The Who2 Blog

Comedian George Carlin is dead at age 71. The New York Daily News reports that he died of heart failure on Sunday in Los Angeles.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering what skinny old Federalist Alexander Hamliton and skinny old golf champ Babe Zaharias had in common. Besides height, that is. (Both were 5’7″.) The answer: Both may have lied about their ages to seem like prodigies in their respective fields.

The Big Brown post-mortems continue, with dissatisfaction on all sides.”It just wasn’t Big Brown’s day,” said jockey Kent Desormeaux on Saturday. This a few days after trainer Rick Dutrow threw Desormeaux under the horse trailer, saying it was more or less all the jockey’s fault.

Countdown to Crawford is a brand-new blog from the Los Angeles Times, chronicling “the last days and the last actions of the Bush administration.” Interestingly, reporters have been blogging “in the dark” for the last month, trying out the new platform.

Here’s video (4 minutes) of NBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviewing Dr. Michael Newman after the autopsy on Tim Russert.

The LA Times offers a hard-hitting photo feature titled “Hollywood hunks before they were hot.”Still, these things are never quite resistable. And Edward Norton looks exactly the same.

Journalist Tim Russert has died in Washington, D.C. He was only 58.MSNBC reports that Russert “was recording voiceovers for Sunday’s Meet the Press broadcast when he collapsed” at the NBC News Washington bureau. That MSNBC article also has a link to Russert video clips and tributes from others.

A few days ago we mentioned that Rep. Ron Paul was still running for the Republican nomination for president — even though John McCain already had the nomination sewn up. Paul’s website even proclaimed “Now there are two!” with a graphic of him and McCain as the last men standing among the original 11 GOP candidates.

Happy birthday to the first President George Bush, who is 84 today. Bush was born in 1924 — along with Marlon Brando and Don Knotts.

The Los Angeles Times follows up (while not quite shooting down) rumors that Paul Newman is fading fast due to lung cancer.