I Blog Dead People.

The Real King.

2010-08-16T01:25:00.007-05:00

Elvis Presley
January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977
You know who started calling Michael Jackson "The King of Pop"? Michael Jackson did, and he insisted people call him that. Because he was delusional and crazy, that's why. You know, what with Bubbles the chimp and the one glove and having no nose and coveting the Elephant Man's bones and also coveting the bones of little boys. Allegedly.

You know who started calling Elvis "The King of Rock and Roll"? Everyone. Because he was.

Look, I'm not even that big a fan of Elvis' music. I can take or leave it, and a most of the music from his movies is just terrible. But Elvis wasn't about music. He was about revolution. He didn't create rock and roll, but he ruled it. And there's no sense denying it. That's why both Michael Jackson and Nicholas Cage married his crazy daughter. They wanted some of that Elvis coolness to rub off on them, too. Worked for Nick, not so much for Michael.

You can't deny that he was cool. Probably the second coolest person who ever lived, right behind Jesus. And being cool is better than being a talented actor or a great singer. Being cool is the best thing you can be in this world. Remember, that's why people smoke.

Down south, even if we don't like Elvis, we appreciate him. We understand what Elvis was all about, and we try to live by that code. Simply put, Elvis' philosophy of life was:

1. Sing.
2. Take care of your momma.
3. Be humble.
4. Bang chicks.
5. Enjoy pharmaceuticals.
6. Eat.
7. Die.

It's a simple way of life that I can understand and relate to.

When Michael Jackson died last year, it was a big deal. Sure, if you've got the internet and 500 TV channels and TMZ to build it up. But when Elvis died, there wasn't an internet, and only three channels...and it was even bigger. You had to be there, but it was a global event.

Nobody could live like Elvis, and nobody could die like him. Especially not self-proclaimed false "kings". Put that in your hyperbaric sleep chamber and smoke it, glove boy.

Weezy!

2010-07-09T03:40:00.016-05:00

Isabel Sanford
August 29, 1917 – July 9, 2004
Last year, when President Obama made a Jeffersons reference during a speech, he screwed it up. He jokingly clutched his chest and said "I'm a-comin', Weezy!". He used Weezy Jefferson's name but was actually quoting a classic bit from Sanford and Son where Redd Foxx notifies his dead wife Elizabeth that he's on his way. It was so hilarious and effective that when Sanford star Foxx suffered a fatal heart attack on the set of his sitcom The Royal Family in 1991, his co-stars thought he was doing a bit.

President Obama must have got it confused because both Redd Foxx's and Weezy Jefferson's real last names were Sanford. I don't blame him for the mix-up. Obama was in Indonesia until the early 1970s, because that's where he was born. I'm just kidding, of course. He was born in Kenya. Allegedly.

But back to Isabel Sanford, better known to the world as Weezy. What kind of name is Weezy, anyway? That's no name, that's an adjective. Eloise Gwendolyn Sanford was born August 29, 1917 in New York City, making her twenty-one years older than Sherman Hemsley, the man who would someday play her husband on The Jeffersons. Twenty-one years! That made her literally old enough to be his mother. But was she his mother? Our sources say no.

The show, of course, was a spin-off of All in the Family, and she almost turned down the role when producer Norman Lear had a congratulatory bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken delivered to her dressing room. Lear assured her that it was a sincere gift, and apparently everyone got chicken. That's some good eatin', no matter what color you are.

I always felt bad for the cast of The Jeffersons, and not just because Roxie Roker, the actress who played neighbor Helen, was in reality the mother of rocker Lenny Kravitz. When the show was cancelled in 1985, the entire cast was so stereotyped that I saw an Entertainment Tonight piece that they were doing a Jeffersons stage play. But they couldn't get their sassy maid Florence (Marla Gibbs) because she had rocketed to (relative) fame as the star of NBC's temporarily popular sitcom 227. Hemsley became the star of NBC's Amen! a year later.

Now they're all dead, except for Hemsley and Gibbs. Helen and her white husband, one of the two actors who played the Jeffersons' son Lionel, and even the annoying British neighbor. Dead and gone. Isabel Sanford would be 92 years old if she hadn't died on this day in 2004.

I'll be honest with you. I know it's Weezy's day and all, but I can't stop thinking about that chicken. I am starving. I heard so much about the Double Down sammich at KFC and when I went there yesterday, it was already gone.

So, it's a tragedy all around. Sitcoms get cancelled, old ladies die, and fast-food chicken restaurants suddenly remove items just when you're craving them the most. I think there's an important lesson to be learned about our fragile existence and crap like that, but I have no idea what it is.

If You've Seen One Dick, You've Seen 'Em All.

2010-07-08T13:40:00.014-05:00

Dick Sargent
April 19, 1930 - July 08, 1994

The TV series Bewitched always confounded me.

Not because I didn't find it particularly funny, or because it was using a fake laugh track, or that it was recycling the same stories over and over again for years. It's none of these things. It's not even that the show was a complete rip-off of the movie Bell, Book and Candle. I could honestly care less about that. No, my beef is of a different nature. It's one that has been much discussed by obsessive TV viewers for many years.

You just can't completely switch Darrens and not say anything. It wouldn't be tolerated now. Today, Darren would either be killed off or they'd divorce. I would have even accepted it if they'd concocted some story involving magic wherein Darren's appearance completely changed...anything to explain the obvious physical differences of the two actors, but it's not even alluded to. Perhaps Samantha couldn't tell the difference between the two Dicks. I bet Uncle Arthur could.

I'm biased. I prefer Dick York's Darren to Dick Sargent's Darren. It was all about timing and comedic reactions. Sargent was probably a better actor, but York was funny. York had to quit the show in 1969 due to a chronic back injury and Sargent, who was originally offered the role in 1964 but couldn't take it because of his contract with Universal Studios, got the part. Sargent appeared in 84 episodes of Bewitched (as opposed to York's 156) before the show ended in 1972. York never worked again, except for an episode of Simon and Simon and a Love Boat in the early 1980s, but Sargent went on to an illustrious career of b-movie roles and TV crime drama guest-spots and sitcom walk-ons. His most memorable role (to me) was that of Grady Byrd, the Sheriff who filled in for Roscoe P. Coltrane on a few episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard.

Sargent announced he had prostate cancer in 1992 but shortly thereafter confirmed tabloid reports that he was gay and that his cancer was AIDS-related. He died on July 8, 1994. Before researching this I had also heard that Dick York was also gay but I can't find anything to verify this. He was married to the same woman for almost 40 years and there's no smoking gun, or penis, or whatever smokes when you're gay. Perhaps the person who told me this simply got their Dicks mixed up.

By the way, Dick Sargent wasn't his real name. He was born Richard Stanford Cox. Yes, that's right. His real name was Dick Cox.

Seriously.

Day of the Dead.

2010-07-07T02:29:00.017-05:00

Ted Williams
August 30, 1918 – July 5, 2002
Louis Armstrong
August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971
Joel Siegel
July 7, 1943 – June 29, 2007
It's been a few days since I blogged dead people, so it's time to catch up with the past few days of room-temperature celebrities.

Ted Williams was a respected and famous major league baseball player and war hero, but he's more remembered for the bizarre legal wranglings by his family after his death. Ted's contested (and possibly fraudulent) will called for his head to be put into "biostasis" (cryogenic suspension) until he could be revived.

But the head was apparently damaged (cracked) by employees at the cryogenics lab, letting Ted's oozy goodness and life essence escape. Williams' son John-Henry was believed to be the forger of the will until he unexpectedly died in 2004 and is currently frozen as well. Someday they'll all be revived, maybe even in a Ray Milland-Rosie Grier Thing With Two Heads type of deal. It would be pretty sweet. Hurry up, science!

Louis Armstrong was a balding, sweaty man who played the trumpet. He was adored by audiences due to his folksy, affable nature. Although he died nearly forty years ago, it's hard to avoid his peaceful anthem "What a Wonderful World". In fact it's impossible to avoid it. You know how great that song is, and how enraging it is to see it used ironically in substandard films like Good Morning, Vietnam and Fahrenheit 9/11?

It's not Louis' fault. Not at all. As usual, I blame the Liberals. Oh, did I say "Liberals"? I meant to say Progressives. Yeah. That's so totally different. My bad.

Joel Siegel was the movie reviewer with a difference: he never met a movie he didn't like. Put any awful movie up for him to review on Good Morning, America and he'd have nothing but glowing things to say about it. Supposedly he was respected by his peers, but I can't see how. You think Roger Ebert, as wrong as he is about so many things (and completely insane on his Twitter account, if you've seen that) would have put up with Siegel's crap? No way, man.

Ebert loves movies, but not all movies. Joel Siegel was just a good date. If somebody paid for his ticket and his popcorn, he seemed happy with whatever was on the screen. A year before his death, though, Siegel went nuts and walked out of a critic's screening of Clerks 2 and loudly announced it was the worst thing he'd ever seen. I think it was just the cancer talking. The real Joel Siegel would never hate a movie. Not even Twilight.

The most interesting thing I've learned about Siegel is that he was a joke writer for Senator Robert F. Kennedy and was at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of his assassination. My strong dislike for Joel dictates that I implicate him in RFK's death, but we all know that it was Sirhan Sirhan...a lone gunman, acting alone, without a hint of conspiracy. Nope. Not even a little bit.

Bored on the Fourth of July.

2010-07-04T13:16:00.017-05:00

"Ann Landers"
July 4, 1918 - June 22, 2002
So, let's get this straight. Ann Landers wasn't a real person. But was also at least two different people. And her daughter, who wasn't named Prudence, became Dear Prudence. And her twin sister was Dear Abby, only that wasn't at all her name. And when the twin sister retired, her daughter, whose name wasn't Abby either, then became Dear Abby.

Sounds like a scam to me.

"Ask Ann Landers" was created by advice columnist Ruth Crowley in 1943 and taken over by Esther "Eppie" Pauline Friedman Lederer, who won a contest in 1955 after Crowley died. Eppie's column debuted on October 16, 1955, but just a few months later her twin sister Pauline Phillips decided she could write a better advice column and adopted the name Abigail Van Buren and started "Dear Abby". The two sisters fought back and forth for a decade or so but eventually made up. But that's not really what this is about.

What I'm saying is, I'm about to head to work in an hour or so to flip stinkin' burgers, and people are still making money writing advice columns telling other people what kind of hats to wear. I'm a semi-talented fellow, so what the hell? Why is it that I have to get burger grease all over my shoes on the Fourth of July while ritzy advice columnists are sipping brandy while wearing monocles like the friggin' Monopoly guy in limos and laughing loudly to themselves about the amusing "little" people? Where is Barack Obama's "social justice" when we need it, I ask you?!?

There is nothing more useless than the advice column. They're such terrible, pathetic wastes of time that I'm surprised Paris Hilton doesn't have one. In an era when newspapers are but oversized leaflets and have eliminated movie, art, and television critics to save money, you can't avoid the advice column. Like Marmaduke and The Family Circus, they're a permanent part of the landscape. And for all I know, they could have simply been reprinting the same column over and over for 60 years. Who the hell would know? Does anyone really read them?

But I digress.

Point is, advice columns are useless, and the advice column industry has made the same family (and only members of that family) stinking rich for the last 55 years. It's a racket, and a conspiracy.

I should start my own advice column for real men who like big boobs, cold beer, and movies with 'splosions in them. I'd call it "Dear Roscoe", or some other manly name. But then the advice column mafia would come after me and burn my house down for daring to write a column without the Ann/Abby family blessing. All I wanted was to give advice to men about beer and Chesty Morgan movies, and I get my house burned down?!?

Where's the justice in that. I'm just sayin'.

Hot, Sexy, and Still Dead After All These Years.

2010-07-03T03:20:00.019-05:00

Brian Jones
February 28, 1942 – July 3, 1969
Jim Morrison
December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971
What are the odds that you can be an immortal musical genius and be dead at age 27? Apparently, pretty good. Just ask Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, Kurt Cobain, and these two guys. It's called the "27 Club" among conspiracy theorists who believe that each of its members sold their souls for rock immortality.

Frankly, I'm willing to believe it in the case of Jones and Morrison.

Brian Jones formed and named the Rolling Stones, but became estranged from the band because of his drug use. Despite being a good musician, he didn't write many songs and he was happier playing blues and jazz than rock and pop. He was finally fired from the band in 1969 and found floating in his swimming pool less than a month later. The details of his death are mysterious, but it was later speculated that Jones was accidentally killed in a fight with a building contractor and it was made to look like an accident. The contractor died in 1994 and apparently confessed on his death bed.

Jim Morrison was a member of a little-known rock and roll quartet called The Doors. They released a few albums, made some decent music, but mostly it was all about Morrison drinking and pulling his penis out on stage. If you've ever heard a live Doors album, they're terrible. What really matters is that they got it right one time in the studio. Oddly, Morrison also had a water-related death: he was found floating in a bath tub after a "heart attack" in Paris. And by "heart attack" I mean "heroin overdose". Allegedly. Morrison and the Doors have been the subject of many books and one well-edited but embarrassingly heavy-handed Oliver Stone film.

I'm not sure about the legend of a "27 Club". What's the point of becoming an immortal rock legend if you have to die in the process? And what kind of retard makes a deal with the Devil?

Don't people realize that Satan, by his very nature, is going to go back on his deals? It's what he does. Satan is going to screw you over. Would Robert Johnson have gone to the Crossroads and inked a contract with Beelzebub if he knew someone was going to give him a bottle of poisoned whiskey? Would Jimi Hendrix have signed on the dotted line with the Dark One if he knew he'd soon be choking on his own vomit? Would Janis Joplin have agreed to the deed with Old Scratch if she knew that before long she'd curled up in a stinky ball of putrid hippie death? Did Kurt Cobain realize he had consented to staring down the barrel of Mephisto's double-barreled shotgun of fame? And didn't Kurt realize that his Hell experience will become infinitely worse when he's eventually reunited with his wife Courtney Love?

It all just reminds me of that CBS TV show from 1977 or so, A Year at the Top. Two musicians (David Letterman's band leader Paul Shaffer and BJ and the Bear star Greg Evigan) sign a contract with a sleazy rock promoter who guarantees them a year of success, but it involves them selling their souls and being sucked into Hell at the end of that time. The show didn't last a whole year, though, so the story didn't have a satisfying conclusion. I guess starring in BJ and the Bear, My Two Dads, and TekWar is its own kind of Hell, though.

Dave Thomas and the Robot Love Cult

2010-07-02T13:51:00.014-05:00

Dave Thomas
July 2, 1932 - January 8, 2002

When I went to work (briefly) for Wendy's in the year 2000, my fellow employees spoke in hushed and reverent tones about Dave Thomas, who was born on this day in 1932. My manager told me that few people had actually met Dave, and she'd worked for the company for over ten years and had never once been in his presence. It apparently was an honor that had to be earned, like an audience with the Pope. A select few were worthy, but most were not.

Dave was a mysterious and enigmatic figure despite his "regular guy" persona. He never knew his mother, who put him up for adoption. He served in the Army during the Korean War, eventually he ran some Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in Ohio, and he started Wendy's in 1969. Typical stuff you can find on Wikipedia, which is pretty much where I got it.

Anyone who works at Wendy's will tell you that (like most fast food joints) the object is to provide good food to customers quickly and make a profit. And yet, I've always felt there was always something that was slightly off about the place. The first thing you notice is the square hamburger patties. At one point my manager told me, "We make the patties square because at Wendy's we don't cut corners."

Even when I was working for them, I was amazed at how well the place was run. Everything was cooked to order and it could take no more than sixty seconds for customers to get their food. There was a person whose job it was to toast buns, there was a constant flow of fresh patties being put on the grill in a clockwise fashion, and there was absolutely no waste. The patties that were not used were put in a bin and chopped up, for use in Wendy's famous chili.

Most amazing to me were the little folded pamplets that had had instructions, in English and Spanish, on how to do everything in the restaurant. They detailed every food item and almost any situation that could occur and how to prevent or remedy it. I've worked in a lot of fast food places and have never seen such fanatical precision.

The manager training process was like going to college. Two weeks of classes, including homework, in a honest-to-goodness full-size fake training restaurant, then weeks and weeks of extensive training in random locations. It was bizarre.

The idea, of course, was to inspire loyalty and to screen out the lazy or unsavory element. But it always seemed to me that maybe there was something deeper. Like it was an initiation. Like if you went through all the hoops and said the right things and did good, then maybe someday you'd meet Dave.

And then it struck me. There was no Dave.

It was all a game. The "Dave Thomas" that was in all the TV ads couldn't be real. He was just an actor, or a robot double, to be the public face of Wendy's while the real Dave was on an island fortress smoking cigars and being serviced by an army of sex slaves. It was like that phony UFO religion made up by that insane sci-fi writer that all the Hollywood stars got suckered into.

Dave Thomas died of liver cancer in 2002, if you can believe that they tell you. Maybe so, maybe not. Or perhaps he's being held in suspended animation, being attended to by an army of robot clones or mad scientists who are even now working to bring him back.

Was there ever a real Dave Thomas? Sure there was. Just like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, Dave Thomas lives in our hearts. As long as there is a dollar menu, or a pick-up window, Dave Thomas will always be watching us.

Baby Chicks For Sale.

2010-07-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

Wolfman Jack
January 21, 1938 - July 01, 1995

Wolfman Jack (Robert Weston Smith), who died on this day in 1995 at the age of 57, was arguably the greatest radio DJ who ever lived.

He was such a legend that most people had never even heard his radio show but still knew who he was. That's largely due to his role in the 1973 George Lucas film American Graffiti. Lucas gave the Wolfman a portion of a point of profits in the film for his participation, and the movie was an enormous hit. It also contributed to the 1950s-mania that spawned Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. Ironically, the Wolfman is probably better known to my generation as the narrator of the early-1980s ABC cartoon series Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. Perhaps it's just my desperate intent to blame George Lucas for Happy Days, or Mork and Mindy, or anything else I can pin on him. I'm not a huge Lucas fan.

Wolfman Jack had his greatest success working for XERF, a radio station on the Mexico/California border, in the early 1960s. It was unregulated by the FCC and therefore would blast 250,000 watts to North America, where it could be heard as far as New York. There he acted as DJ and pitchman, selling mail-order items such as diet pills, sex pills, rose bushes, and live baby chicks. Or at least they were alive when sent out. I would assume there's a reason you can't mail baby chicks any more.

If you want a true testament to the man, consider the number of songs he inspired. What DJ has songs written about him? "Clap for the Wolfman" by the Guess Who, "Wolfman Jack" by Todd Rundgren, and he was featured on the Stampeders' cover of "Hit the Road, Jack", Sugarloaf's "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You", and Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids' "Did You Boogie (With Your Baby at the Movie Show)?" Great songs, all. No, seriously...all great.

On June 30, 1995, he did the last live broadcast of his radio show. He mentioned that he wanted to get back to his wife and give her a hug. He got home on July 1, parked his car, walked into his house, and died of a massive heart attack.

More than a decade after his death, XM Radio took a lot of his old bits and airchecks and began airing them on their '60s station. They started with a Halloween special with a coffin openining and the Wolfman announcing "I'm back!" Tasteless? Not if you know what Wolfman Jack was all about.

But the best thing I ever heard about Wolfman Jack was this:

Later in his career he'd travel around and do one-time spots at radio stations. He'd carry a briefcase and in it he would have all of the CDs he wanted to play, all of his liners, all of his sound effects, everything. He'd do anything he wanted for a few hours, then he'd pack it up and move on to the next gig, like he'd never even been there. Fantastic.

Thanks for the Watery Beer.

2010-06-30T02:30:00.019-05:00

Pat McCormick
June 30, 1927 - July 29, 2005

Before the microbrew revolution, people did what they had to do to get good beer, or what they thought was good beer. Sometimes they'd have no choice but to employ a country trucker, his moustachioed, Firebird-driving accomplice, and a future Oscar winner to help bring that shipment of Coors to Georgia. Or was it Alabama? Same thing, really...shoeless, toothless people on porches playing banjos. That kind of thing.

One thing's for certain: Big Enos and Little Enos loved beer. But not good beer. Things were different, way back when.

Pat McCormick, who played Big Enos, was born on this day in 1927. He was best known by most for his portrayal of Big Enos in Smokey and the Bandit and its two inferior sequels. But to people like me he'll always be the Professor reading from The Big Book of Vampires at the beginning of 1989's Beverly Hills Vamp. Because people like me are weirdos, that's why.

But he spent most of his career as a top gag writer, working on The Tonight Show for twelve years. He once streaked completely naked across the stage behind Johnny during a 1974 monologue. That's comedy. McCormick also had an identical twin brother who became a police sergeant in Chicago.

He also apparently became involved with busty show regular Carol Wayne. They both served as judges in the 1984 straight-to-video Best Chest in the West, where he jokingly stated "This lady will never drown". On January 13, 1985, she drowned while on vacation in Mexico. Oops. He served as host for Best Chest in the West 2 when Dick Shawn, the host of the first one, dropped dead of a massive heart attack on stage in 1986. These are important things to know, and only I seem to know them.

Sadly, McCormick had a stroke in 1998 and was forced to retire. He spent the last seven years of his life at a Hollywood retirement home and could barely speak. Guys like Pat McCormick fall through the cracks in Hollywood and never get the recognition they deserve. But from me, they get all the love.

This is your day, Big Enos...let's have a beer. No, not that bat's piss Coors you like so much...let's have a Summit Pale Ale.

The Other White Meat.

2010-06-29T04:54:00.037-05:00

Jayne Mansfield
April 19, 1933 - June 29, 1967

Supposedly Jayne Mansfield, like her contemporary Marilyn Monroe, was a very smart, deeply introspective, serious actress. She spoke five languages and had a genius IQ. She was a classically trained violinist and pianist, and she turned down the iconic role of Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island because she didn't like being stereotyped as shallow or dumb. By all accounts she was a good mother, a dynamic entertainer, and a hard worker.

Also, did you get a look at those jugs!?!

Look, I'm just saying.

You know, when I started Dead Person of the Day back in 2008, I began it on the first anniversary of the death of one of America's hottest blonde bombshells, Anna Nicole Smith. I compared her death to Marilyn Monroe's at the time, but in truth Anna has more in common with Jayne Mansfield. While all had seen their careers come and go, Monroe's life never became the traveling three-ring circus/freak show that the others slipped into. She simply overdosed and became legend. There was even a beautiful song, Candle in the Wind, written for her. Any songs written for Anna Nicole Smith? None that I can recall (Siouxie and the Banshees apparently wrote Kiss Them For Me about Mansfield's death, though). Smith had the bizarre reality show and court battles, Mansfield had indecency arrests and the $25,000-a-week Vegas show. Their lives became public spectacle, they were held up for ridicule, and then they died.

Even the details of their deaths are freakish. Did Anna only have one nipple, owing to a plastic surgery snafu? Was that Jayne's severed head on the road in that photo, next to her dead dog?* Marilyn's overdose death seems pretty tame when you compare it to hitting a mosquito-spraying truck in a convertible in the middle of the night on a Louisiana highway with three of your kids in the back seat (the kids lived, by the way...one of them is Mariska Hargitay of Law and Order).

Call me shallow and single-minded, but if I had a time machine I'd make four stops. Only Four. One to visit Marilyn Monroe, one to solve the JFK assassination, a stop at Anna Nicole Smith's place, and then on to visit Jayne Mansfield (I guess there would technically be a fifth stop, to return to the present). I'd try to get them when they were at their hottest, and not pregnant or dead yet. I'd say the right things and hit on them, maybe get them drunk (apparently they all enjoyed a pill or a drink or two, so it would be fairly easy). When I got back to the present I'd destroy the machine. Or maybe go visit Russ Meyer starlet Kitten Natividad, circa 1970. Something like that. Maybe I'd just travel through time, hitting on big-boobed starlets and solving mysteries, kind of like an R-rated version of Quantum Leap.

Yep. Time travel, boobs and conspiracies, that's what makes life worth it.

*Answer: no. Apparently it was a wig that Jayne was wearing. The truck that the '66 Buick Electra hit also killed her driver and her boyfriend/manager. She may have been scalped, but she wasn't completely beheaded. The decapitation speculation came from Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon, but it doesn't appear to be true at all. Facts take all the fun out of life.

Thank You, Tiny Old Woman, For Being a Friend.

2009-07-22T01:26:00.007-05:00

Estelle Getty
July 25, 1923 - July 22, 2008
I wasn't really a fan of The Golden Girls.

No, to be completely honest, to say that I wasn't a fan of The Golden Girls is putting it mildly. I hated it. It was a complete waste of time and had no reason to exist, save to give people stuck at home on Saturday night something to watch while their lives passed them by.

But I did pay to see Estelle Getty and Sylvester Stallone in Stop...Or My Mom Will Shoot! in a theater, so who am I kidding?

When Estelle Getty died a year ago today, people felt bad. They were completely shocked...because she was, in reality, only slightly younger than Bea Arthur, the actress who played her daughter on the show. Her Golden Girls co-stars Betty White and Rue McLanahan had very nice things to say about her.

But when Bea Arthur died a few months back, people just made jokes that she was a transexual and slammed her. Nobody had much good to say about her.

I think there's an important lesson to be learned from this. But I don't know what it is.

I guess...be nice to people, and they'll be nice to you. Be a cranky old hag and no one will want to work with you and people will make jokes on radio shows after your death that you had a penis.

Death's Day Off.

2009-07-21T04:00:00.000-05:00

No one died today. Also no one who later died was born today. No one at all. This is a guarantee, and you don't even have to check it out. They must have done something to the water.

Check back tomorrow for guaranteed death.

Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting

2009-07-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

Bruce Lee
Nov. 27, 1940 - July 20, 1973
Bruce Lee died on this day in 1973. He was killed by ninja assassins, the very same ninja assassins who later shot his son Brandon on the set of the movie The Crow and more recently caught up with his friend David Carradine. They dressed David up in fishnets and a wig and tied a rope around his junk to humiliate him. It's the Bruce Lee Curse, my friends. When you run with ninja assassins, you can always count on them getting you. You cannot escape.

Also, on this date in 1969, some guys stood around on a movie set at area 51 and Walter Cronkite reported that we'd walked on the moon. But he knew too much and he was killed last Friday by ninja assassins.

Oh, they will get you. You may be 92 years old and retired, but they will come for you. Beware of ninja assassins.

The Adventures of Crazy Mama Oswald

2009-07-19T04:00:00.004-05:00

Marguerite Oswald
July 19, 1907 - Jan. 17, 1981

"Lee Harvey Oswald, my son, even after his death,
has done more for his country than
any other living human being."
As with all things, I am judging Lee Harvey's mother, Marguerite Oswald, to be crazy simply from something I saw in a movie. In this case it was a throwaway line in Oliver Stone's well-made but historically innacurate 1991 epic JFK. Stone really doesn't expand on it other than to say she was bonkers. So what was so crazy about her, anyways?

"This young man - whether he's my son or a stranger -
repeatedly declares, I didn't do it, I didn't do it. And
he's shot down. That's not the American way of life.
A man is innocent until he's proved guilty."
I read a good bit of Mama Oswald's testimony to the Warren Commission and found it unremarkable. She seems like a cranky old lady trying to get some representation for her son, but it doesn't reveal her to be any crazier than the average old lady.

Lee's father had died two months before he was born and his mother mostly raised him and his two brothers by herself. While living in New York, Young Lee was diagnosed with psychotic tendencies in 1953 and was recommended for psyhciatric help, but his mother opted to suddenly move to New Orleans instead. What could possibly go wrong?

Because his mother moved around so much, he had lived in 22 different homes by age 18. Depending on who you ask, there was or wasn't a series of "uncles" coming around, some with mafia connections. Lee therefore either did or didn't have connections to the New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello, who either did or didn't employ Jack Ruby, the man who either did or didn't shoot Oswald many years later. Allegedly.

(JFK's central character, Jim Garrison, was a gambler and apparently owed money to Marcello. As a result, he was quick to brush off any mob connection to the JFK assassination. This fact is one of many missing from Stone's film.)

"Lee was such a fine, high-class boy. If my son
killed the President he would have said so.
That's the way he was brought up."
In 1964, Marguerite released a record album on Folkways records in which she read her son's letters he'd written while living in Russia. Nothing more American than making a fast buck off your recently-dead son. Papa Joe Jackson would be so proud. It must be terrible...I'd love to hear it.

I was fascinated to find a photographic analysis of photos of Marguerite Oswald from the 1950s. Turns out there were several different Marguerite Oswalds, including fakes and doubles, and the thing was a cover-up before it was even a cover-up. God as my witness, there are some people who believe that they (whoever they are) were planning the JFK assassination while Oswald was still in grade school.

There's nothing about this case that doesn't fit. The most unbelievable nuggets of information somehow all seem to make sense in the enormous scope of it all. Maybe that's why Marguerite Oswald doesn't really seem all that crazy to me.

"Mr. Johnson should remember that I am not just anyone
and that he is only President of the United States
by the grace of my son's action."

**For the record, I am on the fence about the JFK assassination. I was once a believer in a huge conspiracy, but time has shown me that freaky things can and do happen every day. The career of Carrot Top is proof enough of this. There is simply too much money in perpetuating wild theories which can never be proven, and there's a good chance that a lot of the disinformation has come from the government itself in an effort to distract us all from more current shenanigans.**

Hot Chicks of Ancient Hollywood, Part 1

2009-07-18T03:00:00.000-05:00

Lupe Velez
July 18, 1908 - Dec. 13, 1944
What can I say about Lupe Velez? She was hot, and now she's dead. Seriously. There's not much more to it than that.

She starred in several films, most notably the Mexican Spitfire series, but I found her to be at her hottest in a 1932 film called Kongo. She was married to Tarzan star Johnny Weismuller for five years and apparently suffered from bipolar disorder.

As for her death, Wikipedia has this to say:

"In the mid-1940s, she had a relationship with the young actor Harald Maresch, and became pregnant with his child. Vélez, following her Catholic upbringing, refused to have an abortion. Unable to face the shame of giving birth to an illegitimate child, she decided to take her own life. Her suicide note read, "To Harald: May God forgive you and forgive me, too; but I prefer to take my life away and our baby's, before I bring him with shame, or killing him. Lupe." She retired to bed after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. According to newspaper accounts, her body was found by her secretary and companion of ten years, Beulah Kinder.

Andy Warhol's underground film, Lupe (1965), starring Edie Sedgwick as Lupe, is loosely based on this fateful night, suggesting that she was found with her head in the toilet due to nausea caused by the overdose. Another report says she tripped and fell head-first into the toilet, knocking herself unconscious and drowning. However, Kinder reports finding Vélez peacefully asleep in her bed."

Lupe Velez has an unusual place amongst the other women on my "Time Machine List". Assuming a time machine can be perfected in my lifetime, I would steal it and use it to travel back to fornicate with the women on the list. Others on this list include Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smith, and porn actress Trinity Loren. Lupe Velez is the only actress on the list who was less than a c-cup. Although I'm normally a meat and potatoes man, I sometimes like to spice things up.

I, The Badass

2009-07-17T03:00:00.000-05:00

Mickey Spillane
Mar. 9, 1918 - Jul. 17, 2006
Yet another badass. I mean, look at that hat. That is one serious hat, and you don't wear something like that unless you mean business. Mickey Spillane was a serious tough guy who meant what he said. He didn't just write Mike Hammer...he was Mike Hammer.

He started his career by writing comic books. He wrote for Funnies, Inc., which was an outfit that packaged comics for different publishers. He ultimately wrote for every major superhero of the 1940s...Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and Captain America. Kick ass. Remember that this was a time when Batman and Captain America would just as soon shoot you as bring you in. It was a wonderful time.

The day after the Asians attacked Pearl Harbor, Mickey Spillane joined the U.S. Army. He and his wife wanted to buy a house so he wrote the first Mike Hammer novel, I, The Jury, in 19 days. It sold over six million copies.

But when I said that Mickey Spillane was Mike Hammer, he literally was Mike Hammer, playing his own character in the 1963 film The Girl Hunters. He later appeared on an episode of Columbo but is more remembered these days for some Miller Lite commercials he made in the 1980s. This importance of this cannot be overstated. Miller Lite is rat's piss in a can. It's awful and undrinkable. But Mickey Spillane made it manly to drink, and the ad campaign was a huge success.

I'd love to write like Mickey Spillane, and a lot of people have imitated his no-nonsense, two-fisted hardboiled style. But there will never truly be another writer like him...probably because the politically correct crowd would shut him up these days. You can't call women dames or skirts any more because no one has any sense of humor these days. It makes me sad for our eroding culture, where there are no more real men.

It almost makes me want to have a Miller Lite. Almost.

Local Boy Makes Big Splash

2009-07-16T03:00:00.000-05:00

John F. Kennedy, Jr.
Nov. 25, 1960 - July 16, 1999
Sure, you're rich. You've never had to work a day in your life. Your dad was President of the United States. You got to spend the family money starting George, a well-meaning but unread political magazine. You got to bang Madonna and Daryl Hannah. It's been a pretty sweet life by most people's standards...but are you happy?

Well, the answer is, of course, no.

No one is happy...because even millionaires want more than they have. That's why you are seriously contemplating running for the Senate. Who could beat you? No one living in the state of New York, for sure. Unless something crazy happens, like some scheming political carpetbagger suddenly moving to New York to jump on it, the job is yours.

It's a good thing you're not running against someone like that...no one gets in their way. They'd Kaiser Soze your ass, removing the memory of anyone that even spoke to you. People who cross them have a way of winding up in the park with all their blood drained out. Allegedly.

But that's next year. Right now you're headed for your cousin's wedding. And it's bad enough that you've got your wife harping on you, but then you've got her sister along for the ride. It's almost enough to make a guy dive his plane into the Atlantic Ocean, just to end it all. Backseat drivers...am I right, fellas?

You relax, assured in the knowledge that your future is secure. You are, after all, a Kennedy. It's a carefree life when you're America's invincible Golden Boy. Wealth, entitlement, and adventure await. You'll be surrounded by loving children and grandchildren long into old age.

Make sure to work that last bit into the toast at the wedding, when you get there...

Diabetes, Bad.

2009-07-15T05:00:00.004-05:00

Dana Hill
May 6, 1964 - July 15, 1996
(Pardon me if the entries this week are a bit disjointed, brief, or non-existent. Turns out I'm moving and losing internet access completely for a bit, so I'm doing about a week's worth of entries in advance...)

Not much to say about Dana Hill. She was a child star who is best remembered for portraying Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon's European Vacation and numerous after-school specials. She later found work doing voices for cartoons such as Duckman, Rugrats, Goof Troop, Gummi Bears, and Darkwing Duck.

She also unfortunately suffered from diabetes, which stunted her growth and caused major complications. She suffered a stroke and died at age 32 on July 15, 1996, leaving a legacy of goofy cartoon voices.

And now a confession. I always had the hots for her. Of course it never went very far, with her being dead and all...but I suppose these things happen. Sigh.

The Only Good Hippie...

2009-07-14T05:00:00.001-05:00

Jerry Rubin
Jul. 14, 1938 - Nov. 28, 1994
“His words and courage inspired us" - Jerry Rubin, writing about Charles Manson in his book, We Are Everywhere.

First and foremost, a hippie is a hippie. Take the love beads off, give him a bath, and you've got a clean hippie, but a hippie nonetheless. And Jerry Rubin was always a hippie.

I hate hippies. Does that make me a bad person? Almost every so-called "revolution" is quickly repackaged and sold back by The Man to the very people attempting to carry it out. All such movements are a crock of crap, marketed to suckers.

I hate emos and goths for the same reason. Feel free to express your individuality and rage by dressing alike and listening to the same music. Idiots.

But unlike the emo kids and goths of today, who are simply just weepy and annoying, hippies like Jerry Rubin had an extremist agenda...namely, the radical overthrow of the government of the United States. As members of the "Chicago Eight", Rubin and his friend Abbie Hoffman (both also founders of the Yippies, the Youth International Party) helped incite the violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

And even when the Vietnam War was over and there was little left to protest, guys like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman still hung around and made trouble, eventually turning on each other in a series of debates.

Rubin was also an early investor in Apple Computer. But I must point out, so was Forrest Gump.

In a final audacious act of nonconformity, Jerry Rubin jaywalked on a busy street and was hit by a car on November 14, 1994. He lingered and died from his injuries fourteen days later.

Typical. Staying in bed for two weeks. Lazy hippie.

Did I mention I don't like hippies?

Never Got a Dinner!

2009-07-13T05:00:00.002-05:00

Red Buttons
Feb. 5, 1919 - July 13, 2006
What? His real name wasn't Red Buttons?!? You're blowin' my mind, man.

Red Buttons (born Aaron Chwatt) was a lot like yesterday's subject, Milton Berle. Except Red was funny and had talent. Did a ton of film and TV work, was a gifted songwriter, and yet always made time to do those Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts. I was impressed that on every one, he used the same comedy routine.

(From memory) "I want to thank our guest of honor for being here tonight, and it's good to celebrate this person. But there are others from history, great people, who never got a dinner..."

And he'd do five minutes of jokes about people who never got a dinner. It always killed. Unlike that Milton Berle, who just stunk the place up with his stolen 1948 jokes, in his dress.

I always liked Red Buttons. A great comedian with good timing and also a dependable actor. He was probably the only person in The Poseidon Adventure who I have any respect for at all, even though I despise that movie. He also won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe in 1958 for Sayonara, and Milton Berle didn't.

In short, Red Buttons was talented and funny. While his IMDB biography says he still plays Vegas on occasion, I highly doubt this. I'm not sure he ever got a dinner, but he deserved one. Milton Berle almost certainly did get one, and yet he shouldn't have.

He sucked...just like he sucked yesterday.

Men in Dresses? Hilarious.

2009-07-12T05:00:00.002-05:00

Milton Berle
July 12, 1908 - Mar. 27, 2002
Seriously. There was a time when fame meant something. You could become a huge superstar just by appearing on TV. It might help to have talent but you didn't really need it.

That's how Milton Berle did it, anyway.

Steal some jokes, wear a dress, become a superstar. It all seemed so simple back then. Sure, it helped to have a legendarily large penis...but did you ever check out a mirror, buddy? John Holmes had a huge unit, too. Never stopped him from being ugly...not even for a minute.

I hated Milton Berle. There never was a time when I thought he was funny. Men in dresses stopped being funny in the 1940s. My hatred probably started with Ratt's "Round and Round" music video, where he put the dress on one more time for Bing Crosby's grandson's band.

He was "Mr. Television". But there were like three guys on TV, tops. He slept with Marilyn Monroe. Well, so did Sinatra. So did Einstein. So would I have been able to if I was born yet. My bad. He had an enormous penis. Well, probably. But look who it was attached to. He was the ugliest person this side of Neil Young.

He just wasn't funny. He was just on TV, back when it mattered. He couldn't make it today, not even in porn.

He sucked.

People should face up to that.

On Second Thought, Smoke.

2009-07-11T05:00:00.002-05:00

Yul Brynner
July 11, 1920 - Oct. 10, 1985
When Yul Brynner found out he had cancer, he was upset. And he should have been. But he shouldn't have been surprised, he'd been a smoker all his life.

So he does an interview, and I think it was a Barbara Walters interview, during which he pleads with people to stop smoking. He dies not long after, and the segment where he begs people not to smoke plays as a public service announcement from the Cancer Society, or something.

Years later, on an episode of my podcast, I altered the audio so he's begging people to smoke. I did it because it's funny, and because smoking is cool.

Say what you will about smoking. It causes cancer? It surely does. Emphysema? Absolutely. Heart disease and early death? Yep.

But it's freakin' cool. No doubt about it.

Now, I don't smoke. It's not that I necessarily care about my health, it's that I can't pull it off. I tried it, but I am not cool. Never was.

Smokers, who used to constitute a large sector of the American public, have been relegated to second-class citizens at best. You can't smoke in a building, any building, not even a bar. In most places you can't even smoke outside. There will come a time in the future when you can't even smoke in your own home. It's sad.

I say, smoke if you want to smoke. I don't believe all that crap about second-hand smoke, and I actually kind of like the smell. The last pack of cigarettes I bought cost me about $1.75. If I wanted to smoke now, the same pack would cost me around six dollars. If you're paying that much, you should be able to smoke in church. In a time of recession, you are supporting the economy. You are one tax-paying sumbitch.

As I say, I don't smoke...so I'll no doubt die from some other form of cancer. I do respect the level of commitment it takes to be a full-time smoker, but I couldn't afford it. Anybody who can spend $30-$50 a week on smokes, knowing they'll die from them, that's devotion.

No doubt about it, Yul Brynner was cool. Shaved bald head, thick accent, weird sex appeal. And a cigarette. It was a package deal. He lived large in a time when everyone smoked. It was not only acceptable, it was what everyone did. He was a movie star...traveled the world, made a lot of money, banged a lot of chicks. He was a badass.

Complaining about dying to Barbara Walters at the age of 68 after having such a great life just makes you look like a pussy.

Stupid Mysteries of the Internet

2009-07-10T00:00:00.001-05:00

The Radio Rascals
Feb. 10, 1907 - July 10, 1964
As you're probably aware, I get a lot of my info on celebrity deaths from Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database. So, it can be and often is wrong. On any given day, there is a column of celebrity births on that day, and another of celebrity deaths. Keeping to the spirit of Dead Person of the Day, I can pick either one...just as long as the dead person was either born or died that day. But sometimes I stumble upon an entry that makes absolutely no sense, and I'm forced to investigate.

"The Radio Rascals" was born in Marshfield, Missouri on Feb. 10, 1907 and died in Dallas Texas, on July 10, 1964. It is listed under "actor" and has three screen credits (from the '30s and '40s) under "singer". And nothing else. No real names, no cause of death, no explanation of who or what the Radio Rascals was. A search of Wikipedia and the internet turned up nothing related to this.

If it was a person, a real name should have been given. If it was a group, it makes no sense that all the members were born on the same day in the same place and died the exact same way. It couldn't have been a radio show, since commercial radio didn't exist in 1907 and the show wouldn't have run for 57 years without some mention on the internet. It's entirely possible that the entry was slipped in as a joke, but why the time frame? 1907-1964? What could this mean?

It's weird. I don't even care...it just frustrates me that there is something that I cannot know about.

Epic fail, information superhighway.

Check out the IMDB entry here.

Old Dead Guys of the Silver Screen, Part 1

2009-07-09T06:00:00.001-05:00

Charles Lane
Jan. 26, 1905 - July 9, 2007
There is no way I'm going to see 102. No way in hell. Nor do I really want to, to tell you the truth. The sheer number of funerals I'd have to attend would have me wishing that mine would be next. I'd also be in doubt of my own goodness, since Billy Joel has clearly established that dying young is the exclusive province of the good.

Charles Lane, a character actor who died on this day in 2007, did make it that far...making a fool of Billy since nobody has anything bad to say about him. His IMDB profile lists three hundred and fifty acting credits. He first began acting in 1929 and in 1933 was a founding member of the Screen Actor's Guild.

He had a recurring role on Petticoat Junction as Mr. Bedloe, who was always scheming to get the railroad to stop running through Hooterville. My speculation, of course, is the Bedloe didn't even work for the railroad company...he just liked coming around because of those hot Bradley daughters, who tended to bathe in public. Naked.

He even appeared in two of my favorite films, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and It's a Wonderful Life. In fact, his character in the latter film (a rent-collector for Mr. Potter) inspired the humorless blue-haired lawyer seen in several episodes of The Simpsons.

The brilliance of actors like Charles Lane is the fact that they don't stand out. You don't recognize them as movie stars so they don't take you out of the movie. They do their jobs and they move the plot along. The acting world needs background players and character actors just as much as they need Christian Bale. In fact, no one needs Christian Bale. Bad example. Strike that from the record.

Lane was born in San Francisco in 1905 and was, prior to his death, one of the last remaining survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He was quite young, though, so he probably didn't have much to say about it. But now he has nothing at all to say about it, so there you go.

He was married to the same woman for 70 years until she died in 2002. This flies in the face of logic, as it's typically wives who outlive their husbands (KISS bassist Gene Simmons has stated that men die first because they want to).

But then again, maybe she was sick. It happens.

Mr. Lanagan's Big Break

2009-07-08T00:00:00.004-05:00

Glenn Langan
July 8, 1917 - Jan. 19, 1991

Now, let's get one thing straight. This piece has nothing to do with Glenn Langan. He's incidental to it, really, and I know nothing about the man. Other than his birth and death dates and film credits (and having seen one of his movies many, many times), I may or may not have any idea what I'm talking about.

You can work your entire life, slowly and methodically mastering your craft, and never get the attention you seek. It happens to a lot of people. Glenn Langan (or Langen, depending on your source) was one such man. From his early 20s on, he slowly and steadily worked in a series of films, with each acting role being meatier than the preceding one, and yet true stardom eluded him. A good actor, reliable and employable, sure...but was he known? Answer: no.

But ultimately it paid off. All those auditions, all that time pounding the pavement, it lead up to the role of a lifetime.

That's right, 1957's The Amazing Colossal Man.

It's the tale of Major Glenn Manning, exposed to radiation in a government experiment, who grows to an amazing colossal size in the middle of the Nevada desert. After experiencing self-pity and angst over his predicament, he does what any man would do...he goes to Las Vegas and steps on things.

It was the role of a lifetime, and these days it's the role that Glenn Langan is best remembered for. It's one of director Bert I. Gordon's more successful giant monster movies, and he made a metric buttload of those (it also seems to have indirectly inspired Stan Lee and Jack Kirby when they were creating The Incredible Hulk for Marvel Comics in 1962...but that's another story). It was a decent flick in the classic monster tradition.

But that's where the tragedy comes in. The rules of monster movies in those days were different. The man (or woman) who becomes the monster had to be a well-intentioned, average person. Through a cruel plot device of fate, he is cursed to spend the rest of his life (usually about 68 minutes, give or take) causing mayhem and being hounded like an animal. The monster becomes increasingly insane and violent over the remainder of the film and kills innocent people. In the end, the monster is destroyed for the good of mankind. No exceptions.

Unless the movie makes money, that is...in which case the monster comes back for War of the Colossal Beast in 1958. Which it did, and it did.

But Glenn Langan wasn't in that one. His character was made facially disfigured so you couldn't tell it was some other actor playing the part. Odds are he wanted more money, or wanted to be taken more seriously, so he went back to doing television. Glenn Langan's last film was a very small uncredited part in The Andromeda Strain in 1971 and he died of cancer in 1991.

But again, this rambling and disjointed piece is not really about Glenn Langan, who was born 92 years ago today.

It's about a giant bald guy walking around the desert, looking like Mr. Clean in an oversized diaper, picking up toy cars and looking inside them, and throwing a giant syringe at an army dude and killing him with it.

Now that's entertainment...and they don't make 'em like that any more.

I've Got a Secret About the Wild Joker's Password Being Right, and I'm Telling the Blockbuster Truth.

2009-07-07T00:00:00.003-05:00

Bill Cullen
Feb. 18, 1920 - July 7, 1990
"Like thousands of other youngsters, I was stricken with polio as a child. Even with the wonderful care I received from my parents and doctors, I still carry the scars of this experience. Somehow, it never got me down. That's why I would rather not have people who see me limp along show any pity, distress or compassion - since I don't feel this way about my physical condition."
-- Bill Cullen, 1957

Bill Cullen was a one-man game show machine. How can one man host so many game shows? What's up with that? In a career that spanned more than 35 years, he hosted at least twenty-four game shows on radio and TV. Not to mention the fact that he had crippling polio as a child, which makes all the work he did later in life seem pretty bad ass.

Most people don't know that he was the original host on The Price is Right, from 1956-1965. When the show was revived in 1972, Cullen was the original choice to host. Unfortunately, physical demands on him made him unable to take the job, and the position went to insane animal activist Bob Barker. Had Cullen been able to take the hosting job, we might never have been guilted into spaying and neutering our pets by a host who was banging his big-boobed prize sluts behind the scenes. What a wonderful world this would be if we never had to put up with Bob Barker's crap.

Cullen was also the original host of Blockbusters and Chain Reaction, as well as hosting The $25,000 Pyramid, Password Plus, The Joker's Wild, Eye Guess, Three on a Match, Hot Potato, Child's Play, Pass the Buck, Name That Tune, Stop the Music, Winner Take All, The Love Experts, I've Got a Secret, Blankety Blanks, Winning Streak, The Choice is Yours, Place the Face, Bank on the Stars, Decisons, Decisions, and How Do You Like Your Eggs?

From Wikipedia: "The Game Show Congress, a nonprofit association that seeks to promote the game show industry, annually presents the Bill Cullen Career Achievement Award to performers who have had distinguished careers in the genre. The first award in 2004 was given posthumously to Cullen himself, which his widow Ann accepted."

It should also be noted that Bill Cullen was a pilot during World War II, and was interested in mechanics. He also did color commentary for football games and track and field events. A lifelong smoker, he died of lung cancer on July 7, 1990.

You might notice that this entry isn't as snarky and hate-filled as my usual ones. That's because I was inspired by Bill Cullen. I now realize that in America you don't have to be the best at everything to succeed. You only have to be good at one thing. And no matter what that one thing is...if you apply yourself, you can make it. Not that you will make it, of course...you absolutely won't. But you theoretically can. And that really makes all the difference to delusional dreamers like myself.

Either way in the end you'll die of cancer of the lungs (or the brain, or the ass) and pretty much be forgotten...but at least you got to be on TV while you were here. A lot.

I think that's all that any of us can really ask.

Do It. Do It.

2009-07-06T00:00:00.001-05:00

Van McCoy
Jan. 6, 1940 - July 6, 1979
For a guy who never appeared in movies, Van McCoy sure has a lot of IMDB credits. He's been dead for exactly thirty years today, yet people who don't even know who he is, know who he is.

Cause he was that guy. You know the one.

He mostly wrote songs for other artists, most notably Barbara Lewis' "Baby, I'm Yours", but he detoured into disco in the mid-1970s. And that's when things went horribly, horribly wrong. Or horribly right, depending on who you ask.

If you ask me, it wasn't good. Not good at all. What's that? You didn't ask? Consider it a freebie. You're welcome.

His most notable contribution to our culture, and a defining moment of the '70s disco movement, was a groovy disco anthem with only five words:

"Do it...do the Hustle"
Actually, it was only four words, since "do" is really the same word, but used more than once. But you get the idea.

If you were alive in 1975, you fell into one of two groups of people: people that hated "The Hustle", and people that hated "The Hustle"...yet owned it. It was a combination disco dance/infectuous mind weevil that took the nation by storm and went directly to the top of the charts. It was awful, but people couldn't get enough of it.

And years later, that song is the reason that Van McCoy, a man who has been dead for thirty years, has had sixteen TV and movie credits since he died.

It's generally used in a kitschy, ironic sense these days, but I hate that song. Irony doesn't make me want to listen to it more. I was every bit of seven years old when it was released and I hated it then. I have never not hated it.

Van McCoy suffered a sudden massive heart attack in New Jersey at the age of 39 on July 6, 1979. It's a terrible way to die...of a heart attack, and in New Jersey.

I don't hate the guy...but I hate the evil that he released into the world.

Also...nice hat.

Mmmm...Hulka Burger.

2009-07-05T00:55:00.005-05:00

Warren Oates
July 5, 1928 - April 3, 1982
Happy 81st Birthday to our Big Toe, Sgt. Hulka.

Warren Oates was tough. He was a man. He smoked and drank and ate red meat every day of his life. He played tough guys on TV, and even tougher guys in the movies. That's because in the movies they let you kill people and say dirty words. Yeah, all of them...even that one. I know which one you're thinking. Turns out I'm a man, too. And I learned all the mannish manly things I know by watching macho tough guys like Warren Oates.

While he's best known as Sgt. Hulka in Stripes, he played John Dillinger in Dillinger, Lyle Gorch in The Wild Bunch, Specs O'Keefe in The Brink's Job, and Frank Stewart in Race With the Devil. That must have been the toughest role of all, because he played Loretta Swit's husband. You know how freakin' tough of a nail-spitting real man you gotta be to put it to Loretta Swit? Or how great of an actor you have to be to pretend to do so? You have my infinite respect, sir.

But that was just in the movies. On TV, he was the go-to guy when an actor didn't want to (or was too dead to) reprise his movie role for a made-for-TV movie. He was Rooster Cogburn in True Grit: A Further Adventure and took Bogart's role in the 1977 TV remake of The African Queen. He was even in the 1973 musical adaptation of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, playing Muff Potter. Are you aware of what kind of bad ass you have to be to play a character named "Muff Potter"?!? You're the kind of bad ass that all other bad asses have a picture of on their walls that says "Our Leader". That's what kind of bad ass you are.

And he worked all the time. Even after he died of a massive heart attack, he refused to stop working. "Dead? That ain't gonna stop me!", he might have been heard to say, and his projects continued to appear. He was even seen kicking substantial hiney a year after his death in Blue Thunder. The last thing with him in it appeared in 1985, and then he retired. Take that, Hollywood girly-men!

But the question I have is this. Warren Oates and Katherine Helmond were born on the same day. I mean the same day, in the same year. She was the man-hungry Mona on Who's The Boss, which hadn't even aired yet when he died. But he's been dead for twenty-seven years now and she's still going strong. What's up with that?

Perhaps it's as Neil Young said...it's better to burn out, than do a sitcom with Tony Danza.

Fourth of July Firecracker Deathmatch!

2009-07-04T00:00:00.000-05:00

Oh, sure. Everybody takes July 4th off. Well, not me, mister. Other blogs might take national holidays off, but I'll not be caught with my figurative pants around my metaphorical ankles. Death is the biggest thing going, and it never stops. I'm here to keep up with it. And by "keep up", I mean to take swipes at famous people years (or sometimes decades) after their deaths...or whenever I feel like it.

So, in this special holiday edition of Dead Person of the Day, I have decided to put a number of July 4 fatalities up against each other...just for kicks. This is not the way I usually do things, but I didn't feel like doing a "real" post. Enjoy. Or, not.

Barry White
Sep. 12, 1944 - July 4, 2003
vs.
Jesse Helms
Oct. 18, 1921 - July 4, 2008
Now, it's not likely that the paths of white supremacist North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and chocolate mountain of love Barry White ever crossed. Jesse wouldn't have approved of White's sexy ways, and Barry would be too busy having sex and busting out soul hits to even notice. Jesse would be advocating "whites only" drinking fountains and cutting funding for AIDS research, but Barry would be selling 100 million records and making sweet, sweet love. While Jesse would be opposing a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Barry would be busy appearing on The Simpsons and being the commercial spokesman for Arby's. It's not hard to decide whose side I would fall on in such a battle. Barry White all the way, bitches. He was just too sexy and soulful to vote otherwise.

John Adams
Oct. 30, 1735 - July 4, 1826
vs.
Thomas Jefferson
Apr. 13, 1743 - July 4, 1826
Thomas Jefferson...third President of the United States. Political genius, founder of the University of Virginia, father of freakin' democracy. John Adams...second President of the United States. So-so leader whose cousin Samuel brewed kickass beer, accidental war hero, had his ass handed to him by Jefferson in the 1800 election. Both men died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Adams was on his deathbed but spoke of warmly Jefferson, not knowing that Jefferson had totally owned him and grabbed the spotlight by dying hours earlier. Ye TMZ completely had the Jefferson death up already and the Adams story was way down at the bottom of the page. Jefferson for the win...since he's not only on the nickel, but the freakin' $2 bill. How many denominations of money is John Adams on? None, that's how many. Also had a kickass sitcom, The Jeffersons, loosely based on his life. Movin' on up, Tommy J!

James Monroe
Apr. 28, 1758 - July 4, 1831
"Oooooh, I'm James Monroe. I have a doctrine! I want to be like the other Presidents and die on July 4, too! No one remembers me!"

Please. The biggest thing that happened during your Presidency was the acquisition of Florida. You want that to be your legacy?!? You make Millard Fillmore look like Vin Diesel. Point goes to no one. It's just pathetic.

Worst Stooge Ever.

2009-07-03T00:00:00.001-05:00

"Curly Joe" DeRita
July 12, 1909 - July 3, 1993

Following the deaths of Stooges Curly Howard and Shemp Howard, and the lackluster performance of Shemp's replacement Joe Besser, nightclub comic Joe DeRita was recruited by Moe Howard and Larry Fine in 1958 to become the sixth member of the Three Stooges.

There's a lot of debate among Stoogeophiles as to who was worse, Joe Besser or "Curly Joe" DeRita. My money's on DeRita, because while Besser's contract forbade him from being physically abused by Larry and Moe, he at least had a comedic presence. DeRita was just a fat guy who was out of his element, which was telling dirty jokes in Las Vegas. While his act may have killed, he brought nothing to the Stooges, which by the late '50s were making movies for kids.

And the movies were terrible. The Stooges were done until the old Three Stooges shorts were syndicated to television in 1957. This brought a new wave of popularity to the team, which had been out of work since Columbia shut down its short-subjects division. So the movies, made to capitalize on their new fame, were aimed squarely at kids. Movies like The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, Have Rocket, Will Travel, and Snow White and the Three Stooges. You get the idea. Awful.

It's ironic that Curly Joe was with the Stooges for much longer than any other "third Stooge". He was still a member when Moe died in 1975 while planning a new film. In fact, he outlived every other member of the team, causing one to ponder the possible non-existence of a comedy deity.

The worst sin committed by Joe DeRita was not that he never found the Stooges funny, though he admitted this in later interviews. The thing he did that forever damned him in my eyes was puting on a nightclub act with two lesser-known fellow comics called "The New Three Stooges" after Moe died. It was a failure, as it should have been. No Moe Howard, no Stooges.

If there's a silver lining to Curly Joe DeRita's tenure with the Three Stooges, it's that it can be completely ignored. The movies are not part of the Columbia shorts, and it would be easy enough to go the rest of your life without encountering them. The Three Stooges, you say? Yes, I remember. Moe, Larry, Curly, then Shemp, then Joe. Broke up in 1957. Move along...nothing to see here.

Just like those Star Wars prequels. You betcha. Never happened.

Why They Don't Let Chicks Fly

2009-07-02T00:00:00.001-05:00

Amelia Earhart
July 24, 1897 – (missing) July 2, 1937

There was a huge Wikipedia entry on pioneering female aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished into thin air on July 2, 1937...and sure, I could have quoted from it liberally. But I'm not about to do this. It's not that I don't trust Wikipedia. I mean, hell, it's full of lies, but that's never stopped me before. What stopped me was that the story of Amelia Earhart is a simple one. You don't need paragraph after paragraph of boring words to tell her tale.

In the end it's as simple as this: She had a plane. She had a womb. She disappeared.

That's really all we need to know. She and her co-pilot Fred Noonan went poof and the entire freakin' navy spent weeks looking for them, to no avail. There are tons of conspiracy theories stating that she faked her death, was abducted by aliens, became Tokyo Rose, was captured by cannibals, what have you. In truth she was probably trying to tune in soap operas on the plane's radio and caused the plane to dive right into the ocean. Am I right, fellas? Those chicks and their "stories"? It boggles the mind.

As a result, Amelia Earhart is the first, last, and only famous female aviator. There are no others because this one didn't work out so well. Am I wrong? I don't think I'm wrong.

It's like Danica Patrick. We're all pulling for her, but the first time she goes into a wall (God forbid), you'll never see another female Indy driver. It's just the way it goes. Women have equal rights, but not equal equal rights. Even after all this time it's not the same. Never will be.

Now, I'm not gonna say that women should be barefoot and pregnant. That's silly. I'm not a barbarian. Of course you can wear shoes. You're still gonna have to mow the lawn, after all. Now go make me a turkey pot pie, chop chop!

Sassy TV Waitresses of the '70s, Part 1

2009-07-01T00:10:00.005-05:00

Shirley Hemphill
July 1, 1947 - Dec 10, 1999

I want to go out on a limb here and say that I never found What's Happening!! to be a classic of American television. I mean, I saw every episode multiple times, but that doesn't mean they were good. It just meant that it was on between Batman and Gilligan's Island in the afternoons and I had no life. It was a terrible show. I can see why this is controversial, but an argument can be made that there is a valid reason the cast has never appeared on Inside the Actor's Studio.

Much of the show's heat came from the interplay between fat teenager Rerun (Fred Berry) and fat waitress Shirley (Shirley Hemphill). These were a series of fat jokes they exchanged, but you could feel the raw sexual tension between them. You just knew there was something under the surface. There was fire in their eyes. When those cameras went off, it was wall-to-wall naked brown flesh...and lots of it.

I'm also going to go further out on the same limb and say that Shirley Hemphill never turned me on. She was all right, but I never found her joke delivery to my liking. Even after What's Happening!! ended after three seasons and she'd gotten her own short lived show (One in a Million) she didn't seem to grow. She spent the rest of her life playing essentially the same character (and literally played the same character in the 1985-88 syndicated sitcom What's Happening Now!!), but she had her moment, and she made a big enough impression that I'm writing these words about her a decade after her death.

On her TV show the Monday after Shirley Hemphill died, Rosie O'Donnell paid tribute to her by mentioning that she helped Rosie land her first paying gig in comedy. A sweet tribute, but Rosie had the hottest show on daytime TV at the time and never had her on when she was alive. She was also mentioned in the credits of Scary Movie, wherein her good friends the Wayans brothers dedicated the film to her. And misspelled her name.

If you really want to know how big of an impression she made on me, I'll grant you this. July 1, 2000 Walter Matthau died. July 1, 2004 Marlon Brando died. As a rule of this blog, I would have been able to write about them. But instead I saw Shirley Hemphill's name listed (July 1 being the date of her birth) and knew that there was no more important person I could write about today.

The Blog That Almost Died. A Year Later.

2009-06-30T15:32:00.000-05:00

This blog was abandoned a year ago. Well, not really abandoned. Put off and forgotten. I've decided to bring it back. As it is I've missed literally hundreds of opportunities to write about my second-favorite subject, dead celebrities. My first-favorite subject, boobs, will be covered elsewhere.

People I've missed writing about in the last year, and mind you it could have been comedy gold...

George Carlin, Michael Jackson, David Carradine, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, Dom Deluise, that Oxy Clean guy, Bea Arthur, that other tiny old lady from Golden Girls, and God knows who else. Many, many dead people have slipped away, both literally and figuratively, from the grasp of this blog. But no time to look back. Remember the idea of this blog is to capitalize on the very day that a person died, or that the dead person was born. It's all about the day. New daily posts will begin on this blog starting tomorrow, July 1. So, we begin again.

And when I say "we", I'm referring to me and the evil voices in my head.

Why Couldn't it Have Been Keith Olbermann?!?

2008-06-13T14:58:00.001-05:00

Tim Russert
May 7, 1950 - June 13, 2008

I want to be perfectly clear on this: I wasn't a huge Tim Russert fan. Not that he was a bad guy, or that I was opposed to his politics...but the simple truth was, I didn't really know who he was. In fact, in my mind Meet The Press host Tim Russert and Hardball host Chris Matthews were one. To me, they were literally interchangeable. Who hosted Hardball? Beats me. That fat NBC guy? What's his name? Oh yeah, Tim Russert.

Now...not so much, I suppose. Tim Russert had just returned from a vacation to Italy with his family and was recording some audio this morning when he had a massive heart attack and died. Which is indeed a bummer, even though I couldn't really pick him out of a lineup. Everyone else in the media seems to suddenly have an enormous amount of respect for him.

Maybe even Keith Olbermann will have a thoughtful, tearful tribute to him on Countdown tonight. And, maybe, just maybe, the vengeful spirit of Edward R. Murrow will appear and drag Keith's sorry ass screaming down to Hell, Ghost-style.

One More Reason to Hate Richard Dawson.

2008-05-04T13:50:00.001-05:00

Diana Dors
Oct. 23, 1931 - May 4, 1984
I know very little about Diana Dors. She was a British actress and she was hot. Perhaps this is all that really matters.

And yet, there's more to be said. She was generally regarded as the British Marilyn Monroe, and there was a strong physical resemblance. She made many films and became an international star...or at least in countries other than America she was. While she's virtually unknown here, she was nevertheless featured on the covers of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's and the Smiths Singles albums and was the subject of a tribute song ("Good Day") by the Kinks. At the height of her career, she was married to Hogan's Heroes star Richard Dawson. This seems to be the only truly dark spot on her resume. But at least this was before he was kissing all those trailer park wives on Family Feud. She developed stomach cancer and died on this day in 1984.

No Dead Horse Puns, Please.

2008-05-04T01:59:00.001-05:00

Eight Belles
May 3, 2008
Bummer, huh?

You live all your life for one purpose. It's the biggest day of your life. You run fast, you try hard, you come in second, but then you break both your ankles and they come and kill you. In front of everybody. Damn, that sucks.

I mean, really. What's that all about?

You know, a lot of people still think that horse racing is a barbaric sport. I don't think that...but I think it's unnecessary, like boxing. And in my opinion, horse racing is kind of a rip-off. You work for years to get there, you train and spend a lot of money, and it's over in 90 seconds. In many ways I think there's a sexual metaphor there, but I'm not going to be the one to make it. No sir, not today.

The biggest crime of horse racing is that it bores me. Men on horses, wow.

I say put monkeys on them. Only not on horses, on dogs. Yes. Spider monkeys. Spider monkeys on dogs. Those little bastards are nothing but cute. And they're still wearing those little jockey outfits.

Now that's entertainment!

Down and Out in Beverly Hills

2008-05-02T12:58:00.001-05:00

David Rappaport
November 23, 1951 - May 2, 1990
Yeah, well. I remember when this guy died. He was a very small British actor who actually had a fairly successful career in TV and movies. He was one of the main characters in Time Bandits and The Bride and was set to guest-star on Star Trek: The Next Generation at the time of his death. In the year before his death he'd made some appearances on L.A. Law and had a short-lived '80s series of his own (The Wizard). But he suffered from depression and general unhappiness and bought a .38 and killed himself. This is the same way that Herve Villaichaze (Tattoo from Fantasy Island) also chose to check out.

Look. While I'm a man of average (or some would say, less than average) height myself, I will never know what it's like to be a "little person". But I do know that many a diminutive actor has had hard times and continued to work and not offed himself. I know it's all a matter of personal choice, but look how long Billy Barty lived. He took a lot of bad movie and TV roles, up to and including dressing up in the sea monster outfit in Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, but he never gave up. Worked right up until the time of his death at age 76. Warwick Davis, who starred in Willow (which Barty was also in), hasn't given up. Even though he's mostly appeared in the awful Leprechaun movies for the last 15 years, he's still a working and successful actor in Hollywood.

And if you tiny short men out there need further inspiration, you don't need to look very hard to know that you can be a star. I'm pointing, of course to the careers of Al Pacino and Prince. Face!

Thank you and good night.

I'm Huge!

2008-05-01T12:43:00.001-05:00

Steve Reeves
Jan 21, 1926 - May 1, 2000
Steve Reeves is best remembered today for two things:

1) Being a recurring joke on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and
2) Being mentioned in the song "Sweet Transvestite" in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

He's not so much really known for being Mr. Universe 1950 or those terrible Hercules movies he made in the 1950s/1960s. While beautifully filmed, they were poorly dubbed and chopped up and confusing to American audiences. Not really a very good actor, he nonetheless got a lot of film work because he was muscular and good-looking. He turned down the role of James Bond in Dr. No, which might not have been that wise in retrospect. It went to Sean Connery, who became a huge star.

When Gladiator was being filmed, director Ridley Scott never got around to offering Reeves a cameo. He later regretted it, and Reeves died on the very day the film premiered.

An odd thing about Reeves was the fact that you never heard his real voice. In all his Italian-made gladiator movies, his voice was dubbed by other actors. In fact, his actual voice was only heard in the movies Athena and Jail Bait. He was from Montana and spoke fluent English.

My Moustache is Retarded and I am Mean

2008-05-01T01:59:00.001-05:00

Adolph Hitler
April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945

I was never a huge Hitler fan, I'll tell you that right now. I've never been one to follow genocidal maniacs, even if it's true that the Germans do make excellent beer and fantastic cars. You can drive all the BMWs and Volkswagens and drink all the Spaten Munich you want, but there's always going to be that Hitler thing.

Anyway, not only did Hitler murder millions, but he also ruined other things for generations. No one names their kids Adolph anymore, no one parts their hair like that anymore, and no one wears that moustache. And don't forget, that was a very popular moustache many years ago...even Charlie Chaplin had it. But now you can't watch one of the old Chaplin films without thinking "Nazi-loving bastard". And you know it's true.

The rock band KISS cannot use its logo in Germany because the two S's in that logo are jagged and look like symbols of Hitler's SS. This is absolutely true.

So yeah, that's what I'm saying. Not only was Hitler a Jew-hating, VD-ridden, one-testicle-having, bad-art-producing, freaked-out maniac, he was just a jerk.

And I'm glad he's dead.

In your face, Hitler!

Bring Out Your Dead!

2008-03-16T23:28:00.000-05:00

Back at last, with the rest of the dead I missed last week!

Douglas Adams
Mar. 11, 1952 - May 11, 2001
You gotta love Douglas Adams. No, really. You are required to love Douglas Adams. It's a law now. He was the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and the Dirk Gently books, all of which are hilarious. Died of a heart attack at a private gym at age 49. Had a huge influence on fandom, and quite a few writers (this one included) spent their formative years ripping him off. Currently, there is a movement underway to get city planners to rename 42nd Street in Portland, Oregon "Douglas Adams Way". There is no real reason for this, other than the significance of the number 42 in the Hitchhiker's books and the fact that Portland is filled with silly, silly people. Adams would have been proud.

Morton Downey, Jr.
Dec. 9, 1933 - Mar. 12, 2001
Without Morton Downey, Jr. the world wouldn't have The Jerry Springer Show, or any of the "tabloid trash" talk shows like it. Downey essentially pioneered the genre in the mid-1980s. Morton perfected this bit in talk radio, where he insulted pinhead liberal callers on a nightly basis. I used to catch the show on KHTV Houston, where I got my fill of Nazis, strippers, and various other white trash trailer park bastards. It was a good time, but the show ended in the late-1980s and Downey took various small villain parts in movies and TV shows, developed lung cancer from his chronic smoking, and finally died at age 67 in 2001. Interesting to note that he had also pursued a career in music (as had his father) and had a song in the Billboard Top 100, a country song ("Green Eyed Girl", which went as high as #95) in 1981.

John Holmes
Aug. 8, 1944 - Mar. 13, 1988
John Holmes (John Curtis Estes) was born in Ohio in 1944. Not long after that it was discovered that he had a huge schlong and he began a career in porn films. Something like that, anyway. By 1978 Holmes was making as much as $3000 a day in porn films, but he was putting it all up his nose. Holmes spent some time in jail and was tried and acquitted of being involved in some drug-related murders, and somewhere along the line he contracted A.I.D.S. and died from it in 1988. The film Wonderland is directly based on his life and Boogie Nights is a more loose adaptation. Holmes was reputed to have slept with more than 3,000 women in his life. Well, I doubt that number. I don't know how much sleep was really going on, and that's difficult to prove. Also, it must be noted that he wasn't really a very good looking man at all. Giant penis, yes...attractive, not so much. It's a good thing that Neil Young doesn't have a giant penis and an inclination to do porn, or it could have been so much worse.

Hank Ketchum
Mar. 14, 1920 - June 1, 2001
Created the comic strip "Dennis the Menace". Drew it for years. It was never funny, ever. Dennis the Menace character goes to TV and comics, remains unfunny. Dennis the Menace character is made into movies in the 1990s by Home Alone creator John Hughes, and it wasn't funny then. It just never, ever got to be funny to me. Also, it was kind of a rip-off as a comic strip. It was just a single-panel drawing (Family Circus-style), with some semi-humorous dialog below it. Did I mention it wasn't funny? Hank Ketchum had a real-life son named Dennis. For some reason (I can't imagine what) they became estranged and never spoke to each other again. Now that's funny.

Macdonald Carey
Mar. 15, 1913 - Mar. 21, 1994
Played a doctor on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, which I never watched. He would introduce and close the show, and his voice is still heard in the opening credits today. Had a long, long career in radio and TV. I mostly remember him from a low-budget movie made in the late-1970s which I think was called Starship Invasions, but I couldn't find it in the IMDB. He plays "Dr. McCarey", and he mostly stands around looking worried while the real action happens elsewhere. It was an awful movie, and I watched it late at night because I was always awake in the 1980s. I'll spoil the ending for you. The aliens are repelled, but at the very end a nurse enters the room and says "Dr. McCarey...it's starting again." And he looks really, really worried. Must have been hard to refuse a check with his name on it.

Arthur Godfrey
Aug. 31, 1903 - Mar. 16, 1983
I don't think there were a lot of tears shed when Arthur Godfrey died in 1983. He had been a TV pioneer, sure, but he was also (by many accounts) an absolute jerk. No matter what he did or said during his life, there is no denying that he fired Julius LaRosa on live television in 1953 allegedly because the singer had gotten an agent and the controlling Godfrey wasn't "down with that", as the kids say. But consider this: Godfrey is now dead, and LaRosa (now 78) has had a full Godfrey-free quarter century to dance on his grave. Godfrey was also allegedly the model for the character "Lonesome" Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd, about a friendly and popular TV host who is a mean-spirited, manipulative bully off-screen. Take that, Arthur Godfrey.

Death...the Ultimate Slacker

2008-03-14T00:08:00.000-05:00

Yes, Death is a few days behind...what can ya do? It's hard to keep up with the ongoing roster of the non-living. But have no fear: I return Saturday, March 15, with a full catch-up of all the exciting news from the world of the dead.

Another Three-Named Redneck Assassin.

2008-03-10T02:00:00.000-05:00

James Earl Ray
Mar. 10, 1928 - Apr. 23, 1998
I admit it. I really don't know that much about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Once you've got into the JFK assassination, everything else seems kind of minor. Not that MLK and RFK weren't important, mind you...but there's only so much time to look into these things, and JFK is the Holy Grail of Conspiracy Science. Therefore my JFK knowledge is strong and my MLK knowledge is weak. But I do know that James Earl Ray, the man generally considered to be the assassin of Martin Luther King, first confessed to the crime and then spent thirty years in jail denying he did it. He was so persuasive that, by the time he died in 1998, he even had MLK's family convinced he didn't do it. And I don't really know whether he did or not. Everything I know comes from U2's song "Pride (In the Name of Love)", and even it is factually incorrect. The shooting happened at six in the evening...not early morning, as the song states. Ray claimed to have been set up by a mysterious man named "Raoul" or some such, and it was actually this shady character who shot King that evening. But if you saw that episode of X-Files, you know it was Cigarette Smoking Man who really did it.

Original Gangstas.

2008-03-09T03:20:00.000-05:00

Alan Hale, Jr.
Mar. 8, 1921 - Jan. 2, 1990
Alan Hale, Jr. was a good character actor with one character: the Skipper. He was playing the Skipper for years before the part was created for Gilligan's Island, sometimes in westerns. He continued playing the part all the way until his death at age 70. The last time I saw him in 1989 or so was in commercials for TBS (with Bob Denver as Gilligan). They were both dressed as their old characters, still stranded on that island (which they escaped in a TV movie, by the way). He was obviously sick and very thin, but there he was. If you've ever watched Mystery Science Theater 3000, you'll know that he appeared in more bad movies than just about any other actor. These included The Crawling Hand, Angel's Revenge, and Giant Spider Invasion. Also appeared on The Love Boat twice and Fantasy Island three times.

Biggie Smalls
May 21, 1972 - Mar. 9, 1997
Let's make one thing clear right now: I'm generally indifferent to rap and hip-hop music. The law of averages on music, as it is on all things, also applies here. 90% of everything, be it music, movies, or what have you, is bad. That's just the way it works out. But there's nothing like being dead that can suddenly make that mediocre recording artist seem like a martyr and a genius. Odds are most of us would never have heard of Biggie Smalls (or, the Notorious B.I.G.) had he not been shot and killed so young. And we damn sure wouldn't have heard that awful Puff Daddy tribute to him and Tupac ("Missing You") that sampled The Police's "Every Breath You Take". But now, like Selena, he's a fallen hero. I ride the bus most of the time here in Vegas, and I am confronted on almost a daily basis with young hip-hoppers and their oversized Biggie and Tupac tribute shirts. It boggles the mind. Simply put, rap and hip-hop music is disposable music. Very hot and popular, then gone and forgotten. Or there would be hip-hop oldies stations...and there are not. I'm just sayin'.

An American Master.

2008-03-07T02:00:00.000-06:00

Andy Sidaris
Feb. 20, 1931 - Mar. 7, 2007
Andy Sidaris was the man. Period. After a long career as a respected producer for ABC Sports, he retired and moved to Hawaii. It was there he began his real career...making movies. And not just any movies. Ambitious films with lots of car chases, secret agents, and explosions. And tits. Lots and lots of tits. Almost exclusively former Playboy Playmates, Andy Sidaris' actresses found an excuse to get topless at almost every turn. It was a beautiful thing. He had some earlier directorial credits on various TV shows and movies, but is best known for the so-called "Malibu Bay" series of films. Between 1985 and 1998, Sidaris made 10 connected secret agent films, all concerning "The Agency" and the frequently naked agents employed by it. These included Malibu Express, Hard Ticket To Hawaii, and Picasso Trigger. And they weren't made with a penny of studio money...he financed them himself. After he stopped directing, he made appearances in all three of Jim Wynorski's Bare Wench parodies as sleaze mogul "Dick Bigdickian". Not bad, not bad at all. Good job, Andy. We need more guys like you.

How Boobs Changed My Life.

2008-03-06T02:00:00.000-06:00

Bill Ward
Mar. 6, 1919 - Nov. 17, 1998
While "growing up", for lack of a better term, there were few high points in my life. I lived for Marvel comic books, I snuck a look at HBO to see naked breasts when I could, and I always bought Cracked magazine. Not Mad, that didn't do it for me. It had to be Cracked. And why? Because, frankly, it was funnier. And the art was better. In the late 1970s, the main artists in the mag I dug were John Severin and Bill Ward. Severin did the wacky TV parodies up front, and Bill Ward did the Nanny Dickering features at the back. I was just developing an appreciation for the female form, and Ward's women were big, busty, and trashy, with giant hips and enormous hair. But mostly busty. He had a long career of drawing women for men's magazines as far back as the 1940s and was the king of so-called "good girl art". His most famous creation was Torchy, a sexually suggestive (but not lewd) World War II-era comic strip. I really loved his work, even though in his later years he did a lot of highly-sexualized bondage work to pay the bills. I forgive ya, Bill...you're the best.

Brother Bluto and Dead Porn Star #3.

2008-03-05T16:02:00.000-06:00

John Belushi
Jan. 24, 1949 - Mar. 5, 1982
John Belushi died 26 years ago today. A certified comic genius and brilliant actor, dead. And yet Jim Belushi, healthy as ever. Not his fault, really. It just goes to show you that life can suck. You know, Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison are dead, too...but Andrew Dice Clay? Will live to see 80, no problem. 80 and unfunny, but 80 nonetheless. But maybe, just maybe, that's the way it's supposed to be. You don't outstay your welcome. You don't become America's favorite TV dad on According to Jim, but you also don't end up on a VH1 reality series or a crappy sitcom with Cathy Moriarty. You die at the peak of your abilites leaving people wanting more, and the world truly misses you when you're gone. I'll never have that, Andrew Dice Clay will never have that, most people will never have that. But guys like John Belushi, they come around once in a lifetime. I wish I'd known him. Check out Belushi's Wikipedia page. It was amazing the things he did in his life. He crammed into 33 years more life than a lot of us have at 40 or more...or ever will. Well done, my friend.

Lolo Ferrari
Feb. 9, 1963 – Mar. 5, 2000
I wish I'd known Lolo Ferrari, too...but she was no Belushi. John Belushi was the type of guy I'd like to party with, bask in the glow of his sheer personal magnetism. Lolo Ferrari I just wanted to hump. It don't make me a bad person. Lolo has the distinction of having the largest silicone breast implants in the history of the world. Not the largest breasts, mind you, the largest implants. She also did porn...a legacy that her fans can enjoy even today. Wikipedia attributes her death to "natural causes", but she was 37 years old. What sort of "natural causes" kill you at 37? Why Wikipedia didn't mention that her husband was arrested for her murder (by suffocation) in 2002 is a mystery to me.

Edit: The husband was apparently later cleared...which as we know doesn't mean he didn't do it, but that they couldn't pin anything on him. My Consitutionally-protected opinion.

Catching Up With The Dead.

2008-03-05T02:00:00.000-06:00

Lou Costello
Mar. 6, 1906 - Mar. 3, 1959
Abbott and Costello were never a factor in my life. I was aware of them, but I was never really a fan and I didn't like any of their 36 films except Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which is great. But everybody knows it was the monsters and not A&C who made that so good. Of course I know the "Who's on First?" routine, everybody does. But can you name another of their routines? That's what I'm saying. The duo split up in 1957. Costello went on to make one solo film (The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock) and died of a heart attack on March 3, 1959. Bud Abbott, being a curmudeonly bastard, lived until 1974 and died peacefully in his sleep. The TV movie Bud and Lou has Costello (Buddy Hackett) in a hospital bed. Against the doctor's wishes he requests an ice cream soda. He drinks it and says "That was the best ice cream soda I ever tasted", and drops dead. I always thought this story was crap, but apparently it's true. Leave it to Hollywood to surprise you with the truth.

John Candy
Oct. 31, 1950 - Mar. 4, 1994
I love John Candy. I was 13 years old when NBC started airing SCTV on Friday nights in 1981, and I'd more often than not fall asleep trying to watch the whole 90-minute show. He was a master of impersonations, from Orson Welles to Curly Howard to Merlin Olsen and Jackie Gleason, and he was more often than not the highlight of the show for me. Later he went on to appear in supporting roles in movies like Stripes and National Lampoon's Vacation before making a move to leading man and making a lot of unfunny films before his death, including Summer Rental, Who's Harry Crumb?, and Delirious. But don't forget he was also hilarious in the modern classics Spaceballs, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Splash, and Uncle Buck. Being in these four films alone make him fantastic. For me, one of his best roles came in 1991's JFK, where he has a very small part showing great dramatic range. As is the case with heavier actors, he died of a heart attack in his sleep during the filming of Wagons East! in Mexico on March 4, 1994, at age 43.

Lazy, Lazy Death.

2008-03-04T02:00:00.000-06:00

Death is taking a couple of days off. Be back Wednesday, March 5, with more tales of death, boobs, and porn.

Death's Day Off!

2008-03-03T02:00:00.000-06:00

Death is taking a couple of days off. Be back Wednesday, March 5, with more tales of death, boobs, and porn.

Dead Porn Star #2.

2008-03-02T02:00:00.000-06:00

Cal Jammer
March 2, 1960 - January 25, 1995
Apparently, being a porn star and having sex all the time with beautiful women isn't all it's cracked up to be. I'd be willing to test that theory myself...but the evidence suggests that porn stars are as screwed up as the rest of us, if not more.

Cal Jammer (born Randy Lynn Potes) was such an individual. In the porn industry he was popular and got steady work, but wasn't necessarily a huge star. He developed a relationship with porn actress Jill Kelly and they were married in 1993, but he was using illegal drugs and suffering from depression and her openly cheating on him didn't help matters. She became involved with actress P.J. Sparxx as well during this time.

On January 25, 1995 Cal caught his wife in bed with a fellow porn actor. Hours later he blew his brains out in her driveway. This was the basis for a subplot in the film Boogie Nights a few years later.

Again, it seems like there is an extraordinary amount of tragedy in the adult industry. Could it be that the thing that makes a person want to appear in adult films is the same thing that screwed them up in the first place? Or am I just talking out of my ass? We'll never know for sure my friend...we'll never know for sure.

Fester? I Barely Knew Her!

2008-03-01T02:00:00.000-06:00

Jackie Coogan
October 26, 1914 – March 1, 1984
Jackie Coogan was a child actor discovered by Charlie Chaplin in 1917 and he made millions from his movie roles. Unfortunately, all his earnings were spent by his mother and stepfather on cocaine and heroin. He sued them, only to get about $125,000 back. The legal battle resulted in legislation called The California Child Actor's Bill, or The Coogan Act, that specified that 15% of a child actor's earnings be set aside by the employer in a trust.

Coogan served in World War II as a Flight Officer and requested hazardous duty with the 1st Commando Air Group, where he flew British troops hundreds of miles behind Japanese lines. After the war he resumed his acting career and appeared in many films and TV series until his retirement in the mid-1970s.

Of course he's best remembered as Uncle Fester on The Addams Family TV series of the '60s. In the TV series Fester was Morticia's uncle, but in the 1991 movie he was Gomez's brother. My contention is that he was both, because they're both creepy and kooky. The Uncle Fester character was played by a badly miscast Christopher Lloyd in the 1991 film and its sequel, and Ron Jeremy played the part in the XXX-rated parody The Maddams Family. Not that I've seen that, of course. Okay, I'm lying. I have.

Jackie Coogan died of a heart attack at age 69 on Mar. 1, 1984. His grandson is actor Keith Coogan, who starred in Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.

Dead Porn Star #1.

2008-02-29T10:44:00.000-06:00

Taylor Summers
1980? - Feb. 29, 2004
Taylor Summers (born Natel King) was a Canadian-born model and porn actress who was reported missing on Feb. 29, 2004. I can honestly tell you that I don't remember seeing her, or even hearing about her, before I was looking for deaths on this day. She didn't make a huge impact, and most porn actresses don't. I don't think there was an abundance of screen work from her, and the IMDB has no listing of her in anything.

Most of the info I have on her comes from a "charity event" for her and another actress on Fetish Movies:

The ladies that participated and donated their time we thank you. We will be donating 100% of the profits of the DVD to the families of two adult actresses who have had their careers cut short by tragic circumstances. Adult film actress Taylor Summers disappeared after a photo shoot in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, on February 29th. Her body was discovered by authorities three weeks later in nearby Whitemarsh Township. Shannon, a beautiful young woman just getting started in the business, suffered an epileptic seizure while cooking, catching her sweater on fire. Shannon was badly burned on over 40% of her body. By the time she was found and rushed to the hospital, her medical bills have gone up to $750,000. Her family is in dire need of help to cover the costs of Shannon's treatment.

And this, copied whole cloth from Porn Star Updates:
Taylor Summers, born Natel King, was a Canadian born porn star who mostly appeared in fetish porn shoots. In March of 2004 King’s nude body was found down a deep ravine in Whitemarsh, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia. She was found draped in black fabric secured with duct tape, bound with straps and a ball gag. Her body had multiple stab wounds to both her chest and hands indicating a struggle with her murderer.

Police quickly arrested and charged photographer Anthony Frederick, 47, and his assistant Jennifer Mitkus alleging that the murder occurred during a bondage shoot gone terribly wrong. Police speculated on the possibility that the murder might have been recorded and that King may have unknowingly been the subject of a snuff shoot.

In August of 2005, Frederick was found guilty and sentenced to 24-51 years in prison for the murder. At sentencing he issued a verbal apology to the King family during which King’s mother fled the courtroom in tears. Frederick claims the murder took place during an altercation over money immediately following the photo shoot although evidence suggests otherwise. King was 23 years old at the time of her death.
Again, I know nothing more than this, and I can only find one picture of her on the internet. Anyone curious about the title of this post, "Dead Porn Star #1", will find that there are many, many dead and (especially murdered) porn stars. You will see, as the days go by, that I am correct.

The Man Who Did Not Invent Las Vegas.

2008-02-28T10:38:00.000-06:00

Bugsy Siegel
February 28, 1906 – June 20, 1947
You remember the 1991 Warren Beatty film Bugsy, right? Beatty, as Siegel, is driving through the desert with Annette Bening and Harvey Keitel in the 1940s when he has to take a leak. While leaking, Siegel decides to build a great expansive casino on that very spot. He draws up plans and builds the Flamingo, thereby inventing Las Vegas as we know it.

And that's correct...except the part that's utter crap.

Las Vegas was incorporated as a city in 1905, as you may be aware, and gambling was legalized long before Bugsy came to town. In fact, there were already casinos, mostly downtown on Fremont Street. The El Cortez was already there, as were the Golden Nugget, the Sal Sagev (now the Golden Gate), El Rancho Vegas, and the Last Frontier. In fact, the Flamingo was already there, though only partially constructed, when Siegel took over on behalf of his "business associates" in the Chicago Outfit.

Siegel and his associates had already made some money by buying the El Cortez for $600,000 and selling it for a $166,000 profit. This is not mentioned in the film...which, while a decent flick, is filled with lies.

How Siegel convinced Hollywood Reporter owner Billy Wilkerson (who was building the Flamingo) to let him take over isn't quite clear. The story is that the cost of building the hotel was getting out of control and Wilkerson was strapped for cash. But maybe, just maybe, Wilkerson also liked the idea having all his blood stay inside his body. I'm just sayin'.

But it is known that Siegel caused cost overruns on the Flamingo and it made the mob nervous. By the time it finally opened it cost several million dollars more than projected and, while a financial success, it was suspected that Bugsy and his girlfriend Virginia Hill were skimming money. Siegel was shot to death at Virginia's home in Los Angeles on June 20, 1947. She wasn't home. She later fled to Austria where she committed suicide in 1966. The end of the film Bugsy indicates that she returned the money she and Siegel skimmed, but this can't be proven and the mob doesn't give receipts.

The final shot of the film Bugsy shows footage of 1991-era Las Vegas and a note about how much money is spent there today as a result of "Bugsy Siegel's dream". I won't argue that Bugsy contributed to the founding of Las Vegas as we know it, but he invented nothing. The mob was already in Vegas, and I believe that it still would have all happened without him.

Bugsy Siegel was nothing more than a punk and a killer, his contributions to Las Vegas have been vastly overrated, and he dressed like a clown. The end.

Death, 2...Blondes with Giant Breasts, 0.

2008-02-27T02:00:00.000-06:00

Angela Aames
Feb. 27, 1956 - Nov. 27, 1988
If you know me, and by now you surely do, then you know what I'm all about. Hell, the very first post in this blog was all about my perfect woman...Anna Nicole Smith. The blonder the bimbo and the bigger the boobs, the more willing I am to fall for her. And that's as it should be. God made beautiful women for us to stare at...and as long as they're showing it off, I'm there to watch. You're welcome.

And such is the case with Angela Aames. You'd have to be a pretty big b-movie nerd to have even heard of her, much less to have followed her career. Well, turns out I have, and I am. Born in South Dakota in 1956, Angela Aames came to Hollywood in the 1970s and began to appear in cheap b-movies. Being blonde and having large natural breasts was a bonus, of course...but in fact she was a gifted comedic actress. She trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and Harvey Lembeck's Comedy Workshop before landing (largely naked) roles in the movies Fairy Tales and H.O.T.S.. It might not surprise you to know that I've tracked these down and have owned copies for years.

She later got more substantial roles in The Lost Empire and Bachelor Party and appeared on Night Court several times before landing a recurring role in The Dom DeLuise Show.

But as it sometimes goes with these things she was found dead at a friend's home on Nov. 27, 1988 from what the coroner would later determine to be a deterioration of the heart muscle, probably caused by a virus. She was beautiful and had a promising career and it's unfortunate that she died at the age of 32.

But, on the other hand, at least Phil Spector didn't kill her.

Up Front There Oughta Be a Man in Black.

2008-02-26T02:00:00.000-06:00

Johnny Cash
Feb. 26, 1922 - Sep. 12, 2003
As little as I know about Johnny Cash, I can honestly tell you that he had a way of taking a song and making it his own. The finest example of this is his cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt", recorded late in his career. He took a good song and made it great....truly great. Johnny Cash, who was born on this day in 1922, had a long career in country music. Having been born and raised in Texas, I was obliged to listen to him on virtually a daily basis. It's very much in the same way that a Canadian is forced to listen to Rush, or a person from Alabama gets constant and repeated exposure to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Having heard him so much I am quite familiar with his work, even though I have never been a country music "fan" per se. I like some of his songs, sure, and he had a great (especially speaking) voice, but he never really was my thing. I did enjoy his work with Highwayman, though (the 1985 "supergroup" with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson).

Johnny's wife, June Carter Cash, died from complications during heart valve surgery in May of 2003, and Johnny died from diabetes and other health issues on September 12, 2003. His home was purchased by Bee Gees vocalist Barry Gibb in 2006 but was destroyed by fire before he and his wife could move into it.

Three things you did not know about Johnny Cash:

1) Wrote a novel in 1986 called Man in White, about the Apostle Paul.
2) Narrated an audio book, Johnny Cash Reads The Complete New Testament, in 1990.
3) In 1991, sang vocals on a cover of his song "The Man in Black" for a Christian punk band called One Bad Pig.

Ya Doesn't Have to Call Me Johnson.

2008-02-25T02:00:00.000-06:00

Catching up from yesterday's day off...

Michael Johnson
1939 - Feb. 24, 2001

Michael Johnson
1939 - Feb. 24, 2001
What are the odds? I mean, really. "Michael Johnson" is one of the more popular names in the internet movie database, apparently. And an actor named Michael Johnson, who was born in 1939, died on this day in 2001.

No, wait...make that two.

Two actors named Michael Johnson (with completely different IMDB resumes and lists of credits) died on this day, the same day, in 2001. And both were born in 1939, at an unknown date. One (Michael Johnson 1) was a British actor who appeared in and the other (Michael Johnson 2) was an actor who appeared in bit parts in E.R. and Walker, Texas Ranger. Are they the same person? Not according to the Internet Movie Database, they're not. It's bizarre, since MJ1's credits end in 1984, and MJ2's credits pick up in 1985. They carry on until his last appearance in 2000. I suspect that they're the same person...but it doesn't appear so to the IMDB, which is considered to be dang near infallible on such matters.

It's weird, I tell you.

James Coco
Mar. 21, 1930 - Feb. 25, 1987
James Coco was a Broadway and movie actor who was known for being overweight and prematurely bald. This lent him to a lot of comedic roles, and the Neil Simon play Last of the Red Hot Lovers was written specifically for him. He went on to win a Tony award for that role. He also appeared in the Neil Simon films Murder By Death, The Cheap Detective, and Only When I Laugh (for which he was nominated for an Oscar). In the last few years of his life, Coco took to dieting, and he lost an incredible amount of weight. He wrote a diet cookbook and had a recurring role on Who's the Boss?. It is my memory that Coco then put a lot of the weight back on, and he suddenly died of a heart attack at age 56. Bummer. He was a really funny guy.

Darren McGavin
May 7, 1922 - Feb. 25, 2006
Darren McGavin was a great actor with a long list of credits, but is best remembered for two roles: newspaper reporter Karl Kolchak in the 1970s horror TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker and the father in the 1983 classic A Christmas Story. It all really depends on where you're from, and how old you are. It's blasphemy to members of my generation, but I never cared for A Christmas Story. I was, however, crazy about The Night Stalker, a mediocre and short-lived TV series based on a fantastic 1971 TV movie. If you've never seen it, it concerns a reporter on the trail of a vampire in Las Vegas. It is notable for being the highest rated TV movie of its time. The series that followed broke ground that made series like The X-Files possible, and McGavin himself later guest-starred in a memorable episode of that show. Died of natural causes at a fairly old age.

Death Takes a Holiday!

2008-02-24T02:00:00.000-06:00

Back tomorrow!

Shakespeare? More Like Fakespeare!

2008-02-23T02:00:00.000-06:00

Christopher Marlowe
Feb. 23, 1564 - May 30, 1593

Christopher Marlowe was a prolific English playwright who died in a bar fight at the age of 29. He is little remembered when you compare him to his more famous contemporary, William Shakespeare. So why bother remembering him at all?

That's because he was Shakespeare. Maybe.

More than a few scholars believe that it was Marlowe wrote most, if not all, of Shakespeare's plays. He was a marked man in a lot of trouble with the law for his writings and it's believed that he faked his death and continued to write plays, but recruited an uneducated actor to claim he wrote them.

There's actually a pretty strong case to be made that Marlowe faked his own death. The first Shakespeare plays began to suddenly appear only weeks after Marlowe's funeral, there was a great similarity in the writing styles, and then there's the matter of average word size. Both Shakespeare and Marlowe had an average word size of 4.2 letters, and many scholars point toward this as the best proof that both writers were the same individual.

But again, and this can not be stressed strongly enough: Shakespeare had absolutely no education. In no way could he have had the understanding of history and the monarchy that he did. He seems to have appeared from nowhere and been instantly possessed by the spirit of Marlowe, with all of his writing abilities and knowledge. This is why Queen Elizabeth, during the Essex Rebellion, suggested that Marlowe had been the author of Richard II.

Sadly, as with JFK and the Loch Ness Monster, no one will ever know for sure. The only thing that can be said is that it defies common sense that a poor, unschooled actor would suddenly gain the ability to become the most famous playwright in the history of the world. It's as if Carrot Top suddenly won Best Actor at the Academy Awards...not impossible, mind you, but highly unlikely.

I'm just sayin'.

The Magic Voice and the Golden Harp.

2008-02-22T02:00:00.000-06:00

Alexander Scourby
Nov. 13, 1913 - Feb. 22, 1985

Again, I must stress that if you do only one thing and do it better than everyone else, you'll be famous. This is a philosophy I stole directly from Col. Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, but I must add that he is dead and cannot, therefore, sue my ass.

One man who did sue and win from beyond the grave was Alexander Scourby.

Now, Scourby was an actor with an incredible voice, and is credited on the Internet Movie Database with having appeared in at 78 least projects. But none of these are what made him famous, nor was his abundant stage work (he appeared in at least four productions of Hamlet and played a different role in each). No, Alexander Scourby made his name by reading The Bible. The whole Bible, front to back.

He recorded the entire King James Bible in from 1941-44 for the American Foundation for the Blind, and these recordings became bestsellers when released to the general public as The Talking Bible in 1966. You might remember we used to listen to these things on vinyl discs called "records", and the entire set contained 169 of these funny round objects and ran 84.5 hours. It is now part of the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry.

Scourby re-recorded the entire Bible again in 1972-74 for the Episcopal Radio and TV Foundation. He agreed to a reduced fee if proceeds from the sales were to go to non-profit purposes, but filed a lawsuit when tapes were released commercially as the "Authorized Alexander Scourby's Latest Narration". This suit raged on for years, and Scourby died before it could be resolved in 1990. The verdict handed the rights to the 1970s recording to the deceased Scourby and drove the Episcopal Radio and TV Foundation out of business.

While Alexander Scourby is known to have read the entire Bible at least twice, he didn't seem to have any particular religious affiliation.

Bah, Godless Hollywood types!

God's Own Shock Jock.

2008-02-21T04:13:00.000-06:00

Dr. Gene Scott
Aug. 14, 1929 - Feb. 21, 2005

I was probably in my early-mid 20s when I experienced this, so it had to be the early 1990s, late at night, on some cable channel that probably doesn't even exist anymore. There was this old guy sitting in a chair, screaming at viewers to send him money. Then suddenly there would be videotape of some horses. And this videotape would go on and on, and the old guy would come on again and scream some more. Then the horses again. And it seemed to go on for hours.

This was Dr. Gene Scott, who died from a stroke three years ago today.

It's amazing to watch someone who is the best at what they do. It doesn't even matter what they're doing...it's just incredible to watch them work. This was the thing about Gene Scott. Some called him a con artist, but if he was, he was a very good con artist, and that makes all the difference.

When he wasn't ranting about Atlantis, government conspiracies, or UFOs, Gene Scott was preaching the Bible, often from the original Greek texts. He would sit and take apart every symbol, every sentence, every paragraph, everything. He knew it back and forth, and would use chalkboards and dry eraser boards to make his points.

He was married three times, the last time to Melissa Pastore, previously known as porn actress and producer Barbie Bridges. She studied with Scott for years and upon his death took over his church and currently appears on TV doing lectures in front of dry eraser boards. She does as he did, translating the Bible in fifty different ways that would have made him proud. Turns out she's a natural at this. Go figure.

You can still see and hear Gene Scott's message on the internet. Thousands of hours of his teachings and rantings are still out there, so it's like he never really left us. It's reassuring...because in the age of videotape, the internet, and YouTube, nothing is truly lost any more. And this is important, because future generations need Dr. Gene Scott...just as they need living legends such as Ron Jeremy, Jerry Springer, and Larry King. American masters, each and every one.

Because, as I said, and as Gene Scott's life proved...it's not so much what you do, as long as you do it well.

It Never Got Weird Enough.

2008-02-20T02:39:00.000-06:00

Hunter S. Thompson
July 18, 1937 - Feb. 20, 2005

In this entry, I'll rely on Wikipedia a bit more than usual. I think that's because the subject at hand, Hunter S. Thompson, is at best an enigma. He was at once a public celebrity and a recluse. It was as if he had the ability to vanish at will and reappear only when he felt like it, to perhaps write a column or story.

Hunter S. Thompson was a great writer. His writing was powerful, truthful, and fearless. He was also an anti-social, paranoid, drug-taking, unpredictable loose cannon. But perhaps that came with the territory when you wholly and completely invented a style of journalism and influenced generations of budding writers.

A long time before I really knew anything about Hunter Thompson, I liked him. I liked the idea of him, even before I ever read a word he wrote. Traveling around, getting into adventures, pissing people off, and then writing about it...that's the Real American Dream. And you never even really knew if what you were reading actually happened, or he just made it up in his head. It didn't matter, because it still made the point. I wish I had gotten into his work when I was a teen, back when I was reading J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut, because it would have made even more of an impression on me.

If you believe Hunter Thompson's Wikipedia entry, he killed himself three years ago today. Or maybe he didn't.

Thompson died at his self-described "fortified compound" known as "Owl Farm" in Woody Creek, Colorado, at 5:42 p.m. on February 20, 2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Thompson's son (Juan), daughter-in-law (Jennifer Winkel Thompson) and grandson (Will Thompson) were visiting for the weekend at the time of his suicide. Will and Jennifer were in the adjacent room when they heard the gunshot. Mistaking the shot for the sound of a book falling, they continued with their activities for a few minutes before checking on him. Thompson was sitting at his typewriter with the word "counselor" written in the center of the page.

Paul William Roberts in his Globe and Mail article of Saturday, February 26, 2005 wrote the following:

Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did. He'd been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: "They're gonna make it look like suicide," he said. "I know how these bastards think . . ."

They reported to the press that they do not believe his suicide was out of desperation, but was a well-thought out act resulting from Thompson's many painful medical conditions. Thompson's wife, Anita, who was at a gym at the time of her husband's death, was on the phone with him when he ended his life.

What family and police describe as a suicide note was delivered to his wife four days before his death and later published by Rolling Stone Magazine. Entitled "Football Season Is Over",it read:

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt"

Artist and friend Ralph Steadman wrote:

"...He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment. I don't know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable. I think that the truth of what rings through all his writing is that he meant what he said. If that is entertainment to you, well, that's OK. If you think that it enlightened you, well, that's even better. If you wonder if he's gone to Heaven or Hell — rest assured he will check out them both, find out which one Richard Milhous Nixon went to — and go there. He could never stand being bored. But there must be Football too — and Peacocks..."

On August 20, 2005, in a private ceremony, Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot tower of his own design (in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button) to the tune of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", known to be the song most respected by the late writer. Red, white, blue, and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. As the city of Aspen would not allow the cannon to remain for more than a month, the cannon has been dismantled and put into storage until a suitable permanent location can be found. According to widow Anita Thompson, the actor Johnny Depp, a close friend of Thompson (and portrayer of Raoul Duke, Thompson's fictional alter ego, in the movie adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), financed the funeral. Depp told the Associated Press, "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out."

Other famous attendees at the funeral included U.S. Senator John Kerry and former U.S. Senator George McGovern; 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley; actors Bill Murray (who portrayed Hunter S. Thompson in the movie Where the Buffalo Roam), Sean Penn, and Josh Hartnett; singers Lyle Lovett and John Oates, the poet Trip Lucid; and numerous other friends. An estimated 280 people attended the funeral.

Sorry. Borrowed heavily from Wikipedia there. It's good to have a free source of semi-reliable information available when words escape you.

The best words to describe him come from Thompson himself, taken his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"Too weird to live, too rare to die."

Too Tough to Die.

2008-02-19T02:00:00.000-06:00

Lee Marvin
Feb. 19, 1924 - Aug. 29, 1987

Lee Marvin was tough. He ate nails for breakfast, and spit thumbtacks. He had a head full of hate and a heart full of snakes and he once shot a man just for snoring. Something like that.

Or, perhaps not.

But he was one of Hollywood's toughest tough guys, and he did serve as a sniper in World War II in the 4th Marine Division. He was wounded in the Battle of Saipan, and most of his platoon was killed in the battle. He was awarded the Purple Heart and given a medical discharge. Marvin turned to acting and began a career playing tough guy roles, and graduated to leading man status. Ultimately he won the 1965 Academy Award for Best Actor for Cat Ballou and had a hit song ("Wandrin' Star" from 1969's Paint Your Wagon).

Like Oliver Reed, he also turned down the role of Quint in Jaws, but later apparently regretted it. But consider this: Robert Shaw, who took the role, died of a heart attack. Oliver Reed died of a heart attack. And Lee Marvin died of a heart attack. Jaws kills.

Though he never intended to, Lee Marvin made a lasting contribution to the American legal system. Ever hear of "palimony"? That was his baby. From the web site of the California Family Law Institute:

"The first palimony suit was brought by a girlfriend of the actor Lee Marvin, Michelle Triola, back in 1977. The lawsuit stated that Lee Marvin had promised to support Michelle Triola for the rest of her life. Then she alledged that she had given up a promising singing and acting career to be Lee Marvin's constant companion, traveling partner, and to assist him. Lee Marvin was married to Mrs. Lee Marvin at the time. The suit went to trial. It established the principal that "live-in-lovers" can sue on supposed oral contracts also called "pillow-talk" contracts. Ms. Triola never received a single dollar from Lee Marvin. She was not able to establish all the requisite requirements. On appellant remand The California Supreme Court sent it back to the Trial Tourt. The trial court then attempted to give Ms. Triola $150,000 in rehabilitation money. That too went to the California Supreme Court. The California Supreme Court ruled that no rehabilitation could be ordered."

You see? You learn something new every day. Well, I learn something new every day. That's because not only am I a complete idiot, I forget everything I know and have to re-learn it the next day. But I do know not to promise to support some wench for the rest of her life...and I can circumvent any payments to said wench by having absolutely no money whatsoever. Thanks, Lee Marvin!

The Man With the Flanders Moustache.

2008-02-18T04:06:00.000-06:00

Dale Earnhardt
April 29, 1951 – February 18, 2001

The night of February 18, 2001, I finished up my fast-food job and walked into a Rainbow Foods store in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I was confronted by a life-size cardboard display of a smiling man with a cookie. That cookie was an Oreo, and that man was NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, who had died only hours before in a crash at that afternoon's Daytona 500. I thought it odd, that the display was still standing...and I wondered how long it would continue to do so.

If I had been in a grocery store in Alabama, the Oreo cookie display might have been covered by flowers and cards, or it might have been removed completely by weeping fans. As it was, I was in a midwest state that cared not for racing...and yet, my crazy assistant manager had made a note in the daily sales log that went (and I'm paraphrasing, but she was just nutty enough to say this word-for-word):

"Sales slow today because of crash of Dale Earnhardt. We are saddened by this, and we'll miss you, #3."

I never understood auto racing. I mean, good on you all for finding something you love and making a living at it, but I never thought that putting your foot on the accelerator and moving the steering wheel one direction or another was a sport. It never rang true, and it still doesn't.

Want to know if what you're doing is a sport? If a 90-year-old man can do it, it's not a sport. Get in car, turn key, push gas, turn wheel. Not a sport.

I'm just sayin'.

Deadpan Dan is a Dead Man, Man.

2008-02-17T05:15:00.000-06:00

Dan O'Herlihy
May 1, 1919 - Feb. 17, 2005
A great character actor who played many roles from the '40s right up until the late 1990s, and who died three years ago today. You don't know the name, not really, but you know the roles he played. He was Grig in The Last Starfighter, Andrew Packer in Twin Peaks, the evil Cochran in Halloween III, and "The Old Man" in RoboCop...in which he uttered the famous line (to Ronny Cox) "You're fired!"

"...Eight more days 'til Halloween, Silver Shamrock!"

Three Dead People...In 100 Words Or Less

2008-02-16T03:13:00.000-06:00

No real unifying theme today, except I'm talking about dead people. That count? These are short, short essays...each a very non-typical 100 words or less...

Sonny Bono
Feb. 16, 1935 – Jan. 5, 1998
It's amazing that Sonny Bono lived as long as he did, because he began his career working as a promotion man for insane music producer/murderer Phil Spector. He married and created the Frankenstein monster that is Cher and later went on to pursue a career in politics. He was introduced to Scientology by Mimi Rogers, the giant-breasted nutcase ex-wife of Tom Cruise. Sonny was killed in a so-called "skiing accident" on January 5, 1998. But just between me and you, it was either the Democrats or Scientologists that whacked him.

Margaux Hemingway
Feb. 16, 1954 – July 1, 1996
Margaux Hemingway was the granddaughter of famous novelist Ernest Hemingway and the sister of actress Mariel Hemingway. She was named after the wine her parents were drinking the night she was conceived. In honor of this she became an alcoholic, and when she finally quit drinking she changed the spelling of her name to Margot. Although a hot and fabulous babe, she had a long history of drug abuse and depression. This destroyed her modeling and acting careers and she committed suicide at the age of 42 by an overdose of phenobarbital. Bummer, huh?

Harry Goz
Feb. 16, 1932 – Sept. 6, 2003
Harry Goz was a respected Broadway theater actor and voice artist. This is all well and good, but everything pales in comparison to the fact that he was the voice of the Captain Murphy on the Cartoon Network's Sealab 2021. This was a great show...but after he died of cancer it lost its magic and was quickly cancelled. His son Michael Goz did the voice of new Captain "Tornado" Shanks and replaced him on the show. They're available on DVD now, so you have no excuse.

One Out of Three Ain't Dead

2008-02-15T03:24:00.000-06:00

Cesar Romero
Feb. 15, 1907 – Jan. 1, 1994

Heath Ledger
Apr. 4, 1979 – Jan. 22, 2008

I must admit I didn't see the most recent Batman movie, Batman Begins, and I probably won't see this year's upcoming Batman The Dark Knight. While I did like Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, the awful sequels left me flat. Same with Superman, really. But that's not really the point.

The new Batman sequel caused a lot of buzz when Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger was cast as the Joker and then even more talk when he died suddenly last month, sparking rumors of a "Joker curse". Well let's clear this up...there is no curse. Heath Ledger died of an overdose of prescription drugs (accidental or intentional) and Cesar Romero (the Joker from the 1960s Batman TV show who was born 101 years ago today) died because he was old. Period.

If there is a Joker curse, it hasn't affected Jack Nicholson, who played the part the 1989 version. He declined to take a salary but instead took a cut of the film's merchandising, thereby earning many times what he otherwise would have. Since then, he's continued to make (mostly unwatchable) movies, including 1994's Hoffa and 2007's The Bucket List. No one seems to remember that Nicholson publicly bemoaned the fact that no one had asked the 70-year-old actor to reprise his Joker role in the new film. He was the worst thing about the 1989 film because he was too old for the part then. Geez.

To make matters worse, Nicholson gave an interview after Ledger's death in which he said he knew that the young actor had a problem. I'm not sure how Jack knew this, unless he was stalking him. I wonder if he called the director and asked if they needed an actor to fill the role of the Joker. What? Too soon?

In all of this, Cesar Romero's frantic portrayal of the first Joker is largely ignored. He was a good actor and didn't seem too old to be the Joker, even though he was in his 60s when he got the part. He refused to shave his moustache for the role, so if you look closely it's just covered by white makeup. And, not that it makes any difference, but I only discovered that Cesar Romero was gay moments ago. Today I guess it wouldn't be as big of a deal, but under the old Hollywood system, being an open homosexual could ruin your career.

But the most interesting tidbit I learned about Cesar Romero is this, quoted directly from his Wikipedia entry:

Romero believed in 'liberation theology,' a political system combining Marxism with Christianity, which purports that, despite the fact that Karl Marx called religion 'the opiate of the masses,' religion and communism are still compatible. Romero was very Christian yet still believed in a utopian society whose belief is that Christ's kingdom would be very similar to Marx's envisionment of communism, and held to this belief until his death.

You learn the most interesting things about people from their Wikipedia entries. I can only wonder how much you see there is true. I'd check Jack Nicholson's entry, but I don't really care that much.

A Hoffa You Can't Refuse

2008-02-14T05:45:00.000-06:00

Jimmy Hoffa
Feb. 14, 1913 – July 30, 1975 (Allegedly)

You know, nothing says Valentine's Day like hired union goons. While some folks deliver candy and flowers on this day, still others deliver shakedowns and beatings. This is as it should be...circle of life and all that. Such a man was Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Look. I'll be honest with you. I know nothing about Jimmy Hoffa, and I really don't care. The fact that people have spent the last 33 years looking for him and haven't found a thing is the interesting part.

When Jimmy Hoffa got in that car on July 30, 1975, he probably didn't know that he would vanish off the face of the earth. If he had, then getting into that car would be a goofy thing to do. I mean, he saw The Godfather, right? That's what happened to Carlo. But of course Carlo had it coming. He infiltrated the family and got Sonny killed. Most people agree that Jimmy Hoffa also had it coming...he was most certainly not a shiny happy person. He was born 94 years ago on this very day...and, while no body has ever been found, we can all be relatively certain that he's not blowing out any candles today.

Hoffa worked his way to the top, became a major union leader, etc, etc. That part of the story isn't that fascinating to me. What is interesting is how he formed alliances with organized crime and had people beaten and (probably) knocked off. He had a personal war going with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and they apparently ended up at the same party at some point and had an arm-wrestling contest (Hoffa said he won).

I'm intrigued by Hoffa's probable connection to the JFK assassination. If you're familiar with Oliver Stone's movie JFK, you know that New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison dismissed the possibility of mob involvement in the assassination. This is because Garrison himself was a degenerate gambler and owed a lot of money to New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. Don't even get me started on the whole JFK thing...just know that Hoffa was mobbed up through his union connections and the mob and the anti-Castro Cubans all hated Kennedy. Hell, everybody hated Kennedy.

But I digress.

Point is, Hoffa pissed some people off and he got whacked. And nobody seems to know what happened, and there never was any blood or a body or anything. He disappeared real good. It's as if he was sucked up into an alien spacecraft...but if so, the anal probing was probably not that strange for a guy who did as much prison time as he did.

I think it's important that they never find out what happened to Hoffa. I think mysteries like this (and D.B. Cooper and Amelia Earhardt) will never and should never be solved. These mysteries are an important part of our national culture...so don't screw with it.

So happy birthday, Jimmy. And, to the rest of you, have a happy Valentine's Day. Or we'll have your legs broken.

The Oliver Reed Memorial Drinking Binge and Hurl-Off

2008-02-13T03:19:00.000-06:00

Oliver Reed
Feb. 13, 1937 – May 2,1999

"Richard Burton was hitting the bottle with Jimmy Hurt the night before his death. He knew it was going to kill him, but he did not stop. I don't have a drink problem. But if that was the case and doctors told me I would have to stop, I'd like to think I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave."

Before we begin, I'll state the obvious: Oliver Reed was not the greatest actor who ever lived. He wasn't bad, mind you, but I didn't particularly care for his acting. He was hammy and artsy and pretentious. But he had an incredible reputation for partying and drinking and fighting...and he literally drank himself to death. I respect this sort of dedication, and (in the absence of a deceased starlet with breasts larger than her head) this is enough for Oliver Reed to be today's Dead Person of the Day.

I think the reason I never cared for him goes back to my childhood. Back in the days when there were such things as "late movies" on regular (not cable) TV, I caught a showing of Burnt Offerings and the last five minutes or so horrified me. I can't think of Oliver Reed without thinking of Karen Black in the old lady getup pushing him out the window and him landing face-first on the car windshield. I was probably 9 or 10 when I caught this...and while it's not really a scary (or good) movie, it made an impression.

But that's neither here nor there. Him singing in Tommy was just as horrifying, if you ask me. No, the reason I've developed a new appreciation for Oliver Reed is due to the stories of his manliness.

He turned down roles in Jaws and The Sting that later went to Robert Shaw because he just didn't feel like going to California. He was stabbed in the neck while filming The Three Musketeers (1973) and nearly died. But didn't. He got in a bar fight in 1963 and it took 36 stitches to repair the damage to his face. Went on a drinking spree with Steve McQueen and threw up on him. Very nearly replaced Sean Connery as James Bond, but his out-of-control drinking and partying put an end to it (he would have been fantastic, by the way). A legendary adventure has Reed and 36 rugby players drinking 60 gallons of beer, 32 bottles of Scotch, 17 bottles of gin, four crates of wine and one bottle of Babycham -- all in one night.

But the greatest Oliver Reed story is the last one. On a lunch break during the filming of Gladiator in Malta in 1999, Reed drank three bottles of Captain Morgan's Jamaica rum, eight bottles of German beer, several doubles of Famous Grouse whiskey, and beat five much younger Royal Navy sailors at arm-wrestling. Then he promptly dropped dead of a heart attack on the spot, completely avoiding the bar tab (about $900 U.S.). Fantastic.

"I have two ambitions in life: one is to drink every pub dry, the other is to sleep with every woman on earth."

This is a life philosophy I can get in line with. God bless you, Oliver Reed.

Abe-solutely Fabulous!

2008-02-12T03:38:00.000-06:00

Abraham Lincoln
Feb. 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865

When you were a kid, you remember how you knew you were in real trouble? When you got called by your entire name. Right down to the stupid middle name and everything. You could go your entire life avoiding your middle name, never being called by it, and even denying you even had a middle name...but let them find out you smuggled the August 1981 issue of Playboy home, and man, you were done. Over. Sure, it was the same day your dog died, the same day that Harry Chapin died, but it was your thirteen-year-old ass that was on the line.

But I digress.

Point is, there are guys in history whose middle name you never would have known, except they really screwed up. Or rather, succeeded. Succeeded at being bad. Guys like Mark David Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Wilkes Booth...two names good, three names bad.

Make no mistake. Although he was a brilliant, brilliant man, Abraham Lincoln (born 199 years ago today) couldn't get elected to anything these days. No one with a beard can compete in politics anymore. And under that beard, Abe was so hideous that he would make Neil Young look like Hugh Grant. Radio hadn't even been invented yet and he already had a face for it. But he unified his country and his assassination on April 14, 1865 made him a martyr. John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln, actually did the President a favor and made him immortal.

Now don't get me wrong. By "immortal" I don't mean that Booth made Lincoln a Highlander. As you're well aware, there can be only one. Lincoln at best was considered a so-so President while alive...but death made him a figure of major historical importance. Nice going, John Wilkes Jerk.

The story should end there, and yet...I never did know when to let things be. The greatest thing that you never knew about Abe Lincoln isn't really about him at all. It's about his wife, the batshit crazy Mary Todd Lincoln. Her Wikipedia entry says nothing about the fact that she spent a lot of time being locked in the basement of the White House, bouncing off the walls. She would hear voices in public and hired maids to keep her company during the night because she was afraid of falling asleep. In 1875 she was committed by her son Robert to the laughing house. In many ways she was both the Marie Osmond and the Britney Spears of her time. True.

But, speaking of "Honest Abe" Lincoln, what exactly did he do to merit this nickname? Apparently honesty was a common trait amongst our founding fathers, with George Washington also being allegedly honest as the day is long. George W. was copping to cutting down cherry trees while Abe was nothing more than a promising strain of DNA (which certainly existed, though nobody knew about it yet). I have yet to find any reason to believe Lincoln was more honest than anyone else of his era. Besides, it was the middle of the Civil War, and people ate dirt all the time. What the hell did they have to be dishonest about?!? They were keeping it real like a mofo.

Here's an interesting thing to note, and this one actually has something to do with Abe Lincoln. Numerous gangstas and hip-hop types speak of "Dead Presidents" in reference to money. This is all well and fine, but just keep in mind that the only treasury notes currently in circulation are the $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills. The bills all do, in fact, feature so-called "Dead Presidents" except for the $100 bill, which features Ben Franklin. Franklin, while a drunken swinging hedonist and sexual deviant, was never President...so hip-hoppers and gang members surely don't use this note for financial transactions. Which sucks, because using $100 bills can sure make that million-dollar drug buy much lighter than if you're using $20s and $50s.

I'm just sayin', yo.

The Godfather of Hazzard County

2008-02-11T03:49:00.000-06:00

Sorrell Booke
Jan. 4, 1930 - Feb. 11, 1994

Okay. Let's see if I can get through this after two Seagram's Black Cherry Fizzes. I must admit the high blood pressure medicine has made me a lightweight when it comes to alcohol consumption, and I'd no doubt laugh out loud at even the Coy and Vance episodes of Dukes of Hazzard at this point.

So...Boss Hogg. Childhood friend and former moonshine-running associate of Uncle Jesse, now sworn to the destruction of all things Duke. From his headquarters at The Boar's Nest, he runs Hazzard county with an iron fist, or an iron boot...or an iron something. Point is, he's a badass. Big cigar, big white hat, owns a big gas-guzzling Cadillac convertible. He's a man of means, a man with a lot of juice.

So why didn't he just have them killed? It would just seem logical. He wanted the Dukes' land so bad, he could have them all shot and buried. No problem at all. What's up with that? Accidents happen. Farms burn. '69 Dodge Chargers explode. Happens every day. Sheriff Roscoe and Deputy Cletus could take care of the whole thing. Enos might not like it, but he would keep his mouth shut.

Why wasn't there ever an episode where Boss Hogg's voice came screaming from the office of the Boar's Nest, "I want Jesse Duke dead! I want his family dead! I want that farm burned to the ground!"?

But nobody died in Hazzard County, except of completely natural causes. I always wondered why, in the hundreds of accidents over all the seasons of the show, nobody was ever even injured. Never made sense to me...but then again, I was a kid.

Watching Dukes of Hazzard was a big part of my weekend ritual in the late '70s and early '80s. Along with The Muppet Show and The Incredible Hulk (in that order), it made my Friday night. Did I mention I was 10?

Sorrell Booke had a long, long career in television and the movies. He was best known as Boss Hogg, though...and in his later years he made the most of it. You might be surprised to know that he studied at Yale and Columbia University and mastered five languages. During the Korean War, he worked in counter-intelligence. Seriously.

The most shocking thing I learned about Boss Hogg was that he was not seriously overweight. He wore a fat suit that made him look larger.

Probably also slowed him down, or surely he would have caught those Duke boys. And surely would have had them killed, as they long deserved.

Dunking Baskets With the Lord

2008-02-10T05:45:00.000-06:00

Jim Varney
June 15, 1949 - Feb. 10, 2000

Buddy the Wonder Dog
1988? - Feb. 10, 1998

So, the questions have been asked:

How long can you do this?
When will you run out of interesting people and miss a day?
How many dead people are there, anyway?

Well, today was almost that day. The basic premise of Dead Person of the Day, if I haven't given it already, is to discuss a deceased person either on the date of their birth or their death. Or, in special cases make a mention of them if they just died a day or two before. Or, whenever I feel like it...something like that.

So, I looked at my secret reserve of celebrity death and birth dates, and the only two for February 10 that stood out were a dead actor and a dead dog. So I thought, why not give them both shouts-out?

I freely admit, Jim Varney's presence in all those Ernest movies and commercials was pretty annoying. Truth is, he was a trained Shakespearean actor and was pretty versatile. He just got stuck in the Ernest role and it's the only thing he's really remembered for. His most notable non-Ernest role was Jed Clampett in the awful and forgettable 1995 Beverly Hillbillies movie. If I am to believe what I read, he was also good friends with Robin Williams, but I don't hold this against him. A heavy smoker, he developed lung cancer and died at age 50. At the time of his death, he had began work on Ernest the Pirate, but it was shelved and never released. I don't really know how to feel about that. I mean, I'm sorry the guy died...but on the other hand, no Ernest movie. Ya know?

Another cancer victim was Buddy the Wonder Dog, star of 1997's Air Bud. This film was the heartwarming (or is that heartworming?) story of an abused dog who becomes a basketball star. Buddy had been spotted by producers on a David Letterman "Stupid Pet Tricks" segment dunking basketballs and a film was written for him. In fact, there have been at least six sequels made, with the dog learning a different sport in each of them. But of course Buddy got cancer and died at age 9 ten years ago today...so all those other dogs are impostors. Bitches.

So yeah. I don't really have a unifying theme here. I probably could find one if I wanted, like "cancer is bad", or something of that nature.

So, don't get cancer. Or you'll be dead, and some moron will write an idiotic blog post about you and put your picture next to a dog.

Hot Chicks Beat Rock'n'Roll Every Time

2008-02-09T02:21:00.000-06:00

Alberto Vargas
Feb. 9, 1896-Dec. 3, 1983

Bill Haley, most famous for the song "Rock Around the Clock", virtually invented rock'n'roll. In fact, he coined the word rock'n'roll. But even though he died on this date in 1981, this entry isn't about him. While rock'n'roll may be important, Dead Person of the Day is more about people who have had an impact on me personally. And if you know me, and know what I'm all about, then this is an obvious choice. So, no Bill Haley this time. No, in my opinion another figure looms larger, and the name of said figure is Alberto Vargas.

Who?

Let me explain.

I could just wholesale copy the Wikipedia entry for Alberto Vargas, but I don't see the point. The guy's been dead for nearly 25 years and most of you have never heard of him, but you know his work. Vargas did one thing only and he did it better than anyone else...he painted beautiful women. Thousands of 'em. Born in Peru on this day in 1896, he came to the United States in 1916 after studying art in Europe and worked for many Hollywood studios. His greatest fame came in the 1940s painting pin-ups for Esquire magazine. Many of these were adapted and put on the noses of American fighter aircraft in World War II.

But again, mostly he just drew hot busty perfect women.

I admit I didn't know that much about the guy either, and a lot of what I now know about him I just learned from the internet, but I've always been in awe of his art. And I owned a piece of Vargas art long before I ever heard of the guy. The cover of The Cars' album Candy-O.

I've never studied art, but I've studied artists. No one else could do what this guy did. Many artists during that era painted magazine pin-ups, but Vargas' work excelled and its impact on our national culture during World War II cannot be disputed. In a time before the internet, before even Playboy, those pinups in Esquire gave the boys over there something to dream about, something to want to come home for. After all, they were literally fighting for our freedom.

And without freedom, there would never have been rock'n'roll.

Right?

Holy Temple of the White Trash Goddess

2008-02-08T03:18:00.000-06:00

Anna Nicole Smith
November 28, 1967 – February 8, 2007

Ah, the sadness. It still hurts, baby.

I have an un-ironic and deep abiding love for trashy things. I love fermented wine coolers, I love cheap nudie horror flicks, and I love Anna Nicole Smith. And a year ago today she left us. She died as she lived...naked, in bed, drugged-out, and in a pool of her own vomit. I loved her. I really did.

I deliberately waited until this date to start Dead Person of the Day because I wanted my first entry to be meaningful to me, and this is one of the most important of all. Seriously. I know that my reputation as a sarcastic bastard might cause some doubt, but ya gotta believe me!

She started out as a Playboy Playmate and Guess Jeans model, but her greatest fame came as the living embodiment of the bleached-blonde trailer trash mega-skank that America loves so much. In her absence, Britney Spears has attempted to fill her shoes with her own brand of slutty redneck insanity, but it all seems so...hollow. You can show your cooch all you want, Britney. You can get locked up in the laughing house, have all sorts of wanton sex with members of the paparazzi, but you'll never do it with the sense of style that Anna would have.

And also, you'll never have the giant boobs. That's key.

Maybe I've had too much coffee. Maybe it's too late to really be writing these words, but I always had the dream of someday meeting Anna. I just knew that if we ever met in person, that we would be friends, that she might learn to love me as much as I loved her. And also that I could hit that a few times.

But that's neither here nor there. I'll always remember her from her great work in such films as the low-budget action/tit flicks To The Limit and Skyscraper and the weekly train wreck that was The Anna Nicole Show, not the sordid details of her death and the media circus that followed.

Marilyn Monroe was dead a good five years when I was born. Anna Nicole Smith was about a month older than me. For my generation, and for me personally, she was the ultimate woman...and when she was heavier, she was all the more so. I absolutely adored her. Really, honestly I did. I have a weakness for dumb blondes with huge cans, and there will never be another so dumb, with cans so huge. It's a damn shame.

The Bible says that God prepares mansions for his children in Heaven...and somewhere, there is a beautiful trailer park in the sky with streets of gold. There's a bleach-blonde angel hanging white robes on a clothes line up there, and someday I'd like to rent the lot right next to her.

I'm just sayin'.