Finally Stopped Hurting

George McGovern, the unabashed liberal so committed to raising the ceiling for minorities that he selected a vice presidential candidate from an insane asylum, has died at the age of 90. After Thomas Eagleton’s electroshock therapy for depression was revealed, he was dropped from the ticket, and McGovern cast about for a candidate. With most prominent Democrats correctly surmising that the VP slot that year had the career prospects of a Spinal Tap drummer, he was publicly rebuked five times before settling on Sargent Shriver. Not even McGovern telling a heckler to “kiss my ass” at a campaign event was enough to excite the populace to vote for a whiny liberal and the 7th-best candidate for vice president, and the ticket suffered what at the time was the second worst electoral defeat in history, 520-17. McGovern failed to even carry his home state of South Dakota. Luckily, Walter Mondale would come along to knock McGovern down to the bronze medal after his 1984 pasting, after which, Mondale asked, “When does it stop hurting?” to which McGovern said, “I’ll let you know when it does.”

Phnom Penh Ultimate

Norodom Sihanouk, the Sacred Compassionate Foot Lord Sacred Best Jaws of the Lion Sacred Great Brave Warrior of Cambodia, has died at the age of 89. When Sihanouk was first crowned in 1941, his contemporaries on the world stage included Franklin D. Roosevelt, George VI, Haile Selassie, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco. Over the next 6 decades, like a Southeast Asian Sam Drucker, Sihanouk served at varying times as monarch, prime minister, Communist puppet, leader in exile, monarch again, and, after abdicating in 2004, composer, filmmaker and Internet troll. He won independence from French colonial rulers in 1953, relying on diplomacy, rather than armed conflict as had occurred in Vietnam. Surprisingly, his Buddhist socialist agenda was not as effective in sustaining economic growth. He tried to keep Cambodia neutral during the Vietnam War, but his ignoring Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger’s secret bombing campaign along the country’s border led to his ouster in a coup. He sided with the ruthless Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to return to power, lending his prestige and popularity to a regime that would kill 1.7 million people over the next 4 years. He was restored to a figurehead position with the end of the civil war to oust the Khmer Rouge, and had spent most of the last decade traveling to China for treatment of various ailments, lead paint and melamine-tainted milk apparently being secret remedies for hypertension and diabetes.

Beano Before, But They’ll Beano After

Cranky college football analyst Beano Cook has died of some combination of diabetes, heart disease, other ailments and being 81. Dubbed “the country’s leading authority on college football,” in 1982 by Sports Illustrated, Cook headlined ESPN’s Saturday studio shows for more than 20 decades, managing to be informative and amusing without ever donning a gladiator helmet or gator head. A football fanatic from childhood, as a teen Cook hitchhiked to New York to see the Army-Michigan game and to Philadelphia for the Army-Navy game. He spent a decade as Pitt’s sports publicist where he was the one honest man in the business, who proclaimed “I won’t even lie for Pitt.” He had a brilliant idea of posing Pitt’s star basketball player alongside Jonas Salk, who had developed his polio vaccine at Pitt with the proposed caption: “The world’s two greatest shot makers,” but Salk was better at making medicine than making jokes and refused to go along. One of Cook’s most enduring contributions was during a short stint with CBS where he devised the NFL map that determines what regions see what games on television. At the time network executives simply looked at the standings and picked the teams with the best records, ignoring the schadenfreude for football fans watching their archrivals lose. So Packers fans got to watch the Bears and vice versa. The Redskins were broadcast throughout the South because no one cared about the Falcons. When a team was on the rise, they got more air time, like Joe Montana’s San Francisco 49ers. For neutral regions, Cook would call local sportswriters or even random fans to get an idea on what games to program. And when all else failed, they went with the Cowboys, making CBS’ two biggest stars Larry Hagman and Tom Landry. The strategy worked as CBS’s NFL ratings, and the resultant ad dollars, exploded. 

Mongo No Longer Pawn in Game of Life

Alex Karras, best remembered as the cock-fighting oil rigger in When Time Ran Out, has died of kidney disease, heart disease and stomach cancer at the age of 77. This marks the first time that Karras has ever assisted the NFL, as the league has one fewer plaintiff trying to claim he had no idea that running full speed and slamming his head against helmeted, padded men every Sunday would have negative health consequences. After an All-America career at Iowa, including finishing second in the Heisman balloting in 1957, he embarked on a semi-pro career with the Detroit Lions. He emerged as one of the league’s most feared defensive lineman, earning Pro Bowl honors 4 times and making the NFL All-1960s team, despite missing a season when commissioner Pete Rozelle decided that betting on 6 NFL games a year represented a slap at the integrity of the game and suspended him for the 1963 season. He appeared in 1968’s Paper Lion, based on George Plimpton’s story of his training camp experiences as a QB, which opened his second career in Hollywood. A series of guest spots, including a Marine devoted to saving Hawkeye on MASH, and his horse-punching, ox-riding stint as Mongo in Blazing Saddles earned him a starring role in The Diff’rent Strokes rip-off Webster as Emmanuel Lewis’ adoptive father.

A-Bates-ed

Or

Bates No-tell

Roy Bates, who elevated a sitcom premise into a way of life after commandeering an abandoned British fort in the North Sea and declaring it a sovereign nation, has died of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 91. In the 1960s, the former major in the British Army was among a group of disc jockeys setting up pirate stations to avoid England’s restrictive broadcasting regulations. Establishing a base in international waters, in 1967, he proclaimed his pile of abandoned junk to be the Principality of Sealand. The following year, he fired warning shots at an approaching British vessel and got arrested, but the British court ruled it had no jurisdiction. A decade later, Sealand’s prime minister Alexander G. Achenbach led a group of Germans who were stunned to realize there was a part of the continent they hadn’t invaded yet and attempted to remedy this injustice by staging a coup, taking Bates’ son hostage. Bates stormed Sealand in a dramatic helicopter raid, imprisoning one of the invaders. The German government asked Britain to intervene, but it declined, citing the lack of jurisdiction, and when they sent a diplomat to retrieve their citizen, Bates asserted that Germany had effectively recognized Sealand as a sovereign nation. None of the Bateses actually live on Sealand, which is accessible only by helicopter or being lifted off a ship by a crane and consists of modest living quarters, a kitchen, a chapel and an exercise area. The Bates family now sells “the Count/Countess package” offering anyone the chance at a “royal” title from a country that no other nation on earth has recognized, Germany’s eye roll and diplomatic “whatever” notwithstanding.