Pretty much everything in the world worth knowing can be found somewhere in this clip of Cyndi Lauper and the elastic-wearing Lou Albano on Rowdy Roddy Piper’s fake talk show from 1984. The big lug died this morning at the age of 76.

Albano didn’t retire from the WWF until he was fifty-three, which is impressive.  After he left the WWF in 1986, he went on to star in things like the live-action segments of the Super Mario Bros. TV show.  When I was nine, I thought that was pretty awesome, and I’m pretty sure I even had the man’s action figure.

After the jump, the insanely long video for Cyndi Lauper’s Goonies R Good Enough, one of four Lauper videos to star the burly Italian-American.  But first, an important public service announcement:

Kids, if you do drugs, you’ll go to hell before you die.

[Local note: Albano had a cameo in the movie It's a Complex World, filmed in the old old Lupo's, and on which Rich Lupo has a writing credit and plays the mayor. Available at Acme Video. BC]

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I will forever remember Patrick Swayze for his role as the icky creep in Donnie Darko.  And also for his #3 hit She’s Like The Wind, which I caught myself singing in the car the other day, even though it wasn’t actually on.

Above is his film debut as Ace in Skatetown USA, which the Youtube uploader describes as “the Holy Grail of disco movies.”

Dear The Suddenly Late Jim Carroll,

You recorded one of the stupidest, most irritatingly catchy songs ever, and then Leonardo DiCaprio played you in your biopic (which was a terrible, terrible movie.)  That’s really all I know about you, though I guess you must have had some other more interesting qualities, right?  But now, as this fatal summer draws to a close, it seems only fitting that we should add you to the list of people who died, died.

RIP (1949-2009).

Yours,

The World

[UPDATE:  I fixed his birthdate, which had said 1950 until just moments ago.  That's what I get for trusting the first source I read.  Sorry.]

Unless you’re really into the pop music of the sixties (or the name-dropping Portland indie band Parenthetical Girls), there’s a pretty good chance you’ve never heard of Ellie Greenwich. Surely you know some of the songs she wrote, though: “Be My Baby”, “Leader of the Pack”, “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Going To Marry,” “Chapel of Love,” “And Then He Kissed Me,” “Hanky Panky,” “River Deep Mountain High,” “Da Do Run Run,” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home.)”

She also recorded her own songs sometimes, including the incredibly wonderful You Don’t Know (above), which some bored person put on Youtube alongside images from a 1964 Disney movie called The Gnome-Mobile.

She died in Los Angeles today at the age of sixty-nine after a brief hopitalization for pneumonia. Ann Powers at the LA Times has a very good obituary.  And after the jump, some more Youtubery:

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If you’re looking to buy the perfect holiday gift for your favorite morbid celebrity-obsessed child, perhaps you might want to check out these Gone But Not Forgotten finger puppets, which remind us of those that passed away in 2008, including Jesse Helms, Heath Ledger, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  (Helms is the one with the Bible and the devil horns.)

Available at Moss [via The Book Bench]

From the Projo:

The Rhode Island State Police yesterday unearthed what they believe are the remains of Joseph P. “Joe Onions” Scanlon, the onetime hood, police informant and victim of an infamous Rhode Island gangland slaying….In April 1978, Pari and Andrew Merola were arrested for whacking Scanlon in Merola’s Federal Hill social club in Providence. Scanlon’s girlfriend, a prostitute named Sandra Surprise, later testified that Pari punched Scanlon in the face to distract him, while Merola pumped a single shot into the back of his head. She was holding the couple’s three-month-old daughter as she watched.

Read the entire piece here. Photo, Bill Murphy, The Providence Journal

Jonathan Spencer, consultant forensic scientist and firearms expert, said that although the gun, which fires bullets at a speed of 399 feet a second, was tiny, it could still prove fatal and in the eyes of the law was as dangerous as a machine gun. He said: “The general threshold for perforating the skin is about 330 feet a second.

“Apart from bone, skin offers the greatest resistance to penetration. If it can pass through the skin it is potentially lethal, even if the bullets are small.”