[Scarface]

Connie Francis, whose hit songs included ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ and ‘Pretty Little Baby,’ dies at 87

[Scarface]

Ozzy Osbourne has passed away at the age of 76. His family confirmed the news in a heartfelt statement on July 22, 2025, saying he was surrounded by loved ones at the time.

Just weeks before his death, Ozzy gave his final live performance with the original Black Sabbath lineup at Villa Park in Birmingham, marking a powerful farewell to fans. He had been battling Parkinson’s disease since 2019 and had faced numerous health challenges in recent years.

A true icon of heavy metal and rock, Ozzy’s legacy spans decades—from his groundbreaking work with Black Sabbath to his wildly successful solo career and unforgettable presence on reality TV. The Prince of Darkness may be gone, but his influence and music will echo for generations.

[MaxBigfoot]

Damn.  Ozzy was a landmark personality on my personal landscape.  Both in music and in television.  I'm gonna miss him.   

[solvegas]

As a Baby Boomer, Ozzy Osbourne makes me wonder how much longer I'll live. I remember how in the 1960's and 1970's people would talk about how young we were but now, we are getting old. 

[Scarface]

What a bad week.
Hulk Hogan has sadly passed away at the age of 71. According to multiple reports, including TMZ and Variety, he died on July 24, 2025, at his home in Clearwater, Florida, following a cardiac arrest. Hogan, born Terry Gene Bollea, was a towering figure in professional wrestling and pop culture, known for his charisma, signature moves, and unforgettable catchphrases.

He was a six-time WWE Champion, inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame twice—once in 2005 and again in 2020 as part of the New World Order. His legacy spans decades, from headlining WrestleMania to starring in films like Rocky III and Mr. Nanny.

A true icon of the ring, his impact on wrestling and entertainment will be felt for generations.

[MaxBigfoot]

 

[rtpoe]

Ozzy Osbourne has passed away at the age of 76. His family confirmed the news in a heartfelt statement on July 22, 2025, saying he was surrounded by loved ones at the time.

Just weeks before his death, Ozzy gave his final live performance with the original Black Sabbath lineup at Villa Park in Birmingham, marking a powerful farewell to fans. He had been battling Parkinson’s disease since 2019 and had faced numerous health challenges in recent years.

A true icon of heavy metal and rock, Ozzy’s legacy spans decades—from his groundbreaking work with Black Sabbath to his wildly successful solo career and unforgettable presence on reality TV. The Prince of Darkness may be gone, but his influence and music will echo for generations.

But there has always been another side to Satan, the one Osbourne captured. His devil wasn’t the horned villain of Christian nightmares but a trickster, a rebel, a symbol of freedom from sanctimony. In Osbourne's hands, Satan gave a theatrical middle finger to hypocrisy and fearmongering.Osbourne lifted up a mirror to a society obsessed with sin, and he laughed. His life reminds us that sometimes, dancing with the devil is really just refusing to march in lockstep with the saints.

"Ozzy Osbourne taught kids to rebel by subverting Christianity"
Matthew Avery Sutton, USA Today, 7/24/25
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2025/07/24/ozzy-osbourne-black-sabbath-devil-music/85344473007/

[solvegas]

What a bad week.
Hulk Hogan has sadly passed away at the age of 71. According to multiple reports, including TMZ and Variety, he died on July 24, 2025, at his home in Clearwater, Florida, following a cardiac arrest. Hogan, born Terry Gene Bollea, was a towering figure in professional wrestling and pop culture, known for his charisma, signature moves, and unforgettable catchphrases.

He was a six-time WWE Champion, inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame twice—once in 2005 and again in 2020 as part of the New World Order. His legacy spans decades, from headlining WrestleMania to starring in films like Rocky III and Mr. Nanny.

A true icon of the ring, his impact on wrestling and entertainment will be felt for generations.

Today I saw an old May 15, 1982, Johnny Carson Tonight Show in which Hulk Hogan was a guest star, and he had recently done the Rocky 3 movie with Sylvester Stallone, and he was so much larger than Sylvester Stallone and Carson was laughing when seeing the scenes in which Hulk Hogan is literally overwhelming him. Carson asked just how big his arms were, and Hulk Hogan told him they were 24 inches around and Carson said, that's as big as a woman waist. Hulk Hogan then told him he weighed 320 pounds. Hulk Hogan was 29 years old then. 

[gOOber]

 

[solvegas]

I will miss Hulk Hogan. 

[rtpoe]

TOM LEHRER (1928-2025)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2025/07/27/tom-lehrer-dead-singer-satirist/85397729007/

Two stories:

In 2013, Lehrer recalled the studio session for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”, which referred to the practice of controlling pigeons in Boston with strychnine-treated corn:

The copyist arrived at the last minute with the parts and passed them out to the band… And there was no title on it, and there was no lyrics. And so they ran through it, “What a pleasant little waltz”…. And the engineer said, “‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,’ take one,” and the piano player said, “What?” and literally fell off the stool.

https://www.louielouie.net/blog/?p=13266

---

And from a thread on BlueSky:

I worked as a mathematician at the NSA during the second Obama administration and the first half of the first Trump administration. I had long enjoyed Tom Lehrer's music, and I knew he had worked for the NSA during the Korean War era.

The NSA's research directorate has an electronic library, so I eventually figured, what the heck, let's see if we can find anything he published internally!

And I found a few articles I can't comment on. But there was one unclassified article-- "Gambler's Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary".

The paper was co-written by Lehrer and R. E. Fagen, published in January, 1957.

The mathematical content is pretty interesting, but that's not what stuck out to me when I read it.

See, the paper cites FIVE sources throughout its body. But the bibliography lists SIX sources.

What's the leftover?

Well, you can look through the entirety of the body of the paper. It'll take you a while, but you can pretty quickly pick up that sources 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are all cited.

But if you know anything about Lehrer's musical career, you can probably figure it out by looking at the bibliography.

See, entry 3 in the bibliography is "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" by one N. Lobachevsky.

And if you've ever heard Leher's song "Lobachevsky", you may have just finished that title with "Bozhe moi!"

Now, it's important to note: this paper was published internally in 1957. Tom Lehrer had recorded and released "Songs by Tom Lehrer" in 1953, with "Lobachevsky" included. The song had already achieved some success....but nobody at the NSA noticed when he and Fagan dropped it in as a reference.

It struck me as a very Lehrer-ish sort of prank. It's harmless, it's light-hearted, and it thumbs its nose a bit at stuffy respectability through its unfailing pretense of seriousness.

How had other people reacted to the joke, I wondered?

So I sent an email to the NSA historians. And I asked them: hey, when was this first noticed, and how much of a gas did people think it was? Did he get in trouble for it? That sort of stuff.

The answer came back: "We've never heard of this before. It's news to us."

In November of 2016, nearly 60 years after the paper was published internally, I had discovered the joke.

A few years later, I filed to have the paper declassified, and the NSA eventually agreed, and even put it up on their webpage:

https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/14/2002762807/-1/-1/0/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF/GAMBLERS-RUIN.PDF

Once that had happened, I wrote to Mr. Lehrer with a copy of the paper and a letter asking if he had ever gotten in trouble for it.

He kindly wrote back, including a copy of the paper that had been published in Journal of SIAM in 1958, under a slightly different title. Nobody, he said, caught him.

The copy that was published as "Random Walks with Restraining Barrier as Applied to the Biased Binary Counter", of course, didn't include the Lobachevsky reference.

[Scarface]

Loni Anderson, who played a struggling radio station’s empowered receptionist on the hit TV comedy “WKRP in Cincinnati,” died Sunday, just days before her 80th birthday.

Anderson died at a Los Angeles hospital following a prolonged illness, said her longtime publicist

[solvegas]

Loni Anderson, who played a struggling radio station’s empowered receptionist on the hit TV comedy “WKRP in Cincinnati,” died Sunday, just days before her 80th birthday.

Anderson died at a Los Angeles hospital following a prolonged illness, said her longtime publicist

She was also with Burt Reynolds years ago.

[cosine]

June Wilkinson died July 24.

[MaxBigfoot]

June Wilkinson died July 24.

Aw, crap!!