Do You Have Anything to Say in Your Decomposition?

(Don strikes again)
Ike Pappas, unindicted co-conspirator of Jack Ruby in the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, has died of heart disease at the age of 75. On November 24, 1963, as the Dallas Police Department performed the least secure transfer of a prisoner in the history of law enforcement, Pappas was one of several dozen reporters on hand and he yelled out a question, asking Oswald, “Do you have anything to say in your defense,” distracting him long enough for nightclub owner Jack Ruby to get up close and fire a shot into his gut. An arm’s length away from the shooting, Pappas could only muster: “There’s a shot! Oswald has been shot. Oswald has been shot. A shot rang out. Mass confusion here. All the doors have been locked. Holy mackerel.”

Got the Shaft Again

Or
When You're Not, You're Not
(Tip o’ the Cap to Don)

Or
Phantom of the Country Music Hall
(Still more kudos to Don)
Jerry Reed, country singer turned chicken-fried actor, has died of emphysema at age 71. Reed was basically a court jester with a gee-tar, scoring hits with such songs as “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft),” "When You're Hot, You're Hot," "If the Good Lord's Willing and the Creeks Don't Rise," and “Amos Moses,” which featured the line, “When Amos Moses was a boy his daddy would use him for alligator bait.” As his singing career wound down, Reed opted to become Burt Reynolds’ good luck charm in W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Gator and then as The Snowman, Cletus Snow, in the “Smokey and the Bandit” trilogy. Other notable roles as the rescue squad commander in Bat 21, the playbook-stealing football coach in Waterboy, as himself in The New Scooby-Doo Movies "The Phantom of the Country Music Hall" signing "Pretty Mary Sunlite,” as the original Scooby Gang tried to find his missing guitar, and Naomi Harper’s ex-husband on Mama’s Family. Reed also was a regular on the fishing show Bill Dance Outdoors, until Dance released a huge bigmouth bass that Reed had planned to have mounted. Reed became so enraged he chased Dance off the boat and then onto shore.

Killer Be Killed

Wrestling icon Walter (Killer) Kowalski has died of complications from a power suplex at the age of 81. In the simpler 1950s, grown men in tight shorts slapping each other made for nightly entertainment on the old Victrola, and the 6-foot-7, 275-pound Kowalski cut a commanding figure as one the most hated villains in the pseudosport. Unlike the modern iteration, things were a little more real back in the day when Kowalski earned his nickname by accidentally severing the ear of Yukon Eric, then cackling at his bandaged head in the hospital. Kowalski later opened a School of Professional Wrestling in Malden, Massachusetts, turning out Triple H and Chyna.

Does it Croak Like a Duck?

(Props to Don)

Or
Au Revoir, Foie Gras
(More accolades for Don)
Kevin Duckworth, the greatest player in the history of Eastern Illinois University basketball, has died of congestive heart failure at the age of 44. The fat load made two NBA Finals and two All-Star Games with the Portland Trailblazers in an 11-year career. Of all the Jail Blazers I expected to meet an untimely end, he would not have been the first.

Death Before Disability

(Props to Don)

Or
Upshaw Creek

Or
P’Shaw, Perish the Thoughtless
(Additional accolades for Don)
Former NFL greats may finally realize the fruits of the league they built into the most successful in sports now that the greatest impediment to addressing the needs of retirees has been lifted, or should I say lowered into the ground, with NFL Players Association head Gene Upshaw’s death at the age of 63 from pancreatic cancer. While Upshaw did secure free agency for players, the NFL is the only league without guaranteed contracts, so players are free to sign 12-year, $100 million contracts, and then get cut when they hit 30 and lose a step. And the fates of older players are even more dire, with little to no support in the form of pensions or disability payments and scant attention paid to their situation in collective bargaining agreements. Upshaw, by far the highest-paid sports union chief, was deeply concerned with his contemporaries, explaining: “The bottom line is I don’t work for them. They don’t hire me, and they can’t fire me. They can complain about me all day long. They can have their opinion. But the active players have the vote. That’s who pays my salary." Upshaw had also been well behind the curve in addressing the serious long-term effects of post-concussion syndrome among players, apparently determining that his best chance for keeping his job was overseeing a league full of men whose bells had been rung too frequently. There were reports of spreading dissatisfaction with Upshaw and Baltimore Ravens kicker Matt Stover had called for his removal. In his playing days, Upshaw was one of the best offensive linemen in the league, earning spots on one AFL All-Star and seven NFL Pro Bowl teams in a 15-year Hall of Fame career with the Oakland Raiders.

#1 – Fix that loose step

Dave Freeman, author of 100 Things to Do Before You Die, has died at the age of 47 from a head injury sustained in a fall in his home. For those lamenting not having met Mr. Freeman, one of the items on his list is a voodoo pilgrimage to Haiti, so there may be a second chance.

Black Moses Parts the River Styx

Or
Got the Shaft

Or
Shafted
(An admittedly obvious epitaphany shared with Monty)

Or
Isaac Hayes Learns the Hard Way that Pig and Elephant DNA Just Don’t Splice

Or
One too many chocolate salty balls
(Props to Monty)
Soul legend Isaac Hayes has gone from playing funk to smelly funky, killed by his treadmill at age 65. Hayes added a deep bass and a flamboyant wardrobe to the blaxploitation era of the 1970s, as well as one of the eras great movie anthems – the theme song to Shaft: “Who’s a black private dick/Who’s a sex machine to all the chicks?/Shaft/John Shaft/He’s a complicated man/But no one understands him but his woman.” The theme won the Academy Award, suggesting either Oscar voters were hipper than was previously believed, or the old white dudes were really, really afraid. After disappearing from the scene for more than 20 years, Hayes found a new audience as South Park’s Chef, counseling the children on how to make love to a woman and extolling the virtues of his chocolate salty balls. Hayes left the show last year after deciding that while shows mocking Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Mormonism, were OK, his beloved Scientology was above such scorn. The George Harrison Invitational has decided to award points on this, even though Hayes’ thetan lives on. Other things you may not have known – he wrote the songs Soul Man and Hold On, I’m Coming; owned the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Sounds for a year before they were moved to become the Baltimore Hustlers/Claws team that never played a game, and starred in the Shaft-esque Truck Turner about a football player-turned-bounty hunter on the run from a hired assassin.

Weak End at Bernie's

(Tip o' the cap to Don)

What's the Worst that Could Happen? Yeah, I guess that’s It.
(Props to Monty)

Or
Mac Attack
(Further accolades for Monty)

Or
Ocean’s 10
Barack Obama’s presidential aspirations may have gotten a boost as Bernie Mac, The Original Corpse of Comedy, has died of pneumonia, at the age of 50. Mac’s death comes less than a month after his off-color material at a campaign event drew a rebuke from Obama, who apparently had never seen Mac’s act, and chooses comic relief as carefully as he selects his pastors. Appearing as a cranky store detective on Bad Santa, a jackass baseball player in Mr. 3000, and a father figure more in line with Bing Crosby than Ward Cleaver on The Bernie Mac Show, Mac had established a screen persona as a semi-lovable bastard, much in line with his angry stage presence as a stand-up comedian. Other roles included Frank Catton in Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen, Bosley in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, the prospective father in law of Ashton Kutcher (whose head really should have been beaten until the white meat showed) in Guess Who, and brother in law of and vice president for Chris Rock in Head of State.

The Last Day in the Life of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn

Or
That Gulag Sounds Pretty Good Right Now

Or
Alexsandr Solzhenits-out
(Stolen from the Derby Dead Pool, where I am in 33rd)
Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, bitter old man, has died of heart failure at age 89. Solzhenitsyn was at first praised as a critic of Soviet Union by Americans looking to score a P.R. victory in the Cold War, but was later revealed to just be an unhappy crank when he came to the United States in exile in 1974 and quickly set about bitching about the West’s excesses and crass materialism. Then, with the fall of the Soviet totalitarian regime, well, the first one anyway, he returned and bitched about the newly freed people’s embracing the avarice of the West. This was a man who could not be made happy. This was the guy who calls the front desk from the penthouse in the middle of the night because his pillow mint wasn’t minty enough. Sentenced to a series of gulags for more than 12 years after referring to Josef Stalin as “the man with the mustache,” Solzhenitsyn used a variant of prayer beads to help memorize more than 12,000 lines of text, as anything written would have been seized. This would serve as the basis for much of his writing after his release. In 1962, he went from high school science teacher to Tolstoy’s successor with the publication of “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” his novel about a prison camp inmate. He continued exposing Soviet brutality in his novels “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” and historical works like “The Gulag Archipelago.” At first celebrated, his work was later forced underground and circulated around the world by international intellectuals, earning him the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. Unable to shut him up, the Soviets kicked him out, and he spent two decades in the American gulag of Vermont, generally in solitude, with occasional finger-wagging at his host nation, before being welcomed back with the fall of the Soviet Union, where he embraced Vladimir Putin for restoring Russian supremacy.