Agent 86’ed

(An epitaphany shared by Monty, James and your somewhat genial death meister)

Or
Go, Go Gadget Embalmer
(Props to Monty)

Or
Sorry About that, Chief
(More kudos for Monty)

Or
Tennessee Tuxedo Will Not Fail – Unlike Don Adams’ Heart
(We’re not actually sure Monty works during the day)
Don Adams, wacky TV secret agent to two generations, has died at the age of 82. He will be buried at Arlington National Cemetary in a military funeral with full honors. Would you believe a state funeral? Would you believe being buried next to Murray the hamster in his sister's backyard? (Extended riff courtesy of James) Adams was the perfect bumbling CONTROL super spy Maxwell Smart, aka Agent 86, on the James Bond parody Get Smart, forever foiling Siegfried and KAOS despite himself. Adams helped make the show a hit, scoring two Emmys as best comedy, while Adams was thrice honored as best comedy actor. A 1995 reprise featured Max as the Chief with his son Zach played by Andy Dick. It lasted 7 wince-inducing episodes. Adams’ clipped deadpan delivery, the product of a military stint as a drill instructor, was already well known as the voice of Tennessee Tuxedo, and would return in a cartoon variation of Get Smart, Inspector Gadget. He also voiced Comet in an uncredited cameo in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer and played Howard Bannister in the syndicated sitcom Check it Out.

With just two months left, Monty scores a solo hit, and has his hopes pinned on Bruce Bennett, so he won’t miss it by that much. For now, he does pull into second place with 6 hits.

The Leaderboard:
1st Kirsti - 2003 Champion
7 hits, 62.0833333 points
2nd Monty's Mortuary
6 hits, 45.35714286 points
3rd Me - Death Be Not Proud
5 hits, 50.7738095 points
4th Shawn - Team Two
5 hits, 18.6904762 points
5th Mark - The Random Undead
4 hits, 43.75 points

Plight of the Hunter

Reich Goeth Before the Wiesenthal

Or
Rock On
The Boys from Brazil can come out from under the bed, Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal has died at the age of 96. Wiesenthal lost 89 relatives in concentration camps and was bounced between several camps before his rescue by American soldiers in Austria. Following the war, Wiesenthal dedicated his life to bringing, by his account, more than 1,000 Nazi war criminals to justice, and perhaps more importantly, ensuring that the world would not sweep the Holocaust into history books. Among those he helped capture was the Vienna policeman who had arrested Anne Frank, detective work that countered Holocaust deniers who claimed the diary had been fabricated In more recent years, as trails and ex-Nazis grew cold, the Simon Wiesenthal Center focused its efforts on fighting anti-Semitism.

Shawn and I were prepared to sit shiva and take 10 points apiece. My Youth in Asia move into 6th and Shawn’s Team One takes 10th.

Elsewhere on the ethereal plane….

Bowled Over
Chris Schenkel, ABC’s all-purpose broadcaster for six decades, has died at the age of 82. Schenkel came from the era of broadcasters who put the game ahead of their own egos, so there are no “Boo-yas,” “You are looking lives,” or “Slama-lama Ding Dongs” to put on his tombstone, just a portfolio that includes broadcasting arguably the single greatest games in the history of pro football, the 1958 NFL Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants and Nebraska’s 35-31 win over Oklahoma in 1971. He was the man in the booth for the first televised Masters Tournament, was the first to serve as live sports anchor from the Olympics, in Mexico City in 1968. He frequently fronted the Indianapolis 500, and during the 1971 race was in the pace car that crashed into a set of bleachers. And to calm down from all the jet-setting, he also was the longtime voice of the Professional Bowlers Assn., entertaining a generation of viewers with his Saturday afternoon broadcasts. Schenkel’s greatest gift was his versatility, as he was inducted into 16 halls of fame, including the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters and College and Pro Football halls, and he won an Emmy for lifetime achievement in 1993.

On the Fritsch
A name you’re going to be hearing in about 4 months, Toni Fritsch, has died at the age of 60. Fritsch played soccer in Austria for 14 years before he rode the soccer-style kicker wave to the NFL with the Dallas Cowboys. A member of the 1971 Super Bowl Champion team, Fritsch set the NFL record with field goals in 13 consecutive playoff games. Patriots placekicker Adam Vinatieri is currently on a 12-game streak.

The Day the Director Lay Still

Or
The Sound of Silence
Robert Wise, four-time Oscar winning director and producer, better hope somebody up there likes him, after dying at the age of 91. Best known for the 40 years of pain (and counting) he inflicted with his dancing away from the Nazis’ crap-o-rama The Sound of Music, Wise started as the editor of Orson Welles’ classic. Wise had previously mined Oscar gold with singing and dancing Puerto Rican gang members in West Side Story. Other highlights included the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, Executive Suite, The Curse of the Cat People, Somebody Up There Likes Me and Run Silent, Run Deep. He also sensitively handled the love triangle between the stultifyingly dull Steven Collins, the equally wooden Persis Khambatta and the Voyager spacecraft in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Rocket Man
Joe Bauman, the only man to hit 70 homers in a season without the benefit of steroids, has died at the age of 83. Bauman developed pneumonia after breaking his pelvis at a ceremony renaming the scene of his triumph in his honor. As an outfielder with the Roswell Rockets of the Class C Longhorn League, in 1954 Bauman hit 72 homers, with 224 RBIs while hitting .400. In his 9-year minor league career, he hit 337 homers, but never got a sniff of the majors. He did however, get a lot of ham, as a local packing plant gave him a cured ham for each homer. He actually refused a promotion, which would have resulted in a pay cut, as in the low minors at the time, fans would pass money to players through the grandstand netting after home runs. Bauman earned as much as $250 a game, more than most players earned in a month.

No Moore
Constance Moore, the original Wilma Deering to the serial’s Buck Rodgers, has died at the age of 84.

The Corpse McMullen
John McMullen, former owner of the Houston Astros and the man who brought the Devils to New Jersey, has died. McMullen also was one of the partners who bought the New York Yankees from CBS in 1974, though he observed that there is nothing so limiting as being a limited partner of George Steinbrenner.

Clendone-in
Donn Clendenon, a journeyman outfielder who captured lightning in a bottle for one week in 1969, has died at the age of 70. Clendenon hit 3 homers in the 1969 World Series, winning the MVP and helping to carry the Miracle Mets to a 5-game victory over the vaunted Baltimore Orioles.

Gang-Related
Tommy Bond, a child actor of the 1930s, has died in a Gang-related incident. Bond served as the antagonist Butch on The Little Rascals and Our Gang, in competing with Alfalfa for Darla’s affections. Bond also was the original screen Jimmy Olsen in the first Superman movies of the late 1940s.

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of our latest stiff

(Props to Tammy)

Or
Things to do with Denver When He’s Dead
(Yours truly, with Monty sharing the epitaphany)

Or
Little Body
(Kudos to Michelle)

Or
Hey Little Dead Buddy
(Honorifics to Mark Coen)

Or
Down Bob Denver, Down Bob Denver / All he did was die
(Mo’ Me, with a cap tip to Jack Kerouac)
Add curing cancer with a coconut and bamboo to the list of things the Professor can’t do, as Gilligan has died at the age of 70. Bob Denver died of complications from his cancer treatment, 3 months after undergoing quadruple bypass. Best remembered for screwing up rescue efforts involving Hollywood producers and actors, cosmonauts and astronauts and the running list of people who stumbled upon the castaways’ tropic island nest, Gilligan was an iconic idiot for more than 40 years. Denver spent most of his career as Gilligan, first on the eponymous show, then through a series of increasingly awful, but popular TV-movies, two Gilligan cartoons, then cameos in Miss Cast Away, Meego, The New Gidget and ALF. He also played the Gilligan-like characters Dusty on Dusty’s Trail and Junior on Far Out Space Nuts. All of which overshadowed his brilliant beatnik Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, the man who said the word “work” much the same way Fonzie acknowledged he was “wrong,” and explained with a straight face that his middle initial “G” stood for Walter.

Supreme Corpse

(shared with GHI observer Jon)

Or
Chief Just-iced

Or
First Mournday

Or
OverQuist
Chief Justice William Rehnquist added 25 years to the conservative revolution he started on the Supreme Court, delivering a writ of habeus corpse Saturday night at the age of 80 after battling thyroid cancer for more than a year. Appointed as an associate justice by Richard Nixon and elevated to chief justice in 1986 by Ronald Reagan, Rehnquist served the 5th longest term on the Supreme Court. Highlights of his tenure include being one of two justices in the minority on Roe v. Wade. Rehnquist proved to be an ingracious loser by spending the next 30 years retrying elements of that case whenever possible. He also presided over the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the Case of the Overblown Blow Job and appointed George W. Bush as president as the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore. Often a lone dissenter on a liberal court, Rehnquist was the first step in the transformation of the court from the left to its current 5-4 status favoring the right. His career was marked by increasing limits on federal authority in favor of an emphasis on state’s last rites, a rather fuzzy take on the separation of church and state and objections over striking down laws criminalizing homosexual behavior and allowing indefinite detention of terror suspects without access to due process. Prior to his time on the bench, he had clerked for Justice Robert Jackson and suggested that Jackson oppose Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling that declared public school segregation unconstitutional, suggesting he spent at least 50 years in courts being wrong.

Seven of us expected the benchmark decision, led ironically by my Better Dead than Red State, which moves into 6th. Also moving up are Jen, into 7th, Tom, into 11th, Michelle, James and Dawn, into a 4-way logjam at 18th, and Michelle, into 29th.

The unchanged leaderboard:
1st Kirsti MacPherson - 2003 Champion
7 hits, 62.0833333 points
2nd Me - Death Be Not Proud
5 hits, 50.7738095 points
3rd Monty's Mortuary
5 hits, 25.35714286 points
4th Shawn DeVeau - Team Two
5 hits, 18.6904762 points
5th Mark Coen - The Random Undead
4 hits, 43.75 points

And in the better late than never category, a month’s worth of catching up. Yes, I’m tardy, but unlike these folks, I have a life.

Switched off
(Craig weighs in)
Robert Moog, who took music out of the hands of skilled craftsman and into the hands of any yutz who can push a button, has died at the age of 71. After years of playing with the sci-fi sound machine theremin, Moog developed a device that could modulate sound. His synthesizer hit the big time with the surprise 1965 hit Switched on Bach, which reduced one of the world’s great composers to the a reproduction resembling the tinny soundover to the design credits on a video game. Progressive rock bands like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk overcame their own limitations by quickly adding the synthesizer to performances, impressing audiences who were too amazed by something new to think about it, and now hip-hop groups have found that extensive use of the Moog synthesizer is a handy way to overcome idiotic lyrics.

And this time I mean it
Unsatisfied with the response to his resignation as leader of the House of Commons in protest of Tony Blair’s decision to join the U.S. in invading Iraq, Robin Cook has shown the courage of his convictions, dying at the age of 59. Should this fail to sway Blair, Cook announced plans to haunt him for the remainder of his term, much like the actual decision to join the U.S. in invading Iraq.

Looking for Mr. Funeral Director
Judith Rossner, author of the successful novel "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," which was made into a movie starring Diane Keaton, has died at the age of 70. The 1975 novel was loosely based on an actual murder of a Roman Catholic schoolteacher in New York City who frequented singles bars. Other novels included the 1983 bestseller "August," "To the Precipice," "Nine Months in the life of an Old Maid," “Any Minute I Split," "Olivia," and "Perfidia.”

To Kill a Charactor Actor

Or
"Sorry ma'am, Sisko's on Bourbon Street is closed."
(If you get this one, send props to Craig, our resident Trekkie, who suggested it before there were other reasons to close Bourbon Street.)
Last month Soylent Green was made from Brock Peters as the veteran actor has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 78. Best remembered for his heart-breaking performance as a black man falsely accused of rape in "To Kill a Mockingbird," Peters also betrayed the Federation as Admiral Cartwright in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and helped Charlton Heston find the recipe for Soylent Green. Other roles included Ben Sisko’s father on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Porgy & Bess.

His heart has failed him for the last time
Michael Sheard, who authored one of cinema’s greatest death scenes, has died at the age of 67. In The Empire Strikes Back, Sheard, as Admiral Ozzel, has informed Darth Vader that he has lost Millennium Falcon, and then gets a fatal tickle in his throat, as Vader finds a dramatic way of showing his displeasure. Sheard also carved out a niche as cinema’s most prolific Nazi, playing Adolf Hitler 5 times, including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Henrich Himmler 3 times. British fans will also remember him as the autocratic French teacher in the television series Grange Hill. Sheard also appeared with more iterations of the Doctor in the long-running series Doctor Who than any other actor.

Red fish, blue fish, big fish, dead fish
(Laudatories to Tammy)
Matthew McGrory, the 7-foot-plus actor who portrayed Karl the Giant in 2003's Big Fish, has died at the age of 32. McGrory had been working on a biopic of former wrestler Andre the Giant. McGrory also starred as Tiny Firefly in Rob Zombie's 2003 horror flick House of 1000 Corpses and its gory sequel, The Devil's Rejects, released last month.

Hasta La Vista
(Kudos for Monty)
Ibrahim Ferrer the Cuban singer who emerged late in life as the star of the Buena Vista Social Club, has died at the age of 78.