R.I.P.: These are the words that I manifest.

R.I.P.: I'm in love with that song.

R.I.P.: Say goodnight, Nessie.

In a biography of firebrand revolutionary propagandist Thomas Paine, I once read the theory that, prior our modern moment, it was simply easier to be an accomplished Renaissance man. Paine, who not only gave voice of aborning young republic's revolutionary ideals but was also an engineer and architect of minor significance, was downright myopic compared to some of his contemporaries. To explain this riot of talent (and, perhaps, to assure readers like myself - a man who gets tired pondering a trip to the bank a mere five blocks away - that we're not inadequate in some way) the author proposed that it was easier to make lasting achievements in a broad range of fields back then because, in the late 18th Century, so much still had to be done. The bar to entry in to, say the physical sciences was lower because a man with homemade equipment and a few clever insights was on the cutting edge; as opposed to now, when particle colliders the size of small towns are making the breakthroughs.

As reassuring as this idea would be to somebody like me - whose life is not only not-revolutionary, but perhaps falls slightly short of mediocre (though I've come up with some really funny t-shirts designs that, somebody, I'll maybe put up on Cafepress or something) - I don't think its accurate. After are, the modern age still mints the occasional polymath.

Here's the NY Times obit of Robert Rines: inventor, educator, legal innovator, composer, and monster hunter:

Dollars to doughnuts, Robert H. Rines will be mainly remembered not for holding more than 800 patents, starting a law school or writing music for the stage, but for his dogged pursuit of the Loch Ness monster.

But Dr. Rines, who died on Nov. 1 at his home in Boston at 87, may have outlived the fabled Scottish creature he pursued for more than a quarter century. He had come to suspect that the beast died during his hunt, leaving him to search for a skeleton.

Dr. Rines died of heart failure, said his wife, Joanne Hayes-Rines.

Dr. Rines took the most convincing underwater pictures of what might or might not have been the Loch Ness monster, so convincing that in the mid-1970s scientists from Harvard and the Smithsonian expressed serious interest. Others were intrigued by his innovative search tactics: He hired a perfumer to concoct a scent to attract the creature and trained dolphins to carry cameras.

In the end, Dr. Rines, a lawyer, said that though he had failed to meet the standards of science, he was sure he could persuade a jury of the monster’s existence.

"They can just call me crazy, and that's O.K. by me," he said in an interview with Boston magazine in 2008. "At least I won't go to jail for it, like Galileo."

Dr. Rines was far more than a garden-variety monster hunter. He was spectacularly polymathic.

He developed electronic gear to improve the resolution of radar and sonar images that is used in Patriot missiles, found the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck and helped pave the way for ultrasound imaging. His patented hinge for chopsticks is less noticed but quite clever.

"Few Americans have made such a sweeping contribution to the process and business of inventing as Robert Rines," said a biography prepared by the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program, which recognizes outstanding inventors and is run by the engineering school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As a prominent patent lawyer, Dr. Rines greatly influenced the Congressional rewriting of patent laws in 2000, according to Fortune magazine.

In 1973, Dr. Rines founded the Franklin Pierce Law Center to train law students in intellectual property law. It is the only law school in New Hampshire.

Dr. Rines's first love was music, and his family cherishes his story of playing a violin duet with Albert Einstein at a summer camp in Maine when he was 11. He said he played better than Einstein.

As an adult, Dr. Rines combined with the director and actor Paul Shyre to form a theater company to stage plays by Eugene O'Neill and others. He wrote music for most of their dozen or so Off Broadway productions.

He wrote the campaign song for "Hizzoner!" — a one-man play about Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia of New York, written by Mr. Shyre and starring Tony Lo Bianco. The play was shown on public television in 1984 and ran on Broadway in 1989.

Robert Harvey Rines was born on Aug. 30, 1922, in Boston. His father, David, a patent lawyer, helped him try at 6 years old to patent a pocketknife with a fork, spoon and other things. But the idea was already patented.

Robert fell in love with music even earlier and began to play the violin at 4. By high school, he had formed a band, the Six Aces of Rhythm, and was taking composition classes at Harvard.

He left high school early to study physics and engineering at M.I.T., but soon decided he would rather go to Harvard. His father said no, and so he deliberately flunked out. His father kicked him out of the house. He reconsidered and graduated near the top of his M.I.T. class in 1942.

He joined the Army Signal Corps, where his experience in M.I.T.'s radiation laboratory proved critical in helping develop the Army's top-secret Microwave Early Warning System. His radar and sonar patents grew out of this work.

He later worked as an assistant examiner at the patent office in Washington while earning a law degree from Georgetown in 1947. In 1972, he received a doctorate from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, since he was there anyway to help Taiwan develop a patent system. He later helped the People's Republic of China regularize its patent process.

Dr. Rines's passion about the Loch Ness monster was kindled in 1972 when he was in Scotland on his honeymoon with the former Carol Williamson, his second wife.

They were enjoying tea with a friend whose home overlooked the loch. Their host remarked, 'I say, is that an upturned boat?"

What they saw was a big, grayish hump with the texture of an elephant’s skin. It rose four feet out of the water and seemed to be about 30 feet long. They stared at it for 10 minutes.

"I don't care what anybody thinks, you have to find out what that was," Mrs. Rines said.

The obsession had begun. There were many trips to Loch Ness, with Dr. Rines applying his sophisticated sonar techniques to find "Nessie." In 1976, the Academy of Applied Science, an organization Dr. Rines had founded, teamed up with The New York Times in 1976 in a joint quest. Results were inconclusive but made interesting newspaper articles.

Dr. Rines later found evidence that the loch may overlay what was once an ocean floor, suggesting to him that a seagoing dinosaur may have adapted to freshwater. But after the 1970s, Dr. Rines and other seekers stopped seeing monstrous manifestations. He thought his quarry may have died.

Dr. Rines taught at M.I.T., Harvard and Franklin Pierce, started a salmon farm and set up several companies to market his inventions. His Academy of Applied Science shifted focus from aiding unusual experiments, like hunting down Bigfoot, to encouraging students to invent.

Dr. Rines's first marriage, to Dorothy Kay, ended in divorce, and his second, to Miss Williamson, ended with her death in 1993. He is survived by his wife, the former Joanne Hayes; his sons, Justice and Robert; his daughter, Suzi Rines Toth; his stepdaughter, Laura Hayes-Heur; and four grandchildren.

His inventions that live on include a way to use ultrasound radiation to treat cataracts that he conceived while having his own eyes examined several years ago. His dream of inventing something to stop tornadoes never materialized.

R.I.P.: Dun dun DUNNNN!!

Him
August 1, 1933 – May 4, 2009

R.I.P.: Yo, Bea.

I know I promised Class of 1999 chatter, but, well, you know. Here's Bea Arthur wrestling a pack raptors into submission. Because that's how she'd want to be remembered.

R.I.P.: De-Luxed.

You don't pay attention for a half a freakin' second and look what happens . . .

Over the weekend, Lux Interior, frontman for psychobilly pioneers and ANTSS-fave the Cramps, died. He was 62. The cause being given is pre-existing heart condition.

Interior and his wife, Poison Ivy Rorschach, founded the Cramps in 1973, but the band didn't really take off until the couple moved to NYC and joined up with guitarist Bryan Gregory and drummer Miriam Linna.

Through endless line-up changes, chaotic shows, a nasty lawsuit aimed at their label (IRS), and a brief appearance on Beverley Hills 90210, Lux, Poison, and Co. managed to crank out records from 1979 to 2004, leaving behind an impressive catalog of tunes.

Premature rumors of his demise – allegedly by heroin overdose – circulated in 1987. Bereaved fans mistakenly flooded Interior and Ivy's home with wreaths and other signs of condolence. The odd mix up gave the singer an opportunity to muse on what his death may or may not means to fans: "At first, I thought it was kind of funny, but then it started to give me a creepy feeling. We sell a lot of records, but somehow just hearing that you've sold so many records doesn't hit you quite as much as when a lot of people call you up and are obviously really broken-up because you've died."

One of the Cramps most infamous shows was a 1978 gig in, of all places, Sacramento's Napa State Mental Hospital. Here's some video:



Adios, you magnificently odd man.

R.I.P.: O captain! My captain!

The New York Times reports that Frank Mundus, the famed shark hunter who claimed to be the inspiration for Jaws' Quint, passed away of heart attack in his tropical island home in Hawaii.

From the obit:

Frank Mundus, the hulking Long Island shark fisherman who was widely considered the inspiration for Captain Quint, the steely-eyed, grimly obsessed shark hunter in “Jaws,” died on Wednesday in Honolulu. He was 82 and lived on a small lemon-tree farm in Naalehu, on the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, 2,000 feet above shark level.

Was he really the inspiration for Robert Shaw's unforgettable character?

The legend grew, and in the next few years, he repeatedly took Peter Benchley, who wrote the best seller “Jaws,” out to sea.

Mr. Mundus told a New York Times reporter that Mr. Benchley loved the way he harpooned huge sharks with lines attached to barrels to track them while they ran to exhaustion.

In 1975, “Jaws” was turned into Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie, which for years left millions of beachgoers toe-deep in the sand. Robert Shaw played Quint, who exits by sliding feet first into the belly of a monster great white.

Mr. Benchley, who died in 2006, denied that Mr. Mundus had been the inspiration for Quint, whom he described as a composite character.

Clearly irked, Mr. Mundus said: “If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.”

Curiously, the Times fails to mention that Mundus was the subject of two book length profiles: Robert F. Boggs's Monster Man (Mundus's rep for catching monster fish and his well-known advert – which promised charters "Monster Fishing" – earned him the nickname "Monster Man") and the shamefully out-of-print In the Slick of the Cricket by Russell Drumm. The latter is, for my money, one of the finest bits of nature writing in American letters. Mundus's memoirs came out under the title Fifty Years a Hooker. If you go the Amazon page for his book, you can see the short note Frank left there:

Dear Amazon customers,

If you want to find out what kind of a pesty old goat I turned into, buy my book Fifty Years A Hooker

Jaws for Sport,
Frank Mundus

Mundus was less than impressed by Spielberg's blockbuster:

“It was the funniest and the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen, because too many stupid things happened in it . . . For instance, no shark can pull a boat backwards at a fast speed with a light line and stern cleats that are only held in there by two bolts.”

And, finally, the scene that secured Quint's place in the pantheon of Coolest Film Characters of All Freakin' Time:

R.I.P.: The other Stan the Man.

I don't have anything really important to add to the greatly deserved praise pouring out of the Internet for the late Stan Winston. Obits in all-pro outlets like the NYTimes and fan tributes, like the fond farewells at Arbogast on Film and Final Girl, among others, will tell you all you need know about his long and enviable career.

With your indulgence, I would like the chance to throw in a personal memory. When I was a little kid, I only read two kinds of books. One of them was a trade paperback (though this was well before such collections were the industry norm) of superhero team-ups in the Mighty Marvel Manner. I read that over and over until the front cover fell off, the spine broke, and I lost a couple pages of a titanic struggle between Thor and the Silver Surfer – a battle I remember taking place in, of all places, Thor's dining room.

The only other printed pages that could hold my interest were in non-fiction books about dinosaurs. I was pretty young, so we're talking about pretty basic stuff here. Mostly these books had some cool pictures of fighting dinos. There was always the obligatory size-comparison picture: some child in clothes two decades too old standing next to various giant lizards. Usually the child and the dinosaurs were in a row, as if they were in some unimaginable police line-up: "Number 5, please approach the mirror and roar."

I never became a paleontologist or anything. I was interested in living, fighting dinosaurs. The idea of galumphing about the globe looking for fossilized remains seemed pretty lame by comparison. Perhaps I lacked the requisite imagination for it. Perhaps I simply don't possess a scientific mind. Anyhow: dino obsession was a crucial part of my childhood that remained strictly a childhood thing.

This connects to the career of Stan Winston, of course, through Jurassic Park. Winston did all the live-action dinosaurs for all three of flicks that currently make up the franchise. This includes the animatronic Spinosaur: a multi-story, 12-ton monster that holds the record for being the largest animatronic ever built.

I saw Jurassic Park in Washington D.C., on an enormous screen in a classic theater called the Uptown. It was opening night and the theater was packed. I remember the thrill that went down my spine when the first dinosaurs, a couple of grazing brontosaurs, appeared on the screen. I was instantly transported back to my youth when the only things I really cared about were comic book heroics and the lives of the long-dead thunder lizards. I was, for a couple of hours, a little boy again. Though I've seen the film several times since, as well as its sequels, I never get tired of the watching the dinosaurs.

Thanks Stan. You did good work.

R.I.P.: Nameless here for evermore.

On this day, in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore, Maryland.

By way of tribute: here's John Astin reciting Poe's "The Raven."



And here's the bizarre beginning of Roger Corman's extremely loose adaptation of "The Raven," starring Vincent Price and the voice of Peter Lorre.



Finally, the greatest of adaptations: the Simpsons do "The Raven."

R.I.P.: Lily of the field.

Though I was always more of an Addam's Family kind of guy, news that Yvonne De Carlo passed away is still a sad, sad thing.

The painting above is by Isabel Samaras. Warning: not all Samaras's stuff is workplace-friendly.