Sticky Wicket

Phillip Hughes, Australian batsman, has died at the age of 25 after being hit in the head by a bouncer during a match, for those of you who that the only risk during a cricket match was being bored to death.

Marion, Buried

(Props to Monty)
Marion Barry, inspiration for the character of Rob Ford, has died of a heart attack at the age of 78, about the only thing that would preclude him from holding elected office in Washington. A prominent civil rights activist who organized the Nashville Student Movement sit-ins and then served as the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Barry was elected as the second Mayor of the District of Columbia in 1979. All was going mostly swimmingly, except for some skimming and no-bid contracts for his buddies, addictions to booze and cocaine fueled in late-night binges that left him asleep at his desk (Of course, in his defense, "First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what can I say? I'm a night owl.") His subsequent inattentiveness hindered city services, as city crews mismanaged a blizzard clean-up (He later commended how “The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather.”) and police officers lacked cars to get to crime scenes, contributing to a skyrocketing homicide rate. (Though Barry explained that “If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low crime rate.") Then the Bitch set him up and he was videotaped smoking crack cocaine in a hotel room, leading to his arrest by the FBI and a 6-month conviction for possession. He took a sabbatical from the Mayor’s office in federal prisons in Petersburg, Virginia (where he was alleged to have gotten conjugal in a waiting room) and Loretto, Pennsylvania, before being returned by a forgiving electorate in 1995. He left office again in 1999, but the Mayor for Life returned to represent Ward 8 on the Council of the District of Columbia from 2005 to 2014, declining to pay taxes during any of that time. Among the highlights of his tenure were racial epithets against the Asian-American business community in his Ward, then referring to “Polacks” during his apology for said comments, ironic given his assertion that “The laws in this city are clearly racist. All laws are racist. The law of gravity is racist.”

Sometimes BJ and the Bear Get You

(Props to Phil)

 

Or

Death Be Not McCloud

(Additional accolades for Phil)

Glen A. Larson, who decided that the only thing that Tron was missing was Desi Arnaz, Jr, has died at the age of 77. At one point, Larson had 5 shows on the air at a time, usually high-minded fare like a self-righteous medical examiner on Quincy, ME; a babe-chasing truck driver with a chimp for a best friend on BJ and the Bear; a professor who was the master of the secrets that divide man from animal, animal from man on Manimal; a shadowy organization relying on a talking car to enforce peace on Knight Rider; a handsome but somewhat inept PI on Magnum, PI, and his allegory for anti-semitism (interspersed with repeated shots of the exact same explosion 5 times an episode), Battlestar Galactica.

Darkness Falls

Alvin Dark, who won World Series as a player and as a manager but got fired for playing Ozzie Smith, has died at the age of 92. Dark was around the game so long he was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1948 for the Boston Braves, hitting .322 as the team won its first pennant in 34 years. His 9th inning single set up Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in 1951, and Leo Durocher called him the “cement that holds the ball club together,” on the 1954 World Series champion New York Giants. In 1961, Dark was named manager of the Giants, and won the pennant the following year. The year after that, he made one of the most startlingly prescient comments in baseball history. Noting his weak-hitting pitcher Gaylord Perry, he said "They'll put a man on the moon before he hits a home run." On July 20, 1969, an hour after Neil and Buzz and Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Perry hit the first HR of his major league career. On the down side, in 1964, he said that the “Negro and Spanish-speaking players” on the team were not able to “perform up to the white players when it comes to mental alertness.” Hall of Fame voters disagreed and sent Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal and Orlando Cepeda from that team to Cooperstown. For what it’s worth, he claimed to have been misquoted, and both Jackie Robinson and Mays, who Dark had previously named team captain, came to his defense. He later got hired to manage the Kansas City A’s, got fired by Charles Finley for not defending the owner when players revolted against his capricious whims, got hired again by Finley and the A’s, now in Oakland, and led them to a third straight World Series championship in 1974, then got fired again 2 years later when the somewhat devout Finley was quoted as saying that “if (Finley) doesn’t accept Jesus Christ as his savior, he’s going to hell.” He managed the San Diego Padres in 1977, then got fired in spring training 1978, in part for insisting on playing a shortstop who had spent the previous year at lowly Walla Walla. 

Black Hole

(Merit for Monty)

Carol Ann Susi, who achieved the highlight of her career by shrieking off screen, has died of cancer at the age of 62. Prior to finding her faceless fame as Howard Wolowitz’s immense, clingy, over-protective Wheel of Fortune savant stereotype of a Jewish mother, Susi had appeared in bit parts in more than 70 TV shows and movies, only one of which I even vaguely remember, 1987’s Secret of My Success, one of the first forays in the futile attempt to make Michael J. Fox a movie star.

He's a Member of the Boot Hill Gang Now

(Props to Phil)

 

Or

Slowly Rotting Into Something That Looks Like Cheese

(Kudos to Joe)

Big Bank Hank Jackson, one of the men indirectly responsible for Vanilla Ice, has died of complications of cancer at the age of 58. Jackson was a member of The Sugarhill Gang, the first hip hop act to have a hit single, Rapper's Delight in 1979. As with all music popularized by black artists, it was eventually co-opted and ruined by whites, in this case, the artist formerly known as Robby Van Winkle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljUnyv5XUA8&feature=youtu.be

Should Have Gone to Page 52

R. A. Montgomery, who conned critics into believing his crippling indecisiveness was a strategy to foster creativity and decision-making skills in children, has died at the age of 78. A graduate of The College of Middle Earth, Montgomery started the Choose Your Own Adventure series in 1977 with Vermont Crossroads Press before moving to the little mom and pop operation at Bantam Books where he wrote more than 50 in the Choose series, which has produced more than 250 million books.

Don't Die Like My Brother

(Kudos to Monty)

 

Or

Tap Out

(A shared epitaphany with Monty)

Tom Magliozzi, who along with his brother Ray did not smack a smart ass intern from Minneapolis while introducing humor to public radio listeners, has died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 77. So he wasn’t kidding that he couldn’t remember last week’s Puzzler. The rare MIT grads to find honest work, the brothers opened an auto repair shop in Cambridge, their fair city, in the late 1970s. In 1987, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, started as weekly contributors to Weekend Edition on NPR, then got their own gig: Car Talk. Combining corny humor and convincingly impressive automotive distress diagnostic skills – which occasionally proved accurate – they became a fixture on NPR for 25 years, earning a Peabody in 1992, until Tom’s illness forced the end of new shows in 2012. While running the garage, taping the show, and teaching at local universities, Tom also found time to earn a doctorate in Marketing from Boston University School of Management, becoming a full professor for 8 years before deciding he really didn’t like teaching. The brothers “appeared” in Pixar’s Cars as the owners of Rust-eze, Lightning McQueen’s sponsor, with Tom voicing a 1963 Dodge Dart convertible, a reference to the beloved car he mentioned often on the radio.