If there's a rule of 3 about celebrity deaths, we have a set of 2...

... Anita Ekberg and Taylor Negron.

They seem quite different but both appeared in an iconic movie scene — a scene so utterly memorable that when the death is announced, everyone seems compelled to put that scene first.

Who else can you say that about? I'm not looking for a third person to die. I hope everyone lives a good, long time. But... who among the living could complete this triad?

ADDED: Here's a NYT piece timesplaining that "No, Celebrity Deaths Do Not Come in Threes."

"Now, in 1898, Spain owned Cuba, outright. Think about it... Cubans were in a constant" — long pause — "state of revolt..."

There's a knock on the classroom door. The teacher answers. It's Mr. Pizza Guy:



Learnin' about Cuba, havin' some food...

(The book on the girl's desk at 1:31 in the clip is "Land of Truth and Liberty.")

The actor who played Mr. Pizza Guy was Taylor Negron — the cousin of Chuck Negron. You might not know those names, but you know Mr. Pizza Guy and you know the voice that sang "Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine/I never understood a single word he said/But I helped him a-drink his wine."

Chuck Negron, one of the lead singers in Three Dog Night, announces that his cousin Taylor Negron has just passed away at the age of 57: "I just wanted all you people who knew him and loved him to know he just passed."

Chuck Negron — who appeared in an episode of the reality show "Intervention" — wrote an autobiography with a title that seems preordained: "Three Dog Nightmare."

Here's Taylor Negron, telling his story — "I am very California Gothic" — on an episode of the podcast The Moth. "The Marlboro man met the Virginia Slims woman and had... me."

There's a nice comments thread going on over at Metafilter, including:

I met Taylor a couple years ago at a dinner party a friend was having. At one point there was just about six of us sitting around a kitchen table, and he began to tell the story of coming home one day to discover his neighbor had been horrifically and bizarrely murdered, and he managed to convey what an awful shock and trauma it was, and yet it was one of the most hilarious stories I've ever heard. Everyone in the room was howling with laughter, tears running down our cheeks, but he wasn't playing for a cheap laugh at the expense of the victim — this hilarious, crazy story about finding a dead body and then having to go do standup at the improv a couple hours later. But it was told with respect. I still am in awe about the guy's ability to tell a story, the ability to make you laugh while telling you something completely chilling. He was smart and empathetic and warm and charming. I saw him a couple months later in a hardware store and to my surprise he remembered me, and even pointed out that we had another mutual friend. Sweet man.

"By 1965 there'll be total depravity. How squalid everything will be."

A line spoken in the 1961 movie, "La Dolce Vita," starring the woman the director, Federico Fellini called "the most wonderful woman created since the beginning of time." About herself, she said "When you’re born beautiful, it helps you start in the business. But then it becomes a handicap."

About Fellini, she said "they would like to keep up the story that Fellini made me famous, Fellini discovered me... So many have said they discovered me.'' She said she stood out in Italy, because she was blonde:

"On the Piazza di Spagna, in the 50's, I was completely mashed by paparazzi. And the public. My blond hair.... Now everybody is blond here. Have you seen a news presenter on television that is not blond? I mean, there are more blondes here, especially on Italian television, than in the whole of Scandinavia. Really. And they are all dark Mediterranean. But they all want to bleach their hair. Blond, blond, blond.''

Everyone wants to talk about her splashing in that fountain:

''Oh my God, her splendor was incredible, her outsized, totally exaggerated beauty,'' Tullio Kezich, a well-known Italian film critic and Fellini biographer, recalled.... "She was a horse. She plunged into that cold fountain in 'La Dolce Vita' without hesitation or a fuss. She was so Swedish and healthy; she never caught cold. Marcello was terrorized at the idea of getting wet.''

But I think of the image of her strolling aimlessly with a little white kitten carried on her head:



In real life, it was a dog — one of her Great Danes — that brought her down, breaking her hip, leaving her in a wheelchair. And now she has died, at the age of 83 — the most wonderful woman, born beautiful, Anita Ekberg.

And 1965 — the year when, in the reasoning of "La Dolce Vita," we would descend into total depravity — is half a century ago.

ADDED: 4 more things about Anita Ekberg.

1. She's important to me as the first of the icons of feminine beauty in my father's record collection, deeply embedded in my psyche:



2. "A really cool thing about the movie ['Divorce Italian Style'] is that at one point everyone in town — a small, claustrophobic place in Sicily — goes to see the movie 'La Dolce Vita.' 'La Dolce Vita' came out in 1961, one year before 'Divorce Italian Style.' We see the whole population of the small town watching Anita Ekberg on the big screen, and we never see Marcello Mastroianni as he appears in Roman form in 'La Dolce Vita.' We just see the Sicilian Marcello Mastroianni, in the audience, trying to work out his miserable little murder scheme." That's from a 2005 post of mine called "The attorney ... was brilliant, impassioned and sarcastic...."

3."The telephone rang, it would not stop, it was President Kennedy calling me up. He said, 'My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?' I said, 'My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren.'" At least we still have Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren.

4. Only last November, I transcribed a dialogue that began with MEADE: "I just watched a movie called 'Valerie.' Starring Anita Ekberg. What rock star was she married to?" ME: "No. No. No. You're thinking of  Britt Ekland." MEADE: "It had everything: betrayal, justice, frontier justice..."

"A high-ranking leader in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland was charged Friday with manslaughter..."

"... for allegedly driving drunk and sending text messages when she struck and killed cyclist Thomas Palermo last month."

Drunk and texting — the drunkeness tested at 0.22 — but what happened to the hit-and-run part of the story? That's what we were talking about right after the incident, which happened on December 27th.

Why did it take 2 weeks to come up with these charges? From the first link:

Andrew I. Alperstein, a former prosecutor who led Baltimore County's auto-manslaughter unit, said that if anything, charges were brought quickly in this case. He said it can take months for police and prosecutors to reconstruct an accident.

"This is actually extremely fast for the case to have been charged," said Alperstein, who is now a defense attorney.

"I was strapped to a bed by my wrists and ankles and sedated.... I woke up in the recovery room with a port surgically placed in my chest. I was outraged and felt completely violated."

"How long is a person actually supposed to live, and why?... I care about the quality of my life, not just the quantity."

De Blasio's wife did not wear blue jeans to the slain policeman's funeral.

She wore degradé blue trousers, and the degradé effect looks like faded denim. There were lots of angry tweets about her disrespectful appearance, presumably from people who don't know enough about degradé, but approximately no one does. If appearance is what matters and no one can figure out that you're not wearing blue jeans, it's the same as wearing blue jeans.

At the 7-Christmas-Trees Café...

...  Meade will be serving fruit, nuts, and suet.

(Those are the 7 Christmas trees that were the solution to "A Meadhouse Mystery." The snow-covered mound under the trees is what you see in the 4th photo in this post from last November: "Meade mows the semicircular lawn next to the giant collection of leaves that will be next spring's mulch." As noted the previous November, Meade takes in leaves that various neighbors would otherwise put by the curb for the city to collect. This year, he dragged in various Christmas trees that neighbors had left out for collection. There's a mulch plan for the the trees and the leaves, but for now, the trees are providing shelter for some of our avian neighbors... with some added tasty nibbles.)

"Destroy that robot! Burn it to ash!"

Says Sigourney Weaver who is not a fan of the robot who — like all movie robots (and puppets) wants to be a real boy (or a robo-cop, I'm not sure):



Elsewhere in the robots-are-people news, the NYT Magazine has a piece titled "Death by Robot," by Robin Marantz Henigjan, who might be related to a HiFi amplifier.

Among the roboticists I spoke to, the favorite example of an ethical, autonomous robot is the driverless car.... Let’s say the only way the car can avoid a collision with another car is by hitting a pedestrian. “That’s an ethical decision of what you do there, and it will vary each time it happens,” he says. Is the pedestrian a child? Is the alternative to swerve away from the child and into an S.U.V.? What if the S.U.V. has just one occupant? What if it has six?...

Here’s the difficulty, and it is something unique to a driverless car: If the decision-making algorithm were to always choose the option in which the fewest people die, the car might avoid another car carrying two passengers by running off the road and risking killing just one passenger: its own. Or it might choose to hit a Volvo instead of a Mini Cooper because its occupants are more likely to survive a crash, which means choosing the vehicle that is more dangerous for its owner to plow into....

"When they arrived I saw the machine guns so I knew I had to do whatever they said. But they were never aggressive with me. They were always polite. They called me Monsieur."

Said Michel Catalano, held hostage by the Koachi brothers. Catalano had seen the men approaching with a rocket launcher and a Kalashnikov.

"I could immediately see there was a situation of danger. I told my employee [Lilian Lepere] to hide. I knew two of us couldn't hide. At that point I thought that was the end. They came in, they weren't aggressive. They said 'don't worry, we just want to come in.'... I didn't know where Lilian was hidden. I knew he was hidden but I had no idea where. I didn't want them to go to the end of the building... When I thought one of them was tense I said 'I can look after you.'

Suddenly, 10 things.

1. The blog has a theme today. This is something that happens sometimes, and at the point when I notice I use my "blog has a theme today" tag and — if I'm in the mood — I try to construct a 10-item list on that theme. As the post title indicates, the theme is: "sudden."

2. "Three gunmen, who have been hired to assassinate the President, hold a family hostage while waiting for their target. Interesting B film which focuses on psychopathic killer well-portrayed against type by Frank Sinatra." It's titled "Suddenly," and you can watch it in its hour-and-15-minute entirety here.

3. In the phrase "all of a sudden" (or "all of the sudden"), "sudden" is a noun. But we never use the noun in any other context. It's hard even to try to do that, even though it's obvious that the noun means something that is sudden. I challenge you! (By the way, I grew up around people who used the less common "all of the sudden," and it took me a long time to accept the dominance of "all of a sudden.")

4. Good writers should know that "suddenly" is a cheeseball word. One of Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing is "Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose.'" I agree but would make an exception for intentional and delightful cheesiness, as in: "Why do birds suddenly appear/Every time you walk near?"



5. Hearing that, Meade suddenly says "Hey, don't forget, Bissage named his blog Suddenly Bissage." Bissage was a dearly beloved commenter on this blog who disappeared one day, when the uncooperative dear became uncooperative. I've tried to call him back: "Come back, Bissage. We're counting oranges again. Remember? 42. 42. 42..." To no avail.

6. Analyzing sentences in "The Great Gatsby" — the old "Gatsby project" — there was a day, a couple years ago, when we lit upon: "Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season, suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed." About that "suddenly," I said: "This lone female is suddenly joined by numerous men. Though the unnamed men never get definition as individuals, they presumably get one-on-one dates with her, since the numbers match up: half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men. This is the kind of 'dating' one associates with a prostitute." What would Elmore say about that? I'm inclined to justify anything in "The Great Gatsby" as exactly what it has to be, so I want to say that the "suddenly" is hilarious, but why? Perhaps because it's absurd — 6 men popping up in a sequence on each day within a season of days. Presumably, those men and more are always there, seeking dates with Daisy. It's her whimsical option — exercised suddenly — to accept the dates and put them in sequence, 6 per day, day after day. It's an endless flow, not sudden at all. The suddenness is in Daisy's waking up again in this twilight universe.

7. "Sudden death" — to refer to a method of tie-breaking — goes back to 1834, according to the OED, which found the quote: "‘Which’, said he, ‘is it to be—two out of three, as at Newmarket, or the first toss to decide?’ ‘Sudden death’, said I, ‘and there will soon be an end of it.’" Wikipedia has a page on the topic, with specific details on 16 different sports/games and: "Sudden death may instead be called sudden victory to avoid the mention of death, particularly in sports with a high risk of physical injury. This variant became one of announcer Curt Gowdy's idiosyncrasies in 1971 when the AFC divisional championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins went into overtime." Ha. That didn't catch on. If you're that anxious about someone getting hurt, why are you watching?

8. Meade laughs at something he wrote in the comments to "We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends": "I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/And just for that one moment I could be you/Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/You'd know what a drag it is to have vomit in your shoes." And my response to that — because I'm working on this list here — is to do a word search for "suddenly" at bobdylan.com. One of the great ones comes up — "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding":

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

9. Sudden infant death syndrome. To be distinguished — we hope! — from infanticide. "The misdiagnosis of infanticide as SIDS 'happens all over... A lot of doctors and police don't know how to handle it. They don't take it as seriously as they should.'" Said Jamie Talan, co-author of "The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine and High-Stakes Science." That book is from 1997. That's a controversy that seems to have melted away.

10. This is a 10-point list so we must stop here. Did I miss something you were hoping for? "Suddenly Susan"? "Suddenly Seymour"? "Suddenly, Last Summer"?

"We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends."

Said the Dutch cartoonist Bernard Holtrop, AKA Willem, about all of Charlie Hebdo's "new friends."

"We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. It really makes me laugh.... Marine Le Pen is delighted when the Islamists start shooting all over the place.... We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.... A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn't know what it was. Now it's the opposite, but if people are protesting to defend freedom of speech, naturally that's a good thing."

Why is Holtrop still alive to vomit on the new friends of Charlie Hebdo? He doesn't like meetings:

"I never come to the editorial meetings because I don't like them. I guess that saved my life."

If you're going to run for the presidency from the Senate, you shouldn't rack up years of experience. You have to go early.

I had been thinking that it's ridiculous for Rand Paul and Ted Cruz to imagine that they're ready to run for President. They're first-term Senators, as was Barack Obama. But Barack Obama won, and suddenly, I'm thinking that wasn't a fluke. That is, in fact, what you must do if you're running as a Senator.

I'm thinking this as I'm reading Robert A. Caro's "The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV." Read this:

"Sudden Althouse."

I think rhhardin put his finger on something real yesterday, in that "proper focus is the truth" post, where the discussion turned to whether the Daily Caller writer Jim Treacher is "thin-skinned." A commenter named mr said:

Treacher can be witheringly funny, but he is also famously thin-skinned. He simply cannot allow anyone to say anything critical about him in a comment section without jumping in to insult the commenter.

And pm317 immediately added: "Althouse is famously thin-skinned." Then rhhardin — who's been commenting (enigmatically, interestingly, wisely, and weirdly) for at least 10 years — said:

There's also "sudden Althouse."

It's not thin-skinned exactly.

It appears as an out-of-the-blue defense in some thicket where the game is not apparent.

My sudden response to that was "You must enjoy being a spectator at this hard-to-see game, you weirdo." But the truth — to properly focus on the truth — is that he figured something out. I have an instinct — somewhat like the more conventional urge to defend the underdog — to make an out-of-the-blue defense in some thicket where the game is not apparent.

"The United States Supreme Court is hearing a lawsuit by the Sons of Confederate Veterans."

"It wants Texas to issue a specialty plate showing the Confederate battle flag, which a state panel rejected. The group argues that if Texas allows plates that express some opinions, it also must allow the battle flag, even if the symbol offends many people. Anything less, the group says, amounts to discrimination against its viewpoint, in violation of the First Amendment.... Texas rightly sought to avoid the perception that the state was speaking in a way that is contrary to constitutional values like equal protection under the law. It wanted to avoid even the risk of seeming complicit in official nostalgia for the institution of slavery."

A NYT op-ed by polisci prof Corey Brettschneider and lawprof Nelson Tebbe. There's a second case about North Carolina rejecting a pro-abortion-rights specialty place. The 2 professors struggle to say why North Carolina should lose but Texas should win. They recommend "a balancing approach," with Texas deemed to have a strong interest in any connection to slavery and North Carolina having only a "comparatively weak interest" in distancing itself from abortion rights. (North Carolina already has a "Choose Life" specialty plate.)

ADDED: Brettschneider has a good book, which is in my Kindle: "When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality."

AND: I haven't thought deeply about these cases yet, but I will reveal that my sudden vocalized outburst as Meade proofread this post out loud was: "You know, if you can't take the heat, don't have specialty license plates." 

A warning about that "tidying up" book.

I recommended the book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing," by Marie Kondo, and I see that 40 or more of my readers bought the book. How are you liking it? My recommendation was based on the nicely motivating advice in the first third of the book. And I liked the clear sharp writing. Now that I've finished the book, I do feel that it's necessary to alert you to the weirdness that becomes quite pronounced toward the end.

On page 159, 79% of the way through the book, the author reveals: "I once worked as a Shinto shrine maiden for five years." Interesting use of the word "once"! 5 years is a long time period, not a one-time instance. A page later she talks about the effectiveness of Shinto charms. (They expire after one year, we are told.) On page 188, 92% of the way through, she tells us that when she goes to a client's home she "greet[s]" it by "kneel[ing] formally on the floor in the center of the house and address[ing] the house in my mind." She says: "I began this custom quite naturally based on the etiquette of worshipping at Shinto shrines."

Now, this is fine, but I felt ambushed by this information so late in the book. I want to know when someone is luring me into New Age thinking. Shinto is not "new age" for her, if she is in fact from the Shinto tradition, but repackaging it for those outside the tradition is a New Age move. I don't particularly mind rituals like this, but I certainly don't believe them, and I didn't interpret the word "magic" in the title to promise something supernatural.

Those are the only mentions of Shinto in the book, but there is also quite a bit of animism, and this may be Shintoism as well. In any case, it is a kind of religion. I'll just note a few of the examples of animism that jumped out at me:

I pointed to the balled-up socks. “Look at them carefully. This should be a time for them to rest. Do you really think they can get any rest like that?”...

Clothes that have been shut up for half a year look wilted, as if they have been stifled. Instead, let in some light and air occasionally. Open the drawer and run your hands over the contents. Let them know you care and look forward to wearing them when they are next in season. This kind of “communication” helps your clothes stay vibrant and keeps your relationship with them alive longer....

Just like the gentle shake we use to wake someone up, we can stimulate our belongings by physically moving them, exposing them to fresh air and making them “conscious.”...

I put my wristwatch in a pink antique case in the same drawer and place my necklace and earrings on the accessory tray beside it. Before closing the drawer, I say, “Thanks for all you did for me today.”...

I promise you: whatever you let go will come back in exactly the same amount, but only when it feels the desire to return to you. For this reason, when you part with something, don’t sigh and say, “Oh, I never used this,” or “Sorry I never got around to using you.” Instead, send it off joyfully with words like, “Thank you for finding me,” or “Have a good journey. See you again soon!” Get rid of those things that no longer spark joy. Make your parting a ceremony to launch them on a new journey. Celebrate this occasion with them. I truly believe that our possessions are even happier and more vibrant when we let them go than when we first get them.

I find all of that quite charming. I don't know if the author believes it or if she thinks it's fun and helpful and energizing to attribute consciousness to inanimate objects. I still recommend the book, but I thought I owed you a warning. If you have no patience with this kind of cutesiness or want to avoid immersions in religionish things that you don't believe, you might want to say to this book "Sorry I cannot use you, but may you find joy with someone else."

"A full-lipped, cheek-chiselled man in Ancient Greece knew... that his beauty was a blessing... and that his perfect exterior hid an inner perfection."

"For the Greeks a beautiful body was considered direct evidence of a beautiful mind. They even had a word for it - kaloskagathos - which meant being gorgeous to look at, and hence being a good person."