Welcome to Gaia! ::

thats sad he was cool

thats sad he was a good actor, he will be missed

Nick Reynolds
Born: 7/27/1933
Died: 10/2/2008
Age: 75
Cause of death: respiratory disease

Full name: Nicholas Wells Reynolds
Noted For: folk musician, member of the Kingston Trio (1956-68 ).

Fashion critic Mr. Blackwell dies in Los Angeles
Oct. 20, 2008, 6:25 AM EST
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Mr. Blackwell, the acerbic designer whose annual worst-dressed list skewered the fashion felonies of celebrities from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Britney Spears, has died. He was 86.

Blackwell died Sunday of complications from an intestinal infection, publicist Harlan Boll said.

Blackwell, whose first name was Richard, was a little-known dress designer when he issued his first tongue-in-cheek criticism of Hollywood fashion disasters for 1960 — long before Joan Rivers and others turned such ridicule into a daily affair.

Year after year, he would take Hollywood's reigning stars and other celebrities to task for failing to dress in what he thought was the way they should.

Being dowdy was bad enough, but the more outrageous clothing a woman wore, the more biting his criticism. He once said a reigning Miss America looked "like an armadillo with cornpads."

A few other examples:

Madonna: "The Bare-Bottomed Bore of Babylon."

Barbra Streisand: "She looks like a masculine Bride of Frankenstein."

Christina Aguilera: "A dazzling singer who puts good taste through the wardrobe wringer."

Meryl Streep: "She looks like a gypsy abandoned by a caravan."

Sharon Stone: "An over-the-hill Cruella DeVille."

Lindsay Lohan: "From adorable to deplorable."

Patti Davis: "Packs all the glamour of an old, worn-out sneaker."

Ann-Margret: "A Hells Angel escapee who invaded the Ziegfeld Follies on a rainy night."

Camilla Parker-Bowles: "The Duchess of Dowdy."

Bjork: "She dances in the dark — and dresses there, too."

Spears: "Her bra-topped collection of Madonna rejects are pure fashion overkill."

The critic acknowledged he had mixed feelings about appearing so publicly mean. Most of the women he put through the wringer, he said, were people he genuinely admired for their talent if not their fashion sense.

"The list is and was a satirical look at the fashion flops of the year," he said in 1998. "I merely said out loud what others were whispering. ... It's not my intention to hurt the feelings of these people. It's to put down the clothing they're wearing."

He told the Los Angeles Times in 1968 that designers were forgetting that their job "is to dress and enhance women. ... Maybe I should have named the 10 worst designers instead of blaming the women who wear their clothes."

Surprisingly, the woman who topped his worst dressed list for 1982 (announced in early 1983) was the newly married Diana, Princess of Wales. He said she had gone from "a very young, independent, fresh look" to a "tacky, dowdy" style. She quickly regained her footing and wound up as a regular on Blackwell's favorites list, the "fabulous fashion independents."

Blackwell had started out as an actor himself, having been spotted by a talent agent while still in his teens. He landed a job as an understudy in the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley's heralded drama "Dead End."

Although he got to the play the role of the Dead End Kids' leader on stage only one time, it led him to Hollywood where he landed bit parts in such films as "Little Tough Guy" (uncredited) and "Juvenile Hall" (as d**k Selzer).

He abandoned his acting career in 1958 after failing to make it in movies and switched to fashion design. He claimed to be the first to make designer jeans for women, and his salon had begun to attract a few Hollywood names when he issued his first list covering the fashion faux pas of 1960. (Italian star Anna Magnani and Gabor were among his early victims.)

It quickly brought him the celebrity he had long coveted, and he quickly became a favorite on the TV talk show circuit. He also became for a time, in his words, "The worst b***h in the world."

He hosted his own show, "Mr. Blackwell Presents," in 1968 and appeared as himself in such TV shows as "Matlock" and "Matt Houston."

In 1992, he sued Johnny Carson for claiming that he had added Mother Teresa to his list, saying the comment exposed him to hatred and ridicule. NBC's response was that the "Tonight Show" host was obviously joking.

"Did you see what he said about Mother Teresa? 'Miss Nerdy Nun is a fashion no-no,'" Carson had said. "Come on now, that's just too much."

During his heyday the issuing of Blackwell's annual list was an eagerly anticipated media event.

On the second Tuesday in January he would assemble reporters at his mansion for a lavish breakfast before making a dramatic entrance for the television cameras.

By the turning of the millennium, however, the list had lost its juice and Blackwell took to issuing it by e-mail.

Born Richard Sylvan Selzer in 1922, Blackwell recounted in his autobiography, "From Rags to Bitches," a troubled, poverty-ridden childhood in which he was variously a truant, thief and prostitute.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Terkel dies at 96
Oct. 31, 2008, 5:06 PM EST
CHICAGO (AP) -- Studs Terkel, the ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the "non-celebrated," died Friday. He was 96.

Dan Terkell said his father died at home, and described his death as "peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted."

"My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life," Terkell said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close friend Thom Clark.

He was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its "carbuncles and warts," as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go." He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and "never met a picket line or petition I didn't like."

"A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,'" Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. "Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope."

The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession," and, in 1995, "Coming of Age," recollections of men and women 70 and older.

He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death — in his 2001 "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith," and hope, in his 2003 "Hope Dies Last."

Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War," remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in "Division Street: America," 1966; limned the Depression in "Hard Times," 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in "Working," 1974.

"When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch? When Caesar conquered Gall, was there not even a cook in the army? And here's the big one, when the Armada sank, you read that King Philip wept. Were there no other tears?" Terkel said upon receiving an honorary National Book Award medal in 1997. "And that's what I believe oral history is about. It's about those who shed those other tears, who on rare occasions of triumph laugh that other laugh."

For his oral histories, he interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. "What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote in his memoir. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust."

He would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: "Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am."

Terkel also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.

In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked "Working" as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan.

Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he advocated "pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the people who live and work in cities — that used to be called the working class, although now everyone says middle class."

Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.

"It was those loners — argumentative ones, deceptively quite ones, the talkers and the walkers — who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors," Terkel wrote in "Touch and Go."

He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.

His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place, and would go looking for it in Chicago.

"People were never put down," Terkel recalled in the 1995 book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961." "The stories were about little aspects of their lives. There was no audience and no canned laughter. ... It was one of the most exhilarating times of my life."

The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.

"She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active than I. ... Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so."

Peruvian-born singer Yma Sumac dies in Los Angeles
Nov. 3, 2008, 7:00 AM EST

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Yma Sumac, the Peruvian-born soprano who wowed international audiences in the 1950s with her stunning vocal range and modern take on South American folk music, has died.

Sumac's friend and personal assistant Damon Devine says she died Saturday at an assisted-living home in Los Angeles after an eight-month bout with colon cancer.

The reclusive, raven-haired songstress had said she was born in 1927, but Devine says her birth certificate read 1922 and she was 86.

Dubbed the "Peruvian Songbird" and the "Nightingale of the Andes," Sumac's soaring, warbling voice — reported to span well over three octaves — was matched by her flamboyant outfits designed to make her look like Incan royalty.

Her first album, "Voice of the Xtabay" in 1950, launched a decade of worldwide fame.

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Michael Crichton, who helped create the TV show "ER" and wrote the best-sellers "Jurassic Park," "The Andromeda Strain," "Sphere" and "Rising Sun," has died in Los Angeles, his public relations firm said in a news release.

Michael Crichton, here in 2005, was a director and best-selling author. He co-created the TV series "ER."

Crichton died unexpectedly Tuesday "after a courageous and private battle against cancer," the release said.

He was 66.

Crichton, a medical doctor, was attracted to cautionary science tales.

"Jurassic Park" -- perhaps his best-known work -- concerned capturing the DNA of dinosaurs and bringing them to life on a modern island, where they soon run amok; "The Andromeda Strain," his first major fiction success, involves an alien microorganism that's studied in a special military compound after causing death in a nearby community.

Crichton also invited controversy with some of his scientific views. He was an avowed skeptic of global climate change, giving lectures warning against "consensus science." He later took on global warming and the theories surrounding it in his 2004 novel, "State of Fear," which attracted attacks in its own right from scientists, including NASA climatologist James Hansen.

Crichton was a distinctive figure in the entertainment business, a trained physician whose interests included writing, filmmaking and television. (He was physically distinctive as well, standing 6 feet 9 inches.)

He published "The Andromeda Strain" while he was still a medical student at Harvard Medical School. He wrote a story about a 19th-century train robbery, called "The Great Train Robbery," and then directed the 1979 film version.

He also directed several other films, including "Westworld" (1973), "Coma" (197 cool , "Looker" (1981) and "Runaway" (1984).

In 1993, while working on the film version of "Jurassic Park" with Steven Spielberg, he teamed with the director to create "ER." The NBC series set in a Chicago emergency room debuted in 1994 and became a huge hit, making a star of George Clooney. Crichton originally wrote the script for the pilot in 1974.

"Michael's talent out-scaled even his own dinosaurs of 'Jurassic Park,' " said Spielberg, a friend of Crichton's for 40 years, according to The Associated Press. "He was the greatest at blending science with big theatrical concepts, which is what gave credibility to dinosaurs again walking the Earth. ... Michael was a gentle soul who reserved his flamboyant side for his novels. There is no one in the wings that will ever take his place."

Crichton was "an extraordinary man. Brilliant, funny, erudite, gracious, exceptionally inquisitive and always thoughtful," "ER" executive producer John Wells told the AP. "No lunch with Michael lasted less than three hours and no subject was too prosaic or obscure to attract his interest. Sexual politics, medical and scientific ethics, anthropology, archaeology, economics, astronomy, astrology, quantum physics, and molecular biology were all regular topics of conversation."

Michael Crichton was born in Chicago in 1942 and grew up in New York's suburbs. His father was a journalist and Michael loved the writing profession. He went to medical school partly out of a concern he wouldn't be able to make writing a career, but the success of "The Andromeda Strain" in 1969 -- the book was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and optioned by Hollywood -- made him change his mind, though he still had an M.D.

Though most of Crichton's books were major best-sellers involving science, he could ruffle feathers when he took on social issues. "Rising Sun" (1992) came out during a time when Americans feared Japanese ascendance, particularly when it came to technology. "Disclosure" (1994) was about a sexual harassment case. iReport.com: How did Crichton's work affect you? Share your tributes

Crichton won an Emmy, a Peabody, a Writers Guild of America Award for "ER," and won other awards as well.

"Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand," the news release said.

Crichton was married five times and had one child.

A private funeral service is expected.

the grim reaper had his way in 2008. and i'm happy that matilda recived heath's estate. that will help her alot when she gets older.