Rock star Jon Lord, who founded the band Deep Purple, died yesterday aged 71.

The keyboard player, who co-wrote many of the heavy rock band’s legendary songs including Smoke On The Water, had pancreatic cancer.

A statement posted on his website yesterday declared that Lord – who had said that writing music had been therapy through his illness – had passed ‘from Darkness to Light’.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/ar ... z20rbM3a4L

Tom Davis, one half of the famed "Franken & Davis" duo on the original SNL, has passed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/arts/television/tom-davis-saturday-night-live-comedy-writer-dies-at-59.html

Mr. Davis never lost the quirky, original voice that helped shape the show, and in his last months he referred to death as “deanimation.” He deanimated on Thursday at his home in Hudson, N.Y., at age 59. The cause was throat and neck cancer, his wife, Mimi Raleigh, said.

Sylvia Woods, who started famed Harlem restaurant that carries her name, dies at 86

NEW YORK — The founder of the famed Harlem soul food restaurant Sylvia’s has died. Sylvia Woods was 86.

Her granddaughter Tren’ness Woods-Black said Woods died Thursday afternoon at her home in Mount Vernon, N.Y. She had been dealing with Alzheimer’s disease for the past few years.

Woods and her husband Herbert started Sylvia’s Restaurant in 1962. The restaurant became a fixture, with tourists and locals coming there for cornbread, ribs, collard greens, fried chicken and other staples of Southern cooking.

Woods-Black said her grandmother had officially stepped down from running the restaurant when she was 80, leaving it in the hands of her children and grandchildren.

Some of Sylvia's cooking can be bought canned. I recommend one of the greens with homemade cornbread. There is some in my pantry now. A little ham hock or bacon will do wonders for the dish.

Alexander Cockburn, a famous leftist writer and journalist, died Friday evening in Germany after going through a two year battle with cancer that was largely kept a secret.

Only a few people close to Cockburn knew about his condition according to Jeffrey St. Clair, a "friend and comrade" of Cockburn's. St. Clair broke the news of Cockburn's passing on CounterPunch, the newsletter and website the two co-edited since 1994. "Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn’t want the disease to define him. He didn’t want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. He didn’t want to blog his own death as Christopher Hitchens had done," St. Clair writes of his friend.

Cockburn wrote columns for CounterPunch, The Nation, and First Post right up until his death. "In one of Alex’s last emails to me, he patted himself on the back (and deservedly so) for having only missed one column through his incredibly debilitating and painful last few months," says St. Clair. Cockburn also wrote for The New York Review of Books, Esquire, the Village Voice, among other places over the course of his career. Cockburn founded the Voice's on-again-off-again media reporting column "Press Clips" during his tenure with the paper, before leaving under murky circumstances in 1983. Cockburn finished writing his memoirs and a short book on his death bed, both of which CounterPunch plans to publish within the next year.

Alex kept the radical faith, steadily, constantly, going to the ends of the earth to cover the next story of revolt and revolution, going to the far corners of the United States to uncover the news that Americans were not taking it anymore. If a crowd had gathered, and if they were raising the red flag, or any flag of protest, that was enough for Alex. He would report their struggle, usually in The Nation, but also in the pages of The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Esquire, The Village Voice and (for a brief period as remarkable as it was ironic) the Wall Street Journal.

Alex chose as the title and the underlying theme of his finest collection of essays, The Golden Age Is In Us, a line from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. In Tristes Tropiques Levi-Strauss wrote:

If men have always been concerned with only one task—how to create a society fit to live in—the forces which inspired our distant ancestors are also present in us. Nothing is settled; everything can still be altered. What was done but turned out wrong, can be done again. The Golden Age, which blind superstition had placed behind [or ahead of] us, is in us.

Alex taught me, he taught us all, that those were not blandly optimistic words. They are demanding. They suggest that we have fewer excuses than we thought, that this is the place, that now is the time and that there is truth in the Gandhian maxim that we are the people we’ve been waiting for.

She was Gay, ya know?

Making the RWNJs crazy tonight.

She was Gay, ya know?

Making the RWNJs crazy tonight.

A pretty good profile piece about Sally Ride from 1999:

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/aug/29 ... ne/tm-4723

Although the cause of Hemsley's death is unclear, TMZ reports that the actor passed away at his El Paso, Texas, home.
Hemsley made a name for himself as George Jefferson, carrying the iconic sitcom for a decade and earning a 1984 Emmy nomination for his work as lead actor in a comedy series. The actor went on to appear on a handful of other classic television shows including "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and "The Hughleys." He also starred as Deacon Ernest Frye on the NBC series "Amen" for several years.
The Philadelphia born and raised sitcom actor was also an accomplished singer, recording the 1989 single "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" and releasing his R&B album, "Dance," in 1992.