Christa Leigh Steele-Knudslien - founder of Miss Trans America, victim of domestic violence
 

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/...harged-murder/

Jo Jo White
 

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.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee
 

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.”

Writer Ursula Le Guin Has Passed Away
 

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/o...ead-at-88.html

John Mahoney
 

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

Nanette Fabray
 

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.

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Had a major crush on this woman. Thanks for the memories Nanette.

David Ogden Stiers
 

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/davi...sh-1202716860/

Brown v Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas 1953)
 

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/201...7-s300-c85.jpg

(Linda and her dad, in photo above, courtesy of NPR).


LINK to NPR article: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...education-dies

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela
 

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Is Dead at 81; Fought Apartheid
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...-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...-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/w...dela-dead.html

R.I.P my sister
 

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.

I'm so sorry, prof. Don't forget the Listening thread if venting would help.

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

RIP Former First Lady
 

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/polit...ies/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.

RIP Anthony Bourdain

LINK: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/0...dain-dead.html

Charlotte Rae
 

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.

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.

Funny man Burt Reynolds
 

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/2018/0...ad_a_23519479/

Marcia Lipetz
 

Marcia Lipetz, leader in the LGBT community, dies at 71

By Graydon Megan
Chicago Tribune

http://www.trbimg.com/img-5b9c2fb3/t...ge/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/o...14-story.html#

Jinx Beers
 

Jinx Beers — pioneering feminist, Lesbian News founder — dies at 84

https://www.advocate.com/sites/advoc...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. 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 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/...n-news-dies-84

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/o...=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.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/o...ion=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...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/o...neil-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...

Stan Lee R.I.P.
 

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/o...-lee-dead.html

Some words from Stan Lee
 

Favorite Quote by Stan Lee (Rest in Peace)
 

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)

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/o...verlooked.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?...

Nancy Wilson died Thursday after a long illness at her home in Pioneertown, Calif., her manager Devra Hall Levy told NPR.
 

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.

Mary Oliver
 

Mary Oliver, Prize-Winning Poet of the Natural World, Dies at 83

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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.”

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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.”


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/o...gtype=Homepage

http://www.legacy.com/news/celebrity...nal-bull-rider

Mason Lowe, young upcoming bullrider.

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/enter...ead/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: