The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[-Jrabbit]

Holy crap! Giap has been on my list since the second year of the Poly pool, 2009.
I was beginning to think he was immortal.

[ColdWizard]

Perhaps you're right at the edge of the Ming Effectâ„¢.

[-Jrabbit]

More likely it's the Zsa Zsa Effect.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Rack up yet another hit for coldwizard. Chopper Read has gone to join his ears in the afterlife.

[ColdWizard]

Link

Mark "Chopper" Read, one of Australia's most notorious and colorful crime figures, died on Wednesday after a long battle with liver cancer, his manager said. He was 58.

Read, who spent 23 years in prison for a variety of crimes including assault and armed robbery, wrote more than a dozen books detailing his long career of violence, including one entitled "How to Shoot Friends and Influence People." He gained international fame in 2000 after Australian-born actor Eric Bana played him in the film "Chopper."

"A fortnight ago, Mark made his last public appearance in front of a sold-out audience at Melbourne's Athenaeum Theatre," his manager, Andrew Parisi, said in a statement. "Despite his failing health, he delighted the audience with his skills as a raconteur and storyteller. This is how he would wish to be remembered, as someone who spun a great yarn and made many people laugh."

Read earned the nickname "Chopper" after asking a fellow inmate to slice off his ears during one of his prison stints. Read once said he made the request in a bid to get transferred out of the rough cell block where he was housed. Another time, he said it was an attempt to win a bet.

He was never convicted of killing anyone, though he claimed in his books to have murdered 19 underworld figures. Critics said he greatly exaggerated the extent of his crimes in a bid to gain more publicity.

He was known for bilking fellow criminals out of their fortunes and torturing his victims with blowtorches, though he said he never hurt an innocent person. He once tried to kidnap a judge at gunpoint in a failed attempt to get a friend freed from prison. He claimed to have survived being stabbed, shot, run over by a car and beaten in the head with a hammer.

After he was released from prison for the final time in 1998, he transformed himself into a crime writer and painter, and spoke out against drunk driving and violence against women.

"I know most of you out there may hate my guts — I'm not a very popular person," he once said in a drunk driving awareness commercial. "But you drink and you drive ... you're a murdering maggot just the same as I am."

So was Read really the ruthless killer he claimed to be, or was he simply a masterful teller of tall tales? Read's former associate, ex-police detective Roger "The Dodger" Rogerson — himself notorious for spending three years in jail in the 1990s on a charge of perverting the course of justice — said it is almost certainly the latter.

"He made it all up," Rogerson said with a chuckle. "In the end, he was an entertainer. He reinvented himself. And he was clever."

Read is survived by his wife, Margaret, and his sons, Roy and Charlie.

[Grandpa Troll]

Astronaut Scott Carpenter dies @ 88

Scott Carpenter, the fourth U.S. astronaut to fly in space and the second to orbit the Earth, died Thursday at a Denver hospice.

Carpenter’s wife, Patty, confirmed his death to Fox News. Carpenter, 88, reportedly had recently suffered a stroke.

He was chosen in 1959 to be one of NASA’s first astronauts and flew on his one and only space mission on May 24, 1962, circling the Earth three times while conducting scientific experiments

[Uncle Sparky]

Arsala Jamal, Afghani governor, killed in bomb blast-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24530600

Profile: Arsala Jamal
Born in 1966 in Paktika province, Arsala Jamal was a well-travelled man with crucial experience in rural development.
He was close to President Hamid Karzai and even worked as his campaign manager in 2009.
Schooled in Kabul and Peshawar, Pakistan, he went to Malaysia to study for his economics degree.
He migrated to Canada with his family but returned to the country after the US-led invasion.
When back in Afghanistan he worked for the Central Bank and Care International, advised the ministry for rural affairs and also served as governor of Khost province.
He also worked as the acting minister for border and tribal affairs.
Analysts say that Jamal was known as an active and competent politician with experience of dealing with tribal elders and foreign donors.
Appointed to the Logar job in April 2013 he planned to champion the development of a massive copper mine which has attracted Chinese investment.

Most of Jamal's family currently lives in Canada.

[-Jrabbit]

Hey Wezil, when will you update? End of month?

[SlowwHand]

I want to know, but I don't want to know. You know?

[Wezil]

Hey Wezil, when will you update? End of month?

I'm thinking never but we'll see.

I'm down to about 1% interest in Poly and it's entirely the DP.

[Wezil]

In all seriousness....

I will update at some point (I think I'm two behind now) but pretty much everything in my life takes precedence over this site.

[Krill]

Hey, Wezil, if you got any good other off topic forums that you frequent, you care to PM to URLs? Poly is ****ing awful now.

[molly bloom]

The Mambo Kings play a requiem...

As a youngish advertising copywriter, Oscar Hijuelos, who has died aged 62 after suffering a heart attack, composed an advertising campaign for his first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983). "They travelled through three worlds," the slogan ran, "the Cuban, the American and the unknown …" Perhaps without realising it, the Cuban-American author had defined his own trajectory.

He was born to Cuban immigrant parents in New York City. In later life, he often expressed amazement that his father had swapped a country existence in HolguÃn, eastern Cuba, for immigrant life in Morningside Heights, upper Manhattan, and work in hotel kitchens in downtown New York. Hijuelos also recalled how much of his early reading came thanks to his mother's curiosity – she would pick up books abandoned around the nearby Columbia University: "I found myself reading half-portions of novels, or huge tracts on farming techniques in the midwest."

His first life-changing experience came when he was three. After a trip to Cuba, where many of his father's family still lived, he was struck down with a serious kidney disease that kept him in hospital in for almost a year. His mother told him: "You went into hospital speaking only Spanish, and came out speaking only English." According to Hijuelos, this was the seed of one of the main themes of his fiction – "trying to cope as an outsider within my own culture".

Hijuelos was educated at state schools in New York City, then went to City College, where he took creative writing courses taught by established figures such as Susan Sontag and Donald Barthelme. He began writing short stories based on the lives of the immigrant communities around him and, like many aspiring writers, took on a job at an advertising agency. While working there, he published Our House in the Last World, about a Cuban immigrant family trying to survive and succeed in America. The book was well received by the critics, but only 1,500 hardback copies were printed and sales were not enough to allow him to quit his job.

However, in 1985 Hijuelos won an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The prize was a year-long residence at the American Academy in Rome, with a stipend generous enough for him to be able to write the whole time.

This was the genesis of his next and by far most famous novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), about two brothers from Havana who come to New York to start an orchestra. The brothers' energy, their music and their life in New York City in the 1950s struck a chord with readers not only in the US but in many other countries. In 1990 the novel led to him becoming the first Latino to win the Pulitzer prize for fiction. The book was made into a film, The Mambo Kings (1992), starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas, and in 2005 a musical version was staged in San Francisco.

After the book's success, Hijuelos was able to write full-time. He continued to explore the lives of immigrants in books such as The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993) and Mr Ives' Christmas (1995). One of the most interesting was his coming-of-age novel Dark Dude (2009), which takes a teenager out of New York and transplants him to the midwest, where he discovers his sense of identity.

In 2011 Hijuelos published an exploration of his own life and identity in the memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes. Among many other things, the book is a tribute to his father, who was constantly smoking and died when Oscar was 17. It includes warm portraits of him, his mother and life in immigrant New York, and how "I began to look through another window, not out into 118th Street, but into myself – through my writing, the process by which, for all my earlier alienation, I had finally returned home".

He is survived by his wife, Lori Marie Carlson, whom he married in 1998.

• Oscar Hijuelos, writer, born 24 August 1951; died 12 October 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/22/oscar-hijuelos

[Tuberski]

Lou Reed:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelzarrell/music-legend-lou-reed-dies-at-71?bffb

ACK!

[Uncle Sparky]

RIP