The family have asked for donations to be sent to The Salvation Army, instead of flowers.
Bad boys with good souls.
RIP Malcolm
Printable View
The family have asked for donations to be sent to The Salvation Army, instead of flowers.
Bad boys with good souls.
RIP Malcolm
Great rhythm guitarist.Two Young brothers in three weeks.Angus must be nervous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvVlIaTuSts
Cult leader Charles Manson dies at 83 after prolonged illness
Published: Nov 20, 2017 1:25 a.m. ET
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Charles Manson, the ’60s cult leader behind one of the most notorious killings in American history, died Sunday in California after a prolonged illness, officials said. He was 83.
Manson – housed at Corcoran State Prison since 1989 – died at 8:13 p.m. local time at Kern County Hospital, the California Department of Corrections said in a press release early Monday.
He’d been in failing health for months and was first hospitalized back in January, reportedly with serious gastrointestinal problems.
Manson — who infamously wore a swastika tattoo between his eyebrows — had spent more than 45 years in prison after being convicted of directing his “Manson Family” clan of troubled, mostly female, followers to kill seven people in California in the summer of 1969. The dead included actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, who was stabbed 16 times.
“I am crime,” Manson proudly proclaimed during a collect call to The Post from prison in the mid-2000s.
Born on Nov. 12, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a prostitute named Kathleen Maddox, Manson was officially dubbed “no name Maddox” at birth and apparently never knew his biological father.
From a very young age, Manson was a self-styled “outlaw” who took pride in being a criminal and reveled in all the mayhem he caused.
Manson committed his first crimes at around 13 years old, robbing liquor stores to scrounge together enough money to eat and rent motel rooms.
During his teenage years, Manson was in-and-out of juvenile halls and was placed in the Indiana Boys School, where he was sexually assaulted before he escaped in 1951, according to a book, “Manson In His Words,” by Nuel Emmons.
Between 1951 and 1955, Manson was repeatedly arrested for a variety of federal and state offenses, including stealing cars and robbing gas stations.
He was sent to reformatories, but none of them could wean him off his appetite for trouble.
By 1957, Manson was doing hard time in the federal prison at Terminal Island in Los Angeles for violating his probation after he was caught stealing a car and driving it over state lines.
He was eventually paroled, but started a career as a pimp and tried to cash forged US Treasury checks.
Manson found himself back at Terminal Island, where, on March 21, 1967 – the day of his release – he pleaded with prison officials to keep him there because he had been institutionalized for most of his life up to that point.
The wild-eyed, gnome-like figure ended up staying in Los Angeles, where he wrote and played music with a guitar – and began a hippie cult that drew tough men and disaffected suburban young women.
But Manson’s inability to build a musical career led him to an even darker path.
Manson hung out with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and the band’s record producer, Terry Melcher, but the latter refused to give him a record deal.
Furious, Manson put together a plan to exact his revenge, ordering several of his drug-addled, brainwashed followers to kill everyone inside Melcher’s former residence.
Despite knowing that Melcher no longer lived there, Manson specifically chose that location because it represented the music industry that had snubbed him.
Just as importantly, Manson, who harbored bizarre racist theories and philosophies, wanted to start a race war – something he called “Helter Skelter,” named after the Beatles song by the same name.
On Aug. 9, 1969, Manson’s disciples, Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel, descended on Melcher’s former compound in Benedict Canyon, where pregnant actress Sharon Tate was now living with filmmaker Roman Polanski.
Polanski was overseas shooting a movie at the time, but Tate was hosting a low-key party with friends, including hair stylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski.
First, the killers fatally shot Steven Parent, who had been visiting a caretaker on the property. They then butchered to death Tate, Sebring, Folger and Frykowski.
The next night, Manson directed Watson, Krenwinkel, Atkins and another follower, Leslie Van Houten, to murder supermarket magnate Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary LaBianca, in their Los Feliz home.
In the decades since the murders, Manson has become an icon for troubled youth and a fixture in pop culture.
There have been numerous books written about the “Manson Murders,” as well as movies and documentaries detailing the case.
Manson himself reached almost mythical status through his strange and colorful prison interviews with notable media types, including Charlie Rose, Diane Sawyer and Geraldo Rivera.
In his final years in prison, Manson almost got married Afton “Star” Burton, who moved from Mississippi to Corcoran just to be with him.
Although they filed for a marriage license, Manson never got hitched to the woman who is more than 50 years his junior.
No one who carried out murders at Manson’s behest has has ever been released from prison.
Watson, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten remained locked up in California while Atkins died in prison in 1989.
A board granted Van Houten – who at 19 was the youngest of the killers – parole in September.
But the ruling is still under review and California Gov. Jerry Brown will get to uphold, reject or modify the finding of parole early next year.
— Additional reporting by David K. Li
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/cu...ess-2017-11-20
^Utter fucking Nutcase, but seemed to have charisma to burn.
(^^Just seen that. RIP one of rock's best ever rhythm guitarists).
One of Charlies' best tunes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p9UficlHnQ
It would have been interesting to have DNA evidence of who his father was if his father was an important person. Make a great movie; Charles Manson, half brother to Donald Trump :)Quote:
Originally Posted by harrybarracuda
Attributed to Neil Young who was speaking of Charles Manson...Quote:
“He was great, he was unreal – really, really good.” “He had this kind of music that nobody else was doing. I thought he really had something crazy, something great. He was like a living poet.”
...Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil...
It seems lots of people are sad over his death.... because they're confusing him with Marilyn Manson.
:)
(Not that I'd be sad if that irritating twat popped his clogs).
Former Likely Lads star Rodney Bewes dies aged 79
The actor - best known for his role as Bob Ferris in the BBC sitcom - died on Tuesday morning, a representative told the Press Association
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The Likely Lads star Rodney Bewes has died aged 79, his agent confirmed.
In a statement on Twitter, his agent Michelle Braidman described him as a “true one off”.
She added: “It is with great sadness that we confirm that our dear client, the much loved actor Rodney Bewes, passed away this morning.
“We will miss his charm and ready wit.”
Bewes would have turned 80 next week, his agent said.
He went on to star in the sequel to the sitcom, Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, alongside James Bolam, Brigit Forsyth and Sheila Fearn.
Bewes was born in Bingley, West Yorkshire, and his family moved to Luton in his teens.
At 14 he attended RADA’s prepatory school in London where he returned after two years of national service in the RAF, Bewes attended RADA full time.
At nights he was working in hotels, doing the washing up, to finance his studies at RADA during the day, and hence was frequently to be found asleep in class. He was expelled during his final year.
Former Likely Lads star Rodney Bewes dies aged 79 - Chronicle Live
The Likely Lads, classic UK tv comedy. One of my favourites as it's set in Newcastle.
The episodes made in the 1970s were better.
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David Cassidy, ‘Partridge Family’ Star, Dies at 67
David Cassidy, who came to fame as a '70s teen heartthrob and lead singer on "The Partridge Family," has died, according to his publicist Jo-Ann Geffen. He was 67.The singer-actor had recently been admitted to the intensive care unit of a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, area hospital. Cassidy was in critical condition and suffering from organ failure before his death Tuesday, Geffen said.
"David died surrounded by those he loved, with joy in his heart and free from the pain that had gripped him for so long. Thank you for the abundance and support you have shown him these many years," she said.
Cassidy was born into the entertainment industry that made him a star.
His father was famed actor and singer Jack Cassidy, and his mother was actress Evelyn Ward.
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David Cassidy, '70s teen heartthrob, dies at age 67 - CNN
Met him with the gig rowers on the Lizard a very unassuming bloke you'd hardly notice in a crowd .He did a one man show at the Acorn where many of the cast of Cornish detective Wycliffe appeared.The Lads is a great tragi comic view of transition well worth a look.Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ Pat
Likely Lads comedy star Rodney Bewes, who lived in Cornwall, dies aged 79 - Cornwall Live
While whatever happened to here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgSogQEz_Xo
^The one off feature film they made is an absolute classic.
The series also showed the transition the city was making at the time, from slum clearances to new builds.
Gomer Pyle is dead. Singer, actor, and star of a long-running TV series. RIP Gomer.
Gaaalee
Jim Nabors, TV’s Gomer Pyle and Singer, Dies at 87
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Jim Nabors, whose name is synonymous with the genial bumpkin Gomer Pyle, whom he played on TV, has died. He was 87.
His husband, Stan Cadwallader, told the Associated Press that Nabors died on Thursday at their home in Hawaii.
He brought the words “golly” and “shazam” into the vernacular as the naive, well-intentioned Pyle, a regular character on “The Andy Griffith Show” that was later the focus of spinoff “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” Pyle was a loving caricature of a Southern rube, completely out of step with the ’60s and all the more lovable for it. The series ran for four seasons, and Nabors’ 20% cut of the syndication revenue for the popular series made him financially secure thereafter and able to pursue broader interests as a singer and comic raconteur.
Later attempts at a variety show did not last long, however, either on network TV or in firstrun syndication, though Nabors was a popular headliner on the Vegas-Reno nightclub circuit.
Nabors was discovered singing at the Horn cabaret in Santa Monica by writer-comedian Bill Dana, who booked Nabors for occasional stints on “The Steve Allen Show.”
In the early ’60s, he began to appear regularly on “The Andy Griffith Show” as the ingenuous gas station attendant Gomer Pyle, which led to his own CBS series, produced by Griffith, about Pyle’s misadventures after joining the Marines, about which the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Nabors conveys a particular mood of attractive awkwardness, and naivete, a contagious quality of special poignancy rooted in laughter.”
The program shot into the top 10 in the Nielsen ratings, where it stayed for its entire four seasons.
During that time, Nabors starred in a number of variety specials for CBS including “Friends and Nabors,” which attracted an audience of 33.9 million, and guested on shows for Danny Thomas and the Smothers Brothers. He entertained onstage in Vegas, Reno and Tahoe, and his first album, “Jim Nabors Sings,” sold a million copies. By 1967 he was earning $500,000 annually.
Although it was too late to ever completely dissociate himself from Gomer Pyle, Nabors decided to end the series in 1969, while it was still rated in the top five. He hosted variety program “The Jim Nabors Hour” for two seasons on CBS and, in the late ’70s, tried it again in syndication, though “The Jim Nabors Show” was more of a combination comedy/talk program.
During this period he toured almost year round, reaping the benefits of his natural baritone voice, his disarming Southern-boy personality and his high name recognition from television. For a time he lived in Honolulu near his close friend Carol Burnett and starred in “The Jim Nabors Polynesian Extravaganza” at the Hilton Hawaiian Village for two years.
Film roles were few, mostly cameo and supporting appearances in three Burt Reynolds vehicles, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” “Stroker Ace” and “Cannonball Run II.”
Nabors recorded more than two dozen albums. At least four were certified gold by the RIAA, the most recent of which was “Jim Nabors Christmas Album” in 1990.
James Thurston Nabors was born in Sylacauga, Ala. Chronic asthma resulted in a childhood of forced seclusion, and after graduation from the U. of Alabama, he lived for a time in New York, working as a typist at the United Nations. The recurring asthma problems forced him to return home, where he worked as an assistant film editor for a television station in Chattanooga, Tenn., and also sang occasionally on the station’s daytime shows.
After moving to Los Angeles, he continued to work as an editor and entertained for free in the evenings — performing operatic arias interspersed with monologues — until his discovery and subsequent work in television.
Nabors converted to Catholicism in the mid-’60s.
He married his partner of 38 years, Stan Cadwallader, in Washington in 2013 a month after gay marriage became legal in that state.
In addition to Cadwallader, he is survived by two sisters, Freddie and Ruth.
Jim Nabors Dead: ?Gomer Pyle? Star Dies at 87 ? Variety
The difference in this man's Gomer Pyle dopey character and Nabor's personality in real life is amazing. He had a great voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5KeGccP9Jk
Golly shazam!
Not sure what the Neighbours reference is.
^ Damn spellchecker. :)
^ Doh, lol. I didn't even hear it in my head, though I should have. The fact that an Aussie soap is called Neighbours got me to thinking.
Apparently he sang this song at the Indy 500 for 36 years. *
Had a hell of a voice even in later years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wcgaRkHAWY&feature=youtu.be
* I should add only once a year <heh>
Suprise,suprise,suprise. RIP Jim.
Mitch Margo, who took 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' to No. 1 in 1961, dead at 70
Family members said Margo died Nov. 24 in Studio City but did not give a cause.
Margo was a 14-year-old attending high school in Brooklyn, New York, when he formed The Tokens, the Times reported.
The group based “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on a recording of a Zulu folk song, turning it into a doo-wop hit. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts on Dec. 23, 1961, and stayed there for three weeks before being supplanted by Chubby Checker’s hit “The Twist,” which hit No. 1 for the second time on Jan. 13, 1962.
The Tokens followed up with several minor hits, including “I Hear Trumpets Blow” and “Portrait of My Love,” the Times reported.
Margo teamed with his brother Phil and two others in The Tokens. He later produced hits for bands such as The Chiffons and Tony Orlando and Dawn. He also wrote musical scores for television projects and did artwork for children’s books, the Times reported.
“Mitch was an adjective-defying human being,” Noah Margo, a nephew who played drums for the
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQlByoPdG6c
A wimba way
Earworm!
British showgirl at centre of Profumo Affair Christine Keeler dies aged 75
CHRISTINE Keeler, the central figure in the sex-and-espionage Profumo affair that rocked Cold War Britain, has died at 75.
Her son, Seymour Platt, posted on Facebook that Keeler died on Monday at a hospital near Farnborough in southern England.
A naked photo of Keeler straddling the back of a chair is among the most famous U.K. images of the 1960s.
The Sun reports that Keeler was the showgirl whose colourful love life propelled her to the centre of the most famous British scandal of the 20th century — and helped bring down the government.
She was born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, in 1942 and raised in Berkshire by her mum and stepdad.
She claimed in a later memoir she was sexually abused by her stepfather, who she said beat her mother and drowned her puppies.
She also said she aborted her own child with a knitting needle after falling pregnant to a US airman aged 17.
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Christine Keeler: Famous John Profumo affair showgirl dies
French king of rock, Johnny Hallyday, dies at 74
AFP-JIJI
DEC 6, 2017
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PARIS – France’s best-known rock star, Johnny Hallyday, has died at age 74 after a battle with lung cancer, his wife, Laeticia, said on Wednesday.
Hallyday was a leather-clad would-be Elvis who earned love and scorn over five decades spent belting out American rock ‘n’ roll.
While he was never taken seriously abroad, Hallyday was by far the best-known rocker in France.
“There is something of Johnny in all of us,” said the French presidency in a statement after his wife announced his death.
Former President Nicolas Sarkozy — an adoring fan who once tried to tempt him back from tax exile in Switzerland — said he represented “part of our personal history … our memories and emotions.”
Known simply as Johnny, Hallyday sold more than 100 million albums and headlined 50 major tours — the last this summer, when he teamed up with veteran French rockers for the “Old Scoundrels” tour.
Inspired by Elvis Presley, he broke from France’s classic chanson tradition in the late 1950s, rocking like his U.S. idols and summoning the rebellious spirit of James Dean with his quiffed hair and leather clothes.
He drove his young fans wild, attracting 100,000 to a Paris square in 1963 and prompting scenes of hysteria that had been unseen until then in a conservative France led by the stiff Gen. Charles de Gaulle.
“He embodies the emergence of French youth culture and rock ‘n’ roll,” said Serge Kaganski of the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles.
Defying the view that France, then a land of crooners and jazz, could not rock, Hally—day had his big break with the 1960 hit “T’aimer Follement” (“Makin’ Love”) and later belted out French versions of songs such as Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.”
Even as the decades rolled by and politicians began to curry his favor, he kept his bad-boy image alive with a colorful private life, ticking off many rock rites of passage.
He attempted suicide in 1966 and collapsed on stage in 1986.
He married five times — twice to the same woman, the daughter of one of his oldest friends and songwriters.
In 1998 he admitted taking cocaine and said he had suffered a difficult childhood with an alcoholic father who first abandoned the family when Johnny was just 8 months old.
He settled down for a while with the actress Nathalie Baye, with whom he had a daughter, Laura Smet, who followed her mother onto the big screen.
By then, Hallyday had married model Laeticia Boudou, who was 31 years his junior, and adopted two Vietnamese children.
Born Jean-Philippe Leo Smet to a Belgian father and French mother in Paris on June 15, 1943, the singer was brought up by his aunt, an actress, and mentored by an American relative, Lee Halliday, from whom he took his stage name.
Often ridiculed by cartoonists and television comics as a man of little intellect, Hallyday had brief moments of kudos, including starring in films by directors Jean-Luc Godard and Patrice Leconte.
Further acclaim came in 2009 for his performance as a retired hit man out to avenge his murdered family in Johnnie To’s thriller “Vengeance.”
Critics described him as “mesmerizing,” with The New York Times saying that “with his ruined face and pale snake eyes Mr. Hallyday holds the screen.”
“I’m not nearly as dumb as people think,” Hallyday said in an interview. “I think this vision of me belongs to the past.”
There was no doubting his cross-generational popularity — a phenomenon foreigners often found bewildering.
“There is, in the very deep public affection for Johnny, something that goes beyond the sexes and social classes,” said his friend the singer Jean-Jacques Goldman.
He was made a knight of the French Legion of Honor in 1998 by President Jacques Chirac, who called him “the idol of the young.”
“Johnny Hallyday is a real star who has successfully merged two cultures, the French and the American,” Chirac said.
But a few years later, Johnny went into tax exile in Switzerland and Los Angeles — where he was often photographed on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle — claiming that French taxes were too high.
Yet fame outside the French-speaking world eluded him.
“He’s a rock icon in France,” Kaganski said. “But for the English or the Americans, it’d be like the English trying to sell us Camembert.”
“My international career? It’ll happen if it happens,” Hallyday once said in an interview. “But I don’t specially want to succeed elsewhere. It’s better to be king in one’s own country than a prince elsewhere.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture...lyday-dies-74/
Quote:
Originally Posted by bobo746
Sobering image, this one, eh?
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Max Clifford, former celebrity publicist, dies aged 74
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Disgraced former celebrity publicist Max Clifford, 74, has died in hospital after collapsing at Littlehey Prison in Cambridgeshire, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice has said.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/max...d-74-1-4635539
Cheggers is dead.! Only 60 :(
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Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Battling it for a while by all accounts.
Keith Chegwin has died aged 60 after battling lung condition
Aw, that's a bummer. Cheggers used to be great on kids tv. "Cheggers Plays Pop" actually had some decent acts on as well back in the day.
Just waiting for someone to come forward alleging he groped them on swapshop now..
Bruce Brown, 80, Dies; His ‘Endless Summer’ Documented Surfing
Bruce Brown, whose documentary “The Endless Summer,” which followed two surfers on an epic adventure in pursuit of the perfect wave, became an unlikely hit when it was released nationally in 1966, died on Sunday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 80.
His son Dana said the cause was probably heart failure.
Mr. Brown had been making surfing films — mainly for his fellow surfers — since the late 1950s. But as he contemplated making “The Endless Summer,” he had a bigger mission: to change the way surfers had been depicted in popular culture.
He had been surfing since age 11 and believed that surfers were not beach bums or losers.
With a budget of $50,000, he set out in 1963 with two Southern California surfers, Robert August and Mike Hynson, and a Bolex 16-millimeter camera for Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, Tahiti, New Zealand and Hawaii, following the surf over several months as if summer would never end.
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Pat DiNizio, Smithereens Singer, Dead at 62
Pat DiNizio, the lead singer and songwriter of the New Jersey rock group the Smithereens, died Tuesday at the age of 62.
From synth pop and rap to metal and funk, 100 best albums of the Eighties selected by the editors of Rolling Stone
The Smithereens confirmed DiNizio's death in a statement. No cause of death was provided, but the singer had experienced numerous health issues and injuries in recent years.
"It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Pat DiNizio, lead singer and songwriter of the influential New Jersey rock band, The Smithereens - America's Band," the band wrote on Facebook. "Pat was looking forward to getting back on the road and seeing his many fans and friends. Please keep Pat in your thoughts and prayers."
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pat-dinizio-smithereens-singer-dead-at-62-w513988
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Charles Jenkins, Cold War Defector To North Korea, Dies At 77
In 1965, Charles Jenkins, a young U.S. Army sergeant stationed at the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea, made what he described decades later as the biggest mistake of his life: He got drunk, deserted his post and crossed over to North Korea.
Jenkins spent the next four decades as a Cold War trophy of Pyongyang and the last years of his life — after being freed in 2004 — on a small, isolated island in Japan with his wife, Hitomi Soga, a Japanese citizen who had also been freed after being abducted by North Korean spies in 1978.
On Tuesday, Japan's NHK broadcaster announced that Jenkins had died at age 77. The cause was not immediately announced.
Born in Rich Square, N.C., Jenkins dropped out of school at age 15 to sign up for the Army. However, it was not until years later, at age 24, after his second posting to South Korea, that he made the decision that changed his life. In a 2006 interview with The Independent, he called it "the biggest mistake I ever made."
"I know I was not thinking clearly at the time and a lot of my decisions don't make sense now, but at the time they had a logic to them that made my actions seem almost inevitable," Jenkins wrote in 2008 in The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea.
He said he thought he would be handed over to the Soviet Union and eventually returned to the U.S. in one of the semi-regular prisoner exchanges that were a fixture of the Cold War.
"I was so ignorant," Jenkins told The Washington Postin a 2008 interview, describing his life in North Korea as like living in a "giant, demented prison."
For the first eight years in North Korea, it was a literal prison: He was held in a small room with three other American defectors. They were forced to memorize the works of North Korean founder Kim Il-sung – earning a beating for any error.
(It was announced in August that fellow deserter James Joseph Dresnok, who crossed the border three years before Jenkins, had died the previous year "pledging loyalty to the 'great leader Kim Jong-Un,' his sons said," according to The Telegraph)
Jenkins later acted in propaganda movies and taught English to North Korean spies and military cadets.
In 1980, he says he was "presented" with Soga and forced to marry her, but that the two later fell in love. North Korea eventually acknowledged its program of kidnapping Japanese citizens. In 2002, Pyongyang released Soga, who returned to Japan. Two years later, Jenkins and the couple's two daughters were allowed to join her.
After his release, Jenkins served 25 days in a U.S. military brig and was debriefed for two months about his knowledge of the secretive regime and its sensitive installations.
But even in his final years on Sado island, Jenkins never stopped looking over his shoulder.
"My life is not worth five cents, I know that," he told The Independent in 2006. "I don't think they [North Korea] have the nerve to come and get me, but they could assassinate me with a bullet through the head from a distance."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...rea-dies-at-77
Professor Heinz Wolff: Bioengineering pioneer and TV presenter, dies aged 89
Renowned scientist was face of long-running BBC programme The Great Egg Race
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Professor Heinz Wolff, a bioengineering pioneer and TV presenter, has died aged 89.
The renowned inventor and social reformer suffered heart failure on 15 December, his family said in a statement released through Brunel University London.
Prof Wolff was a former adviser to the European Space Agency and presented BBC2's long-running science show The Great Egg Race from 1977 to 1986, with his trademark bow tie, German accent and energetic persona endearing him to viewers.
He came to Britain as a Jewish refugee with his father and other relatives from Berlin in September 1939 as an 11-year-old on the day the Second World War broke out.
He attended school in Oxford before working in haematology at the city's Radcliffe Infirmary, where he invented a machine for counting patients' blood cells, and graduated from University College London with a first-class degree in physiology and physics.
Much of his early career was spent in bioengineering, a discipline he established and named that seeks to solve real-world problems using scientific concepts.
Prof Wolff founded the Brunel Institute for Bioengineering in 1983 after 30 years working for the Medical Research Council. He later became an emeritus professor working on a time-backing scheme which aimed to solve societal issues connected to the elderly population.
“Working with Heinz was like being at the centre of an ideas factory," said Dr Gabriella Spinelli, his colleague on the scheme. "He was fiercely curious and always had new avenues to explore.”
Colleagues at Brunel also recalled his penchant for practical jokes, including arriving at his 80th birthday party celebrations on a scooter propelled by fire extinguishers.
Close friend Professor Ian Sutherland, who took over directorship of the institute when Prof Wolff retired in 1995, said: "Heinz was a most inventive and inspirational leader.
"There was nothing he loved more than having a team of people around him devising completely new ways of doing things."
Sporting a bow tie and tufts of hair above the ears, Prof Wolff became known to British television audiences in the 1970s and 1980s on the The Great Egg Race, which encouraged teams to invent useful objects out of limited resources.
His on-screen career began in 1966 on Panorama with Richard Dimbleby, where he produced a radio pill that could measure pressure, temperature and acidity in the gut.
Speaking in 2016, he recalled: “Richard swallowed one and when I gently poked him, the radio receiver squealed appropriately. The BBC had faith in me because I didn’t need a script and I was comfortable talking in front of a camera lens.”
Alongside his regular television appearances, Prof Wolff's scientific endeavours would continue to flourish.
He was made an honorary member of the European Space Agency in 1975, and his research into how human beings could survive in hostile environments culminated in his co-founding of Project Juno which, in 1991, led to Dr Helen Sharman becoming the first British astronaut and the 15th woman in space when she spent eight days in orbit on the Russian Mir space station.
Prof Wolff had honorary doctorates from several universities, as well as fellowships of the Biological Engineering Society, the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Institute of Biology, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society of Arts. He was awarded the Edinburgh Medal for outstanding contribution by a scientist to society in 1992.
He was also a strong supporter of local charities, including over 25 years as a trustee and then Life President of the Hillingdon Partnership Trust.
Professor Julia Buckingham, vice-chancellor and president of Brunel University London, said: "Heinz's remarkable intellect, ideas and enthusiasm combined to make him the sparkling scientist we will so fondly remember.
"He was a wonderful friend and supporter to staff and to students - and an inspiration to all of us."
Prof Wolff was married to Joan until her death in 2014, and had two sons and four grandchildren.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/professor-heinz-wolff-bionengineering-scientist-tv-presenter-social-reformer-dies-aged-89-the-great-a8114161.html
Most aussie's will know this bloke.
Rory O’Donoghue
Back in 1966, as he prepared to perform in a Sydney University revue, Grahame Bond was introduced to a teenage musician called Rory O’Donoghue. Despite his age, O’Donoghue was already something of a veteran of the stage. Bond knew at once that he had found a collaborator unlike any other.
“It was a magic that just happened,” he says. “It’s something I’ll never experience again, the joy of being on stage with him. He was just such a consummate professional.”
O’Donoghue, best known for his work with Bond on the Aunty Jack Show on the ABC, died in a Sydney hospital last Wednesday. He was 68.
A widely admired musician, actor, teacher and athlete, [at]O’Donoghue teamed up with Bond for the Aunty Jack Show in 1972-73. The show was a surreal comedy that startled conservative tastes, ending each week with Bond telling viewers to tune in again or he would “come round to your house and I’ll rip yer bloody arms off”.
O’Donoghue, who played Thin Arthur in the series, went on to write music for television, film and advertising jingles, and taught music at schools across Sydney
https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2017/12/492.jpg
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/rory-odonoghue-brought-multiple-talents-to-aunty-jack-show/news-story/617b79bef4d297f195889293426ad9ee
Clifford Irving, Author of a Notorious Literary Hoax, Dies at 87
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...tid=5690&stc=1
Clifford Irving, left, facing reporters in 1972, as a grand jury in Manhattan took up the literary-hoax case against him.
Clifford Irving, who perpetrated one of the biggest literary hoaxes of the 20th century in the early 1970s when he concocted a supposedly authorized autobiography of the billionaire Howard Hughes based on meetings and interviews that never took place, died on Tuesday at a hospice facility near his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87.
His wife, Julie Irving, confirmed the death. She said he was admitted to the hospice over the weekend after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer about a week ago.
Mr. Irving hit on the idea for “The Autobiography of Howard Hughes” after reading “The Case of the Invisible Billionaire,” an article about him published in the December 1970 issue of Newsweek.
Hughes, a notorious eccentric and recluse who had not spoken to the press since 1958, had just quit Las Vegas to take up residence on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Mr. Irving, a modestly successful novelist and nonfiction writer, was intrigued.
He had recently published an as-told-to memoir, “Fake!: The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time.” Perhaps inspired by his subject, he came up with a wild scheme.
He convinced editors at McGraw-Hill, his publisher, that Hughes had contacted him to express admiration for “Fake!” and proposed collaborating on a similar project.
After studying a Hughes letter reproduced in the Newsweek article, Mr. Irving forged letters from Hughes to back up the story. He began calling his publisher from exotic locations where, he claimed, he was meeting with Hughes and developing a close relationship. He was betting that Hughes hated the limelight so much that he would never step forward to debunk anything written about him.
Mr. Irving succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. McGraw-Hill paid an advance of $750,000 for the book. Life magazine bought the serial rights for $250,000, and Dell obtained the paperback rights for $400,000.
Over the ensuing months, as publication neared, Mr. Irving bluffed his way past editors, lawyers, handwriting experts and even skeptical journalists who had interviewed Hughes in the past. The CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace grilled Mr. Irving on “60 Minutes” and came away convinced.
At the end of 1971, with McGraw-Hill and Life ready to go to press, the scheme began to unravel. Mr. Hughes went public and denied knowing Mr. Irving, first through a representative and later in a conference call with seven journalists based in Los Angeles.
Swiss banking investigators soon discovered that a Zurich bank account belonging to “H. R. Hughes” had been opened by Mr. Irving’s wife, Edith Irving, a German-born Swiss citizen, using a forged passport with the name Helga R. Hughes.
As the evidence piled up, the house of cards collapsed. In March 1972, the Irvings pleaded guilty to conspiracy in federal court. In state court, along with Mr. Irving’s research assistant, Richard Suskind, they pleaded guilty to conspiracy and grand larceny. Mr. Irving was given a prison sentence of two and a half years and served 17 months. Mr. Suskind received a sentence of six months, of which he served five.
Mrs. Irving served only two months of a two-year sentence, the remainder having been suspended. But immediately after being released from Nassau County Jail, she returned to Switzerland, where she served 16 months of a two-year sentence for larceny and forgery.
With Mr. Suskind, Mr. Irving recounted the debacle in “Clifford Irving: What Really Happened,” published by Grove Press in 1972. (It was reissued in 1981 as “The Hoax.”)
“I had never realized I was committing a crime — I had thought of it as a hoax,” Mr. Irving wrote in the book.
Money, he insisted, was not the motive.
“The whole Hughes affair had been a venture into the unknown, a testing of myself, a constant gauntlet of challenge and response,” he wrote.
Clifford Michael Irving was born in Manhattan on Nov. 5, 1930, to Jay and Dorothy Irving. His father, who had changed his name from Irving Joel Raefsky, was a cartoonist and illustrator who did covers for Collier’s magazine and drew a syndicated strip, Pottsy, about an amiable New York policeman.
He graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan in 1947 and from Cornell University, which he had entered at 16, in 1951 with a degree in English. Smitten with Ernest Hemingway as a writer and role model, he traveled widely and worked at an odd assortment of jobs. At various times he was a copy boy at The New York Times, a Fuller Brush salesman in Syracuse and a machinist’s assistant in Detroit.
Mr. Irving went to the Spanish island of Ibiza in 1953 and became, in time, a permanent resident. There he finished his first novel, “On a Darkling Plain,” a coming-of-age story with a questing, alienated protagonist much like the author.
He went on to try his hand at a psychological thriller, “The Losers” (1958), and a period drama, “The Valley” (1960), set in 19th-century New Mexico. He hatched the Hughes hoax after taking up residence on Ibiza.
After serving his prison sentence, Mr. Irving wrote several novels with a legal setting, as well as true-crime books, including “Daddy’s Girl: The Campbell Murder Case” (1988), “Trial” (1990) and “Final Argument” (1993).
Orson Welles drew on “Fake!” and on the Hughes hoax when making his 1974 film, “F for Fake,” in which Mr. Irving plays a prominent role. The Danish director Lasse Hallstrom dramatized the affair in “The Hoax” (2006), with Richard Gere as Mr. Irving.
In 2012, the fake Hughes autobiography was published under the title “Clifford Irving’s Autobiography of Howard Hughes” as an e-book. (The cover proclaimed, “Until now, the most famous unpublished book of the 20th century.”) He also published “Jailing: The Prison Memoirs of 0040, a k a Clifford Irving” as an e-book.
Mr. Irving was married six times. He married Julie Schall in 1998. Besides her, he is survived by three sons, Josh, Ned and Barnaby; and one grandson.
Mr. Irving offered different explanations for the Hughes affair at different times. In his later years, he dismissed it as nothing more than a joke.
But in certain moods, he looked on the episode with something like awe. It had to be admitted, he wrote in “What Really Happened,” that “a certain grandeur had rooted itself into the scheme, and I could still spy a reckless and artistic splendor to the way we had carried it out.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/o...ies-at-87.html
In summary (though there are 2 days to go)
Notable deaths 2017 - BBC News
Retired US Astronaut Young Dies at 87
https://teakdoor.com/attachment.php?a...tid=6424&stc=1
Veteran U.S. astronaut John Young, who walked on the moon and even smuggled a corned beef sandwich into orbit during one of his six missions in space, has died at age 87, NASA said Saturday.
Young, a former Navy test pilot, in 1972 became the ninth of 12 people ever to set foot on the moon.
"We're saddened by the loss of astronaut John Young," the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said on Twitter.
The time and cause of Young's death were not immediately clear.
Young became one of the most accomplished astronauts in the history of the U.S. space program. He flew into space twice during NASA's Gemini program in the mid-1960s, twice on the Apollo lunar missions and twice on space shuttles in the 1980s.
He retired in 2004 after 42 years with the U.S. space agency.
Moon mission
The Apollo 16 mission in April 1972, his fourth space flight, took Young to the lunar surface.
As mission commander, he and crewmate Charles Duke explored the moon's Descartes Highlands region, gathering 90 kilograms (200 pounds) of rock and soil samples and driving more than 26 kilometers (16 miles) in the lunar rover to sites such as Spook Crater.
Recalling his lunar exploits, Young told the Houston Chronicle in 2004: "One-sixth gravity on the surface of the moon is just delightful. It's not like being in zero gravity, you know. You can drop a pencil in zero gravity and look for it for three days. In one-sixth gravity, you just look down and there it is."
Young's first time in space came in 1965 with the Gemini 3 mission that took him and astronaut Gus Grissom into Earth orbit in the first two-man U.S. space jaunt. It was on this mission that Young pulled his sandwich stunt, which did not make NASA brass happy but certainly pleased Grissom, the recipient of the snack.
Astronaut Wally Schirra, who was not flying on the mission, bought the corned beef sandwich on rye bread from a delicatessen in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and asked Young to give it to Grissom in space. During the flight, as they discussed the food provided for the mission, Young handed Grissom the sandwich.
NASA later rebuked Young for the antics, which generated criticism from lawmakers and the media, but his career did not suffer.
Rehearsal for moon landing
His May 1969 Apollo 10 mission served as a rehearsal for the historic Apollo 11 mission two months later in which Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon.
Young and his crew undertook each aspect of that subsequent mission except for an actual moon landing.
Young's fifth space mission was as commander of the inaugural flight of NASA's first space shuttle, Columbia, in 1981. In 1983, he became the first person to fly six space missions when he commanded Columbia on the first Spacelab trek, with the crew performing more than 70 scientific experiments.
He never went to space again. Young had been due to command a 1986 flight that was canceled after the explosion of the shuttle Challenger earlier that year. He ended up as the only person to fly on space shuttle, Apollo and Gemini missions.
Young was born September 24, 1930, in San Francisco and grew up in Orlando, Florida. After receiving a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952, he entered the Navy and graduated from its test pilot school. NASA picked him in 1962 for its astronaut program.
https://www.voazimbabwe.com/a/retire...s/4196730.html