Category: Worldly stuff

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs, dirty words and the demise of humanity, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday. He was 71.

Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.

Known for his edgy, provocative material developed over 50 years, the bald, bearded Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Continue reading “George Denis Patrick Carlin”

Antonio Stradivari created this violin at his workshop in Cremona, Italy around the year 1700. It’s now up for auction at Christie’s and is expected to bring in between $1,000,000 and $1,500,000. In May of 2006, Christie’s sold Stradivari’s “The Hammer” to an anonymous telephone bidder for just over $3,500,000. Now that’s a big wad of cash!

(CNN) — Author Arthur C. Clarke, whose science fiction and non-fiction works ranged from the script for “2001: A Space Odyssey” to an early proposal for communications satellites, has died at age 90, associates have said. Visionary author Arthur C. Clarke had fans around the world.

Clarke had been wheelchair-bound for several years with complications stemming from a youthful bout with polio and had suffered from back trouble recently, said Scott Chase, the secretary of the nonprofit Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

He died early Wednesday — Tuesday afternoon ET — at a hospital in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since the 1950s, Chase said.

“He had been taken to hospital in what we had hoped was one of the slings and arrows of being 90, but in this case it was his final visit,” he said.

Continue reading “Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE”

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. (AP) — Former President Gerald R. Ford, who declared “Our long national nightmare is over” as he replaced Richard Nixon but may have doomed his own chances of election by pardoning his disgraced predecessor, has died. He was 93.

The nation’s 38th president, and the only one not elected to the office or the vice presidency, died at his desert home at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday.

“His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country,” his wife, Betty, said in a statement.

Ford was the longest living former president, surpassing Ronald Reagan, who died in June 2004, by more than a month. Continue reading “President Gerald Rudolph Ford”

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Don Knotts, who kept generations of TV audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on “The Andy Griffith Show” and would-be swinger landlord Ralph Furley on “Three’s Company,” has died. He was 81.
Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at a Los Angeles hospital, said Paul Ward, a spokesman for the cable network TV Land, which airs his two signature shows.

Griffith, who remained close friends with Knotts, said he had a brilliant comedic mind and wrote some of the show’s best scenes.

“Don was a small man … but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions,” Griffith said Saturday. “Don was special. There’s nobody like him.
“I loved him very much,” Griffith added. “We had a long and wonderful life together.”
Unspecified health problems had forced Knotts to cancel an appearance in his native Morgantown in August.

The West Virginia-born actor’s half-century career included seven TV series and more than 25 films, but it was the Griffith show that brought him TV immortality and five Emmys. Continue reading “Actor Don Knotts dies at 81”

(CNN) — Ray Charles, the innovative singer and pianist whose combinations of blues and gospel pioneered soul music and earned him the nickname “the Genius,” has died. He was 73.

Charles died at 11:35 a.m. (2:35 p.m. ET), in Beverly Hills, California, his publicist said. The cause was of complications from liver disease.

Charles was a towering figure in pop music history. The term “genius” came from Frank Sinatra — no slouch in the singing department himself — and others called him “the greatest pop singer of his generation” and “a true American musical original.”

It was Charles’ blending of gospel and blues music on the 1954 recording of “I Got a Woman” — created at a small radio station studio in Atlanta, Georgia — which is often credited as the beginning of soul music.

But Charles was never one to pay attention to musical boundaries. Born in the Deep South, raised on gospel, blues, country, jazz and big band, he forged these disparate styles into something all his own.

“His sound was stunning — it was the blues, it was R&B, it was gospel, it was swing — it was all the stuff I was listening to before that but rolled into one amazing, soulful thing,” singer Van Morrison told Rolling Stone magazine in April.

Charles won 12 Grammy awards, including the award for best R&B recording three consecutive years (“Hit the Road Jack,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Busted”). His version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia On My Mind” was named the Georgia state song in 1979, and he lent his gravelly voice to songs ranging from “America the Beautiful” to “Makin’ Whoopee” to the 1985 all-star recording of “We Are the World.”

“I was born with music inside me. That’s the only explanation I know of,” Charles said in his 1978 autobiography, “Brother Ray.” “Music was one of my parts … like my blood. It was a force already with me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me, like food or water.”