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Nuke Nixon
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Heather Armstrong: 'Queen of mommy blogging' dead at 47
Heather Armstrong, who found success in the 2000s documenting the ups and downs of motherhood on her blogging website Dooce, has died at the age of 47.
Her boyfriend Pete Ashdown told the Associated Press (AP) he had found her on Tuesday night in their Utah home.
The "queen of mommy blogging" wrote frequently about her children, relationships and personal struggles.
At the height of its popularity, her Dooce website received more than eight million visitors a month, reports Vox.
That was in 2009 - the same year Ms Armstrong was named in Forbes' annual list of the 30 most influential women in media.
Ms Armstrong founded Dooce in the early 2000s as a place to discuss work, sex and leaving the Mormon church.
The site's name came from an inside joke about how she was unable to spell out the word "dude" quickly in online chats, according to the AP and New York Times.
In 2002, Ms Armstrong was fired from her job as a web designer in Los Angeles after the blog - in which she gave colleagues nicknames like That One Co-worker Who Manages to Say Something Stupid Every Time He Opens His Mouth - was found to be hers.
Her firing, and the reason for it, ignited a public debate about privacy - and boosted traffic to her blog.
The site restarted six months later as a different kind of blog after she became pregnant. Embracing honesty in her writing, Ms Armstrong detailed her children's temper tantrums, her mental health challenges, and her struggles with alcoholism and postpartum depression.
According to an estimate quoted in the Wall Street Journal, by 2009, the blog may have generated $40,000 (£32,000) a month in revenue from paid advertising.
Ms Armstrong turned her success into a strong social media presence and three books, including the 2009 memoir It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita.
According to the book, she suffered chronic depression throughout her life and it was not treated until she got to college.
A caption on a Dooce Instagram page on Wednesday announcing her death said: "Hold your loved ones close and love everyone else."
Mr Ashdown told the AP that his partner had been sober for more than 18 months but had recently had a relapse. He said she had taken her own life.
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May 12th, 2023 03:53 AM |
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Nuke Nixon
Senior Member
Gender: Male
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Doyle Brunson Dies: ‘Godfather Of Poker’ And Two-Time World Champion Was 89
Doyle Brunson, the American poker legend who helped popularize the card game globally, has died aged 89.
Known as ‘the Godfather of Poker,’ Brunson was a leading professional player for more than 50 years, wrote a number of books on the game and was a familiar face on programs such as High Stakes Poker and World Series of Poker. He was a Poker Hall of Fame inductee and a two-time World Series of Poker Main Event champion.
Perhaps aptly, he passed away in the home of poker, Las Vegas, on Sunday. He was known in poker circles by a nickname referring to his home state, however: ‘Texas Dolly.’
Brunson appeared in films such as Zak Penn improv comedy The Grand as a poker pro and was a consultant on Lucy You, a 2007 film from Curtis Hanson about a hotshot player with personal demons.
Poker superstars such as Daniel Negreanu, Phil Hellmuth and Scotty Nguyen have written messages expressing their sadness at Brunson’s passing. Negranu, considered by many the greatest poker player of the modern era, wrote on Twitter, “There will never be another Doyle Brunson.”
Brunson began playing illegal poker games in the U.S. before settling in Las Vegas, where he began to build his fortune. He played in the first World Series of Poker and was a champion in 1976 and 1977. He went on to author several books such as Super System: A Course in Power Poker, providing insight into tactics and mindsets for millions of amateur players. He retired from professional poker in 2018, but did occasionally return for tournaments.
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May 15th, 2023 02:41 PM |
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Nuke Nixon
Senior Member
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‘Superstar’ Billy Graham Dies: Wrestling Legend Was 79
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Pro wrestling legend “Superstar” Billy Graham died Wednesday at 79. No cause was given, but he had been battling ill health for some time and had been hospitalized in the ICU on life support.
Graham, real name Eldridge Wayne Coleman, was a three-time former world champion professional wrestler, including a 1977-78 title run in the WWWF, which eventually became the WWE. He was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2004.
His wife, Valerie, posted Monday morning on Graham’s Facebook account that she had refused to remove his life support.
Graham got into pro wrestling in the late 1960s. He wrestled until 1987, when injuries and health issues ended his career. He became a TV commenter after leaving the ring.
Graham won the WWWF championship from Bruno Samartino in April 1977, but lost it to Bob Backlund in February 1978.
Graham was considered an influence on such noted wrestlers as Hulk Hogan, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Scott Steiner and Ric Flair, among others.
He is survived by his wife and two children.
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May 18th, 2023 04:06 PM |
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Nuke Nixon
Senior Member
Gender: Male
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Andy Rourke Dies: The Smiths Bassist Was 59
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Andy Rourke, the bass player for the Smiths, died today of pancreatic cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He was 59.
His death was announced by his former bandmate, the Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, who said in a statment on social media, “Andy will be remembered as a kind and beautiful soul and as a supremely gifted musician.”
The moody band from Manchester, England, whose jangly guitar sound, steady post-punk rhythms and mordantly humorous lyrics sung in a dark-of-night baritone by frontman Morrissey, was one of the most influential rock bands of the 1980s, scoring multiple hit records in the UK and becoming a mainstay in the U.S. of what was then the fledgling college radio circuit.
Rourke was a member of the band throughout its relatively short run of 1983-87, and added his melodic bass playing to all four of the band’s studio albums: The Smiths (1984), Meat Is Murder (1985), The Queen Is Dead (1986) and Strangeways, Here We Come (1987).
After the Smiths came to an acrimonious end — reportedly caused, at least in part, by Rourke’s drug use — years of lawsuits followed. But music did too: Rourke played bass, sometimes with Smiths drummer Mike Joyce, for such artists as Sinéad O’Connor, Pretenders and Badly Drawn Boy, among others.
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May 19th, 2023 04:00 PM |
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Nuke Nixon
Senior Member
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Jim Brown Dies: NFL Legend, Civil Rights Activist And Actor In ‘The Dirty Dozen’ & More Was 87
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Jim Brown, the NFL Hall of Famer and Civil Rights activist who turned to acting and appeared in films and TV shows ranging from The Dirty Dozen and I Spy to Draft Day, Mars Attacks! and The A-Team, died Thursday night in Los Angeles. His wife, Monique Brown, said in an Instagram post that he died peacefully, but she did not provide a cause.
Brown is considered among the greatest football players of all time. Drafted sixth overall in 1957 by the Cleveland Browns out of Syracuse University, his bruising running style redefined the running back position. As a rookie, he ran for 237 yards in a game against the Los Angeles Rams — a record that would stand until the 1970s.
Among his myriad NFL records and milestones, he was the first to top 100 career rushing touchdowns and set single-season and career rushing marks — all amid 12- or 14-game seasons. A three-time MVP, he also was Rookie of the Year, an eight-time All-Pro and eight-time rushing leader, retiring with a slew of records. His Browns won the NFL championship in 1964, three years before the first Super Bowl.
Brown still was playing football when he made his big-screen debut in the 1964 Richard Boone-led western Rio Conchos. After his NFL retirement, he appeared in an episode of the Bill Cosby-Robert Culp action series I Spy in 1967, and he had a key role that same in the star-packed World War II action-adventure pic The Dirty Dozen.
Directed by Robert Aldrich, it followed the story of a rebellious U.S. Army Major (Lee Marvin) who is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead them into a mass assassination mission of German officers. Its ensemble cast also includes Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas, Trini Lopez and Donald Sutherland.
That role – in which he died heroically after wiping out numerous Nazis — was followed by, among others, Ice Station Zebra in 1968. Other film roles would include Slaughter, Keenan Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Oliver stone’s Any Given Sunday. On TV, he had roles on such popular series as CHiPs, Knight Rider, T.J. Hooker, The A-Team and Arli$$, among many others.
Brown was the first Black man to do an interracial love scene in a major Hollywood movie — with Raquel Welch in the 1969 western 100 Rifles. It also starring another running back-turned-actor, Burt Reynolds.
Brown continued to make movies and guest on TV shows all the way into the 2010s, most recently in the 2014 Draft Day, which starred Kevin Costner as the Cleveland Browns’ general manager. Among his more famous roles was as retired boxing champ Byron Williams, who channeled an Egyptian pharaoh as he battled little green aliens in Tim Burton’s campy 1996 romp Mars Attacks!
Spike Lee’s 2002 documentary Jim Brown: All-American, was a retrospective of Brown’s career in football, showbiz and social activism.
Born on February 17, 1936, in St. Simons Island, GA, Brown was a main character in Regina King’s 2020 directorial debut film One Night in Miami, which is set on February 25, 1964 — the night a brash young Cassius Clay shocked the world by knocking out seemingly invincible Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion. In the film, while crowds of people swarm Miami Beach to celebrate the match, Clay – unable to stay on the island because of Jim Crow-era segregation laws – spends the evening at the Hampton House Motel in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood celebrating with three of his closest friends: Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Brown (played by Aldis Hodge). All of them were beginning to assert themselves in the Civil Rights movement.
In 1967, Brown organized the Cleveland Summit response to Muhammad Ali’s decision to defy the Vietnam War draft on religious grounds. Eleven of America’s top athletes — including Brown, Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — as well as Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes met with Ali, who had changed his name by then, to discuss his stance. The group met for hours, with Ali defending and explaining his decision, eventually winning over even the skeptics among them.
Afterward, all 11 athletes held a press conference and expressed their unified support for Ali. The Cleveland Summit has been called “a significant turning point for the role of the athlete in society” and “one of the most important civil rights acts in sports history” as well as a predecessor of the sports-centric protest movements such as the one spurred by Colin Kaepernick.
Brown also was a friend of Richard Pryor, whose legendary 1979 stand-up album Wanted: Live in Concert had a nearly five-minute bit about him. Among the classic lines are one about a time Brown bit off part of a defender’s finger. Pryor said: “Referee asked, ‘Why’d you do that?’ Jim said, ‘All outside this mask belongs to him; all inside belongs to me.” More great lines: “Some people have a death wish and like to f*ck with him. And that’s all it can be is a death wish. [Guy] says, ‘I can’t find a building to jump off of, let’s go up to Jim Brown’s house and f*ck with him.” Later, Pryor added that Brown “knew nothing about the backdown. You can’t just say to Jim, ‘If you don’t get outta the way, I’m gonna kick your ass.’ ‘Cause Jim will say, ‘Well, that’s an ass-whoopin’ I gotta take.”
Pryor also talked about Brown in 1982’s Live on the Sunset Strip, the comic’s first album after a near-fatal drug-fueled incident. Discussing a time Brown came to his house while Pryor was smoking crack, he said: “What you gonna do? You gonna get well, or you gonna end out friendship. What you gonna do?” Pryor said that Brown kept repeating the line but and almost got him to the hospital but had to leave — “and the pipe said, “Hey Rich, Jim’s gone…”
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May 20th, 2023 05:09 PM |
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Nuke Nixon
Senior Member
Gender: Male
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Pete Brown Dies: Lyricist For Cream’s ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ And ‘White Room’ Was 82
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Pete Brown, the cowriter for the massive Cream hits “Sunshine of Your Love” and “White Room” in the 1960s, died Friday in London of cancer. He was 82 and his death was confirmed on his official Facebook page.
“Pete was known to repeat the mantra ‘I come from a long line of worriers, not warriors.’ One of his other favorite expressions, passed down from Spike Hawkins, was ‘that’s life – up one minute, down the next twenty-five years,'” the Facebook tribute stated. “Despite his tendency towards Jewish pessimism, he lived the life of a warrior poet. He was proudly anti-establishment, and dedicated his life to his creative endeavors, in an uncompromising way.
Brown was asked by Cream drummer Ginger Baker to help write songs for Cream, a power trio featuring guitarist Eric Clapton and bass player Jack Bruce. He remained a collaborator with Bruce for decades after Cream’s relatively short life.
“In recent years (Brown) was featured in two documentary films: ‘White Rooms and Imaginary Westerns,’ a loose adaptation of his autobiography, and ‘The Cream Acoustic Sessions,’ a documentary on the re-working of many of the Cream songs,” the songwriter’s Facebook page said. “An accompanying album, ‘Heavenly Cream’ is due for release later this year.”
Survivors include his wife, Sheridan, daughter, Jessica Walker, and son, Tad.
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May 22nd, 2023 04:49 PM |
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Jaden_3.0
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Ray Stevenson RIP
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May 22nd, 2023 11:45 PM |
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Nuke Nixon
Senior Member
Gender: Male
Location: |
Ray Stevenson Dies: ‘Thor’, Vikings’ & ‘Rome’ Actor Was 58
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Ray Stevenson, a veteran actor whose dozens of film and TV credits include RRR, the Thor and Divergent films, Rome, Vikings and Star Wars animated series, died Sunday in Italy. He was 58. His reps at Independent Talent confirmed the news but did not provide details.
He most recently has been cast in historical drama 1242: Gateway to the West, taking over the lead role that originally was to be played by Kevin Spacey.
Stevenson played the main antagonist Scott Buxton in SS Rajamouli’s global box office smash RRR and is known for playing Volstagg in Marvel’s Thor franchise and Othere in History’s Vikings. He also has voiced Gar Saxon in the animated Star Wars series The Clone Wars and Rebels and was set to join Rosario Dawson in Disney+’s upcoming The Mandalorian spinoff Ahsoka.
Born on May 25, 1964, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, Stevenson began his screen career in the early 1990s, appearing in European TV series and telefilms. His first big-screen credit was opposite Helena Bonham Carter and Kenneth Branagh in Paul Greengrass’ 1998 drama The Theory of Flight. We went on to land roles in such features as Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004), Lexi Alexander’s Punisher: War Zone (2008), the Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli (2010) and Adam McKay’s The Other Guys (2010).
Stevenson’s next role would be among his most famous, playing Volstagg — an Asgardian member of the Warriors Three — in Marvel’s Branagh-directed Thor (2011). He would reprise the role in a pair of sequels: Alan Taylor’s Thor: The Dark World (2013) and Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok (2017).
He also co-starred as Porthos in Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers (2011), Firefly in Jon M. Chu’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) and Marcus in 2014’s Divergent and its sequel Insurgent the following year. He toplined Kill the Irishman, playing Danny Greene opposite Vincent D’Onofrio, Val Kilmer and Christopher Walken in Jonathan Hensleigh’s 2011 pic based on a true story.
On the small screen, along with Vikings and the Star Wars series, he starred opposite Poppy Montgomery in the French American series Reef Break, which aired one season on ABC in 2019. He also starred as Titus Pullo in the 2005-07 HBO series Rome and co-starred in the 2017 British miniseries Rellik. Stevenson also played Blackbeard on Starz’s Black Sails and guested in such series as Murphy’s Law, Dexter, Crossing Lines, Medici and The Spanish Princess.
More recently, he co-starred last year as Commander Jack Swimburne in Season 3 of the German TV series Das Boot.
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May 23rd, 2023 12:08 AM |
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rudester
Tommy
 Gender: Male
Location: United States |
Marlene Clark, 'Sanford and Son' Actress, Dead at 85: 'An Extraordinary Woman'
__________________
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May 27th, 2023 10:57 AM |
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