Freedom

Happy Independence Day and God bless the USA!

Pattern Complete

Remember how the other day I speculated that another celebrity was about to meet his or her maker because Billy Mays (Oxyclean guy) and Fred Travalena (impersonator) had just passed away? Famous people always die in threes, you know. I gave it 2 weeks.

Well, it only took 2 days. Karl Malden just checked out and left for the Great Beyond.

Granted he had faded from the collective consciousness a bit; Internet Movie Database gives his last appearance as a one shot role on The West Wing in 2000. But at one time Mr. Malden was one of those versatile, stalwart actors that is always playing in something and everybody recognizes. Johnny Carson did imitations of him, for crying out loud!

I knew him best from Patton, where he played one of my favorite WWII generals, Omar Bradley. And we always used to watch The Streets of San Francisco back in the '70's, in which he starred along with a young whipper-snapper named Michael Douglas.

But the role he'll probably be remembered for long after all his films and TV shows are forgotten is as the guy on those American Express commercials barking, "Don't leave home without it!"

So long Mr. Malden. I hope you didn't forget your card.

"Much to Learn, You Still Have..."

Forced to fly off and save the Rebel Alliance before your trainng was complete? Afraid you haven't practiced enough to go up against the next Sith Lord?

Well fear not, young Padawan! With the new "Star Wars Force Trainer" you can practice your Jedi powers just like Luke did on Dagobah. Great for whiling away those long, lonely hours in an X-Wing fighter. And it only costs $120!

As Master Yoda says: "Buy or buy not -- there is no try!"

Monster Retirement

Have you ever noticed that when you're hiking through the Great American Northwest, you never run into Werewolves anymore? Nowadays, you run into Bigfoot instead. And that despite the fact that Werewolves used to be all the rage -- back in the middle ages, for instance. The only place you find them today is in those weird Twilight books.

Contrary to widespread opinion, this is not the result of an epic, decades-long struggle for territory between the Bigfoots and the Werewolves during the late 1800's. No, according to Professor Brian Regal of Kean University, it was none other than Charles Darwin himself that shot a metaphorical silver bullet into the wayward Werewolf's heart.

Dr. Regal's research indicates that, when Darwin postulated his famous theory of a connection between man and ape in 1859, it sounded the deathknell for, among other things, a connection between man and wolf. From that point onwards, encounters in the dark woods with Werewolves petered out, to be replaced by confrontations with Sasquatch.

Another Pattern Forming...?

I'm not trying to be morbid and mean no disrespect to the dead, but... First there's Billy Mays the Oxyclean guy, then Fred Travalena the Las Vegas impressionist...

Ok, admittedly neither was of Michael Jackson/Farrah Fawcett-type eminence, but both were accomplished in their own right. Could there possibly be (here comes the morbid part) a third untimely but prominent end lurking in the mists ahead?

Then again, if you stretch the 2-week window between passings that I postulated in the last post, the first famous death would have been David Carradine. With Mr. Travalena's sad end today, we would now have 2 groups of 3 departures.

Cue the spooky music...

Patterns

Yesterday, after hearing Farrah Fawcett died, we were sitting around our cubicle pod at work talking about her -- mainly how I'd never owned one of her posters when I was a kid. They seemed to think this odd. Hey, everybody didn't own her poster, you know. Besides, out of the 3 Angels I was more partial to Kate Jackson ("The Smart One").

"Ed McMahon and now Farrah," somebody eventually said. "I wonder who the third one will be. Celebrities always die in threes, you know." We all nodded portentously.

A few hours later, out of a clear blue sky, Michael Jackson was gone. Very mysterious. I'm not the only one to notice this either: even the Wall Street Journal brought it up on their Speakeasy blog.

That there was something peculiar about celebrity deaths first struck me when I was a kid. George Sanders (a famous actor that I mainly knew at the time from his compelling portrayal of Mr. Freeze on the Batman TV show), Hoss Cartright from Bonanza (aka Dan Blocker), and J. Edgar Hoover all died between April 25th and May 13th, 1972.

Then, later that year, Charles Atlas (who advertized in the backs of all the comic books at that time, offering to turn 97-pound weaklings into powerful he-men), Harry Truman and the great Roberto Clemente departed for the next life between December 24th and 31st.

Hmmmm... I thought.

Finally, as if to make sure I got the point, LBJ (the President through the bulk of my childhood), Edward G. Robinson, and Wally Cox (the voice of Underdog! Also Mr. Peepers.) checked out between January 22 and February 15, 1973.

Since then, whenever a celebrity passes on (and admitedly, my criteria for a "celebrity" is a.) I know who they are, and b.) I think they're famous) I look for the other 2 -- and most of the time I'll find them, usually falling within about 2 weeks of each other. It can be a bit problematic when 4 people seem to be dying together, as in January 2008 when Edmund Hillary (conquored Mt. Everest), Bobby Fischer (greatest chess player of all time), Suzanne Pleshette (cool actress), and Heath Ledger left us. But to be honest, Heath Ledger never appeared on my radar screen until he died, so that was still 3.

Spoil sport skeptics, like this guy, want this all to be just an illusion, of course. And I'm aware that, with tons of people dying everyday and the human mind's natural tendency to look for patterns, you're going to get groups of 3 famous people heading for the great beyond together every so often.

But still... it does seem to happen rather often.

Yoo-Hoo Update

To recapitulate: first, wandering Governor Sanford had to do some writing, then he was out hiking, then he took a spontaneous trip to Argentina, and now the story is he was having a torrid affair with a mysterious Argentinian woman -- which, come to think of it, doesn't sound that much more credible than the other stories! But it's apparently the true one (unless it's just a cover for the real story: that he was actually with a saucy, mysterious Argentinian burro named Carmelita!).

I guess it's better to find out a fellow's unglued before he ends up in the Oval Office with the nuclear codes. Thank goodness all of our presidential candidates are all throroughly vetted and have no odd quirks or secret obsessions that might leap out and suprise us during a moment of crisis.

Right? We do do that, right?

"Baby, Remember My Name..."

Why is Paris Hilton famous? Because we need something to talk about.

Or so says this scientific study, which tested the idea using baseball players. Sometimes they're popular for no demonstrable reason, too.



Photo courtesy of Celebboy

RIP Ed McMahon & The Art of the Sidekick

I've written about the deaths of Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas here and (briefly, on another blog) Johnny Carson. They were the big three talk show hosts when I was growing up and got all the attention. Today most hosts go solo -- Jimmy Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, for instance. But Carson, Douglas, and Griffin were all expected to have sidekicks, an expectation each of them handled differently.

Mike Douglas, who had his show earlier, was the most inventive: He had guest-co-hosts, a different one every week. Probably the most famous instance of this was when John Lennon and Yoko Ono of all people spent a week with him. Mike Douglas was pretty much a straight arrow while John and Yoko were, well, radicals. It made for a little TV cult classic that you can still find on DVD to this day.

Merv Griffin (yes, the Wheel of Fortune inventor Merv Griffin) went the more traditional route and hired Arthur Treacher as his sidekick. Mr. Treacher was a British actor who owned a chain of fish 'n chips restaurants and played a bobby in Mary Poppins. He added a touch of class to the show but CBS dumped him in 1970 because he was "too old."

And then there was Ed McMahon who died this morning. As Johnny Carson's sidekick he basically laughed at the jokes and sold Alpo, but he did it so well (which had something to do, no doubt, with the chemistry between him and Carson) that he transformed himself into an institution. After a while we'd do pretty much anything he said just because he was Ed.

We'd take his beer recommendations, watch him on Star Search, and trust his assurances that American Family Sweepstakes really was giving out all that money. Most recently, some of us (not me) were willing to mail our unwanted gold to total strangers and expect them to send us back a fair price, all because Ed -- backed up by MC Hammer -- said so.

Ed McMahon was 86 years old.