RIP

[axn]

Burt Reynolds

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

To those who cite the one single non-execrable thing he was noted for, being anti-torture after his brutal imprisonment by the North Vietnamese

The Vietnamese thought of something else to praise him for. Something that, if your posts to this forum are any indication, would never have occurred to you. From the Asia Times,

John McCain embodies US-Vietnam reconciliation

In state-run media outlets and especially on social media, the former POW turned politician has been affectionately talked about, with some even calling for a street in Hanoi to be named after him.

The main reason that Vietnam’s leaders and people have such great respect for the six-term Arizona senator is that he played a central role in the US-Vietnam reconciliation

Ambassador Ha Kim Ngoc depicted McCain as a symbol of that process. Another piece by VOV, which quoted Pham Quang Vinh, a former Vietnamese ambassador to the US, regarded him as “a vanguard in healing the wounds of war between the two countries.”

Writing in a condolence book at the US embassy in Hanoi, Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh equally stressed: “For both the government of Vietnam and its people, Senator McCain was a symbol of his generation of senators and of the veterans of the Vietnam War […] who took the lead in significantly healing the wounds of war, normalizing ties and promoting the comprehensive Vietnam-US partnership.”

[kriesel]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/08/enter...bit/index.html

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

The Vietnamese thought of something else to praise him for. Something that, if your posts to this forum are any indication, would never have occurred to you. From the Asia Times,

John McCain embodies US-Vietnam reconciliation

I would be more impressed with McCain's gestures of postwar rapprochement if during the same timespan he hadn't suggested the US do to multiple other nations what it did to Vietnam, typically for no better reasons. Also, the magnanimity here seems to me to be more or less entirely on the part if the Vietnamese - after all it was their country which was invaded and subjected to a campaign of genocidal aggression, not the other way around.

[kladner]

https://readersupportednews.org/news...ion-dies-at-92
I am glad to have learned of this amazing hero, even if it is at her life's end.

She was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years younger.

When she rode her bicycle down the streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms hidden in a basket, Nazi officials rarely stopped to question her. When she walked through the woods, serving as a lookout or seductively leading her SS target to a secluded place, there was little indication that she carried a handgun and was preparing an execution.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by kladner

https://readersupportednews.org/news...ion-dies-at-92
I am glad to have learned of this amazing hero, even if it is at her life's end.

If you ever come to Haarlem, it's worth going on the little tour of the Corrie ten Boom house as well,
where she hid Jewish people from the Nazis during the Second World War.

(And, yes, the Harlem in New York is named for our Haarlem, which is much older!)

[axn]

Off topic posts have been moved here

[rudy235]

The greatest is gone!


Charles Aznavour

[Uncwilly]

Juan Romero, the hotel employee that comforted the dying RFK

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/04/65428...rfk-dies-at-68

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Nick

Sir Christopher Lee

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015...-of-93-dracula

He often played the bad guy so well that he put the hero in the shade.

In doing some poking-around on IMDB just now, I realize that I (and this thread) completely missed the passing just a few weeks later of another well-known British actor also born in 1922, Patrick Macnee of The Avengers fame. Perhaps most remarkably of a man who lived into his 90s, Macnee's IMDB bio notes that

For many years he smoked 80 cigarettes a day and drank a bottle of Scotch whisky every night. He was forced to give up drinking after being diagnosed with liver disease in the mid-1980s.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

In doing some poking-around on IMDB just now, I realize that I (and this thread) completely missed the passing just a few weeks later of another well-known British actor also born in 1922, Patrick Macnee of The Avengers fame.

Ah yes, Sir Denis Eton-Hogg: "Tap into America!"