I always heard it pronounced 'Howell' with the 'ow' as in owl. I don't speak Welsh but I know that the Welsh word for Wales is Cymru - which my mother who came from North Wales always pronounced as 'cumree'. There are different dialects in Welsh but I don't know them. Hywel Bennett was in "Eastenders" for a time as a baddy and was also in "Last of the Summer Wine" towards the end of its long run.

"Well, didn't he do well?" ... Bruce Forsyth dies at the good age of 89.



Like him or loath him he was an almost permanent presence, somewhere, on Saturday Night TV schedules for all of my formative years ..... and indeed well beyond too.

Playboy founder, Hugh Hefner, dies aged 91. His widow, 3rd wife Crystal, is 60 years younger.



surprised he lasted that long.

Triceratops,

"surprised he lasted that long."

Of course it is a surprise, having had all "that work" with all those girls...
Couldn't resist Tri and it was already in my "mind" from the moment I saw the message on TV with adjacent pictures...
It seems that the continual use of the "Apparat" (Nielsen asked for the colloquial English translation from German) helps against prostate related illnesses...

Kind regards from Paul.

PS: There was a comment today that he was together with three women at the same time. Some new kind of Sultan with his harem?
PPS: the moral philosopher . Degradation of the female existence, which is many times, especially nowedays, more worthier than that of men. And after all it are they, who decide to...At least in normal Western countries...
PPPS: Read once the reasons why females weren't allowed to drive in Saudi-Arabia...

I hope "Heff" had a good lawyer draw up his will - I heard once that Groucho Marx put a clause in his will that if any of his beneficiaries complained about his or her share that beneficiary was to lose his/her inheritance.

I see that Antonio Carluccio has died ... he was always an entertaining bon viveur, cook and raconteur, and I still regularly consult two of his books: one on Italian cooking, of course, and the other on finding, identifying, preserving and cooking wild mushrooms.

Christine Keeler the former model at the centre of the Profumo scandal that shook the British establishment in the 1960s has just died aged 75.

Here she is (right) with Mandy Rice-Davies leaving the Old Bailey in 1963:



On a day when the Brexit secretary David Davies was forced to admit that he lied to Parliament and that the  government has not assessed the impact of leaving the EU for different sectors of the economy, and when Boris Johnson and Michael Gove can basically do and say what they like and face no consequences whatsoever, Keeler's death is a reminder of a dim and distant era when ministers who had acted inappropriately resigned or were sacked in disgrace.

Meles meles wrote:

Christine Keeler the former model at the centre of the Profumo scandal that shook the British establishment in the 1960s has just died aged 75.

Here she is (right) with Mandy Rice-Davies leaving the Old Bailey in 1963:



On a day when the Brexit secretary David Davies was forced to admit that he lied to Parliament and that the  government has not assessed the impact of leaving the EU for different sectors of the economy, and when Boris Johnson and Michael Gove can basically do and say what they like and face no consequences whatsoever, Keeler's death is a reminder of a dim and distant era when ministers who had acted inappropriately resigned or were sacked in disgrace.

At the time of the "affair" she was 17. Mandy was 15. Can you imagine the reaction to that today?

ps - if all ministers who acted inappropriately were sacked or had to resign, I suspect the cabinet would be markedly short of drawers.

Rock star Johnny Hallyday, who has died at the age of 74, had phenomenal success in the French-speaking world.
The star, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Smet, sold more than 110 million records and starred in a number of films, including one directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
To mark 40 years in showbusiness, the French icon enjoyed a three-week residency at Paris's most famous venue, L'Olympia.
And he once performed before a million people in a mobile musical cavalcade down the Champs-Elysees.
The French called him "Our Johnny". Music critics called him "the French Elvis". To almost anyone else, he was the biggest rock star they'd never heard of.
(from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42249556)

Of course when they say "French" he was only half French - his father was Belgian.

Gilgamesh,

I wanted today to point to two person sChristine Keeler and Johnny Hallyday, as that is the easier stuff on these boards...
And even announce the particularity of the Belgian father Léon Smet...
And now I am beaten in the race by you both...
http://www.france24.com/en/20171206-belgium-johnny-hallydays-fatherland-mourns-lost-son

Kind regards to both of you from Paul.

Ah, Paul, without the Belgians (Reinhardt, Brel, Hallyday) and the Bretons (Stivel, Nolwenn, Gwennyn, Tri Yann) where would the French get their music?

Sad to read this morning that Ursula K Le Guin, sci-Fi/fantasy/philosophy, author of the 'Earthsea' books and 'The Left Hand of Darkness' amongst others, has just died.

Aside from all the usual obituaries in today's press ... I found this article (from 2015) to be an enjoyable and thoughtful piece of writing about her imagined world of Earthsea:

Earthsea – a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin

The Fall singer Mark E Smith has died aged 60, the band's manager has said.
Pam Van Damned said the frontman died at home on Wednesday morning and a more detailed statement would follow "in the next few days".  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42811968

Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, dies aged 91:

I'm never interested in sport but even I noticed that Roger Bannister, the first to run a mile in under four minutes, has just died.

He was then (1954) a 23-year-old medical student who would skip his gynaecology lectures to allow him to run for 45 minutes at lunchtime, and overall in his training only managed to run about 35 miles a week. The day he set the record he had a breakfast of porridge at his Earl’s Court flat, then a ham and cheese salad at a friend’s in Oxford for lunch. In between he spent the morning working at St Mary's hospital, where he sharpened his spikes on a grindstone in a laboratory, before catching the train to Oxford. After setting the record the then went on to complete his medical training and had a full career as a respected neurologist, and once when asked what his proudest achievement was, said that, rather than his running, he was prouder of his medical research into the responses of nervous system.

Meles meles wrote:

After setting the record the then went on to complete his medical training and had a full career as a respected neurologist, and once when asked what his proudest achievement was, said that, rather than his running, he was prouder of his medical research into the responses of nervous system.

2 people who did go on to make careers for themselves largely as a result of having been part of that day in May 1954 were his 2 pacemakers Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway. The former in business with Reebok sport shoes and the London Marathon and the latter as broadcaster and politician. Such was the high profile of Chris Chataway, for example, that I had to double-check today that he wasn’t Minister of Sport in Margaret Thatcher’s government. He wasn’t. That was another Olympian Colin Moynihan. Both Chataway and Moynihan were MPs representing Lewisham which is probably where the confusion arose. To be fair to Brasher and Chataway they were also both Olympians in their own right but being part of Bannister’s record-breaking achievement was what really put them in the history books. Sir Roger of the other hand preferred history to remember him for producing this sort of book:



Truly one of the last gentleman athletes.

I met Chris Brasher once ... we passed each other on Crib Goch, the ridge route to the summit of Snowdon. To be honest I didn't recognise him at the time, although I would have known his name. It was winter and we were all, both groups, well-muffled up against the sleet but we got talking, albeit somewhat briefly as we were on an exposed mountain ridge. It was only later after our two groups had parted, that one of the friends I was with, who, unlike the rest of us had apparently put two-and-two together whilst we were chatting, said something along the lines of: "You lot do know who that old bloke was, don't you? ... No? ... Sheesh!"

Brasher would then have been a few years older than I am now, and I'm not sure I'd be up for a winter ascent of Snowdon these days.

I'd prefer to call "gentleman athletes" by the alternative title "Corinthians". When it was still necessary for an athlete (or other sportsman) to have some form of gainful employment, rather than being sponsored (or paid large sums of "appearance money") they appeared to be much more rounded personalities. One odd survival of the tradition may be found in Glasgow - Queen's Park F.C. play in the Scottish League - its amateur status is reflected by its Latin motto, Ludere Causa Ludendi – "to play for the sake of playing".

Can't let this guy pass without an honourable mention - it's not easy to play a creep who still elicits affection and sympathy from the audience and this actor did it well.



David Ogden Stiers - here as Charles Emerson Winchester III in M*A*S*H
(1942 - 2018)

The mainspring has broken, and Trevor Baylis, the inventor of the wind-up radio, has gone to the Great Horologist in the Sky at the age of 80.

Prof Sir John Sulston. It's largely because of his insistence that knowledge is for everyone that the human genome isn't the property of one of the big biotech companies, holding the rest of us to ransom.
http://www.sanger.ac.uk/people/faculty/honorary-faculty/john-sulston

Silence in Knotty Ash as the King of the Diddymen is no more:

I was going to mention KD but I saw the thread had already been commented on today and realised I had been pre-empted before I clicked on the thread.

French fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, who created famous looks for Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy, has died at the age of 91.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43375454

There's a starman waiting in the sky ...


(1942 - 2018)

Born on the 8th January, the anniversary of Galileo's death.

Died on the 14th March, the anniversary of Einstein's birth.

14th March is also Pi Day.

Here is the great man (apparently it took him 5 seconds to reply to the email asking if he'd do this) in a Monty Python sketch from the live show.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfcC6FYyL4U&index=1&list=RDXfcC6FYyL4U

Hi Gil - please don't post unexplained "blind" links. If it's a YouTube video it should be embedded, or at least the link should be accompanied by some form of explanatory text as to what the reader is being directed to.

Blind links can be used to direct unsuspecting browsers to malicious sites and on many discussion forums these days are simply blocked by default. We have no such automatic block in place here so must depend on a little aforethought ...

... otherwise great clip!

"You can't beat a bit of bully", Bullseye host, Jim Bowen goes the great prizeboard in the sky aged 80:

There's a bit of a queue forming at the cosmic turnstiles today ...

This won't mean much to all you sassanachs, but was a large and beautiful chunk of "the soundtrack to my life" as David Cameron once clichéd. Codladh sámh, a Liam. Buíochas a ghabháil leat go mór.



Liam Óg O'Flynn, uileann piper extraordinaire (1946 - 2018)

Oh heck, that was played at a funeral this sassanach once attended - that's me done for for today I'm afraid.

Utterly haunting.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Hope this is also true of a certain history site...

But I'll turn the lights off if no one ever shows up here again.

I hope the site has some lasting power yet, Temperance.  It's a pity we don't seem able to attract the "young 'uns" to join the site.  We all have our differing personalities and (says she stating the obvious) the thread that interests Person A may not interest Person B.  The fakers thread and the disappearing (disappeared) skills threads looked as if they were flourishing at one time, as did the spy thread, but they seem to have gone on a hiatus.  Maybe a thread that is in abeyance will suddenly become lively again.  One can but hope.

Heartbeat actor Bill Maynard has died at the age of 89 after a career spanning eight decades.
Daughter-in-law Jacqueline Reddin said he died in hospital in Leicestershire, shortly after breaking his hip in a fall from a mobility scooter.
He was perhaps best known as Claude Jeremiah Greengrass in Heartbeat.
Maynard - whose real name was Walter Williams - starred as the scruffy, eccentric poacher in the police drama for eight years, from 1992 to 2000, and was in its spin-off The Royal until 2003.
Other roles included Oh No, It's Selwyn Froggitt!, The Gaffer and In Sickness and In Health. He also made appearances in Carry On films Carry On At Your Convenience, Carry On Matron and Carry On Dick, and was Sergeant Beetroot in TV series Worzel Gummidge in 1980.
more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-43596854

Gilgamesh,

I don't know why, but I always preferred the British actors above for instance the French for which I had also esteem, not the Germans which seems to have never recovered from WWII. The Americans seems also not to be nowadays what they were after the war. Perhaps because I lived a whole time in Ostend, which is of course as a Channel port biased to, as they call it here,  "de Englanders".
My mother, who have read hundreds of books, and had despite her shool up to fourteen a fair chunk of general knowledge, and have seen hundreds of films, first in the cinema and later on the TV, said that the Australian actors, films and books, were the closest to the British, as she saw it. And her preference was also the British.

Kind regards from Paul.

We still watch re-runs of Heartbeat!  They are our Tuesday viewing at 8.30.  We still quite like having a date with the television at a specific time, otherwise we have to scroll down our taped programmes and make decisions that suit us both!  The problem with the Heartbeat that we are seeing is that it a repeat of the not-long-ago seen programmes heading to the grande finale.  We wish they would start again nearer the beginning which we don't remember and lots of the time we didn't watch it.  So they would be new to us, or at least so far in the past that we would have no memory of them.

I liked perhaps the first couple of series of "Heartbeat" but when it went on and on so that in the end the series had been running for longer than the actual 1960s went on for I had lost any interest in watching. I'm glad it provides Caro and her husband with a common interest though. I wasn't too keen on "The Royal" about the hospital (spin-off from "Heartbeat").  I'm not saying I don't like any shows about recent-ish history - I quite liked "Inspector George Gently" and "The Indian Doctor" which were set in the 1960s but wasn't that keen on "Mad Men" and stopped watching after a couple of episodes.

But I don't want to be Ms Grouser especially on a thread paying tribute to people and Bill Maynard did have the acting chops.    He was one of those actors who one would recognise even if one could not automatically name him due to his having played a variety of supporting parts over the years.  A "character actor" - is that term still used?

Paul, I suppose in English speaking countries we are mostly exposed to anglophone (e.g. American, Canadian, British, Australian and New Zealand (New Zealandish?) actors.  Back in the day, I remember one German actor Horst Buchholz being in "Tiger Bay" with a very young Hayley Mills and in "The Magnificent Seven" where he played Chico, paying a Pole and a Mexican respectively.  I don't know much about his later work. I know nothing of his other work but the German actor Tom Wlaschiha I thought suited the part of the mysterious assassin in "Game of Thrones", a character  who befriended one of the main characters (a young girl travelling incognito).  BBC 4 TV has shown some thrillers from continental Europe in recent years - "Engrenages" from France, a couple of adaptations of the Mysterioso novels from Sweden and there was (which I haven't seen though it is said to be good) "The Killing" from Denmark - that's not an exhaustive list. From Belgium Matthias Schoenaerts' face pops up in films sometimes - apparently Carey Mulligan chose him to be her leading man in "Far From the Madding Crowd".  At one time Australian actors seemed to learn a British accent and gravitate towards Britain but of course nowadays Australia has its own broadcasting and film industries and those who leave are maybe more likely to gravitate towards the USA.  So these days an Australian actor is likely to keep their original accent or learn an American one.  There have been some Irish actors and actresses (I'm too old to start using 'actor' as a standard term for both sexes) who have had convincing British (mainly English as opposed to Scots or Welsh) accents in certain parts and I have not realised until I heard them speaking 'out of character' that they were from Ireland.

Thank you very much Lady in retirement for your focus from the other side of the Channel on the continent and Australia.
As I now see my reply to Gilgamesh was in fact as I see it now more focused on films than on actors, what was Gil's subject and as you rightly do too.

Perhaps I haven't not that broad view as yours, as in the 11 cinemas of Ostend in the time, it were mostly English and American films and from time to time a French one. I still remember once a Russian one and no German ones if I remember it well. In the Fifties we had a filmforum in the college and there we saw special films as from Ingmar Bergmann, Russian ones and yes also German ones, as "Die Brücke".
I have to say that contrary to French, German and English films in their respective countries, the films overhere were not dubbed, but given in the original language with subtitles in French and Dutch. And in my opinion that has also its charmes. That said, about the actors we knew all the American, British and French film stars, but less the German ones or it had to be from the papers
And yes perhaps from that limited offer it is perhaps normal that we didn't knew the German actors and films, and from that that my opinion on German films is not fair.
I have heard from Horst Buchholz, but as I see the wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Buchholz
I don't recognize that much and as said I was only watching fervently up to the Sixties and then it was finished, and as such I have to agree that my opinion is not that representative, although from the Fifties and the Sixties I think that it was also a general trend in West and East Flanders (the provinces! (from the former county of Flanders) not the nowadays Flemish region "Flanders" (I know it is confusing for British)) (I lived in my childhood near Ghent (East Flanders))

Kind regards from Paul.

I usually use "google" as my internet search engine (there is one called DuckDuckGo that I use sometimes as it claims not to track the searcher so much) and on its introduction page today it had a link (I don't always click on the link) to information about Gerda Taro who was a female photojournalist who died in the Spanish Civil War.  She seems to have achieved things in her life but I have to do a few mundane things in my life so can't really study her at length now.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerda_Taro

LadyinRetirement wrote:

I usually use "google" as my internet search engine (there is one called DuckDuckGo that I use sometimes as it claims not to track the searcher so much) and on its introduction page today it had a link (I don't always click on the link) to information about Gerda Taro who was a female photojournalist who died in the Spanish Civil War.  She seems to have achieved things in her life but I have to do a few mundane things in my life so can't really study her at length now.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerda_Taro

LIR, 

you mentioned search  engines
There are many of them around and here are some;

Bing,  Yandex, Giburu, Quora, Yippy, Dogpile, Oscobo, Swisscows  all of them are multilingual

Baidu is a Chinese search engine but also has an English page


Dirk

Regarding search engines I was aware of Bing but not of the others you have cited.  Thank you, Dirk.  When I first started using the internet circa the millennium (in cybercafes, I did not have access to the internet at home then) there were "Yahoo" and "Alta Vista"; they may still exist but I don't think they are used so much now.  I see that upthread Paul has referred to East and West Flanders as in the former county of Flanders as opposed to the modern region of Flanders.  I remember several years ago when I read Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings reference was made to a Duchy of Burgundy and a County of Burgundy (later Franche-Comte) and I had to put my thinking cap on to remember which was which.  And I am bemused by the administrative district which now incorporates Burgundy since 2016 though maybe I will eventually "get my head around it".

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Regarding search engines I was aware of Bing but not of the others you have cited.  Thank you, Dirk.  When I first started using the internet circa the millennium (in cybercafes, I did not have access to the internet at home then) there were "Yahoo" and "Alta Vista"; they may still exist but I don't think they are used so much now.  I see that upthread Paul has referred to East and West Flanders as in the former county of Flanders as opposed to the modern region of Flanders.  I remember several years ago when I read Maurice Druon's The Accursed Kings reference was made to a Duchy of Burgundy and a County of Burgundy (later Franche-Comte) and I had to put my thinking cap on to remember which was which.  And I am bemused by the administrative district which now incorporates Burgundy since 2016 though maybe I will eventually "get my head around it".

Lady, 

yes those Burgundians...even the French mix it all...just back from Zurich...to do with 843 Verdun...and the oath of Strasbourg in 842...and Lotharingen/Lorraine...and Burgundy...and Alsace-Lorraine... and the two Burgundies...the countries "landen" "van derwaarts over" and the "landen van herwaarts over"...and the language border...tomorrow more...lost all my time for the umpteenth time...starting from your "Lorraine dondaine" into opera and famous voices ...

Kind regards from Paul.

R.I.P. the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin.  She starts singing at about 1:20 on this clip - there is a lady talking at the beginning.

I know that she was a singer known the world over like many other celebrities are but with all due respect to the families concerned  I feel that the mass media goes well over the top when a celebrity passes away.

Yes , by all means do broadcast and mention the death but don't make it the main topic for 24 hours a day.



Dirk

I think people like Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson are so widely admired and been so influential in their lives for so many people that just to mention their deaths and immediately move on would be disrespectful both to them and their admirers.  If one of your top politicians of the present or the past died you would expect them to be given more than a passing reference.  

Sometimes I feel a bit sorry that someone who was so important in their 40s or 50s is forgotten in later years and their death is just reported and everyone moves on.  They might get a long obituary, but not the discussion they deserve.

Caro wrote:

I think people like Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson are so widely admired and been so influential in their lives for so many people that just to mention their deaths and immediately move on would be disrespectful both to them and their admirers.  If one of your top politicians of the present or the past died you would expect them to be given more than a passing reference.  

Sometimes I feel a bit sorry that someone who was so important in their 40s or 50s is forgotten in later years and their death is just reported and everyone moves on.  They might get a long obituary, but not the discussion they deserve.

Fully agreed Caro.

Caro if you have some time, have a look to the Elephant in the room thread about New Zealand and avocados and today something about the house market in NZ that interest me also as a landlord. We have the same phenomenon in Bruges as Americans, Germans and British buy and increase the price of the housing...what is in fact a good thing for me when selling ...but it can also starte a "bubble" Remember the "Tulip bubble"

Kind regards from Paul.

I was very sorry to hear that wildlife presenter Johnny Kingdom had died in an accident. The linked video is just stills.  I've not been watching much TV of late and hadn't seen him in anything recently but I always liked his enthusiasm and he came across as a genuine sort of person.

I hear that Montserrat Caballe the opera singer has died.  The late Freddie Mercury of Queen liked her (I had mixed feelings about Queen; some songs of theirs were good - others I wouldn't wish on an endless loop for my worst enemy).  I'm linking a thread of her without Freddie 

Leader of the sabotage operation against the heavy water plane at Rjukan, Joachim Ronneberg, dies aged 99:
Joachim Ronneberg

Ronneberg's exploits are the basis on the film Heroes of Telemark
coincidentally, Osprey have a book out next month on this subject:
Heroes of Telemark

Triceratops wrote:

Leader of the sabotage operation against the heavy water plane at Rjukan, Joachim Ronneberg, dies aged 99:
Joachim Ronneberg

Ronneberg's exploits are the basis on the film Heroes of Telemark
coincidentally, Osprey have a book out next month on this subject:
Heroes of Telemark

Triceratops,

I had already downloaded the BBC link, but you are before me...
I saw the Kirk Douglas film around 1965
but now skimming through it I find it is the usual American stuff of that time, not knowing if it is today better...
But in that time it was quite entertaining, as the "Guns of Navarone" (but I preferred the novel)
Better if I have time to read buy the Osprey book, I think...

And on the same BBC link there is that link that I wanted to publish here yesterday:
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45919900


And the Douglas film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axBiR8ZipPM


Kind regards from Paul.