Ed Asner Dies: TV Icon Who Played Lou Grant Was 91

Ed Asner, legendary actor, activist and philanthropist, passed away peacefully Sunday morning, surrounded by family. He was 91.

Asner, former president of the Screen Actors Guild, is best known for his role as Lou Grant during the 1970s and early 1980s, on both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoff series Lou Grant, making him one of the few television actors to portray the same character in both a comedy and a drama.

He is the most awarded male performer in Emmy history with seven wins — five of them for playing Lou Grant. He also received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2001.

Asner’s long list of credits also include the movies Elf, one of several movies in which he played Santa Claus, and Pixar’s Oscar-winning Up, in which he voiced the lead, Carl Fredricksen. He was most recently seen guest starring on the Emmy-nominated comedy series Cobra Kai playing Johnny Lawrence’s step-father, Sid Weinberg.

Asner started his acting career in theater and helped found the Playwrights Theatre Company in Chicago, a predecessor of The Second City. He landed his first Broadway role in Face of a Hero alongside Jack Lemmon in 1960. Asner made his TV debut in 1957 on Studio One.

A string of guest-starring roles led to his casting as Lou Grant in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a character first introduced on the show in 1970. In 1977, after the acclaimed half-hour comedy series ended, Asner’s character was given his own spinoff series, hourlong drama Lou Grant (1977–82). Additionally, Asner made appearances as Lou Grant on two other shows, Rhoda and Roseanne.

Asner also was a series regular on Thunder Alley, The Bronx Zoo and Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He also delivered acclaimed performances on two hugely popular miniseries, Roots and Rich Man, Poor Man, which both earned him Emmy Awards.

In addition to Up, Asner’s extensive voiceover resume includes providing the voices for Joshua on Joshua and the Battle of Jericho (1986) for Hanna-Barbera, J. Jonah Jameson on the Spider-Man series (1994–98); Hoggish Greedly on Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990–95); Roland Daggett on Batman: The Animated Series (1992–94); Ed Wuncler on The Boondocks (2005–14); and Granny Goodness in various DC Comics animated series.

Beginning in 2016, Asner took on the role of Holocaust survivor Milton Saltzman in Jeff Cohen’s play The Soap Myth in a reading at Lincoln Center’s Bruno Walter Theatre in New York. For the next three years, he did the play in cities across the United States, until the tour was thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ed-asner-dies-tv-icon-172330278.html

3 Q posts with "Horizon."

2024, 688, 182

2024 Habbens to be at a 30 day Delta tomorrow

Silicon Valley has given up on reality - and now they want us all to use their terrible new alternative

When Facebook revealed the first public glimpse of Horizon Workrooms last Thursday, it didn't look like the future I want.

Workrooms, currently in open beta, is Facebook's first attempt at a VR product for meetings. Facebook describes Workrooms as a "collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance." In other words, it's an immersive virtual conference room with digital avatars and graphic versions of the technology you'd expect from an online meeting like screenshare, smartboards, and document collaboration.

Screenshots from the recent press briefing show a virtual Workroom all too similar to the brick and mortar offices familiar to many of us - a wood veneer table arranged in the round, overhead fluorescents (or maybe energy-efficient LEDs), and dreary gray carpet. The avatars of the casually-dressed meeting attendees were seated in front of laptops, some looking engaged and others typing away distractedly. None of them had legs, but who needs legs in virtual reality?

To be fair, Workrooms is currently in beta. I can imagine that future versions might have more varied options for the workspace environment, or at least avatars that don't cut off abruptly at the waist. Still, I wasn't sold on this first glimpse of what Zuckerberg might be imagining when he talks glowingly of the "metaverse" he's planning to build out at Facebook. The company's focus on the metaverse is one more way that Silicon Valley leaders are more focused on abstract futures and pie-in-the-sky solutions - from space travel to the singularity - than the material conditions of our shared world today.

For most people, reality sucks

The "metaverse" is currently a hot buzzword with digital creators, venture capitalists, and investors looking to sign on to the next big thing. Depending on who you listen to, the metaverse is the virtual world described in Neal Stephenson's dystopian novel "Snow Crash", or "the gateway to most digital experiences, a key component of all physical ones, and the next great labor platform." Zuckerberg is today's most visible metaverse booster, describing it as an "embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content - you are in it."

Let's get real for a second - the metaverse idea isn't anything new or interesting. It's a catchy sci-fi name for an interactive digital environment where people and companies can hang out, build apps, make money, and extract data. It is Second Life with portable IP, or Roblox with more meetings.

However, what is worth paying attention to is the recent massive glut of investment and interest in so-called metaverse companies and technology. This recent cash infusion and spate of think pieces are the symptom of something much more disturbing than any specific digital conference room: Some of the biggest brains and deepest pockets in Silicon Valley are giving up on our shared reality.

Well, not for themselves. Their reality is mostly just fine - plenty of money, flexible schedules, and ample opportunities for cultural enrichment. But for the rest of us plebs, tech CEOs and VCs can see that life is pretty hard. Marc Andreessen of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz calls this disconnect "reality privilege," paraphrasing an idea from technologist Beau Cronin. "Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people," Andreesen said earlier this year.

This sentiment isn't new - books like Jane McGonigal's "Reality is Broken" contrasted a disappointing "reality" with the exciting worlds of online back in 2011. While the privileged few "live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance" - as Andreessen puts it - everyone else has to deal with crappy jobs, crappy pay, and various overlapping environmental crises.

On this point, he's not wrong. While the looming threat of climate change is coming for us all - even those with escape bunkers or mountain retreats - all the advances of the modern world have done little to improve the lives of anyone sweating away in an Amazon warehouse or digging through piles of e-waste for scraps of precious metal. But to assume that the lives of everyday people are universally hopeless and miserable is its own kind of privilege. The distinction between "reality" and online space is a false one - it's all the same world, and we all have to live here.

more

https://www.yahoo.com/news/silicon-valley-given-reality-now-120400186.html

>>14486992

Speaking of, did you see that Bill Clinton's nephew is now a Model, just like Harris' step daughter?

(side note: If a company uses a "star" to sell a product, soon it's going to be a kiss of death for that co.)

>>14487233

TITANIC

THE SHIP ITSELF

RMS Titanic was actually owned by an American! Although the RMS Titanic was registered as a British ship, it was owned by the American tycoon, John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan, whose company was the controlling trust and retained ownership of the White Star Line! He also owned US Steel, General Electric, as well as global financial services firm JP Morgan Chase & Co which still thrives today.

When Titanic was launched on 31st May 1911 spectators and journalists travelled from as far as America to see the spectacle

https://www.titanicbelfast.com/news/18-american-titanic-facts-you-need-to-know/