“(CNN) — Soul singer and arranger Isaac Hayes, who won Grammy awards and an Oscar for the theme from the 1971 action film “Shaft,” has died, sheriff’s officials in Memphis, Tennessee, reported Sunday.
Relatives found Hayes, 65, unconscious in his home next to a still-running treadmill, said Steve Shular, a spokesman for the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.
Paramedics attempted to revive him and took him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 2 p.m., the sheriff’s department said.
No foul play is suspected, the agency said in a written statement.”
Isaac Hayes and Bernie Mac just finished filming a movie with Samuel L. Jackson called Soul Men which is currently in post. Jackson had better watch his back. If I were him I’d be shakin’ in my platforms.
“And do you know what? This rampant ageism really hurts. I was in the hairdresser the other day (the demented, feverish need of all women past the age of 35 to have our roots retouched every 14 days is as oppressive as foot binding) when the young colourist dared to say: ‘The white regrowth is really obvious, I wonder you didn’t wear a hat!’
I would have been quite within my rights to opine: ‘Well, at least I’m not fat and wearing a ridiculous mini skirt and prone to varicose veins because I’m on my feet all day.’
I could have said all this, but I am sure if I had jaws would have dropped noiselessly around me.
When I challenged the young woman, wondering whether, as I was a paying client, she might have been a bit more tactful, she said, affronted and surprised: ‘Would you prefer it if I wasn’t honest?’
Well, yes, I would, actually, you dim cow. And I would be very grateful if designers and stylists and photographers and magazine editors would stop holding up 16-year-old children as some sort of ideal we should all aspire to.
Yes, teenage girls don’t have deep grooves running from nose to mouth, or thinning eyebrows and really stubborn white whiskers, but neither do they have wit, or conversation, or mystery, or opinions, or experience, or memories, or money.”
Got an email the other day from a fellow Spiraler with a link to a blog review by Russ Bickerstaff of “Wait Until Dark.” It came too late to help the show, but we sold well and got some awesome feedback anyway, even in spite of a weird review in the Freeman, so who the heck cares? ;D
I’m just really encouraged by the fact that the writer of this blog/review still saw the show even though it’d be too late to post anything about it before we closed. I mean– that’s pretty cool, right?
…the space at Bucketworks was reasonably accommodating for the final performance of Wait Until Dark. It was a hot night and the heat carried into the crowded space as Giffin appeared to give the curtain speech. After a brief and congenial introduction, the show started. The opening of the play faded in slowly, allowing for a cursory evaluation of the set, which was solidly constructed for a theatre company with limited funds. The space almost looked lived-in–very impressive for a show that had only been running for a couple of weekends. The story seeped-in around the edges of the set as Brian Richard and Randal T. Anderson began to set the tone in the role of a pair of ex-cons ho had broken into an apartment in Greenwich Village. Anderson was the rougher-sounding of the two, speaking in a voice that reminded me of a Brooklyn I’d never been to. Richards is a distinctively familiar face, having appeared in a number of shows between Spiral and RSVP over the course of the past few years. Here Richards is the tragic “nice guy” criminal who probably would’ve ended up in a more honest profession had things gone differently for him. Richards and Anderson have a natural rhythm for their dialogue that fits the familiarity of the characters well. It isn’t easy to construct familiarity between two actors onstage in a way that seems entirely natural, but Anderson and Richards pull it off quite nicely.
With the early elements of the plot established between Richards and Anderson, Matthew J. Patten appears onstage in the role of their employer. Patten towers over everyone else onstage as usual, but here his height really adds something–here he’s playing a savvy, sinister criminal and the height adds a physical dimension to a commanding stage presence. Patten’s mastermind outlines a job for the other two: they must find a doll filled with narcotics that one of the apartment’s residents unwittingly brought with him from a trip out of town.
Of course, the three men don’t find the doll right away and the couple who live in the apartment return home quit unaware of the three men or their interest in the apartment. The couple in question are Sam and Susy Hendrix. Sam (Nate Press) is a professional photographer. Susy (Ruth Arnell) is recovering from an accident that has left her blind. Press and Arnell have a palpable chemistry together that establishes itself early, which is good because it has to. Sam doesn’t end up in much of the play, so he has to make enough of an impression early on that we feel his effect on Susy for the rest of the play. Press does an excellent job of doing this without making his character seem too unduly charming or superhuman. In the role of the heroine, Arnell is probably onstage for longer than any other person. Arnell carries the center of the play with casual, well-executed grace. The plot that rushes over the stage seems a bit awkward and artificial, but Arnell does a breathtaking job of grounding the production in a very sympathetic emotional center.
Gloria Loeding rounds out the cast in the role of the girl from the apartment upstairs, also named Gloria. Loeding is playing a girl far younger than she is, but she’s carrying the role pretty well considering the character comes harrowingly close to being little more than a plot device. Her role in the central conflict of the story comes as little surprise, which probably has more to do with the script than the production.
The only major flaw in Spiral’s final production at Bucketworks was the title noun. The climax of the play is slowly bathed in darkness as Susy confronts the villains on her own terms. Though Hooker did an admirable job with the production’s lighting design, the space at Bucketworks spilled too much light … rendering messy, imperfect shades of darkness that felt relatively uncomfortable in the summer heat. …
Isn’t that cool?! :D
I know Brian, Randall and Gloria are in something together that opens in a couple months, and Matthew’s in something that opens around the same time. Don’t know what Doug and Nate are up to, but when I find out, and when I get the details on B, R, G and M I’ll definitely post it here so you can check these people out. They’re great. :D
And then today- or was it yesterday?- I also received an email with a link to Russ’s Year In Review pt. 2 blog post and man: I just can’t stop smiling. :D Part two starts off with: “Towards the end of last February, Spiral Theatre staged the single best romance of the year with Ruth Arnell and Ryan Dance in Butterflies Are Free…”
*grins*
Too cool, man.
And to Mr. Bickerstaff: Thanks. Really. Thank you so much. You’ve made my mom ‘n’ pop ‘n’ me smile very much this season with your reviews, and we’ve needed that. Thank you.
“While we bemoan the current oil crisis, I ran across an editorial that led me to research a more immediate threat. Ramped-up production of flat-panel displays means the material to make them will be ‘extinct’ by 2017. This goes for other electronics as well. Quoting: ‘The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.’ More links at the journal entry.”
That’s it! No more fancy copper work! Take your old screens out of storage! Stop… stockpiling gallium!
Or hurry up and develop a new, renewable way to make these things. o_O
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There’s a huge, black fly in here that’s trying to make me kill it. Shoo, fly. Don’t you see I have banana chips I need to be eating?
Anybody have a cool three mil they’d like to lay on me? ‘Cause I’ll totally take it.
Also: I cannot stand this woman. Come ON, Robert Rodriguez!! Think think think!! Mistake mistake mistake!!
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macromarco83: Hehe, that was hilarious :) Did give me a bunch of ideas though.
:D
69bonzo69: Lol, you could do with less milkshakes…
I got my dad’s internet up and running at his new office! Hooray! *shakes clasped hands heartily above head before remembering “I’m not a boxer!!”*
I’ve been thinking about Jake M. a lot lately for some reason. (Jake: How are you?)
And to my friend Sarah K. who has been having eventful days right and left lately: Keep on truckin’, little lady. You’re doing beautiful things oh so beautifully.
Time to wrap this up and frantically try to learn a few more lines before rehearsal tonight. We were supposed to be off book last night. Who had their script on stage for most of her scenes anyway? That’s right: ME! *sigh* It’s getting easier now that we’re not changing the set constantly anymore (I hope). I learn lines by doing them in the context of the scene on stage with the other actors, but when I’m constantly having to re-time stuff it just– ugh. It throws me. Because I am a big, incompetent, unprofessional boob.
“China’s rapid economic growth has stunned the world, making it a global power in a short span of years. It has also produced a staggering amount of environmental damage, which the world is also beginning to note. But it has also done something else spurred ordinary Chinese citizens to start organizing, sometimes in defiance of the government. In the process, they’ve created the beginnings of a civil society that could bring greater freedom overall inside the worlds largest dictatorship.”
“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”
– James Thurber
“Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.”
– Thomas Jones
For Sarah Desrosiers, meeting Bushra Noah was not a moment in her life that she would describe as especially memorable. Not only was it brief – lasting little more than ten minutes – but it was rapidly obvious to Sarah that Bushra was not the person for the junior stylist position she was trying to fill at her hairdressing salon.
Sarah’s reasoning? Quite simply that Bushra, a Muslim who wears a headscarf for religions reasons, had made it clear she would not be removing the garment even while at work. Sarah felt that a job requirement of any hairdresser was that the stylist’s hair would provide clients with a showcase of different looks. Especially one working in a salon such as hers, which specialises in alternative cuts and colours. Yet the ten minutes during which Sarah’s world collided with Bushra’s has resulted in an extraordinary employment battle, in which she was accused of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ discrimination.
For a year, Sarah has been facing financial ruin, due to a compensation claim for £34,000 brought by Bushra, 19, who has maintained she is due that figure after being turned down for a job at the Wedge salon in London’s King’s Cross.
In the event, the tribunal ruled this week that while Bushra’s claim of direct discrimination failed, her claim for indirect discrimination had succeeded. Sarah has therefore been ordered to pay £4,000 compensation by way of ‘injury to feelings’. Although this is a smaller sum than she’d feared she might have to hand over, Sarah, 32, is still outraged. ‘I am a small business and the bottom line is that this is not a woman who worked for me,’ says Sarah. …
(CNN) — Investigators are pursuing a variety of theories in their quest to unravel the mystery of six human feet that have washed up on the shores of the Canadian province of British Columbia in the last 11 months.
The sixth foot turned up Wednesday — a right foot in a man’s size 10 black Adidas athletic shoe, police said. As in the previous cases, however, immediate answers as to the foot’s origin eluded detectives. …
GLOUCESTER (WBZ) There’s a stunning twist to the sudden rise in teen pregnancies at Gloucester High School. 17 students there are expecting and, according to a published report, most of them became that way on purpose.
Time Magazine is reporting that nearly half of the girls confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. None of the girls is older than 16. …
Normally, the school has about four pregnancies per school year. …
A recent graduate who had a baby during her freshman year told Time she knows why the girls wanted to get pregnant. “They’re so excited to finally have someone to love them unconditionally,” Amanda Ireland, 18, said. “I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.” …
I have a neighbor who plays music with a hugely heavy bass line and he plays it so loudly I almost miss the mariachi music outside our windows in Canyon Country. I seriously want to close a door on his head. A couple of times.
According to the affidavit, the teen bride reported her husband “beat and hurt her whenever he got angry — hitting her in the chest and choking her — and that while such abuse was occurring, one of the other women in the home would hold her infant child.”
On March 30, the teen called again. She told workers she was last beaten Easter Sunday. Her husband told her if she tried to leave the ranch “she would be found and locked up.”
She said church members also told her if she left the ranch “outsiders will hurt her, force her to cut her hair, to wear makeup and [different] clothes and to have sex with lots of men.”
Boo-frickin’-hoo. Sounds like a trade up to me, man.
“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”
Oscar Wilde
“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Walt Whitman
“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.”
Mitch Hedberg
No one pinpointed what exactly about the melodrama revolving around scantily clad lifeguards was more acceptable for impressionable children than the iconic sitcom, but the National Telecommunications Commission reported receiving viewer complaints. …
Station general manager Perez Nahim told the Venezuelan newspaper Ultimas Noticias on Friday, when the change went into effect, that the station itself never received Simpsons-related complaints, so he hoped it would continue to have a strong following once it’s rescheduled.
“We are hoping it will continue to have a good rating, because The Simpsons worked very well – so much so that it had the highest levels of viewership for that morning timetable in the history of the channel,” Nahim said.
The work, known as The Vulcan Project, has already yielded a significant discovery: Previous CO2 estimates that used population as a proxy for emissions overestimated the Northeast’s greenhouse-gas generation, while underestimating the coal-heavy Southeast’s contribution.
“Only a very narrow range of appearance in women is considered attractive, and only appearance is considered attractive, and only attractiveness is considered valuable. … You shouldn’t make fun of the people for the way they look, no matter what they look like. You’re not a hero because you’ve said you find the way a popular person looks disgusting: you’re just a different subspecies of asshole.“
“There are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects on earth at any given moment. Seriously, that’s a real number. For every one of us, there are 1.5 billion bugs. But some of them are so horrifying, just one is too many. Here are five you want to avoid at all costs. …”
… Last year, the US box office totaled $9.63 billion, a 5.4% increase over 2006.
‘Piracy is so bad, according to the MPAA, that we need special legislation to target the dastardly college pirates who are destroying the business. It’s so bad that Weekly Reader subscribers will learn about the $7 billion a year “lost” to Internet piracy. It’s so bad that the MPAA wants ISPs to ignore years of common carrier law and the promises of “safe harbor” and start filtering their traffic, looking for copyright violations.
The real world isn’t quite this simple, of course. It turns out that the MPAA’s college numbers were off by a factor of three, a revelation that came after years of hiding the study’s methodology but continuing to lobby Congress with its numbers.
Carlos Edward Tello was facing more than 20 years in prison when he jumped from a ninth-floor balcony of the Central Justice Center in Santa Ana Tuesday afternoon. A suicide note was tucked into his clothing, authorities said.
WASHINGTON – Australian police on Wednesday said they have busted an international pedophilia network stretching from Australia to the United States and Europe and comprised of 2,500 “clients” who traded images of children being brutally sexually abused.
Authorities in Australia conducted raids and arrests on Feb. 29 not only in Australia and the U.S. but also in Britain and Germany, according to Reuters. Work on the sting, coordinated by the FBI and called Operation Achilles, has been ongoing since January 2006.
More than 40 children have been rescued and 22 members of the network been taken into custody as part of the operation, Reuters reported. The pedophilia ring had customers in at least 19 countries, and police confiscated thousands of videos, photos and computers in the bust. …
“It has been the most significant infiltration of an international child exploitation network by a law enforcement agency anywhere in the world,” said Queensland police superintendent Peter Crawford from the state sexual crimes squad.
The 25-year-old man beheaded the baby following a dispute with his sister and brother-in-law in front of stunned shoppers at the Al-Marhaba supermarket Tuesday morning, police say.
“The murderer was in a dispute with the boy’s mother and her husband,” a police officer who would not release his name told Arab News. “He chopped off the boy’s head in front of the mother to get back at her.” …
Jill Campbell and her husband Gary Campbell compiled evidence in 1999 that helped convict the director of an Ethiopian orphanage run by the Swiss charity Terre Des Hommes-Lausanne. The charity acknowledged the abuse took place, but brought a successful defamation case against the Campbells for their claims that the charity’s senior staff covered up the scandal.
Finding FARC An important victory for Colombia sparks a major diplomatic spat.
By Aaron Mannes
…[W]hy is Chavez taking the lead in bashing Colombia?
There are several possibilities:
First, the hard drives captured from the FARC camp are absolute dynamite. So far the documents reveal that the FARC was negotiating with the Ecuadorian government at a very high level, that the FARC had given Chavez $150,000 while he was imprisoned after his 1992 coup attempt, and received $300 million from Chavez in return. …
Second, Chavez is deterring possible Colombian attacks on FARC leaders in Venezuela. It has long been an open secret that the Venezuelan frontier regions were open territory to the FARC. …
Third, Chavez is looking for an international crisis to distract the Venezuelans from their domestic crisis. This is the oldest play in the book for dictators the world over. … Venezuela’s economy has been booming due to high oil prices, but there has been little trickle down. At the same time many of Chavez’s polices – particularly price controls on staples – have led to the predictable shortages and to popular discontent. …
Fourth: Hugo es loco. There have been many rumors about Hugo’s mental health and some of his recent acts (such as calling for the exhumation of his hero Simon Bolivar’s remains for tests to see if he was assassinated by the oligarchs) are increasingly loopy. …
… [A]s more intelligence about the FARC emerges from the late Raul Reyes’s hard drive, the nations of Latin America may be forced to make some tough decisions. Ecuador’s President Correa will have to decide if he wants to play Syria to Chavez’s Iran. But more broadly, the nations of Latin America, many of which have suffered from violence linked to the FARC, will have to decide if they can tolerate a state sponsor of terrorism in their midst or if that state should suffer the consequences of supporting terror.
Locutus of Blog 
