Our Daily Dead

NY Times
IN case you missed its obituary, the joke died recently after a long illness, of, oh, 30 years. Its passing was barely noticed, drowned out, perhaps, by the din of ironic one-liners, snark and detached bons mots that pass for humor these days.

The joke died a lonely death. There was no next of kin to notify, the comedy skit, the hand-buzzer and Bob Newhart’s imaginary telephone monologues having passed on long before. But when people reminisce about it, they always say the same thing: the joke knew how to make an entrance. “Two guys walked into a bar”; “So this lady goes to the doctor”; “Did you hear the one about the talking parrot?” The new humor sneaks by on little cat feet, all punch line and no setup, and if it bombs, you barely notice. The joke insisted on everyone’s attention, and when it bombed - wow.

“A joke is a way to say, ‘I’m going to do something funny now,’ ” said Penn Jillette, the talking half of the comedy and magic duo Penn & Teller and a producer of “The Aristocrats,” a new documentary about an old dirty joke of the same name. “If I don’t get a laugh at the end, I’m a failure.”

It’s a matter of faith among professional comics that jokes - the kind that involve a narrative setup, some ridiculous details and a punch line - have been displaced by observational humor and one-liners. Lisa Lampanelli, who describes herself as the world’s only female insult comic, said that in the business, straight jokes were considered “the kiss of death.”

“You don’t tell joke jokes onstage ever,” she said. “Because then you’re a big hack.”

But out in the real world, the joke hung on for a while, lurking in backwaters of male camaraderie like bachelor parties and trading floors and in monthly installments of Playboy’s “Party Jokes” page. Then jokes practically vanished. To tell a joke at the office or a party these days is to pronounce oneself a cornball, an attention hog, and of course to risk offending someone, a high social crime. “I can’t remember the last time I was sitting around and heard someone tell a good joke,” Ms. Lampanelli said.

First order of today’s business is to answer yesterday’s ODDriddle: “What is the evolutionary purpose of the human female orgasm?” According to Professor Elisabeth A. Lloyd
of Indiana University, the female orgasm has no evolutionary function whatsoever. We ODDFellows, don’t find that all bad news, in fact it may be the best argument the Intelligent Design
crew can put forward (but then they’d also have to explain nipples on males.) Could this really be evidence of a compassionate God(dess)?

Many thanks to the West Coast member of the ODDbraintrust. In addition to throttling the ODDfellows for their continued assault on the English Language, our ODDleftcoaster brought today’s ODD obit to our attention. Our ODDOaklandite also asks the question, “Why is there no 2004 Darwin Award
list? Could the Darwins be On Deck?” Humm, guess we’ll have to cruise on over there and see what’s up.

Why are the Brits continuing to be so upset about pictures of Saddam in his underwear
? For crying-out-loud, it’s getting up to 106 F (41 C) in Baghdad
during the day. Who wouldn’t be sitting around in their underwear?

Here’s a quick recap of the weeks notable partings from the planet:

JIMMY MARTIN (77): King of bluegrass, died of bladder cancer. Bought first guitar with possum skins. What in the world are possum skins used for?
JUNE MCCOY (95): Actress, died of natural causes. If a load of organic vegetables falls on you in Whole Foods and kills you, is that “natural causes?” Never mind. Speaking of organic vegetables…
PAUL K. KEENE (94): Pioneer organic farmer, cause of death not stated…could it be tomatoes or perhaps okra?
?
ELISABETH FRASER (85): Character actor who died of congestive heart failure. She was Sergeant Bilko’s
sweetheart for those that remember black and white TV.
JOSE M. LOPEZ (94): WWII Medal of Honor winner, died of cancer.

FRANK GORSHIN (72): Actor and comedian who died of emphysema and pneumonia. “Holy cigarette smoke Batman!”
PIERO DORANZIO (77): Painter, died of complications of diabetes.
HARRY CORDEN (85): Voice actor best known for Barney Rubble, also died of emphysema.
CHARIE MUSE (87): Inventor of batting helmet, cause of death not stated.

“The Aviator”
comes out on DVD this week. Check out Howard Hughes “ODD Exit.”

Okay, this is a bit edgy, but we have to ask: If, according to research
, from birth, men and women share the same nervous system pathway for orgasms, when did women get the upgrade to “multiple?” Just asking.

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: orgasm, female orgasm, Intelligent Design, nipples, God, On Deck, Saddam in his underwear, Baghdad, JIMMY MARTIN, PAUL K. KEENE, ELISABETH FRASER, JOSE M. LOPEZ, FRANK GORSHIN, PIERO DORANZIO, HARRY CORDEN, CHARIE MUSE, The Aviator, Howard Hughes, orgasms

NY Times
LOS ANGELES, May 20 (AP) - Henry Corden, the voice of the cartoon caveman Fred Flintstone, with his “Yabba dabba doo!,” for more than two decades, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 85.

The cause was emphysema, his longtime agent, Don Pitts, said.

Mr. Corden took over as the lovable loudmouth Fred Flintstone when the original voice, Alan Reed, died in 1977. Reed had had the role since the show first appeared in 1960.

Born in Montreal, Mr. Corden moved to New York as a child and arrived in Hollywood in the 1940’s. His first acting role was in the 1947 film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Known for playing villains, he found small parts in movies like “The Black Castle” (1952) and “The Ten Commandments” (1956).

Mr. Corden moved into voice acting in the 1960’s, taking on bit parts in Hanna-Barbera shows like “Jonny Quest,” “Josie and the Pussycats” and “The New Tom & Jerry Show.”

Since “The Flintstones” echoed “The Honeymooners,” Mr. Corden tweaked his delivery to approximate that of Jackie Gleason’s character, Ralph Kramden, Mr. Pitts said.

Mr. Corden was working until about three months ago. He can most recently be heard on cereal commercials yelling “Barney, my Pebbles!”

Flintstones Collectibles at Ebay.com
Flintstones Bedrock Bowling
Flintstones Children’s Complete Multivitamin, Chewable Tablets - 150 ea
The Flintstone Comedy Show 25th Silver Anniversary Special (1972)

NY Times
PITTSBURGH, May 19 (AP) - Charlie Muse, a longtime Pittsburgh Pirates executive who helped create baseball’s modern batting helmet, died on May 5 in Sun City Center, Fla. He was 87.

His death was announced by the Pirates.

Muse spent 52 years with the Pirates, many as their traveling secretary. He was nicknamed the Colonel because of his all-business approach, and it was his military-like ability to improvise that helped speed the invention of the batting helmet.

Until Branch Rickey, the Pirates’ general manager, pushed in the early 1950’s for the creation of a protective helmet, batters traditionally wore only their cloth caps to the plate. At the time, Rickey owned American Baseball Cap Inc., and he chose Muse to run the company and design a suitable helmet.

“It was more difficult than people would think,” Muse told The Associated Press in a 1989 interview. “The players laughed at the first helmets, called them miner’s helmets. They said the only players who would wear them were sissies.”

Muse worked with Ralph Davia, an inventor, and Ed Crick, a designer, to perfect a helmet. They went through numerous designs before coming up with a comfortable plastic helmet that provided maximum protection above the ears.

The Pirates were the first team to wear the helmets, in 1952 and 1953, and their adoption was speeded after the Braves’ Joe Adcock, wearing a helmet, was beaned so severely by the Dodgers’ Clem Labine in 1954 that he was unconscious for 15 minutes.

Major League Batting Helmets at Ebay.com
Steel Pots

We must report that the cloud seeding experiment was unsuccessful, so it’s back to a life of writing ODD things and scrounging for dinner in the waste bins of McDonalds. Oh well, could be worse, it could be pictures of ODDfellows rather than Saddam
in their underwear. Does the fact that this story broke in a British tabloid say anything about what the Brits find erotic? What do you suppose Prime Minister Tony and his wife Cherie Blair have for bathroom reading?

Henry Corden, voice of Barney Rubble has died. If you’re planning on attending the
Sturgis, South Dakota motorcycle rally this August, check out Flintstone’s Bedrock City
in Custer. It will give new meaning to “meretricious.”
Also having completed his last inning is Charlie Muse, inventor of the baseball batting helmet. So long Colonel, you might look up Raymond Johnson Chapman in that “grand baseball diamond in the sky” (again, see definition, “meretricious.”)In ODD Exits you will read that Chapman is the only major league baseball player killed during a game.

Time to start working on the ODDweeklyrecap. In honor of Frank “The Riddler” Gorshin, we leave you with today’s ODDriddle: What is the evolutionary purpose of the human female orgasm? Answer tomorrow. We’ll give you the latest information, and not fake it.

YABBA-DABBA-DOO!

NY Times
Piero Dorazio, a celebrated Italian abstract painter and an important innovator of Modernism in that country, died on Tuesday in a hospital in Perugia, near his home in Todi, Umbria. He was 77. The cause was complications of diabetes, said his dealer in New York, Achim Moeller.

Mr. Dorazio started exploring abstraction in the late 1940’s and in the late 1950’s began to create all-over meshes of colored lines. During the next decade, like the American Color Field painters who also came into their own in the 1960’s, Mr. Dorazio produced expansive paintings that asserted vivid color and simplified, often geometrically ordered design. For the rest of his career, he would continue to work with the tension between lyrical sensuality and formalist rigor.

Piero D’Orazio was born on June 29, 1927. in Rome. He began painting and drawing as a teenager and after World War II began associating and exhibiting with other young and progressive artists, including those in Forma 1, the first group of Italian abstract artists.

In 1947 he received a French government grant to live in Paris, where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. During a yearlong stay, he met Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Francis Picabia and other leading lights of the French art world. Back in Rome, Mr. Dorazio organized Modern art exhibitions and wrote art criticism. In 1950 he helped found L’Age d’Or, an artists’ cooperative gallery, and in 1955 he published “La Fantasia Dell-Arte Nella Vita Moderna,” the first book on international Modern art to appear in Italy.

See also Piero Dorazio memorabilia.
Piero Dorazio, a retrospective: An exhibition
The work of Piero Dorazio
Piero Dorazio: paintings 1965-1968
Piero Dorazio: Paintings of the fifties
Piero Dorazio, paintings and collages 1971-1972: [catalogue of an exhibition held at the Marlborough Gallery], February 1973

Speak like Yoda today we thought we would. And if time enough (and perhaps cats enough) you give us Walk Like an Egyptian
we will too.

To peer into the life of Piero Dorazio (or D’Orazio) sashay we must over to Wikipedia for clues to Abstract Painting we seek. And told we are that Abstract is now understood to be non-representational or non-objective representation of natural world objects. Of Washington does this remind you?

Abstract Painting discussions complete cannot be without mentioning he of the Spilled Paint School of Abstract Art: Mr. Jackson Pollack. Hanging around the barn have the ODDfellows one or two Pollacks. Admire these paintings our horses do, particularly Number 8.

BTW, BIF the answer is to yesterday’s wanna-be riddle - a Back to the Future main character and one of the favorite fight scene terms in Batman.

For reading us we thank you. Your ODDLy non-representational or non-objective tips for today are:
Kudzu depresses urge for alcohol. This in mind you should keep when wandering afield in the great South.
And the Headless Chicken Mike Festival is this weekend. Amok running you must.