Re: HE IS FINE - it was a hoax
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At school aged about 13/14 I well remember being set upon by class "mates" who were intent on pulling all my newly emerging grEy hairs out, no doubt helping their proliferation? Note that at no time did my hair turn grAy!! |
Re: HE IS FINE - it was a hoax
A letter to the editor I came across in the Toronto Sun newspaper sums it up for a lot of us here
Canada’s best singer Re “Singing from the grave” (Joe Warmington, Feb. 19): As a huge Gordon Lightfoot fan, it hit me like an 18-wheeler when I heard he had died. I was devastated and totally depressed. Then, shortly after, came the best news I had heard in years — Lightfoot is alive. I have even forgiven Canwest because our beloved Gord is still with us. Charles Adler summed it up best — “I have never been happier to be wrong about a story.” Canwest should realize there are losers out there who use the Internet for scurrilous agendas. I hope this is never repeated. Long live the greatest Canadian singer ever. Harry S. Anchan Calgary (What could the agenda possibly be for saying Lightfoot is dead when he’s not?) |
Re: HE IS FINE - it was a hoax
Glad I missed the rumor!
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Re: HE IS FINE - it was a hoax
no agenda - just stooopidity....
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New York magazine article places Gordon in the "I saw my own obituary" club:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment...the_i_saw.html Probably, we'll never know the identity of the prankster who called Ronnie Hawkins' management office...that's bizarre for someone to call like that and of course, not funny in the least. But Gordon's response for sure in good form with his humor. And some comments I read in blogs, etc: http://www.canada.com/health/Singer+...156/story.html |
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i wonder if they ever got that call traced...could have come from a booth i suppose....btw, ever noticed how hard it is to find a booth these days...not everyone has a cell phone, eh |
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Many of the blog comments I've been seeing are comical. Some posters seem to have turned it into a "competition" to see who discovered it was a rumor first. I'm pretty sure there is no prize. LOL Oh wait...the prize is the fact that it was just a rumor. :)
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Last time I saw (and used) a booth lol was at a gas station on the outskirts of Hamilton. Our cell phones don't work in CA. No phonebook at the booth or inside the station. |
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Did you read the one where someone jokingly wrote that they thought Gordon had died on the Edmund Fitzgerald? But there were a few out there who seriously didn't know Gordon was still alive. oh geez, a competition to see who was the 1st to squelch the rumor? How lame is that! |
Re: HE IS FINE - it was a hoax
Hmmm... Pam comments on the previous posts but not the one about losing my mind. That tells me all i need to know.....
I did like the comment that said his condition had been upgraded to alive. |
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in the spirit of the Olympics: Lightfoot - 1 / Grim Reaper - 0
lol |
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ok, joking aside (but still an uncomfortable topic), do you think GL has a plot reserved at some place in Toronto like Mt Pleasant or perhaps a spot up by his mom and dad...or ratehr where would an appropriate place be to scatter ashes? "I will do my final number, by Lake Couchiching" |
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Well , like the rest of you here ....I too was relieved at this news. (That it wasn't true.)
I only saw this story on my local news,thankfully,after it had already cleared up as a hoax. I fortunatley had not heard,seen or read anything about him being gone,If i had I would have bawled like I did for MJ. Godon's stickin' with us until he's 100! ;) Strange part is ,just the day before i had played one of my Songbook CDs! :eek: |
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"...do you think GL has a plot reserved at some place in Toronto like Mt Pleasant or perhaps a spot up by his mom and dad...or ratehr where would an appropriate place be to scatter ashes?"
in the lee of Christian Island? where the green dark forests are too silent to be real? Beyond the wild misty mountain,within the valley so free? And of course: when I get my final slumber, when I pawn my diamond ring, I will do my final number, by Lake Couchiching... |
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I didn’t kill Gordon Lightfoot http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...rticle1481522/ Many people blamed me last week when rumours of his death arose. I just happened to be the first to tweet about it Rebecca Fleming From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010 4:33PM EST Last updated on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010 8:45PM EST The un-news was short-lived. On Feb. 18, the media had legendary Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot dead, then un-dead, within the span of about an hour. That was pretty easy for Mr. Lightfoot to clear up, from his car on the way to the dentist. But my own good no-name, not so much. I, Rebecca Fleming (heard of me? Didn't think so), have been identified by several news sources as ground zero for the rumour. I, a full-time biologist with two little kids recovering from gastroenteritis, apparently have nothing better to do on a Thursday afternoon in quarantine than to start celebrity death hoaxes. The idea is kind of appealing in principle – having the time, free headspace and lack of conscience to dream up twisted schemes like this. Not to mention having that kind of clout and credibility. Can you imagine? Move over, Perez Hilton. But alas, my sole claim to infamy is that I, @fleminski, was the first to tweet “RIP Gordon Lightfoot.” I had heard the news from a mutual friend of Ronnie Hawkins (who, incidentally, introduced my parents to each other). Someone claiming to be Gordon Lightfoot's grandson started the whole business with a prank call to Mr. Hawkins's management. But nobody seems to be interested in him. He used the telephone. And dude, that's just so 20th century. If you want to spread things fast, Twitter is your friend. Or your enemy, as the case may be. I was a Twitter nobody with a mere 100 followers, tweeting just for fun, a molecule in the Twitter sea. But 10 minutes after I posted that seemingly innocent tweet, I got a call from a CanWest reporter. I pretty much had the feeling of floating above my body when I realized the magnitude of what I had done. But my first thought wasn’t, “What if it isn't true?” It was, “What if his family doesn't know yet?” The reporter assured me she had heard the rumour elsewhere and needed a source, so I spilled. Then I set about protecting my tweets in a vain attempt to stop the spread of the news. Not long afterward, I got a tweet from @rootsmusicanada, who had confirmed that Gordon Lightfoot was alive and well. After a brief moment with my head between my knees, trying to maintain consciousness, I posted an apologetic retraction, which went out to, well, nobody, because my tweets were protected. Around the same time, I started seeing “RIP Gordon Lightfoot” everywhere. On Facebook, on Twitter and, oh my gosh, in the news. I panicked. I deleted my Twitter account outright (RIP @fleminski) and turned off my computer in the hope that it would all just go away. It didn’t. By the time I went back online, Gordon Lightfoot was officially undead (phew!) and the witch hunt was on (uh-oh!). Media guru and sleuth Ian Capstick was hot on my trail, and even had my picture and the dreaded tweet in question on his blog. Commenters were gleefully posting personal information about me: my full name, where I lived, whom I worked for. So I did what anybody in my situation would do. I opened a bottle of wine, and began to drink. Meanwhile, Ronnie Hawkins, Gordon Lightfoot's production company and the media were unable to make any kind of connection between the phone-call hoax and my tweet, and nobody was quite sure which came first. Of course, @fleminski was nowhere to be found. But never mind that. In reality, my tweet was a pop rock compared to respected CanWest journalist David Akin’s atomic bomb. He innocently tweeted, to his many journalist followers, a CanWest alert: “Gordon Lightfoot has died, sources close to the singer say.” Kaboom. You can figure out the rest. In the wake of Lightfoot's good-humoured resurrection, a huge blamestorm blew through the media and blogosphere, and few seemed to be able to get the story straight. People largely blamed Twitter and lack of journalistic integrity. And they blamed little old me. Hardly anybody seemed to care about the prankster who started this whole thing with a call to Mr. Hawkins's management. But I'm betting even he is surprised at the magnitude of the outcome. I think this all boils down to the fact that we're human. It's not unusual for people to die. And we're inherently gullible, especially when we have no reason to doubt the story or the source. Ronnie Hawkins believed his management. CanWest and I believed Ronnie Hawkins. David Akin believed CanWest. The rest of the media believed David Akin. Thankfully, Gordon Lightfoot didn't believe the radio, or he wouldn't have made it to his dentist appointment. Though I wasn't the origin of this hoax, I know that I acted as a significant and unwitting catalyst, and for that I am deeply sorry. I am glad that Gordon Lightfoot lives on to sing about the things that make us all human. Our passions, our fears and, most of all, our mistakes. Rebecca Fleming lives in Ottawa. ***23 Comments to date - go to link at top to view |
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It was pretty clear almost immediately that she wasn't the source... I feel for her..
David (Roots Music Canada) tweeted he had contacted EMP after finding out it was a rumour with them and I phoned B. Fiedler at the same time and let Kenyon (who called me with the news he saw on the news wire) know all was well.. Ronnie Hawkins was on the radio and tv talking about the phone call from a grandson so it was clear that a tweet didn't start it. A Tweeter just innocently took erroneous info, and passed it on. Tweets are a lot faster way to pass info on than years ago and the audience is much larger. The culprits are the originator who made the call and the media person who did not complete due process in confirming such a serious story with the proper sources. They owe me 10 years.. ;) |
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Interesting article. Makes me wonder where we're going with news reporting and verification of sources. I thought Lightfoot took the whole thing with very good humour. I also thought the illustration in today's Globe was particularly unflattering.
Brian |
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http://mitchellshannon.wordpress.com...grim-reaper-0/
February 28, 2010 GORDON LIGHTFOOT 3, GRIM REAPER 0 Gordon Lightfoot, a folksinger and a preeminent cultural figure up here in Canada, last week suffered the unkindest death of all, which is the widespread assumption by his audience and countrymen that he had died. The phony news of his expiration was spread via Internet-borne rumors. Ersatz-death, where is thy dignity? Rompin` Ronnie: Tell me, wha'd I say A couple of idiots who get paid by large news organizations to know better reported the baseless gossip as fact on their newspaper and TV websites, and somehow managed to get Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, the merry old rockabilly character, to confirm the faux-report. The Hawk is like a current-day Gabby Hayes, the kind of fellow whose opinion you might seek if you were looking for an incoherent response along lines of, “Dad-gum the dasted durn ding-dong!” His confirmation, if that’s what it was, of his friend’s death made the tragedy true, but only for as long as it took Lightfoot to receive word that he had croaked. (I use ‘croak’ here in a colloquial sense, to mean ‘died’. I did not intend to draw attention to the singer’s long-diminished vocal prowess, but we’ll need to raise this unfortunate aspect in due course.) Lightfoot claimed to be just leaving his mid-town Toronto office when he learned of his death. Artists in other places work out of garrets, but I love that folksingers in Canada have mid-town offices. “Miss Stitt! Take some dictation: ‘Sundown, you better take care, comma, if I find you been creepin’ round my back stairs.’ Make two copies, and then get me Cisco Houston on line four.” As it happily turned out, Lightfoot wasn’t deceased in the slightest, to paraphrase Michael Palin’s landmark dead-parrot sketch. The singer was as vital — and outwardly amused by the incident — as you would expect from any plucky septuagenarian stroke-victim with a precarious medical chart. Like many, I found Lightfoot’s close brush with death to be unsettling. I have longstanding ties to the Canadian music scene, having once been beaten up as a child attending Danesbury Public School by Murray McLaughlin, the famously sensitive songwriter who lived on the other side of Lyon Avenue. I forgave McLaughlin years after the incident when he recorded “On the Boulevard,” a fine song about workingmen killing time on Lakeshore Blvd. in Etobicoke, the street where Lightfoot once earned a DUI citation after catching Adam Timoon‘s pub gig at the Seaway Hotel. (Adam Timoon these days occasionally entertains the residents of the veterans’ nursing home where they’re looking after my dad. Small world, ain’t it?) Critics of the newspaper industry are making much out of how the incompetents at Global News obliviously circulated the misinformation, because, you know, the only thing lower than an employee of those olde-timey media corporations is a self-described Internet-based critic of same. These blogospheric nudniks would use the undead Lightfoot to make a point about how the New Media are cleaning the clocks of the old, but this is like the naturopath celebrating when the oncology surgeon fails to fully remove someone’s tumor. Call it unseemly. The lesson to be gleaned is that all you consumers of news and information should paste a warning sticker that reads ‘caveat-freaking-emptor’ to your I-pads. The main thing is that Lightoot is okay. I took in a Jimmy Buffett concert back in November -– uneasily stuck in the middle of 16,000 or so rabid, exceedingly moist and garrulous parrotheads –- and, from the stage, Mr. Buffett announced between songs that he’d rather be attending the Gordon Lightfoot gig that was taking place across town, but, sadly, he “had to work.” It seemed like an unguarded comment to offer to your paying audience, but give Jimmy full marks for honesty. Taking his point, when we got home, my wife found a pair of decent seats for the final night in Lightfoot’s annual series of shows here in his hometown of Toronto. He draws a far smaller and less raucous audience than Buffett, and the crowd was rapt to a fault, which is understandable with the man’s grandchildren in attendance. There was a striking contrast in the styles of ‘70s singer-songwriters, I must observe: Buffett onstage barefoot in what looked like bathing trunks; Lightfoot, post-aneurysm surgery, post-mild stroke, wearing the atavistic costume of a geriatric elevator-operator in a budget-friendly mid-Manhattan tourist hotel. He looked too much like Seymour Cassel in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Lightfoot, who underwent a tracheotomy a few years back, seems to have appropriated the recent phrasing and vocal approach of his chum Bob Dylan, making the most of his new rasp, and using muted whispers to a powerful effect. When the 71-year-old crooner, absent his baritone, sang my favourite of his songs, “The Watchman’s Gone,” well, you have to know it was an emotional moment: “If you find me feedin’ daisies/Please turn my face up to the sky And leave me be/Watchin’ the moon roll by Whatever I was/You know it was all because I’ve been on the town/Washin’ the bullshit down.” That is telling them. Those incandescent lyrics, written when Lightfoot was 36, half his current age, foresaw the defiance of a man late in his life still able to sum up the grit and the vocabulary to tell the big cruel world to go screw itself. Hank Snow may be dead; Wilf Carter is gone, but Lightfoot and Lenny Cohen and Stompin’ Tom Connors are all still around to tell you what it is you need to know: Keep moving on, folks. Love calls you by your name, on a Sudbury Saturday night. Lightfoot earns last word, this time, a perquisite of genius. “You’d better take care,/Knowing the watchman’s always there.” |
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The thing that really freaked me about this was the fact that in Sept. 2002 I had taken the "red eye" (overnight flight) from Vancouver, landing the next morning in Ottawa to be greeted with the news that Gordon Lightfoot was in a coma and in the process of being air lifted to a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario for treatment.
On Feb 17th, 2010, I took the "red eye" from Vancouver to arrive next morning in Ottawa to news that Gord was dead followed by an emergency phone call telling me that it was a hoax. It's got to be something about that "red eye" that's for sure. Time to step into that tent and have the palm read I guess. This is all too freaky. RJ. |
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The words I can think of to describe the person who originated this rumor aren't publishable,so I'll use these:JERK! IDIOT! MORON!
Ok,I'm fine now that I've 'shouted across the ocean to the shore'. patybear |
Dead man walking
I don't remember seeing this, so please forgive me if it's a repeat:
http://www.hour.ca/music/music.aspx?iIDArticle=19567 http://www.hour.ca/_images/montreal/...tfoot_1813.jpg Dead man walking Richard Burnett Lightfoot has stayed in touch with the widows of the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald Gordon Lightfoot wants you to know that rumours of his death are greatly exaggerated If you could read Gordon Lightfoot's mind right now, what a tale his thoughts would tell. Except I don't have to because I got the Canadian music icon on the phone a couple days after Canwest reported on Feb. 18 that he had died. "I was in my car driving from the dentist with the radio on when the DJ said I was dead!" Lightfoot explains. "It became an obituary. Then they played a strain of If You Could Read My Mind. It gave me a bit of a shock. I put my foot on the gas and got to [my] office and the phone was lit up like a Christmas tree! It was also weird for my kids - my eldest daughter got very emotional that night." Despite some serious health problems over the years, today Lightfoot is healthier than he's ever been. "When I gave up alcohol [in 1982] the gym became my substitute." Lightfoot famously got his start when Ian Tyson introduced him to rock's first great manager, NYC-based Albert Grossman, in 1964. Grossman also managed Bob Dylan, The Band and Janis Joplin. "I'd see Bob Dylan in the office. And Janis was in a corner reading a book." Lightfoot was a favourite of Johnny Cash ("We did a duet on his TV show") and his songs have been covered by rock royalty, including Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bob Dylan. And Lightfoot explored his relationship with his former lover Cathy Evelyn Smith - famed for her drug connections to The Rolling Stones and John Belushi - in his number one Billboard hit Sundown. "She came to see me in concert in Vancouver six months ago and looks healthy and happy." So does Lightfoot. "I am happy," he says. "Today I have control of my own destiny." Gordon Lightfoot At Place des Arts, April 8 |
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I can only imagine what a terrible shock that had to be for him to hear his own obituary.
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http://www.thestar.com/videozone/910...-minute-canada
the Year in a Minute .... including Gord's fifteen, stiff, minutes of fame... |
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lol |
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Wow, I watched the Olympics too, (in part hoping gordon would be mentioned,) and I didn't see that clip either. Bummer!
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Very cool, jj.
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In that still of Gord--it looks like he's had his Martin D-18 refinished. Are there any other recent pix of that guitar? I loved its old beat-up patina...
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That's the "other" D-18. He was playing it a lot a few years ago but is now back to playing the "well-worn" one - the one we all know and love. :)
Melissa |
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Three years ago today - what a scare...!! http://www.corfid.com/vbb/showthread...t=rumour+death
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AUDIO - didn't see this in the previous pages. http://www.680news.com/2010/02/18/li...in-fact-alive/
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TWITTER tried and YOUTUBE is taking a kick at it now: (thanks Gwen!)
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Why are we reviving this 3 year old thread?
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OK in response Touchy I am probably not alone in wondering why you did not bother playing the youtube video that Char presented when you could have seen had you not already guessed that at aboot 2:22 whoever made the video included a picture of Gord amongst the roster of late singers see the attached screenshot this grievous error was made by whoever made that video presumably it was the originator of the web site http://adhdrecords.com/rockandrollheaven/?s "Robby Rockman" who apparently uploaded the video in April 2011 but who had not checked the facts about the previous year's tweeting properly! |
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Not only that but to celebrate the third anniversary Char also showed a link to the page that contains a recording of Gord's bemused phone call to the radio station
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from the video producer: yes just a mix up with the software and photo batch i had ... it showed different pictures under wrong names, Sorry Gordon!
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just because I am thankful that it was a hoax I've brought this forward again to mark 4 years and he's still out there because as he says, "we love the work!"
lol ..(As well as for those who may not have seen it when it happened.) |
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How long are we gonna drag this on?
If he saw this site and this thread he's probably think something's wrong with you. Let it go for pete sakes! That was 4 years ago! |
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I'd have never heard of the hoax if it weren't for corfid.
Feb. 18th again...my ex-husbands birthday. I'd have been married 30 years last Nov.,:clap:.... but thank God I didn't stick around for the applause. |
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