YBTL
2008 Deaths To Date
(Updated
01/23/09)
.
Veteran Irish actor Peter Caffrey has died in England at the
age of 58. The renowned stage, TV and film actor passed away Tuesday 01/01/08 following
years of ill health after he suffered a stroke in 2000. Despite being left
disabled by the stroke, he planned to return to acting in 2005 when he was cast
to play a publican in the independent film "Sweet Dancer".
He was a familiar face on both sides of the Irish Sea and is best known for his role as Padraig O'Kelly in the BBC drama "Ballykissangel", watched by 15 million viewers, in which he starred in five of the six series. After the series was cancelled in 2001, he was a much sought-after film actor, starring in a number of roles. He played an Anglican minister, a gay television producer and a transvestite. He also received critical acclaim for his portrayal of the loudmouth Frank Grogan in the low-budget heist movie "I Went Down", which made him a star on both sides of the Atlantic. Caffrey was strongly praised for his portrayal of a transvestite in John Lynch's 1998 film 'Night Train', starring John Hurt.
He was a solid veteran of the stage, starring in West End productions in London and at Dublin's Abbey and Gaiety theatre. His theatre credits include "Whale" and "The Crucible" at the National Theatre as well as the Abbey Theatre's production of "The Patrick Pearse Motel", and Pat McCabe's "The Borstal Boy" at the Gaiety Theatre.
His numerous television credits include Channel 4's series "Criminal Conversations", RTE's series "Bracken" and "The Burke Enigma" and BBC
Northern Ireland's "The Hanging Gale" and "Shannongate". He also appeared in numerous roles in popular television dramas and sit-coms, including "Glenroe", "The Bill", "Coronation Street", "Father Ted" and "Casualty".
We start off the year with a 28-point hit! 3rd year veteran The Famous Final Scene II gets the Harry Helmsley Award for First Stiff of the Year and adds an Under 65 age bonus to a solo hit (20+4+4). Give praise!
Princess Galyani Vadhana, the elder sister of Thailand's King
Bhumibol Adulyadej, died Wednesday 01/02/08, the royal palace announced. She
was 84 years old. Galyani's passing came after the 80-year-old king himself
recovered from the symptoms of a stroke after being hospitalized for three
weeksin October. Both were treated at Bangkok's Siriraj Hospital. Galyani had
been hospitalized since June, after doctors found she had abdominal cancer.
The princess was noted for her interest in the arts, especially theater and classical music, a taste cultivated when she, like the king, was educated in Switzerland, where she spent much time until later life. She spoke five languages, and loved to travel, documenting many of her journeys in books. She was the oldest child of Prince Mahidol - a son of King Chulalongkorn - and his commoner wife, Sangwal.
Galyani married Col. Aram Ratanakul Serireungriddhi, a royal aide but a commoner, in 1944, which meant she had to give up the royal title she was awarded in 1935. The couple had a daughter, but were divorced in 1949. Bhumibol restored the royal title in 1950, after the divorce. She married again in 1969 to Prince Varananda Dhavaj, a professional pilot, who died in 1990.
A lifelong Francophile, she founded the Association of Teachers of French in Thailand, which she headed in 1977-81. She also took up an intensive schedule of charity work, which is a mainstay of royal responsibility. She was a patron of at least five health-related foundations.
Already Dead ascends to 2nd in command with another solo hit, this one for 20 points.
South Korean boxer Choi Yo-sam, who fell into a coma after
winning his WBO intercontinental flyweight title fight last week, was declared
officially dead early Thursday 01/03/08. He was 33. The declaration was made at
12:18 a.m. (1518 GMT Wednesday) as doctors stopped the flow of blood to Choi's heart
and took him off life support. His heart, liver, both kidneys and both corneas
were removed for donation to six patients awaiting transplants. Doctors were
required to get approval from the prosecutors' office before the organs could
be removed.
On Wednesday, a hospital committee pronounced Choi brain dead after conducting a series of tests. He had been in a coma since shortly after winning the fight against Indonesian challenger Heri Amol in Seoul on Dec. 25. A former world champion, he was knocked down just before the end of the 12th and final round of the bout but got back up and was declared the winner on points before collapsing.
Choi was the WBC light flyweight world champion from Oct. 1999 to July 2002, and fought for the WBA light flyweight world title in Sept. 2004.
In 1982, South Korean lightweight Kim Duk-koo died four days after being knocked out by Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini in a WBA lightweight world title fight in Las Vegas. Kim was knocked out in the 14th round, prompting the WBC to reduce the length of its bouts from 15 to 12 rounds, with the other major sanctioning bodies following later.
Another South Korean fighter, bantamweight Lee Tong-choon, died of acute swelling of the brain in 1995, four days after losing consciousness following a Japanese title fight against Setsuo Kawamasu in Tokyo.
Our first multi-shot hit is also our first Un-Natural Death. AA88, Already Dead, Die2K, Forrest Tucker's Ghost, Hannibal Lechter's Sunday Brunch, Monty Python's Dying Circus, Morris the Cat's 9 (+21) Lives, Skeleton In Their Closet, The Finish Line, TO DIE FOR and Van Owens Body all get smacked with 31 points each (5 for the 11-way hit+12 for Under 45+10 for Un-Natural+4 for Youngest Stiff).
Former columnist and sports editor Milt Dunnell, a Toronto
Star legend and Hall of Fame journalist known for his deft turn of phrase and
encyclopedic breadth of experience, has died. He was 102. Dunnell died at North
York General Hospital late Thursday night 01/03/08.
Dunnell, who turned 102 on Christmas Eve, was an honoured member of Canada's Sports Hall of Fame, the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame and the Football Reporters of Canada Hall of Fame. Dunnell was known around the newsroom as Mr. Sports or, more fondly, as Uncle Miltie.
Dunnell's work took him around the world, covering Olympics from Melbourne to Mexico City or following Muhammad Ali to Zaire and the Philippines. He reached retirement age in 1970 but kept writing until 1994, when he was just shy of 89. In all Dunnell wrote some 11,000 columns for the Star. And he did it like no other.
His 1966 report on the Ali-George Chuvalo fight in Toronto started: "They had a contest between a bull and a bumblebee at Maple Leaf Gardens last night - with the usual result. The bull came out of it with his face looking like a bucket of balls at a golf driving range."
Dunnell, from St. Marys, Ont., began his career writing for his hometown paper, the St. Marys Journal-Argus, before spending 13 years with the Stratford Beacon-Herald, including five as sports editor. He joined the Star in 1942 and seven years later was named sports editor. He retired from the position in 1970 but continued writing five columns a week - and to work for another 24 years.
A book containing 77 of his columns, "The Best of Milt Dunnell," was published in 1993.
In 1996, Sports Media Canada gave Dunnell its Achievement Award.
Century Mark and Tailgaiting with Jesus open up the mic and announce they got 18 points on the Canadian Sportscaster. He shoots, he scores!
Ken Nelson, the record producer behind the twangy Bakersfield
Sound made popular by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, died on Sunday 01/06/08 at
his home in Somis, CA. He was 96. He died of natural causes.
Although best known for his work with Mr. Owens and Mr. Haggard, Mr. Nelson also helped reinvent country music when 1950s rock ’n’ rollers like Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins began supplanting perennial hitmakers like Red Foley and Eddy Arnold on the country charts. Rather than treating the big-beat incursion of Mr. Presley and Mr. Perkins as a threat, Mr. Nelson, then the head of the country division of Capitol Records, saw it as an opportunity to take rural music in a more sophisticated direction.
First he persuaded a rising singer named Sonny James to record “Young Love”, a smooth romantic ballad, which topped both the country and the pop charts in 1957. He also recruited the Jordanaires, the uptown vocal chorus that had already backed Mr. Presley and Mr. James, to sing on “Gone”, a No. 1 country hit for the crooner Ferlin Husky, which reached the pop Top 5. Both “Young Love” and “Gone” became prototypes for the Nashville Sound, which would give country music more mainstream appeal.
Meanwhile, Mr. Nelson had signed several young rockabilly acts of his own, most notably Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson. For Mr. Vincent he produced the hiccupping “Be-Bop-a-Lula”, a Top 10 hit on the pop, country and R&B charts in 1956. With Ms. Jackson, Mr. Nelson cut the raucous “Let’s Have a Party” in 1960.
A musical omnivore who briefly oversaw the Capitol label’s jazz division as well, Mr. Nelson recorded a broad array of music under the country rubric in his nearly three decades there. The harmony duo the Louvin Brothers and the swing-inflected band of Hank Thompson both came under his direction. Known for being a hands-off producer who let his artists record with their touring bands instead of insisting that they work with studio professionals, Mr. Nelson consistently supervised a roster of acts whose music demonstrated how durable and elastic the country genre could be.
Kenneth F. Nelson was born on 01/19/11, in Caledonia, Minn. Placed in an orphanage by his mother when he was an infant, he spent his childhood in Chicago, where he would go on to work in a music store and, later, at a radio station, WJJD. Promoted to music director at the station, Mr. Nelson did everything from announcing broadcasts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to scouting talent for its “hillbilly” variety show, “Suppertime Frolic”.
After serving in the Army during World War II, Mr. Nelson returned to Chicago and WJJD. He also began producing sessions for Capitol, eventually moving to Hollywood in 1948 to work for the label full time. By his retirement in 1976 he had produced around 100 chart-topping country hits, including “The Wild Side of Life”, a No. 1 record for Mr. Thompson for 15 weeks in 1952. Mr. Owens and Mr. Haggard accounted for more than three dozen of Mr. Nelson’s No. 1 recordings. Many of these were unvarnished, emotionally direct performances that reached beyond country audiences to influence rock acts like the Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Mr. Nelson’s wife June died in 1984. He is survived by his daughter, Claudia Nelson, and three grandchildren.
A co-founder of the Country Music Association, Mr. Nelson was president of that organization’s board in 1961 and 1962. In 2001 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He published an autobiography, “My First 90 Years Plus 3”, last year.
Fecal Matter, Forrest Tucker's Ghost and Swan Song get their toes tapping on a 3-way hit worth 16 points on the CMHOFer.
George Moore , who died on Tuesday 01/08/08 aged 84, was one of
Australia's greatest jockeys, dominating the sport in his native country in the
1950s and 1960s; he also made his mark overseas, winning both the Epsom Derby
and the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Moore died in a Sydney nursing home. He had
been suffering from Alzheimer's disease and had undergone two heart bypass
operations.
Moore - nicknamed "Cotton Fingers" for his delicate handling of his mounts - formed a successful partnership with the trainer Tommy ("TJ") Smith. The relationship between the two men was sometimes cantankerous, but no one doubted its fruitfulness. Although Moore never won the Melbourne Cup, he amassed a record 119 Group One races in Australia, and rode Smith's great racehorse Tulloch to 19 of its 36 victories. In 1957-58 he and Tulloch took the Rosehill and Caulfield Guineas; the Australian Jockey Club (AJC), Victoria and Queensland Derbys; and the Victoria and AJC St Legers.
George Thomas Donald Moore was born on 07/05/23 at Mackay, Queensland. In 1938, at the age of 15, he was apprenticed to the trainer Louis Dahl in Brisbane; he then transferred his services to Jim Shean, and rode his first metropolitan winner on New Year's Day 1940. In 1943 he went to Sydney, attached to Peter Riddle's stable, and in that year he won his first senior jockeys' premiership (or championship), in Brisbane. He then moved to Sydney, and in 1949 began his association with Tommy Smith. In the same year he rode Playboy, a 100-1 chance, to victory in the AJC Australian Derby.
Like many top jockeys, Moore was no stranger to the stewards' room. The most serious of these encounters was in the 1950s, when he was given a two-and-a-half-year suspension for placing a bet on a horse called Flying East which won a race at Hawkesbury; not only was Moore its registered owner, he also rode another horse in the same race.
Back on the racetrack Moore won the jockeys' premiership titles in 1957 and 1958. The next year he accepted an invitation to ride Prince Aly Khan's horses being trained in France by Alec Head. He duly won the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe (on Saint Crespin), as well as, in Britain, the 2,000 Guineas on Prince Aly Khan's Taboun. In May 1960 the prince was killed in a motor accident, but Moore continued to ride for his son, the Aga Khan, winning that year's Prix du Jockey Club (the French Derby) on Charlottesville.
He returned to Australia for another successful spell before crossing the globe again, in 1967, to ride in Britain for Sir Noel Murless, whose stable jockey, Lester Piggott, had gone freelance. In that year Moore won three Classics for Murless - the 1,000 Guineas (on Fleet) and, on Royal Palace, both the 2,000 Guineas and the Epsom Derby. He also won the King George on Busted.
It was a remarkable season, but Moore was unable to capitalize on his success in Britain owing to a sinister turn of events. It is said that he began to receive telephone calls demanding that he throw races; and that his flat in London was broken into and his clothes cut to ribbons. Rather than expose his family to risk (the telephone calls had threatened violence) Moore returned to Australia.
He won many other races over the course of his brief career in Britain, among them the Coronation Cup, Ascot Gold Cup, the Gimcrack and the Ebor. He also took Fiorentina to victory in the Irish 1,000 Guineas. In the United States he won the San Diego Stakes.
He finally retired from the saddle in 1971, his last winner being Classic Mission in the Victoria Derby. He had ridden a total of 2,278 winners, and his big race victories included two WS Cox Plates (1957 and 1958); two Golden Slippers (1970 and 1971); three Sydney Cups (1946, 1966 and 1968); two Victoria Derbys (1957 and 1971); and five AJC Derbys (1949, 1957, 1962, 1963 and 1971). He also won 10 jockeys' championships in Sydney between 1957 and 1969.
Moore continued to be involved in the sport after retiring as a jockey, taking out a trainer's licence. He trained briefly in France before going to Hong Kong, where he won the trainers' championship 11 times in 13 years. He then returned to Australia, settling in the Gold Coast area of south-east Queensland.
The first jockey to be granted a place in the Australian Sporting Hall of Fame (in 1986), Moore is also remembered in the form of the George Moore Medal, presented annually to Sydney's outstanding jockey.
In 1972 he was appointed OBE. Unable to attend an investiture, he received his medal through the post.
Already Dead, Decay NY, Die2K, Goatsucker and Putnam's Tomahawk Chop, all veterans of the game, race across the line with 12 points each on the Aussie jockey.
Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who conquered
Mount Everest in 1953 and was renowned as one of the 20th century's greatest
adventurers, has died. He was 88. Hillary died Friday 01/11/08 at Auckland
Hospital from a heart attack.
The New Zealander devoted much of his life to aiding the mountain people of Nepal and took his fame in stride, preferring to be called Ed and considering himself an "ordinary person with ordinary qualities".
The climbing accomplishment, part of a British climbing expedition, even added luster to the coronation of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II four days later, and she knighted Hillary as one of her first acts.
But he was more proud of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal, the homeland of his climbing companion Tenzing Norgay, the mountain guide with whom he stood arm in arm on the summit of Everest on 05/29/53.
Hillary remains the only nonpolitical person outside Britain honored as a member of the Britain's Order of the Garter, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II on just 24 knights and ladies living worldwide at any time.
Honored by the United Nations as one of its Global 500 conservationists in 1987, he was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates from universities in several parts of the world.
One of his accolades was the Smithsonian Institution's James Smithson Bicentennial Medal for his "monumental explorations and humanitarian achievements," awarded in 1998.
Christopher Reeve's Dancecard, Dead Wringers, GHOSTBUSTIN' BABE, If You're Still Alive...You're Dead To Me!!, Mhor Rioghain (Queen O' the Dead) and Reporting For Plastination all begin their ascent with 10 points each on the mountaineer. Team Dirt gets the first Taxi Squad hit of the year worth 3 points.
Carl N. Karcher, who parlayed a $325 investment in a hot-dog
cart into one of the largest hamburger chains in the West died Friday 01/11/08.
He was 90. The founder of the Carl's Jr. fast-food chain suffered from
Parkinson's disease and was being treated for pneumonia when he died at St.
Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, said Beth Mansfield, a spokeswoman for CKE
Restaurants.
Karcher, a deeply religious father of 12, was famous in the fast-food industry for his rags-to-riches story - a tale that was tainted in later years by an insider trading scandal and feuds with his board of directors that led to his eventual demise as chief executive officer.
The company and its founder grew even more estranged in recent years when Carl's Jr., seeking to woo a younger male clientele, launched a series of ads that included a scantily clad Paris Hilton washing a car and Playboy Magazine founder Hugh Hefner, surrounded by beautiful women, expounding on the advantages of being able to enjoy a different variety of hamburger every night of the week.
In happier years, Karcher had appeared in the chain's ads himself, cutting a grandfatherly figure as he stood alongside the smiling Carl's Jr. "Happy Star" logo.
Karcher was working as a bread-truck driver in South Central Los Angeles when he noticed the large number of hot dog stands in the neighborhood and saw a business opportunity. He borrowed $311 on the 1941 Plymouth Super Deluxe he owned with his new bride, Margaret, added the rest in cash and bought his first pushcart hot dog stand. One cart soon became four, and by the end of World War II Karcher had opened his first restaurant, Carl's Drive-In barbecue, in Anaheim. He opened the first Carl's Jr. - named "Jr." to distinguish it from his full-service eatery - in 1956.
"With the help and support of my wife and children, my faith in God, my good health, my belief in the free enterprise system, and my willingness to work hard, there was no way I could have failed," he wrote in his 1991 autobiography, Never Stop Dreaming.
From the beginning, Karcher wanted to appeal to a slightly higher-end customer who would pay a little more for quality fast food. Some of his restaurants had carpeting and allowed customers to have their orders delivered to their table. Karcher was also among the first to pick up on America's growing interest in healthier fast food, introducing grilled chicken sandwiches and salad bars. The business fit well with the postwar boom and California's emerging car culture.
Today, Carl's Jr. has more than 1,000 locations across the West; its parent company, the Carpenteria, CA-based CKE Enterprises (CKE), made $1.52 billion in sales in 2006 and had 29,000 employees.
CKE also owns the Hardee's, La Salsa Fresh Mexican Grill and Green Burrito chains.
Eternal Dirtnap gets a solo hit on the restauranteur, but only gets 5 points for the Taxi Squad hit. Sizzle!
The last American commander of anti-Fascist forces during the
Spanish Civil War – who befriended Ernest Hemingway during the conflict – has
died. Milton Wolff, 92, died on Monday 01/14/08 of heart failure in Berkeley,
California, according to Peter Carroll, the chairman of the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade Archives, an organisation devoted to preserving the history of North
American volunteers in the war.
While in Spain, Mr Wolff met Hemingway, who was writing about the conflict, and the author served him his first ever Scotch.
Hemingway described Mr Wolff as being "tall as Lincoln, gaunt as Lincoln, and as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg. He is alive and unhit by the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed.”
Born in New York City on 10/07/15, Mr Wolff was only 21 when he stepped off the soapboxes in his native city, where he defended his Communist views, and into the Spanish war. By the time he was 22, he was the ninth leader of what was known as the Lincoln Brigade, which fought to support Spain's elected socialist government against General Francisco Franco.
About 3,000 Americans fought in volunteer battalions in Spain and more than 900 were killed. About 40 are still alive today.
Soon after the American fighters returned home on 12/15/39, Madrid fell to the Fascists, and the war was over.
But Mr Wolff never stopped fighting for what he considered worthy causes, including integration in baseball, and against the Vietnam War.
More Hemlock Please takes down a field marshall worth 20 points.
Allan Melvin, a popular character actor who played Cpl. Henshaw
on the classic 1950s sitcom "The Phil Silvers Show" and later
portrayed Archie Bunker's neighbor and friend Barney on "All in the
Family," has died. He was 84. Melvin, who was in the original Broadway
cast of "Stalag 17" in the early 1950s, died of cancer Thursday
01/17/08 at his home in Brentwood, said his wife of 64 years, Amalia.
During his five-decade career, Melvin made guest appearances on numerous TV shows, including playing different roles on at least eight episodes of "The Andy Griffith Show" and playing Dick Van Dyke's old Army buddy on "The Dick Van Dyke Show". He also played Sgt. Charlie Hacker on "Gomer Pyle: U.S.M.C."; portrayed butcher Sam Franklin - Alice the housekeeper's boyfriend - on "The Brady Bunch"; and continued playing Barney when the hit "All in the Family" became "Archie Bunker's Place".
Melvin, who appeared in only one movie - the 1968 Doris Day comedy "With Six You Get Eggroll" - also did voice-over work in cartoons, including providing the voices of Magilla Gorilla and Bluto on "Popeye". He worked on numerous TV commercials as well, including playing Al the Plumber in the Liquid-Plumr commercials for 15 years.
After launching his show business career in the sound effects department of NBC radio in New York in 1944, Melvin began acting on radio soap operas and then moved into live television. At the same time, he did movie star impressions in Manhattan in a nightclub act written by his friend Richard Condon, who later wrote "The Manchurian Candidate".
Melvin's stand-up act led to his winning "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts" radio show in the late 1940s.
He was playing Reed in "Stalag 17," the hit 1951-52 Broadway play set in a German POW camp during World War II, when he first caught Silvers' attention. "The Phil Silvers Show", originally titled "You'll Never Get Rich," was set on an Army base in Kansas and ran from 1955 to 1959. As Cpl. Henshaw, Melvin was the right-hand man to Silvers' con man extraordinaire, Sgt. Ernie Bilko. "He was brilliant" as Henshaw, Mickey Freeman, who played Pvt. Zimmerman on the show, said Friday. In recent years, when fans would ask Freeman how many surviving cast members were left, he would reply, "Allan Melvin and me - that's a high mortality rate for a noncombatant unit."
Noting that Melvin "was a great mimic of voices," Freeman recalled an episode in which an officer arrived at Ft. Baxter to stop the men from gambling. One of the ways the officer did that, Freeman said, was to make them listen to his wife lecture on art. But the woman had an unusual twitch - pulling on her skirt - and Bilko and the other soldiers placed bets on how many times she would do that during her lecture.
Freeman recalled that Melvin, as Henshaw, was positioned outside the lecture hall with a microphone, broadcasting to the other soldiers on the base -- " 'She's up to 42 now . . . 43 . . . 44, and she's not even breathing heavy.' He made a whole racetrack thing out of it," Freeman said. "He was wonderful."
Melvin was born 02/18/23, in Kansas City, MO. His family soon moved to New York City, where he graduated from Columbia University as a journalism major.
Melvin retired from acting about 10 years ago - long after becoming a household face who was used to people spotting him in public and saying, "Hey, Henshaw" or "Hey, Sam the Butcher!"
Life's a Bitch, Then You Die and Playin for Bonz get some meat for their diets, scoring 18 points each on the character actor.
Madeleine Milhaud, actress, musician and legendary hostess
died on Thursday 01/17/08, aged 105.
She was famed in Parisian circles for her fashionable “salons”, brilliant gatherings of modernist authors, painters, dancers and musicians. Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Fernand Léger, André Gide, Paul Claudel, and Erik Satie were regular fixtures, and Pablo Picasso and the ballet impresario Diaghilev would occasionally make an appearance. Milhaud was thus one of a dying breed - the French Society hostess, who would regularly provide the setting for a vibrant interchange of philosophical and artistic ideas and initiatives.
She acquired this role through marrying at the age of 23 her first cousin, the composer Darius Milhaud. It was the start of a happy 49-year marriage, in which Milhaud encouraged his wife's career. He was one Les Six, a group of French musicians whose most famous member was Francis Poulenc.
Milhaud experimented with South American rhythms and jazz. His friends would frequently collaborate with opera and theatre productions. Madeleine had a key role as a muse and Milhaud dedicated his piano suite "La Muse Ménagère" (The Household Muse) to her. She had chosen the title herself and she later wrote the libretti for two of his operas, "Médée" and "Bolivar".
She was born on 03/22/1902. Intelligent and multi-talented, Madeleine was one of the first actresses to act in front of a radio microphone rather than a visible audience. She specialised in poetry, and her study of music was a good preparation for speaking roles in musical works, such as Joan of Arc in Arthur Honegger's oratorio "Jeanne d'Arc au bûche".
When the Germans invaded Paris in 1940, Milhaud knew that as a prominent Jewish intellectual he was likely to be arrested, so fled with the family to California. A deep attachment to Europe meant they returned to Paris after the liberation - although Milhaud continued to teach annual composition courses in California until shortly before his death in 1974.
Madeleine devoted the next quarter century, until she was well into her nineties, to promoting Milhaud's work and his place in the canon of European music. She established archives, collections of photographs, rummaged through and classified his papers and 400 compositions. And she was ever ready to advise musicians on the interpretation of his works.
To celebrate her own centenary in 2002 she co-authored and published a book about her life and legendary circle of friends titled "Mon XXème Siècle" (My 20th Century).
The Famous Final Scene toasts to the passing of the French actress/socialite worth 20 points.
Georgia Frontiere, the St. Louis native who became a hometown
hero when she brought the NFL's Rams from Los Angeles in 1995, died Friday
01/18/08. She was 80. Frontiere had been hospitalized for breast cancer for
several months, the Rams said in a statement posted on their Web site.
The one-time nightclub singer was married seven times, starting at age 15. Her sixth husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, owned the Los Angeles Rams at the time of his drowning death in 1979.
The Rams moved twice under Frontiere's leadership, first relocating from the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1980 to Anaheim, 35 miles away. St. Louis' original NFL franchise, the Cardinals, had left for Arizona in 1988. After the city failed to land an expansion team, civic leaders built a $260 million, taxpayer-financed domed stadium anyway, in hopes of luring another team.
Frontiere, born in St. Louis, agreed in January 1995 to move, causing her to be demonized in Southern California but heralded in her hometown. At a downtown rally soon after the move was announced, thousands chanted "Georgia! Georgia!" "You take my breath away," Frontiere told the crowd. "It's so good to be back in St. Louis, my hometown." The Rams won the Super Bowl in 2000.
The Rams were the first major sports team to arrive in California when then they moved from Cleveland in 1946. They became the first football or baseball team to leave the state with the move to St. Louis.
Frontiere was a fixture at Rams games during the heyday of the "Greatest Show on Turf" teams that made the playoffs five out of six seasons from 1999 through 2004. Led by quarterback Kurt Warner, running back Marshall Faulk and receivers Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt, the Rams won the 2000 Super Bowl 23-16 and lost the Super Bowl two seasons later on a last-second field goal by the New England Patriots.
Frontiere was born Georgia Irwin on 11/21/27, and attended Soldan High School before moving to California at age 15. She wed that year, though the marriage was eventually annulled, according to published reports. Her second husband was killed when hit by a bus. She left her third husband to try to make it as a showgirl in Las Vegas. Her fourth marriage - to a stage manager of the Sacramento Music Circus - ended in divorce after three years. Husband No. 5 was a Miami television producer.
She married Rosenbloom in 1966, shortly after he took over the Baltimore Colts. He eventually swapped that franchise for the Rams, which his wife took control of after he drowned. Frontiere remarried again after Rosenbloom's death. Her seventh husband, Dominic Frontiere, was an award-winning composer. They divorced in 1988 upon his release from prison after serving time on tax charges related to the scalping of more than 2,500 tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl in Pasadena.
Frontiere left day-to-day operation of her team to Shaw, both when the franchise was in Southern California and after the move to St. Louis. Shaw continues to run the team from Los Angeles. The team has missed the playoffs in each of the last three seasons.
Frontiere became involved in several philanthropic efforts in St. Louis after moving the team, including the creation in 1997 of the St. Louis Rams Foundation. According to the team's Web site, the Rams and the foundation have contributed more than $5 million to charities in the St. Louis area.
Frontiere also committed $1 million to the Fulfillment Fund, an organization that helps needy high school students pay for college. She has served as a member of several boards, including the United Way of Greater St. Louis, Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club, Saint Louis Symphony, Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America and the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
In addition to her two children, she is survived by six grandchildren, and Earle Weatherwax, her companion of 19 years.
Already Dead, Bud Dwyer's Brains, Check the Cut List Redux, Decay NY, Goatsucker, Hannibal Lechter's Sunday Brunch, Life'll Kill Ya, More Hemlock Please, Morris the Cat's 9 (+21) Lives, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop, Skeleton In Their Closet, SPT On Your Grave, Sudden Death/Game Over and Team Dirt all get the minimum 5 points for the NFL franchisee. Don't Fear the Reaper and Happiest Epitaphs catch 3 points each for the taxi Squad hit.
Don Wittman, who has called some of Canada's most significant
sporting events, died of cancer Saturday 01/19/08. He was 71.
For more than 40 years, Wittman was a familiar face on CBC television. He did the play-by-play for Grey Cups and Stanley Cups, and covered curling, golf, and track and field, as well. He was a fixture at both summer and winter Olympics. Wittman called Ben Johnson's steroid-tainted victory in the 100 meters at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and he was there when Donovan Bailey sprinted to gold in the same event in the 1996 Games at Atlanta.
Wittman saw Wayne Gretzky win Stanley Cups and was in Czechoslovakia in 1987 for the Canada-USSR brawl at the world junior hockey championships.
During the 1972 Olympics in Munich he stood on a balcony and looked into the masked face of one of the terrorists who kidnapped nine Israeli athletes.
Wittman, chosen as the 2002 broadcaster of the year by Sports Media Canada, was a member of the Canadian Football League Hall of Fame, the Canadian Curling Hall of Fame and Manitoba's provincial sports hall of fame.
Already Dead, Ethnic Cleansing, Forrest Tucker's Ghost, Goatsucker, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop, Skeleton In Their Closet and Van Owens Body all get the call on the Canadian sportscaster worth 8 points each.
Suzanne Pleshette, 70, a smoky-voiced actress who appeared
in hundreds of television programs and was best known as Bob Newhart's sardonic
TV wife in the 1970s, died Saturday night 01/19/08. She had under gone
chemotherapy for lung cancer in 2006, and died of respiratory failure at her
home in Los Angeles.
Ms. Pleshette was a strikingly beautiful actress and had one of the deepest, most distinctive voices in show business. "Telephone operators have called me 'sir' since I was 6," she once said. Yet her dark allure never quite translated into a movie career that was her aim in the late 1950s.
Her talents were easily adaptable across film genres, from westerns to Disney fare. Her most-remembered film role was the schoolteacher killed by crazed gulls in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" (1963). Yet several of her starring projects were terrible, including the 1965 adaptation of John O'Hara's book "A Rage to Live," in which she was a socialite nymphomaniac.
Instead of a career as a front-rank movie actress, Ms. Pleshette thrived as a fetching personality on television and in interviews. She proved capable of sassy, well-timed bon mots. To one reporter, she described how she won roles with her best physical asset by saying, "I got every job I ever got walking out of the office." Such risque commentary made her a popular guest on "Hollywood Squares" and Johnny Carson's "Tonight" show. Her banter with Carson brought her to the attention of comedian Newhart, and she eagerly agreed to a leading part in his self-titled sitcom.
"When I started in movies they said I'd be this big star, but I was only a moderate one," she told the Toronto Star in 1989. "Not enough good pictures. It's important to be in a good piece of work no matter the size of one's own part."
She received two Emmy nominations for best actress for her work on "The Bob Newhart Show," which aired on CBS from 1972 to 1978. She portrayed Emily Hartley, an elementary school teacher married to Newhart, who played a Chicago psychiatrist named Bob Hartley.
Ms. Pleshette reprised the role of Emily for the ending of CBS's "Newhart," Bob Newhart's successor sitcom of the 1980s in which he was a Vermont innkeeper named Dick Loudon. In the final episode, Newhart is knocked unconscious by a golf ball. When he wakes, he finds himself in bed with Emily on his old television-show set and tells her about a terrible dream in which he owned a New England hotel. The episode was regarded as one of the cleverest finishes of a television series, and one of the few times an ending in which "it was all a dream" worked.
In the interim, Ms. Pleshette had a long career as a sitcom guest star and in made-for-television movies, the best of which was her Emmy-nominated leading role in CBS's "Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean" (1990), as the social-climbing Manhattan real-estate magnate convicted of federal income tax evasion.
New York Times television critic John J. O'Connor wrote:
"Even with prosthetic cosmetics, Ms. Pleshette is considerably more attractive than Mrs. Helmsley, but her performance captures what could very well be the essence of the woman. The portrait is all the more effective for being not entirely critical."
Suzanne Pleshette was born on 01/31/37, in New York. Her father, Eugene, became a theater and television executive. Her mother, Geraldine, was a ballerina. As a child, Ms. Pleshette appeared in a revival of Maxwell Anderson's "Truckline Cafe" at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. She attended a performing arts high school and the now-defunct Finch College, both in Manhattan, and studied social work at Syracuse University before starting her entertainment career in earnest.
In 1958, she won good reviews for supporting roles in Broadway shows such as S.N. Behrman's drama "The Cold Wind and the Warm" - Meisner, her early mentor, was also in the cast. That same year, she made her film debut in the Jerry Lewis comedy "The Geisha Boy".
Ms. Pleshette also began a prolific television career in such series as "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", "Ben Casey" and "The Fugitive". She received an Emmy nomination for her guest appearance as a happy-go-lucky woman dying of leukemia on a 1961 episode of "Dr. Kildare". Also that year, she
replaced Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan in the Broadway play "The Miracle Worker", and a magazine photo of Ms. Pleshette captured the attention of film producer-director Delmer Daves. He cast her in "Rome Adventure" (1962), in the leading role of a teacher who finds love in Italy with artist, played by Troy Donahue.
She married her co-star but the relationship deteriorated quickly. They were divorced after eight months, although she and Donahue put aside differences to act together in Raoul Walsh's poorly received 1964 western, "A Distant Trumpet". Ms. Pleshette was married to businessman Tom Gallagher from 1968 until his death in 2000. The next year, she married TV comedian Tom Poston, whom she had known for decades. He died in April 2007. Survivors include three stepchildren, Francesca Poston of Nashville, Jason Poston of Los Angeles and Hudson Poston of Portland, Ore.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, she played opposite Steve McQueen ("Nevada Smith") and Tony Curtis ("40 Pounds of Trouble"). She was particularly well cast with the laconic James Garner in "Mister Buddwing," in which she loves amnesiac Garner, and "Support Your Local Gunfighter," in which she loves con man Garner. She starred in several Disney comedies of the period, including "The Ugly Dachshund" with Dean Jones, "The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin" with Roddy McDowall and "Blackbeard's Ghost" with Peter Ustinov and Jones.
Ms. Pleshette periodically returned to the screen in family fare ("Oh, God! Book II," "The Shaggy D.A.") and did voice-over work on more recent animated films, such as "The Lion King II" and "Spirited Away." She also played on Broadway with Richard Mulligan as a divorced couple in a
1982 flop called "Special Occasions."
She remained a durable television performer, even if she never quite equaled the success of "The Bob Newhart Show." In recent years, Ms. Pleshette took guest roles on sitcoms such as "8 Simple Rules" and "Will & Grace," often as the outspoken mother of a main character. The parts were not far-fetched. When starring in NBC's short-lived medical drama "Nightingales" in 1989, she told a reporter: "You call us 'Charlie's Angels' in white uniforms and I'll sock ya!"
Adios Amigos, Already Dead, Cape Cadaver, Christopher Reeve's Dancecard, Dead Like Them, Death Be Not Proud, Don't Fear the Reaper, Excuse Me For Coffin, Gratefull Dead, Hannibal Lechter's Sunday Brunch, I Am Stretched On Your Grave, Made It Ma! Top Of the World!, Mhor Rioghain (Queen O' the Dead), Otis' Cirrhosis from Rafe Hollister's Still, Reporting For Plastination, Schadenfreude, Sweeney Todd's Pie Filling, Ten Toes Up and What's a TSCU? all get 5 points for the husky-voiced actress. Dead Can Dance settles for 3 points with their Taxi Squad hit.
Victor S Johnson Jr, president of Aladdin Industries and one
of Nashville's most prominent citizens outside the music industry, died
Saturday 01/19/08. He was 91.
Mr. Johnson was born in Chicago, IL on 06/12/16. He received his BA degree from Amherst College in 1938 and earned his law degree from Yale University in 1941. During his lifetime, he was awarded honorary degrees from Amherst College, Hamilton College and Meharry Medical College. Upon graduation from law school, he served in the Judge Advocate General's office, rising to the rank of Captain.
After his father's sudden death in 1943, Mr. Johnson assumed the role of interim president of the Mantle Lamp Company of America, the company his father founded in 1908 to provide superior kerosene lighting to rural America. Upon completing his military obligation in 1946, Mr. Johnson entered the family business on a full time basis at its headquarters in Chicago. In 1949, he decided to move both the executive offices and the manufacturing facilities to a newly constructed plant in Nashville. Later named Aladdin Industries, he led the company as its Chairman and CEO for the next thirty-five years. Under his leadership, the company expanded its business interests from kerosene lamps to thermos bottles, school lunch boxes, electronic components, food service systems and real estate development.
Johnson was an industrial and civic lion, and one of ten most influential people in Nashville. He kept Aladdin alive, due to his love of the lamp created by his father, despite declining sales. Johnson supported collectors and attended Gatherings of Aladdin Knights in Nashville. The lamp division was purchased by 14 passionate Aladdin Knights in 1999 to continue manufacture in Clarksville, TN.
In 1971 he became a partner in a massive real estate development project to convert an eight hundred fifty acre floodplain just north of Nashville's central business district into one of the city's premier business parks knows as MetroCenter. Additionally, he was an influential force behind the idea to create the Tennessee Performing Arts Center where he served on the Board of Directors of its foundation and received the organization's Applause Award in 1985. He is also credited with proposing to then Governor Ned McWherter that the State of Tennessee acquire land north of the State capitol for what later became the Tennessee Bicentennial Mall.
Over the years, Mr. Johnson was involved with United Way, the Nashville Committee on Foreign Relations, the Atlanta Regional Panel of the President's Commission on White House Fellowships, and the Tennessee Historical Commission to name a few.
Century Mark carries away 20 points in their Speed Racer lunch box for the solo hit on the industry icon. The Rules Committee voted 4-3 in favor of Johnson, ruling that major media missed the death of this important industrialist.
World War I veteran Louis de Cazenave died Sunday 01/20/08 at
age 110, leaving just one known French survivor of the 1914-1918 conflict. De
Cazenave, who took part in the Battle of the Somme, died in his home in Brioude
in central France, said his son, also named Louis de Cazenave.
"He died at his house, in his sleep, without suffering," the son said by telephone. He said his father was to be buried Tuesday in Brioude.
The last known French veteran of World War I - known as "poilus", meaning hairy or tough - is Lazare Ponticelli, also 110.
Born 10/16/1897, de Cazenave was called up to fight in 1916 and served in different infantry regiments before joining an artillery unit in January 1918, according to a statement from the French president's office.
De Cazenave took part in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, in which more than a million soldiers died, and in the liberation of France from German forces, the statement said.
"His death is an occasion for all of us to think of the 1.4 million French who sacrificed their lives during this conflict, for the 4.5 million wounded, for the 8.5 million mobilized," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement.
Ethnic Cleansing and Goodbye Cruel World shoot up 22 points (18 for the 2-way hit + 4 for oldest stiff) on the old soldier.
Convicted sex offender Kenneth Eugene Parnell, known for
kidnapping Steven Stayner in 1972, died of natural causes on Monday 01/21/08 at
the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, CA.
Parnell was 76 and was in hospice status when he died. He was serving a 25-years-to-life term under the state's three strikes law for attempting to buy a 4-year-old boy for $500 in 2003. The Alameda County jury found him guilty in 2004 of soliciting a person to kidnap someone, attempting to buy a person and attempted child stealing. Parnell actually had five strikes. In December 1972, he kidnapped 7-year-old Steven Stayner of Merced, the younger brother of Cary Stayner who was convicted of killing three tourists and a Yosemite National Park naturalist in 1999.
On 02/14/80, Parnell abducted 5-year-old Timothy White of Ukiah in 1980. He was arrested after Stayner and White hitchhiked to Ukiah and went to a police station. He was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison and was paroled to Berkeley in 1985 after serving five years.
Steven Stayner died in a motorcycle accident in 1985.
Parnell's criminal history began at age 19 when he reportedly abducted and sodomized a 9-year-old Bakersfield boy in 1951. He also was convicted of robbery and grand larceny for using a gun to rob a service station owner of $150 in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1960.
Flatliners steals away with a 20-point solo hit on the notorious criminal.
Richard Darman, a former White House budget director who helped
convince former President George HW Bush to renege on his no new taxes pledge,
has died. He was 64. Darman died Friday 01/25/08 in Washington after battling
leukemia for several months, according to a statement issued by former
Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a longtime friend.
Darman was chief architect of a compromise designed to reduce the federal budget deficit. Although it drew praise from many economic analysts, the plan included tax increases that broke Bush's 1988 election promise, "Read my lips, no new taxes!" Although the change of policy is partly blamed for Bush's re-election defeat to Bill Clinton, it contributed to balancing the federal budgets in the late 1990s.
Darman sometimes drew criticism for being abrasive, intellectually arrogant and overly concerned with his standing in the White House pecking order. He had a reputation for being so crafty that "Darmanesque" became a word to describe maneuvering that was clever and Machiavellian. He had a more playful side and was known for pranks. He once donned a gorilla suit to amuse his boss, the president.
Darman began his government career in 1971 as a deputy assistant secretary in the former Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He later held high-level posts in the Defense, Justice and Commerce departments. He served as a top aide to Attorney General Elliot Richardson, who lost his job in the "Saturday Night Massacre" during the Watergate scandal. He was deputy chief of staff to President Reagan while Baker was running
the staff. Baker became his mentor, which helped Darman survive in the Bush White House. When Baker switched jobs to become Treasury secretary, Darman went with him, becoming deputy Treasury secretary.
Along with his jobs in many federal agencies, Darman taught at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Morris the Cat's 9 (+21) Lives got some good advice on the Washington insider and now has 24 more points (20 for solo, 4 for Under 65).
Viktor Schreckengost, a celebrated industrial designer whose
products included mass-produced dinnerware, riding lawn mowers, bicycles and
coffins, and who revolutionized trucking by putting the cab over the engine,
died of respiratory arrest 01/26/08 at his Tallahassee, FL condominium. He was
101.
Mr. Schreckengost was one of the world's most prolific artists of commercial goods, and his impact on the economy once was calculated at more than $200 billion. He spent decades as an independent contractor for such companies as American Limoges, Harris-Seybold and Sears, Roebuck. During World War II, he worked on a top-secret radar-recognition project for the Navy.
His 1932 cab-over-engine truck for White Motor Co. was a huge boon to laborers during the Depression, who were paid by the freight they could carry. The extra cargo space would allow the truckers to pay off their vehicle in a year. He also influenced many generations of artists and industrial designers who passed through the industrial-design department he founded in 1931 at what became the Cleveland Institute of Art. His students included Joe Oros, chief designer of the Ford Mustang.
Mr. Schreckengost - whose name means "frightening guest" in German - was born 06/03/1906, in Sebring, OH. He learned clay sculpting from his father, a commercial potter, and said his parents expected their children to make their toys. One creation of Mr. Schreckengost's was a plywood plane that had a 10-foot wingspan and was built from piano crates. He used a wound-up inner tube to power the propeller and showed perhaps greater ingenuity by having a friend test-fly it - from an elementary-school fire escape three stories off the ground. The plane did not work, but the friend survived.
As a young man, Mr. Schreckengost was interested in cartooning, but he moved to ceramics while studying at the Cleveland School of Art. After his graduation in 1929, he went to Austria to continue his artistic studies. He became a proficient jazz saxophonist in Vienna.
Upon his return, he created for Cowan Pottery of Rocky River, OH. Possibly his most famous work: an art deco punchbowl featuring images of New York nightlife. Unknown to him at the time, it was commissioned by future first lady Eleanor Roosevelt as a gift for her husband. The "Jazz Bowl" sold at Sotheby's auction house for $254,400 in 2004.
In the early 1930s, he was hired by American Limoges to design what widely is believed to be the first modern mass-produced dinnerware. Its patterns had a Manhattan theme and became ubiquitous in homes of that era.
Mr. Schreckengost went on to design more than 100 bicycles for Sears, including the Spaceliner, Western Flyer and Campus Compact. He also was chief bicycle designer for Murray-Ohio, for whom he also designed the Pursuit Plane and other pedal cars.
He never had children but was known in his Cleveland Heights neighborhood for taking a keen interest in the playing habits of young people. At one point, he designed a little red wagon with a handle that bent to allow steering control by the person in the wagon.
In addition to the National Medal of Arts, which he received in 2006, Mr. Schreckengost earned the highest honor of the American Institute of Architects.
He continued teaching into his 90s and enjoyed painting Mexican fish.
Easel Kill Ya! designs a 20-pointer on the commercial artist.
Former
dictator Suharto, an army general who crushed Indonesia's communist movement
and pushed aside the country's founding father to usher in 32 years of tough
rule that saw up to a million political opponents killed, died Sunday 01/27/08.
He was 86. Dozens of doctors had been rushed to the Pertamina Hospital in the
capital, Jakarta, after Suharto's blood pressure fell suddenly Saturday night.
Suharto had slipped out of consciousness for the first time in more than three
weeks of treatment, doctors said. Suharto had been in intensive care with lung,
heart and kidney failure since he was admitted to the hospital on 01/04/08.
Over the past week his physicians had spoken of a recovery, but by Sunday that
had changed dramatically. He had been in and out of the hospital several times
since being toppled by a pro-democracy uprising during the 1997-1998 Asian
financial crisis for heart problems and internal bleeding.
Suharto, who led a regime widely regarded as one of the 20th century's most brutal and corrupt, has lived a reclusive life in a comfortable villa in downtown Jakarta for the past decade. Historians say up to 800,000 alleged communist sympathizers were killed during Suharto's rise to power from 1965 to 1968. His troops killed another 300,000 in military operations against independence movements in Papua, Aceh and East Timor. Suharto's poor health had kept him from facing trial, and no one has been punished for the killings.
Corruption watchdog Transparency International has said Suharto and his family amassed billions of dollars in stolen state funds, allegations the family is fighting in court.
Suharto's successors as head of state - BJ Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono - vowed to end corruption that took root under Suharto, yet it remains endemic at all levels of Indonesian society. With the court system paralyzed by corruption, the country has not confronted its bloody past. Rather than put on trial those accused of mass murder and multibillion-dollar theft, some members of the political elite consistently called for charges against Suharto to be dropped on humanitarian grounds.
Some noted Suharto also oversaw decades of economic expansion that made Indonesia the envy of the developing world. Today, nearly a quarter of
Indonesians live in poverty, and many long for the Suharto era's stability, when fuel and rice were affordable. But critics say Suharto squandered Indonesia's vast natural resources of oil, timber and gold, siphoning the nation's wealth to benefit his cronies and family like a mafia don.
Those who profited from Suharto's rule made sure he was never portrayed in a harsh light at home, so even though he was an ''iron-fisted, brutal, cold-blooded dictator,'' he was able to stay in his native country.
Like many Indonesians, Suharto used only one name. He was born Haji Mohammad Suharto on 06/08/21, to a family of rice farmers in the village of Godean, in the dominant Indonesian province of Central Java.
When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch in 1949, Suharto quickly rose through the ranks of the military to become a staff officer. His career nearly foundered in the late 1950s, when the army's then commander, Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution, accused him of corruption in awarding army contracts.
Absolute power came in September 1965 when the army's six top generals were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and their bodies dumped in an abandoned well in an apparent coup attempt. Suharto, next in line for command, quickly asserted authority over the armed forces and promoted himself to four-star general. Suharto then oversaw a nationwide purge of suspected communists and trade unionists, a campaign that stood as the region's bloodiest event since World War II until the Khmer Rouge established its gruesome regime in Cambodia a decade later. Experts put the number of deaths during the purge at between 500,000 and 1 million.
Over the next year, Suharto eased out of office Indonesia's first post-independence president, Sukarno, who died under house arrest in 1970. The
legislature rubber-stamped Suharto's presidency and he was re-elected unopposed six times. During the Cold War, Suharto was considered a reliable friend of Washington, which didn't oppose his violent occupation of Papua in 1969 and the bloody 1974 invasion of East Timor. The latter, a former Portuguese colony, became Asia's youngest country with a U.N.-sponsored plebiscite in 1999.
Even Suharto's critics agree his hardline policies kept a lid on Indonesia's extremists. He locked up hundreds of suspected Islamic militants without trial, some of whom later carried out deadly suicide bombings with the al-Qaida-linked terror network Jemaah Islamiyah after the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Meanwhile, the ruling clique that formed around Suharto - nicknamed the ''Berkeley mafia'' after their American university, the University of California, Berkeley - transformed Indonesia's economy and attracted billions of dollars in foreign investment.
By the late 1980s, Suharto was describing himself as Indonesia's ''father of development,'' taking credit for slowly reducing the number of abjectly poor and modernizing parts of the nation. But the government also became notorious for unfettered nepotism, and Indonesia was regularly ranked as one of the world's most corrupt nations as Suharto's inner circle amassed fabulous wealth. The World Bank estimates 20 to 30 percent of Indonesia's development budget was embezzled during his rule.
Die2K, Don't Fear the Reaper, Live and Let Die, Memoriam Montage, Ol' Dying Bastards and Old Soldiers Never Die siphon off 10 points each for the dictator. No World for Old Men and Reporting For Plastination take 3 points each for having Suharto on their Taxi Squads.
Mormon Church president Gordon B Hinckley has died of natural
causes on Sunday 01/27/08 in Salt Lake City, UT at 97. He has been replaced as
president by Thomas Monson, 81, the senior member of the church's quorum of the
Twelve Apostles.
Mr Hinckley, revered as a "prophet, seer and revelator" by almost 13 million Latter-Day Saints worldwide, had served in the top job since 1995.
The church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claims a worldwide membership of 13 million, fewer than half of which are in the US; 36% of members live in Latin America and 17% outside the western hemisphere.
Mr Hinckley was born on 06/23/10, in Salt Lake City, to Bryant Strigham and Ada Bitner Hinckley.
He began his church service as a young man in Britain, and held a number of important posts.
As a member of the First Presidency, the highest governing body of the church, he had a major role in administering both the ecclesiastical and temporal affairs of the church, whose members are spread over 160 nations and territories.
He was the first church president to travel to Spain, where in 1996 he broke ground for a temple in Madrid, and to Africa, where he met thousands of Mormons in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.
During his tenure, the church grew by more than three million members, printed the 100 millionth Book of Mormon, and underwent a huge temple-building effort, which saw him travel extensively worldwide.
BLOODY MARY, Bury Me Shallow, Excuse Me For Coffin, Flatliners, Memoriam Montage, No World for Old Men and The Absent And The Dead Have No Friends..Nor Do We fulfill their prophecy of 8 points each for the Mormon leader. Brian's Flat Cat and Check the Cut List Redux receive the gift of 3 points for the Taxi Squad hits.
The head of the powerful Greek Orthodox Church, Archbishop
Christodoulos has died after a battle with liver cancer. Church officials say
the archbishop died early Monday 01/28/08 in Athens, months after a failed
attempt to receive a liver transplant in the United States. He was 69 years
old.
The Greek government announced three days of mourning while his body lies in state. Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis praised the archbishop for bringing the church closer to the public.
Christodoulos was elected archbishop in 1998 and was highly admired in Greece despite upsetting both the liberal and ultra-orthodox wings of the church.
He welcomed the late Pope John Paul to Athens in 2001 - the first Roman Catholic leader to visit the Greek capital in more than 1,000 years - infuriating hardliners. He later made a return visit to the Vatican.
He also upset liberals with his condemnation of homosexuality and his unsuccessful fight to keep religious affiliation on state-issued identity cards.
Some Greeks called for his resignation during sex and corruption scandals in the church, but he remained one of the country's most popular figures.
Orthodox church leaders have 20 days to elect a new archbishop.
The vast majority of Greeks identify themselves as Greek Orthodox, making the church a major force in the country.
21 teams heard the news in December about the archbishop’s illness and add 5 points to each of their coffers.
Margaret Truman, the only child of former President Harry S
Truman and a concert singer, actress, radio and TV personality, and mystery
writer, died Tuesday 01/29/08. She was 83. Truman, known as Margaret Truman
Daniel in private life, died at a Chicago assisted living center after a brief
illness. She had been at the center for the past several weeks and was on a
respirator.
Her father's succession to the presidency in 1945 thrust her into the national spotlight while a college junior.
Her singing career attracted the barbs of music critics - even the embarrassment of having her father threaten one reviewer. But she found a fulfilling professional and personal life in New York City, where she met her husband, journalist Clifton Daniel, who later became managing editor of The New York Times. They married in 1956.
She published her first book, an autobiography titled "Souvenir", in 1956. She said it was "hard work" and told reporters: "One writing job is enough."
But then she did a book on White House pets in 1969, and later more, one a biography of her father. The idea of doing a mystery called "Murder in the White House" came "out of nowhere," she said.
That 1980 title was followed by mysteries set in the Supreme Court, the Smithsonian, Embassy Row, the FBI, Georgetown, the CIA, Kennedy Center, the National Cathedral and the Pentagon. The last book, "Murder on K Street," was released last year. Donald Bain, a well-known ghost writer, was rumored to have written Truman's mysteries but has denied it.
Later in life, she was a grandmother and sang only in her church choir.
Mary Margaret Truman was born 02/17/24, in Independence, MO. She was the only child of Bess and Harry Truman, who was a county judge at the time. For a few years after her father was elected to the Senate in 1934, she split her school year between Independence and a private girls' school in Washington, D.C. She later attended George Washington University. She also had taken voice lessons, at the urging of a church choir leader. After graduation, she used the political limelight to launch her singing career.
She made her professional singing debut with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1947 and gave her first Carnegie Hall concert two years later. Critics generally praised her poise but were less impressed with her vocal talent. When Washington Post critic Paul Hume wrote after a 1950 concert that she "is extremely attractive on the stage ... (but) cannot sing very well. She is flat a good deal of the time," her father fired off a note on White House stationery scolding Hume for a "lousy review. I have never met you, but if I do you'll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a supporter below," the president wrote. The note made Page One news - but was not the sort of publicity an aspiring artist seeks. Years later she was able to laugh about it: "I thought it was funny. Sold tickets."
She soon turned more to radio and television, where she made regular guest appearances with Jimmy Durante and Milton Berle. On radio, she was co-host, with Mike Wallace, of a daily talk show on the NBC network and had her own nationally syndicated interview program for eight years. She also worked with Fred Allen and Tallulah Bankhead. Her stage career began in 1954, about the time she quit the concert stage.
Throughout her 20s, reporters were constantly asking about marriage prospects, but she said she was pursuing her career for the time being.
When she met Clifton Daniel at a dinner party in 1955, he was working in New York after a decade as a foreign correspondent. It was not until a month before their wedding in April 1956 that their romance became public. She and Daniel had four sons; he died in February 2000. Son William died in September 2000 when he was hit by a taxi; he was 41.
She was honorary co-chair of the Harry S Truman Library Institute, the nonprofit partner of her father's presidential library, and a governing board member of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Health issues had prevented her from visiting the library in recent years, but she remained actively interested in its operations, said Michael Devine, director of the library.
Schadenfreude gets 20 points of joy on the demise of the first daughter/singer/broadcaster/debutante/author. Who said she had no talent?
Earl L Butz, the outspoken US agriculture secretary forced from
office in 1976 for making a racist joke, died Saturday morning 02/02/08. He was
98. Butz was found dead in his bed at his son Bill's Washington, DC home. Butz
had traveled to his son's home last week for a visit and had been in poor
health recently. His death was announced during the Purdue Agriculture Alumni
Association's annual fish fry, an event at the West Lafayette campus Butz
rarely missed.
The free-market advocate, a longtime dean of agriculture at Purdue University, had a relaxed and earthy style that won him acclaim as an after-dinner speaker but caused problems in his public life.
Controversy began swirling around Butz after President Nixon appointed him secretary of agriculture in 1971. The farm economist figured in public disputes ranging from foreign grain sales to high meat prices. He was forced to resign his Cabinet post in October 1976 after telling an obscene joke that was derogatory to blacks. The slur was overheard by John Dean, the former counsel to Nixon who was jailed in the Watergate scandal, and Dean's report on it was published in Rolling Stone magazine. Two years earlier, Butz apologized to the Vatican after criticizing the Roman Catholic Church's stand on birth control by using a mock Italian accent while referring to the pope.
Butz maintained during his career that farmers should rely on a free market driven by exports and not federal subsidies. As agriculture secretary, he drew the ire of unions and consumer groups when he worked out long-term agreements on the sale of grain to Eastern European nations and Japan. The sales led to a jump in grain prices at home and drew the applause of the farmers who benefited.
When world food prices soared in the 1970s, Butz gained the acrimony of environmentalists by urging the nation's farmers to "plant from fencerow to fencerow." That policy resulted in vegetation along fencerows being plowed and planted and wetlands tilled and drained. Butz also proclaimed that farming "is now a big business" and that the family farm "must adapt or die" by expanding into large operations reliant on industrial pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.
In the years that followed his resignation, Butz became one of the most sought-after GOP speakers in the nation, in part because of his salty, humorous delivery. One Butz observation about environmentalists who complained about chemical use had centered on apples. He remarked that most living Americans had never bitten into a wormy apple and, after seeing the wormhole, wonder whether they had eaten the worm or whether it was still in the apple.
"Let's be honest about it," Butz said. "God put the worm in the apple; man took it out ... Man used poison to get it out - deadly poison. But the good part is that you can't buy a bad apple in your town today."
As a private citizen, Butz pleaded guilty in 1981 to federal charges of failing to report $148,000 of taxable income for 1978. He was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000. Butz served only 25 days in jail, however, as the judge commuted all but 30 days to probation and Butz got five days off for good behavior.
He was born 07/03/09, and raised on a 160-acre livestock farm in northeastern Indiana's Noble County. His first eight years of education were in a one-room school. His long affiliation with Purdue University started in 1927, when he began studies on a 4-H scholarship. He earned the school's first doctorate in agricultural economics 10 years later. He then joined Purdue's agricultural economics faculty, and rose through the ranks over the next 17 years to head the department.
Butz married Mary Emma Powell in 1937, and they had two sons, Bill and Thomas. She died in 1995.
Butz was assistant secretary of agriculture from 1954 to 1957, during the Eisenhower administration. He then returned to Purdue and was dean of the School of Agriculture for the next 10 years. He unsuccessfully campaigned for the Republican nomination for Indiana governor in 1968, his only try for elective office. After leaving the Cabinet, he was named dean emeritus of Purdue's School of Agriculture.
Butz made his home near Purdue's West Lafayette campus, located in agriculturally rich central Indiana. He termed himself a "farmboy at heart" and attributed his longevity to rising early and keeping busy.
In his later years, Butz remained active in Purdue activities and spoke widely. He hosted his own radio program and worked for several farm-related businesses as a board member or consultant. In 1999, Butz donated $1 million to Purdue's Department of Agricultural Economics.
Autopsy Payouts, BairBones, Dead Wringers, Death March, Excuse Me For Coffin, Indiana Jones and the Coffin Of DOOM!!, No World for Old Men, Playin for Bonz and The Absent And The Dead Have No Friends..Nor Do We all harvest 5 points each on the AgSecOTUS.
Barry Morse, who played a detective pursuing the wrongly accused
Dr. Richard Kimble in 1960s TV series ''The Fugitive'', has died. He was 89.
Hayward Morse said his father died Saturday 02/02/08 at University College
Hospital in London after a brief illness.
Born in London in 1918, Morse trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and appeared in British repertory and West End theaters before emigrating in 1951 to Canada, where he became a regular on radio and television. The actor's Web site estimated he played more than 3,000 roles on radio, TV, stage and screen over a seven-decade career.
In 1963, he was hired by producer Quinn Martin to play Lt. Philip Gerard on ''The Fugitive.'' The series ran for 120 episodes over four seasons, teasing audiences with the cat-and-mouse pursuit of Kimble, wrongly accused of murdering his wife, by the implacable Gerard. ''He thought it was a good show - well filmed, well directed and well acted,'' Hayward Morse said. ''He had nothing disparaging to say about 'The Fugitive.'''
Morse also played Professor Victor Bergman in 1970s science fiction series ''Space 1999.'' In 1966, he was named artistic director of the Shaw theater festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, rescuing it from financial crisis.
Morse was a lifelong devotee of playwright George Bernard Shaw, and his son said reviving the festival, which produces the works of Shaw and his contemporaries, was his proudest achievement.
GHOSTBUSTIN' BABE, Rigger Morty's Pasta Way Café and Yersinia Pestis run away with 16 points each on the British actor.
Joshua Lederberg, who died on 02/02/08 aged 82, shared the
1958 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Edward Tatum and George
Beadle) for establishing that bacteria engage in sex, a discovery that laid the
foundations for modern genetics and biotechnology.
When Lederberg began his researches after the Second World War, bacteria were thought to reproduce by cell division, producing clones identical to the parent organisms. But the discovery by Oswald Avery that deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, was the material that encoded the genetic information for life, inspired him to test that hypothesis.
Working at Yale with Edward Tatum, Lederberg began studying E.coli and, within a year, had established that the bacterium underwent a sexual stage in which it could mate and exchange genetic material - a process known as recombination or conjugation. In 1952, working with Norton Zinder on the salmonella bacterium, Lederberg discovered that bacteria have a second method for exchange of genes, called transduction. This takes place when viruses that infect bacteria transfer genetic material from one bacterium to another.
These discoveries enabled scientists to explain how bacteria evolve and acquire new traits, including resistance to antibiotic drugs, and raised the possibility that, using viruses, it would be possible to manipulate an organism's genetic material. Transduction now forms the basis of much modern genetic engineering.
Joshua Lederberg was born on 05/23/25 in Monclair, NJ the son of Jewish immigrants from Palestine. His father was an Orthodox rabbi descended from a long line of rabbinical scholars. Despite his lineage, as a child Joshua decided that he wanted to be "like Einstein", and by the age of 11 he was reading university science textbooks at the back of the class.
He was educated at the Stuyvesant High School, New York, which he left at 15 in order to study Zoology at Columbia University. He went on to Columbia medical school, interrupting his studies in 1943 to enroll in a US Navy fast-track medical training program, and became involved in examining servicemen returning from war in the Pacific for the parasites that cause malaria.
He left Columbia early to work with Tatum on research into bacteria and in 1948 he was offered a position in the department of genetics at the University of Wisconsin. In 1958 he transferred to Stamford as head of a new genetics department at the university and also as Professor of Biology and Computer Science, working on artificial intelligence as well as in biology and medicine. He remained there for 20 years before serving as president of Rockefeller University from 1978 to 1990.
Lederberg's research interests included space biology, and he coined the term "exobiology" for the study of extraterrestrial life. His warnings of the possibility of microbial contamination from space exploration led to NASA imposing strict quarantine rules on astronauts returning to Earth - much to their irritation.
Lederberg served, at various times, on government advisory commissions on health policy, national security and arms control. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006. He was a foreign member of the Royal Society.
Laureate's Lament II splices in 20 points for the Nobel Laureate.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who founded the technique
of Transcendental Meditation and was best known as a spiritual advisor to the
Beatles during a brief period in the 1960s, died at his home in the Netherlands
on Tuesday 02/05/08. He was 91 and a spokesman said he passed away due to
''natural causes, his age.''
From the 1950s on, the meditation specialist was something of a rock star in his own field, touring the world to teach his method, which involves sitting still and silent for 20 minutes twice every day. But it was his union with the Beatles that turned the Maharishi into a pop cultural icon. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr's much-publicized (and much-debated) trip to India to study with the Maharishi remains perhaps the most familiar touchstone in understanding the Eastern-tinged songs of the band's late-middle period - though the relationship between the Beatles and the guru did not last very long. The author of several books and the founder of a university in Iowa, the Maharishi also is said to have instructed Mike Love, Donovan, Mia Farrow, Andy Kaufman, Doug Henning, the Rolling Stones, and Clint Eastwood. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1975 under the headline, ''Meditation: The Answer to all Your Problems?''
Crypt Kickers, God's Country Death Duo, The Ex Files and TO DIE FOR each find solace in their thoughts for choosing the Maharishi, gaining 14 points and spritual wealth. Oooooommmmm….
Phyllis A. Whitney, a prolific best-selling author of romantic
mysteries, young-adult novels and children’s mysteries for more than a
half-century, died on Friday 02/08/08 in Faber, VA. She was 104. Her death was
confirmed by her daughter, Georgia Pearson, who said the cause was pneumonia.
Ms. Whitney, who once said she stayed young by writing, continued to publish books until she was 94. Her last was “Amethyst Dreams” (1997), about a young woman who stands to inherit a fortune but who has disappeared from a family seaside villa. Only her best friend can help find her. Her first book, in 1941, was “A Place for Ann,” a young-adult novel about girls who create a personal service organization doing jobs like dog walking.
In all, Ms. Whitney produced 39 adult suspense novels, some with a Gothic twist (with titles like “Woman Without a Past” and “The Glass Flame”); 14 novels for young adults (“A Window for Julie”, “Nobody Likes Trina”); 20 children’s mysteries (“Mystery of the Scowling Boy”, “Secret of the Missing Footprint”); several books about writing; and many short stories for magazines. Her novels, considered fast-paced with lots of cliffhangers, have been translated into 30 languages and sold in the millions. Though many have gone out of print, some have continued to be re-released in paperback.
In 1988 Ms. Whitney received the prestigious Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement from the Mystery Writers of America. “I always told myself that when I get old I’ll reread all my books, but I never seem to get old,” Ms. Whitney said in an interview with The Times when she was 79. She said that one of her writing tricks was to set her books in places she had visited. She called her vacations book-hunting expeditions. Her earliest novels took place in Chicago, but as her appeal grew the settings became more glamorous and romantic: Palm Springs, CA, Sedona, AZ, and Maui, HI, as well as Turkey, Norway, Greece and Japan. “Amethyst Dreams” was set on Topsail Island in North Carolina.
Ms. Whitney’s travels began early. She was born Phyllis Ayame Whitney on 09/09/1903, to Charles J. Whitney and the former Mary Lillian Mandeville in Yokohama, Japan. (Ayame means “iris” in Japanese.) Her father was in the shipping and hotel business. Her parents had met in the United States and became sweethearts but initially broke up. Afterward, Ms. Whitney’s mother married another man, Gus Heege, an actor, and they had a son, Philip. After Mr. Heege died, Ms. Whitney’s parents reunited in Japan and married there. Phyllis was their only child. Her parents’ story was the inspiration for one of Ms. Whitney’s plots, about a love affair gone awry.
The family moved to the Philippines when Ms. Whitney was 6 and later lived for a time in China. When Ms. Whitney was 15, after her father died, she and her mother left for Berkeley, CA. They later moved to San Antonio, where her mother died of cancer.
At 17, Ms. Whitney moved to Chicago to live with an aunt. She graduated from McKinley High School there in 1924, at 20. (She had gone to missionary schools overseas, causing her to lag behind academically.) The next year she married George A. Garner. They had one child, Georgia, in 1934. Besides their daughter, also of Faber, Ms. Whitney (who always kept her maiden name) is survived by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In the first years of her marriage, Ms. Whitney worked in bookstores and at the Chicago Public Library while writing on the side. It took her four years to publish her first short story, which appeared in The Chicago Daily News. Besides publishing “A Place for Ann” in the 1940s, she became a book reviewer for The Chicago Sun and then The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Her first book in the adult suspense genre was “Red Is for Murder,” published in 1943 by Ziff-Davis with a picture of a blood splatter on the cover. It tells the story of Linell Wynn, who writes sign copy for a department store and whose life has been uneventful “until the day that murder walks the floors at dusk,” according to the book jacket.
Ms. Whitney and her husband divorced in 1945, partly because he was not supportive of her writing. Five years later she married Lovell F. Jahnke. The couple moved to Staten Island, where they lived for decades and traveled widely together as she gathered fodder for her tales, in one instance taking a hot-air balloon trip. Mr. Jahnke died in 1973, when they lived in Hope, NJ.
Ms. Whitney ascribed her success as a writer to persistence and an abiding faith in her abilities. “Never mind the rejections, the discouragement, the voices of ridicule (there can be those too),” she wrote in “Guide to Fiction Writing.” “Work and wait and learn, and that train will come by. If you give up, you’ll never have a chance to climb aboard.”
Better Off Dead, Check the Cut List Redux, Don't Fear the Reaper, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Formaldehyde Enema, God's Country Death Duo, Mangled Baby Ducks, Morbidly Obsessed, No World for Old Men, Not Playing Dead, Reporting For Plastination, Sweeney Todd's Pie Filling, Team Dirt, The Absent And The Dead Have No Friends..Nor Do We and The Yips write up 5 points each for the aged author. Excuse Me For Coffin authors 3 points for the Taxi Squad hit.
Devidas Murlidhar Amte, an Indian social activist who fought
against caste and religious prejudice and founded clinics for lepers and
handicapped children, died Saturday 02/09/08. He was 93. Amte was diagnosed
with leukemia last year and died in his sleep at a clinic he founded for the
disabled in Chandrapur in the western state of Maharashtra.
Amte was widely known as "Baba", a term of respect in many Indian dialects. His largest leper center covered 182 hectares (450 acres), accommodated thousands of people and included a library, a bank, a theater and a technical college. Amte believed in training lepers and the disabled to work, and a motto at his centers was "Charity destroys, work builds."
Amte was born into a wealthy upper-caste family and educated at a Christian college. He went on to become an attorney, and rebelled against caste barriers. He was revered across India for his work on behalf of people from the lowest rungs of the country's complex caste system, those known as "untouchables."
Amte won the Padma Vibhushan - India's second highest civilian honor - and international awards, including the Magsaysay Award, the Templeton Prize and the United Nations Human Rights Prize.
Amte was also famous for organizing environmental awareness marches in the 1980s against large dam projects that displaced millions of farmers and tribes people.
No World for Old Men gets assistance building their point total with a solo hit worth 20 points on the social activist.
Roy Scheider, the actor best known for his role as a police
chief in the blockbuster movie "Jaws," has died. He was 75. Scheider
died Sunday 02/10/08 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
hospital in Little Rock. The hospital did not release a cause of death.
However, hospital spokeswoman Leslie Taylor said Scheider had been treated for
multiple myeloma at the hospital's Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy
for the past two years.
Scheider received two Oscar nominations, for best-supporting actor in 1971's "The French Connection" in which he played the police partner of Oscar winner Gene Hackman, and for best-actor for 1979's "All That Jazz," the autobiographical Bob Fosse film. However, he was best known for his role in Steven Spielberg's 1975 film, "Jaws", the enduring classic about a killer shark terrorizing beachgoers and well as millions of moviegoers.
Widely hailed as the film that launched the era of the Hollywood blockbuster, it was also the first movie to earn $100 million at the box office. Scheider starred with Richard Dreyfuss, who played an oceanographer. In 2005, one of Scheider's most famous lines in the movie - "You're gonna need a bigger boat" - was voted No. 35 on the American Film Institute's list of best quotes from U.S. movies.
That year, some 30 years after "Jaws" premiered, hundreds of movie buffs flocked to Martha's Vineyard, off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, to celebrate the great white shark. The island's JawsFest '05 also brought back some of the cast and crew, including screenwriter Carl Gottlieb and Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel that inspired Spielberg's classic. Spielberg, Scheider and Dreyfuss were absent.
Scheider was also politically active. He participated in rallies protesting U.S. military action in Iraq, including a massive New York demonstration in March 2003 that police said drew 125,000 chanting activists.
Brian's Flat Cat, Dead Can Dance, Made It Ma! Top Of the World!, Otis' Cirrhosis from Morrison Sisters' Still and host team The Big Casino all scare up 12 points each on the versatile actor.
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Oscar Brodney died six days shy
of his 101st birthday on Tuesday 02/12/08.
Entering the film industry in 1935, Brodney worked on various projects, including Abbott and Costello's "Mexican Hayride" and the adapted screenplay for "Harvey". The playwright Lawrence Riley and two other screenwriters adapted one of Brodney's stories for the screen under the title "You're a Lucky Fellow, Mr. Smith" in 1943.
Mr. Brodney was nominated for an Oscar and a WGA for "The Glenn Miller Story". He was nominated for another WGA for "The Gal Who Took the West". Mr. Brodney wrote over 50 films and TV shows during his career. He also produced four films including "All Hands on Deck." Mr. Brodney's many writing credits include "Harvey", three of the "Francis the Talking Mule" films, several episodes of the TV series "It Takes a Thief" and two "Tammy" movies. His final credit was co-writer of the Sherman Hemsley horror comedy "Ghost Fever" in 1987.
He also wrote "The Black Shield of Falworth". The film was made famous for allegedly containing Tony Curtis' famous line "Yonder lies da castle of my fodda." In fact, the line of dialogue is urban legend. It wasn't in the movie.
Chitragupta's Roll Call and The Famous Final Scene II finally get a curtain call on the Hollywood writer, earning 18 points each.
Herbert "Smoky" Dawson, the country music legend known
as "Australia's first cowboy", died after a short illness at age 94.
A spokeswoman for the Australian Country Music Foundation said Dawson had been
sick for about six days before dying Wednesday 02/13/08 in Sydney, the
Melbourne Herald Sun reported.
Dawson was born Herbert Henry in Warrnambool, Victoria, in 1913. A generation of young Australians listened to Dawson's adventures on his
horse, Flash, and he was dubbed "Australia's first cowboy".
Dawson's first recording was "I Am A Happy Go Lucky Cowhand" in 1942 and he had his own national radio show from 1952-1962. In 1978, Dawson was awarded an MBE and in 1999 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia. He was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2005. A DVD featuring new performances was completed this month.
Dawson also taught horse riding on his ranch, and was known for his yodeling, whip cracking, knife throwing and acting.
Dawson is survived by his wife Dot, who turns 102 this year.
Stiff As A Board And Bright Green wrangle 20 points for the solo hit on the Aussie country star.
Popular entertainer Lydia Shum died Tuesday morning 02/19/08
after a long battle with cancer. She was 62. Known for her chubby appearance
and joviality, she earned the nickname "Fei-fei" (Fatty) and
"Happy Fruit" early in a career that spanned nearly half a century.
Born in Shanghai in 1945, Shum moved to Hong Kong with her family soon after, and made her debut in 1960 as a film child star for the Shaw Brothers studio. She later ventured into singing, television drama and hosting.
One of the most celebrated and beloved comediennes and actresses in the Chinese-speaking world, she appeared in 70 films in Cantonese and Mandarin, and gained wide popularity with her comedic and hosting skills for the Hong Kong television variety show "Enjoy Yourself Tonight."
In 2002, she starred in the English-language sitcom "Living with Lydia" in Singapore, which was broadcast there and also in the U.S., on AZN Television.
Shum married Hong Kong television actor-singer Adam Cheng after a decade-long courtship in 1985. In 1987, she gave birth to a daughter, Joyce Cheng. Her marriage dissolved the following year.
A testament to Shum's iconic status in the territory, Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang expressed his sadness at Shum's passing in a morning briefing. He noted that her laughter accompanied many Hong Kong people as they grew up and called Shum's fortitude in the face of illness "a demonstration of the Hong Kong spirit."
Shum has long suffered from diabetes and hypertension and was diagnosed with a liver tumor in September 2006.
Bud Dwyer's Brains, Ethnic Cleansing, La Morta la Diventa and Van Owens Body get fat on the lady known as “Fei-Fei”, scoring 18 points (14 on the 4-way hit, 4 for Under 65).
Actress Emily Perry, who played Dame Edna Everage's sidekick
Madge Allsop, has died at the age of 100. The performer, who played the
megastar's taciturn and long-suffering bridesmaid for many years, was 80 when
she first took on the role in 1987.
Perry appeared on Dame Edna's ITV star-studded shows and travelled the world as part of comic Barry Humphries' stage spectaculars.
The actress appeared in the Dame Edna Experience, a comedy chat show which attracted a whole host of UK and Hollywood names, from 1987 to 1989. As New Zealander Madge Allsop she never uttered a word, and her main function was to affix badges to star guests - and bear the brunt of Dame Edna's savage comments.
Allsop appeared in two other Dame Edna shows in the early 1990s, eventually retiring in 2004 and moving to Brinsworth House, the entertainment industry's retirement home in Twickenham, south-west London.
The actress also made a one-off appearance in long-running BBC sitcom Last of the Summer Wine in 1995.
Devon-born Perry - who was known as Pat - ran a children's dancing school for 25 years before finding fame late in life.
Speaking to the BBC News website last year ahead of her 100th birthday, Perry said: "You know, my memory's gone. I've been all around the world with Barry, and I can't remember a thing."
Autopsy Payouts and The Famous Final Scene do the duet worth 18 points on the British actress.
Former Slovenian president Janez Drnovsek, 57, who helped
lead his country to independence from Yugoslavia and later enthralled many of
his countrymen by adopting a New Age lifestyle, died 02/23/08 at his home in
the Slovenian village of Zaplana. The cause of death was not reported, but he
had had cancer in recent years.
Mild-mannered but resolute, Mr. Drnovsek became a political icon in his nation of 2 million for working to keep violence at a minimum when Slovenia gained independence in 1991, a sharp contrast to what happened in neighboring countries as Yugoslavia fell apart. He later led Slovenia to membership in the European Union and NATO.
In recent years, as he dealt with cancer, he made a radical transformation to a holistic lifestyle and wrote several New Age-influenced books.
When Mr. Drnovsek's region declared its independence, Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic sent tanks to the Slovenian border, triggering a brief war. But Mr. Drnovsek pushed for negotiations and eventually orchestrated a deal for the peaceful withdrawal of the Yugoslav army.
Mr. Drnovsek was Slovenia's prime minister for a decade before being elected president in 2002. He did not run for a second presidential term in elections late last year and was replaced by Danilo Turk in December.
Mr. Drnovsek had a cancerous kidney removed in 1999. In 2005, he acknowledged that doctors had diagnosed what he described as "formations" - apparently cancer - on his lungs and liver in 2001, a year before he was elected president. Nevertheless, he generally carried out his duties without disruptions. He said he realized in 2005 that doctors could not cure him. Instead, he insisted that he had cured himself simply by changing his diet, his lifestyle and his way of thinking.
After many years as a straight-laced and stodgy politician, Mr. Drnovsek turned into something of a New Age guru. He moved from Ljubljana, the capital, to remote Zaplana, where he lived with his dog, baked his own bread and ate only organic fruit and vegetables. He had no TV.
As president, he considered some of the daily political give-and-take a waste of time and focused instead on the fight for the poor and weak, even offering to mediate in Sudan's troubled Darfur region. Some criticized him for trying to take on global issues, and he also ruffled feathers by reversing himself on some key issues.
Once an important supporter of the European Union, he grew critical of it, complaining about the bloc's agricultural subsidies. In 2005, he angered Serbia, a valued trading partner, by openly supporting Kosovo's independence-seeking Albanians. He wrote about the perils of technology and urged humans to rely instead on each other. His book "Thoughts on Living and Becoming Conscious" became a bestseller last summer. He recently published a book called "Dialogues".
Born in the northeastern city of Celje, Mr. Drnovsek received a degree in economics at Ljubljana's Faculty of Economics and then worked as a banker. In his youth and early adulthood, he was a member of the Communist Party, the only political force in the former Yugoslavia. But he was never a Communist at heart, going off to ski whenever the party held a congress.
When the Communists were ousted in the first multiparty elections in Yugoslavia in 1990, paving the way for Slovenia's independence, he exclaimed, "This is a sign of a democracy drive that cannot be stopped!"
Already Dead, Bury Me Shallow, Life'll Kill Ya and Monty Python's Dying Circus preside over 18 points each (14 for the 4-way hit, 4 for the Under 65) on the Slovenian President.
Myron Cope, the screechy-voiced announcer whose colorful catch
phrases and twirling Terrible Towel became symbols of the Pittsburgh Steelers
during an unrivaled 35 seasons in the broadcast booth, has died. He was 79.
Cope died Wednesday morning 02/27/08 at a nursing home in Mount Lebanon, a
Pittsburgh suburb. Cope had been treated for respiratory problems and heart
failure in recent months.
Cope's tenure from 1970-2004 as the color analyst on the Steelers' radio network is the longest in NFL history for a broadcaster with a single team and led to his induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2005. Even after retiring, Cope - a sports talk show host for 23 years - continued to appear in numerous radio, TV and print ads, emblematic of a local popularity that sometimes surpassed that of the stars he covered.
Beyond Pittsburgh's three rivers, Cope is best known for pioneering the Terrible Towel, the yellow cloth twirled by fans as a good luck charm at Steelers games since the mid-70s. The towel is arguably the best-known fan symbol of any major pro sports team, has raised millions of dollars for charity and is displayed at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
An announcer by accident, Cope spent the first half of his professional career as one of the nation's most widely read freelance sports writers, writing for "Sports Illustrated" and the "Saturday Evening Post" on subjects that included Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell and Roberto Clemente. He was hired by the Steelers at age 40, several years after he began doing TV sports commentary on the whim of a station manager, mostly to help increase attention and attendance as the Steelers moved into Three Rivers Stadium.
Neither the Steelers nor Cope had any idea how much impact he would have on a five-time Super Bowl champion franchise that, within two years of his hiring, would begin a string of home sellouts that continues to this day. Cope became so popular that the Steelers didn't try to replace his unique perspective and top-of-the-lungs vocal histrionics when he retired, instead downsizing from a three-man announcing team to a two-man booth.
Capital Punishment, Skeleton In Their Closet and The Finish Line tackle the competition with 16-pointer on the legendary sportscaster.
William F Buckley Jr, the columnist, novelist, talk show host
and tireless intellectual who founded the modern conservative movement and was
its articulate voice for nearly six decades, died Wednesday 02/27/08. He was
82. Buckley, who had been ill with emphysema, died while at work in his study
in Stamford, CT. In a commentary on the National Review website, the magazine
he founded, Kathryn Jean Lopez said it was fitting that he died while working.
"If he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that
would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas."
An urbane and charming pundit with a lacerating wit and intellect, Buckley was, virtually alone, the public face of American political conservatism in the 1960s and '70s. His ardent friends and admirers came to include a California governor, Ronald Reagan, who sought Buckley's counsel frequently during his campaign and presidency, calling him "perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era."
Buckley also inspired generations of conservatives, who now fill think tanks and write for National Review - which he launched in 1955 - and the Weekly Standard and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
"It's not lonely the way it was 45 years ago," Buckley said in an interview with The Times a few years ago, "when there was really nothing, certainly no journal of opinion on conservative thought. There are tons of people here now."
Buckley was a fierce debater, who loved trading lyrical put-downs with his political opponents. But, unlike some of the conservative pundits who drive talk radio today, he had many personal friends and admirers among his public foes, including such luminaries as the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith and the late author Norman Mailer. Some of his political opponents, though, had trouble reconciling the two Buckleys: the irresistibly charming raconteur with the talk show host who drew exquisite rhetorical nooses around the necks of his opponents. "You can't stay mad at a guy who's witty, spontaneous and likes good liquor," Mailer once said.
Dead Betters plays it close to the vest, picking up a 20-point solo hit on the conservative talk show host.
Joseph M. Juran, a pioneer of quality management whose
"Quality Control Handbook" revolutionized how companies around the
world made and sold products, has died. He was 103. Juran died Thursday
02/28/08 after suffering an apparent stroke.
The "Quality Control Handbook" was first published in 1951, and at least five more editions followed. The book describes the mathematical basis for quality improvements. Juran believed that quality improvements were key to businesses' survival and profits - not only for manufacturers, but for enterprises as diverse as scientific organizations, hospitals, supermarkets, and Internet companies.
He worked as a quality control consultant, lecturer and author until he was in his 90s, his son Donald Juran said. "He always told me, 'Never be without a project,' and he never was," he said.
Juran attended the University of Minnesota and started his career in Chicago at Western Electric Co., the former manufacturing arm of AT&T, trying to resolve product defects, his son said. During World War II, Juran worked in Washington, eliminating bottlenecks that hindered timely equipment shipments to U.S. allies overseas, and worked to minimize defective exports.
After teaching industrial engineering briefly at New York University, he became a hired expert, helping companies come up with quality control standards, his family said. In 1979, he founded Juran Institute, an organization aimed at providing companies with research and advice on managing quality.
Century Mark gets a 20-point solo hit, opening the year with the quality control guru on their Active Squad. The Absent And The Dead Have No Friends..Nor Do We gets a 3-pointer with the author sitting on the Taxi Squad.
Cape Town's famous centenarian Philip Rabinowitz has died
at the age of 104. Rabinowitz was known for his feats on the athletics front
and held a number of records at the time of his death.
Family, friends and fellow athletes gathered at the Jewish cemetery in Pinelands to pay homage to the man who was also known as "Flying Phil". He passed away Friday 02/29/08 after suffering a mild stroke the previous Saturday - only a day after a photo session with the international media at his daughter's factory where he still worked as a bookkeeper.
In 2004 Rabinowitz sprinted into the Guinness Book of World Records, when he broke the 100m record for centenarian sprinting in a time of 30.86 seconds at the Greenpoint stadium.
"He really hit the news when he broke the 100m and 200m, and he loved it. He loved the adoration of everyone," said his daughter Joyce Kruger. She said her father was proud of himself and that they were also proud of him.
Flying Phil who also held the 200m world record was a regular participant in big walks on the Cape Peninsula.
Sir Wolfie's Gate Keepers dashes out of the gate with a 20-point solo hit on the World’s Fastest Centenarian. The Rules Committee voted 5-1 with 2 abstentions in favor of Flyin’ Phil.
Blind guitar wizard Jeff Healey of Toronto died Sunday 03/02/08
of cancer. He was 41. Healey lost his vision as a baby to a rare form of
retinal cancer called retinoblastoma and he battled the disease throughout this
life. His website said Sunday that he died with his wife, Cristie, at his
bedside in Toronto's St. Joseph's Hospital. Healey had a long fight with
cancer. In 2007, he underwent surgery to remove cancerous growths from his
lungs. He had earlier had two sarcomas removed from his legs.
Norman Jeffrey Healey was one of Canada's premier blues and jazz musicians who is perhaps best known for his 1988 album "See The Light", which included the hit single "Angel Eyes". He was also nominated for a Grammy for the song "Hideaway" and in 1990, was awarded a Juno in the Entertainer of the Year category. Other Healey hits have included "How Long Can a Man Be Strong" and a cover of The Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".
As a toddler, Healey picked up a guitar and, setting it on his knees, developed a distinct sound and playing style. By the time he was a teenager, Healey had formed a four-piece band called Blue Direction and was playing in clubs throughout the Toronto area. His best known work came when he formed the Jeff Healey Band several years later with bassist Joe Rockman and drummer Tom Stephen. His career took off when he appeared in the movie "Road House", which starred Patrick Swayze. The Jeff Healey Band was a sellout act across Canada and sold over a million albums in the U.S. market.
During the course of his musical career, he shared the stage with such music titans as Stevie Ray Vaughan, George Harrison and B.B. King. But Healey's passion was not always in rock music and later in his career branched into jazz, especially from the golden years of the genre in the 1920s and '30s. He released several jazz CDs and had a collection of some 25,000 78 rpm jazz records.
Until recently, he had a show on a Toronto jazz station CJRT-FM.
At the time of his death, Healey was about to unveil his first rock/blues CD in eight years. "Mess of Blues" is scheduled to be released in Europe in March and in North America on 04/22/08.
Drop Dead Gorgeous, Ethnic Cleansing, Flatliners,
Goatsucker, La Morta la Diventa, Morris the Cat's 9 (+21) Lives, Putnam's
Tomahawk Chop,
Skeleton In Their Closet, Team Dirt and Van Owens Body all pick up 17 points (5 for the 10-way hit, 12 for Under 45) each on the Grammy nominee.
Former Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, an Ohio Democrat who was a feisty
self-made millionaire before he began a long career fighting big business in
the Senate, died Wednesday night 03/12/08. He was 90. Metzenbaum died at his
home near Fort Lauderdale, FL. No cause was given.
During 18 years on Capitol Hill, until his retirement in 1995, Metzenbaum came to be known as "Senator No" and "Headline Howard" for his abilities to block legislation and get publicity for himself. He was a cantankerous firebrand who didn't need a microphone to hold a full auditorium spellbound while dropping rhetorical bombs on big oil companies, the insurance industry, savings and loans, and the National Rifle Association, to name just a few favorite targets. Unabashedly liberal, the former labor lawyer and union lobbyist considered himself a champion of workers and was a driving force behind the law requiring 60-day notice of plant closings.
When other liberals shied away from that label, Metzenbaum embraced it, winning re-election in 1988 from Ohio voters who chose Republicans for governor and president, and by wider margins than either George Voinovich or George H.W. Bush. That victory produced his third, final and most productive term in the Senate. When it was over, in 1995, he started a new career as consumer advocate, heading the Consumer Federation of America.
Born 06/04/17, Metzenbaum grew up a child of poverty and prejudice on Cleveland's east side. He was 10 years old when he got his first job, delivering groceries in exchange for tips. He worked his way through Ohio State University selling flowers, playing trombone in a National Youth Administration band, selling magazines, renting bicycles and peddling razor blades. He made extra money by charging classmates for weekend rides home. That stopped when his father had to sell Metzenbaum's 1926 Essex to make mortgage payments.
Metzenbaum made his first big money when he and a partner got the idea for a well-lighted, 24-hour-staffed parking lot at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. The enterprise expanded to Cincinnati and San Juan, Puerto Rico, and eventually became APCOA, the world's largest parking lot company.
His former partner, Ted Bonda, maintained that Metzenbaum would have ended up among the world's richest men if he'd stayed in business. Bonda and Metzenbaum started one of the country's first car-rental agencies, now Avis.
Metzenbaum once described himself as "born knowing how to make money." He bragged about his ability to take advantage of tax loopholes, but as senator said he sought to erase loopholes favoring the wealthy. Metzenbaum got into politics right out of law school, and spent eight years in the Ohio Legislature. At one point, he thought he was in line to become the state Senate's majority leader, but his reputation as an extreme liberal, or anti-Semitism, or both, changed five crucial votes. Describing the episode decades later, he said the five vote-changers were subsequently defeated, and "I had something to do with it."
A Cleveland bank once refused to put him on its board. So Metzenbaum and a partner became the largest shareholders. He also was proud of leading the fight to open two Cleveland country clubs to minorities. A political miscalculation led to his defeat by John Glenn in a ferocious 1974 Senate primary. Metzenbaum had been contrasting his business background with Glenn's military and astronaut credentials, saying his opponent had "never worked for a living." Glenn's reply came to be known as the "Gold Star Mothers" speech. He told Metzenbaum to go to a veterans' hospital and "look those men with mangled bodies in the eyes and tell them they didn't hold a job. You go with me to any Gold Star mother and you look her in the eye and tell her that her son did not hold a job."
Metzenbaum won Ohio's other Senate seat in 1976, but he and Glenn didn't speak for years. The two senators made peace when Glenn needed help with his presidential campaign in 1984. In 1988, Glenn returned the favor by piloting Metzenbaum throughout Ohio to announce the beginning of his re-election campaign and later recorded a commercial rebuttal to a GOP allegation that Metzenbaum was soft on child pornography.
In the Senate, Metzenbaum was a master of the rules and a constant presence in the often-empty chamber, where he posted an aide to scout for unexpected amendments or hastily scheduled floor action on single-interest bills. Former Sen. David Pryor, D-AK once compared Metzenbaum to an airport security guard: "You know he's going to X-ray your baggage, so you have to be clean."
His filibusters and stall tactics were so successful that the mere threat of Metzenbaum opposition was often enough to win concessions. Once, when a two-week filibuster was cut off and Metzenbaum was still determined to block action on lifting natural gas price controls, he and a partner sent the Senate into round-the-clock sessions by demanding roll call votes on 500 amendments. Another year, he held up 80 judicial appointments until his colleagues agreed to schedule consideration of a bill he considered vital. Metzenbaum claimed to have single-handedly saved billions of tax dollars by blocking special tax breaks and pork-barrel programs. In 1982, The Washington Post tallied the price tag of legislation he blocked that year and came up with a minimum of $10 billion.
In time, Metzenbaum evolved from minority-party commando to majority-party subcommittee chairman and became known as much for the legislation he moved as for the bills he blocked. He headed panels with jurisdiction over labor and antitrust, and took on such issues as pension protection, workplace safety, the right to strike, age discrimination, food labeling, baby formula pricing, retail price-fixing, insurance antitrust and cable television monopolies. He was the Senate's prime sponsor of the Brady Act, seeking a waiting period for handgun purchases.
Andes Rugby Player Mints and Friends of the Devil are appointed 18 points each on the veteran Ohio lawmaker.
Lazare Ponticelli, French Army veteran of the First World
War died on Wednesday 03/12/08, aged 110. With the death of Louis de Cazenave
in January, Lazare Ponticelli assumed the mantle of "le dernier
poilu". Now, less than two months later, Ponticelli too is dead, the last
of the French Army veterans of the Great War of 1914-18.
He was in fact born Lazarro Ponticelli in northern Italy in 1897 in a small mountain hamlet near Bettola in Piacenza province. He was one of seven children in a desperately poor family: his father was a jobbing carpenter and cobbler, his mother tried to scratch a living from the family vegetable plot and three times a year left home to go down to the Po valley to work on the seasonal rice harvest.
When Ponticelli was 2 his mother left for France in search of work that could make some meaningful contribution to domestic, most of the family eventually following her. He was left in the care of neighbors. When his father and brother were killed in an accident, he made his way by train to Paris, though speaking no French. Eventually he found work as a chimney sweep at Nogent-sur-Marne, which had a fair-sized Italian community.
When war came in August 1914 he lied about his age and joined the 1st Régiment de Marche of the French Foreign Legion, where he found himself a comrade in arms with one of his brothers. But in 1915, with the entry of Italy into the war on the Allied side he was told he must join the Italian Army and was discharged. Refusing at first to be parted from his French uniform, he was firmly escorted by two gendarmes to Turin, where he joined a regiment of Alpinieri for service on the Austrian front. There he was serving as a machinegunner when he was seriously wounded by a shell burst during one of the many futile Italian assaults on welldefended Austrian mountain positions. After surgery and convalescence in Naples he returned to the front, this time to be gassed in 1918 an Austrian use of the chemical weapon that killed hundreds of his comrades.
Demobilized in 1920, he returned to France and with two brothers founded a stovemaking and pipework company, Ponticelli Frères, which did a roaring business supplying industry both in France and abroad.
When the Second World War broke out he obtained French nationality, but he was adjudged too old for active service and instead put his company at the service of France's war effort. When in 1940 the Germans invaded and occupied France he moved his factory to the unoccupied zone. But when Vichy France too was occupied, he returned northwards and worked for the Resistance.
After the war he restarted his company, guiding its business until his retirement in 1960. Latterly he lived in the Paris suburb of Le Kremlin Bicêtre, and regularly attended Armistice Day ceremonies.
Ponticelli held both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Interalliée for his services in 1914-18. More recently, like all surviving veterans of the First World war, he had been appointed a Chevalier, Légion d'honneur.
Goodbye Cruel World and How Much For Those Stem Cells? get a 4-3 vote from The Rules Committee, based on awards received for service. Both teams receive their awards of 18 points each for the WWI vet.
Erwin Geschonneck, a German actor who spent years in Nazi
concentration camps for his communist sympathies and went on to star in scores
of East German films, died Wednesday 03/12/08, the country's Academy of Arts
said. He was 101.
Geschonneck's "engaging artistic and political efforts were recognized with the highest international acclaim for decades," the organization said in a statement. It said that the biography of Geschonnek, who died at his Berlin apartment, "is a window into a century of German history."
Geschonneck, the son of a cobbler, was born in East Prussia on 12/17/1906 and grew up in Berlin.
He joined the Communist party in 1919, and spent years with theater groups that performed agitprop, with workers' choirs and in a young people's theater. He made his big-screen debut in 1931 as an extra in Slatan Dudows' "Kuhle Wampe" - a film about unemployment in the Weimar Republic written by famed playwright and director Bertolt Brecht.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Geschonneck went into exile in the Soviet Union, settling in Odessa - where he worked in a German-language collective theater until he was expelled in 1938.
During the war, he was also imprisoned in the Dachau and Neuengamme camps. Just days before the end of the war, he was being transported aboard the Cap Arcona - a prewar luxury liner that had been commandeered by the German navy - along with some 4,000 other concentration camp inmates when it was sunk by the Royal Air Force in the Baltic. Many of those who were not killed in the attack were gunned down by the SS as they tried to swim ashore. Geschonneck was one of 350 who survived, and his story would be later made into the 1982 East German television film "Der Mann von der Cap Arcon" (The Man of the Cap Arcona) - in which he also acted.
After the war, Geschonneck resumed acting in 1946 in Hamburg in the theater, and also took on several supporting film roles. In 1949, he moved to East Berlin and joined Brecht's Berliner Ensemble theater troupe, where he gained national attention starring as "Matti" in an acclaimed production of "Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti".
He acted in his first film for DEFA - East Germany's state-run film agency - in 1950 and later that decade decided to concentrate all of his efforts on the screen, despite Brecht's objections.
He rose to become one of East Germany's best-known actors with scores of films to his credit, and won several awards for his work. He also became vice president of the country's film and television federation.
After the reunification of Germany, he was awarded with the national "Filmband in Gold" prize in 1993.
He acted in his last film, "Matulla und Busch", in 1995 under the direction of his son, Matti Geschonneck.
The Famous Final Scene II take their bows after their 20-point solo hit on the ancient actor.
Radio disc jock Mikey Dread is dead. He succumbed to a brain
tumor late Sunday afternoon 03/16/08 at his family home in Connecticut, USA at
the age of 54. Born Michael Campbell in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he distinguished
himself as an extraordinary studio engineer and presenter at the now defunct
Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) where he came to prominence in the 1970s
as "The Dread-the-Control Tower", the name of the late night show he
presented at a time when reggae music was scoffed at by many.
One of reggae's greatest innovators and original radio engineers/technicians, the past student of Titchfield High School, in 2006 celebrated the 30th anniversary of the night programme which he started at the JBC, and revolutionised the after midnight shift making it into the most popular slot on radio, by playing strictly dub music. This innovation is seen by many musicologists as the antecedence of dancehall as we now know it.
Upon leaving the JBC, Mikey Dread ventured into recording and scored with a number of releases such as Weatherman Skanking in combination with Ray I, Barber Saloon, Love the Dread, as well as albums such as Dread at the Control, Evolutionary Rockers and World War III. Over time he attracted the attention of British punk rockers, The Clash, who invited him to produce some of their music, the most famous of which is their single Bankrobber, and contributed to several songs on their 1980 album, Sandinista. Mikey Dread also toured with The Clash across Britain, wider Europe and the US.
He also worked closely with producer Trevor Elliot to launch musical career of singer Edi Fitzroy, who was then an accountant at the JBC. As the news of his passing surfaced yesterday, the Sunday Observer got comments from a number of persons in the media and the music fraternity, all of whom hailed Mikey Dread as a significant contributor to the development of Jamaican music. "His (Mikey Dread's) work, is not only national or regional, but also international," former JBC's journalist Leslie Miles noted. "It spanned the world scene and made Mikey a pioneer broadcaster for playing dub music, and also redefined aspects of radio, especially night time radio" Miles, who is now head of news at Bess FM, also spoke of the struggle Mikey Dread faced at the conservative JBC. Music consultant Colin Leslie pointed out that the consequence of the "fight" he received from the management was putting him on at night, but that backfired.
"Remember he is a Portlander, so I always appreciated the fact that we shared the same alma mater (Titchfield High School), that is something I've always cherished and I hold him in high esteem. Although he was ahead of my era, he was somebody who laid an awesome foundation and was very unique and highly respected," was how Richard "Richie B" Burgess of Hot 102, remembered Mikey Dread.
"We were at JBC together, and in those days when he started at the JBC dreads weren't popular on the air. The powers that be in management really gave him a fight," Ali McNab told the Sunday Observer.
"Michael Campbell, is someone who revolutionised radio in Jamaica when there was still an anti-Jamaican sentiment regarding music and culture. In terms of the emerging dancehall, it was Mikey Dread who popularised it on radio. Although it was late night, he still managed to popularise dancehall music and bring it to the masses," was the perspective of Dennis Howard who also worked on JBC Radio, in the post-Mikey Dread era.
And Irie FM's disc jockey, GT Taylor hailed the late Mikey Dread as a role model. "Reggae music in Jamaica, owes a lot that that brother. He was one man who stood up for reggae in the early '70s, bringing the music to the forefront. He is one of my inspirations."
Veteran singer Freddie McGregor attested to the fact that "Mikey Dread was one of the persons fighting the struggle for reggae music. Mikey and I did a lot of shows together over the years. A wonderful brethren".
Already Dead and Van Owens Body scratch out 26 points (18 for the 2-way hit, 8 for Under 55) a piece on the reggae musician/producer/radio host.
Pioneering science fiction writer and visionary Arthur C.
Clarke, best known for his work on the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey,"
has died in his adopted home of Sri Lanka at the age of 90. He died on
Wednesday 03/19/08 of respiratory complications and heart failure doctors
linked to the post-polio syndrome that had kept him wheelchair-bound for years.
Marking his "90th orbit of the sun" in December, the prolific
British-born author and theorist made three birthday wishes: For E.T. to call,
for man to kick his oil habit and for peace in Sri Lanka.
Clarke was born in England on 12/16/17, and served as a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force during World War Two. He was one of the first to suggest the use of satellites orbiting the earth for communications, and in the 1940s forecast that man would reach the Moon by the year 2000 -- an idea experts at first dismissed. When Neil Armstrong landed in 1969, the United States said Clarke "provided the essential intellectual drive that led us to the Moon."
Clarke first came to the Indian Ocean island in the 1950s for scuba, later founding a diving school, and said he became a resident after he "fell in love with the place." President Mahinda Rajapaksa paid tribute to Sri Lanka's most famous foreign resident and "prophet". "We were all proud to have this celebrated author, visionary and promoter of space exploration, prophet of satellite communications, great humanist and lover of animals in our midst," Rajapaksa said in a statement.
Clarke wrote around 100 books and hundreds of short stories and articles, and wanted to be remembered foremost as a writer. Trained as a scientist, he was renowned for basing his work on scientific fact and theory rather than pure fiction and for keeping humanity at the heart of his technological visions.
In 1964, he started to work with the film maker Stanley Kubrick on the script of a groundbreaking film that was to win audiences and accolades far wider than those of most previous science fiction - "2001: A Space Odyssey." Based loosely on a short story he had written in 1948, it dealt poetically with themes of human evolution, technology and consciousness and came to be regarded by many as one of the greatest films ever made.
Clarke, one of the most prolific authors of his genre, was the last surviving member of a group of science-fiction writers known as the "Big Three." The two others were the Russian-born Isaac Asimov, who died in 1992, and Robert A. Heinlein, a Missouri native who died in 1988.
Clarke finished reviewing the final manuscript of his latest novel "The Last Theorem" just days ago. He had also been working on the idea of a "space elevator."
"The golden age of space is only just beginning," Clarke forecast. "Over the next 50 years, thousands of people will travel to earth orbit and then to the Moon and beyond. Space travel and space tourism will one day become almost as commonplace as flying to exotic destinations on our own planet."
Carrion Luggage, Crypt Kickers, Dead Wringers, God's Country Death Duo, Goodbye Cruel World, Monty Python's Dying Circus and What's a TSCU? all discover 8 more points on their totals with the demise of the author/visionary.
Paul Scofield, the towering British stage actor who won
international fame and an Academy Award for the film "A Man for All
Seasons," died Wednesday 03/19/08. He was 86. Scofield died in a hospital
near his home in southern England. He had been suffering from leukemia.
Scofield made few films even after the Oscar for his 1966 portrayal of Tudor statesman Sir Thomas More. He was a stage actor by inclination and by his gifts - a dramatic, craggy face and an unforgettable voice that was likened to a Rolls Royce starting up or the rumbling sound of low organ pipes.
Even his greatest screen role was a follow up to a play - the London stage production of "A Man for All Seasons", in which he starred for nine months. Scofield also turned in a performance in the 1961 New York production that won him extraordinary reviews and a Tony Award. He also was in a stage adaptation of Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" in 1956.
Scofield's huge success with "A Man for All Seasons" was followed in 1979 by another great historical stage role, as Salieri in "Amadeus." His later stage appearances included "Heartbreak House" in 1992 and the 1996 National Theatre production of Ibsen's "John Gabriel Borkman."
Scofield's rare films included Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" in 1974, Kenneth Branagh's 1989 production of "Henry V," in which he played
the king of France; "Quiz Show," Robert Redford's film about the 1950s TV scandal in which Scofield played poet Mark Van Doren; and the 1996
adaptation of Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible".
Rigger Morty's Pasta Way Café snares a solo 20 points with the Active Squad hit on the thespian. US Signal Corpse had the actor listed as understudy, but still gets 3 points for the Taxi Squad hit.
Gabriel París Gordillo died 03/21/08. He was President of
Colombia from May 1957 to August 1958 as Chairman of the Colombian Military
Junta Government following his 1957 Coup d'état. He lived his last days at a
ranch named "El Recreo" in a vereda named El Topacio in Flandes. At
the age of 98 years old, he was the last survivor of the military junta and the
eldest former president of Colombia.
He was born 03/08/10. He studied at the Colegio San Simón in Ibagué, Department of Tolima. After graduating París enlisted in the Colombian Army studying at the Gr. José María Córdova Academy in 1928 and becoming a lieutenant for the cavalry later on 12/11/29. As a lieutenant, París participated in the Colombia-Peru War in 1933 at the Línea Baraya-La Tagua war front. For being an excellent officer París was assigned a horse trainer at the "Gr. José María Córdova" Academy.
Gabriel París was promoted to Major in 1941 at the Colombia Superior School of War. In 1941 was later promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and was sent to study in Fort Leavenworth, United States. He was later assigned trainer at the Colombian Superior School of War and Chief of the Mounted and Veterinary. In 1950, he was promoted to Chief of the Second Brigade, based in Barranquilla. He was later assigned commander of the Fourth Brigade, based in Medellín.
During the military dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, París was appointed to many public office posts. He was promoted to Brigadier General on 12/28/53 and assigned commander of the Colombian Army. On 06/27/53. París was appointed alternative representative of Colombia in the disarmament commission of the UN Security Council, acting as ambassador of Colombia to the United Nations. París was appointed Minister of Justice on 02/09/54 and later on 08/07/54, appointed as Minister of War. He also managed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs temporarily. París occupied the presidency of Colombia temporarily while General Rojas Pinilla visited Ecuador between 07/30 and 08/02/55. On 02/29/56 París was promoted to the rank of Major General.
At the age of 47 years old, París was selected by General Rojas Pinilla to precede the Military Junta set to replace himself. París assumed the Presidency on 05/10/57 along with three other high ranking Army officers; Luis E. Ordóñez Castillo, Rafael Navas Pardo, Deogracias Fonseca Espinosa and another from the Colombian National Armada Rear Admiral Rubén Piedrahita Arango.
As Chief of the Military Junta, París promoted the advancement of technical educational institutions such as the Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje (SENA), promoted a national plebiscite which originated the National Front and decreasing the foreign debt. París also implemented the Plan Vallejo which intended to stimulate exports, established bipartisanship in the public office bureaucracy and reopened the Congress of Colombia on 07/28/58.
On 05/04/58 popular elections took place to replace the Military Junta and transition once again into a democracy. Alberto Lleras was elected as the first president of the National Front. General París retired from active service and inaugurated Lleras as president of Colombia on 08/05/58.
Death & Taxes rolls in and takes over 20 points with a solo hit on the prez. The Rules Committee voted 6-1 in favor of the former head of state whose obituary did not appear in English.
Al Copeland, who became rich selling spicy fried chicken and
notorious for his flamboyant lifestyle, died Sunday 03/23/08. He was 64. The
founder of the Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken chain had been diagnosed shortly
before Thanksgiving with a malignant salivary gland tumor. His death was
announced by his spokeswoman, Kit Wohl. Copeland died at a clinic near Munich,
Germany.
After growing up in New Orleans, Copeland sold his car at age 18 for enough money to open his own one-man doughnut shop. He went on to spend 10 modestly successful years in the doughnut business. The opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in New Orleans in 1966, however, caught Copeland's eye. Inspired by KFC's success, Copeland in 1971 used his doughnut profits to open a restaurant, Chicken on the Run ("So fast you get your chicken before you get your change").
After six months, Chicken on the Run was still losing money. In a last-ditch effort, Copeland chose a spicier Louisiana Cajun-style recipe and reopened the restaurant under the name Popeyes Mighty Good Fried Chicken, after Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman's character in the film "The
French Connection." The chain that grew from the one restaurant became Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken.
Christopher Reeve's Dancecard, Ethnic Cleansing, Forrest Tucker's Ghost, More Hemlock Please, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop and Van Owens Body take out 14 points each (10 for the 6-way hit and 4 for Under 65) on the Chicken King.
Richard Widmark, whose movie debut as a giggling killer made
him an overnight star, giving rise to an enduring Hollywood career playing a
gallery of nasty hoodlums and flawed heroes, died Monday 03/29/08 at his home
in Roxbury, CT. He was 93. His health had been declining since he fractured a
vertebra in recent months.
Widmark first etched his name in film noir history in the 1947 gangster movie "Kiss of Death", playing Tommy Udo, a snickering, psychopathic ex-convict seeking revenge against an informer (played by Victor Mature). In one indelible scene, he binds the informer's mother (Mildred Dunnock) in her wheelchair with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoves her down a flight of stairs to her death. The performance made Widmark, who had been an established radio actor, an instant movie star, and it brought him his sole Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. For the next seven years, as a contract actor, he was given parts in the 20th Century Fox studio's juiciest melodramas.
His mobsters were drenched in evil. But even his heroes were nerve-strained and feral - the daredevil pilot flying into the eye of a storm in "Slattery's Hurricane" (1949); the doctor who fights bubonic plague in Elia Kazan's "Panic in the Streets" (1950); and the pickpocket who refuses to be a traitor in Samuel Fuller's "Pickup on South Street" (1953).
In reality, the screen's most vicious bad guy was a mild-mannered former college teacher who had married his college sweetheart, the playwright and screenwriter Ora Jean Hazlewood.
His trademark villains overshadowed his work in a wide range of roles in a career that spanned six decades and more than 60 movies. In "The Cobweb" (1955), he played the head of a psychiatric clinic where the staff seemed more emotionally troubled than the patients; in "Saint Joan" (1957), he was the Dauphin to Jean Seberg's Joan of Arc; in "The Alamo" (1960), he was Jim Bowie, the inventor of the Bowie knife; in "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1961), he was a U.S. Army colonel prosecuting German war criminals.
As his blond hair turned gray, Widmark played generals in the nuclear thriller "Twilight's Last Gleaming" (1977) and "The Swarm" (1978), in which he waged war on bees. He was the evil head of a hospital in "Coma" (1978) and a U.S. senator in "True Colors" (1991).
Richard Widmark was born on 12/26/14, in Sunrise, MN and grew up throughout the Midwest, the son of a traveling salesman. Graduating from Lake Forest College in Illinois in 1936, he spent two years as an instructor in the college drama department while acting in stage productions. Then he headed to New York, where a classmate was producing 15-minute radio soap operas and cast Widmark in a variety of roles.
In World War II, Widmark tried to enlist in the army but was rejected three times because of a perforated eardrum. So he turned to Broadway. In his first stage role, in 1943, he played an army lieutenant in F. Hugh Herbert's "Kiss and Tell", directed by George Abbott.
After 10 successful years as a radio actor, Widmark tried the movies with "Kiss of Death", which was being filmed in New York. He was originally turned down for the role by the director, Henry Hathaway, who told him that he was too clean-cut and intellectual for the part. It was Darryl Zanuck, the Fox studio head, who, after watching Widmark's screen test, insisted that he be given the part.
Widmark, who shunned the limelight, spent his Hollywood years living quietly on a large farm in Connecticut and on an 80-acre, or 32-hectare, horse ranch in Hidden Valley, north of Los Angeles. He sold the ranch in 1997 after the death of Hazlewood, his wife of nearly 55 years.
Dead Wringers, GHOSTBUSTIN' BABE, Gratefull Dead, Otis' Cirrhosis from Morrison Sisters' Still, Playin for Bonz, Prop 'Em Up Beside the Jukebox, Satan's Waitin' and Spectral Evidence find their motivation with 6 points each on the veteran actor.
American director Jules Dassin, whose Greek wife Melina
Mercouri starred in his hit movie "Never on Sunday" and six more of
his films, died late Monday 03/31/08 at an Athens hospital. He was 96. The
cause of death was not made public. A spokeswoman for Hygeia hospital said only
that he had been treated there the past two weeks.
Dassin, a leftist activist whose more than 20 films also included "Topkapi", abandoned Hollywood in 1950 during the communist blacklisting era. Five years later, he won wide acclaim for "Rififi", famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialogue. The movie won him the best director prize at Cannes, where he met Mercouri.
He married the actress-politician in 1966 and settled permanently in Athens. Dassin directed his wife in seven films, including 1960's "Never on Sunday", in which she gained international notice for her portrayal of a kindhearted prostitute. It brought him two Oscar nominations, for direction and writing.
Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis called Dassin, who was born in Middletown, CT, "a first-generation Greek."
After Mercouri's death in 1994, Dassin focused on her main unrealized goal while she was Greece's culture minister: trying to persuade the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, a large collection of sculptures taken from the Parthenon by a Scottish diplomat nearly 200 years ago. "If there is anything I want to be remembered for, it is for fulfilling Melina's dream," he said in a 1997 interview.
Dassin's Hollywood credits include "Reunion in France", a 1942 wartime romance with Joan Crawford and John Wayne; "Brute Force", a 1947 prison drama starring Burt Lancaster; and the detective thriller "The Naked City" in 1948. The latter, co-written by Hollywood 10 member Albert Maltz, won Oscars for cinematography and film editing.
His 1974 film "The Rehearsal" was based on the Greek student rebellions that helped bring down a 1967-74 military junta that had forced Dassin and Mercouri into exile in Paris. In 1980, Dassin made the Canadian-backed film "Circle of Two", starring Richard Burton as an aged artist with a romantic fixation on a teenage student, played by Tatum O'Neal. Dassin was disheartened by its weak box office performance and never made another film.
Born on 12/18/11, to a Jewish barber who emigrated from Russia, Dassin was raised in working-class neighborhoods around New York.
Drop Dead Gorgeous, Spectral Evidence and The Famous Final Scene II produce 16 points each on the Hollywood outsider.
Max Helton, who formed a Christian ministry that 20 years ago
became Motor Racing Outreach, died Sunday afternoon 03/31/08 of brain cancer at
his home in Huntersville, NC. He was 67.
"This is an earthly loss but a heavenly gain," said Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage, who serves on the Board of Directors of World-Span Ministries, Helton's international motorsports ministry.
"Max aided so many people in auto racing and you would often see him with some of the sport's top drivers offering a quiet prayer just before the start of a race. He very personally counseled me through the years and was a great influence on my life."
Helton was working at a church in Glendora, CA in 1988 when he met Darrell Waltrip and his wife, Stevie. Helton told the Waltrips that he felt called to lead a ministry in auto racing. Soon after, Helton formed Motor Racing Outreach and was leading Bible study with drivers and crew members in the sport, chapel service at race tracks each weekend and personal counseling session with those in the sport. He left Motor Racing Outreach in 2002.
He then formed World-Span Ministries and took a very similar approach to racing series around the world traveling internationally as he spread the message.
Helton was diagnosed with brain cancer in August. He is survived by his wife, Jean, along with four daughters and nine grandchildren.
Putnam's Tomahawk Chop and Walking Toward the Light receive a glorious 18 points each on the NASCAR chaplain.
Charlton Heston, the Oscar-winning actor who achieved stardom
playing larger-than-life figures including Moses, Michelangelo and Andrew
Jackson in historical epics and went on to become a best-selling author, a
contentious Hollywood labor leader, an unapologetic gun advocate and darling of
conservative causes, has died. He was 84. Heston died Saturday 04/05/08 at his
Beverly Hills home, his family said in a statement. In 2002, he had been
diagnosed with symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer's disease.
With a booming baritone voice, the tall, ruggedly handsome actor delivered his signature role as the prophet Moses in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 Biblical extravaganza "The Ten Commandments", raising a rod over his head as God miraculously parts the Red Sea.
Heston won the Academy Award for best actor in another religious blockbuster in 1959's "Ben-Hur," racing four white horses at top speed in one of the cinema's legendary action sequences - the 15-minute chariot race in which his character, a proud and noble Jew, competes against his childhood Roman friend, played by Stephen Boyd.
"I don't seem to fit really into the 20th century," Heston said in a 1965 interview. "Pretty soon, though, I've got to get a part where I wear pants with pleats and pockets."
Heston stunned the entertainment world in August 2002 when he made a poignant and moving videotaped address announcing his illness.
A few days after his dramatic announcement, Heston would sit down for an interview in his beloved Coldwater Canyon home, which he always said "Ben-Hur" had built, and faced the uncertain future with brave resolve and a sense of humor. "The world is a tough place," he said with a chuckle. "You're never going to get out of it alive."
Late in life, Heston's stature as a political firebrand overshadowed his acting. He became demonized by gun control advocates and liberal Hollywood when he became president of the National Rifle Assn. in 1998.
Heston answered his critics in a now-famous pose that mimicked Moses' parting of the Red Sea. But instead of a rod, Heston raised a flintlock over his head and challenged his detractors to pry the rifle "from my cold, dead hands."
Like the chariot race and the bearded prophet Moses, Heston will be best remembered for several indelible cinematic moments: playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with Orson Welles in the oil fields in "Touch of Evil", his rant at the end of "Planet of the Apes" when he sees the destruction of the Statue of Liberty, his discovery that "Soylent Green is people!" in the sci-fi hit "Soylent Green" and the dead Spanish hero on his steed in "El Cid".
The New Yorker's film critic Pauline Kael, in her review of 1968's "Planet of the Apes", wrote: "All this wouldn't be so forceful or so funny if it weren't for the use of Charlton Heston in the [leading] role. With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win. He represents American power - and he has the profile of an eagle."
For decades, Heston was a towering figure in the world of movies, television and the stage. He liked to say that he had performed Shakespeare on film more than any other actor, and he once lamented that modern-day movie stars didn't attempt the Bard to hone their acting skills.
"He was the screen hero of the 1950s and 1960s, a proven stayer in epics, and a pleasing combination of piercing blue eyes and tanned beefcake," David Thomson wrote in his book "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film".
Heston also was blessed by working with legendary directors like DeMille in "The Greatest Show on Earth" and again in "The Ten Commandments", Welles in "Touch of Evil", Sam Peckinpah in "Major Dundee", William Wyler in "The Big Country" and "Ben-Hur", George
Stevens in "The Greatest Story Ever Told", Franklin Schaffner in "The War Lord" and "Planet of the Apes" and Anthony Mann in "El Cid".
22 teams get their paws on 5 points each for the actor/activist.
Barbara McDermott, who died on 04/12/08 aged 95, was one of the
last survivors of the Lusitania disaster in 1915, when the Cunarder was sunk by
a German submarine en route from New York to Queenstown (now Cobh) in southern
Ireland.
As Barbara Anderson, she was a month short of her third birthday and on her way to visit her grandmother in England when the liner was torpedoed off the Irish coast on 05/07/15. The ship sank within 18 minutes with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives. The young Barbara, who had been eating lunch with her mother, was ushered into a lifeboat and survived, together with 747 others.
In the melée the ship's purser, William Harkness, saw the frightened girl at the ship's rail near the stern. "Mother was nearby," she remembered, "but he scooped me up and we both fell together into a boat which was lowering." After their rescue, she and her mother, five months pregnant, continued their journey to England to stay with Barbara's maternal grandmother at Darlington. Later that year, in September, Barbara's mother, Emily, gave birth to a son, Frank, who lived only five months.
Emily Anderson herself died from tuberculosis a year later, aged 28. In 1919 Barbara Anderson, then seven, returned to the United States aboard the Lusitania's sister ship, the Mauretania, arriving on Boxing Day.
According to the official version of the sinking, the Lusitania had been wantonly sunk in contravention of international agreements. The disaster was among the factors which drew America into the First World War. Claims that the liner had been carrying a secret cargo of wartime munitions have been hotly debated down the years.
Barbara Winifred Anderson was born on 06/15/12 at Derby, CT, where her father worked as a draughtsman for a munitions factory. The First World War had created such demand for the factory's production that he was unable to accompany his family on their transatlantic voyage.
His pregnant wife and child boarded the Lusitania at Pier 54 in New York City on May 1. Six days later the liner was eight miles off the Irish coast when she was sunk by a German U-20 submarine.
Barbara Anderson recalled clearly being in the ship's upper level dining room eating her pudding when the torpedo hit at 2.28pm, and clutching her spoon as she watched other passengers scurrying about below. She became separated from her mother but found her in lifeboat number 15 - her mother explained that she had been rescued after falling into the Atlantic.
Barbara Anderson became an assistant at a Connecticut department store, later transferring to the personnel office as manager. Before her eyesight failed, she was a records clerk at a cemetery office.
The last living survivor of the Lusitania disaster is now thought to be Audrey Lawson-Johnston, aged 93.
Barbara Anderson married, in 1932, Milton McDermott, a laboratory assistant at Yale University. He died in 1981, and she is survived by their son and daughter.
Ethnic Cleansing floats to the top with a 20-point solo hit on the disaster survivor.
Physicist John A. Wheeler, who had a key role in the
development of the atom bomb and later gave the space phenomenon black holes
their name, has died at 96. Wheeler, for many years a professor at Princeton
University, died of pneumonia Sunday 04/13/08 at his home in Hightstown, NJ.
Wheeler rubbed elbows with colossal figures in science such as Albert Einstein and Danish scientist Niels Bohr, with whom Wheeler worked in the 1930s and '40s. Born in 1911, Wheeler was 21 when he earned his doctorate in physics from Johns Hopkins University. In the mid-1930s, he traveled to Denmark to study for a year with Bohr, who won a Nobel Prize for his work describing the nature of the atom.
In early 1939, with war looming in Europe, Bohr arrived in the United States with the news that German scientists had split uranium atoms. Working at Princeton, Bohr and Wheeler sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. During World War II, Wheeler was part of the Manhattan Project, the scientists charged with using nuclear fission to create an atomic bomb for the United States. Unlike some colleagues who regretted their roles after bombs were dropped on Japan, Wheeler regretted that the bomb had not been made ready in time to hasten the end of the war in Europe. His brother, Joe, had been killed in combat in Italy in 1944. Wheeler later helped Edward Teller develop the even more powerful hydrogen bomb.
The name "black hole" - for a collapsed star so dense that even light could not escape - came out of a conference in 1967. Wheeler made the name stick after someone else had suggested it as a replacement for the cumbersome "gravitationally completely collapsed star," he recalled. "After you get around to saying that about 10 times, you look desperately for something better," he said.
In his 1998 autobiography, "Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics", he wrote that the black hole "teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as 'sacred', as immutable, are anything but."
Among Wheeler's students in the early 1940s was the future Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman.
While he spent most of his academic career at Princeton, Wheeler moved to the University of Texas in 1976 because Princeton's retirement age was looming.
Stiff As A Board And Bright Green pull in 20 points for the Active Squad solo hit, while Don't Fear the Reaper earn 3 points for the Taxi Squad hit.
Ollie Johnston, the last of the "Nine Old Men" who
animated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", "Fantasia",
"Bambi" and other classic Walt Disney films has died. He was 95.
Johnston died of natural causes Monday 04/14/08 at a long-term care facility in
Sequim, WA.
Walt Disney lightheartedly dubbed his team of crack animators his "Nine Old Men", borrowing the phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's description of the U.S. Supreme Court's members, who had angered the president by quashing many of his Depression-era New Deal programs. Although most of Disney's men were in their 20s at the time, the name stuck with them for the rest of their lives.
Perhaps the two most accomplished of the nine were Johnston and his close friend Frank Thomas, who died in 2004 at age 92. The pair, who met as art students at Stanford University in the 1930s, were hired by Disney for $17 a week at a time when he was expanding the studio to produce full-length feature films. Both worked on the first of those features, 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".
Johnston's other credits included "Cinderella", "Alice in Wonderland", "Peter Pan", "Lady and the Tramp", "Sleeping Beauty", "101 Dalmatians", "Mary Poppins", "The Jungle Book", "The Aristocats", "Robin Hood" and "The Rescuers".
After Johnston and Thomas retired in 1978, they lectured at schools and film festivals in the United States and Europe and co-authored the books
"Bambi; the Story and the Film", "Too Funny for Words", "The Disney Villains" and the epic "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life". They
were also the subjects of the 1995 documentary "Frank and Ollie", produced by Thomas' son Ted. The pair's guide to animation is considered "the bible" among animators, said John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar animation studios and Johnston's longtime friend.
Adipocere and Chitragupta's Roll Call draw up 18 points each on the Disney animator.
Edward N. Lorenz, a meteorologist who tried to predict the
weather with computers but instead gave rise to the modern field of chaos
theory, died Wednesday 04/16/08 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 90. The
cause was cancer.
In discovering “deterministic chaos”, Dr. Lorenz established a principle that “profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,” said a committee that awarded him the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences. Dr. Lorenz is best known for the notion of the “butterfly effect”, the idea that a small disturbance like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can induce enormous consequences.
As recounted in the book “Chaos” by James Gleick, Dr. Lorenz’s accidental discovery of chaos came in the winter of 1961. Dr. Lorenz was running simulations of weather using a simple computer model. One day, he wanted to repeat one of the simulations for a longer time, but instead of repeating the whole simulation, he started the second run in the middle, typing in numbers from the first run for the initial conditions. The computer program was the same, so the weather patterns of the second run should have exactly followed those of the first. Instead, the two weather trajectories quickly diverged on completely separate paths.
At first, he thought the computer was malfunctioning. Then he realized that he had not entered the initial conditions exactly. The computer stored numbers to an accuracy of six decimal places, like 0.506127, while, to save space, the printout of results shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.506. When typing in the new conditions, Dr. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off numbers, and even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.
Even though his model was vastly simplified, Dr. Lorenz realized that this meant perfect weather prediction was a fantasy. A perfect forecast would require not only a perfect model, but also perfect knowledge of wind, temperature, humidity and other conditions everywhere around the world at one moment of time. Even a small discrepancy could lead to completely different weather.
Dr. Lorenz published his findings in 1963. “The paper he wrote in 1963 is a masterpiece of clarity of exposition about why weather is unpredictable,” said J. Doyne Farmer, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
The following year, Dr. Lorenz published another paper that described how a small twiddling of parameters in a model could produce vastly different behavior, transforming regular, periodic events into a seemingly random chaotic pattern. At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, he gave a talk with a title that captured the essence of his ideas: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”
Dr. Lorenz was not the first to stumble onto chaos. At the end of the 19th century, the mathematician Henri Poincaré showed that the gravitational dance of as few as three heavenly bodies was hopelessly complex to calculate, even though the underlying equations of motion seemed simple. But Poincaré’s findings were forgotten through the first three-quarters of the 20th century.
Dr. Lorenz’s papers also attracted little notice until the mid-1970s.
“When it finally penetrated the community, that was what started people to really start to pay attention to this and led to tremendous development,” said Edward Ott, a professor of physics and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland. “He demonstrated a chaotic model in a real ituation.”
Born in 1917 in West Hartford, CT, Edward Norton Lorenz received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1938 and a master’s degree in math from Harvard in 1940. He worked as a weather forecaster during World War II, leading him to pursue graduate studies in meteorology; he earned master’s and doctoral degrees in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943 and 1948.
Dr. Lorenz was a staff member of M.I.T.’s meteorology department from 1948 to 1955, when he became an assistant professor. He was promoted to professor in 1962 and served as head of the department from 1977 to 1981. He became an emeritus professor in 1987.
Dr. Lorenz remained active almost to the end of his life, in both research and outdoor activities. “He was out hiking two and a half weeks ago,” Cheryl Lorenz said, “and he finished a paper a week ago with a colleague.”
Fecal Matter weather a storm of 20 points for the solo strike on the chaos theorist.
Danny Federici, the longtime keyboard player for Bruce
Springsteen whose stylish work helped define the E Street Band's sound on hits
from "Hungry Heart" through "The Rising", died Thursday
04/17/08. He was 58. Federici, who had battled melanoma for three years, died
at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. News of his death was
posted late Thursday on Springsteen's official Web site. According to published
reports, Federici last performed with Springsteen and the band last month,
appearing during portions of a March 20 show in Indianapolis. Springsteen
concerts scheduled for Friday in Fort Lauderdale and Saturday in Orlando were
postponed after news of Federici's death.
He was born in Flemington, NJ, a long car ride from the Jersey shore haunts where he first met kindred musical spirit Springsteen in the late 1960s. The pair often jammed at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park, N.J., a now-defunct after-hours club that hosted the best musicians in the state. It was Federici, along with original E Street Band drummer Vini Lopez, who first invited Springsteen to join their band.
By 1969, the self-effacing Federici - often introduced in concert by Springsteen as "Phantom Dan" - was playing with the Boss in a band called Child. Over the years, Federici joined his friend in acclaimed shore bands Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom and the Bruce Springsteen Band. Federici became a stalwart in the E Street Band as Springsteen rocketed from the boardwalk to international stardom. Springsteen split from the E Streeters in the late '80s, but they reunited for a hugely successful tour in 1999.
Federici played accordion on the wistful "4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" from Springsteen's second album, and his organ solo was a highlight of Springsteen's first top 10 hit, "Hungry Heart". His organ coda on the 9/11-inspired Springsteen song "You're Missing" provided one of the more heart-wrenching moments on "The Rising" in 2002.
In a band with larger-than-life characters such as saxophonist Clarence Clemons and bandana-wrapped guitarist "Little" Steven Van Zandt, Federici was content to play in his familiar position to the side of the stage. But his playing was as vital to Springsteen's live show as any instrument in the band.
Federici released a pair of solo albums that veered from the E Street sound and into soft jazz. Bandmates Nils Lofgren on guitar and Garry Tallent on bass joined Federici on his 1997 debut, "Flemington." In 2005, Federici released its follow-up, "Out of a Dream."
Federici had taken a leave of absence during the band's tour in November 2007 to pursue treatment for melanoma, and was temporarily replaced by veteran musician Charles Giordano.
At the time, Springsteen described Federici as "one of the pillars of our sound and has played beside me as a great friend for more than 40 years. We all eagerly await his healthy and speedy return."
Besides his work with Springsteen, Federici played on albums by an impressive roster of other artists: Van Zandt, Joan Armatrading, Graham Parker, Gary U.S. Bonds and Garland Jeffreys.
Ethnic Cleansing and Inverse Genesis bang out 22 points each (18 for the 2-way, 4 for Under 65) on the NJ rocker. Life'll Kill Ya stay in rhythm with 7 points (3 for TSH, 4 for Under 65).
Aimé Césaire, an anticolonialist poet and politician who was
honored throughout the French-speaking world and who was an early proponent of
black pride, died in Fort-de-France, Martinique on Thursday 04/17/08. He was
94. He died at a hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and
other ailments.
Mr. Césaire was one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated cultural figures. He was especially revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to the French parliament for nearly half a century and where he was repeatedly elected mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city.
In Paris in the 1930s he helped found the journal Black Student, which gave birth to the idea of “negritude”, a call to blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 book “Discourse on Colonialism” was considered a classic of French political literature.
Mr. Césaire’s ideas were honored and his death mourned in Africa and France as well as the Caribbean. The office of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said Mr. Sarkozy would attend Mr. Césaire’s funeral, scheduled for Sunday in Fort-de-France. Students at Lycée Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Mr. Césaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday.
Mr. Césaire’s best-known works included the essay “Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain” and the poem “Notes From a Return to the Native Land”.
Born on 06/26/13, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Mr. Césaire attended high school and college in France. In 1937 he married another student from Martinique, Suzanne Roussi, with whom he eventually had four sons and two daughters. He returned to Martinique during World War II and was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, except for a break from 1983 to 1984. Mr. Césaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department of France.
He was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France’s National Assembly, where he served from 1946 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1993.
As the years passed, he remained firm in his views. In 2005 he refused to meet with Mr. Sarkozy, who was then minister of the interior, because of Mr. Sarkozy’s endorsement of a bill citing the “positive role” of colonialism. “I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anticolonialist,” Mr. Césaire said at the time. The offending language was struck from the bill.
Despite the snub, Mr. Sarkozy last year successfully led a campaign to rename Martinique’s airport in honor of Mr. Césaire. Mr. Césaire eventually met with Mr. Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in the 2007 French elections.
Stiff As A Board And Bright Green get another 20 points for the solo hit on the poet/politician.
A death row inmate who was challenging Alabama's method of lethal
injection died Tuesday 04/22/08, apparently of complications from cancer.
Prison system spokesman Brian Corbett said Daniel Lee Siebert, 53, was
pronounced dead at 1:35 p.m. at Holman prison near Atmore, AL where he had been
awaiting execution for more than 21 years for strangling four people. Corbett
said the exact cause of Siebert's death would be determined later but it
appeared to be related to his pancreatic cancer.
Siebert, a self-described serial killer, was also known for grim drawings he made that were offered for sale on "murderabilia" Web sites specializing in artwork, letters and essays by convicted killers. "He certainly hoped to die from the cancer before he was executed," said Esther Brown, executive secretary of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty. Siebert's death comes less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court approved the most widely used method of lethal injection, prompting states to move forward with executions after a nearly seven-month halt. He was one of several death row inmates challenging Alabama's method, but his suit was unique in that he claimed his cancer medication would counteract with the lethal injection drugs and inflict unnecessary pain.
Siebert was condemned for the 02/19/86 strangulation of his 24-year-old girlfriend, Sherri Weathers, and her two sons, 5-year-old Chad and 4-year-old Joey. He was also convicted separately and sentenced to death for killing a neighbor at her Talladega apartment complex, Linda Jarman, the same night. Siebert was sentenced to life in prison for killing Linda Faye Odum, also of Talladega. He confessed to a number of other killings from California to New Jersey, but the exact number of his victims is not known.
Siebert came within a day of lethal injection in October before a federal appeals court stayed his execution pending the Supreme Court ruling on a Kentucky case. Alabama Attorney General Troy King said Siebert's death should "put an end to the years of legal shenanigans that have gone on." "It's a shame that he got what he wanted, but the people who he brutally executed had no say in the matter at all and that's the injustice of this," King said.
AA88, Die2K and Flatliners all get a reprieve for their hit on the Death Row inmate, as Siebert dies of natural causes and not the needle. 24 points (16 for the 3-way, 8 for Under 55) go out to the teams who took the gamble on a condemned man.
John McConnell, a steel-processing entrepreneur who grew the
company he started on a $600 loan into a billion-dollar enterprise, died Friday
04/25/08 of cancer at age 84. McConnell passed away at Riverside Methodist
Hospital in Columbus, the same city in which he founded his business.
After growing up during the Great Depression and serving in World War II, McConnell enrolled in Michigan State University with G.I. Bill funding. Following in the footsteps of his father, McConnell entered the steel industry as a salesman for Weirton Steel Corp. After several years with Weirton, McConnell sensed the potential in custom-sized steel orders and set off to start his own company to fill that niche.
Headquartered in his basement, McConnell brokered his first order of steel with $1,200 in his checking account and a $600 loan against his 1952 Oldsmobile. The $600 profit on the deal catalyzed the birth of Worthington Industries Inc., (WOR) which was incorporated in 1955. It's now an 8,000 employee-strong company with $3 billion in sales last year.
McConnell received numerous accolades throughout his life, including Industry Week's Excellence in Management award and Financial World Magazine's Outstanding CEO of the Year award. Worthington made Fortune magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" list in 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2006.
In his 2004 book Our Golden Rule, McConnell attributed his success to his customer service.
"John left his mark not only on the business world but on this community by way he treated people," says Cathy Lyttle, Worthington's vice president of corporate communications. "It didn't matter who you were; he would reach across the table and shake your hand. His philosophy was simple: Be honorable, do the right thing and trust people."
One of McConnell's landmark accomplishments was bringing a National Hockey League franchise to Columbus. As the majority owner of the Blue Jackets, an expansion team founded in 2000, McConnell played a significant role in growing the franchise.
Sudden Death/Game Over get their first score with the NHL franchisee. But it was only worth 5 points, because he was sitting on the bench.
Enrico Donati, an Italian-born American painter and sculptor
considered by many in the art world to be the last of the Surrealists, died on Friday
04/25/08 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. The cause was complications of
injuries sustained in a taxi accident in July, said David Oxman, a spokesman
for the family.
Mr. Donati survived Surrealism and moved through other art movements, including Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism, and became a successful owner of a perfume company.
After receiving a doctorate in what would now be called sociology at the University of Pavia in 1929, he first turned to music. Unhappy with the state of musical education in Milan under the Fascists, he moved to Paris and for a time composed avant-garde music in a Montmartre garret. He developed an interest in anthropology and in 1934 traveled to the American Southwest and Canada to study and collect American Indian artifacts.
After dabbling in commercial art and printing in New York, he resolved to commit himself to painting and returned to Paris, where he was drawn to the flourishing Surrealist movement. When war broke out in 1939, Mr. Donati returned to New York for good, along with his first wife, Claire Javel, and their two daughters, Marina Donati and Sylvaine Mahis of Paris, who survive him. He was divorced from Ms. Javel in 1965 and married Adele Schmidt, who also survives him, as well as a daughter from his second marriage, Alexandra Donati of New York; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Mr. Donati attended the New School for Social Research and in 1942 had his first one-man show at the New School’s gallery. His work impressed the art historian Lionello Venturi, who introduced him to the writer André Breton, often considered the father of Surrealism. Breton brought him into the circle of prominent European artists, many of them Surrealists, who had gathered in New York at the outset of the war.
“You are one of us,” he recalled Breton saying to him. The group included Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger and the American sculptor Alexander Calder. Duchamp became a particular friend. They collaborated on various projects, including the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme at the Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1947. They devised the exposition’s program, decorating the cover of each copy with a foam rubber breast.
There was his Constructivist phase and, for a time, a focus on Abstract Expressionism. In later years, Mr. Donati became fascinated with surface and texture, mixing his paint with sand, dust, coffee grounds and, at times, the contents of his vacuum cleaner, which he mixed with pigment and glue and slathered on his canvas. “It opened up a new world for me,” he recalled in a 1968 oral history interview for the Smithsonian Institution. “I kept on using the vacuum cleaner dirt for years.”
Mr. Donati’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Art in Houston and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.
Mr. Donati was for many years as engaged in the business world as he was in the world of art. In the early 1960s, he joined the board of Houbigant Inc., one of the oldest purveyors of French perfumes and eau de cologne. In 1965 he bought the company, which was privately held. In 1978 Fortune Magazine reported that as chairman and chief executive, he had “revived the sagging fortunes” of the company, then worth $50 million. His first wife was a member of the Houbigant family, Fortune said.
Easel Kill Ya! and Old As the Hills construct a whopping 28 points (18 for the 2-way, 10 for Un-Natural Death) on the last of the Surrealists.
Albert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose
medical discovery inspired - and arguably corrupted - millions in the 1960s
hippie generation, died Tuesday 04/29/08. He was 102. Hofmann died at his home
in Burg im Leimental, where Hofmann moved following his retirement in 1971.
The Swiss chemist discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains at the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm in Basel.
He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped onto his finger during a repeat of the laboratory experiment on 04/16/43.
Hofmann and his scientific colleagues hoped that LSD would make an important contribution to psychiatric research. For a time, Sandoz sold it under the name Delysid, encouraging doctors to try it themselves.
Horror stories emerged about people going on murder sprees or jumping out of windows while hallucinating. Heavy users suffered permanent psychological damage. The U.S. government banned LSD in 1966, and other countries followed suit.
17 teams trip out on their 5-point hit, while Century Mark and The Morgue the Merrier come down with 3 points each for the TSH.
Sir Anthony Mamo, the first President of Malta, died aged 99 on
Thursday morning 05/01/08 at Casa Arkati in Mosta. A Department of Information
statement said that the Prime Minister phoned Sir Anthony Mamo's family and
conveyed his condolences. Sir Anthony Mamo is to be given a state funeral of
which details will be announced shortly. The Malta Labour Party (MLP) also sent
a statement sending condolences to Sir Mamo’s family.
Sir Anthony Joseph Mamo was born on 01/09/09 son of Joseph Mamo and Carla Brincat and was the first President of Malta when the country became a republic on December 13th, 1974, and held the office until 1976. He was previously Governor-General, representing Elizabeth II as Queen of Malta, when the country was a Commonwealth realm. He was also the first Maltese citizen to be appointed Governor-General, and before independence, briefly served as acting Governor.
He was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1955 and knighted two years later. He was made Sieheb il-Gieh within the National Order of Merit in 1993.
Sir Anthony Mamo was a professor of criminal law at the University.
Mamo has been the world's oldest living former head of state since Somalian President Aden Abdullah Osman Daar died on 06/08/07.
Death & Taxes, Hannibal Lechter's Sunday Brunch and The Absent And The Dead Have No Friends..Nor Do We all ascend the leaderboard with 16 points a piece on the Maltese President.
Eddy Arnold, the influential singer who had more than two dozen
No. 1 country hits, including two of the six biggest in the history of
Billboard's singles chart, and is one of the genre's most successful acts ever,
died Thursday 05/08/08 at a care facility near Nashville. He was 89. His wife
of 66 years, Sally, died in March, and in the same month, Arnold fell outside
his home, injuring his hip. He would have turned 90 next week.
Joel Whitburn's "Top Country Songs, 1944-2005" ranks Arnold as country's all-time No. 1 singles artist; the book is dedicated to him. Arnold's mellow baritone made him the king of the chart beginning in 1945 with his first hit, "Each Minute Seems a Million Years." Counting double-sided singles, he hit the top 10 more than 90 times during the next 35 years, including 28 No. 1s. From 1947-68, Arnold's singles spent a total of 145 weeks at No. 1.
One of those, 1947's "I'll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)", spent a record 21 weeks atop the chart, a mark that was tied twice in the 1950s. Less than a year later, Arnold's "Bouquet of Roses" had a 19-week run at No. 1 - tied for sixth-longest in country history - and spent 54 weeks on the Billboard chart, a record that still stands. His other chart toppers include "Anytime", "Just a Little Lovin' (Will Go a Long, Long Way)", "Don't Rob Another Man's Castle", "There's Been a Change in Me", "I Wanna Play House With You" and "I Want to Go With You".
Most of his hits were done in association with famed guitarist Chet Atkins, the producer on most of the recording sessions. His biggest pop single was "Make the World Go Away," which hit No. 6 in 1965.
He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1966. The following year he was the first person to receive the entertainer of the year award from the Country Music Assn.
Arnold was born 05/15/18, on a farm near Henderson, TN, the son of a sharecropper. He sang on radio stations in Jackson, TN, Memphis and St. Louis before becoming nationally known. Early in his career, his manager was Col. Tom Parker, who later managed Elvis Presley. His image was always that of a modest, clean-cut country boy.
Death March and Swan Song rise through the charts with 18 points each on the country superstar.
Irena Sendlerowa, a Polish woman who saved thousands of Jewish
children during World War Two by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, died
in the Polish capital on Monday 05/12/08 after a long illness, local media
said. Israel's Holocaust remembrance authority, Yad Vashem, said in a statement
that it mourned her death. The web portal of Poland's leading daily, Gazeta
Wyborcza, said Sendlerowa, 98, died in Plocka Street hospital early on Monday.
The hospital declined to comment on the report.
Using her position as a social worker, Sendler regularly entered the ghetto, smuggling around 2,500 children out in boxes, suitcases or hidden in trolleys. The children were then placed with Polish families outside the ghetto, created by Nazi Germany in 1940 for the city's half a million strong Jewish population, and given new identities.
But in 1943 Sendler, who led the children' section of the Zegota organization which helped Jews during the war, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. She only escaped execution when Zegota managed to bribe some Nazi officials, who left her unconscious but alive with broken legs and arms in the woods.
"People who stand up for others, for the weak, are very rare. The world would have been a better place if there were more of them," Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, said on national television. His sentiments were echoed by former Polish President Lech Walesa as well as religious leaders.
Sendler was honored with Israeli Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations medal in 1965 for her actions, and later made an honorary Israeli citizen. She was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year but, despite her bravery, she denied she was a hero. "The term 'hero' irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little," Sendler said in one of her last interviews.
Old Soldiers Never Die and Stiff As A Board And Bright Green escape with 18 points each on the war heroine.
Artist Robert Rauschenberg, whose use of odd and everyday
articles earned him regard as a pioneer in pop art but whose talents spanned
the worlds of painting, sculpture and dance, has died. He was 82. Rauschenberg
died Monday 05/12/08.
Rauschenberg, who first gained fame in the 1950s, didn't mine popular culture wholesale as Andy Warhol (Campbell's Soup cans) and Roy Lichtenstein (comic books) did. But his "combines", incongruous combinations of three-dimensional objects and paint, shared pop's blurring of art and objects from modern life. He also responded to his pop colleagues and began incorporating up-to-the-minute photographed images in his works in the 1960s, including, memorably, pictures of John F. Kennedy.
Among his most famous combines was "Bed", created when he woke up in the mood to paint but had no money for a canvas. His solution was to take the quilt off his bed and use paint, toothpaste and fingernail polish for his creation. But not to be limited by paint, Rauschenberg was a sculptor and choreographer and even won a 1984 Grammy Award for best album package for the Talking Heads album Speaking in Tongues.
Rauschenberg's more than 50 years in art produced such a varied and prolific collection that it consumed both uptown and downtown locations during a 1998 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, in his book "American Visions", called Rauschenberg "a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art.
Rauschenberg split his time between New York and Captiva Island in Florida, where he kept a house stoked with his own art and those of his friends.
Born Milton Rauschenberg in 1925 in Port Arthur, TX and raised a Christian fundamentalist, Rauschenberg wanted to be a minister but gave it up because his church banned dancing.
He was drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II and knew little about art until a chance visit to an art museum where he saw his first painting at age 18. He drew portraits of his fellow sailors for them to send home. When his time in the service was up, Rauschenberg used the GI. Bill to pay his tuition at art school. He changed his name to Robert because it sounded more artistic. He studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1947. He later took his studies to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied under master Josef Albers, and alongside contemporary artists such as choreographer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage. He also studied at the Art Students League in New York City.
Rauschenberg first paintings in the early 1950s comprised a series of all-white and all-black surfaces under laid with wrinkled newspaper. In later works he began making art from what others would consider junk - old soda bottles, traffic barricades, and stuffed birds and calling them "combine" paintings.
One of Rauschenberg's first and most famous combines was entitled "Monogram," a 1959 work consisting of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint. By the mid-1950s, he was also designing sets and costumes for dance companies and window displays for Tiffany and Bonwit Teller.
He met Jasper Johns in 1954. He and the younger artist, both destined to become world famous, became lovers and influenced each other's work. According to the book "Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists", Rauschenberg told biographer Calvin Tomkins that "Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, `I've got a terrific idea for you,' and then I'd have to find one for him."
In recent years he founded the organization Change Inc., which helps struggling artists pay medical bills.
Easel Kill Ya! gathers another 20 points for a solo hit on the abstract artist.
Kuwait's former emir Sheik Saad Al Abdullah Al Sabah, who ruled
this small oil-rich ally of Washington for nine days before being removed for
ill health, has died, state television reported. The station said he died
Tuesday 05/13/08 in Kuwait City. He was 78.
As crown prince, Sheik Saad automatically became ruler when his distant cousin and then emir, Sheik Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah, died 01/15/06. But it became increasingly clear that his poor health would not allow him to carry out his new responsibilities.
Sheik Saad's health started deteriorating after he suffered colon bleeding in 1997. When he appeared on television after the death of Sheik Jaber, he was in a wheelchair and could barely shake hands with visitors.
In a historic vote on 01/23/06, parliament removed Sheik Saad from power because of his health and confirmed the current emir, Sheik Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah, as ruler.
Monty Python's Dying Circus and Cape Cadaver get oiled up and enjoy 18 points each on the former emir.
Alexander (Sandy) Courage, composer of the original Star Trek
theme and an Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated arranger for TV and movies, died
Thursday 05/15/08 at the Sunrise assisted-living facility in Pacific Palisades,
CA. He was 88 and had been in declining health since 2005.
Courage's fanfare for the Starship Enterprise, written
in 1965 for the first of two Star Trek pilots, was heard throughout the three
original seasons of the show and has been reprised in all of the Trek feature
films and several of the TV series, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation
in the 1980s and '90s. Courage's eight-note brass signature for the Enterprise
may be the single best-known fanfare in the world. When told that more people
know it than know Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, Courage – in his
typically self-deprecating fashion – said that must surely be an exaggeration.
He won a 1988 Emmy as principal arranger for the ABC
special Julie Andrews: The Sound of Christmas, and received Oscar nominations
(both shared with Lionel Newman) for his adaptation scores for The Pleasure
Seekers in 1963 and Doctor Dolittle in 1967.
He was born 12/10/19, in Philadelphia, but moved to
New Jersey as a boy and took up both the piano and horn. He received his degree
from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY in 1941, then enlisted in the
Army Air Corps and became a bandleader at various bases in California and
Arizona.
After the war, he began working for CBS Radio,
composing and sometimes conducting for such shows as Hedda Hopper's "This
Is Hollywood", "Screen Guild Theater", "The Adventures of
Sam Spade", "Detective and Yours Truly", "Johnny
Dollar". From 1948 to 1960, he worked as an orchestrator and arranger at
MGM, including work on the classic musicals "Show Boat", "The
Band Wagon", "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers", "Guys and
Dolls", "It's Always Fair Weather", "Funny Face",
"Gigi" and others.
He also scored a handful of films in the late 1950s,
including Arthur Penn's "The Left-Handed Gun" and such drive-in fare
as "Shake, Rattle and Rock" and "Hot Rod Rumble". But
television became Courage's primary outlet for composition, including various
episodes of "M Squad", "Wagon Train" and "The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour" at Universal, "National Velvet" at MGM and
"The Untouchables" at Desilu.
Much of Courage's 1960s output was at 20th
Century-Fox, where Newman assigned Courage to write music for "Voyage to
the Bottom of the Sea", "Daniel Boone", "Lost in
Space", "Land of the Giants" and other series. He wrote a
dramatic theme and over a dozen scores for the Carl Betz legal drama "Judd
for the Defense" in 1967-68. It was his only other TV theme besides Star
Trek.
In addition to his adaptation work on "The
Pleasure Seekers" and "Doctor Dolittle", he contributed
orchestrations to such '60s musicals as "Hello, Dolly!" at Fox and
"My Fair Lady" at Warner Bros. He also orchestrated dramatic and
comedic scores for composing colleagues including Adolph Deutsch ("Some
Like It Hot"), Andre Previn ("Irma La Douce") and Alex North
("The Agony and the Ecstasy").
"Star Trek", which went on the air in 1966,
became his most famous work. In addition to the fanfare, series theme and
scores for two pilot episodes, Courage composed the music for just four other
hours of the sci-fi classic (two in the first season, two more in the third).
He did far more work on "The Waltons", scoring over 100 episodes in
the 1970s and early 1980s, plus four Waltons TV-movies in the '80s and '90s.
He also composed music for "Apple's Way",
"Eight Is Enough" and other series in the '70s and '80s, receiving an
Emmy nomination as composer on a "Medical Center" in 1973 and another
as arranger for ABC's "Liberty Weekend" ceremonies in 1986. He also
served as music coordinator, and appeared onscreen as a conductor, in Luciano
Pavarotti's 1981 film "Yes, Giorgio".
As composing work in TV waned, Courage returned to
orchestration for old friends including John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. For
Williams, Courage orchestrated several scores including "Fiddler on the
Roof", "The Poseidon Adventure", "Hook" and
"Jurassic Park". He also adapted Williams' themes for "Superman
IV: The Quest for Peace", and wrote many orchestral arrangements for the
Boston Pops during Williams' 1980-93 tenure as conductor.
For Goldsmith, Courage orchestrated numerous films
including "Basic Instinct", "First Knight", "The
Mummy", "Air Force One", "Mulan" and, ironically,
"Star Trek: First Contact" and "Star Trek: Insurrection".
Courage also wrote large-scale orchestral arrangements
for several recording projects, including Barbra Streisand's 1985
"Broadway Album," opera star Kathleen Battle's 1991 Christmas album,
and violinist Joshua Bell's 1998 "Gershwin Fantasy" album.
He was among the founders of the Composers and Lyricists
Guild of America, the union that represented composers and songwriters in
Hollywood during the 1950s, '60s and '70s. He was also an award-winning
photographer whose photos appeared in such popular magazines as Life and
Colliers.
More Hemlock Please
compose a fanfare with a 20-point solo hit on the Hollywood composer.
Physicist and Nobel laureate Willis E Lamb Jr, who made a career
of studying the science of matter and energy and their interactions, died
Thursday 05/15/08 of complications arising from a gallstone disorder. He was
94.
The University of Arizona professor emeritus joined the physics department in 1974. He received a 1955 Nobel Prize in physics for his experimental work on the fine structure of the hydrogen atom and for the discovery of a small energy difference, the quantum effect that became known as the Lamb Shift, which revolutionized the quantum theory of matter. His discovery led physicists to rethink the basic concepts behind the application of quantum theory to electromagnetism. His work became one of the foundations of quantum electrodynamics, a key aspect of modern elementary particle physics.
Lamb was born in Los Angeles and, in 1934, earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. Lamb's thesis research during graduate studies was directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who went on to head the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb. Lamb was awarded his doctoral degree in 1938 for his dissertation on the electromagnetic properties of nuclear systems.
Lamb was on the faculty of multiple prestigious universities - Columbia, Stanford, Oxford and Yale - before he joined the UA. In 2000, Lamb was awarded the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. The Medal of Science recognized Lamb's Nobel Prize-winning work as well as his later contributions: his theories of laser radiation and quantum optics and his interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
In addition to his widow, Lamb is survived by a brother, Perry, who lives in Maine. Lamb was preceded in death in 1996 by his first wife, distinguished UA historian Ursula Schaefer Lamb.
Laureate's Lament makes a quantum leap with their first hit of the year worth 20 points on the Nobel physicist.
Robert Mondavi, the pioneering vintner who helped put
California wine country on the map, died at his Napa Valley home Friday
05/16/08. He was 94. Mondavi died peacefully at his home in Yountville, CA.
He was 52 and a winemaking veteran in 1966, when he opened the winery that would help turn the Napa Valley into a world center of the industry. Clashes with a brother that included a fistfight led him to break from the family business to carry out his ambitious plans with borrowed money.
At the time, California was still primarily known for cheap jug wines. But he set out to change that, championing use of cold fermentation, stainless steel tanks and French oak barrels, all commonplace in the industry today. He introduced blind tastings in Napa Valley, putting his wines up against French vintages, a bold move. Always convinced that California wines could compete with the European greats, Mondavi engaged in the first French-American wine venture when he formed a limited partnership with the legendary French vintner Baron Philippe de Rothschild to grow and make the ultra-premium Opus One at Oakville. The venture's first vintage was in 1979.
The success of the Mondavi winery allowed him to donate tens of millions of dollars to charity, but a wine glut and intense competition gradually cost his family control of the business. In 2004, the company accepted a buyout worth $1.3 billion from Fairport, N.Y.-based Constellation Brands.
Mondavi was an enthusiastic ambassador for wine - especially California wine - and traveled the world into his 90s promoting the health, cultural and social benefits of its moderate consumption.
Born in Virginia, MN, Mondavi got an economics degree from Stanford University in the 1930s and went to work at the Charles Krug Winery, which his Italian-born parents had bought after moving to California from Minnesota.
He married his high school sweetheart, Marjorie Declusin, in 1937, and they had three children, Michael, Marcia and Tim.
For 20 years, the winery was a family business. But Robert clashed frequently with his younger brother, Peter, who had a more conservative approach the business. According to Robert Mondavi's autobiography "Harvests of Joy," matters came to a head with a November 1965 fistfight. "When it was all over, there were no apologies and no handshake," wrote Robert Mondavi.
In the late 1970s, Mondavi's first marriage ended; in his autobiography he wrote that his single-minded pursuit of the wine business was partly to blame. In 1980, he married a second time, to Margrit Biever, a native of Switzerland who had worked at the Mondavi winery since the late '60s.
By the mid-1990s, Mondavi had turned over operation of the company to his sons. But like their father and uncle before them, Tim and Michael clashed over management styles. More troubles emerged as a grape glut soured the wine market in 2002 and lower-priced wines in the Mondavi portfolio faced tough competition from cheaper Australian imports and domestic brands like California's Two Buck Chuck. Also a problem were the millions in charitable donations Mondavi and Margrit had pledged, including helping found Copia, The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, in Napa and giving $35 million to the University of California, Davis.
In her 2007 book, "The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty," author Julia Flynn Siler wrote that declining stock prices later left Mondavi in danger of not being able to cover the millions in gifts he and Margrit had promised.
A corporate restructuring in August 2004 boosted the stock price, but undercut the family's control of the company. By time it was bought out, Michael Mondavi, who disagreed with the board strategy, had already left the company, and Tim Mondavi had loosened ties.
Later there was a bittersweet family moment when Robert and Peter Mondavi, aided by members of the younger generation, made wine together for the first time in 40 years. Using a 50-50 split of grapes from Robert Mondavi and Peter Mondavi family vineyards, the brothers made one barrel of a cabernet blend that sold for $401,000 at the 2005 Napa Valley wine auction.
The auction lot was called "Ancora Una Volta," or "Once Again."
Crypt Kickers and Rigger Morty's Pasta Way Café give a toast to their 18 points on the Napa Valley vintner.
George Huntington Hartford II, who died on monday 05/19/08 aged
97, was born into one of the wealthiest families in America and inherited a $90
million fortune at the age of 12, but blew it on a series of quixotic artistic
and commercial ventures and expensive wives.
Born in New York on 04/18/11, he was named George Huntington Hartford after his grandfather, a Maine tea merchant who had founded the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) in 1859. His father, Edward, had little to do with the family business; it was Huntington's uncles, John and George, who built A&P into the world's leading retail grocery business.
Huntington, who became the beneficiary of a $1.5 million annual income on his grandfather's death in 1917, was brought up by English governesses in a fabulous apartment on Fifth Avenue, on a plantation in South Carolina and an estate in Connecticut. His father died in 1922, leaving his shareholdings to his two children, Josephine, who went on to marry into the grandest circles, and Huntington, then under the care of his mother, Henrietta.
Huntington was educated at St Paul's School, a patrician establishment in New Hampshire, where he was ostracised as "new money", and at Harvard. There he studied English Literature, played tennis and squash, and married Mary Lee Epling, a dentist's daughter who divorced him in 1939 after he had fathered a son with a chorus girl. (She would later marry Douglas Fairbanks Jr.)
After graduation Hartford entered the family business, but found it difficult to concentrate on stock lists of pound cake and was fired six months later after playing truant to watch the Harvard-Yale football match.
In 1940 he put up $100,000 towards the founding of a new New York newspaper, PM, for which, fancying himself a writer, he became a reporter. But he soon gained a reputation for missing deadlines – once when he took his yacht to cover a story but returned to find his berth taken by someone else.
On America's entry into the war, Hartford donated his yacht to the US Coast Guard and, in return, was given the command of a small supply ship in the Pacific. He ran it aground twice.
After the war Hartford moved to Los Angeles, where he opened a model agency and, surrounded by celebrities and showgirls, became a fixture at nightclubs. In 1949 he married a cigarette seller and aspiring starlet called Marjorie Steele, whom he cast in Face to Face (1952), a film which received moderate reviews. Encouraged by his new wife to make a name as a patron of the arts, Hartford set up an artists' foundation and, in 1954, converted an old cinema into a theatre where he staged his own adaptation of Jane Eyre with Jan Brooks as Jane and a hopelessly drunk Errol Flynn as Mr Rochester.
The script was panned by critics and Flynn dropped out but, undaunted, Hartford took the show to New York, where it played to empty houses for six weeks. Other ventures at this time included a "handwriting institute" (he even wrote a book on graphology) and an automated parking business in Manhattan which lost $1.8 million.
In 1959 Hartford sold $40 million of his shares in A&P to buy Hog Island, a two-mile strip of farmland 600 yards off Nassau, hoping to develop it into the St Tropez of the Bahamas. He renamed it Paradise Island and built the Ocean Club, a luxury resort with 35 acres of gardens modelled on those at Versailles and featuring a 12th-century French Augustinian monastery originally purchased and dismantled by William Randolph Hearst. At the other end of the island he built himself a palatial home where he played host to a cast of celebrities including Winston Churchill, Aristotle Onassis and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
In 1960 Marjorie had sued him for divorce, winning a settlement which included $1 million trust funds for each of their two children. Two years later he married Diane Brown, a red-haired model who had appeared in Thunderball. She bore him a daughter, Juliet, but they both had affairs (she with the singer Bobby Darin), and they divorced in 1970.
Meanwhile the Ocean Club suffered because of Hartford's failure to obtain a gambling license. Resorts International eventually bought him out for $1 million, leaving him with losses of around $30 million. In the early 1960s he built the Huntington Hartford Museum in Manhattan as a showcase for modern art, but he had decidedly unfashionable tastes, preferring "realistic" works (mainly, oddly enough, by Salvador Dalí) to "vulgar" cubism and abstract expressionism. The gallery opened in 1964 to withering reviews both for its design ("a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops") and contents. The whole venture cost Hartford $7.4 million before he abandoned it.
In 1974 Hartford married Elaine Kay, a 20-year-old beautician from Fort Lauderdale. Within 72 hours of their marriage she walked out after a row but soon returned, bringing several of her women friends with her to share Hartford's 20-room duplex apartment in Manhattan. He began to experiment with drugs, apparently under her influence.
The couple were divorced in 1981 but continued to live together, and Hartford's apartment became the site of violent encounters involving transient visitors, some of whom robbed him of artworks and other possessions. In 1984, after Ms Kay and a friend were charged with tying up Hartford's teenage secretary and shaving her head, the directors of the building voted for eviction.
Little more was heard of Hartford until 2001, when his daughter Juliet found him living alone and covered in bedsores in a squalid rented house in Brooklyn. She placed him in a nursing home, before taking him back to the Bahamas in 2004.
Hartford's illegitimate son committed suicide in 1967. His daughter by his second wife died in 1988 after developing drug problems. He is survived by a son by his second marriage and by the daughter of his third.
"At least I tried to do something artistic with my money," Hartford would say. "What did Paul Getty ever do but make more?"
Fecal Matter inherits 20 points for the solo hit on the supermarket heir.
Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose "Rowan
and Martin's Laugh-In" took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars
of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as
"Sock it to me!" has died. He was 86. Martin, who went on to become
one of television's busiest directors after splitting with Rowan in the late
1970s, died Saturday night 05/24/08 of respiratory complications at a hospital
in Santa Monica "He had had some pretty severe respiratory problems for
many years, and he had pretty much stopped breathing a week ago," a family
spokesman said. Martin was surrounded by family and friends when he died just
after 6 p.m.
"Laugh-In", which debuted in January 1968, was unlike any comedy-variety show before it. Rather than relying on a series of tightly scripted song-and-dance segments, it offered up a steady, almost stream-of-consciousness run of non-sequitur jokes, political satire and madhouse antics from a cast of talented young actors and comedians that also included Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Jo Anne Worley and announcer Gary Owens.
Presiding over it all were Rowan and Martin, the veteran nightclub comics whose standup banter put their own distinct spin on the show.
Like all straight men, Rowan provided the voice of reason, striving to correct his partner's absurdities. Martin, meanwhile, was full of bogus, often risque theories about life, which he appeared to hold with unwavering certainty.
Martin also starred as Lucille Ball's neighbor and love interest in her comeback sitcom "The Lucy Show" and, after Laugh-In's run ended in 1973, went on to direct several television shows, including "Newhart" and "Family Ties". He also appeared on "The Love Boat" and "Diagnosis Murder".
He is survived by his wife, Dolly Read, and sons Cary and Richard. Rowan died in 1987.
Andes Rugby Player Mints, Crypt Kickers and Death March say goodnight to the comedian and get 16 points each.
J.R. Simplot left home in 1923 at age 14 with four gold coins
given to him by his mother. He ended his life as the spud king of America and
one of the nation's richest men. The Idaho farmer, who dominated the state's
business and political landscape for 70 years, died Sunday 05/25/08 at his
Boise home at age 99. Simplot apparently died of natural causes.
His businesses, still family owned, manufacture agriculture, horticulture and turf fertilizers; animal feed and seeds; food products such as fruits, potatoes and other vegetables; and industrial chemicals and irrigation products. He all but invented the first commercially viable frozen french fries in the world.
Simplot and his family were ranked at No. 80 on Forbes magazine's 2006 list of richest Americans, with an estimated wealth of $3.2 billion.
In 1980, at age 71, Simplot took a gamble on the next generation of businessmen, giving Ward and Joe Parkinson $1 million for 40 percent of what would become computer chip maker Micron Technology Inc. Over the years, he pumped in $20 million more to help Micron build its first manufacturing plant and to stay afloat. Micron went on to become a major producer of DRAM memory chips, which are used to store information in personal computers.
Born John Richard Simplot in Dubuque, IA, he was raised with five siblings on a hardscrabble homestead in Declo in south-central Idaho.
In 1923, he left home with four $20 gold coins and paid $1 a day for room and board at Declo's only hotel. As a shrewd young businessman, Simplot bought interest-bearing scrip paid to teachers who also were boarding there for 50 cents on the dollar. He used it for collateral on a bank loan to buy 600 hogs at $1 each. When pork prices jumped the next year, he brought some rare fat hogs to market for a whopping $7,500. That was Simplot's stake for the potato business. He leased land and from an early partner learned to plant certified seed, not cull potatoes as was common then. Idaho's dominance in potatoes grew with the innovation. Simplot bought an early electric potato sorter and by 1940 had bought or built 33 potato warehouses along the rich Snake River plains from Idaho Falls to Vale, OR.
A chance encounter with a Chicago businessman led Simplot into the onion-drying business in Caldwell in 1941. He made $500,000 the first year and soon was supplying much of the dried potatoes and vegetables consumed by U.S. troops during World War II. The headstrong young man then started buying ranches, cattle and timberland. Taking notice of the wartime shortage of fertilizer, he bought phosphate reserves and built a fertilizer production plant at Pocatello.
After the war, his food production business expanded into freezing and canning, developing the product that would become the company's mainstay: the frozen french fry. Simplot struck a deal with McDonald's Corp. founder Ray Kroc, and his fry business grew with Americans' love for fast food.
Late into his life, the former McDonald's board member drove his white Lincoln Town Car with "Mr. Spud" vanity plates to the fast food chain for hashbrowns or french fries several times a week. More recently, he could be seen driving around Boise in a motorized cart.
In 2004, he donated his former home in the Boise Foothills to the state to be used as Idaho's new governor's mansion.
Like many captains of industry, Simplot had scrapes with the law.
In the mid-70s, Simplot was charged with trying to manipulate Maine potato futures. He was barred from commodities trading for six years and paid $50,000 in fines and an undisclosed amount to settle a lawsuit.
In 1977, he and the J.R. Simplot Co. each paid $40,000 in penalties for failing to report income and claiming false deductions.
Not a religious man - "I'm a fact man and if it don't add up, I don't buy it; I don't believe in hocus pocus," he said in a 1999 interview - Simplot credited his longevity to disdain for tobacco and alcohol.
Autopsy Payouts, Dead As a Doornail, Ethnic Cleansing and The Absent And The Dead Have No Friends..Nor Do We feast on 14 points each on the potato magnate.
Sydney Pollack was remembered as a generous, unpretentious
talent by the elite actors he directed in films such as "Out of
Africa", "Tootsie" and "Absence of Malice". Pollack,
diagnosed with cancer about nine months ago, died Monday afternoon 05/26/08,
surrounded by family, at his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. He was
73.
Unlike many other top directors of his era, Pollack was also a film and television actor himself, and he used this unique position to forge a relationship with Hollywood's elite stars and create some of the most successful films of the 1970s and '80s.
In 1970, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", about Depression-era marathon dancers, received nine Oscar nominations, including one for Pollack's direction. He was nominated again for best director for 1982's "Tootsie", starring Dustin Hoffman as a cross-dressing actor and Pollack as the exasperated agent who tells him, "I begged you to get some therapy." As director and producer, he won Academy Awards for the 1986 romantic epic "Out of Africa", starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, which captured seven Oscars in all. Last fall, Pollack played law firm boss Marty Bach opposite George Clooney in "Michael Clayton", which he also co-produced. It received seven Oscar nominations.
Other A-listers Pollack directed include Sally Field and Paul Newman in "Absence of Malice", Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn in "The Interpreter", Robert Mitchum in "The Yakuza", Tom Cruise in "The Firm", and Redford in seven films: "This Property Is Condemned", "Jeremiah Johnson", "Three Days of the Condor", "The Way We Were" with Barbra Streisand, "The Electric Horseman" with Jane Fonda "Out of Africa" and "Havana".
In later years, Pollack, who stood over six feet tall and had a striking presence on screen, devoted more time to acting, appearing in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives", Robert Altman's "The Player", Robert Zemeckis' "Death Becomes Her" and Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut".
On television, Pollack had an occasional recurring role on the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" playing Will's (Eric McCormack) father, and appeared in the "The Sopranos", "Frasier" and "Mad About You". His last screen appearance was in "Made of Honor," a romantic comedy currently in theaters, where he played the oft-married father of star Patrick Dempsey's character.
Pollack first met Redford when they acted in 1962's low-budget "War Hunt", and would go on to play a major role in making Redford a star. "It's easy working with Bob; I don't have to be diplomatic with him," Pollack once told The Associated Press. "I know what he can and cannot do; I know all the colors he has. I've always felt he was a character actor in the body of a leading man."
Pollack produced many independent films with the late Anthony Minghella and the production company Mirage Enterprises. His producing credits include "The Talented Mr. Ripley"; "Cold Mountain"; "Sketches of Frank Gehry", a documentary that was the final film directed by Pollack; and the new HBO film "Recount", about the 2000 presidential election.
Sidney Irwin Pollack was born in Lafayette, IN to first-generation Russian-Americans. In high school in South Bend, he fell in love with theater, a passion that prompted him to forgo college, move to New York and enroll in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. Studying under the renowned Sanford Meisner, Pollack spent several years cutting his teeth in various areas of theater, eventually becoming Meisner's assistant.
After appearing in a handful of Broadway productions in the 1950s, Pollack turned to directing. He began on TV series such as "Naked City" and "The Fugitive", then moved to film. His first full-length feature was "The Slender Thread", about a suicide help line. The film was scored by Quincy Jones. "Sydney Pollack's immense talents as a director were only surpassed by the compassion that he carried in his soul for his fellow man," Jones said.
Pollack said in 2005 that for "Tootsie", Hoffman pushed him into playing the agent role, repeatedly sending him roses with a note reading, "Please be my agent. Love, Dorothy." At that point, Pollack hadn't acted in a movie in 20 years - since "The War Hunt" with Redford. The love soon frayed as Pollack and Hoffman differed over whether the film should lean toward comedy or drama, and the tension spilled into the public arena. But the result was a hit at the box office and received 10 Oscar nominations, with Jessica Lange winning for best supporting actress.
Pollack is survived by his wife, Claire; two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; his brother Bernie; and six grandchildren.
Already Dead, Auditioning For the Choir Invisible, Bury Me Shallow, Dead Can Dance, Death Be Not Proud, Die2K, Goatsucker, GrimLimo, Happiest Epitaphs and Morris the Cat's 9 (+21) Lives produce 5 points each on the actor/director.
Earle Hagen, the Emmy Award-winning television composer who
wrote the theme music for "The Andy Griffith Show", "The Dick
Van Dyke Show", "I Spy" and other classic TV programs, has died.
He was 88. Mr. Hagen, who also composed the jazz standard "Harlem
Nocturne" and was a former big-band trombonist for Tommy Dorsey, Benny
Goodman and Ray Noble, died Monday night 05/27/08 at his home in Rancho Mirage,
CA.
After seven years at 20th Century Fox as an arranger and orchestrator, Mr. Hagen moved into television in 1953. During the next 33 years, he composed music for some 3,000 TV-series episodes, pilots and TV movies and composed the themes for "That Girl", "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.", "The Mod Squad" and "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer".
He also wrote a jazz arrangement of the traditional Irish tune "Londonderry Air", which served as the theme for Danny Thomas' "Make Room for Daddy" situation comedy. The Thomas show, which debuted in 1953, launched Mr. Hagen's longtime professional relationship with director-producer Sheldon Leonard. The happy-go-lucky theme for "The Andy Griffith Show" might be Mr. Hagen's most recognizable tune. It's certainly the most beloved.
In his autobiography, "Memoirs of a Famous Composer - Nobody Ever Heard Of", Mr. Hagen wrote that while sitting at home "wracking my brain for an idea for a theme for the Griffith show, it finally occurred to me that it should be something simple, something you could whistle. With that in mind, it took me about an hour to write the Andy Griffith theme." That night, he and several musicians recorded a demo for the opening of the show, with Mr. Hagen doing the whistling and his 11-year-old son Deane doing the finger-snapping.
During his TV heyday, Mr. Hagen wrote music for up to five weekly shows simultaneously, putting in "16-hour workdays, seven days a week, for 40 weeks a year", he told the online magazine Film Score Monthly in 2001. "In the 12 weeks off between seasons, if anyone mentioned music to me, I would kill," he said.
For "I Spy", the hourlong 1965-68 espionage series starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, Mr. Hagen received three Emmy Award nominations for outstanding achievement in musical composition, and he won in 1968. Unlike all the others, 'I Spy' had a new, clean score for every episode. It was unheard of; it was too expensive, but Sheldon put it in the budget.
Mr. Hagen, who was born 07/09/19, in Chicago, was playing trombone and writing arrangements for the Ray Noble Orchestra in 1939 when he wrote "Harlem Nocturne". The sultry tune was frequently recorded, including by the Charlie Barnet, Glenn Miller and Stan Kenton bands. It also was used as the theme for "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer", starring Stacy Keach as the fedora-wearing, retro private eye.
During World War II, Mr. Hagen served in the Army Air Forces. After the war, he joined 20th Century Fox as an arranger and orchestrator and worked on movies such as "Monkey Business", "Call Me Madam" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes".
Mr. Hagen's wife of 59 years, former big-band singer Elouise "Lou" Sidwell, died in 2002.
He married his second wife Laura in 2005. He is also survived by five children and four grandchildren.
Sneezin' & Coffin is serenaded by a 20-point solo hit on yet another Hollywood composer.
Harvey Korman, the tall, versatile comedian who won four Emmys
for his outrageously funny contributions to "The Carol Burnett Show"
and played a conniving politician to hilarious effect in "Blazing
Saddles", died Thursday 05/29/08. He was 81. Korman died at UCLA Medical
Center after suffering complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic
aneurysm four months ago. He had undergone several major operations.
A natural second banana, Korman gained attention on "The Danny Kaye Show", appearing in skits with the star. He joined the show in its second season in 1964 and continued until it was canceled in 1967. That same year he became a cast member in the first season of "The Carol Burnett Show".
His most memorable film role was as the outlandish Hedley Lamarr (who was endlessly exasperated when people called him Hedy) in Mel Brooks' 1974 Western satire, "Blazing Saddles".
On television, Burnett and Korman developed into the perfect pair with their burlesques of classic movies such as "Gone With the Wind" and soap operas like "As the World Turns" (their version was called "As the Stomach Turns"). Another recurring skit featured them as "Ed and Eunice", a staid married couple who were constantly at odds with the wife's mother (a young Vicki Lawrence in a gray wig). In "Old Folks at Home", they were a combative married couple bedeviled by Lawrence as Burnett's troublesome young sister.
Korman revealed the secret to the long-running show's success in a 2005 interview: "We were an ensemble, and Carol had the most incredible attitude. I've never worked with a star of that magnitude who was willing to give so much away."
After 10 successful seasons, Korman left Burnett's show in 1977 for his own series. Dick Van Dyke took his place, but the chemistry was lacking and the Burnett show was canceled two years later. "The Harvey Korman Show" also failed, as did other series starring the actor.
Brooks tapped Korman's kinetic comic chops often, including roles in "High Anxiety", "The History of the World Part I" and "Dracula: Dead and Loving It." "I gave him tongue twisters because I knew he was the only one who could wrap his mouth around them," Brooks said. "Harvey was such a good solid actor that he could have done Shakespearean drama just as well and easily as he did comedy." Brooks described Korman as a "dazzling" comic talent.
Korman's other films included two "Pink Panther" moves, "Trail of the Pink Panther" in 1982 and "Curse of the Pink Panther" in 1983; "Gypsy," "Huckleberry Finn" (as the King), "Herbie Goes Bananas" and "Bud and Lou" (as legendary straightman Bud Abbott to Buddy Hackett's Lou Costello). In television, Korman guest-starred in dozens of series including "The Donna Reed Show", "Dr. Kildare", "Perry Mason", "The Wild Wild West", "The Muppet Show", "The Love Boat" and "Burke's Law".
Korman and "Carol Burnett" co-star Tim Conway continued working together into their '70s, touring the country with their show "Tim Conway and Harvey Korman: Together Again". They did 120 shows a year, sometimes as many as six or eight in a weekend.
Korman had an operation in late January on a non-cancerous brain tumor and pulled through "with flying colors," Kate Korman said. Less than a day after coming home, he was re-admitted because of the ruptured aneurysm and was given a few hours to live. But he survived for another four months.
Harvey Herschel Korman was born 02/15/27, in Chicago. He left college for service in the U.S. Navy, resuming his studies afterward at the Goodman School of Drama at the Chicago Art Institute. After four years, he decided to try New York. "For the next 13 years I tried to get on Broadway, on off-Broadway, under or beside Broadway," he told a reporter in 1971. He had no luck and had to support himself as a restaurant cashier. Finally, in desperation, he and a friend formed a nightclub comedy act.
"We were fired our first night in a club, between the first and second shows," he recalled.
After returning to Chicago, Korman decided to try Hollywood, reasoning that "at least I'd feel warm and comfortable while I failed."
For three years he sold cars and worked as a doorman at a movie theater. Then he landed the job with Kaye.
In 1960 Korman married Donna Elhart and they had two children, Maria and Christopher. They divorced in 1977. Two more children, Katherine and Laura, were born of his 1982 marriage to Deborah Fritz.
Dead Like Them crack up over the 20-point solo hit on the comedian.
Yves Saint Laurent, one of the most influential and enduring
designers of the 20th century, empowered women by reinventing pants as a sleek,
elegant staple of the female wardrobe. Saint Laurent, 71, died Sunday night
06/01/08 at his Paris home after a yearlong battle with brain cancer.
In his own words, Saint Laurent once said he felt "fashion was not only supposed to make women beautiful, but to reassure them, to give them confidence, to allow them to come to terms with themselves."
Saint Laurent widely was considered the last of a generation that included Christian Dior and Coco Chanel and made Paris the fashion capital of the world, with the Rive Gauche, or Left Bank, as its elegant headquarters. The designer raised the stature of fashion while making it more accessible, it is widely agreed. From the first YSL tuxedo and his trim pantsuits to see-through blouses, safari jackets and glamorous gowns, Saint Laurent created instant classics that remain stylish decades later.
Saint Laurent was born 08/01/36, in Oran, Algeria, where his father worked as a shipping executive. He first emerged as a promising designer at age 17, winning first prize in a contest sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat for a cocktail dress design. A year later, in 1954, he enrolled at the Chambre Syndicale school of haute couture, but student life lasted only three months. He was introduced to Christian Dior, then regarded as the greatest creator of his day, and Dior was so impressed with Saint Laurent's talent that he hired him on the spot. When Dior died suddenly in 1957, Saint Laurent was named head of the House of Dior at age 21.
He opened his own haute couture fashion house with Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent's close friend and business partner for four decades in 1962. The pair later started a chain of Rive Gauche ready-to-wear boutiques.
Saint Laurent's simple navy blue pea coat over white pants, which the designer first showed in 1962, was one of his hallmarks. His "smoking", or tuxedo jacket, of 1966 remade the tux as a high fashion statement for both sexes. It remained the designer's trademark item and was updated yearly until he retired. Also from the 60s came Beatnik chic - a black leather jacket and knit turtleneck with high boots - and sleek pantsuits that underlined Saint Laurent's statement on equality of the sexes. He showed that women could wear "men's clothes", which when tailored to the female form became an emblem of elegant femininity. Some of his revolutionary style was met with resistance. There are famous stories of women wearing Saint Laurent pantsuits who were turned away from hotels and restaurants in London and New York.
Saint Laurent's rising star was eternalized in 1983, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted a show to his work, the first ever to a living designer. He was awarded the Legion d'Honneur in 1985. But bouts of depression marked his career. Berge, who lived with the designer for years, was quoted as saying that Saint Laurent was born with a nervous breakdown.
When Saint Laurent announced his retirement in 2002 at age 65 and the closure of the Paris-based haute couture house, it was mourned in the fashion world as the end of an era. His ready-to-wear label, Rive Gauche, which was sold to Gucci in 1999 for $70 million cash and royalties, still has boutiques around the world.
Saint Laurent had long been rumored to be ill, and Berge said on RTL radio Monday that he had been afflicted with brain cancer for the past year.
After retirement, Saint Laurent spoke of his battles with depression, drugs and loneliness, though he gave no indication that those problems were directly tied to his decision to stop working.
"I've known fear and terrible solitude," he said. "Tranquilizers and drugs, those phony friends. The prison of depression and hospitals. I've emerged from all this, dazzled but sober."
Dead Can Dance, Don't Fear the Reaper, Morris the Cat's 9 (+21) Lives and Tastes Like Chicken all get fitted for 14 points each on the fashion mogul.
Bo Diddley, a founding father of rock 'n' roll whose
distinctive "shave and a haircut, two bits" rhythm and innovative
guitar effects inspired legions of other musicians, died Monday 06/02/08 after
months of ill health. He was 79. Diddley died of heart failure at his home in
Archer, FL. He had suffered a heart attack in August, three months after
suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa. Doctors said the stroke affected his
ability to speak, and he had returned to Florida to continue rehabilitation.
The legendary singer and performer, known for his homemade square guitar, dark glasses and black hat, was an inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, had a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, and received a lifetime achievement award in 1999 at the Grammy Awards. In recent years he also played for the elder President Bush and President Clinton.
The name Bo Diddley came from other youngsters when he was growing up in Chicago, he said in a 1999 interview.
"I don't know where the kids got it, but the kids in grammar school gave me that name," he said, adding that he liked it so it became his stage name. Other times, he gave somewhat differing stories on where he got the name. Some experts believe a possible source for the name is a one-string instrument used in traditional blues music called a diddley bow.
His first single, "Bo Diddley," introduced record buyers in 1955 to his signature rhythm: bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp, often summarized as "shave and a haircut, two bits." The B side, "I'm a Man," with its slightly humorous take on macho pride, also became a rock standard.
The company that issued his early songs was Chess-Checkers records, the storied Chicago-based labels that also recorded Chuck Berry and other stars. Howard Kramer, assistant curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, said in 2006 that Diddley's Chess recordings "stand among the best singular recordings of the 20th century."
Diddley's other major songs included, "Say Man", "You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover", "Shave and a Haircut", "Uncle John", "Who Do You Love?" and "The Mule."
Diddley's influence was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Buddy Holly borrowed the bomp ba-bomp bomp, bomp bomp rhythm for his song "Not Fade Away."
The Rolling Stones' bluesy remake of that Holly song gave them their first chart single in the United States, in 1964. The following year, another British band, the Yardbirds, had a Top 20 hit in the U.S. with their version of "I'm a Man."
Diddley was also one of the pioneers of the electric guitar, adding reverb and tremelo effects. He even rigged some of his guitars himself.
Many other artists, including the Who, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello copied aspects of Diddley's style.
Growing up, Diddley said he had no musical idols, and he wasn't entirely pleased that others drew on his innovations.
Despite his success, Diddley claimed he only received a small portion of the money he made during his career. Partly as a result, he continued to tour and record music until his stroke. Between tours, he made his home near Gainesville in north Florida.
Diddley, like other artists of his generations, was paid a flat fee for his recordings and said he received no royalty payments on record sales. He also said he was never paid for many of his performances.
In the early 1950s, Diddley said, disc jockeys called his type of music, "Jungle Music." It was Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed who is credited with inventing the term "rock 'n' roll." Diddley said Freed was talking about him, when he introduced him, saying, "Here is a man with an original sound, who is going to rock and roll you right out of your seat."
Diddley won attention from a new generation in 1989 when he took part in the "Bo Knows" ad campaign for Nike, built around football and baseball star Bo Jackson. Commenting on Jackson's guitar skills, Diddley says to him, "Bo, you don't know diddly."
Born as Ellas Bates on 12/30/28, in McComb, MS, Diddley was later adopted by his mother's cousin and took on the name Ellis McDaniel, which his wife always called him. When he was 5, his family moved to Chicago, where he learned the violin at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. He learned guitar at 10 and entertained passers-by on street corners. By his early teens, Diddley was playing Chicago's Maxwell Street.
"I came out of school and made something out of myself. I am known all over the globe, all over the world. There are guys who have done a lot of things that don't have the same impact that I had," he said.
BairBones, Bud Dwyer's Brains, Dead Martha, Don't Fear the Reaper, Mangled Baby Ducks, Monty Python's Dying Circus, Otis' Cirrhosis from Rafe Hollister's Still, Skeleton In Their Closet, The Yips, Van Owens Body and When the Music's Over all tune up with 5 points each on legendary guitarist.
Actor-filmmaker Mel Ferrer, the onetime husband of Audrey
Hepburn who co-starred with the screen icon in "War and Peace",
directed her in "Green Mansions" and produced her film "Wait
Until Dark", has died at age 90. Ferrer, who also appeared with Hepburn on
Broadway for her Tony Award-winning turn in "Ondine," died in his
sleep on Monday 06/02/08 surrounded by relatives and friends at his family's
ranch in Carpenteria, CA, near Santa Barbara.
The lanky, gaunt Ferrer first appeared on Broadway as a chorus dancer in 1938. After suffering a bout of polio, he worked behind the scenes in radio, TV and film before making his big-screen acting debut in the 1949 drama "Lost Boundaries" playing a fair-skinned black doctor passing as white. Delving as it did into the sensitive subject of post-war American race relations, it was a risky role that "had a huge impact on him and his commitment to civil rights," Ferrer's son, Mark, recalled of his father.
But he is best remembered for his role as the lame puppeteer in the 1953 musical "Lili" with Leslie Caron, the same year Hepburn made her big-screen breakthrough opposite Ferrer's friend Gregory Peck in "Roman Holiday", which earned her a best actress Oscar. Ferrer and Hepburn married in 1954 and appeared together that year in the Broadway production of "Ondine", for which she won a Tony as best actress for playing the water sprite just weeks after receiving her Academy Award. They also co-starred in the 1956 movie adaptation of the Leo Tolstoy novel "War and Peace" - she as Natasha Rostov and he as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. So intent was Hepburn on remaining near her husband that shooting of her Paris scenes in "Funny Face" were timed to coincide with Ferrer's filming of the French movie "Elena et les hommes," in which he co-starred with Ingrid Bergman.
Although he appeared in over 100 films and made-for-TV movies, Ferrer viewed himself less as a screen actor than as a creative talent behind the camera. As a filmmaker, Ferrer directed Claudette Colbert in the 1950 mystery "The Secret Fury" and Hepburn in the 1959 romantic adventure "Green Mansions", set in the jungles of Venezuela.
But the couple enjoyed a more successful collaboration in the 1967 thriller "Wait Until Dark", which he produced starring Hepburn as a blind woman pursued by killers out to silence her as a potential witness. That role earned Hepburn her fifth and final Oscar nomination.
Their marriage - the first of five for Ferrer (he was married twice to Frances Gunby Pilchard) - ended the next year. Their only child, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, 47, is a filmmaker who directed the 2001 documentary "Racehoss."
Ferrer suffered a heart attack following their divorce, and Hepburn largely retired from Hollywood. She died of cancer in 1993.
Born in New Jersey, the son of a surgeon and a prominent New York socialite, Ferrer dropped out of Princeton University to work as an actor in summer stock, beginning a lifelong attachment to live theater.
With fellow actors Peck and Dorothy McGuire, he co-founded the La Jolla Playhouse in 1947, which is still running. His sister was the famed cardiologist Dr. M. Irene Ferrer, who helped refine the cardiac catheter and electrocardiogram.
Carrion Luggage, Crypt Kickers, Ghost of a Chance and Prop 'Em Up Beside the Jukebox perform a 4-way hit worth 14 points each on the actor/director/producer.
Hungarian-born historian, writer and journalist Ferenc Fejto
died at the age of 98 in Paris on Monday 06/02/08. Fejto, a respected expert of
Eastern Europe, died of a heart attack in a hospital near Notre Dame he was
taken to with a pulmonary embolism a week ago.
Fejto was born in Nagykanizsa, SW Hungary, on 08/31/09. A committed anti-Nazi, Fejto was sentenced to prison in 1932, and spent nearly a year in custody. After he was sentenced again in 1938, he fled the country and settled in France. In 1955 he was granted French citizenship and worked for the French news agency AFP as an expert on the Eastern Bloc. He has been the Paris correspondent of the left leaning Népszava newspaper, but he also contributed to several other titles, making him an active participant of Hungarian public life, even from abroad.
His book on the 1956 revolution was published with a foreword by Jean Paul Sartre. He was the director of the CEE and Soviet Union department of the University of Political Sciences in Paris between 1972 and 1982. He first returned to Hungary after his exile to attend the reburial of Imre Nagy (1896-1958), the martyred prime minister of the 1956 Hungarian anti-Soviet revolution in 1989. He visited home afterwards on a regular basis.
He owned the French Legion of Honour as well as numerous international and Hungarian decorations.
Old As the Hills author a 20-point solo hit on the writer/historian.
Jim McKay elegantly covered competitions from badminton to
barrel jumping. Yet he may best be remembered for that grim day at the Munich
Olympics when he broke the news with three simple words: "They're all
gone." The groundbreaking sportscaster died Saturday 06/07/08 of natural
causes at his farm in Monkton, MD. He was 86.
McKay was the one who spanned the globe to bring television viewers the constant variety of sports on ABC's influential "Wide World of Sports", where he told of "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat."
A far different kind of agony awaited in 1972 when word came down in Munich that Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes. McKay was summoned from a day off, hurriedly putting clothes over a bathing suit to anchor ABC's coverage of the drama as the games stood still. The commando raid to free the hostages ended awfully. McKay told the world. Later, at the closing ceremony, he read a poem by A.E. Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young."
It was "Wide World of Sports" that built ABC Sports into a powerhouse after its debut in 1961. The age before ESPN and a constant video loop of highlights was simpler then, and viewers tuned in to see what new kind of competition McKay could find. ABC estimated McKay traveled 4 1/2 million miles on assignment for "Wide World," covering 40 countries.
When he moved from NBC to ABC Sports, pioneering television executive Roone Arledge specifically sought out McKay.
A veteran of the U.S. Navy in World War II, James McManus was a newspaper reporter who transferred to television when The (Baltimore) Sun started its own station. He was the first on-air broadcaster seen in Baltimore, and hosted a three-hour weekday show, "The Sports Parade". He moved to New York to do a similar show there dubbed "The Real McKay" by a CBS executive. McManus changed his professional name accordingly.
McKay - understated, dignified and with a clear eye for detail - covered 12 Olympics. His last was in 2002 at Salt Lake City for NBC after he received special permission to get out of his lifetime contract with ABC Sports.
McKay was a minority owner of the Baltimore Orioles.
In addition to McManus, McKay's survivors include his wife, Margaret, and his daughter, Mary. Margaret met McKay when they were reporters at The Sun, and they would have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in October.
Death March feels the thrill of victory with a 20-point solo hit on the legendary sportscaster.
Tyrone Jones, a linebacker who
helped the Winnipeg Blue Bombers capture two Grey Cup titles during his
eight-year tenure with the CFL club, has died. He was 46. Jones, who starred at
Southern University, died in his native Georgia on Tuesday morning 06/10/08. He
was diagnosed with brain cancer in August 2005.
"This is a very sad day, however we need to
remember and celebrate the person of Tyrone Jones; the player of Tyrone Jones
and the human being that was Tyrone Jones," said Bombers president Lyle
Bauer, a former teammate of Jones. "He made a huge, huge impact on this
football team and this league."
Jones joined the Bombers in 1983 and spent eight
seasons with the club. He also spent time with the Saskatchewan Roughriders and
B.C. Lions, and tried out for the Phoenix Cardinals in 1988.
He was a four-time CFL All-Star and still holds the
Winnipeg career sack record with 98. Jones was the 1984 Grey Cup MVP and in
1985 was named the CFL's top defensive player.
Jones is survived by three sons.
Already Dead, BairBones, Die2K, Formaldehyde Enema,
Forrest Tucker's Ghost, Life'll Kill Ya, Memoriam Montage and Walking Toward the Light all pick up two
touchdowns (6 points for 8-way hit, 8 for Under 55) on the CFL star.
Samuel L Evans, a leader of Philadelphia's political, civil
rights and entertainment spheres for about 70 years, has died. He was 105.
Evans died Friday 06/13/08.
Evans founded anti-violence and youth mentoring programs, brought world-class musicians to the Academy of Music and organized Philadelphia's 43,000-member contingent to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s historic march on Washington.
Though never elected to public office, he accumulated power and influence by adroitly manipulating the political process through generations of city leaders. Evans' status among fellow black civic leaders in Philadelphia earned him the nickname "Godfather".
Evans was jailed briefly in the 1930s for picketing North Philadelphia stores that refused to hire blacks and protesting Nazi activism in his community.
He held sway in political circles through the crowded 1999 election for mayor, when several candidates sought the cachet that the name Sam Evans could still bring to a campaign.
Goatsucker
marches to the beat of a 20-point solo hit.
Cyd Charisse, who thrilled generations of moviegoers with her
dancing in such classic films as "Singin' in the Rain", has died. She
was 86 and passed away Tuesday 06/17/08 after suffering a heart attack in Los
Angeles.
Born Tula Ellice Finklea, the Texas native studied classical ballet from a young age, touring with the legendary Ballets Russes starting at age 14. Later, having taken on the stage name Cyd Charisse (a combination of her childhood nickname and the surname of her first husband), she rose to fame dancing in MGM musicals opposite Fred Astaire (Ziegfeld Follies, The Band Wagon, Silk Stockings) and Gene Kelly (Singin' in the Rain, Brigadoon, It's Always Fair Weather). Though just 5 feet, 6 inches tall, Charisse became known for her long legs; the Guinness Book of World Records reportedly once listed her as having the world's most valuable legs, due to a $5 million insurance policy taken out on them. As Astaire said, ''She wasn't a tap dancer, she's just beautiful, trained, very strong in whatever we did. When we were dancing, we didn't know what time it was.''
Charisse also forged a popular partnership with her second husband, singer Tony Martin, with whom she performed song-and-dance acts in nightclubs and on television. In later years, she appeared in exercise videos and on Broadway, where she debuted in 1992, at age 71, in the musical "Grand Hotel". In 2006, she received the National Medal of Arts and Humanities, the highest U.S. honor afforded to people in the arts.
Prop 'Em Up Beside the Jukebox sashay up the charts with a 20-point solo hit on the leggy dancer/actress.
Classic French filmmaker Jean Delannoy, who adapted novels by
Victor Hugo and Andre Gide and won the Cannes Film Festival's top prize in
1946, has died at age 100. Delannoy died Wednesday 06/18/08 at his home in
Guainville, southwest of Paris, the local city hall said, without providing the
cause of death.
Many of Delannoy's films, starring actors including Jean Gabin, Jean Marais and Michele Morgan, were French box office successes in the 1940s and 1950s. But Delannoy's classic style went out of fashion in the 1960s, when he was derided by the more avant-garde New Wave filmmakers, including Francois Truffaut. The New Wave dubbed his movies "le cinema de papa".
French President Nicolas Sarkozy praised Delannoy for "devoting his life, with success, to his passion for art. More than just a great artist, he was a man of great intelligence, alert, pertinent and faithful in friendship," Sarkozy said in a statement.
Culture Minister Christine Albanel said Delannoy represented the "pure classic French style: a mix of refinement and depth inherited from his long companionship with literature."
Working with a script by Jean Cocteau, Delannoy revisited the Tristan and Isolde legend in 1943's "L'Eternel Retour" (Eternal Return.)
His 1946 film "La Symphonie Pastorale", adapted from a Gide novel, won Cannes' top prize. The film told the story of a blind orphan who falls in love with a married pastor.
Another of his films was "Notre Dame de Paris" (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), an adaptation of Hugo's novel starring Gina Lollobrigida and Anthony Quinn.
The Famous Final Scene II make the cut with another 20-point solo hit on the French film maker.
Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his
routines about drugs, dirty words and the demise of humanity, died of heart
failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday 06/22/08. He was 71. Carlin,
who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John's
Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being
admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains.
Known for his edgy, provocative material developed over 50 years, the bald, bearded Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television". A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1978 case, Federal Communications Commission vs. Pacifica Foundation, the top U.S. court ruled that the words cited in Carlin's routine were indecent, and that the government's broadcast regulator could ban them from being aired at times when children might be listening.
The Grammy-winning Carlin remained an active presence on the comedy circuit. Carlin was scheduled to receive the John F. Kennedy Center's prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in November and his publicist said Carlin performed in Las Vegas this month.
His comedic sensibility revolved around a central theme: humanity is a cursed, doomed species. "I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas," he told Reuters in a 2001 interview. Carlin told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a "heavenly CNN".
"The world is a big theater-in-the round as far as I'm concerned, and I'd love to watch it spin itself into oblivion," he said. "Tune in and watch the human adventure."
Carlin wrote three best-selling books, won four Grammy Awards, recorded 22 comedy albums, headlined 14 HBO television specials, and hosted hundreds of variety shows. One was the first episode of "Saturday Night Live" in 1975, when he was high on cocaine.
Drug addiction plagued him for much of his life, beginning with marijuana experimentation as a teen, graduating to cocaine in the 1970s, and then to prescription painkillers and wine. During the cocaine years, Carlin ignored his finances and ended up owing about $3 million in back taxes. In 2004, he entered a Los Angeles rehab clinic for his alcohol and Vicodin abuse.
George Dennis Carlin was born on 05/12/37, in New York City, where he was raised with an older brother by their single mother. He fondly recalled that the nuns at his school tolerated his early comedic inclinations.
After a brief, troubled stint in the U.S. Air Force, he started honing his comic act, developing such characters as Al Sleet, a "hippie-dippie weatherman."
Carlin told Playboy that his sensibilities developed in the 1950s, "when comedy stopped being safe ... (and) became about saying no to authority." He cited such influences as Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory and Bob Newhart.
He also dabbled in movies and television, recently voicing a hippie Volkswagen bus named Fillmore in the Pixar cartoon "Cars."
Carlin is survived by his second wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; and brother Patrick. His first wife, Brenda, died of cancer in 1997. News of his death was first reported by the television show "Entertainment Tonight."
Mr. Carlin leaves his wife, Sally Wade, and daughter Kelly Carlin McCall.
Flatliners yell out 7 words you can’t say on TV, because the comedian was on their Taxi Squad, yielding only 5 points.
Dody Goodman, the delightfully daffy comedian known for her
television appearances on Jack Paar’s late-night talk show and as the mother on
the soap-opera parody “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” has died at 93. Goodman
died Sunday 06/22/08 at Englewood (NJ) Hospital and Medical Center. The actress
had been ill for some time and had lived in the Actors Fund Home in Englewood
since October.
Goodman, with her pixyish appearance and Southern-tinged, quavery voice, had an eclectic show-business career. She moved easily from stage to television to movies, where she appeared in such popular films as “Grease” and “Grease 2,” playing Blanche, the principal’s assistant, and in “Splash”.
It was on “The Tonight Show” when Paar was the late night TV program’s second host in the late 1950s that Goodman first received national attention. Her quirky, off-kilter remarks inevitably got laughs and endeared audiences. “I was just thrown into the talking,” Goodman said in a 1994 interview. “I had no idea how to do that. In fact, they just called me up and asked me if I wanted to be on ’The Jack Paar Show.’ I didn’t know who Jack Paar was. They said, ’We just want you to sit and talk.“’
After a falling out with Paar, other chat shows took up the slack, including “The Merv Griffin Show” and “Girl Talk.” And there were roles on TV series, too, most notably her appearances as Martha Shumway (Louise Lasser’s mother) on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” starting in 1976, and guest shots on such shows as “Diff’rent Strokes”, “St. Elsewhere” and “Murder, She Wrote”.
In later years, Goodman was a regular in “Nunsense” and its various sequels, appearing off-Broadway and on tour in Dan Goggin’s comic musical celebration of the Little Sisters of Hoboken. She started out playing Sister Mary Amnesia, later graduating to the role of Mother Superior.
The actress was born Dolores Goodman on 10/28/14, in Columbus, OH, where her father ran a small cigar factory. She arrived in New York in the late 1930s to study dance at the School of American Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, and later graduated to Broadway musicals.
The actress performed regularly on stage in the 1940s and early ’50s as a chorus member in such musicals as “Something for the Boys”, “One Touch of Venus”, “Laffing Room Only”, “Miss Liberty”, “Call Me Madam”, “My Darlin’ Aida” and “Wonderful Town” in which she originated the role of Violet, the streetwalker.
It was the early to mid-’50s, when small, topical nightclub revues flourished. Goodman, a natural comedian, thrived in them. She performed in shows by Ben Bagley and Julius Monk, and in Jerry Herman’s first effort, a revue called “Parade”.
In more recent times, she appeared on David Letterman’s late-night talk show. “He understands my sense of humor. I will do a dumb thing for fun. That’s how I got the reputation for being dopey and dumb. I don’t like dumb jokes but I will do dumb things for a laugh,” she said.
Goodman, who never married, is survived by seven nieces and nephews, 11 great nieces and nephews and 15 great-great nieces and nephews.
Ghost of a Chance get a chuckle over their 20-point solo hit on the actress/comedienne.
Aviation icon and Poughkeepsie resident John McDonald Miller was
pronounced dead Monday 06/23/08 at Vassar Brothers Medical Center. He was 102.
Miller's daughter, Trish Taylor, said Miller died from natural causes after spending two nights at the hospital.
"He was aware that he wasn't what he used to be and it really annoyed him," Taylor said. "He had a health fetish and he always ate right. He never took prescription medication until the very end."
Miller, who began flying when he was 18, was an active participant in this country's aviation history. He and Amelia Earhart were acquaintances and he witnessed Charles Lindbergh take off for his history-making, nonstop New York to Paris flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. He barnstormed in the 1920s, set cross-country records that stood for 72 years, carried mail and flew airshows with an autogiro in the 30's, and spent a career as an air transport pilot from the 40's to the 60's, logging more than 39,000 flying hours. He has published numerous articles and one book "Flying Stories: A Chronicle of Aviation History from Jennys to Jets by the Pilot Who Flew Through It All" about his exploits in the air.
Three of the airplanes Miller has flown are exhibited at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC; and he was the first to land an aircraft on the roof of a building - an autogiro, the precursor of the helicopter. Miller was a test pilot during World War II and retired in 1965 as an Eastern Airlines pilot.
Taylor said Miller made his last flight about two years ago. She said Miller's last words were made to his nephew.
"He said 'I guess my flying days are over'," Taylor said.
Century Mark does the loop-de-loop after landing the aviation pioneer for 20 points.
Professor Leonid Hurwicz, who died on Tuesday 06/24/08 aged
90, shared last year's Nobel Prize for Economics, with Eric Maskin and Roger
Myerson, for his work on mechanism design theory, a branch of economics which
aims to establish rules for arranging economic transactions so that, when
everyone behaves in a self-interested manner, the result is one which leaves
everybody satisfied.
Although the mathematics behind mechanism design theory is complex, the basic principles will be familiar to any parent who has had to deal with two siblings squabbling over how to divide a cake. The answer, of course, is that one child cuts and the second gets to choose. The second child will choose the larger half, which gives the first the incentive to cut the cake as equitably as possible. The first-cut, second-choose solution is a simple example of a mechanism designed to achieve the fairest solution for all concerned – and avoid tantrums.
Mechanism design, initiated by Hurwicz and further developed by Maskin and Myerson, uses similar principles to arrange economic incentives within institutions where the "invisible hand" of the market alone will not suffice – from utility regulation to contracting out of government services, and from structuring the pay and incentives of company executives to designing insurance schemes which provide the best coverage without inviting misuse.
Hurwicz took up economics in the 1940s and 1950s, a period when debate was raging about the relative merits of central planning and the market mechanism. He argued that at the centre of the failure of the central planning model was a lack of incentive for people to share their information with governments truthfully.
Moreover, although markets were less afflicted by such incentive problems, they were by no means immune from the problem of "asymmetric information". When, for example, one person wishes to buy an item, and another is happy to sell it, both may have an incentive to lie about the true price they would be happy to trade at. As a result, trades that ought to take place often do not.
Hurwicz's most important argument, set out in two seminal articles in 1972 and 1973, was that the way to get to the most efficient and satisfactory economic outcome in any system is to design mechanisms in which everybody does best for themselves by sharing truthfully whatever private information they have – an idea called "incentive compatability".
In the 1970s mechanism design was taken to new levels of mathematical sophistication and complexity thanks to the boom in computing power and game theory.
It was subsequently employed on tasks ranging from devising better ways of paying defence contractors to how to auction a radio spectrum. In the latter case the theory was that the highest bidder, having invested much in a particular bandwidth, will have an incentive to provide a first-class service.
Hurwicz's work also had a major effect on development economics, shifting the focus away from governments in solving the problems of poor countries to a focus on the rule of law, property rights and the provision of incentives to farmers and small businessmen to act in ways that further the social interest.
Leonid Hurwicz was born in Moscow on 08/21/17, just two months before the October Revolution, to Jewish parents who had lived in Congress Poland (the part of Poland then within the Russian Empire), but had been displaced during the First World War. In 1919, fearing persecution by the Bolsheviks, the family fled back to (now independent) Poland in a horse-drawn wagon and settled in Warsaw, where Leonid took a Law degree at Warsaw University in 1938.
The legal education had been his father's idea and, alongside his studies, the young Hurwicz indulged his real interests by studying Physics and entering the Warsaw conservatory as a piano student. Then, during a second-year course in Economics for his Law degree, he discovered a new passion; and after taking his degree, he moved to England to study at the London School of Economics.
His English was rudimentary, and the classes he understood best were taught by the Hungarian economist Nicholas Kaldor. "He had a worse accent than I did," Hurwicz recalled, "but I could understand it, so I took all the courses he was teaching."
In 1939 he moved to Geneva, where he enrolled at the Graduate Institute of International Studies and attended seminars given by the economist Ludwig von Mises. Meanwhile, his parents and a brother, who had fled eastwards in front of the invading Germans, were arrested and interned in Soviet labour camps. In 1940 Hurwicz moved to Portugal, and finally emigrated to the United States, where the rest of his family later joined him. He became a research assistant to the economist Paul Samuelson, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1970, and to Oskar Lange at Chicago University.
After America's entry into the war, he became a faculty member of the Institute of Meteorology at Chicago and taught statistics in the university department of economics. He also worked for the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, which sought to create mathematical models of the economy. In 1951 Hurwicz was recruited by the economist Walter Heller as professor of economics and mathematics in the School of Business Administration at the University of Minnesota. He became chairman of the university's statistics department in 1961 and Regents' Professor of Economics in 1969.
He spent most of the rest of his career at Minnesota, interspersed with studies and teaching elsewhere in the United States and Asia, and was appointed Curtis L Carlson Professor of Economics in 1989. Although he retired from full-time teaching in 1988, he continued to teach graduate students until 2006.
Hurwicz served on the United Nations Economic Commission in 1948, and on the United States National Research Council in 1954. A man of catholic interests (he was knowledgable on such diverse matters as the dialects of Tamil, archaeology, biochemistry and music), he also served as a member of the National Science Foundation Commission on Weather Modification, established under Lyndon B Johnson to research ways of modifying the climate to benefit mankind.
A lifelong Democrat, Hurwicz was a pledged delegate from Minnesota for Senator Eugene McCarthy at the 1968 Party Convention and served as a member of the Democratic Party Platform Committee. Among other things he used his "mechanism design" expertise to help design the "walking subcaucus" method of allocating delegates among competing groups, which is still a feature of Democratic caucus meetings. In February this year he attended his own precinct caucus at the age of 90.
Hurwicz won many honours and prizes, most notably the National Medal of Science, presented to him by President George Bush in 1990, though it seemed that the Nobel Prize would elude him. In the 1950s he worked on non-linear programming with Kenneth Arrow, who in 1972 became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Economics prize. He was also the graduate adviser to Daniel McFadden, who received the prize in 2000.
By last year Hurwicz had more or less given up hope. "There were times when other people said I was on the short list, but as time passed and nothing happened I didn't expect the recognition would come because people who were familiar with my work were slowly dying off," he said. When informed last October that he had become the oldest recipient of the award, Hurwicz said: "I hope that others who deserve it also got it."
Leonid Hurwicz married, in 1944, Evelyn Jensen, who survives him with their two sons and two daughters. "The hardest part of marriage," Hurwicz said on his wedding anniversary last year, "is the first 63 years."
In The Deathroom starts adding up the points with yet another 20-point solo hit on the Economics Laureate.
Clay Felker, who revolutionized the magazine genre as founding
editor of New York, bringing readers a smart, sassy mix of gossip and news that
was replicated relentlessly across the country, died Tuesday 07/01/08. He was
82. Felker died with his wife, writer Gail Sheehy, at his side at their New
York City home after a battle with throat cancer, the magazine said.
Felker's New York became indispensable in the 1960s and '70s for those craving the latest on the city's social scene, inside knowledge of its business and politics, and consumer tips from its endless "best of" lists.
When publishing titan Rupert Murdoch forced Felker and co-founder Milton Glaser out in a hostile takeover in 1977, New York's staff walked out in solidarity with their departing editors, leaving an incomplete issue three days before it was due on newsstands.
Felker published, edited and wrote for dozens of publications including Life, Time, Esquire, the Village Voice, Adweek, Daily News Today, Manhattan Inc. and U.S. News and World Report.
Felker was born in Webster Groves, MO and graduated in 1951 from Duke University, where he edited the student newspaper. His first journalism job out of college was as a sports writer at Life magazine, where he got the scoop on a Brooklyn Dodgers scouting report of the New York Yankees that highlighted Joe DiMaggio's ailing arm.
New York magazine began as a Sunday magazine supplement in the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. In 1968, Felker and Glaser molded it into a standalone weekly glossy. Felker bought the Village Voice in 1974 and created New West magazine a westernized version of his original creation, based in California. Both publications met the same fate as New York magazine, landing in the hands of Murdoch.
After reluctantly leaving his magazine, Felker served as editor and publisher of Esquire from 1978-1981, but none of his later publications had as much impact as New York.
Die2K, I Am Your Flesh, Morris the Cat's 9 (+21) Lives, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop, Walking Toward the Light and How Much For Those Stem Cells? all get news of their 10 points each on the magazine magnate.
Larry Harmon, who turned the character Bozo the Clown into a
show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died
Thursday 07/03/08 of congestive heart failure. He was 83.
Although not the original Bozo, Harmon portrayed the popular clown in countless appearances and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly dozens of television stations around the country. The stations in turn hired actors to be their local Bozos. "You might say, in a way, I was cloning BTC (Bozo the Clown) before anybody else out there got around to cloning DNA," Harmon told the AP in a 1996 interview. "Bozo is a combination of the wonderful wisdom of the adult and the childlike ways in all of us," Harmon said.
Pinto Colvig, who also provided the voice for Walt Disney's Goofy, originated Bozo the Clown when Capitol Records introduced a series of children's records in 1946. Harmon would later meet his alter ego while answering a casting call to make personal appearances as a clown to promote the records. He got that job and eventually bought the rights to Bozo. Along the way, he embellished Bozo's distinctive look: the orange-tufted hair, the bulbous nose, the outlandish red, white and blue costume. "I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet, (people) would never be able to forget those footprints," he said.
The business - combining animation, licensing of the character, and personal appearances - made millions, as Harmon trained more than 200 Bozos over the years to represent him in local markets. "I'm looking for that sparkle in the eyes, that emotion, feeling, directness, warmth. That is so important," he said of his criteria for becoming a Bozo.
The Chicago version of Bozo ran on WGN-TV in Chicago for 40 years and was seen in many other cities after cable television transformed WGN into a superstation. Bozo - portrayed in Chicago for many years by Bob Bell - was so popular that the waiting list for tickets to a TV show eventually stretched to a decade, prompting the station to stop taking reservations for 10 years. On the day in 1990 when WGN started taking reservations again, it took just five hours to book the show for five more years. The phone company reported more than 27 million phone call attempts had been made.
By the time the show bowed out in Chicago, in 2001, it was the last locally produced version. Harmon said at the time that he hoped to develop a new cable or network show, as well as a Bozo feature film.
He became caught up in a minor controversy in 2004 when the International Clown Hall of Fame in Milwaukee took down a plaque honoring him as Bozo and formally endorsed Colvig for creating the role. Harmon denied ever misrepresenting Bozo's history. He said he was claiming credit only for what he added to the character - "What I sound like, what I look like, what I walk like" - and what he did to popularize Bozo. "Isn't it a shame the credit that was given to me for the work I have done, they arbitrarily take it down, like I didn't do anything for the last 52 years," he told the AP at the time. Harmon protected Bozo's reputation with a vengeance, while embracing those who poked good-natured fun at the clown.
As Bozo's influence spread through popular culture, his very name became a synonym for clownish behavior.
On New Year's Day 1996, Harmon dressed up as Bozo for the first time in 10 years, appearing in the Rose Parade in Pasadena. The crowd reaction, he recalled, "was deafening." "They kept yelling, `Bozo, Bozo, love you, love you.' I shed more crocodile tears for five miles in four hours than I realized I had," he said. "I still get goose bumps."
Born in Toledo, OH, Harmon became interested in theater while studying at the University of Southern California.
"Bozo is a star, an entertainer, bigger than life," Harmon once said. "People see him as Mr. Bozo, somebody you can relate to, touch and laugh with."
The Famous Final Scene II gets a laugh after realizing no one else picked the clown, giving them a 20-point solo hit.
Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who
built a career along the fault lines of racial politics and battled liberals,
Communists and the occasional fellow Republican during 30 conservative years in
Congress, died on the Friday 07/04/08. He was 86. Helms died at 1:15 am in
Raleigh of natural causes.
Helms, who first became known to North Carolina voters
as a newspaper and television commentator, won election to the Senate in 1972
and decided not to run for a sixth term in 2002.
“Compromise, hell! ... If freedom is right and tyranny
is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll
of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?” Helms wrote in a 1959 editorial
that foretold his political style.
As he aged, Helms was slowed by a variety of
illnesses, including a bone disorder, prostate cancer and heart problems, and
he made his way through the Capitol on a motorized scooter as his career neared
an end. In April 2006, his family announced that he had been moved into a
convalescent center after being diagnosed with vascular dementia, in which
repeated minor strokes damage the brain. Helms' public appearances had dwindled
as his health deteriorated. When his memoirs were published in August 2005, he
appeared at a Raleigh book store to sign copies but did not make a speech.
Helms served as chairman of the Agriculture Committee
and Foreign Relations Committees over the years at times when the GOP held the
Senate majority, using his posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and
other farmers and place his stamp on foreign policy.
His opposition to Communism defined his foreign policy
views. He took a dim view of many arms control treaties, opposed Fidel Castro
at every turn, and supported the contras in Nicaragua as well as the right-wing
government of El Salvador. He opposed the Panama Canal treaties that President
Carter pushed through a reluctant Senate in 1977.
Early on, his habit of blocking nominations and
legislation won him a nickname of “Senator No.” He delighted in forcing
roll-call votes that required Democrats to take politically difficult votes on
federal funding for art he deemed pornographic, school busing, flag-burning and
other cultural issues.
In 1993, when then-President Clinton sought
confirmation for an openly homosexual assistant secretary at the Department of
Housing and Urban Development, Helms registered his disgust. “I'm not going to
put a lesbian in a position like that,” he said in a newspaper interview at the
time. “If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”
After Democrats killed the appointment of U.S.
District Judge Terrence Boyle, a former Helms aide, to a federal appeals court
post in 1991, Helms blocked all of Clinton's judicial nominations from North
Carolina for eight years. Helms occasionally opted for compromise in later
years in the Senate, working with Democrats on legislation to restructure the
foreign policy bureaucracy and pay back debts to the United Nations, an
organization be disdained for most of his career. And he softened his views on
AIDS after years of clashes with gay activists, advocating greater federal
funding to fight the disease in Africa and elsewhere overseas.
But in his memoirs, Helms made clear that his opinions
on other issues had hardly moderated since he left office. He likened abortion
to the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 terror attacks. “I will never be silent about
the death of those who cannot speak for themselves,” he wrote in “Here's Where
I Stand.”
Helms never lost a race for the Senate, but he never
won one by much, either, a reflection of his divisive political profile in his
native state. He knew it, too. “Well, there is no joy in Mudville tonight. The
mighty ultraliberal establishment, and the liberal politicians and editors and
commentators and columnists have struck out again,” he said in 1990 after
winning his fourth term. He won the 1972 election after switching parties, and
defeated then-Gov. Jim Hunt in an epic battle in 1984 in what was then the
costliest Senate race on record.
He defeated black former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt
in 1990 and 1996 in racially tinged campaigns. In the first race, a Helms
commercial showed a white fist crumbling up a job application, these words
underneath: “You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority.”
Helms also played a role in national GOP politics -
supporting Ronald Reagan in 1976 in a presidential primary challenge to
then-President Ford. Reagan's candidacy was near collapse when it came time for
the North Carolina primary. Helms was in charge of the effort, and Reagan won a
startling upset that resurrected his challenge.
During the 1990s, Helms clashed frequently with
Clinton, whom he deemed unqualified to be commander in chief. Even some
Republicans cringed when Helms said Clinton was so unpopular he would need a
bodyguard on North Carolina military bases. Helms said he hadn't meant it as a
threat.
Asked to gauge Clinton's performance overall, Helms
said in 1995: “He's a nice guy. He's very pleasant. But ... (as) Ronald Reagan
used to say about another politician, ‘Deep down, he's shallow.”'
Helms went out of his way t