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Overton Joseph Paul (b. 1960-01-04 / d. 2003-06-30)
He was a senior vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He held a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Michigan Technological University and a Juris Doctor degree from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. Overton is known for conceiving of the idea now known as the Overton window, the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream at a given time. He died at age 43 from injuries suffered in a crash while piloting an ultralight aircraft, soon after taking off from the Tuscola Area Airport near Caro, Michigan. Overton had just married a few weeks before the accident.
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53
Born 1963-06-25. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Heart
He was an English singer, songwriter, record producer, and philanthropist who rose to fame as a member of the music duo Wham! and later embarked on a solo career. Michael sold over 80 million records worldwide making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He achieved seven number one songs on the UK Singles Chart and eight number one songs on the US Billboard Hot 100. He was widely known for his success in the 1980s and 1990s, including Wham! singles such as "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" and "Last Christmas" and solo singles such as "Careless Whisper" and "Faith". In March 2017, a senior coroner in Oxfordshire attributed Michael's death to dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and a fatty liver.
83
Born 1932-05-22. Domain:Science (Medical/Bio style). Cause of death:Age
He was a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City. He was a major force in the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Spitzer led a successful effort, in 1973, to stop treating homosexuality as a mental illness.
62
Born 1953-04-21. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Cancer
He was an Israeli chess grandmaster. He emigrated from the Ukrainian SSR to Israel in 1990.
53
Born 1962-04-11. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Suicide
She was a German comedian and actress. Friesicke is best known to German audiences for her TV sketches. In 1996 she joined Ingolf Lück, Anke Engelke, Bastian Pastewka and Marco Rima in a regular nationwide series, the Wochenshow ('The Weekly Show').
79
Born 1935-01-05. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Age
David John Ryall was an English stage, film and television character actor. He had leading roles in Lytton's Diary and Goodnight Sweetheart, as well as memorable roles in Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective and Andrew Davies's adaptation of To Play the King. He also portrayed Billy Buzzle in the ITV sitcom Bless Me, Father and Frank in the BBC sitcom Outnumbered.
45
Born 1964-11-12. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Accident
He was an American singer-songwriter living in Athens, Georgia. His first album, Little, was released in 1990, but his breakthrough to commercial success came with the release of the 1996 tribute album Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation.
Chesnutt died from an overdose of muscle relaxants that had left him in a coma in an Athens hospital.
92
Born 1917-09-23. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Age
He was a resistance fighter and noted explorer from Norway who accompanied Thor Heyerdahl on his famous 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition.
81
Born 1927-01-17. Domain:Music. Cause of death:cancer (colorectal)
She was an American actress, singer, and cabaret star. She was perhaps best known for her 1953 Christmas song "Santa Baby". Orson Welles once called her the "most exciting woman in the world". She took over the role of Catwoman for the 4th series of the 1960s Batman TV series, replacing Julie Newmar who was unavailable for the final series.
35
Born 1973-00-00. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Murder
He was a reggae musician from Kenya. He died on Christmas Day, 2007, after being poisoned (as attributed in the local newspaper). He was transported to Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, where he died as he was being treated.
73
Born 1933-05-03. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Pneumonia
james Brown was eventually interred 2 months after is death, on March 10, 2007.
Maybe not for long...
92
Born 1908-06-25. Domain:Philosophy. Cause of death:Age
He was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continuously affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of mathematics, and finally as an emeritus elder statesman who published or revised seven books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard, 1956–78.
6
Born 1990-08-06. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Murder
She was an American child beauty pageant contestant made famous by her murder and the subsequent media coverage. She was found dead in the basement of her parents' home in Boulder, Colorado, nearly eight hours after she was reported missing. The case is notable in both its longevity and the media interest it has generated in the United States. After several grand jury hearings, the case is still unsolved.
The results of the autopsy revealed that JonBenét was killed by strangulation and a skull fracture. A garrote made from a length of tweed cord and the broken handle of a paintbrush had been used to strangle her; her skull had suffered severe blunt trauma; there was no evidence of conventional rape, although sexual assault could not be ruled out. The official cause of death was asphyxiation due to strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma.
78
Born 1917-06-07. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Cancer (lung)
At his side in his last years was ex-wife Jeannie (Bieggers) Martin, whom he had divorced years earlier. The pair became close again, although they resisted suggestions that they wed and seemed content to just being together.
Martin died of respiratory failure, at home with Jeannie by his side, on Christmas morning 1995.
Martin's world began to crumble on March 21, 1987, when his son Dean Paul Martin was killed when his jet fighter crashed while flying with the Air National Guard. A much-touted tour with Davis and Sinatra in 1988 sputtered, with Martin's heart just not into it. On one occasion, he infuriated Sinatra when he turned to him and muttered "Frank, what the hell are we doing up here?" Martin, who always responded best to a club audience, felt lost in the huge stadiums they were performing in (at Sinatra's insistence), and he was not the least bit interested in drinking until dawn after their performances.
In fact, Martin never completely recovered from losing his son, and as a lifelong smoker was suffering from emphysema. In September 1993, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He courageously kept his private life to himself, emerging briefly for a public celebration of his 77th birthday with friends and family.
87
Born 1904-09-18. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Age
Companion of Marecl Pagnol. They met in 1923.
71
Born 1918-01-26. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Murder
The Ceauşescus were executed by a firing squad lead by Captain Ionel Boeru and two other soldiers who shot them with AK-47 assault rifles. After the shooting had stopped, the bodies were covered with canvas. The hasty trial and execution were videotaped. The footage was promptly released in France and other western countries. Several days later, footage of their trial and pictures of their corpses (but not of the execution itself) were released on television for the Romanian public.
Before they were shot dead, Ceauşescu sang part of "The Internationale" and proclaimed that history would judge him well. His wife was screaming at everyone to go to hell.
73
Born 1916-01-07. Domain:Politics. Cause of death:Murder
She was born Elena Petrescu into a peasant family in the village of Petreşti, Baloteşti Commune, Ilfov County, in the informal region of Wallachia. Her family was supported by her father's job as a ploughman.
Elena Ceauşescu fled with her husband on December 22, 1989, after the events in Timişoara led to the Romanian Revolution, but she and her husband were captured. At the show trial that took place, she refused to answer the questions asked and refused to acknowledge her interrogators' legitimacy, boldly proclaiming that they did not know who they were speaking to, and that they were using an insulting tone of voice. According to the execution officer Ionel Boeru, after the announcement of the death penalty, "Elena was stinking like a beggar, she probably wet her pants out of fear". On the afternoon of December 25, 1989, in Târgovişte they were executed while Nicolae Ceauşescu was singing part of The Internationale song; Elena was screaming at everybody to go to Hell. She was almost 74 years old. She was outlived by her almost 100-year old mother, her brother Gheorghe Petrescu (also an important figure in the party) and her three children: Valentin (b. 1948), Zoia (1950 - 2006) and Nicu (1951 - 1996), who was also a very important member of the Romanian Communist Party.
87
Born 1902-09-01. Domain:Science (Physics style). Cause of death:Age
Riccardo Morandi was an Italian civil engineer best known for his innovative use of reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete, although over the years some of his particular cable-stayed bridges have had some maintenance trouble. Amongst his best-known works are the General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge, an 8 km (5 mi) cable-stayed bridge crossing Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela; a similar bridge in Genoa commonly known as Ponte Morandi (officially Viadotto Polcevera), which partially collapsed in 2018 for reasons under investigation; and the Subterranean Automobile Showroom in Turin.
90
Born 1893-04-20. Domain:Painting. Cause of death:Age
"How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling..."
66
Born 1880-01-29. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Other
Fields spent his last weeks in a hospital, where a friend stopped by for a visit and caught Fields reading the Bible. When asked why, Fields replied, "I'm checking for loopholes." In a final irony, W. C. Fields died in 1946 (from a stomach hemorrhage) on the holiday he claimed to despise: Christmas Day.
A notable quote regarding alcohol is attributed to Fields: "I can't stand water because of the things fish do in it."
77
Born 1867-11-03. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
He was a German mathematician. In 1901, he co-developed the Runge-Kutta method, used to solve ordinary differential equations numerically. He is also remembered for the Zhukovsky-Kutta aerofoil, the Kutta-Zhukovsky theorem and the Kutta condition in aerodynamics. Kutta died in Fürstenfeldbruck, Germany in 1944.
48
Born 1890-01-09. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Pneumonia
He was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century, and a Nobel Prize nominee (1936). He introduced and made popular the frequently used international word robot, which first appeared in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1921. Karel named his brother Josef Čapek as the true inventor of the word robot.
Čapek refused to leave his country--despite the fact that the Gestapo had named him Czechoslovakia's "public enemy number 2." Karel Čapek died of double pneumonia on December 25, 1938, shortly after part of Bohemia was annexed by Nazi Germany following the so-called Munich Agreement. He was interred in the Vyšehrad cemetery in Prague. His brother Josef Čapek, a painter and writer, died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
75
Born 1854-09-26. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
Percy Alexander MacMahon was a mathematician, especially noted in connection with the partitions of numbers and enumerative combinatorics. In the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity Kevin McNally plays as MacMahon. The film accurately depicts the first meeting of MacMahon and Srinivasa Ramanujan, where Ramanujan successfully completes some mathematical calculations. Gian-Carlo Rota notes in his introduction to Volume I of MacMahon’s Collected Papers: It would have been fascinating to be present at one of the battles of arithmetical wits at Trinity College, when MacMahon would regularly trounce Ramanujan by the display of superior ability for fast mental calculation (as reported by D. C. Spencer, who heard it from G. H. Hardy). The written accounts of the lives of these characters, however, omit any mention of this episode, since it clashes against our prejudices.