Rest In Peace

[MN-Skeptic]

I'm going to have to cue up a couple of the Smothers Brothers comedy albums to play on the drive down to my brother's this weekend!

[Flatpoint High]

I'm going to have to cue up a couple of the Smothers Brothers comedy albums to play on the drive down to my brother's this weekend!

[Flatpoint High]

Draft Dodger Rag

[RTH10260]

[Estiveo]

Tom Wilkinson, 75

Estiveoshot_20231230_102630.jpg (77.83 KiB) Viewed 25469 times

https://deadline.com/2023/12/tom-wilkin ... 235683717/

[Dr. Ken]

One of my favorite of his roles

[AndyinPA]

RIP. I thought he was a great actor.

[poplove]

Shecky Greene, Legendary Las Vegas Headliner, Dies at 97
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv ... 235777187/

[RVInit]

Terrible losses, all three. I loved the Smothers Brothers show. Tom Wilkinson was such a gifted actor, I would watch a movie just because I saw that he played a part. And Shecky Greene was one of the real greats.

[AndyinPA]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituari ... izen-dies/

Sidney M. Wolfe, a doctor turned consumer activist who battled drug companies, lobbyists and regulators during a nearly five-decade crusade against ineffective, risky and overpriced medications that made him a hero to patient advocacy groups and an implacable foe to anyone who opposed him, died Jan. 1 at his home in Washington. He was 86.

The cause was a brain tumor, said his wife, Suzanne Goldberg.

Dr. Wolfe did not practice medicine for long and instead spent most of his career with the Health Research Group, part of the Washington-based Public Citizen organization founded by consumer activist Ralph Nader.

[Volkonski]

Glynis Johns dies at 100; award-winning actress was best known for role in ‘Mary Poppins’

[Flatpoint High]

Glynis Johns dies at 100; award-winning actress was best known for role in ‘Mary Poppins’

[Volkonski]

David Soul: Starsky & Hutch actor dies aged 80

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment- ... press.coop

His wife, Helen Snell said he died on Thursday "after a valiant battle for life in the loving company of family.

"He shared many extraordinary gifts in the world as actor, singer, storyteller, creative artist and dear friend," she said.

"His smile, laughter and passion for life will be remembered by the many whose lives he has touched."

[Kendra]

I remember him better in Here Comes the Brides.

[Slim Cognito]

Me too!!

[RTH10260]

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth
Evangelist of lean software and devisor of 9 programming languages and an OS was 89

Liam Proven
Thu 4 Jan 2024 // 17:45 UTC

Swiss computer scientist Professor Niklaus Wirth died on New Year's Day, roughly six weeks before what would have been his 90th birthday.

Wirth is justly celebrated as the creator of the Pascal programming language, but that was only one step in a series of important languages and research projects. Both asteroid 21655 and a law of computer design are named after him. He won computer-science boffinry's highest possible gong, the Turing Award, in 1984, and that page has some short English-language clips from a 2018 interview.

more

► Show Spoiler

Niklaus Emil Wirth was born in Wintherthur in Switzerland, the day after St Valentine's Day 1934. In 1959 he got his bachelor's degree from ETH Zürich, to which he returned later in life and from which much of his important research emerged.

He changed countries several times in his life – his 1960 master's degree was from the Université Laval in Canada, and his 1963 doctorate from UC Berkeley* – the home of Berkeley Unix, or BSD as it's usually known. He stayed in California for the next four years as assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University. During this time, he worked on his first two programming languages: Euler in 1965, and PL/360, published in 1968.

Partly as a result of this work, he was invited into the Working Group planning the next iteration of the ALGOL programming language, to replace ALGOL 60. Along with British computer scientist Sir Tony Hoare, he presented a proposal called ALGOL-W. However, this was rejected in favour of a more complex proposal from Adriaan van Wijngaarden, which became ALGOL-68.

As described in C H Lindsey's History of ALGOL-68 [PDF], when the ALGOL-W proposal was rejected, Wirth resigned from the committee, contributing a strong "Closing Word" to the November 1968 Algol Bulletin 29, containing gems such as:

I pulled out my copy of the draft report on ALGOL-68 and showed it to her. She fainted.

Instead, Wirth took his proposal, changed it to be somewhat less compatible with ALGOL, and released it in 1970 under the name Pascal.

even more at https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/ ... _obituary/

[RTH10260]

Off Topic

personal note: I studied a couple of semesters under Wirth in Zürich (Switzerland) just after he had developed Pascal in the early 1970s. At the time I had to enroll for Mathematics to be able to take those courses. It was still some time until Software Engineering became a track of its own.

[RTH10260]

Franz Anton Beckenbauer (German pronunciation: [fʁants ˈʔantoːn ˈbɛkn̩ˌbaʊɐ] ⓘ; 11 September 1945 – 7 January 2024) was a German professional football player and manager. Nicknamed "Der Kaiser" (lit. 'The Emperor'),[1][2] Beckenbauer was a versatile player who started out as a midfielder, but made his name as a central defender. He is often credited as having invented the role of the modern sweeper (libero).[3] With success at club and international level, he is one of nine players to have won the FIFA World Cup, the European Champions Cup, and the Ballon d'Or.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Beckenbauer

[AndyinPA]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituari ... ners-dead/

Joyce Randolph, an actress best remembered for playing Trixie Norton, the disapproving Brooklynite wife of a sewer worker, on the influential 1950s variety-show skit and sitcom “The Honeymooners,” died Jan. 13 at her home in Manhattan. She was 99.

[Dr. Ken]

I missed posting about it earlier last week but Adan Canto passed away this week. He was 42. He died of appendix cancer last week on the 8th. His most recent credit was in the show the cleaning lady. But you also might know him from Designated Survivor as the chief of staff Aaron Shore






Also Sunspot from Xmen: Days of Future Past

[Dr. Ken]

Alec Musser - All My Children, grown ups

[MN-Skeptic]

Peter Schickele, Composer and Gleeful Sire of P.D.Q. Bach, Dies at 88

Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died on Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.

[Volkonski]

[northland10]

Peter Schickele, Composer and Gleeful Sire of P.D.Q. Bach, Dies at 88

Peter Schickele, an American composer whose career as a writer of serious concert music was often eclipsed by that of his antic alter ego, the thoroughly debauched, terrifyingly prolific and mercifully fictional P.D.Q. Bach, died on Tuesday at his home in Bearsville, a hamlet outside Woodstock, N.Y. He was 88.

Noticed that earlier today:

[Tiredretiredlawyer]