Category: people

“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has reintroduced the grizzly bear to California. On a recent business and skiing trip to Aspen, Colo., the governor popped into an art gallery and became transfixed by a large-scale bronze sculpture of a grizzly bear. … So he reached into his personal bank account and ponied up for the bear — as well as the shipping costs to Sacramento last month — and there it now sits, outside Mr. Schwarzenegger’s office….”

“The great contralto used to live in this two-story house at No. 762 on South Martin Street, now known as Marian Anderson Way. She entertained in the basement during those inhospitable years of segregation when she feared what unkind words might ricochet her way in the city’s downtown eateries. … [H]ere, on a quiet street in South Philly, you can get a feel for the life she lived and the family she came from.”

“The global recession has forced Hollywood star Nicolas Cage to tighten his purse strings and sell his sumptuous castle in Bavaria in southern Germany.” He had purchased the 16th-century Neidstein castle, with 28 rooms and more than 400 acres of land, only two years ago.

“At 1.78m tall, with creamy blonde hair, beautiful legs, a love of fashion and a sense of style, she was probably also the most glamorous [of Australia’s opera singers]. In the 1960s she was likened to Doris Day.”

Matthew Zachary was a promising 21-year-old concert pianist and composer when a brain tumor cost him the use of his left hand. As he battled his cancer over the next 13 years, he created the I’m Too Young for This! Cancer Foundation, so named because his doctors had misdiagnosed him at first for just that reason. This weekend, long symptom-free and with control over his left hand restored, he gives a concert for the first time in more than a decade.

He was “an alto saxophonist and flutist who helped propel cool-school West Coast jazz to prominence in the 1950s and fostered the melding of American and Brazilian music that created the bossa nova.”

“Fred Astaire was definitely an odd bird, at least by Hollywood standards. He despised publicity, appears to have been a fierce monogamist, was a regular churchgoer and decidedly Republican in his politics. He wasn’t tall or dark or handsome in the manner of a typical leading man; Astaire was about 5-foot-7 but looked taller because he was so slim – 135 pounds.”

“Salsa dance instructor Alex Da Silva lured at least four women into the bedrooms of his home, where he allegedly raped them…, police said Monday. Da Silva, a salsa dance instructor and choreographer for Fox’s ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ was arrested over the weekend on suspicion of sexually assaulting the women over the last six years.”

He gave this year’s Nancy Hanks speech. “Marsalis’s eloquence and easy humor made his tears at the finale all the greater a surprise. He bowed and cried, and bowed and cried, which made the crowd cheer even more. Though he couldn’t articulate what brought on this emotion, he told me it came from feeling ‘overwhelmed’–from putting into words the full weight of the tragic, glorious history bound up in our arts, and vice versa: ‘That’s our life, that’s the life I live, so it started to hit me’.”

“We found statistically significant drops in vocabulary, and increases in repeated phrases and indefinite nouns in 15 detective novels from The Mysterious Affair at Styles to Postern of Fate, These language effects are recognised as symptoms of memory difficulties associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”