The Trifecta Connection of some 2010 Celebrity Deaths

I am back. It has been almost three weeks since my last post. Oh well, I have been kind of busy and when I have not been, I just did not have the inspiration to post.

I could make this a year in review-type thing and that is not my style. I could go on about all the trouble in the world, see the Korean peninsula, AfPak/Iran, and that would only depress me, you too, once I was done. I could throw a melancholy blanket over what could be the world going to hell in a handbasket. I mean as scary as things seemed or could have seemed during the Cold War era, at least we knew that really there were only two main players (US and USSR) with a number of proxies. The nukes threat was contained because of mutally assured destruction (MAD). Retaliate first and ask questions later.....after the fall out later but later nonetheless. It is not the case now. Fucking strange and insane forces, small, shit house countries have nuclear capabilities and bombing them back to year one may actually be an improvement. Kind of like a karmic reset button being hit. How do you take any solace in that?

I did not want to go there and yet I still did. Enough about that, though. (Isn't that wonderful, get you all depressed heading into a new year, 2011, and all, so welcome aboard this train...it may be Pelham 123).

What I wanted to comment on today is this. I just realized something and I kick myself for not seeing it earlier. This has been a bad year for the movie "Airplane". It was released 30 years ago and was wet your pants funny (oh yeah for real wet your pants funny please check out www.peopleofwalmart.com, scary place that WalMart....or much of America. Not an insult, I am just saying). A barrage of quick jokes, so that if one missed another one hit you rather quickly.

It was sad enough when Lloyd Bridges died years ago (he will always be Izzy Mandelbaum to me...or the father of Jeff Bridges, the Dude, and the new Rooster Cogburn). 2010 saw the death of three (at least) actors who appeared in that seminal film. I am upset that I did not count the threes, when we were at two, and see that pattern. We, as if you or I had anything to do with it, Peter Graves (Captain Clarence Ovuer), Barbara Billingsly and Leslie Nielsen (Dr. Rumack, and don't call me Shirley). I was so caught up in the Billingsly/Tom Bosley deaths that I missed her Airplane connection and how Leslie Nielsen was the third. (Again, I am stretching, like most of us do, to "prove" that celebrity deaths come in threes or are connected by threes).

Again, I will give props to that film. In fact, and I am sure that I have mentioned this before, the movie lead to one of my brother's better quips. Back in 1985, when he was 14 turning 15, he had gone to San Franscisco with our father (who art in heaven....or so we have ourselves believe). He got some sort of walking pneumonia, was barking up a lung and pissed off my, and his, father. Due to his illness, they came home early. While waiting in the airport, they see the flight crew getting on the plane. My brother yells, "Don't eat the fish!". My father cracks up. It was the fish that killed off the pilots, etc. leading to the whole disaster spoof in the movie.

There you have it. Something pleasant to make us forget the earlier part of the posting. Ciao!