Where Aren't They Now?: Overlooked Deaths of 2008

[Mr.Sam]

1. January 7: The Greatest Competitive Eater of All Time

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This is a man who weighed 300 pounds, ate up to 25,000 calories per day, once ate 1000 packets of potato chips (flavor unspecified) and one time drank a lion under the table. Yet he lived until the age of 89 and married a former Princess of the Pasadena Rose Bowl (basically, a beauty queen). He was what all of America aspires to be.

2. January 10: Vampira

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Maila Nurmi, the actress known for her "Vampira" character, the inspiration for both Elvira and the Simpsons' Booberella and immortalized in Tim Burton's Ed Wood biopic.

3. March 10: Inventor of SpaghettiO's

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Kurt Eberling, Sr. After fighting with Germany in the Korean War, he got a job at the Campbell Soup Company. One day he was just chillin’ at his house, staring at his kitchen, when he saw a piece of spaghetti curled up in the sink. This gave him a thought: he approached his supervisor with the concept of tinned spaghetti and meatballs, and SpaghettiOs were born.

4. March 25: The Daddy of the Egg McMuffin

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Herb Peterson, Food Scientist. March was a bad year for guys who invented convenient meals. Two days before Peterson, Al Copeland, founder of Popeye’s Chicken also died.
Peterson invented the Egg McMuffin in 1972, a process that surely involved eating every combination of bread, eggs, cheese and bacon. It's every fat kid's dream (up there with "finding witch dead in her gingerbread house, with no living relatives").

5. April 9: The ****** Who Created the Chicken Dance

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Bob Kames. Polka musician, member of the Wisconsin Area Music Industry's Hall of Fame, guy who recorded over seventy albums. So we mock him for the Chicken Dance, but what the **** have we done today?
We should tell you that the Chicken Dance single was released in Poland in 1983, and sold 300,000 copies. Not just a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Poland during the 80s was utterly ******ed for polka.

6. May 4: Pringles Can Inventor

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Fred Baur, chemist and food storage technician.

7. May 26: Kermit's Namesake

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Kermit Scott , childhood friend of Jim Henson. Professor of Philosophy. Honored by a green felt amphibian.
Kermit the Human taught philosophy for over three decades. He then did a master’s in social work and became a counselor.
2008 was a bad year for that most common of person, "Men named Kermit who are associated with the Muppets." Kermit Love, puppeteer and costumer for the Muppets, died about a month after Scott. His name was just a coincidence. Which forces us to ask: just how many guys named Kermit were walking around in the 60s?

8. July 12: World's Oldest Blogger

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Olive Riley, nursing home resident, Australian, old woman, blogger.
She mostly just blogged about whatever your Nana talks about when you finally get around to giving her a call, you ingrate. Family trips, stories from the good old days, coloring her hair, football. Oh, and typical blogger stuff, like posting pictures in her swimsuit.

9. August 30: Killer Kowalski

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Wladek ‘Killer’ Kowlaski. Once named WWF World Tag Team Champion with the adult film-sounding Big John Studd.
He actually legally changed his name to Killer Kowalski in 1963, which would have made for some frightened bank tellers and doctor’s receptionists. In college he majored in electrical engineering, but opted for a career in the more glamorous field of pretend-beating the **** out of people in a ring.
Reports indicate that outside the ring he was incredibly friendly, polite and vegetarian. Inside the ring, though, he ripped some guy’s ear off.
He didn’t drink milk or alcohol, and was a bachelor until he was 80. He died two years later.

10. September 10: The Shark Hunter

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Frank Mundus, rumored to be the inspiration for Quint in the movie (and book) Jaws.
He originally wanted to fish for bluefish. He decided that hunting twenty-pound sea creatures was a *****’s game, and moved on to sharks. He once harpooned a 4,500 pounder. With a hand-held harpoon, none of this harpoon gun business. In 1986 he caught a 3,427 pound great white... with a rod and reel. Though some say he actually killed the whale the shark was feeding off, then ****** up the shark.

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