The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Uncle Sparky]

I hated that song the first time I heard it and I still hate it today.

Then stop looping it.

[-Jrabbit]

Film critic Judith Crist, 90, has died.

[Uncle Sparky]

Helen Gurley Brown just died.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/bu...pagewanted=all

Helen Gurley Brown, who as the author of “Sex and the Single Girl” shocked early-1960s America with the news that unmarried women not only had sex but also thoroughly enjoyed it — and who as the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine spent the next three decades telling those women precisely how to enjoy it even more — died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 90, though parts of her were considerably younger.

[Wezil]

I approve of that message.

[Wezil]

(CNN) -- The infamous "Onion Field" cop killer whose 1963 crime was chronicled in a best-selling book and a movie has died, officials said Monday. He was 79.

Gregory Powell died Sunday at the California Medical Facility, a prison in Vacaville, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.

In October, Powell was denied compassionate release, all but guaranteeing he would die behind bars.

He had cancer, according to the Los Angeles Police Protective League. Prison officials, however, never confirmed that account and Monday's statement said simply that Powell died of "natural causes."

He was serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole for killing Los Angeles Police Officer Ian Campbell nearly 50 years ago.

The crime was chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh's best-selling book, "The Onion Field" and a movie by the same name.

On the night of March 9, 1963, Powell and accomplice Jimmy Lee Smith were driving around Los Angeles, looking for a liquor store to rob.

Campbell and his partner, Officer Karl Hettinger, pulled the two over in a routine stop. Powell, who was ordered out of the car, pointed a gun at Campbell's head. He and Smith disarmed both officers, took them hostage and drove to a remote onion field in Bakersfield, a town about 110 miles of north of downtown Los Angeles.

The officers were forced out of the car and ordered to stand with their hands above their heads. Powell said to them, "We told you we were going to let you guys go, but have you ever heard of the Little Lindbergh Law?"

"Yes," Campbell, 31, replied. Powell then shot him to death. Hettinger escaped, but the murder of his partner haunted him for the rest of his life.

Powell and Smith were sentenced to death in November 1963. Their sentences were commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole in the early 1970s when the death penalty was declared unconstitutional.

I never saw the movie but did read the book many years ago. It was a very powerful telling of a very sad story.

[Wezil]

Oooh, ooh!

Ron Palillo, the actor best known as the nerdy high school student Arnold Horshack on the 1970s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, died Tuesday in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He was 63.

Palillo suffered an apparent heart attack at his home about 4 a.m., said Karen Poindexter, a close friend of the actor. He was pronounced dead at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center.

Palillo was inextricably linked with the character he played from 1975 to 1979 on Kotter, the ABC sitcom, in which the title character returns to his Brooklyn alma mater to teach a group of loveable wiseguys known as the Sweathogs. Horshack was the nasally teen who yelped, “Oooh, ooh,” and shot his hand skyward whenever Kotter posed a question.

[Krill]

Maybe Prince Phillip will actually go to the great hunting field in the sky some time this year...

[Uncle Sparky]

TV Actor William Windom is dead

William Windom, who won an Emmy Award playing an Everyman drawn from the pages of James Thurber but who may be best remembered for his roles on “Star Trek” and “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Thursday at his home in Woodacre, Calif., north of San Francisco. He was 88.

Mr. Windom won the Emmy for best actor in a comedy series in 1970 for his performance in “My World and Welcome to It,” a whimsical TV show based on Thurber’s humorous essays and fantastic cartoons. He subsequently toured the country with a solo show based on Thurber’s works.

But filmgoers and television viewers may be more likely to associate him with roles that, though also fanciful, had a distinctly darker tone. He teamed up with Rod Serling on episodes of both “The Twilight Zone” (“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” in 1961 and “Miniature” in 1963) and “Night Gallery”; played the president in “Escape From the Planet of the Apes”; and had a memorable role in an early episode of “Star Trek.” He was also a guest star on “The Rookies,” “The Streets of San Francisco” and dozens of other television shows.

Not until 1985 did Mr. Windom find another role that drew on his avuncular side with such success: he appeared in more than 50 episodes of “Murder, She Wrote” as the leading physician of Cabot Cove, Me., and a close friend of Jessica Fletcher, the lead character played by Angela Lansbury.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/ar...ead-at-88.html

Tony Scott dead of apparent suicide-

Los Angeles (CNN) -- Director Tony Scott, best known for the films "Top Gun" and "Beverly Hills Cop II," died in an apparent suicide Sunday when he jumped from the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, California, an official with the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office told CNN.

"There's nothing to indicate it is anything else at this time," said Lt. Joe Bale of the coroner's office.

Scott, 68, jumped from the bridge at about 12:30 p.m., Bale said. The bridge spans the Los Angeles Harbor, connecting San Pedro and Terminal Island.

A passerby who saw Scott jump from the bridge called 911, according to a statement released by the coroner's office late Sunday.

"The L.A. Port Police recovered the body from the water," the statement said.

The coroner's office declined to comment or confirm a Los Angeles Times report that authorities found contact information in Scott's car parked on the bridge, and later found a suicide note in his office.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/20/showbiz/obit-tony-scott/

R.I.P.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

That's one hell of a shock over Tony Scott.

[Wezil]

Ridley would have done it better.

[Guynemer]

Ridley would have done it better.

I don't know, after Prometheus, I'm not entirely sure.

[molly bloom]

As a young man, Alexander Cockburn, who has died from cancer at the age of 71, had something of the air of the classic Bollinger Bolshevik: elegant, with his blue shades and his Gauloises cigarettes, well-connected and perversely radical politically. In reality he was more interesting and more admirable, a contrarian who despised cant. He had the courage to take on anything and anyone, from the most powerful organisations in the world to his closest friends, and the energy and persistence to follow his own path wherever it took him.

The sheer volume of his journalism over 50 years was enormous. It ranged from the student newspaper Cherwell at Oxford to the magazine, CounterPunch, that he co-edited in recent years from the remote hamlet of Petrolia (formerly New Jerusalem) in northern California, by way of the Nation, the Village Voice and every radical magazine known or hardly known in America. Two examples suggest the sweeping violence and the wry humour of his style.

Cockburn took dry issue with his lifetime friend and rival Christopher Hitchens's monstering of Mother Teresa: if you were starving in a Bombay gutter, he asked, loftily unconcerned that Teresa operated in Kolkata, "Who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?"

Only a few weeks ago, he deprecated the fashion for finding signs of fascism in European politics. "If there's any nation in the world," he pronounced, "that's well on the way to meeting the admittedly vague label of 'fascists', surely it's the United States ... We live in a fascist country, 'proto-fascist' if you want to allay public disquiet ... So quit beating up on Europe."

Of Hitchens, he said he was no radical, but "craved to be an insider". Cockburn certainly showed no desire to be a political insider, though at least as a young man he was not wholly immune to the charms of social acceptance. He also called Hitchens a "dauphin of contrariansim", a phrase that applied at least as well to himself.

Cockburn's background was both posh and complex. He was the oldest of the three sons of Claud Cockburn and his third wife, Patricia. Claud worked as a subeditor and foreign correspondent on the Times and became a communist – or at least a leftwing socialist – who fought for the Republic in Spain and from 1933 to 1941 ran the irreverent and influential newsletter the Week.

The Cockburns were Scots lawyers and military men of distinction. Alexander liked to recall that a remote ancestor, Admiral Sir George Cockburn, ordered the burning of Washington in 1814, and his own feelings about the capital ran along similar lines.

In 1947 Claud moved to Ireland, and Alexander was brought up in Youghal, Co Cork. He was educated at Glen- almond college, Perthshire, then studied English at Keble College, Oxford, where he wrote for Cherwell. After a couple of years' freelancing for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Left Review and the New Statesman, he left for the US in 1972, with a parting shot about how reactionary and sclerotic the old country had become. It was not long before he had turned his ready pen to equally sharp criticism of his adopted country. In 2009 he became an American – as opposed to an Irish – citizen.

From 1973 Cockburn wrote a regular column on media, Press Clips, for the Village Voice, and was soon widely admired for the breadth and justice of his coverage of the journalism business. However, in 1983, he was "suspended" by the Voice after reports that he had accepted a fee of $10,000 from an Arab educational foundation. He found a new journalistic home at the venerable left-of-centre magazine, the Nation, where his column was called Beat the Devil, after one of his father's novels.

In 1994 he and a colleague, Jeffrey St Clair, joined forces with the Washington investigative reporter Ken Silverstein in founding CounterPunch, with which they set out to do the best investigative journalism in the country. Two years later, they parted company with Silverstein, and soon Cockburn moved to northern California to edit the magazine from there.

Cockburn was sometimes typecast as a leftwing journalist, but in fact his positions were complex, individual and unpredictable. For example, he shared the scepticism of many conservatives about global warming and climate change. He criticised the German government for legislating against Scientology. Nonetheless, he was a consistent and passionate critic of American policies in the Middle East, and opposed intervention in Iraq long before the Iraq war began.

Perhaps his most controversial battles were over antisemitism. Cockburn always denied that he was an antisemite: his point was that Israel and its defenders were quick to accuse anyone who criticised Israeli policy of antisemitism. In response to the accusation of antisemitism by the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, he edited a collection of essays, The Politics of Antisemitism (2003), to which he contributed an essay called My Life As an "Antisemite". One could always tell when Israel was behaving badly, he wrote, because of the accusations of antisemitism hurled at its critics.

From 1968 to 1973 Cockburn was married to the novelist Emma Tennant, and they had a daughter, Daisy. She survives him, as do his brothers, Andrew and Patrick, both journalists.

• Alexander Cockburn, journalist, born 6 June 1941; died 21 July 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jul/22/alexander-cockburn-obituary

'Corruptions Of Empire' by Cockburn is a good introduction to his work.

[molly bloom]

A favourite writer of mine- perhaps it's the shared Catholic education. I liked his sense of humour too. He also made much modern art accessible and comprehensible.

Robert Hughes, who has died aged 74 after a long illness, dismissed the notion of Crocodile Dundee as a representative Australian figure as "macho commedia dell'arte". All the same, Hughes as the Crocodile Dundee of art criticism is too good a parallel to reject: burly ocker from the outback, tinny in left hand, confronted by New York aesthete armed with stiletto, reaches with his right hand for his own massive bush knife, commenting slyly to his terrified assailant: "Now that's what I call a knife."

I described him in the Guardian once as writing the English of Shakespeare, Milton, Macaulay and Dame Edna Everage; Hughes enjoyed the description. His prose was lithe, muscular and fast as a bunch of fives. He was incapable of writing the jargon of the art world, and consequently was treated by its mandarins with fear and loathing. Much he cared.

When he reached a mass audience for the first time in 1980 with his book and television series The Shock of the New, a history of modern art starting with the Eiffel Tower and graced with a title that still resounds in 100 later punning imitations, some of the BBC hierarchy greeted the proposal that Hughes should do the series with ill-favoured disdain. "Why a journalist?" they asked, remembering the urbanity of Lord Clark of Civilisation.

He gave them their answer with the best series of programmes about modern art yet made for television, low on theory, high on the the kind of epigrammatic judgment that condenses deep truths. Van Gogh, he said, "was the hinge on which 19th-century romanticism finally swung into 20th-century expressionism". Jackson Pollock "evoked that peculiarly American landscape experience, Whitman's 'vast Something', which was part of his natural heritage as a boy in Cody, Wyoming". And his description of the cubism of Picasso and Braque still stands as the most coherent 10-page summary in the literature.

Hughes was born in Sydney into a family of lawyers descended from an Irish policeman who had emigrated to Australia 100 years before Robert's birth. This was something of which Hughes was obscurely ashamed, because convicts were to be the heroes of his great work of Australian social history, The Fatal Shore (1987). His father died when he was 12, and he went to a Jesuit boarding school, St Ignatius college.

At Sydney University, where he went to study architecture, he was academically undistinguished. In his words: "I actually succeeded in failing first year arts, which any moderately intelligent amoeba could have passed."

All the same, he went on at the age of 28 to write a book on The Art of Australia. He himself later dismissed this as juvenilia. In truth, it is a useful source on Australian art. After its publication the popular historian Alan Moorehead advised Hughes, who by now was making a bare living as a freelance architectural writer, to go to Europe.

Hughes took the advice, travelled around the great art capitals and the dodgier casinos, washed ashore in London, wrote art criticism for the Sunday Times which, with the proviso that art did not have the hold on the public imagination then that it does now, had something of the same effect as the young Kenneth Tynan erupting in the theatre columns of the Observer. In London he wrote a book called Heaven and Hell in Western Art (1969) that bombed. However, a Time magazine executive happened upon a copy, leafed through it, and promptly hired Hughes as art critic. In 1970 he moved to Manhattan and wrote for Time for the rest of the century.

The Shock of the New was a success around the world; the book was revised and republished in 1991. But, when Moorehead took Hughes under his wing and gave him shelter for a couple of months at his house in Porto Ercole, Tuscany, he also advised him that if he wanted to find a big subject for a book, he ought to consider convicts. Convicts! thought Hughes. I didn't come all this way to think about convicts but about Piero della Francesca.

Nonetheless, the seed was planted. And when, in tackling a TV series on Australian art (called Landscape with Figures), Hughes could find no book to tell him about the experience of Australia's early settlers, in effect the cultural background, he was committed. "Our past was either denied or romanticised. I wrote The Fatal Shore to explain it to myself."

His private working title for the book was Kangaroots. In the public records office he found a privy council envelope marked Convict Ms, tied with faded ribbon still bright red in the knots and containing rat-nibbled papers bearing firsthand testimony of the experience of transportation under George III. The rest is history, 688 pages of it.

He followed this in 1990 with a study of Frank Auerbach, a painter whom he much admired, not least for his refusal to paint by the yard, either bespoke or made to measure. In a more dogged way, the British painter possessed the qualities that are most to be valued in Hughes himself and which are demonstrated in his collection of essays Nothing If Not Critical (1991).

Normally these collections of journalists' cuttings are not much of an advance on vanity publishing. Hughes's collection is a jewel box. Here he is on Watteau's "musicality": "it lives in pauses, silences between events. He was a connoisseur of the unplucked string, the immobility before the dance, the moment that falls between departure and nostalgia." And on a new manifestation of fashionable Manhattan, Hughes sets out his stall in the first sentence: "A taste for Alex Katz's work is easily acquired, but is it obligatory?"

Such certitude; but Hughes could also leave the door quietly ajar: "One may wonder if any painter in the last century put more meaning into his sense of colour than Gauguin; and while one is under the spell of this show, it seems quite certain that none except Van Gogh and Cézanne did."

His blithe clearsightedness always eschewed ideology, so that when he essayed into the broader cultural scene with his book excoriating American political correctness, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993), he found himself ducking flak from left and right. And in 1995 a Time cover story on the assault on federal funding of the arts caused such outrage that Newt Gingrich, the house speaker, demanded and got a right of reply.

In 1999 Hughes had a near-fatal car crash in Western Australia, from which legal complications followed. The episode provided the starting point for his memoir Things I Didn't Know (2006).

The hallucinations he suffered after the accident led him to identify even more strongly with an artist taken up with grotesques and horrors, and in 2004 he produced a long-planned book, Goya. That was also the year of his BBC television sequel programme, The New Shock of the New, which regretted the growing power of money and celebrity in art. These themes recurred in a Channel 4 programme criticising Damien Hirst in 2008, and there was also plenty of scope for sharp observation in his last book, the historical survey Rome (2011).

Hughes is survived by his third wife, Doris Downes. His previous marriages ended in divorce, and in 2002 his son by his first wife took his own life.

• Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, art critic and historian, born 28 July 1938; died 6 August 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/07/robert-hughes

[molly bloom]

He wrote some of the best history books I've ever read.

The military historian Sir John Keegan, who has died aged 78, possessed a rare ability to describe warfare from the standpoint of the frontline soldier. For this he depended in great part on imagination, since poor health prevented him from wearing a uniform. It was only in 1984 that he acquired a close-up view of battle (in the Lebanese civil war), which he described as physically disgusting and very frightening.

His third book, The Face of Battle (1976), made his name as a fine writer and is still widely regarded as his best despite more than 20 other works. He portrayed the life of the common soldier in three great British battles: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916). He used original sources to bring out the physical and mental aspects of warfare, including bloodlust, fear, comradeship and the ugliness, dirt and even stink of the battlefield.

Keegan was five years old when the second world war broke out. His father came from an Irish Catholic family and had served in the artillery in the first world war, but when the second came was a schools inspector, taking responsibility for the welfare of hundreds of child evacuees. So the family left Clapham, south London, where John had been born, for the Somerset countryside late in 1939.

The 10-year-old John was impressed by the huge buildup for the Normandy invasion in 1944, when southern England was flooded by military traffic. He met soldiers of several nationalities, learned to identify aircraft and kept up with the war on maps. Many a schoolboy did the same, but for him the interest became lifelong. While he sometimes regretted his lack of military experience, he thought he would not have made a good soldier because of tendencies to insubordination.

After he returned to London, Keegan's education at the Jesuit Wimbledon college was interrupted when he was 13 by a tubercular hip that led to a lengthy confinement in an open-air ward in the worst winter for decades. In eight months he was allowed home, yet the TB hip reasserted itself and took him to St Thomas's hospital in Lambeth, London. This time his fellow patients were cockney war veterans whose soldiers' tales fascinated him.

After two years of this he left with a hip "frozen" by a bone operation and a permanent limp. He won a scholarship to study history at Balliol College, Oxford, but another year-long battle with TB delayed his start.

In 1957 he graduated. Following two years of writing political analyses at the US embassy in London, in 1960 Keegan was appointed a lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in Surrey, where he worked for 26 years. He wrote potted military histories before starting his first major work, The Face of Battle, published when he was 42. He was moved to write it by the realisation that neither he nor his cadet students had experienced the warfare they were studying. It has remained in print ever since. But works such as The Mask of Command (1987) showed that he understood generalship as well as life in the trenches. He made a point of visiting the sites of the battles he described.

In 1986 Keegan joined the Daily Telegraph as defence correspondent, later defence editor until his death. The books continued to appear in a steady, prizewinning stream. Six Armies in Normandy (1982) was a classic portrayal of frontline combat prefaced by elegant nostalgia for a vanished Britain; The Price of Admiralty (1988) was a rare voyage into naval history from Trafalgar to the Battle of the Atlantic.

Histories of both world wars, of military intelligence and War in Our World, the printed version of his Reith lectures of 1998, added to an impressive body of work. However, there was controversy too as Keegan drew criticism from colleagues for his emphatic rejection of the doctrine of the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz that war was a continuation of policy by other means. He was sometimes accused of political naivety.

But his journalistic output was very influential. Highly conservative, at least in the non-political sense, he overcame initial doubts to become a strong supporter of the Falklands war in 1982 under the nom de plume (he was still employed at Sandhurst) of Patrick Desmond in the Spectator, and of the first Iraq war eight years later under his real name. He was appointed OBE in 1991.

His support for the second Iraq war in 2003 was unconditional even though he was highly critical of the lack of an exit strategy. He viewed western intervention in Afghanistan as justified if also highly dangerous, but thought premature withdrawal would make matters worse. Unsurprisingly he was strongly in favour of the British nuclear deterrent and its renewal, but was surprised and disturbed by the idea of a British nuclear strike against pariah states such as Iran and North Korea, as envisaged by Geoff Hoon, the Labour defence secretary, in 2002.

Keegan was knighted in 2000 and further honoured with membership of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He took to writing a whimsical column in the Telegraph magazine about rural life as seen from his 17th-century manor house in Wiltshire. More ill-health dogged his later years when he was struck by a spinal failure, then had a leg amputated. Using a wheelchair, he continued to visit the office once a week and write articles. In April 2009 he suffered a stroke, but made a remarkable partial recovery.

He is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, the biographer Susanne Everett, two daughters and two sons.



• John Desmond Patrick Keegan, military historian, born 15 May 1934; died 2 August 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/05/sir-john-keegan

[molly bloom]

Wreaths would seem appropriate:

Scott McKenzie, whose 1967 hit San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair) became an anthem for the 1967 Summer of Love has died at his home in Los Angeles, aged 73.

McKenzie, who had been in and out of hospital since being diagnosed two years ago with Guillaine-Barré syndrome, a disease of the nervous system, had been "very ill" in recent weeks and died on Saturday night, according to his website.

It is thought he may have had a heart attack earlier this month but had insisted on leaving hospital.

San Francisco was a global hit and by June 1967 was No 4 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in the US and topped the British charts. It was written by John Phillips, of the Mamas and Papas, a close friend who had played in three bands with McKenzie.

As a child, McKenzie lived in North Carolina, Kentucky and Rhode Island with his grandparents and other families before joining his widowed mother who worked in Washington DC.

In an effort to further his career as a musician he had changed his name from Philip Wallach Blondheim, but when Phillips formed the Mamas and Papas he declined an invitation to join them. He released two singles on his own before Phillips and Lou Adler, who were organising the Monterey Pop Festival, saw San Francisco as an ideal way to promote the first major rock event and the rest was history.

McKenzie went on to release two solo albums but further hits eluded him. San Francisco, the song that for many epitomised hippie counter-culture, also rang through eastern Europe. McKenzie regularly dedicated it to US veterans who had fought in Vietnam and sang at the 20th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in 2002.

He dropped out in the late 60s, moving to Joshua Tree, a California desert town near Palm Springs. In 1973, he went to Virginia Beach, where he lived for 10 years.

Later he co-wrote Kokomo, a No 1 hit for the Beach Boys in 1988, and toured with a new version of the Mamas and the Papas. In 2002, he said: "One thing is certain: the new pop music that emerged from those times was indeed wonderful. Never before or since, with the exception of rap, has popular music contained such sheer poetic and social power. Even at the end of the decade, when so many of us had lost hope, when the summer of love had turned into a winter of despair, our music helped keep us alive and carry us forward into a world we had hoped to change. And so it still does."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/20/scott-mckenzie-dies-san-francisco?newsfeed=true