Monday, April 9, 2012

Passing

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60 Minutes' newsman, Mike Wallace, passed away this weekend...

In a career that spanned seven decades, Wallace evolved from a radio entertainer in the 1940s and TV game-show host in the '50s to the no-nonsense inquisitor of CBS' top-rated news magazine, 60 Minutes, which launched in 1968. He applied his trademark reporting technique — steely questioning, skeptical debating and ambush-style assault on the unsuspecting — well into his 80s.

Wallace died Saturday night at a care facility in New Canaan, Conn., nearly a month shy of his 94th birthday.


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Also, "Painter of Light" and Hobbitish cottageland artist, Thomas Kinkad passed away this weekend as well...

Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled "Painter of Light" who died Friday at 54, once said he worked to "create images that project a serene simplicity." But despite his astonishing commercial success with luminous seascapes and paintings of cottages and street scenes, Kinkade's life in many ways was neither serene nor simple.

In the last decade he had been locked in legal battles with former Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery owners, some of whom accused him in lawsuits of trading heavily on his Christian beliefs even as he drove them to financial ruin.

He had battled alcohol abuse, former business associates said in court records and interviews, and in 2010 his mug shot went viral after his arrest on a drunken driving charge to which he later pleaded no contest.


I always saw his paintings in mall shops and oftentimes imagined what living in one of his magical cottage or woodland villages might have been like.

They always make me think of Rivendell (where the elves lived in Lord of the Rings).

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