Ingemar Johansson, until Buster Douglas the worst heavyweight champion of all time, has died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at 76. The Big Swede’s first big-stage appearance was the gold medal bout of the 1952 Olympics, where he was disqualified for lack of effort. He claimed his strategy was to tire his opponent for a third-round assault, and the pansies in the Olympic Committee gave him the silver medal in 1982. He then embarked on a professional career and punched his way to a title shot in 1959, which he trained for at the Catskills resort Grossingers, rather than the usual Spartan conditions. After several lackluster rounds, he caught Floyd Patterson with a lucky punch, and won the title. He preferred the high-life to workouts, and his pre-fight regimen consisted of rich food, loose women and late nights, and he got his clock cleaned in his rematches with Patterson in 1960 and 1961.
Or Rabbit at Rest in Peace – Mark (Meritorious mention for Mark)
Or Rabbit Fur Coded (Accolades for Phil) John Updike, champion of the insignificant, chronicler of suburban adultery, ghost writer for Krusty the Clown’s memoir “Your Shoes Are Too Big to Kickbox God” and former Boston University professor, has met the little death that awaits athletes; he has died, of cancer at the age of 76, and has a lyric little band box all to himself. Best remembered for his 4 novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a middle class salesman who hates his job and his wife and whose life is traced across the major events of the century, Updike’s resume included 61 books and countless essays, short stories, poems and critiques, all written in a lyrical, detailed style. He also contributed The New Yorker’s best sports reporting, an essay on the baseball star Ted Williams’s last game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” Early in his career, some suggested his Protestant faith kept him from receiving the Pulitzer, because God does not answer men of letters, but he eventually picked up a couple in 1982 and 1991.
Bob May, the man inside B9, aka Robot, in every episode of camp classic Lost in Space, has died at the age of 69. He didn’t provide the voice, and got the job because he could fit inside the suit, so he mostly owes his fame to the obsessed Comic-Con set. Although he fit, it wasn’t an easy job getting in and out, and he would spend all day inside the Robot on set, even taking cigarette breaks in costume, so to speak, and turning one of TV sci-fi’s most beloved characters into a chimney.
Bob May, the man inside B9, aka Robot, in every episode of camp classic Lost in Space, has died at the age of 69. He didn’t provide the voice, and got the job because he could fit inside the suit, so he mostly owes his fame to the obsessed Comic-Con set. Although he fit, it wasn’t an easy job getting in and out, and he would spend all day inside the Robot on set, even taking cigarette breaks in costume, so to speak, and turning one of TV sci-fi’s most beloved characters into a chimney.
Or Tempera-rary Andrew Wyeth, who confounded critics and delighted the masses with pictures of things people know rather than splotches, miscolored tomato cans, melting clocks and feces-smeared canvases, has died at the age of 91. Wyeth’s America was largely bleak – gray and brown vistas, strange old houses, barren hills, abandoned barns, bare-limbed trees, and empty beaches – but was viewed as stolidly middle class, an immediate turn-off for the intelligentsia. Some criticized him as romanticizing a long-past America, as though one’s past is something to be forgotten or that cripples crawling through fields is romantic. With this latter work, Christina’s World, Wyeth’s fame exploded – Winston Churchill requested Wyeth watercolors to decorate his room, Harvard gave him an honorary degree, in 1963 President Johnson gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Mister Rogers hung a Wyeth in the entry way of his studio house.
John Mortimer, English barrister turned dramatist, has died at the age of 86. His most notable legal decision was getting the Sex Pistols off on an obscenity charge for the use of the word bullocks in their album Never Mind the Bollocks. But he’s best remembered for creating the barrister Horace Rumpole, defender of the accused at London’s Old Bailey in the BBC series Rumpole of the Bailey, starring Leo McKern. Mortimer also served as consultant on left-wing screed Boston Legal, where his legal experience came in less handy than his time in the Communist Party.
Or His Coffin Will be Lined with Fine Corinthian Leather (Accolades for Phil)
Or De Graves, Boss, De Graves..... (More whoop whoop for Phil) Ricardo Montalban, who spent his cinematic career trying to destroy the world, has died at the age of 88. As Armando, he sheltered Caesar, the ape who led the revolution in Conquest for the Planet of the Apes that would lead to the overthrowing of man by apes who would finally do it, finally blow it all up, damn them all to hell. As Khan Noonien Singh in Space Seed and Star Trek II: The One that Didn’t Suck, he tried to kill James T. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise who would go on to save the planet by stealing a whale in Star Trek IV: Revenge of the Obelisk. And as the evil Abner Smith, he tried to kill Cathy Lee Crosby's blonde Wonder Woman in an elf costume. He also served as concierge for the world’s creepiest island – sorry Lost fans – lisping midgets always trump polar bears. Montalban’s career arc took him from Latin lover to knowing self-parody, extolling the soft, Corinthian leather of the Chrysler Cordoba, playing the King in Cannonball Run II, and getting trumped by Frank Drebin as the evil tycoon Vincent Ludwig in Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! He was called on to play a range of ethnicities with skin darker than coral, including a Kabuki actor in Sayonara and Chief Satangki in the miniseries How the West Was Won, for which he won an Emmy. More recently, he played Grandpa in the Spy Kids movies, Señor Senior Sr on Kim Possible, and the voice of McStroke, a genetically engineered cow on Family Guy.
Or I am Not a Number, I am a Dead Man (An epitaphany shared with Phil)
Or Prisoner No More (Kudos to Monty)
Or I am not a number....actually, it's lot 238, 2 rows, third on the left (Additional accolades for Phil)
Or Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow (Tip o’ the cap for Don)
Or You are number......86ed (Further flourishes for Phil)
Or The Village is Missing Their Idiot (Bonus bragging for Phil)
Or It Takes a Village to Kill a Man..... (More merit for Phil)
Or He's just a number, not a free man (A different take from Don)
Or Be seeing you, Number Six (A trifecta from Don) Patrick McGoohan is off to meet another No. 2 after finding his way out of the Village at the age of 80. The original choice to play James Bond, McGoohan instead took up as TV’s coolest spy, John Drake, on the BBC series Danger Man. Unlike Bond, Drake made mistakes, didn’t use a gun and didn’t nail everything that moved. Despite the series’ popularity, McGoohan gave it up to create The Prisoner, one of TV’s truly grand experiments. He starred as an unnamed spy who has gone off the reservation, only to get captured or kidnapped and taken to the high-tech prison/country club The Village for a bizarre interrogation. McGoohan was intimately involved in the show, drafting a 54-page “Bible” explaining the history of the Village and covering every minute detail to ensure the series’ mythology. A BBC man to the core, McGoohan conceived the series as a 7-episode run, but the demands of U.S. television stretched it out to 17 shows, and it remains a cult phenomenon. He showed up in the Village one more time in The Simpsons episode The Computer Wore Menace Shoes, where he gets left behind as Homer, aka No. 5, steals his boat to escape. When not trying to elude the Rover, he tormented Clint Eastwood as the sinister warden in Escape from Alcatraz, ran the Scanners wing of ConSec, and played the sadistic King Edward I in Braveheart, and pulled off the unique feat of playing two different special guest murderers on Columbo TV-movies 15 years apart and winning an Emmy for each. Other roles he turned down included Simon Templar, aka The Saint, Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series, Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, and as a potential replacement for Columbo.
No-hitter hating manager Preston Gomez has died at the age of 86, several months after getting hit by a car at a gas station. The second Latin American manager in the major leagues when he took the reins of the expansion San Diego Padres in 1969, he also managed the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros and achieved the level of success generally ascribed to the Padres, Cubs and Astros of the 1970s, amassing a record of 346-529 and 4 last-place finishes. With Clay Kirby throwing a no-hitter in the 8th inning in 1970, but the Padres trailing 1-0, Gomez lifted him for a pinch-hitter, drawing boos from the crowd, with one fan jumping into the dugout to confront him. The Padres lost the no-hitter and the game. With the Astros in 1974 and Don Wilson throwing a no-hitter into the 8th, but trailing 2-1, Gomez did it again, and history repeated itself.
Or Contracted (Mad Props to Craig) Carl Pohlad, the only owner to advocate for the dissolution of his own team when visionary commissioner Bud Selig decided that the answer to the game’s ills was not to impose a strict salary cap or other salary controls, but to eliminate two franchises, and not one that even in the midst of a World Series run can’t sell out its horrible ballpark, but one with 40 years of history that was less than a decade removed from a World Series title, has died at the age of 93. Thankfully, he won’t get to enjoy the fruits of the new stadium opening in 2010 that he held up the citizenry of Minnesota for. The son of a railroad brakeman had an estimated worth of $3.6 billion, making him the 102nd richest man in the United States with interests in banking, financial services, soft drink bottling, airlines and real estate before buying the Minnesota Twins in 1984. Initially hailed as the man who saved the team from moving to Florida, he became seen as a cheap bastard who wanted to disband the franchise as it was a better investment than paying for a decent team. The Twins won World Series titles in 1987 and 1991, but Pohlad ordered executives to cut salaries, and the Twins had 8 straight losing seasons starting in 1993. He almost sold the team to a businessman who wanted to move the team to Charlotte in 1997, then sought to have the Twins contracted in exchange for $125 to $200 million in 2001, not long after he had lent $3 million to the Milwaukee Brewers, owned by Selig’s daughter, in what was in no way a conflict of interest. Instead of being eliminated, the Twins made the playoffs the next three seasons, returned in 2006 and were 2 runs short of the AL Central title in 2008.
Griffin B. Bell, the simple country lawyer who became the attorney general of his childhood neighbor Jimmy Carter, has died at the age of 90 of pancreatic cancer. Judge Bell was to many a caricature of the Southern law-talking guys, with a small-town background, courtly manner, self-deprecating humor, a gift for persuasion and an instinct for politics. He also stood out among Georgia Democrats as the biggest nutbag until Zell Miller, working with Georgia’s governor to oppose racial segregation in the 1950s, defending Dow Corning against faulty breast implants claims and serving as President Bush’s personal counsel during the Iran-contra investigation. Helping the governor ran counter to his own stance on segregation, and later while serving on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, his ruling helped break the control of rural honkry political bosses in Georgia. As manager of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in Georgia, he helped deliver a larger majority than Kennedy earned in Massachusetts, without the advantage of bribes and family favors. He acted to fix the Justice Department after the Watergate scandal, and helped establish the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established rules and safeguards for wiretapping that the current administration chose to ignore.
(Props to Don for the headline and the heads up) William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'. -- "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," by Bob Dylan On Feb. 8, 1963, a young, socially prominent tobacco farmer named William Devereux Zantzinger got drunk at a charity ball in Baltimore and demanded a drink from Hattie Carroll, a 51-year-old barmaid with 11 children and a history of high blood pressure. She asked him to wait, and the upstanding gentleman cursed, did not refer to her as ma’am, and rapped her repeatedly with his cane. She served him and walked away, telling co-workers she felt deathly ill. Hours later, she collapsed and died of a stroke, and Zantzinger was charged with homicide, later reduced to manslaughter, based partially on her poor health. In the volatile civil rights climate, this case drew national attention, without the benefit of Fox News commentators to point out the rather significant judicial overreaching. Dylan included "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," on his 1964 album "The Times They Are A-Changin'." Mr. Zantzinger was freed during sentencing to finish harvesting his tobacco crop. He served six months in jail and was fined $500. He would later have another brush with the law in 1991 when he was indicted for collecting $64,000 in rent on rural shacks without indoor plumbing that he had lost for failure to pay taxes 5 years prior. For that crime, he was sentenced to 18 months in the county jail and fined $50,000. Take that statement on Southern justice however you will. Zantzinger died Jan. 3 at the age of 69.
Pat Hingle, one of the great, “Hey, it’s that guy,” guys in cinematic and television history, has died of myelodysplasia at the age of 84. He had a husky everyman look, and held almost as diverse a collection of pre-acting jobs - shoe salesman, playground attendant, rather unsuccessful purveyor of Bibles, farmhand, usher, waiter, file clerk at Bloomingdale’s – as he had cinematic roles, taking so many that he often watched his own films with fascination as he couldn’t remember the characters he’d played. Some may remember him as the egomaniacal, justice-obsessed judge who uses Clint Eastwood as a reluctant long arm of the law in Hang ‘Em High. Others recall Edward Roundfield, executor of Mortimer Brewster’s great uncle’s will in Brewster’s Millions. He stubbed out a cigar in Angelica Huston’s hand in The Grifters. As Gus O’Malley, he was the staff-abusing former owner of Cheers who sold Sam the bar. He owned Dennit Racing in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. He and Michael Gough were the only two actors to appear in all four of the pre-Christian Bale Batman films, playing Police Commissioner Gordon. He played the gay J. Edgar Hoover in the 1992 HBO film Citizen Cohn. But for me, he was Col. Potter’s old friend and fellow prankster Colonel Daniel Webster Tucker, who convinces the camp he’s a hard as nails general and baits them into a seemingly fatal prank.
Sheikh Rashid III bin Ahmad Al Mu'alla, ruler of Umm al-Quwain, the second smallest of the United Arab Emirates, has died at the age of 79. Governed by Rashid III since 1981, Umm al-Quwain, literally “Mother of two powers,” comprises 750 km2 and has 62,000 inhabitants, and was established as an independent sheikdom in 1775. In 1820, it became a British protectorate to keep the Ottoman Turks out, but was the lowest class of salute, or princely, state, warranting only a three-gun (out of 21) greeting for its ruler. And last month they banned motorcycles. That’s all I got. What do you want? He was a guy in a sheet running a sandbox a third the size of Delaware.
Mr. Cantwell will be taking over Mr. Collins' classes...
(Props to our resident Teech, Mr. Barker, for the headline and the heads up)
Steven Gilborn, a classic “hey it’s that guy” actor, has died at the age of 72 of cancer. Among his notable roles are as the teacher who vows to teach Kevin Arnold algebra or die trying and manages both on The Wonder Years, a Congressman on the committee investigating Leo McGarry’s involvement in concealing the president’s multiple sclerosis on The West Wing, the guy running the Jewish center where Andy volunteers to assuage his guilt about schtupping an anti-Semitic old flame on Andy Richter Controls the Universe, Uncle Rory, the sanest member of Xander’s family at his wedding to Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the judge who points out that The Tick’s vigilante ways aren’t compatible with the U.S. judicial system on The Tick, and Ellen’s beloved and befuddled father on Ellen.
Claiborne Pell, the effete out of touch senator whose namesake college grant now doesn’t even cover the cost of a semester’s worth of beer, has died at the age of 90. The Rhode Island senator was one of the odder inhabitants of Capitol Hill. An avid jogger, he wore a tweed jacket while logging his miles. He called for Congressional hearings on ESP and UFOs. A member of one of the richest families in the country, he was unfamiliar with the ways of the working class he championed. During a rainstorm, an aide provided him with footwear. He asked: “To whom am I indebted for these fine rubbers?” The aide told him he got them at Thom McAn, to which he replied “Well, do tell Mr. McAn that I am much obliged to him.” When a campaign opponent derided his blue blood and branded him “a cream puff,” Pell responded by promptly obtaining the endorsement of a bakers’ union. Pell wrote the legislation that created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant (aka Pell) program. Because the grant award was not tied to any logical measure, it is currently funded to $4,050 annually, which when the law was written, covered about 60% of the cost of tuition at a public four-year university. In 2007, the average cost to attend a private 4-year institution was $23,712. He was also strongly tied to international relations, serving as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1987-1995, and among his fruitless or ill-conceived positions were initially supporting President Johnson’s expansion of war in Vietnam, normalizing relations with Cuba, challenging President Reagan’s support of Nicaraguan guerillas, advocating for the role of the United Nations and supporting a treaty to keep nuclear weapons off the sea floor. The six-term Democrat is regarded as being the most powerful politician in the history of Rhode Island, somewhat akin to being the longest-lived drummer for Spinal Tap. Descended from a family that derived its wealth from an 18th-century royal charter of land from King George III of England and whose ancestors were the original lords of the manor in Pelham Manor, N.Y., Pell lived among the old-money families in Newport and was one of 6 members of his family to serve in Congress or the Senate, plus James K. Polk’s vice-president George Dallas.
