The Italian conductor, 69, is “suffering from extreme gastric distress” and, on the advice of local physicians, “must fly home to Milan to consult with his doctors,” according to a statement released by the orchestra on Sunday.
Category: people
What Really Killed Canadian Painter Tom Thomson?
“That suspicious death – accident? murder? suicide? – and the subsequent question as to whether his body remained at Canoe Lake, where his friends had buried him, or had later been exhumed at the Thomson family’s request and taken to Leith, Ont., has made Tom Thomson Canada’s greatest enduring mystery, his famous works inextricably tied to his fate.”
A Jesuit Genius at the Chinese Emperor’s Court
Matteo Ricci (a/k/a Li Madou), who arrived in China in 1582 and died there in 1610, mastered Chinese and the Confucian classics; wrote respected and popular books; translated Euclid; made and annotated world maps; built astrolabes and sundials; and won the admiration of the empire’s entire mandarin class.
Beyond the Valley of the Rhinestones: What Made Liberace Great
“His total lack of irony makes for a ferociously compelling spectacle. Liberace MEANS it! With his white minks and bejeweled everythings, he is the most blithely flamboyant dude to walk the planet since Louis XIV. … He is the un-Ralph Lauren, the anti-WASP, a gorgeous paean to the utter pointlessness of good taste. He is FUN.”
I’ll Bet You A Million Giraffes
“A Norwegian man who made a bet with his friend that he could get a million giraffe pictures before the end of this year has already passed his target with months to go.”
Tony Curtis, 85
His career spanned six decades and he made more than 120 films including Trapeze, Spartacus and The Vikings.
‘I’m Not the English Philip Roth, I’m a Jewish Jane Austen’
Howard Jacobson, whose novel Kalooki Nights is a Booker Prize finalist, “explains how Jewish humour was developed as a form of self-protection and suggests that it was the Jews who invented the idea of the joke.”
Sally Menke, Tarantino’s Longtime Film Editor, Killed in Hiking Accident
“Director Quentin Tarantino’s longtime film editor … was discovered dead early Tuesday morning by searchers in [L.A.’s] Bronson Canyon, according to law-enforcement sources. Award-winning film editor Sally Menke, 56, worked on such movies as Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Jackie Brown.“
The Kreutzer Sonata and the Tolstoys’ Marriage
“To read The Kreutzer Sonata after one has read the diaries of both Sophia and Leo Tolstoy is to realize two things simultaneously: one, the story line (except for the murder) is very nearly a transcript of daily life inside the Tolstoy marriage; two, the marriage itself is something that Dostoevsky more easily than Tolstoy might have written.”
Shel Silverstein’s (Very) Grown-Up Side
We know about all the children’s poems that made him famous, and the Top 40 tunes he wrote (“A Boy Named Sue,” “The Cover of the Rolling Stone“). But what about albums like Freakin’ at the Freakers’ Ball? Or such tunes as “Masochistic Baby,” “Sausalito Witch,” and a few others whose titles wouldn’t get past our spam filter …