Carroll Shelby, a Texas chicken farmer turned hot-rodder who went on to build innovative sports cars like the Cobra that challenged Europe’s longtime dominance of road racing as well as high-performance versions of production cars like the Ford Mustang, died on Thursday in Dallas. He was 89.
In the 1960s, Shelby raised the profile of American racing machines on the international sports-car circuit by packing powerful Ford V-8 engines into lightweight British roadsters, and by developing racing cars for Ford.
“Carroll is sort of like the car world’s Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays,” Jay Leno, who owned three Shelby cars, told The New York Times in 2003. “Unlike so many racers, he didn’t come from a rich family, so he signifies that Everyman, common-sense ideal. When I was a kid, American cars were big, clunky things, until Carroll used his ingenuity to make them compete with European cars.”
In 1959, Shelby became the second American-born driver to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the famously brutal endurance race in France, co-driving a British-made Aston Martin.
But a heart ailment forced him to quit driving, and he founded Shelby American in 1962. It became one of the most successful independent sports-car builders of the era.
Shelby is survived by his wife, Cleo; his children, Patrick, Michael and Sharon; and a sister, Anne Shelby Ellison.
Shelby had homes in the Bel Air hills of Los Angeles and in Las Vegas, and owned ranchland in Pittsburg, Tex., where he raised miniature horses and African cattle while keeping his hand in high-performance design into his later years. He owned small vintage planes and numerous cars, including his original Cobra.
He possessed the brashness and imagination of a consummate promoter.
Bill Neale, an automotive artist who illustrated Shelby’s designs, once recalled for Vanity Fair that when Shelby assembled his first Cobra, he painted it yellow and had it photographed for the cover of Sports Car Graphic. The next day, he showed another magazine what seemed to be an identical car, colored red.
“I said, ‘You have two of them?’ ” Neale recalled. “And he said, ‘Nah, we just painted it so they think we have two.’ ”
-courtesy new york times-
“I’m really tryna make it more than what it is, cause everybody dies but not everybody lives.” -Drake-
Aubrey Drake Graham (born October 24, 1986), who records under the mononym Drake, is a Canadian recording artist and actor.[1] He originally became known for playing Jimmy Brooks on the television series Degrassi: The Next Generation.[2]
In June 2009, Drake signed a recording contract with Lil Wayne’s Young Money Entertainment.[3] In November 2009, Lil Wayne released a statement announcing that Drake’s first studio album, Thank Me Later, had been completed. The album was released on June 15, 2010, and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200.[4] The album has since gone platinum. He released his second studio album on November 15, 2011 titled Take Care. Drake was set to release an R&B mixtape sometime in the future along with a collaboration album with Lil Wayne however both have been postponed for various reasons.[5][6]
Drake has worked with several other hip-hop artists such as Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Kanye West, Eminem, Jay-Z, and Nicki Minaj. With the success of his mixtape turned EP So Far Gone, Drake has been nominated for several awards including Grammys, even being selected to perform at the 2010 Grammy award ceremony. Drake has also won several awards, including two Juno Awards in 2010 for Best New Artist, and Rap Recording of the Year. He was ranked #2 on MTV’s Hottest MCs In The Game VII list in 2012.[7]
In addition to making his own music, Drake has also written for other artists in the industry such as Alicia Keys, Jamie Foxx and more. He also tends to feature or remix tracks that he has written for other artists such as Unthinkable Remix by Alicia Keys. Drake also claims that he and Lil Wayne have both written for Dr. Dre’s Detox album.[8] In the list of the songs written, “Yesterday”, of Diddy - Dirty Money featuring Chris Brown, written with Chris Brown, Cristyle, Kevin McCall and Mario Winans,[9] from Diddy’s fifth studio album, Last Train to Paris. Drake also wrote the song “Unthinkable”, by Alicia Keys, also written with Keys and Kerry Brothers, Jr., Noah “40” Shebib, from her album The Element of Freedom. He is featured in the remix of the song.[10]
He was ranked #2 on MTV’s Hottest MCs In The Game VII list in 2012.[11]
” I think it is very important that films make people look at what they’ve forgotten.” -Spike Lee-
Spike Lee was born Shelton Lee in 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from a proud and intelligent background. His father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a school teacher. His mother dubbed him Spike, due to his tough nature. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After graduating from Morehouse, to go to the Tisch School of Arts graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) — a ten-minute film. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), which won a student academy award. However, success did not mean money, and Lee’s next film, “The Messenger,” in 1984, was somewhat biographical.
In 1986, Spike Lee made the film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), a comedy about sexual relationships. The movie was made for 175,000 dollars, and made seven million. Since then, Lee has become a well-known, intelligent, and talented film maker. His next movie was School Daze (1988), which was set in a historically black school and focused mostly on the conflict between the school and the Fraternities, of which he was a strong critic, portraying them as materialistic, irresponsible, and uncaring. With School Daze (1988) in profit, Lee went on to do his landmark film, Do the Right Thing (1989), a movie specifically about his own town in Brooklyn, New York. The movie portrayed a neighborhood (Bed-Stuy, to be exact) on a very hot day, and the racial tensions that emerge. The movie garnered an Oscar nomination, for Danny Aiello, for supporting actor. It also sparked a debate on racial relations and exactly where Lee was taking the film.
courtesy imdb
