R.I.P. The thread of death....celebrity or otherwise

[hepcat]

Roku has a channel for an archive of many of the late night shows he hosted.. And Internet Archive has a bunch too.

[Hipolito]

Roku has a channel for an archive of many of the late night shows he hosted.. And Internet Archive has a bunch too.

I randomly selected this video, jumped around in it, and at 2:05:15.

I see there are Best of Big Chuck & Lil John videos on YouTube. Here's another great moment:


I guess Big Chuck is like Chicago's Son of Svengoolie.

[hepcat]

Fun trivia: one of the first "whacky" late night horror hosts in America was Cleveland's Ernie Anderson. Up to that point, most late night horror/sci fi hosts were vampires and other horror creatures who didn't dabble in comedy so much as play it straight. But Anderson's Ghoulardi was a hippie mad scientist who injected comedy into everything. That's where Big Chuck started off (as did comedic legend Tim Conway).

The trivia part of this is: Ernie Anderson was the father of Hollywood director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, etc.).

[McNutt]

Garth Hudson of The Band, dead at 87.

[Isgrimnur]

[AWS260]

Rest in peace, Cecile Richards. A huge champion of reproductive rights - it's a shame that her last years saw those rights being stripped from American women.

[RM2]

[Daehawk]

RIP to her. She got out before it all goes to shit.
As for that video I laughed. Good twist on Abbott & Costello.

[Isgrimnur]

Singer and actress Marianne Faithfull dies at 78

The singer had previously suffered multiple health problems, including bulimia, breast cancer and emphysema caused by decades of smoking.

In 2020, she contracted Covid-19 and was hospitalised for 22 days.

Doctors said they did not expect her to survive - but she pulled through, releasing her 21st album, She Walks in Beauty, a year later.

[Blackhawk]

I didn't realize that this was her with Metallica (time queued.)

[Pyperkub]

RIP one of the all time great American Novelists - Tom Robbins:

Tom Robbins, whose cosmically comic novels about gargantuan-thumbed hitchhikers, stoned secret agents and mystic stockbrokers caught hold of millions of readers in the 1970s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in La Conner, Wash. He was 92....

...“I’m descended from a long line of preachers and policemen,” he told High Times magazine in 2000. “Now, it’s common knowledge that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling fantastic tales in such a way as to convince otherwise rational people that they’re factual. So, I guess I come by my narrative inclinations naturally.”...

...And indeed his work, especially his early books, was not merely nostalgic fluff. Their ridiculous sentences and shaggy-dog plots obscured serious literary ingenuity, while he was decades ahead of the pack in taking on themes about ecology, feminism and religion.
“What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness,” he told The New York Times in 1993. “One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.”

I devoured every single one of his novels, and re-read them. He will be missed.

So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.
Tom Robbins

[Holman]

I devoured every single one of his novels, and re-read them. He will be missed.

Amen. RIP.

[Kraken]

He was a unique voice, and always entertaining. RIP and thanks for the books.

[Jaymann]

Haven't read him, but sounds like my cuppa. RIP.

[Blackhawk]

That's a lot of praise from a lot of smart people. If someone was going to check out a single novel of his, which one would it be?

[Kraken]

That's a lot of praise from a lot of smart people. If someone was going to check out a single novel of his, which one would it be?

Easy. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

[Unagi]

That's a lot of praise from a lot of smart people. If someone was going to check out a single novel of his, which one would it be?

I very much enjoyed Another Roadside Attraction back in my youth.

[Jaymann]

Olivia Hussey. She was 73. I remember her from back in the day. She was in Romeo and Juliet, and several period pieces. RIP.

[Unagi]

Olivia Hussey. She was 73. I remember her from back in the day. She was in Romeo and Juliet, and several period pieces. RIP.

Too young.
She was the first breast presented to me artistically, in our school auditorium - no less.
(she died of breast cancer complications, I believe - although she survived 'with it', for quite a while.

Sad.
RIP

[TheMix]

Not to detract from the comments, but to give credit where it's due, Olivia passed on Dec. 27th. And McNutt report on it here at the time.

[Daehawk]

She was the first breast presented to me artistically, in our school auditorium - no less.

Im sorry,..what now?

[Isgrimnur]

Romeo and Juliet (1968). She was 15.

[Unagi]

I was 15 when I saw it ?

[Isgrimnur]

You’re good….

[disarm]

We watched Romeo & Juliet in English class in 7th grade...had to have a permission slip signed by our parents due to the nudity.

[Holman]

[pedant]
Shakespeare's original Juliet would have been played by a 12- or 13-year-old boy whose voice had not yet changed.

English theater had a huge problem with women on stage, so all of Shakespeare's female characters were played by tween boys or young men who could persuasively do female voices. This applied to love interests (Juliet, Ophelia, Desdemona) and mature women (Lady MacBeth, Queen Gertrude).

Interestingly, European theater companies did not have this hangup, so German and French and Italian acting companies who visited England performed with female actresses on stage, apparently without scandal.
[/pedant]

[Daehawk]

Weirdos

[Brian]

[YellowKing]

There was a rumor that one of our substitute teachers in high school got fired for showing Romeo and Juliet to us and not censoring the nudity (censoring in that day meant wheeling the TV cart around when the naughty parts came up). He was a regular sub and was never seen again after the day he showed it. He was also a really creepy dude, though, so I would also not be surprised if he was booted for something else.

[Blackhawk]

Our teachers just held a notebook in front of the TV.

[Brian]

It wasn't censored in our high school viewing.

I was actually surprised that nobody really reacted to it.
There was no giggling, pointing, jokes or anything.
It was just, yup, we all saw that, and moved on.

[LordMortis]

I want to say they showed it in 8th grade, which would have made me 13 at the time, I think. I also want to say there was a permission slip involved in being able to see it but I may conflating that with other things that needed permission slips. My memory is that it was shown on maybe a 32" TV in a big classroom and was very brief, so for kids largely disinterested it was 'meh.' at the time. I'm sure for me, I was getting to the point of needing glasses and wouldn't get them for another year, while I always sat in the back the classroom anyway.

[McNutt]

It was 7th grade for me and I can't remember if there was a note required (public school). I think the teacher just told us she expected us to watch it for what it is and when "the scene" happened nobody really cared. Even in 1984 Louisiana the kids weren't terribly phased by seeing a nipple.

[Blackhawk]

The reference to the notebook was general, by the way. I've never actually seen the film in question.

[Punisher]

For some reason I'm thinking we saw it in an actual theater. Not an AMC or anything though. Would have been early 80s.

[hepcat]

We were shown Tromeo and Juliet.

[Madmarcus]

Slightly premature but I can't think of a better thread - I can now add my dad to the otherwise / non-celebrity category.

He's been in and out of hospitals since just before Christmas. Initially he fainted when standing up so the assisted living place sent him to the hospital but since then it has been rounds of dehydration, Covid, C. diff infection, and various messed up blood work. At times he's been good, he was even released back to the assisted living situation at one point, but it's been clear for a week or two that he's really just going through the motions. Today he finally said he's done, tired, and ready to go.

I completely understand his thinking because his QoL is poor. It was fine through the end of last year but almost two months in bed has destroyed his ability to get in and out of bed unaided. For a while he was willing to do PT in an attempt to regain enough mobility to go back to his cat but he's decided that it isn't a realistic goal. He has said no forced feeding of any form including fluids. I've seen how fast he goes downhill when dehydrated so I don't expect he'll last long but he also has no underlying condition that will make it shorter.

[Dramatist]

Sad news. I’m sorry.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Kraken]

Oof, that's rough, Madmarcus. How old is he? I ask because my 66 yo BIL is on a similar path.

A few months ago I posted in here that my BIL was circling the drain. Four months later, he's still in the rehab facility with release constantly being pushed back a week or two at a time. He's not bouncing back to the hospital anymore, but I suspect his next stop will be assisted living. He just can't regain enough strength after his (successful) back surgery to walk to the bathroom or get himself in and out of a wheelchair, and he can't go home until he can at least tend to his most basic needs. Medicare ran out a few weeks ago so they're now paying $250/day out of pocket -- not something that can continue indefinitely. He's already a frail old man.

[LordMortis]