Packed like Lemmings into Shiny Metal Boxes/Contestants in a Suicidal Race

The Best and the Deadest
David Halberstam was killed while drag racing in Menlo Park, CA at the age of 73. The Pulitzer Prize winner’s later years were of great concern with friends and family as his thrill-seeking became more and more dangerous. “I was in Vietnam. I talked to DiMaggio. How can I spend my days at a typewriter?” Halberstam brought home the failures of the military in Vietnam as a reporter for The New York Times, upsetting Army officials and the White House with his stark, but accurate, depictions of life at the front of a war slowly slipping away and earning him a share of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize. He eventually summed up these failures in The Best and the Brightest, and later wrote about the Korean War - The Coldest Winter - and U.S. military policy in the 1990s - War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals. In addition to his high-minded books, Halberstam was also a hell of a sportswriter, writing about basketball in The Breaks of the Game, the lasting bond between Red Sox teammates Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky and Bobby Doerr in The Teammates, the epic 1949 battle between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees for the American League pennant before everyone was sick of those matchups in The Summer of '49 and he was killed while on his way to interview Y.A. Tittle for a book on the 1958 NFL Championship Game, often called the greatest football game ever played. Halberstam's experiences in Vietnam and his untimely demise reminds one of the utopian vision of young Akio in the Anglicized version of the Akira Kurosawa classic Gamera vs. Guiron: "I looked in my telescope every day, and I thought there'd be a perfect planet, without work, and wars, and traffic accidents... "

Rated D for Dead
Jack Valenti, who aided in Lyndon Johnson's White House coup, became one of those Hollywood pretty boys like Mel Gibson who can have any woman they want, then tried to make America feel guilty for stealing brie and caviar out of the mouths of soulless movie executives, has died of complications of a stroke at the age of 85. After John Kennedy's assassination, Valenti, a Texas-based political consultant, became the first new hire of the Johnson administration, living at the White House for several months. In 1966, he moved to LA to become president of the Motion Picture Association of America, where he established today's arbitrary movie rating system where studios can show films where a teenager gets disemboweled by a garden rake but an independent movie with a bare set of boobs can sit in review interminably. He also railed against VHS/Betamax and digital file sharing, proclaiming they would be the death of the motion picture industry, telling Congress: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone."

He’ll be a Graveyard Smash
Bobby "Boris" Pickett, creator of the greatest Halloween song ever, has died of leukemia at the age of 69. With Pickett delivering a spot-on Boris Karloff impersonation, "Monster Mash" hit #1 in 1962, then returned to the top of the charts in August 1970 and again in May 1973. The fact that an 8 and then 11 year-old Halloween novelty song topped the charts in spring and summer pretty much speaks to how bereft of musical quality the '70s were. Pickett recognized his one-hitness, jokingly offering to "play a medley of my hit." He performed at Halloween concerts for years, including a 1973 gig where his bus broke down in Frankenstein, Missouri.

There's Always Room for Cello
Mstislav Rostropovich, master cellist turned political dissident, has died of intestinal cancer at the age of 80. Taking up after his father and grandfather, Rostropovich began playing the cello at 7 was performing in public at 15 and by 24 was being used by the Soviet Union as a public relations pawn in international conceBut Rostropovich chafed under Soviet repression and became a national embarrassment with his calls for free speech, art without borders and democratic freedoms. He hid Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his home when the Soviets began pressuring the dissident author and wrote an open letter to the Soviet media protesting the official condemnations when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. He left the country in 1974 and his citizenship was revoked in 1978. As Communism collapsed, he came to perform Bach suites below the crumbling Berlin Wall and his Soviet citizenship was restored the next year. While ostracized by his home country, he became musical director and conductor of the U.S. National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.

Going Off Half Hancocked
Josh Hancock, a member of the 2006 World Champion St. Louis Cardinals bullpen, was killed in a car accident at the age of 29. Hancock drove his SUV into the back of a flatbed tow truck and was killed instantly, so I'm guessing it'll be a closed casket. Hancock, a former Boston Red Sox, Philadelphia Phillie and Cincinnati Red, is the second active Cardinal pitcher to die in midseason in the last 5 years, following Darryl Kile's heart attack in 2002 and is the second former Phillie pitcher to die vehicularly in the last 6 months. Hancock was driving at or near the speed limit, and there was no evidence of alcohol, he simply drove into the truck. As Don noted previously, proving that it is location, not speed, that matters most. On the plus side, the Cardinals now have a built-in excuse when they don't repeat as champions.