Raymond was the man."

Though Hale is remembered most frequently as Della, she had a number of other notable roles on the big screen as well as on television. An early favorite was "Higher and Higher" (1943), Frank Sinatra's film debut. Hale played a young debutante, the love interest of Sinatra's character, and the two sang together. Of the chance to share vocals with Ol' Blue Eyes, Hale later told the Los Angeles Times, "Isn't that fun? I never had been so scared in my life, but he's been a very dear friend ever since."

Hale's first starring role was in 1946's "Lady Luck" opposite Robert Young. She'd go on to play opposite other top leading men of the day, including James Stewart in "The Jackpot" (1951), Rock Hudson in "Seminole" (1953), and Charlton Heston in "The Far Horizons" (1955). After a break from the big screen during the years when she starred on "Perry Mason," Hale returned for a few films in later years, including a supporting role in 1970's "Airport."

On television, Hale guest-starred on a number of shows during the years between the main "Perry Mason" series and the movie revivals, including "Lassie," "Adam-12," "Marcus Welby, M.D.," and "The Greatest American Hero." Her final television appearance came after a hiatus of five years with a 2000 turn on an episode of "Biography" focusing on Burr.

Hale has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and she won a 2001 Golden Boot Award for her memorable presence in a number of movie Westerns during her pre-"Perry Mason" career.

Kobi

02-15-2017, 12:58 PM

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John Hurt, the acclaimed English character actor who starred in “The Elephant Man,” has died. He was 77.

Hurt, whose prolific career stretched for six decades across stage, film, and television, was known for playing offbeat characters whose stories were tinged with darkness. He was almost unrecognizable under prosthetic makeup in his Academy Award-nominated performance as John Merrick, the deformed 19th-century Englishman whose life story was depicted in “The Elephant Man” (1980).

Other notable roles included Winston Smith, protagonist of the dystopian classic “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1984); Kane, the ill-fated spacefarer who was host to the titular parasite in “Alien” (1979); the insane Roman emperor Caligula in the BBC miniseries "I, Claudius" (1976); a secret incarnation of the face-changing, time-traveling Doctor on the 50th anniversary episode of "Doctor Who" (2013); and Mr. Ollivander, the magic wand salesman who appeared in three of the "Harry Potter" films (2001 - 2011).

He was knighted in 2015 for his services to drama.

Kobi

02-15-2017, 01:02 PM

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"Professor" Irwin Corey, the classic comedian billed as the World's Foremost Authority, died Monday, Feb. 6, 2017. He was 102.

The centenarian funnyman was known for a decidedly weird routine. Dressed in the garb of an absent-minded professor – wild hair, a shabby suit, and sneakers – he'd wander onstage distractedly. He'd consult his notes, maybe laugh at something he saw there, pocket the notes, consult them again … finally, the first word of his routine, always the same: "However …" What followed was a masterpiece of doublespeak, improvised by Corey and thoroughly confusing and amusing his audience.

One oft-quoted snippet of a Corey routine started: "However ... we all know that protocol takes precedence over procedures. This Paul Lindsey point of order based on the state of inertia of developing a centrifugal force issued as a catalyst rather than as a catalytic agent, and hastens a change reaction and remains an indigenous brier to its inception. This is a focal point used as a tangent so the bile is excreted through the panaceas."

Corey sprinkled more recognizable aphorisms among the 50-cent words, and these quotable quotes were so perfect that some have entered the lexicon as clichéd phrases, with few who repeat them knowing who coined them. Here's how Corey turned a phrase:

"Wherever you go, there you are."

"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going."

"You can get further with a kind word and a gun that you do with just a kind word."

The distinctive routine came from the brain of a man who had an unconventional childhood and young adulthood. Born in Brooklyn July 29, 1914, Corey was one of six siblings who grew up in an orphanage despite not being orphans. Abandoned by her husband, Corey's mother struggled to support her children while working and also attempting to recover from tuberculosis. The Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum was a solution born out of desperation – she could work enough to send them money for the children's care while also recuperating from her illness.

It was Corey's home until he was 13, and it was where he started his long comedy career, performing to amuse the other children. But then the young teen joined the tide moving west, riding the rails to California in search of work. He returned to New York as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, working his way across the country and, in his spare time, taking up boxing and becoming a featherweight champion.

Back east, Corey began performing as a comedian, working the Catskills circuit as well as New York City clubs. As his career burgeoned, World War II interrupted. Corey was determined not to serve, first seeking 4F status and then, when he was drafted nevertheless, convincing his superiors he was a homosexual and being discharged after six months.

Postwar, Corey honed his Professor persona and ramped up his path to fame, appearing on many of the hottest shows of TV's early days. He was a regular guest of talk show hosts including Steve Allen, Johnny Carson, and Ed Sullivan. Through his surreal stand-up routine, he influenced many of the next generation of comics as they got their start: Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, and George Carlin were just a few of the stand-ups who looked up to him. He occasionally acted, too, as when he guest-starred on an episode of "The Phil Silvers Show" and, later, in movies such as "How To Commit Marriage" (1969) and "Car Wash" (1976).

Alongside his stage and screen career came a number of odd stunts, not least of which was his 1960 bid for the presidency of the United States as part of Hugh Hefner's "Playboy" ticket. His campaign slogans included, "Vote for Irwin and get on the dole" and, "Corey will run for any party, with a bottle in his hand."

In 1974, attendees of the National Book Award ceremony were perplexed as Corey arrived onstage to accept the award on behalf of its actual winner, Thomas Pynchon, author of "Gravity's Rainbow." His acceptance speech was much like one of his "professorial" comedy routines. Just as the audience was at its most bewildered, a streaker ran across the stage – not associated with Pynchon or Corey in any way; he was just a random sign of the times. Corey knew the more serious contingent of the literary world was annoyed by his appearance, but he didn't care: As he told interviewer Jim Knipfel, "I got paid $500 for it, and I had a good time."

In his 80s and 90s, Corey undertook an unusual mission. Walking the streets of New York City, he sold newspapers to drivers for a dollar or a handful of change. According to The New York Times, those papers were often free ones that he took from public newspaper boxes. Unkempt and repeating his mantra – "Help a guy out?" – Corey appeared like any other panhandler, though some recognized the comedian. What they didn't know was that he donated all his proceeds from these escapades to a charity that provides medical supplies for children in Cuba. He even had the autographed photo of Cuban President Fidel Castro on his apartment wall to prove it.

It was one of many ways in which Corey was politically and socially conscious. A far-left liberal, he loved relating his favorite example of his radicalism: "When I tried to join the Communist Party, they called me an anarchist," as he told The New York Times. He was blacklisted in Hollywood for his support of the party, a consequence that continued to affect his career for years after the end of the McCarthy era. But he remained active with his leftist views, supporting causes including the Mumia Abu-Jamal defense fund and Palestinian relief efforts.

Of his political activism, Corey told interviewer Kliph Nesteroff, "I was never aware that I was a political commentator. It just happens. You just do it. You breathe, but you're not conscious of breathing. When I did my act, I wasn't conscious that it was political."

Kobi

02-15-2017, 01:08 PM

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Al Jarreau, the legendary jazz singer who won seven Grammy awards, has died. He was 76.

Jarreau was born March 12, 1940, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His father was a minister, and he started singing in church as a young boy. Jarreau told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel it was at Lincoln High School where "my love of music and singing really deepened. I began to have ideas of taking this as far as it could go. And I kept dreaming that dream and nourishing that dream."

After moving to San Francisco, he made a name for himself singing with acoustic guitarist Julio Martinez.

Jarreau moved on to Los Angeles and sang at clubs such as the Troubador. He appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" and sang on “Saturday Night Live” during the show's inaugural season. Jarreau became known for his rhythmic scat singing.

He was signed to Warner Brothers Records and released his debut record titled “We Got By,” which led to international fame.

His most successful album, “Breakin’ Away,” came out in 1981 and featured his biggest song, “We’re in This Love Together,” a smooth jazz-pop track. Jarreau was also a vocalist on the all-star 1985 track, "We Are the World."

Jarreau released 20 albums during his career and is the only Grammy-winning singer to win in the jazz, pop, and rhythm and blues categories.

*Anya*

02-26-2017, 11:17 AM

BILL PAXTON DEAD AT 61

2/26/2017 7:18 AM PST

We're told Paxton underwent heart surgery and had complications post-op and suffered a fatal stroke.

Bill Paxton has died ... TMZ has learned.

We're told the actor died suddenly Saturday due to complications from surgery.
Paxton had a string of hits, including "Twister," "Titanic" and "Aliens." He won an Emmy for "Hatfields and McCoys."

He was on a CBS series, "Training Day" at the time of his death. The 61-year-old actor had 2 children and was married to Louise Newbury for 30 years.

The family says, "It is with heavy hearts we share the news that Bill Paxton has passed away due to complications from surgery." The family accurately describes his "illustrious career spanning four decades as a beloved and prolific actor and flimmaker." The family adds, "Bill's passion for the arts was felt by all who knew him, and his warmth and tireless energy were undeniable.

http://www.tmz.com/2017/02/26/bill-paxton-dead-dies/

*Anya*

02-26-2017, 11:19 AM

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Kobi

02-27-2017, 03:24 PM

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Known to many as the "queen of carbon science" — for her foundational work uncovering the electrical properties of carbon and other semi-metals — Mildred Dresselhaus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), died on Monday, February 20, at the age of 86 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dresselhaus was President of APS in 1984, and was involved in many research areas in the physics community. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2012, the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize in 2008, the National Medal of Science in 1990, and numerous other scientific prizes, Dresselhaus was celebrated for her lifelong commitment to researching the electronic properties of two-dimensional materials. Her work included the exploration of ‘buckyballs’ — spherical, hollow molecules composed of carbon atoms — and graphene. Some of her best-known research focused on uncovering the electric properties of carbon nanotubes and enhancing thermoelectric properties of nanowires.

Beyond her scientific research, Dresselhaus was a champion of women in science and an active leader to her colleagues. She became the first woman at MIT to attain the rank of full, tenured professor, and was the first woman to win the National Medal of Science in Engineering. These primary achievements pushed her to lead by example for women following in her footsteps.

In 1971, Dresselhaus and a colleague organized the first Women’s Forum at MIT, and she later accepted a Carnegie Foundation grant to continue encouraging female students in the traditionally male-dominated field of physics research. Dresselhaus was also appointed the Abby Rockefeller Mauze chair, an Institute-wide chair, endowed in support of the scholarship of women in science and engineering. She was later awarded the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science in 2007, and the American Chemical Society Award for Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences in 2010.

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

In celebration of Millie Dresselhaus:

Last week, the world lost a pioneer. Millie Dresselhaus, known as the "Queen of Carbon" for her trailblazing research into the element, was the first woman to win the National Medal Of Science in Engineering, and the first woman to attain the rank of tenured MIT professor. Millie's unmatched enthusiasm, mentoring spirit, and commitment to promoting the roles of women in science and engineering are things worth celebrating today and everyday.

We at General Electric were so inspired by Millie's achievements in science and gender equality, that we created a goal for our company to employ 20,000 women in tech roles by 2020. Thank you Millie for inspiring us all.

From your friends at GE....via a full page ad in today's Boston Globe.

Soft*Silver

02-27-2017, 03:32 PM

Judge Wapner of the people's court died yesterday

Jesse

02-28-2017, 11:40 AM

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I just wrote a post about trans woman Keke Collier being killed in Chicago earlier this week, and now I'm having to announce that we have lost another trans sister in Chyna Gibson

New Orleans Police responded to a call Saturday night around 8:26 PM CST in the 4300 block of Downman Road and found the body of the 31 year old Gibson lying in the parking lot of the Bella Plaza shopping center in New Orleans East between two vehicles in front of a clothing store.

And as usual, at least one NOLA news station, WWL-TV misgendered her.

She had been shot multiple times and was pronounced dead on the scene. Gibson is now the fifth US trans woman murdered in 2017, all women of color...
http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2017/02/rest-in-power-and-peace-chyna-gibson.html

Kobi

03-12-2017, 04:45 AM

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Joni Sledge, a founding member of the vocal group Sister Sledge, was found dead Friday in her home in Phoenix.

The group of sisters recorded the dance anthem "We Are Family" in 1979. Other hits were "He's the Greatest Dancer" and "My Guy."

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Kobi

03-18-2017, 10:05 PM

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Born Oct. 18, 1926, Berry wrote and performed some of the great classics of the early rock 'n' roll era – "Johnny B. Goode," "Maybellene," "Roll Over Beethoven," "Rock and Roll Music," "Sweet Little Sixteen" and many more.

In 1953, he began performing with Johnnie Johnson, who would become Berry's frequent collaborator. Berry got a kick out of experimenting with combining the blues he regularly played with the country music he heard white audiences requesting. The combination caught on, and more and more people began attending his concerts. He caught the attention of famed bluesman Muddy Waters, who sent him to audition for Chess Records. Founder Leonard Chess liked what he heard, recorded and released "Maybellene," and a legend was born.

Berry churned out hits throughout the 1950s, and after a prison stint in the early 1960s, he was back on the charts with hot singles including "No Particular Place To Go," "Nadine" and "You Never Can Tell." He topped the R&B chart over and over, and while he frequently had songs in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, only one of his singles ever saw the No. 1 spot there – the novelty song "My Ding-a-Ling." He continued to play and tour well into his 80s.

Berry's influence is seen all over rock 'n' roll, and his music is widely considered some of the greatest rock music ever recorded. He was the very first inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His "Johnny B. Goode" ranked No 1 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time," and it's just one of many of his songs to find a place on such lists. John Lennon notably said of Berry, "If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry.'"

rVT65M4mRnM

Kobi

03-22-2017, 08:07 AM

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Chuck Barris, the "dangerous mind" behind game shows including "The Newlywed Game" and "The Gong Show," died Tuesday, March 21, 2017. He was 87.

Barris was the King of Schlock TV, the creator of a genre of titillating TV shows that some say is the direct ancestor of today's tell-all reality shows. That's a judgment usually accompanied by hand-wringing. Barris' TV creations were lambasted as the lowest-common-denominator viewing of the 1960s and '70s, bringing down the country's collective IQ by several points. Barris would argue, however, that his shows were harmless and positive: They were fun, simple, and eminently watchable.

It all started with 1965's "The Dating Game." Barris' first game show, created after a stint of working backstage for Dick Clark on "American Bandstand," "The Dating Game" took a simple concept and turned it into a long-running TV institution. Created by Barris but hosted by a variety of others, most notably Jim Lange in the show's initial run, it saw three bachelors vying for the hand of one bachelorette. She decided among them by asking them questions about how they would woo her on a date. Once she chose a winner, they'd be sent on a destination date in a faraway city, paid for by the show. The twist: The bachelorette couldn't see the bachelors while she questioned them and had to make her decision based on their answers and voices alone.

The twist jump-started Barris' career and the careers of several others as well. One of the legacies of "The Dating Game" was the leg up it gave to a number of young actors and actresses who appeared as contestants before they became famous. They include John Ritter, Farrah Fawcett, and Casey Kasem.

The success of "The Dating Game" opened the door for other romance-based game shows in a trend that culminated in more recent ratings-grabbers such as "The Bachelor" and "Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire?" For Barris, the obvious next step after setting up couples on dates was to feature young marrieds, in his next hit game show: "The Newlywed Game," in 1966. Like "The Dating Game," it was hosted by others, with Bob Eubanks taking the reins for years. Its premise: Ask a newly married couple questions about their lives together and see just how similar – or uproariously different – their answers would be.

Some questions had the contestants remembering romantic moments, like, "Where was your first kiss?" Others tested a husband's memory: "What did your wife wear on your first date?" Risque answers were often encouraged, especially by the questions about "making whoopee," the show's frequently used euphemism. Barris loved the way the show's simple premise brought never-ending hilarity: "In my opinion, the best game-show format ever was 'The Newlywed Game' because it's so simple: It's just four couples, eight questions, and a refrigerator or washing machine. That's it. You're done, and it worked."

Indeed, it did work: "The Newlywed Game" became one of the longest-running game shows in TV history, with an original run of eight and one-half years, followed quickly by a syndicated run and a number of revivals in the decades that followed. It was still popular when, in 1976, Barris took on hosting duties in his next – and most notoriously strange – TV creation.

"The Gong Show" was a talent show gone off the rails, a deliberately awful collection of the truly talented, the sincere-but-dreadful, and the just plain strange. Originally slated as host, John Barbour was yanked before the first episode when he realized the show would be a parody rather than a genuine talent show and tried to change Barris' mind about the angle. Barris didn't want to change his mind, so he stepped in as host at the last minute, and his quirky persona proved the perfect final touch needed to elevate "The Gong Show" to legendary status.

On "The Gong Show," contestants sang, danced, and otherwise tried to entertain, usually with a bizarre twist: Two competent singers squeezed into one outfit of clothes; a dentist played "The Stars and Stripes Forever" on his drill; an Elvis impersonator sang "Hound Dog" in a droning monotone. And those were the fairly normal acts. Things often got weird on "The Gong Show," encouraged by Barris' enthusiastic introductions. If an act were bad, the celebrity judges – a rotating panel of three that included 1970s notables like Jamie Farr, Phyllis Diller, and Jaye P. Morgan – would rush to hit a gong, signaling the act's end. If it was good, or at least goofy enough to appeal to the judges, it didn't get gonged, and the contestant might be the day's winner of a check for $516.32 (the going day rate for Screen Actors Guild members at the time) and a trophy.

Pulling it all together was Barris, whose discomfort with being onstage manifested in a series of tics that audiences grew to love – he'd punctuate his sentences with claps, point at the camera, dance while watching an act perform. He pushed the envelope with risque acts, which contributed to the show's cancellation in 1978 (though it ran in syndication for another two years and was revived later for a reboot). After the program's cancellation, Barris tried to keep up the show's momentum with "The Gong Show Movie" in 1980, but reviews were dismal; it quickly dropped out of sight.

Other shows created by Barris include 1973's "The New Treasure Hunt," 1967's "How's Your Mother-in-Law?", and, in 1979, the contentious "Three's a Crowd," which pitted a man's wife against his secretary to see who could answer more questions about his life, preferences, and proclivities. The latter show, which was seen as deeply problematic, was denounced by major groups including United Auto Workers and the National Organization for Women. A hostile backlash followed, with "Three's a Crowd" being pulled from the air after just a few months and the rest of Barris' creations also suffering in its wake. The ratings of his programs plummeted, including "The Gong Show," and his various shows still in syndication came to abrupt ends.

Barris rallied, trying out new show concepts including "Camouflage" in 1980 and a new version of "Treasure Hunt" the following year. Then, in 1984, Barris once again demonstrated his ability to surprise the world with his eccentricity when he published the autobiography "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." It included the legendary claim that he was an assassin for the CIA throughout the 1960s and '70s. He asserted that when he chaperoned "Dating Game" contestants on their destination dates, sometimes in foreign – and hostile – countries, he would sometimes slip off to carry out his orders from higher-ups at the CIA, assassinating a target before accompanying the happy couple back home.

Barris insisted on the truth of the claim his whole life, though a CIA spokesman said that his assertion was "ridiculous. It's absolutely not true." But it was fascinating enough for screenwriter Charlie Kaufman to turn it into a feature film, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell as Barris. The film added to the mythology of Barris' life by including salacious details that were, themselves, made up. Barris told Time magazine, "(Kaufman) wrote stuff out of nowhere. My mother never dressed me like a girl. I was never on drugs. The part about my father being a serial killer? That's Charlie. He writes such good stuff."

"Dangerous Mind" was one of several books Barris wrote, including two additional memoirs and novels including 1973's "You and Me, Babe" and 2009's "Who Killed Art Deco?" Barris also had a career in music, primarily as a songwriter, though he also recorded. His greatest songwriting success was the 1962 hit "Palisades Park," which Freddy Cannon recorded. The tune reached No. 3 on the Billboard chart.

Jesse

03-31-2017, 07:05 PM

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Gilbert Baker, the artist and LGBT civil-rights activist who designed the Rainbow Flag, passed away Friday at the age of 65. According to the Bay Area Reporter, Baker’s cause of death has not been disclosed and he passed away in New York. Baker’s long-time friend and fellow gay-rights activist Cleve Jones confirmed the news, posting on Twitter, “My dearest friend in the world is gone. Gilbert Baker gave the world the Rainbow Flag; he gave me forty years of love and friendship.” Baker designed the iconic symbol of the gay pride movement in 1978.

Gemme

04-06-2017, 01:18 PM

Don Rickles (https://www.aol.com/article/entertainment/2017/04/06/legendary-comedian-don-rickles-dies-at-90/22028997/), comedian, dies at age 90.

Don Rickles, one of the most influential comedians in history, has died at the age of 90.

Rickles passed away from kidney failure on Thursday morning in his Los Angeles home, his longtime publicist confirmed. He would have turned 91 on May 8.

His wife of 52 years, Barbara, was by his side at the time of his death.

The icon, whose career spanned more than seven decades, is known as the best "insult comic" ever. His first big break came in 1965 when he appeared on "The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson." Soon after, he reached headliner status in Las Vegas, Reno and Lake Tahoe.

He was also a regular on Dean Martin's "Celebrity Roast," which perfectly showcased his no-mercy stand-up comedy style that earned him the nickname "The Merchant of Venom." The comedian's roast of then-president Ronald Reagan (which you can watch here) during his inaugural ball in 1985 is one of Rickles' most noteworthy performances.

Don found the most success in his TV guest appearances throughout the years, appearing in a variety of shows like "The Lucy Show," "Get Smart" and "Hot In Cleveland." He also had his own show, "The Don Rickles Show," which only lasted one season in 1972.

Later in his career, he became the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the "Toy Story" films. According to IMDb, he was set to reprise his role in "Toy Story 4," which is expected to premiere in 2019.

The industry icon has remained out of the spotlight in recent years.

The day after Johnny Carson's death in 2005, Don appeared with Bob Newhart, whom he considered his best friend, on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" to honor the longtime host. In 2014, the funnyman was honored by the likes of David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld and Jon Stewart in the Spike TV special "One Night Only: An All-Star Comedy Tribute to Don Rickles."

He also penned a memoir, "Rickles' Book," that was published in 2007. A documentary about his career, "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project," debuted on HBO later that year -- his performance in the special earned him an Emmy for individual performance in a variety or music program.

The legend was born in Manhattan in 1926 and studied acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City after serving in the Navy during World War II.

RockOn

04-06-2017, 04:11 PM

I am very sorry Rickles died. Thanks for posting, Gemme.

I have to say I never cared for Don Rickles' brand of humor. "Sacrifice one person so the whole group gets a laugh." Mean-spirited type humor. I have seen people sincerely hurt or humiliated by him. Just not funny to me! (only my opinion)

Anyway, like I said, I hate to hear of anyone losing their life.

Thanks, again! :)

Jesse

04-06-2017, 06:14 PM

He did a great voice for Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story! I wonder who will replace him in that roll?

Kobi

04-19-2017, 08:37 AM

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Former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez was found dead in his prison cell Wednesday morning in an apparent suicide, Massachusetts corrections officials said.

The 27-year-old was serving a life sentence for murder. Just last week he was acquitted in a double homicide case.

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Man had so much talent and potential. Thought he would be greater than Gronk. Hope he finds the peace in death that eluded him in life.

MsTinkerbelly

04-20-2017, 11:15 PM

Cuba Gooding Sr. , age 72, Soul Singer

Found slumped over in his car in Woodland Hills California

"Everybody plays the fool"

RIP

Kobi

04-22-2017, 07:59 PM

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Erin Moran, best known as Ron Howard’s kid sister in the classic sitcom “Happy Days,” has died. She was 56.

Moran was just six years old when she was cast in the TV series “Daktari,” where her most unusually costars were a chimp named Judy and Clarence the Lion. During that three-season run, she made her film debut in the Debbie Reynolds comedy “How Sweet It is!” As a child, Moran also appeared in Melvin Van Peebles’ “Watermelon Man” and made guest appearances in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” “My Three Sons,” “Family Affair” and “Gunsmoke.”

But Moran was best known for playing Ron Howard’s feisty kid sister, Joanie Cunningham, on the sitcom “Happy Days” from the time she was 12 until 22 (1974-1984). Her teaming with Scott Baio proved to be so popular that they spun off into their own short-lived series, “Joanie Loves Chachi.”

She later went on to make appearance on “The Love Boat,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Diagnosis: Murder” and “Arrested Development.” In 2008, she was a contestant on VH1’s “Celebrity Fit Club.”

*Anya*

04-26-2017, 09:05 AM

Scott Baio blames 'fake news' for his harsh comments about former co-star Erin Moran's death

ROB MORAN

Last updated 13:26, April 26 2017

Actor Scott Baio has been forced to backtrack from harsh comments he made about his former Happy Days co-star Erin Moran's death following criticism from fans.

While appearing on The Bernie and Sid Show on Tuesday morning, the actor appeared to blame Moran for her own untimely passing, saying, "you do drugs or drink, you're gonna die."

"I'm sorry if that's cold, but God gave you a brain, gave you the will to live and thrive and you've gotta take care of yourself," he said on the show.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/91929383/scott-baio-blames-fake-news-for-his-harsh-comments-about-former-costar-erin-morans-death

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Scott Baio regrets blaming Erin Moran’s death on drugs, alcohol

BY KATE FELDMAN

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Tuesday, April 25, 2017, 5:46 AM

“Happy Days” star Scott Baio regrets speaking out on Erin Moran’s deathas drug-related before learning it was likely complications from stage four cancer.

The 56-year-old actor reportedly went to bed reading that Moran died of a possible heroin overdose and he went on “The Bernie & Sid Show” the next morning under that impression, according to TMZ.

Baio added that he would have never discussed her past drug and alcohol abuse if he had known about the cancer diagnosis.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/scott-baio-blames-erin-moran-death-drugs-alcohol-article-1.3096540

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

How did Erin Moran die? Stage 4 cancer likely killed ‘Joni’ Happy Days star, not drug overdose

By AP/Wire

Erin Moran, the former child star who played Joanie Cunningham in the sitcoms “Happy Days” and “Joanie Loves Chachi,” has died at the age of 56 and her cause of death was likely stage 4 cancer, authorities said today.

“A joint investigation into Mrs. Moran’s death was conducted by the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department and the Harrison County Coroner’s Office. A subsequent autopsy revealed that Mrs. Moran likely succumbed to complications of stage 4 cancer,” Sheriff Rod Seelye said in a statement.

Toxicology results are pending but no illegal narcotics were discovered at Moran’s Indiana residence, the statement revealed.

http://www.oxfordeagle.com/2017/04/24/how-did-erin-moran-die-stage-4-cancer-likely-killed-joni-happy-days-star-not-drug-overdose/

Kobi

04-26-2017, 12:48 PM

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Director Jonathan Demme, who won an Academy Award for “The Silence of the Lambs,” has died. He was 73.

In a 46-year career in Hollywood, Demme is best known for directing 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs” and 1993’s “Philadelphia.” His most recent feature was 2015’s “Ricki and the Flash,” which starred Meryl Streep as an aging rock star.

After starting out directing television commercials, Demme’s film career began in the early 1970’s, writing and directing for B-movie producer Roger Corman. His earliest film credit is as a screenwriter on 1971’s biker movie “Angels Hard as They Come,” and 1974’s “Caged Heat,” written by Demme to satisfy Corman’s desire to fill the “women in prison” niche of exploitation films, was Demme’s directorial debut.

1980’s “Melvin and Howard” was Demme’s first film to win critical acclaim. “Melvin and Howard” is a fictionalized account of a true story, an encounter between reclusive movie mogul Howard Hughes (played by Jason Robards) and a Utah gas station attendant, Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat). The film also starred Mary Steenburgen, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance.

“Melvin and Howard,” widely praised by critics including Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael and nominated for a number of Academy Awards and Golden Globes, marked the beginning of a string of successful films for Demme, including 1984’s Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn vehicle “Swing Shift,” 1986’s “Something Wild,” starring Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels, and the 1988 comedy “Married to the Mob,” which featured Michelle Pfeiffer as a mobster’s wife attempting to detach herself from the mafia.

At the same time, Demme was also directing a number of successful documentaries, including the 1984 Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense,” praised by critic Pauline Kael as “close to perfection;” and the Spalding Gray monologue “Swimming to Cambodia” (1987).

But it was 1991’s thriller “The Silence of the Lambs” and 1993’s “Philadelphia” that cemented Demme’s place in the pantheon of great film directors. “The Silence of the Lambs,” based on a novel of the same name by Thomas Harris, starred Jodie Foster as FBI agent Clarice Starling, who must consult with imprisoned serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) to track down another killer. The film was a huge critical and popular success, one only three films to win all five major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay.

Demme followed up “The Silence of the Lambs” with the 1993 drama “Philadelphia,” starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. “Philadelphia,” one of the first major movies to deal in depth with the topics of HIV/AIDS and homophobia, is loosely based on a 1987 lawsuit alleging wrongful dismissal because of AIDS discrimination. Roger Ebert called the film “a ground-breaker like ‘Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,’” and Tom Hanks won the Best Actor Academy Award and Golden Globe for his performance.

Demme’s films since “Philadelphia” include 1998’s “Beloved,” a thriller based on a Toni Morrison novel; a 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” 2007’s “Man from Plains,” a documentary about former U.S. President Jimmy Carter; and 2008’s “Rachel Getting Married,” widely seen as a return to successful return to the style of Demme’s early 1980s films.

Kobi

05-10-2017, 05:19 PM

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Character actor Michael Parks, 77, who played memorable roles in films by directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith has died.

Parks’ acting career began with small roles on 1960s television series, and from 1969 to 1970, he starred on NBC’s “Then Came Bronson” as Jim Bronson, a wanderer who motorcycles around the country. Parks also sang the show’s theme song, "Long Lonesome Highway," which became a pop and country hit. The song’s popularity led to a series of MGM albums in the following years.

Though he continued acting through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, notably playing Canadian drug smuggler Jean Renault in five episodes on David Lynch’s cult classic ABC series “Twin Peaks” in 1990, Parks’ career experienced a resurgence around the turn of the century. Coming to the attention of director Quentin Tarantino, Parks played Texas Ranger Earl McGraw in the Tarantino-written “From Dusk Till Dawn” and the same character again in both of Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movies as well as in the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration “Grindhouse.” He also appeared in Tarantino’s acclaimed 2012 drama, “Django Unchained.” The same year, he also played comic book author Jack Kirby in the best picture Oscar-winning “Argo.”

Parks played multiple roles in several movies, including “Kill Bill Vol. I” and Kevin Smith’s “Tusk.” Smith, who called Parks “hands-down, the most incredible thespian I ever had the pleasure to watch perform,” also directed him in the 2011 thriller “Red State.”

PYKQ3fwNb0c

Kobi

05-15-2017, 06:34 AM

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Powers Boothe, a character actor on screens large and small had died. He was 68.

The Emmy Award-winning Boothe excelled in playing evil characters, including his role on the hit TV show "Deadwood." His film credits include "Sin City," "Tombstone," and "The Avengers."

He won his Emmy in 1980 for playing the eponymous crazed cult leader in the television movie "Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones."

Boothe was featured on the HBO series "Deadwood," playing the brothel owner Cy Tolliver. He also had a memorable role as the smarmy Sen. Roark in 2005's "Sin City" and the 2014 sequel "Sin City: A Dame To Kill For."

Fans of "24" remember his turn as acting President Noah Daniels on "24: Redemption."

Kobi

05-17-2017, 05:50 PM

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Born May 13, 1936, O'Dell was part of a group of young rock 'n' rollers making waves in the Phoenix music scene during the mid-1950s. She was the only woman in that group, which included Duane Eddy, Sanford Clark and producer/songwriter Lee Hazlewood.

“She stood her place with all the guys. She was not looked at as a female player. She was looked at as a player, period,” said Joe Chambers, founder of the Musicians Hall of Fame. “She was just a joy to be around.”

In 1956, she played rhythm guitar on Clark's hit "The Fool," a song written and produced by Hazlewood.

Beginning in 1957, O'Dell played on many Duane Eddy's most memorable recordings, including twangy gems "Rebel Rouser," "Ramrod" and his take on the "Peter Gunn" theme. The pair, who had known each other since they were teenage guitarists in Phoenix, were lifelong friends and sidekicks. Eddy fondly called her "the first side-chick of rock 'n' roll."

In 2014, O'Dell, Barbara Mandrell and Velma Smith were the first three women inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame. Other members of the Class of 2014 included Buddy Guy and Peter Frampton, among others. She called that moment her "Cinderella night," said Chambers. “Corki didn’t miss a beat. She was just tearing it up.”

NavyButch

05-18-2017, 04:34 AM

Chris Cornell, the powerful, dynamic singer whose band Soundgarden was one of the architects of grunge music, has died at 52.

Mr. Cornell died Wednesday night in Detroit, said his representative, Brian Bumbery, in a statement that called the death “sudden and unexpected” and that said the singer’s family would be “working closely with the medical examiner to determine the cause.”

Mr. Cornell was born in 1964 in Seattle and helped form Soundgarden 20 years later. Sub Pop, then a fledgling record label, released the group’s first single, “Hunted Down,” in 1987, as well as two subsequent EPs. The group’s debut album, “Ultramega OK,” came a year later.

“Badmotorfinger,” released in 1991, benefited from the swell of attention that was beginning to surround the Seattle scene, where Soundgarden, along with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, were playing a high-octane, high-angst brand of rock ’n’ roll. Soundgarden’s musical journeys tended toward the knotty and dark, plunging into off-kilter meters and punctuated by Mr. Cornell’s voice, which could quickly shift from a soulful howl to a gritty growl.

Three of Soundgarden’s studio albums have been certified platinum, including “Superunknown,” from 1994, which featured “Black Hole Sun,” “Fell on Black Days,” “Spoonman” and “My Wave.”

The group — which includes the guitarist Kim Thayil, the bassist Ben Shepherd and the drummer Matt Cameron — disbanded in 1997, but it reunited in 2010 and performed regularly since then. In a review of a 2011 concert at the Prudential Center in Newark, The New York Times chief pop critic Jon Pareles called Soundgarden “one reunited band that can pick up right where it left off.” In 2012, it released “King Animal,” its first album in 16 years, which Mr. Pareles said “sounds like four musicians live in a room, making music that clenches and unclenches like a fist.”

The group played at the Fox Theater in Detroit on Wednesday night, and it had been scheduled to perform in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday at the Rock on the Range festival.

Mr. Cornell appeared to be active on social media in the hours before his death. A post on his Twitter account on Wednesday announced that the group had arrived in Detroit, and a clip of the group’s 2012 release “By Crooked Steps” was posted to his official Facebook page hours before his death.

Mr. Cornell had admitted in interviews to struggling with drug use throughout his life. In a 1994 Rolling Stone article, he described himself as a “daily drug user at 13,” who had quit by the time he turned 14.

After Soundgarden disbanded in 1997, Mr. Cornell returned to heavy drug use, he told The Guardian in a 2009 interview, describing himself as a “pioneer” in the abuse of the opiate OxyContin, and saying that he had gone to rehab.

Mr. Cornell released five solo albums during and after his time with Soundgarden, starting with the 1999 LP “Euphoria Morning.” His 2007 album “Carry On” featured an acoustic cover of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” that served as the inspiration for a well-received version of the song on “American Idol.” He contributed the song “Seasons” to the soundtrack of “Singles,” Cameron Crowe’s love letter to the Seattle music scene, and performed alongside other members of Soundgarden in the film.
Chris Cornell - "Seasons" Video by Micheleland

In 2001, after Rage Against the Machine’s lead singer, Zack de la Rocha, left the group, Mr. Cornell and members of the band formed Audioslave. The group released three albums before announcing its split in 2007.

Rage Against the Machine posted a message on Twitter honoring Mr. Cornell shortly after news of his death began to spread online.

In November 2016, Mr. Cornell hit the road for the first time with another supergroup of sorts, Temple of the Dog, which features a blend of members of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. The group was formed a quarter-century ago as a tribute to Andrew Wood, the lead singer of the Seattle bands Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone, who died in March 1990 of a heroin overdose.

Speaking to The New York Times, Mr. Cornell said the group had decided to finally bring its songs to life to honor Mr. Wood. “I thought, well, this is one thing that I can do to remind myself and maybe other people of who this guy is and was and keep his story and in a way his life with us,” he said.

Bèsame*

05-18-2017, 09:37 PM

Kobi

05-23-2017, 08:05 AM

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Dina Merrill, a beautiful, blonde actress with an aristocratic bearing known as much for her wealthy origins, philanthropy and marriage to actor Cliff Robertson as for her work in film and television, died on Monday. She was 93.

Her parents were Post Cereals heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and her second husband, Wall Street’s E.F. Hutton.

In 1983, on the occasion of Merrill’s musical comedy debut in a revival of Rodgers and Hart’s 1936 musical ”On Your Toes,” the New York Times gushed, “Long regarded as the essence of chic, the epitome of class and such a persuasive purveyor of charm and charity that she could have a rightful claim to fame as an eloquent spokesman — and fund-raiser — for a slew of worthy causes, Miss Merrill has evoked instant recognition and elegant associations, more so for her persona than for her stage and screen performances.”

As Merrill hit the feature scene in the late 1950s, she was marketed as a replacement for Grace Kelly and certainly shared that actress’s elan. Merrill played nurse Lt. Duran, the love interest of Tony Curtis’ character, in Blake Edwards’ 1959 popular submarine comedy “Operation Petticoat,” and in 1960’s “Butterfield 8,” in which Elizabeth Taylor’s prostitute character has a relationship with a married man played by Laurence Harvey, Merrill played Harvey’s wife. Reviewing the latter film, the New York Times said that in her role Merrill is “lovely and simple.”

Also in 1960, the actress had a supporting role in Fred Zinnemann’s critically hailed “The Sundowners,” starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr as a couple trying to make their way in rural Australia.

Merrill had the lead female role opposite Burt Lancaster in John Frankenheimer’s 1961 effort “The Young Savages,” a social-issues film about poverty and crime in which Lancaster plays a assistant district attorney from the streets and Merrill his limousine-liberal wife — who in one (for the time) harrowing scene is threatened by gang members at knifepoint.

In Vincente Minnelli’s 1963 film “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” the actress played an elegant potential mate for Glenn Ford’s widower who is disapproved of by the titular Eddie.

Merrill, who, by the 1960s, was spending more time working in television than on films, also appeared in the 1965 Bob Hope comedy “I’ll Take Sweden”; in starring roles in 1973 Western “Running Wild” opposite Lloyd Bridges and 1974 family film “Throw Out the Anchor!” opposite Richard Egan; and in supporting roles in 1977 Muhammad Ali biopic “The Greatest,” Robert Altman’s 1978 film “A Wedding,” Sidney Lumet’s 1980 film “Just Tell Me What You Want” and John Cusack-James Spader thriller “True Colors.” She was also among the many celebrities with small roles in Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire “The Player.”

Merrill made her feature debut in the 1957 Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn office comedy “Desk Set” and her last credited bigscreen appearance in the 2003 poker-themed film “Shade,” starring Sylvester Stallone.

The actress’s relatively recent TV credits include A&E’s 2002 remake of “The Magnificent Ambersons” and a guest gig as a judge on A&E’s legal drama “100 Centre Street” the same year. In 1984 she had a series regular on the brief thriller series “Hot Pursuit.” She had a role in “Roots: The Next Generations,” among other TV movies and miniseries, and she guested on a wide variety of series beginning with “Four Star Playhouse” in 1955 and “Playhouse 90,” and on through “Dr. Kildare,” “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Night Gallery,” “The Odd Couple,” “The Love Boat” and, of course, “Murder, She Wrote.”

She and husband Cliff Robertson appeared as guest villains on “Batman,” she as Calamity Jan, he as Shame. They also starred together in the 1968 telepic “The Sunshine Patriot,” directed by Joseph Sargent.

In addition to the 1983 appearance in musical “On Your Toes,” Merrill appeared onstage in 1991 among the rotating cast in the Off Broadway staged reading of the play “Wit and Wisdom.”

Kobi

05-23-2017, 08:09 AM

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Roger Moore, whose 12-year run as James Bond in the ’70s/’80s turned him into a Hollywood icon, has died. He was 89.

Moore — who remains the longest-serving Bond actor — succeeded Sean Connery as 007 No. 3 in the early ’70s. All told, he appeared in seven Bond pics: Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983) and A View to a Kill (1985).

His pre-Bond work included the UK TV series Ivanhoe (1959-1959) and (most memorably) The Saint (1962-69), as well as ABC’s Maverick, in which he played the English-accented cousin of James Garner’s titular card shark.

CherylNYC

05-23-2017, 09:52 PM

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/22/motorsport/nicky-hayden-dead-motogp-cycling-italy/

Nicky Hayden dies five days after cycling crash
By Aimee Lewis and Jill Martin, CNN
Updated 1853 GMT (0253 HKT) May 22, 2017

American Nicky Hayden won the MotoGP world championship in 2006.

American MotoGP rider Nicky Hayden dies aged 35
Hayden was involved in a cycling crash five days ago
He was crowned MotoGP world champion in 2006
(CNN)Former MotoGP world champion Nicky Hayden has died five days after being involved in a cycling accident in Italy, according to Italy's ANSA news agency and Red Bull Honda, a sponsor of Hayden. He was 35.

Hayden, the 2006 MotoGP world champion, had been hospitalized at the Maurizio Bufalini Hospital in Cesena, Italy, following the accident last week.
"It is with great sadness that Red Bull Honda World Superbike Team has to announce that Nicky Hayden has succumbed to injuries suffered during an incident while riding his bicycle last Wednesday," Red Bull Honda posted on its website Monday.
"The nicest man in Grand Prix racing"

Thanks for the memories, Nicky. #RideOnKentuckyKid pic.twitter.com/BX4VvGgKWC

— MotoGP™ (@MotoGP) May 22, 2017
The statement also said that fiancée Jackie, mother Rose and brother Tommy, who flew in from the US, were at his side.
"On behalf of the whole Hayden family and Nicky's fiancée Jackie I would like to thank everyone for their messages of support -- it has been a great comfort to us all knowing that Nicky has touched so many people's lives in such a positive way," Tommy Hayden said.
"Although this is obviously a sad time, we would like everyone to remember Nicky at his happiest -- riding a motorcycle. He dreamed as a kid of being a pro rider and not only achieved that but also managed to reach the pinnacle of his chosen sport in becoming World Champion. We are all so proud of that.
"Apart from these 'public' memories, we will also have many great and happy memories of Nicky at home in Kentucky, in the heart of the family. We will all miss him terribly."
Nicky was a great sportsman, a true gentleman and a friend. We'll never forget him. Our hearts and thoughts are with his family and friends. pic.twitter.com/Tc49KNUeFP

— Repsol Honda Team (@HRC_MotoGP) May 22, 2017
The American, who had been racing for Red Bull Honda's World Superbike team, collided with a car near Rimini on May 17 while training. He had been in the intensive care unit at the hospital in Cesena.
A statement released Friday by the hospital confirmed he had sustained multiple injuries, including "serious cerebral damage."
"Throughout his career Nicky's professionalism and fighting spirit was greatly valued and carried him to numerous successes, including his childhood dream of being crowned MotoGP World Champion with Honda in 2006," Red Bull Honda said. "As well as being a true champion on the track, Nicky was a fan favourite off it due to his kind nature, relaxed demeanour, and the huge smile he invariably carried everywhere.
"Nothing says more about Nicky's character than the overwhelming response expressed by fellow racers and his legions of fans over the past few days. Jackie and his family are truly grateful for the countless prayers and well wishes for Nicky."
Nicky Hayden 1981-2017. We all will miss you pic.twitter.com/k0uyowmv9Z

— Scuderia Ferrari (@ScuderiaFerrari) May 22, 2017
Hayden, from Owensboro, Kentucky, was treated at the scene and taken to a hospital near Rimini before being transferred to the facility in Cesena.
"Hayden will be deeply missed by the paddocks he has graced throughout an incredible career, his millions of fans around the world, and by all those closest to him," MotoGP said on its website. "We wish to pass on our sincerest condolences to his family, friends, team and colleagues as we sadly bid farewell to the 'Kentucky Kid' far too soon -- a true legend of the sport, and to all those who knew him."
Marilia Brocchetto and Sarah Chiplin contributed to this reporting.

*Anya*

05-25-2017, 09:23 PM

‘Game of Thrones’ Actor Neil Fingleton Dies at 36

Neil Fingleton, who played the colossal warrior Mag the Mighty on “Game of Thrones,” died from heart failure on Saturday. He was 36.

Fingleton was the U.K.’s tallest man at seven feet, seven inches in height. In addition to “Thrones,” Fingleton appeared in “Doctor Who,” Avengers: Age of Ultron,” and “X-Men: First Class.”

His death was announced Sunday by Tall Person Club’s Facebook page.

“Sadly it has come to our attention that Neil Fingleton Britain’s Tallest man passed away on Saturday,” the statement reads. “Neil became Britain’s Tallest man in 2007 passing the height of Chris Greener. Neil started off in basketball in the USA before becoming an actor and starring in the X-Men First Class and also recently in the Game of Thrones. Our thoughts and condolences go out to his family.”

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/game-of-thrones-actor-neil-fingleton-dies-at-36-1201996907/

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jools66

05-26-2017, 08:31 AM

All those young children and those adults murdered just outside the Ariana Grande gig, RIP, your light was gone too soon.
All the families left behind who now have to cope with so many questions and feelings, its hard to even comprehend what they must be going through.
The Manchester arena was the first place i ever saw Madonna, and its holds so many amazing memories.
I feel so sad and sickened by these senseless deaths, no-one can justify it.
We love you Manchester

Kobi

05-27-2017, 02:35 PM

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Gregg Allman, the soulful singer-songwriter and rock n' blues pioneer who founded The Allman Brothers Band with his late brother, Duane, and composed such classics as "Midnight Rider," "Melissa" and the epic concert jam "Whipping Post," has died at age 69.

The group also landed 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits between 1971-1981. It earned its best showing with "Ramblin Man," which reached No. 2 in October 1973, and reached the top 40 two more times with "Crazy Love" (No. 29, 1979) and "Straight From the Heart" (No. 39, 1981). The band also logged a No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Songs chart in 1990 with "Good Clean Fun." In total, since Nielsen Music began tracking point-of-sale music purchases in 1991, Allman Brothers Band have sold 9.3 million albums in the U.S.

As a soloist, Allman notched seven charting albums on the Billboard 200, including one top 10 set: the No. 5-peaking Low Country Blues in 2001. On the Hot 100, he claimed a pair of entries with "Midnight Rider" (No. 19 in 1974) and "I'm No Angel" (No. 49 in 1987). The latter also topped the Mainstream Rock Songs chart that same year.

6VxoXn-0Ezs

theoddz

05-27-2017, 02:36 PM

Gregg Allman died today in my hometown of Savannah, Georgia. He was 69 years old.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/27/entertainment/gregg-allman-obituary/index.html?adkey=bn

RIP, Gregg, and thanks for all of the great tunes. :candle: :bouquet:

ItnG3jFErvo

~Theo~ :bouquet:

Kobi

05-31-2017, 02:08 PM

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Elena Verdugo, the actress best known for her role as nurse Consuelo Lopez on the TV series “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” has died at the age of 92.

Verdugo was a native of Los Angeles who started acting as a child. She appeared in many movies in the 1940s. She starred opposite Gene Autry in the movie “The Big Sombrero.” She had a supporting role in the Abbott and Costello comedy “Little Giant.” In 1957, Verdugo starred in the musical comedy film “Panama Sal.”

Verdugo starred in the CBS radio comedy “Meet Millie” as the wisecracking Brooklyn secretary Millie Bronson. She then starred on the television version of “Meet Millie” from 1952 until 1956. The show was one of the first to be broadcast live from Hollywood.

She had a recurring role in 1964 on “The New Phil Silvers Show” as the sister of Silver’s character. She also starred in the CBS sitcom “Many Happy Returns” during the 1964-1965 season.

Her most popular character was Nurse Consuelo Lopez on “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” which ran from 1969 until 1976. She received supporting actress Emmy nominations in 1971 and 1972 for playing the thoughtful nurse. Many consider the role to be one of the first to portray a working-professional Latina woman.

Kobi

06-04-2017, 11:54 AM

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Jimmy Piersall, former Major League center fielder who wrote about his struggle with mental illness, has died at the age of 87.

PIersall played with the Red Sox for seven seasons and is a member of the Red Sox Hall of Fame. He made his first appearance in the Majors in 1950. He made the All-Star team in 1954 and 1956. In 1956, he led the league in doubles. Piersall was an outstanding defensive player who won two gold gloves. After playing for the Red Sox, he went on to play for the Indians, Senators, Mets and Angels. Piersall retired after the 1967 season.

Piersall co-wrote his biography in 1955 titled “Fear Strikes Out: The Jim Piersall Story.” He talks about having a nervous breakdown and being admitted to a mental hospital for therapy. Piersall’s father put a great amount of pressure on him to be great in baseball. The book was adapted into a movie in 1957 that featured Anthony Perkins as Piersall. Piersall later was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

After his playing career, Piersall was a broadcaster for the Texas Rangers in 1974 and the Chicago White Sox from 1977 until 1981.

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

Guy bears an uncanny resemblance to Ben Affleck.

Kobi

06-10-2017, 10:31 AM

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Adam West — an actor defined and also constrained by his role in the 1960s series “Batman” — has died. He was 88.

With its “Wham! Pow!” onscreen exclamations, flamboyant villains and cheeky tone, “Batman” became a surprise hit with its premiere on ABC in 1966, a virtual symbol of ’60s kitsch. Yet West’s portrayal of the superhero and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, ultimately made it hard for him to get other roles, and while he continued to work throughout his career, options remained limited because of his association with the character.

West also chafed against the darker versions of Bob Kane’s hero that emerged in more recent years, beginning with the Michael Keaton-starring, Tim Burton-directed adaptations that began in 1989, and followed by Christopher Nolan’s enormously successful Dark Knight trilogy.

In February 2016, CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” which had hosted a number of geek favorites over the years, celebrated its 200th episode — and marked the 50th anniversary of “Batman” — with an appearance by West.

Kobi

06-18-2017, 05:59 AM

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Stephen Furst, the actor best known for playing Flounder in “Animal House,” died Saturday, from complications related to diabetes. He was 62.

He starred as awkward fraternity pledge Kent “Flounder” Dorfman in the hit comedy, “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978). He reprised the role in the TV sitcom version, “Delta House,” which aired for one season in 1979.

Furst’s had other notable television roles, including Dr. Elliot Axelrod in “St. Elsewhere” (1983-1988), and Vir Cotto in the sci-fi series “Babylon 5” (1994-1998). He also went on to direct three movies for the Sci Fi Channel during the 2000s.

Kobi

06-19-2017, 01:19 PM

i6ckW7uRRNw

Bill Dana, the entertainer who was known best for his dialect comedy embodied in the character José Jiménez, had died. He was 92.

Dana created and, with a thick accent, played the Bolivian character José Jiménez, frequently as an astronaut, on television programs. He created the character in 1959.

Dana was born William Szathmary Oct. 5, 1924, in Quincy, Massachusetts. He later created the Dana stage name, altering the first name of his mother, Dena.

Dana served in the U.S. Army during World War II, earning a Bronze Star as a combat infantryman. After the war, he began his career as an NBC page. At night, he performed in New York City nightclubs along with partner Gene Wood.

In the 1950s, he performed on “The Imogene Coca Show,” “The Danny Thomas Show,” and “The Martha Raye Show.” Dana also wrote for and produced “The Spike Jones Show.”

Dana’s career began to be noticed after he wrote comedy routines for the stand-up comedian Don Adams. Among them was the “Would you believe?” routine that Adams later used on his sitcom “Get Smart.” With that success, Dana was hired to write for “The Steve Allen Show,” the program for which he originated the Jiménez character for Allen’s “Man in the Street” interviews. Dana also played Jiménez on “The Ed Sullivan Show” as well as Dana’s eponymous sitcom, which aired from 1963 to 1965; he played the character as a clumsy bellhop.

Dana also wrote for several television shows, and he penned lines including those for the episode of “All in the Family” that featured the actor and singer Sammy Davis Jr.

In the 1990s, he played Uncle Angelo on “The Golden Girls.”

In 1997, Dana received an image award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition.

Kobi

07-17-2017, 09:43 AM

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His résumé includes 'Mission: Impossible,' 'Tucker: The Man and His Dream' and 'North by Northwest.'

Martin Landau, the all-purpose actor who showcased his versatility as a master of disguise on the Mission: Impossible TV series and as a broken-down Bela Lugosi in his Oscar-winning performance in Ed Wood, has died. He was 89.

Landau, who shot to fame by playing a homosexual henchman in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest, died Saturday of "unexpected complications" after a brief stay at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, his rep confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.

After he quit CBS’ Mission: Impossible after three seasons in 1969 because of a contract dispute, Landau’s career was on the rocks until he was picked by Francis Ford Coppola to play Abe Karatz, the business partner of visionary automaker Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988).

Landau received a best supporting actor nomination for that performance, then backed it up the following year with another nom for starring as Judah Rosenthal, an ophthalmologist who has his mistress (Anjelica Huston) killed, in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

Landau lost out on Oscar night to Kevin Kline and Denzel Washington, respectively, in those years but finally prevailed for his larger-than-life portrayal of horror-movie legend Lugosi in the biopic Ed Wood (1994), directed by Tim Burton.

Landau also starred as Commander John Koenig in the 1970s science-fiction series Space: 1999, opposite his Mission: Impossible co-star Barbara Bain, his wife from 1957 until their divorce in 1993.

A former newspaper cartoonist, Landau turned down the role of Mr. Spock on the NBC series Star Trek, which went to Leonard Nimoy (who later effectively replaced Landau on Mission: Impossible after Trek was canceled).

Landau was born in Brooklyn on June 20, 1928. At age 17, he landed a job as a cartoonist for the New York Daily News, but he turned down a promotion and quit five years later to pursue acting.

In 1955, he auditioned for Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio (choosing a scene from Clifford Odets’ Clash by Night against the advice of friends), and he and Steve McQueen were the only new students accepted that year out of the 2,000-plus aspirants who had applied.

With his dark hair and penetrating blue eyes, Landau found success on New York stages in Goat Song, Stalag 17 and First Love. Hitchcock caught his performance on opening night opposite Edward G. Robinson in a road production of Middle of the Night, the first Broadway play written by Paddy Chayefsky, and cast him as the killer Leonard in North by Northwest.

He went on to perform for such top directors as Joseph L. Mankiewicz in Cleopatra (1963) — though he said most of his best work on that film was sent to the cutting-room floor — George Stevens in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), John Sturges in The Hallelujah Trail (1965) and Henry Hathaway in Nevada Smith (1966).

Landau met Bruce Geller, the eventual creator of Mission: Impossible, when he invited the writer to an acting class. Bain was in the class as well, and Geller wrote for them the parts of spies Rollin Hand and Cinnamon Carter. Landau earned an Emmy nomination for each of his three seasons on the series.

Landau found a kindred spirit in Burton, who also cast him in Sleepy Hollow (1999) and as the voice of a Vincent Price-like science teacher in the horror-movie homage, Frankenweenie (2012).

Landau played puppet master Geppetto in a pair of Pinocchio films and appeared in other films including Pork Chop Hill (1959), City Hall (1996), The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), Rounders (1998), Edtv (1999), The Majestic (2001), Lovely, Still (2008) and Mysteria (2011).

On television, he starred in the Twilight Zone episodes “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” and “The Jeopardy Room,” played the title role in the 1999 Showtime telefilm Bonnano: A Godfather’s Story and could be found on The Untouchables, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Maverick, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Wagon Train, I Spy and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

More recently, Landau earned Emmy noms for playing the father of Anthony LaPaglia’s character on CBS’ Without a Trace and guest-starring as an out-of-touch movie producer on HBO’s Entourage. He portrayed billionaire J. Howard Marshall, the 90-year-old husband of Anna Nicole Smith, in a 2013 Lifetime biopic about the sex symbol, and starred for Atom Egoyan opposite Christopher Plummer in Remember (2015).

And Landau appeared opposite Paul Sorvino in The Last Poker Game, which premiered at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Kobi

07-18-2017, 05:54 PM

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Harvey Atkin, the Canadian character and voice actor has died. He was 74.

He was famous for the combination of glasses, a big nose, and a mustache for most of his roles.

Atkin was perhaps best known as camp director Morty in the 1979 comedy “Meatballs.” He also played Staff Sgt. Capt. Ronald Coleman on “Cagney and Lacey” and Judge Ridenour on “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.” Most recently, he has a role as a judge on the tv series "Suits".

Atkin appeared in more than 75 films during his long and varied career. Besides Meatballs, he was also in Silver streak, Atlantic City, Beetlejuice, and Ticket to Heaven.

He was also the voice of Mario's and Luigi's archenemy King Koopa on DiC Entertainment's cartoon version of Super Mario Bros. (notably, he is the first English voice actor for the character). Playing Bowser in all three Mario animated series, he is the only voice actor to appear in all three series as the same character.

GeorgiaMa'am

07-20-2017, 07:21 PM

from The New York Times:

Chester Bennington, the ferocious lead singer for the platinum-selling hard rock band Linkin Park, was found dead in his home near Los Angeles on Thursday. He was 41.

Brian Elias, the chief of operations for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, confirmed the death, in Palos Verdes Estates, and said it was being investigated as a possible suicide after law enforcement authorities responded to a call shortly after 9 a.m.

Mr. Bennington, who was known for his piercing scream and free-flowing anguish, released seven albums with Linkin Park. The most recent, “One More Light,” arrived in May and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. The band was scheduled to start a tour with a concert on July 27 in Mansfield, Mass.

Mike Shinoda, one of Linkin Park’s founders, spoke on behalf of the group in a tweet. “Shocked and heartbroken,” he wrote, adding that the band would issue a statement.

Kobi

07-28-2017, 12:56 PM

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Charlie Gard, the British baby who caught the world’s attention as he struggled with a rare genetic disorder while his parents fought the courts for the right to place him on an experimental treatment plan, died today

Charlie spent much of his short life in a hospital bed at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in London on life support machines, unable to hear, see or breathe on his own. Born August 4, 2016, he initially appeared to be a perfect, healthy baby. But within weeks, he began to exhibit symptoms that would lead doctors to diagnose him with infantile onset encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS).

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

Charlie, your life was brief yet meaningful. You touched the hearts of millions. Godspeed lil buddy.

Kobi

07-31-2017, 01:41 PM

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Sam Shepard, the bard of America’s flat highways, wide-open spaces and wounding, dysfunctional families, has died at the age of 73 in his home in Kentucky from complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease, his family announced Monday.

Shepard found incredible success as both a playwright and as an actor. He won a Pulitzer Prize for drama for his 1979 play, Buried Child, and wrote 40 plays over the course of his career. He also wrote the screenplays for Zabriskie Point; Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas; and Robert Altman's Fool for Love, a film version of his play of the same title. As writer/director, he filmed Far North and Silent Tongue in 1988 and 1992 respectively.

A famously intense and taciturn actor, Shepard broke out as a Hollywood actor in Terrence Malick’s “Days Of Heaven” (1978), playing opposite Richard Gere and Brooke Adams. For his appearance in “The Right Stuff” (1983), he was nominated for an Academy Award. And many fans adore his work in Wim Wenders’ acclaimed “Paris, Texas” (1984) for which Shepard co-wrote the screenplay. His Hollywood portfolio was diverse, encompassing “Crimes of the Heart,” “Steel Magnolias” and “Black Hawk Down.”

Shepard played the Weston patriarch in the 2013 movie version of Tracy Letts’ “August: Osage County,” originally a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that owed much to his structural and thematic influence — an influence that extends to Ireland and the Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.

Shepard was romantically involved with the actress Jessica Lange from 1982 to 2009, although the pair never married. They had two children together: Hannah Jane Shepard, 31, and Samuel Walker Shepard, 30.

JDeere

08-08-2017, 03:12 PM

Country singer Glen Campbell passed away at the age of 81, after a long and public battle with Alzheimers.

Bèsame*

08-08-2017, 09:06 PM

Rest In Peace, Rhinestone Cowboy....

Gayandgray

08-09-2017, 07:58 AM

Rest In Peace, Rhinestone Cowboy....

I always loved Glen Campbell! Grew up listening to his music!

Orema

08-20-2017, 04:34 AM

Dick Gregory, 84, Dies; Found Humor in the Civil Rights Struggle (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/arts/dick-gregory-dies-at-84.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news)
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(Dick Gregory in 2016. He believed that within a well-delivered joke lies power. Credit Brent N. Clarke/FilmMagic, via Getty Images)

Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84.

Mr. Gregory’s son, Christian Gregory, who announced his death on social media, said more details would be released in the coming days. Mr. Gregory had been admitted to a hospital on Aug. 12, his son said in an earlier Facebook post.

Early in his career Mr. Gregory insisted in interviews that his first order of business onstage was to get laughs, not to change how white America treated Negroes (the accepted word for African-Americans at the time). “Humor can no more find the solution to race problems than it can cure cancer,” he said. Nonetheless, as the civil rights movement was kicking into high gear, whites who caught his club act or listened to his routines on records came away with a deeper feel for the nation’s shameful racial history.

Mr. Gregory was a breakthrough performer in his appeal to whites — a crossover star, in contrast to veteran black comedians like Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley and Slappy White, whose earthy, pungent humor was mainly confined to black clubs on the so-called chitlin circuit.

Though he clearly seethed over the repression of blacks, he resorted to neither scoldings nor lectures when playing big-time rooms like the hungry i in San Francisco or the Village Gate in New York. Rather, he won audiences over with wry observations about the country’s racial chasm.

He would plant himself on a stool, the picture of insouciance in a three-button suit and dark tie, dragging slowly on a cigarette, which he used as a punctuation mark. From that perch he would bid America to look in the mirror, and to laugh at itself.

“Segregation is not all bad,” he would say. “Have you ever heard of a collision where the people in the back of the bus got hurt?” Or: “You know the definition of a Southern moderate? That’s a cat that’ll lynch you from a low tree.” Or: “I heard we’ve got lots of black astronauts. Saving them for the first spaceflight to the sun.”

Some lines became classics, like the one about a restaurant waitress in the segregated South who told him, “We don’t serve colored people here,” to which Mr. Gregory replied: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Just bring me a whole fried chicken.” Lunch-counter sit-ins, central to the early civil rights protests, did not always work out as planned. “I sat in at a lunch counter for nine months,” he said. “When they finally integrated, they didn’t have what I wanted.”

Mr. Gregory was a national sensation in the early 1960s, earning thousands of dollars a week from club dates and from records like “In Living Black and White” and “Dick Gregory Talks Turkey.” He wrote the first of his dozen books. Time magazine, enormously powerful then, ran a profile of him. Jack Paar, that era’s “Tonight Show” host, had him on as a guest — after Mr. Gregory demanded that he be invited to sit for a chat. Until then, black performers did their numbers, then had to leave. Time on Paar’s sofa was a sign of having arrived.

Newspapers in those days routinely put Mr. Gregory on a par with two white performers, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, anointing them a troika of modern satire. Just as routinely, he was later credited with paving the way for a new wave of black comedians who would make it big in the white world, notably two talents of thoroughly different sensibilities: the reflective Bill Cosby and the trenchant Richard Pryor.

It was Mr. Gregory’s conviction that within a well-delivered joke lies power. He learned that lesson growing up in St. Louis, achingly poor and fatherless and often picked on by other children in his neighborhood.

“They were going to laugh anyway, but if I made the jokes they’d laugh with me instead of at me,” he said in a 1964 autobiography, written with Robert Lipsyte. “After a while,” he wrote, “I could say anything I wanted. I got a reputation as a funny man. And then I started to turn the jokes on them.”

He titled that book “nigger,” lowercase N. The word — typically reduced these days to “the N-word” — figured prominently in his routines, even as he shunned the obscenities that casually littered the acts of other comedians.

“I said, let’s pull it out of the closet, let’s lay it out there, let’s deal with it, let’s dissect it,” he said in a 2000 interview with NPR. “It should never be called ‘the N-word.’ ”

In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.

Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.”

He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.”

In 1965, he was shot in the leg (the wound was not grave) by a rioter as he tried to be a peacemaker during the Watts riots in Los Angeles.

Increasingly, he skipped club dates to march or to perform at benefits for civil rights groups. Club owners became reluctant to book him: Who knew if he might fly off to Alabama on a moment’s notice? As the ’60s wore on, the college lecture circuit became his principal forum.

“Against the advice of almost everyone, he decided to risk his career for civil rights,” Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s” (2003). Some pillars of the movement, like Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, who died in 1971, believed that Mr. Gregory was more valuable to their cause onstage than in the streets. To which Mr. Gregory replied, “When America goes to war, she don’t send her comedians.”

In 1967, his head now ringed with a full beard and bushy hair — no more the thin mustache of earlier years — he ran for mayor of Chicago, more or less as a stunt. The next year he ran for president on the Freedom and Peace Party ticket, getting by his count 1.5 million write-in votes. The official figure was 47,133.

There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.

And he reveled in conspiracy theories, elaborating on them in language that could be enigmatic and circuitous. Hidden hands, Mr. Gregory insisted, were behind everything from a crack cocaine epidemic to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; from the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon to the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. Whom to blame? “Whoever the people are who control the system,” he told The Washington Post in 2000.

His fasting led to a keen interest in nutrition. Working in the 1980s with a Swedish health food company, Mr. Gregory developed a weight-reduction powder called Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet. The partners had a falling-out, and the business swooned.

Still, Mr. Gregory remained a fervent health-food advocate. In late 1999, he learned he had lymphoma but rejected chemotherapy, relying instead on vitamins, herbs and exercise. The cancer went into remission.

His activism came at a price, however. For one thing, the cascade of cash that he had once enjoyed turned into a trickle. His family paid, too.

Mr. Gregory moved to Chicago to build a comedy career in the late 1950s. There he met Lillian Smith, a secretary at the University of Chicago, and they were married in 1959. They had 11 children, one of whom, Richard Jr., died in infancy.

In 1973, when cash was still rolling in, they bought a 400-acre farm near Plymouth, Mass. (Why Plymouth? “I think the white folks is coming back, and I’m going to get a handful of Indians and stop ’em there this time,” Mr. Gregory said.) But by the early 1990s, the strapped Gregorys had lost the farm and moved into an apartment in Plymouth.

Over more than five decades of marriage, Lillian Gregory said, she understood her husband’s need — some called it an obsession — to wander off on behalf of this or that cause, typically earning nothing except attention, and sometimes not even that. But Christian Gregory, a chiropractor in Washington, said to The Washington Post in 2000: “He told his 10 children that the movement came before the family. It was a hard pill to swallow.”

Father absenteeism was a familiar phenomenon for the man born Richard Claxton Gregory in St. Louis on Oct. 12, 1932. He was the second of six children. His father, Presley, disappeared after the birth of each child, and finally left for good. The Gregory children were reared by their mother, Lucille, who scraped by on welfare and a meager income as a maid.

“Kids didn’t eat off the floor,” Mr. Gregory said of their Depression-era poverty. “When I was a kid, you dropped something off the table, it never reached the floor.”

Information about Mr. Gregory’s survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Gregory graduated from Sumner High School in St. Louis, then attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill. At both schools he was a track star and enjoyed local fame.

Not that the acclaim was free of complications. In 1961, by then a national figure, he received the key to the city from the mayor of St. Louis. Yet in his hometown he was denied a room at a leading hotel. “They gave me the key to the city,” Mr. Gregory said, “and then they changed all the locks.”

He left college in 1954 and joined the Army, where he was able to work on comedy routines while attached to Special Services. He then returned to college, only to give it up again without graduating.

In 1956 he headed to Chicago, where he worked in small-time clubs at night and at odd jobs by day. He even tried running a club of his own, but that venture failed.

In one part-time job Mr. Gregory sorted mail in a post office. His pattern, he later said, was to toss letters destined for Mississippi into a slot marked “overseas.” That job did not last long.

His real break came in January 1961, when he was asked to fill in for the comedian Irwin Corey, who had canceled a gig at the flagship Playboy Club in Chicago. On the big night, club managers had misgivings; the house was packed with businessmen from the Deep South. No matter, Mr. Gregory said. He insisted on performing.

“I understand there are a great many Southerners in the room tonight,” he began his act. “I know the South very well. I spent 20 years there one night.” He so won over the crowd that Playboy’s Hugh Hefner signed him for three more weeks, then extended the contract.

Despite having sworn off nightclubs in 1973, saying he could no longer work in places where liquor was served, Mr. Gregory returned to them on occasion in later years, a thin presence wreathed in white hair and beard. Though his best days were well behind him, his approach never seemed to waver from principles that he set for himself when starting out. He put it this way in his autobiography:

“I’ve got to go up there as an individual first, a Negro second. I’ve got to be a colored funny man, not a funny colored man.”

Mel Watkins contributed reporting.

Kobi

08-20-2017, 02:34 PM

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Jerry Lewis, the comedian and filmmaker who was adored by many, disdained by others, but unquestionably a defining figure of American entertainment in the 20th century, died on Sunday morning at his home in Las Vegas. He was 91.

Mr. Lewis knew success in movies, on television, in nightclubs, on the Broadway stage and in the university lecture hall. His career had its ups and downs, but when it was at its zenith there were few stars any bigger. And he got there remarkably quickly.

Barely out of his teens, he shot to fame shortly after World War II with a nightclub act in which the rakish, imperturbable Dean Martin crooned and the skinny, hyperactive Mr. Lewis capered around the stage, a dangerously volatile id to Mr. Martin’s supremely relaxed ego.

After his break with Mr. Martin in 1956, Mr. Lewis went on to a successful solo career, eventually writing, producing and directing many of his own films.

As a spokesman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, Mr. Lewis raised vast sums for charity; as a filmmaker of great personal force and technical skill, he made many contributions to the industry, including the invention in 1960 of a device — the video assist, which allowed directors to review their work immediately on the set — still in common use.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/movies/jerry-lewis-dead-celebrated-comedian-and-filmmaker.html?smtyp=cur

Canela

08-20-2017, 03:45 PM

Rest in peace, Jerry Lewis my old friend... it feels like he was, since I've seen him on TV my whole life... it's so unreal... I will remember him fondly...

Kobi

08-24-2017, 01:44 PM

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Jay Thomas, was an American actor, comedian, and radio talk show host. His notable television work includes his co-starring role as Remo DaVinci on Mork & Mindy (1979–81), the recurring role of Eddie LeBec on Cheers (1987–89), the lead character Jack Stein on Love & War (1992–95), and a repeat guest role as Jerry Gold on Murphy Brown. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series in 1990 and 1991 for portraying Gold.

In 1997, he starred in the television film Killing Mr. Griffin, based on the novel of the same name. In film, he co-starred in Mr Holland's Opus and portrayed The Easter Bunny in The Santa Clause 2 and The Santa Clause 3. He was also an annual guest on The Late Show with David Letterman during the Christmas season, where he told a story about how he met Clayton Moore, who portrayed the self-titled character on The Lone Ranger.Beginning in 2005, he hosted The Jay Thomas Show on Sirius Satellite Radio, and was on every Friday afternoon on Howard 101.

girl_dee

09-05-2017, 06:00 AM

Walter Becker, the guitarist and songwriter who made suavely subversive pop hits out of slippery jazz harmonies and verbal enigmas in Steely Dan, his partnership with Donald Fagen, died on Sunday. He was 67.

His death was announced on his official website, which gave no other details. He lived in Maui, Hawaii.

Kobi

09-07-2017, 09:54 AM

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Kate Millett, the activist, artist and educator whose best-selling "Sexual Politics" was a landmark of cultural criticism and a manifesto for the modern feminist movement, has died. She was 82.

"Sexual Politics" was published in 1970, in the midst of feminism's so-called "second wave," when Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Millett and others built upon the achievements of the suffragettes from a half-century earlier and challenged assumptions about women in virtually every aspect of society. Millett's book was among the most talked-about works of its time and remains a founding text for cultural and gender studies programs.

Millett chronicled millennia of legal, political and cultural exclusion and diminishment, whether the "penis envy" theory of Sigmund Freud or the portrayals of women as disrupters of paradise in the Bible and Greek mythology. She labeled traditional marriage an artifact of patriarchy and concluded with chapters condemning the misogyny of authors Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, but also expressing faith in the redemptive power of women's liberation.

While countless women were radicalized by her book, Millett would have bittersweet feelings about "Sexual Politics," which later fell out of print and remained so for years. She was unhappy with its "mandarin mid-Atlantic" prose and overwhelmed by her sudden transformation from graduate student and artist to a feminist celebrity whose image appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Amused at first by her fame, she was worn down by a "ruin of interviews, articles, attacks."

"Soon it grew tedious, an indignity," she wrote in the memoir "Flying," published in 1974.

She was dubbed by Time "the Mao Tse-tung of Women's Liberation," and rebutted by Mailer in his book "The Prisoner of Sex," in which he mocked her as "the Battling Annie of some new prudery." Meanwhile, she faced taunts from some feminists for saying she was bisexual (she was married at the time), but not gay. During an appearance by Millett at Columbia, an activist stood up and yelled, "Are you a lesbian? Say it. Are you?"

"Five hundred people looking at me. Are you a Lesbian?" Millett wrote. "Everything pauses, faces look up in terrible silence. I hear them not breathe. That word in public, the word I waited half a lifetime to hear. Finally I am accused. 'Say it. Say you are a Lesbian!'

"Yes, I said. Yes. Because I know what she means. The line goes, inflexible as a fascist edict, that bisexuality is a cop-out. Yes I said yes I am a lesbian. It was the last strength I had."

Millett's books after "Sexual Politics" were far more personal and self-consciously literary, whether "Flying" or "Sita," a memoir about her sexuality in which she wrote of a female lover who committed suicide; or "The Loony Bin Trip," an account of her struggles with manic depression and time spent in psychiatric wards.

"There is no denying the misery and stress of life," she wrote. "The swarms of fears, the blocks to confidence, the crises of decision and choice."

The daughter of Irish Catholics, Millett was born in St. Paul, Minn., and was long haunted by her father, an alcoholic who beat his children and left his family when Millett was 14. She attended parochial schools as a child and studied English literature at the University of Minnesota and St Hilda's College, Oxford, from which she graduated with honors.

For a couple of years, Millett lived in Japan, where she met her husband and fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura (they divorced in 1985). They moved to Manhattan in 1963, and Millett embraced the political and artistic passions of the city. She joined the National Organization for Women and began attracting a following for her sculpture, which appeared in Life magazine and has been exhibited worldwide. Through her own Women's Liberation Cinema production company, she directed the acclaimed feminist documentary "Three Lives." She also founded the Women's Art Colony Farm in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Millett taught at several schools, including the University of North Carolina and New York University. In 1968, she was fired from her job as an English lecturer at Barnard College, a decision that stemmed at least in part from her support of student protests against the Vietnam War. The extra free time did allow her to complete "Sexual Politics," which began as her doctoral thesis at Columbia University.

Less known to younger feminists than Steinem or Friedan, she was honored several times late in life. In 2012, she was given the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation and the same year was presented a Courage Award for the Arts prize by her longtime friend Yoko Ono. Millett was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2013 and, in her acceptance speech, reflected on her years as an activist.

"The happiness of those times, the joy of participation, the excitement of being part of my own time, of living on the edge, of being so close to events you can almost intuit them. To raise one's voice in protest, just as the protest is expressed in life, in the streets, in relationships and friendships," she said.

"Then, in a moment of public recognition, the face of the individual becomes a woman's face."

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MsTinkerbelly

09-12-2017, 06:47 PM

R.I.P.

Edie Windsor

Thank you from my wife and I (f)

girl_dee

09-12-2017, 06:52 PM

R.I.P.

Edie Windsor

Thank you from my wife and I (f)

We owe SO much to her..

VintageFemme

09-12-2017, 07:50 PM

R.I.P.

Edie Windsor

Thank you from my wife and I (f)

So grateful. So sad.

Kobi

09-15-2017, 05:42 PM

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Harry Dean Stanton, the actor known for roles in movies including "Repo Man" and "Cool Hand Luke" as well as for the TV show "Big Love," has died. He was 91.

Born July 24, 1926, in West Irvine, Kentucky, Stanton grew up singing and faced an early decision between music and acting. Acting won, but many years of struggle would pass before Stanton would become a household name.

His first movie roles came in the mid-1950s: an uncredited part in "The Wrong Man" and turns in "Tomahawk Trail" and "The Proud Rebel" as Dean Stanton. He appeared on several TV shows, including "The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." He began attracting notice in higher-profile movies such as "Aliens," "Private Benjamin" and "Escape From New York," but it was with 1984's "Paris, Texas" that he rose to star status.

"Paris, Texas" stars Stanton as a wanderer with amnesia who finds and reconnects with his family. Directed by Wim Wenders, the film proved extremely well-received, winning the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival and the BAFTA Award for best director. It holds an impressive 100 percent fresh rating on the movie review site RottenTomatoes.com.

After the success of "Paris, Texas," more notable roles followed for Stanton. He starred in the cult classic "Repo Man" and played a hard-to-love father in "Pretty in Pink." He had roles in "The Last Temptation of Christ," "Wild at Heart," "The Green Mile" and dozens more. In 2006, Stanton took a prominent TV role on the HBO drama "Big Love," playing the megalomaniacal leader of a polygamous sect.

Stanton has been honored with the annual Harry Dean Stanton Film Festival in Lexington, Kentucky. He was the subject of the 2013 documentary "Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction."

Kobi

09-17-2017, 02:46 PM

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Penny Chenery, who bred and raced 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat as well as realizing her ailing father's dream to win the Kentucky Derby in 1972 with Riva Ridge, has died. She was 95.

In 1973, Secretariat captured the imagination of racing fans worldwide when he became the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, sweeping the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont. He won the last leg by a whopping 31 lengths in one of the greatest performances in sports history.

The previous year, Riva Ridge won the Derby and Belmont Stakes.

Both colts were inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame.

Chenery developed a love of horses as a child and learned to ride at age 5. She attributed her affinity for horses to her father, Christopher Chenery, who founded Meadow Stable, a thoroughbred racing and breeding operation, in Caroline County, Virginia.

After graduating from Smith College in 1943, Chenery worked as an assistant for a company that designed landing craft for the Normandy invasion. Before the invasion, she quit her job and at her father's urging, she volunteered for the Red Cross. In 1945, Chenery traveled to France as a Doughnut Girl to help war-weary soldiers transition to ships headed home at the end of World War II.

Chenery returned from Europe in 1946, and at her father's urging, she attended Columbia University's business school, where she was one of 20 women in her class. Six months from graduation, she got engaged to Columbia Law graduate John "Jack" Tweedy. Her father encouraged her to quit and focus on her wedding. The couple married in 1949.

For nearly 20 years, Chenery was content to be a housewife and mother to the couple's four children in the Denver area. She and her husband helped found and raise the initial money for Vail ski resort in the early 1960s.

Her life changed in 1968 when her father's health and mind began failing and her mother died. His Meadow Stable, which had been profitable, began losing money. Her two siblings had planned to sell it when their father could no longer run the operation.

Chenery took over management of the racing stable, with the help of siblings Margaret Carmichael and Hollis Chenery, and her father's business secretary. The operation was losing money and few took her seriously. Chenery commuted monthly from Colorado to Virginia, but after two more years in the red, selling the stable seemed almost inevitable.

By 1971, her colt Riva Ridge swept the juvenile stakes and won 2-year-old of the Year honors. In 1972, Riva Ridge won the Kentucky Derby, fulfilling her father's dream in the last year of his life. That same year, Secretariat burst onto the scene, so dominating the 2-year-old races that he won Horse of the Year honors.

In 1973, Secretariat became a pop culture icon with his Triple Crown victory, landing on the cover of Time magazine. For the next four decades, Chenery served as a careful steward of the colt's legacy.

Following Secretariat's retirement, Chenery became an ambassador for thoroughbred racing and remained so after the colt's death in 1989.

She served as the first female president of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association and president of the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation. She became one of the first women admitted to The Jockey Club and helped found the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation.

Chenery created the Secretariat Vox Populi award annually honoring racing's most popular horse, as well as the Secretariat Foundation, which assists and supports various charities within the racing community.

She received the 2006 Eclipse Award of Merit for lifetime contributions to the thoroughbred industry, and in recent years, she advocated for laminitis research and care advancement as well as efforts to ban the use of performance-enhancing drugs in racing.

Chenery was portrayed by actress Diane Lane in the 2010 movie "Secretariat." Chenery had a cameo role as a spectator at the Belmont Stakes.

Kobi

09-20-2017, 12:29 PM

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From the CROW clinic:

With heavy hearts, we said goodbye to one of our beloved Animal Ambassadors, Sneezy.

Sneezy first came to us in 2014 after he was hit by a car. He suffered a broken jaw and tail. To prevent infection, his tail was amputated, making him non-releasable. He spent the next few years teaching CROW visitors about the importance of opossums in the environment.

In the recent weeks, as old age began to set in (opossums only live 1-2 years in the wild), arthritis in his hind limbs gradually made it more difficult for Sneezy to walk. His quality of life had declined to the point that veterinarians at CROW had to make the extremely difficult decision to ease his pain.

Sneezy will be greatly missed, but never forgotten.

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

Was looking forward to meeting this lil guy on my trip down this year. Rest in peace lil buddy.

Kobi

09-20-2017, 12:35 PM

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Boxing legend Jake LaMotta, whom Robert De Niro portrayed in the film "Raging Bull," died at the age of 95.

Born July 10, 1921, LaMotta began fighting when he was just a child, made to do so by his father to help support the family – he'd fight other neighborhood children and adult spectators would throw change into the ring. By 19, LaMotta had honed his skills enough to go pro.

LaMotta was an aggressive fighter with a brutal style that earned him the nicknames "The Bronx Bull" and "The Raging Bull." Among his early fights was a legendary series against Sugar Ray Robinson, beginning in 1942. LaMotta lost their first bout but won their second – he was the first ever to defeat Robinson. Robinson would win four subsequent fights with LaMotta.

In 1949, LaMotta defeated world middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan in a title bout. He held that title until Feb. 14, 1951 – and he lost it in his final fight against Robinson. In a fight that went down in history and was nicknamed the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, LaMotta fought hard but took a beating, and he lost after the winner stopped LaMotta in the 13th round. LaMotta would never regain the championship. After that defeat, he moved to light heavyweight, winning some fights but no titles.

After his retirement from boxing, LaMotta owned and managed bars. He also acted and performed stand-up comedy. He had roles in movies including "The Hustler" as well as several guest-star turns on TV's "Car 54, Where Are You?"

LaMotta also wrote several books about his life and career. One of those books was the 1970 memoir, "Raging Bull: My Story." Ten years after its publication, the movie adapted from it, directed by Martin Scorsese, was released to great critical acclaim. Star Robert De Niro trained with LaMotta until LaMotta deemed him skilled enough to fight professionally. The effort won De Niro an Academy Award.

LaMotta is a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Kobi

09-27-2017, 10:09 PM

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Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment-industry giant has died.

Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from his emergence in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.

Gemme

09-30-2017, 08:25 PM

Monty Hall (https://www.aol.com/article/entertainment/2017/09/30/lets-make-a-deal-host-monty-hall-dead-at-96/23228528/) dies at 96.

(Reuters) - Monty Hall, one of the most popular game show hosts in American television history as he presided over a throng of outrageously costumed and nearly delirious contestants on "Let's Make a Deal" for almost three decades, died on Saturday at age 96, his son said.

Richard Hall said his father died at home in Beverly Hills, California, likely of heart failure.

Members of his audiences, dressed as clowns, playing cards or giant tomatoes, would shriek "Monty, Monty, Monty!" as they tried to convince Hall to give them a chance to win a washing machine or a new Cadillac. Sometimes the prizes were a "zonk" - a gag gift such as a live donkey or a wrecked car.

Hall was the co-creator of "Let's Make a Deal" and hosted more than 4,000 episodes from 1963 to 1986 (with occasional hiatuses) and then again in 1990 and 1991. The show drew good ratings even as it jumped from network to network and into syndication.

"Let's Make a Deal" became a part of American pop culture, with Hall one of the most recognizable stars on TV. Hall would offer contestants a modest prize, then give them a chance to trade it for a mystery prize hidden by a curtain, stashed in a big box or concealed behind door No. 1, door No. 2 or door No. 3. That prize might be worth thousands of dollars or might be a "zonk" like a farm animal. Audience members jumped up and down, shouted, cried and kissed Hall when they won, and sometimes even when they lost.

"In 4,700 shows, I got kissed 50,000 times," Hall said in an interview with a classic TV website. "Even when they lost, they were very nice about it. But you know the law in game shows - if you go on a show and you win a donkey, that's your prize. You're entitled to it."

The show's producers showed mercy on the "zonk" winners, however. After the taping of the show, they would be offered a substitute prize, such as a television, and most would take it."In 1 percent of the cases, they didn't," Hall said. "There was a time when a farmer won five calves and he wanted the calves. That cost me a fortune because when you rent them from the animal place, they're expensive."

Other members of the show's team were studio announcer Jay Stewart and model Carol Merrill, who displayed the prizes.

Hall made appearances on revivals of the show, including the version hosted by comedian Wayne Brady starting in 2009.

In 1991, the New York Times published an article about what became known as "the Monty Hall problem" - a probability puzzle hotly debated by mathematicians centering on the advisability of switching choices when given options like those on his show. The conundrum was featured in the 2008 film "21" with Kevin Spacey.

Hall was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1973.

In 1947, Hall married his wife, Marilyn, who became an Emmy Award-winning producer. Their three children include Tony Award-winning actress Joanna Gleason.

firegal

09-30-2017, 08:35 PM

Kobi

09-30-2017, 09:39 PM

Thanks for the memories Monte.

Kobi

10-02-2017, 02:46 PM

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Tom Petty has died at the age of 66.

The Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers lead singer was removed from life support after tests revealed he had no brain function following a cardiac arrest.

Rock n Roll Hall Of Famer Petty first found fame in the 1970s with his band releasing hits including Breakdown, American Girl, The Waiting, Free Fallin', Stop Draggin' My Heart Around and Listen to Her Heart.

He had success both as part of The Heartbreakers - with whom he worked on and off for 40 years - and as a solo artist.

He also formed part of the 1980s supergroup the Traveling Wilburys alongside Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison. Petty continued to work as a popular musician up until his death.

Petty's most recent album, 2014's Hypnotic Eye, was the first Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers to top the charts in the U.S.

The artist had just completed a 40th anniversary 53-date tour with The Heartbreakers, winning good reviews with his final performance at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on September 22.

GeorgiaMa'am

10-02-2017, 05:22 PM

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c3/8c/9c/c38c9cb2a60fff9420bbd5371e3cdfaa.jpgTom Petty has died at the age of 66.

Oh no! I loved his music. He was still so young!

cricket26

10-02-2017, 05:32 PM

Ozgmyx919a4

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Kobi

10-02-2017, 05:55 PM

Um, I always check more than one source before I post about a death. I checked more than a few on Tom Petty because the stories were oddly written.

As far as I can tell, at the moment, Tom Petty is still with us. He was found unconscious after a cardiac arrest and was placed on life support. The life support was supposedly removed after he was declared brain dead with a do not resuscitate order now in place. That seems to be consistent through all the current reports.

Sorry about that.

Kobi

10-20-2017, 06:37 PM

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Over and over, Rita Henley Jensen's friends and colleagues describe her as "a force." They call her formidable and extraordinary. Jensen used those strengths to fight her way out of poverty and into an award-winning career in journalism, working all the while to amplify women's voices and advocate for their health and welfare.

Jensen, the founder of Women's eNews and of the Jane Crow Project, died Oct. 18 of breast cancer. She was 70.

Born Jan. 1, 1947 in Columbus, Ohio, Jensen built her success from an unlikely starting point: She was a teen mother with an abusive boyfriend who later became her abusive husband. She remained in that marriage for six years before leaving on the heels of her husband's threats to kill her and their two daughters.

Alone, in her mid-20s and with children to feed, Jensen relied on welfare and a waitressing job and "tried not to eat much myself" in order to save precious pennies, as she recounted in an essay in the book "Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God: 73 Women on Life’s Transitions." Determined to rise out of poverty, she borrowed money and applied for scholarships to attend the Ohio State University, beginning her college education at 25.

Jensen received her bachelor's degree from Ohio State in 1976, then completed a Master's at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.

Jensen's award-winning journalism career began with her first job out of graduate school, working as a general assignment reporter for the Paterson News in Paterson, New Jersey. While at the newspaper for just two years, she won eight awards for her investigative journalism. She moved on to write for the Stamford Advocate, the American Lawyer, and the National Law Journal, as well as freelancing for news outlets including the New York Times, ABA Journal and Ms. Magazine, before creating the organization that became her crowning achievement.

Women's eNews was born from Jensen's desire to fill a hole in traditional media coverage of events and issues. "I was a prize-winning investigative reporter," Jensen told Sheryl McCarthy in a 2011 interview for CUNY's One on One, "but I began to say, 'I have to focus on what's going on with women, because no one else is.'"

Founded by Jensen as a project of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1999, Women's eNews became an independent organization in 2002. Jensen described to McCarthy the Women's eNews approach to news coverage: "We will not endorse a candidate, but we will report the issues from the perspective of women's interests. We had a recent piece about the health plans: Do they really cover the issues most concerned to women? We'll cover the war as it concerns women. The thing that's going around right now about children's health coverage – that also covers pregnant women, but you haven't heard a word of it in other media. So we'll be covering that as that controversy continues."

Women's eNews has been widely honored with awards including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Reporting. It was among the 100 Best Websites for Women named by Forbes in 2013, and About.com readers named it their "Favorite Women's Rights Blog or Website" in 2012.

While serving as editor in chief at Women's eNews, Jensen began a years-long investigative project focusing on maternal mortality rates among African American women. Those rates, she found, are substantially higher than they are for white women: Across the U.S., African-American women are three to four times more likely to die due to pregnancy and childbirth-related complications than white women. In some states, they’re as much as 14 times more likely to die of those causes than women of other races. It's a statistic that has improved for women of other races in the past 100 years, but not for African American women.

Digging into the causes and repercussions of this phenomenon became a passion project for Jensen, and in 2016, she left Women's eNews, retaining editor in chief emerita status, to work full time on what became the Jane Crow Project. A book, "Jane Crow: Why the Mothers Are Dying," was in progress at the time of Jensen's death.

Of Jensen's work with the Jane Crow Project, Jensen-Vargas noted, "Her groundbreaking journalism can be indirectly attributed to the saving of African American lives by bringing the attention of the high mortality rates of African American moms and babies in the U.S. to the attention of the U.N. and the New York Task Force, which has resulted in the establishment of a department in New York City specially appointed to resolve that issue."

Jensen received many awards and honors for her work, including being named by the New York Daily News in 2004 as one of the "100 Women Who Shape Our City." In 2016, the Women's Economic Forum included Jensen among their Women of the Decade awards as an "Iconic Thought Leader of the Decade in Media." Her other honors include the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Alumni award, the Alicia Patterson fellowship and the Lloyd P. Burns Public Service prize.

As Jensen's career advanced, she never forgot the days when she struggled in an abusive marriage and then as a single mother. The experience led her to be an advocate for women, speaking frankly about her background – her bios always mentioned that she was a domestic abuse survivor – and pointing out injustices against women. In a 1995 article for Ms. Magazine, she said that her work only began with reporting the facts about women. It continued with fierce advocacy: "I think we have to raise hell any way we can."

Jensen's longtime friend and colleague, Susy Schultz, president of Public Narrative and founding president of the Association for Women Journalists – Chicago, spoke to Legacy.com about how Jensen's impulse to raise hell made her a powerful force for women. "At times, people thought that Rita was difficult, but she was passionate, and she wanted to change the world. Really, difficult women often change the world."

Kobi

10-24-2017, 03:10 PM

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Emmy Award-winning actor Robert Guillaume, best known as the title character in the TV sitcom “Benson,” died Tuesday. He was 89.

Guillaume often played acerbic, dry-witted, but ultimately lovable characters like the butler Benson Du Bois, which he created on the 1977 series “Soap,” before his character was spun off in 1979. Guillaume won Emmys both for “Soap” (as supporting actor) and “Benson” (as lead actor).

He was also known as the the voice of Rafiki in “The Lion King,” for which he also won a Grammy for a spoken word recording.

“Benson” ran on ABC for seven years until 1986. The butler slowly evolved to become a government official, deflecting early complaints by critics like the Washington Post’s Tom Shales that his character was a “male Mammy.” The show brought Guillaume an Emmy in 1985 for lead actor in a comedy.

In the late ’90s he took on the role of Isaac Jaffe, executive producer of a cable sports show on the ABC sitcom “Sports Night,” and continued to perform even after being felled by a stroke.

But Guillaume also possessed a powerful, mellifluous voice, which he used most notably to play the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera” onstage.

After suffering through a period of unemployment during the ’70s, he was cast in an all-black revival of “Guys and Dolls” as Nathan Detroit, which debuted on Broadway in 1977 and secured him a Tony nomination. He also guested during this period on sitcoms such as “All in the Family,” “Good Times,” “Sanford and Son” and “The Jeffersons,” which led to the supporting role of Benson in “Soap.”

After leaving “Benson” behind, he starred in TV movie “John Grin’s Christmas,” a black retelling of “A Christmas Carol” that was Guillaume’s directorial debut. He tried another sitcom in 1989, “The Robert Guillaume Show,” playing a marriage counselor. The series lasted four months before ABC pulled the plug.

He returned to singing in 1990 in the Los Angeles production of “Phantom of the Opera” and on Broadway in the lead role of “Cyrano — The Musical” for four months beginning in November 1993. He also performed regularly in concert.

He was featured in films such as “Meteor Man,” “First Kid” and “Spy Hard.” On television he appeared in the HBO family series “Happily Ever After” and TV movies and miniseries including “Children of the Dust,” “Run for the Dream” and “Pandora’s Clock.”

Guillaume returned to series television in 1998 on “Sports Night” as the fictitious sports program’s producer. A year later he suffered a stroke and was waylaid for a few months. When he returned his illness was worked into the storyline of the series until the series ended its run on ABC the following year.

During the 2000s Guillaume made a few guest appearances on TV shows, including on “8 Simple Rules” in 2003 and “CSI” in 2008, but he focused more heavily on voicework for straight-to-video animated children’s films and videogames.

He appeared in Tim Burton’s “Big Fish” in 2003, and then made more frequent bigscreen appearances later in the decade, appearing in the Christian film “The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry” in 2008; in the thriller “Columbus Circle,” starring Selma Blair, in 2010; and in the small musical dramedy “Satin” in 2011.

Robert Peter Williams was born in St. Louis, Mo., changing his name only after he decided on a career in acting. After completing his schooling he joined the Army in 1945 and was discharged 15 months later. He took on a number of menial jobs while studying nights at St. Louis U. He originally intended to study business but became interested in singing and transferred to Washington U. to study voice and theater.

His performance at the 1957 Aspen Music Festival led to an apprenticeship at the Karamu Performing Arts Theater in Cleveland, where he appeared in operas and musical comedies.

After moving to New York, he made his Broadway debut in a 1960 revival of “Finian’s Rainbow” and found regular employment in the chorus of shows like “Fly, Blackbird,” “Golden Boy” and “Porgy and Bess.” In 1972 he took on the title role in the musical “Purlie” and also appeared in the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.”

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/robert-guillaume-dead-dies-benson-1202598171/

girl_dee

10-25-2017, 08:10 AM

Someone in New Orleans just texted me that Fats Domino passed away. If this is true it's a huge loss :(

Kobi

10-25-2017, 09:41 AM

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Fats Domino, the early rock 'n' roll superstar who sang enduring songs including "Blueberry Hill," died Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2017, according to multiple news sources. He was 89.

"Blueberry Hill" was Domino's biggest hit, occupying the No. 1 spot on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues Chart for 11 weeks in 1956. But the New Orleans native recorded several other well-known songs before and after "Blueberry Hill" sealed his fame, along the way profoundly influencing the development of rock 'n' roll with his rolling piano and suggestive lyrics.

1950's "The Fat Man" was one of his early tracks, the first rock 'n' roll song to sell 1 million copies. "Ain't That a Shame," a rocker that Domino performed in the 1956 movie "Shake, Rattle and Rock!," enjoyed moderate chart success before it was eclipsed by Pat Boone's watered-down cover version. "I'm Walkin'" was another R&B chart-topper in 1957, which Ricky Nelson covered that same year.

Born Antoine Domino Jr. Feb. 26, 1928, the son of French Creole parents, Domino grew up around music, watching his father play violin and learning piano from his brother-in-law. He spoke Louisiana Creole French before he learned English and was performing in New Orleans by the time he was 10. He was discovered by bandleader Billy Diamond while still in his teens, playing at a backyard barbecue. Domino joined Diamond's band and got his first taste of musical success.

After an impressive string of singles in the 1950s, Domino continued to chart modestly in the 1960s, releasing songs including "Red Sails in the Sunset" and a cover of the Beatles' "Lady Madonna," a tribute that must have been satisfying to a band that was influenced by the rock pioneer and even reportedly wrote that song in Domino's style. "Ain't That a Shame" was the first song John Lennon learned to play on the guitar, and both Lennon and Paul McCartney covered Domino songs in their solo careers.

Domino was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its 1986 inaugural group. Despite his legendary status, by the 1980s he was living by choice in a working-class neighborhood of New Orleans, opting to stay in the city that was home rather than touring extensively.

When 2005's Hurricane Katrina hit Domino's neighborhood hard, he chose to stay in the city with his ailing wife. A Coast Guard helicopter rescued Domino several days after Katrina's landfall. He stated that his family "lost everything" in the disaster, and they lived in nearby Harvey, Louisiana, while their home was gutted and rehabbed. The work was helped by proceeds from a tribute album to Domino, "Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino," featuring covers of his songs by musicians including McCartney, Willie Nelson and Elton John.

Domino won a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1987, and he was honored with the National Medal of Arts, which President Bill Clinton presented to him in 1998. Domino was No. 25 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" in 2004. He was a member of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame and the Delta Music Hall of Fame.

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Double checked this one. Family confirmed.

girl_dee

10-25-2017, 09:49 AM

Kobi

11-19-2017, 09:49 AM

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Actress Ann Wedgeworth, who gained fame on film and Broadway before taking on the role of a flirty divorcee on "Three's Company," has died at age 83.

Wedgeworth landed her first Broadway role in the 1958 comedy "Make a Million" and continued to take on stage roles for decades. She won the 1978 Tony award for best featured actress in a play for her performance in Neil Simon's "Chapter Two."

She acted in soaps The Edge of Night and Another World, and also found success in Hollywood with roles alongside Gene Hackman in the 1973 film "Scarecrow" and Robert De Niro in "Bang the Drum Slowly" the same year.

But she's perhaps best known for her brief tenure on the TV sitcom "Three's Comedy," where she played Lana Shields, an older woman with her eyes set on her young neighbor Jack, played by John Ritter.

Wedgeworth continued to tally TV and film credits for decades, including a starring role on the CBS series "Evening Shade" with Burt Reynolds from 1990 to 1994.

Kobi

11-20-2017, 05:18 PM

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Della Reese, the actress and gospel-influenced singer who in middle age found her greatest fame as Tess, the wise angel in the long-running television drama "Touched by an Angel," has died at age 86.

Reese's co-star on the series, Roma Downey, said in a statement that the actress died peacefully Sunday evening in her home in the Los Angeles area. No further details were included.

Before "Touched by an Angel" debuted in 1994, Reese was mainly known as a singer, although she had costarred on "Chico and the Man," ''Charlie and Company" and "The Royal Family" and hosted her own talk show, "Della."

"Touched by an Angel" was a gamble for CBS from the start. The story of an apprentice angel (Roma Downey) and her supervisor (Reese) being sent to Earth to solve people's problems appeared to have little chance in a TV world dominated by sitcoms and police dramas.

The first season brought mediocre ratings, but slowly the show's audience grew until it became one of television's highest rated dramas. It lasted until 2003.

When Mahalia Jackson, known as The Queen of Gospel Music, came to Detroit, she needed a singer to replace a member of her troupe. She turned to Reese, who was only 13.

Jackson was so impressed by the teenager's voice that she enlisted her for a summer tour, and Reese went on to tour with her for five summers. In later years she would remark that she would never forget what she learned from the legendary gospel singer, including "how to communicate with people through song."

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Kobi

11-20-2017, 05:30 PM

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Earle Hyman, a veteran actor of stage and screen who was widely known for playing Russell Huxtable on "The Cosby Show," has died. He was 91.

He made his Broadway stage debut as a teenager in 1943 in Run, Little Chillun, and later joined the American Negro Theater. The following year, Hyman began a two-year run playing the role of Rudolf on Broadway in Anna Lucasta, starring Hilda Simms in the title role. He was a member of the American Shakespeare Theatre beginning with its first season in 1955, and played the role of Othello in the 1957 season.

In December 1958 he came to London to play the leading role in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, by Errol John, at the Royal Court.

In 1959 he again appeared in the West End, this time in the first London production of A Raisin In the Sun alongside Kim Hamilton. The show ran at the Adelphi Theatre and was directed again by Lloyd Richards. A life member of The Actors Studio,[ Hyman appeared throughout his career in productions in both the United States and Norway, where he also owned property. In 1965, won a Theatre World Award and in 1988, he was awarded the St Olav's medal for his work in Norwegian theater.

In addition to his stage work, Hyman appeared in various television and film roles including adaptions of Macbeth (1968), Julius Caesar (1979), and Coriolanus (1979), and voiced Panthro on the animated television series ThunderCats (1985–1990). He played two roles (at different times) on television's The Edge of Night.

One of his most well known roles, that of Russell Huxtable in The Cosby Show, earned him an Emmy Award nomination in 1986. He played the father of lead character Cliff Huxtable, played by actor Bill Cosby, despite only being 11 years older than Cosby.

Kobi

11-20-2017, 05:49 PM

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Former NFL receiver Terry Glenn, who caught Tom Brady’s first touchdown pass with the New England Patriots in 2001, died Monday following a one-vehicle rollover traffic accident near Dallas . He was 43.

Glenn won the Biletnikoff Award as the nation’s top college receiver in 1995, piling up 1,411 yards and 17 touchdowns in his only year as a starter for Ohio State to set the stage for a pro career. Glenn played 12 seasons in the NFL, from 1996 to 2007, including six with the Patriots, five with the Dallas Cowboys and another year in Green Bay. He finished his career with 8,823 yards receiving and 44 touchdowns.

The Patriots drafted Glenn seventh overall in 1996 when Bill Parcells was coach, and Glenn set an NFL rookie record with 90 catches for a team that reached the Super Bowl, losing to the Packers.

Brady’s first touchdown pass was a 21-yarder to Glenn in a 29-26 overtime win over San Diego the year that Brady took over for an injured Drew Bledsoe and led the Patriots to their first Super Bowl title.

Gráinne

11-20-2017, 07:52 PM

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/20/tennis/jana-novotna-dead-aged-49-wimbledon/index.html

Jana Novotna, who cried at the 1997 Wimbledon final and finally won it in 1998, died of cancer in the Czech Republic at 49.

Kobi

11-30-2017, 02:21 PM

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Jim Nabors, the actor known best for playing Gomer Pyle on "The Andy Griffith Show" and its spinoff, "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.," has died at the age of 87.

His husband told the Associated Press he died at his Hawaii home.

Gomer Pyle was never intended to be a recurring character, let alone carry his own show. The role was going to be a one-off, popping up in a single episode of season three of "The Andy Griffith Show." But Nabors, who was discovered by Griffith while doing cabaret theater at a Santa Monica nightclub, played the country-bumpkin gas station attendant so well that he was brought on in a recurring role. When the character's popularity continued to grow, "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C." was spun off.

"Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C." saw the character leaving Mayberry to join the Marines. It was a perennial ratings leader, making it into the top-10 shows for each of its five seasons. In 1969, after playing Pyle for seven years, Nabors was ready to move on, so he announced his resignation and the show was canceled. But the seven years were enough to typecast Nabors, and the majority of his future roles would be in comedies harking back to his sitcom roots.

Nabors played similar characters in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," "Stroker Ace" and "Cannonball Run II." On the children's show "The Lost Saucer," he played an android trying to find his way home. In 1986, he reprised his Pyle role in the TV movie "Return to Mayberry." Carol Burnett asked him to appear on each season premiere of "The Carol Burnett Show," considering him a good-luck charm.

n addition to acting, Nabors was also a skilled singer who recorded a number of albums and had a hit in Australia with his recording of "The Impossible Dream." In the U.S., Nabors musically associated with "Back Home in Indiana," which he sang at the start of every Indianapolis 500 race from 1972 until 2014.

Born June 12, 1930, in Sylacauga, Alabama, Nabors used his Southern upbringing as he envisioned the country character he performed in his cabaret act that would become Pyle. He was honored by his home state: He was inducted into the Alabama Stage and Screen Hall of Fame, and U.S. Highway 280 was named "Jim Nabors Highway" where it runs through his home county of Talladega County.

On Jan. 29, 2013, Nabors married his longtime partner, Stan Cadwallader, in Seattle. The pair, who lived in Hawaii and had been together for 38 years, married a month after same-sex marriage was legalized in Washington. Nabors was open with friends about his sexual orientation but chose not to go public with it before the couple wed. He commented, "I haven't ever made a public spectacle of it. Well, I've known since I was a child, so, come on. It's not that kind of a thing. I've never made a huge secret of it at all."

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Thanks for the memories Jim.

Kobi

12-29-2017, 09:04 AM

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Rose Marie, an actress, singer and comedian best known for portraying the wisecracking Sally Rogers in the popular 1960s sitcom “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” has died. She was 94.

Cast as a glib, man-hunting comedy writer on the show, Marie continued playing the part, in a way, on other stages years after the role ended.

When the series wrapped in 1966, she became a regular on the game show “The Hollywood Squares,” game show, essentially staying in character.

She had been onstage for much of the 20th century after winning a New York City talent contest in the late 1920s. As a 3-year-old, she had belted out “What Can I Say After I Say I’m Sorry?” in a raspy voice mature beyond her years.

She was soon known professionally as Baby Rose Marie and became a sensation on the NBC radio network, which signed her to a seven-year contract. To prove to a doubting public that the singer who sounded like Sophie Tucker actually was a child, the network sent her on a yearlong tour.

She toured in vaudeville, was featured in a handful of movies and — after dropping “Baby” from her name as an adolescent — began headlining nightclubs. She also made her way to Broadway in the early 1950s in “Top Banana,” appearing with Phil Silvers in the musical revue and subsequent film.

In 1960, she was a regular on the short-lived sitcom “My Sister Eileen,” which starred Elaine Stritch, and later that decade was cast in a featured role on the sitcom “The Doris Day Show.”

From 1977 to 1985, she went on the road in “4 Girls 4,” a variety show that also originally featured singers Rosemary Clooney, Barbara McNair and Margaret Whiting.

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Sally Rogers was one of my heroes growing up.

Kobi

12-29-2017, 04:50 PM

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Sue Grafton, author of the best-selling "alphabet series" of mystery novels, has died in Santa Barbara. She was 77.

Grafton began her "alphabet series" in 1982 with "A is for Alibi." Her most recent book, "Y is for Yesterday," was published in August.

"Many of you also know that she was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows, and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name," her daughter wrote. "Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y."

BullDog

12-29-2017, 05:27 PM

I'm so bummed that Sue Grafton died - especially not quite making it to Z. But I am so happy she has a good family that is honoring her wishes and work. I absolutely hate when someone takes over after a writer's death to finish a book or carry on a series. So thank you to the Grafton family.

*Anya*

01-02-2018, 03:17 AM

Obituaries

Ben Barres, transgender brain researcher and advocate of diversity in science, dies at 63

By Matt Schudel December 30, 2017

Ben Barres, a neurobiologist who made groundbreaking discoveries regarding the structure and function of the brain that may have implications for understanding Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative disorders and who, as a transgender man, became an outspoken opponent of gender bias in science, died Dec. 27 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 63.

His death was announced by Stanford University, where he was a professor of neurobiology in the medical school. The cause was pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Barres was one of the world’s leading researchers on glial cells, which are the most numerous structures in the brain but whose purpose was almost a complete mystery.

“Until Ben grabbed hold of this, there was very little known about what they did in the brain,” Beth Stevens, a Harvard University professor and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient who studied with Dr. Barres, said in an interview. “He made a remarkable number of discoveries and launched many avenues of research. He started a whole new field.”

There are three primary types of glial cells, or glia — microglia, oligodendrocytes and astrocytes — but before Dr. Barres began to look at glia, their functions were poorly understood. Most researchers concentrated on the brain’s neurons, which send electrical impulses.

Trained as a physician, Dr. Barres had an early interest in diseases of the brain. Other scientists had noticed that irregularly shaped glial cells were often found near damaged brain tissue, and Dr. Barres began to study whether the glia affected other structures in the brain.

“He has made one shocking, revolutionary discovery after another,” Martin Raff, a biologist at University College London who once trained Dr. Barres, told Discover magazine in August.

Dr. Barres sought to understand the normal functions of glial cells to understand what happened when things went awry. Among other things, the glia appeared to help neurons form synapse connections to transmit electrical signals throughout the brain. Some glial cells (oligodendrocytes) wrapped around neurons like insulation, making them work more efficiently.

Dr. Barres also discovered that some glial cells — the astrocytes, in particular — could have harmful effects. In what he described as “the most important discovery my lab has ever made,” he showed in a 2017 article published in the journal Nature that the glia could undergo changes or secrete substances that could damage neurons and other cells in the brain.

In other words, glial cells might contribute to the degeneration of brain tissue that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, as well as multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), glaucoma and other conditions. Dr. Barres’s work holds promise for other researchers to explore ways to treat or prevent such debilitating illnesses.

“He laid the groundwork for many other scientists,” Stevens said. “He’s really cracked open a whole new phenomenon.”

Dr. Barres began his scientific career when he was known as Barbara Barres. After undergoing hormone treatments and surgery, Dr. Barres became known as Ben Barres in 1997. His experience led him to become a powerful advocate for women and other marginalized people he believed were denied opportunities in a scientific world dominated by men.

I have this perspective,” he told the Associated Press in 2006. “I’ve lived in the shoes of a woman, and I’ve lived in the shoes of a man. It’s caused me to reflect on the barriers women face.”

In 2005, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers attributed the relative dearth of female scientists to the “intrinsic aptitude” of women. The next year, Dr. Barres published a scathing essay in Nature, in which he wrote that the ad feminam statements by Summers and other scholars were “nothing more than blaming the victim.”

“The comments,” he wrote, “about women’s lesser innate abilities are all wrongful and personal attacks on my character and capabilities, as well as on my colleagues’ and students’ abilities and self-esteem. I will certainly not sit around silently and endure them.”

Dr. Barres cited studies showing that boys and girls had comparable test scores in mathematics and science but that the college science departments, tenure committees and grant-awarding panels were overwhelmingly controlled by men.

Two Harvard professors jumped into the fray, with one, political scientist Harvey C. Mansfield, calling Dr. Barres “a political fruitcake” and another, psychologist Steven Pinker, complaining that Dr. Barres had “reduced science to Oprah.”

.“If a famous scientist or the president of a prestigious university is going to pronounce in public that women are likely to be innately inferior,” Dr. Barres wrote in his Nature essay, “would it be too much to ask that they be aware of the relevant data?”

Citing his own experience, Dr. Barres recalled that, after his transition to life as a man, he led a seminar at an academic conference. A colleague overheard another scientist say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”

Dr. Barres wrote that in everyday transactions as well as in academic circles, “people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect” than when he was living as a woman. “I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

[‘A towering legacy of goodness’: Ben Barres’s fight for diversity in science]

Dr. Barres was born Sept. 13, 1954, in West Orange, N.J. His father was a salesman.

From the age of about 4, Dr. Barres, who had a fraternal twin sister, preferred boys’ toys and clothing. For Halloween, the young Barbara Barres dressed as a football player or soldier.

“I felt like a boy,” Dr. Barres said on the “Charlie Rose” show in 2015. “The brain has innate circuits that determine our gender identity. And so being transgender is not a choice that I made.”

Dr. Barres had an early interest in science and became the first member of his family to attend college. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he later wrote, “I was the only person in a large class of people of nearly all men to solve a hard math problem, only to be told by the professor that my boyfriend must have solved it for me.”

After graduating from MIT in 1976, he received a medical degree from Dartmouth in 1979. He later enrolled in graduate school at Harvard, working nights as a physician. He received a PhD in neurobiology — his second doctorate — in 1990.

Dr. Barres then studied at University College London before joining the Stanford faculty in 1993.

When Dr. Barres was 41 — and still known as Barbara — he developed breast cancer, a disease his mother died of at about the same age. He underwent a mastectomy.

“I said, ‘While you are there, please take off the other breast,’ ” Dr. Barres said on “Charlie Rose.” “Since this cancer runs in my family, he did agree to remove the other breast.

“And I just can’t tell you how therapeutic that was. I felt so relieved to have those breasts removed.”

Dr. Barres later read an article about a transgender man who had undergone a female-to-male transition.

“I realized for the first time in my life,” he said in 2015, “that there were other people like me and that I might be transgender.”

He began to take testosterone, which led to a deeper voice, a beard and male-pattern baldness. Meanwhile, with the full encouragement of his Stanford colleagues, his scientific work continued without interruption. (Dr. Barres also had prosopagnosia, sometimes called face blindness, which made him unable to recognize faces. He identified people by their voices, hairstyles or other sensory cues.)

In addition to running a laboratory with 15 to 20 researchers, Dr. Barres taught classes in the medical school and became chairman of the neurobiology department. He also developed Stanford’s master of medicine program, combining clinical work and research, and became an informal adviser to female, gay and transgender science students.

Researchers at his laboratory were an unusually diverse group, with women often outnumbering men. His former students now run research labs at Harvard, Duke University, New York University and elsewhere.

“It was the most fun and creatively dynamic environment I’ve ever worked in,” said Stevens, the Harvard scientist who was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Barres’s laboratory from 2004 to 2008. “He created such a tight family. These are not just scientists working at the bench. These are people who are working together and helping each other.”

Dr. Barres had two surviving sisters and a brother.

After learning of his pancreatic cancer diagnosis, Dr. Barres arranged for other scientists to take over his laboratory, wrote recommendation letters and gave interviews about his journey as a woman and later as a man through science.

“I feel like I have a responsibility to speak out,” he said. “Anyone who has changed sex has done probably the hardest thing they can do. It’s freeing, in a way, because it makes me more fearless about other things.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ben-barres-transgender-brain-researcher-and-advocate-of-diversity-in-science-dies-at-63/2017/12/30/3b697cba-ebea-11e7-9f92-10a2203f6c8d_story.html?utm_term=.fe1ee560057e

Kobi

01-06-2018, 04:57 PM

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Jerry Van Dyke, the younger brother of Dick Van Dyke who struggled for decades to achieve his own stardom before clicking as the dim-witted sidekick in television's "Coach," has died. He was 86.

Van Dyke, a native of Danville, Ill., had an affable, goofy appeal, but he spent much of his career toiling in failed sitcoms and in the shadow of his older brother, even playing the star's brother in "The Dick Van Dyke Show."

Until "Coach" came along in 1989, Van Dyke was best known to critics as the guy who had starred in one of television's more improbable sitcoms, 1965's "My Mother the Car." Its premise: A small-town lawyer talks to his deceased mother (voiced by actress Ann Sothern), who speaks from the radio of an antique automobile.

In "Coach," he finally made it, playing assistant coach Luther Van Dam, comic foil to Craig T. Nelson's coach Hayden Fox. The two headed up a hapless Minnesota college football team, its follies aired from 1989 to 1997, and Van Dyke was nominated four times for an Emmy.

Over the years, Van Dyke made guest appearances on numerous programs, among them "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," whose star had played his sister-in-law on "The Dick Van Dyke Show."

He also appeared on "The Andy Griffith Show," ''Perry Mason" and in such films as "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," ''Palm Springs Weekend," ''Angel in My Pocket" and "McLintock!"

He also passed on a chance to play the title role on "Gilligan's Island" and to replace the departing Don Knotts as the deputy on "The Andy Griffith Show."

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Think I was the only person who liked My Mother The Car. Very creative idea. Thanks for the memories Jerry.

Kobi

01-09-2018, 10:21 PM

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Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien, 42, founder of the Miss Trans America and Miss Trans New England pageant, died Friday in North Adams, Mass., becoming the first known transgender homicide victim of 2018.

Her husband, Mark S. Steele-Knudslien, 47, is charged with first-degree murder in the case.

Christa was well known in the Massachusetts transgender community for her activism and helped launch the first New England Trans Pride event a decade ago, friends said. She and other advocates later started the Miss Trans New England Pageant, which brought together transgender women from across the region, said A. Vickie Boisseau, who officiated at her wedding last April.

Another longtime friend, Justin Adkins, said, “Her thing was always that transgender women are beautiful and need a venue for trans women to be seen as beautiful.”

Searched for an hour. Cant find any other stories about her life and accomplishments. The only stories I can find, at the moment, are the ones with the gruesome details of her death.

http://www.washingtonblade.com/2018/01/09/miss-trans-america-founders-husband-charged-murder/

Bèsame*

01-16-2018, 05:00 PM

The voice of The Cranberries, Delores O'Riordan, died suddenly on Monday in London. Her urgent powerful voice helped make the Irish rock band The Cranberries a global success in the 1990's. She was 46.

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Kobi

01-17-2018, 12:54 PM

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Boston Celtics legend Jo Jo White, who helped the franchise return to glory in the 1970s after Bill Russell’s retirement, lost his battle with cancer at age 71, the team announced on Tuesday night.

His contributions to the team’s championship legacy may have only been surpassed by the deep and lasting impact that he had in the community.

White played 10 seasons for the Celtics before finishing his career with the Golden State Warriors and Kansas City Kings, making seven straight All-Star appearances and winning two NBA titles in Boston alongside John Havlicek and Dave Cowens. The 1976 Finals MVP’s No. 10 hangs in the rafters of TD Garden, and he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s class of 2015.

White played four seasons at the University of Kansas and won a gold medal as a member of the U.S. men’s national team at the 1968 Summer Olympics before the Celtics drafted him ninth overall in 1969.

Also drafted by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and Major League Baseball’s Cincinnati Reds, White served one year in the U.S. Marine Corp Reserves before beginning his NBA career. Following his retirement in 1981, White later rejoined the Celtics as director of special projects, a role he served until his death.

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An amazing athlete. An even more amazing man. Thank you Jo Jo for everything you did and everything you were.

Nat

01-17-2018, 11:54 PM

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has died. (In Mid-December 2017)

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, released the following statement:

“We are deeply saddened by the sudden passing of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee,” said HRC president Chad Griffin.“Mayor Lee was a tireless advocate for LGBTQ equality who worked to make San Francisco a stronger, more vibrant, and inclusive community. As the first Asian American mayor in the city’s history, he was both a trailblazer and a dedicated public servant admired by millions. Our hearts go out to his family, friends and all those grieving his loss today."

Lee was a founding member of the “Mayors Against LGBT Discrimination” coalition.

He began his career as a civil rights attorney, fighting for fair housing for low-income people and battling corruption.

According to the Office of the Mayor, San Francisco added more than 140,000 jobs and more than 17,000 homes during Lee’s tenure.

Just last week, Lee joined with Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney in penning an op-ed about the importance of rejecting licenses to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

Regarding Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court of the United States, they said, “As co-chairs of the national Mayors Against LGBT Discrimination coalition, we are proud to join more than 150 other mayors and municipalities nationwide in opposing religious exemptions that allow sexual orientation-based discrimination.”

BullDog

01-23-2018, 07:53 PM

Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88
By Gerald Jonas, NY Times

Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like “The Left Hand of Darkness” and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.

Her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause but said she had been in poor health for several months.

Ms. Le Guin embraced the standard themes of her chosen genres: sorcery and dragons, spaceships and planetary conflict. But even when her protagonists are male, they avoid the macho posturing of so many science fiction and fantasy heroes. The conflicts they face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles.

Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several, including “The Left Hand of Darkness” — set on a planet where the customary gender distinctions do not apply — have been in print for almost 50 years. The critic Harold Bloom lauded Ms. Le Guin as “a superbly imaginative creator and major stylist” who “has raised fantasy into high literature for our time.”

In addition to more than 20 novels, she was the author of a dozen books of poetry, more than 100 short stories (collected in multiple volumes), seven collections of essays, 13 books for children and five volumes of translation, including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. She also wrote a guide for writers.

“The Left Hand of Darkness,” published in 1969, takes place on a planet called Gethen, where people are neither male nor female.

Ms. Le Guin’s fictions range from young-adult adventures to wry philosophical fables. They combine compelling stories, rigorous narrative logic and a lean but lyrical style to draw readers into what she called the “inner lands” of the imagination. Such writing, she believed, could be a moral force.

“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”

The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”

She was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 21, 1929, the youngest of four children and the only daughter of two anthropologists, Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora Quinn Kroeber. Her father was an expert on the Native Americans of California, and her mother wrote an acclaimed book, “Ishi in Two Worlds” (1960), about the life and death of California’s “last wild Indian.”

At a young age, Ms. Le Guin immersed herself in books about mythology, among them James Frazier’s “The Golden Bough,” classic fantasies like Lord Dunsany’s “A Dreamer’s Tales,” and the science-fiction magazines of the day. But in early adolescence she lost interest in science fiction, because, she recalled, the stories “seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers: White men go forth and conquer the universe.”

She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951, earned a master’s degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952, and won a Fulbright fellowship to study in Paris. There she met and married another Fulbright scholar, Charles Le Guin, who survives her.

On their return to the United States, she abandoned her graduate studies to raise a family; the Le Guins eventually settled in Portland, where Mr. Le Guin taught history at Portland State University.

Besides her husband and son, Ms. Le Guin is survived by two daughters, Caroline and Elisabeth Le Guin; two brothers, Theodore and Clifton Kroeber; and four grandchildren.

By the early 1960s Ms. Le Guin had written five unpublished novels, mostly set in an imaginary Central European country called Orsinia. Eager to find a more welcoming market, she decided to try her hand at genre fiction.

Her first science-fiction novel, “Rocannon’s World,” came out in 1966. Two years later she published “A Wizard of Earthsea,” the first in a series about a made-up world where the practice of magic is as precise as any science, and as morally ambiguous.

The first three Earthsea books — the other two were “The Tombs of Atuan” (1971) and “The Farthest Shore” (1972) — were written, at the request of her publisher, for young adults. But their grand scale and elevated style betray no trace of writing down to an audience.

The magic of Earthsea is language-driven: Wizards gain power over people and things by knowing their “true names.” Ms. Le Guin took this discipline seriously in naming her own characters. “I must find the right name or I cannot get on with the story,” she said. “I cannot write the story if the name is wrong.”

The Earthsea series was clearly influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. But instead of a holy war between Good and Evil, Ms. Le Guin’s stories are organized around a search for “balance” among competing forces — a concept she adapted from her lifelong study of Taoist texts.

She returned to Earthsea later in her career, extending and deepening the trilogy with books like “Tehanu” (1990) and “The Other Wind” (2001), written for a general audience.

“The Left Hand of Darkness,” published in 1969, takes place on a planet called Gethen, where people are neither male nor female but assume the attributes of either sex during brief periods of reproductive fervor. Speaking with an anthropological dispassion, Ms. Le Guin later referred to her novel as a “thought experiment” designed to explore the nature of human societies.

“I eliminated gender to find out what was left,” she told The Guardian.

But there is nothing dispassionate about the relationship at the core of the book, between an androgynous native of Gethen and a human male from Earth. The book won the two major prizes in science fiction, the Hugo and Nebula awards, and is widely taught in secondary schools and colleges.

Much of Ms. Le Guin’s science fiction has a common background: a loosely knit confederation of worlds known as the Ekumen. This was founded by an ancient people who seeded humans on habitable planets throughout the galaxy — including Gethen, Earth and the twin worlds of her most ambitious novel, “The Dispossessed,” subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974).

As the subtitle implies, “The Dispossessed” contrasts two forms of social organization: a messy but vibrant capitalist society, which oppresses its underclass, and a classless “utopia” (partly based on the ideas of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin), which turns out to be oppressive in its own conformist way. Ms. Le Guin leaves it up to the reader to find a comfortable balance between the two.

“The Lathe of Heaven” (1971) offers a very different take on utopian ambitions. A man whose dreams can alter reality falls under the sway of a psychiatrist, who usurps this power to conjure his own vision of a perfect world, with unfortunate results.

“The Lathe of Heaven” was among the few books by Ms. Le Guin that have been adapted for film or television. There were two made-for-television versions, one on PBS in 1980 and the other on the A&E cable channel in 2002.

Among the other adaptations of her work were the 2006 Japanese animated feature “Tales From Earthsea” and a 2004 mini-series on the Sci Fi channel, “Legend of Earthsea.”

With the exception of the 1980 “Lathe of Heaven,” she had little good to say about any of them.

Ms. Le Guin always considered herself a feminist, even when genre conventions led her to center her books on male heroes. Her later works, like the additions to the Earthsea series and such Ekumen tales as “Four Ways to Forgiveness” (1995) and “The Telling” (2000), are mostly told from a female point of view.

In some of her later books, she gave in to a tendency toward didacticism, as if she were losing patience with humanity for not learning the hard lessons — about the need for balance and compassion — that her best work so astutely embodies.

At the 2014 National Book Awards, Ms. Le Guin was given the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She accepted the medal on behalf of her fellow writers of fantasy and science fiction, who, she said, had been “excluded from literature for so long” while literary honors went to the “so-called realists.”

She also urged publishers and writers not to put too much emphasis on profits.

“I have had a long career and a good one,” she said, adding, “Here at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html

Kobi

02-05-2018, 07:57 PM

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John Mahoney, best known for playing Martin Crane on 11 seasons of “Frasier,” has died. He was 77.

Mahoney played the father of Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce’s characters during the show’s run on NBC from 1993 to 2004. He won a SAG Award and received two Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations for his portrayal. He was also a mainstay of Chicago’s theater community.

From 2011 to 2014, he had a recurring role on “Hot in Cleveland” as Roy, the love interest of Betty White’s character, Elka. He was much praised for his performance as an anguished CEO in psychological counseling on Season 2 of HBO’s “In Treatment” in 2009.

Mahoney worked in film for more than 35 years, appearing in classics like “The American President” and “Say Anything,” along with voicing animated characters in the “Antz” and “Atlantis” films. He also had guest spots in a number of popular TV shows including “Cheers” and “3rd Rock from the Sun.”

Born Blackpool, England, the actor started his career in theater and continued to return to the stage, appearing in “Prelude to a Kiss” on Broadway and “The Outgoing Tide” and “The Birthday Party” in Chicago after “Frasier” ended.

He came to the U.S. at age 19 and taught English at Western Illinois University before entering into the entertainment industry in 1977

Kobi

02-23-2018, 07:55 PM

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The exuberant, indefatigable actress-singer Nanette Fabray, a Tony and Emmy winner, a star of Vincente Minnelli’s golden-age musical “The Band Wagon” and a longtime presence on television, most notably on “The Hollywood Squares,” has died. She was 97.

In MGM’s “The Band Wagon” (1953), also starring Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and Oscar Levant, Fabray appeared in that classic film’s two most famous numbers, “That’s Entertainment” and, as one of the bratty (and bizarre) babies in high chairs, “Triplets.”

Fabray also appeared on TV comedies and drama, starring on “Westinghouse Playhouse,” created by then-husband Ranald MacDougall, and recurring as Grandma Katherine Romano on hit 1970s sitcom “One Day at a Time.” She guested on “Burke’s Law,” “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” on which she played Mary’s mother; “Love American Style,” “Maude,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Coach.”

In her 20s, Fabray was diagnosed with hereditary hearing loss. She had four operations throughout her lifetime to restore her hearing. She also began wearing a hearing aid and speaking publicly about her disability in her 30s.

Throughout her life, Fabray continued to advocate for people with hearing disabilities. Her efforts contributed to the Americans With Disabilities Act, and she was a founding member of the National Captioning Institute, which was instrumental in passing a law requiring that all TV sets be equipped with captioning in 1994.

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

Had a major crush on this woman. Thanks for the memories Nanette.

Kobi

03-03-2018, 08:56 PM

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/ae/47/dc/ae47dc632d9d99b3a9d4af4eb4fd9d9f.jpg

David Ogden Stiers, best known for his role as the arrogant surgeon Major Charles Emerson Winchester III on “MASH,” died Saturday. He was 75.

For his work on “MASH,” Stiers was twice Emmy nominated for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy or variety or music series, in 1981 and 1982, and he earned a third Emmy nomination for his performance in NBC miniseries “The First Olympics: Athens 1896” as William Milligan Sloane, the founder of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

The actor, with his educated, resonant intonations — though he did not share Major Winchester’s Boston Brahmin accent — was much in demand for narration and voiceover work, and for efforts as the narrator and as of Disney’s enormous hit animated film “Beauty and the Beast,” he shared a Grammy win for best recording for children and another nomination for album of the year.

He voiced Dr. Jumba Jookiba, the evil genius who created Stitch, in 2002’s “Lilo & Stitch” and various spinoffs; once he became part of the Disney family, Stiers went on to do voicework on a large number of movies, made for TV or video content and videogames.

In addition to serving as narrator and as the voice of Cogsworth in “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991, he voiced Governor Ratcliffe and Wiggins in Disney’s 1995 animated effort “Pocahontas” and voiced the Archdeacon in Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” He also contributed the voice of the grandfather for the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1992 animation “Porco Rosso” and of Kamaji in Miyazki’s classic “Spirited Away” in 2001. From 2011-15 he recurred on Cartoon Network’s “Regular Show.”

Stiers was also known for the eight Perry Mason TV movies he made between 1986-88 in which his prosecuting attorney invariably lost to Raymond Burr’s Mason, and more recently he had recurred on the USA Network series “The Dead Zone” from 2002-07 as the Rev. Eugene Purdy, the chief antagonist to star Anthony Michael Hall’s Johnny Smith.

In 2009, the actor revealed publicly that he was gay. He told ABC News at the time that he had hidden his sexuality for a long time because so much of his income had been derived from family-friendly programming, and coming out thus might have had repercussions in the past.

http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/david-ogden-stiers-dead-dies-mash-1202716860/

Kätzchen

03-27-2018, 04:44 PM

Linda Brown <<<<<--- the student at the center of Brown v Board of Education, passed away yesterday. She was 75 years old.. Her landmark civil rights case was fought for and won by Thurgood Marshall, putting an end to racial segregation in public schools, during the Jim Crow Era (1877 - mid-1960s).

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/03/26/ap_7905171257_custom-234e4d508ac4f79cc2fe4c478afe86436257c247-s300-c85.jpg

(Linda and her dad, in photo above, courtesy of NPR).

LINK to NPR article: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/26/597154953/linda-brown-who-was-at-center-of-brown-v-board-of-education-dies

Orema

04-02-2018, 01:03 PM

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Is Dead at 81; Fought Apartheid (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/world/africa/winnie-mandela-dead.html)
By Alan Cowell

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whose hallowed place in the pantheon of South Africa’s liberators was eroded by scandal over corruption, kidnapping, murder and the implosion of her fabled marriage to Nelson Mandela, died early Monday in Johannesburg. She was 81.

Her death, at the Netcare Milpark Hospital, was announced by her spokesman, Victor Dlamini. He said in a statement that she died “after a long illness, for which she had been in and out of hospital since the start of the year.”

The South African Broadcasting Corporation said she was admitted to the hospital over the weekend complaining of the flu after she attended a church service on Friday. She had been treated for diabetes and underwent major surgeries as her health began failing over the last several years.

Charming, intelligent, complex, fiery and eloquent, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela (Madikizela was her surname at birth) was inevitably known to most of the world through her marriage to the revered Mr. Mandela. It was a bond that endured ambiguously: She derived a vaunted status from their shared struggle, yet she chafed at being defined by him.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/04/03/obituaries/03mandela4/03mandela4-master675.jpg
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was cheered by supporters after appearing in court in Krugersdorp, South Africa, in 1986. She commanded a natural constituency of her own among South Africa’s poor and dispossessed. Credit Associated Press

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela commanded a natural constituency of her own among South Africa’s poor and dispossessed, and the post-apartheid leaders who followed Mr. Mandela could never ignore her appeal to a broad segment of society. In April 2016, the government of President Jacob G. Zuma gave Ms. Madikizela-Mandela one of the country’s highest honors: the Order of Luthuli, given, in part, for contributions to the struggle for democracy.

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela retained a political presence as a member of Parliament, representing the dominant African National Congress, and she insisted on a kind of primacy in Mr. Mandela’s life, no matter their estrangement.

“Nobody knows him better than I do,” she told a British interviewer in 2013.

Increasingly, though, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela resented the notion that her anti-apartheid credentials had been eclipsed by her husband’s global stature and celebrity, and she struggled in vain in later years to be regarded again as the “mother of the nation,” a sobriquet acquired during the long years of Mr. Mandela’s imprisonment. She insisted that her contribution had been wrongly depicted as a pale shadow of his.

“I am not Mandela’s product,” she told an interviewer. “I am the product of the masses of my country and the product of my enemy” — references to South Africa’s white rulers under apartheid and to her burning hatred of them, rooted in her own years of mistreatment, incarceration and banishment.

Conduit to Her Husband

While Mr. Mandela was held at the Robben Island penal settlement, off Cape Town, where he spent most of his 27 years in jail, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela acted as the main conduit to his followers, who hungered for every clue to his thinking and well-being. The flow of information was meager, however: Her visits there were rare, and she was never allowed physical contact with him.

In time, her reputation became scarred by accusations of extreme brutality toward suspected turncoats, misbehavior and indiscretion in her private life, and a radicalism that seemed at odds with Mr. Mandela’s quest for racial inclusiveness.

She nevertheless sought to remain in his orbit. She was at his side, brandishing a victor’s clenched fist salute, when he was finally released from prison in February 1990.

At his funeral, in December 2013, she appeared by his coffin in mourning black — positioning herself almost as if she were the grieving first lady — even though Mr. Mandela had married Graça Machel, the widow of the former Mozambican president Samora Machel, in 1998, on his 80th birthday, six years after separating from Ms. Madikizela-Mandela and two years after their divorce. It was Mr. Mandela’s third marriage.

In 2016, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela began legal efforts to secure the ownership of Mr. Mandela’s home in his ancestral village of Qunu. She contended that their marriage had never been lawfully dissolved and that she was therefore entitled to the house, which Mr. Mandela had bequeathed to his descendants. High Court judges rejected that argument in April. After learning that she had lost the case, she was hospitalized.

Her lawyers said she would appeal the High Court judgment.

‘She Who Must Endure’

Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela was born to a noble family of the Xhosa-speaking Pondo tribe in Transkei. Her first name, Nomzamo, means “she who must endure trials.”

Her birth date was Sept. 26, 1936, according to the Nelson Mandela Foundation and many other sources, although earlier accounts gave the year as 1934.

Her father, Columbus, was a senior official in the so-called homeland of Transkei, according to South African History Online, an unofficial archive, which described her as the fourth of eight children. (Other accounts say her family was larger.) Her mother, Gertrude, was a teacher who died when Winnie was 8, the archive said.

As a barefoot child she tended cattle and learned to make do with very little, in marked contrast to her later years of free-spending ostentation. She attended a Methodist mission school and then the Hofmeyr School of Social Work in Johannesburg, where she befriended Adelaide Tsukudu, the future wife of Oliver Tambo, a law partner of Mr. Mandela’s who went on to lead the A.N.C. in exile. She turned down a scholarship in the United States, preferring to remain in South Africa as the first black social worker at the Baragwanath hospital in Soweto.

One day in 1957, when she was waiting at a bus stop, Nelson Mandela drove past. “I was struck by her beauty,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom.” Some weeks later, he recalled, “I was at the office when I popped in to see Oliver and there was this same young woman.”

Mr. Mandela, approaching 40 and the father of three, declared on their first date that he would marry her. Soon he separated from his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase, a nurse, to marry Ms. Madikizela-Mandela on June 14, 1958.

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was thrust into the limelight in 1964 when her husband was sentenced to life in prison on charges of treason. She was officially “banned” under draconian restrictions intended to make her a nonperson, unable to work, socialize, move freely or be quoted in the South African news media, even as she raised their two daughters, Zenani and Zindziswa.

In a crackdown in May 1969, five years after her husband was sent to prison, she was arrested and held for 17 months, 13 in solitary confinement. She was beaten and tortured. The experience, she wrote, was “what changed me, what brutalized me so much that I knew what it is to hate.”

After blacks rioted in the segregated Johannesburg township of Soweto in 1976, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela was again imprisoned without trial, this time for five months. She was then banished to a bleak township outside the profoundly conservative white town of Brandfort, in the Orange Free State.

“I am a living symbol of whatever is happening in the country,” she wrote in “Part of My Soul Went With Him,” a memoir published in 1984 and printed around the world. “I am a living symbol of the white man’s fear. I never realized how deeply embedded this fear is until I came to Brandfort.”

Contrary to the authorities’ intentions, her cramped home became a place of pilgrimage for diplomats and prominent sympathizers, as well as foreign journalists seeking interviews.

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela cherished conversation with outsiders and word of the world beyond her confines. She scorned many of her restrictions, using whites-only public phones and ignoring the segregated counters at the local liquor store when she ordered Champagne — gestures that stunned the area’s whites.

Banishment Took Toll

Still, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela’s exclusion from what passed as a normal life in South Africa took a toll, and she began to drink heavily. During her banishment, moreover, her land changed. Beginning in late 1984, young protesters challenged the authorities with increasing audacity. The unrest spread, prompting the white rulers to acknowledge what they called a “revolutionary climate” and declare a state of emergency.

When Ms. Madikizela-Mandela returned to her home in Soweto in 1985, breaking her banning orders, it was as a far more bellicose figure, determined to assume leadership of what became the decisive and most violent phase of the struggle. As she saw it, her role was to stiffen the confrontation with the authorities.

The tactics were harsh.

“Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we will liberate this country,” she told a rally in April 1986. She was referring to “necklacing,” a form of sometimes arbitrary execution by fire using a gas-soaked tire around a supposed traitor’s neck, and it shocked an older generation of anti-apartheid campaigners. But her severity aligned her with the young township radicals who enforced commitment to the struggle.

In the late 1980s, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela allowed the outbuildings around her residence in Soweto to be used by the so-called Mandela United Football Club, a vigilante gang that claimed to be her bodyguard. It terrorized Soweto, inviting infamy and prosecution.

In 1991 she was convicted of ordering the 1988 kidnapping of four youths in Soweto. The body of one, a 14-year-old named James Moeketsi Seipei — nicknamed Stompie, a slang word for a cigarette butt, reflecting his diminutive stature — was found with his throat cut.

Ms. Madikizela-Mandela’s chief bodyguard was convicted of murder. She was sentenced to six years for kidnapping, but South Africa’s highest appeals court reduced her punishment to fines and a suspended one-year term.

By then her life had begun to unravel. The United Democratic Front, an umbrella group of organizations fighting apartheid and linked to the A.N.C., expelled her. In April 1992, Mr. Mandela, midway through settlement talks with President F. W. de Klerk of South Africa, announced that he and his wife were separating. (She dismissed suggestions that she had wanted to be known by the title “first lady.” “I am not the sort of person to carry beautiful flowers and be an ornament to everyone,” she said.)

Two years later, Mr. Mandela was elected president and offered her a minor job as the deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology. But after allegations of influence peddling, bribetaking and misuse of government funds, she was forced from office. In 1996, Mr. Mandela ended their 38-year marriage, testifying in court that his wife was having an affair with a colleague.

Only in 1997, at the behest of Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, did Ms. Madikizela-Mandela offer an apology for the events of the late 1980s. “Things went horribly wrong,” she said, adding, “For that I am deeply sorry.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/04/03/world/mandela-obit-3/mandela-obit-3-blog427.jpg
Ms. Madikizela-Mandela at a 2009 gathering to honor her former husband, who died four years later. Credit Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Yet the catalog of missteps continued, cast into sharp relief by her haughty dismissiveness toward her accusers. In 2003 she was convicted of using her position as president of the A.N.C. Women’s League to obtain fraudulent loans; she was sentenced to five years in prison. But her sentence was again suspended on appeal, with a judge finding that she had not gained personally from the transactions.

To the end, Ms. Madikizela-Mandela remained a polarizing figure in South Africa, admired by loyalists who were prepared to focus on her contribution to ending apartheid, vilified by critics who foremost saw her flaws. Few could ignore her unsettling contradictions, however.

“While there is something of a historical revisionism happening in some quarters of our nation these days that brands Nelson Mandela’s second wife a revolutionary and heroic figure,” the columnist Verashni Pillay wrote in the South African newspaper The Mail and Guardian, “it doesn’t take that much digging to remember the truly awful things she has been responsible for.”

Joseph R. Gregory contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/world/africa/winnie-mandela-dead.html

ProfPacker

04-07-2018, 05:31 AM

I know I have been absent from BFP. It has been a horrible year. My mother passed in September and my sister passed Thursday. I have now facilitated the death of my parents and only sibling through hospice. I will probably not be active for a while because I am just emotionally shot. I have not forgotten my friends here just with the deaths and being the sole parent and helping my oldest in her first year of college and going through the college process with little help from my ex, and working, I can’t do much more than check in. Thanks for your understanding.

DapperButch

04-07-2018, 03:33 PM

Nat

04-17-2018, 06:35 AM

New York lawyer David Buckel - well-known for his work on behalf of the LGBT community, as well as with environmental groups - immolated himself in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in protest against the use of fossil fuels. Buckel had been the lead lawyer in the case of Brandon Teena And served as the Marriage Project Director and Senior Counsel for Lambda Legal.

Link (http://www.newsweek.com/new-york-lawyer-burns-himself-death-protest-fossil-fuels-886332)

Canela

04-17-2018, 10:11 PM

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/politics/barbara-bush-dies/index.html

Barbara Bush, the matriarch of a Republican political dynasty and a first lady who elevated the cause of literacy, died Tuesday, according to a statement from her husband's office. She was 92.

Only the second woman in American history to have had a husband and a son elected President (Abigail Adams was the first), Bush was seen as a plainspoken public figure who was instantly recognizable with her signature white hair and pearl necklaces and earrings. She became a major political figure as her husband, George H.W. Bush, rose to become vice president and president. After they left the White House, she was a potent spokeswoman for two of her sons -- George W. and Jeb -- as they campaigned for office.
'The enforcer' -- how Barbara Bush became the matriarch of the Republican Party
'The enforcer' -- how Barbara Bush became the matriarch of the Republican Party
The mother of six children -- one of whom, a daughter, Robin, died as a child from leukemia -- Barbara Bush raised her fast-growing family in the 1950s and '60s amid the post-war boom of Texas and the whirl of politics that consumed her husband.
She was at his side during his nearly 30-year political career. He was a US representative for Texas, UN ambassador, Republican Party chairman, ambassador to China and CIA director. He then became Ronald Reagan's vice president for two terms and won election to the White House in 1988. He left office in 1993 after losing a re-election bid to Bill Clinton.
Quick-witted with a sharp tongue, the feisty Barbara Bush was a fierce defender of her husband and an astute adviser.
As first lady, her principal persona as a devoted wife and mother contrasted in many ways with her peer and predecessor, Nancy Reagan, and her younger successor, Hillary Clinton, both of whom were seen as more intimately involved in their husbands' presidencies.
Still, Barbara Bush promoted women's rights, and her strong personal views sometimes surfaced publicly and raised eyebrows -- especially when they clashed with Republican Party politics. For instance, she once said as her husband ran for president that abortion should not be politicized.
Barbara Bush in failing health, won't seek further treatment
Barbara Bush in failing health, won't seek further treatment
She also was not shy about the possibility of a female president, disarming a Wellesley College audience at a 1990 appearance protested by some on campus who questioned her credentials to address female graduates aiming for the workplace.
"Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow my footsteps and preside over the White House as the president's spouse.
"I wish him well," she said.
Childhood and family life
Barbara Pierce was born June 8, 1925, in New York and raised in the upscale town of Rye. She attended a prestigious boarding school in South Carolina, where she met her future husband at a school dance when she was only 16 and he was a year older. A year and a half and countless love letters later, the two were engaged just before George Bush enlisted in the Navy and went off to fight in World War II.
Bush, who was the youngest fighter pilot in the Navy at the time, would return home a war hero, after being shot down by the Japanese. He had flown 58 combat missions and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery. By that time, Barbara had dropped out of Smith College and the pair were married in January 1945.
They raised their family mainly in Texas, where George H.W. Bush, the son of a US senator, was in the oil business and later entered politics.
Barbara Bush's dedication to keeping order at home earned her the nickname "the enforcer."
Barbara Bush Fast Facts
Barbara Bush Fast Facts
"We were rambunctious a lot, pretty independent-minded kids, and, you know, she had her hands. Dad, of course, was available, but he was a busy guy. And he was on the road a lot in his businesses and obviously on the road a lot when he was campaigning. And so Mother was there to maintain order and discipline. She was the sergeant," George W. Bush told CNN in 2016.
With her husband as vice president in the 1980s, Bush adopted literacy as a cause, raising awareness and eventually launching the nonprofit Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. After George H.W. Bush's presidency, he and Barbara raised more than $1 billion for literacy and cancer charities.
"I chose literacy because I honestly believe that if more people could read, write, and comprehend, we would be that much closer to solving so many of the problems that plague our nation and our society," she said.
A writer, her books include an autobiography and one about post-White House life. Her children's book about their dog, Millie, and her puppies written during her White House years was, as were her other books, a bestseller.
On the campaign trail
In 2001, when George W. Bush took office, Barbara Bush became the only woman in American history to live to see her husband and son elected president.
She campaigned for son George W. and fiercely defended him from critics after he became president.
Asked in a 2013 interview about the prospect that her younger son, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, might mount a White House campaign in 2016, Bush quipped in her dry fashion, "We've had enough Bushes."
But when Jeb decided to run, she changed her mind and campaigned for him, appearing in a video for Jeb Bush's ultimately unsuccessful campaign, saying, "I think he'll be a great president."
She also was outspoken about Donald Trump. In one of her last interviews, the former first lady said in early 2016 she was "sick" of Trump, who belittled her son repeatedly during the 2016 GOP primary campaign, adding that she doesn't "understand why people are for him."
"I'm a woman," she added. "I'm not crazy about what he says about women."
Most recently, Bush published a note in the spring edition of Smith College's alumnae magazine, where she declared: "I am still old and still in love with the man I married 72 years ago."
The college awarded Bush an honorary degree in 1989.
Bush battled health problems for much of her later life. She was diagnosed in 1988 with Graves' disease, an autoimmune disease that commonly affects the thyroid. She had open-heart surgery in 2009 and in 2008 underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer.
In her final years, she was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, better known as COPD, as well as congestive heart failure. But, along with her husband, she kept an active public schedule, raising money for charity.
Bush is survived by her husband, George H.W.; sons George W., Neil, Marvin and Jeb; daughter, Dorothy Bush Koch; and 17 grandchildren.
CNN's Brandon Griggs and Kate Bennett contributed to this story.

Gemme

04-20-2018, 05:06 PM

DJ Avicii (http://www.newsweek.com/avicii-cause-death-dj-28-dead-895549) died today. He was only 28.

Kätzchen

06-08-2018, 08:10 AM

RIP Anthony Bourdain

LINK: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/business/media/anthony-bourdain-dead.html

Kobi

08-06-2018, 07:55 AM

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/5d/66/05/5d660515cf42ceb83bf1f63841a6914a.jpg

Charlotte Rae, the Emmy and Tony-nominated actress who entertained TV audiences as Mrs. Garrett on "The Facts of Life" and "Diff'rent Strokes," died Sunday at the age of 92.

Born Charlotte Rae Lubotsky in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Rae got her start doing theater and radio (where she was told to drop her last name). She broke into playing Sylvia Schnauser, the wife of Al Lewis’ Officer Leo Schnauser on Car 54, Where Are You? While she earned Tony nominations Pickwick, Morning Noon and Night, and an Emmy nom (Queen of the Stardust Ballroom), it wasn’t until 1978 when Norman Lear, a longtime fan, cast her in Diff’rent Strokes, that Rae’s career took off.

Rae played the kooky but kind housekeeper Edna Garrett, unmissable thanks to that mound of bright orange hair, on Diff’rent Strokes, and when she became a popular breakout character, Rae herself proposed the spin-off. That spin-off became The Facts of Life, a sitcom about a girls’ boarding school and their (once again) kooky and kind house mother. Rae’s Mrs. Garrett (or Mrs. G, as Nancy McKeon’s Jo liked to call her) helped guide the girls through every very special episode theme imaginable, from depression to dating, AIDS to alcohol. Rae left the show in 1986 for health reasons, and though Cloris Leachman stepped in as Mrs. Garrett’s sister, the show was canceled two years later.

Rae went on to guest star on TV shows like ER, Pretty Little Liars, Sisters, and The King of Queens, and appeared in movies such as Don’t Mess with the Zohan and Tom and Jerry: The Movie. Her final regular gig was voicing “Nanny” in the animated 101 Dalmations: The Series, which aired from 1997-98.

As much as she was beloved by TV watchers throughout the ‘80s, she remained associated with the beloved character of Mrs. Garrett thanks to reruns. In 2011, The Facts of Life cast reunited for the TV Land Awards, where she took home the Pop Icon award. That night, her Facts of Life costars Kim Fields and Nancy McKeon gave speeches in her honor. , they again got together for the closing night of PaleyFest in Los Angeles.

Gemme

08-16-2018, 09:23 AM

RIP Aretha Franklin.

6FOUqQt3Kg0

nhplowboi

08-25-2018, 06:41 PM

RIP Senator John McCain.....you were a man among men.

Gemme

08-25-2018, 07:55 PM

RIP Senator John McCain.....you were a man among men.

I am so sad about this. He was a good man.

Martina

08-25-2018, 11:54 PM

Gemme

08-26-2018, 09:25 AM

He died as a result of glioblastoma, the same disease that killed my mother. My mom was also 81 when she passed. I feel so sorry for the family. Like McCain, Mom was very healthy and acive before diagnosis.

Ted Kennedy also died from it, 9 years to the day prior to Senator McCain passing. It's a brutal disease.

Breathless

09-06-2018, 05:57 PM

Burt Reynolds has passed away today, at 82 yrs of age. Reports say it is from cardiac arrest.

Most of my childhood was spent laughing watching some of his movies..

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/09/06/burt-reynolds-dead_a_23519479/

Gemme

09-06-2018, 07:04 PM

It's okay! He has someone waiting for him.

Captain Chaos!!!

j2hGFN8NlLQ

Orema

09-19-2018, 02:58 PM

Marcia Lipetz, leader in the LGBT community, dies at 71

By Graydon Megan
Chicago Tribune

http://www.trbimg.com/img-5b9c2fb3/turbine/ct-1536962479-gdevlymevi-snap-image/685/685x385
Marcia Lipetz was the first full-time executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and helped establish the Center on Halsted. (Hal Baim/Windy City Times)

Marcia Lipetz had a knack for recognizing issues early and tackling them head-on, whether it was the AIDS crisis, challenges facing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community or the fight for women’s rights.

Lipetz was the first full-time executive director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago in the 1980s and also helped establish the Center on Halsted, which describes itself as the Midwest’s largest LGBTQ social service agency.

In 2009, Lipetz was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame, which cited her “leadership, energy, passion, and vision for Chicago’s LGBT community and the institutions affiliated with it, especially for her work with the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, the WPWR-TV Channel 50 Foundation, and Center on Halsted.”

“She really was a foundational person in our community,” said Tracy Baim, longtime editor of the Windy City Times who was recently named publisher and executive editor of the Chicago Reader. “She never sought the limelight. She just did the work day in and day out. She really helped build the community as it is today by creating these long-lasting institutions.”

Lipetz, 71, died Sept. 11 in her Evanston home of cancer, according to her spouse, Lynda Crawford.

She was born and grew up in Louisville, Ky. Both of her parents were social workers, and she grew up with an orientation to the Jewish concept of “tikkun olam,” or repairing the world, Crawford said.

She went to Douglass College of Rutgers University in New Jersey for her undergraduate degree, then got a master’s in sociology from Ohio State University in Columbus. She came to Chicago to get a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University.

Fred Eychaner, chairman of Newsweb Corp., met Lipetz around 1980 when both were on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

“She was a relentless defender of the Bill of Rights and a woman’s right to free choice unhindered by government dictates,” Eychaner said.

As the AIDS crisis unfolded in the 1980s, she was among those who saw the epidemic both as a health disaster and a threat to civil liberties.

“Marcia struggled fearlessly to protect everyone affected by that horrible disease,” Eychaner said. “She fought fiercely against those who saw the epidemic as an opportunity to moralize and blame rather than a true public health emergency.”

Lipetz soon became the first full-time director of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. She later became the first executive director of what is now the Alphawood Foundation, where Eychaner is president.

Patrick Sheahan worked with Lipetz when she was with the WPWR Foundation. Lipetz had been on the board of Horizons in the mid-1980s, formerly Gay and Lesbian Horizons, and Sheahan recruited her to help with plans and fundraising for what would become the Center on Halsted.

“I twisted her arm,” Sheahan said, “and she graciously agreed to serve on the steering committee.”

Sheahan said Lipetz was an invaluable resource whose strengths included “her remarkable standing in the community, a rich history of creating organizations and a deep knowledge not only about Chicago’s LGBT community but the broader Chicago philanthropic community.”

In an interview on the website Chicago Gay History, Lipetz offered her own version of her contributions. “I guess I’m a builder — solid hard work that builds for the future — and I’m enormously proud of the work of the ACLU and the future of Center on Halsted.”

Lipetz later was president and CEO of the Executive Service Corps of Chicago, working with local nonprofits. Most recently, according to Baim, Lipetz started Lipetz Consulting, where her clients included the Chicago Community Trust, working as an adviser on the LGBT Community Fund.

“I don’t think people realize how much of a teacher she was,” Crawford said. “She just quietly helped people — teaching and mentoring.”

Lipetz is also survived by a sister, Judith Graham.

A memorial service will be at noon Sept. 23 in the Skokie chapel of Chicago Jewish Funerals, 8851 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obituaries/ct-met-marcia-lipetz-obituary-20180914-story.html#

Orema

10-09-2018, 12:34 PM

Jinx Beers — pioneering feminist, Lesbian News founder — dies at 84

https://www.advocate.com/sites/advocate.com/files/2018/10/05/jinx-beers-750x.jpg

Jinx Beers, the pioneering lesbian activist who founded the long-running Southern California magazine Lesbian News, has died at age 84.

Beers died Friday at Nazareth House Los Angeles, a senior living facility, her friend Wendy Averill told Q Voice News (https://qvoicenews.com/2018/10/04/jinx-beers-pioneering-feminist-lesbian-news-founder-dies-at-84/). She had been suffering from renal failure for several months and was in hospice care.

“At a time when our community needed a voice, Jinx was there,” Averill said in a statement to Q Voice News. “She created the Lesbian News at a time when our community was not organized and needed someone, something to help us rally.”

“Jinx was never a part of our history for her own gain. She did it for our community,” Averill added. “She kept such a low personal profile that some people thought she didn’t really exist.”

Beers started Lesbian News (http://www.lesbiannews.com) in 1975, and it still operates as both a print and an online publication. From its beginnings as a four-page monthly newsletter, it “grew into a tabloid-sized magazine that covered Southern California from Santa Barbara to San Diego,” Q Voice News reports.

“I never planned to have a publication. I had to learn everything along the way,” Beers once said, according to Q Voice News. “My point of view was it would be open to anyone in the lesbian community, and it would be free.”

“If you wanted to know where there was going to be a demonstration, how to find a therapist, locate a partner or job and a myriad of other opportunities, the LN was there,” Averill said.

Before founding the publication, Beers, a California native, had served four years in the U.S. Air Force, which she joined at age 18 in 1951, and 12 years in the Air Force Reserve. She left the military in protest of the Vietnam War and to become a more vocal lesbian activist. She was out to her military colleagues but not her commanding officers, and at the time being gay or lesbian could result in a dishonorable discharge.

“I couldn’t support the military because I didn’t believe in why we were in Vietnam,” she said recently, according to Q Voice News. “I also knew it was just a matter of time before someone would connect the dots about my being a lesbian. I didn’t want to be dishonorably discharged.”

After leaving the service, she earned a psychology degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and then worked in the UCLA Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering. She also taught a class called the Lesbian Experience. She eventually became active in a variety of political groups.

She was inducted into the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame in Philadelphia in 2017 for her work with Lesbian News.

A memorial service is being planned for December at the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood. Details are forthcoming.

https://www.advocate.com/media/2018/10/05/jinx-beers-founder-lesbian-news-dies-84

CherylNYC

10-20-2018, 05:52 PM

Wow! This woman is a divine inspiration. A remarkable mind and true grit. Plus she was beautiful. You'll have to follow the link to see her glam photo. She looks like Eartha Kitt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/obituaries/raye-montague-a-navy-hidden-figure-ship-designer-dies-at-83.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_rr_20181020&nl=race-related&nl_art=1&nlid=53594173emc%3Dedit_rr_20181020&ref=headline&te=1

Raye Montague, the Navy’s ‘Hidden Figure’ Ship Designer, Dies at 83

Oct. 18, 2018

During World War II, when Raye Montague was 7 and growing up in Arkansas, her grandfather took her to see a traveling exhibit of a German submarine that had been captured off the coast of South Carolina. She was enchanted.

“I looked through the periscope and saw all these dials and mechanisms,” she recalled years later. “And I said to the guy, ‘What do you have to know to do this?’ ”

His response: “Oh, you’d have to be an engineer, but you don’t have to worry about that.”

The clear implication was that as a black girl she could never become an engineer, let alone have anything to do with such a vessel.

She would go on to prove him very wrong.

The girl who faced racism and sexism in the segregated South, where she rode in the back of the bus and was denied entry to a college engineering program because she was black, became an internationally registered professional engineer and shattered the glass ceiling at the Navy when she became the first female program manager of ships. She earned the civilian equivalent of the rank of captain.

In a breakthrough achievement, she also revolutionized the way the Navy designed ships and submarines using a computer program she developed in the early 1970s.

It would have normally taken two years to produce a rough design of a ship on paper, but during the heat of the Vietnam War Ms. Montague was given one month to design the specifications for a frigate. She did it in 18 hours and 26 minutes.

At the height of her career, she was briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff every month and teaching at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. Many of her ship designs are still in use.

She died of congestive heart failure on Oct. 10 at a hospital in Little Rock, Ark., her son, David R. Montague, said. She was 83.

Although she was decorated by the Navy, Ms. Montague, who retired from the service in 1990, was not acknowledged publicly until 2012, when The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote an in-depth profile of her.

She was not recognized nationally until the publication in 2016 of “Hidden Figures,” Margot Lee Shetterly’s best-selling account of the black female mathematicians at NASA who facilitated some of the nation’s greatest achievements in space. Their acclaim was amplified later that year when the book became an Oscar-nominated movie.

The Navy honored Ms. Montague as its own “hidden figure” in 2017. She was inducted into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame this year.

Like her counterparts in the space program, Ms. Montague faced enormous obstacles — or what she called challenges, since she believed she could always find ways to work around anything that stood in her way.

She grew up in Arkansas in the racially fraught 1950s, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., and Gov. Orval E. Faubus of Arkansas called up the National Guard to bar nine black students from the all-white Little Rock Central High School.

But Ms. Montague had a certain confidence about herself, she said, instilled by her mother, who raised her alone.

“You’ll have three strikes against you,” her mother, Flossie (Graves) Jordan, told her, Ms. Montague recalled last year in an interview on the ABC program “Good Morning America.” “You’re female, you’re black and you’ll have a Southern segregated school education. But you can be or do anything you want, provided you’re educated.”

Raye Jean Jordan was born in Little Rock on Jan. 21, 1935. Her father, Rayford Jordan, was not in the picture for long, and her mother raised her on her income from a cosmetology business. Ms. Montague graduated from Merrill High School in Pine Bluff, Ark., in 1952.

A bright student who loved science and math, she wanted to study engineering at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. But because Arkansas colleges would not award such degrees to African-Americans in those days, she attended Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff). She graduated in 1956 with a degree in business.

Still determined to become an engineer, she headed to Washington and secured a job with the Navy as a clerk-typist. She worked her way up, becoming a digital computer systems operator and a computer systems analyst in a male-dominated field.

“I worked with guys who had graduated from Yale and Harvard with engineering degrees and people who had worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atom bomb,” Ms. Montague told The Democrat-Gazette.

She took computer programming at night school and after a year asked for a promotion.

Her boss, by her account, told her that if she wanted a promotion, she would have to work nights. That was tough for her. There was no public transportation at night, and she didn’t have a car. In fact, she didn’t know how to drive.

But she went out and bought a 1949 Pontiac for $375 and had the salesman drive it to her house. She then taught herself to drive, leaving her house at 10 o’clock at night and creeping along the roads until arriving at work for the midnight shift. She got the promotion and returned to working days.

The project that would be her signal achievement seemed to be an impossible task when it was assigned — to lay out, step by step, how a Naval ship might be designed using a computer. That had never been done before.
Image
Ms. Montague receiving a plaque in 2017 from representatives of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. She was publicly and nationally recognized only later in life.

Her boss (who didn’t like her, she said) gave her six months to complete the project, not telling her that his department had been trying to do it for years without success.

Ms. Montague learned the computer system on her own and then told her boss that to install her program she would have to tear down the Navy’s computer and rebuild it. And that would mean working at night, she said.

He told her she could work nights only if she had someone else with her, and then made it clear that he wouldn’t pay any of her colleagues overtime. She thought that his demand was frivolous and that he intended her to fail.

Not to be deterred, Ms. Montague brought along her mother and her 3-year-old son. Finally impressed by her determination, her boss gave her extra staff. She met the deadline and presented him with her computer-generated designs for a ship.

President Richard M. Nixon, who wanted the Navy to be able to produce ships at a faster pace, heard about her accomplishment and sent word for her to design a rough draft of an actual ship. They gave her all the staff she needed and an unlimited budget, her son said. It led to her designing the first Navy ship with a computer program, in less than 19 hours.

For that feat she received the Navy’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1972. The Navy began using her system to design all its ships and submarines. Her achievement put her on the map, and she began advising other government agencies and the private sector, including the automobile industry. Her last Navy project was the nuclear-powered Seawolf submarine.

Along the way she was married three times, to Weldon A. Means in 1955, to David H. Montague in 1965 and to James Parrott in 1973. She had her only child, David, with Mr. Montague, who has since died. When her third marriage ended, she returned to using the name Montague. In addition to her son, she is survived by a granddaughter.

After she retired, Ms. Montague moved back to Little Rock to be near her family. There she took part in civic organizations; mentored young people, including prison inmates; organized clothing drives; gave motivational talks; and played bridge.

“She was busy opening doors for people and inspiring them,” her son said. “Her message was always the same: ‘Don’t let people put obstacles in front of you, but understand you also have to put in the work.’ She didn’t have any patience for people who weren’t willing to go the extra mile.”

CherylNYC

11-07-2018, 08:18 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/obituaries/ruth-gates-dead-marine-biologist-who-championed-coral.html?action=click&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&contentCollection=Obituaries

Ruth Gates, Who Made Saving Coral Reefs Her Mission, Is Dead at 56

By Katharine Q. Seelye
Nov. 5, 2018

Ruth Gates, a renowned marine biologist who made it her life’s work to save the world’s fragile coral reefs from the deadening effects of warming water temperatures, died on Oct. 25 in Kailua, Hawaii. She was 56.

The Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology in Manoa, where Dr. Gates was director, announced her death, at Castle Hospital. Robin Burton-Gates, her wife, said that the cause was complications of surgery for diverticulitis. Dr. Gates also had cancer that had spread to her brain, she said...

CherylNYC

11-07-2018, 08:23 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/obituaries/kitty-oneil-dead.html

Kitty O’Neil, Stuntwoman and Speed Racer, Is Dead at 72

By Richard Sandomir
Nov. 6, 2018

1
On a dry lake in the Alvord Desert in Oregon in December 1976, Kitty O’Neil wedged herself into a three-wheeled rocket-powered vehicle called the SMI Motivator. She gave the throttle two taps to awaken the engine and then watched an assistant count down from 10 with hand signals. At zero, she pushed the throttle down.

“During a sliver of a second, the howling machine stood motionless, as if stuck in time,” Coles Phinizy wrote in Sports Illustrated. “In the next instant, it was gone, a shrinking blur lost in its own trailing noise.”

The Motivator accelerated rapidly, though silently for Ms. O’Neil; she was deaf. Her speed peaked briefly at 618 miles per hour, and with a second explosive run measured over one kilometer, she attained an average speed of 512.7 m.p.h., shattering the land-speed record for women by about 200 m.p.h.

For Ms. O’Neil, her record — which still stands — was the highlight of a career in daredevilry. She also set speed records on water skis and in boats. And, working as a stuntwoman, she crashed cars and survived immolation.

In one stunt, as a double for Lindsay Wagner, she flipped a dune buggy on the television series “The Bionic Woman”; in another, she leapt 127 feet from a hotel balcony onto an inflated airbag as Lynda Carter’s stunt double on “Wonder Woman.”

Ms. O’Neil died on Friday at 72 in Eureka, S.D., where she had lived since 1993. The cause was pneumonia, said Ky Michaelson, a close friend who built rocket-powered vehicles, including some for Ms. O’Neil...

GeorgiaMa'am

11-12-2018, 10:45 PM

Stan Lee Dies at the Age of 95

Stan Lee was responsible for bringing many Marvel comics to fruition. Among those were X-Men (a haven for many a queer kid), Black Panther, Spiderman, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Daredevil and the ones that started it all, the Fantastic Four. He brought Marvel Comics back from almost dead in the 1960s with these characters. In later years, he became a guru of sorts, the main cheerleader for Marvel fans everywhere. He was the public face of a company that grew into today's Marvel Universe and movie and Netflix franchises.

We'll miss you Stan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/obituaries/stan-lee-dead.html

Orema

11-13-2018, 06:00 AM

sjobevGAYHQ

Kätzchen

11-13-2018, 09:59 AM

My immediate family (my two sons, who are bi-racial African Americans) were big fans of Stan Lee, as well as myself. I often bought them comic books created by Stan Lee, due to his soap box stand on social evils and his views on racism, sexism, bigotry and megalomaniac super villain personalities.

"Let’s lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them is to expose them — to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are. The bigot is an unreasoning hater — one who hates blindly, fanatically, indiscriminately. If his hang-up is black men, he hates ALL black men. If a redhead once offended him, he hates ALL redheads. If some foreigner beat him to a job, he’s down on ALL foreigners. He hates people he’s never seen — people he’s never known — with equal intensity — with equal venom," ~ Stan Lee.

Rest in Peace, and thank you for taking a stand, Mr. Stan Lee.

(article link) (https://www.good.is/articles/stan-lee-quote-going-viral)

CherylNYC

11-19-2018, 07:20 PM

From the NY Times Overlooked No More initiative. Belated obituaries for women who were never recognized with a proper NYT obituary at the time of their death. The below baseball pitcher looks and sounds exactly like a butch lesbian to me. You'll have to follow the link to see the awesome photos of a confident young athlete with plenty of swagger.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/obituaries/jackie-mitchell-overlooked.html

Overlooked No More: Jackie Mitchell, Who Fanned Two of Baseball’s Greats
Mitchell was a 17-year-old pitcher in 1931 when she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game, but questions about that exploit linger.

The baseball pitcher Jackie Mitchell. She was on the roster of the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts when she faced the Yankees.
Credit
George Rinhart/Corbis, via Getty Images

The baseball pitcher Jackie Mitchell. She was on the roster of the minor league Chattanooga Lookouts when she faced the Yankees.CreditCreditGeorge Rinhart/Corbis, via Getty Images
Nov. 7, 2018

By Talya Minsberg
Women have cleared many barriers in sports, but few exploits have been as stunning, and steeped in mystery, as the day Jackie Mitchell struck out two of baseball’s giants, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

It was April 2, 1931, and Mitchell, all of 17, was on the roster of the otherwise all-male Tennessee minor league team the Chattanooga Lookouts, which had signed her to a contract just a week before. The Yankees were in town for an exhibition game as they made their way from spring training in Florida back to New York, and 4,000 people had filled the Lookouts’ stands.

Mitchell took the mound in the first inning, in relief. “The Babe performed his role very ably,” William E. Brandt, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote. “He swung hard at two pitches then demanded that Umpire Owens inspect the ball, just as batters do when utterly baffled by a pitcher’s delivery.”

The third pitch was a strike that left Ruth looking. When the umpire called him out, the Bambino flung his bat away, “registering disgust with his shoulder and chin,” The Times reported. Gehrig took “three hefty swings” and struck out, too.

Mitchell received a standing ovation. “That completed the day’s work for Pitcher Mitchell,” Brandt wrote.ave a Suggestion for an Overlooked Obit? We Want to Hear From YouMarch 8, 2018

The rest of the game was of little note. Another pitcher replaced Mitchell, and her team lost 14-4.

The next day, The Times article was headlined, “Girl Pitcher Fans Ruth and Gehrig.” Mitchell was pictured standing on the mound, baseball glove in hand, smiling slightly.

But what actually happened that day remains in question. Was the strikeout real, or was it orchestrated by Joe Engel, the Lookouts’ owner, as a publicity stunt?...

ksrainbow

12-15-2018, 11:52 AM

Nancy Wilson, Legendary Vocalist And NPR 'Jazz Profiles' Host, Dies At 81

Grammy-winning singer Nancy Wilson performs in 2003 at Lincoln Center's
Nancy Wilson died Thursday after a long illness at her home in Pioneertown, Calif., her manager Devra Hall Levy told NPR. She was 81.

Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1937, Wilson has recounted in interviews that she started singing around age 3 or 4.

"I have always just sung. I have never questioned what it is. I thank God for it and I just do it," she told Marian McPartland, host of NPR's Piano Jazz in 1994.

She never had formal training but was influenced by Dinah Washington, Nat "King" Cole, and others. Wilson says she knew at an early age what she would do for a living.

During her decades-long career, Wilson performed jazz ballads, standards, torch songs, show tunes and pop songs. She told McPartland that she loves a song with a good story and good lyrics. A song that has a beginning, middle and an end.

After attending Central State College in Ohio for one year, she left to pursue music full time. She had been touring continuously in her 20s when she met saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. He suggested she move to New York and in 1959 she did. Many successful singles and albums followed.

From 1996 through 2005, NPR listeners will remember Wilson as the host of Jazz Profiles, a documentary series that profiled the legends and legacy of jazz. More than 190 episodes were produced.

In the interview on Piano Jazz, McPartland described Wilson as a multi-talented entertainer. She didn't just sing, Wilson made guest appearances on TV variety programs and acted in several TV series.

As Variety reports: Wilson may be remembered by millions of TV viewers who recall her 1974-75 NBC variety series, "The Nancy Wilson Show," for which she won an Emmy. She was frequently a guest herself on the variety shows hosted by Carol Burnett, Andy Williams and Flip Wilson as well as acting on "The Cosby Show" and dramatic series like "The F.B.I." and "Hawaii 5-O."

In 1998, she received the NAACP Image award — having been active in the civil rights movement, including the 1965 march on Selma, Ala.

In 2011, she stopped touring following a show at Ohio University, but had hinted years earlier that she had thought about retiring.

The Associated Press reports that in 2007, when she turned 70, "Wilson was the guest of honor at a Carnegie Hall gala. 'After 55 years of doing what I do professionally, I have a right to ask how long? I'm trying to retire, people,' she said with a laugh before leaving the stage to a standing ovation."

According to a family statement, Wilson did not want a funeral. A celebration of her life will be held later.

Bèsame*

12-18-2018, 03:06 PM

Penny Marshall dead at 75, best known as TV's Laverne and director of 'Big,' 'A League of Their Own'

She definitely left a footprint on our lives 💝💝💝

Orema

01-18-2019, 08:50 AM

Mary Oliver, Prize-Winning Poet of the Natural World, Dies at 83 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/obituaries/mary-oliver-dead.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage)

https://i.postimg.cc/7P3cfqbS/merlin-73970284-83c42e77-317e-46bc-9493-bb141484a5e6-super-Jumbo.jpg
The poet Mary Oliver with her dog, Ricky, in 2013 at her home in Hobe Sound, Fla. Throughout her work, Ms. Oliver was occupied with intimate observations of the natural world. Credit: Angel Valentin for The New York Times

Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work, with its plain language and minute attention to the natural world, drew a wide following while dividing critics, died on Thursday at her home in Hobe Sound, Fla. She was 83.

Her literary executor, Bill Reichblum, confirmed the death. Ms. Oliver had been treated for lymphoma, which was first diagnosed in 2015.

A prolific writer with more than 20 volumes of verse to her credit, Ms. Oliver received a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection “American Primitive,” published by Little, Brown & Company. She won a National Book Award in 1992 for “New and Selected Poems,” published by Beacon Press.

Ms. Oliver, whose work appeared often in The New Yorker and other magazines, was a phenomenon: a poet whose work sold strongly. Her books frequently appeared on the best-seller list of the Poetry Foundation, which uses data from Nielsen BookScan, a service that tracks book sales, putting her on a par with Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, as one of the best-selling poets in the country.

Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public, including clerics, who quoted it in their sermons; poetry therapists, who found its uplifting sensibility well suited to their work; composers, like Ronald Perera and Augusta Read Thomas, who set it to music; and celebrities like Laura Bush and Maria Shriver.

All this, combined with the throngs that turned out for her public readings, conspired to give Ms. Oliver, fairly late in life, the aura of a reluctant, bookish rock star.

Throughout her work, Ms. Oliver was occupied with intimate observations of flora and fauna, as many of her titles — “Mushrooms,” “Egrets,” “The Swan,” “The Rabbit,” “The Waterfall” — attest. Read on one level, these poems are sensualist still lifes: Often set in and around the woods, marshes and tide pools of Provincetown, Mass., where she lived for more than 40 years, they offer impeccable descriptions of the land and its nonhuman tenants in a spare, formally conservative, conversational style.

In “Spring,” here in its entirety, she wrote:

I lift my face to the pale flowers

of the rain. They’re soft as linen,

clean as holy water. Meanwhile

my dog runs off, noses down packed leaves

into damp, mysterious tunnels.

He says the smells are rising now

stiff and lively; he says the beasts

are waking up now full of oil,

sleep sweat, tag-ends of dreams. The rain

rubs its shining hands all over me.

My dog returns and barks fiercely, he says

each secret body is the richest advisor ,

deep in the black earth such fuming

nuggets of joy!

For her abiding communion with nature, Ms. Oliver was often compared to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. For her quiet, measured observations, and for her fiercely private personal mien (she gave many readings but few interviews, saying she wanted her work to speak for itself), she was likened to Emily Dickinson.

Ms. Oliver often described her vocation as the observation of life, and it is clear from her texts that she considered the vocation a quasi-religious one. Her poems — those about nature as well as those on other subjects — are suffused with a pulsating, almost mystical spirituality, as in the work of the American Transcendentalists or English poets like William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Readers were also drawn to Ms. Oliver’s poems by their quality of confiding intimacy; to read one is to accompany her on one of her many walks through the woods or by the shore. Poems often came to her on these walks, and she prepared for this eventuality by secreting pencils in the woods near her home .

Throughout Ms. Oliver’s career, critical reception of her work was mixed. Some reviewers were put off by the surface simplicity of her poems and, in later years, by her populist reach. Reviewing her first collection, “No Voyage,” in The New York Times Book Review in 1965, James Dickey wrote, “She is good, but predictably good,” adding:

“She never seems quite to be in her poems, as adroit as some of them are, but is always outside them, putting them together from the available literary elements.”

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/01/18/obituaries/18OLIVER2/18OLIVER2-jumbo-v4.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp
Ms. Oliver received a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for her collection “American Primitive.”

More recently, David Orr, the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, was even more dismissive. In 2011, he referred to Ms. Oliver as a writer “about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.” (That comment drew a retort from Ruth Franklin of The New Yorker, who wrote in an admiring article about Ms. Oliver in 2017, “The joke falls flat, considering how much of Oliver’s work revolves around the violence of the natural world.”)

Ms. Oliver’s champions argued that what lay beneath her work’s seemingly unruffled surface was a dark, brooding undertow, which together with the surface constituted a cleareyed exploration of the individual’s place in the cosmos.

“Her corpus is deceptively elementary,” the writer Alice Gregory says in an essay on the website of the Poetry Foundation. “But you miss a lot by allowing the large language to overshadow the more muted connective tissue. Paying such crude attention will not grant you the fortifying effects Oliver has to offer.”

OnKUKmcFVuo
Mary Oliver with Coleman Barks, 4 Aug 2001. Credit: Video by Lannan Foundation

Mary Oliver was born on Sept. 10, 1935, in Cleveland to Edward and Helen (Vlasak) Oliver, and grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Her father was a teacher and her mother a secretary at an elementary school.

In one of her rare interviews, with Ms. Shriver in O: The Oprah Magazine in 2011, Ms. Oliver spoke of having been sexually abused as a child, though she did not elaborate.

“I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood,” she told Ms. Shriver. “So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.”

Leaving home as a teenager — she would study briefly at Ohio State University and Vassar College but took no degree — Ms. Oliver spontaneously drove to Steepletop, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s former home in Austerlitz, N.Y., near the Massachusetts border. Ms. Oliver lived at Steepletop for the next half-dozen years, helping Millay’s sister Norma organize her papers.

In the late 1950s, on a return visit to Steepletop, Ms. Oliver met Molly Malone Cook , a photographer, who became her life partner and literary agent. Ms. Cook died in 2005. No immediate family members survive.

Ms. Oliver taught at Bennington College and elsewhere. Her other poetry collections include “The River Styx, Ohio” (1972), “House of Light” (1990), “The Leaf and the Cloud” (2000), “Evidence” (2009), “Blue Horses” (2014) and “Felicity” (2015).

Her prose books include two about the craft of poetry, “Rules for the Dance” (1998) and “A Poetry Handbook” (1994), and “Long Life: Essays and Other Writings” (2004).

Given its seeming contradiction — shallow and profound, uplifting and elegiac — Ms. Oliver’s verse is perhaps best read as poetic portmanteau, one that binds up both the primal joy and the primal melancholy of being alive.

For her, each had at its core a similar wild ecstasy. In one of her best-known poems, “When Death Comes,” she wrote:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Ana Fota contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/obituaries/mary-oliver-dead.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

JDeere

01-20-2019, 11:50 PM

http://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity-deaths/notable-deaths/article/mason-lowe-1993-2019-professional-bull-rider

Mason Lowe, young upcoming bullrider.

Gemme

02-03-2019, 08:01 AM

Rosemary Mariner (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/us/captain-rosemary-mariner-funeral.html)-the first woman to command a naval aviation squadron, died.

theoddz

05-13-2019, 08:27 AM

I'm quite a bit late in posting this, but I did want to let folks know about this passing, because quite of few of us 50 somethings grew up with Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and will remember Jim Fowler. He, along with Marlin Perkins, hosted the beloved and long-running nature show that we all knew and loved. Jim Fowler passed away on May 8, 2019.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jim-fowler-dead-mutual-omahas-wild-kingdom-host-was-89-1209218

Interestingly, Jim Fowler and my father were close friends when they both attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, together, in the 50's. My dad was 2 years older than Jim, but they were good friends and Jim was my dad's best man at my folk's wedding, in 1956.

So, rest in peace, Mr. Fowler......and give my dear Pop a great big hug for me when you see him up there in Heaven. :winky::heartbeat:

~Theo~ :bouquet:

theoddz

05-13-2019, 08:40 AM

On another sad note, the breaking news is now that the lovely and vibrant Doris Day has passed away, at age 97.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/13/entertainment/doris-day-dead/index.html

RIP, Ms. Day, and thank you for all of the great entertainment, over the years. You will be dearly missed. :heartbeat:

~Theo~ :bouquet:

Gemme

05-13-2019, 08:50 PM

Actress Peggy Lipton, star of ‘The Mod Squad’ and ‘Twin Peaks,’ died of cancer this week at 72.

Kobi

05-14-2019, 02:01 PM

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/d5/56/8f/d5568f69a4fe1c23728a0ab563e6f7d6.jpg

Tim Conway, whose gallery of innocent goofballs, stammering bystanders, transparent connivers, oblivious knuckleheads and hapless bumblers populated television comedy and variety shows for more than half a century, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 85.

With a sweetly cherubic face, a deceptively athletic physicality and an utter devotion to foolishness and slapstick, Mr. Conway was among Hollywood’s most enduringly popular clowns. The winner of six Emmy Awards and a member of the Television Academy Hall of Fame, he was a leading non-leading man, a vivid second banana whose deferential mien and skill as a collaborator made him most comfortable — and often funniest — in the shadow of a star.

For Mr. Conway, those stars were, most notably, Ernest Borgnine, with whom he appeared on the popular early-1960s series “McHale’s Navy,” and Carol Burnett, on whose comedy-variety show Mr. Conway was regularly featured from 1967 to 1978.

Obit (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/obituaries/tim-conway-carol-burnett-death.html)

C0LLETTE

05-17-2019, 07:54 AM

Architect IM Pei, best known for designing the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre in Paris, died early Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 102

Kätzchen

05-19-2019, 08:02 AM

https://d28mt5n9lkji5m.cloudfront.net/i/Vt0jeslbMi.png

http://www.clubhousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Grumpy-Cat-1024x745.jpg

GeorgiaMa'am

08-06-2019, 08:25 AM

charley

08-06-2019, 09:39 AM

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has died at the age of 88. I will never forget her novel "The Bluest Eye", which, although it was not perhaps her most famous novel, had a deep affect on me.

Stacey Abrams tweeted, "Toni Morrison was a towering intellect, a brilliant scribe of our nation’s complex stories, a heartbreaking journalist of our deepest desires, and a groundbreaking author who destroyed precepts, walls and those who dared underestimate her capacity. Rest well and in peace."

I can't add anything to that, except I am profoundly saddened.

Indeed!, a great loss - one of my favourite books - a difficult read for me, Beloved, which I loved, and had an enormous impact on my life, also became my favourite word, which I now use for only one.

easygoingfemme

08-06-2019, 10:06 AM

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has died at the age of 88. I will never forget her novel "The Bluest Eye", which, although it was not perhaps her most famous novel, had a deep affect on me.

Stacey Abrams tweeted, "Toni Morrison was a towering intellect, a brilliant scribe of our nation’s complex stories, a heartbreaking journalist of our deepest desires, and a groundbreaking author who destroyed precepts, walls and those who dared underestimate her capacity. Rest well and in peace."

I can't add anything to that, except I am profoundly saddened.

She was such a profound influence on my life. I am so thankful for that. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to bed listing to her audio books that she read herself. Her voice soothing me to sleep. I wish I could be a fly on the wall at her services.Can you imagine? I've met Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. Both times I was scanning the crowd for Toni, thinking, she must be here somewhere, but I never laid eyes on her. Fly free, beautiful fierce spirit.

Kätzchen

08-10-2019, 11:52 AM

A Favorite Quote by Toni Morrison (Rest in Peace):

"If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it,"~ Toni Morrison

Kätzchen

08-30-2019, 09:32 PM

Valerie Harper died today. (w)(w)(w)

She was Mary Tyler Moore's best friend on the TV show.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-harper-idUSKCN1VK2P0

Uika7CJJoDw

Kätzchen

09-05-2019, 09:53 PM

I can't help but think of all the people who never stood a chance of making it through that horrible hurricane that devastated the Bahamas. So heart wrenching, the emerging stories of heartache experienced by those left behind. RIP, to all the loved ones who didn't make it through the hurricane, down in the Bahamas.

And, RIP Kylie Rae Harris... a young mother and aspiring Country Western singer from the heart of Texas. I read about her today and how her little girl is now parent-less. So sad. She wrote this song for her little girl, a few years ago. No doubt Kylie was a bright light on the horizon.

nAzE-PmLlOw

Kobi

09-17-2019, 10:26 AM

https://abcnews.go.com/US/legendary-journalist-political-commentator-cokie-roberts-dies-75/story?id=65633507

Orema

09-28-2019, 02:43 PM

Joseph Wilson, Who Challenged Iraq War Narrative, Dies at 69
By David E. Sanger and Neil Genzlinger

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/joseph-wilson-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

He contradicted a statement in President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. A week later, his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, was outed as a C.I.A. agent.

https://i.postimg.cc/cL0qDTR2/27-Wilson1-sub-super-Jumbo.jpg
Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson in 2006 with his wife, the former C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame. Credit Lawrence Jackson/Associated Press

Joseph C. Wilson, the long-serving American diplomat who undercut President George W. Bush’s claim in 2003 that Iraq had been trying to build nuclear weapons, leading to the unmasking of his wife at the time, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 69.

Ms. Plame said the cause was organ failure.

Mr. Wilson’s decision to challenge Mr. Bush’s argument that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, was secretly reconstituting his nuclear program changed both the narrative and the politics of the war. It forced the White House to concede, grudgingly, that Mr. Bush had built the case for the invasion of Iraq on a faulty intelligence report — one that critics said was cherry-picked to provide an urgent rationale for a war that quickly turned into a morass.

Mr. Wilson’s action ultimately created a rift between the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency and led to inquiries about whether intelligence had been politicized, a debate that racks Washington to this day. And the unmasking of Ms. Plame — who worked in the C.I.A. unit responsible for determining whether nations were building weapons of mass destruction — led to investigations and ultimately a trial for Vice President Dick Cheney’s top national security aide.

A big personality whom some found prickly and difficult, Mr. Wilson served in numerous posts, many in Africa, in a 23-year diplomatic career that began in 1976. One posting was to Niger, and in 2002, by then a private citizen, he was asked by the C.I.A. to return to that country to try to verify reports that Niger had sold uranium yellowcake to Iraq in the 1990s. That material is essentially raw uranium that can be turned into nuclear fuel with considerable processing.

At the time, the Bush administration was building to a crisis point with Iraq, and the key issue was whether Mr. Hussein had resumed his quest for nuclear weapons.

It was a legitimate question. After Mr. Hussein was defeated in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, international inspectors found, and dismantled, what appeared to be an advanced program to develop nuclear weapons that Western intelligence agencies had missed.

But Mr. Wilson concluded from his trip that the reports of a Niger-Iraq deal were false. Nevertheless, in his State of the Union address in January 2003, President Bush declared that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” He ordered an invasion of Iraq seven weeks later.

Soon after, the intelligence behind Mr. Bush’s “16 words” from the State of the Union speech was under attack. American military teams could find no evidence of an active nuclear program in Iraq.

Mr. Wilson felt that the record needed to be corrected. In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on July 6, 2003, titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” he argued that the intelligence had most likely been twisted to create a rationale for the invasion.

“If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why),” he wrote. “If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”

DYtApDoS3FE
Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV recounted the story behind his New York Times Op-Ed from June 2003 and the series of events that followed its publication.

That challenge did not sit well with Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney, who ripped the article out of the paper and began annotating it with questions, some of them wondering why a civilian had been sent by the C.I.A. to figure out what had happened. “Or did his wife send him on a junket?” Mr. Cheney wrote.

The White House story about how the language got into the speech — and why “British intelligence” was cited — began to shatter. The day after the Op-Ed article was published, Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, was challenged by a Times reporter about how the 16 words had gotten into the speech.

“So it was wrong?" he was asked.

“That’s what we’ve acknowledged,” Mr. Fleischer said.

Only the White House had never acknowledged it, and his admission engulfed the Bush White House in a tide of criticism and led to years of investigations.

A week after the Op-Ed was published, Robert Novak, a syndicated columnist with conservative leanings and Republican connections, wrote a column identifying Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. operative — a startling breach, since she had been under cover for much of her career.

Revealing a C.I.A. agent’s identity can be a crime, and an investigation into the leak led to charges against Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr. But Mr. Libby was not charged with leaking the information — it had come from a top State Department official who acknowledged that he was the source — but with lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with reporters.

After a long trial that involved testimony from a parade of administration officials, news editors and reporters, Mr. Libby was convicted. President Bush later commuted his 30-month prison sentence. Mr. Cheney, however, did not believe that commutation was enough. He insisted on a full pardon. The split on the issue contributed to a breach between the president and his vice president, and Mr. Cheney was increasingly marginalized in the administration’s second term.

Last year, President Trump issued Mr. Libby a full pardon.

Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame did not flee the spotlight once they had been thrust into it. They posed for photographs in a convertible parked near the White House. Their story was told in a 2010 movie, “Fair Game,” in which Mr. Wilson was played by Sean Penn and Ms. Plame by Naomi Watts.

For Mr. Wilson, the decision to write the Op-Ed article was a matter of patriotic duty.

“The path to writing the op-ed piece had been straightforward in my own mind,” he wrote in a 2004 memoir, “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity.” “My government had refused to address the fundamental question of how the lie regarding Saddam’s supposed attempt to purchase African uranium had found its way into the State of the Union address.

“Time after time during the previous four months,” he continued, “from March to July, administration spokespeople had sloughed off the reality that the president of the United States had sent our country to war in order to defend us against the threat of the ‘mushroom cloud’ when they knew, as did I, that at least one of the two ‘facts’ underpinning the case was not a fact at all.”

In a telephone interview on Friday, Ms. Plame, whose marriage to Mr. Wilson ended in divorce this year, said he had never regretted writing the article.

“He did it because he felt it was his responsibility as a citizen,” she said. “It was not done out of partisan motivation, despite how it was spun.”

“He had the heart of a lion,” she added. “He’s an American hero.”

Joseph Charles Wilson IV was born on Nov. 6, 1949, in Bridgeport, Conn., to Joseph Wilson III and Phyllis (Finnell) Wilson. Both parents were journalists, and young Joe had a colorful upbringing because of it.

“I had spent my high school years in Europe following my parents in their quixotic quest to be expatriate journalists and authors,” he wrote in his memoir. “We had first traveled to Europe in 1959, driving around in an old Citroën taxi that was low-slung like the gangster cars in old movies.”

That background was a foundation for his diplomatic career, but his first job on graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1971 was as a carpenter. Within a few years, though, he had taken the Foreign Service exam, and in 1976 he received his first posting, to Niamey, the capital of Niger.

He was there for two years. Then came assignments in Togo, South Africa, Burundi and elsewhere, including Iraq. There, from 1988 to 1991, a tense period that included Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, he was deputy chief of mission, the No. 2 job in an embassy. He left in early 1991, just before the United States and its allies launched the military action known as Operation Desert Storm to force Iraq out of Kuwait.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush named Mr. Wilson ambassador to two African countries, Gabon and the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, a post he held for three years. He finished his government service as senior director for African affairs for President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. He then started a consulting business.

https://i.postimg.cc/ydZsqxkb/merlin-161617074-0381ae00-c04e-43d6-bcfc-aad582ab4ecc-super-Jumbo.jpg

Mr. Wilson’s first marriage, to Susan Otchis, ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, to Jacqueline Giorgi. He married Ms. Plame in 1998.

He is survived by a brother, William; two children from his first marriage, Joseph Wilson V and Sabrina Ames; two children from his marriage to Ms. Plame, Trevor and Samantha Wilson; and five grandchildren.

In his memoir, Mr. Wilson found a positive side to his and Ms. Plame’s experience.

“I come away from the fight I’ve had with my government full of hope for our future,” he wrote. “It takes time for Americans to fully understand when they have been duped by a government they instinctively want to trust. But it is axiomatic that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, and our citizens inevitably react to the deceit.”

——————————
David E. Sanger is a national security correspondent. In a 36-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook

Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries Desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic.

Kätzchen

10-04-2019, 08:40 PM

HFfb_w7y3Gw

homoe

10-12-2019, 05:55 PM

~
Even tho he starred in many roles it's his performance as Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, that will always remain my very favorite!

cathexis

10-16-2019, 07:26 PM

Drummer of the early rock group "Cream" which included Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood, and Lenny Bruce.

Ginger Baker has long been considered the best rock drummer in the history of rock.
The second best rock drummer is the late John Bonham of "Led Zeppelin."

The most well known song of "Cream" is "The White Room."
"Cream" was active from 1966-1969, with single concerts in 2005 and 2006 for charity causes.

Mr. Baker was inducted into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1993.

He was raised in London, England. Began his musical career in 1956.

Ginger Baker will be sadly missed by Rock enthusiasts

Orema

10-17-2019, 04:43 AM

Elijah E. Cummings, Powerful Democrat Who Investigated Trump, Dies at 68

A son of sharecroppers, he fought tirelessly for his hometown of Baltimore and became a key figure in the impeachment investigation of President Trump.

https://i.postimg.cc/G3Y9tFtb/merlin-154332234-e81312c7-8294-45cb-a128-c01569578970-super-Jumbo.jpg (https://postimages.org/)photo uploader for website (https://postimages.org/)

By David Stout and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Oct. 17, 2019
Updated 6:23 a.m. ET

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a son of sharecroppers who rose to become one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress and a key figure in the impeachment investigation of President Trump, died on Thursday in Baltimore, his spokeswoman said. He was 68.

His death resulted from “complications concerning longstanding health challenges,” the spokeswoman, Trudy Perkins, said in a statement, without elaborating on the cause.

As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Mr. Cummings, of Maryland, had sweeping power to investigate Mr. Trump and his administration — and he used it.

A critical ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Cummings spent his final months in Congress sparring with the president, calling Mr. Trump’s effort to block congressional lines of inquiry “far worse than Watergate.” He was sued by Mr. Trump as the president tried to keep his business records secret.

With his booming voice and a speaking cadence with hints of the pulpit, Mr. Cummings was a compelling figure on Capitol Hill. For more than two decades, he represented a section of Baltimore with more than its share of social problems. He campaigned tirelessly for stricter gun control laws and help for those addicted to drugs.

He grabbed the national spotlight in 2015 when he took to the streets of Baltimore, where, bullhorn in hand, he pleaded for calm after riots erupted in his neighborhood after the funeral of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in police custody. Hours earlier, Mr. Cummings had delivered Mr. Gray’s eulogy.

In July, after Mr. Cummings attacked President Trump for the conditions seen in immigrant detention centers on the southern border, Mr. Trump struck back, calling the congressman’s district a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Mr. Cummings vociferously defended his hometown.

Mr. Cummings had been ailing recently, and was sometimes seen using a wheelchair and an oxygen tank. He was away from Congress for nearly three months following heart surgery in the fall of 2017. Soon afterward, he was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for what his office described as a bacterial infection in his knee.

A hulking, bear-like man, Mr. Cummings had served in Congress since winning a special election in 1996 to fill the seat vacated by Kweisi Mfume, who resigned to become president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mr. Cummings’s Seventh District includes most of West Baltimore and suburbs west of the city, as well as Howard County.

Since his initial victory in 1996, Mr. Cummings had not been seriously challenged in either a primary or general election, according to The Almanac of American Politics. In 2003 and 2004, he was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was an early supporter of Barack Obama for president and was co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s campaign in Maryland in 2008.

Elijah Eugene Cummings, the son of sharecroppers from South Carolina who moved north to improve prospects for themselves and their children, who would eventually number seven, was born in Baltimore on Jan. 18, 1951, and grew up in the city.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Howard University in Washington, where he was student government president, with a degree in political science. He earned a law degree from the University of Maryland and was a practicing attorney while serving for 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where he was the first African-American in the state’s history to be named speaker pro-tem.

https://i.postimg.cc/1znVKLmq/00-Cummings2-super-Jumbo.jpg (https://postimages.org/)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/us/politics/elijah-cummings-dead.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

~ocean

12-28-2019, 07:11 AM

RIP Don Imus age 79 ~ a very controversial radio & television personality ~ someone I used to listen and watch with my mom.

C0LLETTE

12-31-2019, 09:30 AM

Inuit pop singer-songwriter Kelly Fraser, suicide at age 26

Inuit pop singer-songwriter Kelly Fraser, who garnered worldwide attention with her Inuktitut cover of Rihanna’s Diamonds, had been seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder before dying by suicide last week, according to her family.

Ms. Fraser’s mother, Theresa Angoo, and six siblings issued a joint statement on Monday saying she had taken her own life on Christmas Eve at the age of 26.

“Kelly suffered from PTSD for many years as a result of childhood traumas, racism and persistent cyber-bullying,” the statement said. “She was actively seeking help and spoke openly about her personal challenges online and through her journey."

On social media, Ms. Fraser proudly showed off clothing and jewellery by Inuit designers, and promoted other Inuit musicians and artists. She posted excitedly about traditional foods: caribou, seal eyeballs, mattak (whale skin and blubber), oatmeal with aqpik berries. But amid the cheery posts were also signs that she felt the weight of criticism.

“I face a ton of lateral violence and criticism and hate,” she wrote in a Dec. 15 Facebook post. “I need a strong support system. ... Just because I am well known doesn’t mean I deserve it.”

Charlie Angus, NDP MP for Timmins-James Bay, said Ms. Fraser’s death underscores the need for a national suicide prevention strategy.

“We lose so many young people in my region to suicide and they are treated as tragedies,” Mr. Angus said in an interview on Monday. “A tragedy is when someone gets hit by a bus crossing the street. When you see patterns that are preventable, where steps can be taken, that’s not a tragedy, that’s systemic negligence – the failure to act on the indicators of suicide, the need to put resources in place.”

Ms. Fraser was born in Sanikiluaq, Nunavut, and was living in Winnipeg. She released her debut album, Isuma, in 2014; her 2017 sophomore effort, Sedna, was nominated for best Indigenous music album at the 2018 Juno Awards.

She sang and rapped in both English and Inuktitut and blended her cultural influences with those of contemporary pop. Most recently, she had been crowdfunding for her third album, Decolonize.

“Kelly was an incredibly kind person who gave so much of herself to help others. She was fiercely open with her fans in the hopes that sharing her struggles might help them know that they were not alone," her family said in Monday’s statement.

According to a biography posted on her website, Ms. Fraser experienced numerous personal struggles, including substance use and the loss of her father to suicide.

Inuit have among the highest suicide rates in the world; in 2017, the rate was 106 for every 100,000 people.

C0LLETTE

01-22-2020, 12:05 PM

Terry Jones, one of the co-creators and star of British comedy Monty Python, has died aged 77 after suffering from a rare form of dementia.......

Sephen Fry:" Farewell, Terry Jones. The great foot has come down to stamp on you. My god what pleasure you gave, what untrammelled joy and delight. What a wonderful talent, heart and mind"

Kätzchen

01-26-2020, 02:58 PM

RIP Kobe Bryant :(

He died earlier this morning when the helicopter he was riding in, crashed into the side of a mountain, down in the greater metro area of Los Angeles.

He was 41. He and his wife just welcomed another baby into their family this past year. Such a terrible loss. Kobe Bryant was an awesome athlete.

Bèsame*

02-05-2020, 06:07 PM

https://cdn.britannica.com/s:300x300/01/97501-050-44A38406/Publicity-Kirk-Douglas-Spartacus.jpg

Spartacus actor Kirk Douglas, who was one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, has died aged 103.

Jedi

02-06-2020, 03:20 PM

I couldn't find this thread when I heard about Neil Peart's death. Peart was the drummer for the band Rush and their lyricist. Peart was 67. Peart died of glioblastoma on January 7, 2020. RIP Neil.......you will be greatly missed.

theoddz

02-18-2020, 10:41 AM

Mickey Wright, a legend in the world of women's golf and the LPGA, has passed away at the age of 85. The world and the golfing community, will be so much the lesser without her. RIP, Mickey, and thank you for all of the really great games!!! :bouquet:

2ZiuCpDs3nc

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/golf/mickey-wright-lpga-tour-golf-dies-spt-intl/index.html

~Theo~ :bouquet:

Jedi

02-20-2020, 07:10 AM

So sad he was only 48
https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/john-henson-son-of-muppets-creator-dies-at-age-48-1.1688640#_gus&_gucid=&_gup=Facebook&_gsc=8qUsRdb

FireSignFemme

02-20-2020, 02:54 PM

So sad he was only 48
https://www.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/john-henson-son-of-muppets-creator-dies-at-age-48-1.1688640#_gus&_gucid=&_gup=Facebook&_gsc=8qUsRdb

That's one thing I hope my family never has to go through, my children dying before their father and I, my grandchildren dying before my sons do.

Orema

02-24-2020, 09:37 AM

https://i.postimg.cc/tTsn1JHt/Screen-Shot-2020-02-24-at-10-09-11-AM.png

They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.

She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures.”

By Margalit Fox
Feb. 24, 2020, 10:14 a.m. ET

Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, whose death at 101 was announced on Monday by NASA, calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.

A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961.

The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division — the office from which the American space program sprang — and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name.

Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred rigorously educated, supremely capable yet largely unheralded women who, well before the modern feminist movement, worked as NASA mathematicians.

But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American.

In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women — perhaps three dozen — who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film “Hidden Figures,” based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film’s central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as her real-life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.

In January 2017 “Hidden Figures” received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.

https://i.postimg.cc/NFDCCd5x/merlin-157899726-f670c425-adb2-46f6-9c15-bc356754fb87-jumbo.jpg
Katherine Johnson, part of a small group of African-American women mathematicians who did crucial work at NASA, in 1966. Credit: NASA/Donaldson Collection, via Getty Images

A complete obituary will be published by the New York Times shortly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/science/katherine-johnson-dead.html

Orema

03-18-2020, 04:29 AM

Barbara Harris, First Woman Ordained an Episcopal Bishop, Dies at 89 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/us/barbara-harris-dead.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage)

Her groundbreaking election angered many conservatives. She even received death threats.

https://i.postimg.cc/ncxhsgPd/17-Harris2-super-Jumbo.jpg
The Rt. Rev. Barbara Harris at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in Boston in 1998. As a preacher she could electrify a congregation.Credit...Tom Herde/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

By Emily Brennan
March 17, 2020

The Rt. Rev. Barbara C. Harris, who was the first woman to be ordained a bishop in the Episcopal Church of the United States — indeed, in its parent body, the worldwide Anglican Communion — an election that caused a furor among conservatives, died on Friday in Lincoln, Mass., outside Boston. She was 89.

Her death, at a hospice, was confirmed in a statement by the bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, the Rt. Rev. Alan M. Gates. He did not give a cause.

Ms. Harris served as suffragan, or assistant, bishop of the Massachusetts diocese from 1989 until her retirement in 2002, and in some ways she was an unlikely candidate for the role. She had neither a bachelor’s nor a seminary degree, and she was divorced — a profile that some critics said made her unfit for election, regardless of gender. Others feared that she was too progressive for the church.

An African-American, she went on to challenge the Episcopal hierarchy to open its doors wider to women as well as to black and gay people.

Her election in 1988 caused turmoil both in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion, an international family of 46 autonomous churches that includes the Church of England.

Some Episcopalians, objecting to her political views and theological stances, declared that they would not recognize her position and campaigned against her.

She even faced death threats. For her consecration as bishop, on Feb. 11, 1989, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, the Boston police offered her a bulletproof vest to wear. Ms. Harris declined.

Years later, in a 2002 interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project, she shrugged off the furor. “Nobody can hate like Christians,” she said.

She often criticized the church as being too dogmatic — as worrying over the particulars of canon law instead of preaching inclusivity, a truer reflection of Christ’s teachings, she believed.

At a church service sponsored by an L.G.B.T. advocacy group, Integrity U.S.A., in 2009, Ms. Harris — who could electrify a congregation with her gravelly, stentorian voice — asked worshipers, “If indeed God, who doeth all things well, is the creator of all things, how can some things be more acceptable to the creator than others?”

She paused, as applause overtook her words, then continued, “If God is the creator of all persons, then how can some people be more acceptable to God than others?”

In a church whose parishioners have included about a quarter of American presidents and business titans like J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, Ms. Harris pressed for the integration of historically segregated parishes — she was an early member of the Union of Black Episcopalians, founded in 1968 — and called for greater numbers of women in the clergy. In 2003 she supported the election of Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the church.

His election dramatically widened a longstanding divide between theological liberals and conservatives at a time when the church was seeing Sunday attendance drop by 23 percent from 2000 to 2010. In 2009, conservatives who felt alienated from the church, chiefly over the ordination of gay people, founded a small rival denomination, the Anglican Church in North America.

The Episcopal Church was led by a woman, the Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, until 2015, when Michael B. Curry became the church’s first African-American presiding bishop. A majority of the Communion’s member churches now ordain women.

But in 1976, when the Episcopal Church decided to ordain women, it was only the third member church to do so. The Church of England did not allow women to become priests until 1992, and bishops not until 2014. The move upended centuries of tradition holding that bishops had to be male because they belonged to an unbroken line of successors of the 12 apostles, all of them men.

Several congregations withdrew from the church in part because of that decision.

https://i.postimg.cc/h4drry0W/merlin-170640702-b6f54150-e959-4564-af12-8bf35ccbe4f8-super-Jumbo.jpg
Ms. Harris during her consecration as an Episcopal bishop at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston in 1989. She was the first woman in the United States to be elevated to that position. Credit...Peter Southwick/Associated Press

Barbara Clementine Harris was born on June 12, 1930, in Philadelphia, the middle of three children. Her father, Walter Harris, was a steelworker, and her mother, Beatrice (Price) Harris, was an organist at the family’s parish, St. Barnabas Church. (It later merged with another parish, St. Luke’s.) Ms. Harris studied the piano, learning to play dozens of hymns by heart.

She is survived by her brother, Thomas. Her sister, Josephine White, died.

After graduating from Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1948, Ms. Harris attended Charles Morris Price School of Advertising and Journalism and entered public relations, ultimately becoming a manager in 1968 for Sun Oil Co.

Active in civil rights, she traveled to Mississippi to register voters in 1964 and the next year marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

All the while she prepared herself for ordination, studying at Villanova University and the Urban Theology Unit in Sheffield, England. When three retired Episcopal bishops at her parish, the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, ordained 11 women in 1974 — two years before the church had authorized such an action — Ms. Harris was the cross bearer in the procession.

Ms. Harris was ordained a priest in 1980, served at St. Augustine of Hippo Church, a small parish in Norristown, Pa., and was a prison chaplain. She reached a wider audience through her speaking and writing on behalf of racial justice and in opposition to apartheid in South Africa.

Writing in 1984 in The Witness, an Episcopal journal of which she was publisher, she said the church was wasting its energy debating the ordination of women.

“How typical of this church and the society it reflects to get its adrenaline flowing over nonissues like irregularity versus validity,” she wrote, “while real issues go unaddressed — justice, power, authority, shared mission and ministry and wholeness in the body of Christ.’’

The Rev. John P. Streit Jr. of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, who served alongside Ms. Harris at the Cathedral of St. Paul, said social justice had been not just a sermon topic for Ms. Harris; it was the organizing principle of her work, he said, most apparent in her ministry to the homeless people around Boston Common.

“She connects with them, and they connect her,” he said — and not just because they knew that she, an inveterate smoker, could be hit up for a cigarette.

Mr. Streit recalled Ms. Harris once speaking of her confirmation ceremony at the historically black parish of St. Barnabas. The diocesan bishop, who was white, she remembered, wore Episcopal gloves to perform the rite. Though that practice was not unheard-of, it made her wonder whether the bishop had done so to avoid touching her and the other black children.

That episode stood in sharp contrast to how Bishop Harris confirmed children, Mr. Streit said. She would lay her bare hands on their heads, cup their cheeks and look them in the eyes.

Julia Carmel contributed reporting.

~ocean

03-21-2020, 01:37 PM

Kenny Rogers died at age 81 of natural causes . RIP

GeorgiaMa'am

03-31-2020, 10:19 AM

Alan Merrill, who wrote "I Love Rock and Roll" (which was made famous by Joan Jett) has died of COVID-19. He was 69 years old, and still playing shows up until just a few weeks ago.
--from BBC World News

Kätzchen

04-03-2020, 09:57 AM

Bill Withers passed today from heart complications.

He was in his early 80s.

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Jedi

04-04-2020, 07:38 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/arts/harriet-glickman-dead-peanuts.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR2HXyxjmOdLeuyyAwu6j60h3F2aILkieRTI1_dSF MtXe-MUpP_lRudxok8

GeorgiaMa'am

04-11-2020, 02:43 PM

Terrence McNally, playwright and screenwriter, and 4-time Tony Award winner, as well as the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award died from complications due to COVID-19 on March 24, 2020. He was also inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was responsible for works such as
Love! Valour! Compassion!
Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Ragtime
Master Class
The Full Monty
Catch Me If You Can

as well as many other plays, musicals, operas, films and TV shows.

McNally was an openly gay man throughout his career. He was 81 years old when he died.

Kätzchen

04-12-2020, 05:57 PM