Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Diane Knippers, president of the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy and a vocal proponent of traditional Christian practice whom Time magazine recently named as one of the nation’s 25 most influential evangelicals, has died. She was 53.

Knippers, who battled colon cancer for more than a year, died Monday in a hospital in Arlington, Va.

NY Times
Dr. Saunders Mac Lane, a mathematician at the University of Chicago who helped to develop category theory, an abstract branch of algebra that has applications in computer science and other fields, died on April 14 at a hospice in San Francisco. He was 95.

The cause was internal bleeding, his family said.

NY Times
Clement Meadmore, a sculptor who wrestled hulking lengths of steel into abstract artworks of arresting fluidity and lightness, died on Tuesday in New York. He was 76 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said Peter Rose, a New York art dealer who represented him.

A native of Australia who moved to the United States in the 1960’s, Mr. Meadmore was renowned internationally for for his massive outdoor pieces made of square-sided steel beams bent or coiled into sinuous forms. Monumental in scale - some were 25 feet tall, others 45 feet long - his sculptures can be found on college campuses, at corporate headquarters and in the collections of major museums around the world.

Sam Donaldson
suggests we place network news On Deck
, and we will oblige. Anyone remember when Sam decided to do a weekly feature television show live, the first one of which was a tour of the White House with Barbara Bush? Walking down the hallway of the White House, in a shot of Sam and Barbara framed from the waist up, Sam was seen to hesitate for a moment, jerk a bit to his right, and then continue on. Barbara said, ‘Sam, did you just kick Millie?’ Millie
being the Bush’s Springer spaniel dog who once did the gypsy’s kiss
thing on Donaldson’s shoes’in front of the Washington press corps (there’s no humiliation like public humiliation). At first Sam denied it, but Barbara kept after him, ‘Sam, you kicked Millie!’ All subsequent shows were taped.

Today’s obituaries have some wonderful names. If you took college algebra, you may well have used one of Saunders Mac Lane’s textbooks. If you walked on a college campus, and saw a massive metal sculpture, it may have been created or inspired by Clement Meadmore. If you saw an inspiring woman evangelist, it might have been Diane Knipper.

Finally, to hopefully put to rest this whole recent kick we ODDfellows have been on concerning resurrection, we note that there is some scientific basis to hope for human hibernation
. ‘Bears do it, bats do it, you do it too.’

We can’t afford U2 tickets, so we’re off to kick the dog.