Natural Causes

Ruth Ann Steinhagen, who lived out every Phillies’ fan’s dream by getting to shoot one of the miserable, stinking bums, has died at the age of 83. In 1947, the then-17 year old became obsessed with Chicago Cubs first baseman Eddie Waitkus, Cubs’ fandom being people’s exhibit #1 that she was a bit unhinged, building the kind of shrine now regularly seen on Criminal Minds and setting an empty place across from herself at dinner as though he was Elijah in batting gloves. After the 1948 season, Waitkus got traded from the 8th place Cubs to the 6th place Phillies. Just when he thought things were looking up, the Phillies came to Chicago to play the Cubs, and Steinhagen invited Waitkus to her hotel room. Displaying the kind of reflexes common to the stalwarts of the first franchise to lose 10,000 games, after Waitkus entered the room, Steinhagen had time to retrieve a .22 rifle, aim and fire, hitting him in the chest. She spent 3 years in an asylum before being released. Waitkus declined to press charges, and Steinhagen slipped into obscurity. Except for the Bernard Malamud novel with a similar plot, published in 1952. Or the 1984 film based on it.

Carey on, Wayward Son

Harry Carey, Jr., who John Wayne got killed in Red River, 3 Godfathers, The Searchers and Big Jake, has died at the age of 91. The prolific character actor was the last surviving member of John Ford’s famed stock company, and is the son of another western movie legend, a mentor for John Wayne. His lineage and status as living history helped him score many of his later roles as directors hired him just to hear stories between takes, including Joe Dante, who hired Carey to be the guy in the bank in Gremlins. Other notable films included Rio Grande, Mister Roberts, Cheyenne Autumn, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Cahill U.S. Marshall and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula.

Mournin’ Norman

(Props to Monty)

Or

Deserted Shield

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the very model of a modern four-star general, has died at the age of 78 from complications of pneumonia. His gruff but genial and second helping of mashed potatoes physique were straight out of central casting for a military commander - or a football coach – and he was the star of CNN’s programming for months in 1991. A veteran of Vietnam, where he earned two Purple Hearts and three Silver Stars, Schwarzkopf reminded America what it meant to win a war and showed what the greatest military in the history of the planet looked like by whipping Iraq, the world’s 4th largest army, all over the desert in Operation Desert Storm. Forced to stop short of actually resolving our problems with Saddam Hussein by the gutless chairman of the Joint Chiefs (Colin Powell) and his spineless president (George I), Schwarzkopf had to sit quietly when Junior attempted to resolve his Daddy issues in 2003 by finishing things. A member of Mensa, Schwarkopf was a New Jersey native and Hall of Famer and followed in the family business, as his grandfather was also a West Point graduate, served in World War I, helped found the New Jersey State Police and served as a lead investigator of the Charles Lindbergh, Jr. kidnapping, then re-upped for World War II, and his father restored the Shah of Iran to power after the CIA coup overthrew the democratically elected government and prime minister.

Thunderbirds are No!

Gerry Anderson, who made the future seem wooden, crappy and boring, has died at the age of 83. Using his supermarionation technique, he saved the world time and again with millionaire astronaut turned playboy adventurer Jeff Tracy, his boys and Lady Penelope at the end of strings attached to sticks in the 1960s classic Thunderbirds. Only slight less stiff and creaky was Space: 1999, starring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain as part of the crew of a base on the moon, which had been knocked out of orbit by an explosion. Anderson had been tapped to write and produce Moonraker, which managed to be cartoonish without his handiwork.

Durning Needled

With more than 200 screen credits on his resume, if you’ve never seen Charles Durning, you’re either Amish, lying or, as his appearances included both The Sting and The Muppet Movie, an idiot. He was one of the first men on the beach at Normandy on D-Day, and the lone member of his unit to survive an ambush. In Belgium, he was stabbed seven times in hand-to-hand combat before beating the German soldier to death with a rock, then was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and marched into the forest at Malmedy, where he was one of the only survivors when the Germans opened fire on 90 POWs. After that, surviving in the rough and tumble streets of Hollywood was a piece of cake. Among his more memorable roles were Lt. Snyder, the crooked cop trying to shake down grifters in The Sting; Doc Hopper, the frog leg cooking restaurateur in The Muppet Movie; Pappy O’Daniel, good ol’ boy governor in O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Les, the widower who finds Dustin Hoffman attractive in Tootsie; and Moretti, the hostage negotiator dealing with the idiot crooks in Dog Day Afternoon. Along the way, he earned supporting Oscar nominations as another slippery governor in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and as a horny Nazi in To Be or Not to Be, and 9 Emmy nominations, most recently as Tommy’s father in Rescue Me, but never won. He had to mollify himself with a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts, and a Tony for playing Big Daddy in a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The Last Angry Man

Or

Odd Man Out

(Stolen without remorse from stiffs.com)

Or

Slab Coat

(Props to Monty)
Jack Klugman, who only got into acting school because of the war-time absence of able men and often sold his own blood to make rent, has died at the age of 90. Klugman was slovenly sports writer Oscar Madison to Tony Randall’s prissy photographer Felix Unger on the TV version of The Odd Couple, earning two Emmys to Randall’s one. The two remained lifelong friends, reuniting for a benefit stage version of The Odd Couple and a revival of The Sunshine Boys. Randall was one of the first people to visit Klugman after undergoing surgery for throat cancer, and Klugman wrote about their friendship in Tony and Me. Klugman then moved on to star in the weekly public service announcement that was Quincy, ME, solving crimes while delivering long-winded soliloquies about various medical and societal injustices. One of those soliloquies drew attention to orphan drugs – medications that treat conditions not common enough to make them profitable for pharmaceutical companies to pursue – with Klugman himself testifying before Congress to encourage passage of legislation that would offer economic incentives to develop these agents and then writing an episode of Quincy to shame Senator Orrin Hatch, who had been holding up the bill. He starred in 4 episodes of The Twilight Zone as a down-and-out trumpeter, an excellent small-town pool player, a spaceship pilot who refused to accept his own death and a bookie who trades his life for his soldier son’s. Despite the years of good will he earned on the small screen, he was unable to make John Stamos palatable and You Again? was cancelled after 2 seasons. His best known movie role is probably Juror #5 in Twelve Angry Men, as the product of a tough neighborhood who explains how switchblades are used; he was the last surviving member of the cast.

Borked

(Kudos to Monty)
Robert Bork, owner of the worst combover in the Western world, has died at the age of 85. Bork was known as a conservative legal theorist who held that the Constitution offered no right to privacy or protection for minority views and groups. He opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, held that 1st Amendment rights only covered discussions related to the business of governing, and as Richard Nixon’s solicitor general (after the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General resigned rather than comply) fired the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate break-in and his entire staff in the Saturday Night Massacre. Bork considered himself an originalist, holding that only those rights explicitly enumerated by the Founding Fathers were constitutional, and that every legal mind in the nearly 200 years that followed was wrong, save himself. Nominated by Ronald Reagan to the United States Supreme Court, he was soundly defeated in his confirmation vote, which some have held set the stage for the denial of confirmation for any nominee with strongly held legal beliefs, but which sounds like prevented 25 years of bad judging from the bench.

No Way

(Props to Monty)

Or

Aloha

Daniel K. Inouye, hands down the finest senator in the history of Hawaii, has died of respiratory complications at the age of 88. A medical volunteer at Pearl Harbor during  the Japanese bombings, Inouye headed off to Europe while more than 7,000 of his fellow Japanese-Americans were in internment camps. Inouye was a member of the first all-Nisei volunteer unit, which became the most decorated unit in American military history. In 1945, during an assault on three machine gun emplacements, Inouye destroyed one with a grenade, another with submachine gun fire, then, already shot in the stomach, had his right arm severed by enemy fire, with a grenade still gripped in his right hand. He retrieved the arm and destroyed the last bunker with the grenade, earning the Medal of Honor. From the start of Hawaii’s statehood, he represented it in Washington, DC, first in Congress, then, since 1962, in the Senate, the first Japanese-American in both houses. He was in influential member of the committees investigating Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair, and helped reform the intelligence committee as chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence.

Mr. Sitar Dead, Not Special He’s Got Skin That’s Blue and Cold Ain’t No Good for Nothing But to Fill a Hole Six Feet in the Ground

Or

Shanked

(More chapeau doffing for Monty)
Ravi Shankar, who stroked George Harrison’s pretentiousness in much the same way Yoko stroked John’s, has died of complications from heart surgery at the age of 92. Without the influence of the legendary sitarist, the world might have missed out on the  annoying twang in such songs as BJ Young’s Hooked on a Feeling an Shakira’s Gypsy, as well as countless others from artists trying to add cache and depth to crappy pop songs. Shankar and his ensemble started touring the US in the 1950s, developing a following among beret-wearing, goateed beatniks. Harrison found a sitar and became intrigued. The rest of the Beatles, not happy enough with merely proclaiming themselves bigger than Jesus, decided to see just how far they could push their popularity and let him play one on Norwegian Wood. Sensing that future music historians would proclaim The Beatles the most influential band of all time, groups like The Rolling Stones, The Animals and The Byrds quickly followed suit to avoid falling behind in their sheepdom. Assuming that if audiences went crazy for white guys playing the sitar badly, they’d completely lose their shit for someone who knew what he was doing, Shankar expanded his touring and recording and found that, yes, Americans really are that dumb. In later years, Shankar became offended when he realized that rather than revolutionizing music, his twangy board was really just a fad that wasted hippies found soothing.

My hit has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R...

(Tip o’ the cap to Mark)
Oscar Niemeyer, who brought The Jetsons to the jungle, has died of a respiratory infection at the age of 103. A student of the French architect Le Corbusier, he developed a distinctive modernist style typified by sweeping curves, which he claimed were inspired by the women on Brazil’s beaches, and stark concrete, which was apparently inspired by the pasty tourists on Brazil’s beaches. His work suggested Brazil’s hedonism with curves reminiscent of a samba dancer, including the Saint Francis of Assisi church, which boasted sensuous lines that offended a Catholic Church more attuned to the sensuality of straight lines and cowering choirboys and was refused consecration for more than a decade. An avowed Communist, Cold War politics kept him out of the United States for most of his career, though fittingly enough he did collaborate again with his mentor Le Corbusier in designing the United Nations complex in Manhattan. His crowning achievement was Brasilia, the national capital of Brazil. Like Walt Disney building his modern playground in the Orlando swamps, Niemeyer broke from the nation’s colonial past and built his own Tomorrowland in the woods. The abstract forms, most notably a circular, crownlike church that splays open at the top to let light into the main sanctuary, took on added grandeur in their isolation. When political dysfunction led to a military coup, the capital’s empty spaces and slums surrounding the sleek, enormous government structures reminded people that Modernist architecture was just a way of designing buildings and not a promise of a utopian future. Among the more than 600 expensive, impractical, overly decorous monstrosities he added to the world’s skylines are the Niemeyer Foundation building near Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo’s Anhembi Sambadrome and the Communist Party headquarters in Paris.

Take Five, no, Make it Six Feet

(Kudos to Mark)

Or

The Man on Cloud No. 7

(Props for Don)

Or

Time Out

(Additional accolades for Don)

Or

Taking Five Forever

(Credit to Chris N)

Or

Waltzing to the Grave in 5/4

(More merit for Chris N)

Or

Take 91

(Can I get a whoop-whoop for Monty?)
Dave Brubeck, who helped make jazz palatable to white folk in the 1950s and 1960s, has died on his way to his cardiologist a day shy of his 92nd birthday. The pianist and composer is probably best known for Time Out, the first jazz album to sell a million copies, and Take Five that album’s centerpiece. Although his music was denounced by critics as being schematic, bombastic and stolid, and decidedly heroin-free, his odd and often idiosyncratic experimentations gave his arrangements an originality that struck a chord with listeners, especially his overhauls of well-known songs like You Go to My Head, All the Things You Are and Pennies From Heaven. His music may have literally been life-saving – serving in the US Army during World War II, his commanding officer heard him playing with a Red Cross traveling band and decided anyone who could play music that well couldn’t possibly handle a rifle. Brubeck courted disdain from jazz aficionados by recording albums instead of only performing in smoky clubs before a dozen people, and by doing things like recording songs from Disney movies on 1957’s Dave Digs Disney. A trip for the Quartet to the Middle East and India, and exposure to musical languages that didn’t stick to 4/4 time led to Time Out, in 1959, which put Brubeck and his Quartet on the pop charts and secured their place in music history.

In the Coaching Ranks, A Man Among Men; His Mouth Held More Than a Billiken

Or

Ute Movement

Rick Majerus, the former college basketball coach with a little round belly, that shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly, has died of heart failure at the age of 64. In coaching stints at Marquette, Ball State, Utah and Saint Louis totaling 25 years, he only had 1 losing season, and took all 4 schools to postseason tournaments, highlighted by reaching the NCAA finals with Utah in 1998. His career record of 517-216, included 15 20-win seasons and two 30-win seasons. As renowned for his appetite as for his hoops acumen, Majerus was a walking Zagat’s guide in a Bill Cosby sweater, capable of giving restaurant recommendations for any college town in the United States. Health concerns nearly ended his career in 2004, as he had accepted the head coaching job at USC, only to turn it down 5 days later due to health concerns. He returned to the bench with St. Louis after a 3-year absence in 2007 and ended a 12-year tournament drought for the Billikens last year, but had announced he would not be coaching this season due to heart trouble.