Onward Trusty Steed

Patrick Macnee, best remembered as Professor Plocostomos in Lobster Man from Mars, has died at the age of 93. Macnee was schooled at Eton before being expelled for being a bookmaker and selling porn, gateway vices for life as an actor. Muddling through limited TV and movie “Hey, it’s that bloke” roles, he got his big break as John Steed, first trusty sidekick, then Big Bowler in Charge on The Avengers, a swinging ‘60s blend of British eccentricity and high camp. The mysterious Mr. Steed never carried a gun, opting for quips and unleashing leather catsuited fury in the forms of Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg, and Linda Thorson. A second go-round with Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt was less successful, and the less said of the movie, for which Macnee only lent his voice, the better. Other roles included Sir Godfrey Tibbett, who found himself on the wrong end of Grace Jones in A View to a Kill, the voice of the Cylons' Imperious Leader in Battlestar Galactica, Sir Denis Eton-Hogg in the This Is Spinal Tap, and in various films, Macnee pulled off the rare feat of playing both Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. 

Counted Out

Harvey Pollack, the last man who had been employed by the NBA since its founding in 1946, has died of complications from a car accident at the age of 93. The OCD freak spent 67 years as a public relations man and statistician with the Warriors and 76ers, with his most notable moment in the sun being scrawling a number on a piece of paper the night Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game, which became one of the most reprinted sports photos of all time. Pollack’s statistical analysis revolutionized record-keeping when he had nothing more than an abacus and a slide rule, but laid the groundwork for the sissies of the computer age. Pollack found statistics in the arcana of athletic contests where none had existed before, making the 76ers media guide a must read around the NBA and setting standards other teams copied. He was one of the first to record minutes, offensive and defensive rebounds, blocked shots, assists, steals and created the categories double- and triple-doubles, turnovers and points off turnovers. He combed other teams’ records for statistical gems, finding that Oscar Robertson was the first player to record 800 rebounds and assists in the same season. Even last year, Pollock was aggravated by stories that Kevin Durant was closing in on Michael Jordan’s record of 40 consecutive 25-point games, and remembering that the NBA had existed before Jordan, took it upon himself to actually read box scores to identify that Wilt Chamberlain had done it in 106 straight. Pollock brought a sense of humor to his deep statistical dives, coining the term Trillionaires Club for players who recorded minutes in a game, but managed no other statistics, leaving their stat line as a number followed by a line of zeroes. For his efforts, all 4 Philadelphia teams that won NBA titles – the Warriors in 1947 and 1956 and the 76ers in 1967 and 1983 – presented him with championship rings, and he earned a lifetime achievement award from the Basketball Hall of Fame. He also compiled statistics for all of the city's Division I collegiate basketball teams, the Philadelphia Tapers of the American Basketball League, the WFL’s Philadelphia Bell, the NLL’s Philadelphia Wings, even Mummer’s Parades. Pollack was a living cliché, smoking cigars at the scorer’s table, speaking in a thick Philadelphia accent, hunting and pecking his way to 110 words (and countless mistakes) a minute on the manual typewriters he lugged around with him. After his wife’s death in 2003, Pollack started a streak of more than 4,500 consecutive days wearing a different T-shirt.

86 was Enough

(An epitaphany shared with Monty and Phil)

Or

Roland Roland Roland, Get the Hearse for Roland

(Props to Phil)

Dick Van Patten, nucleus of the Van Patten project, which determined that the interaction of one Adam (-12) with another Adam (Rich) could unleash a series of unpleasant interactions, or bombs – his failed series, his family's failed series, his TV family's failed series, has died of complications of diabetes at the age of 86. And if this sounds even vaguely similar, I assure you that you are not thinking about a host segment from Master Ninja I featuring Crow T. Robot. Best known as Tom Bradford, patriarch of the dramedy Eight is Enough, Van Patten also played Druidia’s King Roland in Spaceballs (even though he didn’t look Druish), Friar Tuck in When Things Were Rotten, blob chow in Beware! The Blob, Beverly Ann Stickle’s ex-husband on the pathetic last season of The Facts of Life and the blind weatherman on the pathetic only season of WIOU.

Taking Stock

Kirk Kerkorian, indecisive billionaire, has died at the age of 98. He built an airline, then sold it, then bought it back, then sold it again; not satisfied, he bought and sold MGM three times. Which makes him the only guy who actually understands the end of Trading Places. His father’s get-rich-quick schemes took a century to pull off, and centered on having his 8th grade dropout, boxing, poker-playing daredevil pilot of a son build the world’s largest hotel on three different occasions, con Ted Turner into buying struggling MGM for $1.2 billion more than he would buy it back for, trump Howard Hughes’ casino-building efforts and snaking Mirage Resorts out from under Steve Wynn. In 1995, for reasons surpassing understanding, he decided to buy an American car company, but his hostile takeover of Chrysler fell apart. He tried and failed again in 2007. He accumulated a 6% stake in Ford, and lost a half billion for his trouble, and had similar success with GM. His net worth in 2008, according to Forbes magazine, was $16.0 billion, making him the 41st richest person in the world, but those 1 percenters are hurting too, and by 2013 he had fallen to 412 with a net worth of $3.9 billion.

Take Him Home, Dusty Rhodes

Or

Rhodes Cooler

Or

Ashes to Ashes, Dusty to Dust

(Props to Steve)

Or

American Dream Deferred

(Kudos to Peter)

Or

Rhodes Kill

Virgil Riley Runnels Jr., call name Dusty Rhodes, has died of stomach cancer at the age of 69. Rhodes took the nickname "The American Dream," apparently assuming the American dream involved being obese and steroid addled and rolling around with half naked men. Rhodes was a three-time NWA World Heavyweight Champion, and won a range of other titles in Jim Crockett Promotions and regional organizations. He is one of six men inducted into each of the WWE, WCW, Professional Wrestling, and Wrestling Observer Newsletter Halls of Fame. 

Vlad Tidings

(Props to Don)

Or

Stop Hammer Time

Or 

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (for Awhile, Anyway)

Christopher Lee, best remembered as the Russian commandant in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow, has died at the age of 93. On screen, he took on James Bond (as Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun), Professor Van Helsing (in the Brides of Dracula), Yoda (as Count Dooku/Darth Tyranus in the prequel trilogy best left forgotten), Dennis Nayland Smith (as Fu Manchu in 5 films, including the MST3K’ed The Castle of Fu Manchu) and Gandalf (as Saruman in about 157 hours of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien sesquicentennialogy), not to mention countless riled up villagers as Dracula and Frankenstein’s Creature in various Hammer Films creations. All of which paled in comparison to his real life badassery as a member of Britain's Special Operations Executive, a crack commando unit tasked by Winston Churchill himself to "set Europe ablaze," whose actions remain classified to this day. Holding the Guinness World Record for Tallest Leading Actor at 6 foot-5, Lee appeared in more than 260 films, in which he used some of the seven languages in which he was fluent, and scored a knighthood. He parodied his persona as a mad scientist in Gremlins 2: The Next Batch, and paid homage to Hugh Hefner in his role as the free loving, public nudity and human sacrifice endorsing hedonistic pagan leader Lord Summerisle, he played an expert scuba diver who drowned within minutes of entering the water in Airport ’77 and played a Nazi U-boat commander in 1941. At the age of 87, he then recorded a metal album, in which he played his great-great-ancestor Charlemagne. 

He's gotten to the bottom, but I don't expect him to get back to the top of the slide

Vincent Bugliosi, who set the mark for tough-minded and effective prosecutors in Los Angeles that we have all come to expect and has never been sullied since, has died of cancer at the age of 80. In 1970, with a 21-0 record for murder prosecutions, he got handed a case unlike anything anyone had ever seen. The savage murders of actress Sharon Tate and 6 others at the behest of crazed Svengali and Beatles aficionado Charles Manson, who thought his “family” was bringing about the race war to end all wars. With Susan Atkins bragging about the killings to a grand jury, a lot of Bugliosi’s job was done, so he set his sights on the involvement of Manson, who wasn’t actually present for the killings. The 6-month trial ended with convictions and death sentences for all 4 defendants, though the sentences were overturned when California canceled the death penalty. It also made Bugliosi a star, and his account of the crimes and trial, Helter Skelter, sold more than seven million copies, making it the best-selling true-crime book ever and won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America as the best true-crime book of the year. He won two more Edgars for Till Death Do Us Part and Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Other books included Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder and The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Convicting a deranged maniac and then writing about it had to be its own reward, as his campaigns for district attorney in 1972 and 1976, and for the Democratic nomination for state attorney general in 1974 were unsuccessful.