[mcgarp]

(his death was on Jan. 16, but I just heard about it today)

While watching a line of ants at a Fourth of July picnic, novelty-toy entrepreneur Milton Levine was transported back to childhood and his uncle's farm in Western Pennsylvania, where he collected ants in jars and watched them "cavort," Mr. Levine told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. "We should make an antarium," he recalled announcing.

Selling for $1.98, the original 6-by-9-inch ant farm was an immediate hit, soon selling thousands a week by mail order to children persuaded by commercials on after-school television shows. Ants were delivered separately, once you had purchased the farm.

In 1991 he noted, "Most novelties, if they last one season, it’s a lot. If they last two seasons, it’s a phenomenon. To last 35 years is unheard of." Mr. Levine certainly appreciated Pogonomyrmex californicus, the California Red Ant. "I found out their most amazing feat yet,” he said. "They put three kids through college."

Obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (the city of his birth)

Video: A young boy loves his ant farms

I got one of those ant farms for Christmas when I was a kid.  It came with a certificate to mail in to get your supply of ants.  I sent it in in the middle of winter in MN.  The ants came a while later in a plastic tube.... dead.  Never did get to see the farm in action.

[Jubei]

Damn, news of Tura Satana's death makes me regret not going up to say hi and meet her when i was at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2007. She had gained a lot of weight, but her bosom was quite the site to see, she stuck out in a crowd, that's for sure!

[TheZookie007]

SurfGossip: "Scion of Oil Fortune, J. Paul Getty III dies at 54"

J. Paul Getty III dies at 54 after a long-suffering illness. Before he died he was already a quadriplegic after he had a stroke.

He was a grandson of J. Paul Getty, who made a fortune in oil. His grandfather helped build the J. Paul Getty Museum.

When Getty was 16 years old he was **70** in Italy. His father Getty II didn’t believe in the **71** at first so the kidnappers, purportedly the Mafia, sliced the young Getty’s ear and sent it to the elder Getty. The elder Getty paid nearly $3 million to get his son back.

The young Getty was disinherited by his father when he married an older woman. And during the 1980s he suffered from addiction to drugs and alcohol. During the 90?s he had lived with his mother when his marriage ended.

[Zorro]

The veteran character actor with a flair for German-type accents also starred as the Nazi playwright in "The Producers."

Kenneth Mars, a farcical character actor best known for playing the police inspector with a creaky prosthetic arm in Mel Brooks’ 1974 classic Young Frankenstein, died Saturday of pancreatic cancer at his home in Granada Hills, Calif. He was 75.
Related Topics
•Obituaries

With a flair for German-type accents, Mars also appeared as the insane Nazi playwright who creates Springtime for Hitler in Brooks’ The Producers (1968) and as a Yugoslavian shyster in Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972).

Mars has regular roles on TV as ranch owner Otto Mannkusser on the Fox series Malcolm in the Middle, as W.D. “Bud” Prize on Norman Lear’s Fernwood Tonight and its offshoot, America Tonight, in the late 1970s and as Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin’s fireman neighbor in He & She, a 1967-68 CBS series.

The Chicago native cultivated a robust career as a voice actor during his 40-plus years in show business, working on such projects as The Jetsons, The FIintstones Kids, The Little Mermaid, Duckman and Life With Louie. He was Grandpa Longneck in many installments of The Land Before Time series that ran on film, video and TV.

In a take-off on Lionel Atwill’s local police Inspector Krogh character with a mechanical wooden arm in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, Mars’ Inspector Kemp in Young Frankenstein sports an eye patch and monocle over the same eye, a disjointed wooden arm that moves in all manner of ways and an accent so thick even his own countrymen can’t understand him.

Mars also appeared in the Woody Allen films Radio Days (1987) and Shadows and Fog (1991), and in another dramatic turn, opposite Shirley MacLaine in 1971’s Desperate Characters. His stage appearances included the role of Martin Eliot in The Affair and Sir Evelyn Oakleigh in Anything Goes. 

Survivors include daughters Susannah Mars Johnson and Rebecca Mars Tipton; their husbands, Gary Johnson and Wayne Tipton; and grandchildren Alex Tipton, Kate Johnson, Noah Tipton, Nick Tipton, Olivia Johnson and Sam Tipton.

Services will be private. Remembrances on his behalf can be made to Smile Train in Washington D.C.

[rtpoe]

"It's hard to think of anybody who was more important to exploitation films," said Eric Schaefer, an expert on the exploitation genre and a professor of visual and media arts at Boston's Emerson College. "He was a link to the old road-show days of exploitation that begin in the 1920s and obviously was a crucial producer."

As a longtime chairman of the board of the Adult Film Assn. of America, Friedman also was "a constant champion of the rights of adults to see adult material," Schaefer said.
emphasis mine

Among his works are:

Blood Feast (1963)
Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)
Space-Thing (1968)
Trader Hornee (1970)
The Erotic Adventures of Zorro (1972)
Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1975)

"Incredibly crude and unprofessional from start to finish, 'Blood Feast' is an insult even to the most puerile and salacious audiences. The very fact that it is taking itself seriously makes the David F. Friedman production all the more ludicrous. It was a fiasco in all departments." - Variety

"Herschell [Herchell Gordon Lewis, director of 'Blood Feast'] and I have often wondered who told the Variety scribe we were taking ourselves seriously." - David F. Friedman

Something Weird Raids David F. Friedman's Film Vault, 1992

[TheZookie007]

I saw the end of the crawl on the television saying "Frazier dead at 88" and was like "what? Not Smokin' Joe Frazier!"

Good thing I Googled for it and found:

"Former Mets manager Joe Frazier dies at 88"

[pedonbio]

In yet another dreadfully confusing overdose/suicide, Perry Moore, executive producer of the over-the-top Christian propaganda series "Chronicles of Narnia" was found dead at 39 by his gay partner, thereby again demonstrating the effect of too much oxycontin.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/18/perry-moore-found-dead-na_n_825313.html

[pedonbio]

Recent photo of Tura Satana at Exotic World. Left to right, Tura, Selene Luna, Kitten Natividad:

[SamV]

A bit of sadness in every old comic book fan's heart --
Joanne Carter Siegel, widow of Superman's co-creator Jerry Siegel died last week.

What many people don't know, but every true fan boy does, any actress whoever played the intrepid girl reporter Lois Lane owes a bit of thanks to Joanne as she was the inspiration for the character.

Check out this Joe Shuster drawing of Lois Lane that Joanne sat for as Joe's model.

[Cutter]

Our last World War 1 vet has finally passed.  We won the war of survivors. 

Now we need to get a proper WW1 Memorial in DC for those vets.  There IS a WW1 memorial but it is for service members that came from DC only.

[solvegas]

Our last World War 1 vet has finally passed.  We won the war of survivors. 

Now we need to get a proper WW1 Memorial in DC for those vets.  There IS a WW1 memorial but it is for service members that came from DC only.

I started a thread about Frank Buckles. Yes, a proper memorial should have been done years ago for the doughboys. Unfortunately, the squekee wheel gets the grease and that generation was not made of those who make a big show about themselves, especially compared to those that came afterward.

[pedonbio]

I started a thread about Frank Buckles. Yes, a proper memorial should have been done years ago for the doughboys. Unfortunately, the squekee wheel gets the grease and that generation was not made of those who make a big show about themselves, especially compared to those that came afterward.

I don't understand this obsession we've recently developed for memorials. There were no WW II memorial plans until the last few years; none for Korea. The Vietnam Wall is at best an ambiguous thing. I can't recall who said that a nation that needs heroes is lost, but history seems to bear him out.

We should note that Buckles was probably the last survivor of a major combatant. There are no French, German, or Canadian survivors. I couldn't find a reference for Britain.

And it looks as though the local D.C. memorial with be declared the "national" memorial for WW I.

[pedonbio]

Jane Russell died today at 89. Best known for wearing a bra designed by engineers working for Howard Hughes, she was remarkable for Hollywood.

[rtpoe]

"I saw him play plenty of times, but carry only a fragmented memory of him in action: rounded shoulders, and that thick face tilting while the finish of his big, left-side stroke starts him up the baseline, his gaze fixed on the rising (and often departing) ball. A first-class center fielder, who eagerly closed the angle on line drives. Great arm. Good guy, terrific smile. Hall of Famer." - Roger Angell

They'd better have the flags in Brooklyn at half-mast....

[luvdemwhoppers]

^I remember him as a NY Met in 1963, Polo Grounds. Flags in Bronx as well.