About Patrick Swayze
December 20, 2011 at 6:57 pm
(This post was last modified: December 20, 2011 at 7:02 pm by orogenicman.)
As some of you may recall, Patrick Swayze died a couple of years ago. I bring this about because I was cleaning off my harddrive today and found a video of images and song I had put together the day he died.
Now, I'm not some Hollywood star junkie or anything like that (and he is, after all, a man, as am I), but I have seen and enjoyed quite a bit of his work over the years. It was his personal and public response to his fatal disease (and later, in reading about his life) that really made an impression on me. Anyway, I bring this up because I don't think I ever shared this celebration of his life video I made when he died. So I thought I would share it here:
http://www.4shared.com/video/ui47J2Nz/pa...aster.html
I highly recommend downloading this before watching it because for some reason the audio doesn't seem to play right streaming over the internet (probably the bit rate is too high), but the file plays fine on a computer.
Here is a Wikipedia biography of Patrick Swayze:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Swayze
**************
After he died, I read a lot about his life, and I have to say that while he may have been a heart throb to so many women, but he was also a man's man. He was a licensed instrument-rated pilot, loved to sky dive, and raised horses and exotic animals (he owned a Cheetah, or rather, it owned him), and was much admired by his peers and friends. It came as a surprise to me to find that he had been married to the same woman since 1975. Happily married, in fact. Happy marriages are an endangered species in Hollywood. Patrick and his wife were devoted to one another. Though they never had children, both were deeply involved in children's charities. Swayze's movie "City of Joy", was about a self-centered doctor who stumbles into a Calcutta slum, and was won over by the people there. In a promotional interview, he said that that movie was a turning point for him, because in many ways it described his life. I think it is one of his best movies.
He wasn't a great actor, in my opinion, but he had a contagious personality. They say the room always lit up when he entered it. He was a talented man and a good man who suffered much personal tragedy in his life, fought to overcome it, and tried to do it his way to the end. Overcoming his fear of death showed me that although he was a bit of a Hollywood under achiever, his personal life was, in the end, a triumph, not a tragedy, one that should be celebrated rather than mourned.
Anyway, enjoy the video.
Now, I'm not some Hollywood star junkie or anything like that (and he is, after all, a man, as am I), but I have seen and enjoyed quite a bit of his work over the years. It was his personal and public response to his fatal disease (and later, in reading about his life) that really made an impression on me. Anyway, I bring this up because I don't think I ever shared this celebration of his life video I made when he died. So I thought I would share it here:
http://www.4shared.com/video/ui47J2Nz/pa...aster.html
I highly recommend downloading this before watching it because for some reason the audio doesn't seem to play right streaming over the internet (probably the bit rate is too high), but the file plays fine on a computer.
Here is a Wikipedia biography of Patrick Swayze:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Swayze
**************
After he died, I read a lot about his life, and I have to say that while he may have been a heart throb to so many women, but he was also a man's man. He was a licensed instrument-rated pilot, loved to sky dive, and raised horses and exotic animals (he owned a Cheetah, or rather, it owned him), and was much admired by his peers and friends. It came as a surprise to me to find that he had been married to the same woman since 1975. Happily married, in fact. Happy marriages are an endangered species in Hollywood. Patrick and his wife were devoted to one another. Though they never had children, both were deeply involved in children's charities. Swayze's movie "City of Joy", was about a self-centered doctor who stumbles into a Calcutta slum, and was won over by the people there. In a promotional interview, he said that that movie was a turning point for him, because in many ways it described his life. I think it is one of his best movies.
He wasn't a great actor, in my opinion, but he had a contagious personality. They say the room always lit up when he entered it. He was a talented man and a good man who suffered much personal tragedy in his life, fought to overcome it, and tried to do it his way to the end. Overcoming his fear of death showed me that although he was a bit of a Hollywood under achiever, his personal life was, in the end, a triumph, not a tragedy, one that should be celebrated rather than mourned.
Anyway, enjoy the video.
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
