Eddie is kaput. The little dog that caused people to think Jack Russel terriers were a good idea is chasing bumpers in heaven.

http://tv.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=226276&GT1=7703

Jim Baen
 

Jim Baen was a modern sci-fi publisher who tried to maintain the traditions of the past. Baen Books featured a lot of the hard sci-fi that Hugo Gernsback would have liked.

In an era where a lot of 'intellectual property' companies were aggressively pursuing methods to squeeze profits from legacy content, limit sales to libraries and even went so far as to fine 12-year-old girls in an effort to sow fear among their consumers, Baen Books made it their policy to give away old content for free to build new readership.

This approach showed the kind of innovation that is completely foreign to a large corporation.

RIP Jim, and I hope the ********ers at Sony don't get their hands on your legacy.

Mister Jalopy :(

I've always loved Baen Books for doing what they do. Sorry to hear of Jim's passing.

Shine On....

That sucks. I grew up on Floyd, even though I was after their time.

1967, Apples and Oranges. :(

Red Buttons died today at 87. I really liked his performance in Hatari.

The scene with the rocket powered monkey catching net...

I was a big Red Buttons fan.

Mickey Spillane died today. He was 88. I've never read any of the Mike Hammer novels. I guess I need to go do that.

Bruno Kirby has died. He was 57. Bruno played best friend to Billy Crystal in both "When Harry met Sally" and "City Slickers".

Strange, I was just thinking about Bruno Kirby the other day. We were talking about baby names, and mentioned how some friends named their kid Bruno.

Damn. That's way too young to go.

Sad, but my biggest surprise was finding out that his dad was still alive ...

Glenn Ford has passed on at the age of 90. There are so few of the great screen actors of the 20th Century left by now, and Ford was one of the greatest. He could do it all, and in a believeable, Everyman sort of way, whether he was portraying a hero or an average Joe. He was extremely convincing in military roles, probably because he was, in fact, a military man during WWII, and became a Naval Reserve Captain thereafter.

Ford's greatest performances came in "Gilda" and "Blackboard Jungle", two landmark films of the American cinema, but I will, for some reason, always think of him as a Western star. There never was a better cowboy than Glenn Ford.

Thanks for all the great work, Glenn.