RIP

[Kobi]

Mel Parnell, the left-handed pitcher who spent his entire 10-year career with the Boston Red Sox and faced some of the best hitters of the 1940s and early 1950s, has died. He was 89.

Mel Parnell was masterful at Fenway Park even though he pitched in front of the Green Monster, a home run hitter’s dream at only 310 feet down the left field line. Parnell had a career record of 123-75, but he was 70-30 at Fenway.

He still holds the club record for left-handed pitchers in games started, innings and victories. Parnell’s victories rank second in team history, behind Cy Young and Roger Clemens, who each had 192 victories.

[Gemme]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...6pLid%3D145374


Ruby Garrett, Butte, Montana's last madam died.

BUTTE, Mont. -- Ruby Garrett ran the last brothel standing in this mining town's once-lively red-light district with a reputation for kindness toward her girls, but the grandmotherly figure was also a husband-shooting, tax-evading madam who once said that prostitution should be considered a commodity.

The first time Garrett went to prison, it was for shooting her husband five times in the middle of a card game in 1959. She killed him, she said, because he had abused her repeatedly.

She went to prison again in 1982 for failing to report her earnings. While she was investigated, the sheriff padlocked the doors of the Dumas Hotel in late 1981, marking the end of the brothel that had catered to the miners in the Montana boomtown since 1890.

Butte's last madam died Saturday at Crest Nursing Home at the age of 94, the Duggan-Dolan Mortuary confirmed Tuesday. The cause of her death was not immediately known.

Garrett, also known as Lee Arrigoni, told the Montana Standard in 1991 that prostitution should be considered a commodity instead of being morally wrong.

"If you don't think it's morally wrong, then it's kind of fun," she told the Butte newspaper.

The ex-madam, then in her mid-70s, even had advice for the next generation of women: "These little chippies who will do it for a burger and a beer, I say they might as well sell it."

People who knew Garrett in her later years remembered a kind person who looked out for the women who worked at the Dumas. Ellen Crain, director of the Butte-Silver Bow Archives, said Garrett was a savvy businesswoman who felt strongly about treating the women well and took pride in keeping the brothel clean and orderly.

"She was truly one of the last living legends in Butte, from the end of Butte's famed red light district," said Chris Fisk, a Butte High School history teacher who met Garrett two years ago.

Former Sheriff Bob Butorovich, who shut down the brothel, said prostitution became a fact of life in Butte with so many young, single miners. He said Garrett never held a grudge against him for closing down her establishment.

"She was a wonderful old gal," he said. "Part of Butte history is gone."

She lived in the little town of Divide, south of Butte, and her friends and neighbors were protective of her. The day before she began her six-month prison term in 1982, they threw her a party at the Melrose Bar.

Les Baldwin, one of those who turned out to bid her farewell, told an Associated Press reporter at the party: "I think it's a crime that a fine woman like this is sent to prison. I've done more things wrong than this woman."

Garrett was acquitted of a first-degree murder charge for shooting common-law husband Andy Arrigoni but served nine months for the shooting on a manslaughter conviction. Garrett had said that he beat her, and Crain said she was a domestic-violence victim.

"She was beaten so bad that day that when she walked in that Board of Trade to shoot him, they couldn't recognize her," Crain said.

Garrett pleaded guilty in 1982 to failing to failing to pay $51,670 in federal taxes from 1975 to 1978. She received a six-month sentence and was fined $10,000, which she said she paid with a loan from a friend.

Garrett had refused to sell the Dumas unless it could be used as a brothel, news reports said at the time. It's now a tourist attraction in Uptown Butte.

Garrett made no apologies for what she did, but she told the Montana Standard that she would have made some different decisions if she could do it over again. She was raised a Catholic, sang in the church choir and prayed regularly, she said.

"I don't think I would have become a nun or a Sister, but I would have done some things different," Garrett told the newspaper.

Services were pending with Duggan-Dolan Mortuary.

[Kobi]

Reuters - Murray Lender, who made a traditionally Jewish food a staple of American cuisine and built a frozen bagel empire, died on Wednesday in Miami Beach, Florida, after a 10-week illness. He was 81.

He became the face of Lender's Bagels in the 1970s and 1980s when he appeared on television advertisements encouraging people unfamiliar with bagels to try them.

"It's not so easy telling people that after all those years of eating toast for breakfast, now there's something better," Lender said in one ad from the 1980s. "But it's not so hard either."

Lender's father immigrated from Poland to the United States in 1927 and opened a bakery in New Haven, Connecticut, where he made bagels, a doughnut shaped bread that is boiled and then baked. Lender and his siblings took over the family bakery in the 1960s and built the bagel line into a national brand. "He took this idea of a bagel, which in the 1960s was primarily a product eaten by Jews in the greater New York area, and he envisioned this product becoming available to everyone in the country," Marvin Lender, his brother and business partner, said in a telephone interview.

"The way we did that was through the vehicle of frozen foods. Because of his marketing and sales prowess we took every penny we had and directed it toward advertising." The Lenders grew the company from seven employees in 1963 to 700 in 1984, when they sold it to Kraft Foods. Kraft retained Lender as a spokesman for two years after it purchased the company. Lender's Bagels was later sold to cereal-maker Kellogg Company, which in turn sold the company to Pinnacle Foods Group, based in Peoria, Illinois. Later in life, he and his brother spent two years running a bagel restaurant company in Israel, where bagels are not widely eaten, Marvin Lender said.

[Martina]

From Twenty-One Love Poems

V.

This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved—
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children—
women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts—their hands, clasped for centuries—
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

[Kobi]

(CNN) -- Earl Scruggs, who as a child developed the distinctive picking style that forever changed banjo playing, and whose association with Lester Flatt cemented bluegrass music's place in popular culture, died Wednesday of natural causes at a Nashville hospital, his son Gary Scruggs said. He was 88.

For many of a certain age, Scruggs' banjo was part of the soundtrack of an era on "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" -- the theme song from the CBS sitcom "The Beverly Hillbillies," which aired on CBS from 1962 to 1971 and for decades afterward in syndication.

But much more than that, he was the originator of the three-finger picking style that brought the banjo to the fore in a supercharged new genre, and he was an indispensable member of the small cadre of musical greats who created bluegrass music.

Scruggs was born in 1924 to a musically gifted family in rural Cleveland County, North Carolina, according to his official biography. His father, a farmer and a bookkeeper, played the fiddle and banjo, his mother was an organist and his older siblings played guitar and banjo, as well.

Young Earl's exceptional gifts were apparent early on. He started playing the banjo at age 4 and he started developing his famed three-finger banjo style at the age of 10.

"The banjo was, for all practical purposes, 'reborn' as a musical instrument," the biography on his official website declares, "due to the talent and prominence Earl Scruggs gave to the instrument."

In 1945, Scruggs met Flatt when he joined Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys, for whom Flatt was the guitarist and lead vocalist. Along with the group's mandolin-playing namesake were fiddler Chubby Wise and bassist Howard Watts (alias: Cedric Rainwater).

In an article on the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum's website, bluegrass historian Neil V. Rosenberg described Scruggs' style as "a 'roll' executed with the thumb and two fingers of his right hand" that essentially made the banjo "a lead instrument like a fiddle or a guitar, particularly on faster pieces and instrumentals. This novel sound attracted considerable attention to their Grand Ole Opry performances, road shows, and Columbia recordings."

Scruggs and Flatt left Monroe in 1948 to form the Foggy Mountain Boys, according to the Country Music Hall of Fame website. Along with guitarist/vocalists Jim Eanes and Mac Wiseman, fiddler Jim Shumate and Blue Grass Boys alum Rainwater, the group played on WCYB in Bristol, Tennessee, and recorded for the Mercury label.

The Foggy Mountain Boys' roster changed over the years, but Flatt & Scruggs became the constants, the signature sound of the group on radio programs, notably those sponsored by Martha White Flour, and as regulars at the Grand Ole Opry. They became syndicated TV stars in in the Southeast in the late 1950s and early '60s, and they hit the country charts with the gospel tune "Cabin on the Hill."

But it was during an appearance at a Hollywood folk club that brought them into contact with the producer of "The Beverly Hillbillies" and led to "The Ballad of Jed Clampett." It was their only single to climb to No.1 on the country charts.

The 1967 film "Bonnie and Clyde" featured their 1949 instrumental "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," with its distinctive Scruggs-style banjo solo perhaps the most ubiquitous of bluegrass sounds

[Martina]

Damn. i'll miss him. That Three Pickers concert he did with Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs was something.

[Martina]

[Jess]

Originally Posted by Martina

From Twenty-One Love Poems

V.

This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved—
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children—
women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts—their hands, clasped for centuries—
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

I will plant flowers for her today
She planted so many seeds in me...

[Arwen]

Originally Posted by Martina

From Twenty-One Love Poems

V.

This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved—
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children—
women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts—their hands, clasped for centuries—
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

Such an amazing talent. The OtherSide will be happy she's with them, I'm sure.

[BullDog]

Planetarium
by Adrienne Rich


Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848),
astronomer, sister of William; and others.


A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled

in those spaces of the mind

An eye,
'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

[puddin']

[Blade]

Thomas Kindade has died at age 54. Known as the Painter of Light, the family says he died of natural causes. RIP Thomas
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...,6353513.story

[Kobi]

Jonathan Frid, the man known to fans around the world as Barnabas Collins, the suave vampire from the cult hit soap opera "Dark Shadows" has died at age 87.

The Hamilton Spectator, of Hamilton, Ontario, reports the Canadian actor died in his hometown of Hamilton at the Juravinski Hospital on Friday, April 13.

Frid's final screen role was a cameo in "Dark Shadows," the soap opera's upcoming big-screen revamp directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas.

The soap opera ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. Originally conceived as a straightforward gothic soap opera by creator Dan Curtis, it languished in the ratings until Curtis began adding supernatural elements, first a ghost, and then Barnabas Collins. Frid joined the show in 1967 and it began to take off as a cult hit, especially with younger children, who rushed home from school to watch the show.

Outside of the Barnabas role, Frid had an extensive stage career, including a Broadway and national tour of "Arsenic and Old Lace" in the mid-1980s.

I remember running home from school to watch this show....until it got to be totally bizarre.

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Charles Colson, a Richard Nixon White House operative during the Watergate scandal who had a reputation for ruthlessness before going to jail and starting a prison ministry, died on Saturday at age 80, the ministry said.

Colson served as counsel to the president from 1969 to 1973 and a major part of his job was playing hardball politics to assure Nixon's re-election in 1972.

In 1973, Time magazine said Colson "was probably more disliked, as well as feared, than any other White House aide ... If Colson actually performed half the various acts of which he has been accused, he was easily the least principled of all Nixon's associates."

It was in that atmosphere that Colson and others at the top of the White House staff engaged in a series of misadventures and illegal acts that resulted in Nixon resigning the presidency in 1974 in the face of impeachment over the Watergate scandal, which grew out of a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington.

Colson ended up with a sentence of one to three years in prison but it did not come from a Watergate crime. He had pleaded no contest to obstruction of justice in the break-in of the offices of the psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.

ENEMIES' LIST

In 1971, Colson had been the chief author of a memo listing Nixon's major political critics and opponents, including businessmen, members of Congress, journalists and entertainers. When the "enemies list" became public, those included on it - among them actor Paul Newman - wore the mention like a badge of honor and cited the list as a prime example of Nixon's paranoia.

The same year, the president's re-election committee set aside $250,000 to do "intelligence gathering" on Democrats. To lead the program, Colson choose one of his assistants, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt.

Hunt's group came to be known as "the plumbers" and they participated in a number of questionable and outright illegal events, including the Ellsberg break-in.

Colson had other capers in mind, including starting a fire at the Brookings Institution think tank and breaking into the apartment of the man who tried to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace. Such ideas were never carried out.

Then came the break-in that failed when "plumbers" were caught inside the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex.

http://news.yahoo.com/watergate-figu...210520742.html

[Kobi]

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — Junior Seau, regarded as one of the N.F.L.’s best linebackers over a 20-year career with the San Diego Chargers, the Miami Dolphins and the New England Patriots, died of a gunshot wound to the chest Wednesday at his home in Oceanside, Calif. He was 43.

The Oceanside police said Seau’s death was being investigated as a suicide. He was found by his girlfriend in a bedroom of his beachfront house Wednesday morning, and a handgun was found near the body, the police said, adding that Seau did not appear to leave a note.

A native of Oceanside, Seau starred at the University of Southern California before being drafted fifth over all in the 1990 N.F.L. draft by the Chargers, who played 40 miles south of his hometown. A 12-time Pro Bowler, Seau played 13 seasons with the Chargers and was one of the team’s most popular players. In the 1994 season, he led the team to the Super Bowl, where they lost to the San Francisco 49ers, 49-26. The Pro Football Hall of Fame selected him for the 1990s All-Decade Team.

Seau was traded to the Dolphins in 2003, and after three injury-plagued seasons he was released. He signed a one-day contract with the Chargers in August 2006 to announce his retirement. But four days later, he signed with the New England Patriots and was a member of the 2007 team that went undefeated in the regular season, losing to the Giants in the Super Bowl.

His last season in the N.F.L was 2009. He finished his career with 1,524 tackles, 56 ½ sacks and 18 interceptions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/sp...icide.html?amp

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


This man was one heck of a football player. Loved when he played for us. Didnt like it much when he was playing against us. Thanks for the memories Junior.

[DapperButch]

I can't help but wonder if his suicide was a function of losing too much of his identity when he retired in 2009. It can be intolerable for athletes who are used to the limelight and being revered. For that matter, it can be hard for anybody who identifies greatly with their career.

[starryeyes]

Having grown up in Oceanside and still living in San Diego, Junior Seau was always around. I remember him coming to our high school pep rally. He was such a sweet and giving person. It is terrible to see someone take their own life like that. RIP Junior!

Originally Posted by Kobi

OCEANSIDE, Calif. — Junior Seau, regarded as one of the N.F.L.’s best linebackers over a 20-year career with the San Diego Chargers, the Miami Dolphins and the New England Patriots, died of a gunshot wound to the chest Wednesday at his home in Oceanside, Calif. He was 43.

The Oceanside police said Seau’s death was being investigated as a suicide. He was found by his girlfriend in a bedroom of his beachfront house Wednesday morning, and a handgun was found near the body, the police said, adding that Seau did not appear to leave a note.

A native of Oceanside, Seau starred at the University of Southern California before being drafted fifth over all in the 1990 N.F.L. draft by the Chargers, who played 40 miles south of his hometown. A 12-time Pro Bowler, Seau played 13 seasons with the Chargers and was one of the team’s most popular players. In the 1994 season, he led the team to the Super Bowl, where they lost to the San Francisco 49ers, 49-26. The Pro Football Hall of Fame selected him for the 1990s All-Decade Team.

Seau was traded to the Dolphins in 2003, and after three injury-plagued seasons he was released. He signed a one-day contract with the Chargers in August 2006 to announce his retirement. But four days later, he signed with the New England Patriots and was a member of the 2007 team that went undefeated in the regular season, losing to the Giants in the Super Bowl.

His last season in the N.F.L was 2009. He finished his career with 1,524 tackles, 56 ½ sacks and 18 interceptions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/sp...icide.html?amp

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


This man was one heck of a football player. Loved when he played for us. Didnt like it much when he was playing against us. Thanks for the memories Junior.