2014 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool - Now under New Management

[Hauldren Collider]

I'll give $5 to anyone that will go and hold a pillow over Zsa Zsa's face. Anyone?

Doesn't this violate one of the rules?

[SlowwHand]

So I hear. (hear.hear.hear)

[Colon™]

Can I still play? (too many rules, me no read)

[Ming]

Can I still play? (too many rules, me no read)

You have till the end of today (But I"m pretty sure nobody would mind if you are a little late, as long as you follow the late entry rules...

a) Late submissions will be accepted until January 7, 2013 under the following conditions:
i) New players must submit a list of 20 unique (not picked in 2013) celebrities. Consult the 2013 game thread opening posts for a complete list of picked celebrities.
ii) Returning players may submit their old team with unique picks filling any openings created by 2012 (or earlier) deaths. New picks are added to the bottom of the player's Rank List. In the alternative - Returning players may create a new team as per clause 4 (a)(i).
iii) Any and all "unique" picks on a late submission team are ineligible for the Unique Pick Award (the "penalty" for a late submission).
iv) All picks must be eligible (i.e. Still alive) as of team submission. Any returning player picks that may die prior to submission are removed from the team list and may be filled by a new "unique" pick.

It would be pretty hard to actually make a late entry since we don't know who the "unique" picks would be since picks haven't been posted yet.. so I would think you still have time depending on when the picks are posted.

But yet again, It's all up to our new Dead Pool overlord, since it's his game now

[regexcellent]

Ugh

I'll delay posting the picks for a bit while Colon selects his team, get it to me by midnight EST Wednesday (about 24 hours from now) and don't pick anyone who's died yet. Also do me a favor and don't pick someone who's been in the news as dying this past week.

For Colon only.

Also increment those dates in Ming's post by a year

[Colon™]

For Colon only.

Thank you.

[-Jrabbit]

Possible First Blood Award...

Chinese movie mogul Run Run Shaw, credited as the inventor of the kung fu genre, has passed away. He was 106.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/movies/run-run-shaw-movie-mogul-seen-as-creator-of-kung-fu-genre-dies-at-106.html?_r=1

Nice article. He was a pretty interesting guy.

[regexcellent]

This would be way easier if you fools would format the names the same way

[Colon™]

I formatted my names by theme, which was an awesome idea.

[Colon™]

Since you're busy with such things anyway, I misspelled on of the names and I'd appreciate if you'd correct it.

[SlowwHand]

Maybe you should have spent more time on spelling than artsy decor.

[molly bloom]

From the imitation of life to death... Juanita Moore:

From its earliest days, Hollywood, which has always lagged behind wider social advances, limited the roles of black actors to stock, wide-eyed cowards, simpletons or servants, often referred to as "uncles" and "mammies". Juanita Moore, who has died aged 99, suffered from this limitation by having to play maids throughout most of her long career. However, Moore could have echoed what Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award, once said: "Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one."

Where McDaniel as Mammy, Scarlett O'Hara's lovable, sassy servant in Gone With the Wind (1939) was the apotheosis of the black maid, Moore's Oscar-nominated portrayal of Annie Johnson, housekeeper to the glamorous Broadway star Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), was the most substantial, progressive and sympathetic version.

Moore was only the fourth black Oscar nominee, male or female, in the 20 years since McDaniel's victory. Although Hollywood was part of an ideological superstructure, still projecting a largely conservative, white, middle-class view of the world, the superior melodrama Imitation of Life dared to deal with racism. Despite rigidly knowing their places, Annie and Lora are close friends, each having trouble with their daughters. Annie's light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), rejects her mother in an attempt to pass as a white woman. Moore commented: "My husband's mother was Caucasian and so I was living that kind of thing with my husband prior to Imitation of Life: one family black, one family white."

Moore brings great warmth, charm and sensitivity to the part of the saintly, self-sacrificing Annie. "I think my part was the greatest dramatic role ever given to an actress of my race and I was determined to do it justice," she remarked. Unforgettable is the scene in which she painfully stands by as Sarah Jane, working in a nightclub, introduces her mother to her white colleagues as her old nanny. On her deathbed, Annie forgives her errant daughter. "Tell her I know I was selfish – and if I loved her too much, I'm sorry – but I didn't mean to cause her any trouble. She was all I had."

Moore remembered that Sirk was patient with her: "There were times I was so nervous the muscles were jumping in my face. One day I cried all day long, yet he didn't fire me. During my dying scene, Sirk said: 'Juanita, you got to remember you are dying not crying.'"

She was grateful for the role of her life. "They auditioned a lot of people before casting me in the part," she recalled. "Pearl Bailey was their first choice. But producer Ross Hunter really wanted me. I have been in a lot of pictures. However, most of them consisted of my opening doors for white people."

Born in Los Angeles, Moore started her career in her teens, dancing at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York. She then returned to LA, where she got jobs as a movie extra, and was seen as a chorus girl in the Sharp as a Tack number in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), Paramount's all-star variety show, and in the all-black-cast musical Cabin in the Sky (1943). Gradually, Moore began to get a few small speaking parts, such as a nurse in Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949), a precursor of Imitation of Life.

At the same time, Moore was a member of the Ebony Showcase theatre, Los Angeles, founded by Nick and Edna Stewart, which provided a venue for black performers to play the types of roles they were denied elsewhere.

In films, it was back to stereotypes, tending to shift between the African jungle and the boudoir: a native girl in Tarzan and the Jungle Queen (1951); maid to a southern belle played by Virginia Mayo in The Iron Mistress (1952). In Affair in Trinidad (1952), Moore had a key role – though way down the credits – as Rita Hayworth's intuitive maid, Dominique, who says: "It is the prerogative of a faithful and loyal servant to be impertinent." In slight contrast, she was a patient in a psychiatric hospital to which Barbara Stanwyck has been committed in Witness to Murder (1954) and a convict called Polyclinic Jones – "named after the hospital where she was born" – in Women's Prison (1955), first seen scrubbing floors and singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot.

Unfortunately, after her triumph in Imitation of Life, Moore's film and television roles were only marginally bigger and better. "I think I made less money after that, to tell you the truth, because I thought I was going to make more money with better parts and things like that but found myself right back making minimum." She was the sweet Sister Mary in The Singing Nun (1966) and a feisty mother in Up Tight (1968), Jules Dassin's transposition of Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer from Dublin to a black ghetto of Cleveland, Ohio. On television, she appeared in several episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1963-65), among other series.

Moore gained more satisfaction from her stage role as the strong and devoted matriarch Mama Lena in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, which ran at the Adelphi theatre in London in 1959. On Broadway, she played Sister Boxer in James Baldwin's The Amen Corner (1965).

In the 70s, Moore profited somewhat from the wave of blaxploitation movies, mostly in long-suffering maternal roles. In The Mack (1973), Moore played the mother of a pimp (Max Julien) whom she expects to lead a respectable life. The following year, she was in Thomasine and Bushrod, based on Bonnie and Clyde; and Abby, based on The Exorcist – and was also inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.

She continued to appear in films and television until 2001, her last movie role being the wise grandmother in the time-travel film The Kid (2000).

Moore's husband predeceased her.

• Juanita Moore, actor, born 19 October 1914; died 1 January 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/02/juanita-moore

He no longer shoots or scores... the late, the great, Eusebio :

Eusébio, who has died aged 71, was the greatest African footballer in the history of the game. He moved from his native Mozambique to the Portuguese club Benfica in 1961, blazing a trail from poverty to stardom that scores of young African footballers would follow, though none since has played with such grace or reached the benchmark he set.

He was the prototype of a complete 21st-century striker, decades ahead of his time; a superb athlete (he ran the 100 metres in 11 seconds at the age of 16) with explosive acceleration who could leave defenders trailing in his wake. He could also dribble, was good in the air and possessed a fearsome and highly accurate right foot.

His scoring record was astonishing. In 15 years at Benfica he scored an incredible 473 goals in 440 competitive games, plus many more in friendlies. He was top scorer seven times in the Portuguese league and was European Golden Boot winner twice. In his only appearance in the World Cup finals, in England in 1966, he won the Golden Boot for top scorer of the tournament, with nine goals in six games.

Eusébio da Silva Ferreira was born in the colonial capital of Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo), the son of Laurindo António da Silva Ferreira, a white Angolan railroad worker, and Elisa Anissabeni, a black Mozambican. His father died when Eusébio was eight, and he was brought up in poverty before being signed by Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques, a feeder club of Sporting Lisbon, at the age of 15.

Word of the prodigy soon spread beyond his home town – in fact his destiny was determined in a Lisbon barber shop. It was there that a coach from the Brazilian club São Paulo, who was touring Mozambique and later Portugal, waxed lyrical to an old friend about a young Mozambican he had spotted. The friend was Benfica's legendary coach Béla Guttmann, and he was so impressed with what he heard that the following week he flew to Mozambique and persuaded Eusébio's family to let him sign for Benfica.

This happened right under the noses of Benfica's rivals, Sporting, who disputed the legality of the transfer. Such was the ill-feeling between the two Lisbon clubs that, on Eusébio's arrival in Portugal in December 1960, Benfica had to hide him in a fishing village in the Algarve and ordered him to stay in his hotel room. It took Benfica five months of legal wrangling to register him, but as soon as the ink on his contract was dry, the footballing world learned what all the fuss had been about.

Eusébio scored a hat-trick on his Benfica debut, in June 1961. Two weeks later, in a friendly match in Paris, the team faced the Brazilian club Santos, and their great striker Pelé. With Benfica losing 4-0 and with no chance of winning, Guttmann brought on Eusébio in the second half. Within 20 minutes, he had scored another hat-trick. Pelé, along with everyone else watching, sensed the arrival of a future great.

Benfica were then reigning European and Portuguese champions, but Eusébio forced his way into their formidable side the following season. At the end of that season the club retained the European Cup, defeating the mighty Real Madrid, unbeaten in their previous five finals and led by Ferenc Puskas and Alfredo di Stefano, Eusébio's boyhood idol. The 19-year-old scored the last two goals in the 5-3 victory, and at the end of the game swapped shirts with Puskas, who had scored a hat-trick, a symbolic exchange between the game's greatest goal scorer and his heir apparent, before Benfica supporters carried their new king from the pitch on their shoulders. Europe's football writers voted him the continent's second-best player in his first full season as a professional.

Mozambique was a colony, Portuguese East Africa, until 1975, so Eusébio played his international career for Portugal. In England in 1966, he lit up the World Cup, outshining Pelé as the star of the tournament – though that was thanks partly to the brutal tackling of Eusébio's Portuguese team-mates, who literally kicked the Brazilian out of the tournament.

Eusébio scored twice in the 3-1 win over the reigning champions, Brazil, a game that set up the famous quarter-final with North Korea at Goodison Park. The underdogs were winning 3-0 until Eusébio almost single-handedly led the Portuguese recovery, scoring their first four goals in the eventual 5-3 victory.

In the semi-final, Portugal faced England at Wembley – though most English histories of the tournament gloss over the fact that this match had been scheduled for Goodison Park, where Portugal had already played twice and felt at home, until the English authorities connived to switch venues, forcing the Portuguese to catch a train to London the night before the match.

Eusébio was nullified by Nobby Stiles and England won 2-1, with Bobby Charlton scoring twice. Eusébio wept at the end of the game, and the occasion is still remembered as Jogo das Lágrimas (the Game of Tears) in Portugal. But even in defeat, Eusébio was the sensation of the World Cup.

He never again played in the finals of the World Cup, but two years later he was back at Wembley to face Manchester United in the European Cup final. Once again, Charlton scored two goals and inspired his team to victory, and again it was Stiles who marked Eusébio out of the game – rather more violently on this occasion.

Eusébio did have a chance to win the game in the dying minutes with a close-range shot on goal, but hit it straight at the United goalkeeper, Alex Stepney. It was typical of a man who always played in the Corinthian spirit that, even at a critical moment of such an important match, he put an arm around Stepney's shoulder to praise him for the save.

This was Eusébio's third European Cup final defeat in six years, after losing to AC Milan in 1963 and Inter Milan in 1965, and his last on the big stage, but he continued to win trophies and score goals for Benfica for another seven years. In 15 years with the club he won 11 league titles, five Portuguese cups, was European Player of the Year and the first player to win the European Golden Boot award in 1968, and again in 1973.

In the mid-70s Eusébio followed the well-trodden path then taken by ageing world-class players, to the burgeoning North American Soccer League, for one last lucrative payday. He turned out for Boston Minutemen, Las Vegas Quicksilvers and Toronto Metros-Croatia, helping the last to win the NASL title in 1976.

He lived in Portugal for the rest of his life (although he frequently returned to Mozambique, where he was hero-worshipped), acting as a football ambassador for both his adopted country and Benfica, where he is immortalised in a statue at the club's stadium, the Estádio da Luz.

He is survived by his wife, Flora, two daughters and several grandchildren.

• Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, footballer, born 25 January 1942; died 5 January 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/jan/05/eusebio

Goodbye to all that for Simon Hoggart :

Others in its history may have left more of a lasting mark on events, shifting the minds of statesmen, or promoting great national and international causes. But few in nearly two centuries of the Manchester Guardian and Guardian can have afforded more consistent pleasure to readers than Simon Hoggart, the paper's parliamentary sketchwriter, who has died aged 67, after suffering from cancer.

That was partly the product of Simon's cleverness, but it also reflected the fact that, like many outstanding columnists, he thought in different patterns from conventional people. Who else could have written of Bill Clinton as guest speaker at a Labour conference: "The former president was brilliant, dazzling, charismatic, seductive and completely shameless. He wooed them all the time. He didn't stop. He cast his eyes down coyly. Then he raised his head, smiled, and looked slowly round the audience, gazing deep into their eyes. He is the Princess Di of the political world …"

Or of Margaret Thatcher's trusty bulldog Bernard Ingham: "Brick-red of face, beetling of brow, seemingly built to withstand hurricanes, Sir Bernard resembled a half-timbered bomb shelter." Or earlier, of a familiar and much liked performer at Labour conference: "Jimmy Knapp, of RMT, the transport union, was bold and passionate. At least, I assume he was, since I couldn't comprehend a word he said and spent the time marvelling that this vast, stooped, bald man, who looks like a polar bear attacked by a lawn strimmer, is almost precisely the same age as Cliff Richard."

Matched with that was a scepticism that made him suspicious of anything that fashion or rhetorical contrivance was busy asserting. Politicians who claimed to sense the hand of history on their shoulders got a dusty response from Simon, especially if they did so in verbless sentences. As for "the court of history", history, he once pointed out, had yet to reach a conclusion on Richard III.

As gleefully as a pig after truffles, he dug out, in his daily sketches and his long-running Saturday column, unthinking cliche. He would take some resonant, empty statement and destroy it by simple inversion. "Now is not the time for cowardice!" some self‑important politician would boom. So just when, he would ask, is the time for cowardice?

Simon was the eldest of the three children, two sons and a daughter, of Richard and Mary Hoggart, formerly Mary Holt France. At the time of Simon's birth in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, his father was awaiting demobilisation, and the shape of his early years was dictated by Richard's academic employment, first in Hull, which took Simon to Hymer's College, then at Leicester, where he went to Wyggeston grammar school and developed a lasting affection for Leicester City FC. Richard Hoggart was already famous as the author of the sociological book The Uses of Literacy. A rich array of guests appeared at the family home, among them WH Auden, who taught the young Simon how to make a dry martini, extolled the merits of food mixers and talked about drugs.

After school, he took a year off to teach in Uganda ("I was a terrible teacher," he claimed in his 2010 book of recollections, A Long Lunch), before starting at King's College, Cambridge. There he studied English and became part of a group working on the university newspaper Varsity, several of whom went on to be Fleet Street names. His special delight was a column spiced with malicious gossip called Mungo Fairweather's Diary. He had hoped to edit Varsity, but lost out to a subsequent Guardian colleague, Peter Cole. Old Cambridge friends believe that had it mattered to him he could have come away with a first-class degree, but already by then it looked clear he would find his future in newspapers.

The Guardian in those days recruited two graduates every year for its Manchester office. In 1968, Simon was one. There were those in Manchester, at a time when local or regional newspaper experience was usually regarded as an essential preliminary for work on a national or regional paper – as it had been for Simon's subsequent editor, Peter Preston – who were sceptical about graduate entrants. But Simon's conspicuous brightness and his links with the north were useful qualifications.

He once earned a famous reproach for writing too highfalutin a match report of a game between Chelsea and Blackpool, evoking Greek tragedy and, specifically, the blinding of Oedipus ("Will you tell me one thing?" a grizzled night editor asked him, "were they playing with a ball or a discus?") But generally his seemed a particularly promising signing; so much so that he was picked out to cover Northern Ireland, working with Simon Winchester.

He stayed for five years, and for two of them made his home there. He was present through the time of mounting tension that culminated on 30 January 1972 in Derry with the events that became known as Bloody Sunday. Simon was in Belfast that day, with Winchester covering Derry, but a few days before he had written a piece, immediately denounced by the military, about the excessive behaviour of the Parachute Regiment elsewhere in the province. The truth of his report was specifically confirmed in 2010 by the Saville inquiry.

In the autumn of 1973, he moved to London to join the paper's staff at Westminster as a political reporter. The Guardian's long-established sketchwriter then was Norman Shrapnel, but the circumstances of the 1974 parliaments, when at any time a vote might have triggered a new election, meant that events on the floor of the Commons became a prominent part of the news, which against all the paper's traditions put pressure on Norman to update his sketches and start them off with the vote. He became increasingly despondent and in 1975 he resigned.

Simon at this point inherited the title of parliamentary correspondent, but not Norman's old role. He remained a part of the paper's political staff, and his contributions from the Westminster gallery were often more news reports than sketches. It was already clear, even so, especially from his rich accounts of Edward Heath's doomed progress round Britain as he fought to keep his government in power in the contest for the February 1974 election, that here was one of nature's born sketchwriters waiting to happen.

Yet with that restlessness that was one of his enduring characteristics, he abandoned the gallery for the lobby. In February 1976, as Ian Aitken moved up to the role of political editor, Simon, as his number two, took the title political correspondent. Aitken declared himself perplexed at this decision. "Simon wants to be my deputy," he said to a colleague. "I don't know why. I don't sell newspapers; the sketchwriter does." His seat in the gallery went to his old Cambridge friend and rival Cole.

Having made the decision, Simon soon showed signs of regretting it. But by now he was also developing a useful broadcasting practice, appearing at frequent intervals on the BBC Today programme. Increasingly, too, rival papers tried to lure him away: the London Evening Standard, to write its Londoner's Diary; and then in 1981 the Times, under Harold Evans. After a long and painful process of indecision over that offer, he announced that he wouldn't be going. A few days later, he resigned to join the Observer – not then linked as it is today with the Guardian – where he made his debut in June 1981.

In 1983, at 37, he married Alyson Corner, a psychologist, to whom he had been introduced by her cousin, the political journalist Julia Langdon, a friend and at one time a Guardian colleague of Simon's. Both were the children of Portsmouth naval officer families, a culture decidedly different from that of the Hoggarts. Two children, Amy and Richard, were born during his four-year term from 1985 as the Observer's Washington correspondent.

These were happy years. He loved the posting, found his assignments unfailingly intriguing and entertaining, and developed a lasting affection for the US. "Living in New York" he once wrote "is like being at some terrible late-night party. You're tired, you have had a headache since you arrived, but you can't leave, because you'd miss the party."

One of the highlights of almost every subsequent year would be his attendance at an event that called itself the Conference on World Affairs, but which Simon liked to describe as "a piss-up with speeches", at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In 1989, he returned to London and after a spell as a columnist became the Observer's political editor. This appointment was not, in the end, a success. It was abruptly terminated when the Guardian took over the Observer and the new regime removed Simon and his deputy Paul Routledge, and contrived to lose the seasoned columnist Alan Watkins. The changes mystified some old political hands who saw them as weakening the team. Others thought it partly reflected a piece of miscasting. If Simon had failed to furnish the steady stream of page-one exclusives for which Sunday newspapers thirst, that had never been his particular expertise. After he gave up the post in 1993, he talked of it with some bitterness. "When the Observer sacked me …" he would sometimes say, even two decades on.

The obvious choice thereafter was to return to a seat in the gallery at Westminster. He rejoined the Guardian as sketchwriter and remained there for the rest of his working life, consistently finding even on the dullest and least eventful of days something vivid, piquant and unexpected to say.


He also developed a string of ancillary occupations. In the 1980s, he had written a regular column of disrespectful political comment for Punch, and now he began to contribute to the Spectator, writing on television and for rather longer on wine (along with food, a consistent Hoggartian passion). He also became a familiar voice on the radio and to a lesser extent on television, seized on by producers as someone always sure to light up a programme – most of all, on the News Quiz on Radio 4, first as a participant and then for 10 years from 1996 as chairman.

How, people sometimes wondered, was it possible to sit in the same seat day after day, year after year, observing much the same set of characters, without becoming hopelessly jaded? One remedy for that was to develop a kind of repertory company in which familiar, even beloved, old stagers constantly recurred in an almost soap-opera fashion. Sir Peter Tapsell, weflecting on the wepwehensible nature of modern wealities (Sir Peter, Simon liked to explain, has a slight speech defect) was a particular favourite; so was Michael Fabricant, once disc jockey Mickey Fab, with his unlikely hair – a successor in this sense if no other to Michael Heseltine, the tactical use of whose hair at conference time always fascinated Simon.

The Tory MP Nicholas Soames was another favourite: "Soames" (this, again, at a party conference) "was magnificent, a vast, florid spectacle, a massive inflatable frontbench spokesman. You could tow him out to a village fete and charge children 50p to bounce on him. They could have floated him over London to bring down the German bombers …"

Then there were John Prescott, having his wicked way with the English language and Michael Martin, as Speaker, addressing the house in allegedly impenetrable Scots. Tapsell and, after some early palpitations, Fabricant, enjoyed their punishment; Prescott and Martin, sprung from the working class and feeling that they were mocked for it, vehemently did not.

And though the great parliamentary shakeup of 2010 deprived Simon of several cherished targets, it brought new personalities to study, savour, and sometimes roast. The slightest scent of sycophancy always set Simon's nostrils twitching. "I have my eye on Baldwin," he wrote in the autumn of 2010 of the new Conservative member Harriett Baldwin. "With her blonde hair and her ability to ask the most grovelling questions, she is rapidly becoming the female Fabricant – or at least Fabricant Mark I, before he stopped crawling and became an elder statesman."

Yet, as his 50th birthday came and went, and then his 60th, it seemed to his friends, and they sensed to Simon himself, that his penetrating eye and acerbic pen had been too much confined to entertainment. There had been a succession of books, two early on with a specifically serious purpose: The Pact (1978), written with Alistair Michie, on the Callaghan-Steel arrangement after Labour lost its majority, and Michael Foot: A Portrait (1981), with David Leigh.

But the books that followed were mainly collections of parliamentary reports or subjects developed through the diary he wrote for the Guardian every Saturday from the time of his return from the Observer: collections of what he (wrongly) described as round robins, the records of their friends' often grossly tedious adventures that readers had found included with Christmas cards.

Then there were the often hair-raising experiences reported by gap-year students in letters home, in a book (Dear Mum, 2006), which he concocted with Emily Monk. A Long Lunch: My Stories and I'm Sticking to Them (2010) was described by his publishers as "a host of memories from 40-plus years in journalism" and by Simon himself as "my anti-memoirs". He had toyed with writing his memoirs but rejected the notion after reading Matthew Parris's. His life, he said, had not been eventful enough to fill a book.


Further collections of sketches followed – Send Up the Clowns (2011) and House of Fun (2012). He became a prize draw at literary festivals, guaranteed to pull crowds and send an audience home buzzing. Yet there might have been, should have been, something more left behind. There was always a sense that Simon existed under the shadow of his celebrated father, whose The Uses of Literacy had come to be seen as one of the most influential books of the century. "Hoggart?" people would say when Simon introduced himself: "Are you any relation to Richard?" Eventually it was jubilantly reported to Simon that someone in an airport, noting the surname on his father's luggage, had asked Richard Hoggart if he was any relation to Simon.

The restlessness, the sense of unease that one constantly saw in Simon, was one of the ingredients that made him so alert and responsive and therefore so good at his job, but it did not always make him easy company. He could seem inattentive, distracted, as though his mind was elsewhere. Sometimes he gave offence in ways he was unaware of. (At other times, he knew he was giving offence, and did so deliberately: he nursed a small but distinguished hate-list, prominent among them, to the last, Tony Benn.)

However, this apparent distractedness did not reflect a failure of feeling for friends. Indeed, in compiling this piece, I was told of various unobtrusive acts of kindness to people in trouble that Simon had never spoken about, to add to others of which I had already come to know about over the years, none of them ever mentioned by Simon himself.

Though devoted to his family, he was not endowed for a gentle harmonious life by the fireside. In December 2004, he found himself elevated from the stalls to the stage when the News of the World wrote about his involvement with the Spectator publisher Kimberley Quinn, then the focus of avid media attention because of her relationship with David Blunkett. That episode shook him badly. Even at an age that is sometimes assumed to bring on a mellow maturity his restlessness scarcely abated. Though he savoured an evening at home with a glass – several glasses – of wine and an Araucaria crossword (his reverence for John Graham, the Guardian's Araucaria, was matched by John's for Simon), he was constantly out in society, always likelier to say yes than no to a party, where you would find him expatiating, glass in hand, to attentive gatherings.

He often now seemed weighed down by concern for his aged and ailing parents. In the summer of 2010, however, it became increasingly clear that his apparent dejection had other causes. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. For a time he kept the news to himself, but once he had shared it with family and close friends, his mood seemed to lift. The parliamentary and conference sketches recaptured their sparkle. The Saturday column recounted many happy weekends with friends.

Initially the treatment seemed to be working better than he could have hoped, and against the odds he continued to write until early December. Though increasingly ill, and drained by the disease and the treatment, the old sharpness, the old vividness, were still there in abundance. "Another day, another U-turn. This is less a government than a dodgem car ride. Sparks fly from the roof. Attendants bellow unintelligibly from the sides. Nominally driving, ministers crash into each other. Sometimes they fling the wheel round and nothing happens …" he wrote of the latest ministerial U-turn in one of his last sketches, on 28 November.

Slippered inaction would never have suited him. The columns, the books (if not the ones he ought to have written), the TV and radio slots, the writings on wine and food and literature and bizarre beliefs, would have persisted for at least a further decade, and beyond.

He is survived by Alyson, Amy and Richard, and by his parents, Richard and Mary, his sister, Nicola, and brother, Paul. But far beyond his family, he leaves a host of disconsolate people, from his closest friends to those whose only acquaintance was through what he wrote and said, who know they have lost a rare, wondrously talented and wholly original man.

David McKie


Alan Rusbridger writes: Simon was the last of a breed of reporter hired straight from university to have the edges knocked off them in a Manchester newsroom overseen by a news editor who had seen it all before and who had a shrewd way of throwing the most talented recruits in at the deep end. Simon's initial spells in Northern Ireland were arduous and sometimes dangerous. He learned the hard way how to write tightly, vividly and quickly.

Of course he will be mainly remembered for more than 20 years of political sketchwriting. His news training stood him in perfect stead for the daily task of noting the key moments of any debate before retiring to write something apparently effortless, piercing and funny – all written in the beautiful spare prose that had been drummed into him in Manchester.

His humour was not savage, nor was it exactly gentle. He turned politics into theatre, complete with a cast of characters that he made his own. His refusal to take any MP or situation very seriously masked an encyclopedic knowledge of politics derived from his spell as the Observer's political editor. He had a long, and very functioning, memory. From his column you could often learn as much about what was truly important in politics as from the front-page splash. There was real learning, historical literacy and respect for parliament beneath the mischief and the jokes.

He kept up a prodigious work rate even when ill. At the height of his activity he was simultaneously writing about politics, wine and television as well as radio programmes, a weekly diary and a stream of books. The Guardian will be a different place without him.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jan/06/simon-hoggart-obituary

You know you're getting older when you can remember when Amiri Baraka was just LeRoi Jones :

Amiri Baraka, who has died aged 79, was an African-American writer who chose separation rather than integration. In 1962, James Baldwin, the most prominent black author of the period, had asked, "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?" In the middle of the decade, Baraka, at the time still known by his birth name of LeRoi Jones, put the rhetoric into action and walked away from New York literary society.

By then a successful poet and playwright, with Beat generation affinities, Jones left his white wife and their two daughters, changed his name (he gave the meaning of Amiri Baraka as "blessed prince"), and moved from the downtown bohemian hangout of Greenwich Village to Harlem. There, he helped found the Black Arts repertory theatre on 130th Street (no whites allowed), which staged his own plays as well as work by those who, like him, believed in "a blacker art". As Jones, he had had success as both a poet and a playwright; as Baraka, his work became increasingly didactic and the activist in him took over from the writer. His first theatrical publication under his new name was Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969).

Everett LeRoi Jones was born in Newark, New Jersey, into a milieu he described as "black bourgeoisie". He attended Howard, Rutgers and Columbia universities, without graduating, but his realisation that literature was the medium that might grant him a vocation came during his service in the US air force (1954-57). "Something dawned on me, like a big light bulb over my noggin," he wrote in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (1984), describing his sudden passion for Joyce and Dostoevsky. "All kinds of new connections yammered in my head." Less predictable was his love of Evelyn Waugh. "I read every novel of his I could find. I thought Sebastian Flyte was marvellous," he told the Guardian in 2007.

On leaving the air force, Baraka headed for Greenwich Village, and began working in the music shop Record Changer, which fuelled his enthusiasm for jazz and blues. He built friendships on the hip literary scene, centred on the monthly Evergreen Review and its publisher Grove Press, which brought out Jones's first full-length collection, The Dead Lecturer (1964). Jones founded his own little magazines, Yugen and Floating Bear, as well as Totem Press, which issued pamphlets of poetry and prose by Beat and Black Mountain writers, including Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson and Gary Snyder. Totem issued Jones's first pamphlet, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961).

In 1958, Jones married Hettie Cohen, whom he had met at Record Changer and who worked at the leftwing journal Partisan Review. Her parents temporarily cut her off as a result. The couple had two daughters, Lisa and Kellie (the former now a writer herself, the latter a professor at Columbia). Among the Joneses' circle of friends were the poets Allen Ginsberg, Edward Dorn and Frank O'Hara. In 1964, Jones's play Dutchman was staged at the Cherry Lane theatre in Greenwich Village. The action takes place in the carriage of a New York subway train, in which a white woman and a black man flirt with one another, leading to unexpected violence. It won an Obie award for the best off-Broadway play. Forty-four years later, it was successfully revived at the same theatre.

Throughout his career, Jones/Baraka was highly productive and quick to switch allegiance, as his change of name and the circumstances of his marriage suggest. Not only did he walk out on his Jewish wife, but he wrote some notorious antisemitic poems ("I got the extermination blues, jewboys / I got the Hitler syndrome figured"). He spoke and wrote disparagingly of "queens" at a time when his best friends included O'Hara and Ginsberg, both openly gay.

Later, in an article published in the Village Voice (Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite, 1980), he repudiated those former positions, and elsewhere repented certain misogynistic pronouncements. Those who knew him through his statements in the press, or who witnessed his noisy interventions at public gatherings, were apt to regard Baraka as a rabble-rouser. In private, though, he could be warm and funny. He believed his own best quality was "tremendous energy"; his worst, to act and speak without responsibility.

Baraka is possibly the only modern American poet to have landed in prison on account of a poem. Following his arrest on a charge of possessing illegal firearms during the 1967 riots in Newark (characterised by Baraka as "the rebellion"), he was beaten and held in solitary confinement. During his trial, the judge read out one of his inflammatory prose poems ("All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother ****er this is a stick up") and sentenced him to three years in prison, which was, however, overturned on appeal.

In 1979, he was arrested during a quarrel in a Manhattan street with his wife, charged with assault and resisting arrest, beaten again – in both cases by a black policeman, as he was quick to point out – and sentenced to serve 48 consecutive weekends in the Harlem Correctional Facility. It was there – "in a room with a desk, a bed and a shower, a closet full of paper and a little portable" – that he wrote The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (under the authorship of Amiri Baraka). "I call it my Harlem literary fellowship," he quipped later, adding: "It was gruelling, nevertheless, looking toward that each week." The Autobiography is regarded by many as his best book, giving a good showing to his wit and intelligence, in among the usual fist-shaking.

In later years, Baraka toured international festivals, often reciting poems to musical accompaniment. Having pointed out that while the best jazz musicians were black, the critics were usually white, he published several books on music, notably Blues People (1963) and Black Music (1968), in which he attempted to make sense of the quintessential African-American art form. "Blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives," he wrote in Blues People. In a review of the book, Ralph Ellison pointed out that the author tended to ignore the aesthetic aspects of the music. "He appears to be attracted to the blues for what he believes they tell us of the sociology of Negro American identity." Ellison felt that Jones (as he then still was) would like to set aside his pen and "pick up a club".

After his change of name in 1967 and his marriage in a Yoruba ceremony to Sylvia Robinson (who took the name Amina), Baraka returned to his home town of Newark, where he remained for the rest of his life. He and Amina – also a performer of her own work – made their home into a community centre, the Spirit House, where readings and musical recitals were given, and theatrical performances tried out.

It was while acting as poet laureate of New Jersey that Baraka wrote his poem about the attacks of 11 September 2001, Somebody Blew Up America, based on the suggestion that information about the forthcoming assault was known in government circles: "Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day / Why did Sharon stay away?" Accusations of antisemitism flew at once, and the governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, demanded that he resign as poet laureate. When Baraka refused, the governor abolished the post.

Baraka received awards including a Guggenheim fellowship (1965), and taught at various universities. He made peace with many of his old adversaries, including Baldwin, about whom he had written in his book of essays, Home (1966), that if he "were turned white, there would be no more noise" from him. In a late interview, he appeared to have stepped back some distance from his separatist position. "As Baldwin used to say, there's no black people and no white people. You can't be an American without being related." His anger, however, based on the balance of power, remained undimmed.

He is survived by Amina and their five children; by Lisa and Kellie; and another daughter, Dominique, from a liaison with the poet Diane Di Prima.

• Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), writer and activist, born 7 October 1934; died 9 January 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/10/amiri-baraka

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

We have hits. Ariel Sharon has died.

[regexcellent]

Working on it...I'm trying to get the OP done by the end of the day today (I'm going out of town next week).

[-Jrabbit]

Hang in there, man. We can be patient.