Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister (24 December 1945 – 28 December 2015) was an English musician, singer, and songwriter who founded and fronted the rock band Motörhead. His music was a distinctive part of the heavy metal genre.
There are few distinctive voices in Rock and Roll… you hear it and immediately know who it is… for me, Geddy Lee and Lemmy were the two that always stuck as truly unique.
Ace of Spades!
George “Meadowlark” Lemon III (April 25, 1932 – December 27, 2015)
The world’s most famous basketball prankster, George “Meadowlark” Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters, has died at age 83.
Posted in News
Maureen O’Hara, whose green eyes, porcelain skin and flaming red hair made her the reigning queen of the Technicolor costume dramas of Hollywood’s Golden Age, has died at age 95.
Discovered while playing Esmeralda in the 1939 version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” she would go on to be one of the staples of Hollywood.
She was living proof beauty and goodness could go hand in hand, and she was just as capable playing attractive mothers of a certain age in such box-office hits as “The Parent Trap” (1961) with Haley Mills and Brian Keith, and in “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation” (1962) with James Stewart, and with Henry Fonda in “Spencer’s Mountain” (1963).
In her final feature film “Only the Lonely” (1991), the actress played the Irish battle-ax mother of funnyman John Candy.
On Saturday the Irish arts minister, Heather Humphreys, said O’Hara was “the quintessential Irish success story”.
“Maureen O’Hara left Ireland to carve a successful life in America,” Humphreys said, “but in the hearts and minds of every Irish person Maureen was the quintessential Irish success story. She went on to become one of the icons of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the height of her career.”
Humphreys said O’Hara would be “best remembered for her fiercely passionate roles in classic films and in particular the films she made with her great friend John Wayne”.
Wayne once famously said he preferred to work with men, “except for Maureen O’Hara. She’s a great guy”. In 1991, O’Hara said of Wayne: “We met through Ford, and we hit it right off. I adored him, and he loved me. But we were never sweethearts. Never, ever.”
O’Hara, who has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, enchanted generations of fans and received a long overdue honorary Academy award in 2014.
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Dean Carroll Jones (January 25, 1931 – September 1, 2015)
Actor Dean Jones has died at the age of 84. Herbie is sad… very sad.
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Richard Dawson Kiel (September 13, 1939 – September 10, 2014)
Richard Kiel (September 13, 1939 – September 10, 2014) was an American actor known for his role of the steel-toothed Jaws in the James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979) as well as the video game Everything or Nothing; he also had cameos in many other James Bond video games. He was also well-known as Mr. Larson in the 1996 comedy Happy Gilmore, for playing the Kanamit aliens in the classic The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” and for his role of Dr. Miguelito Loveless‘ assistant, Voltaire, in first-season episodes of The Wild, Wild West (1965-1966).
Richard Kiel in his younger days
Kiel died on September 10, 2014, aged 74, three days before his 75th birthday. He had been admitted to a hospital in Fresno, California after breaking his leg the previous week. He is survived by his wife, Diane, four children, and nine grandchildren.
Posted in News, The Big Screen
According to his family’s announcement Thursday, Super Bowl-winning Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken “The Snake” Stabler died at the age of 69. He was nicknamed “The Snake” for his elusiveness on the field, and played 184 NFL games for the Raiders, Houston Oilers and New Orleans Saints. Stabler was the 1974 NFL Most Valuable Player, and led the league in touchdown passes in 1974 and 1976. Former Oakland head coach John Madden said in a statement, “If I had one drive to win a game to this day, and I had a quarterback to pick, I would pick Kenny,”
Dick Van Patten (December 9, 1928 – June 23, 2015)
Dick Van Patten, a onetime juvenile star of Broadway, radio and TV who played the genteel patriarch on the hit 1970s comedy-drama “Eight Is Enough” and proved his versatility in Walt Disney fare and Mel Brooks parodies, died June 23 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 86.
Richard Vincent “Dick” Van Patten was an American actor, businessman, and animal welfare advocate, best known for his role as patriarch Tom Bradford on the television comedy-drama Eight Is Enough.
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Carroll Hall Shelby (January 11, 1923 – May 10, 2012)
Carroll Shelby was an American automotive designer and racing driver. He was most well known for making the AC Motors-based Shelby American Cobra and later the Mustang-based performance cars for Ford Motor Company known as Mustang Cobras which he has done since 1965. His company, Shelby American Inc., founded in 1962, currently sells modified Ford vehicles, as well as performance parts.
The one-time chicken farmer had more than a half-dozen successful careers during his long life. Among them: champion race car driver, racing team owner, automobile manufacturer, automotive consultant, safari tour operator, raconteur, chili entrepreneur and philanthropist.
“He’s an icon in the medical world and an icon in the automotive world,” his longtime friend, Dick Messer, executive director of Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum, once said of Shelby.
“His legacy is the diversity of his life,” Messer said. “He’s incredibly innovative. His life has always been the reinvention of Carroll Shelby.”
Shelby first made his name behind the wheel of a car, winning France’s grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race with teammate Ray Salvadori in 1959. He already was suffering serious heart problems and ran the race “with nitroglycerin pills under his tongue,” Messer once noted.
He had turned to the race-car circuit in the 1950s after his chicken ranch failed. He won dozens of races in various classes throughout the 1950s and was twice named Sports Illustrated’s Driver of the Year.
Soon after his win at Le Mans, he gave up racing and turned his attention to designing high-powered “muscle cars” that eventually became the Shelby Cobra and the Mustang Shelby GT500.
The Cobra, which used Ford engines and a British sport car chassis, was the fastest production model ever made when it was displayed at the New York Auto Show in 1962.
A year later, Cobras were winning races over Corvettes, and in 1964 the Rip Chords had a Top 5 hit on the Billboard pop chart with “Hey, Little Cobra.” (“Spring, little Cobra, getting ready to strike, spring, little Cobra, with all of your might. Hey, little Cobra, don’t you know you’re gonna shut ’em down?”)
In 2007, an 800-horsepower model of the Cobra made in 1966, once Shelby’s personal car, sold for $5.5 million at auction, a record for an American car.
“It’s a special car. It would do just over three seconds to 60 (mph), 40 years ago,” Shelby told the crowd before the sale, held in Scottsdale, Ariz.
It was Lee Iacocca, then head of Ford Motor Co., who had assigned Shelby the task of designing a fastback model of Ford’s Mustang that could compete against the Corvette for young male buyers.
Turning a vehicle he had once dismissed as “a secretary car” into a rumbling, high-performance model was “the hardest thing I’ve done in my life,” Shelby recalled in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press.
That car and the Shelby Cobra made his name a household word in the 1960s.
Posted in Because I Can, News, Planes Trains and Automobiles
Donna Douglas (September 1932 – January 1, 2015)
Donna Douglas (born Doris Smith; September 1932 – January 1, 2015) was an American actress and comedienne, known for her role as Elly May Clampett in CBS‘s The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971). Following her acting career, Douglas became a real estate agent, a Gospel singer and inspirational speaker, and authored books for children and adults.
Douglas died at Baton Rouge General Hospital, aged 82, on January 1, 2015, from pancreatic cancer.
Posted in News, The Little Screen (Television)
Little Jimmy Dickens (December 19, 1920 – January 2, 2015)
James Cecil Dickens, better known as Little Jimmy Dickens, was an American country music singer famous for his humorous novelty songs, his small size, 4’11” (150 cm), and his rhinestone-studded outfits (which he is given credit for introducing into country music live performances). He started as a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1948 and became a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1983. At the time of his death, he was the oldest living member of the Grand Ole Opry.
Dickens was hospitalized after a stroke on December 25, 2014, days after his last appearance on the Opry to mark his birthday. He died of cardiac arrest on January 2, 2015, at the age of 94.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfYFx6MOTYU
The jet and its pilot were unharmed.
Posted in News, Planes Trains and Automobiles
Legendary TV creator Glen A. Larson has passed away at the age of 77 from esophageal cancer. He created the original Battlestar Galactica TV series, brought Buck Rogers to TV, and the kitschy ’80s hit Knight Rider and the less fortunate but cult favorite Manimal and Automan series.
Larsen was responsible for a great deal of you favorite TV series of the ’70s and ’80s, but he didn’t just work in scifi; he created other phenomenally popular shows like Magnum P.I., The Fall Guy and Quincy M.E., and he produced the 1977 Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, for which we’re also grateful. Basically, he’s one of the greats, and all of television owes him a debt of gratitude. Of course, we’ll always be most thankful to him for Battlestar Galactica.
Posted in News, The Big Screen, The Little Screen (Television)
This is the incredible moment two people were pulled alive from a car that had been almost entirely flattened by a shipping container falling on top of it.
Firefighters arriving at the scene in Qingdao in eastern China’s Shandong province were convinced that nobody could have survived the shocking accident, which occurred when a lorry overturned and shed its load.
But they were amazed to discover that despite the vehicle being crushed into a barely recognizable shape, a woman could be heard calling for help from inside the twisted metal and giving the thumbs up through a tiny gap in the window to indicate both she and a male friend were somehow still alive.
A woman in a car crushed flat when a shipping container fell on top of it gives the thumbs up through a crack in the bodywork to indicate she is somehow still alive.
Posted in News, Planes Trains and Automobiles
Richard Dawson Kiel (September 13, 1939 – September 10, 2014)
Richard Kiel (September 13, 1939 – September 10, 2014) was an American actor known for his role of the steel-toothed Jaws in the James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979) as well as the video game Everything or Nothing; he also had cameos in many other James Bond video games. He was also well-known as Mr. Larson in the 1996 comedy Happy Gilmore, for playing the Kanamit aliens in the classic The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” and for his role of Dr. Miguelito Loveless‘ assistant, Voltaire, in first-season episodes of The Wild, Wild West (1965-1966).
Richard Kiel in his younger days
Kiel died on September 10, 2014, aged 74, three days before his 75th birthday. He had been admitted to a hospital in Fresno, California after breaking his leg the previous week. He is survived by his wife, Diane, four children, and nine grandchildren.
Posted in News, The Big Screen
A man in Perth, Australia was boarding a train when he slipped and his leg became wedged between the train and the platform. He couldn’t get out on his own. Other passengers tried to lift him up, but he was stuck.
So a crowd gathered around the train. On a signal, they all pushed the train until it tilted enough to free the man. David Hynes, a spokesman for the public transportation agency, described the incident to ABC News:
“We alerted the driver, made sure the train didn’t move.
“Then our staff who were there at the time got the passengers, and there were lots of them, off the train, and organised them to sort of rock, tilt the train backwards away from the platform so they were able to get him out and rescue him.”
The rescued man escaped the incident without any serious injuries–thanks to his new friends. You can watch the dramatic rescue in the video embedded below.
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Robin Williams (July 21, 1951 – August 11, 2014)
Robin McLaurin Williams was an American actor, voice actor, and stand-up comedian. Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy (1978-1982), Williams went on to establish a successful career in both stand-up comedy and feature film acting. His film career included such acclaimed films as Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989), Awakenings (1990), The Fisher King (1991), and Good Will Hunting (1997), as well as financial successes such as Popeye (1980), Hook (1991), Aladdin (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Jumanji (1995), The Birdcage (1996), Night at the Museum (2006), and Happy Feet (2006).
On August 11, 2014, Williams was found unconscious at his residence and was pronounced dead at the scene.
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James Garner as Bret Maverick
James Garner as Jim Rockford
James Garner (born James Scott Bumgarner; April 7, 1928 – July 19, 2014) was an American film and television actor. He starred in several television series over more than five decades, which included such popular roles as Bret Maverick in the 1950s western-comedy series Maverick and Jim Rockford in the 1970s detective drama The Rockford Files.
Garner starred in more than 50 films including The Great Escape (1963), Paddy Chayefsky’s The Americanization of Emily (1964), Grand Prix (1966), Blake Edwards’ Victor Victoria (1982), Murphy’s Romance (1985) for which he received an Academy Award nomination, and The Notebook (2004).
Posted in News, The Big Screen, The Little Screen (Television)
As one of my favorite works, I can’t believe I missed the news that Daniel Keyes, the author of Flowers for Algernon, had passed away.
Daniel Keyes (August 9, 1927 – June 15, 2014) was an American author best known for his Hugo award-winning short story and Nebula award-winning novel Flowers for Algernon. Keyes was given the Author Emeritus honor by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000.
Posted in Because I Can, Literary, News
Ann Bradford Davis (May 5, 1926 – June 1, 2014)
Davis achieved prominence for her role in The Bob Cummings Show (1955–59) for which she twice won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, but she was best known for playing the part of Alice Nelson, the housekeeper in The Brady Bunch series (1969–74). CNN is reporting that Davis fell in her home this weekend and never regained consciousness.
Posted in News
