Pausched On

Randy Pausch, the doomed Carnegie Mellon professor who actually got Oprah Winfrey to shut up for 10 minutes, has died of pancreatic cancer at 47. Pausch delivered his famed “Last Lecture” in 2007, soon after learning he had 6 months to live, and then kept delivering it everywhere, including a shortened and uninterrupted version on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Like most lectures, this one didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already know – in this case, that you’re going to die, so you might want to do something with your life before you do, thus imparting that hoary, weepy life lesson about accomplishment that has everyone pledging to be better people, to play catch with their dad, to fish with their grandfather and go to Rome to learn Italian and paint sunsets, until they get home, flop on the couch and see that a Roseanne marathon is on Nickelodeon. The shame is that Pausch was a gifted computer programmer and professor and was a pioneer in virtual reality work, but will be instead be confused with the dead guy from Tuesdays with Morrie. At least he scored an invite to Steelers’ training camp and a Star Trek cameo out of the deal.

Stop, My Mom Is Shot

Or
Picture it, Los Angeles, 2008

Or
Lifetime, Television for Dead Women

Or
Stop, or My Mom Will Croak
(Props to Mark)

Or
I Wouldn't Bury Her With Bea Arthur's Shovel
(An epitaphany shared by Mark and Phil)

Or
Golden Harp Girl
(Kudos to Monty)

Or
Syndicated to Death
(More Merit for Monty)

Or
Gone to the Shady Pines Garden of Memories
(Accolades for Phil, displaying disturbingly deep Golden Girls cred)

Or
Stop or My Mom Will Shoot - Mom?, Mom.......?
(Additional accolades for Phil)
Estelle Getty, star of Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot, has died at age 84 of complications from any one of the half dozen dementia related illnesses ascribed to her over the last decade. Getty had bounced around stages for decades before Brandon Tartikoff came upon the idea of promoting the funny side of strokes and greenlit The Golden Girls, a show that took all those hilarious unfiltered things that kids say because they don’t know any better and transferred them to a feisty octogenarian who had suffered a stroke and lost that social filter that tells people they can’t just say anything they want. For 7 years, Getty, as Sophia Petrillo, scored Emmy nominations for mocking dim-witted Rose, creepily horny Blanche and hermaphroditic Dorothy. When Blanche, the original cougar, declared her life was an open book, Sophia countered, “Your life is an open blouse.” The less said about sequels Golden Palace, Golden Showers and the Cinemax offshoot Golden Girls Gone Wild, the better. Other roles included Harvey Fierstein’s mother in Torch Song Trilogy, Cher’s mother in Mask, and the matronly owner of the Philly department store where Andrew McCarthy makes his love connection with Kim Cattrall in Mannequin.

Save Author Meets Savior

Jerome Holtzman’s doctor belongs in the New York Mets bullpen, as he blows the save and allows Holtzman to die of a stroke at the age of 82. Few have done more to distort the importance of the 9th inning than Holtzman, who created the save statistic as a means to determine the effectiveness of relief pitchers in 1959 and saw it become the first new official statistic acknowledged by major league baseball in almost 50 years in 1969. In so doing, he allowed hundreds of marginal pitchers to rack up meaningless saves in games that were not in question by striking out the bottom of the order with a 3-run lead. In studies of games from the 1920s through today, there has been little change in the likelihood that a team that entered the 9th with a lead would win, whether the “closer” was involved or not. When not padding the pockets of the likes of Bobby Thigpen and Mark Davis, Holtzman was one of the great sportswriters of his generation, spending 30 years as a columnist for Baseball America, appearing in more than 1,000 consecutive issues, writing the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on baseball, providing the year-end summary of the baseball season for the Official Baseball Guide and chronicling an oral history of sportswriting in No Cheering in the Press Box.

Is he a Met now?

(Excellent cheap shot from Shawn)
Bobby Murcer, 1965 Carolina League MVP, has died at the age of 62, so the inevitable push to retire his number that all players who wear the pinstripes get will have to be posthumous. The solid but unspectacular outfielder spent 17 years in the majors, mostly with the Yankees, making 5 All-Star Games. Never matching Mickey Mantle’s abilities, other than a shared ineptitude at shortstop, despite predictions he would be his successor as the next Yankee superstar, he served as a bridge for homegrown Yankee talent, as the last active teammate of Mantle before retiring, which made room on the Yankees roster in 1983 for Don Mattingly. Murcer was beloved by Yankees fans for his flair for the dramatic, most notably driving in all 5 runs in the first game the Yankees played after the death of Thurman Munson.

Snow Fall

HIt was reported that Tony Snow has died, but since I didn’t believe anything that came out of his mouth before, I’m not about to start now. If reports are accurate, he was 53 when he succumbed to colon cancer, apparently brought on by pulling stuff out of his ass for years. The mouthpiece for the most divisive, disingenuous and morally bankrupt administration in modern history got his start lying professionally as a commentator on Faux News. As press secretary, he was long on bluster, even when short on facts and regularly had to apologize and correct himself. He also relished sparring with reporters, and his bouts with David Gregory and Helen Thomas made headlines.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Or
Author of, but not Possessor of, The Living Heart
(Inspired by Kirsti)
Michael DeBakey, surgical innovator, has died while trying to determine how old and feeble a heart could be and still sustain life. The answer in this case – 99 years. DeBakey continued working almost to the end of his life, and who wouldn’t want the shaky hands of a near centenarian poking around inside their chest cavity? DeBakey developed the coronary artery bypass, designed the heart-lung machine pump, which opened the era of open-heart surgery, discovered that Dacron grafts could be used to repair previously inoperable aneurysms, conceived the Army MASH unit, and performed more than 60,000 operations, leading many to regard him as 'the greatest surgeon ever.' In 1966, he implanted the precursor of the first artificial heart, but his protégé Denton Cooley went around his back to be the first to get the artificial heart DeBakey had been testing in animals into a human. DeBakey’s efforts were shown to be self-serving last year, when he underwent surgery to repair a torn aorta, a procedure he had devised a half century earlier. In 1939, DeBakey was co-author on a study linking cigarettes and lung cancer, 25 years before contributions from tobacco companies were no longer able to buy the silence of the Surgeon General. DeBakey was also the Ryan Seacrest of surgeons, and the name-dropping surgeon was a walking HIPAA violation, stocking his office with photographs of his celebrated patients and discussing their ailments, including the deposed Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi; the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII of England; Marlene Dietrich; Joe Louis; Leo Durocher; Jerry Lewis; and Boris Yeltsin.

It Cuts Like A Knife

Rocky Aoki, who added the attraction of possible mutilation to the allure of mediocre meals, has died of pneumonia at the age of 69, as Mark’s Eat, Drink and Be Buried misses another golden opportunity. Aoki opened his first Benihana steakhouse in Manhattan in1964, and treated the meal as theater, with chefs as acrobats, sharpening their knives, tossing them in the air, drizzling the grill with oil, sizzling the chicken, shrimp or steak on the grill, and flipping the food onto the plates of diners sitting around a great circular grill.

Senator No Pulse

Or
The Battle For Helms Deep
Racist treasonous redneck, junior college drop-out and former U.S. Senator from North Carolina Jesse Helms has died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 86. Helms started out working for Democratic Senator candidate Willis Smith in his primary campaign against Frank Graham, developing an ad that implored: "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man. He’d revisit racist electoral politics with his own ad showing a white job-seeker crumpling a rejection slip as an announcer explained that the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. After his meal ticket died, Helms returned to fan the flames of bigotry in North Carolina as a commentator before switching parties and throwing his own hat in the ring in 1972. He won and as senator, helped buoy Ronald Reagan’s insurgency in 1976, propelling him on to the 1980 nomination. Other highlights of his career included leading Senatorial opposition to the legislation making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, supporting Salvadoran death squads and Augusto Pinochet, serenading Carol Mosely-Braun with “Dixie” in a Capitol Building elevator, earning his reputation as Senator No by cutting or blocking funding for foreign aid, AIDS research, welfare programs and the arts and threatening President Clinton if he were to visit North Carolina without a bodyguard. To honor his forwarding-thinking approach to governance, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University opened the Jesse Helms School of Government in 2005.

Quit Clowning Around

Larry Harmon, who franchised creepiness across the country, has died at the age of 83. He wasn’t the first to don the red fright wig of Bozo the Clown, but he did cash in the most off it after buying the rights to it and licensing the character to dozens of television stations around the country who hired their own Bozos.