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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1680 on: January 23, 2018, 10:52:02 PM »
When Paul Simon's Graceland tour made it to Harare, Zimbabwe, I was in the crowd there somewhere. It was magical, beyond words.


In 1967, he performed at the Monterey Pop Festival alongside Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar, The Who and Jimi Hendrix.


Look at that lineup! Amazing!
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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1681 on: January 23, 2018, 10:57:05 PM »
"It's less than an hour since the news broke that Ursula K. Le Guin has died and right now my Twitter feed, populated as it is with science fiction and fantasy writers, editors and fans, is a single, unbroken string of testimonials. N.K. Jemisin, who won back-to-back Hugo Awards for her novels "The Fifth Season" and "The Obelisk Gate," is recounting how a note from Le Guin filled her with joy. Novelist Madeline Ashby recounts meeting Le Guin at a lecture, mentioning to Le Guin that she was writing her thesis on her, and Le Guin insisting Ashby send it to her. She did. Le Guin wrote back with notes.

Neil Gaiman is saying, "I miss her as a glorious funny prickly person, & I miss her as the deepest and smartest of the writers, too." Patrick Nielsen Hayden, associate publisher of Tor Books, is saying, "She wasn't always right, but she was always wise."

On and on and on goes this immediate and real-time outpouring of grief and remembrance of a woman who gave us Earthsea, "The Left Hand of Darkness" and the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," which is as much a parable for our time as anything that anyone has written, or likely will.

She was a supporting column of the genre, on equal footing and bearing equal weight to Verne or Wells or Heinlein or Bradbury. Losing her is like losing one of the great sequoias. As the unceasing flow of testimonials gives witness, nearly every lover and creator of science fiction and fantasy can give you a story of how Le Guin, through her words or presence, has illuminated their lives."

-- John Scalzi in the Los Angeles Times
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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1682 on: January 24, 2018, 07:21:26 PM »
I already had it written, so....

URSULA K. LE GUIN (1929-2018):

She was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, California, on Oct. 21, 1929, the youngest of four children and the only daughter of two anthropologists, Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora Quinn Kroeber.

She fell in love with SF and fantasy at an early age, but grew disillusioned with how the stories “seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers: White men go forth and conquer the universe.”

After earning 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. Returning to the United States, she abandoned her graduate studies to raise a family; the Le Guins eventually settled in Portland, where Charles Le Guin taught history at Portland State University.

By the early 1960s Le Guin had written five unpublished novels. 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 world where the practice of magic is as precise as any science, and as morally ambiguous. More novels and accolades quickly followed. Her work was translated into over 40 languages and sold millions of copies across the globe, with some of her more popular titles still in print.
Le Guin was a staunch champion of the intellectual strength of science fiction and fantasy at a time when they were often relegated without a thought to the realm of the unserious “genre ghetto.” She spoke out against authors who used the tropes of science fiction and fantasy while refusing to acknowledge what they were writing, which led to a very public debate with Margaret Atwood over the boundaries of SF&F and a very public shaming of Kazuo Ishiguro.

At the 2014 National Book Awards, 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.”

“Hard times are coming,” she said, “when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”

Neil Gaiman does the honors at the 2014 National Book Awards:
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« Last Edit: January 24, 2018, 07:34:58 PM by rtpoe »
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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gonZo

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1683 on: January 25, 2018, 07:03:25 PM »
When Paul Simon's Graceland tour made it to Harare, Zimbabwe, I was in the crowd there somewhere. It was magical, beyond words.

I saw the same tour (some different players because of visa issues in the 2 countries) at the Smith Center in Chapel Hill, NC. It was easily the most moving live performance I've ever seen.
« Last Edit: January 25, 2018, 07:06:14 PM by gonZo »

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salem

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1684 on: January 25, 2018, 08:20:46 PM »
A bit late off the mark, but I just dicovered that Peter Wyngarde of TV series Department S and Jason King died on the 15th of january, aged 90. He was also in the Doctor Who story 'Planet of Fire' way back in 1984.

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3deroticer

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1685 on: January 26, 2018, 05:13:46 PM »
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2018/01/20/porn-star-is-found-dead-in-rehab-fifth-adult-film-actress-to-die-in-three-months.html

From FOXnews so I am not sure what to make of it! But I wonder if FOXnews are getting deep interest in Porn Star lifestyle for a reason?
With the recent accusation and payoff of Trump lifestyle secrets. Here is the strange pattern that I saw that seems quite of lot of people that had ties to the Russian Investigation are showing up dead, and now a handful of porn stars are ending up dead in 3 month and very close to the new sudden interest in porn stars. This is the stuff that would make a movie plotline.
"Yesterday, Reince Priebus called this whole story a 'nothing burger,'" he said. "Well these emails have turned it into an all-you-can-prosecute buffet."

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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1686 on: January 27, 2018, 07:01:16 PM »
A bit late off the mark, but I just dicovered that Peter Wyngarde of TV series Department S and Jason King died on the 15th of january, aged 90. He was also in the Doctor Who story 'Planet of Fire' way back in 1984.

Those were some cool shows, and Mr. Wyngarde was super-cool in them. :(
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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1687 on: January 27, 2018, 07:04:25 PM »
Washington Post: "Mort Walker, whose ‘Beetle Bailey’ was a comic-page staple for decades, dies at 94"

Mort Walker, whose "Beetle Bailey" comic strip followed the exploits of a lazy G.I. and his inept cohorts at the dysfunctional Camp Swampy, and whose dedication to his art form led him to found the first museum devoted to the history of cartooning, died Jan. 27 at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 94.

Tom Richmond, a former president of the National Cartoonists Society, confirmed the death. The cause was pneumonia.

In contrast with the work-shirking soldier he immortalized, Mr. Walker was a man of considerable drive and ambition. He drew his daily comic strip for TK years, longer than any other American artist in the history of the medium.

Debuting in 1950, "Beetle Bailey" was distributed by King Features Syndicate and eventually reached 200 million readers in 1,800 newspapers in more than 50 countries. Beetle and company appeared in comic books, television cartoons, games and toys and were also featured in a musical with the book by Mr. Walker and, in 2010, on a U.S. Postal Service postage stamp.

"Beetle Bailey" was among the first cartoons to mark a shift in the funny pages from the serial strips of the previous decade to the graphically simpler gag-a-day model that predominates today.

Beetle's cast includes the title character, a lanky goof-off whose eyes are always covered by the visor of his hat or helmet; his rotund nemesis, Sgt. Snorkel, a violent but sentimental man who frequently beat Beetle to a pulp of squiggly lines; the ineffectual Gen. Halftrack, who ran Camp Swampy (a place the Pentagon had lost track of); Halftrack's voluptuous secretary, Miss Buxley; Cookie, the hairy-shouldered chef and purveyor of inedible meatballs; and the bumpkin Pvt. Zero.

The characters never saw battle, and weapons and uniforms were not updated. Mr. Walker said that the military setting was simply a convenient stand-in for the pecking order of which everyone is a part…

Starting in 1954, Mr. Walker wrote another hit cartoon, the widely syndicated family strip "Hi and Lois," originally illustrated by Dik Browne (later the creator of "Hägar the Horrible"). Mr. Walker said he wanted to depict a loving family "together against the world ... instead of against each other."

He thrived on collaboration, working with assistants (including Jerry Dumas and Bill Janocha, and his sons Brian and Greg) to review jokes every week and to create at least eight other strips, among them "Boner's Ark" and "Sam's Strip."

Brian and Greg, who have written "Hi and Lois" since the 1980s and have assisted Mr. Walker with Beetle gags and inking since the 1970s, will continue to produce "Beetle Bailey."

Even as he was devising his gags — he claimed to have 80,000 unused jokes in storage — Mr. Walker devoted himself to establishing a museum that would treat the comic strip as a serious art form.

In 1974, with a check from the Hearst Foundation and refurbishing help from family and friends, he opened the Museum of Cartoon Art in a mansion in Greenwich, Conn. The collection grew with donations of art from newspaper syndicates and the estates of cartoonists, and is today worth an estimated $20 million.

…Mr. Walker, who became president of the National Cartoonists Society, won its Golden T-Square award for 50 years of service to the industry in 1999…In 1990, the Pentagon recognized Mr. Walker (if not Camp Swampy) with the Certificate of Appreciation for Patriotic Civilian Service. "As hard as it is to find anything at the Pentagon," the veteran gagman quipped, "they finally found a sense of humor."


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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1688 on: February 05, 2018, 10:55:12 PM »
Deadline: "John Mahoney Dies: Emmy-Nominated Frasier Star Was 77"

John Mahoney, who played Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce’s father on the hit NBC sitcom Frasier, died on Sunday, Deadline has confirmed. He was 77.

Born in England, Mahoney first discovered acting at the Stretford Chi!dren’s Theater. His interest in acting brought him to the United States and studied at Quincy University before joining the Army. He took acting classes at St. Nicholas Theatre which was the start of his professional acting career as he was encouraged by John Malkovich to join Steppenwolf Theater. While there, he won Clarence Derwent Award as Most Promising Male Newcomer. He would eventually go on to win a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves.

In 1987 he made his feature film debut in Barry Levinson’s Tin Men. He continued to add film credits to his resume with impressive roles in iconic films such as Say Anything…, Reality Bites, In the Line of Fire, The American President, Eight Men Out as well as the Coen BrothersBarton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy. He also appeared as Steve Carell’s father in Dan in Real Life.

But it was his role in Frasier as the titular character’s fussy, unfiltered father Martin Crane that earned him the most recognition. He appeared on the show from the start in 1993 until 2004. The role earned him two Emmy nominations, two Golden Globe nominations and a Screen Actors Guild Award win. In addition to Frasier, Mahoney also appeared on Cheers, Becker, ER, Burn Notice, In Treatment, and Hot in Cleveland.

Mahoney was also known for his voice work which started with W. B. Yeats’ “The Words upon the Window-Pane” for the award-winning National Radio Theater of Chicago. He voiced characters in many classic animated features including The Iron Giant, Antz, Atlantis: The Lost Empire as well as the follow-up Atlantis: Milo’s return. In 2007, he reunited with his Frasier co-stars on The Simpsons and voiced the character of Dr. Robert Terwiiliger, Sr., the father of Grammer’s Sideshow Bob and Pierce’s Cecil.

On stage, he co-starred as the Old Man in the Broadway revival of Prelude to a Kiss and in March 2008, opened in the world premiere of Better Late at the Northlight Theatre in Illinois. In 2013, he was a featured ensemble cast member in The Birthday Party which played at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.

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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1689 on: March 08, 2018, 10:53:26 PM »
DAVID OGDEN STIERS (1942 - 2018)

Born in Illinois, he and his family moved to Eugene OR where he graduated from high school. After getting into acting at the California Shakespeare Festival in Santa Clara. He studied acting and voice at Juilliard, and made his Broadway debut in December 1973. In 1977, he was picked to join the cast of M*A*S*H after Larry "Frank Burns" Linville departed. His work as Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III earned him two Emmy nominations for Best Supporting Actor.

After the series ended, he expressed a disdain for the show and how hard it was to break away from the Winchester role. But he managed, with numerous acting roles and even another Emmy nomination. He went back to voice work (his first screen credit was as an announcer in THX-1138), doing notable work as Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast, Governor Ratcliffe in Pocahontas, and Jumba in Lilo and Stitch.

Music remained a great love, and he wound up helping to found and then working as the resident conductor for the Newport (OR) Symphony Orchestra. "David Ogden Stiers was a generous, loving, and inspirational friend and pillar to our orchestra, and, indeed, to all of us individually. Our orchestra would not be here if it weren't for his great support and inspiration over three decades," said Music Director Adam Flatt.

"The thing I love about the arts — music, theater, museums, galleries — is that everybody wins," he told Canada’s National Post newspaper in 2002. "You are touched and hopefully moved, and it is unique to each person. Even though you may have listened to the same performance, what you heard could be vastly different from what anyone else heard."

Major Winchester's finest moment:



rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1691 on: March 14, 2018, 09:28:50 PM »
Famed professor Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76, Reuters reports.

He didn't really do that much as an astrophysicist. His only contribution to the field was showing that black holes could actually lose mass. Other than that, there's not really a lot in the literature.

But what he did better than anyone of recent note is explain black holes and the cosmos to the people. That's a rare talent. And he made it COOL to be smart, even more than Neil de Grasse Tyson or Stephen Jay Gould or any other "popularizer" of science that you can name. Maybe his illness had something to do with it, but I think it was more his sense of humor.

(I paraphrase here)

JOHN OLIVER: So, if there are an infinite number of universes, then there's got to be one where I'm smarter than you, right?

STEVEN HAWKING: Yes. And one where you're funny, too.
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1692 on: March 19, 2018, 07:30:47 PM »
ROGER BANNISTER (1928-2018)

On May 6, 1954, he took a break from his medical studies to participate in a track meet at Iffley Road Track in Oxford...

Norris McWhirter announced the results:

"Result of Event Eight: One mile. First, R. G. Bannister of Exeter and Merton Colleges, in a time which, subject to ratification, is a new Track Record, British Native Record, British All-Comers Record, European Record, Commonwealth Record and World Record… Three minutes…......"

He competed for a few more years, but his medical work was never far off.

After earning his degree, he became a staff neurologist at National Hospital at Queens Square in 1963 and, the next year, joined the staff of St. Mary’s. He worked at both facilities for more than 20 years, teaching, seeing patients and conducting research on the understanding of degenerative disease and disorders of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary functions such as heart rate and digestion. He contributed to medical journals and edited two textbooks and received the American Academy of Neurology’s first lifetime achievement award.

In the 1970s, he chaired the government-funded Sports Council of Great Britain, now called Sport England, and was the president of what is now the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education , a cultural and social organization. He initiated the council’s “Sport for All” campaign and pressed for testing of anabolic steroid use. For his work on the council, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975.

“None of my athletics was the greatest achievement,” he said. “My medical work has been my achievement and my family with 14 grandchildren. Those are real achievements.”


rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1693 on: March 21, 2018, 04:09:33 PM »
"Bento" aka Keyboard Cat died on March 20. He shall be missed. (The original Keyboard Cat, "Fatso", died in 1987.)
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rtpoe

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Re: The R.I.P. Thread
« Reply #1694 on: March 29, 2018, 09:04:35 PM »
RUSTY STAUB (1944-2018):

Daniel Jospeh Staub got his nickname almost as soon as he was born (on April 1, 1944) when a nurse commented on the red-orange fuzz on his head. His father, a minor-league catcher for a few years, gave him a bat when he was three. By the time he was a teenager, Rusty was a star first baseman at Jesuit High in New Orleans and after leading his team to the 1961 Louisiana State AAA championship, he signed a $100,000 bonus with the then-National League expansion Houston Colt 45s.

By 1965, he'd become a full-time major leaguer and soon developed into Houston's first star. But salary disputes after his All-Star season in 1967 led to him getting traded to the Montreal Expos for the 1969 season. He blossomed there, becoming the best thing about the team. After hitting a two-run homer and making a specular game-ending catch to break a 20-game Expo losing streak, Montreal Gazette sportswriter Ted Blackman began referring to him as "Le Grand Orange." It stuck with him the rest of his life.

With the Expos, a close friendship with team owner and whiskey magnate Charles Bronfman helped get his foot in the door as a restauranteur and "foodie". But friendship couldn't get in the way of business. Staub was traded to the Mets at the start of the 1972 season for a trio of young players. He and New York fell in love with each other; helping the Mets get to the 1973 World Series (where he led the team in hitting) added to the mutual love fest.

Rusty gives the Mets the lead in Game 4 of the 1973 World Series:



The Mets stupidly traded him to the Tigers after the 1975 season. But after becoming a free agent in 1980 (after quick stops back with the Expos and with the Rangers), he signed with the Mets. There, he became a pinch-hitter extraordinaire (tying records for most consecutive pinch hits and most RBIs in a season by a pinch hitter) before retiring after the 1985 season. A six-time All-Star, he's the only player to collect at least 500 hits with four different teams. He finished with a solid .279 batting average (and a .362 on base percentage), with 2,716 base hits, and 292 home runs. Could have easily been 3,000 hits and 300 HR if he had more regular playing time

His work wasn't done, though. Sportswriter Bill Madden recalled an interview in 2001. "My mother's brother was a policeman killed in the line of duty in New Orleans. I was just a little kid, sitting on my bed with my mom and my brother saying the rosary, and I never got over that. Then, in 1984, I was sitting in my old restaurant when a cop I knew was killed, leaving a wife and three kids. I remember saying to Frank: 'Someone needs to do something about this.'"

The Rusty Staub Foundation, which in 1986 established the New York Police and Fire Widows' and Children's Benefit Fund, distributed over $11 million in the first 15 years of its existence to the families of New York area police and fire fighters killed in the line of duty, and since the September 11, 2001 attacks, received over $112 million in contributions. On January 8, Staub announced that, in conjunction with Catholic Charities, his foundation had also served 9,043,741 meals to the hungry at food pantries throughout New York over last 10 years, with funds though his annual wine auction dinner and foundation golf tournament.

“For more than thirty years, Rusty dedicated his life to helping others," said Stephen Dannhauser, the foundation's chairman, in a statement. "He worked tirelessly on behalf of the widows, widowers, and children of New York City's fallen heroes.

"There were better hitters than Rusty Staub, but far fewer than you might think. There may have been more beloved baseball figures than Staub, but that number is even smaller." - Craig Calcaterra, NBC Sports
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie