[rtpoe]

And now Harry Reid, former senator from Nevada....

You'd think the Grim Reaper was rushing to meet a quota or something....

[TheZookie007]

And now Harry Reid, former senator from Nevada....

You'd think the Grim Reaper was rushing to meet a quota or something....

And yet he's taking the wrong people.

[cosine]

Betty White died today, 31 December. 99 years old.

[TheZookie007]

Another example of the Grim Reaper taking the wrong people, to end up this fairly shitty year. Couldn't he have waited until January 17, 2022, when she would have turned 100? 

The Washington Post, December 31, 2021: "Betty White, one of the most endearing and enduring faces on television, dies at 99"

By Adam Bernstein, 2:37 p.m. EST

"Betty White, an Emmy Award-winning comic actress who was best known for playing a man-hungry TV hostess on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s and a ditsy widow on The Golden Girls in the 1980s before her late-in-life resurgence as a tough, funny and ribald old lady, died at her home overnight in Los Angeles. She was 99."

[TheZookie007]

"Betty White has died at age 99, according to reports from TMZ and People Magazine.

White, who was born in 1922, would have turned 100 on January 17.

Law enforcement told TMZ White died at her home Friday morning.

A new coffee table book celebrating White's life and career was recently published as she neared the century milestone.

The book by a veteran entertainment journalist details White's journey in Hollywood, including hosting an early variety-talk show. Carol Burnett and Candice Bergen are among those interviewed for the book, written by Ray Richmond and titled Betty White: 100 Remarkable Moments in an Extraordinary Life.

Her witty style gave life to a roster of quirky characters over more than a half-century.

They included the oddball Rose Nylund in The Golden Girls and the outspoken caretaker on Hot In Cleveland. She also drew laughs in the 2009 comedy The Proposal and the horror spoof Lake Placid.

By popular demand, she hosted Saturday Night Live in 2011.

White once said her character Sue Ann Nivens in The Mary Tyler Moore Show could be “icky-sweet” but was “really a piranha type.” That role brought her two Emmys.

A nationwide theatrical event of "Betty White: 100 Years Young — A Birthday Celebration,” was scheduled for Jan. 17, which would have been her 100th birthday.

The one-day-only movie event is set to highlight moments the actress had during her career with appearances by Ryan Reynolds, Tina Fey, Robert Redford, and Morgan Freeman.

It's not clear whether those event plans have changed following White's death."



None of the five people in this photo of The Mary Tyler Moore Show castmates is still with us now:
 
Gavin McLeod died on May 29, 2021, at the age of 90. No cause was given.

Valerie Harper died on August 30, 2019, after an extensive battle with lung cancer and the rare condition of leptomeningeal carcinomatosis (where cancer cells spread into the meninges, the membranes surrounding the brain). She was 80. 

Cloris Leachman died on January 27, 2021, ostensibly from a stroke but with possible COVID-19 complications as well. The most Primetime Emmy-nominated (22) and -winning (eight) performer in Hollywood history (only Julia Louis-Dreyfuss has as many Primetime Emmys) and Academy Award winner, was 94.

Ed Asner died on August 29, 2021, at age 91. No cause was given.

[solvegas]

Dan Reeves, January 19, 1944 to January 1, 2022, died at age 77. Played for eight seasons as a running back for the Dallas Cowboys and was a member of the Super Bowl VI which Dallas beat the Miami Dolphins 24-3 This is how I best remember him, as a running back for my team, the Dallas Cowboys. He also played in the 1967 NFL title game against the Green Bay Packers which is the legendary Ice Bowl game played in Lambeau Field and remains the coldest game in NFL history. The Packers won 21-17 and went on to Super Bowl II and spanked the Oakland Raiders pretty hard. He then retired from playing and Coach Tom Landry, who was head coach for 30 years at Dallas, made Reeves an assistant coach who then was hired by the Denver Broncos as Head Coach, then the New York Giants and then the Atlanta Falcons. He was in the NFL as a player and coach for 38 years and was involved with nine Super Bowls. He died in Atlanta, Georgia and he was born in Rome, Georgia. He'll always be a Dallas Cowboys player to me first and foremost.   

[rtpoe]

PETER BOGDANOVICH (1939-2022)

Starting out as a writer and film critic in the 1950s, he decided to follow the lead filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard and become a director. Hooking up with Roger Corman ("I went from getting the laundry to directing the picture in three weeks. Altogether, I worked 22 weeks – preproduction, shooting, second unit, cutting, dubbing – I haven't learned as much since."), he directed the critically praised Targets (1968) and the not-so-critically praised Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968).

His career as a director peaked soon after, with The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973). His next pictures - Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975) - bombed. His personal life became a mess, so his work slowed down. The rest of his career was a mix of writing (both movie scripts and works about movies), producing, directing, and acting. He'd never come close to recapturing his early success, but was good enough to keep working and even pick up a few honors along the way (like a Grammy for his work on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream (2007) - Best Long Form Music Video, if you're interested).

Add up all his work - from in front of the camera to behind it to his writing - and there's probably never been someone as well-versed in the Art of Cinema.

"He was a dear friend and a champion of Cinema. He birthed masterpieces as a director and was a most genial human. He single-handedly interviewed and enshrined the lives and work of more classic filmmakers than almost anyone else in his generation.” - Guillermo del Toro

[rtpoe]

SIDNEY POITIER

In the Heat of the Night (1967)


Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)


Lilies of the Field (1963)

[TheZookie007]

Lilies of the Field was a nice enough movie, but The Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and To Sir, With Love were superior and more impactful, especially In the Heat of the Night. This scene was so shocking for the time that only Mr. Poitier could have pulled it off and it still resonates today.

In the Heat of the Night (1967) - Mr. Tibbs Slaps Endicott

[TheZookie007]

The Hollywood Reporter: "Bob Saget, Comedian and Full House Star, Dies at 65"
The former host of America's Funniest Home Videos was found dead at a hotel in Orlando, Florida.

[TheZookie007]

Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, French twins and television hosts whose noble lineage, questionable research in quantum physics and extreme adventures in plastic surgery captivated Parisian society and horrified the scientific community, died within days of each other at a hospital in Paris, Grichka on Dec. 28 and Igor on Jan. 3. They were 72.

Family statements sent by an agent for the brothers announced their death but did not specify the cause. A lawyer for the twins told multiple French news outlets that they had died of Covid-19. Both said in December that they were unvaccinated.

The Bogdanoff brothers were perhaps best known internationally for their extensive employment of Botox, lip filler and chin sculpting in the 1990s and 2000s, which resulted in changes so extensive that they rendered them almost unrecognizable — some said almost alien.

It was fitting, the jokes went, because the once conventionally looking brothers had first rocketed to fame in the late 1970s as the hosts of the otherworldly TV show Temps X (“Time X”).

The show mixed gadgetry, science fiction and actual science — think Mr. Wizard crossed with Mystery Science Theater 3000, but weirder than the former and more earnest than the latter — with the Bogdanoffs dressed in silvery suits on a set made to look like the control deck of a spaceship.

Later, they received doctoral degrees, Igor in physics and Grichka mathematics and published academic papers laying out what they claimed was an explanation for the state of the universe just before the Big Bang.

But their research was soon called into question by scientists in Europe and North America, who said the work was so incomprehensible that, at least at first, they believed it was most likely a hoax by the attention-seeking twins.

The brothers insisted that they were serious, and correct; they later sued several scientists and magazines for libel. That didn’t stop “L’Affaire Bogdanoff” (pronounced BOG-dan-off) from becoming a roast, even as it raised difficult questions about the peer-review process and whether theoretical physics had become so abstruse that it was difficult to tell real work from nonsense.

To many in the scientific community, they were con men. But the French public did not seem to care: Their book Before the Big Bang (2004), which encapsulated their research for a general audience, was a swift seller in France, and they hosted two more TV shows in the late 2000s.

And at least someone thought their work was worthy. In the mid-2000s they worked as professors of cosmology at Megatrend University, a private institution in Belgrade, Serbia, that has been accused of operating as a diploma mill.

By then their facial transmogrifications were largely complete and, though often mocked as comically repulsive, they continued to mix with elite French society, dating models and heiresses and making the rounds during gala season. The brothers denied ever undergoing cosmetic surgery, insisting instead that their changes resulted from their dabbling in unspecified “technologies.”

Then, in a final act that seems both fitting and inevitable given the times in which we live, the brothers became a crypto meme.

Their virality, which began around 2015, was not entirely random. The Bogdanoffs claimed to have helped write the source code for Bitcoin, and said that its legendary, perhaps fictional inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, had given them a pair of “ancient” bitcoins “in physical form.”

The meme depicts Grichka as a sort of crypto puppet master, dumping or pumping the markets to thwart a hapless, nameless investor. Whether or not the brothers got the humor, they seemed keen to play along, recently suggesting that they were planning to launch their own cryptocurrency.

Igor Yourievitch Bogdanoff and Grégoire Yourievitch Bogdanoff, who sometimes spelled their surname Bogdanov, were born on Aug. 29, 1949, in a castle in the town of Saint-Lary, in southwestern France.

Their father, Youri Ostasenko-Bogdanoff, was an itinerant painter who said he was descended from a Tatar prince and who had fled Russia as a boy. They were raised by their maternal grandmother, Bertha Kolowrat-Krakowska, an erstwhile Bohemian countess who had lost her title after having an affair with Roland Hayes, an American opera singer who was touring in France and who was the first Black man to win international fame as a concert performer. Their daughter, Maria Dolores Franzyska Kolowrat-Krakowska, was the twins’ mother.

Igor’s first marriage, to the Belgian aristocrat Ludmila d’Oultremont, ended in divorce. He married Amélie de Bourbon-Parme, a model and descendant of Louis XIV, in 2009 in a star-studded ceremony at the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley. They separated in 2016 and later divorced.

The brothers are survived by their half brother, François Davant, and their sisters, Laurence, Géraldine and Véronique Bogdanoff. Igor is also survived by a son, Dmitri, whom he had with the actress Geneviève Grad; his daughters, Sasha and Anna-Claria, and his son Wenceslas, all from his first marriage; and his sons Alexandre and Constantin, from his second marriage.

The Bogdanoffs claimed to be geniuses from an early age, saying they had each scored 190 on childhood I.Q. tests. They studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, also known as Sciences Po, and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

After Temps X ended in 1987, the Bogdanoffs wrote Dieu et La Science (1991), about the relationship between religion and science. It was a best seller in France, but it drew a lawsuit by Trinh Xuan Thuan, an astrophysicist at the University of Virginia, who claimed they had plagiarized one of his books.

The brothers settled out of court in 1995, having in the meantime begun their graduate studies. They said they were motivated by their interest in the so-called initial singularity, the moment before the Big Bang, when all matter, space and time were condensed into an infinitely dense point.

Others, however, suspected that they were trying to raise their intellectual prestige during the lawsuit, and at least one scientist, John Barrow of the University of Cambridge, said they had approached him about how to get a doctoral degree quickly.

The brothers began their studies at the University of Bordeaux before transferring to the University of Burgundy. Their adviser, Daniel Sternheimer, told The New York Times in 2002 that while the Bogdanoffs were exceptionally intelligent, they were often “impressionistic” in their research. Still, he said, he signed off on their theses.

“These guys worked for 10 years without pay,” he said. “They have the right to have their work recognized with a diploma, which is nothing much these days.”

It was rough going; Grichka was denied a physics doctorate, though he got a degree in mathematics from Burgundy in 1999, while Igor was forced to substantially revise his thesis and publish additional papers before receiving a physics degree there in 2002. They each received an “honorable” grade, the lowest and least common.

That same year, rumors began to circulate among physicists and mathematicians about a pair of French cele br ities who were trying to spoof the scientific establishment — a retread of a 1996 hoax by the physicist Alan Sokal, who managed to get a paper filled with nonsense into an esteemed cultural studies journal.

Eventually, most agreed that no hoax was intended, just inanities masquerading as insight. The pile-on was both painful to watch and impossible to ignore, as scientists took turns dunking on the brothers.

“One thing that seems pretty clear to me is that the Bogdanovs don’t know how to do physics,” John Baez, a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, told The Times in 2002.

The brothers pushed back, growing increasingly litigious, especially after France’s National Center for Scientific Research opened an inquiry into their work. They successfully sued Marianne, a French magazine, for publishing portions of the center’s report, and then unsuccessfully sued the center itself when it concluded that their research was worthless.

But the law cuts both ways, and in 2018 the Bogdanoffs were arrested on charges of “aggressive fraud” after they had persuaded a French millionaire to invest nearly $1 million in a series of unrealized projects, including a reboot of Temps X. The millionaire, whose identity was never disclosed, died by suicide in 2018.

The brothers were indicted in 2020 and were preparing to go to court when they entered the emergency room on Dec. 15 with Covidlike symptoms.

Ms. Bourbon-Parme told the BFMTV news channel on Wednesday that the brothers, who were several hospital rooms apart, called each other often to chat, but that doctors had already placed Igor in an artificial co ma when Grichka died.

Ms. Bourbon-Parme confirmed that the twins were not vaccinated against Covid-19, but she said their decision had been personal, not political.

“They were both 72, they were in great shape, and they thought they were untouchable,” she said, adding that they had always been reluctant to face their own mortality. Death, she said, “was a taboo topic for them, and at the same time it fascinated them.”

[rtpoe]

YVETTE MIMIEUX (1942-2022)

After a few modest roles in movies and TV, she made it big when picked to play "Weena" opposite Rod Taylor in 1960's The Time Machine. Under contract at MGM, she became noted for playing "sensitive" roles, like a mentally disabled girl in Light in the Piazza (1962), a ch|ld bride in Toys in the Attic (1963), or a surfer suffering from leprosy on an episode of Dr. Kildare.

Her career slowly declined; she worked most often in TV movies after the 60s. It might not have been her fault that she got stuck with crappy roles. Pauline Kael once called her “a much better actress than the parts she gets.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic, agreed. “Miss Mimieux is better than I imagined she could be,” he wrote when reviewing “Three in the Attic,” a dark 1968 sex comedy. “She gets stuck in a lot of hopeless roles.”

She did some writing, penning the script for 1974's TV movie Hit Lady, where she played the title role. More TV movies allowed her to broaden her range, but she still lamented that actresses like her were so often typecast. “The women they write are all one dimensional,” she said. “They have no complexity in their lives. It’s all surface. There’s nothing to play. They’re either sex objects or vanilla pudding.”

She retired from acting in 1992, devoting her time to real estate, selling crafts inspired by Haitian folk art, and studying archaeology.

She kept her personal life private, and her funeral will be a private ceremony, too.

A young Yvette (date unknown):

[TheZookie007]

The worlds of fashion and entertainment are still reeling from the news of André Leon Talley’s shocking, sudden passing.

The fashion icon paved the way for generations of Black fashion enthusiasts and was known to champion Black journalists, designers, and models during his tenure as Senior Fashion Editor and later creative director at Vogue.

His larger-than-life stature and collection of signature caftans made him a standout on the front rows of fashion week, and his warm and regal nature earned him a slew of famous friends and admirers in life. Naturally, that admiration and friendship has carried on now that the trailblazer has transitioned beyond this physical plane.

Legendary supermodel Iman called Talley a “titan of fashion journalism,” noting how much he will be missed on a caption of a montage video of his life’s highlights and wise words.

Supermodel Tyra Banks said on Instagram:

"I had never experienced such a prolific person serving up a rare mix of fashion ‘fabulousness’ and real down-home southern comfort love until I met @andreltalley.

Being in his presence was so magical. He made me smile, laugh and was a masterful teacher - a generous, genius historian.

Scholar, colleague, effervescent spirit, legend…you are resting now, Dearest André. But your spirit, your ‘je ne sais quoi’, your VOICE - your laugh, your screams of effervescent, delightful joy…I hear it now. And will forever.

We all will."

On Twitter, Whoopi Goldberg eulogized him by saying "Just in time for the front line at fashion week in Heaven, Diana Vreeland, Coco Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld...and now André Leon Talley. R.I.P. Unforgettable in every way…"

André Leon Talley passed away on the night of January 18th, 2022 in White Plains, NY. Reported sources have revealed that the cause of death was from the effects of COVID and underlying health issues. This news shocked the fashion industry at large as Talley was one of the original fashion legends. He’s left behind an immeasurable legacy that has inspired and birthed generations of Black professionals in fashion.

Talley, who went from being a young man living in Durham, North Carolina to being a fashion editor who traveled the world and worked at the helm of Vogue, is the very reason many Black men and women chose to pursue a career in the industry. His educational background in French Literature prepared him to enter the world of fashion, where three of the four fashion capitals of the world are overseas including Paris, Milan, and London.

While he was present during some of fashion’s most memorable and historical times, he worked alongside Dianna Vreeland and at prominent publications such as Interview, W, WWD, and The New York Times. However, Talley wasn’t just a fly on the wall, he also made history himself by becoming the first Black person to work as a Senior Fashion Editor and Creative Director at Vogue.

His personal style was the epitome of exuberance and fashion royalty. He was known for sporting and popularizing the iconic Norma Kamali sl eep ing bag coat, which he often mimicked the silhouette of with his custom long coats and robes designed by the finest, luxury fashion houses.

He definitely was one of a kind.

[TheZookie007]

BBC, 1/21/22: "Meat Loaf: Bat Out Of Hell singer dies at 74"

[solvegas]

BBC, 1/21/22: "Meat Loaf: Bat Out Of Hell singer dies at 74"

He really wasn't that old. He lived life like the rebel he was.