Category: News

From Yahoo News:

George Carlin, the dean of counterculture comedians whose biting insights on life and language were immortalized in his “Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV” routine, died of heart failure Sunday. He was 71.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,” Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

How this for irony?

The 20-year-old grandson of a prominent anti-gun campaigner in West Yorkshire has been charged with her murder.

Patricia Regan, 53, was found stabbed to death at a property in Marlborough Grange in the Hyde Park area of Leeds on Sunday.

I guess she should have stopped wasting her time trying to ban guns and instead spent some time trying to ban kitchen knives, huh? And yes, there are people in the UK that want to ban kitchen knives!

Read the whole story about Ms Regan’s murder here.

Add Jim McKay to the list of the recently departed:

NEW YORK – Jim McKay, the veteran and eloquent sportscaster thrust into the role of telling Americans about the tragedy at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has died. He was 86.

McKay died Saturday, said ABC, the network with which he was long affiliated. The cause of death was not immediately given.

McKay was host of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” for decades. The influential weekend series introduced viewers to all manners of strange, compelling and far-flung sports events.

But he was suddenly placed in the role of a newscaster in 1972 when Israeli athletes were kidnapped in Munich. As viewers followed the gripping story, McKay told how the hostages were killed in a commando raid.

McKay was the father of Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports.

I was too young to remember the 1972 Olympics, but I’ve seen McKay’s coverage in documentaries… and wow! McKay covered those horrible events with a sensitivity, humanity and grace that barely exists in the sports world these days. Oh, who am I kidding – it was a sensitivity, humanity and grace that barely exists in the world at all these days.

On a happier note, I’ll always have the voice of Jim McKay saying “… and the agony of defeat” permanently seared into my head!

RIP, Jim and God Bless!

For some reason, Amazon.com is down!

Sites are reporting on it, but there’s been no word from Amazon itself.

What’s the dealio with all the celebrity deaths and other bad news lately?

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been kind of busy for the past few days. I’ve marked certain posts about celebrity deaths, heath scares and arrests in my RSS bucket to post about here, but then I got busy… and now the marked posts are really piling up!

Here’s the list so far:

Martin Kelly (husband of actress Natascha McElhone, died of heart failure)
Bo Diddley (Blues musician, terrible health in the past few years)
Yves Saint Laurent (French designer, died of a brain tumor)
Ted Kennedy (Liberal jackass and bad driver, has brain tumor)
Kelsey Grammer (Actor, had “mild” heart attack)
Tatum O’Neal (arrested trying to buy crack cocaine)

What the hell?

As an interesting side note, if Ted Kennedy eventually dies of natural causes, he’ll be the only son of Joseph Kennedy Sr. to die of natural causes. Their oldest son, Joe, Jr., died in a plane crash in WWII, while John and Bobby were (of course) assassinated.

Wow – there are some cool pictures out today!

The first is a picture of NASA’s Phoenix Lander in its decent to the Martian surface, as taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:

The second picture is of a rare portrait of Elizabeth I as a young girl. According to this article from the BBC,  the portrait was “found in the Duke of Buccleuch’s collection at Boughton House”, and was painted between 1650 and 1680, after a (now lost) original dating to the 1550s. Prior to this find, there were only two known portraits of the Queen as a young girl; now the world has three. Elizabeth is to the far right in this picture, flanked by her father, her brother, and sister (click to enlarge):

And lastly, enjoy another beautiful picture of Amy Winehouse:

Not that I care, but according to the BBC, “US Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy has a malignant brain tumour, doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital say”.

The news hit the Internet on Saturday, so I’m a bit late with this… but I just thought I’d mention that Condé Nast’s WIRED digital division has purchased Ars Technica, one of my all-time favorite web sites, for an undisclosed sum (guesstimated to be around $25 million).

I’ve been a member of Ars for 9 years now (can that be right?) and was terrified for the past couple of days at what might happen to the “little tech site that could”. Thankfully, Ken Fisher – the genius behind Ars – has written this post, which says that Ars will not change at bit, except to greatly expand its base. Instead of a handful of writers, Ars will now have a couple dozen, and the site will soon be opening offices in Chicago and San Francisco. Ken will be staying on as “Caesar”, so I’m sure that Ars will remain the site I know and love… only bigger and better!

It makes me all giddy inside. I’ve met half of the Ars staff over the years (Hi Jade!) and I feel like I know them personally. To me, they aren’t nameless faces running a website… they’re my friends! And so, I’ll just say this:

CONGRATULATIONS GUYS! SOLID GOLD TACOS FOR THE ARS STAFF!!

Imagine the disappointment when people clicked on this BBC News story:

“Great tits cope well with warming”

No, the story is not about Gemma Atkinson… it’s about small British birds that are apparently unaffected by global warming (so far, anyway). There are some great lines in the story, though, such as: “The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds commented that other species are likely to fare much worse than great tits as temperatures rise”.

Personally, I am a huge fan of great tits and if I found out that great tits were being hurt in any way by global warming, I’d stop climate change all by myself (although one feels that I’d hardly be alone in this – most other men love great tits too!)

Seriously, the article does raise some interesting points. Britain’s great tits are adapting to change by laying their eggs earlier in the spring, since their main food supply – caterpillars – are appearing earlier in the spring as well. The exact same species of bird has not done the same thing in the Netherlands, and scientists are puzzled as to why not. Are British tits smarter than Dutch tits? Who knows? But I don know one thing… I could go on with the double entendres for hours!