Maggio 17, 2014

Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger (/ˈɡiːɡər/; 5 February 1940 – 12 May 2014) was a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer. He was part of the special effects team that won an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects for their design work on the film Alien.He was named to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013.

Giger was born in 1940 in Chur, capital city of Graubünden, the largest and easternmost Swiss canton. His father, a chemist, viewed art as a “breadless profession” and strongly encouraged him to enter pharmaceutics, Giger recalls. Yet he moved in 1962 to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger had a relationship with Swiss actress Li Tobler until she committed suicide in 1975. He married Mia Bonzanigo in 1979; they separated a year and a half later.^{[citation needed]}

Giger’s style and thematic execution were influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence.Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums.

In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work. The artist lived and worked in Zürich with his wife, Carmen Maria Scheifele Giger, who is the Director of the H.R. Giger Museum.

On 12 May 2014, Giger died in a hospital in Zürich after having suffered injuries in a fall.

In a New York Times obituary for Giger, Timothy Leary was quoted as having praised the artist by saying, “Giger’s work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span. It shows us, all too clearly, where we come from and where we are going.”

Maggio 9, 2014

Santiago (“Yago”) Lamela Tobío (July 24, 1977 – May 8, 2014) was a Spanish athlete competing in the long jump.

is greatest year was 1999, when he jumped 8.56 during the indoor season to win the silver medal at the 1999 World Indoor Championships. Later that year he set a new outdoors personal best with 8.56, and won another silver medal at the World Championships. His 8.56 m jump stayed as European indoor long jump record for ten years.

Maggio 1, 2014

Robert William “Bob” Hoskins, Jr.(26 October 1942 – 29 April 2014) was an English actor known for playing Cockneys and gangsters. He appeared in films such as The Long Good Friday (1980), Mona Lisa (1986), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Mermaids (1990), Hook (1991), Nixon (1995), A Christmas Carol (2009), Neverland (2011) and in his final role in Snow White and the Huntsman (2012).

Hoskins’ father was a communist and brought up Hoskins to be an atheist.^[12] In 1967, aged 25, Hoskins spent a short period of time volunteering in kibbutz Zikim in Israel,^[13][14] and also herded camels in Syria.^[15] In an interview, when asked what he owed his parents, he said, “Confidence. My mum used to say to me, ‘If somebody doesn’t like you, fuck ‘em, they’ve got bad taste.'”^[16] When asked which living person he most despised, Hoskins named Tony Blair and claimed that “he’s done even more damage than Thatcher”.He made light of his similarities with film actor Danny DeVito, who he joked would play him in a film about his life.^[16]On 8 August 2012, Hoskins announced his retirement from acting due to Parkinson’s disease.With his first wife Jane Livesey, Hoskins had two children, Alex (born 1968) and Sarah (born 1972). With his second wife Linda Banwell, he had two more children, Rosa (born 1983) and Jack (born 1986).

Aprile 28, 2014

Vujadin Boškov (Serbian Cyrillic: Вујадин Бошков; 16 May 1931 – 27 April 2014) was a Serbian footballer and coach. Boškov was born in the village of Begeč near Novi Sad, Serbia. He played with FK Vojvodina for most of his career (1946–1960).

In 1961 he moved to Italy to play for Serie A club Sampdoria for one season (1961/62), before accepting a stint as a player/coach at Swiss side Young Boys (1962–1964).^[Boškov then returned to the club that made him as a player – FK Vojvodina – and coached it for 7 seasons (1964–1971) winning one Yugoslav league championship in 1965–66. He also became a playing member of the Yugoslavia national team, and was part of the team that won the silver medal at the 1952 Olympic football tournament. Also he played at the 1954 and 1958 FIFA World Cups. He soon developed a successful international coaching career with stints in Dutch Eredivisie (FC Den Haag (1974–1976), and Feyenoord (1976–1978)), Spanish La Liga (Real Zaragoza (1978/79), Real Madrid (1979–1982), and Sporting de Gijon (1983–84)), Italian Serie A (Ascoli Calcio 1898 (1984–1986), U.C. Sampdoria (1986–1992, 1997–98), A.S. Roma (1992–93), S.S.C. Napoli (1994–1996), and A.C. Perugia (1999)), and Swiss league (Servette Geneva (1996–97)).

Arguably his greatest achievement as a coach came in 1991, when he steered Sampdoria to the Serie A scudetto. The following season, he got them to the European Cup final, where they lost 1–0 to Barcelona at Wembley.

He also coached Yugoslavia at Euro 2000, where they famously lost 4–3 to Spain in Brugge and later went out to Holland in the quarter-finals.

Aprile 27, 2014

Peter Scoones (27 October 1937 – 20 April 2014) was an Emmy Award winning underwater cameraman known for his evocative work on the oceans. His work inspired many people to dive and many divers to take up underwater photography.

Scoones is one of those very rare filmmakers who could visualise a new and exciting way to reveal a different side to his subjects. He could also invent the technology to make his vision reality. His naturalistic images are testimony not just to his imagination with a camera but also to his innovative equipment designs.Peter Scoones was diving and taking underwater photographs from 1959 until his death. He originally trained as a naval architect and,with a keen interest in dinghy racing, his service with the RAF in the Far East initiated his underwater interests. He died aged 76 on 20 April 2014.

Aprile 26, 2014

Francesc “Tito” Vilanova i Bayó, 1968-2014,  was a Spanish manager and footballer who played as a central midfielder.

After a professional playing career which culminated in three seasons in La Liga, where he played 26 games in three seasons for Celta de Vigo, Vilanova went on to work with Barcelona as an assistant coach under Pep Guardiola, being part of the squads that won 14 titles.^[1]In 2012 Vilanova was appointed first-team manager, winning the La Liga title in his first season. He stepped down in July 2013, due to ill health. He died of cancer 10 months later on 25 April 2014.

Aprile 21, 2014

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, 1937-2014, was an American middleweight boxer who was wrongly convicted of murder and later freed via a petition of habeas corpus after spending almost 20 years in prison.

In 1966, police arrested both Carter and friend John Artis for a triple-homicide committed in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey. Police stopped Carter’s car and brought him and Artis, also in the car, to the scene of the crime. On searching the car, the police found ammunition that fit the weapons used in the murder. ^[2] Police took no fingerprints at the crime scene and lacked the facilities to conduct a paraffin test for gunshot residue. Carter and Artis were tried and convicted twice (1967 and 1976) for the murders, but after the second conviction was overturned in 1985, prosecutors chose not to try the case for a third time.

Carter’s autobiography, titled The Sixteenth Round, was published in 1975 by Warner Books. The story inspired the 1975 Bob Dylan song “Hurricane” and the 1999 film The Hurricane (with Denzel Washington playing Carter). From 1993 to 2005, Carter served as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted.

Aprile 18, 2014

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (American Spanish: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣarˈsi.a ˈmarkes]  6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they had two sons,Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

Since García Márquez was eighteen, he had wanted to write a novel based on his grandparents’ house where he grew up. However, he struggled with finding an appropriate tone and put off the idea until one day the answer hit him while driving his family to Acapulco. He turned the car around and the family returned home so he could begin writing. He sold his car so his family would have money to live on while he wrote, but writing the novel took far longer than he expected, and he wrote every day for eighteen months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and their baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord.  Fortunately, when the book was finally published in 1967 it became his most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which sold more than 30 million copies. (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa 1970). The story chronicles several generations of the Buendía family from the time they founded the fictional South American village of Macondo, through their trials and tribulations, instances of incest, births and deaths. The history of Macondo is often generalized by critics to represent rural towns throughout Latin America or at least near García Márquez’s nativeAracataca.

This novel was widely popular and led to García Márquez’s Nobel Prize as well as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972. William Kennedy has called it “the first piece of literature since theBook of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race,”^[51] and hundreds of articles and books of literary critique have been published in response to it. Despite the many accolades the book received, García Márquez tended to downplay its success. He once remarked: “Most critics don’t realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.”

Dicembre 21, 2013

Võ Nguyên Giáp (25 August 1911 – 4 October 2013) was a General in the Vietnam People’s Army and a politician

He first grew to prominence during World War II, where he served as the military leader of the Viet Minh resistance against the Japanese occupation of Vietnam. Giáp was a principal commander in two wars: the First Indochina War (1946–54) and the Vietnam War (1960–1975). He participated in the following historically significant battles: Lạng Sơn (1950), Hòa Bình (1951–52), Điện Biên Phủ (1954), the Tết Offensive (1968), the Easter Offensive (1972), and the final Ho Chi Minh Campaign (1975). Giáp was also a journalist, an interior minister in President Hồ Chí Minh’s Việt Minh government, the military commander of the Việt Minh, the commander of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), and defense minister. He also served as a member of the Politburo of the Vietnam Workers’ Party, which in 1976 became the Communist Party of Vietnam. He was the most prominent military commander, beside Ho Chi Minh, during the Vietnam War, and was responsible for major operations and leadership until the war ended.

Dicembre 19, 2013

Ronald Arthur “Ronnie” Biggs (8 August 1929 – 18 December 2013) was an English thief, known for his role in the Great Train Robbery of 1963, for his escape from prison in 1965, for living as a fugitive for 36 years and for his various publicity stunts while in exile. In 2001, he returned to the United Kingdom and spent several years in prison, where his health rapidly declined. Biggs was released from prison oncompassionate grounds in August 2009 and died in a nursing home in December 2013.

In need of a loan to fund a deposit on a house purchase for his family, Biggs approached Reynolds, who offered him a place on the proposed train robbery. Biggs was tasked by Reynolds to find a suitable engine driver to move the train forwards to the unloading point, and he recommended Stan Agate, known on the gang as “Pop” due to his age.

Having told his wife that he was off logging with Reynolds in Wiltshire,^[4] on the night of the raid Biggs was a passenger in the stand-by getaway car, and only saw the haul once the gang returned to Leatherslade farm.^[2] Stopping the mail train from Glasgow to London in the early hours of 8 August 1963 (Biggs’s 34th birthday), engine driver Jack Mills was coshed with an iron bar in the course of the robbery. As Agate had never driven a diesel engine, the gang forced the injured and bleeding Mills to move the engine and mail carriages forward to the bridge chosen as the unloading point.

Having unloaded 120 of the 128 mailbags from the train within Reynolds’ alloted timetable, and returned to their hideout at Letherslade Farm, various sources show that the robbery yielded the participants £2.6 million; Biggs’s share was £147,000. With their timetable brought forward due to the enclosing police investigation, Biggs returned home on the following Friday with his stash in two canvas bags.^[2]

After an accomplice failed to burn down Leatherslade Farm as agreed to clean it for evidence, Biggs’s fingerprints were subsequently found by the Metropolitan Police investigation team on a ketchup bottle. Three weeks later, he was arrested along with 11 other members of the gang in South London.  In 1964, nine of the 15-strong gang including Biggs, were jailed for the crime; most received sentences of 30 years.