Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out

Or
Keeping Tabs
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who saw the natural world as offering countless opportunities to get high and until recently was regarded as the greatest living genius by the 2007 Synectics Survey of Contemporary Living Genius, has died at the age of 102. Hofmann synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide(LSD) in 1938 but didn’t discover how much fun it was until accidentally ingesting it 5 years later. Much like hippies three decades later, Hofmann used the drug as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. And for making cool trails with his fingers. Ironically, he came to disdain the recreational use of LSD championed by Timothy Leary, perhaps because it detracted from his research into Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms. And a bunch of kids took a tab, thought they could fly and jumped off buildings to their deaths, which was a bit of a downer. Late last year, Hofmann realized some vindication as LSD research began with patients with terminal cancer and other deadly diseases.

Marz Visits Pluto

John Marzano, beloved mediocre back-up catcher, died after a drunken tumble down the stairs at the age of 45. The Temple grad was a member of the 1984 Olympic baseball team, but he was more John Hoover than Mark McGwire and the Boston Red Sox wasted the 14th round of the 1984 amateur draft on him, ahead of future Hall of Famers Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine – overlooking the Billerica boy in their own back yard. Marzano’s best moment for Boston fans actually came while he was a member of the Seattle Mariners and told whining Yankees outfielder Paul O’Neill to “shut up and hit,” then punched him in the face. Although he never made the majors with his hometown team, the Phillies, Marzano spent a season with their AAA farm club and later served as baseball analyst in Philadelphia and on mlb.com.

Dead End on E Street

Hard though it may be to believe, but the E Street Band is now just one behind the Rolling Stones in terms of dead members as Danny Federici succumbed to melanoma at the age of 58. The band’s keyboardist from its formation, Federici began playing Jersey bars with Vini Lopez before asking a skinny guy with long hair and a ratty T-shirt with a decent voice and serious chops on the guitar to join. After Child begat Steel Mill begat Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, that skinny guy recorded Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, then introduced the E Street Band. For much of the 1980s, Springsteen kept the E Streeters on retainer while he fooled around with other musicians, and Federici came back like an abused girlfriend on Tunnel of Love, The Ghost of Tom Joad, The Rising and Born in the U.S.A. He also released two pop-jazz albums: Flemington and Sweet.

Accordian to my records, Steve@the movies was the only one with this hit and joins the dogpile at 12th.

His Death was Unpredictable

(Props to Craig)

Or
Butterfly Defect
(Kudos to Craig)
Edward Lorenz, pioneer of the chaos theory concept that Michael Crichton beat to an unmerciful death in Jurassic Park, has died at the age of 90. Lorenz developed a mathematical model for how air moves in the atmosphere, then discovered that subtle changes in variables yielded wildly divergent results, which he termed the butterfly effect, a concept later stomped to a brutal end by the Ashton Kutcher nosebleed-fest film. Lorenz described the phenomenon in his page turner Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, and the complex dynamical object is now known as the Lorenz attractor, which was the nickname of Italian screen siren sirer Carlo Ponti as I cruelly smack my joke into pulp. For Lorenz, the dramatic difference in outcome resulting from such minute changes made him realize that perfect weather prediction was a fantasy, but that doesn’t stop your local news from wasting hours of air time touting the Weatherificator 5000 and trying to get you to swallow their complete winter forecast made in mid-August.

Nine Dead Men

Oliver Martin "Ollie" Johnston Jr., the last member of the celebrated "Nine Old Men" of Disney animation, has died at the age of 95. Johnston created Bambi, Thumper, the Three Good Fairies in Sleeping Beauty, Pongo and Perdita and probably others of the 101 Dalmatians, and Mowgli and Baloo in The Jungle Book. Other work included Pinocchio's nose growing, the befuddled Mr. Smee trying to follow Captain Hook's orders in Peter Pan and the penguin-waiters serving Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. The Nine Old Men set the standard for movie animation, and Johnston and close friend and fellow animator Frank Thomas wrote the quintessential text books on how to imbue the animated with emotion, humor and sentiment. Thomas and Johnston were remembered by Brad Bird, currently a genius at Pixar, who hired them to provide voices in The Iron Giant and The Incredibles.

Braves' Yield

Tommy Holmes, the Boston Braves outfielder who set a National League record by hitting in 37 consecutive games in 1945, has had his streak of breathing snapped at 33,231 days. The MVP runner-up also started the 1952 season as manager of the Boston Braves, the team’s last year in its appropriate home.

Filling a Black Hole

John A. Wheeler, the theoretical physicist who coined the term black hole as well as conceiving of wormholes and quantum foam, will soon be full of wormholes, succumbing to pneumonia at the age of 96. Wheeler’s collaborators included Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and Albert Einstein. Bohr, Wheeler and Einstein spearheaded the efforts to build the atomic bomb, with Wheeler motivated by a note from his brother, fighting in Europe, that read simply “Hurry up.” Joe Wheeler died in Italy.

Kamel Went

Adrian Monk is screwed. Stanley Kamel, best known as Dr. Charles Kroger, over-matched psychiatrist for Tony Shaloub’s obsessive-compulsive, poly-phobic detective Adrian Monk, has died of a heart attack at the age of 65. The Boston University alum also played crooked psychiatrist Graham Lester on Murder One, pansy mob boss Tony Marchette on Beverly Hills, 90210, delusional engineer Kosinski who thought that he was the one responsible for the Enterprise achieving astronomical speeds, when actually an alien was taking the ship for a joy ride and Stanley, an incredibly boring flunky from the Commerce Department.

Guess we can get that gun now

(An epitaphany shared most closely with Mark, with similar sentiments from Shawn and Joe)

Or
Soylent Green is Heston
(Another popular epitaphany suggested in various forms by Mark, longtime observer Tammy, Joe and Monty)

Or
I'll see you in hell you damn dirty apes
(Kudos to Peter)

Or
Heston is Restin'
(Whoop whoop for Monty)

Or
Guns and Moses
(Stolen from politico.com by Michelle H)
Right wing, gun toting ham and book on tape narrator for Madonna’s Sex Charlton Heston was killed in the family’s weekly gunplay last Saturday at his Beverly Hills, California home at the age of 84. Heston’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease was ironic, given that he made his career playing historical figures no one remembered, like El Cid, Ben Hur, Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Richelieu… Moses. In nearly 100 movies, Heston portrayed the same forceful big block of granite – I mean really, was there any difference between Robert Neville in The Omega Man, Will Penny and Brad Braden in The Greatest Show on Earth? Add in a loathing for mankind and you’ve got Taylor from Planet of the Apes. Add in a couple dozen wives and you’ve got Brigham Young in The Avenging Angel. When not rewriting history or overseeing the end of mankind, he ventured into the disaster genre, getting lowered into Karen Black’s cockpit in Airport ’75 and drowning himself rather than stay with Genevieve Bujold in Earthquake, and battling ants in The Naked Jungle. Along the way, the man who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. on Washington decided that the real problem with America was that 7 days was far too long to wait to be able to shoot 24 kids at a time in a high school and became the president of the NRA. It was his decision to go on with the show when the NRA had scheduled its annual meeting in Denver the week after the Columbine massacre. He was elected to serve as president of the NRA for the 4th time in 2001, after the association revised its constitution to allow him to serve more than twice, so apparently it is possible to revise a constitution. His 4th term also came about a year after he had entered alcohol rehab, which he apparently started because he was afraid of spilling beer into his gun barrel.

There were only 8 men on a dead man's Cheston, who take 2.5 points apiece: Ern’s Closing Soon at a Theater Near You moves into 5th, My Better Late Than Never takes 8th, Michelle’s Lights, Camera, Casket climbs into 11th, while Aimee, Shawn’s Team Old, Peter, Joy’s Cold as Ice – no longer just an observer, and Jen inch into 29th. Matt is now our pole sittah, coming up on the anniversary of his last hit: Kitty Carlisle Hart.

10th Avenue Freeze Out

Wayne Frost, the hip-hop pioneer known as Frosty Freeze who helped inspire a worldwide break-dancing craze as a member of Rock Steady Crew, died of asphalt poisoning at the age of 44. Frost appeared in several videos and documentaries about the sidewalk freak show, then hit the mainstream with his performance with Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.