The Dead

It's a three-fer!

To begin with...

American chess grandmaster Larry Evans has died at 78.

First of all, I wish that more professions allowed one to become a "grandmaster". That would be awesome. As far as I know, you only get to be called that if you play chess or lead a ninja clan.

Second of all, I think you have to love that he started out hustling chess players for dimes and ended up counting cards in Reno casinos. That's a pretty cool career progression.

Also...

Astronomer Allan Sandage has died at 84. Along with a former mule driver, he cut his teeth studying at the feet of Edwin Hubble during what could accurately be called the wild west of cosmology. His job was to study the birth and death of everything.

“So the universe will continue to expand forever,” Dr. Sandage said in an interview, “and the galaxies will get farther and farther apart, and things will just die. That’s the way it is. It doesn’t matter whether I feel lonely about it or not.”

Finally...

Silent film child star Marie Osborne is dead at 99. I can't decide whether her life was Dickensian or silent-film-sian. She made a fortune as a child, saw it squandered by her parents only one day...

In 1933, as her first marriage deteriorated, Ms. Osborne took a job in a dime store. It was a low point. Then came an astonishing call from the superintendent of the Colorado Children’s Home, who informed her that she had been adopted as an infant by the Osbornes! And that a man who said he was her real father, H. L. Shriver, had become a tycoon!! And that he had left her a substantial inheritance!!!

Wow. It really says something when the New York Times feels compelled! to use escalating exclamation points!! in an obituary!!!