Brave Last Dave answered the call, and splendidly.

* * *

In 1976, the Sex Pistols went to Manchester to play a gig. The crowd was tiny; some say fewer than 40 people were in attendance. But legend has it that everyone in attendance started a rock band of their own. The Pistols were a template for something new and exciting. You didn't have to be musicians as skilled as Led Zeppelin or Emerson, Lake and Palmer to create something memorable, but you had to have passion.

David Broder compelled people to write in a different way. After reading even one of his columns, hundreds if not thousands of people from all over the political spectrum thought "I am way more interesting than this miserable old fuck!" and decided to become political bloggers.

Broder won the Pulitzer in 1973. He celebrated with a double Scotch and a promise to phone it in for the rest of his career. He was called the "dean of the Washington press corps." Some thought this was an honorific, but many knew that it was because he reminded people of Jimmy Dean, who also made bland and barely edible sausage that was bad for you.

There are a couple of quotes of Broder's on his Wikipedia page. If you make it to the end of any of them without falling asleep, you either have a much stronger constitution than I do, or you have a serious problem with amphetamines and should seek professional help.

If Broder ever had an interesting idea, it died alone and unloved in the middle of an excruciatingly dull sentence.

Much like that miserable hack Michael Crichton, the only chance the keyboard would be abandoned by Broder was death. As Brother Theodore reminds us each time we check into this website, "As long as there is death, there is hope!"

Some good things happened when Broder died this year. The Washington Post finally had to admit there must be some better use for those column-inches every week, and Morris the Cat and Bushwhacker got all-important points in the race for the Moxie. As of this update, Morris is now residing near the top of the table, while Bushwhacker got that always satisfying first hit of the year. (Actually, the first hit of the last two years.) Five points, plus 3 for the duet. Total: 8.

— Brave Last Dave

Another spectacular update from Hulka, whose solo this is ... and it's important that you read it to the very end.

* * *

By the mid-1920s, the spelling bee — an American tradition dating back to the Pilgrims — was looked upon by many as a hoary relic of a bygone era, as dated as the hoop skirt and the cotton gin. In their 19th-century heyday, organized spelling competitions had been as much a popular diversion as an educational tool, enjoyed by rowdy gold miners [1] and Park Avenue socialites alike, but although some states held competitions among county champions, for the most part these bees remained steadfastly provincial, like the pie-baking and horseshoe-tossing contests they often appeared alongside.

Amid the postwar cultural turmoil of the Jazz Age, "the indoor sport of spelling bees, so popular in the days when schoolhouses were painted red," was considered "worth reviving — as an antidote to jazz and frivolity." [2] In that spirit, the Louisville Courier-Journal organized the first National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. in 1925. From a field of more than two million schoolchildren, nine contestants spelled for the gold medal and $500 prize; when the final bell rang after 90 action-packed minutes, the first national champion was Louisville's own Frank Neuhauser, 11 years old. His winning word was "gladiolus," a flower he grew in his own garden.

As 1986 national champion Jon Pennington said, "There aren't any [National Spelling Bee winners] living under bridges or cracking under the pressure [...] The only thing that tends not to be average about them is they tend to be smart and have very large memories and usually have more degrees than the average person." [3] Frank Neuhauser was no exception; far from peaking early, he earned degrees in engineering and law, and spent a long and fruitful career as a patent lawyer, serving as president of the American Intellectual Property Law Association and chairman of the American Bar Association's patent law division. He also lived to see the tradition he helped inaugurate become a fixture in the American popular imagination — not only prime-time TV entertainment but also fodder for a best-selling novel and an Oscar-nominated documentary. At the end of his life, he was a regular in the audience at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, signing autographs for contestants and cheerily telling reporters how much easier competitive spelling was in his day.

— Hulka

[1] http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/11523/
[2] New York Times, 12 February 1922, via James Maguire's "American Bee: The National Spelling Bee
        and the Culture of Word Nerds."
[3] http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1624100_1624098_1623359,00.html

 

Neuhauser died of myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disease whose name alone would give almost any competitive speller the shivers. Former National Spelling Bee finalist Hulka (6th place, 1992; 8th place, 1996) gets 7 points: 2 for the hit and 5 for the solo.

Busgal gets the hit and gets to write the update. Both fantastic.

* * *

Since he's "Gone," we remember one of country music's early ambassadors, Ferlin Husky, aka Terry Preston, aka Simon Crum.

Ferlin Husky was born in southeastern Missouri, and his entertainment skills were honed as a Merchant Marine, where he entertained troops during WW2. His ship transported troops across the English Channel for D-Day.

When Husky came home from the war, he took several jobs, one as a DJ, and he also played gigs from St. Louis to Springfield, Missouri before heading out to California. One gimmick he used was the alter ego Simon Crum, an outspoken hayseed character based on his one-time neighbor Simon Crump. Four Star Records signed him around 1951 and suggested the name Terry Preston. One of his first singles, recorded as Terry Preston, was "Gone," but was recorded without strings or backup singers. By 1953 he had moved to Capitol, where he did the male recitation of "A Dear John Letter" with Jean Shepard. He re-recorded a more countrypolitan version of "Gone" in 1957, and it went to number one on the country charts. In 1960 his biggest selling record, "On the Wings of A Dove," was released. (It was covered by Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies.) With 18 movies to his credit, Ferlin was one of the first country singers to have a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. Some of Elvis Presley's first tours were opening for Ferlin, and they were friends to the end of Presley's life. Husky traveled extensively, performing through 2010, when he received the ultimate honor: membership in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

— Busgal

Busgal, DDT, Deceased Hose, Direcorbie (first of the year), Morris the Cat and Ray Arthur (first of the year) knew Ferlin was on his last breath, and get 5 points for the hit.

This crazy bitch was the tip of the crazy iceberg of Monaco.

Monaco is a strange place. Its economy is based almost totally on gamblers and tax exiles, people who care very much about the succession to the gilded tin throne of Monaco because, under Monegasque law, if the royal line were to fail, the country would revert to France — and all those tax exiles and gamblers would find themselves facing a hefty French tax bill. Recent changes to the laws have made that possibility remote, but at the time Antoinette of Monaco was born it was a very real threat, which explains a lot about her upbringing.

Antoinette's mother Charlotte was indeed born on the wrong side of the blanket to Louis II of Monaco and Marie Juliette Louvet, but Mlle Louvet was no washerwoman: She was a cabaret singer, which at the time was a fine, well-understood euphemism. Monaco being a dictatorship at the time, Louis II could do whatever the hell he wanted except father a legitimate child, so in 1919 he adopted and legitimated Charlotte for lack of a more appropriate heir. (Given that the only other surviving heir to the Monegasque throne at the time was some German blowhard who wasn't even competent enough to hold onto the throne of Lithuania, Louis probably thought he had no other choice.) But then Louis idiotically married Charlotte off to a fabulous French nobleman named Count Pierre de Polignac, who took his wife's name, title, jewels, and money upon marriage. Charlotte had two children, Antoinette and Rainier, and they might even have been her husband's (yeah sure), but eventually the exasperated Louis II threw Pierre out of the country and threatened to call out the mighty Monegasque army if Pierre set foot in the principality again. Louis also had Charlotte "voluntarily" set aside her claim to the crown in favour of her son.

The highlight of Antoinette's life was her attempt to oust Rainier from the Monegasque throne in favour of her very young son. She and her lover, the president of the Parlement, intended to rule through the child as regents, but to do so they had to get rid of that annoyingly normal brother of hers. Their cunning plan: destroy the public's support of him by spreading rumours that his girlfriend was sterile. For unknown reasons this did nothing but accelerate the breakdown of Rainier's relationship with the woman in question and propel him into a marriage with the beautiful, imperious and eminently fertile Grace Kelly. Within weeks of the wedding, Antoinette was sent packing and told never to return. She married her president, and later a gay ballet dancer, and later did what neither of her parents could do: She gave up on men.

The more stately newspapers called Antoinette a tireless campaigner for animal welfare. That translates to "crazy dog lady." She lived alone, except for 90 dogs, an assortment of cats, a scattering of overworked and exasperated servants, and the odd confused paparazzo.

Incidentally, here's a photo of a member of the Monegasque army. You think Pierre really would have minded?

— Charlene

Kathi is all alone on this one, so she gets two points for the hit and five for the solo. Total: 7.

While his co-writer's royalties kept food on the table, Ralph Mooney was out on the road with Wynn Stewart and doing session work at Capitol Records in Los Angeles, providing his brand of pedal steel guitar to the Bakersfield sound.

As a teenager, Ralph used a knife to flat-pick on his guitar after hearing Leon McAuffie on Bob Wills's version of "Steel Guitar Rag." His early pedal steels used coat hangers and a bicycle pedal. (Wanda Jackson asked Ken Nelson, "What is this guy going to do to my session?")

Ralph's prominent session work started with Skeets McDonald, then on to Stewart, Wanda Jackson, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Most folks will remember his twenty years touring with Waylon Jennings. In recent years, Ralph mostly played steel guitar shows (I saw him several times at the Texas State Guard Association convention in Dallas), and his last recordings were on Marty Stuart's 2010 album Ghost Train.

— Busgal

Busgal, who is a moderator on the Steel Guitar Forum as well as a country DJ at http://www.live365.com/stations/busgaljan, gets 5 points for shooting for the Moon, and another five points for hitting it solo. Total: 10.

A Bill Schenley special.

* * *

He smoked since 1922, and worse ... every day he ate quarter-pound cheeseburgers at the golden arches fast-food place he called McDaniel's [1]. Dressed as an old-time pimp, he was in bars almost every night of his adult life, and he would often play piano, for free, until the early-morning hours — and that was after he turned 70. After his wife died, he drank himself into a stupor until he was 85 years old. At 86 he was still going home, late at night, with women young enough to be his great-granddaughter. Pinetop Perkins has died at 97, and he was a bluesman. At the time of his death, he still had twenty dates he was booked to play. He embodied the Joy of the Blues.

Pinetop wasn't a smooth Blues piano player like Otis Spann (whom he replaced in Muddy Waters' band), but he was, as they say, ragged and right. He taught Ike Turner how to play Boogie Woogie style piano, as heard on "Rocket 88" and, as a result, some music historians credit Perkins for helping invent rock 'n' roll. He topped comedian George Burns as the oldest person to win a Grammy.

He was a friend to the great Robert Johnson, and he performed with musicians like Muddy Waters, Robert Nighthawk, Earl Hooker, Hubert Sumlin, B.B. King, Ike Turner, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Lockwood, Jr., Big Mama Thornton and just about every other bluesman alive during the last eighty years. He was in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Waltz," and he appeared in the movie "The Blues Brothers," pounding the 88s behind John Lee Hooker. Fittingly, Pinetop Perkins was buried in Clarksdale, Mississippi, at McLaurin Memorial Gardens ... on Highway 61.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. He was on my deadpool list — for years. But this year I'm singing this tune with Buford. We each get two points for the hit and another three bonus points for the duet. Total: 5.

— Bill Schenley

[1] Guitarist Elvin Bishop told this story about Perkins: "We were both nominated for a Grammy, so we decided to go together and 'Big Dog' it [take a limo]. On the way to the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Pinetop suddenly screamed at the driver, 'Turn left into the McDaniel's!' The limo driver pulled into McDonald's, and Pinetop ordered his usual two cheeseburgers, an apple pie and a Sprite, on the way to the Grammys."

Jim Thornton, our resident AO Deadpool poet, delivers the update and, of course, the poem, which follows.

* * *

From child star, to collector of husbands and diamonds, Elizabeth Taylor was high maintenance. In 1963 it took a record $1M to persuade her to take her most famous role, Cleopatra. She got husband number five, Richard Burton, but the cost overruns and resulting flop nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

Burton found her expensive too. Her engagement ring, featuring the 33-carat Krupp diamond, was followed by gifts of no fewer than three other diamonds big enough to be given a name: the La Peregrina Pearl, the Taj-Mahal and (eventually) the biggest of them all, the £1M, 69-carat Cartier (later Burton-Taylor) diamond. He shouldn't have been surprised; she had form. She'd pulled in a £500,000 divorce settlement from husband No. 1, Hilton heir Conrad Jr.

Michael Todd (No. 3), and his best friend Eddie Fisher (No. 4) had also both done their best to keep her happy with big rocks; Fisher later complained that a £50,000 diamond kept her sweet for only about four days.

The problem, as Burton saw it, was she had been too famous too young, and a spoiled brat ever since. He had a point. Wholesome good looks and a winning manner had made the child star. As an adult, the looks got less wholesome, and pulled in seven husbands, but she skipped the winning manner, which led to eight divorces. Her performance in Cleopatra was dire, and her illnesses kept costing other people fortunes. When later in life she put on weight and developed back trouble and an alcohol problem, few had much sympathy for her.

But that was unfair. Plenty of people drink too much and get fat, and the back troubles allegedly stemmed from a fall during shooting of National Velvet, the film which had made her famous, about a kid who rides the winner of the Grand National. And she wasn't a bad actress. Although her first Oscar, for playing a whore in Butterfield 8, was by common consent won by the sympathy vote — Michael Todd had been killed in a plane crash the previous year — her second, for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opposite Burton, was well deserved.

In three of her best films (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Reflections in a Golden Eye) she played women married to men with sexual secrets. Eight marriages to seven men must teach you a bit about male sexuality. She probably learned a bit from the male friends she didn't marry, too. Nearly all were gay.

After the death of one of them, Rock Hudson, she supported many gay causes, even selling her diamonds for some. She managed to get her penultimate husband, John Warner, a Virginia politician, not only elected to the U.S. Senate, but to make him one of the most socially liberal Republicans to ever come out of the South. It was no surprise that she stood by her friend Michael Jackson as he faced his child-abuse accusations.

Through it all her fame kept growing. Hobnobbing with royalty one day, and picking up husband No. 7, a lorry driver named Larry Fortensky in rehab the next, she rose far beyond normal celebrity. By her death, Andy Warhol's iconic silkscreen prints of her had become as valuable as those of Marilyn Monroe. She outlived all but her last two husbands, and even her New York Times obituarist — but not me, and not you.

Abby, Allen Kirshner, Allezblancs, Another Lurker, Brave Last Dave, Brigid, Busgal, Carl & Cherie, Chaptal, Denise, DGH, Direcorbie, Erik, Exuma, Fireball, JD, Jim Thornton, JTH, Kathypig1, King Daevid, Loki, Mo, Roxanne Wiggs, Undertaker and Worm Farmer get 8 points apiece. (First hits of the year for Abby, Another Lurker, Brigid, Denise, DGH, JD, Jim Thornton, JTH, Kathypig1, King Daevid and Worm Farmer.)

Here's a poem.

Andrew McKie, one of England's (and Scotland's) finest writers, has done for us what he did for the Telegraph for many years: written a marvelous obituary. Diana Wynne Jones would have loved it.

* * *

Diana Wynne Jones wrote children's fantasy books which, like those of Alan Garner, Penelope Lively or Joan Aitken, were not taken very seriously by publishers or critics for many years. But they were taken very seriously by her audience: children who often discovered the pleasures of reading through her work. When her small but devoted following grew up, it turned out to be the people who wrote fiction, or wrote about it. Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman were among the chief public mourners.

In recent years, following the success of the Harry Potter books — pale imitations of her Witch Week — which she had almost certainly inspired, Diana enjoyed wider commercial success and, from academics who had grown up with her earlier work, serious critical attention. The scholar Farah Mendlesohn produced a full-length critical study in 2005, and there was a conference devoted to Diana's work in 2009.

She was born on August 16, 1934 in north London, the eldest of three daughters. Her parents were progressive schoolteachers (i.e., weirdos) and, even by the norms of that group, remarkably useless parents. Just before the outbreak of war in 1939, Diana was sent to live with her grandparents in Wales and was not reunited with her parents for four months. When her mother tipped up, she complained that the child had acquired a Welsh accent and refused to hug her.

The evacuated family went to the Lake District where they shared, with several other families, the house which had once been home to the children upon whom Arthur Ransome based his Swallows and Amazons stories. Ransome ("a small, tubby man with a lot of beard") complained about the noise the children were making; Beatrix Potter smacked Diana's younger sister for swinging on a gate.

Diana began making up stories for her younger sisters Isobel [Armstong], now Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck College in the University of London, and Ursula, a successful children's author and actress who once played Elsie Duckworth in Coronation Street. Diana had to made up the stories because their father was too mean to buy books for them.

In 1943 the family moved to Thaxted in Essex, where her parents ran an educational conference centre while their daughters slept in an unheated lean-to. Diana went from a Quaker school to St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she attended classes with C.S. Lewis ("a superb lecturer") and J.R.R. Tolkein ("almost inaudible").

She discovered children's books while reading to her three sons and began to write when the boys started school. In 1970, shortly after a year in America, where her husband was teaching at Yale, Diana published her first and only novel for adults, Changeover, a satire about the dying days of colonial rule.

But she had already concluded that she would have to write fantasy, since she had so little experience of normal life, and for the next four decades concentrated on children's books, sometimes turning out three a year. The first was Wilkins' Tooth (1973). Among the best of the rest are The Ogre Downstairs; Dogsbody; the Chrestomanci books; Archer's Goon; The Time of the Ghost; Fire and Hemlock; The Dalemark Quartet; and Howl's Moving Castle and its sequels. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a merciless send up of sub-Tolkein fantasy.

In 1976, after her husband took up a post as Professor of English at Bristol University, the couple were involved in a serious car accident. Diana Wynne Jones was often in pain thereafter. Last year, she was diagnosed with cancer, but continued to work. "I get unhappy if I don't write," she said. "Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn't have as a child myself."

— Andrew McKie

McKie is joined by DDT, Deceased Hose, EdV and Hulka. They each get 8 points.

As serial killers go, four-times-married Dorothea Puente was not the most outrageous, nor did she rack up the biggest body count, nor was she beautiful or Panavision-sized evil or any of those other things that lift a common killer into the limelight of national attention. What she was, was a woman, and women don't tend to be serial killers — or maybe it's just that they're better at hiding the bodies and keeping their mouths shut.

Puente was also a landlord, which makes her story even better, because we all know that landlords secretly want to kill and bury their tenants ... or maybe that's just in New York. Anyway, Puente's life of crime began early, with convictions for check forging, vagrancy and being the madam of a brothel. Eventually she became a nurse's aide and, in the late 1960s, began running a big boarding house on F Street in Sacramento, California, where she cared for the disabled and elderly. Puente also sidled up to elderly men in bars and relieved them of their benefit checks, which she forged and cashed. Since her victims were drinking up their benefits, the thefts may not have made much difference, but the cops frown on that sort of thing anyway. Puente was nabbed and got probation. It was then that she turned her life around, by which I mean that she went right back to cruising bars and stealing benefit checks from elderly drunks.

The cops said later that, along with whatever she was getting by swatting barflies, Puente was also making as much as five grand a month stealing benefit checks from those under her care at the big boarding house. However, all those murders didn't start until Puente relocated a few blocks up F Street in 1981. Puente's friend and business partner, Ruth Monroe, moved in with her a few months later. Monroe committed suicide with prescription drugs not long after she arrived. Anyway, that's the story Puente told the cops, and the cops believed her. Puente was arrested a few months after that for stealing from one of her tenants at the new house, and she did three years of a five-year sentence.

While she was in the clink, Puente struck up a correspondence with Everson Gilmouth, who was 77 and retired. Even if you were 77 and retired, your meat was still plenty fresh enough for Dorothea Puente. Their correspondence soon blossomed into love, and when Puente was released in 1985, Gilmouth picked her up in his 1980 red Ford pickup truck. They lived together in the F Street house and began making wedding plans. That November, Puente hired a handyman to do some work in her apartment. She paid him with a 1980 red Ford pickup truck which, she said, belonged to her boyfriend who had left her and moved to Los Angeles. Puente also asked the handyman to build a box six feet by three feet by two feet for some junk she wanted to put into storage. Sure, said the handyman. He and Puente loaded the now-heavy and tightly nailed box onto that 1980 red Ford pickup truck, and when Puente said forget the storage, let's just toss the box onto that remote building site over there, the ever-agreeable handyman said okay. Sure, somebody found the box within a few months, but the cops didn't identify Gilmouth's badly decomposed body for another three years. Meanwhile, Puente kept accepting tenants at F Street and cashing Gilmouth's benefit checks.

According to the conditions of Puente's parole following the short nickel she did for theft, she had to stay away from the elderly, and she wasn't allowed to handle government checks. In fact, parole agents told Puente more than a dozen times to stop doing what she was doing. Ha ha! A fine joke! By the end of 1988, even the cops in Sacramento began to suspect that something was up at F Street. They dropped by to look around a bit. Puente said fine, I'm going out for coffee and I'll be right back. The cops said okay. Puente instantly fled to Los Angeles and quickly made friends with yet another elderly pensioner, but this one wasn't quite as braindead as the others, and recognized Puente from her many pictures in the paper. He turned her in.

The cops found seven bodies buried in Puente's backyard. Puente wound up being charged with nine murders, but she was convicted of only three. One of Puente's defenses was that everybody had died of natural causes, and that she'd buried the bodies in her backyard because she didn't want anyone to know she was violating her parole by taking in elderly tenants. (She'd kept right on cashing their benefit checks, though.) The trial lasted a year and the jury deliberated for more than a month, and it deadlocked on six of the murder charges. It also deadlocked on whether to give Puente the death penalty, so she got life without parole, which is the sentence she recently completed serving.

While Puente was in prison, one of her correspondents put together a few dozen of Puente's home-cooking recipes — the barbiturate-free ones, I hope — along with some other material, and it was all published in 2004 as a book called Cooking with a Serial Killer. M'mm m'mm good!

DDT and Loki get five tasty points for the hit and an extra three for the duet. Total: 8.

— Brad

The painting is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. You can usually see it on the top floor with all the amazing Hoppers, Bellows, O'Keeffes, Sheelers and Marshes. And yet, I'd wager not a soul reading this had heard of George Tooker before his death recently at the age of 90. The painting is called "The Subway," it was painted in 1950, and I go to see it every chance I get. Tooker did a lot with anxiety. He painted waiting rooms and government offices and subway platforms, where people are (of course) waiting or lost or just staring into the eye of the beholder, screaming silently. It was the mid-century equivalent of "your call is important to us, so listen to this mind-numbing music until we give you a thorough run-around." Harried people entering the world of the underground and bureaucracy through turnstiles and frosted glass. It's said that you can't look quickly at a Tooker painting and turn away. It's possible that he wasn't more well-known outside of art historian circles because he was gay, but I think it's more likely that it's because he left New York for Europe and, when his lover died, found religion and Vermont. Also, he was painting these angst-ridden figures just when abstraction was the hot thing. By his own admission, he painted happier pictures as he got older and got fewer complaints.

The first time I saw "The Subway," I was surprised to see the artist was still alive. Taking advantage of that insider information, I enter the pool for 2011 with 2 points for the hit and 5 for the solo. Total: 7.

— Amelia