Losing Donna Summer-Real Bad!

Quick on the heels of the loss of Whitney Huston, we now lose Donna Summer, a doyen of pop music that set the mood for the pulsating era of the disco 70’s to Heaven’s door.

A Grammy winner and global record seller, Summers passed on from cancer on Thursday May 17, 2012.

Gloria Gaynor, disco's other great diva, said Summer "forever changed ... how America danced and enjoyed themselves. She may have had her Last Dance here on earth, but Heaven Knows it is dancing with joy for her arrival."

The famed Liza Minelli said, "We will be dancing to her music forever," and record producer Quincy Jones said her voice was "the heartbeat and soundtrack of a decade."

Born LaDonna Gaines in Boston, she made her debut as a church singer at age 10 and began her professional career in Germany at the age of 18, performing in the shows Hair and Porgy and Bess and working as a studio session singer.

But it wasn't until 1975 that she found fame with the breathy vocals and grinding beat of Love to Love You Baby. The song was a huge hit in American and European nightclubs even though its overt sexuality made it controversial.

Summer told Billboard magazine in a 2008 interview that she wasn't originally planning on singing that song herself.

"It was kind of a work in progress, and I thought that if I could get the right singer, it could be a hit. I had given Giorgio Moroder,the producer, the idea of Love to Love You Baby, and he went into the studio and put a track to the idea and I went in and sang some words over it," she said.

"I didn't need a lot of words, so I oohed and aahed my way through it. I was imagining if Marilyn Monroe sang the song, that's what she would do," Summer told Billboard.

Summer followed up with a string of other disco tunes in the 1970s and into the mid-1980s, including Last Dance, Hot Stuff, Bad Girls, I Feel Love and her cover version of the ballad MacArthur Park, which was her first No. 1 record in the United States in 1978.

Barbra Streisand, who recorded the 1979 duet No More Tears (Enough is Enough) with Summer said on Thursday, "She had an amazing voice and was so talented...It's so sad."

In 1983, Summer scored a massive hit with She Works Hard for the Money, as she sought to branch out of the disco genre.

Throughout her career, Summer had 32 hit singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including four No. 1s.

Summer's recording success declined in the 1990s, after she embraced Christianity and released songs like I Believe in Jesus. But her last studio album, Crayons in 2008, produced three dance club hits with I'm a Fire, Stamp Your Feet and Fame.

In 2009, Summer sang at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Norway in 2009 in honor of Nobel laureate U.S. President Barack Obama.

She also made guest appearances in the last three years on TV shows America's Got Talent and Platinum Hit.

Her most recent hit was the 2010 single To Paris With Love.

We will all missed her badly.

Here, watch some of her videos. Do not miss the one where she appeared on Oraph and sang to the audience in sheer abandonment.

She Works Hard for the Money



Last Dance



Dim All the Lights



Bad Girls and Hot Stuff



MacAuthurs’s Park



On The Radio



I Feel Love



No More Tears (with Barbara Streisand)



On Oprah

Christian the Lion

Kindred kindness between man and the king of the jungle.

Let the video tell you the story.

The Passing of Peter Graves

Peter Graves is dead.

Renown for his role in 'Mission Impossible' TV series, he was a consummate actor and was a joy to watch when an episode starts to roll before the credits as he listens to a self-destructing tape-recorder.

We all loved Peter Graves. Yes, is was not impossible for him to leave us. He died yesterday at his home in Pacific Palisades.

Apart from the 'Mission Impossible' series, he starred also in  “Airplane!” and Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17”

We say good-bye to another brilliant actor of the silver screen.

J.D. Salinger Passes ON

J.D. Salinger, who wrote the American post-war literary classic “The Catcher in the Rye,” has died of natural causes aged 91.

“The Catcher in the Rye” was published in 1951. Its story of alienation and rebellion, featuring the teenage hero Holden Caulfield, immediately resonated with adolescent and young adult readers.

The novel’s first-person narrative shadows Caulfield through New York City in the days following his expulsion from a Pennsylvania prep school.

Generations of young people read the novel and embraced Caulfield, the phony-hating personification of teenage angst, as a proxy for their own experiences.


Many schools and libraries either banned the book due to its use of profanity and occasional scatological references or championed it for its portrayal of adolescence.

“Catcher” has been translated into the world’s major languages and sold more than 65 million copies. It is routinely listed among the best novels of the 20th century.

Alarmed by his sudden fame, Salinger has been a recluse since 1953, ferociously protecting his privacy in Cornish, a small town in northwest New Hampshire.

Besides “Catcher” he published only a few books and collections of short stories, including “9 Stories,” “Franny and Zooey,” “Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: An Introduction.”

Neighbours in Cornish rarely saw him and he never returned phone calls or letters from readers or admirers. Only rumours, infrequent sightings, and rare, brief interviews brought him to public attention.

He has not published a work since 1965 and the real-life Salinger would have been a disappointment to his most famous creation.

“What really knocks me out,” Caulfield said in “The Catcher in the Rye,” “is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

In a rare interview with the New York Times in 1974, he said there was “marvellous peace” in not publishing.

“It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure,” he said.

Salinger often turned to the courts to help him guard his privacy. In 1982 he sued to halt the publication of a fictitious interview with a major magazine. In 2009, he sued to stop the US publication of a novel by Swedish writer Fredrik Colting that presents Holden Caulfield as an old man.

Jerome David Salinger was born on New Year’s Day in 1919 in New York to Sol Salinger, a cheese importer, and Marie Jillich. He attended three colleges but never graduated.

Salinger began writing magazine stories in 1940 before joining the Army during World War Two and seeing combat as part of the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.

In her controversial 2001 biography “Dream Catcher,” Salinger’s daughter Margaret said her father was one of the first soldiers to arrive at a liberated concentration camp.

The book portrayed him as a self-centred wife-abuser who told his pregnant daughter to get an abortion because she “had no right to bring a child into this lousy world.”

Salinger married three times. The first was an eight-month marriage with a woman he had arrested in Europe for being a minor Nazi Party official.

Salinger met a young Radcliffe student, Claire Douglas, in New Hampshire in 1953. The pair married in 1954, and had two children, Margaret and Matthew. He and Claire divorced in 1966.

His third and surviving wife, Colleen, was a nurse who was some 40 years younger than him.

We bid farewell to one of the great Illuminati and literati of our age.

Ghazali Shafie Passes On

The man who self-proclaimed himself or was proclaimed with that moniker by third parties from the cartoon strip,"Alley Oop", Ghazali Shafie or “King Ghaz” passed away yesterday.

Let us recall his highlights.

He was a no-nonsense Minister. Know your stuff before going before him or else you will feel the lashes of the Spanish Inquisition from him.A thoroughbred of a man, he choose to know as much as possible of an issue before speaking on it. He was the epitome of what a strict taskmaster was. He is quick tempered and harsh if you pussyfooted with him.

He served 4 prime ministers though he came close to become one. Did the late Tun Hussein Onn made one sad irreversible mistake by not choosing Ghazalie Shafie, the apparently wisest of the three UMNO VPs then?

He was also known internationally when he was foreign minister, besides serving with various international bodies and missions. He famously escaped death in a plane crash in Kampung Janda Baik on Jan 10, 1982 which killed his personal bodyguard and the co-pilot. The incident shocked the nation at the time.

Born in Kuala Lipis on March 22, he received his early education at a number of Malay and English schools in Raub, Kuala Lipis, Bentong and Penjum before studying at Clifford School, Kuala Lipis from 1939 to 1940.

In 1941, he furthered his studies at Raffles College in Singapore before obtaining his LLB (Honours) at University College of Wales and then a degree in international relations from the London School of Economics in 1954.

From 1941 to 1946, he served in several defence forces including the Malayan Volunteer Force and Anti-Japanese Movement.

Ghazali who had worked as a clerk with the Selangor Council, was appointed as Malaya’s High Commissioner to India in 1957 and two years later, was made the secretary-general of the Foreign Ministry.

He was foreign minister from July 1981 to July 1984 and resigned from the post the same month. A highly important task held by Ghazali was as a member of the Cobbold Commission on the formation of Malaysia.

His long service in the Cabinet started in 1970 when he was appointed minister with special functions and a year later was given the additional information portfolio. Sixteen months later, he was made home and information minister and in July 1981, was appointed foreign minister.

After resigning from the Cabinet in 1984, Ghazali held various important positions in the corporate sector and international organisations.

He lost in the contest for a party vice-president post in 1972 and 1975. However, he won the post in 1981.

I post this in memory of the man who wants to excel and did in his own way. We say goodbye to him here.

We Lost a Little Sunshine

A promising star Brittany Murphy, of 'Girl,Interupted', 'Clueless', and '8 Mile', dies today at the age of 32.

Brittany, who got her start in the sleeper hit 'Clueless' and rose to stardom in '8 Mile',died Sunday (20 December US time)in Los Angeles.

Murphy was rushed to a hospital from her home in the Hollywood Hills. There is currently no news of the cause of her death.

According to a neighbor, Clare Staples said she saw firefighters working to resuscitate the actress Sunday morning. She said Murphy was on a stretcher and "looked as though she was dead at the scene."

Murphy's husband, wearing pajama bottoms and no shoes, appeared "dazed" as firefighters tried to save her, Staples said. "It's just tragic," she added.

Born Nov 10, 1977, in Atlanta, Murphy grew up in New Jersey and later moved with her mother Sharon to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

Her career started in the early 1990s with small roles in television series, commercials and movies. She is best known for parts in 'Girl, Interrupted', 'Clueless' and '8 Mile'.

Her on-screen roles declined in recent years, but Murphy's voice gave life to numerous animated characters, including Luanne Platter on more than 200 episodes of Fox's King of the Hill and Gloria the penguin in the 2006 feature Happy Feet.

She dated Ashton Kutcher, who co-starred with her in 2003's romantic comedy 'Just Married'.

Kutcher sent a message on Twitter Sunday morning about Murphy's death: "Today the world lost a little piece of sunshine," Kutcher wrote. "My deepest condolences go out to Brittany's family, her husband, & her amazing mother Sharon."

This was one great actress with those doleful eyes and a great come-hither.

We will surely missed her!

Alex Ooi: First Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of the passing of my good buddy,the late Alex Ooi Eng Chor.

Alex passed on after suffering a heart attack during dinner after a dance competition in Ipoh.

I went for the wake the following day to pay my last respects.

Looking at the viewing glass plate in the coffin, I could see for the first time a clean shaven Alex lying in peace.

Alex has always been a person that is friendly and gifted with the serving spirit.

According to his mother, he had omens that he would not last 2008.As such, he told her that he would not cook the Chinese New Year dishes in 2009.

We remember him in memory this day and pray the Almighty Lord will be kind to his soul.

Amen.