Robert Goulet has died while awaiting a lung transplant in Los Angeles. He was 73.Goulet was “the strikingly handsome singer with the rich baritone who soared to stardom on the Broadway stage in 1960 playing Lancelot in the original production of the hit musical Camelot,” says the The Los Angeles Times.
“Porter Wagoner, a country singer who mixed rhinestone suits, a towering cotton-candy pompadour and cornball jokes with direct, simple songs…”So begins the New York Times obituary of the longtime Grand Ole Opry star. He died of lung cancer on Sunday in Nashville.
The Boston Red Sox have swept the Colorado Rockies, 4-0, to win their second World Series in four years after an 86-year drought. Sorry, Babe Ruth! The colorful curse of the Bambino is a thing of the past.
Juicy tidbit about GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee: He comes from Hope, Arkansas, the very same small town that produced President Bill Clinton.
Two recent profiles: Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and college radio favorite Conor Oberst.Oberst fronts the folk-rock band Bright Eyes. Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas from 1996-2007, fronts a rock band called Capitol Offense. This being 2007, both bands have MySpace pages.
Singer Robert Goulet is gravely ill at the “sickbay to the stars,” Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.Goulet’s family says he has Interstitial Pulmonary Fibrosis, a “rare but rapidly progressive and fatal condition.” Goulet is hoping for a lung transplant if a donor can be found.
First Mister Ramen. Now Mister Rice-A-Roni.
New England quarterback Tom Brady had six touchdown passes yesterday. It was the most of his career and put him one short of the NFL record of seven, last achieved by Joe Kapp way back in 1969.
Deadpan comedian Joey Bishop has died in California at 89. Bloomberg has the obit.
Actress Deborah Kerr has died at age 86. She suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, according to the Associated Press.Kerr (pronounced “carr”) was a huge star in the 1950s. She shared a rolling-in-the-surf makeout scene with Burt Lancaster in From Here To Eternity that remains one of Hollywood’s most famous kisses. (See video below.)
DNA discoverer and Nobel Prize winner James Watson has ruffled feathers yet again with new comments about his fellow scientist Rosalind Franklin — the woman who took a crucial X-ray image that helped him make his big discovery.Watson told the Guardian that he thinks Rosalind Franklin was “partially autistic” and “either not a nice person, or just clueless.”
Tycoon Richard Branson says that his friend Steve Fossett is probably “no longer with us.”Fossett, the thrillseeking millionaire, disappeared in a small airplane over Nevada on September 3rd and has not been seen since. Branson made his remarks on NBC’s The Today Show, noting that “I think everybody involved has pretty well given up hope, sadly.”
Harvard formally installs its first female president today. She is Drew Gilpin Faust — Civil War historian, former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and thrillseeker.
Al Gore is going to Oslo.The former vice-president has been awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. He shares the prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.The Nobel committee calls Gore “probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding” of climate change and the measures needed to combat it.
October 16th is the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam war protest in which 67 American draft resisters burned their Selective Service cards at Boston’s Arlington Street Church (Unitarian). 214 more protesters placed their draft cards on offering plates held by ministers, including Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin.
Quirky (but Oscar-winning!) director Errol Morris has an irregular feature in The New York Times titled Zoom, in which he muses about photographs and their power to inspire or mislead.
The mysterious case of Steve Fossett has us looking through our Who2 case files of oddities: missing rafters, nutty hypnosis subjects, elusive mountain critters, and the like.Which bring us to the Boy in the Box, otherwise known as the Fox Chase Boy and certainly one of the oddest unsolved crime mysteries of 20th century America.
Aviator Steve Fossett remains missing in Nevada. It’s now been one month since he disappeared after leaving on a three hour tour from an airstrip near Reno.
It’s the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the event that excitable physicist Edward Teller called “A greater defeat for our country than Pearl Harbor.”