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Originally posted by Mister.Weirdo
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Yow...That's all you're giving a Jazz God?!?!?!? -
Hey! It's not my fault that not many people have died today.Originally posted by Abin Surly View Post
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Well, if it's a 'slow news day', he should have had more space...post some music!Originally posted by Mister.Weirdo View Post
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20657939
British astronomer and broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore has died, aged 89, his friends and colleagues have said.
He "passed away peacefully at 12:25 this afternoon" at his home in Selsey, West Sussex, they said in a statement.
Sir Patrick presented the BBC programme The Sky At Night for over 50 years, making him the longest-running host of the same television show ever.
He wrote dozens of books on astronomy and his research was used by the US and the Russians in their space programmes.
Described by one of his close friends as "fearlessly eccentric", Sir Patrick was notable for his habit of wearing a monocle on screen and his idiosyncratic style.
Continue reading the main story
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Through his regular monthly programmes he was telling us what to look for and what was out there and that was a real inspiration”
Maggie Aderin-Pocock
Space scientist
Sky at Night colleague's tribute
Sky At Night profile of Sir Patrick
Tributes paid to Sir Patrick Moore
Sir Patrick presented the first edition of The Sky at Night on 24 April 1957. He last appeared in an episode broadcast on Monday.
A statement by his friends and staff said: "After a short spell in hospital last week, it was determined that no further treatment would benefit him, and it was his wish to spend his last days in his own home, Farthings, where he today passed on, in the company of close friends and carers and his cat Ptolemy.
"Over the past few years, Patrick, an inspiration to generations of astronomers, fought his way back from many serious spells of illness and continued to work and write at a great rate, but this time his body was too weak to overcome the infection which set in, a few weeks ago.
"He was able to perform on his world record-holding TV programme The Sky at Night right up until the most recent episode .
"His executors and close friends plan to fulfil his wishes for a quiet ceremony of interment, but a farewell event is planned for what would have been Patrick's 90th birthday in March 2013."Comment
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Yo.
Tazer
Originally posted by Andrew NDBComment
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That is a great picture.
BTW: he starred as himself in a Doctor Who episode.
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Yo.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...n_2272062.html
Jenni Rivera: Mexican-American Singer's Tragic End Echoes Life Of Hardship On Journey To Stardom
Tazer
Originally posted by Andrew NDBComment
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/ar...anted=all&_r=0
Galina Vishnevskaya, an electrifying soprano who endured repression and exile as one of the postwar Soviet Union’s most prominent political dissidents, died on Monday in Moscow. She was 86.
Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Vishnevskaya Opera Center in Moscow.
Ms. Vishnevskaya, the wife of the celebrated cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, was renowned both as an emotional singer with a polished technique and as a charismatic actress. She had performed in operettas and music hall revues before joining the Bolshoi Theater of Russia, the country’s premier opera company.
At the Bolshoi she breathed new life into stodgy Soviet-era productions with dynamic interpretations of Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Marina in Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Natasha Rostova in Prokofiev’s “War and Peace.” In 23 years at the Bolshoi, from 1952 through 1974, she performed more than 30 roles.
Though Ms. Vishnevskaya was rarely allowed to sing in the West at the height of her powers in the 1960s and ’70s, she drew rave reviews when she did. “Galina Vishnevskaya’s appearances at the Metropolitan Opera are like a comet’s, sudden, infrequent, capable of lighting up the sky,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The New York Times, reviewing her performance in the title role of Puccini’s “Tosca” in 1975.
In the mid-1970s, Ms. Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich were hounded by the Soviet authorities for their liberal political views and their friendship with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate novelist and dissident.
In 1978, while traveling abroad, the couple were stripped of their Russian citizenships by the Kremlin. They were allowed to return to the Soviet Union and regain citizenship only in 1990 at the behest of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last head of state before the collapse of the Communist regime a year later.
By then, Ms. Vishnevskaya had already retired from opera. In 1984 she published a memoir, “Galina: A Russian Story,” which recounted the repression, squalor and humiliation endured even by cultural luminaries like herself and her husband under a corrupt political system that claimed to exalt classical music and the opera. She was forced to live in a communal Moscow apartment “swarming with people and bedbugs,” she wrote.
Nor was fame any protection from the politically powerful. In 1955, she wrote in her memoir, Premier Nikolai Bulganin made passes at her in front of her husband and pressured Rostropovich unsuccessfully to agree to let her become his mistress in exchange for better housing. But Ms. Vishnevskaya was by then inured to such indignities. Her earlier life had been far more harrowing.
Galina Pavlovna Ivanova was born in St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, on Oct. 25, 1926. As a 3-year-old she sang to house guests while her mother strummed a guitar. She was brought up mostly by her grandmother after her father, an alcoholic, tried to kill her mother with an ax. At 10, she was given a recording of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” It was the first opera she had ever heard, and she played it again and again on her grandmother’s hand-cranked record player.
“I was in a fever for days,” Ms. Vishnevskaya recalled. “I noticed nothing around me, I forgot to eat, I no longer ran out into the street to play with the boys.”
During the Stalinist purge of the 1930s, entire families in her building were hauled off to Siberian camps and almost certain death. Then came World War II, with the 872-day siege of Leningrad by the German Army that left more than a million people dead from starvation, disease and combat injuries.
When the siege was finally broken in 1944, she successfully auditioned for the Leningrad Operetta Theater and joined a music hall revue that entertained Russian troops. During this period she married twice — briefly to a young alcoholic sailor, Georgi Vishnevsky, whose surname she took, and then to a violinist, Mark Rubin, who was 22 years her senior.
Ms. Vishnevskaya began studying opera under a prized voice teacher, Vera Garina, in 1951. But her career and life were almost cut short by tuberculosis. Doctors told her she could survive only if she allowed them to collapse her infected lung — the conventional treatment in those days, when antibiotics were scarce. But at the last moment she balked because the procedure would have prevented her from singing professionally again. She recovered with injections of adulterated streptomycin purchased on the black market.
Then, in 1952, she won a competition to join the Bolshoi in Moscow. Her first starring role there was as Tatyana in “Eugene Onegin” in October 1953. She had almost been passed over after complaining that the traditional production was boring. But she was allowed to offer her own, more animated interpretation of Tatyana, and it became her signature role. In Paris 29 years later, she sang the part in her farewell appearance.
As her star rose, she left her second husband in 1955 to marry Rostropovich, with whom she had her two daughters, Olga and Elena. But Ms. Vishnevskaya’s fame and dark beauty soon attracted unwanted admirers in the Kremlin. She was forced to attend drunken parties for Politburo members.
“Most loathsome was to be expected to sing toward the end of a reception,” she recalled. “People drink and chew, their backs turned to you.” She added, “In that huge pigsty you sing for their pleasure like a serf girl.”
The Soviet authorities allowed her to perform abroad, most notably in recitals with the U.S.S.R. State Symphony Orchestra on a two-month tour of the United States in 1959, and again in 1961, when the impresario Sol Hurok arranged a 46-day American tour, during which she sang four “Aidas” and one “Madama Butterfly” at the Met and 11 solo concerts across the country. Rostropovich also performed in more than 25 concerts on the second trip.
Tours of Western and Eastern Europe followed for the couple.
A turning point in their lives came when they were in Prague, at the start of a tour, on Aug. 21, 1968, the day Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Communist reform government there. “It seemed the most disgraceful act in the history of the Russian state,” she wrote.
Ms. Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich began associating with Soviet dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, the eminent nuclear physicist who became a human-rights activist. The couple allowed Solzhenitsyn, who had come under attack by Soviet authorities, to live and write in their country home outside Moscow from 1969 to 1973.
Ms. Vishnevskaya received the highest prize in the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, in 1971. But within months the government, apparently regretting the award, ordered a media blackout. “The major newspapers simply stopped writing about me, and my voice could no longer be heard on radio or television,” she wrote.
When the couple criticized the lack of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union during a tour abroad, the Kremlin proclaimed them “ideological renegades” and revoked their citizenships. Before it was restored in 1990, they lived in Europe and the United States.
In addition to her daughters, survivors include six grandchildren.
In 2002 Ms. Vishnevskaya opened the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Center to promote young Russian singers. By then she had become conservative in her opera tastes. A half-century earlier she had fought the conservative Soviet cultural establishment in arguing for a fresh version of “Eugene Onegin.” But now a new production of the opera at the Bolshoi in 2006 angered her — so much so that she canceled her 80th-birthday celebration there and moved it to the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. “I’ll never enter this theater again,” she vowed.
The following year Rostropovich died in Moscow at 80.Comment
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Yo.
Tazer
Originally posted by Andrew NDBComment
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Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii dead at 88
via Yahoo! newsWASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the influential Democrat who broke racial barriers on Capitol Hill and played key roles in congressional investigations of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, died Monday. He was 88.
Inouye, a senator since January 1963, was currently the longest serving senator and was president pro tempore of the Senate, third in the line presidential succession. His office said Monday that he died of respiratory complications at a Washington-area hospital.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Inouye's death on the Senate floor.
Inouye was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor winner who lost an arm to a German hand grenade during a battle in Italy. He became the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress, when he was elected to the House in 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. He won election to the Senate three years later and served there longer than anyone in American history except Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who died in 2010 after 51 years in the Senate.
After Byrd's death, Inouye became president pro tem of the Senate, a largely ceremonial post that also placed him in the line of succession to the presidency, after the vice president and the speaker of the House.
Although tremendously popular in his home state, Inouye actively avoided the national spotlight until he was thrust into it. He was the keynote speaker at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and later reluctantly joined the Senate's select committee on the Watergate scandal. The panel's investigation led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Inouye also served as chairman of the committee that investigated the Iran-Contra arms and money affair, which rocked Ronald Reagan's presidency.
A quiet but powerful lawmaker, Inouye ran for Senate majority leader several times without success. He gained power as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee before Republicans took control of the Senate in 1994.
When the Democrats regained control in the 2006 elections, Inouye became chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. He left that post two years later to become chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.
Inouye also chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee for many years. He was made an honorary member of the Navajo nation and given the name "The Leader Who Has Returned With a Plan."
In 2000, Inouye was one of 22 Asian-American World War II veterans who belatedly received the nation's top honor for bravery on the battlefield, the Medal of Honor. The junior senator from Hawaii at the time, Daniel Akaka, had worked for years to get officials to review records to determine if some soldiers had been denied the honor because of racial bias.Comment
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Because a simple news article doesn't seem like enough:
via Badass of the WeekDaniel Inouye
"My father just looked straight ahead, and I looked straight ahead, and then he cleared his throat and said, 'America has been good to us. It has given me two jobs. It has given you and your sisters and brothers education. We all love this country. Whatever you do, do not dishonor your country. Remember – never dishonor your family. And if you must give your life, do so with honor.' I knew exactly what he meant. I said, 'Yes, sir. Good-bye."
This Wednesday, November 1st, the surviving members of the American 442nd Regimental Combat Team traveled to Washington, DC, where they were awarded Presidential Gold Medals to honor their dedication to the timeless art of crotch-kicking the flaming shitfire out of Nazi Deutschbags across Italy and France during the Second World War. Now, while everyone who served in the war can absolutely be considered a badass, this elite fighting unit is particularly noteworthy in that it consisted entirely of Japanese-American soldiers – men who were fighting for their country (a country where they were viewed with suspicion as possible spies or enemy agents) in a no-holds-barred worldwide asskicking competition against the land of their forefathers – and not only did these guys go out and do their duty, but they all volunteered for the job. These were guys with a chip on their collective shoulder and a penchant for bayoneting Fascist fucks, and in two years of near-constant combat with tough-as-nails opponents the 12,000 men of the Four-Four-Two racked up 9,400 Purple Hearts, 53 Distinguished Service Crosses (19 of which were later upgraded to Medals of Honor) and seven Presidential Unit Citations, easily making them one of the most decorated combat units of World War II. This is some serious shit, and, with all due respect to fictional badass Mister Miyagi of Karate Kid fame, the most hardcore member of this celebrated unit is easy to identify – he's a face-crushing asskicker named Daniel K. Inouye, and his story is so over-the-top insane that if you saw it in a movie you'd think the screenwriter was totally full of shit.
Daniel Inouye was a second-generation Japanese-American living in Honolulu, Hawaii, when the Japanese fighter-bombers started hammering the fucking bejeezus out of the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The seventeen-year-old Inouye had been on his way to church when the shit hit the fan, and as Zeroes buzzed over the roof of his house he could clearly see the plumes of smoke from the burning American battleships in the harbor. Inouye was an aspiring physician and taught first aid at the local Red Cross station, so naturally he hauled ass down there and spend the next five sleepless days patching up wounded military personnel. Immediately after his marathon bout of tourniquet application, Inouye went down to enlist in the army and kick the shit out of the people who had just dropped bombs on his hometown. Unfortunately, even though this guy was a U.S. citizen, as a person of Japanese descent he was classified 4-C, meaning "Enemy Alien". Undraftable. Unable to serve. The Enemy. Possibly a Cylon.
But Daniel Effin Inouye wasn't going to take that bullshit excuse for an answer. This guy was no Enemy Alien – he was an American, and goddamn it he was going to fight. So, even while something like 120,000 Japanese-Americans were being moved to internment camps across the United States, destined to live out the war in government barracks, Inouye kept signing petitions and desperately trying to assist the war effort in any possible capacity. In 1943, when FDR decided, "Fuck it, let's see what these dudes can do" (and I believe that's a direct quote) and ordered the creation of two all-Japanese-American units (the 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team) Inouye was at the enlistment office the next day. When the recruiter told Danny he couldn't join up because he was employed as an EMT at a government aid station, Inouye went home, quit his job, came right back, and took the oath. Balla shit.
The 442nd RCT deployed in Italy towards the end of 1943. As I said, these were motherfuckers who had something to prove (mainly, "We're all on the same side here, guys"), and Inouye was no exception. This tornado of American Asskicking was personally engaged in six major campaigns, and was such a fucking badass that even when he stepped on a tripwire and got a shotgun-blast of grenade shrapnel in his leg he just "walked it off" and kept on wasting Fascists with a relentless series of rifle butts and bazooka blasts to the dome. By his fourth battle he was already a Sergeant, which is just as much a testament to his leadership and balls-out-ed-ness as it is to the fact that officers and NCOs in the Four-Four-Two were expected to survive about fifteen seconds of live-fire combat.
The 442nd got its first major operational test in the Fall of 1944, when a company of Texas National Guardsmen were trapped, surrounded, and pinned down in the Vosges Mountains by nearly a full division of German troops. A couple of attempts had been made to break the Texans out, but every effort had been thwarted by ferocious German resistance. So, in a last-ditch effort to save the cut-off Americans, the 442nd was sent on what basically amounted to a suicide mission.
They didn't disappoint. The 4,200 men of the "Go for Broke" Regiment dove face-first into a fortified position where they were outnumbered roughly 5-to-1 by crack, battle-tested German infantry, but they couldn't have given a fuck about it if you'd paid them to do so. After five days of hand-to-hand, bayonet-to-face combat that cost the 442nd roughly a third of their men, Inouye and his unit busted through the lines in an explosion of blood, found the Texans, and shot their way out of the trap like Ellen Ripley tearing ass through the colony on LV-426 in an APC. For kicking asses and leading his platoon through a battle they had absolutely no business winning, Inouye was issued a Bronze star and a commission to Second Lieutenant. According to Inouye, the best part of this commission was that he now got to tote a Thompson submachine gun into combat – and even though that thing was wildly fucking inaccurate, it was loud, nasty, and it was so goddamned powerful that one time he shot a dude in the ankle and blew the guy's entire foot off.
After this side quest in France, Inouye went back to Italy, where he performed what is now his most famous act of totally badass shit. Inouye's platoon had been ordered to capture a German strong point along the Colle Musatello Ridge, so naturally this guy decided to go in guns blazing. He led his team through intense fire to capture an observation post, a mortar team, and an artillery position (no bigs), and then moved his troops within 40 yards of a heavily-fortified defensive line, where they immediately came under heavy suppressing fire from three different heavy machine gun positions. Inouye didn't give a fuck. He started chucking grenades like a madman, trying to blast the bunkers apart. This was fun for a while, but as he stood up to lob yet another explosive he was suddenly shot through the abdomen by a German MG bullet that passed all the way through his torso and came mere inches from severing his spine.
Naturally, this only pissed him off.
So, with the rest of his men pinned down by heavy weapons, the wounded Lieutenant grabbed a backpack of frags and started army-crawling up the ridge towards the enemy guns. As soon as he was close enough, he assaulted the first machine gun nest on his own, taking it out with a grenade from just five yards away and then clearing the rest of it out Al Capone-style with a spray of .45-caliber ammunition from his badass Tommy gun. When that one was taken care of, Inouye sprinted to a second position, dual-chucking two grenades that redecorated the walls of the bunker with Fascist parts.
Unfortunately, the time Inouye was headed for the third position, the Germans were ready for him – the dudes in this nest had just watched this insane-as-fuck little Japanese dude flying around bombing the shit out of their buddies, and these motherfuckers weren't about to sit back and let Inouye just hand-deliver a fragmentation explosive into their rectums without a fight. So when Inouye was sprinting across open ground a mere 10 yards the machine gun nest, suddenly he saw a German dude pop up from behind a sandbag, aim a rifle-mounted grenade at him, and blast him at point-blank range with the WWII version of an RPG.
The blast covered Inouye with shrapnel and shredded his right arm to the point where it was barely still attached. This, however, failed to stop him. Inouye simply looked down at his useless arm (which was still clutching a hand grenade), pried the grenade out of it with his left hand, and lobbed it underhand right into the dumbfounded German's face from about 15 feet away. The results weren't pretty.
From this point on in the battle, Lieutenant Daniel Inouye of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team went into Total Fucking Berserker Meltdown Mode. He doesn't even remember what happened next – but his awestruck platoon members sure as fuck do.
While still bleeding profusely from the mangled stump that used to be his right arm, Daniel Inouye ditched the grenades, unslung the Tommy Gun, and started firing it one-handed while running all over the goddamned battlefield like a fucking maniac, blasting the holy living shit out of anything with a gray helmet. He cleared out the third machine gun position with the Tommy Gun, changed the magazine, and then started running towards the main body of the enemy position, by himself, shooting the machine gun with his off-hand, wasting Nazis left and right in a hail of gigantic bullets. Finally, after rampaging like a madman, Inouye was shot in the leg, lost his footing, and fell down a hill. Unable to move, but unwilling to back down, Inouye propped himself up against the nearest tree, kept firing, and refused to be evaluated until his Sergeants had moved the unit into position and prepared defenses for the inevitable German counterattack. All told, he had killed 25 Germans and wounded 8 more, and he'd literally done it all single-handedly. When the men in his unit came to the hospital and recounted the events to Inouye, his exact words were, "No, that can't be... you'd have to be insane to do all that."
No shit.
Daniel Inouye received the Distinguished Service Cross, which was later upgraded to the Medal of Honor. He lost the arm and had it replaced with a badass hook, and after 20 months of surgery and recovery in various military hospitals, he went home, got a law degree, and worked as a prosecuting attorney. In 1962 he was almost unanimously elected to the Senate (thus making him the first Japanese-American in Congress) -- he's won the post nine times since then, making him the longest-serving current member of the Senate and the second-longest serving Senator in the history of the United States.
"Americanism is not and has never been a matter of race or color.
Americanism is a matter of mind and heart."
- FDRComment
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Yo.
/salutes
Tazer
Originally posted by Andrew NDBComment
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http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment...ies-at-age-70/
Lee Dorman, the bassist for psychedelic rock band Iron Butterfly, has died at age 70.
Orange County sheriff's spokeswoman Gail Krause says Dorman was found dead in a vehicle Friday morning. A coroner's investigation is under way, but foul play is not suspected.
Krause said Dorman may have been on his way to a doctor's appointment when he died.
Iron Butterfly was formed and rose to prominence in the late 1960s. Its second album, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," sold more than 30 million copies, according to the band's website.
The title track's distinctive notes have been featured in numerous films and TV shows including "The Simpsons," "That `70s Show" and in the series finale of "Rescue Me."
Douglas Lee Dorman was born in September 1942 and had been living in Laguna Niguel, a coastal city in Southern California, when he died.
A message sent through the band's website was not immediately returned.Comment
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