Singer Robert Goulet dies at 73 2 hours, 35 minutes ago


Associated Press

LOS ANGELES - Robert Goulet, the handsome, big-voiced baritone whose Broadway debut in "Camelot" launched an award-winning stage and recording career, has died. He was 73.

The singer died Tuesday morning in a Los Angeles hospital while awaiting a lung transplant, said Goulet spokesman Norm Johnson.

He had been awaiting a lung transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after being found last month to have a rare form of pulmonary fibrosis.

Goulet had remained in good spirits even as he waited for the transplant, said Vera Goulet, his wife of 25 years.

"Just watch my vocal cords," she said he told doctors before they inserted a breathing tube.

The Massachusetts-born Goulet, who spent much of his youth in Canada, gained stardom in 1960 with "Camelot," the Lerner and Loewe musical that starred Richard Burton as King Arthur and Julie Andrews as his Queen Guenevere.

Goulet played Sir Lancelot, the arrogant French knight who falls in love with Guenevere.

He became a hit with American TV viewers with appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and other programs. Sullivan labeled him the "American baritone from Canada," where he had already been a popular star in the 1950s, hosting his own show called "General Electric's Showtime."

>> May God Bless His Soul<<

Celeb Homes threaten as fire torch Penn's Land

Fires Torch Penn's Land, Threaten Celeb Homes Natalie Finn
Mon Oct 22, 5:12 PM ET



Los Angeles (E! Online) - Private beaches, a fleet of luxury cars, 24-hour private security and sweeping ocean views are no match for Mother Nature, especially on a windy day in SoCal after a hot, dry summer.

A wildfire that began early Sunday morning in Malibu scorched a plot of land belonging to Sean Penn on Monday and has forced evacuations all over the tony Pacific-adjacent enclave, including gated communities where celebs such as Mel Gibson, Jennifer Aniston and Kelsey Grammar reside.

Penn's lot at the top of Carbon Canyon Road, where he used to have a home before it was destroyed in an arson-suspected 1993 brushfire, contained two trailers, both of which burned after firefighters determined that, since they were unoccupied, there was no use risking lives to save them.

Photos posted on splashnews.com, which first reported Penn's loss, show the burning structures.

No damage has been reported, however, to David Duchovny and Téa Leoni's home, which is right near Penn's property.

Firefighters were also spotted clustered outside David Arquette and Courteney Cox's home, but according to images on celebrity photo site X17.com, the house remains intact and it looks to have been hosed down to ward off damage.

The gated community where Gibson, Olivia Newton-John and country singer Tanya Tucker have homes has been evacuated. James Cameron and Cindy Crawford's residences are also said to be in danger; Mark Hamill and his wife are also packed and ready to go should the siren sound, per the actor's rep.

Grammar and Victoria Principal were also among those who were forced out of town over the weekend, according to their publicists.

The Malibu fire, which as of Monday afternoon was reportedly only 10 percent contained, started at about 4:50 a.m. Sunday and has since charred at least 2,400 acres.

According to authorities, the blaze was probably triggered when the oft-destructive Santa Ana winds, which were blowing at about 65 miles per hour on Sunday, crossed paths with some high-voltage power lines.

Meanwhile, a dozen conflagrations have sprung up all over the Southland, affecting parts of the San Fernando Valley, Orange County, San Diego and Lake Arrowhead. More than 250,000 people have been evacuated altogether.

Taking matters into their own hands were The Hills' Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, who talked to Ryan Seacrest on Monday about their own containment efforts when a brushfire inched toward their Los Angeles-area home on Sunday.

"Spencer was literally down there putting out the fire, and I was screaming at him 'Come back here, the firemen are coming!'” Montag said on Seacrest's KIIS-FM morning show.

“It was here and I was putting out the fire with the hose,” Pratt added. “Until the firemen got there. They were fast.”

Also affected Monday was Young Hollywood's home away from home—Promises treatment center. Patients staying at the Malibu rehab facility, where Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Ben Affleck and a host of others have stopped to sober up, were transferred to an outpatient locale after the area was included in a mandatory evacuation.

"Part of the problem is that Promises is on a single-lane road, and we didn't want to have problems with a lot of people trying to get out at one time," an L.A. County Fire Department spokesperson told reporters.

Despite the allure of all that oceanside luxury, Malibu has always been a notorious hot spot, so to speak.

Suzanne Somer's beachside manse was one of 11 homes destroyed when a brushfire, spurred by big winds, whipped through Malibu Road in January. Penn's residence was one of 268 homes that burned in 1993 when a possible arson blaze killed three people and caused $219 million in damage.

Collier Glacier is shrinking

BEND, Ore. - Between the North Sister and Middle Sister in Oregon's Cascade Range, Collier Glacier has advanced and receded for hundreds of thousands of years. But like many glaciers, it is headed in one direction these days: backward.

It is in serious peril, says geologist Ellen Morris Bishop of the Fossil-based Oregon Paleo Lands Institute. "We have basically a really sad picture of Collier Glacier today."

Geologists blame among other things a warming climate, altering the landscape and perhaps the availability of water to high-elevation ecosystems. Collier is shrinking faster than most of the 35 glaciers in the state.

"Now everything is just in a chaotic shrink," Bishop said.

This summer she led a climate change-themed tour of the Central Oregon Cascades, starting from McKenzie Pass and heading south. Volcanic activity built the Cascades, but over eons the glaciers have worn them down.

At the glacier's base is a moraine, or a ridge of rocks, deposited by the slowly moving glacier when it was bigger. Today an empty valley fills the space between the ridge and the glacial edge.

"This was a full valley in 1906," Bishop said. Since then it has retreated more than a mile.

The ice sheet has visibly shrunk since she first visited the glacier in the 1980s, Bishop said.

"We're in trouble," said David Eddleston, of Bend and a participant in the field trip. "It's right there in front of our eyes."

The shrinking of the glacier started about the same time carbon dioxide emissions started rising, Bishop said.

"It's all tied to climate change, said Peter Clark, a geosciences professor at Oregon State University.

In the late 19th century, many glaciers started to retreat, he said. That shrinking was probably due to natural fluctuations in the atmospheric temperature.

But in the last 20 to 30 years, all of the Cascades' glaciers have been shrinking, he said.

Collier is reflective of glaciers all along the Cascades, Clark said.

And because the actions of glaciers reflect temperatures from two decades ago, even if warming trends were to stop today, glaciers would still be shrinking for at least 20 years to come, he said.

With warming predicted to rise between 3 and 5 degrees by the end of the century, temperature will likely be the main factor that causes glaciers' decline.

"Most people would say that by the turn of the century there will be very little ice left on the mountains," Clark said.

Glaciers store water in the winter and then release it throughout the year, Clark said, spreading out the time when water is flowing. Without the glaciers, many streams will rely more on springtime runoff.

"It will affect the water balance of the mountainous regions," he said.

"At some point, they're going to be so small that they're not going to pump out that water," said Andrew Fountain, a geology professor at Portland State University.

And when that happens, lands at higher elevations will be much drier and subject to droughts, Fountain said. Stream flow will probably decrease, which means that plant life along those waterways would diminish.

Some lakes previously fed by glaciers would become clearer because there would be no sediment but they could also start to evaporate and become smaller.

But while glaciers might shrink, that doesn't mean the ice on mountains will disappear completely, he said.

"It's actually tough to get rid of a glacier," Fountain said. As glaciers retreat, they do so by inching up to higher mountain elevations, where the air is colder.

"But it's the difference," Fountain said, "between the Collier Glacier today and a little ice patch that might be 100 yards long."

___

Information from: The Bulletin, http://www.bendbulletin.com

Mars is coming!

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You've probably heard that line before – no doubt fairly recently, thanks to a bogus e-mail that unfortunately received wide circulation on the Internet this summer with promises of Mars being as big as the full moon.


But this fact is absolutely true: Mars, the only planet whose surface we can see in any detail from the Earth, is now moving toward the best viewing position it will provide to us until the year 2014. Planet watchers have already begun readying their telescopes.


If you haven't seen it, it will be well worth looking for the red planet next week, even though you'll have to wait until after midnight to see it well.


Mars is currently midway between the zodiacal constellations of Taurus, the Bull and Gemini, the Twins and during this week it will rise shortly before 11 p.m. local daylight time. There is certainly no mistaking it once it comes up over the east-northeast horizon. Presently shining like a pumpkin-hued, zero magnitude star, Mars is currently tied for fifth place (with Vega) among the 21 brightest stars.


But as it continues to approach our Earth in the coming weeks and months, Mars will only be getting brighter: it will surpass Sirius, the brightest star in the sky by Dec. 9 and during the latter half of December it will even almost match Jupiter in brilliance.


Late next Wednesday night (or more precisely, early on Thursday morning), Mars will hover about 7-degrees above and to the right of the last quarter moon as they rise above the east-northeast horizon (your clenched fist held at arm's length is roughly 10-degrees in width). As you will see for yourself, the so-called "Red Planet" actually will appear closer to a yellow-orange tint – the same color of a dry desert under a high sun.


How close?


Every 26 months, or so, Earth makes a close approach to Mars, as our smaller, swifter orbit "overtakes" Mars around the sun. Because both the orbits of Mars and Earth are mildly elliptical, some close approaches between the two planets are closer than others.


This current apparition of Mars will be nowhere near as spectacular as the oft-referred approach of August 2003 when the planet came closer to Earth than it had in nearly 60,000-years.


Rather, on this upcoming occasion, Mars will come closest to Earth on the evening of December 18th (at around 6:46 p.m. Eastern Standard Time).


The planet will then lie 54.8 million miles (88.2 million kilometers) from Earth as measured from center to center. Mars will arrive at opposition to the sun (rising at sunset, setting at sunrise) six days later on Christmas Eve, December 24th.

How big?

That recent Martian e-mail message – a hyperbole which was widely circulated for a fourth consecutive year – lead people to believe, with liberal use of exclamation marks, that on Aug. 27, Mars would appear as bright as (or as large as) that night's full moon in the night sky. The subject header urged viewers to prepare to view "Two Full Moons."


It was amazing (and a little disturbing) to see just how many people actually believed that Mars could loom so large in our sky. But the truth is that even when at its absolute closest possible approach to Earth, Mars can appear no larger than 1/72 as big as the moon; to the unaided eye it would appear as nothing more than an extremely bright, non-twinkling star.


When it comes closest to Earth on December 18th of this year, Mars' apparent disk diameter will be equal to 15.9 arc seconds. To get an idea of just how large this is, wait until darkness falls this week and if you have a telescope, check out Jupiter, gleaming in the southwestern sky; it'll appear about 35 arc seconds across.


In contrast, Mars' disk will appear less than half as big as Jupiter's when the Red Planet comes closest to Earth later this year. While this may sound small, keep in mind that this is still atypically large for Mars. In fact, from November 30th through Jan. 5, 2008, Mars' apparent size will be larger than at any time until April 2014. Around the time that Mars is closest, amateurs with telescopes as small as 4-inches and magnifying above 120-power should be able to make out some dusky markings on the small yellow-orange disk, and perhaps the bright white polar cap.


Size isn't everything


From Dec. 15 through Dec. 29, Mars will blaze at magnitude -1.6, a bit brighter than Sirius, but just slightly inferior to Jupiter. Mars will still be positioned between Taurus and Gemini, at a rather high declination of about +27-degrees.

So almost as if to compensate for its relatively small apparent size, Mars will literally soar in the night sky of late-December.

When it reaches its highest point in the sky at around midnight local time, its altitude will be 70-degrees at Seattle, 76-degrees for New York, and an exceptional 83-degrees at Los Angeles. Meanwhile, amateur and professional astronomers stationed in southern Texas and central Florida will see Mars pass directly, or very nearly overhead!

Online Sky Maps and More
Sky Calendar & Moon Phases
Astrophotography 101
Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for The New York Times and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, New York.

Original Story: Mars in the Morning: Red Planet Grows Brighter
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Three drinks a day ups breast cancer risk -study
September 26, 2007 11:03:44 PM PST Three or more drinks a day, whether beer, wine or spirits, boost a woman's risk of breast cancer as much as smoking a pack of cigarettes, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

The relationship between alcohol and breast cancer is known but there has been little data on whether the choice of drink made a difference, they told a European Cancer Conference.

In what the researchers said was one of the largest studies to investigate links between breast cancer and alcohol -- found that alcohol itself and the amount a person consumed were key rather than the type of drink.

"Studies have consistently linked drinking alcohol to an increased risk of female breast cancer, but until now there has been little data, most of it conflicting, about an independent role played by the choice of beverage type," Arthur Klatsky of Kaiser Permanente in California and one of the researchers said.

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer killer of women, after lung cancer. It will be diagnosed in 1.2 million people globally this year and will kill 500,000.

Other studies have shown that light- to moderate alcohol use can protect against heart attacks, though Klatsky said other mechanisms were probably at work.

The heart protection likely comes from alcohol-induced "good" cholesterol, reduced blood clotting and decreased diabetes risk. But for breast cancer, the ethyl alcohol found in all booze likely ups the risk, the researchers said.

The researchers looked at the drinking habits of more than 70,000 women from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who supplied information during health examinations between 1978 and 1985. By 2004, nearly 3,000 of the women were diagnosed with breast cancer.

Among women who drank, the team examined a preference for a type of alcohol and how much of each drink people consumed. They also compared the total amount consumed and compared it to women who drank less than one drink a day.

Women who drank between one and two alcoholic drinks per day increased their risk of breast cancer by 10 percent compared with people who consumed less than one drink each day, the study found. The risk of breast cancer jumped by 30 percent in women who drank more than three drinks a day.

The results were also similar in different age and ethnic groups, the researchers said.


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george clooney hurt in motorcycle crash

WEEHAWKEN, N.J. - George Clooney and a companion were injured on Friday when their motorcycle collided with a car on a narrow road across the Hudson River from New York City.

Clooney suffered a broken rib and scrapes while his passenger, Sarah Larson, broke her foot in the 3:30 p.m. collision. The two were treated at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen and released, Clooney's spokesman, Stan Rosenfield, said.

"He's doing fine," Rosenfield said. "He has a broken rib, it's very painful and it'll take a long time to heal."

Clooney and Larson were traveling north and sped up to pass on the right of a 1999 Mazda Millenia that was preparing to make a right turn, said Weehawken police Sgt. Sean Kelly. Both were wearing helmets.

It wasn't known whether the Mazda's driver, whose identity was not immediately released, used a turn signal, Kelly said. The accident was under investigation.

"It's a he-said, she-said right now, but you can't pass on the right in Weehawken or anywhere in Jersey," Kelly said.

Rosenfield said the accident occurred when the vehicle signaled a left-hand turn, but turned right and struck Clooney's motorcycle.

"The car signaled left. George was riding to the right. The driver decided to make an abrupt right turn and clipped George," he said.

The 46-year-old actor was in the New York area to film the dark comedy "Burn After Reading," co-starring Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand.

Clooney's recovery shouldn't interrupt the production's schedule, Rosenfield said.

Clooney's latest film, "Michael Clayton," will be released next month. He and Larson have been spotted together at several film festivals and movie premieres in recent weeks.

the beck's

i think she really overdo with this outfit....it's trully shocking...