RIP Blinky the Clown

I'm not entirely sure whether my fear of clowns is naturally occurring or whether I should blame the media for making me think that everybody is afraid of clowns. Think of that show on Cartoon Network called Johnny Bravo - he was totally terrified of clowns. Now, every time I see a clown, I also see Johnny Bravo. But I'm not afraid of him. yet.


Anyway, before I was afraid of clowns, I'm pretty sure that I watched the Blinky the Clown Show on PBS.

This is like our own personal Mr. Rodgers.

LOCAL NEWS

Blinky the Clown, Denver TV icon for more than 40 years, dead at 91

POSTED:   08/27/2012 03:12:40 PM MDT
UPDATED:   08/28/2012 09:26:45 AM MDT

By Claire Martin
The Denver Post

Russell Scott better known as Blinky the Clown on the local kids TV program "Blinky's Fun Club," at his room at the Bear Creek Nursing Center in Morrison with portraits of him as Blinky on Thursday, July 28, 2011. (Cyrus McCrimmon, Denver Post file photo)

The Emmy award-winning television clown who wished Colorado children a"Happy Birf Day"every day for more than 40 years died with Russell "Blinky The Clown" Scott, who passed away Monday at age 91. His daughter said he died from complications of pneumonia.

Scott created a Coloradolegend and legacyasBlinky, a red-nosed, plaid-jacketed, pouty-mouthed goof whose gentle humor made awould-be thief temporarily reform his waysand whose safety tips prompted generations of children to look both ways before crossing the street.

From 1958 to 1998, countless children began their days as Blinky greeted them with his"Good morning/Glad to see you!"song. Scott's career as a clown grew from sketches he performed for children who came to see the elaborate miniature circus he maintained at his home.

"Dad was incredibly artistic," said daughter Linda Scott Ballas, who with her husband Steve, owns Steve's Snappin' Dogs in Denver.

"Everything was to scale, like one of those model train layouts. He hand-carved the elephants, a gorilla, put little motors under the plywood table that would move the animals in a circle, move the trapeze act and the barkers. It started out for me and my sister, but the more involved Dad got, we weren't actually allowed to touch it."

Scott's employer at a Colorado Springs Sears store heard about the circus layout and invited him to put it on display at the appliance department where he worked. Scott put together a clown he called Sears-O, who became the prototype forBlinky.

Children loved Sears-O. Local television producers, looking for stars for a new medium, invited Scott to host a children's show, but Scott didn't agree until Colorado Springs' KKTV offered to let him write and produce the show — asBlinky, not Sears-O. (A photo display at Steve's Snappin' Dogs shows the progression of clown faces that Scott developed in the transition from Sears-O toBlinky.)

Scott, who sewed his own puppets forthe show, went on to produce and host nearly 10,000 shows over four decades, moving from Colorado Springs to Denver's KWGN-TV in 1966. From the moment he walked into the TV studio, he wasBlinky, not Scott, handing out the Blinky's Fun Club Safety Tips cards that became one of his trademarks.

"He gave me one of his safety tips cards when I first went into his antiques shop," said Andrew Novick, who still emails an MP3 of Blinky's birthday song each year to a friend.

When the Denver County Fair made its debut in 2011, promoter Dana Cain brought Blinky from Bear Creek nursing home in Morrison to host a Blinky's Fun Club Reunion.

By then, the earliest members of Blinky's Fun Club had children, and sometimes grandchildren, of their own. Some parents,fortunate enough to be among the handful of childrenfeatured on stage during the daily birthday song, were even luckier to escort their own children to those special stage seats. (At that point, the elder Blinky veterans found new meaning in his safety tip to "Mind Mom and Dad.")

"Blinky's Fun Club"went off the airin 1998, silencing Blinky's staccato voice. He continued to run his South Broadway shop, which drew some celebrities, including a member of ZZ Top — "Dad didn't have a clue which one he was, and they all look alike" Ballas said — and Michael Jackson, who he did recognize, securing an autograph.

Among his favorite stories was one about a man who talked him into staying open until midnight "for a very special person."

"That evening, I made some coffee and waited until about 12 o'clock," he recounted in a2011 Denver Post interview.

"Pretty soon, this car pulled up. Not a fancy car. But Liberace stepped out," Scott said. "He came into my store and bought a few things for his own antiques store in California."

Scott operated his store until 2008, when hesold itand auctioned off its merchandise.

Another one of his favorite stories from that period was about a note he discovered when he came to work one summer morning.

"I opened it up," Scott recounted in the same Denver Post interview, "and it said, 'Dear Blinky, I was in your store a few days ago. I was coming in with the intentions of robbing you at gunpoint. But when I heard you were the real Blinky, I said to myself, 'I can't rob this person. I sat onBlinky'slap when I was 5 years old.' "

Services are pending. Survivors include daughter Linda Scott Ballas of Denver and son Larry Scott of Littleton; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Daughter Susan Scott Besaw preceded him in death.

Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin

Blinky The Clown,, who won Colorado children's hearts and celebrated their birthdays for nearly 40 years, died Aug. 27 with his creator, Russell Scott, who passed away at age 91.

Read more:Blinky the Clown, Denver TV icon for more than 40 years, dead at 91 - The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21411432/blinky-clown-denver-tv-icon-more-than-40#ixzz24reZ3epW
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RIP Helen Gurley Brown

It's a very sad day for all women out there. Helen Gurley Brown has died at the age of 90.
Ms. Brown wrote "Sex and the Single Girl" - which I haven't read but will add to my list - and also edited Cosmopolitan for over thirty years. Ms. Brown taught women quite a bit about sexual empowerment through her book and the magazine, an education that surely benefited members of both sexes.

Helen Gurley Brown, Who Gave Cosmopolitan Its Purr, Is Dead at 90

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Marty Lederhandler/Associated PressHelen Gurley Brown in 1997.

Helen Gurley Brown, the former editor of Cosmopolitan who transformed the magazine in the 1960s into a source of sexual empowerment for women, died Monday morning.

A spokesman for the Hearst Corporation, which publishes Cosmopolitan, said that Ms. Brown, 90, died after being hospitalized briefly at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital.

Ms. Brown, who wrote “Sex and the Single Girl,” took over at the magazine in 1965, giving it its sexually frank tone. She remained editor until 1997 and is still listed as editor in chief for Cosmopolitan International on all mastheads. Until her death, Ms. Brown was known for coming into her pink corner office nearly every day.

The Hearst statement reads: “It would be hard to overstate the importance to Hearst of her success with Cosmopolitan, or the value of the friendship many of us enjoyed with her. Helen was one of the world’s most recognized magazine editors and book authors, and a true pioneer for women in journalism — and beyond.”

source: The New York Times 

RIP Baby Beluga

Normally I don't really read the Google alerts that come through my inbox every day. (I know, what's the point of having them then?)

Today, I got really sad to hear that the whale who inspired the song currently stuck in my head as a result of reading the words, "Baby Beluga", has died of cancer at the age of 46 (46?!).

This is sad. Very sad. Like Free Willy sad. (Was that movie sad, or was I just an over-emotional child who, as an adult, doesn't remember the plot?)

Singer Raffi Says Goodbye To His ‘Baby Beluga’

August 8, 2012 Tazi Phillips

(WHALE NEWS) The beluga whale named Kavna that inspired singer Raffi to create the great children’s song “Baby Beluga” passed away at the Vancouver Aquarium on Monday. The 46-year-old whale is thought to have suffered from cancer in her last years. Although Kavna did not swim so wild and swim so free like the song’s memorable lyrics, she touched a generation through one brief yet powerful encounter with the children’s singer and advocate. Read on for the profound impact this beautiful whale had on the world. — Global Animal

Photo credit: The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post, Allie Compton

Kavna, the beluga whale that inspired the beloved children’s song “Baby Beluga” by Raffi, passed away from a possible cancer-related illness on Monday afternoon at the Vancouver Aquarium.

The 46-year-old whale spent her life in captivity, according to the Vancouver Sun, but lived well beyond the life expectancy of her species. Aquarium workers told The Canadian Press that belugas typically live 25 to 30 years, and that Kavna may have been even older than her estimated age.

After conducting a preliminary autopsy, aquarium veterinarian Dr. Martin Haulena told reporters that he uncovered a series of cancerous lesions that indicated a recent and quickly spreading cancer.

“Right now, the lesions are most consistent with a cancer, and that is unfortunately a disease we associated with age,” said Haulena, “So we’re looking at a great life for a great whale who had almost nothing wrong with her.”

Kavna had been with the aquarium since 1975. Four years after her arrival, prolific children’s singer/songwriter Raffi Cavoukian visited the aquarium. His interaction with Kavna inspired him to write “Baby Beluga,” a song about a baby whale who swims and plays at sea: 

Baby beluga in the deep blue sea,

Swim so wild and you swim so free.

Heaven above and the sea below,

And a little white whale on the go.

Raffi recalled his first interaction with Kavna in an interview with News 1130 in Vancouver.

“The folks at the aquarium brought me to poolside and the trainer helped me to play with Kavna. Kavna even came out of the water and placed a gentle, graceful kiss on my cheek and I couldn’t stop talking about it for a couple of weeks!”

Raffi took to Twitter Monday to express his condolences, posting this picture of Kavna and him from 1980:

Raffi Cavoukian@Raffi_RC

Kavna & me in1980. in '81 CBC TV did a 30min special: Raffi, Belugas & Friends. note Baby Beluga button#belugagrads pic.twitter.com/mqCrTSAB

7 Aug 12

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“She was just so beautiful,” Raffi told the Sun, “She was so playful and she had a very pure spirit and you could swear she smiled at you.”

“On a day like this, I’m mostly thinking about the joy of knowing Kavna and the profound impact of the close encounter that would not have been possible in any other way,” he told News 1130.

More Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/baby-beluga-raffi-whale-dies_n_1755750.html

RIP Marvin Hamlisch

MARVIN HAMLISCH | 1944-2012

Sensationally Decorated Maestro of Film and Stage

By ROB HOERBURGER

Published: August 7, 2012

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Marvin Hamlisch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who imbued his movie and Broadway scores with pizazz and panache and often found his songs in the upper reaches of the pop charts, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 68 and lived in New York.

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Marvin Hamlisch in 2009.

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A scene from the final performance of the Broadway musical "A Chorus Line" in 1990. Marvin Hamlisch won a Tony Award for his score to the show.

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Marvin Hamlisch, right, at the piano with the lyricist Howard Ashman in 1986.

He collapsed on Monday after a brief illness, a family friend said.

For a few years starting in 1973, Mr. Hamlisch spent practically as much time accepting awards for his compositions as he did writing them. He is one of a handful of artists to win every major creative prize, some of them numerous times, including an Oscar for “The Way We Were” (1973, shared with the lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman), a Grammyas best new artist (1974), and a Tony and a Pulitzer for “A Chorus Line” (1975, shared with the lyricist Edward Kleban, the director Michael Bennett and the book writers James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas Dante). His omnipresence on awards and talk shows made him one of the last in a line of celebrity composers that included Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim.

Mr. Hamlisch, bespectacled and somewhat gawky, could often appear as the stereotypical music school nerd — in fact, at 7, he was the youngest student to be accepted at the Juilliard School — but his appearance belied his intelligence and easy banter with the likes of Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin. And his melodies were sure-footed and sometimes swashbuckling. “One,” from “A Chorus Line,” with its punchy, brassy lines, distills the essence of the Broadway showstopper. The show started as a series of taped workshops with Broadway dancers, then evolved into a show that opened at the Public Theater in 1975 and moved to Broadway later that year. It ran for 6,137 performances, the most of any Broadway musical until it was surpassed by “Cats.”

“I have to keep reminding myself that ‘A Chorus Line’ was initially considered weird and off the wall,” Mr. Hamlisch told The New York Times in 1983. “You mustn’t underestimate an audience’s intelligence.” The composer Alan Jay Lerner called “A Chorus Line” “the great show business story of our time.”

Mr. Hamlisch had a long association with Barbra Streisandthat began when, at 19, he became a rehearsal pianist for her show “Funny Girl.” Yet he told Current Biography in 1976 that Ms. Streisand was reluctant to record what became the pair’s greatest collaboration, “The Way We Were.”

“I had to beg her to sing it,” he said. “She thought it was too simple.”

Mr. Hamlisch prevailed, though, and the song became a No. 1 pop single, an Oscar winner and a signature song for Ms. Streisand. They continued to work together across the decades — Mr. Hamlisch was the musical director for her 1994 tour and again found himself accepting an award for his work, this time an Emmy.

Ms. Streisand said in a statement through her publicist that the world will always remember Mr. Hamlisch’s music, but that it was “his brilliantly quick mind, his generosity, and delicious sense of humor that made him a delight to be around.”

Mr. Hamlisch had his second-biggest pop hit with “Nobody Does It Better,” written with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager and the theme from the James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me.” Carly Simon’s recording of the song reached No. 2 in 1977. Thom Yorke, the lead singer of the band Radiohead, which has performed the song in concert more recently, called it “the sexiest song ever written.”

Yet for all his pop success — he and Ms. Bayer Sager also wrote a No. 1 soul hit for Aretha Franklin, “Break It to Me Gently” — Mr. Hamlisch’s first love was writing for theater and the movies. His score for “The Sting,” which adapted the ragtime music of Scott Joplin, made him a household ubiquity in 1973.

Despite the acclaim he received, he often said he thought his background scores were underappreciated. He said he would love for an audience to “see a movie once without the music in it” to appreciate how the experience changed. He would go on to write more than 40 movie scores.

Marvin Frederick Hamlisch was born June 2, 1944, in New York to Jewish parents. His father, Max, was an accordionist, and at age 5 Mr. Hamlisch was reproducing on the piano songs he heard on the radio; his entrance into Juilliard soon followed. According to his wife, Terre Blair, he was being groomed as “the next Horowitz,” but when all the doors were closed and everyone was gone he would play show tunes. He performed some concerts and recitals as a teenager at Town Hall and other New York sites, but soon gave up on the idea of being a full-time performer.

“Before every recital, I would violently throw up, lose weight, the veins on my hands would stand out,” he told Current Biography.

He had no such reaction, though, when his song “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” became a Top 20 hit in 1965 for Lesley Gore, when Mr. Hamlisch was 21. The movie producer Sam Spiegel heard him playing piano a few years later at a party and as a result Mr. Hamlisch scored his first film, “The Swimmer.”

Mr. Hamlisch soon moved to Los Angeles, and the successes snowballed. But he remained a New Yorker through and through. He once said he liked New York because it was the one place “where you’re allowed to wear a tie.”

Mr. Hamlisch is survived by Ms. Blair, a television broadcaster and producer, whom he married in 1989.

After “A Chorus Line,” Mr. Hamlisch scored another Broadway hit, “They’re Playing Our Song,” based on his relationship with Ms. Bayer Sager, in 1979. It ran for 1,082 performances. After that, the accolades subsided but the work didn’t. He wrote two more Broadway scores in the ’80s, for “Jean Seberg” (1983) and “Smile” (1986). His most steady work continued to come from the movies. He wrote the background scores for “Ordinary People,” “Sophie’s Choice” and, most recently, “The Informant.” His later theater scores included “The Goodbye Girl” (1993) and “Sweet Smell of Success” (2002) and “Imaginary Friends” (2002). He had also completed the scores for an HBO movie based on the life of Liberace, “Behind the Candelabra,” and for a musical based on the Jerry Lewis film “The Nutty Professor,” which opened in Nashville last month.

According to his biography his official Web site, Mr. Hamlisch held the title of principal pops conductor for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Pasadena Symphony and Pops, the Seattle Symphony and the San Diego Symphony.

In more recent years, Mr. Hamlisch also became an ambassador for music, traveling around the country and performing and giving talks at schools. He often criticized the cuts in arts education.

“I don’t think the American government gets it,” he said during an interview at the Orange County High School of the Arts in Santa Ana, Calif. “I don’t think they understand it’s as important as math and science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of certain things. You don’t have to become the next great composer. It’s just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things. It’s part of being a human being.”

Despite all the awards he received over the years, Ms. Blair said Mr. Hamlisch was always most focused, and most excited about, whatever current project he had going. And, she said, he was always appreciative of his gift: “He used to say, ‘It’s easy to write things that are so self-conscious that they become pretentious, that have a lot of noise. It’s very hard to write a simple melody.’ ”