Democracy strugles at the Washington Post

They had it right the first time.

The Washington Post changed the headline on its Al-Baghdadi obituary from “Islamic State’s terrorist-in-Chief” to “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State.” pic.twitter.com/cs243EVz7W

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 27, 2019 

They gave it another try...

There's a power struggle at the @washingtonpost
for control of the #alBaghdadi obituary. pic.twitter.com/Bb3fR0qrM3

— Lem (@Lemang01) October 27, 2019 

Final analysis...

How papers like The Washington Post run into trouble with headline-writing is overly sophisticated editors overthinking what their urban-bourgeois readers expect: “It would be just too crude and vulgar to call Baghdadi a terror mastermind! What would @CJR say!”

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) October 27, 2019

"Original Beastie Boys Member John Berry Dead at 52"

Rolling Stone:  John Berry, an original member of hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died Thursday morning at 7:30 a.m. at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts. He was 52.
John Berry III, Berry’s father, confirmed his death Thursday afternoon to Rolling Stone. He said his son suffered from frontal lobe dementia, which had worsened in recent months.

Shock: Prince Dead at 57

The "Purple Rain" writer had suffered a major health scare just one week ago when his flight made an emergency landing in Atlanta and he was hospitalized for flu-like symptoms. He appeared the following day, however, at a $10 dance party near his home, reportedly telling a jubilant crowd: "Wait a few days before you waste any prayers."

In 2007 Super Bowl Halftime show is considered the greatest in the history of such performances. He also stole the show with his guitar solo on the Beatles classic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" during a 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Famesuper-group performance honoring the late George Harrison.

The legend himself was inducted to the Rock Hall that same year, during his first year of eligibility.

TMZ: Garry Shandling Dead at 66... (massive heart attack)

Comedian Garry Shandling died at an L.A. area hospital on Thursday ... TMZ has learned.

The 66-year-old star was not suffering from any illness ... as far as we know ... so, it appears this was sudden. A source connected to Shandling says he was healthy and speaking to people on Thursday morning.

Our source says there was a 911 call from "The Larry Sanders Show" star's home, and he was transported to the hospital. We're told Shandling was alive when he arrived at the hospital.

Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2016/03/24/garry-shandling-dead/#ixzz43rKwOmwi

"Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford dies at 46"

The Globe and Mail:  Official word of his death came from a source close to the family. His passing marks the end of a rare political actor whose everyman persona, budget-slashing agenda and very public substance-abuse issues inspired both intense loyalty and deep loathing among the city’s diverse electorate.

It also ends an 18-month struggle with cancer.

Mr. Ford had been diagnosed with pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare form of soft-tissue cancer, in September of 2014, amid a heated re-election battle. The illness forced him to withdraw his candidacy for a second term to focus on cancer treatments....

The son of a well-known Etobicoke businessman and former provincial MPP, Mr. Ford left the family label business to win a council seat in 2000. Re-elected twice, he turned his attentions to the mayoralty in 2010, launching a long-shot campaign for the city’s highest office. He quickly tapped into a vein of suburban resentment toward urban elements of the recently amalgamated megacity, and trounced his nearest opponent.

His small-government agenda ran afoul of left-wing politicians and unions, but his bedrock of support – which he affectionately referred to as Ford Nation – only began to erode in May, 2013, after stories emerged on the U.S. website Gawker and the Toronto Star about a video showing the mayor smoking what appeared to be crack cocaine. The revelations touched off a Toronto Police investigation and a ceaseless lampooning on U.S. late-night talk shows hosted by the likes of Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel and Jay Leno.

Mr. Ford vehemently denied the accusations until abruptly reversing himself in November, admitting to a throng of reporters, “Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine.”

Though damning details eventually emerged from the police investigation and a second crack video eventually surfaced, Mr. Ford maintained surprising support until his cancer diagnosis.

"Former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson dies at 73"

From the Tennessean

"It is with a heavy heart and a deep sense of grief that we share the passing of our brother, husband, father, and grandfather who died peacefully in Nashville surrounded by his family," the statement reads.

"Fred once said that the experiences he had growing up in small-town Tennessee formed the prism through which he viewed the world and shaped the way he dealt with life. Fred stood on principle and common sense, and had a deep love for and connection with the people across Tennessee whom he had the privilege to serve in the United States Senate. He enjoyed a hearty laugh, a strong handshake, a good cigar, and a healthy dose of humility. Fred was the same man on the floor of the Senate, the movie studio, or the town square of Lawrenceburg, his home.

"Fred believed that the greatness of our nation was defined by the hard work, faith, and honesty of its people. He had an enduring belief in the exceptionalism of our country, and that America could provide the opportunity for any boy or girl, in any corner of our country, to succeed in life."

"He's survived by his family and Yogisms"

This morning at the @Yogi_Museum in Little Falls, a single bouquet of flowers at his statue. RIP. pic.twitter.com/Jx2z8OxWMN

— Steve Politi (@StevePoliti) September 23, 2015

Oliver Sacks is dead

"Dr. Sacks announced in February, in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times, that an earlier melanoma in his eye had spread to his liver and that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer."

“I am very tenacious, for better or worse,” he wrote in “A Leg to Stand On.” “If my attention is engaged, I cannot disengage it. This may be a great strength, or weakness. It makes me an investigator. It makes me an obsessional.”

“I love to discover potential in people who aren’t thought to have any,” hetold People magazine in 1986.

He was also a man of contradictions: candid and guarded, gregarious and solitary, clinical and compassionate, scientific and poetic, British and almost American. “In 1961, I declared my intention to become a United States citizen, which may have been a genuine intention, but I never got round to it,” he told The Guardian in 2005.

For years, Dr. Sacks lived on City Island in the Bronx, where he liked to take long swims around it. More recently, he lived in Greenwich Village. But he remained ambivalent about being called a New Yorker.

“I rather like the words ‘resident alien,’ ” he told The Guardian. “It’s how I feel. I’m a sympathetic, resident, sort of visiting alien.”

Sacks’s last piece in the Times, which appeared just two weeks ago, ended like this:

“And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”

Watch Oliver Sacks on writing, after the break...

"Al Michaels remembers Frank Gifford as ‘coolest guy in the room’"

"Gifford died Sunday, a week shy of his 85th birthday, and Michaels recalled just how important he was as a legendary New York Giants player, a broadcaster and a larger-than-life presence in New York City."

“You had to live in New York in the ’50s and ’60s to truly understand what a gigantic figure Frank Gifford was,” Michaels said in a tribute during halftime of the Hall of Fame game Sunday night (watch it here). “He was right there with Mickey Mantle.”

“I’ll forever remember Frank as a man who, no matter what was going on around him, was always the coolest guy in the room.”

Gifford made the job look effortless.

“So many of us, especially in these high-pressure, high-profile businesses, there’s a tendency to have these knee-jerk responses to things,” Michaels told Sam Farmer of the Los Angeles Times. “That was never Frank. Frank was always the guy who would assess it. He would do it quietly. Then he would very often have something on the back end, when everything had calmed down, that was well thought out.

“Frank never wasted any energy flying off the handle.”

Christopher Lee dies at 93

"Screen legend famous for roles in Hammer Horror films, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars dies in hospital after suffering heart and respiratory problems"

Christopher Lee, Vincent Price,
John Carradine and  Peter Cushing

'Leonard Nimoy, Spock of 'Star Trek,' Dies at 83'

“For whatever reason, I projected some kind of quality that people said, ‘OK, he’s a good alien,’ ” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 1999 interview."

He served in the U.S. Army from 1953-55

For Spock, Nimoy invented the V-shaped Vulcan “Live Long and Prosper” hand gesture and the neck pinch that rendered his enemies unconscious. (He said he devised the latter move because he had grown tired of getting into staged fistfights. “Here’s a chance to cleverly avoid that,” he said in a 2000 interview with The Archive of American Television.)

Nimoy was not happy about wearing pointy ears, but Roddenberry convinced him to do it.

After being impressed with the humor in Star Trek IV, new Disney studio chiefs Jeffery Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, fresh from Paramount, asked Nimoy to step in to direct Three Men and a Baby, a remake of the 1985 Oscar-nominated French film Trois Hommes et un Couffin (Three Men and a Cradle). Coline Serreau, who directed Trois Hommes, had exited the American version because of “creative differences.”

Starring Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg as bachelors scrambling to take care of a child, Three Men and a Baby raked in $167 million in the U.S., and no film grossed more that year.

A deep-thinker, Nimoy authored nine poetry books; a comic book titled PriMortals (developed with writer Isaac Asimov); a 1977 autobiography, I Am Not Spock; and another autobiography in 1995, I Am Spock. He once said that the contradicting titles “baffled the reading audience” but that he “had some fun with that.”

"ALS ice bucket challenge co-founder Corey Griffin drowns, aged 27"

"Corey Griffin, a philanthropist who was instrumental in making the ALS ice bucket challenge fund-raising drive go viral, has died after drowning in a diving accident off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts."

"The 27-year-old's life was cut tragically short on Saturday (16 August) when he dove off a wharf that serves as a popular diving perch for locals, resurfacing once before disappearing back under the water and drowning."

Link to a story revealing more about Corey Griffin.

"Joan Rivers, Legendary Comedienne, Dies at 81"

"Joan Rivers, the blunt, tart-tongued celebrity and talk show host who reconstructed her career time and time again en route to becoming one of the most memorable female comics of all time, has died. She was 81."

Don Pardo RIP

"Don Pardo, the magisterial announcer of Saturday Night Live for nearly 40 years — the highlight of seven heard and hardly seen decades at NBC — has died. He was 96."

TMZ: Actor James Garner of 'The Rockford Files' dead

"Law enforcement sources tell us an ambulance was dispatched to the actor's home in Los Angeles around 8PM Saturday evening ... and he was dead when they arrived on scene."

 

USA Today: "I'm a Spencer Tracy-type actor," Garner once said. "His idea was to be on time, know your words, hit your marks and tell the truth. Most every actor tries to make it something it isn't [or] looks for the easy way out. I don't think acting is that difficult if you can put yourself aside and do what the writer wrote."

John Lahr: "I’ll miss her"

"Elaine Stritch’s death, at the age of eighty-nine, marks the end of an era—the end of old-school, succeed-or-die, knock-’em-dead, Broadway show-biz."

Her contradictions were as enormous as her great gift. She was marvellous and monstrous, sirocco and mistral, fragile and brutish, inspired and vacant. She could seduce an audience but she could never surrender herself, which was both her poignance and her tragedy. Onstage, she could create joy; offstage, she could inflict a lot of pain. These extremes made her memorable, compelling, and a caution.

Yet, both onstage and off, she was unforgettable. Her audacity onstage was thrilling; offstage, it could be breathtaking. “John,” she once said to me, “you gotta stop giving me these books with your signature. I can’t give ’em away.” I’ll miss her.

Mickey Rooney: "Of course, You who I am"

 

"Mickey Rooney, the pint-sized actor who was one of MGM’s giant box office attractions in the late ’30s and early ’40s, died on Sunday. He was 93."