RIP Posts Here

Get the latest and greatest scoops on what's going on in the world around you, find out what's hot and what's not fo' sho!
Post Reply
User avatar
BilboBaggins
bitHobbit
Posts: 1447
Joined: Sun Jun 08, 2003 7:35 am
Location: Bag End, Hobbiton, Shire, Middle Earth
Contact:

Post by BilboBaggins »

One final Standing Ovation for George Carlin.

:rockon: :rockon: :bowdown: :bowdown: :-D
Sitting at my workbench in my comfortable little Hobbit hole.
User avatar
TheMechanic54
bitThug
Posts: 52
Joined: Sun Apr 02, 2006 8:39 pm

Post by TheMechanic54 »

The Hippy-Dippy Weather Man has gone to the great comedy club in the
sky. He was my hero in high school. He will be missed by many. :(
"I know you believe you understand what you think I
said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard
is not what I meant."
sidewinder
bitProphet
Posts: 3165
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:31 pm
Location: Walmart

Post by sidewinder »

I loved most of his stuff...and I think I'm the only person who actually liked his tv show :grin:
I would have bet serious money on either Cheech or Chong going first.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand
User avatar
DarkTari
bitPimp
Posts: 3952
Joined: Mon Mar 03, 2003 2:48 pm
Location: D.C. GoGo! In Da House

Post by DarkTari »

crazydave wrote:One of the few people in this world that made sense to me. I can't properly express how profoundly he will be missed by me.
I know Cavey, if you were a comedian, I would think you'd be a lot like George.......

R.I.P. ! :-?
Image
sidewinder
bitProphet
Posts: 3165
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:31 pm
Location: Walmart

Post by sidewinder »

? You mean dead? the rip right after kind of confused my tiny brain. :?
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand
User avatar
BilboBaggins
bitHobbit
Posts: 1447
Joined: Sun Jun 08, 2003 7:35 am
Location: Bag End, Hobbiton, Shire, Middle Earth
Contact:

Post by BilboBaggins »

Larry Harmon, longtime Bozo the Clown, dies at 83

By JOHN ROGERS

LOS ANGELES (AP) Jul 3, 9:12 PM (ET) - Larry Harmon, who turned the character Bozo the Clown into a show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died Thursday of congestive heart failure. He was 83.

His publicist, Jerry Digney, told The Associated Press he died at his home.

Although not the original Bozo, Harmon portrayed the popular clown in countless appearances and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly dozens of television stations around the country. The stations in turn hired actors to be their local Bozos.

"You might say, in a way, I was cloning BTC (Bozo the Clown) before anybody else out there got around to cloning DNA," Harmon told the AP in a 1996 interview.

"Bozo is a combination of the wonderful wisdom of the adult and the childlike ways in all of us," Harmon said.

Pinto Colvig, who also provided the voice for Walt Disney's Goofy, was the first Bozo the Clown, a character created by writer-producer Alan W. Livingston for a series of children's records in 1946. Livingston said he came up with the name Bozo after polling several people at Capitol Records.

Harmon would later meet his alter ego while answering a casting call to make personal appearances as a clown to promote the records.

He got that job and eventually bought the rights to Bozo. Along the way, he embellished Bozo's distinctive look: the orange-tufted hair, the bulbous nose, the outlandish red, white and blue costume.

"I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet, (people) would never be able to forget those footprints," he said.

Susan Harmon, his wife of 29 years, indicated Harmon was the perfect fit for Bozo.

"He was the most optimistic man I ever met. He always saw a bright side; he always had something good to say about everybody. He was the love of my life," she said Thursday.

The business - combining animation, licensing of the character, and personal appearances - made millions, as Harmon trained more than 200 Bozos over the years to represent him in local markets.

"I'm looking for that sparkle in the eyes, that emotion, feeling, directness, warmth. That is so important," he said of his criteria for becoming a Bozo.

The Chicago version of Bozo ran on WGN-TV in Chicago for 40 years and was seen in many other cities after cable television transformed WGN into a superstation.

Bozo - portrayed in Chicago for many years by Bob Bell - was so popular that the waiting list for tickets to a TV show eventually stretched to a decade, prompting the station to stop taking reservations for 10 years. On the day in 1990 when WGN started taking reservations again, it took just five hours to book the show for five more years. The phone company reported more than 27 million phone call attempts had been made.

By the time the show bowed out in Chicago, in 2001, it was the last locally produced version. Harmon said at the time that he hoped to develop a new cable or network show, as well as a Bozo feature film.

He became caught up in a minor controversy in 2004 when the International Clown Hall of Fame in Milwaukee took down a plaque honoring him as Bozo and formally endorsed Colvig as the first. Harmon denied ever misrepresenting Bozo's history.

He said he was claiming credit only for what he added to the character - "What I sound like, what I look like, what I walk like" - and what he did to popularize Bozo.

"Isn't it a shame the credit that was given to me for the work I have done, they arbitrarily take it down, like I didn't do anything for the last 52 years," he told the AP at the time.

Harmon protected Bozo's reputation with a vengeance, while embracing those who poked good-natured fun at the clown.

As Bozo's influence spread through popular culture, his very name became a synonym for clownish behavior.

"It takes a lot of effort and energy to keep a character that old fresh so kids today still know about him and want to buy the products," Karen Raugust, executive editor of The Licensing Letter, a New York-based trade publication, said in 1996.

A normal character runs its course in three to five years, Raugust said. "Harmon's is a classic character. It's been around 50 years."

On New Year's Day 1996, Harmon dressed up as Bozo for the first time in 10 years, appearing in the Rose Parade in Pasadena.

The crowd reaction, he recalled, "was deafening."

"They kept yelling, 'Bozo, Bozo, love you, love you.' I shed more crocodile tears for five miles in four hours than I realized I had," he said. "I still get goose bumps."

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Harmon became interested in theater while studying at the University of Southern California.

"Bozo is a star, an entertainer, bigger than life," Harmon once said. "People see him as Mr. Bozo, somebody you can relate to, touch and laugh with."

Besides his wife, Harmon is survived by his son, Jeff Harmon, and daughters Lori Harmon, Marci Breth-Carabet and Leslie Breth.

---

Associated Press writers Polly Anderson in New York and Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed to this story.
Sitting at my workbench in my comfortable little Hobbit hole.
sidewinder
bitProphet
Posts: 3165
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:31 pm
Location: Walmart

Post by sidewinder »

Damn Bilbo, do you just hover over the obits? Oh well, anyway, I never really got into Bozo but its sad when icons leave. I suppose with Kieth Obermann, Allen Combs and the enire Congress he just wasn't needed anymore. :-?
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand
User avatar
BilboBaggins
bitHobbit
Posts: 1447
Joined: Sun Jun 08, 2003 7:35 am
Location: Bag End, Hobbiton, Shire, Middle Earth
Contact:

Post by BilboBaggins »

sidewinder wrote:Damn Bilbo, do you just hover over the obits? Oh well, anyway, I never really got into Bozo but its sad when icons leave. I suppose with Kieth Obermann, Allen Combs and the enire Congress he just wasn't needed anymore. :-?
I don't hover over them. I just seem to be reading the news stories when a well know personality dies.
Sitting at my workbench in my comfortable little Hobbit hole.
User avatar
BilboBaggins
bitHobbit
Posts: 1447
Joined: Sun Jun 08, 2003 7:35 am
Location: Bag End, Hobbiton, Shire, Middle Earth
Contact:

Post by BilboBaggins »

Died on the Fourth of July.

Sidewinder, is he one of your heroes?

-------------

Former Republican N.C. Sen. Jesse Helms dies at 86

BY DAVID ESPO and WHITNEY WOODWARD

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - Jul 4, 12:02 PM (ET) Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals, Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in Congress, died on the Fourth of July. He was 86.

Helms died at 1:15 a.m., said the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate University in North Carolina. The center's president, John Dodd, said in a statement that funeral arrangements were pending.

"He was very comfortable," said former chief of staff Jimmy Broughton, who added Helms died of natural causes in Raleigh.

Helms, who first became known to North Carolina voters as a newspaper and television commentator, won election to the Senate in 1972 and decided not to run for a sixth term in 2002.

"Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?" Helms wrote in a 1959 editorial that foretold his political style.

As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of illnesses, including a bone disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and he made his way through the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared an end. In April 2006, his family announced that he had been moved into a convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which repeated minor strokes damage the brain.

Helms' public appearances had dwindled as his health deteriorated. When his memoirs were published in August 2005, he appeared at a Raleigh book store to sign copies but did not make a speech.

In an e-mail interview with The Associated Press at that time, Helms said he hoped what future generations learn about him "will be based on the truth and not the deliberate inaccuracies those who disagreed with me took such delight in repeating."

"My legacy will be up to others to describe," he added.

Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and Foreign Relations Committees over the years at times when the GOP held the Senate majority, using his posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and other farmers and place his stamp on foreign policy.

His opposition to Communism defined his foreign policy views. He took a dim view of many arms control treaties, opposed Fidel Castro at every turn, and supported the contras in Nicaragua as well as the right-wing government of El Salvador. He opposed the Panama Canal treaties that President Jimmy Carter pushed through a reluctant Senate in 1977.

Early on, his habit of blocking nominations and legislation won him a nickname of "Senator No." He delighted in forcing roll call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and other cultural issues.

In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust. "I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that," he said in a newspaper interview at the time. "If you want to call me a bigot, fine."

After Democrats killed the appointment of U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle, a former Helms aide, to a federal appeals court post in 1991, Helms blocked all of Clinton's judicial nominations from North Carolina for eight years.

Helms occasionally opted for compromise in later years in the Senate, working with Democrats on legislation to restructure the foreign policy bureaucracy and pay back debts to the United Nations, an organization he disdained for most of his career.

And he softened his views on AIDS after years of clashes with gay activists, advocating greater federal funding to fight the disease in Africa and elsewhere overseas.

But in his memoirs, Helms made clear that his opinions on other issues had hardly moderated since he left office. He compared abortion to both the Holocaust and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," the former senator wrote in "Here's Where I Stand."

Helms never lost a race for the Senate, but he never won one by much, either, a reflection of his divisive political profile in his native state.

He knew it, too. "Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The mighty ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and commentators and columnists have struck out again," he said in 1990, after winning his fourth term.

He won the 1972 election after switching parties, and defeated then-Gov. Jim Hunt in an epic battle in 1984 in what was then the costliest Senate race on record.

He defeated former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt in 1990 and 1996 in racially tinged campaigns. In the first race, a Helms commercial showed a white fist crumbling up a job application, these words underneath: "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."

"The tension that he creates, the fear he creates in people, is how he's won campaigns," Gantt said several years later.

Helms also played a role in national GOP politics - supporting Ronald Reagan in 1976 in a presidential primary challenge to then-President Gerald R. Ford. Reagan's candidacy was near collapse when it came time for the North Carolina primary. Helms was in charge of the effort, and Reagan won a startling upset that resurrected his challenge.

During the 1990s, Helms clashed frequently with President Clinton, whom he deemed unqualified to be commander in chief. Even some Republicans cringed when Helms said Clinton was so unpopular he would need a bodyguard on North Carolina military bases. Helms said he hadn't meant it as a threat.

Asked to gauge Clinton's performance overall, Helms said in 1995: "He's a nice guy. He's very pleasant. But ... (as) Ronald Reagan used to say about another politician, 'Deep down, he's shallow.'"

Helms went out of his way to establish good relations with Madeleine Albright, Clinton's second secretary of state. But that didn't stop him from single-handedly blocking Clinton's appointment of William Weld - a Republican - as ambassador to Mexico.

Helms clashed with other Republicans over the years, including fellow Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana in 1987, after Democrats had won a Senate majority. Helms had promised in his 1984 campaign not to take the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, but he invoked seniority over Lugar to claim the seat as the panel's ranking Republican.

He was unafraid of inconveniencing his fellow senators - sometimes all of them at once. "I did not come to Washington to win a popularity contest," he once said while holding the Senate in session with a filibuster that delayed the beginning of a Christmas break. And he once objected to a request by phoning in his dissent from home, where he was watching Senate proceedings on television.

Helms was born in Monroe, N.C., on Oct. 18, 1921. He attended Wake Forest College in 1941 but never graduated and was in the Navy during World War II.

In many ways, Helms' values were forged in the small town where his father was police chief.

"I shall always remember the shady streets, the quiet Sundays, the cotton wagons, the Fourth of July parades, the New Year's Eve firecrackers. I shall never forget the stream of school kids marching uptown to place flowers on the Courthouse Square monument on Confederate Memorial Day," Helms wrote in a newspaper column in 1956.

He took an active role in North Carolina politics early on, working to elect a segregationist candidate, Willis Smith, to the Senate in 1950. He worked as Smith's top staff aide for a time, then returned to Raleigh as executive director of the state bankers association.

Helms became a member of the Raleigh city council in 1957 and got his first public platform for espousing his conservative views when he became a television editorialist for WRAL in Raleigh in 1960. He also wrote a column that at one time was carried in 200 newspapers. Helms also was city editor at The Raleigh Times.

Helms and his wife, Dorothy, had two daughters and a son. They adopted the boy in 1962 after the child, 9 years old and suffering from cerebral palsy, said in a newspaper article that he wanted parents.

---

AP Special Writer David Espo in Washington contributed to this story.
Sitting at my workbench in my comfortable little Hobbit hole.
sidewinder
bitProphet
Posts: 3165
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:31 pm
Location: Walmart

Post by sidewinder »

I didn't always always agree with Senator No but I do have to admit he had his moments! I think his biggest asset and biggest liability was the same thing...he was a "good ol' boy" who got himslf elected to the Senate... you gotta love that!
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand
User avatar
BilboBaggins
bitHobbit
Posts: 1447
Joined: Sun Jun 08, 2003 7:35 am
Location: Bag End, Hobbiton, Shire, Middle Earth
Contact:

Post by BilboBaggins »

I just read this on a Gossip Site.

----------

Hiroaki "Rocky" Aoki - Founder of Benihana.

Hiroaki Aoki, father to supermodel Devon and DJ Steve, passed away on Friday in New York.

He was 69 years old.

A Japanese immigrant, "Rocky" - as he was called in America - was best known as the founder of the extremely successful Benihana chain franchise.
Sitting at my workbench in my comfortable little Hobbit hole.
sidewinder
bitProphet
Posts: 3165
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:31 pm
Location: Walmart

Post by sidewinder »

Huh, its odd...I'm sad but oddly enough I'm more hungry. :?
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand
User avatar
steelwoolghandi
bitPimp
Posts: 1696
Joined: Fri Jun 11, 2004 11:53 am
Location: RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!
Contact:

Post by steelwoolghandi »

sidewinder wrote:Huh, its odd...I'm sad but oddly enough I'm more hungry. :?

yummmmm Fried rice and flipping knives................. :???:
My other hangout! R7R
My Bitpimps Gallery of Pics:
User avatar
BilboBaggins
bitHobbit
Posts: 1447
Joined: Sun Jun 08, 2003 7:35 am
Location: Bag End, Hobbiton, Shire, Middle Earth
Contact:

Post by BilboBaggins »

Former USAC National Champion Greg Weld Dies at 64

Aug 4, 7:27 PM (ET) INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -Greg Weld, who won 21 U.S. Auto Club sprint car races and was the series national champion in 1967, died Monday. He was 64.

The cause of death was not immediately known.

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway said Weld died in Kansas City, Mo., where his company, Weld Racing Wheels, is based.

Weld passed his Indianapolis 500 rookie test in 1965, when he was the USAC sprint car runner-up to Johnny Rutherford, but his only start at the Speedway was in 1970, when he finished 32nd.

By that time, however, his growing business was taking up much of his time, and he finished his driving career at age 30 with a fourth-place finish in the 1974 USAC Silver Crown series. In his final race, he was runner-up to A.J. Foyt in a 50-mile sprint car race on the Indiana State Fairgrounds dirt track two nights before the 1974 Indy 500.

A funeral service is scheduled for Friday at the Kansas City Baptist Temple.
Sitting at my workbench in my comfortable little Hobbit hole.
sidewinder
bitProphet
Posts: 3165
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:31 pm
Location: Walmart

Post by sidewinder »

I think he was the first person to offer factory bead-locks. Before that you had to drill holes in the rim and use sheet metal screws... I never new much about him but I have had a bunch of his wheels over the years.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand
Post Reply