Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Aged 65. He had been diagnosed with throat cancer a decade ago, but had reportedly recovered from that. Pneumonia did him in, which is normally fairly treatable, says the man who is immune-compromised and had it five times in seven months in his late 40s.

He did a lot of very good work, definitely a career cut short.

This obit is rather short as a Rolling Stone Breaking News arrived in my email only half an hour ago.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/val-kilmer-dead-obit_n_67ecb4d4e4b0923ef8b48f70

The Santa Fe county coroner released the report today revealing what happened, and it's pretty sad.

Both deaths were from natural causes. The first death, his wife, Betty Arakawa, died on February 11 of Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome. Hantavirus is not very common outside of northern New Mexico and Arizona, it's spread by Eastern Deer Mice feces and saliva and can cause an asymptomatic infection. Gene passed away on the 18th from heart disease and advanced Alzheimer's. Reportedly his pacemaker logged his heart stopping. Could be the heart disease, could be Broken Heart Syndrome from his wife dying, or perhaps malnutrition of not feeding himself after she died? The advanced Alzheimers could account for him not calling for help.

No foul play is suspected but the investigation is continuing.

Very tragic.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/gene-hackman-cause-of-death-revealed-1235281821/

EDIT to add non-paywalled source:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gene-hackman-betsy-arakawa-cause-of-death_n_67c9ea6ce4b0404dff30062e

To read Rolling Stone articles and avoid paywalls, open a private browsing window. Normally on PCs this will be a Ctrl-Shift-N. You can also install the Epic browser which focuses on user privacy and does not maintain cookies.

Michelle was found in her New York City apartment unresponsive. No cause of death has been announced. For a 39 year old, she has been an actor for 36 of those years! Perhaps most famously for Gossip Girl and Harriet The Spy, for me she will always be Dawn Summers, Buffy's kid sister in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember the utter shock of the reveal that *BOOM* Buffy has a sister? It was an amazing twist in a great TV series, and she was fantastic in that show. It's additionally sad as it's entirely possible that Buffy may be seeing a relaunch with Sarah Michelle Geller coming up: talks are in progress with a good producer, not Joss Wheden.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/michelle-trachtenberg-dead-obituary-1235280880/

His hospice stay has finally ended after over a year.

He had a rough time with his presidency, having an oil crisis and the Iranian hostage situation. The latter was further complicated with the incoming Reagan presidency meddling in that affair so that the hostages would not be released under his watch, which could have resulted in his re-election. Interesting thing to posit what situation the country would have been in subsequent years had Reagan/Reaganomics not come into power.

He was also one of three sitting Presidents to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, subsequently President Obama was awarded it.

Subsequent to his term in office, President Carter had a very successful post-election career with his non-profit Carter Foundation, doing election monitoring internationally and working to worked to eradicate the Guinea worm, which has been hugely successful. With his wife, they worked tireless building homes with Habitat For Humanity.

I would rate him as perhaps the most publicly vigorous and useful post-term presidency that we have yet seen. Interestingly, aside from a few books, he really didn't monetize his presidency and continued living a very modest life. A humble and modest man who has gone on to a very well-earned peaceful rest.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/jimmy-carter-dead-obituary-794884/

Elwood was a camera operator and jack of all trades at WKYC TV channel 3 in Cleveland, Ohio and a fanatic at catching typos.

A pretty anonymous guy. Except for one thing.

Years ago, he was paid $200 to record a few phrases.

"You've got mail!"

He was the voice of AOL's recorded phrases.

A little piece of computer trivia and history has left the planet.

If you scroll down the page, he appeared on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon and did several phrases for them.

https://www.wkyc.com/article/life/people/elwood-edwards-wkyc-employee-voice-aol-youve-got-mail-greeting-dies-74/95-940b6ed4-b90b-4c4c-b0d5-6c57fddb6546

Phil was an eclectic one, classically trained. Jerry Garcia handed him a bass and invited him to play with the band that would become the Dead. He'd never played a bass before, but jumped in, playing it like a low guitar.

After Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995 and the dissolving of the Grateful Dead, Lesh continued performing and recording, sometimes with former Dead members.

In 2015 it was reported that he'd contracted bladder cancer after having survived a liver transplant in 1998 from an old Hep-C infection. He and his wife of 40 years Jill opened a restaurant in California where their sons performed as the house band, Phil would join them for Grateful Dead song nights.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/phil-lesh-grateful-dead-dead-1234809976/

And everybody is asking who the heck is Ward Christensen?

Ward invented, or co-invented, two little computer programs, or systems. They were kind of foundational to a lot of pre-internet culture. XModem in 1977 and the BBS system in 1978.

What would social media have been without them? Would there have been social media without BBSes?

Ward and his collaborator wrote the original CBBS code in TWO WEEKS. Then they told people it took them four so they wouldn't think it was rushed!

I remember in the early '80s dialing in to boards with my TRS-80 Model 100 (built-in 300 baud modem, runs off of 4xAA batteries and I still have it and it still works) and screaming in fury inside whenever someone picked up the phone and disconnected me.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/ward-christensen-bbs-inventor-and-architect-of-our-online-age-dies-at-age-78/

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/10/15/002203/ward-christensen-bbs-inventor-and-architect-of-our-online-age-dies-at-age-78

Jones won his first award for stage work: a Tony in 1970 in The Great White Hope. His first movie role was a smallish part in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove as one of the airmen on the ill-fated bomber. He was tagged as the voice of Darth Vader by George Lucas when it was quickly apparent that David Prowse's accent was entirely inappropriate to be used in the film and had to be re-recorded: he was being called Darth Farmer during production. Apparently Orson Welles was also considered for the voice role, good choice made by Lucas considering the relative lifespans of the two actors.

James Earl Jones went on to do quite a number of memorable roles, including the Eddie Murphy comedy Coming To America, and, of course, Mufasa in The Lion King.

He created some amazing roles and earned his rest.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/james-earl-jones-dead-obituary-1234768096

Dr. Ruth was born in Frankfurt, Germany to Jewish parents in 1928. In 1938 her father was loaded into a truck the week after Kristallnacht to be taken to a labor camp and she never saw him again. Her mother put her on a train to go to a boarding school in Switzerland the following year, and that was the last she saw of her mother. She kept in mail correspondence with her relatives during the war until it all stopped.

After the war, she went to the nascent state of Israel and joined one of the fighting forces trying to keep the country alive. She later married a Jewish soldier. She said of her growing up in an orphanage and losing her parents and family, “I was left with a feeling that because I was not killed by the Nazis — because I survived — I had an obligation to make a dent in the world,” Dr. Westheimer once told an interviewer. What she did not know, she added, was that the dent would entail her “talking about sex from morning to night.”

She settled in at the height of 4'7", and was quite the dynamo. Rest well, doctor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/07/13/dr-ruth-westheimer-sex-dead/

A very long and storied career, Sutherland pioneered the role of Hawkeye Pierce in the film M*A*S*H and Alan Alda later went up to him and said 'Thank you for giving me my career!'. He was Buffy's Watcher in the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a plotter alongside Sean Connery in The Great Train Robbery, for me his most memorable role was as Sgt. Oddball in Kelly's Heroes, a WW II heist movie by Clint Eastwood: 'There you go with the negative vibes again, Moriarity!' And, of course, President Snow in The Hunger Games.

Quite the list of awards, including Prime Time Emmys, a Razzie, the French Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, but no Oscar. Still, he was recognized around the world.

Quite the career and lots of good work to look back on.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/donald-sutherland-dead-obituary-1033141/