more sad news

rest in peace, Maynard G. Krebs... we'll all miss you, little buddy



Bob Denver, known to generations as TV's Gilligan, dead at 70
JOHN ROGERS

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy castaway Gilligan on the 1960s TV show Gilligan's Island made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died. He was 70.

He died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer, his agent, Mike Eisenstadt, said Tuesday. His wife, Dreama, and children Patrick, Megan, Emily and Colin were with Denver, who also had undergone quadruple heart bypass surgery earlier this year.

"He was my everything and I will love him forever," Dreama Denver said in a statement.

Denver's signature role was Gilligan, but when he took the role in 1964 he was already widely known to TV audiences for another iconic character, Maynard G. Krebs, the bearded beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman's Dobie in the The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963.

Krebs, whose only desire was to play the bongos and hang out at coffee houses, would shriek every time the word "work" was mentioned in his presence.

Gilligan on the other hand was industrious but inept. And his character was as lovable as he was inept. Viewers embraced the skinny kid in the Buster Brown haircut and white sailor hat. So did the Minnow's skipper, Jonas Grumby, who was played by Alan Hale Jr., and who always referred to his first mate affectionately as "little buddy."

"As silly as it seems to all of us, it has made a difference in a lot of children's lives," Dawn Wells, who played castaway Mary Ann Summers, once said. "Gilligan is a buffoon that makes mistakes, and I cannot tell you how many kids come up and say, 'But you loved him anyway.' "

TV critics were less kind, dismissing the show as inane. But after it was cancelled by CBS in 1967, it found new audiences over and over in syndicated reruns and reunion films, including 1981's The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island. (It also led to the recent TBS reality series The Real Gilligan's Island.)

One of the most recent of those films was 2001's Surviving Gilligan's Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three Hour Tour in History, in which other actors portrayed the original seven-member cast while three of the four surviving original members, including Denver, narrated and reminisced.

Gilligan's Island writer-creator Sherwood Schwartz insisted that the show had social meaning along with the laughs: "I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications."

Denver went on to star in other TV series, including The Good Guys and Dusty's Trail, as well as to make numerous appearances in films and TV shows.

But he never escaped the role of Gilligan, so much so that in one of his top 10 lists - "the top 10 things that will make you stand up and cheer" - Late Show host David Letterman once simply shouted out Denver's name to raucous applause.

"It was the mid-'70s when I realized it wasn't going off the air," Denver told The Associated Press in 2001, noting then that he enjoyed checking EBay each day to keep up on the prices Gilligan's Island memorabilia were fetching.

"I certainly didn't set out to have a series rerun forever, but it's not a bad experience at all," he added.

just do it!

fyi folks, what a great idea! Spread the word!!

Air America Public Voicemail - 1-866-217-6255

Air America Radio's Public Voicemail is a way for disconnected people to communicate in the wake of Katrina. Here's how it works:

Call the toll-free number above, enter your everyday phone number, and then record a message. Other people who know your everyday phone number (even if it doesn't work anymore) can call Emergency Voicemail, enter the phone number they associate with you, and hear your message.

You can also search for messages left by people whose phone numbers you know.
Air America Radio will leave Public Voicemail in service for as long as this crisis continues. You can call it whenever you are trying to locate someone, or if you are trying to be found.

Obviously, for this to work, people need to know about it so please forward the number to as many people as you can. You can find out more about Katrina and the affected areas at www.airamericaradio.com.

Air America Radio brings you Emergency VoiceMail in conjunction with VoodooVox.

Also, if you’re looking for a way to help personally, MoveOn.org Civic Action, formerly known as MoveOn.org, launched a new web site yesterday, http://hurricanehousing.org/ asking its 3.3 million members and the public to post any available housing for the thousands of people left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. The organization will directly connect evacuees with volunteer hosts, and also provide the housing information to the Red Cross and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

fatigue

The more coverage of Katrina that I hear / read / watch, the more sick and angry I get. This morning, the guy's on Morning Sedition played a lengthy interview that Mayor Ray Nagin gave to a local New Orleans radio station. The poor man was so pissed off and frustrated that he, and the chap conducting the interview, both broke down in tears at the end of it. What kind of a paper bag does Bush have over his head. It's sickening that he's allowed things to escalate into the disaster it's become. Mayor Nagin should have the tools he needs to do his job. Sadly, it's a situation that, not only did they not give the man his tools, they cut off his hands to add insult to injury.

Where were the National Guard last Saturday and Sunday helping with the evacuation? Why didn't they have trucks and buses available to transport the folks who don't have vehicles? Why aren't they air dropping food, water, medical supplies, etc. into New Orleans? They can do it other places in the world, why not in their own back yard? We all know that the Bush administration doesn't give a flying fuck about the poor and that is so sadly obvious now. How many more people have to kill themselves, or be murdered, or be raped or die from a lack of medical attention in New Orleans. These deaths and acts of violence were completely preventable, had the Bush government acted last week.

It would not surprise me one bit, if this were the final straw that toppled the Bush government. People of all political stripes in the states are furious about this, after all, these are human beings we are talking about. Being poor or elderly or ill does not mean that your life is worth less that someone who was able to get out of town last weekend.

I know that being angry and frustrated isn't healthy or productive. Right now, I guess all we can do is help out in any way we can, to try to make a horrible situation better.

do what you can

I'm going to leave a link up, to the Canadian Red Cross up for a while, like I did after the Tsunami in south east Asia. My heart has been breaking, watching the coverage of the Hurricane on television. Worse than that, reading the stories from the survivors that are coming out. I absolutely love New Orleans, it is one of my favourite cities in the entire world, it's just magical. Seeing the photos of it underwater is totally surreal. I cannot imagine how terrifying this must be for the thousands of people of still stuck there. I just hope that the aid agencies, relief workers, engineers, medical personnel, etc are able to safely get in there and help these folks, it's such a desperate situation.

In other news, Klaus succumed to his injuries sometime last night. He was very very weak last night but I had hoped that he still might bounce back. I think he had just stopped eating, poor little guy. Anyway, he's in fishy heaven now and the other two little fish (Feargal and Ani) are living it up in the new tank.

weather report

Today at work, I received no fewer than four copies of the same email, warning about an "impending storm." Apparently, it's supposed to rain tonight, and get windy, some kind of remnant from Katrina. I have a feeling that folks around here are going to be all kinds of disappointed if we don't lose power tonight. It's odd. In January 1998, our town was in the path of that huge ass ice storm that pounded Ontario and Quebec. Personally, I lost power at my apartment for a week. Fortunately, after four days, I retreated to the suburbs where my parents had power (they had, however, lost their cable for a day or so).

I think that everyone's been watching too much cable news coverage of what's happening to those poor folk down in Louisiana and Mississippi and they fear it could happen up here. I hate to tell them but it's not. The worst thing that could happen is this 2 inches of rain they are forecasting could hit within a two hour period and the downtown core's toilets will be backed up. It's gross and it's messy but it's happened before during summer storms and it'll likely happen again.

Now, just in case we do some big flood, we have picked up the boxes of cd's and lp's that were piled on the basement floor and piled them up on top of plastic storage totes. It's highly unlikely that we'd get flooded (we're on the top of a hill) but you can never be too safe when there is all kinds of Japanese vinyl involved, can you?

a note about Klaus
I should mention that Klaus is doing much better. Still not 100% out of the woods but very much improved. We also picked up a new tank tonight for the smaller fish to move into. It's in my office, set up, right now (if I wanted to, I could touch it with my right hand). We plan to move Klaus into it tomorrow and, if all goes well, the other two will move in on the weekend.