The word on John Forsythe, even in his many obits, was that he was a film actor who went to TV in desperation when movie roles dried up. Hogwash. The facts are that he made exactly two movies in 1943 — he had a small role in the brilliantly bad war film Destination Tokyo — and then did nothing on film for five long years. Forsythe started doing TV in 1948, and he plunged into it with enthusiasm. Maybe Forsythe couldn't fill a big screen, but he sure as hell could star on a small one. Forsythe was in TV up to his neck, with dozens of roles in quick succession on quality live dramas such as Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One, and The Philco Television Playhouse. Once in a while, there'd be a film, too, but TV was really his thing.

Forsythe had recurred on a dozen episodes of Studio One, but Bachelor Father was his first series, and he was its star. Bachelor Bentley Gregg, who dates a lot but never seems to get laid (it was, after all, 1957), adopts his suddenly orphaned niece Kelly. There was also a Chinese houseboy (God forgive us our trespasses) and a dog named Jasper. The show was only a middlin' success, but it ran on all three TV networks, one after the other, for five years, and it was constantly rerun for more than a decade thereafter. The show made Forsythe financially comfortable — not because he starred in it (actors were paid shit in those days) but because his production company owned a piece of it.

A bunch of years and a couple of failed series go by, and then all of a sudden there's Charlie's Angels, which was about — well, it doesn't matter what it was about. It had three gorgeous women wearing very little. The women were detectives or secret agents or something. It doesn't matter. An uncredited Forsythe supplied the voice of their employer, Charlie Townsend. Charlie would brief the Angels about that week's case on a then-uncommon speakerphone. Forsythe was literally phoning it in, and for this he became, for a while, the highest-paid actor on TV. Whatta guy.

Then, just as Charlie's Angels was ending, there came Dynasty, a prime-time soap opera about people who had lots more money than was good for them. To the series' great good fortune, Forsythe replaced George Peppard early on as the patriarch of the oil-rich Carrington family. (Peppard said he wasn't comfortable playing an unsympathetic rich guy, so he left. Maybe he was remembering The Carpetbaggers.) Dynasty ran for eight years.

It's always fun to watch a good actor take on a role against type. Forsythe would do that sometimes. I remember two standouts: his corrupt judge in the 1980 theatrical film And Justice for All, and a chilling performance as a despicable commanding general in the dystopic 1968 TV-film Shadow on the Land.

Late in life, Forsythe began doing voice work in animated features and TV shows, finishing up as Charlie Townsend on the two Charlie's Angels movies they made about ten years ago. Maybe that was just in case anybody had forgotten about him, I guess. As if.

— Brad

Abby, Dead People Server, DGH, Eternity Tours, Exuma, Pat Peeve (Happy Birthday!), Tim J, and Worm Farmer each get two points.

The former Sonia Hopkins married William McMahon in 1965. He was 57, she was 32. It was the first marriage for both. William McMahon became prime minister of Australia in 1971, and Sonia became famous for wearing a "revealing dress" to a Nixon White House dinner right after hubby took office. The Dress had slats or slits or something running up the sides, and Sonia looked a little like an unwinding roll of film. Years later she told a biographer that her husband had picked The Dress for her so that everybody would be talking about Australia the next day. (Anybody who actually remembers this stuff really needs to get a life.)

See 'The Dress' in 1971

Despite his crafty use of The Dress, William McMahon couldn't quite cut the mustard as prime minister, and was out of office in less than two years. He was knighted in 1977, which made his wife Lady McMahon. (Tip of the hat to Charlene for knowing that.) William died in 1988. Sonia, who never remarried, carried on as a socialite on the Sydney scene, and gave considerable time and effort to charities such as the Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation and the Australian Cancer Research Foundation.

The McMahons had three children. Their middle child, and only son, is Julian McMahon, an actor who's starred as plastic surgeon Dr. Troy in the Nip/Tuck TV series as well as the disfigured Dr. Doom in two recent Fantastic Four movies and, perhaps more enjoyably, on Robot Chicken.

Sonia wore The Dress again when she appeared with her son five years ago at the Golden Globes, where he had been nominated for his acting.

See 'The Dress' in 2005

About a year ago Sonia was on a friend's yacht when she tumbled down a flight of stairs, suffering severe injuries. Then, several months ago, they found out she had cancer. She died in the hospital, her children at her bedside, and that stupid dress in the lead paragraph of her obit.

— Brad

I know it will come as a great shock to you to learn that Philip of Australia had this hit. He gets 8 for the hit plus 5 for the solo. Total: 13. And even though Brad thinks Philip should get a life, he's suddenly now in FIRST PLACE. Well done.

Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador to the United States for 24 years, serving during the terms of six U.S. presidents, from Kennedy to Reagan. Both sides were comfortable with Dobrynin, and that made Dobrynin one of the big reasons the world didn't blow itself up during the 20th century.

As a young man, Dobrynin started out designing airplanes, but somebody up the Party line decided he was too smart for that, so he wound up in diplomatic school. He knocked around the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for about a decade, and then was assigned to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations in 1957. He went back home two years later to run the North America Department, which sounds like it was full of spies. Dobrynin was appointed ambassador to the U.S. in 1962, just in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nice way to start a career.

Upon his return to Moscow in 1986, Dobrynin was rewarded for his long service with a plush job with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, an organization you don't hear much about these days. The job disappeared when the Soviet Union did. In his retirement, Dobrynin published a memoir, In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents, which for some reason left out all the stuff about how the Impossible Missions Force kicked his ass every week. I guess he was still embarrassed by that.

— Brad

Constant Irritant, Kixco and Born with the Defect, not a new player but an old and dear friend with a new name, each get 2 points for the hit and one for the trio. Total: 3. Xorosho!

I suppose this isn't the time or place to bring up midget sex. But ... see, just the other day, driving back from Florida, I saw this guy, about my size (6 foot plus) with a shaved head, who was with a woman who was about two feet tall. She was all tits and ass, real pretty.

The shaved-head guy was wearing a Slipknot T-shirt, and I started thinking, Ummmmmmmmmmmm Midget Sex. How does a guy wearing a Slipknot T-shirt get lucky enough to ...

Oh, yeah, Meinhardt Raabe ... The Update.

Would any Raabe obituary or deadpool update be complete without the gratuitous:

As coroner, I must aver
I thoroughly examined her
And she's not only merely dead
She's really, most sincerely dead!

Okay, I get it. Midgets don't have a lot of options. They can either be Munchkins, wrestlers, the Oscar Mayer wiener guy, or star in midget porno (Ummmmmmmmmmmmm Midget Sex). Meinhardt Raabe scored in three out of four midget success categories. Unfortunately, the midget was mostly known for the line, "As coroner, I must aver ... ", a few lines he never really spoke in the movie. A few lines. That was it. 90 or 100 years later (or however long ago it was), we are here to pay tribute to the midget.

So here goes the tribute ... Buford, Eternity Tours, Kathi and R H Draney each get two points for jarring that whole midget-sex thing in my head that I try to suppress. Two fucking points. Are you people proud of yourselves? Total: 2.

— Bill Schenley

(Today, 4/20, is National Weed Day.)

Oh, man ... I hope this update isn't late for, like, National Weed Day. A federal holiday since, like, George W. was, like, the President. For those of you who don't know this stuff, Bush was like a huge weed head.

Anyway, this guy, Jack Herer, was also like a giant weed head. In fact, he was like the Emperor of Hemp. I guess he became the emperor because he ran for president of the United States twice and lost both times. In 1992 he received something like 3,875 votes as the Grassroots Party candidate and, it should be noted here, that was more votes than George W. Bush got in all of his elections combined.

Jack believed that the cannabis plant should be decriminalized because it has been shown to be a renewable source of fuel, food, and medicine, and can be grown in virtually any part of the world, and he also believed that the U.S. government deliberately conceals proof of this. Jack, dude, the U.S. government conceals all kinds of creepy stuff.

Jack was like 70 when he died and Allen Kirshner was like the BONG! BONG! BONG! BONG! Oh, man. I'm gonna be like late <puff, puff, puff ...> BONG! BONG! BONG! ... Fuck. Where was I? BONG! BONG! BONG! Oh, yeah ... Kirshner gets like five points for the solo, man. Oh, and I almost forgot ... Eight points for ... BONG! BONG! Fuckin-a ... It was like just too much pressure, man. Eight points for, like, something else ... Total: 13.

— Bill Schenley

So, really, all you have to know about Juan Antonio Samaranch is that he ran the Olympics for 21 years starting in 1980 (longer than anybody else save the Founder Himself), and he made the formerly money-losing sweatfest pay off big-time with huge sponsorship and broadcast-rights deals worth billions. He let all those professional athletes into the tent, too, just the way American TV wanted.

Samaranch had his detractors. For instance, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency said that Samaranch couldn't have cared less about athletes using performance-enhancing drugs. However, the name of the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency is Dick Pound, and how seriously can you take a guy with a name like Dick Pound? All that really matters is that Samaranch made an assload of money for Olympics, Inc. When Samaranch got the job, the organization's assets stood at $2 million. When he left, they'd risen to $900 million — and all that the Lord of the Rings had to do was rework the Olympics for TV and ruin them for all time to come. A small price to pay. Even a French judge would have given high marks.

— Brad

You know things are bad for me (Amelia) when ???Guest gets a hit before I do. Add Exuma and Undertaker, and we got a nice trio. Samaranch wasn't going to turn 90 until July so that's 5 for the age and 1 for the triple. Total: 6. One fewer bad guy in the world, eh ???Guest?

W. Willard Wirtz was Secretary of Labor under JFK and LBJ. He served between Arthur Goldberg, who got to go to the Supreme Court and the UN, and George Shultz, who got a tiger tattoo on his ass. [citation needed]

Although Wirtz was from Illinois, he was not one of the Wirtzes who own the Chicago Blackhawks, and thus bears no responsibility for a championship drought that extends beyond 60 years (medium-sized, by Chicago standards). He probably wouldn't have wanted anybody to go that long without winning. He admitted to being emotionally involved in the challenges of reducing unemployment. He was a mediator and an arbitrator, one who worked to find mutually acceptable ways to resolve disputes. The sort of person who makes for really bad television.

Wirtz was once Adlai Stevenson's law partner, and he was married to the same woman for 66 years. The Department of Labor's main library is named for him. He had a falling out with Johnson over Vietnam, but it didn't cost him his job. OK, it wasn't exactly Hemingway's life, but he didn't blow his brains out either. He was the oldest living ex-Cabinet member when he died at 98; in an interview he gave when he was 96, he said that it would have been just as well if he had gone a few years before. If it had been long enough before, it would have meant more than 5 points (2 + 3) each for me and Charlene. It would have made us happier. He probably would have liked that.

— Deepstblu