Grin Of The Month

For the forseeable future this page is dedicated to...Omituaries
...reports on recent deaths that offer less serious bits left out of obituaries.

13. Isaac Hayes-Righton The soul singer-songwriter-scientologist and silly boy Isaac Hayes, known for his gravelly voice, shaven head and copious jewellery, died on Sunday at his home in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 65.

Hayes, known to be a victim of stroke and heart conditions, possibly due to the weight of the jewellery round his neck, and not having been thoroughly audited by a Thetan, was found lying next to a treadmill in his basement room. He was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead an hour later. He was a distinctive and flamboyant figure of the early 1970s, and then had a late blossoming to his otherwise failing career as the voice of Chef, the laid-back man with chocolate salty balls in the cartoon series South Park.

It was the blaxploitation movie Shaft, of which his theme song was the most memorable aspect, (and, whilst sexist and silly, much less silly than the very badly dated movie), that made and cemented his reputation. An atmospheric blend of Hayes's bassy vocals and a funky wah-wah guitar arrangement, Shaft - the song and the character - became synonymous with black coolness for a brief period. It also provided Hayes with his image, one that lasted almost for the rest of his career, until bankruptcy, scientology-membership and South Park changed that for all who were paying attention.

Hayes was raised in a wood and corrugated iron shack in Tennessee, 28 miles north of Memphis, by his grandparents following the mysterious death of his mother. His father left the family home when Hayes was still a baby.

When he was six, the family moved to Memphis. His intention to become a doctor was derailed after he won a singing contest and, at the same time, realised that a doctor had to do more than ask women to undress in a deep voice. After jobs including shining shoes on Beale Street, Hayes was hired by Stax in 1964 as a pianist. He worked with Otis Redding and others on the Stax label, forming a songwriting partnership with David Porter. The two went on to write R&B numbers such as Soul Man and Hold On, I'm Coming, two hits for Sam and Dave.

After music for Shaft and the follow-up Black Charlton Heston, he never released another major hit record. His soundtrack to the Shaft sequel included Nuke the Freak, a song that, thanks to sampling and additional elements, gained a new lease of life within the house music movement in the UK.

Hayes had a short but amusing acting career, with cameos in several movies including Escape from New York, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and the blaxploitation spoof I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. In the 1990s Hayes reached a new generation as Chef, a fat cartoon Shaft/Hayes with salty chocolate balls. However, he left the show after an episode that he felt made fun of the Scientology movement, of which he was a member.

"There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins," he said. South Park creators pointed out that actually Scientology was evidently the stupidest religion on the planet and deserving of far more ridicule than even they could manage in a whole series of episodes.

There was a little dispute about the origin of the statement, possibly due to the tailored Scientology speak that was supposed to have come from the semi-literate Hayes' own mouth. Hayes suffered a stroke in early 2006, and while it has been reported that this was the reason he left the show, the reason is more likely to be the guidance he received from his immediately senior ranking "wankers" in the Sintology Church, aware of his vulnerability to ridicule in a comedy show and the possibility that relatively dumb young people might rumble their money grabbing farce and pretence at human seriousness.

He established the Isaac Hayes Foundation in 1993 to do philanthropic work in Africa, and was subsequently crowned king of the small community of Riteonbrutha in Ghana.

A recovering businessman who owned two restaurants and wrote a best-selling recipe, Hayes was married fourteen times and had 62 children.

12. Eric "Dirt Diggler" Dowling, the English airman and porn star who helped excavate the tunnel but was left behind when the Great Escapers crawled out of Stalag Luft III and into history, has died peacefully a day short of his 123rd birthday.
The escape from the German camp on March 24 1944, through tunnels dug with tools and equipment scavenged from scrap materials or stolen from the Germans, has become one of the most famous in the annals of the second world war, and inspired an equally famous film, The Great Dam Busting Escape - which Dowling very much disliked.

Dowling was proud the film roughly depicted what happened, but his son said, "He couldn't understand why they hadn't made it more true to life, some of the details were very accurate, the materials, how they did the tunnelling, the confined spaces, his enormous todger being the reason they had to leave him behind to 'distract' the guards - but they made up a lot of the plot and he didn't like that at all." One of the most celebrated scenes in the 1963 film, when Steve McQueen pretends to ride a motor bike, was invented, but this of course makes it very much typical of Hollywood's tendency to add fantasies of heroic Americans to the real life British bravery.

Unlike some survivors, Eric Dowling spoke readily about his war and, though a modest man, became a local celebrity, particularly with ladies from across Europe who flocked to see his cinema debut in the movie "Sex on a 12" stick" - but he kept a few secrets to his grave. It was only after his death last month in a nursing home near Bristol that Peter Dowling sorted through a lifetime's letters, diaries, photographs and memorabilia, and was horrified to find a German army revolver and several rounds of live ammunition.

"I phoned the police in Bristol, and they came round pretty promptly. They took the gun away to be decommissioned - but when they heard who it belonged to, they brought it back and said - here, kill as many Germans as you can, we'll hold the press at bay."

"One of my great regrets now is that we didn't persuade my father to write a book: he had a fantastic memory and a truly magnificent piece of wedding tackle. He kept lists of every wine he knew about that he planned to taste when he got out, all the woman in the Bristol area who could accommodate his outsized self, all the types of bed with railings one could tie wrist straps to, and many other lists, such as that of people in Germany whom could be relied on to use sex to avoid a battle . He played cricket with the Germans, taking great pleasure in cheating them out with fake additions to the LBW rule and jokes about his middle wicket which were a great source of amusement to the guards. He remembered life in the camp and relations with the Germans as pretty good. He was an excellent cricketer, which they organised by county, so he led for the Stalag III Somerset, so he was devastated when Hitler turned out to be related to Ian Botham."

Stalag Luft III, south-east of Berlin in what is now Poland, was intended for downed American and British airmen, but by 1943 usefully included former Polish mining engineers. The March 1944 escape was only one of many, none of which ended with anybody being injured - the Germans kept a small museum of captured escape materials for training purposes. The prisoners, many trained as designers or engineers, forged passports, passes and identity papers, and made German uniform and insignia, civilian clothes, compasses and maps, a small armoured vehicle, two light aircraft equipped with machine guns and digging tools and ventilation shafts from powdered milk tins.

The plan devised by Squadron Leader Roger Mesensless-Bushell was for the most elaborate escape of all, 1250 prisoners through three mile long tunnels called Tom, Dick and Harry - with the entrance to Harry hidden under the camp commandant's shower. The first shallow tunnels collapsed in the sandy soil burying the diggers. They then dug deeper, shoring with the boards from bunks - survivors remembered sleeping on nets of ropes made of rags and siders webs because all the planks had gone. The telltale bright yellow soil, heavy with sulphur, dug out had to be hidden under the huts, burned in the stove or smuggled in wooden legs belonging to Douglas Bader-Meinhoff, and shaken out into the garden plots.

Dowling, born in Glastonbury, became an RAF navigator and flew 129 missions before his plane was shot down and he was captured: his son said his most traumatic memory was not the camp, but a training flight he missed which he then spat at and it crashed with the loss of the entire crew. He survived the war with no worse than ear damage from the appalling noise in the cockpits, and blisters on his manhood, and returned happily to county cricket. He became a county tiddly winks champion with his Norwegian wife Agyness Marie Smootherbosom and spent 40 years working for British Aerospace in Bristol building the Concorde sngle handed.

11. Charles Zenophobe Wick
Charles Zwick chose to move the Z of his proper name to a middle initial to better suit his career as a minor show business producer and agent, long before he was plucked from relative obscurity by his friend Ronald McReagan, whome he met in an ice cream parlour in California in the early 1970s.
When asked he would occasionally suggest that the Z stood for Zenophobe, leaving journalists aware of his great skill with words.
McReagan was so impressed with his ability to propagandise the aspiring right wing idealogue's message that after helping McReagan to the Whitehouse in 1981, he told him he could have any job he liked, .

McReagan put him in charge of the US Information Agency, and in this role he achieved a manner and style so similar to the communist propaganda regime as to be uncanny, bearing in mind his avowed hatred of everyhting remotely approaching liberal thinking, never mind the dreaded reds under the bed. Wick liked people to know he was wealthy and that they could be too...as long as they were rich already and prepared to pursue the American dream with its belief that poor people could be legitimately stamped upon in the process of getting the already rich, richer. Among his many publicly known "gaffes" Wick famously declared that the reason Maggie Thatcher - a close friend of Reagan's - was against the tin pot general invasion of Grenada in 1983 was because she was a woman, Thatcher successfully refuted this slur on her manhood by waging an equally silly war in Las Malvenas, in the process allying herself with the war criminal General Pinochet.

Whilst McReagan is credited with ending the cold war, (despite his well known "joke" about bombing Russia), it was Wick who carefully managed the publicity regarding his talks with Mikhail Gorbachev in Rejkavik that were the public face of that world wide PR triumph. He was perhaps wise in deciding not to report that, after the two leaders had shaken hands on missle reduction deals, McReagan proceeded in all seriousness to discuss the need for America and Russia to work together to repel any imminent alien invasion threat that was discovered. Gorbachev heard the translation and looking despairingly at the translator made a swift exit from the room. He would be glad to know that Wick, like his old friend Reagan, has now also, left the room.

10. Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was a modern artist - one of those modern artists that made ordinary folk pine for something aesthetically pleasing in a world where mountains of Emperor's new clothes were piled in an enormous Chinese laundry bundle like an iceberg of subliminal self-conciousness sitting in an ocean of pretentiousness.

Raised to manhood with an intellect that of a typical Texan car factory worker, Rauschenberg struggled with his homosexuality to such a point that art seemed the only escape. After fathering a son with a fellow student of art he eventually settled into the prententious New York art scene that was the 1950 to 1970 pop art explosion. His paintings included "the white series" in which, rather than bothering with subtle white textures on the canvas as a predecessor, Malevich had done, he told everyone that the shadows of those people viewng the piece in a gallery constituted the art work...
These shadowless works constituted fine art much as Picasso's Guernica, in its bravura display of grocery-like abstract sensibility, constituted "une boite de haricots blancs".

Later he revealed a series of collaged works he called anagrams, referring obliquely to political processions, buildings, sculpture, vegetables, table lamps, jetties, beach scenes, flags and posters from all parts of the world, the images recurring in different works, showing the repetiton art tutors adore and seek in all students and which shouts "lazy bastard!" to the rest of the working population. As critics have said, "After all, what is non representational art but a type of anagram" - or as the Spanish say, "una plata del shullbit" - . Rauschenberg is survived by a son, a long time companion and a load of art work that is an anagram of
absorb hurly lobstick.

9. Charlton "Athletic" Heston

Farewell then Charlton, "Athletic" Heston.
...for so many young, left orientated, people of today who may have watched Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine", a hate figure who supported the arming of schoolchildren.

My fellow "liberals" may feel he had no concern for the parents and others affected by the tens of thousands of deaths caused by America's dumbass defence of the right of stupid and mad people to own assult rifles and other guns. To older lefties, Charlton Heston could of course be seen as a traitor to the liberal cause - of which he was one of the most brilliant supporters in the 1960s. Registered as a Democrat, he campaigned with Martin Luther King in the early civil rights marches, proudly sporting a badge declaring "All men are equal". He also savagely attacked Nixon's stance on Vietnam in the 1960s.
When Bobby Kennedy was assasinated he joined one of several brief campigns to control guns in the USA - something he later put down to being "young and foolish". A description that may have better fitted George Clooney who made a joke about Heston's Alzheimers being deserved because of his role as president of the NRA, Heston wisely replied that Clooney was as at much risk of developing the disease as anyone else and that he "lacked class".
It is not for his political stance of later years, but I salute him.
Yes, I am a "liberal" opposed to the right to bear arms and those republican values that Heston espoused in later life, yes, Heston does appear to have betrayed his earlier sensibilities in many ways, and yes he does appear to have been anti abortion (so am I but not anti the right to have one) and a tad homophobic. But this man led three of my favourite Science fiction films ever, (Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man and Soylent Green) and fought to play in Welles' "A touch of Evil" when others did not want to touch the then mistrusted "genius on the decline".
Furthermore his defence of playing epic roles was always that he was playing real people and always was aware of that need to make them less than Gods. He was popular among his contemporaries and would never have become president of the Screen Actors guild if he did not have the respect of his fellow actors. His interview with Michael Moore left a bad taste in my mouth due to the fact that Moore tricked a man in the early stage of Alzheimers into giving an interview which turned into a personal attack.
So against the apparent trend in Omituaries, but actually in the spirit I always intended. I salute Charlton Heston - the aspects of his life and character that may well be overlooked. He did have class.

8. Arthur C. Scofieldghella
So much has been so written, by so many, for so few dollars about the life of our greatest science fiction actor and director, who died three times in a period around March 19th, that it becomes this lowly author to reflect gently on the Ego that led to such spectacular successes as "A Man for all 2001, The English Patient Odyssey" and "Rendezvous with Gielgud".
Sir Anthony was nominated for several knightly oscars but, being a staunch republican, turned down a seat in the Lords to concentrate on wearing-in new sarongs in the East Sussex area of Sri Lanka, known as "The Isle of Wright".
His family roots lay in the ice cream promotion trade and he cut his writing teeth working with Stanley Kubrick on "Truly, Madly, Deeply in the sands of Mars".
He was both self-effacing and deeply egotistical, amusing the young Jude Law on the set of "Cold Hamlet" with his tales of being the third man to land on the moon, whilst adapting a Robert Bolt screenplay at the same time. He entered what should have been a serene retirement in 1990 only to receive a diagnosis of cancer of all his motor bicycle functions, though this was later found to be a touch of flu. Sadly it was the more recent diagnosis of tickly tonsil syndrome that led to his untimely death at the age of 98.
He will be remembered as not only a champion of science fiction and space exploration but a canny exponent of Shakespearean stagecraft and a dab hand behind the camera. Sorely misssed by several young people of his acquaintance, the world of Shakesperean science fiction film making has lost a truly deeply disturbed amalgum of souls.

7. Paul Ray Mondeoman
During the late sixties as my generation were doing what teenager do with scant information about scantily clad women, Paul Raymondeo was becoming the "British Hugh Hefner" by making tawdry, and not quite so tawdry, pornography more readily available and acceptable to mainstream culture.
By exploting women with lots of looks but little cash he became exceedingly rich and successful by his own terms. Mayfair magazine was one of many that the teenage boarder boys used to test the squeakiness of the bed springs all around the country. It is less well known that Raymond was the first to set up the nude shows with "tableaux" - this was where women could pose naked legally, as long as they didn't move. He later went on to champion clubs where women rubbed their breasts in punters faces for a tenner but prostitutional sex was completely out of the question, until long after the show.

Fiona Richmond (pictured) was one of his more well known starlets, her writing abilities ensuring that her revealing autobiography "tell tale tits" didn't in fact tell the true tales of the relationship between her and the other sad people for whom pornogrpahy was the key to easy money and frequent STDs. She may have said of Raymond, "He gave me my first big break", but she may also have said, "he was a boring rich guy who shagged me until I got rich too". Her yellow E Type Jaguar number plate summed up her philosophy, "FU2".
Unlike his equally deluded American counterpart, Hefner, Paul was not one to seek the limelight himself, describable as a mondeo man who owned a rolls royce, he wanted the trappings of wealth without having to work too hard, and achieved this goal. Happy familky life was not to be his however and after his only daughter died of a drug overdose he became a recluse and has now died fairly miserably and alone at 82.
"Don't do porn kids" are reputed to have been his dying words.

6. Maharishi defraudingyogi
The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had many names:
"my hero", to many, who knew him as the creator of transcendental meditation© (all rights reserved the Swiss banking org),
Sexy Sadie,
Smelli-Ripoff Guru,
and, of course, Twat...
Now he is simply "that dead Indian guy the Beatles liked for a short while", because he has gone, and he isn't coming back.
Having said that, his copyright version of meditation, TM© (all rights reserved) is very durable, still practiced by thousands all over the world.

The practice he taught was all about learning how to be at peace with yourself, live in harmony with nature, and care not for the foolishness of greedy western society - whilst he took your money and enjoyed it immensely.
Many have found that inventing a religion is the easiest way to become very rich and have your ego massaged by thousands of very unintelligent people, Smelli-Ripoff guru didn't pretend to be God, nor even the messenger of God, nor would he claim that TM© was a religion. His claim to fame was the simplicity of his teaching of a mix of spiritual Hindu style living, for you, while he gained material wealth to escape from the poverty of India, as so many justifiably wished for...The reason he became so famous had a lot to do with the amount of LSD the Beatles took before deciding to go clean - it must have been what fooled them for so long.

The greatest trick with most cults is the secret membership code; in Scientology it is the ability to shout from a rooftop: "My name is Tom Cruise and I am the biggest alien loving asshole on the planet!" fifty times without being arrested.
With Mahareshi's pyramid selling scheme it was an individual secret mantra, "My name is...(state your name) andIwanttogivemymoneytoYogi" - the repetative chanting of this gave the chanter a strange kind of peace and lightness - a little like banging your head against a wooden door takes your mind off the troubles you have with paying your bills...
now at last, all those chanters can give out their secret mantras without fear of a great Maharishi law suit heading their way...
"Who is that at the door, Alhandra Skyfeather?"

5. Norman Mailer-Daemon
Few modern writers can have escaped the frustration of having a long and difficult piece of writing returned to their inbox by the recently deceased Norman Mailer-Daemon...
His long battles with early feminist web designers in the 1980s and 90s led to a huge delay in establishing sensible universal html code, Mailer-Daemon insisting that all references to "women", "woman" and "wimmin" should be a default code taking you to a 404 error. It is believed that a group of disgruntled lesbians were responsible for the retaliatory strike that regularly sees Norman Mailer-Daemon's wikipedia entry being re-written in amusing and derogatory ways.

The fact was that Mailer was a half decent writer but a ridiculously stupid macho man with the moral perversity that goes along with the stereotype. Along with shouting out about Martin Amis's racism it is the duty of every decent human being to avoid buying any of these men's work and put them down in ways as effective as possible.
Fortunately Mailer-Daemon did this himself with his ill-advised takes on "how a man can do one more thing to a woman than a lesbian can" and arranging the release of a serial killer because he wrote a pretty fine little novella in prison. Mailer went on to defend this action on the grounds that the waiter the killer knifed to death soon after his release, "never wrote anything of value anyway". A spokesperson for the League of Gentlemen said, "No one related to Norman is mourning his loss".

4. Ned Sherrin
There have been many plaudits for the broadcaster, producer, director and agreed to be talented all round good egg, Ned Sherrin, who has died of throat cancer...
What they all fail to say was that his long running radio 4 early evening show "loose ends" was the one thing guaranteed to make hundreds of Radio 4 listeners decide it was time to make a tight end...turn off the radio and actually go out and do something.
This was because his smug know-it-all manner and irritating voice made you run for the off button (well the three people I know best all did).
Otherwise, I am sure he was a splendid chap, what what...

3. Marcel Mangel
Someone suggested that an obituary for a mime artist should leave out all the words...
...and in this way demonstrate the wit and skill that is the whole school of mime that 'originated' with Marcel Marceau (real surname Mangel) who has died aged 129.

Tragically, he was a victim of his own success; the Mafia taking exception to his mocking of their great leader, Jimmy "the stripes" Gandino, they left him, in full costume, in a glass cube in the middle of a Chicago square. His frantic attempts to get out were ignored by the cynical public who only acknowledged his presence and called 911 four days after his death from suffocation.

Commenting on his legacy could be said to be risking being accused of bad taste but this is surely in keeping with the mime reputation. Gary Larson the prolific cartoonist, postulated a variation on the philosophical question regarding sound and perception...
    "If a tree in a forest falls on a mime artist and there is no one there to hear it...
does anyone care?"

It is thanks to Marcel Marceau that we have had generations of impoverished and talent deprived wannabe actors caking up their faces and annoying as many people as possible in public parks and busy summer streets. Marceau himself admitted that what he did was imitate Charlie Chaplin, an artist who managed to move out of the silent era with some dignity, if not great oral talent. The point was that he was only a silent clown because movie sound hadn't been invented...and he was funny.
The general view of the vox populi now seems to be that, please... can we see a real death of the street mime, all of them, to celebrate the departure of the French originator, Marcel Marceau.

2. Ingdirectmar Bergman
Woody Allen once famously described Ingdirectmar Bergman as not only his inspiration, but the one other director in the world who made art in movies and movies that were art.

"When I say Art - I mean "Art", said Allen, "that is... fundamentally, material created by a genius, the value of which is decided on by an educated elite and which is defined as being: not funny, not accessible, difficult, expensive, perhaps collectable, and with deliberately meaningless false trails to help bluff the way past those masses with mere common sensibilities".

Bergman, who has died of writer's cramp at the age of 134, left a legacy of films that helped this self-designated elite define art in the modern cinema. Early on he established the style that was to become so familiar to tens of art house masochists:- sad, earnest looking Nordic faces staring past each other, and past the camera, trying to, as Woody Harrelson-Allen once said, "either be Max von Sydow (pictured) or reflect in his Viking brilliance, like a non pretentious contemplative study of a never-setting sun, a distant billboard or a Macdonalds sign".

Allen famously lost his own humourous plot when he imitated this style in his disastrous 'serious' debut, "Three Women and a baby", starring his then seriously ex-lover Dianne von Keaton. Rumour has it that Allen spent several weeks with Bergman just before scripting this film and Bergman convinced him that having actors smile was simply not true to life.
"Each actor must play their own deadly serious snakes and ladders with death", he told his diminutive New York disciple.

Earlier in his career he had made several films with intense Scandanavian actress, Tracy Ullman, who was also to become his second, fourth and seventh wife. The result of this collaboration included his most famous work,"Wild Travelling Wilburies" and Ullman's introduction of 'The Simpsons' into her Swedish TV show.
The Swedish Public did not take kindly to his intense domestic relationship dramas and he struggled to gain acceptance in a country where they had greatly enjoyed, and paid record receipts to see, his earlier exploitation flicks, "Fanny and Cock, Swedish style" and "Confessions of a United Nations General secretary" - a film later remade by Quentin Tarantula as, "Blood Lust and Viagra".

Towards the end of his life he made a dazzling return to form with "Fanny and Alexander", a tale of sexual repression and farting, that received both critical and box office success. Unbeknown to many of his film followers, during his third retirement from the business, he also established a successful banking system that takes his name, (INGdirect). He leaves three wives, many unknown children and a body of work that will remain unseen in 98% of the worlds cinemas, for the simple reason that most of it is completely unwatchable
- and in Swedish, and Black & White.

1. Tammy Faye Danny-Kaye Messie-Bakker Trailer-Saint
To many who gave their hard earned insurance pay out cash to the Ripoffthe Lord ministry in the seventies and eighties, Tammye Faye Bakker, as she was then, will always be a selfless heroine who used their money to gain favours in a heaven that was sure to come.
What very few people realised was that she was entirely made of little pieces of leather that a Jimmy Bakker fan found in the back streets of a Tunisian town whilst filming "Jesus of Nazareth" the unexpurgated Fox story of Jesus, the founder of capitalism.

"I was sold these magic pieces of leather by a mysterious street trader back in '69" said Jessie Fairweather-Hicksville, then an aspiring Biblical sound effect recordist now a seventy two year old weightlifter on the cable channel, HBU.

"He told me they had miraculous properties, and he was right, the day after I returned to the United States they magically transformed into Tammy Faye right there in my motel bedroom, just as I was out getting a coke from the machine". Jessie says he resisted telling the world of Tammy Faye's recent past as several pieces of camel skin, not wanting to appear to undermine her credibility as a messiah-like figure in the mascara industry.

Recently, as she was losing weight dramatically in what her public were informed was a tragic case of God supported cancer, it became apparent to all who visited and cared for her that the truth was about to slip out, so a veto was placed on any pictures of her descent into her former state. Her trademark mascara was instead used as a stand-in for her at all TV press conferences.

Tammy officially died on July 20th, but she and her supporters, rejoicing in the faith that sustained so many for so long, will always rest assured in the knowledge that she isn't really dead, just cured, and dyed.