Tom Daley

LONDON – A Welsh Premier League footballer has been suspended after an abusive message was sent to Olympic diver Tom Daley.

If there is any consolation for finishing fourth at least Daley and Waterfield can go and bum each other #teamHIV @10danthomas10

Port Talbot Town FC has confirmed its midfielder Daniel Thomas will be the subject of an internal investigation into a tweet sent to Team GB diver Daley.
Daley, 18, and diving partner Pete Waterfield missed out winning a medal at the 2012 Olympics when they finished fourth in the 10m synchronised dive on Monday.
According to reports, a homophobic message was sent to Daley’s Twitter page from the 10DanThomas10 account, which has since been deleted.
It comes following a separate “trolling” incident involving Daley which resulted in the arrest of a teenager.
Port Talbot FC officials stressed their player had been the victim of a “misguided prank” after leaving his phone unattended – but confirmed 28-year-old Thomas had been suspended while they looked into the matter.
A club spokesman said: “Port Talbot Town Football Club can confirm Daniel Thomas has been suspended from all involvement with the club until we have carried out a full internal investigation.
“We were made aware to an offensive comment appearing on the Twitter feed of one of our players.
“Upon being informed of the matter, we immediately distanced ourselves from any offensive messages whilst investigating the matter further.
“Having spoken at length to the player in question, we believe he regrettably left his phone unattended and was the victim of a very misguided ’prank’.”
The club said it and Thomas apologised “unreservedly” and in no way condoned the views made in the tweet.
The spokesman added: “All footballers at Port Talbot Town will also be briefed on the appropriate use of social media and ensuring it is used securely and responsibly.”
The incident is not the first time Daley has been the recipient of abusive online messages since his Olympics heartbreak.
Yesterday, Dorset Police confirmed a 17-year-old had been arrested following allegations the teen had sent malicious messages referring to the British diver’s late father.
Daley had apparently received a tweet saying he had let down his late father Rob, who died from brain cancer in 2011, after missing out on the podium.
Daley responded to the post by saying: “After giving it my all…you get idiots sending me this.”
from Wales Online
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Tom Daley Shows Up For Book Signing In Speedos

Lana Wachowski

The upcoming genre-bending, time-twisting movie epic Cloud Atlas is unusual by Hollywood standards, and not because co-director Lana Wachowski achieved directorial superstardom with 1999’s The Matrix while still named and gendered as Larry Wachowski.
Lana, 47, began the transition process 10 years ago after separating from then-wife Thea Bloom, but here’s the actually weird thing about Cloud Atlas: It is one movie, and it has three directors.
The Wachowski siblings, Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski, the family team behind the Matrix movies, V for Vendetta and Speed Racer, have thrown their formidable talents and resources in with Tom Tykwer, German-born director of 1998’s girl-on-a-treadmill cult sensation Run Lola Run, to create a movie that has stoked fan-boy expectations while eluding categorization.
Responding to uncertainties raised by Cloud Atlas’s five-minute-plus trailer, Lana, Andy and Tom have released a self-conducted panel discussion to pitch the project directly to you, the audience.
For a bit over two minutes, the Wachowski duo and Tykwer talk up the events and processes that lead to Cloud Atlas, adapted from a mind-expanding novel, Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell.
Maybe it’s that the logistics of the film are fascinating, that the big ideas are hugely engrossing, or that the three directors are so enamored of one another and their work, but 20 seconds into the pitch, the fact that one of them has transitioned from a world-famous male movie director to a world-famous female movie director is the least extraordinary aspect of the discussion.
Or maybe we’re just realizing that transgender people are as natural to this life as anybody else. Either way is good news for film fans!
Cloud Atlas stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant.
from Take Part
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Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal was impossible to categorize, which was exactly the way he liked it.
The reading public knew him as a literary juggernaut who wrote 25 novels —from the historical “Lincoln” to the satirical “Myra Breckinridge” — and volumes of essays critics consider among the most elegant in the English language. He also brought shrewd intelligence to writing Broadway hits, Hollywood screenplays, television dramas and a trio of mysteries still in print after 50 years.
When he wasn’t writing, he was popping up in movies, playing himself in “Fellini’s Roma,” a sinister plotter in sci-fi thriller “Gattaca” and a U.S. senator in “Bob Roberts.” The grandson of a U.S. senator, he also made two entertaining but unsuccessful forays into politics, running for the Senate from California and the House of Representatives from New York.
In other spare moments, he demolished intellectual rivals like Norman Mailer andWilliam F. BuckleyJr. with acidic one-liners, establishing himself as a peerless master of talk-show punditry.
“Style,” Vidal once said, “is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” By that definition, he was an emperor of style, sophisticated and cantankerous in his prophesies of America’s fate and refusal to let others define him.
Iconoclastic author, savvy analyst and glorious gadfly on the national conscience, Vidal died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills from complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said. He was 86.
In 1993, Vidal won the National Book Award for his massive “United States Essays, 1952-1992,” a collection of erudite and infuriating critiques on politics, sexuality, religion and literature written originally for such publications as The Nation, Esquire and the New York Review of Books.
“No one else in what he calls ‘the land of the tin ear’ can combine better sentences into more elegantly sustained demolition derbies than Vidal does in some of his best essays,” Thomas Mallon once wrote in the National Review.
Threaded throughout his pieces are anecdotes about his famous friends and foes, who included Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Orson Welles, Truman Capote, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Eleanor Roosevelt and a variety of Kennedys. He counted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Al Gore among his relatives.
Vidal began his public life at age 22 when his first novel, the World War II-themed “Williwaw,” won the wide admiration of critics. Two years later, however, the literary golden boy became an outcast with “The City and the Pillar” (1948), one of the first mainstream novels to deal frankly with homosexuality.
Ignored by book critics for the next several years, he turned to television writing, churning out dramas for prestigious showcases such as “Suspense,” “Goodyear Playhouse” and “Studio One.” He adapted one of these works, “Visit to a Small Planet” (1957), for the stage. A Cold War parable featuring a space alien who provokes war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, it ran on Broadway for 388 performances and was made into a movie starring Jerry Lewis.
Vidal’s other major critical and commercial success as a playwright was “The Best Man,”a 1960 political drama that starred Melvyn Douglas as a high-minded presidential candidate modeled on Adlai Stevenson. After a 520-show Broadway run, it was made into a 1964 movie starring Henry Fonda. This spring it was revived on Broadway with a star-studded cast led by James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury.
Although Vidal often declared the novel dead, he wrote more than two dozen of them. He called books such as “Burr” (1973), “Lincoln” (1984) and “Julian” (1964) “meditations on history and politics.”
(more…)

Luis Canelos

FLORIDA -  When Luis Canelos was 9, he picked up his father’s rifle and accidentally shot himself in the groin.
The tragedy destroyed his genitalia except for a small part of his right testicle.
Now, 17, he has a chance to become whole again.
A doctor in Miami heard about Luis’ plight and reached out to his family.
In May, the teen learned he would undergo replacement surgery called phalloplasty.
The hope is that Luis will have a fully functioning penis once the operation is done, allowing him to father children in the future.
“I want to recover my body, be young again,” Luis said.
Luis and his father, Roger, 41, arrived in Miami July 16 thanks to a program called International Kids Fund Wonderfund, which is run by Jackson Memorial Foundation. The charity helps foreign kids get medical treatment and surgery they can’t receive or afford in their home countries.
Children are treated at Holtz Children’s Hospital at University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center and money is raised through private and public donations to help cover the costs.
The Wonderfund organization felt compelled to help Luis “not only because of the physical situation but also because of the emotional side effects that come with the situation,” said Executive Director María Luisa Chea.
Luis’ treatment will cost $50,000, an expense his family could not afford on their own. Ronald McDonald House, a hostel for visiting families near Jackson, is providing them housing.
“My family is a poor family. We don’t have a lot of resources,” Roger said.
The Canelos family lives in a straw house in a village of 10,000 in the rural Peruvian region of Loreto, bordering Colombia and Ecuador. They share a parcel of land with other families where they grow yucca, plantains, corn and rice, as well as raise small chickens, for their own consumption.
Loreto is isolated from much of the country, Roger explained. Ambulances, for example, arrive by river.
“Everything is jungle out there,” Roger said.
Luis and Roger had never left their village before. Their journey to the United States began when they took a small boat bound for Mazan, a town in the same province. Next they crossed part of the Amazon to arrive in Quito, Ecuador. From there, father and son boarded a flight to Lima, where they stayed for two weeks before departing for Miami.
Roger brought with him a camera to document the trip to South Florida, a metropolis unlike his village. So far he has taken pictures of Metrorail and large homes.
“I never thought I could get this far,” Luis said.
The group first learned about Luis through Dr. Christopher J. Salgado, associate professor of surgery and section chief of plastic surgery at the University of Miami, Chea said.
Luis said he has found a lot of support in his large family — his mother, father, one brother and seven sisters. Keeping in touch with the family from Miami has been difficult. Their home only receives electricity at night. If the family’s sole cellphone is out of battery, they’re virtually out of reach. Luis said he misses them and wants to spend time with them again.
Luis hopes the surgery will allow him to move on with his life, or “ seguir adelante,” as he said in Spanish.
During the surgery, two medical teams will build a penis using a fibular bone from a cadaver, a procedure Salgado has performed before successfully, Chea said.
After completing his remaining two years of high school, Luis would like to attend college in Peru and become an engineer. With the help of scholarships from the local government, Roger said his son’s dream will become a reality.
In the meantime, Luis said he is calm and happy. His father noted he is very grateful to both God and the organization “that opened doors for us and has a big heart.”
If all goes according to plan, Luis should undergo surgery in August and be back in Peru around mid-September, Chea said. Once back in Peru, doctors there will help Luis recover.
from The Miami Herald