This one from Allezblancs, a Brit, followed by fellow Brit Jim Thornton. One was nicer than the other. Both much appreciated.

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Given the response to her death, one could be forgiven for thinking there were two Margaret Thatchers.

On the international stage, she was hugely influential and admired in every continent except, maybe, in South America.

She loved Gorbachev and she loved Reagan, and the love was mutual. She recognized that Gorbachev was a man with whom she could do business, and she persuaded Reagan that he should talk with the Soviet leader.

Her influence was such that, when Gorbachev was heading for arms reduction talks in Washington in December 1987, he stopped over at RAF Brize Norton to be briefed by Thatcher on how to get the best deal. The summit culminated with the INF treaty; START and START II followed.

At home, it was a very different story.

There is no doubting Mrs. Thatcher's courage and determination to bring her policies to fruition, but this caused her to become the most divisive Prime Minister in British history.

She was happy to sell off state-run industries, and she gave social housing tenants the right to buy the houses they lived in, often at a substantial discount. Many thousands of ordinary people became property owners and shareholders for the first time. She united the nation as British forces repelled the Argentinian troops who had invaded the Falkland Islands.

But within two years of that triumph, Britain was divided as Margaret Thatcher confronted head-on the might of the trade unions who, she believed, were destroying British industry. She laid waste to the coal-mining industry and destroyed many communities, particularly in the north of England.

She managed to alienate both sides in the Northern Ireland conflict. The IRA almost succeeded in blowing her up with half her Cabinet in the Grand Hotel, Brighton; then she angered the Unionists by signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Her other successes and failures in eleven years as Prime Minister are far too numerous to mention here. She was the Marmite Prime Minister but, love her or hate her, she will be remembered long after today's crop of politicians are gone.

(On a personal note - some of you know that my mother died last year. When I saw Brad's update of the website with Margaret Thatcher's dates of birth and death, it occurred to me that she was almost exactly the same age at death as my mother. In fact, my Mum lived for just eight days longer than Margaret Thatcher.)

— Allezblancs

She had wonderful enemies. From the student politicians who branded the junior education minister "Mrs. Thatcher, milk snatcher!" for withdrawing milk subsidies from rich farmers and overfed kids, right through to Galtieri and Scargill, she could not have asked for better. Only her European ones let her down.

In the depths of the 1981 recession, 364 economists wrote to The Times criticising her monetarist second budget. Asked in Parliament to name two economists who supported her policies, she came up with Patrick Minford and Alan Walters, prompting a nearby civil servant to mutter, "Good job she wasn't asked to name three!" The 364 are now all forgotten or have recanted, and the economy turned at that very moment, but she needed a better enemy. A South American dictator, right out of central casting, stepped up to the plate.

Britons still remembered how appeasing the last fascist to invade his weak neighbours had turned out, so all Thatcher had to do was win the Falklands back. It was close run but she did it, and went on to win the following election in a landslide. It was time to tame the unions, roll back the state and stand up to communism. Again, she was lucky in her enemies.

There was much sympathy for the miners. They did a dirty, dangerous job and had suffered as pit after pit became uneconomic, but they were led by a madman. Arthur Scargill was an unrepentant Marxist who made no secret of his desire to bring down the government and usher in a centrally planned Utopia. Thatcher had prepared well. She built up coal stocks and, crucially, was able to split some miners away from the main union. It took a year, and changed Britain forever, but the strike failed.

Lesser enemies, Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and a string of hapless Labour Party leaders came and went, but Thatcherism marched on. Council houses were sold off; airways, utilities, and dozens of state-owned companies were privatised; and Soviet communism collapsed without a fight. Despite being nearly murdered by the IRA, she signed the Hillsborough Agreement with the Republic. It prompted a revolt of all the Unionist MPs, but it was the first step to peace in Northern Ireland. Apart from the Poll Tax, none of her signature policies were reversed by subsequent governments. Most were extended.

But there was the knotty problem of Britain and the European Union. Half her party regarded the entanglements of membership as a price worth paying for free trade, and half didn't. For eleven years she rode both horses, doing her best to cast Jacques Delors, a barmy French socialist, as the enemy. But he wasn't up to the role, and in 1990 she came unstuck. Her successors didn't make that problem look any easier.

Apart from encouraging self-sufficiency, Thatcher generally steered clear of social issues. Perhaps she had enough other battles to fight. More likely she was out of step with her party. Long before she was famous, she had voted to legalise both homosexuality and abortion, and by all accounts she was never too bothered by the sexual shenanigans of her ministers. Good for her.

She deserves a poem, but I'm not qualified to do her justice.

— Jim Thornton

Matt Hubbard writes this loving tribute to Byrne. He got the hit, a solo.

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Robert Byrne was an American chess player who became an International Grandmaster. This is different from Grandmaster. Grandmaster is about your rating, which can go up and down playing matches in sanctioned tournaments. International Grandmaster is a title conferred when a player does well in a tournament or several tournaments with enough good players to be considered worthy.

Whatever happens to his rating, International Grandmaster status can't be taken away from him. (Forgive me for using the gender specific pronoun. To this day, no great woman player has shown herself to be at the same level as the best men.)

Robert Byrne's name also shows up on the list of players who beat Bobby Fischer in a sanctioned game. There are fifty names on the list, only thirty-three of which beat Fischer after he turned 16. He beat Fischer when Bobby was a grown-ass man, as we say in Oakland.

So there's something else you can't take away from Robert Byrne.

You can't talk about a player from this era without mentioning Fischer. Robert's brother Donald, who made it to International Master but died young from complications from lupus, is best known for having lost a game to a 13-year-old Bobby in 1956. Fischer sacrificed his queen for a devastating attack Donald thought he could withstand. It is often called The Game of the Century.

Robert Byrne is also shown respect for a loss to Fischer. In the 1963-64 United States chess championship, Fischer went 11-0 in a round robin tournament, the only player in more than 100 years to sweep the table at this famously tough invitational. Robert and Bobby were in a complicated battle and all the commentators thought Byrne was in the driver's seat, but suddenly Byrne resigned. Fischer had laid an extremely subtle trap and Byrne realized his predicament long before anyone who wasn't named Bobby Fischer. Commentators gave him props for seeing it so early, though not early enough.

Byrne got his revenge in the 1965-66 tourney, beating Fischer for the first and last time. Fischer still won the tournament, this time without a perfect record.

Both Byrne brothers were prodigies raised in New York City, tutored by the legendary chess coach John W. Collins. As good as they were, they decided not to become pros and instead graduated college and became professors, Robert teaching philosophy at Indiana University. He finally turned pro in his forties, which for most players is past their prime. He wrote a column for the New York Times for decades.

Byrne won the U.S. Open several times, a tournament considered less prestigious than the National Championship — so much so that Fischer never bothered with it. Byrne won the National Championship in 1972, which was during the era when Fischer decided he didn't need more than eight trophies. Byrne claimed the title that year in a three-person playoff tournament against Sammy Reshevsky and Lubomir Kavalek, both of whom were émigrés from Eastern Europe: Reshevsky in the 1930s and Kavalek in the 1960s.

And now Robert Byrne is dead, his life taken from him by complications from Parkinson's disease. Even so, he was a National Champion, and Open Champion, and International Grandmaster, and one of the handful of people who beat Bobby Fischer in a chess game that counted.

All those things can never be taken away. Best wishes to the family and friends of Robert Byrne, from a fan.

— Matthew Hubbard

Jefferson Survives decided to help us out with some updates. Remember updates? I know. I know. Anyway, I'm grateful.

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George Beverly "Bev" Shea was a gospel singer best known for his longtime association with Billy Graham, with Shea's baritone voice providing the background music to countless Graham crusades. His lengthy career resulted in more than seventy albums, two Grammys (one competitive, one honorary) and a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest cumulative live audience. He also seemed like a genuinely nice guy.

In contrast to Graham, whose menagerie of health problems needs no introduction, Shea enjoyed good health right up until the end, even riding in a speedboat at 102. Most remarkable to me is that, watching YouTube videos of Bev singing past 100, his voice was still strong at an age where one's glad to be merely comprehensible.

One of Shea's albums was Hymns That Have Lived 100 Years. Shea lived even longer than that, dying at 104. Due to Chipmunk Roasting, Grim McGraw, JinksB and Kixco forming the choir, he becomes the first 1-point hit since Dolores Hope in late 2011.

— Jefferson Survives