2014 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool - Now under New Management

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Apparently molly has found a new treasure trove of death news.

I doubt any of them are on anybody's Poly Dead Pool list, but may the RIP anyway.

I seriously considered Sue Townsend.

[molly bloom]

I seriously considered Sue Townsend.

Her catalogue of illnesses seemed to make her a dead cert.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Be careful- you might be accused of sharing a taste for wilfully obscure and abstruse things with me.

I'm rather proud of the fount of useless information that is my memory, but Shepard was HUGE in cyberpunk back in the day, and his short stories were much-anthologized. Anyone keeping up with the contemporary SF in the 80s and 90s knew who he was.

[Colonâ„¢]

From AP:

PHOENIX (AP) — Charles H. Keating Jr., the notorious financier who served prison time and was disgraced for his role in the costliest savings and loan failure of the 1980s, has died. He was 90.

Holy cow, talk about a proper hypocrite:

Charles Keating
Crusader and fraud
Charles Keating, moral crusader and financial snake-oil salesman, died on March 31st, aged 90
Apr 12th 2014 | From the print edition

THEY called him “Mr Clean�. It was not a joke. First, he was a champion swimmer, and would emerge from the pool with his long lanky frame smooth and shiny as a fish. Second, he was a moral crusader. If you wanted porn and obscenity cleared out of your Cincinnati neighbourhood, Charlie Keating was your man. He got Playboy and Oui magazine banished from news-stands near his office. He denounced the Ramada Hotel for showing adult TV programming in its rooms. He stopped a TV showing of “Oh Calcutta!�, the naked revue, at the old Shubert Theatre. He made sure Larry Flynt got a jail sentence in 1976 for publishing Hustler magazine, and he came down like a ton of bricks on the keeper of the variety store at 8th and State, who sold dirty pictures to schoolboys.

Mr Keating was so doughty in this holy war that Richard Nixon appointed him in 1969 to the national commission on obscenity. When the commission produced a feeble report, Mr Keating dissented. He wrote that “Never in Rome, Greece or the most debauched nation in history has such utter filth been projected to all parts of a nation.� At meetings of his 300-chapter organisation, Citizens for Decency through Law, he would stride round with a big red Bible in his hand. Sundays saw him devoutly at Mass, with thousands of dollars given to Catholic causes. Such was his local influence that when the Supreme Court ruled that obscenity should be judged by “community standards�, every adult theatre in Cincinnati closed down.

Strange, then, that this knight on a white charger—as he saw himself—was also the man who bilked 23,000 investors out of their savings. The total loss was $250m-288m, and the cost to the taxpayer $3.4 billion. In 1984 he had bought Lincoln Savings, a savings and loan association based in Irvine, California, and turned it into a piggy bank for his own American Continental Corporation. He persuaded Lincoln investors to swap their secured bonds for ACC’s junk ones, claiming that these too were backed by the government. Then he speculated freely in foreign exchange, risky development and tracts of raw cactus desert. Staff were exhorted to prey on “the weak, meek and ignorant�.

Those hoodwinked investors subsidised a lavish life. Mr Keating travelled by private jet the world over. He built the $300m Phoenician Hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, with gold-leaf ceilings and a swimming pool lined with tiles of mother-of-pearl. He threw champagne-soaked parties at which, in 1986, $2,000 was spent on Silly String alone. Pretty, biddable young women were paid enormous salaries to work for him. At one party, typically, he leapt on a table and posed as Superman.

Influence-buying was his second nature. The city council of Phoenix, his base after 1976, was safely in his pocket. In 1987, as Lincoln’s false profits mounted and the bad smell drew attention, he used his influence with Washington politicos to hold off the regulators. Five senators, recipients of hundreds of thousands of Keating campaign dollars, assisted in keeping the Federal Home Loan Bank Board kicking its heels for two years. When Mr Keating was asked if his donations had inspired their kindness, he replied: “I certainly hope so.� He had also given at least $1m to Mother Teresa, who in return praised his good character. But in 1989 Lincoln went bust. No one could save him then from being convicted two years later on 17 counts of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy, and almost five years in jail.

The sound of the guns

Crusader and snake-oil salesman were hard to reconcile. Perhaps it all sprang from having an invalid father, too weak to steer him. Perhaps it came from spending years in navy training in the war, but never fighting. A bronze plaque on his desk declared that “A man can do no wrong if he always rides to the sound of the guns.� His energy and arrogance seemed to fire off wildly in dozens of different directions.

For him, however, there was no contradiction. He fought scum in all its forms. For him, federal regulation too was an obscenity. When the savings-and-loans industry was deregulated in 1982, it was allowed to take risks with investments. That was what he did with Lincoln, quintupling its worth in four years. Then in 1985 the rules tightened again. At that point the regulators—some of them homos, all of them evil—launched a vendetta against him. The practitioners of yellow journalism followed.

He was no sinner in his own eyes. “Martyr� and “scapegoat� were more like it. He was running a dynamic enterprise that was bound to recover when the market perked up. If Washington had let him alone, the Lincoln investors “would all be rich�. Besides, in the far worse financial scandals of 2008-09, no one went to jail.

This noble self-image convinced very few. Not the jurors who convicted him. Not the SEC, which had sniffed him out as early as 1976 at the first company he ran, American Financial Corporation, for a dodgy insider loan worth $14m. Not the porn kings, who noticed that he seemed to enjoy collecting and flaunting the salacious stuff they sold. And least of all Sarah Solomon, 72, a Lincoln investor, who at his trial stood on tiptoe to seize him by the lapels and shout, into that craggy and sanctimonious face, “Mr Keating, what happened to my money? You took all my money away.�

From the print edition: Obituary

[molly bloom]

I'm rather proud of the fount of useless information that is my memory, but Shepard was HUGE in cyberpunk back in the day, and his short stories were much-anthologized. Anyone keeping up with the contemporary SF in the 80s and 90s knew who he was.

I quite agree. Have several of his books and the anthologies featuring his short stories .

Reminds me of a teched-up J. G. Ballard in some respects.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Hmmm. There was a certain new wave element to much of his work where stories seemed to stop instead of end... He didn't push it as far as Ballard, all to the good, if you ask me.

[molly bloom]

Hmmm. There was a certain new wave element to much of his work where stories seemed to stop instead of end... He didn't push it as far as Ballard, all to the good, if you ask me.

I like Ballard's experiments.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Your tastes run more cosmopolitan than mine.

[molly bloom]

Your tastes run more cosmopolitan than mine.

You sweet talker , you.

I wish I owned a Doubleday edition of 'The Atrocity Exhibition' :

Here it is... the heart of my JGB collection.

This edition was destroyed by the publisher before distribution, scheduled for June 12, 1970, so it's difficult to tell how many escaped the pulper. Even the super-informed Lloyd Currey doesn't know how many are really out there... but he thinks there's probably less than 10... and my sources have located at least five. My copy is further distinguished by being signed by both Ballard and the artist, Michael Foreman... Foreman, of course, is JGB's buddy and was the art director of Ambit magazine. His illustrations are bang-on late 1960s line art -- check the hat tips to Peter Max, Yellow Submarine, Eye Magazine, Laugh-In, etc.

In 1990 JGB gave the following commentary to RE/Search publications:

Why I Want to F*ck Ronald Reagan prompted Doubleday in 1970 to pulp its first American edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ronald Reagan's presidency remained a complete mystery to most Europeans, though I noticed that Americans took him far more easily in their stride. But the amiable old duffer who occupied the White House was a very different person from the often sinister figure I described in 1967, when the present piece was first published. The then-novelty of a Hollywood film star entering politics and becoming governor of California gave Reagan considerable air time on British TV. Watching his right-wing speeches, in which he castigated in sneering tones the profligate, welfare-spending, bureaucrat-infested state government, I saw a more crude and ambitious figure, far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 movie, The Killers, his last Hollywood role. In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan's manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth. Though the man himself mellowed, his later presidency seems to have run the same formula."

http://www.jgballard.ca/terminal_collection/jgbatrocity.html

[-Jrabbit]

RIP Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, an amazing writer and Nobel laureate (a big favorite of my wife), who passed away today at age 87.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/garcia-marquez-nobel-laureate-dies-87-0

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

And that's a unique hit for me.

[regexcellent]

**** magical realism. One Hundred Years of Solitude was among the worst books I read in high school (beaten out handily by the Scarlet Letter though).

Also, dude was a ****ing communist.

His acceptance speech for the nobel prize in literature was a hilariously hamfisted attempt to justify why South America is a ****hole.

[-Jrabbit]

RIP boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, 76. Prostate cancer.

[Uncle Sparky]

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter is dead @ 76

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014...ead_at_76.html

Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who spent 19 years in jail for a triple murder he did not commit, has died in Toronto, the city where he reclaimed his life.

The professional boxer from New Jersey with a swift left hook and a troubled past started anew in the GTA, becoming a world-renowned champion for the wrongly convicted, acclaimed speaker and keen gardener.

He passed away in his home on Sunday of prostate cancer, at age 76.

[-Jrabbit]

Another sports figure: RIP Earl Morrall, 79.
Complications from Parkinson's disease.

Morrall played 21 years, was QB for 3 Super Bowl teams, and had a reputation as the 'ultimate backup quarterback.' He was league MVP in 1968 when Unitas got hurt in training camp, then a few years later came in for an injured Unitas and got Baltimore past favored Dallas 16-13 in another Super Bowl. Morrall also started the last 9 games of the regular season (at age 38) when Bob Griese broke a leg during Miami's 17-0 season in 1972. Pretty impressive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/sports/football/earl-morrall-backup-quarterback-in-dolphins-perfect-season-dies-at-79.html?_r=0