Buzz driving is drunk driving. This is a popular advertisement run by our local law inforcement office. Does the Ryan Dunn case prove their point?  

Published: Celebrities with diseases reported June 20, 2011

Given the crazy nature by which they lived it was perhaps inevitable that one of the “Jackass” cast would eventually wind up on the ‘died too young’ list. Ryan Dunn, the unofficial 4th member of the Margera family, was killed early this morning after his Porsche left the road at high speed before colliding with a tree and erupting into flames killing Dunn and his passenger.

He and the as yet unnamed passenger had been socialising with friends at Barnaby’s of America in West Chester a few hours prior to the accident and is reported to have consumed three Miller Lites and three ‘girly’ shots over a four hour period, which according to a friend who said he was “not too drunk to drive”.

Ryan Dunn seen on Sunday night. This shot was removed from his tumblr site.

Police at West Goshen reported that Dunn was identified by an eye witness on the scene who recognised his tattoos as he was pulled from the wreckage.

It was at around 2:30 a.m. on Route 322 when the accident happened and police state that the vehicle was travelling significantly fast enough that it hurtled through 40 metres of forest before hitting the tree.

Their statement read, “Preliminary investigation revealed that speed may have been a contributing factor to the accident.”

The manager of Barnaby’s told NBC Philadelphia that “Ryan didn’t appear drunk before he left” at 2 a.m.

The wreckage of Ryan Dunn’s Porsche is removed from the scene.

Often seen at the Margera house, Ryan was considered part of the family as highlighted by April Margera who said, “He’s just the sweetest guy you’d ever want to know and he would do anything for you.”

She and husband Phil Margera paid a simple yet tearful tribute to Dunn, whom they considered a son.

“I know the entire ‘Jackass’ family is devastated and all of West Chester is devastated,” she said.

According to April, Dunn was renowned for driving too fast and she was often telling him to slow down a little. He had been involved in a bad accident a little over ten years ago but it seems that didn’t deter him from putting his foot down.

“He drove too fast and I yelled at him all the time about that,” said April.

The Jackass crew have ben largely unreachable but Johnny Knoxville tweeted, “Today I lost my brother Ryan Dunn. My heart goes out to his family and his beloved Angie. RIP Ryan, I love you buddy.”

MTV followed that up with a similar message which simply read, “We’re deeply saddened by the passing of a member of the MTV family, Ryan Dunn. Our hearts and thoughts are with his friends and family.”

Ryan Dunn’s Porsche before police moved it from the scene.

Bam Margera, Dunn’s best friend is currently in Arizona and has not yet made a statement because he is too devastated by the tragic accident.

While his candle burned brightly, Dunn gave us laughs at his own expense and it is a sad loss; sad that he lived so dangerously and perished because of it, and that not only his light has been extinguished so suddenly but that the lives of all those affected have grown a little darker in his passing.

Please share your thoughts on Ryan Dunn’s tragic and untimely death by leaving a comment.

Read about other stars who died young including Bill Hicks; River Phoenix; Brittany Murphy; Heath Ledger and Andy Irons.

Other posts related:

Adriana and Gil are seen above walking together in the movie “Midnight in Paris.” Adriana was a fictional character who was Picasso’s mistress in the film. Earlier she had been Modigliani’s mistress and later Georges Braque’s mistress before moving on to Picasso according to the film story line. Actually Picasso had taken girls from others quite often in the past. Picasso’s blue period was during a time when he moved into his best friend’s apartment and took up with his girl after his best friend’s suicide.

I am in the process of going through all the characters from Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.”  Today I am spending time on Modigliani.

Modigliani, Picasso and André Salmon.jpg

Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno (Leghorn) on 12 July 1884 into a rich merchant family. Versed in literature and art at an early age, Modigliani took his first lessons in drawing and painting between 1898 and 1900 at Guglielmo Micheli’s studio. Amedeo Modigliani was particularly fond of the Italian Early Renaissance.
In 1902 Modigliani shared a studio in Florence with Oscar Ghilia and became a pupil at the free school for drawing from the nude. A year later Modigliani transferred to the Venice Academy, where he spent a great deal of time studying the works of the Old Masters and became familiar with international movements in art.
Amedeo Modigliani went to Paris in 1906 to study at the private Colarossi Academy. In 1907 he met a young physician, Paul Alexandre, who was the first person to promote his work. Alexandre not only bought paintings and drawings of Modigliani’s; he also helped to arrange the artist’s first commissions.
That same year Modigliani showed work at the Salon d’Automne and a year later at the Salon des Indépendents. The few pictures by Amedeo Modigliani to have survived from that period reveal the influence of the Fauves, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Cézanne.
Paul Alexandre introduced Modigliani to the sculptor Constantin Brancusi and Modigliani began to sculpt under his influence but he gave up sculpture in 1914-15 to devote himself to painting.
The same salient features are common to both Modigliani’s sculpture and his painting: despite mask-like stylization, a poignant grace and spirituality inform Modigliani’s heads. His lasting fame rests on the portraits of artists he did after 1914.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Amedeo Modigliani volunteered for service but was exempted for health reasons: two severe attacks of tuberculosis had left him weakened for the rest of his life. Modigliani began to work with the art dealer Paul Guillaume and was also supported by the Polish poet Léopold Zborovski and his wife, doing many portraits of both.
Modigliani’s first one-man show was opened by the Galerie Berthe Weill on 3 December 1917 but was closed after only a few hours because his nudes caused a public scandal. Modigliani left Paris while it was under German siege in 1918 and went to Nice with his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne. There he did some of his best known pictures and some of his few landscapes. A daughter was born to him in Nice. In May 1919 Modigliani returned to Paris and went to England several times, thus ensuring the successful sale of his work there.
Early in 1920, however, Amedeo Modigliani again fell ill of tuberculosis and died in Paris on 24 January.

Amedeo Modigliani: Portrait of a Woman

No swearing. No car crashes. No special effects. In an adult movie? “Finally,” sighed one premieregoer after the AFI Associates’ screening of Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, a love poem to the City of Light. He’s a born romantic, proof positive being Woody’s alluring visions of New York and London and Barcelona that fill the screens. As he has with his last five movies and their montages of that become beguiling travelogues. Like a five-course dinner at Laperouse, Midnight In Paris is to be savored.

Welcoming the SRO audience at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre, AFI president and CEO Bob Cassaleannounced that Midnight In Paris, starring Owen Wilson as a lonely night-time wanderer and Rachel McAdams as his feisty fiancee, is Woody’s 50th movie. Archivists beg to differ, that this is his 4lst or 44th. Bob reminded about Woody’s clever jab at Los Angeles – “I could not live in a city where the only cultural advantage is making a right turn on a red light.” Woody’s also said, “Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.”

At 75, Woody’s creativity percolates, a rich brew with his poetic original style laced with that famously sly humor and slapdash wit. His Midnight In Paris cast is top-drawer, as he weaves us into a time-travel lovefest of icons from the ’20s, when artists and writers flocked to Paris for inspiration.

Here’s Ernest Hemingway in a standout performance from Corey Stohl, Gertrude Stein played by Kathy Bates, who’s equally wonderful, as are Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali, and Marion Cottilard as a flirtatious French beauty in love with La Belle Epoque.

Here’s Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Man Ray, and Cole Porter singing and playing the piano with his melodies.

All the while, Woody and his director of photography Darius Khondji capture landmarks such as Montmartre, Place de la Concorde, the flea market, Notre Dame Garden Square, Maxim’s, Laperouse, the Shakespeare & Co. book store. Threaded throughout is the saxophone music of expatriate Sidney Bechet, Woody being a fan of vintage jazz. A dreamscape for Francophiles.

While in pre-production, Woody and wife Soon-Yi Previn breakfasted with French president Nicolas Sarkozy and First Lady Carla Bruni at the Elysee Palace. Woody suggested Carla appear in a cameo, promising she’d work for only two days. Overnight, Carla was written into a scene as a Rodin Museum guide, embarassed by pompous professor Michael Sheen, who hasn’t any clue of what he’s talking about.

Woody still writes on an Olympia portable typewriter that he bought for $40 when he was 16, and keeps a wrinkled brown bag in his closet to store ideas and jokes. Says that he fell in love with Paris in 1964 during the eight months when his screenplay, What’s New Pussycat, was being filmed. “The movie was a mess. I wanted to stay, didn’t have the guts to leave New York, and sometimes wish I had.” (An aside about Paris: Samuel Morse bedded there “to paint,” was quite accomplished, and ended up inventing the telegraph and the code; Paris has a way of ambushing its visitors.)

Very good news: Midnight In Paris raked in $579,000 during its opening weekend with only six theaters. Two in L.A., and four in New York, and opens wider this weekend. Thanks to Sony Pictures Classics presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard for their smarts to buy and distribute Midnight In Paris, which rates amongst Woody’s finest.

Next up for Woody is Rome, where he’s filming Bop Cameron with Penelope Cruz, Jesse Eisenberg, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis, Ellen Page and Roberto Benigni. Is or isn’t this a cast that’s as good as it gets? Any actors out there that would bypass the chance of working with Woody? Doubtful.

Ischia, idyllic Ischia, that summertime haunt of Truman Capote, is an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, near Capri, and not far from the Gulf of Naples. Our twenty-something friends, India Irving and Mario Rivelli, will be there in July with their charming fifteen-minute movie, Mont Reve, that will open Ischia’s Global Film and Music Festival.

India and Mario created the story of Mont Reve, a name for an imaginary private school in Europe where “the sons and daughters of royals, along with the children of tycoons” are enrolled. India’s the daughter ofLynn von Kersting and Richard Irving, who’ve given us the fabled Ivy restaurants, also Lynn’s stylish Indigo Seas shop, where Ralph Lauren and photographer Bruce Weber shop whenever they’re in town.

An award-winning writer, India met Mario, a champion athlete and the son of Naples’ former mayor, at school. They graduated with honors at USC’s School of Theatre, and co-star in Mont Reve, which India’s written. Lynn von Kersting and Rocky Collins directed, with Lynn producing and serving as music supervisor. Gene Nagata was the director of photography.

Lynn reveals that financing’s now available to begin production for a feature, with European investors pleased that several languages are spoken, which will enhance the global market. Both India and Mario are fluent in Italian, French, Spanish, all in the dialogue of Mont Reve. For years, India summered in Capri, helping with errands at the Grand Hotel Quisisana. She also clerked in Paris at Shakespeare & Co., established on the rue Bucherie in 1919 by heiress Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was banned in the U.S.

Mont Reve was filmed in an astounding two days at Lynn and Richard’s estate, the previous residence of the late director George Cukor, which we christened Villa Abondanza in our article in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Inspired interiors that Baroness Pauline de Rothschild would have admired, along with the thousand rosebushes, fragrant flowers and vegetable gardens.

Throughout the filming, the Ivy’s favored owner/chef Richard Irving took over as the Craft Services, cooking delicious meals for the ecstatic staff and crew. Would that we could have been there!

Other posts with Woody Allen:

Leviathan: the Fire-Breathing Dragon: Kent Hovind [6 of 7]

Everybody is trying to get info on this subject. Here is what the Bible has to say about it.

Mace Baker wrote the aritcle, “Sea Dragons – The Institute for Creation Research,” and here is the third portion of that article: 

Pterosaurs were the flying reptiles of the ancient world. Why would they wind up in an ichthyosaur’s stomach? This was more than likely due to the immense amount of volcanism that was going on during the Flood year. These would have put large volumes of volcanic gases and ash into the atmosphere, which in many cases would have suffocated birds and pterosaurs. As they fell into the sea, some of them would have been quickly eaten by large fish or marine reptiles.

In some cases we not only have articulated bones of the ichthyosaur skeletons but carbonized skin impressions as well. This is even acknowledged by the authors who talk about slow and gradual covering of these reptiles with fine muds, “Carbonized skin impressions have been found around the skeletons of ichthyosaurs in the black shales at Holzmaden, Germany.” (Op. cit., p. 234.)

Evolutionists today teach that these creatures became extinct 65 million years ago, a number which has grown in magnitude historically. For example, in 1905 Nature magazine reporting on dinosaurs says, “It is almost an appalling thought that the skeleton of a creature which lived at least several million years ago should have come down in such marvellous preservation to our own day.” (———, “The New Diplodocus Skeleton,” Nature, May 25, 1905, p. 83.) According to the time reckoning in 1905, the dinosaurs lived only “several” million years ago. Now, today’s paleontologists are “sure” that they became extinct 65 million years ago and lived on the earth as many as 220 million years ago. (This time parameter, of course, applies to the dinosaurs, sea dragons, and pterosaurs.)

However, sea monsters or sea dragons have been referenced in many secular sources throughout human history. Modern paleontologists hold to the idea that the sea “dragons” are only mythological in nature, but refer at times to fossil ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs as “sea dragons,” i.e., “They were thought to belong to the euryapsid group of reptiles along with other sea dragons such as nothosaurs and plesiosaurs.” (Steve Parker, Age of the Dinosaur, p. 116.) The late Carl Sagan titled his book that includes information on dinosaurs, The Dragons of Eden. Further, Christopher McGowan, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and Professor of Zoology at the University of Toronto, gave his book on dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine reptiles the title, Dinosaurs, Spitfires, and Sea Dragons.

The Scriptures indicate very clearly that sea dragons were part of the original creation and are mentioned as being alive and flourishing even after the time of Noah’s flood. For instance, in Psalm 74:13 we read, “Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.” The Hebrew word used here for dragons is “tannim.” This is the same Hebrew word which refers to the land dragons (dinosaurs) in a variety of Scriptures including, for instance, in Malachi 1:3 which reads, “And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.”

Clearly, it is important for Christians to realize in this age when the doctrine of Creation has been undermined by the teaching of evolution, that God has been careful to reference all the major animal groups that He created, as well as an account of a global flood of judgment which made it possible for animals of the ancient world to be fossilized. If it was not for this great watery catastrophe that covered the entire earth, we would not find articulated fossil remains of animals on every continent. In the Scriptures, the Lord God has documented the fact that many of these creatures lived for an extended period of time after the Flood. During this time, they were also referenced by navigators who encountered them during their sea travels. The Biblical and secular accounts of the land dragons (dinosaurs) and sea dragons (ichthyosaurs) enable us who live in a time of great apostasy and unbelief to have strong confidence in the reliability of the Scriptures

ryan dunn Jackass dead in crash

Bam Margera’s First Interview After Ryan Dunn’s Death

Ryan Dunn and his friends moments before they died.

Flickr user Eric Lewis posted the image below with a caption that says the photo shows what’s left of Dunn’s car.