Dead Celebrity Alert

After a seven-year battle with breast cancer.

Marcheline Bertrand, actress and mother of Angelina Jolie, has died of cancer, her daughter said Sunday. …

Bertrand, who had small roles in the movies “Lookin’ to Get Out” in 1982 and “The Man Who Loved Women” in 1983, raised Jolie and her brother after divorcing their father, Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight, when Jolie was a toddler. … Read full obituary

The Rev. Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Jesuit who — over the objections of his superiors — became the first Roman Catholic priest to serve as a voting member of Congress, died Sunday. … Read full obituary

… The 2006 Kentucky Derby winner’s fight for survival was their fight, a symbol of strength, courage and comfort — and, more than anything else, a source of inspiration.

He was, after all, winner of the world’s most famous race, in a sport desperate for a superstar. For months he seemed, remarkably, to take everything that came at him: good and bad. … Read full obituary

MITCHELL, S.D. — Eleanor McGovern, the wife of former Sen. George McGovern, has died at the family’s home in Mitchell, according to a Mitchell funeral home. She was 85. … Read full obituary

PLACENTIA, California (AP) — Brent Liles, a former bassist for the 1980s punk rock group Social Distortion, was struck and killed by a truck while riding a bicycle, authorities said Wednesday. He was 43. … Read full obituary

Just announced on CNN; no online links yet, so here’s his bio from Wikipedia:

Everette Howard Hunt (born October 9, 1918, in East Hamburg, New York, United States) worked for the CIA and later the White House under President Richard Nixon. Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy, had engineered the Watergate first break-in. He subsequently was fingered in the ensuing Watergate Scandal and was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping, eventually serving 33 months in prison.

Hunt, with Liddy and others, was one of the White House’s “plumbers” — a secret team of operatives charged with fixing “leaks.” Information disclosures had proved an embarrassment to the Nixon administration when defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg sent a series of documents, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times.

During World War II, Hunt served in the U.S. Navy, United States Army Air Forces and finally, the Office of Strategic Services. An employee of the CIA from 1949 to 1970, in 1949, he established the first post-war CIA station in Mexico City. In 1951, he hired William F. Buckley, Jr. as a CIA agent working within the Mexican student movement. Buckley and Hunt remained life-long friends. During this period, he also wrote several novels under his own name East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), Stranger in Town (1947), Bimini Run (1949) and The Violent Ones (1950)] and, more famously, several spy novels under an array of pseudonyms.

Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he saw as President Kennedy’s lack of spine in overturning the Castro regime. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us this Day, he wrote: “The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away.” (p.13-14)

Hunt organized the bugging of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building and was also found to be responsible for a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

JFK’s assassination

The Rockefeller Commission of the U.S. Congress, in 1974, regarded Hunt and Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis as suspects in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Support for this claim came from a figure from the 1960s counterculture, Kerry Thornley, who believed that on several occasions from 1961 to 1963 he had conversed with Hunt (whom Thornley claimed used the alias “Gary Kirstein”) about plans to assassinate Kennedy, while Thornley was living in New Orleans. Newsweek magazine reported and printed photographs of two men similar in appearance to Hunt and Sturgis who were detained at the grassy knoll shortly after the assassination. The article stated the official reports that the men were released as “railroad bums” who had found shelter sleeping in the boxcars of the trains located near the grassy knoll. According to the article, the men were released without further inquiry; readers were invited to draw their own conclusions from the pictures published.

Many conspiracists thought two of the tramps to be Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, although several other men were also identified as tramps. The mystery was apparently solved in the early 1990s when researcher Mary LaFontaine discovered documents identifying the men as Harold Doyle, John Forester Gedney and Gus W. Abrams. Both the F.B.I. and independent researchers confirmed the identifications.

Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, was killed in the December 8, 1972, plane crash of United Airlines Flight 533 in Chicago. Congress, the FBI, and the NTSB investigated the crash, but did not find any basis for determining that the crash was not purely accidental. $10,000 was found in Dorothy Hunt’s handbag, and was generally regarded as part of the “hush money” paid to Watergate defendants in an attempt to procure their silence regarding White House involvement.

In 1981, Hunt was awarded $650,000 in a libel lawsuit against Liberty Lobby, after it published an article by Victor Marchetti in its newspaper The Spotlight accusing Hunt of involvement in the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy. However, this decision was overturned on appeal, with Mark Lane successfully defending Liberty Lobby. Lane outlined his theory about Hunt’s and the CIA’s role in Kennedy’s murder in a 1991 book, Plausible Denial.

In addition to his work at the CIA — which included nontrivial roles in Operation PBSUCCESS and the Bay of Pigs Invasion — Hunt was a prolific author, primarily of spy novels. He declared bankruptcy in 1995 and lives in Biscayne Park, Florida. His memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond is to be published by John Wiley & Sons in March 2007.

Source

The 45-year-old was found dead Friday morning by his girlfriend at her home in Hudson, Fla. He was awaiting trial for his role in the DWI crash, for which he was facing potential prison time. … Read full obituary

It is with great sadness that the Cincinnati Reds announce the death of former pitching coach Vern Ruhle, who died at 11 p.m. last night at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston of complications from a donor stem cell transplant for the treatment of multiple myeloma. … Read full obituary

MISSISSAUGA, Ontario: Denny Doherty, one-quarter of the 1960s folk-rock group the Mamas and the Papas, known for their soaring harmony on hits like “California Dreamin’” and “Monday, Monday,” died Friday at 66. … Read full obituary

Ron Carey, the pint-sized, round-faced comic best known as the unjustifiably cocky Police Officer Carl Levitt on the long-running television situation comedy “Barney Miller,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 71. …

Besides playing roles in other less successful sitcoms, Mr. Carey appeared in 15 movies, including “High Anxiety” in 1977 and “History of the World: Part I” in 1981, both with Mel Brooks. … Read full obituary

January 17, 2007 — Benny Parsons, a popular champion auto racer who became a home-spun analyst for Nascar’s nationally televised races, died yesterday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 65 and lived in Ellerbe, N.C. … Read full obituary

Art Buchwald, who took humorous jabs at Washington politicians in syndicated columns for decades, has died, a close friend said Thursday. He was 81. … Read full obituary

Darlene Conley, a veteran stage and television actress who entertained daytime audiences for nearly two decades as the feisty fashion mogul Sally Spectra on “The Bold and the Beautiful,” has died. She was 72. … Read full obituary

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Larry Stewart, a millionaire who became known as Secret Santa for his habit of roaming the streets each December and anonymously handing money to people, died Friday. He was 58. … Read full obituary

Italian producer (”Doctor Zhivago,” “Blowup”) and husband of actress Sophia Loren.

No mainstream news links yet (although he died yesterday, 1/11), so here’s his bio from Wikipedia:

Robert Anton Wilson or RAW (January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was a prolific American novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurologist, anarchist, and conspiracy theory researcher.

His writing, which often shows a sense of humor and optimism, is described by him as an “attempt to break down conditioned associations — to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models (maps) and no one model elevated to the Truth.” And: “My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.”

Life

Wilson was born in Methodist Hospital, downtown Brooklyn, New York, and spent his first years in Flatbush, moving with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child, the effects of which remained with him throughout his life.

He attended Brooklyn Polytechnical College and New York University, studying engineering and mathematics. He worked as engineering aide, salesman, and copywriter and was associate editor for Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. In 1979 he received a Ph.D. in psychology from Paidea University in California, an unaccredited institution that has since closed. The reworked dissertation was published in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.

He married the freelance writer Arlen Riley in 1958. They had four children; their daughter Luna was killed in 1976. Her brain was preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society. Arlen suffered a stroke and died after long illness in 1999.

Death

On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert A. Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family. On 2 October 2006 Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble. Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the Subgenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff’s appeal. As his webpage reported on 10 October, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least 6 months.

On the 6th of January, he wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he was likely to have only between two days and two months left to live, closing his message with “Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.” He died five days later, a week before his 75th birthday, at 4:50 AM.

Writings

His best-known work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea and advertised as “a fairy tale for paranoids,” humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. Much of the odder material derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson worked as editors of the Playboy Forum. The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called “Operation Mindfuck”; the trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine’s Laws, concepts Wilson has revisited several times in other writings. Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career.

In Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and other works, he examined Discordianism, Sufism, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, the Illuminati and Freemasons, Yoga, and other esoteric or counterculture philosophies. He advocated Timothy Leary’s eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he also wrote about in Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books containing practical techniques for breaking free of one’s “reality tunnels”. With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI2LE).

Wilson also supported many of the utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and the theories of Charles Fort (he was a friend of Loren Coleman), as well as those of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he had taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and had written commentary on Finnegans Wake and Ulysses.

Ironically, considering Wilson long lampooned and criticized new age beliefs, his books can often be found in bookstores specializing in new age material. He claimed to have perceived encounters with magical “entities”, and when asked whether these entities were “real”, he answered they were “real enough”, although “not as real as the IRS” since they were “easier to get rid of”. He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting “energies” they unleash can lead people to go “quite nuts”. Instead, he recommends beginners start with NLP, Zen Buddhism, basic meditation, etc., before progressing to more potentially disturbing activities.

In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, RAW described himself as a “Model Agnostic” which he says “consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes… My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory.” More simply, he claims “not to believe anything,” since “belief is the death of thought.” He has described his approach as “Maybe Logic.” Wilson wrote articles for seminal cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.

While he had primarily published material under the name Robert Anton Wilson, he had also used the pen names Mordecai Malignatus, Mordecai the Foul, Reverend Loveshade, and other names associated with the Bavarian Illuminati, which he allegedly revived in the 1960s.

Wilson’s writings connect to the madcap satirical fiction of Flann O’Brien in a several ways, including his free use of O’Brien’s character De Selby. The views of De Selby, a would-be obscure intellectual, are the subject of long pseudo-scholarly footnotes in Wilson’s novels as well as O’Brien’s. This is entirely fitting, because O’Brien himself made free use of characters invented by other writers, allegedly because there are already too many fictional characters as is. O’Brien was also known for pulling the reader’s leg by concocting elaborate conspiracy theories, and for publishing under several pen names.

Other activities

Wilson had a long-standing relationship with the Association for Consciousness Exploration, beginning in 1982. He was the keynote speaker for their center’s open house in 1984, and appeared at many Starwood Festivals. Both Illuminatus! co-author Robert Shea and Wilson’s wife Arlen Riley Wilson have appeared with him at the WinterStar Symposium. They served as his American lecture agency while he lived in Ireland, and hosted his first on-stage dialog with his life-long friend Timothy Leary in 1989 in Cleveland, OH, entitled The Inner Frontier.

Wilson was also a member of the Church of the SubGenius, who referred to him as Pope Bob. He was a contributor to their literature, and shared a stage with Rev. Ivan Stang on several occasions.

He and his wife Arlen Riley Wilson founded the Institute for the Study of the Human Future.

As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Fully Informed Jury Association, he worked to inform the public about jury nullification, the right of jurors to nullify a law they deem unjust.

RAW held the post of American director of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) and appeared at Disinformation events.

He was a supporter of E-Prime, the elimination of the verb “to be” from the English language, preferring instead a “maybe logic”.

A lifelong experimenter with drugs and strong opponent against the war on drugs, he participated in the weeklong 1999 Annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. He was photographed receiving medical marijuana at a 2002 demonstration in Santa Clara to curb his chronic pain from post-polio syndrome.

Wilson was a founder and primary instructor of the Maybe Logic Academy, named for his agnostic approach to all knowledge. Fellow instructors include Patricia Monaghan, Rev. Ivan Stang, Philip H. Farber, Antero Alli, Peter J. Carroll, Starhawk, R. U. Sirius, Douglas Rushkoff and David Jay Brown.

Source

PC World lost a treasured colleague and friend Tuesday, when Senior Technical Editor Rex Farrance was killed during a home-invasion robbery attempt. For 19 years, Rex served PC World with professionalism and a passion for accuracy. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Yvonne De Carlo, the beautiful star who played Moses’ wife in “The Ten Commandments” but achieved her greatest popularity on TV’s slapstick comedy “The Munsters,” has died. She was 84. … Read full obituary

Related:
Grandpa Munster, Al Lewis, 95

The death of Mohan Seneviratne has friends and family mystified at how a traditional New Year’s Day dip into the waters of Coney Island could have ended in absolute tragedy for a promising young man.

The 32-year-old journalist from Manhattan died on Friday after suffering spinal chord and neck injuries while taking a dive into the ocean, a 104-year-old tradition that draws hundreds of novice cold water swimmers each year. … Read full obituary

Iwao Takamoto, the animator who created the cartoon canine Scooby-Doo as well as characters on such shows as “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons,” died Monday after suffering a massive coronary, a spokesman said. He was 81. … Read full obituary

Related:
Animation legend Joe Barbera, 95

“Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, a steel guitar prodigy who rose to fame as one of the original members of the Flying Burrito Brothers, has died. He was 72.

Kleinow, who also worked in film as an award-winning animator and special effects artist, died Saturday at a Petaluma convalescent home near the skilled nursing facility where he had been living with Alzheimer’s disease since last year, his daughter Anita Kleinow said. … Read full obituary

Foul play probably was not a factor in the death of Southern California kicker Mario Danelo, whose body was found about 120 feet down a rocky cliff, police said today. … Read full obituary

Nikki Bacharach, daughter of songwriter Burt Bacharach and actress Angie Dickinson, committed suicide, Bacharach and Dickinson said in a statement Friday.

Nikki Bacharach, 40, suffered from Asperger’s Disorder, a form of autism. She killed herself Thursday night at her condo in Thousand Oaks, said Linda Dozoretz, a spokeswoman for the family. … Read full obituary