David Bowie and Alan Rickman: January 10-14, 2016

Obvious Celebrity Death Pair in David Bowie and Alan Rickman this week, both at the age of 69!

Scott Weiland and Robert Loggia December 4 2015

Hundreds of thousands of 30 something suburban bros weaned on alt rock made themselves post mournfully on Facebook today over the death of Scott Weiland, lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots. That band always seems somewhere between Silverchair and Pearl Jam in the spectrum of unmeaningful Nirvana coattail-riders but a lot of people seem pretty fake broken up about it. Nothing coming has said it was related to drugs but. Heroin?

Also Robert Loggia died at age 85. He played the gangster in Lost Highway, and I think few actors could do comedy and intimidation simultaneously the way he did it. I couldn't find the whole clip, but the end, when he says something like "hey kid, want to borrow some pornos? It'l give you a boner..." makes me crack up every time.

Christopher Lee and Ornette Coleman June 7-11 2015

Christopher Lee was an actor for a long time and even though he is super famous and in lots of famous movies, I can't really remember what he looked like. He was "the bad guy" in the Star Wars prequels but not "that other bad guy". He was in "Lord of the Rings trilogy" but I didn't watch that, I watched "The Matrix Trilogy" (eesh)

Ornette Coleman invented Free Jazz; at least the word of it.

February 27-28, 2015: Leonard Nimoy and Anthony Mason

Leonard Nimoy played Spock in Star Trek and as far as I know just kind of coasted on that for the rest of his career. His autobiographies are about being Spock or not being Spock. I can't think of any other roles he played. He seemed like a nice guy. He probably went to a lot of ComicCons and whatnot so he probably was very skilled with dealing with non-celebrity folk. He was 83 so thats pretty good.

Anthony Mason was a basketball player on the mid 90's New York Knicks and was their most physical player. Whenever someone on the other team would be shooting well or making layups, Anthony Mason would foul that guy really hard and that guy would start shooting worse and stop driving to the hoop. After a quarter or two of this the other team would be scared to even shoot a long 3 because they knew that Mase or Oak would foul them into the 3rd row. Then the Knicks would win. Mase could ball as well but subsumed his personal stats for the betterment of the team. This was a really successful style of basketball as far as playoff wins go but it was unwatchable for fans and rule changes eventually got rid of these tactics. Now the NBA does not really have any "enforcer" guys. Not even Kendrick Perkins counts. Anthony Mason died of a heart attack at age 48, only like 10 years after retiring from the NBA.