People

One of Heard’s favorite jobs was in the 2013 original Sharknado movie. “‘I knew it was going to be a cult classic,’ he told the Baltimore Media Blog last year. ‘It’s just ridiculous. I thought it would replace people calling me the Home Alone dad.'”

‘Strewth: “Van Dyke, 91, was chosen this week by Bafta to receive the Britannia award for excellence in television. Speaking afterwards, he said: ‘I appreciate this opportunity to apologise to the members of Bafta for inflicting on them the most atrocious cockney accent in the history of cinema.'”

Yes. The mustache, in “classic 10-past-10 position,” survives. “Narcís Bardalet, who had embalmed Dalí’s body in 1989, told the Catalan radio station RAC1 that finding the mustache intact was ‘a miracle.’ He added: ‘Salvador Dalí is forever.'”

Barbara Weldens was singing at a church in the village of Goudron in southwestern France as part of the Festival Léo Ferré when she collapsed mid-song. There are conflicting reports regarding her cause of death with some reporting that she suffered a cardiac arrest and the BBC saying that she may have been electrocuted. Police are investigating, and the remainder of the festival has been canceled.

“Among a large group of Americans who were tracked for up to two decades, the death rate was far higher among those who viewed themselves as less active than their peers. Intriguingly, this held true even “after adjusting for actual levels of physical activity.” This suggests that, while spending too much time on the sofa is clearly bad for your health, there are dangers in simply thinking of yourself as couch potato.”

“The complaints — some anonymous — surfaced only after an internal dispute about whether the theater’s latest production should have an intermission boiled over, angering many of the community volunteers the theater relies on to function. As anger over the theater board’s oversight gained steam, MPR News interviewed these six people and one more who said they personally had been subjected to unwelcome sexual advances.”

Barbara Weldens, a 35-year-old Frenchwoman who took first prize in last year’s Jacques Brel Young Talent competition and who released her first album in February, was performing at a festival in southwestern France when she abruptly collapsed, apparently having been electrocuted.

In life, Federico Cerruti was a solitary bachelor who made his fortune binding books, lived in a small apartment above his office, and visited his villa packed with Old Masters and Modern art every Sunday. In death, he has become the latest equivalent of Henry Clay Frick, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Albert Barnes.

“Money is the last taboo in contemporary writing — there is no Fifty Shades of Green. I have a simple, crude, and self-serving idea of why that is the case: the people in our world, from book editors to magazine and newspaper editors to writers, usually hail from pretty pampered backgrounds and live pretty pampered lives. Often they’re downright rich. It’s an article of faith among these liberal elites, if you will pardon the loaded term, that they got to where they are all by themselves, and that the meritocracy works — all government has to do is level the playing field. So they talk a lot about identity, which is an easy addition to their moral equity and requires no change to their lives.”

“My country is living through dark and complicated times, following a dangerous path that may lead us inevitably to the betrayal of our deepest national traditions.”

What many may not realize is that when Devos isn’t busy gutting unions, spreading the word of God or reminding us that “nothing in life is free” (except her multimillion-dollar inheritance), she and her family are quite active in the arts world. In 2010, Betsy and her husband, Dick, donated $22 million to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, to endow its Arts Management Institute. Her family also founded and funds ArtPrize, a renowned international arts competition that takes over the streets of Grand Rapids, MI every fall.

“You know, I went north all those years ago, as a romantic young crusader and artist, and I imagined that in Alaska I could step outside my own culture — which is patently ridiculous. But somehow I was able to draw music from the air and the earth, and that has served me well. Even though it’s obviously a ridiculous idea, it’s given me a life’s work.”

“[Brian] Henson said he had to have numerous talks with [Steve] Whitmire over the years about his unprofessional conduct, which included ‘appalling’ communications with colleagues. … Henson declined to go into specifics about Whitmire’s exact demands, but did say, ‘Steve would use ‘I am now Kermit and if you want the Muppets, you better make me happy because the Muppets are Kermit.’ And that is really not OK.'”

“When you work with film, there’s a risk of things becoming very concrete. I think a strength of art is that you can steer people in a certain direction, but they have to take the last few steps themselves—everyone can find their own truth in the piece. I like to push people in a certain direction, but leave a few things for them to interpret themselves.”

At the unveiling Tuesday of the new “tenner” at Winchester Cathedral in southern England, Bank of England governor Mark Carney said the new note celebrates the “universal appeal” of Austen’s work.

“I don’t believe in the afterlife as a reality, but I believe in the afterlife as metaphor, and my mother, from the afterlife, is metaphorically kicking my ass. … I have been sobbing many times a day during this book tour. I have sobbed in private and I have sobbed onstage.” (One commenter called it “the most poetic cancelling of a book tour in history.”)

“[He was] best known for repurposing vintage golf bags by creating assemblages with their tempered plastic, steel, leather, vinyl, and hardware.”

While she has appointed rapper/producer Q-Tip, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and opera singer Renée Fleming as artistic advisers, more than a dozen senior executives and artistic leaders have resigned or been let go.

Steve Whitmire, 58, had been voicing the Muppets’ flagship character for the 27 years since Jim Henson died. He says, “The only thing I’ve done my whole adult life, and it’s just been taken away from me. I just couldn’t understand why we couldn’t resolve this.” The head of the Muppets Studio, on the other hand, says, “We raised concerns about Steve’s repeated unacceptable business conduct over a period of many years, and he consistently failed to address the feedback.”

“In the libel suit, the dealer, Hicham Aboutaam, said he has never handled antiquities looted by terrorists and that sales at his Manhattan-based gallery, Phoenix Ancient Art, have plummeted. The article reported that authorities in Switzerland, France, Belgium and the United States were investigating Mr. Aboutaam and his older brother, Ali Aboutaam.”

If there is a gene for bluntness, Liu likely had it. In the 1980s, while still a graduate student in Chinese literature, he was already known as a “black horse” for denouncing nearly every contemporary Chinese writer: the literary star Wang Meng was politically slippery; “roots-seeking” writers like Han Shaogong were excessively romantic about the value of China’s traditions; even speak-for-the-people heroes like Liu Binyan were too ready to pin hopes on “liberal” Communist leaders like Hu Yaobang. No one was independent enough. “I can sum up what’s wrong with Chinese writers in one sentence,” Liu Xiaobo wrote in 1986. “They can’t write creatively themselves—they simply don’t have the ability—because their very lives don’t belong to them.”

Compared to their counterparts, the longtime yoga practitioners showed significantly greater cortical thickness “in left prefrontal lobe areas associated with attention and other executive functions,” the researchers report. Previous research has linked activity in this area of the brain with language and memory.

Of course, Landau also starred as Rollin Hand for several years in the original Mission: Impossible and the heroic villain of Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The man who jump-started the modern zombie era didn’t like The Walking Dead and some other new zombie projects, even while he continued working in the genre (and in other genres). He once said of newer zombies, “They’re just dervishes, you don’t recognize any of them, there’s nothing to characterize them. … [But]I like to give even incidental zombies a bit of identification. I just think it’s a nice reminder that they’re us. They walked out of one life and into this.”

Speaking of persistence: “Sentenced in 1983, on her 29th birthday, to the seven-year maximum term for ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,’ Ms. Ratushinskaya composed some 250 poems in prison, many drafted with burned matchsticks on bars of soap. She memorized them and smuggled them on cigarette paper through her husband to the West, where they were published, and where human rights groups indefatigably lobbied for her release.”

John Bernecker, a 33-year-old stuntman for the popular zombie show, “reportedly fell more than 20 feet from a balcony onto a concrete floor, suffering a head injury.”

“As a business, MasterClass seems primed to capitalize on this era of self-betterment, when thousands flock to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop newsletter for advice on wellness and self-care has become a millennial mantra. But just how effective are the classes, which range between three to six hours? Does watching an acting course taught by Kevin Spacey actually give aspiring stars a leg up in Hollywood?”

“With the possible exception of Asa Gray, no American read the Origin of Species with as much care and insight as Henry David Thoreau. … That the struggle among species was an engine of creation struck him with particular force. It undermined transcendentalist assumptions about the essential goodness of nature, but it also corroborated many of Thoreau’s own observations.”

He was the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in state custody since Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist and foe of Nazism who won the prize in 1935 and died under guard in 1938 after years of maltreatment.