3 losses in one day!

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Gob
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Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:40 am

3 losses in one day!

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Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Celebrity chef Gary Rhodes, who helped transform the stodgy reputation of British food, has died aged 59 with his wife Jennie by his side, his family said Wednesday. Rhodes' family said in a statement that he died Tuesday, but did not elaborate on the cause of death, saying only that they thank everyone for their support and ask for privacy during this time.

Fellow celebrity chefs from around the world expressed their sympathies to Rhodes' family and kids, and praised Rhodes for his life's work.

On Instagram, British chef Jamie Oliver said Rhodes "was a massive inspiration to me as a young chef. He reimagined modern British cuisine with elegance and fun."
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As a comedian, TV presenter, satirist, stage director, man of medicine and all-round intellectual, Jonathan Miller, who has died aged 85 after suffer- ing from Alzheimer’s disease, was unrivalled in his own lifetime.

He had wise words on almost any subject under the sun. His big failing, somebody once said, was that he was interested only in everything; his curiosity, and his ability to formulate ideas in cascades of language around it, knew no bounds. As a child, he challenged the received notions of chicken speech by conducting his own in-depth survey. Instead of them going “buk buk buk buk” followed by “bacagh” he found a quite different pattern of chicken speech: six “buks” followed by a soft “bacagh”; two “buks” followed by a further soft “bacagh”; and nine further “buks” followed by a loud, conclusive “bacagh”.

The critic Penelope Gilliatt reported this breakthrough, adding that Miller could also enact objects: “I saw him imitate the sound of a sofa being sat on. His face expressed outrage on behalf of sofas everywhere.”

Miller was a very funny man. He was also a polymath, a dangerous word, with its overtones of “too clever by half” and dusty, book-bound isolation. But he was no snob. He loved low comedy and the Carry On films. It was his fate, however, to be branded a “pseud” in Private Eye; he became, in those pages, a cartoon character, Doctor Jonathan, a preposterous figure holding forth in Camden Town on Jung, Freud, Shakespeare, Schiller and schadenfreude. The fact that Susan Sontag, in some ways his opposite number in New York, branded him as “one of the most valuable people in the United Kingdom” did not help.
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Clive James, an Australian journalist, joker and intellectual who had a long career as a writer and broadcaster in the U.K., has died. He was 80.

James’ representatives, United Agents, said he died Sunday at his home in Cambridge, north of London, and a private funeral was held Wednesday.

James had been diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema, and he suffered kidney failure in 2010.

“I am a man who is approaching his terminus,” James said in 2012. He later assured well-wishers that he intended to live a few more years — and he did, continuing to write and broadcast almost until the end.

“Clive died almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis, and one month after he laid down his pen for the last time,” United Agents said in a statement. “He endured his ever-multiplying illnesses with patience and good humor, knowing until the last moment that he had experienced more than his fair share of this ‘great, good world.’ ”

The poet, essayist, author and entertainer had a gift for tickling the divergent sensibilities of the readers of highbrow literary magazines and the audiences of Saturday night TV in Britain, his adopted country.
Stop this right now!!
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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