Nov 30, 2017

Jim Nabors, 87, TV’s Gomer Pyle, Is Dead

Jim Nabors, 87, TV’s Gomer Pyle, Is Dead.






Jim Nabors, a comic actor who found fame in the role of the amiable bumpkin Gomer Pyle in two hit television shows of the 1960s while pursuing a second career as a popular singer with a booming baritone voice, died on Thursday at his home in Honolulu. He was 87.

His husband, Stan Cadwallader, confirmed the death. He said that Mr. Nabors’s health had been declining for a year and that his immune system had been suppressed since he underwent a liver transplant in 1994.

At the time, Mr. Nabors announced that he had contracted hepatitis B in India several years earlier when he cut himself shaving with a contaminated straight razor, which he had bought there.

Gomer Pyle, the character that so indelibly stamped Mr. Nabors’s career, originated in 1962 as a supporting role on “The Andy Griffith Show,” a bucolic CBS comedy that had been running since 1960. Gomer was a guileless, sweet-natured gas-station attendant in Mayberry, N.C., a sleepy fictional town where Mr. Griffith played the widower sheriff, Don Knotts his deputy, Ron Howard his son and Frances Bavier his matronly Aunt Bee.

Mr. Nabors’s character, a village innocent who tended to make a mess of things, became a favorite, and his sheepish “gawwwleee” and wide-eyed “shazam!” became popular catchphrases.Continue reading the main story



In 1964, the character was spun off into his own series, “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” in which Gomer, still bumbling but well meaning, joined the Marines and, on a weekly basis, tried the patience of his loudmouthed drill sergeant, Vince Carter (Frank Sutton).








Gomer was a recognizable kind of American hero: a good-hearted, gentle, unsophisticated sort (not unlike Forrest Gump of a later era) who encounters a harder, more cynical modern world — in this case embodied by Southern California — and helps redeem it.

“Sheldon Leonard and his co-creators astutely chose a Southern California Marine base for their hero,” Gerard Jones wrote in his 1992 history of the American sitcom, “Honey, I’m Home!”

He added: “In various episodes Gomer connected with the movie and TV industries, the music business, the surf scene, the Beverly Hills rich — all the easy symbols of modernity. Everywhere he went he left a trail of fond smiles and innocence — at least temporarily — restored.”

But “one thing Gomer never, ever connected with,” Mr. Jones added, “was the Vietnam War,” which was raging at the time, just as he and his neighbors in Mayberry had remained isolated from the civil rights movement in the South. “He somehow existed in the peacetime military when there was no peace.”

Mr. Nabors first showed off his booming singing voice for a national TV audience in a guest appearance on “The Danny Kaye Show” in 1964. To fans who knew him only as Gomer, his full-throated, almost operatic baritone was surprisingly striking, if strangely incongruous.

“Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” lasted five seasons, ending in 1969, when Mr. Nabors was given his own CBS variety show and with it more opportunities to sing. “The Jim Nabors Hour” lasted until 1971. In 1975 and 1976, he and Ruth Buzzi starred as a pair of androids in the ABC children’s show “The Lost Saucer.” He was a frequent guest on “The Carol Burnett Show.”

Hand Pump Operated By Self l By A Soul

Nov 29, 2017

The digital currency dropped more than 18 percent


Bitcoin plunges 18% after topping $11,000 in extremely volatile trading.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and worldwide payment system. It is the first decentralized digital currency – the system works without a central repository or single administrator

The digital currency dropped more than 18 percent from a record high of $11,388.33 to current levels around $9,292 on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk.
Trading was extremely volatile as exchanges such as Coinbase's GDAX struggled to keep up with the surging demand.
"There's no fundamental value to any of this stuff and it's all based on ... supply and demand at any point in time," said Leigh Drogen, a former trader who now heads Estimize, a 6-year-old company that collects and publishes financial estimates for data such as earnings.

idiosyncratic

Relating to idiosyncrasy; peculiar or 

individual.


  • ‘The differences are sometimes idiosyncratic, but they may also reflect deeper divisions of allegiance.’
  • ‘It is idiosyncratic to the individual carer, staff member, or nursing home.’
  • ‘You get the sense that you were surrounded by idiosyncratic and iconoclastic people.’
  • ‘The other type of risk is idiosyncratic risk, or risk that is unique to an individual in the market.’
  • ‘The aim of linguistic research is to discover the general rules, not to list the idiosyncratic and the irregular.’
  • ‘And that, as much as its unlikely origins, sums up the idiosyncratic charms of a unique golfing venue.’
  • ‘Nor does she swamp the material with idiosyncratic, personal embellishments.’
  • ‘His fans long ago came to terms with the intensely coded, idiosyncratic and bizarre thing that is Dylan.’
  • ‘His operating model is thus entirely personal, and entirely idiosyncratic.’
  • ‘He dapples and sprays his canvas with sound, and the fact he is self-taught makes his music even more idiosyncratic and unique.’
  • ‘And the picture is made more confused by McLean's own idiosyncratic personality.’
  • ‘It remains to be seen whether Irish television can prove a sympathetic home for more idiosyncratic talents than that.’
  • ‘Always an idiosyncratic individualist, he seems to have introduced his own pronunciations for the names of players.’
  • ‘One longs for less to distract you from his unique world-view and wonderfully idiosyncratic voice.’
  • ‘Penn does a marvelous job in fleshing out the little idiosyncratic elements of his character.’
  • ‘She is warm, funny, idiosyncratic and a dedicated people watcher.’
  • ‘However grand or private or idiosyncratic a state of affairs I have in mind, I can go on hoping for it in the only way that remains possible to me.’
  • ‘They're just so idiosyncratic and quirky - and yet, they're also still being made.’
  • ‘The author has a distinctive, idiosyncratic style that draws you in and keeps you reading.’
  • ‘When a lot of diverse people pursue their idiosyncratic interests, unexpected things happen.’

Gertrude Jekyll: The inspirational wisdom of one of the world's greatest horticulturalists

Today’s Google Doodle pays tribute to horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) on the 174th anniversary of her birth.




Jeykll was a much-admired landscape gardener who created over 400 unique green spaces, cultivated and bred new flora of her own and was a pillar of her period’s Arts and Crafts movement.
Known for her work with architect Edwin Luytens, her home in Munstead Wood, Surrey, remains a popular tourist spot to this day for those keen to see a well-maintained example of her approach.
In addition to being an expert practitioner of her craft, Jekyll was also something of a philosopher on the subject and often wrote of the soothing qualities of gardening as a leisure activity, wisdom we in the hectic modern world would be well advised to bear in mind.
Here are ten of her most insightful remarks on the Zen pleasures of cultivating a natural garden:
  • "The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies."
  • "There is no spot of ground, however arid, bare or ugly, that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an impression of beauty and delight."
  • "A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust."
  • "The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives."
  • "If you take any flower you please and look it over and turn it about and smell it and feel it and try to find out all its little secrets, not of flower only but of leaf, bud and stem as well, you will discover many wonderful things. This is how you make friends with plants, and very good friends you will find them to the end of our lives."
  • "More than half a century has passed, and yet each spring, when I wander into the primrose wood, I see the pale yellow blooms and smell their sweetest scent - for a moment I am seven years old again and wandering in that fragrant wood."
  • "I do not envy the owners of very large gardens. The garden should fit its owner or his or her tastes, just as one's clothes do; it should be neither too large nor too small, but just comfortable."
  • "The good gardener knows with absolute certainty that if he does his part, if he gives the labour, the love, and every aid that his knowledge of his craft, experience of the conditions of his place, and exercise of his personal wit can work together to suggest, that so surely will God give the increase. Then with the honestly-earned success comes the consciousness of encouragement to renewed effort, and, as it were, an echo of the gracious words, 'Well done my good and faithful servant'."
  • "I plant rosemary all over the garden, so pleasant is it to know that at every few steps one may draw the kindly branchlets through one's hand, and have the enjoyment of their incomparable incense; and I grow it against walls, so that the sun may draw out its inexhaustible sweetness to greet me as I pass."
  • "In garden arrangement, as in all other kinds of decorative work, one has not only to acquire a knowledge of what to do, but also to gain some wisdom in perceiving what it is well to let alone."