Hanging Body was Kung Fu Dying

Or
Caine Not Able

Or
Grave Dave

Or
Not So Well Hung

Or
Bill Killed
(An epitaphany shared by Kirsti and Don)

Or
Carra-Die
(Further props for Kirsti)

Or
Be Still, My Exploding Heart
(Kudos to Don)

Or
No Longer Walking This Earth
(Additional accolades for Don)
Grasshopper may have misunderstood the Master’s wisdom that true happiness only comes when man can love himself. David Carradine was apparently lovin’ the lil’ locust when things went south, and he was found hanging naked in the closet of his Bangkok hotel room at the age of 72. Prior to his Michael Hutchence impersonation, Carradine was best remembered as half-Chinese, half American Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine wandering the 19th Century west and solving problems on Kung Fu, kind of BJ & the Bear with Zen koans instead of a chimp. That role turned into parodies for Lipton Tea and Yellow Book and a gig as a kung fu master in a Jonas Brothers video. The lasting pop culture significance also scored him a late career resurgence as a master assassin in Kill Bill, Volumes 1 and 2. In a career with more than 200 appearances on TV and in film, Carradine also answered the long-standing question as to what happened after the fade to black at the end of Shane as the star of the 1968 reprisal TV show. Shane survived, but over the course of 14 years of treatment by Indian medicine men, he grew more than a foot taller. Other roles included a 100-year-old Chinese gangster in Crank: High Voltage, Frankenstein in Death Race 2000 and a voice over in the 2008 remake, Dad in Karate Cop, and Coy ‘Cannonball’ Buckman in Cannonball!, before the movies got even more campy. He was almost as prolific in his personal life, as he was on his 5th marriage, following 4 divorces, producing two kids, plus a son, Free Carradine, with 1970s live-in lover Barbara Seagull, now known again as Barbara Hershey.

As a public service announcement, gentlemen, if you’re ever considering autoerotic asphyxiation, leave the boxers on and leave a suicide note, just in case. At least leave a little plausible deniability.

Give Us This Day Our Daly Dead

Chuck Daly, whose thuggish approach to basketball with the Detroit Pistons was the palate cleanser between the Los Angeles Lakers Showtime and Michael Jordan’s artistry with the Chicago Bulls, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 78. What do you expect from a guy who coached at Boston College? In addition to the back-to-back titles with the Pistons in 1989 and 1990, Daly coached the Olympic Dream Team to the 1992 gold medal, and earned a spot in the Basketball Hall of Fame and the NBA 50th anniversary team as one of the 10 top coaches.

Where Have You Gone Dom DiMaggio? Oh, St. Paul’s in Wellesley.

Dom – the Harpo of the DiMaggio clan – has resumed his place in the shadows of his brother and outfield mate, following Joe and Ted Williams into the grave at the age of 92. The 7-time All-Star spent his entire 11-year career with the Red Sox, hitting .298 with 7 100-run seasons, and a Red Sox record 34-game hitting streak in 1949. With the Sox, he had the two toughest jobs in baseball – center fielder, where he had to cover most of left while Ted practiced batting stances, and lead-off hitter, the first witness for Teddy Ballgame’s third degree on what the day’s opposing starter was throwing. Still, theirs was a more cordial relationship than he had with his brother. The joke in baseball was that Joe was the best hitter, Dom the best fielder and Vince was the best singer, and even Dom said that the only two things he did better than Joe were playing pinochle and speaking Italian, but Joe never missed the opportunity to burnish his own image and didn’t dissuade anyone of the supposition that his brothers followed on his coattails. As a member of the Red Sox for 11 years, the Little Professor contributed to the 84 years of heartache between titles. In the top of the 8^th inning of Game 7 of the 1946 World Series, his 2- run double tied the game 3-3, but he pulled a hamstring in the process. DiMaggio, who had already thrown out three runners in the series, was replaced by Leon Culberson, whose weak arm did nothing to deter Enos Slaughter from racing around from first to score the winning run in the bottom of the 8^th.

O Danny Boy, Your Pipes, Your Pipes are Failing

Danny Ozark, the manager who dragged the Phillies out of the dregs to the brink of their first World Series title, but has haunted by playoff failures, has died at the age of 85. His 1976 and 1977 teams were the best in team history – both winning a team record 101 games. The 1976 season ended in an NLCS sweep by the Reds, who then did the same to the Yankees in the World Series. The 1977 season will be remembered for Black Friday, when Ozark failed to lift the slow-footed Greg Luzinski in left field for a better fielder in the 8th inning of Game 3 while the Phils held a 5-3 lead, as he had done all season. A Red Sox-esque collapse followed as the Dodgers mounted a 2-out 3-run rally, helped by a blunder in left by Luzinski and a blown call by Bruce Froemming at first (Davey Lopes was out, you fat bastard). The Phils lost game 4 in a monsoon. Another division title followed in 1978, as did another early exit in the playoffs. When the still talented team failed to answer the bell in 1979, Ozark was out, and hard-ass Dallas Green was brought in to berate the team into a championship. Along the way, Ozark amused off the field far more than on it. When explaining a slump, he offered that "even Napoleon had his Watergate." Asked how team morale was holding up, he said, "Morality isn't a factor at this point." On getting a rare ovation from a Veterans Stadium crowd, he was moved to observe: "It really sent a twinkle up my spine," he said. In 1975, when the Phillies fell 4 games back of the Pittsburgh Pirates with 3 to play, he insisted, "We're not out of it yet."

Silence of the Ham

(An epitaphany shared with Joe)

Or
Doomed DeLuise

Or
All Doms Go to Heaven
(Tip o’ the cap to Joe)

Or
Pizza Sent Out for Him
(Another accolade for Joe)
Dom Deluise, best remembered for opening the 1987 Oscars performing Fugue for the Tinhorns with Telly Savalas and Pat Morita, has died at the age of 75, I’m guessing not from choking on cauliflower. The Paul Prudhomme impersonator will be buried in a Ziploc bag to keep him fresh forever. I have it on good authority that he was the only one worth watching in the Mae West-Timothy Dalton-Regis Philbin-Tony Curtis-George Hamilton-Ringo Starr opus Sextette. The manic load had a big fan in Mel Brooks, who cast him as the larcenous priest in The Twelve Chairs, the mincing director at the Python-esque conclusion of Blazing Saddles, director’s assistant Dom Bell in Silent Movie, Emporer Nero in History of the World – Part I, Pizza the Hutt in Spaceballs, Godfather-like Don Giovanni in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and whose wife Anne Bancroft starred him as Fatso in her lone directorial attempt. He also served as Burt Reyolds’ good luck charm, doing double duty as Victor Prinzim and his alter ego Captain Chaos in the Cannonball Run franchise, and appearing in The End, Smokey and the Bandit II and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The rest of us were pretty content watching movies he had nothing to do with, and after his career dried up with dreck like porno king Harry “the Hippo” Gutterman in Loose Cannons and Animal Cannibal Pizza in The Silence of the Hams, he turned to a line of cookbooks. Write what you know, they always say.

A fat lot of good that did Fred, who scores his first career hit, a solo job that puts his Death Row squad into the dogpile at 13th.

Jack Kemp Cooked

Jack Kemp, who helped extend the Buffalo Bills losing streak as Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996, has died of cancer at the age of 74. A former MVP quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, Kemp went on to serve western New York in Congress from 1971 to 1989. In Congress, he helped develop the only ideas in the Republican arsenal for any and all economic shortcomings: tax cuts and deregulation. He was considered a leading candidate for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, but lost to the towering personality of George Herbert Walker Bush, and got the token bitch position of HUD Secretary. His real legacy was helping to empower inept offspring: pissing away the Republican party in 1988 gave rise to the Bush dynasty, and we know how well that worked out. Even more significantly, his jackass son Jeff cost the Philadelphia Eagles a playoff appearance in 1991 with two interceptions against the Dallas Cowboys, despite having the league’s best defense behind him.

And Then There’s Morgue

(An epitaphany shared with Monty)

Or
And Then There's Mowed
(Kudos to Joe)

Or
And Dead There's Maude
(Props to Phil)
Female impersonator Bea Arthur, best remembered as the singing bartender from The Star Wars Holiday Special, has died at the age of somewhere between 40 and the death. In her 50 year career, said that she did everything but rodeo and porno, for which fans of the equine and the supine… and anyone with eyes… can be grateful. The manly, acid-tongued sitcom star spent her career as a sex symbol for the forgotten, first as Maude, the swinging cousin of Edith Bunker, who at 47 needed an abortion, 2 months before Roe v. Wade made it legal nationwide, and then helped put the sex in sexagenarian as one of the Golden Girls showing off their golden gates to any continent Miami man with his own hair. Arthur proved to be less delightfully unlovable than John Cleese in the Fawlty Towers adaptation Amanda’s. In addition to her two Emmys, one each for Maude and Dorothy, she won the Tony in 1966 as Vera Charles, Angela Lansbury’s drunken best friend in Mame. She recreated the role in the comically awful screen version opposite Lucille Ball. Other roles included Dewey’s babysitter on Malcolm in the Middle, playing Peter Griffin in Rolling Courage: The Joe Swanson Story, and highlighting the Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson, reading excerpts about receiving sodomy advice from Anderson’s Star: The Novel.

The Doctor is Out

Doc Blanchard, who won the 1945 Heisman Trophy as Mr. Inside, has died at the age of 84. In the era before the service academies existed to help Notre Dame make the Outback Bowl, Blanchard and his Army backfield mate Mr. Outside Glenn Davis led the Cadets to a three-year record of 27-0-1 and national titles in 1944 and 1945. Blanchard racked up 38 TDs, and 1,908 yards in three seasons. Drafted by the Steelers in 1946, Blanchard opted to tie instead of losing and served as a fighter pilot in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, retiring as a colonel in 1971.

Outta Here

Harry Kalas, legendary voice of the Philadelphia Phillies for 44 years, has died at the age of 73, and I can’t imagine an obituary I have wanted to write less. The Hall of Famer was one of the last of a disappearing breed in an era of homogenized interchangeable announcers, and enjoyed the 8th-longest tenure as a play-by-play man with a single team. Coming to the Phillies in 1971 to replace Bill Campbell, another popular legend, after 5 years as the Houston Astros radio voice, he was not welcomed with open arms, but quickly formed an amazing rapport with Richie Ashburn that made broadcasts a treat and for many less than memorable games in so many lost seasons, they were the only reasons to tune in to the evening broadcasts. He was unabashedly enthusiastic about the Phillies, declaring, “Chase Utley, You are the Man,” after an amazing bit of base-running derring do, but never shied from criticizing when the home team botched yet another play. When an error set up a game-winning homer off Billy Wagner that put the nail in the Phils coffin in 2005, he wrapped up the inning, “All 3 runs were unearned, not that it matters.” Umpires weren’t immune, either, with “Right down the middle for a ball,” being a familiar call whether the Phillies were pitching or batting at the time. He emceed the opening and
closings of Veterans Stadium, the opening of Citizens Bank Park, the 1980 World Series parade, number retirement ceremonies for Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton and Jim Bunning, called Schmidt’s 500th homer and sang High Hopes when the 1993 Phillies completed their improbable clinching of the National League pennant. He also emceed countless community and charity events, and never turned down a request for an autograph or to record an answering machine message to inform callers that someone was “Outta Here,” or had taken “A long drive.” Some will take solace in him reuniting with Richie Ashburn, his best friend and broadcast partner for almost 30 years before Ashburn’s passing in 1997, but I’ll remember him finally getting to broadcast the World Series clinching moment last fall after being denied by MLB in 1980, calling Matt Stairs’ game-winning homer in his last game, and in the last Phillies game I’ve attended this year, with the team collecting World Series rings for the second time in its history, some of the loudest cheers of the afternoon were for Harry throwing out the first pitch. For three generations of Phillies fans, Harry Kalas meant baseball, the Phillies and summer, and none of the three will ever be the same.

A Bird on the Mound is Worth Two Under the Truck

Mark Fidrych, one of the great one-year wonders in major league baseball history, was strangled by the drive shaft of his dump truck in a small New England town at the age of 54, inspiring 4 Stephen King novels. The year was 1976. The Detroit Tigers were coming off a 102-loss season and having nothing to lose, called up a gangly 6-foot-3, 21-year-old kid nicknamed Bird after his resemblance to Big Bird. He made his major league debut on May 15 with a complete game win, carrying a no-hitter for 6 innings. More interesting were his eccentricities – talking to the ball in tight situations and getting on his hands and knees to pat down the mound before every inning. He completed his next game, a loss, then manager Ralph Houk decided bullpens were for sissies and sent him out for back-to-back 11-inning complete games. By this time Bird mania had set in, and every Fidrych start, home or away, drew 15,000-20,000 more fans than any other game. The Tigers drew as many for his 18 home starts as they did for their other 63 without him. The only thing bigger than Fidrych was the Bicentennial – he finished 19-9 with a 2.34 ERA with 24 complete games, winning the Rookie of the Year and finishing second in the Cy Young balloting. Along the way, he met his namesake on Sesame Street, dazzled the nation in a nationally televised win at Yankee Stadium, started the All-Star Game, was the first athlete on the cover of Rolling Stone and signed an endorsement deal with Aqua-Velva – ironic because he hadn’t started shaving yet. The modern bullpen hadn’t been invented yet, and all those innings in 1976 took their toll – after starting 29 games that year, he only started 27 more over the next 4 years and was out of major league baseball by 25 with what was eventually diagnosed as a torn rotator cuff.

Behind the Green Grass

(Props to Joe)

Or

99 44/100% Dead

(Further fanfare for Joe)

Marilyn Chambers, the best advertisement ever for Ivory Snow, has died at the age of 56. No cause of death has been identified, but she was known to have survived several thousand strokes. After some time as a model, she got a small part in The Owl and the Pussycat, which gave her an insatiable appetite for acting. She would see a lot more birds and kitties, but there would be no more small parts in her career. She was a pioneer, introducing the era of pube-free porn as one of the first actresses to go hairless, the better to show off her lady bits. She enjoyed widespread fame with her first feature, Behind the Green Door, as a wholesome woman kidnapped into an Eyes Wide Shut-like party, without the midget. She thought this might open the door for mainstream films, a tragic misuse of her lack of a gag reflex, but the only doors that getting passed around on-screen like a doobie in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert opened were on the backs of vans. She was never able to penetrate Hollywood the same way she got… never mind. In an ironic twist, she was found naked and alone in a mobile home, the same way most of her fans enjoyed her career.

No Sajak City

Dan Miller, who went from the obscurity of an anchor’s desk in Nashville to the near obscurity of being Pat Sajak’s sidekick on his short-lived late-night talk show, has died at the age of 67. After 15 months of pretending Sajak was funny, Miller was granted a reprieve with the show’s cancellation.

Franklin’s Interred, Dude

African-American scholar John Hope Franklin has died at the age of 94, in a shameless attempt to extend discussion of black history beyond its prescribed month. Franklin was the inspiration for Franklin and Roosevelt Franklin, the only black characters on Peanuts and Sesame Street, respectively; although it’s entirely possible I just made that up. He was renowned for shaping the discussion of black life in America in the 18th and 19th centuries in America, while also interacting with the men who defined black life in the 20th and 21st. He published articles and books on slavery and worked closely with Martin Luther King and W.E.B. Du Bois. He argued that historians shouldn’t just chronicle the past, but should help shape the future, working with Thurgood Marshall in the Brown v. Board of Education case and marching with Dr. King in Selma. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, capping a career in which he was the first African-American president of the American Historical Association; the first black department chairman at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke; the first black chairman of the University of Chicago’s history department; and the first African-American to present a paper at the segregated Southern Historical Association, one of many groups that later elected him its president.

Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, K-E-L-L Died!

(Props to Phil)

Or
For whom the Kell Tolls
(Kudos to Phil)

Or
Found a Death Kell
(More merit for Phil)

Or
Hell's Kells
(Additional accolades for Phil)

Or
All's Kell that Ends Kell
(Another tip o’ the cap for Phil)
Hall of Fame third baseman George Kell has died at the age of 86. Kell was named to 10 All-Star teams in 15 seasons and hit .300 nine times, including the famed down to the wire 1949 batting title as a member of the Tigers, where he beat Ted Williams .34291 to .34276. He followed that by hitting .340 in 1950, but after dropping to .319, he got traded to the Boston Red Sox. He concluded his career in 1957 with the Baltimore Orioles, imparting his wisdom to rookie third baseman Brooks Robinson, helping him become the second greatest third baseman of all time, no matter what Annie Reed says. His favorite play came against the Yankees, when Joe DiMaggio hit a line drive to third, breaking Kell’s jaw. Kell said, “I picked up the ball, made the play, and then passed out.” Kell and Robinson entered the Hall together in 1983. After his playing career ended, he spent 40 years in the Tigers’ broadcast booth.

It’s All Downhill

Or
I’ll be Skiing You
Natasha Richardson, a member of the Redgrave acting family and wife of a guy who hasn’t done anything noteworthy in more than a decade, died in a skiing accident sending ski helmet futures skyrocketing. After a week of public mourning, I’m still not sure who she is. The daughter of Vanessa Redgrave, niece of Lynn Redgrave, granddaughter of Sir Michael Redgrave, sister of Joely Richardson, wife of Liam Neeson, great-granddaughter of Roy Redgrave and cousin of Jemma Redgrave starred in the remake of The Parent Trap and Maid in Manhattan. Richardson was better known and acclaimed for her work on the stage, winning the 1998 Tony as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, and appeared on Broadway in Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Comedy and A Streetcar Named Desire.