Category: people

“Zaslow, a columnist and best-selling author whose books included chronicles of a dying professor’s last lecture, a pilot who landed a crippled commuter plane in the Hudson River and Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s recovery from wounds in a horrific shooting in Arizona, died on Friday in a car accident in northern Michigan.”

“His death comes less than three weeks after the ambiguous end of his criminal trial in Rome on charges of trafficking in looted antiquities. Since the 1990s, Hecht had been at the center of an Italian investigation that traced objects looted from tombs in Italy through a network of smugglers, dealers and private collectors to museums across the United States, Europe and beyond.”

“Radio drama was thought to be nearly extinct when Yuri Rasovsky launched the National Radio Theater of Chicago in the early 1970s, and he emerged as a major voice in its revival.” In the 1990s, Rasovsky – nicknamed “El Fiendo” for his exacting standards and sharp temper – moved to Los Angeles and produced a string of award-winning recorded audio dramas.

The novelist “originally wanted to be an actor. … He was an avid theatregoer, joined the Garrick Club at the age of 25 and had many theatrical friends … He visited circuses and melodrama houses; his periodical writings covered vents and ‘grimacers’, waxworks, freak shows, actors, gaslight fairies and clowns.”

“Now it’s been revealed that the 10-year-old Jack Russell, who will retire from feature film-making after the Academy Awards ceremony, is leaving the biz due to a mystery illness that has baffled experts and cost his trainer thousands of dollars in vets’ bills.”

“I learned the importance of breath. There was a thing I learned in my lessons from Estelle — to breathe from your back. She would always say, there’s room in the back — that you expand three dimensionally. … I use it all.”

“[He] came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings strongly influenced by Surrealist painters like Miró and Klee, a style he abandoned by the mid-1950s as he turned to what became his signature work: the heavily built-up surfaces that were often scratched, pitted and gouged and incised with letters, numbers and signs.”

From the 40-second video, Werner Herzog on Chickens: “Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity, and the intensity of stupidity that is looking back at you is just amazing.”

The search engine redecorates its logo for the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth.

“A fleshy rebellion is spreading hot and fast across the cybersphere, as a growing number of activists are stripping down in support of Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, who was reportedly banned from her homeland after posing topless for French magazine Madame Le Figaro.”