Jon Swift
>> Thursday, March 04, 2010
R.I.P. I'm sure he's enjoying the company of Gilliard and Capozzolla in the Great Blogosphere in the Sky.
Read more...
Showing posts with label i see dead people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label i see dead people. Show all posts
Michael Foot 1913 - 2010
>> Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Michael Foot died today. He's best known as leading Labour from 1980 until 1983, and having a hand in writing the "longest suicide note in history", or officially the Labour Party Manifesto for the 1983 elections. Foot was as old Labour as they come, and his election as leader in 1980 prompted the "gang of four" to break off and form the Social Democratic Party, which would eventually merge with the Liberals.
Foot was also born and raised in Plymouth, and a life long supporter of Plymouth Argyle FC, and I believe that he was a director of the club for a while. For his 90th birthday the club formally registered him as a player and issued him with a squad number of 90.
Considering the quality of Argyle's play of late, the running joke is obvious.
Ongoing tributes to Foot can be found at The Guardian here.
Al Haig
>> Saturday, February 20, 2010
A life like Al Haig's couldn't help but to touch so many people. I most fondly remember his failed 1988 campaign for the Republican nomination for President, where he managed to place substantially behind Pete du Pont in the Iowa caucus. In comments, feel free to share your own memories of Al Haig...
Point of trivia: This drops us to nine living Secretaries of State. I'd give roughly a 50% chance of getting back to ten, but only about a 10% chance of breaking the record of ten living SecsState.
Murtha
>> Monday, February 08, 2010
John Murtha has passed. He became a strong and courageous critic of the Iraq War (although he voted for the initial authorization). His overall legacy is mixed, particularly given his twitchy connections in the defense contracting arena.
Read more...J.D. Salinger
>> Thursday, January 28, 2010
J.D. Salinger's son has announced that his father has died.
I'm not familiar with most of Salinger's work, but I recently had a striking experience with The Catcher in the Rye. I read it in college and hadn't looked at it in 25 years when I picked up while browsing in a bookstore. I read the first two chapters while standing there, and I had the distinct and rather unnerving impression that I could remember having read every sentence practically word for word. It was sort of like being transformed into the Rainman character or Borges' Funes the Memorious. (link is to original; can't find an English translation on the web).
added by davenoon:
R.I.P. Salinger.
I'm not sure what the Farley twins are reading these days, but Audrey and Imogen are clearly preparing to take on regular blogging duties in the near future...
Zinn
>> Wednesday, January 27, 2010
It appears that Howard Zinn has passed. The only work of Zinn's that I've read is People's History; I was both deeply disappointed in it as a work of history, yet glad that it existed.
Rest in peace.
And In Other Bad News....
>> Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Kate McGarrigle, 1946-2010. Definitely a great one.
Sad Week In Memphis
>> Thursday, January 14, 2010
Willie Mitchell and Jay Reatard, R.I.P. Carrie Brownstein urges us to think of Mitchell not just as a great producer, but as a terrfic musician in his own right.
Addendum: [from PC]: Also Teddy Pendergrass.
I always thought that Al Green being from Grand Rapids Michigan was kind of like Lenny Bruce being from Salt Lake City (for the uninitiated Gerald Ford is one of the funkier people to ever come out of GR).
Dead Pool 2010
>> Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Sadly, my best showing in four years of Dead Pool competition was not enough to assure victory. Though matched with a friend from CSU-Long Beach for the most stiffs overall, I lost the tiebreaker, which favors the list with the lowest cumulative age; Swayze and Fawcett were easy enough picks to make, though my friend's prescient selection of Michael Jackson -- a real forehead-smacker with the benefit of hindsight -- pretty much assured her of the top slot.
Here's my 2009 list:
Patrick Swayze[14 September, age 57]- Vo Nguyen Giap
Claude Levi-Strauss[3 November, age 100]- Ariel Sharon
Eunice Kennedy Shriver[11 August, age 88]Edward Kennedy[25 August, age 77]- Miep Gies
- John Wooden
Farrah Fawcett[25 June, age 62]- Fidel Castro
And my starting lineup for 2010:
- David Hasselhoff
- Seve Ballasteros
- Robert Byrd
- Art Linkletter
- Gloria Stuart
- Fidel Castro
- Ariel Sharon
- John Wooden
- Ronnie Biggs
- Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi
As always, there were hard choices to be made. I knocked Giap off my list list this year because I've determined that he's simply never going to die. And while I might come to regret the omission of Gies as
Raising the dead
>> Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Oral Roberts has apparently launched a new fundraising campaign.
However, as he explained twenty-two years ago, this might just be a temporary thing:
Roberts also said that in the "world to come," he expected to return to Tulsa. He added, "I wouldn't be surprised if God did not bring me back to these 400 acres of Oral Roberts University he has built and would let me reign over these 400 acres."Experts inform us that while Zombie Oral Roberts can be as dangerous as any other zombie, he can be distracted easily with spare change and loose bills. Read more...
Claude Levi-Strauss
>> Tuesday, November 03, 2009
R.I.P.
An anecdote from The Raw and the Cooked: During World War II, when the US Army approached the caves in which Roquefort cheese is fermented, they assumed the smell was of rotting corpses, and destroyed the contents with flamethrowers.
Safire
>> Sunday, September 27, 2009
At his best, he was a clever writer with a commitment to civil liberties increasingly absent from the Republican Party; at his worst, he used his establishment credentials to push the most unabashed wingnuttery. If you replace "civil liberties" with "moderate advancement of the welfare state," in other words, a classic Nixonite. R.I.P.
Read more...Ertugrul Osman RIP
>> Friday, September 25, 2009
Ertugrul Osman, heir to the Ottoman Empire, died yesterday in Istanbul. I profiled his dynasty here. The head of House Osman is now Bayezid III, who was born in Paris, lived in New York, and once served in the US Army.
Read more..."Now you get me Pig, and then we'll be ready to record this song....You get your hair cut. You don't belong in Nashville."
>> Thursday, September 17, 2009
People who died
>> Monday, September 14, 2009
R.I.P. Jim Carroll.
...R.I.P. Jody Powell
R.I.P. Patrick Swayze.
Brutal day, though I suppose no more or less than all the others.
Gelbart RIP
>> Friday, September 11, 2009
Larry Gelbart has passed. He was one of the key creative elements behind the early, funny years of M.A.S.H., and was also one of the authors of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Tootsie.
Read more...
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