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Naturalbl0g was b0rn in 2oo5 as an experiment to see if I can be funny once a day. All the work contained herein is copywritten, often by the entity from which I stole it.
I hope I'm not the one breaking the news to you (especially because I'm already joking about it), but actor Patrick Swayze is now a ghost. His death at 57 in Los Angeles came about a year after his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
Many will remember him as Dirty Dancing's Johnny Castle, "a sexy-yet-sensitive dance instructor from the wrong side of the tracks," as the LA Times puts it.
But me? I'll always remember him as this half-man, half-horse tattoo figure, on a field of rainbows.
I know that many of you are still waiting for my Bea Arthur obituary, but I'm just too torn up to write about it. In the meantime, I have this remembrance of Dom DeLuise, the larger-than-life actor, comedian and chef who died this week at age 75.
Perhaps not surprisingly, DeLuise died of high blood pressure and diabetes.
There are lots of reasons to love him, but mine will always be for his work in the Cannonball Run series of movies. These Burt Reynolds vehicles had great ensemble casts, but DeLuise's star was always seemed the biggest.
I'll give the final word to Gene Wilder, who wrote of DeLuise: "He was the funniest man, in person, that I've ever known."
I wrote a few months back that my favorite former first feline Sock the cat was near death, and it's with a heavy heart I tell you he passed away last week at age 20 (or maybe 19).
Socks won America's heart when freedom-hating liberal media types coaxed him out of the White House in order to take his picture, angering the President and first family.
According to this creepily detailed obituary, Socks fame spanned the globe after he was featured on a set of collectors’ stamps in the Central African Republic.
Buddy the Dog displaced Socks as the favorite pet in the White House, and upon the end of the Clinton Administration Socks went to live with former Clinton secretary Betty Currie in Maryland.
It's reported Currie will have him cremated. It's unclear if he has any survivors.
John Updike has died at age 76. No jokes, just a poem of his I like and excerpted here a few years back.
Sunday in Boston The fags and their gay dogs are patrolling the Garden; on Boylston the blacks, hollow-backed, demonstrate styles of meander in this hearttown theirs by default.
The winos on Commonwealth, wiser than wisdom, blink eyes pale as bottle bottoms; sun-pickled and lined fine as maps, their faces beam from within this particular nowhere.
Pistachio George sits high. July bed bloom. The Ritz's doorman sports his worn maroon. Above us like a nearer sky great Pei's glass sheet, cerulean, clasps clouds to its chest.
And, unapologetic in their pallor, girls in jigging halters and sordid shorts parade festive colorless flesh regathered from its Saturday spill, the bearded lover split.
Brick Boston, city of students and drunks! In Godless doggy righteousness we bask. The suburbs send us their stifling cars, and we in turn give back the hollow sound of bells.
The headline refers not to failed Republican presidential nominee John McCain, but the late star of the big and small screen Bernie Mac.
Bernie Mac died back in August, but he has a new film called "Soul Men" that comes out today.
I won't use this space to ponder how he was able to film this movie after his death. Instead, I will come clean about the role I played in his death.
Doctors say he died from a lung disease, but I still feel guilty. See, back in early August I wrote a piece for a humor newspaper about Bernie Mac, and the next day he was dead.
Since I can't kill him again, here's what I wrote:
Bailout for Bernie Mac Doubtful on Capitol Hill WASHINGTON -- The leadership of the House Financial Services Committee says it will reject a plan to amend a bailout plan for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to also include Bernie Mac.
A rider filed by U.S. Rep. Don Cazayoux, the Congressman from Louisiana's sixth district and a member of the committee, seeks to extend billions of dollars in new government credit to not only the struggling mortgage lenders but also the 50-year-old comedian and star of Fox Television's "The Bernie Mac Show" from 2001 to 2006.
"The federal government must recognize the important contributions these three have made to the U.S. economy over many decades," Cazayoux said. "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the combined $5 trillion in loans they hold and Bernie Mac for his hilarious work in House Party 3, Booty Call, and as Uncle Bernie eleven episodes of 'Moesha' in the late 1990s."
But the leader of the House committee, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), said it was doubtful Cazayoux's amendment would gain enough support to make it into the final bill.
Frank drew a contrast between the battering that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have taken in recent weeks on Wall Street and the work that Bernie Mac continues to find in Hollywood, including a recurring role as Frank Catton in the Ocean's series of heist movies, as well as two films in post-production that are due out this year and next.
"I would also point out that he's the winner of numerous NAACP Image Awards and that he's been nominated for two Golden Globes," Frank said. "This is not a man whose humor and acting skill have gone unrewarded by Americans."
Another critic of the plan is Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Martin told reporters yesterday that the Bush Administration will oppose the Mac bailout because of the comedian's sometimes controversial stand-up routines.
"Bernie Mac's repeated use of the n-word and sexual references make him an inappropriate recipient of federal aid," Martin said. "Not to mention his truly offensive performance in Mr. 3000."
He was also the inspiration for the Monopoly Man. Laurence Urdang, who worked on more than 100 dictionaires and reference books, died of congestive heart failure at age 81 earlier this month. I hope that by paying tribute to him here, lexicographers will include some of my new words in their upcoming dictionaries.
The irony is strong with this one. Dave Freeman, the 47-year-old co-author of "100 Things to Do Before You Die," has died. Friends say he only finished about half the things on his list. His collaborator on the book Neil Teplica said, "He didn't have enough days, but he lived them like he should have."
Picture it: Brighton, 2008. A plaintive wail rises up to the heavens from my home after I read that Estelle Getty, who played the equally lovable and irascible Sophia Petrillo on The Golden Girls, has died.
"Why God -- why didn't you take Bea Arthur instead?!?!"
Estelle Getty was 84, which means she was only in her 60s when she was on the Golden Girls back some 20 years ago. The AP obituary says she failed her first two auditions because she didn't look old enough. On the third audition she told a makeup artist, "To you this is just a job. To me it's my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80."
She had suffered from advanced dementia before she died early yesterday at Shady Pines. In the west wing.
Falafel flap as silly as it is delicious. Congressional Quarterly says the FBI tracked terror activity in San Francisco by looking at sales of falafel. The thinking went that the more falafel, the more likelihood of a terror attack. An FBI spokesman says it's "too ridiculous to be true." Too ridiculous? That from the same government that came up with an exploding cigar to kill Fidel Castro and a bomb to make enemy soldiers gay.
This is the stuff nightmares are made of. A forensic artist is credited with helping identify a girl whose body was found in Texas. She drew what she thought the girl would've looked like alive. News reports call her sketch precise, but I have to say the drawing looks more like Chucky than the victim.
Robert Cade eaten by alligator. The man who founded Gatorade has died. I would recap how Gatorade came to be famous, but Keith Jackson does it better:
I'm sorry if I'm the first to tell you that Robert Goulet has died at age 73 in a tragic wakeboarding accident. One fact in that sentence is wrong. I'll let you pick.
I've said in this space before how much I like Goulet, not only for his Red Sox fandom (he sang the national anthem on opening day this year) but for this hilarious nut ad.
What's a shame is that my enduring memory of Robert Goulet isn't even of Robert Goulet, but of Will Ferrell making fun of Robert Goulet. For posterity's sake, I post it here.
Alex the Parrot, a smarty pants know-it-all bird who recognized shapes and colors, understood the concept of zero, and even made fun of bad grammar, has died, apparently of natural causes. He was 31.
Alex was considered the smartest parrot in the world, with the intellect of a five-year-old child, but the emotional development of a two-year-old, which would explain all the tantrums. The parrot once starred alongside Alan Alda on a PBS show. He used to admonish the scientists in his lab to "talk better."
Researcher Irene Pepperberg of Brandeis and Harvard Universities bought Alex in 1977, apparently unaware that she was purchasing the Einstein of birds. There is a creepy divergence in the reporting surrounding Alex's final conversation with Pepperberg.
The New York Times says:
As she put him into his cage for the night last Thursday, she recalled, Alex looked at her and said: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you.”
But the Boston Globe reports more ominously:
Pepperberg said she and Alex went through their good-night routine, in which she told him it was time to go in the cage and said: "You be good. I love you. I'll see you tomorrow."
To which Alex said, "You'llbe in tomorrow."
The emphasis is my own, but the point stands. Was the bird trying to tell Pepperberg he was dying?
Unsatisfied with the reporting, I contacted Pepperberg and she told me via email that Alex's chilling final words came in unrhymed iambs:
Ask for me tomorrow, and / you shall find me a grave man.
J/K. The bird did not quote from Romeo and Juliet, Act III, scene i.
Pepperberg's actual response was cryptic. Asked which version was true, she said "Alex said most of it...I told him I loved him, too..." I think she's covering for the dead bird. Fortunately, an eagle-eyed NaturalBlog coworker managed to find this video of Alex's final moments:
I was proud a few weeks back when I was dubbed a "Bold Explorer" by a beer focus group. I earned the appelation via my willingness to try new beers. That, and the fact that I will venture Indiana Jones-style for a good beer.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I probably owe a debt of thanks to Michael Jackson for ensuring people worldwide wouldn't be doomed to forever drink crappy beer.
Michael Jackson, not the singer, was a tireless beer critic, beer lecturer, beer author, and beer connoisseur, perhaps best known for his TV documentary series "The Beer Hunter." He died at age 65 at his home in West London, after a heart attack. While it's impossible to know for sure the reach of his influence, obituarists are crediting him with everything from starting the 1970's renaissance of interest in beer to being the English language's leading authority on beer.
Here's a funny line he wrote once:
But one glass of the Dublin stout and I would be transported from my desert island to a pub where the glistening black of the beer reflected the brass barrails, the polished mirrors and mahogany ... Two glasses and I would begin to enjoy my own company, three, and I would find myself as entertaining as Joyce, Wilde or O'Casey.
Next time I'm at my favorite bar, I'll have to pour out a $20 Belgian in Michael Jackson's memory. And after downing my own Belgian, maybe I'll find myself as entertaining as, say, Michael Jackson.
Harold Madison, Jr., the mostly benign homeless man known as "Mr. Butch," has died in a scooter accident. He was 56.
Friends and family say he was killed when the scooter he was driving hit a pole, which is strange because it seemed to me his preferred method of travel was a drunken stumble.
You could usually find Mr. Butchin Allston, at least when he wasn't in state custody. Mr. Butch fans of another generation remember him as the King of Kenmore Square, where he smoke, drank and played air guitar before cops hassled him so much he moved up Comm. Ave.
His iconic leather jacket is hanging in an Allston storefront. There's a memorial Monday night.
When I remember former Red Sox relief pitcher Rod Beck, I will remember the way his right (pitching) arm would swing lightly back and forth from his shoulder while he glared in to the catcher to get the sign.
I'm sorry to report this morning Don Herbert, the lovable grandfatherly figure better known to thousands of people in my generation and in others as Mr. Wizard, has died. He was killed in a tragic baking soda-volcano accident.
Just kidding. He died at age 89 in Los Angeles, after having cancer.
For some reason, I thought his only incarnation was on Nickelodeon in the 1980s, but he was apparently prolific before he went grey, with a show on NBC as early as 1951.
Though I was never once able to duplicate his amazing experiments, he did make me feel like junior scientist. I like to imagine that he is explaining to God right now why it's impossible for angels to walk atop the clouds.
Ernest Gallo, a winemaking entreprenuer known more for his business acumen than for his tasty table wines, was cut down in the prime of his life this week -- dead at age 97.
He had just begun to sip from the cup of life, which was not coincidentally filled with wine from a $4.99 bottle of delicious cabernet savignon.
In his honor, please enjoy this walk down memory lane, a totally non-cheesy ad for some blush chablis.
Of course it's not all plonk from the brothers Gallo. Through Ernest's strong-arm business tactics, his wine empire grew to encompass such legitimately good brands like the Frei Brothers and Louis M. Martini.
RIP, Ernest. If they bury you among your vines, may your nutrients find their way into my next glass of white zin.
A case study in America: The life of Anna Nicole Smith (born Vickie Lynn Hogan)
Where to begin when remembering a figure as larger than life as Anna Nicole Smith, who died yesterday in Florida. Do our emotions first lead us to 1993, when she was Hugh Hefner's hand-chosen successor to Marilyn Monroe in American soft-core pornography, or perhaps her 2004 drunken speech at the American Music Awards. What about her 1989 drunk driving arrest (right -- 5'9" with hair, 5'6" without), her totally natural weight loss in 2003, or her activist work with PETA (save the whales).
My favorite Anna Nicole Smith moment was not her reality TV show with that stupid little rat-dog (Sugar Pie was its name, after her favorite breakfast), but the day she entered the annals (yikes!) of U.S. history -- her appearance before the Supreme Court in the inheritance case of her late husband, billionaire J. Howard Marshall.
It's not common for women to outlive their husbands, especially when the husbands are 63 years their elder. Also when the woman met the man at a strip club and married him with the intention of sexing him to death. Don't take my word for it, a judge said so.
But I guess I'll remember Anna Nicole Smith for the one thing she did that I liked, which was to appear in the Coen brothers' 1994 classic The Hudsucker Proxy. So what if I don't remember her performance as "Za-Za" -- it's probably best that she be forgotten.
I hate to bear bad news, so I hope I'm not the first to tell you that Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin has died, when a barb from a stingray pierced his chest.
