I wonder how Danny Kaye is doing.

I'm frightened to google Dick Van Dyke

Newhart was recently in The Big Bang Theory. His timing is still masterful.

I was surprised to see Merle Haggard was still alive...he performed the other night at The Grammys.

The New York Times gave Pete Seeger 4 pieces and nearly three full pages of coverage yesterday; must have been 10,000 words. Was really surprising to me given the bourgeoisie lifestyle-brandery of the paper's readership, I don't think any lefties have read the Times in decades. Anyway, pretty tight imo.

A lot of former lefties are now comfortably bourgeois suburbanites.

Well I know that of course, but I still wouldn't expect them to want to read all that. Especially the political stuff. Particularly on Wednesday, when they publish the dining section. You don't want to bury that recipe for Superbowl clam dip or Asimov's fresh look at Savennières too far. My guess is the obit was written 40 years ago and they didn't bother to revise.

Sometimes a Seeger is only a Seeger.

Peter Seeger was a piece of human garbage*. He should have been beaten to death with a baseball bat and his body burned in a trash bin. He was worse than Nixon.


*He did write a few great songs.

Peter Seeger was a vile piece of human garbage*. He should have been beaten to death with a baseball bat and his body burned in a trash bin. He was worse than Nixon.


*He did write a few great songs.

He's no Bob Newhart, that's for damn sure.

wait...why was Pete Seeger a piece of garbage??

Not that I know that much about Seeger or Zeno, but I would guess that it's because, despite a lifetime personally and professionally dedicated to peace and love and helping the disadvantaged, he was a commie and went to Hanoi during the war.

I looked up this Nixon character to see what the deal was there too. Tons of them on Wikipedia, but the top result was Richard? If so, it looks like he died almost 20 years ago. He also visited Hanoi apparently, so that may be the connection there idk.

I blame Kissinger for Nixon going soft on communism and visiting the ChiComs.

1951 Nixon woulda never done that.

And without Nixon doing that, it's quite possible China never would've been opened and that country of over a billion people would now be as radicalized and nutty as North Korea.

Still, a tip of the cap to Kissinger who is still alive and kicking at the age of 142.

Only the good die young.

And speaking of people that should be dead but are not (a title for a great thread by the way); I include Barbara Streisand. That bitch should have been hack to pieces years ago and the bloody chunks tossed to the fishes. You would have to search pretty far into the underworld of human scum to meet her match.

Lauren Bacall is still alive. No wait, I think she just died*. She was great and she knew how to whistle.

No, no: she is still alive and whistling.

Why in the world are you spitting such invective at Seeger and Streisand?? I mean I don't really care for either, but I'm not wishing them ill, either.

Since you are a relative newcomer, I will fill you in. Since the early days of this website, Mason Malmuth has had a standing offer: the first poster who is wrong about everything gets a signed first edition of Blackjack Essays. The takeaway here is that you should never trust a poster with a pre-2004 registration date.

*Dom, I could just be having some fun you know.

Well ok then

There was a nice obit for Philip Hoffman in the Times yesterday. Every time I see one for somebody who passes young or unexpectedly I realize that the obit staff is not determining who gets included at the time of death, but rather they write them in advance, update the files as needed, and just add a few final things before publication. Which means that there is some ongoing process by which the staff decides who is important enough to bother writing up. This is fascinating to me. I wonder what the process is like, and what kind of criteria there is for inclusion. Is there some equivalent to a style guide for this decision? What people are just shy of being important enough to merit their own file? And does anyone work their way off that list over time and have their obit tossed out?

lol...While I was in college I badgered the editor of a local paper to let me write some sports coverage articles on out school teams, as they didn't bother. Instead, he gave me a few obits to write of old, famous people. I was stunned they wrote obits before people had died. I wrote one for George Burns and one for James Cagney.

Then he let me write some sports ones.

Heller, Seeger, Hoffman. These things always happen in threes.