RIP

[ruffryder]

RIP Whitney Houston.

Anyone watching the live stream of her funeral?

http://omg.yahoo.com/whitney-houston-funeral/

[SnackTime]

RIP Whitney Houston

Watching the service on CNN

[Scuba]

One thing that attracts me to an artist and to their music is their authenticity. Tell me a story, make me believe that this is your truth to some degree.

I've not paid much attention to Whitney in my life and in an attempt to overcome judgement (specifically the glorified life of an addict), I sat and watched her videos (music and interviews). Here is what stood out for me.

She loves to sing.
She loves the camera.
She has one hell of a voice.
She has passion and it shows.
She cares deeply.
She loves God.
She lives to move people through music.
She has touched a lot of lives.
She, like all of us, suffers from the human condition.

A person's life should be celebrated despite their mistakes. Imagine the burden of having a gift so beautiful it moves people to tears, instills pride and empowers people...this is the gift Whitney and so many others have given. We should all just be grateful

So...on that note I invite you to watch this one...it's now one of my favorites.

[Kobi]

Scuba, that was a very sweet and lovely tribute. Thank you for sharing it.

[macele]

i really don't think there is another voice as powerful/beautiful ... as whitney's. i've thought about this, and i just don't think anyone else compares. oprah said that when she hears whitney's voice, ... it's like hearing god.

her voice was/is an inspiration. her voice lifts you up. i get lost, ... in that space of inspiration.

i watched her funeral service. i know that made her rejoice. the service was powerful, beautiful, and inspirational, ... just like whitney. amen.

[Vlasta]

As well known as a resident boo hoo femme , I watched entire service and cry , cry and cry . I personally think was beautiful . I am disgusted , by the fact how people post on Internet such rude, mean and ugly comments on the day of Whitney funeral service . It's disgusting ! Who we are to judge ? There are a many people with addictions just not in a public eye . This it's what is wrong with today society . People are mean , non empathetic and there for themselves . Sad !

[foxyshaman]

I am often drawn to romanticize bravery. I don't know why, nor does it matter if I ever find out why. I have deep respect for war journalists and photographers. I have even deeper respect for Marie Colvin.

Marie Colvin was truly one of a kind. She had bravery I could only dream about. I am truly sorry to hear of her passing. I truly am. To all the brave warriors and the people who bring us "truth" no matter how ugly, I give you my heart.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-17136037

[Kobi]

Monkees singer Davy Jones has died after suffering a heart attack. He was 66.
Martin County, Florida’s Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed the news.
Authorities are still investigating the circumstances surrounding his death, which happened earlier today.

Jones joined the Monkees in 1965 along with Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork.
Their hits include “I’m a Believer,” “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” “Daydream Believer,” and “Last Train to Clarksville.”

[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']

[Novelafemme]

RIP Caballo Blanco. You were an incredible inspiration to so many of us. Your legacy will live on in the hearts and feet of runners everywhere. I wish you were still with us, but I take comfort knowing that your death came while you were doing what you loved the most. May we all be so blessed. Have fun running on those soft, fluffy clouds. <3