RIP

[Kobi]

Ann Morgan Guilbert, actress who played Millie Helper on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” has died at the age of 87.

Guilbert was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She studied theater arts at Stanford University.

She is best known for her beloved role as the next door neighbor and best friend of Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) on the 1960s classic sitcom, “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” She appeared on 61 episodes of the show.

In the 1990s, she had a notable supporting role as Fran Fine’s feisty grandmother on the sitcom, “The Nanny.” Other television appearances by Guilbert include “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and “That Girl.”

She also had roles in films including “Grumpier Old Men,” and as recently as 2010 she had appeared in the movie “Please Give.”

[Kobi]

Anton Yelchin died Sunday morning in “fatal traffic collision".

Yelchin begin his acting career appearing in shows like ER, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2006, he received critical acclaim for his performance in crime drama Alpha Dog and starred as the title character in the next year’s Charlie Bartlett.

The actor made his Star Trek debut in the franchise’s 2009 film, where he played Pavel Chekhov. He reprised that role in 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness and again in the upcoming Star Trek Beyond, which is set to arrive in theaters July 22.

Although Yelchin was most known for his Star Trek work, he made a name for himself appearing in smaller films like 2011’s Like Crazy, where he starred opposite Felicity Jones, and 2011’s The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster and also starring Mel Gibson and Jennifer Lawrence.

He last was seen in this year’s Green Room, a horror film released this past spring.

[Kobi]

Pat Summitt, the iconic University of Tennessee women's basketball coach who became the winningest coach in college basketball history, has died at the age of 64, several years after being diagnosed with early onset dementia, her son, Tyler, and her foundation's website say.

For 38 years, the trailblazing coach roamed courtside at Tennessee, racking up 1,098 wins against only 208 losses. Along the way, there were eight national championships and 16 conference titles that put Summitt and women's college basketball on the nation's sports map.

She stepped down as Tennessee's coach in 2012, one year after announcing her diagnosis of early onset dementia, Alzheimer's type.

After her diagnosis, Summitt played a leading role in the fight against Alzheimer's. She launched the Pat Summitt Foundation, which is dedicated to researching and educating people about the disease while also providing services to patients and caregivers.

Summit grew up in north-central Tennessee, in a family of five, according to a 2012 ESPN profile. She went to high school in Henrietta, Tennessee, where she played basketball. She later went on to attend University of Tennessee at Martin.

Summitt took over as coach the job of Tennessee Lady Volunteers at the age of 22 in 1974. She has the most career wins of any Division I men's or women's basketball coach.

During her time, Tennessee never failed to reach the NCAA tournament, never received a seed lower than No. 5 and reached 18 Final Fours.

She led the 1984 Olympic team to a gold medal, after having won an Olympic silver medal herself in 1976.

Summitt continued to hold a position as head coach emeritus of the Tennessee women's basketball team up until her death. She attended nearly every home game and many practices in the first year after stepped down as coach, though she had a less visible role in subsequent seasons. She cut back on public appearances in recent years.

Summitt was also an author of three books, her most recent released in 2014, titled "Sum it Up."

[Kobi]

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-tof...48.html?ref=gs
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[C0LLETTE]

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]

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]

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.