The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Uncle Sparky]

R.I.P.

[self biased]

Chi Cheng of Deftones has finally passed away after being in a coma for years.

http://www.underthegunreview.net/2013/04/13/chi-cheng-deftones-bassist-passes-away/

[Sava]

i pick william shatner

[molly bloom]

i pick william shatner

For a date ? For President ? For centre spot on Celebrity Squares ?

More details needed.

[rah]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/arts/television/frank-bank-lumpy-on-leave-it-to-beaver-dies-at-71.html?_r=0

Frank Bank, Lumpy on ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ Dies at 71

I'm sure no one had him, but what the hey.

[-Jrabbit]

No hits on this one, either: sports broadcaster Pat Summerall, 82.



RIP to Pat. He was on my first dead pool team in 2008...I also had Roger Ebert in 2009.

[Tuberski]

He was on my team last year or the year before, IIRC.

ACK!

[Wezil]

He was on my team last year or the year before, IIRC.

ACK!

2010 - You and SlowwHand picked him.

2011 - MRT144 had him

[Sava]

More details needed.

he's going to die
and when he does, i win this game

[Wezil]

Sava - Do us a favour pal and get a life. The fact you have time for this forum vandalism on a daily basis is just plain sad.

[Wezil]

I wasn't a fan but many were:

SYDNEY, N.S.—Rita MacNeil, known as Cape Breton’s first lady of song, has died at 68.


Her website says she died Tuesday night from complications following surgery.


MacNeil, who was born in Big Pond, N.S., recorded more than 24 albums during her career.


Some of her most popular songs include, “Working Man,” “Flying on Your Own,” “Reason to Believe,” “I’ll Accept The Rose Tonight” and “Home I’ll Be.”


Her music often spoke of the courage to rise above life’s challenges, particularly those faced by the working class.

MacNeil’s big breakthrough came relatively late in life. When she was in her 40s, she won acclaim for her performance on stage at Expo 86 in Vancouver.


“I hit the ground running and I never stopped,” she said in an interview with The Canadian Press in 2004. “I don’t think I ever want to look at retirement, because if the songwriting is still there in some capacity, please God, if everything goes well, I’d still love to be doing that.”

[Wezil]

Richard LeParmentier, an American-born film and TV actor who spent most of his career working in England, has died at the age of 66. LeParmentier was best remembered for playing Admiral Motti, the Imperial head of Naval operations in Star Wars (1977) who has the arrogance to insult Darth Vader’s “sorcerer’s ways,” thus becoming the first character to give Vader reason to demonstrate his party trick of strangling someone from the other side of the room.

[Krill]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22210378

Graphic designer Storm Thorgerson dies

Storm Thorgerson, whose album cover artwork includes Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, has died aged 69, the band's management has confirmed.

A childhood friend of the founding members of the band, he became their designer-in-chief, fashioning a string of eye-catching creations.

Most-famously he designed the prism spreading a spectrum of colour across The Dark Side Of The Moon.

His credits also include albums by Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and Muse.

A statement on the Pink Floyd.com official site said: "We are saddened by the news that long-time Pink Floyd graphic genius, friend and collaborator, Storm Thorgerson, has died.

"Our thoughts are with his family and many friends."

[molly bloom]

he's going to die

We all are, you munchkin.

Basil Copper potted :

Although Basil Copper, who has died aged 89 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was best known as an author of macabre short stories and novels, he also wrote two popular detective series, set almost half a century and two totally different genres apart. His first novel, The Dark Mirror (1966), launched a series of hard-boiled thrillers featuring the Los Angeles private investigator Mike Faraday, an obvious and acknowledged homage to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Critics admired Copper's authentic descriptions of the City of Angels, but he had never been to California. All his knowledge was gleaned from watching old movies and referring to maps. Faraday's charm as a tough protagonist and poetry-quoting narrator, ably supported by his faithful secretary Stella, proved popular. The first book spawned a series and over the next 22 years Copper produced 52 volumes. The books were translated into numerous foreign languages.

Then, seven years after the death in 1973 of the US author August Derleth, Copper took Derleth's Solar Pons detective series in hand. Derleth had begun writing about Pons in the late 20s, after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said there would be no further tales of Sherlock Holmes. Derleth's Pons, a consulting detective, was closely modelled on Holmes – he lived in London, at 7b Praed Street, not far from Paddington station; his own Watson was Dr Lyndon Parker; and Mrs Johnson was their long-suffering landlady.

Unfortunately, Derleth's research left much to be desired and Copper was asked to revise and edit the entire series of 70 short stories and one novel. The task took almost 18 months, and the result was published in 1982 as The Solar Pons Omnibus. Then, Copper was invited to continue the Pontine canon himself, and he produced seven collections of novellas and the novel Solar Pons Versus the Devil's Claw (2004). Copper's Pons stories have been collected by various publishers, although the author has disowned some editions after unauthorised rewriting by inhouse editors.

Born in London, Copper moved with his family to Kent as a boy. "Little Willy", as he was affectionately known, attended the local grammar school, where he contributed fiction to the school magazine, took part in amateur dramatics and was a member of a football team. A voracious reader, Copper also started haunting bookshops and libraries, and soon discovered the works of MR James and Edgar Allan Poe.

At a local commercial college, he learned bookkeeping, economics and shorthand and touch-typing. Copper began training as an apprentice journalist, but with the outbreak of the second world war many reporters were conscripted, and he soon found himself in charge of the local newspaper branch office at the age of 17, while also serving in the Home Guard.

He then joined the Royal Navy and was a radio operator with a motor gunboat flotilla off the Normandy beaches during the D-day operations. He subsequently spent two years on radio stations in Egypt, Malta and Gibraltar, before demobilisation.

A new edition of Basil Copper's The Great White Space is due to be published later this year Copper resumed his career in the regional press, becoming editor of the Sevenoaks edition of the Kent Messenger. He made his fiction debut in The Fifth Book of Pan Horror Stories (1964) with The Spider, for which he was paid £10. He then set out to write a novel, a tongue-in-cheek crime story in the Dashiell Hammett/Chandler mode. The Dark Mirror was turned down by 32 publishers because it was too long, before Robert Hale eventually published a cut-down version. Four years later, in 1970, Copper gave up journalism to write full-time.

His macabre and supernatural novels (he disliked the term "horror") include The Great White Space (1974), Into the Silence (1983) and The Black Death (1991), along with a trio of gothics comprising The Curse of the Fleers (1976), Necropolis (1980) and The House of the Wolf (1983) – the last two published by Derleth's US imprint Arkham House.

Two of Copper's early collections of short stories, From Evil's Pillow (1973) and And Afterward, the Dark: Seven Tales (1977), were also issued by Arkham. Other collections included Not After Nightfall: Stories of the Strange and the Terrible (1967), Here Be Daemons: Tales of Horror and the Uneasy (1978), Cold Hand on My Shoulder: Tales of Terror and Suspense (2002) and the self-published Knife in the Back: Tales of Twilight and Torment (2005).

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in Copper's work, and in 2008 PS Publishing brought out my biography and bibliography Basil Copper: A Life in Books. PS has collected all his macabre fiction in the impressive two-volume set Darkness, Mist and Shadow (2010), and in 2012 reissued The Curse of the Fleers in a restored version. Forthcoming is a complete collection of Copper's Solar Pons tales and a US publisher is due to release new editions of The Great White Space and Necropolis later this year.

Copper's story Camera Obscura was dramatised for the TV series Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971, and his tale The Recompensing of Albano Pizar was broadcast as Invitation to the Vaults for BBC Radio 4 in 1991. He was a member of the Crime Writers' Association for more than 30 years, serving as its chairman from 1981 until 1982 and on its committee for seven years. In 2010, he was presented with the inaugural lifetime achievement award of the World Horror Convention in Brighton, where he shared the stage with fellow award-winner James Herbert.

Copper is survived by his French-born wife, Annie Guerin, whom he met while she was a student learning English and married in 1960.

• Basil Frederick Albert Copper, writer, born 5 February 1924; died 3 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/14/basil-copper

and rather appropriately :

[molly bloom]

Les Blank's out:

The film-maker Les Blank, who has died aged 77, explored the margins of America's music, capturing and framing idioms such as Louisiana Cajun and zydeco, the norteño music of the Texas-Mexico border, blues, polka, and Appalachian old-time music. He was also fascinated by traditions of eating and cookery, and when screening his film Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980) he sometimes created what he called "smellovision" by cooking garlicky dishes in the auditorium.

Blank made more than 40 films, including Burden of Dreams (1982), about the shooting of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. While few of his documentaries were known to a wide public, many were admired by other directors. In 2007, he received the Edward MacDowell medal, an annual award for achievement in the arts, only twice before given to film directors, and never to a documentary maker. One of the panel, the director Taylor Hackford, called Blank a national treasure.

Uninterested in conventional linear histories and their well-worn patchwork of archive footage and talking heads, Blank preferred to make intimate, rounded portraits. His role was that of the quiet guy in a corner who melts into the shadows. His favourite subjects were people who lived on cultural frontiers: the Texas songster Mance Lipscomb (A Well Spent Life, 1971), the zydeco accordionist Clifton Chenier (Hot Pepper, 1973), the old-time fiddler and banjoist Tommy Jarrell from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina (Sprout Wings and Fly, 1983). Many of his film projects were made in collaboration with Chris Strachwitz, founder of the roots-music label Arhoolie Records and co-founder with Blank of Brazos Films, their interests coalescing in superb studies of Tex-Mex music (Chulas Fronteras, 1976, and Del Mero Corazon, 1979) and the Cajun culture of the South Louisiana bayou country (J'ai Été au Bal, 1989). "He had a wonderful, extraordinary eye," says Strachwitz. "His aesthetic was to just sit calmly back and watch people do what they do."

Born in Tampa, Florida, Blank studied English at Tulane University in New Orleans, a city whose vibrancy he celebrated in Always for Pleasure (1978). He thought of becoming a writer, but while at graduate school in Berkeley saw Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and decided, "This is what I want to do. I want to be working around people that do this kind of work." After film school he made a number of educational and industrial movies before taking on his first musical subject, the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, in 1965. Two years later he created his own production company, Flower Films.

The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins (1968) introduced his name not only to lovers of American vernacular music but also to fellow film-makers and other cin̩astes struck by his ability to film what one of them called "stuff that nobody else gets Рhe really gets close to the people, and you actually feel how they live". Steve Dollar, writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, said Blank "may be one of America's greatest journalists working without a laptop".

His longtime sound recordist and editor Maureen Gosling describes his films as "celebrations – looking at the way people survive in their lives above and beyond the struggles. [Many] of his films are about people that are poor, marginal or struggling, but there's something else going on there … the other human qualities that make life worth living, the music and the food that help these groups and cultures survive".

Blank's last movie, co-directed with Gina Leibrecht, was All in This Tea (2007), about an American tea importer. As well as receiving many prizes over the years for individual films, Blank was honoured by the American Film Institute with its Maya Deren award for his achievement as an independent filmmaker. In January 2013 the city of Berkeley honoured him with a Les Blank Day.

Blank was married and divorced three times. He is survived by his sons, Harrod and Beau, his daughter, Ferris, and three grandchildren.


• Leslie Harrod Blank, film-maker, born 27 November 1935; died 7 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/12/les-blank-dies-documentary-music

Truly lustrous face fungus: