R.I.P. Michael Crichton

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Bestselling Jurassic Park author and filmmaker Michael Crichton has lost his battle with cancer in Los Angeles. He was 66. Crichton, who also wrote sex thriller Disclosure and co-created hit TV series ER , was 66. In a statement, the author's representative says, "While the world knew him as a great story teller that challenged our preconceived notions about the world around us, and entertained us all while doing so, Michael Crichton was a devoted husband, loving father and generous friend who inspired each of us to strive to see the wonders of our world through new eyes. "He did this with a wry sense of humour that those who were privileged to know him personally will never forget." A family insider tells website MomLogic.com, "Michael's family respectfully asks for privacy during this difficult time." Crichton was born in Chicago, Illinois but grew up in Roslyn, New York, the son of a journalist who encouraged his writing passion. He quit studying English at Harvard University to travel through Europe and then returned to Massachusetts to study medicine at Harvard Medical School. His early novels were written under the pseudonym Jeffery Hudson. Crichton gave up medicine in the early 1970s and moved to California, where he began directing movies based on his books. His big break came with 1973 cult movie Westworld. He almost became an actor in the mid-1970s when director Nicolas Roeg called on him to play the alien David Bowie eventually portrayed in The Man Who Fell to Earth. To date, his only acting role came in 1971's The Andromeda Strain, in which he played an uncredited surgeon. The author/director starred in his own real-life drama in 2002 when he was tied up and robbed at gunpoint by masked men in his Santa Monica, California home. Married five times, Crichton leaves behind one child, Taylor. His bestselling novels and hit screenplays also include Twister, Congo, The First Great Train Robbery and all the Jurassic Park sequels. As a filmmaker, he directed the movies The 13th Warrior, Physical Evidence, Runaway and The First Great Train Robbery, among others.

Zitat von Nico

ER ist bis zum ende der s6 über jeden zweifel erhaben, imo.

Zitat von flying_teapot

wie immer sterben die besten als erster weg.

ftp.

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The battle between anti-global warming activists and their critics is frequently uncivil. Name calling, put downs, you name it, they fling them.

But this marks a new threshold, I think.

This March, Michael Crowley wrote a cover story (sub. req.) in The New Republic hitting blockbuster novelist Michael Crichton's very public denials that global warming was a proved phenomenon.

That was the last he'd heard from Crichton until he picked his latest novel, Next. Here's what he found:

" Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.) "

In an article posted to the New Republic's Web site today, Crowley responded:

" The next page contains fleeting references to Crowley as a "weasel" and a "dickhead," and, later, "that political reporter who likes little boys." But that's it--Crowley comes and goes without affecting the plot. He is not a character so much as a voodoo doll. Knowing that Crichton had used prior books to attack very real-seeming people, I was suspicious. Who was this Mick Crowley? A Google search turned up an Irish Workers Party politician in Knocknaheeny, Ireland. But Crowley's tireless advocacy for County Cork's disabled seemed to make him an unlikely target of Crichton's ire. And that's when it dawned on me: I happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And, perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer. "