Word: johnings
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...human brains aren't particularly up to the task. Go back thousands of years and think about the simpler times of human existence. "We had a few friends; we had to be scared of a few animals. A trillion didn't come up very often," says Temple University mathematician John Allen Paulos, whose book Innumeracy addresses the topic. "There is a sense that when numbers are too big or too small, the brain just shuts off," says Colin Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at the California Institute of Technology. "People either don't think about...
...John Michael Hayes, 89, batted out radio crime shows before becoming Alfred Hitchcock's go-to screenwriter in the mid-50s, penning Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Trouble With Harry and The Man Who Knew Too Much. An Oscar nomination for Peyton Place launched Hayes as the favored writer of elevated sleaze: Butterfield 8, The Carpetbaggers and the Carroll Baker Harlow...
...week before Heath Ledger's passing, Brad Renfro died. A poor kid from Knoxville, he was cast at 10 as the lead in a John Grisham thriller The Client, revealing a natural, winsome poise that made viewers of the hit film want to adopt him. Someone responsible should have. This sensitive waif starred in Bryan Singer's film of the Stephen King Apt Pupil, but over the years his rap sheet proved longer than his movie résumé. Constantly in trouble on drug-related charges, Renfro died of a heroin overdose...
...Some novelists and playwrights moonlighted in the movies. As a writer whose crime novels inspired a couple dozen movies (seven of them French), Donald Westlake, 76, could have retired with honors in the 60s, after Godard turned The Jugger into Made in USA and The Hunter became John Boorman's Point Blank. In the 70s he owned the comedy-caper genre, for what that's worth, with The Hot Rock, Bank Shot and Hot Stuff. He wrote scripts based on his own novels and those of other crime writers, incl. Jim Thompson's The Grifters (Oscar nomination) and Patricia Highsmith...
...about that "half of the Kingston Trio"... When founder Dave Guard left the group in 1960, John Stewart replaced him, joining Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane. The Trio was a late-'50s chart sensation that helped establish the album, not the single, as the unit of pop music. Reviled and/or envied by purists, the group nonetheless got a myriad of kids hooked on traditional music. They were the training wheels of the folk movement, and kept wearing their smiles and striped shirts for decades as a tribute band to themselves. Reynolds was 75, Stewart...