2014 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool - Now under New Management

[Uncle Sparky]

RIP John Pinette -
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/04...le-dead-at-50/

[Uncle Sparky]

He would have kicked Putin's ass...

James Hellwig, The Ultimate Warrior, is dead.

http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcomm...wwe-stars.html

The Ultimate Warrior, who just days ago was inducted into the WWE hall of fame, has died at the age of 54. Just days ago, he addressed his screaming fans from the ring at an event. "No WWE talent becomes a legend on their own," he said.

[Uncle Sparky]

Jim Flaherty, former Canadian Finance Minister, dead at 64.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/04...eath-tributes/

[molly bloom]

Sue Townsend of 'Adrian Mole' fame.

Richard Hoggart, author of 'The Uses of Literacy' .

Len Davies, airman, veteran of the Battle of Britain.

Alan Davie, Scottish artist.

Peter Matthiessen, environmental activist and author of 'The Snow Leopard' .

Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, ex-President of Sierra Leone, oversaw its return to democracy.

John Edwards, Welsh artist.

Lorenzo Semple, screenwriter, notably for the t.v. 'Batman'.

Derek Martinus, television director of early Dr. Who episodes .

Jerry Roberts, Bletchley codebreaker.

Roger Pomphrey, director of documentaries and videos, blues guitarist and ex-Eurythmics' member.

Stass Paraskos, Cypriot artist.

Phil Evans, cartoonist.

Lorna Arnold, historian.

Lucius Shephard, novelist and writer.

Helmut Koenigsberger, historian.

Bryan Clarke scientist/geneticist.

Patrice Wymore, actor/dancer/singer, also married to Errol Flynn.

Khushwant Singh, Indian novelist, activist and short story writer.

Kjell Nupen, Norwegian artist.

Bellini, captain of the winning Brazilian football team in the 1958 World Cup.

[-Jrabbit]

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.

[Uncle Sparky]

http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/musician-...t-69-1.1771976

Folk singer Jesse Winchester dies at 69

Folk musician Jesse Winchester, who became a star after moving to the Eastern Townships as a conscientious objector, has died at 69.

Winchester died in Charlottesville, Virginia on Friday, his wife Cindy reportedly told media outlets.

Winchester moved to Quebec in 1967, was granted amnesty in the U.S. a decade later and returned to live in the U.S.A. in 2002.

He had what Rolling Stone Magazine once declared to be “the greatest voice of the decade.”

He was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in 2011.

Winchester lived for many years in a log house in Magog and released 14 albums including “Nothing but a Breeze” (1977) which contained a title song reflecting his ambivalence towards being a Southerner living in Quebec. “Me I want to live with my feet in Dixie and my head in the cool blue north.”

He boasted that he was the fifth cousin of Robert E. Lee and that his father served in the second World War but he chose to instead to renounce his family's militaristic tradition and spend his time gardening...

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Lucius Shephard was a hell of a writer - how are we only hearing about this now?

[Uncle Sparky]

Lucius Shepard was a hell of a writer - how are we only hearing about this now?

This years 'dead pool' is a lot less lively than previous ones.

[-Jrabbit]

The night is young.

[molly bloom]

Lucius Shephard was a hell of a writer - how are we only hearing about this now?

I've been busy.

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

also mentioned in despatches-

Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of the Two Fat Ladies, barrister, cook and cookery writer

Alain Resnais, film director (notably 'Nuit et Brouillard')

Adolfo Suarez, Spain's first Prime Minister after the death of El Caudillo

Mickey Duff, boxing promoter

[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.

[Colon™]

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.