Fileted Fignon

The cycling world has reason to celebrate, with a rare headline regarding a Tour de France winner that does not involve a doping scandal, as two-time Tour de France champion Laurent Fignon has died of cancer at the age of 50. Fignon won the annual Ride through France while Chafing Your Ass in 1983 and 1984 but is best remembered in the country that has relegated cycling to the Vs. network alongside SnoCross (snowmobile motorcross), whitetail deer hunting and the American Drag Racing League as the guy Greg LeMond caught on the last day of the 1989 Tour de France, erasing a 50-second deficit to win by 8 seconds, the closest in Tour history. This being a cycling story, that same year, Fignon tested positive for amphetamines at the Grand Prix de la Liberation in Eindhoven. I only said the headline didn’t involve doping.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

Or
Klaatu Barada Nixed
Patricia Neal, the only actress in Hollywood for whom strokes had nothing to do with the casting couch, has died at the age of 84. After winning a Tony in her debut performance in Another Part of the Forest, Neal’s first major movie role was almost her last, as Ayn Rand gave her as much trouble as any freshman literature student, and The Fountainhead was a big flop, although it did net her a 3-year affair with 48-year-old co-star Gary Cooper. She was the somewhat dim leg of a love triangle between Whit Bissell-wannabe Hugh Marlowe and suave alien Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still. In 1965, she was at the top of her career, a year removed from winning the Oscar for Hud, when a series of strokes left her in a coma for 3 weeks. She emerged semiparalyzed and unable to speak, but after learning to walk and talk again, earned a 1968 Oscar nomination as a bitter mother in The Subject Was Roses. Neal later won a Golden Globe as Olivia Walton in the TV-movie The Homecoming: A Christmas Story. Although the movie served as the pilot for The Waltons, producers were concerned her health wouldn’t stand up to the rigors of a weekly series and the role went to Michael Learned.

Body Bag Piper

Remember in The Longest Day, when there’s a bagpiper in the middle of the chaos on Sword Beach on D-Day getting mocked by Sean Connery? That walking target was based on Bill Millin, who has died of a stroke at the age of 88. On June 6, 1944, Millin was approached by his brigade’s commanding officer, Brig. Simon Fraser (aka Lord Lovat), who was one of Scotland’s most celebrated aristocrats. Against orders dating from World War I that forbade playing bagpipes on the battlefield because of the high risk of attracting enemy fire, Lord Lovat asked Private Millin to play on the beachhead to raise morale. Millin cited regulations, but Fraser told him “Ah, but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.” Whereas I would have shot at him just to stop that ungodly noise, the Germans didn’t shoot because they thought he was crazy while the British troops never forgot the inspiration they drew from the pipes that day. Hard to believe they got their asses

The Giant Bites the Dust! The Giant Bites the Dust!

Or
The Rotting Corpse Heard 'Round the World!
(Kudos to Terry)
Bobby Thomson, Scotland’s greatest baseball player, has died following a long illness at 86, giving Ralph Branca a new place to walk his dog. Thomson hit arguably the most famous home run in baseball history as the New York Giants capped an amazing comeback to top their archrival Brooklyn Dodgers for the 1951 NL pennant. After trailing the Dodgers by 13 ½ games with a month and a half to go and Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen declaring “The Giants is dead,” the Giants won 16 in a row and 37 of 44 to tie the Dodgers on the last weekend of the season and force a three-game playoff. In game 3, with 2 on, 1 out and Branca on the mound protecting a 4-2 lead in the 9th, Thomson lived every kid’s backyard fantasy, hitting an 0-1 pitch into the left field stands, the Shot Heard ‘Round the World capping the Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff, prompting Russ Hodges famed broadcast “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” and costing Charles Emerson Winchester III a fortune. That was actually Thomson’s second homer off Branca in the playoff series, as Thomson had hit a 2-run homer off Game 1 starter Branca for a 3-1 win. “Now it is done,” Red Smith wrote in The New York Herald Tribune. “Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.” Although his legacy was sealed on Oct 3, 1951, for his 15-year career, he finished with a respectable 264 home runs and 1026 RBI and made 3 All-Star Games.

Goodbye, Newman

(Lauditations for Mark)

Or
A Civil Tongue Stilled
Edwin Newman, the only grammarian to host Saturday Night Live, has died of pneumonia at the age of 91. Newman was to broadcast journalism what William Safire was to print, bringing erudition and wit to the defense of language while broadcasting the news in his three decades with NBC News as correspondent, anchor and critic, covering events from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and moderating two presidential debates. To hear Newman tell it, he “had a spotless record of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” such as a trip from London to Morocco, where upon landing he learned that England’s King George VI had died. His generally grumpy disposition belied his droll sense of humor and love of puns, as how he related a story about a man who used newspapers to remove moisture from his shoes, then dropped the punchline, “These are The Times that dry men’s soles.” Citing one of his grammatical pet peeves, a sign in his office read, “Abandon ‘Hopefully’ All Ye Who Enter Here.” In his 1984 Saturday Night Live appearance, Newman played an operator at a suicide hotline who takes a call from a distraught woman, and then corrects her grammar. He also read the news on David Letterman’s NBC morning show and later anchored the USA cable channel program “Weekly World News,” lending an air of authority to stories on a South Seas island tribe that worshiped boxing promoter Don King and a poltergeist that had taken up residence in a bathroom, as they are wont to do.

From Answering to the Ward Boss to Answering to the Warden

Dan Rostenkowski, who maintained the finest standards of Chicago politics, has died of cancer at the age of 82. In the halcyon days when elected leaders reached across the political aisle to line their own pockets instead of adhering mindlessly to partisanship, Rostenkowski was among Congress’ most skilled practitioners, parlaying his deal making skills into the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee, but his interest in philately helped usher in the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. Federal investigators determined that he had bought $22,000 in stamps from the House post office with public money and converted them to cash, had 14 no-show employees on his payroll, and used office expense account to charge $40,000 in furniture, fine china and crystal among 14 counts that led to 15 months at Club Fed.

Wait ‘Til the Next Life

Gene Hermanski, former Brooklyn Dodger spring training legend, has died at the age of 90. Hermanski is often lauded as one of the most welcoming of the Dodgers when Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, putting an arm around the rookie when most teammates ignored him, and for suggesting that all the Dodgers wear number 42 to confuse snipers who might take a shot at him. Given Robinson’s more obvious distinguishing characteristic, the GHI leaves it to readers to determine if Hermanski was trying to break the tension with gallows humor or was a stone cold moron.

Flight to Nowhere

Or
Down the Tubes
Ted Stevens, the anti-Al Gore, has died in a plane crash at the age of 86. Stevens was instrumental in helping secure statehood for the Last Frontier, affording himself the opportunity to rape the land and secure billions of taxpayer money for the unpopulated wilderness and hundreds of thousands for himself; all the while keeping an eye on Russia. The longest-serving Republican senator ever represented the caribou and Eskimos for 40 years before losing his seat a week after a DC federal jury convicted him on seven felony counts related to more than $250,000 in illegal gifts. This was a nice bookend to his career, as his lobbying efforts for statehood while he was a lawyer for the Interior Department were also a violation of federal law. He was defeated by Nick Begich, Jr., whose father was serving Alaska in Congress when he died in a 1972 plane crash. Stevens himself had barely walked away from a 1978 plane crash that killed his wife, suggesting a relationship between Alaskan politicians and airplanes rivaling that of Rocket Romano and helicopters. Stevens never failed to remind Alaskans they came from a meaningless backwater and would be lost without him, in part through the works of the Ted Stevens Foundation, a charity established to "assist in educating and informing the public about the career of Senator Ted Stevens." These efforts included innumerable pork barrel projects that netted more federal dollars per capita than any other state – 1,452 earmark projects and $3.4 billion since 1991, including a $3.5 million airport to service an island populated by 100 people (and a seafood processing plant that donated heavily to Stevens’ PAC), and of course the proposed $400 million Bridge to Nowhere, which essentially would have made it easier for the last two residents of another isolated island to leave. The angriest man in the Senate wore his trademark Incredible Hulk tie as he shouted down environmentalists who sought to preserve Alaska’s natural beauty, advocating drilling and clear-cutting old growth forest at every turn. He was also instrumental in helping to define the Internet as “not a big truck,” but rather, “a series of tubes.”