Our Daily Dead

Pretending to have a daily life we were wandering about the web with Jack Wild on the fingers we came across this bit from the Independent Online. They cover what they term the curse of Oliver! And that got us zeroing in on curses for today’s diary of a mad housewife entry.

So tickling the plastics we did go ever so smoothly over to E! Online’s report on the Poltergeist curse.

And then there are movies using Curses in the title. But most of these movies will just cause you to curse be assured of that.

And perhaps it is no surprise that on this same subject you’d expect something from Wes Craven and by golly he does not disappoint. At least in the fact that he has released a movie called Cursed.

And finally (Oh please Buddha let it be so!) you decidedly need to know that just for you - yes you - Family Media Guide tracks cursing (or profanity as they say) in movies. They also track smoking, sex and violence. They are also most considerate in providing a search mechanism so you can quicly find all those movies with profanity, violence and sex. Just select via radio button the level you want: none, suggestive, explicit and graphic. Likely we’ll be spending the weekend trying to determine where explict leaves off and graphic begins.

And before you curse us into oblivion we’ve one last thing…you might want to check this Amazon Listmania: movies with lots and lots of cursing.

Pardon but, ah bugger it dude, we’ve to run. The Big Lebowski is about to start.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: daily life, Jack Wild, diary, Poltergeist, Wes Craven, Buddha, Family Media Guide, sex, Amazon

From SFGate.com and the fine folks over at Infospigot.
Luna Leopold, a naturalist considered the nation’s leading expert and educator on how rivers shape the land, died at his home in Berkeley on Feb. 23. He was 90 and had been suffering from heart and lung problems, said his care giver, Cathy Zimmerman.

Mr. Leopold was the son of Aldo Leopold, the pioneering conservationist who made wildlife management a national ethic with his 1949 anthology “A Sand County Almanac.” Born in the river-carved Southwest, Luna Leopold extended his father’s ecological philosophy into the field of geomorphology — the study of how landforms are made by the action of water. His research led to quantitative explanations for the natural forms of rivers.

Notably productive until his final weeks, Mr. Leopold published some 200 books and articles and received more than 40 awards during a lifetime that included careers as the chief hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey and a professor at UC Berkeley. Since 1987, he had been a Cal professor emeritus and was seen working in the university’s earth sciences library as recently as a month ago. During his last year, he published articles and a book.

“In his field, he absolutely was the most fundamental person,” said James Kirchner, a Cal professor of earth and planetary sciences. “He wrote the original book in the field.

“He was a theorist and experimenter,” Kirchner said. “He was in many respects the consummate scientist. You almost never get both in the same package at that level.”

Technorati Tags: Luna Leopold, wildlife management, geomorphology, hydrologist

From the NY Times

Arnold A. Rogow, an author and political scientist who trained as a psychoanalyst to gain insight into historical figures like Alexander Hamilton, died on Feb. 14 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital in Manhattan. He was 81.

The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Jeanne Rogow said.

Mr. Rogow, a professor at City College of New York, argued in his book “A Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr” (Hill and Wang, 1998) that Hamilton became obsessed with his hatred of Burr and that this obsession ultimately prompted him to force the situation that led to his death in their duel. Hamilton, more than Burr, was thus responsible for Hamilton’s death, Mr. Rogow argued.

He arrived at his conclusion by examining Hamilton’s personal letters. So far as is known, Burr never openly criticized Hamilton.

Mr. Rogow used his psychoanalytic knowledge to diagnose Hamilton as a manic depressive who, in effect, committed suicide by agreeing to fight a duel with Burr. Mr. Rogow argued that Hamilton was pulled down by recurring illnesses and was depressed by Washington’s unexpected death in 1799.

Hamilton’s decision not to fire, as well as his serenity in the days before the duel, contributed to Mr. Rogow’s diagnosis.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Arnold A. Rogow, author, political scientist, psychoanalyst, Alexander Hamilton

From the San Jose Mercury News
LONDON - Jack Wild, the actor who earned an Oscar nomination for his role as the irrepressible Artful Dodger in the movie musical “Oliver!”, has died, his agent said Thursday. He was 53.
Wild died Wednesday after a battle with mouth cancer, agent Alex Jay said.
Born in Royton, northwest England, in 1952, Wild was spotted by a talent agent while playing soccer in a London park and later attended stage school. He appeared in the London stage production of “Oliver!”, Lionel Bart’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.” He was cast in the film as cheeky pickpocket the Artful Dodger, a role that earned the 16-year-old an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
Wild also was known to a generation of children as the hero of “H.R. Pufnstuf,” a psychedelic U.S. television series about a boy stranded on a fantastical island with a talking flute, a friendly dragon and eerie, chatty trees. A feature film, “Pufnstuf,” appeared in 1970.
Wild became a teen music idol, releasing three albums - “The Jack Wild Album,” “Everything’s Coming up Roses” and “Beautiful World.”
But he struggled with alcoholism and his adult acting career was fitful, although he had a role as one of the Merry Men in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” in 1991.

Technorati Tags: Jack Wild, Artful Dodger, Oliver, mouth cancer, H.R. Pufnstuf, Pufnstuf

Our ODD guests today Mr. Owen Chamberlain and Mr. Frederick Brusch made worldly impact with their creations of bombs and books.

Early in his career, Mr. Chamberlain was part of the team that created the atomic bomb. He is said to have made a $5 bet that the test device would fail to explode - a bet he lost. Years later he would apologize to the Japanese for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also was awarded the Nobel Prize for his part in the discovery of the antiproton.

We have to admit here in black and white and red all over that we have yet to turn a page in any book by Frederick Brusch. However, we’ve ordered one or two or three and will certainly be rectifying that situation while studying the potential causes of tidal waves in La Palma.

And having nothing whatsoever to do with the first part of our daily life diary today let us just take a severe right turn and say Happy Birthday to Lou Reed.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Owen Chamberlain, Frederick Brusch, atomic bomb, Nobel Prize, tidal waves, La Palma, daily life, diary, Lou Reed

from the LA Times
Frederick Busch, the author of close to 30 books, many of them novels and collections of short stories about the hardships and anguish of ordinary people, has died. He was 64.

A former professor of literature at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., Busch suffered a heart attack during a visit to New York City and died Feb. 23 at Bellevue Hospital Center, his family said. He had been a resident of Sherburne, in central New York state.

Using his local environs as the setting for many of his novels, Busch “brought central New York alive for millions of readers,” Colgate President Rebecca S. Chopp said in a recent statement.

He was often referred to as a “writer’s writer,” and his work was compared to that of such literary masters as Raymond Carver and John Cheever. Busch received a number of prestigious awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters fiction award in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud prize in 1991. Busch once said his goal was to be “a really honest, minor writer of the 20th century.”

Technorati Tags: Frederick Busch, author, writer

from the LA Times
Owen Chamberlain, a California physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb and was later awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the antiproton, died Tuesday. He was 85.

Chamberlain, a politically active scientist who famously apologized to the Japanese for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, had long suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He died quietly in bed at his Berkeley home of complications from the disease, according to UC Berkeley, where Chamberlain taught for many years.

Chamberlain’s research “opened up a whole new field of physics and expanded our understanding of particle physics,” said his colleague and former student, Herbert Steiner, a physics professor at UC Berkeley.

Technorati Tags: Owen Chamberlain, physicist, Manhattan Project, Nobel Prize, antiproton

Our daily life diary wish list for today. Ahem…drum roll please…

A wee dram. Any will do, but “Bruichladdich The Forty 1964″ would be especially nice.

A Retro Lamborghini Miura. You might want to catch the 2006 North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

Some nice merlot from Behrens and Hitchcock. These are some Humboldt County folks who have done themselves proud in the wine buisness - yes we know a little different than the usual agriculture business in that area. If you can’t decide why then a mixed 6 pack - if you will - would be just ducky. You can always round out things to a full case with a jaunt over to pickup some excellent cabernet at Atalon.

Ok and one last one. A small place to roam about, yell when we want to without troubling the neighbors and as inspiration for these daily blogs.

Oh wait. Dang. What WERE we thinking? Natch our Miura would be a tad troubling around the ranch. Would you, could you please get us some different transport too?

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: daily life, diary, Bruichladdich, Lamborghini, Miura, Behrens and Hitchcock, Humboldt County, Atalon, daily blogs

Uncle Owen - had made him a cult figure.

The son of a doctor, Brown was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Stanford University. In 1938 he joined the socially conscious Group Theatre, appearing in such plays as William Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939), Robert Ardrey’s Thunder Rock (1939) and Clifford Odets’s Night Music (1940). When the Group disbanded in 1941, Brown moved to Hollywood, where he and other ex-Group members helped form the Actors Lab Theatre, where screen actors could hone their theatre skills in study and in stage performances. Brown directed plays for the Lab, which, during the Second World War, sent its productions to army camps, service hospitals and naval bases in America and overseas.

After making his screen début in Paramount’s I Wanted Wings (1941), he appeared in a dozen more Hollywood films; there were thrillers such as The Killers (1946) and Johnny O’Clock (1947), comedies such as The Impatient Years (1944), Over 21 (1945) and Without Reservations (1946) and such horror quickies as Weird Woman (1944) and Jungle Captive (1945). His best film roles were as a homicidal mental patient in Calling Dr Gillespie (1942) and as Jeanne Crain’s dull, bespectacled farmer fiancé in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical State Fair (1945).

Although Brown was not a Communist, his contribution to Russian War Relief during the war and his involvement with the Group and the Actors Lab landed him on the blacklist. After moving with his family to London, where they lived on a houseboat, he acted at the Haymarket Theatre in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1948), in a production starring Helen Hayes and directed by John Gielgud.

Technorati Tags: Phil Brown, Larry Adler, Sam Wanamaker, Joseph Losey, Star Wars

NY Times
Brig. Gen. Robert L. Scott Jr., one of America’s most celebrated World War II fighter pilots and author of the best-selling wartime memoir “God Is My Co-Pilot,” died yesterday at an assisted living center in Warner Robins, Ga., home of Robins Air Force Base, near Macon. He was 97.

Robert L. Scott Jr., then a colonel, in 1943, the year he dictated a memoir that became a best-selling account of aerial combat in World War II.

His death was announced by Paul Hibbitts, director of the Museum of Aviation at the base. General Scott was the honorary chairman of the museum’s foundation.

In the spring of 1942, Robert Scott, then a colonel in the Army Air Forces, was awarded the Silver Star for helping to evacuate thousands of Allied troops and refugees trapped when the Japanese overran Burma. Braving blinding storms and pursued by Japanese fighters, he ferried evacuees to India aboard a C-47 transport plane, flying over 17,000-foot peaks.

Piloting a Curtiss P-40 fighter painted with the single eye and tiger-shark teeth of the Flying Tigers, he also roamed the skies on one-man missions. Operating out of Dinjan, India, he strafed Japanese truck columns on the Burma Road linking Burma to China, dropped 500-pound bombs on bridges across the Salween River and hit barges loaded with Japanese troops.

Technorati Tags: Robert Scott

NY Times
Danny Perasa, a nimble-witted leprechaun of a man who captivated radio listeners across the nation with goofy, slyly wise stories, most touchingly about his romance with the woman who became his wife, died on Friday at his home in Brooklyn.

He was 67, and died in the arms of that woman, Annie Perasa. The cause was pancreatic cancer resulting from diabetes, she said.

Mr. Perasa was a member of the office staff at The New York Times for 34 years, then worked for the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation. But, in a sense, his true life’s work was storytelling. Indeed, he and his wife became beloved among National Public Radio listeners who relish great stories. On Aug. 11, 2004, the 27th anniversary of the day they met, those listeners heard him tell of their snap engagement.

The Perasas had long recounted their adventures through StoryCorps, an organization that seeks to capture the life experiences of ordinary people. Participants enter soundproof booths to spin tales that StoryCorps hopes will become a national oral history. Discs of interviews go to the Library of Congress, and some of the more interesting ones go to NPR.

“Maybe I’ve still got the instincts and intellect of a 6-year-old,” Mr. Perasa said when he was 63, “and maybe I’m better off for it.”

Technorati Tags: Danny Perasa, leprechaun, National Public Radio, StoryCorps