A good day to break bad news

Today seems to be the anniversary of the death of some famous names for, on January 14th, the following people went to meet their funeral director:

Humphrey Bogart
George Berkeley
Lewis Carroll
Anthony Eden
Peter Finch
Edmund Halley
Ricardo Montalban
Anaïs Nin
Earnest Thesiger
Donna Reed

Of these, I pick out Donna Reed. January 14th, 1986, was the second time death came to call for her. Reed won an Academy Award for her role in From Here to Eternity.

Quote: “Forty pictures I was in, and all I remember is ‘What kind of bra will you be wearing today, honey?’ That was always the area of big decision - from the neck to the navel.”

This is how Reed missed her first appointment with the Grim Reaper:

..the DC-3 crashed, exploded and burned on a ridge of McClure Canyon of the Verdugos, approximately 2-3/4 miles northeast of the Lockheed Air Terminal. All 21 passengers -- 17 U.S. Army members and four U.S. Navy personnel -- were killed, as was the aircraft’s crew of three: the pilot, first officer and stewardess.

Actress Donna Reed, 23, narrowly avoided the same fate as those aboard the doomed plane. Reed, who had traveled to Juarez, Mexico, on January 8 to obtain a divorce from her husband, Hollywood makeup artist William Tuttle, was returning to California on the night of January 9 and had boarded the airliner when it made its scheduled stop across the border at El Paso, Texas. However, the actress was bumped from the flight just prior to takeoff to make room for a military officer holding a wartime-travel “priority” pass.

Source http://www.jaydeebee1.com/crash40s.html 

Also, George Berkeley, the philosopher, who died January 14th 1753. I need to spend some more time reading about him. At first I thought he was a proto existentialist but nothing could be further from the truth.

Unpack this if you will:

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question, may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?


Further reading: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/