WA2K Radio is now on the air

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE5_3L0JCiE&feature=related

Anybody here sleep with a teddy bear? Not me, for certain. But, I like this song anyway.

Good morning, WA2K radio audience.

edgar, The King would say to Connie: "Let me be Your Teddy Bear." I think, Texas, that I might have slept with a panda bear when I was a wee thing.

Well, folks, according to the spider web of the world, today is George M. Cohan's birthday.

A tribute to George M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f78i6sdEQE4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA4hxbslgig
Can't have the coming up 4th of July, without the
Yankee Doodle Dandy

Absolutely, edgar, and thanks for the song and the reminder.

It is my understanding that the largest minority group in America is the Hispanics. Odd that, how can a minority group be large? Well, we know what that means.

Today is Franz Kafka's birthday, so see if you can make the connection, folks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0nQMgaJibc&feature=related

I admit to not making a study of Kafka. I know some about The Wretched of the Earth -

Hey, edgar. To make a long allegory short, Gregor, a traveling salesman who provides for his family, turns into a giant cock roach, and they eventually kill him. Does that help? The title of the thing is Metamorphosis.

Hey, folks. Let's go To Mexico with James Taylor. I wanted an excuse to do James.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvNl1rqB-Fs&feature=related

George M. Cohan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born July 3, 1878(1878-07-03)
Providence, Rhode Island
Died November 5, 1942 (aged 64)
New York City, New York
Occupation Entertainer, Playwright, Composer, Lyricist, Actor, Singer, Dancer, Director, and Producer
Spouse Agnes Mary Nolan (29 June 1907-5 November 1942) (his death) 3 children
Ethel Levey (1899-1907) (divorced) 1 child
Children Georgette Cohan
Mary Cohan
Helen Cohan
George M Cohan, Jr.
Parents Irish Catholics


George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878 - November 5, 1942) was a United States entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer, director, and producer of Irish descent. Known as "the man who owned Broadway" in the decade before World War I, he is considered the father of American musical comedy.





Early career


Cohan was born in Providence, Rhode Island to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that he was born on July 3, but the Cohan family always insisted that George had been "born on the Fourth of July!" George's parents were traveling Vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, at first as a prop, later learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk.

He completed a family act called The Four Cohans, which included his father Jeremiah "Jere" Cohan (1848-1917), mother Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan (1854-1928), and sister Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo (1874-1916). Josie, who died of heart disease at a young age, was married to Fred Niblo Sr. (1874-1948), an important director of silent films, including Ben Hur (1925), and a founder of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Their son, Fred Niblo Jr. (1903-1973) was an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.

By his teens, Cohan became well-known as one of the stage's best male dancers, and he also started writing original skits and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. Cohan had his first big Broadway hit in 1904 with the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy".

Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 1500 original songs, noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His other major hit songs included "You're a Grand Old Flag", "The Warmest Baby In The Bunch", "Life's A Funny Proposition After All", "I Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune", "You Won't Do Any Business If You Haven't Got A Band", "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "The Small Town Gal", "I'm Mighty Glad I'm Living, That's All", "That Haunting Melody", and the popular war song, "Over There".

From 1906 to 1926, Cohan and Sam Harris also produced over three dozen shows on Broadway,[1] including the successful Going Up in 1917, which became a smash hit in London the following year.

In 1925, Cohan published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There.


Later career


In 1932, Cohan starred in a dual role (as a cold, corrupt politician and his charming, idealistic campaign double) in the Hollywood musical The Phantom President, co-starring Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, with songs by Rodgers and Hart.

He earned acclaim as a serious actor in Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! (1933), and in the role of a song-and dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's musical, I'd Rather Be Right (1937).

His final play, The Return of the Vagabond (1940) featured Celeste Holm in the cast; she was either 21 or 23 years old at the time.

In 1940, Judy Garland played the title role in a film version of his 1922 musical, Little Nellie Kelly. Cohan's mystery play, Seven Keys to Baldpate, was first filmed in 1916 and has been remade seven times, most recently as House of Long Shadows (1983), starring Vincent Price.

In 1942, a musical biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy, was released, and James Cagney's performance in the title role earned the Best Actor Academy Award. The film was privately screened for Cohan as he battled the last stages of abdominal cancer.

His 1920 play The Meanest Man in the World was filmed with Jack Benny in 1943.

He died of cancer at the age of 64 on November 5, 1942, at his New York City home, 993 Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After a large funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York on Fifth Avenue, Cohan was interred at the Bronx's Woodlawn Cemetery, in a private family mausoleum he had erected a quarter-century earlier for his sister and parents.


Influence and legacy


Cohan was the pioneer of the musical theater libretto. He is mostly remembered for his songs, later interpolated into musicals such as Anything Goes, Guys and Dolls, and Hello Dolly! However, he invented the "book musical," becoming the first showman to bridge the gaps between drama and music, operetta and extravaganza.[citation needed]


More than three decades before Agnes de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, Cohan used dance not merely as razzle-dazzle but to advance the plot. The engaging books of his musicals supported the scores that yielded so many popular songs. As a storyteller, Cohan's main characters were "average Joes and Janes".

Characters like Johnny Jones and Nellie Kelly appealed to a whole new audience. He wrote for every American, instead of highbrow Americans. (see book by Thomas S. Hischak, Boy Loses Girl (ISBN 0-8108-4440-0).

In 1914, he became one of the founding members of ASCAP. In 1919, he unsuccessfully opposed a historic strike by Actors' Equity Association, for which many in the theatrical professions never forgave him. Cohan opposed the strike because in addition to being an actor in his productions, he was also the producer of the musical that set the terms and conditions of the actors's employment. During the strike, he donated $100,000 to finance the Actors' Retirement Fund in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. After Actors' Equity was recognized, Cohan refused to join the union as an actor which hampered his ability to be in his own productions. After 1919, Cohan had to seek a waiver from Equity to act in any theatrical productions.

Cohan wrote numerous other Broadway musicals and straight plays, in addition to contributing material to shows written by others ?- more than 50 in all. Cohan shows included Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), George Washington, Jr. (1906), The Talk of New York and The Honeymooners (1907), Fifty Miles from Boston and The Yankee Prince (1908), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The Cohan Revue of 1918 (co-written with Irving Berlin), The Tavern (1920), The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly (1923, featuring a 13-year-old Ruby Keeler among the chorus girls), The Song and Dance Man (1923), American Born (1925), The Baby Cyclone (1927, one of Spencer Tracy's early breaks), Elmer the Great (1928, co-written with Ring Lardner), and Pigeons and People (1933). At this point in his life it is often said that he walked in and out of retirement.

Cohan is arguably the most honored American entertainer. On June 29, 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented him with The Congressional Gold Medal of Honor for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular the songs "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Over There". The Congressional Gold Medal of Honor is not the military Medal of Honor presented by the President in the name of Congress.

In 1959, at the behest of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a $100,000 bronze statue of Cohan was dedicated in Times Square, at Broadway and 46th Street in Manhattan. The 8-foot bronze remains the only statue of an actor on Broadway.[1]He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970, and into the American Folklore Hall of Fame in 2003.

His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6734 Hollywood Boulevard.

The United States Postal Service issued a 15-cent commemorative stamp honoring Cohan on the anniversary of his centenary, July 3, 1978. The stamp, one of the long-running Performing Arts Series of the USPS, depicts both the older Cohan and his younger self as a dancer, along with the tag line "Yankee Doodle Dandy". It was designed by Jim Sharpe.

Cohan was inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame on October 15, 2006.

Many of these honors were accepted posthumously by Cohan's large family.

In 1999, Regimental Band of the United States Merchant Marine Academy was instrumental in helping the local community and Park District of Great Neck, NY save his former residence, which was slated for demolition. Helen Ronkin Lafaso and Ms. Mary Ronkin Ross, the grandchildren of Mr. Cohan, formally thanked the band for their support and gave the band the honor to be called, "George M. Cohan's Own" for "now and in the future." Thus, the Regimental Band became the first Federal Academy Band with an officially bestowed title.[2] The USMMA Regimental Band now owns the rights to all of George M Cohan's music. The bulk of George M. Cohan's music is in the Public Domain, as are all compositions created in the U.S. before 1923.


Family life


From 1899 to 1907 Cohan was married to Ethel Levey (1881-1955), a musical comedy actress who bore him a daughter, Georgette Cohan Souther Rowse (1900-1988).

He married again in 1907 to Agnes Mary Nolan (1883-1972), who had been a dancer in his early shows; they remained married until his death. They had two daughters (Mary and Helen) and a son (George, Jr.).

Mary Cohan Ronkin (1909-1983) had a brief career as a cabaret singer in the 1930s, and later composed a score for her father's non-musical play The Tavern, and in 1968 supervised musical and lyric revisions for the Broadway play George M!.

Helen Cohan Carola (1910-1996) made several movies, including Lightnin' (1930) starring Will Rogers, and was one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1934.

George M. Cohan, Jr. (1914-2000) graduated from Georgetown University and served in the entertainment corps during World War II.

In the 1950s, George Jr. reinterpreted his father's songs on recordings, in a nightclub act, and in television appearances on the Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle shows. George Jr.'s only child, Michaela Marie Cohan (1943-1999), was the last descendant named Cohan. She graduated with a theater degree from Marywood College, Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1965.

From 1966 to 1968, she served in a civilian Special Services unit in Vietnam and Korea. In 1996, she stood in for her ailing father at the ceremony marking her grandfather's induction into the Musical Theatre Hall of Fame, at New York University.


Pop culture


James Cagney revived his role as Cohan in the 1955 film The Seven Little Foys, starring Bob Hope as the vaudevillian Eddie Foy. Cagney performed this role free of charge as an expression of his gratitude to Eddie Foy Sr., who had done Cagney a favor during Cagney's early vaudeville days.
Mickey Rooney played Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a television special broadcast on NBC on May 11, 1957. The same month, Rooney released a 78 RPM record: the A-side featured Rooney singing Cohan's best-known songs; the B-side featured Rooney singing several of his own compositions, such as the maudlin "You Couldn't Count the Raindrops for the Tears".
Joel Grey starred on Broadway in a biographical revue of Cohan's music, George M! (1968), which was adapted into a NBC television special in 1970.
Donny Osmond took the Cohan role in a 1982 Broadway adaptation of Little Johnny Jones, which was so poorly received and reviewed that it ran only one night.
Allan Sherman sang a parody-medley of 3 Cohan tunes on an early album: "Barry (That'll Be the Baby's Name)"; "H-o-r-o-w-i-t-z"; and "Get on the Garden Freeway" to the tune of "Mary's a Grand Old Name", "Harrigan" and "Give My Regards to Broadway", respectively.
Cohan's 1932 film, The Phantom President, was remade in 1993 as Dave, starring Kevin Kline in the dual role, and Sigourney Weaver as the First Lady.
The title of the book and the movie Born on the Fourth of July, about disabled Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic (who actually was born on July 4th), was directly inspired by a well-known line from Cohan's song, The Yankee Doodle Boy.
The Pogues track "Thousands are Sailing" (written by Phillip Chevron), on their album, "If I Should Fall From Grace With God" tells of somebody walking around New York, Then we said 'Goodnight' to Broadway, giving it our best regards, tipped our hat to Mr Cohan, dear old Times Square's favourite bard...
The life of Cohan is presented as a one-person show in [[George M. Cohan Tonight!]] which ran Off-Broadway at the Irish Repertory Theatre in 2006.

Franz Kafka
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born July 3, 1883(1883-07-03)
Prague, Austria-Hungary
Died June 3, 1924 (aged 40)
Kierling near Vienna, Austria
Occupation insurance officer, factory manager, novelist, short story writer
Nationality Jewish-Bohemian (Austria-Hungary)
Genres novel, short story
Literary movement modernism, existentialism, precursor to magical realism
Notable work(s) The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis

Influences
Schopenhauer, von Kleist, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Nietzsche, Walser

Influenced
Pinter, Nabokov, Camus, Musil, Fellini, Arendt, Benjamin, Singer, Borges, García Márquez, Fuentes, Kundera, Jančar, Rushdie, Murakami, Grass, Park, Vasquez, Filipacchi, Salinger, Lynch, Bukowski



Franz Kafka (IPA: [ˈfʀanʦ ˈkafka]) (3 July 1883 - 3 June 1924) was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. He was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). His unique body of writing?-much of which is incomplete and was mainly published posthumously?-is among the most influential in Western literature.[1]

His stories, such as The Metamorphosis (1915), and novels, including The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal and bureaucratic world.




Family

Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of Bohemia. His father, Hermann Kafka (1852-1931), was described as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman"[2] and by Kafka himself as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature".[3] Hermann was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a ritual slaughterer, and came to Prague from Osek, a Czech-speaking Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia. After working as a traveling sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people and using a jackdaw (kavka in Czech) as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856?-1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Poděbrady, and was better educated than her husband.[4]

Kafka was the eldest of six children.[5] He had two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of fifteen months and six months, respectively, before Kafka was seven, and three younger sisters, Gabriele ("Elli") (1889-1941), Valerie ("Valli") (1890-1942), and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1891-1943). On business days, both parents were absent from the home. His mother helped to manage her husband's business and worked in it as much as 12 hours a day. The children were largely reared by a series of governesses and servants.

Kafka's sisters were sent with their families to the Łódź Ghetto and died there or in concentration camps. Ottla was sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and then on October 7, 1943 to the death camp at Auschwitz, where 1267 children and 51 guardians, including Ottla, were gassed to death on their arrival.[6]


Education

Kafka learned German as his first language, but he was also fluent in Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of French language and culture; one of his favorite authors was Flaubert. From 1889 to 1893, he attended the Deutsche Knabenschule, the boys' elementary school at the Masný trh/Fleischmarkt (meat market), the street now known as Masná street. His Jewish education was limited to his Bar Mitzvah celebration at 13 and going to the synagogue four times a year with his father.[7] After elementary school, he was admitted to the rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium, an academic secondary school with eight grade levels, where German was also the language of instruction, at Old Town Square, within the Kinsky Palace. He completed his Maturita exams in 1901.

Admitted to the German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague, Kafka first studied chemistry, but switched after two weeks to law. This offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. At the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings and other activities. In the end of his first year of studies, he met Max Brod, who would become a close friend of his throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who also studied law. Kafka obtained the degree of Doctor of Law on June 18, 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.[1]


Work

On November 1, 1907, he was hired at the Assicurazioni Generali, a huge Italian insurance company, where he worked for nearly a year. His correspondence, during that period, witnesses that he was unhappy with his working time schedule - from 8 p.m. (20:00) until 6 a.m. (06:00) - as it made it extremely difficult for him to concentrate on his writing. On July 15, 1908, he resigned, and two weeks later found more congenial employment with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His father often referred to his son's job as insurance officer as a "Brotberuf", literally "bread job", a job done only to pay the bills. However, he did not show any signs of indifference towards his job, as the several promotions that he received during his career suggest that he was a hardworking employee. A little-known fact about this period, reported by Peter Drucker in Managing in the Next Society, is that Kafka invented the first civilian hard hat. He received a medal for this invention in 1912 because it reduced Bohemian steel mill deaths to fewer than 25 per thousand employees. He was also given the task of compiling and composing the annual report and was reportedly quite proud of the results, sending copies to friends and family. In parallel, Kafka was also committed to his literary work. Together with his close friends Max Brod and Felix Weltsch, these three were called "Der enge Prager Kreis", the close Prague circle, which was part of a broader Prague Circle, "a loosely knit group of German-Jewish writers who contributed to the culturally fertile soil of Prague during the 1880s until after World War I."[8]

In 1911, Karl Hermann, spouse of his sister Elli, proposed Kafka collaborate in the operation of an asbestos factory known as Prager Asbestwerke Hermann and Co. Kafka showed a positive attitude at first, dedicating much of his free time to the business. During that period, he also found interest and entertainment in the performances of Yiddish theatre, despite the misgivings of even close friends such as Max Brod, who usually supported him in everything else. Those performances also served as a starting point for his growing relationship with Judaism.


Later years

In 1912, at Max Brod's home, Kafka met Felice Bauer, who lived in Berlin and worked as a representative for a dictaphone company. Over the next five years they corresponded a great deal, met occasionally, and twice were engaged to be married. Their relationship finally ended in 1917.

In 1917, Kafka began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family, most notably his sister Ottla. Despite his fear of being perceived as both physically and mentally repulsive, he impressed others with his boyish, neat, and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and dry sense of humor.[9]

In 1921 he developed an intense relationship with Czech journalist and writer Milena Jesenská. In July 1923, throughout a vacation to Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea, he met Dora Diamant and briefly moved to Berlin in the hope of distancing himself from his family's influence to concentrate on his writing. In Berlin, he lived with Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who was independent enough to have escaped her past in the ghetto. Dora became his lover, and influenced Kafka's interest in the Talmud.[10]

It is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life[citation needed]. He also suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by a regimen of naturopathic treatments, such as a vegetarian diet and the consumption of large quantities of unpasteurized milk. However, Kafka's tuberculosis worsened; he returned to Prague, then went to Dr. Hoffmann's sanatorium in Kierling near Vienna for treatment, where he died on June 3, 1924, apparently from starvation. The condition of Kafka's throat made eating too painful for him, and since parenteral nutrition had not yet been developed, there was no way to feed him (a fate resembling that of Gregor in the Metamorphosis and the main character of A Hunger Artist). His body was ultimately brought back to Prague where he was interred on June 11, 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery (sector 21, row 14, plot 33) in Prague-Žižkov.


Personal views

Kafka was not formally involved in Jewish religious life, but he showed a great interest in Jewish culture and spirituality. He was deeply fascinated by the Jews of Eastern Europe who he regarded as having an intensity of spiritual life Western Jews did not have. Yet he was at times alienated from Judaism and Jewish life: "What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe."

During the later years of his life, Kafka developed an interest in moving to Mandate Palestine. He dreamed of going with Dora Diamant to create a new kind of life in the Land of Israel. Here too he was perhaps influenced by his Zionist friends Hugo Bergmann and Max Brod. Tragically, Kafka's tuberculosis was too advanced and he was unable to realize this dream of his final years.


Literary work

Kafka published only a few short stories during his lifetime, a small part of his work, and never finished any of his novels (with the possible exception of The Metamorphosis, which some consider to be a short novel). His writing attracted little attention until after his death. Prior to his death, he instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his manuscripts. His lover, Dora Diamant, partially executed his wishes, secretly keeping up to 20 notebooks and 35 letters until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933. An ongoing international search is being conducted for these missing Kafka papers. Brod overrode Kafka's instructions and instead oversaw the publication of most of the work in his possession, which soon began to attract attention and high critical regard.

All of Kafka's published works, except several letters he wrote in Czech to Milena Jesenská, were written in German.


Style of writing

Kafka often made extensive use of a trait special to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop - that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions cannot be duplicated in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text.[11] One such instance of a Kafka translator's quandary is demonstrated in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis.

Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings. An example is Kafka's use of the German noun Verkehr in the final sentence of The Judgment. Literally, Verkehr means intercourse and, as in English, can have either a sexual or non-sexual meaning; in addition, it is used to mean transport or traffic. The sentence can be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge".[12] What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of 'Verkehr' is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation". In the English translation, of course, what can 'Verkehr' be but "traffic"?[13]


Critical interpretation

Critics have interpreted Kafka's works in the context of a variety of literary schools, such as modernism, magical realism, and so on.[14] The apparent hopelessness and absurdity that seem to permeate his works are considered emblematic of existentialism. Others have tried to locate a Marxist influence in his satirization of bureaucracy in pieces such as In the Penal Colony, The Trial, and The Castle,[14] whereas others point to anarchism as an inspiration for Kafka's anti-bureaucratic viewpoint. Still others have interpreted his works through the lens of Judaism (Borges made a few perceptive remarks in this regard), through Freudianism[14] (because of his familial struggles), or as allegories of a metaphysical quest for God (Thomas Mann was a proponent of this theory[citation needed]).

Themes of alienation and persecution are repeatedly emphasized, and the emphasis on this quality, notably in the work of Marthe Robert, partly inspired the counter-criticism of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who argued that there was much more to Kafka than the stereotype of a lonely figure writing out of anguish, and that his work was more deliberate, subversive, and more "joyful" than it appears to be.

Furthermore, an isolated reading of Kafka's work ?- focusing on the futility of his characters' struggling without the influence of any studies on Kafka's life was worthless ?- reveals the humor of Kafka. Kafka's work, in this sense, is not a written reflection of any of his own struggles, but a reflection of how people invent struggles.

Biographers have said that it was common for Kafka to read chapters of the books he was working on to his closest friends, and that those readings usually concentrated on the humorous side of his prose. Milan Kundera refers to the essentially surrealist humour of Kafka as a main predecessor of later artists such as Federico Fellini, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Salman Rushdie. For García Márquez, it was as he said the reading of Kafka's The Metamorphosis that showed him "that it was possible to write in a different way".


Publications and dates

Much of Kafka's work was unfinished, or prepared for publication posthumously by Max Brod. The novels The Castle (which stopped mid-sentence and had ambiguity on content), The Trial (chapters were unnumbered and some were incomplete) and Amerika (Kafka's original title was The Man who Disappeared) were all prepared for publication by Brod. It appears Brod took a few liberties with the manuscript (moving chapters, changing the German and cleaning up the punctuation), and thus the original German text was altered prior to publication. The editions by Brod are generally referred to as the Definitive Editions.

According to the publisher's note[15] for The Castle,[16] Malcolm Pasley was able to get most of Kafka's original handwritten work into the Oxford Bodleian Library in 1961. The text for The Trial was later acquired through auction and is stored at the German literary archives[17] at Marbach, Germany.[18]

Subsequently, Pasley headed a team (including Gerhard Neumann, Jost Schillemeit, and Jürgen Born) in reconstructing the German novels and S. Fischer Verlag republished them.[19] Pasley was the editor for Das Schloß (The Castle), published in 1982, and Der Prozeß (The Trial), published in 1990. Jost Schillemeit was the editor of Der Verschollene (Amerika) published in 1983. These are all called the 'Critical Editions' or the 'Fischer Editions'. The German critical text of these, and Kafka's other works, may be found online at The Kafka Project.[20]

There is another Kafka Project based at San Diego State University, which began in 1998 as the official international search for Kafka's last writings. Consisting of 20 notebooks and 35 letters to Kafka's last companion, Dora Diamant (later, Dymant-Lask), this missing literary treasure was confiscated from her by the Gestapo in Berlin 1933. The Kafka Project's four-month search of government archives in Berlin in 1998 uncovered the confiscation order and other significant documents. In 2003, the Kafka Project discovered three original Kafka letters, written in 1923. Building on the search conducted by Max Brod and Klaus Wagenbach in the mid-1950s, the Kafka Project at SDSU has an advisory committee of international scholars and researchers, and is calling for volunteers who want to help solve a literary mystery.[21]


Translations

There are two primary sources for the translations based on the two German editions. The earliest English translations were by Edwin and Willa Muir and published by Alfred A. Knopf. These editions were widely published and spurred the late-1940's surge in Kafka's popularity in the United States. Later editions (notably the 1954 editions) had the addition of the deleted text translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. These are known 'Definitive Editions'. They translated both The Trial, Definitive and The Castle, Definitive among other writings. Definitive Editions are generally accepted to have a number of biases and to be dated in interpretation.

After Pasley and Schillemeit completed their recompilation of the German text, the new translations were completed and published -- The Castle, Critical by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), The Trial, Critical by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) and Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Michael Hoffman (New Directions Publishing, 2004). These editions are often noted as being based on the restored text.

George Sanders
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




Born July 3, 1906(1906-07-03)
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Died April 25, 1972 (aged 65)
Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain
Years active 1929 - 1972
Spouse(s) Susan Larson
(m. October 27, 1940, div. 1949)
Zsa Zsa Gabor
(m. April 2, 1949, div.April 2, 1954)
Benita Hume
(m. February 10, 1959, died November 1, 1967)
Magda Gabor
(m. December 4, 1970, div. January 16, 1971)
Awards won
Academy Awards
Best Supporting Actor
1950 All About Eve

George Sanders (born George Henry Sanders) (July 3, 1906 - April 25, 1972) was an Academy Award-winning English film and television actor.




Early life

Sanders was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, of British parents. In 1917, at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, when Sanders was 11, the family returned to Britain and, like his brother, he attended Brighton College, a boys' independent school in Brighton. He then attended Manchester Technical College in Manchester, England. After graduation he worked in an advertising agency. It was there that the company secretary, an aspiring actress named Greer Garson, suggested to him a career in acting. Sanders' lookalike older brother, Tom Conway, was also a movie actor, to whom Sanders later handed over the role of The Falcon in The Falcon's Brother (1942). The only other film in which the two real-life brothers appeared together was Death of a Scoundrel (1956). In both films they played brothers.


Career

Sanders made his British film debut in 1934 and, after a series of British films, made his American debut in 1936 with a role in Lloyd's of London. His British accent and sensibilities, combined with his suave, snobbish, and somewhat menacing air, were utilised in American films throughout the next decade. He played supporting roles in prestige productions such as Rebecca, in which he joined forces with Judith Anderson in her persecution of Joan Fontaine. He also played leading roles in such less high-profile pictures as Rage in Heaven. During this time he was also the lead in both The Falcon and The Saint film series, and also played Lord Henry Wotton in a film version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1947 he co-starred with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

In 1950 Sanders gave his most widely recognised performance, and achieved his greatest success, as the acerbic, cold-blooded theatre critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

He moved into the field of television and was responsible for the successful series George Sanders Mystery Theatre. Sanders played an upper crust English villain, G. Emory Partridge, in a 1965 The Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode, "The Gazebo in the Maze Affair", and reprised the role later that year in "The Yukon Affair". He also portrayed Mr. Freeze in two episodes of the 1960s live-action Batman TV series.

Later, he provided the voice for the malevolent Shere Khan in the Walt Disney production of The Jungle Book. One of Sanders's final screen roles was in the 1972 feature film version of the popular television series Doomwatch.

Sanders' smooth voice, urbane manner, and upper-class British accent were the inspiration for the Peter Sellers' character "Hercules Grytpype-Thynne" in the famous BBC radio comedy series The Goon Show. Sellers and Sanders appeared together in the Pink Panther sequel, A Shot in the Dark.

He was honoured with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: for motion pictures at 1636 Vine St, and for television at 7007 Hollywood Blvd. In popular culture, he is mentioned in The Kinks' song "Celluloid Heroes" and his ghost makes an appearance in Clive Barker's 2001 novel Coldheart Canyon.


Other projects

Sanders has two crime novels to his credit: Crime on My Hands (1944, written in the first person and mentioning his "Saint" and "Falcon" movies) and Stranger at Home (1946). These were published simply to cash in on his screen success, and both were ghostwritten: the former by Craig Rice, the latter by Leigh Brackett.

In 1958 Sanders recorded an album entitled The George Sanders Touch: Songs for the Lovely Lady. Released by ABC-Paramount Records, the album offered lush string arrangements of romantic ballads, crooned by Sanders in a persuasive baritone. He went to great lengths to get himself signed to sing in South Pacific, but was overwhelmed with anxiety over the role and quickly dropped out. Sanders' singing voice can be heard in Call Me Madam and Disney's The Jungle Book as Shere Khan. He signed for the role of Sheridan Whiteside in the stage musical Sherry! (1967) based on the Kaufman - Hart play The Man Who Came to Dinner, but felt overwhelmed by the demands of the production, and resigned when his wife, actress Benita Hume, found she had terminal bone cancer.


Marriages

On 27 October 1940, Sanders married Susan Larson. The marriage ended in divorce in 1949. From 1949 until 1954, Sanders was married to the Hungarian actress Zsa Zsa Gabor. (In 1956 he and Gabor starred together in the film Death of a Scoundrel.) On 10 February 1959 Sanders married actress Benita Hume, the widow of actor Ronald Colman. Benita Hume died in 1967. Sanders' final marriage, on 4 December 1970, was to Magda Gabor, the older sister of his second wife; the marriage lasted only 6 weeks. Following this he began to drink heavily.

His autobiography, Memoirs of a Professional Cad, was published in 1960 and received critical praise for its wit. Sanders, himself, suggested the title A Dreadful Man for the biography of him later written by Brian Aherne and published in 1979.


Later life

In his later years, Sanders suffered from bewilderment and bouts of anger, both made worse by health problems. He was losing his balance, among other things, and can actually be seen visibly teetering in his very last films. He also had a minor stroke, according to correspondence quoted in the book of his friend and biographer Brian Aherne. His latest girlfriend, a Mexican woman, much younger than himself, induced him to sell his beloved house in Majorca, Spain - an act which he regretted bitterly afterwards. From then on, he drifted. But house or no house, what stands out is that he couldn't bear the idea of losing his health, of being dependent on someone else's care. By this time Sanders was fed up with life anyway. (It was around this time that he dragged his grand piano out onto the lawn and smashed it to pieces with an axe because he couldn't play it anymore.[1])


Death

Soon after, in April 1972, he checked into a hotel in Castelldefels, a coastal town near Barcelona, Spain. His body was discovered two days later, along with five empty bottles of Nembutal. He left behind a suicide note that read:

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

His friend David Niven recorded in his autobiography Bring On The Empty Horses that Sanders had predicted, many years earlier, in 1937 at age 31, that he would commit suicide at the age of 65. In 1972, he fulfilled this prediction.

His body was cremated and the ashes were scattered in the English Channel.


Tribute

To mark his 102nd birthday on July 3, 2008 the cable channel Turner Classic Movies will be showing his movies from seven in the morning until about eight at night. They are starting off with Samson and Delilah and have Assignment in Paris, Witness to Murder and so on.

Susan Peters
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Born Suzanne Carnahan
July 3, 1921(1921-07-03)
Spokane, Washington, United States
Died October 23, 1952 (aged 31)
Visalia, California, United States
Spouse(s) Richard Quine
(1943-1948) (divorced) 1 child
Awards won
Other Awards
Hollywood Walk of Fame

Susan Peters (July 3, 1921 - October 23, 1952) was an Academy Award-nominated United States film actress whose promising career was cut tragically short.





Biography

Early life

Peters was born Suzanne Carnahan in Spokane, Washington. First contracted by Warner Brothers, which was unable to utilize her talents, she subsequently began working for MGM Studios after completing high school. Her first job was to read with potential actors in their screen tests. Before long she had impressed studio executives with her own talent, and they began casting her in films.


Career

For the first two years she used her given name and played small, often uncredited parts in films such as Meet John Doe (1941), before adopting her stage name. But her beguiling acting in a supporting role in the MGM programmer, Tish, resulted in a studio contract. Her first substantial role, in Random Harvest (1942), earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nomination.

Further impressed, MGM began to groom her for starring roles, casting her in several lesser productions that allowed her to learn her craft. A starring role in Song of Russia (1943) earned her critical acclaim but the film was not a commercial success. However, in 1944, she was one of ten actors who were elevated from "featured player" status to the studio's official "star" category; the others included Esther Williams, Laraine Day, Kathryn Grayson, Van Johnson, Margaret O'Brien, Ginny Simms, Robert Walker, Gene Kelly, and George Murphy. An official portrait taken of MGM's contracted players during this period prominently features Peters sharing the front row with the head of the studio himself, Louis B. Mayer, and alongside such illustrious actors as James Stewart, Mickey Rooney, Margaret Sullavan, Katharine Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr, and Greer Garson -- such was the faith that the studio had of her talent and potential at the time.


Personal tragedy

Married to the actor Richard Quine, she was with him on a hunting vacation in early 1945, when a rifle accidentally discharged, causing a bullet to be lodged in her spine. The accident left her permanently paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheel chair, however she attempted to continue her acting career.

MGM continued to pay her salary, but unable to find suitable projects, Peters subsequently left the studio. An unsympathetic role in Columbia's The Sign of the Ram (1948) failed to win an audience, and a starring role as a wheelchair bound lawyer in the television series Miss Susan (1951) was also unsuccessful.

She toured in stage productions of The Glass Menagerie and The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and her performances were highly regarded, but her disability made her a difficult actress to cast.

Her career faltered, and as her marriage ended, Peters suffered from depression. Her health continued to deteriorate until her death, aged 31, in Visalia, California, from kidney disease and pneumonia, complicated by anorexia nervosa.

Susan Peters has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contribution to motion pictures, at 1601 Vine St.

Pete Fountain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information

Birth name Pierre Dewey LaFontaine, Jr.
Born July 3, 1930 (1930-07-03) (age 78)
New Orleans, Louisiana
Genre(s) Dixieland Jazz
Occupation(s) Musician
Instrument(s) Clarinet
Pierre Dewey LaFontaine, Jr. (born July 3, 1930), is a New Orleans clarinetist. According to a Belgian radio program ("La troisieme oreille", produced by Marc Danval) his name was originally Pierre de la Fontaine.





About Fountain

Pete Fountain was born in New Orleans and started playing clarinet, heavily influenced first by Benny Goodman and then by Irving Fazola. Early on he played with the bands of Monk Hazel and Al Hirt. With his long time friend, trumpeter George Girard, Fountain founded The Basin Street Six in 1950. After this band broke up four years later Fountain was hired to join the Lawrence Welk band, and became well known for the many solos he took on Welk's ABC television show, The Lawrence Welk Show. Fountain returned to New Orleans, played with The Dukes of Dixieland, then began leading bands under his own name, owning his own club in the French Quarter in the 1960s and 1970s. He later acquired "Pete Fountain's Jazz Club" at the Riverside Hilton in downtown New Orleans.


Pete Fountain Day in New Orleans

The New Orleans Jazz Club presented the Pete Fountain Day on October 19, 1959, with celebrations honoring the pride of their city concluding with a packed concert that evening. His Quintett was made up of his studio recording musicians, Stan Kenton's bassist Don Bagley, vibeist Godfrey Hirch, pianist Merle Koch and the outstanding double bass drummer Jack Sperling. Fountain brought these same players together in 1963 when they played the Hollywood Bowl. Pete would make the trek to Hollywood many times appearing on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 56 times.

In 2003 Fountain closed his club at the Hilton with a performance before a packed house filled with musical friends and fans. He then began performing two nights a week at Casino Magic in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi where he had a home (later destroyed by Hurricane Katrina).

After heart surgery in 2006 he performed at JazzFest, and helped reopen the Bay St. Louis Casino which has the new name of the Hollywood Casino. As of March, 2007 he has returned to performing Tuesday and Wednesday nights there.

Fountain was a founder and is the most prominent member of The Half Fast Walking Club, one of the best known marching Krewes that parades in New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day. The original name was "The Half-Assed Walking Club" and was an excuse to take a "lubricated" musical stroll down the parade route. Pete changed the name under pressure exerted by the parade organizers. On Mardi Gras Day 2007 Pete once again joined his Half Fast Walking Club, having missed the event in 2006 due to illness.

Fountain's clarinet work is noted for his sweet fluid tone. He has recorded over 100 LPs and CDs under his own name, some in the Dixieland style, many others with only peripheral relevance to any type of jazz.

Loyola University New Orleans awarded Fountain an honorary degree in 2006.

On April 5, 2008, Fountain was inducted at the seventh annual Delta Music Festival in Ferriday in Concordia Parish. An exhibit was dedicated to Fountain, and he received a star on the museum "Walk of Fame" sidewalk, according to the office of Louisana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne.[1]

Pete Fountain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Background information

Birth name Pierre Dewey LaFontaine, Jr.
Born July 3, 1930 (1930-07-03) (age 78)
New Orleans, Louisiana
Genre(s) Dixieland Jazz
Occupation(s) Musician
Instrument(s) Clarinet

Pierre Dewey LaFontaine, Jr. (born July 3, 1930), is a New Orleans clarinetist. According to a Belgian radio program ("La troisieme oreille", produced by Marc Danval) his name was originally Pierre de la Fontaine.





About Fountain

Pete Fountain was born in New Orleans and started playing clarinet, heavily influenced first by Benny Goodman and then by Irving Fazola. Early on he played with the bands of Monk Hazel and Al Hirt. With his long time friend, trumpeter George Girard, Fountain founded The Basin Street Six in 1950. After this band broke up four years later Fountain was hired to join the Lawrence Welk band, and became well known for the many solos he took on Welk's ABC television show, The Lawrence Welk Show. Fountain returned to New Orleans, played with The Dukes of Dixieland, then began leading bands under his own name, owning his own club in the French Quarter in the 1960s and 1970s. He later acquired "Pete Fountain's Jazz Club" at the Riverside Hilton in downtown New Orleans.


Pete Fountain Day in New Orleans

The New Orleans Jazz Club presented the Pete Fountain Day on October 19, 1959, with celebrations honoring the pride of their city concluding with a packed concert that evening. His Quintett was made up of his studio recording musicians, Stan Kenton's bassist Don Bagley, vibeist Godfrey Hirch, pianist Merle Koch and the outstanding double bass drummer Jack Sperling. Fountain brought these same players together in 1963 when they played the Hollywood Bowl. Pete would make the trek to Hollywood many times appearing on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 56 times.

In 2003 Fountain closed his club at the Hilton with a performance before a packed house filled with musical friends and fans. He then began performing two nights a week at Casino Magic in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi where he had a home (later destroyed by Hurricane Katrina).

After heart surgery in 2006 he performed at JazzFest, and helped reopen the Bay St. Louis Casino which has the new name of the Hollywood Casino. As of March, 2007 he has returned to performing Tuesday and Wednesday nights there.

Fountain was a founder and is the most prominent member of The Half Fast Walking Club, one of the best known marching Krewes that parades in New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day. The original name was "The Half-Assed Walking Club" and was an excuse to take a "lubricated" musical stroll down the parade route. Pete changed the name under pressure exerted by the parade organizers. On Mardi Gras Day 2007 Pete once again joined his Half Fast Walking Club, having missed the event in 2006 due to illness.

Fountain's clarinet work is noted for his sweet fluid tone. He has recorded over 100 LPs and CDs under his own name, some in the Dixieland style, many others with only peripheral relevance to any type of jazz.

Loyola University New Orleans awarded Fountain an honorary degree in 2006.

On April 5, 2008, Fountain was inducted at the seventh annual Delta Music Festival in Ferriday in Concordia Parish. An exhibit was dedicated to Fountain, and he received a star on the museum "Walk of Fame" sidewalk, according to the office of Louisana Secretary of State Jay Dardenne.[1]

Tom Cruise
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV
July 3, 1962 (age 46)
Syracuse, New York
Years active 1981 - present
Spouse(s) Mimi Rogers (1987?-1990)
Nicole Kidman (1990?-2001)
Katie Holmes (2006?- present)
Domestic partner(s) Penélope Cruz (2001-2004)
Awards won
BAFTA Awards
Britannia Award
2005 Excellence in Film
Golden Globe Awards
Best Actor - Motion Picture Drama
1989 Born on the Fourth of July
Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1996 Jerry Maguire
Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture
1999 Magnolia
Golden Raspberry Awards
Worst Screen Couple
1994 Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chroniclesshared with Brad Pitt
Most Tiresome Tabloid Targets
2006 shared with Katie Holmes
Other Awards
NBR Award for Best Actor
1996 Jerry Maguire
NBR Award for Best Cast
1999 Magnolia
Saturn Award for Best Actor (film)
2001 Vanilla Sky
IAS Freedom Medal of Valor
2006

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV (pronounced /ˈtɒməs ˈkruːz ˈmeɪpɒθɚ/; born July 3, 1962), more commonly known to the media as Tom Cruise, is an American actor and film producer. Forbes magazine ranked him as the world's most powerful celebrity in 2006.[1] He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and won three Golden Globe Awards. His first leading role was the 1983 film Risky Business [2], which has been described as "A Generation-X classic, and a career-maker" for the actor.[3] After playing the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and financially successful 1986 film Top Gun, Cruise continued in this vein, playing a secret agent in a series of Mission: Impossible action films in the 1990s and 2000s. In addition to these heroic roles, he also played other roles, such as the misogynistic male guru in Magnolia (1999) and a cool and calculating psychotic hitman in the Michael Mann crime-thriller film Collateral (2004).

Economist Edward Jay Epstein argues that Cruise is one of the few producers (the others being George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Jerry Bruckheimer) who are able to guarantee the success of a billion-dollar movie franchise. Since 2005, Cruise and Paula Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists film studio[4], with Cruise as producer and star and Wagner as the chief executive. Cruise is also known for his support of and adherence to the religion of Scientology.[5] His notable public criticisms of psychiatry and the use of anti-depressive drugs have attracted controversy and media interest.




Family and early life

Cruise was born in Syracuse, New York,[6] the son of Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer), a special education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer.[7] Cruise has German and Colonial English ancestry from his paternal great-grandparents, William Reibert and Charlotte Louise Voelker; and purportedly Welsh ancestry from his paternal great-great-grandfather, Dylan Henry Mapother, who emigrated from Flint, Wales to Louisville, Kentucky in 1850.[8][9]

Cruise attended Robert Hopkins Public school for grades 3, 4 & 5 and Henry Munro Middle School for grade 6 in Gloucester, now Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, part of the Carleton Board of Education.[10] The family lived in the Gloucester suburb of Beacon Hill. His family having moved from Kentucky so his father could take a position as a Defence consultant with the Canadian Army. Cruise became involved in drama at Robert Hopkins P.S. early on under the tutelage of teacher Mr. George Steinburg. [11] The first play he participated in was called "IT". Cruise won the co-lead with Michael de Waal. One playing "Evil", the other playing "Good". The play met much acclaim and toured with five other classmates to various schools around the Ottawa area and was filmed at the local Ottawa TV station..[12] The two were also singled out for a version of Jesus Christ Superstar and a Marcel Marceau-type act. When there was concern by school Principal Jim Brown of the religious overtones of J.C. Superstar, Cruise's mother convinced the school that the play should proceed. Mrs. Mapother was one of the founders of the Gloucester Players, a theatrical troupe where Cruise and some of the boys in Mr. Steinburg's class acted. As a boy, Cruise was also active in athletics, playing floor hockey almost every night; he was a ruthless player and ended up chipping his front tooth. In "British Bull Dog" he lost his newly capped tooth and hurt his knee.[13]

When Cruise was twelve, his mother left his father, taking Cruise and his sisters Lee Anne with her.[14] Cities in which Cruise lived included Ottawa, Ontario (where he attended Colonel By Secondary School), Louisville, Kentucky, Winnetka, Illinois and Wayne, New Jersey. In all, Cruise attended eight elementary schools and three high schools. He briefly attended a Franciscan seminary in Cincinnati and aspired to become a Catholic priest. In his senior year, he played football for the varsity team as a linebacker, but he was cut from the squad after getting caught drinking beer before a game.[15] He eventually graduated from Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey in 1980.

Cruise has said that he suffered from abuse as a child. This was partially due to him suffering from dyslexia. He stated that when something went wrong, his father came down hard on him. He told Parade Magazine that his father was "a bully" and "a merchant of chaos." Cruise said he learned early on that his father was - and, by extension, some people were - not to be trusted: "I knew from being around my father that not everyone means me well."[16] Having gone through fifteen schools in twelve years, Cruise, who dropped his father's name at age twelve, was also a victim of bullying at school. Cruise started acting after being sidelined from his high school's wrestling team due to a knee injury. While injured, he successfully auditioned for a lead role in his high school's production of Guys and Dolls and decided to become an actor after his success in the role. His cousin William Mapother is also an actor most known for playing Ethan Rom on Lost.


Hollywood


Acting career

1980s

Cruise's first film role came in 1981, when he had a small role in Endless Love, a drama/romance film starring Brooke Shields. Later that same year he had a more substantial role in the film Taps, appearing alongside George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn. The film about military cadets was moderately successful. In 1983, he was one of many teenaged stars to appear in Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders. The cast for this film included Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, and Ralph Macchio, some of which were part of the Brat Pack. That same year Cruise appeared in the teen comedy Losin' It with Shelley Long. Also in 1983, Risky Business was released, which helped to propel Cruise to stardom. One sequence in the film, featuring Cruise lip-syncing Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll" in his underwear, has become an iconic moment in 1980s film. The film has been described as "A Generation-X classic, and a career-maker for Tom Cruise".[3] A fourth film that was released in 1983 was the high-school football drama, All the Right Moves. Cruise's next film was the 1985 fantasy film Legend directed by Ridley Scott.

Cruise was then selected as the first choice by producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson for an upcoming American fighter pilot film. Cruise at first apparently turned down the project, but helped to alter the script he was given and developed the film. After being taken for a flight with the Blue Angels, Cruise changed his mind and signed on with the project. The project was titled Top Gun and opened in May 1986, becoming the highest grossing film of the year, taking in US$354 million in worldwide figures. He also starred in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money along with Paul Newman that same year, which earned Paul a Best Actor academy award. In 1988, he starred in the lighthearted drama Cocktail. The film received mixed reviews and Cruise was subsequently nominated for a Razzie award in 1989, an award intended to counterpoint the Academy Awards by dishonoring the worst acting, screenwriting, songwriting, directing, and films that the film industry had to offer. Later that year, Rain Man was released, which also starred Dustin Hoffman and was directed by Barry Levinson. The film was praised by critics and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won four, including Best Picture and Best Actor.


1990s

Cruise was welcomed with similar success the following year when he received Academy Award nominations for Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, which was based on the best selling autobiography of parapalegic veteran and anti-war activist Ron Kovic. In 1990, Cruise starred as hot-shot racecar driver "Cole Trickle" in Tony Scott's Days of Thunder. While filming Days of Thunder Cruise first met Australian actress Nicole Kidman, who was his co-star. They married in December 1990, but divorced after eleven years of marriage. Cruise's next film was Ron Howard's Far and Away where he again was starring with Nicole Kidman. After Days of Thunder he starred in the military thriller A Few Good Men with Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore. This film was very well received and earned Cruise a Golden Globe and MTV nominations. The following year he starred in Sydney Pollack's The Firm along with Gene Hackman and Ed Harris. It was based on the best selling novel by John Grisham, and won Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture at the People's Choice Awards.

In 1994, Cruise starred along with Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and Christian Slater in Neil Jordan's Interview with the Vampire, a gothic drama/horror film that was based on Anne Rice's best-selling novel. The film was well received, although Rice was outspoken in her criticism of Cruise having been cast in the film. In 1996, Cruise starred in (as well as produced) Brian de Palma's Mission: Impossible. The film, a remake of the 1960s TV series, grossed US$456 million worldwide, making it the third highest grossing film that year. That same year he played the title role in the comedy-drama Jerry Maguire. The film earned him an Academy Award Best Actor nomination as well as winning co-star Cuba Gooding, Jr. an Academy Award; the film was nominated for five Academy Awards in total. The film also included the catchphrase "Show Me the Money!" which became part of popular culture. In 1999 he starred in the erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut which took two years to complete and was director Stanley Kubrick's last film. It was also the last film in which he starred alongside then spouse Nicole Kidman. But the film, which had a straightforward description of sex and a recondite story-telling style, raised great controversies. Cruise also played a misogynistic male guru in Magnolia (1999), which netted him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. He was originally intended to play as Jericho Cane in the action horror film End of Days before Arnold Schwarzenegger assumed the lead role.


2000s

In 2000, Cruise returned as Ethan Hunt in the second installment of the Mission Impossible films, releasing Mission: Impossible II. The film was directed by Hong Kong director John Woo and branded with his Gun fu Style, but it continued the series' blockbuster success at the box office, taking in almost US$546 M in worldwide figures, like its predecessor, being the third highest grossing film of the year. The following year Cruise starred in the remake of the 1997 film Abre Los Ojos, Vanilla Sky. In 2002, Cruise starred in the dystopian science fiction thriller, Minority Report which was directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick; and the following year, he was in Edward Zwick's historical drama The Last Samurai.

In the 2004 Michael Mann's crime-thriller film Collateral, Cruise took a turn against his generic "good guy" role by playing the role of a sociopathic hitman. In 2005, Cruise worked again with Steven Spielberg in War of the Worlds, which became the fourth highest grossing movie of the year with US$591.4 M worldwide. The film also earned three Razzie nominations including one for Cruise. In 2006, he reprised his role as Ethan Hunt in the third installment of the Mission Impossible film series, Mission: Impossible III, which was also a box office success and was more positively received by critics than its predecessor. He appeared in the 2007 drama Lions for Lambs and will star in the 2009 thriller Valkyrie.


Producing career

Cruise partnered with his former talent agent Paula Wagner to form Cruise/Wagner Productions in 1993,[4] and the company has since co-produced several of Cruise's films,[17] the first being Mission: Impossible in 1996 which was also Cruise's first project as a producer. He won a Nova Award (shared with Paula Wagner) for Most Promising Producer in Theatrical Motion Pictures at the PGA Golden Laurel Awards in 1997 for his work as a producer for the film Mission: Impossible.

His next project as a producer was the 1998 film Without Limits about famous American runner Steve Prefontaine. Cruise returned to work as a producer in 2000, continuing work on the Mission Impossible sequel. He then served as an executive producer for The Others which starred Nicole Kidman, also that year, he again worked as actor/producer in Vanilla Sky. He subsequently worked on (but did not star in) Narc, Hitting It Hard and Shattered Glass. His next project, which he also starred in, was The Last Samurai, he was jointly nominated for the Motion Picture Producer of the Year Award at the 2004 PGA Golden Laurel Awards. He then worked on Suspect Zero, Elizabethtown and Ask the Dust.

Cruise is noted as having negotiated some of the most lucrative movie deals in Hollywood, and was described in 2005 by Hollywood economist Edward Jay Epstein as "one of the most powerful - and richest - forces in Hollywood". Epstein argues that Cruise is one of the few producers (the others being George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Jerry Bruckheimer) who are regarded as able to guarantee the success of a billion-dollar movie franchise. Epstein also contends that the public obsession with Cruise's tabloid controversies obscures full appreciation of Cruise's exceptional commercial prowess in the industry.[18]

Cruise/Wagner Productions, Cruise's film production company, is said to be developing a screenplay based on Erik Larson's New York Times bestseller, The Devil in the White City about a real life serial killer at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition. Kathryn Bigelow is attached to the project to produce and helm. Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio's production company, Appian Way, is also developing a film about Holmes and the World's Fair, in which DiCaprio will star.[19]


Breakup with Paramount

On August 22, 2006, Paramount Pictures announced it was ending its 14-year relationship with Cruise. In the Wall Street Journal, chairman of Viacom (Paramount's parent company) Sumner Redstone cited the economic damage to Cruise's value as an actor and producer from his controversial public behavior and views.[20][21] Cruise/Wagner Productions responded that Paramount's announcement was a face-saving move after the production company had successfully sought alternative financing from private equity firms.[22] Industry analysts such as Edward Jay Epstein commented that the real reason for the split was most likely Paramount's discontent over Cruise/Wagner's exceptionally large share of DVD sales from the Mission: Impossible franchise.[23][24] However, Radar has claimed that the "personal conduct" complained of by Redstone was an allegedly Cruise-inspired attempt to intimidate Brad Grey, CEO of Paramount. According to Radar, when Grey was walking to his car one night after tense negotiations with Cruise over Mission: Impossible 3, he was "surrounded by more than a dozen Scientologists, who pressured him to ease up on the actor … Following a terse exchange, the visitors allowed Grey to get into his car and leave, but the message was clear." Grey reportedly stood his ground and convinced Cruise to accept a lower fee than the actor had initially demanded.[25]


Management of United Artists

According to an Associated Press report on November 2, 2006, Cruise and Paula Wagner announced that they will be in charge of the United Artists film studio.[4] Cruise will produce and star in films for United Artists, while Wagner will serve as UA's chief executive. Production began in 2007 of Valkyrie, a thriller based on the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler. The film was acquired in March 2007 by United Artists. On March 21, 2007 Cruise signed on to play Claus von Stauffenberg, the protagonist. This project marks the second production to be greenlighted since Cruise and Wagner took control of United Artists. The first was its inaugural film, Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford and starring Redford, Meryl Streep and Cruise. Lambs was released on November 9, 2007,[26] opening to unimpressive box office revenue and critical reception.


Popularity

In 1990, 1991 and 1997, People magazine rated him among the 50 most beautiful people in the world. In 1995, Empire magazine ranked him among the 100 sexiest stars in film history. Two years later, it ranked him among the top 5 movie stars of all time. In 2002 and 2003, he was rated by Premiere among the top 20 in its annual Power 100 list.[2]


In 2006, Premiere magazine established Cruise as Hollywood's most powerful actor, as Cruise came in at number 13 on the magazines 2006 Power List, being the highest ranked actor.[27]

On 16 June 2006, Forbes magazine published 'The Celebrity 100', a list of the most powerful celebrities, which Cruise topped. The list was generated using a combination of income (between June 2005 and June 2006), web references by Google, press clips compiled by LexisNexis, television and radio mentions (by Factiva), and the number of times a celebrity appeared on the cover of 26 major consumer magazines.

As of August 2006, "a USA Today/Gallup poll in which half of those surveyed registered an "unfavorable" opinion of the actor" was cited as a reason in addition to "unacceptable behavior"[28] for Paramount's non-renewal of their production contract with Cruise. In addition, Marketing Evaluations reports that Cruise's Q score (which is a measure of the popularity of celebrities), had fallen 40%. It was also revealed that Cruise is the celebrity people would least like as their best friend. Cruise came bottom with just 3 percent, while the winner was School of Rock star Jack Black. October 10, 2006 was declared "Tom Cruise Day" in Japan; the Japan Memorial Day Association said that he was awarded with a special day because he has made more trips to Japan than any other Hollywood star.[29]


Relationships and personal life

Mimi Rogers

Cruise was married to Mimi Rogers on May 9, 1987; they divorced on February 4, 1990.[2] Rogers is generally believed to have introduced Cruise to Scientology.[30]


Nicole Kidman

Cruise met Nicole Kidman on the set of their film Days of Thunder. The couple married on December 24, 1990 and divorced on August 8, 2001. He and Kidman adopted two children, Isabella Jane (b. December 22, 1992) and Connor Antony (b. January 17, 1995).[2] They separated when Kidman was three months pregnant, just before their tenth wedding anniversary; she later miscarried.[31]


Penélope Cruz

Cruise was next romantically linked with Penélope Cruz, the lead actress in his film Vanilla Sky. After a three-year relationship, in March 2004, Cruise announced that their relationship had ended in January.[32]


Katie Holmes

In April 2005, Cruise began dating actress Katie Holmes (born 1978), best known for her breakthrough role on the teen television drama Dawson's Creek, and also for her roles in art house films such as The Ice Storm, thrillers such as Abandon, and blockbusters such as Batman Begins. Shortly after they began their highly publicized relationship, on 17 June 2005, Cruise announced he had proposed to her at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.[33] She accepted his proposal, and the couple married in Bracciano, Italy on November 18, 2006. met, Holmes and Cruise were engaged. Their relationship made Holmes the subject of international media attention, much of it negative, including speculation the relationship was a publicity stunt to promote the couple's films.[34] Holmes, who was raised a Roman Catholic,[35] joined the Church of Scientology shortly after the couple began dating.[36].

On April 18, 2006 Katie gave birth to a baby girl named Suri at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California.[37] Cruise stated that the name derives from the Hebrew word for "princess" or the Persian word meaning red rose.[38] (See also Sarah.) She is the first child for Holmes and third for Cruise, who (as previously mentioned) has two adopted children with Nicole Kidman.[39]


Controversy

Scientology

Cruise is an outspoken advocate for the Church of Scientology. He became involved with Scientology in 1990 through his first wife, Mimi Rogers.[40] Cruise has publicly said that Scientology, specifically the L. Ron Hubbard Study Tech, helped him overcome dyslexia.[41] In addition to promoting various programs that introduce people to Scientology, Cruise has campaigned for Scientology to be fully recognized as a religion in Europe. He lobbied politicians in France and Germany, where the legal systems regard Scientology as a cult and business respectively. In 2005 the Paris city council revealed that Cruise had lobbied officials Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Claude Gaudin, described him as a spokesman and militant for Scientology, and barred any further dealings with him.[42][43] Cruise co-founded and raised donations for Downtown Medical to offer New York 9/11 rescue workers detoxification therapy based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard. This has drawn criticism from the medical profession,[44] as well as firefighters.[45] For these activities and others, David Miscavige awarded Scientology's Freedom Medal of Valor to Cruise in late 2004.

A controversy erupted in 2005 after he openly criticized actress Brooke Shields for using the drug Paxil (paroxetine), an anti-depressant, to which Shields attributes her recovery from postpartum depression after the birth of her first daughter in 2003. Cruise asserted that there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance, and that psychiatry is a form of pseudoscience. This led to a heated argument with Matt Lauer on The Today Show on June 24, 2005.[46] Brooke Shields responded to Cruise's comments by calling them "irresponsible and dangerous",[47] In late August 2006, Cruise apologized in person to Shields for his comments; Shields said that she was "impressed with how heartfelt [the apology] was […]. I didn't feel at any time that I had to defend myself, nor did I feel that he was trying to convince me of anything other than the fact that he was deeply sorry. And I accepted it."[48] Cruise's spokesman confirmed that Cruise and Shields had made up but said that Cruise's position on anti-depressants had not changed.[48] Shields was a guest at Cruise's and Holmes's wedding.

Cruise also said in an Entertainment Weekly interview that psychiatry "is a Nazi science" and that methadone was actually originally called Adolophine after Adolf Hitler, a myth well-known as an urban legend.[49] In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, Cruise said that "In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. It's called Narconon… It's a statistically proven fact that there is only one successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. Period". While Narconon claims to have a success rate over 70%,[50][51] the accuracy of this figure has been widely disputed.[52] Scientology is well-known for its opposition to mainstream psychiatry.

In January 2008 the Daily Mail (UK) announced a forthcoming biography of Cruise, Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, by Andrew Morton. Cruise's attorney Bert Fields said that the unauthorized biography was full of "tired old lies" or "sick stuff."


IAS Freedom Medal of Valor ceremony video

On January 15, 2008, a video produced by the Church of Scientology featuring an interview with Cruise was leaked to the Internet and uploaded to YouTube. In the video, music from Cruise's Mission Impossible films plays in the background, and Cruise discusses what being a Scientologist means to him.[53][54] According to The Times, Cruise can be seen in the video "extolling the virtues of Scientology".[55] The Daily Telegraph characterizes Cruise as "manic-looking" during the interview, "gush[ing] about his love for Scientology".[56]

The Church of Scientology asserted that the video material that had been leaked to YouTube and other websites was "pirated and edited" and taken from a three-hour video produced for members of Scientology.[54][57] YouTube removed the Cruise video from their site under threat of litigation.[58] As of February 4, 2008, the web site Gawker.com was still hosting a copy of the video, and other sites have posted the entire video.[59][58] Lawyers for the Church of Scientology sent a letter to Gawker.com demanding that they remove the video, but Nick Denton of Gawker.com stated: "It's newsworthy, and we will not be removing it."[60]


Oprah Winfrey Show incident

Cruise jumps on the couch during the taping of an interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show.Cruise has made several expressions of his feelings for Holmes to the media, most notably the "couch incident" which took place on the popular Oprah Winfrey Show of May 23, 2005. Cruise "jumped around the set, hopped onto a couch, fell to one knee and repeatedly professed his love for his new girlfriend."[61] The phrase "jumping the couch", fashioned after "jumping the shark", is used to describe someone "going off the deep end" in public in a manner extreme enough to tarnish his or her reputation. It enjoyed a short-lived popularity, being chosen by the editors of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang as the "slang term of the year" in 2005[62] and by the nonprofit group Global Language Monitor as one of its top phrases for the year.[63]

The "couch incident" was voted #1 of 2005's "Most Surprising Television Moments" on a countdown on E![64] and was the subject of numerous parodies, including the epilogue of Scary Movie 4.

In early May 2008, Cruise reappeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to celebrate 25 years of being in the film business. The feature was a two hour special, the first hour was Oprah spending the day with Cruise at his house in Telluride, Colorado on May 2. The second part was on May 5 with Cruise making an in studio appearance and ending with every member of the audience receiving a box DVD set of all the films Cruise had ever starred in.


Litigation related to gay rumors

The Daily Express newspaper ?- During his marriage to actress Nicole Kidman, the couple endured public speculation about their sex life and rumors that Cruise was gay. In 1998, he sued a British tabloid that alleged that the marriage was a sham designed to cover up his homosexuality.[65]
David Ehrenstein ?- Tom Cruise's lawyers threaten to sue Ehrenstein for his book titled "Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-1998", that discussed Cruise's appeal to both men and women.[66]
Chad Slater ?- In May 2001 he filed a lawsuit against gay porn actor Chad Slater (aka Kyle Bradford). Slater had allegedly told the celebrity magazine Actustar that he had engaged in an affair with Cruise. Both Slater and Cruise denied this, and in August 2001 Slater was ordered to pay $10 million to Cruise in damages after Slater declared he could not afford to defend himself against the suit and would therefore default.[67]
Michael Davis ?- He also sued Michael Davis, publisher of Bold Magazine, who alleged but never confirmed that he had video that would prove Cruise was homosexual. The suit was dropped in exchange for a public statement by Davis that the video was not of Cruise and that Cruise was heterosexual.[68]

Other litigation

Buffalo Beast newspaper - After The Beast's publication of their 50 Most Loathsome People of 2004 (which included Cruise in the list), Cruise's lawyer Bertram Fields threatened to sue the small independent publication. The Beast, seeing the opportunity for nationwide exposure (particularly after the story broke on the entertainment program Celebrity Justice and later in mainstream newspapers) actively encouraged the lawsuit, effectively calling Fields' bluff. No lawsuit was ever filed and Cruise was included more prominently in the 2005 list.[69]
TomCruise.com - In 2006, Cruise sued cybersquatter Jeff Burgar to obtain control of the TomCruise.com domain name. When owned by Burgar, the domain redirected to information about Cruise on Celebrity1000.com. The decision to turn TomCruise.com over to Cruise was handed down by WIPO on July 5, 2006.[70] The decision was criticized by The Register suggesting that the WIPO conflict resolution system is flawed and that "if you were provided with the names of the panelists in any given case, you could predict with almost complete certainty what the outcome was."[71]

Publicist

Cruise's more open attitude to Scientology has been attributed to the departure of his publicist of 14 years, Pat Kingsley, in March 2004. He replaced her with his sister, fellow Scientologist Lee Anne DeVette, who served in that role until November 2005.[72] He then demoted his sister and replaced her with veteran publicist Paul Bloch, from the publicity firm Rogers and Cowan. DeVette explained that it was her decision to work on philanthropic projects rather than publicity.[73] Such restructuring is seen as a move to curtail publicity about his Scientology views, as well as the hard-sell of his relationship with Katie Holmes backfiring with the public.[74][75]

These epitaphs are reported to be from actual tombstones...

On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
Here lies
Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good
Die Young.



In a London, England cemetery:
Ann Mann
Here lies Ann Mann,
Who lived an old maid
But died an old Mann.
Dec. 8, 1767



In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:
Anna Wallace
The children of Israel wanted bread
And the Lord sent them manna,
Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna.



Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:
Here lies
Johnny Yeast
Pardon me
For not rising.



Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:
Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake.



In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:
Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw.



A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:
Sacred to the memory of
my husband John Barnes
who died January 3, 1803
His comely young widow, aged 23, has
many qualifications of a good wife, and
yearns to be comforted.



A lawyer's epitaph in England:
Sir John Strange
Here lies an honest lawyer,
And that is Strange.



Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:
I was somebody.
Who, is no business
Of yours.



Lester Moore was a Wells, Fargo Co. station agent for Naco, Arizona in the cowboy days of the 1880's. He's buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona:
Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les No More.



In a Georgia cemetery:
"I told you I was sick!"



John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
Reader if cash thou art
In want of any
Dig 4 feet deep
And thou wilt find a Penny.



On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:
She always said her feet were killing her
but nobody believed her.



In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
On the 22nd of June
- Jonathan Fiddle -
Went out of tune.



Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:
Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go.



More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:
Gone away
Owin' more
Than he could pay.



Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr. Wood:
In Memory of Beza Wood
Departed this life
Nov. 2, 1837
Aged 45 yrs.
Here lies one Wood
Enclosed in wood
One Wood
Within another.
The outer wood
Is very good:
We cannot praise
The other.



On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
Under the sod and under the trees
Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
He is not here, there's only the pod:
Pease shelled out and went to God.



The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a consumer tip:
Who was fatally burned
March 21, 1870
by the explosion of a lamp
filled with "R.E. Danforth's
Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"



Oops! Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:
Born 1903--Died 1942
Looked up the elevator shaft to see if
the car was on the way down. It was.



In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:
Here lies an Atheist
All dressed up
And no place to go.

Hey, hawkman. Thanks for the great bio's and the wonderful epitaphs. Glad the deceased have a sense of humor. You and Nair have a wonderful holiday, and dump some tea in the harbor for us, ok?

Here's one by Pete Fountain called "Shine". Fabulous dixiland, y'all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipDtG8xV9_4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIr-FoBW5Xw
Caruso singing "Over There."

Why did the farmer name his rooster Robinson?




Because he crew so.

edgar, can you hear me groan?

God bless Enrico Caruso. Love the way he pronounced "word". Knew every one of those war songs, Texas, and thanks.

Speaking of hearing, y'all...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJt5KXP0cZM

I enjoy Enique almost as much as Julio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zbZilQxF8k
In keeping with the 4th of July patriotism theme, here is a Luke the Drifter recording.

Ah, edgar. You are unique, Texas. Here's one for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34IzVKnk2yw