R.I.P. In Memoriam........

A couple of discs that I would recommend are 2 CDs with suites from several of his films:

A CD featuring music from his scores for Tarabas and Hiob:
http://www.soundtrackcollector.com/title/27275/Tarabas

Tarabas has a lovely theme that's a highlight of this CD.

A second CD features music from his scores to Flucht ohne Ende, Radetzkymarsch and Don Carlos:
http://www.soundtrackcollector.com/titl … +Ohne+Ende

Flucht ohne Ende is a highlight of this CD.

Normand Corbeil RIP

Most people don't know him, but I got to know him through his work on the sci fi movie Screamers, and more importantly Heavy Rain (which is a perfect film score for a video game). He was about to work (or did already work on) Beyond Two Souls, the much anticipated game of the makers of Heavy Rain

Anyway, sad to hear about his death, 56 is no age to go

He became one with the Force.
R.i.p.

This affected me tonight, the man played no small part in my love of reading....

JAMES HERBERT

I got into Herbert at a very young age, I was only 13 when I read THE RATS ( his first novel ), like you Stephen King came to prominence too when I first read a novel of his, THE STAND ( in 1980 and the first tombstone sized book I dug into ), the likes of King, Clive Barker ( who blew everyone else out of the water with the awesome WEAVEWORLD ), Ramsey Campbell and others would take up my reading time over the likes of Herbert but every now and then I'd dip back into his works and it was always oddly comforting, like watching a favourite Hammer film, his work was classic horror.

p.s. Me and a mate accidently "bumped" into James Herbert in a Bristol bookshop back in 1980, I ended up buying his latest novel ( The Dark ) and got it signed which I still have to this day, he was a lovely and gentle bloke and quite happy to chew the fat with a couple of high spirited teenage idiots.

People are saying that Roger Ebert has passed away. The news site seems to be overloaded, though.

Sad news.

He was one of my favorite film reviewers.

It won't mean much to almost anyone here, but I just learned Carmen Infantino died.

Infantino was a comic books artist for DC, and did a lot of work on Batman in the weird 'interbellum' (roughly 1963-1969) between the silly fifties scifi Batman (classic plot line example: Batman is transported to the past by aliens, helping troglodytes fight dinosaurs) and the early seventies' New Golden Age of Dennis O'Neill, bringing the Bat back to its manhunting detective roots.

As such, he wrote and illustrated a great number of classic, but ultimately forgettable stories. Probably his most important contribution there was the redesign of the bat logo, which went from a standalone black symbol to a black on yellow vignet.

in the early eighties he tried his hand at illustrating some Star Wars comics in the Marvel line, but keeping to his own style rather than the reference material, everything he did looked like "old science fiction", with a distinct late fifties flavour. He really botched up some damn good stories with this ill-advised approach.

I will remember him fondly though as the man who ushered in the second (and to many definitive) Flash, Barry Allen, with his famous streamlined red and yellow costume design. For his tireless, decade long work on The Flash, defining the look and feel of one of DC's most beloved super hero and his foes, may his name live forever in the chronicles of comics' greats.

Sorry to hear that. Regardless of what one feels about her or her politics, she was a dominant figure of the 20th century.

I am hoping that comments here will not degenerate to the levels that I see on Twitter and Facebook.

I have little interest in politics but I'm reading of people who will celebrate her death. At that basic level that can't be right? Are people actually lumping her in with the likes of Hitler, Hussein, Ghaddafi, etc?

There is already two threads about her on FSM, fancy a wager on how soon both threads will get locked?

Thatcher, like Reagan, having come to power during my (political and social) formative years, will to me always be associated with the strongest possible sense of clear direction and no-nonsense leadership that seemed needed in a time of social and material confusion and turmoil.

Of course having read as much as I have on either leader, there's been the occasional second thought on any impending sainthood (for one thing, as sharp witted as she was, Thatcher apparently had absolutely no sense of humour!), but it's very hard in my mind to keep in any kind of objectivity: she defined British hardnosed bulldoggishness on a level not seen since Winston Churchill.

And of course her and Neil Kinnock (leader of the Labour Party at the time) made politics fun again and as eminently watchable as a wrestling match!

It's not the "I'm-getting-old-because-the-policemen-are-looking-younger" scenario; politicians back then were old. Old meant experience. Today, young means no experience and (theoretically) no skeletons in the closet.

Most of the politicians I remember would be a PR company's worst nightmare today!! (Yes, I mean Michael Foot!!)

I'm watching Eggheads on BBC 2, I find our Prime minister David Cameron ( aka Mr Punch, Billy Bunter ) too queasy to watch.

And growing up as a child of her era - for most of my life I knew of no other kind of politics. It always saddened me to discover the kind of politics that followed (from 1997, anyway, for over a decade there was no functional opposition in the UK, which was a bad time).