Octopus Overlords

Sudy wrote: ↑Fri Jan 05, 2024 9:48 pm This seems to come up a lot.

If you think someone deserves their own thread, they deserve it. It's about what they meant to you, or what significance you think they had. We don't need formal rules because we have civility and most of us have known each other, no matter how superficially, for years if not decades.

If we want to make a drive against catch-all threads, the community has the ability to do that. Just... create new threads for topics that you think warrant more in-depth/isolated discussion. Blackhawk for example does this all the time. As mentioned, within reason I don't think we have to worry about the forum being flooded with superfluous content. But please, use clear subjects and update them as needed (or if the original poster is no longer active, create a continuation thread).

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 1:58 pm We have a place to comment when someone dies, but every once in a while someone sees someone who was important to them die and wants to set up what amounts to a memorial to that person.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 2:02 pm As an afterthought, I'd also frown on shaming someone for offering their respects to someone that they admired. It's just a thread.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 2:07 pm

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 2:02 pm As an afterthought, I'd also frown on shaming someone for offering their respects to someone that they admired. It's just a thread.

It's a good rule to follow on forums / social media overall. Contribute if you're motivated; ignore if you're not interested.

EDIT: Case in point, just yesterday someone (elsewhere) was asking about a snowblower and how to get it started because of the snowstorm hitting our area today and tomorrow. They'd asked a pretty basic question and someone posted a sarcastic response, inferring they were a moron for asking it. Well, as it turns out, the OP's husband recently died and she was trying to figure out how to deal with something she'd never considered before and had also lost track of during her grief.

EDIT The REVENGE: I'm more bothered that people wouldn't start new forum topics than I'd be bothered that we have 37 new topics posted (broadly) about the same thing (like Starfield, to give a modern example). We're a dying breed here and at some point there will be a magic number where heat-death finally occurs because there's no activity.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 2:07 pm EDIT The REVENGE: I'm more bothered that people wouldn't start new forum topics than I'd be bothered that we have 37 new topics posted (broadly) about the same thing (like Starfield, to give a modern example). We're a dying breed here and at some point there will be a magic number where heat-death finally occurs because there's no activity.

Morgan’s female roommate, who had just returned home after being away for the holidays, knocked on Morgan’s bedroom door and received no response that day. However, she did smell a “foul odor” coming from the bedroom, so she called the police to investigate, the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office’s public information office told PEOPLE.

Skinypupy wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2024 11:49 am I just find it interesting which celebrities do and don’t get their own threads, that’s all. It’s a fascinating look into the impact different people had on our lives.

Kraken wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2024 5:50 pm I'm mostly interested in the lives (and obits) of scientists, astronauts, politicians, and similar historical figures. There was one in today's paper for an ordinary local man who died last week at 102 years old, that detailed his experience in WW2. That kind of matter-of-fact heroism fascinates me.

Jeff V wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2024 10:55 pm

Kraken wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2024 5:50 pm I'm mostly interested in the lives (and obits) of scientists, astronauts, politicians, and similar historical figures. There was one in today's paper for an ordinary local man who died last week at 102 years old, that detailed his experience in WW2. That kind of matter-of-fact heroism fascinates me.

I would be interested in such things. Do you have a link to post that elaborates on the life of this person?

Major Mike Sadler, a World War II navigator on the trackless Sahara of North Africa, who guided Britain’s first special forces across sand seas on daring behind-the-lines night raids that blew up enemy aircraft on the ground and troops in their billets, died Thursday in Cambridge, England. He was 103.

The death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by John Allcock, the secretary of the Special Air Service Regimental Association, a welfare organization for veterans of the elite task force of the British army that Mr. Sadler had belonged to, a prototype for hit-and-run warfare and for the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEALs.

Mr. Sadler was one of the first recruits and the last surviving member of the SAS from the year of its founding, 1941. Like a navigator at sea, he used stars, sun and instruments to cross expanses of the Libyan Desert, a wasteland almost the size of India, whose shifting, windblown dunes can be as changing and featureless as an ocean.

Compared with the commandos he guided on truck and jeep convoys — volunteer daredevils who crept onto Nazi airfields; attached time bombs to Messerschmitt fighters, Stuka dive bombers, fuel dumps and pilot quarters; then sped away as explosions roared behind — Mr. Sadler was no hero in the usual sense. Comrades said he might not have fired a single shot at the enemy in North Africa.

But he got his men to the targets — and out again. Without him, they said, the commandos could not have crossed hundreds of miles of desert, found enemy bases on the Mediterranean Coast, destroyed more than 325 aircraft, blown up ammunition and supply dumps, killed hundreds of German and Italian soldiers and pilots, or found their way back to hidden bases.

“His navigating skills were legendary,” wrote Sean Rayment, the author of the book “Tales From the Special Forces Club: Mike Sadler’s Story” (2013). He said Mr. Sadler’s skills had “helped to ensure the success of some of the S.A.S.’s most spectacular missions during the North African campaign.”
...
Mr. Sadler was intrigued by desert navigation. “What amazed me,” he told Rayment, “was that even with the vast, featureless expanses of the desert, a good navigator could pinpoint his exact location by using a theodolite, an air almanac and air navigational tables, and having a good knowledge of the stars.”

He spent weeks studying navigation techniques, including use of a theodolite — a telescopic device, with two perpendicular axes, used mainly by surveyors, for measuring angles in the horizontal and vertical planes. It was not unlike the sextant used by mariners to fix positions at sea.
...
To Mr. Sadler’s commandos — ragtag buccaneers in Arab headdresses and pirate beards — the Libyan Desert was an otherworldly mystery, stretching 1,000 miles south from the Mediterranean and 1,200 miles across, from the Nile to the mountains of Tunisia, a bone-dry realm of howling winds and dead silence, of dunes as tall as a 15-story building, rocky escarpments, hidden wadis and temperatures that could soar to 140 degrees by day and plunge below freezing at night.

Mr. Sadler’s first attack mission was a truck convoy in December 1941. “It was the SAS’s first ground operation after the earlier failed mission, so a lot rested on it,” Mr. Sadler recalled. “My job was to navigate from the Jalo Oasis to the German airfield at Tamet.” It took two days and three nights to cross more than 400 miles of desert. The team reached its target without being detected.

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Jan 08, 2024 12:27 am “Tales From the Special Forces Club: Mike Sadler’s Story”

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Jan 08, 2024 12:27 am Mike Sadler, intrepid desert navigator in World War II, dies at 103

Adan Canto, best known to TV audiences for his roles on The Cleaning Lady and Designated Survivor, has died at the age of 42.

“Actor Adan Canto died on Jan. 8, 2024, of appendiceal cancer,” Canto’s publicist, Jennifer Allen, confirmed in a statement to TVLine. “Adan had a depth of spirit that few truly knew. Those who glimpsed it were changed forever. He leaves behind his wife, best friend and creative partner Stephanie Ann Canto as well as his two greatest works of art, Roman Alder, three-and-a-half years of age, and Eve Josephine, one-and-a-half years of age. He will be greatly missed by so many.”

Joyce Randolph, a veteran stage and television actor whose role as the savvy Trixie Norton on “The Honeymooners” provided the perfect foil to her dimwitted TV husband, has died. She was 99.

Randolph died of natural causes Saturday night at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, her son Randolph Charles told The Associated Press Sunday.

She was the last surviving main character of the beloved comedy from television’s golden age of the 1950s.

Gary Graham, the actor best known for starring in “Star Trek: Enterprise,” died Monday. He was 73.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Tue Jan 23, 2024 8:58 pm Gary Graham has passed at 73. Star Trek and Alien Nation star. I always liked him. He brought a warmth and a peace to all his scenes somehow. Sad. Goodbye Gary. Thanks for the work.

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... 89&dpr=1.3

Gary Graham, the actor best known for starring in “Star Trek: Enterprise,” died Monday. He was 73.

No information on the cause of death was immediately given. But Melanie — full name Melanie Safka — had been in the studio earlier this month working on a new record of cover songs, “Second Hand Smoke,” for the Cleopatra label; it would have been her 32nd album, the label said.
...
In early January, according to her label, Melanie recorded a cover of Morrissey’s “Ouija Board Ouija Board” for a forthcoming tribute album celebrating his music. (Morrissey was known to be a fan of hers, having covered “Some Say (I Got Devil).”) She had also just cut a version of and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” for her planned covers album, “Second Hand Smoke.”

Other songs she had recorded for the new record included Radiohead’s “Creep,” the Moody Blues’ “Nights In White Satin,” Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” and David Bowie’s “Everyone Says Hi.”

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 2:02 pm As an afterthought, I'd also frown on shaming someone for offering their respects to someone that they admired. It's just a thread.