Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Constance Moore, the glamorous singer-actress who co-starred in a string of World War II-era movie musicals and gained cult-film status as Buster Crabbe’s co-star in the 1939 “Buck Rogers” serial, has died. She was 84.

Moore, who also appeared in a hit Broadway musical in the early ’40s, died Friday of heart failure at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills after a long illness, said her son, Michael Maschio.

Moore was a band vocalist on a Dallas radio show before being discovered by a Universal Studios talent scout. She arrived in Hollywood as a teenager in 1937 and subsequently appeared in comedies, dramas, westerns and musicals.

Among her more than 40 film credits are the movie musicals “Delightfully Yours” with Jane Powell, “Show Business” with Eddie Cantor and George Murphy, “Earl Carroll Vanities” with Dennis O’Keefe and “Hit Parade of 1947″ with Eddie Albert.

She also appeared with Ray Milland and William Holden in the wartime drama “I Wanted Wings,” co-starred with Bill Elliott in the western “In Old Sacramento” and supported Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray in the comedy “Take a Letter, Darling.”

On television two decades later, she co-starred with Robert Young in the short-lived “Window on Main Street,” a 1961-62 situation comedy.

But Moore may be best remembered for playing the daughter of W.C. Fields’ Larson E. Whipsnade in the classic 1939 comedy “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” and Wilma Deering in “Buck Rogers,” the 1939 science-fiction serial based on the popular comic strip.

LA Times
Molly Yard, who became president of the National Organization for Women when she was 75 and yet was credited with making the women’s movement relevant to a new generation, has died. She was 93.

Yard died Wednesday at the Fair Oaks Nursing Home in her longtime home of Pittsburgh, her family announced.

“She was a brilliant strategist and tireless organizer for campaigns for social justice who could always rally the troops,” Eleanor Smeal, a close friend who preceded Yard as president of NOW, said in a statement released by the Feminist Majority Foundation, where Yard had worked after leaving NOW.

When Yard became NOW’s president in 1987, The Times said she “had a gift for rafter-rattling oratory,” and under her leadership, the organization became more visible. Membership grew to 250,000 members, and the annual budget went up 70% to more than $10 million a year.

She led NOW during the bitter fight that helped defeat the nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, arguing that he might provide the fifth vote that would override the high court’s landmark 1973 ruling legalizing abortion.

Yard campaigned for abortion rights and worked to elect more women to political office. Until a major stroke in 1991 cut short her NOW presidency, she talked about creating a third major political party that would represent women and minorities.

We have somewhat of an ODDassociation in today’s notable passings. Constance Moore capitalized on her feminine beauty while Molly Yard soundly beat the drum of feminism.

So do any other ODD associations lurk within the cosmos? Moore starred opposite W.C. Fields
in “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man.” Well, you can see the issue of gender equality in the title alone. What of the fate of honest women? And what about the quotes of Fields
(e.g. “No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it’s only a question of degree.” Then we come to Moore’s staring role in Buck Rodgers
. (BTW, this is a link to a very sucky website, compared to this Flash Gordon website
, which isn’t too shabby)
” Who was the male lead in Buck Rogers? Why of course, “Buster Crabbe.” Now hold on cause we’re about to make a stretch. Short for “Buster” is “Bust,” and we know how the bust fits into all arguments feminine ( click here
for a short history of the brassier, and BTW, here’s another example of why you can’t always believe what you hear, whether in the backseat of a car or otherwise
.). And as for Crabbe, well that’s pretty close to “crabby,” which might characterize some attitudes within the feminist movement, but then again, the stakes are high, just witness some attitudes about the Judge Roberts nomination
. (Is it just us, or does Judge Roberts look just a tad extraterrestrial
? Guess it would fit with the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon theme.)

Okay, for those of you ODDones who have really been paying attention, we have a great ODDassociation in that yesterday we reported the death of Gordon Gould, inventor of the laser. Here’s what he said about ol’Flash
(and we assume Buck.) Ain’t life strange.

Well, we think we’ve gotten our ODDselves in enough trouble for today. We close with a quote from Dale Arden of Flash Gordon fame, Flash, I love you! But we only have 14 hours to save the Earth!

LA Times
Gordon Gould, the prolific physicist who was widely credited with inventing the laser in a caffeine- and nicotine-fueled weekend in 1957, then spent 30 years persuading federal courts to uphold his patents on a device that has now become ubiquitous, died Friday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He was 85 and suffered from emphysema resulting from years of smoking.

Derided as an “attic inventor” with a “candy-store patent,” Gould was forced to sit on the sidelines when Charles H. Townes shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with two Russian physicists for developments that led to the laser. Gould had the last laugh when he received patents on the device that brought him more than $30 million in royalties.

Gould was a physics graduate student at Columbia University in November 1957, living off his wife’s income while finishing up his thesis, when he conceived the laser in a late-night flash of inspiration. He spent the weekend laboriously compiling nine pages of calculations in his laboratory notebook, then had the foresight to have the work notarized at a neighborhood candy store.

Think how many times a day you are impacted by recently-departed-Gordon Gould’s invention, the L.A.S.E.R.
Grocery checkout, CD players, cordless mousii
, smart bombs
, redneck accoutrements
, municipal and state revenue generators
, surgical procedures
, and all things barcode
, oh the list goes on and on. Gould hung out in Breck
before the altitude got his emphysema; however, his invention helped get a 72 year-old man in a fair amount of trouble on the mountain. Irony
? We think not.

Gould didn’t get the Nobel Prize
. Life isn’t fair
.

He had his invention notes notarized at a candy store. Name a song written by Cowboy Jack Clement
and recorded by Johnny Cash
that centered on a candy store (today’s ODDassociation.) Click here
for answer.

Lasers are also used to remove tattoos, but we ODDones strongly recommend Turlington’s Lower Back Tattoo Remover
.

Tag, you’re it

NY Times
VIENNA, Austria (AP) — Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who helped track down Nazi war criminals following World War II, then spent the later decades of his life fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people, died Tuesday. He was 96.

Wiesenthal, who helped find one-time SS leader Adolf Eichmann and the policeman who arrested Anne Frank, died in his sleep at his home in Vienna, said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

‘’I think he’ll be remembered as the conscience of the Holocaust. In a way he became the permanent representative of the victims of the Holocaust, determined to bring the perpetrators of the greatest crime to justice,'’ Hier told The Associated Press.

A survivor of five Nazi death camps, Wiesenthal changed his life’s mission after the war, dedicating himself to tracking down Nazi war criminals and to being a voice for the 6 million Jews who died during the onslaught. He himself lost 89 relatives in the Holocaust.

Wiesenthal spent more than 50 years hunting Nazi war criminals, speaking out against neo-Nazism and racism, and remembering the Jewish experience as a lesson for humanity. Through his work, he said, some 1,100 Nazi war criminals were brought to justice.

‘’When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it,'’ he once said.

Simon Wiesenthal is dead. He dedicated his life to hunting down Nazis
. A survivor of the death camps
, he fought anti-Semitism and prejudice.

Thus, today is simple, you have two reading assignments: First, “Doctors from Hell: The horrific accounts of Nazi experiments on humans,”
plainly written by a court reporter who covered the Nuremberg War Crimes Trails
. Like Wiesenthal, author Vivien Spitz, has devoted her life to making sure the atrocities of the Third Reich would not be forgotten or history rewritten. (This book is the subject of a glowing review in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine,
and well it should be.) Our second ODDassignment is, Dr. Martha Stout’s “The Psychopath Next Door.”
.” It will help you understand famous leaders, maybe your neighbor, and perhaps even your boss
. (Think of it as a form of survival manual.)

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation. title
Loren Eiseley