Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Sir John Mills, the Academy Award-winning actor and patriarch of one of Britain’s leading theatrical families, died Saturday. He was 97.

Mills, the father of actresses Hayley and Juliet Mills, died at his home in Denham, west of London, after a short illness.

Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1976, Mills was a onetime West End musical comedy song and dance man whose versatile career spanned more than 70 years and more than 100 movies.

Mills won an Oscar and a Golden Globe as best supporting actor for his role as the brain-damaged mute villager in “Ryan’s Daughter,” David Lean’s 1970 romantic drama set in Ireland during World War I.

NY Times
David Hughes, an English man of letters best known for exploring the individual’s role in traumatic public events in his elegantly written novels, among them “The Pork Butcher” (Schocken, 1985) and “The Joke of the Century” (Taplinger, 1986), died on April 11. He was 74 and lived in London.

His death was reported in the British news media

Maybe, instead of quoting ‘Voodoo Child’ we should have entitled yesterday’s comments: ‘Snotty-nosed, whinny, well-socialized little-brat-graduates of mini-gladiator schools live longer’. No, this is not a Mike Jackson defense tactic, but has to do with the report of decreased incidence of leukemia in children routinely enrolled in day care.

Evidently yesterday was also a bad day to be an Englishman. Oscar-winning actor, and father of Haley and Janet, Sir John Mills coasted off. Writer David Hughes has moved on.

So, let’s look quickly at the week in review of those no longer with us on our little spaceship:

JERRY BYRD (85): marvelous and versatile electric steel guitarist. (We ODDfellows failed to pick up on the irony of his last name and our report of chicken resuscitation.)

JOHN FRED (63): John Fred and the Playboy band went from rocking Louisiana road houses to international prominence by singing ‘Lemonade pie with a brand new car, cantaloupe eyes come to me tonight. Judy in disguise with glasses.’ All things 60’s psychedelia, bubblegum, rockabilly, a little hint of zydeco, and R&B.

RICHARD POPKIN (81): Well, it’s said this skeptical philosopher is dead, but we be so sure?

WB LIPES (84): Navy pharmacist who removed a shipmates appendix on a submarine. Don’t try this at home.

SAM MILLS (45): All-Pro football player and coach who proved you can’t coach heart. Dead too soon.

GEORGE MOLCHAN (82): Drove the Oscar Myer Weinermobile, hey, it was a job, and think of the people he met. Did he take work home with him?

LAURA CANALES (50): Known as ‘The Barbara Streisand of Tejano Music’, we hope Canales was not offended. She died of complications of gall bladder surgery. Evidence of the existence of ‘The Cosmic Flyswatter.’

DIANE KNIPPERS (53): Politically powerful evangelical Christian. In a world of red and blue states, we ODDfellows prefer to think of ODDland as purple.

CLEMENT MEADMORE (76): Constructed massive metal sculptures’sort of artistic heavy-lifting.

SAUNDERS MAC LANE (95): Mathematician known for studies and writings in algebra. Please solve the following equation: ‘(Al Gore + Sheryl Crow) / x = Larry the Cable Guy
; what is x?’ Send answers to ODDfellows

JAMES HOUSTON (83): Writer who helped popularize Eskimo sculpture, and gets this week’s award for best obituary: how to capture a wolverine with a Kleenex. See April 22 ODDcomment for answer.

NEILS-HENNING ORSTED PEDERSEN (58): Jazz bassest, with great talent and a funny name. Well, he was Danish.

NORMAN NEWELL (96): Paleontologist who popularized theories of mass extinction is now extinct.

That’s the week in review. We ODDones are considering some springtime remodeling, so keep your eyes peeled on www.ourdailydead.com. Here’s to fresh french-fries and coolranch dressing.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Voodoo Child, John Mills, David Hughes, Cosmic Flyswatter

LA Times
Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, the Danish bassist whose virtuosity and flawless sense of time made him a favorite accompanist for many of the leading names in jazz, most notably pianist Oscar Peterson, has died. He was 58.

Orsted Pedersen, known as NHOP for his lengthy name, died Tuesday at his home in Ishoj, south of Copenhagen, his manager told Danish media. The cause of death was not announced.

NY Times
Dr. Norman D. Newell, an influential paleontologist who challenged opponents of evolutionary theory and helped shape theories explaining the mass extinctions of species, died on Monday at his home in Leonia, N.J., his family said. He was 96.

In a wide-ranging career that included scholarship, fieldwork and popular writing, he taught at Columbia and spent four decades as a curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.

A recent study
out of Great Britain found children in daycare were less likely to develop childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia
. The hypothesis is exposure to common infection early in childhood helps eliminate clones of malignant cells in the human system. The authors state.”Some degree of early exposure to infection seems to be important for child health.” A significant, but less powerful, protective effect was seen with other cancers as well. So we ODDfellows can predict the following admonitions from parents this coming Monday, ‘Jimi, of course mommy loves you, but if you don’t stop crying, get out of the car, and get inside, you’re going to die of cancer.’ Talk about tough love
.

So on to today’s list. If a 96 year old paleontologist dies, can he be called an ‘Old Dead Dinosaur’ (ODD), or would that be mean? Bassist Neils-Henning Orsted Pedersen was called ‘NHOP’ because of the length of his name. The band GWAR
also has a four letter, shortened name, but in their case it’s made up of the first letter of ‘God, what an awful racket.’ Would we kid you? What would you think if you overheard a muffled conversation where somebody said, ‘NHOP had great hands, and was a master basser‘? Would you be willing to shake his hand?
Of course you would, he was a ‘mas-ter-bass-er'’get your mind out of the gutter, and listen up. (Opps, we may have just become a little too ODD and a little less cute.) We trust NHOP is off in the cosmos, grooving, slapping, tapping, improvising, and much more.

We trust your having an ODDly great weekend. We ODDfellows are off to find a kid to cough on.

NY Times
James A. Houston, a writer and artist almost single-handedly responsible for introducing contemporary Eskimo art to an international audience, died on Sunday in New London, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Stonington, Conn.

The cause was complications of a heart attack, his wife, Alice, said.

A Canadian who lived in the United States since the early 1960’s, Mr. Houston spent more than a decade among the Inuit of Canada’s eastern Arctic in the years after World War II. There, he introduced local people to printmaking, helped them establish a profitable crafts cooperative to sell their prints and sculpture, and brought their work, then virtually unknown to outsiders, to the attention of museums and collectors worldwide.

So how did Friday get called Friday? A reasonable day for ODDthoughts, so we looked around. Here’s the answer (we think): Friday takes its name from the Old Norse goddess Freya
, the goddess of sex, wealth, war and fertility. Given what we see go on in ODDland Fridays, we find this to be appropriate and contemporarily accurate. We’re considering an ODD-Friday anthem
.

Here’s a link to more than you’ll ever want to know about naming of days of the week
.

Only one notable passing from the planet posted (try saying that five times’you’ll have to wipe off your monitor screen after the third time.) Read the full obituary of James Houston, and you’ll know how to capture a wolverine with Kleenex (note, this link is not to Kimberly Clark’a company with two first names )
.

Okay, if you’re too lazy to click through Houston’s obit, here’s the answer: To trap a wolverine, saturate a Kleenex with a certain redolent
perfume, available in the Arctic in the 1950’s. Wolverines find it irresistible.

That’s it, we ODDfellows are off to start on the first part of the possible ODD-Friday anthem.