Larry King's (now there's a guy who should have his epitaph ready!) new book is about celebrity obits and epitaphs like:

Arnold Schwarzenegger
"I had fun!"

Gene Shallit, NBC movie critic
"I won't be back after this commercial break"

Sen. Bob Dole
"I demand a recount"

Jack Lemmon (he actually used this)
"in"

Donald Trump
“A man of great vision, who fulfilled many of his dreams, loved his family and was loyal to his friends.”

Kato Kaelin
“I guess my 15 minutes are up.”

Hugh Hefner
“I'd like to be remembered as someone who played some part in changing our hurtful and hypocritical views on sex — and had a lot of fun doing it.”

Ed McMahon
"He was a good broadcaster and a great Marine!"

Brad Garrett
“If this is heaven, where are all the strip joints?”
“At least I'm not in France.”
“Lincoln is shorter in person.”
“What's with all the angels?”
“It's Sinatra's heaven, God just lives in it.”

Larry King (talk-show host/author)
“I am grateful to the listeners who have kept me going all these years and I hope that 50 years from now when people talk about Larry King, they will say, ‘He did a hell of an interview!’"

My personal favorite:

Yogi Berra
"It's Over"

Botnst: "Hey Gabriel, would you shut up with that that dang horn playing, already?"

B

Dick Vitale: The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! That's the Trifecta babeeeee!

__________________
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows - Robert A. Zimmerman

HI ALL

Clint Eastwood- Dying ain't much of a Living Boy.

From- The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Yoggie once said. Go to all your friend's funerals or they won't come to yours.

Viagra is the greatest invention known to man.

hugh hefner.

Happy driving.

joe moon
85-380SL
94-E320Sedan
95-E320Cabriolet

__________________
joe moon/95Benzman

Home is the hunter, home from the hill,
and the sailor, home from the sea. -- R. L. Stevenson

Dude, hold my beer. Now watch this $hit! -- Botnst

Anna Russell, Deft Parodist of Operatic Culture, Dies at 94

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Anna Russell, the prima donna of operatic parody who claimed to have begun her career as “leading soprano of the Ellis Island Opera Company,” who said she learned to play the French horn from an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and who gave indelibly grating performances of a song she identified as Blotz’s “Schlumpf” to demonstrate what it is like to sing with “no voice but great art,” died on Wednesday in Bateman’s Bay, New South Wales, Australia. She was 94.

Her death was confirmed by her adopted daughter, Deirdre Prussak, in an interview with the Australian ABC radio network, quoted on its Web site.

Ms. Russell’s most enduring creations, now a half-century old, were associated with the most cultic portions of the art music repertory — the works of Wagner and those of Gilbert and Sullivan. Her routines are still regularly invoked even though they can only be sampled on decades-old recordings of her performances.

Merely by telling the plot of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungs” in a voice laced with Edwardian-era class and postwar-era sarcasm, Ms. Russell affectionately sullied opera’s most devotional experience.

“I’m not making this up, you know,” she said when her account of the plot seemed to become particularly outrageous. That became her tag line — and the title of her 1985 autobiography.

Similarly, her instructions about “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera” seemed to deflate the reputation for wit and effervescent fantasy the operettas had acquired. She provided “all the necessary ingredients” for do-it-yourselfers, offering a model prime example. She stirred together patter song and madrigal, paternal stubbornness and young love, class snobbery and babes switched at birth and led her star-crossed heroine, Pneumonia Vanderfeller, to happiness and ever-greater wealth.

It was, though, not as a pedagogue, musicologist, singer, analyst and critic that she made her mark, but as an entertainer. In her first major successful season, 1952-53, she performed in 37 cities in the Unites States and Canada before an estimated 100,000 listeners. Her recording “Anna Russell Sings?” became a best seller.

She was seen on television, Broadway, in film and on the opera stage, including appearances as the Witch in a New York City Opera production of “Hansel and Gretel.” By the late 1960’s, she had announced her retirement, though she would occasionally emerge, like one of the aging divas she caricatured, for another farewell tour, the last, apparently, about 20 years ago.

In her routines, Ms. Russell tapped into a long tradition of deflating the highly formal manners of the concert hall and its devotees, making fun of bad voices and bad teaching, of all pomp and most circumstance, seeming like a Margaret Dumont figure from the Marx Brothers movies who had decided to join their rambunctious dismantling of pretense. But the affection and knowledge of an insider accompanied the jest, leaving the art form intact — almost. Ms. Russell’s was a career that could only have been a success at a time when classical music culture was near the center of popular awareness and public education.

Ms. Russell was born Claudia Anna Russell-Brown in London, Ontario, in Canada, on Dec. 27, 1911, though she later said she had been born in London, England, where early reports suggest her family had moved six months after her birth.

She was the only child of Colonel Claude Russell-Brown and Beatrice Magdalen Russell-Brown, and grew up in a home in which tradition, and music, ruled. For three generations every male on her father’s side served in the British Army.

“I was thoroughly done as I grew up,” Ms. Russell told The New York Times in 1953, “I was presented at court in 1934. I was a debutante. I was exposed to all the likely looking young men in the hope that one of them would marry me.” One did, but the marriage was not a success. She later married Charles Goldhammer, an artist and teacher; the marriage was reported to have ended in 1954.

Ms. Russell gave a number of explanations for why her ambitions changed from being a serious singer to being a serious satirist. Ms. Russell said that one factor was that when she was 16, bones in her face were broken by a hockey stick: “That ruined my acoustic.”

“I had no range, no color,” she said, “But I could sing loud. And it grew louder and louder and awfuller and awfuller.”

That did not prevent her from singing folk songs on the BBC or studying at the Royal Academy. The main inspirational trauma for her career may have been a British touring company production of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” in which she sang Santuzza as a substitute. The tenor, who was supposed to shove her, did not expect her considerable girth and fell backward. She herself then tripped and literally brought the house down, the sets collapsing to the accompaniment of an audience roaring with laughter.

The performance was brought to an end. “So was my career,” she said. “My life’s work was shattered, after five years of hard preparation . . . But I got over it.”

On her first trip to New York, in 1947, she was initially met with skepticism. “No one knew what to do with my kind of satire,” she said. “One agent told me, ‘You can’t do it in a nightclub, and you’re not pretty enough to be on Broadway.’ ” The key to satirizing concert life, it turns out, was to do it in concert.

After retiring in the late 1960’s, Ms. Russell lived in Unionville, just north of Toronto, on a street named after her. She later moved to be with her adopted daughter in Australia, where she tried to establish a catering business.

In the 1970’s and 80’s, Ms. Russell would occasionally come out of retirement, like one of the aging divas she caricatured, for another “farewell tour” and the cheers of fans who did not mind her failing voice. She said that a friend told her: “It doesn’t matter what you sound like. You were no Lily Pons anyway.”

Epitaphs From Near And Far

1. Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:
Here lies
Johnny Yeast
Pardon me
For not rising.
2. Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery:
Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake.
3. In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:
Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw.
4. A lawyer's epitaph in England:
Sir John Strange
Here lies an honest lawyer,
And that is Strange.
5. Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:
I was somebody.
Who, is no business
Of yours.
6. Lester Moore was a Wells, Fargo Co. station agent for Naco, Arizona in
the cowboy days of the 1880's. He's buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery in
Tombstone, Arizona:
Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No Les No More.
7. In a Georgia cemetery:
"I told you I was sick!"
8. John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
Reader if cash thou art
In want of any
Dig 4 feet deep
And thou wilt find a Penny.
9. On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia:
She always said her feet were killing her
but nobody believed her.
10. In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
On the 22nd of June
- Jonathan Fiddle -
Went out of tune.
11. Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an epitaph that
sounds like something from a Three Stooges movie:
Here lies the body of our Anna
Done to death by a banana
It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
But the skin of the thing that made her go.
12. More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea, London, England:
Gone away
Owin' more
Than he could pay.
13. Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr. Wood:
In Memory of Beza Wood
Departed this life
Nov. 2, 1837
Aged 45 yrs.
Here lies one Wood
Enclosed in wood
One Wood
Within another.
The outer wood
Is very good:
We cannot praise
The other.
14. On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
Under the sod and under the trees
Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
He is not here, there's only the pod:
Pease shelled out and went to God.
15. The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is almost a consumer tip:
Who was fatally burned
March 21, 1870
by the explosion of a lamp
filled with "R.E. Danforth's
Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"
16. Oops! Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:
Born 1903 - Died 1942
Looked up the elevator shaft to see if
the car was on the way down.
It was.
17. In a cemetary in England:
Remember man, as you walk by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so shall you be,
Remember this and follow me.
- To which someone replied by writing on the tombstome:
To follow you I'll not consent,
Until I know which way you went.
18. On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
Here lies Ezekial Aikle
Age 102
The Good Die Young.
19. In a London, England cemetery:
Here lies Ann Mann,
Who lived an old maid
But died an old Mann.
Dec. 8, 1767
20. A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:
Sacred to the memory of
my husband John Barnes
who died January 3, 1803
His comely young widow, aged 23, has
many qualifications of a good wife, and
yearns to be comforted.
21. In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:
The children of Israel wanted bread
And the Lord sent them manna,
Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna.
22. In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:
Here lies an Atheist
All dressed up
And no place to go.

__________________

Johnny was a likely boy
Alas he is no more
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13