I actually never saw HUD, but I added it to Netflix - thanks!

Former Senator Ted Stevens died today in a plane crash outside Dillingham, Alaska, anyone have him?

In a related story, Sarah Palin won a local skeet shooting tournament.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Mitch Miller. He was 99.

Doesn't anybody remember "Sing Along With Mitch"?

Signor V.

I remember the albums, SV. I don't really remember the tv show (I was born in '59). When I heard Mitch died, I was shocked. Mainly because I figured he died years ago!

I had a discussion several weeks ago with a friend and Mitch Miller's name came up. He was quite surprised when I told him that (at the time) ol' Mitch was still alive.

Then Mitch Miller died.

Obviously, I should've kept my mouth shut!

Also, I discovered that Lorene Yarnell died quite recently at the age of 66. I remember her from the mime duo Shields & Yarnell with her then-husband. They were popular in the '70s. Hadn't heard anything about her in years. Still, I was sad to hear the news.

Signor V.

Wow, I used to love that show! She must've been pretty young back then...

How great is Netflix? I typed that 3 days ago, and was able to watch it tonight on DVD.

Good film! That Hud (Paul Newman) was one SOB! RIP Patricia Neal - she did great. But I was saddened to discover that the kid Brandon De Wilde (Lon) was dead by 30. Yet another young talent squelched before his prime -- that list is too long.

i get my movies from the local library and amazon

And pretty soon they'll carry movies from the 80's!

I knew of her primarily through her work with her former husband, Max Roach. She was a very good singer. She was also an actress and was in the movie "For the love of Ivy" with Poitier.


Full Article: Abbey Lincoln Passes Away

Abbey Lincoln, a singer whose dramatic vocal command and tersely poetic songs made her a singular figure in jazz, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.

Her death was announced by her brother David Wooldridge.

Ms. Lincoln’s career encompassed outspoken civil rights advocacy in the 1960s and fearless introspection in more recent years, and for a time in the 1960s she acted in films, including one with Sidney Poitier.

Long recognized as one of jazz’s most arresting and uncompromising singers, Ms. Lincoln gained similar stature as a songwriter only over the last two decades. Her songs, rich in metaphor and philosophical reflection, provide the substance of “Abbey Sings Abbey,” an album released on Verve in 2007. As a body of work, the songs formed the basis of a three-concert retrospective presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2002.

Her singing style was unique, a combined result of bold projection and expressive restraint. Because of her ability to inhabit the emotional dimensions of a song, she was often likened to Billie Holiday, her chief influence. But Ms. Lincoln had a deeper register and a darker tone, and her way with phrasing was more declarative.

“Her utter individuality and intensely passionate delivery can leave an audience breathless with the tension of real drama,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1989. “A slight, curling phrase is laden with significance, and the tone of her voice can signify hidden welts of emotion.”

She had a profound influence on other jazz vocalists, not only as a singer and composer but also as a role model. “I learned a lot about taking a different path from Abbey,” the singer Cassandra Wilson said. “Investing your lyrics with what your life is about in the moment.”

Ms. Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Chicago on Aug. 6, 1930, the 10th of 12 children, and raised in rural Michigan. In the early 1950s, she headed west in search of a singing career, spending two years as a nightclub attraction in Honolulu, where she met Ms. Holiday and Louis Armstrong. She then moved to Los Angeles, where she encountered the accomplished lyricist Bob Russell.

It was at the suggestion of Mr. Russell, who had become her manager, that she took the name Abbey Lincoln, a symbolic conjoining of Westminster Abbey and Abraham Lincoln. In 1956, she made her first album, “Affair ... a Story of a Girl in Love” (Liberty), and appeared in her first film, the Jayne Mansfield vehicle “The Girl Can’t Help It.” Her image in both cases was decidedly glamorous: On the album cover she was depicted in a décolleté gown, and in the movie she sported a dress once worn by Marilyn Monroe.

For her second album, “That’s Him,” released on the Riverside label in 1957, Ms. Lincoln kept the seductive pose but worked convincingly with a modern jazz ensemble that included the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the drummer Max Roach. In short order she came under the influence of Mr. Roach, a bebop pioneer with an ardent interest in progressive causes. As she later recalled, she put the Monroe dress in an incinerator and followed his lead.

The most visible manifestation of their partnership was “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite,” issued on the Candid label in 1960, with Ms. Lincoln belting Oscar Brown Jr.’s lyrics. Now hailed as an early masterwork of the civil rights movement, the album radicalized Ms. Lincoln’s reputation. One movement had her moaning in sorrow, and then hollering and shrieking in anguish — a stark evocation of struggle....

Bobby Thomson, who hit the 'shot hear 'round the world' home run for the Giants, dies

BY Bill Madden AND Michael O'Keeffe
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

The man who hit the most famous home run in baseball history is gone.

Bobby Thomson, whose "shot heard 'round the world" capped a best-of-three playoff and the Giants' miracle comeback to win the 1951 National League pennant over the Dodgers, died Monday night at his home in Savannah, Georgia. He died peacefully according to his daughter Megan Thomson Armstrong. He had been in declining health for years.

Of baseball's historic walk-off home runs - Bill Mazeroski's in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, Joe Carter's in Game 6 of the 1993 World Series, Carlton Fisk's in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series - Thomson's shot off of Ralph Branca into the left-field seats of the Polo Grounds on Oct. 3, 1951, will always be regarded as the granddaddy of them al. The dramatic blast capped the Giants' incredible charge to the pennant after they had trailed the Dodgers by 13 1/2 games as late as Aug. 11. Beginning on Aug. 12, the Giants won 16 straight games and went 37-7 down the stretch to force a tie with the Dodgers at season's end. In the playoff series that ensued, the Giants won the first game, 3-1, on a two-run fourth-inning homer by Thomson off Branca and the Dodgers came back to win the second game, 10-0, behind the six-hit pitching of Clem Labine.

That set the stage for the deciding game, which the Dodgers led, 4-1, going into the ninth inning. But Dodger starter Don Newcombe, who had logged 272 innings that season, tired in the ninth, surrendering a leadoff infield single to Alvin Dark, another single to Don Mueller, and then, after Monte Irvin fouled out, a two-run opposite field double to left field by Whitey Lockman. On the play, Mueller severely sprained his ankle sliding into third and as he was attended to and finally removed from the game for pinch-runner Clint Hartung, Dodger manager Charlie Dressen summoned Branca from the bullpen to replace Newcombe with Thomson coming to the plate.

"I was sorry to see Don hurt," Thomson had said, "but the delay really helped me. I walked out to talk to (Giants manager) Leo (Durocher) and he said: 'If you ever hit one, hit one now.' I could see he was plenty excited too and I calmed down a bit. On my way back to the plate, I said to myself: 'You're a pro. Act like one!'"

Like Newcombe, Branca had been used extensively as Dressen desperately sought to hold off the surging Giants, and after pitching 1 1/3 innings of relief in the last game of the season and eight more innings the next day as the Dodgers' starter in the Game 1 of the playoff, he didn't expect to be called on again two days later. But when Dressen called down to the bullpen, Clyde Sukeforth, the bullpen coach, reported that Carl Erskine, warming up with Branca, had just bounced a ball in the dirt, and the Dodger manager told him to send in the burly righthander from Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Branca's first pitch was a fastball called strike. His second pitch, another fastball, Thomson hit on a low rising liner toward left. As Dodger leftfielder Andy Pafko drifted back to the wall, the ball sailed over his head into the seats for a 5-4 victory, and from the broadcast booth Giants announcer Russ Hodges could be heard screaming, "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"

"Right away after I hit it I thought it was a home run," Thomson said. "Going around the bases, I could hardly breathe. I was starting to hyperventilate."

Although Thomson and Branca actually became friends years after their careers ended and capitalized on the historic home run by doing card show autograph sessions together, their relationship became strained again some 50 years after the fact when an article by Joshua Harris Prager in the Wall Street Journal quoted backup Giants catcher Sal Yvars' detailing an elaborate sign-stealing scheme on the Giants' part during that 1951 season. The story, which was later incorporated into a book, essentially credited the Giants' historic comeback - and by extension Thomson's home run - to their ability to steal the opposing teams' signs. Branca took that as his exoneration while Thomson insisted he didn't know what pitch was coming.

"Bobby was a really good guy," Branca said from his home in Rye, N.Y. "He was just doing job and I was just doing mine. I don't condemn him for knowing what pitch was coming. I condemn the leaders of the Giants - (manager Leo) Durocher, (coach) Herman Franks (team captain) Alvin Dark. Bobby was always a class act and I'll miss him."

In some ways the home run was a bit of a mixed blessing in that, with it, came future expectations that Thomson was never able to meet. Thomson hit .293 with 32 homers and 101 in 1951 and had similar seasons in '52 and '53, but he never achieved superstar status. After the '53 season in which he hit .288 with 26 homers and 106 RBI, the Giants traded him to the Milwaukee Braves for pitchers Johnny Antonelli and Don Liddle, both of whom played key roles in their winning the world championship in 1954. For Thomson, the '54 season was a complete bust as he broke his ankle sliding into third base in spring training and appeared in only 32 games for the Braves.

Thomson, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland and moved to Staten Island when he was two years old, would never again approach 100 RBI and was traded four more times before retiring in 1960 with a lifetime .270 average, 264 homers, 1,705 hits and 1,026 RBI for 15 years.

"The Flying Scot", as he was called, took the high road when the Wall Street Journal story came out. Branca maintained the sign-stealing story vindicated him; that Thomson knew what pitch was coming.

"Ralph has a right to believe what he wants," said Thomson who, through their mutual fate, had formed a close, lifetime friendship with Branca. "But I can assure you nobody gave me any sign. I was looking for a fastball and that's what I got. We're married to each other by this. This is the first sign of any trouble between us and it's nothing big. We're too damn old to let it bother us now."

The GIants Win the Pennant! The Giants Win the Pennant!

Jefferson Thomas, one of the "Little Rock Nine" who provoked a major civil rights battle when they integrated Arkansas' largest public high school in 1957 over the opposition of Gov. Orval E. Faubus, died Sept. 5 at a care facility in Columbus, Ohio.

Mr. Thomas, who was 67, had pancreatic cancer. His death was confirmed by Carlotta Walls LaNier, who also enrolled at Central High School in 1957 and is president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation.

Many school districts in the South defied the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared racial segregation unconstitutional, forcing lawsuits and violent methods of enforcement. One of the first and most shocking showdowns occurred in Little Rock, when Faubus ordered the state's National Guard to keep black students out of Central High in September 1957.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the Army's 101st Airborne Division to carry out the court's mandate. Nine black students were caught in the middle -- corralled by a spitting and rock-throwing mob of white protesters.

Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the civil rights movement, once described Central High's integration as the "first on-site news extravaganza of the modern television era," and the subsequent images of the confrontation shocked millions for their disturbing look at American race relations.

Mr. Thomas said decades later that he was stunned and traumatized by the violence. He said Little Rock neighborhoods had not been segregated, even if the schools were, and he often practiced football on weekends with white kids from Central High before the conflict over integration.

"I had no reason to think that the quiet, peaceful place where I grew up could change so drastically," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I used to go to Central on weekends and play ball with the kids there."

Full Obit

Imagine the courage it took for them to walk into school that day! Incredible. We take so much for granted today, and forget the struggles that were not so far in the past.

That's for sure SB. We sometimes tend to forget it really was NOT that long ago. We may still have a ways to go, but we have come a long way, thank God.


TIS

SOMEONE.....ahem had Kevin McCarthy the actor from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and is awaiting credit.

Geez, Louise..... he just died Saturday. Relax, or you'll wake up with a seed pod next to you.

FWIW - I have two kills for which I wasn't credited.

Ralph Houk died 7/21 and Mitch Miller died 7/31.

I'm on it -- thanks!

Unofficial standings as of now:

SC 7
Mig 7
Kly 6
DT 6
JG 4
TIS 3
BAM 3
Capo 2

Please be sure to check over your own lists before the New Year!

Shall we discuss any rule changes for 2011, like bonuses for younger ages?

Something like:

+6 Age 0-10
+5 Age 11-19
+4 Age 20-30
+3 Age 31-45
+2 Age 46-60
+1 Age 61-70
+0 Age 71+

Perhaps a -1 (tho still a +1 if they're 71+) if they're known to be sick by the end of the previous year?

Any other ideas?

so, basically if we want the most out of the picks we should pick from 0-70 and no known health problems besides old age?

It's not MY idea... but it's been thrown out there the past couple years, to reward those with younger picks as opposed to guys like me who just pick the oldest fockers on the block! lol

They still have to DIE, tho... it's about high risk/reward...

If I relax I might fall asleep!

Keep it simple.

under 80 3 points
81 - 90 2 points
91 and over 1 point

Also a one point penalty for anyone of any age who has a known life threatening illness during the prior year. For instance Dennis Hopper was a goner going into the year, and I imagine there will be some sickos (yours truly included) who will be watching Michael Douglas closely.

What kind of odds can you get on Lindsay Lohan?

i like dontomasso's idea because there are a couple old geezers that some how stay alive and it's a risk of putting them on the list. (i.e. abe vigoda).

Veteran character actor Harold Gould dies at 86

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Veteran character actor Harold Gould, who played Valerie Harper's father on television's "Rhoda" and the con man Kid Twist in the 1973 movie "The Sting," has died. He was 86.

Leah Gould, his daughter-in-law, told the Los Angeles Times that he died Saturday of prostate cancer at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement community in Woodland Hills.

Gould had a prolific career both on the big and small screen. He appeared in such films as "Harper," ''Love and Death," ''Freaky Friday" and "Patch Adams."

On television, he played Betty White's boyfriend on "The Golden Girls," and also made guest appearances on "Soap," ''Perry Mason" and most recently "Nip/Tuck."

He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Lea; his children, Deborah Gould Harris, Joshua Gould and Lowell Gould; and five grandchildren.

He did TONS of tv work in the '60s and '70s.