Today Lileks applies his usual mixture of insight and off-beat perspective to the late Barnard Hughes. As he always seems to do, he says something I wish I’d thought of for my own write-up on the man:

…He had been 70 years old for the last forty years of his life, it seemed. Perhaps he was cast as an old man long before he was old, and it stuck. Died at the age of 91, which meant he spent half a century as a septugenarian. Happens to some guys. Wilford Brimley, for example, got 15 years shaved off his life at some point; he was a middle-aged guy in “The China Syndrome,” and then he was an Old Coot (with a faint note of Old Fart) with nothing in between except an improbable role as a heavy in “The Firm.” If he ever got an Oscar he’d have to split it with his moustache, which does most of the work.

He also sums up Mickey Spillane, the low-brow mystery/crime writer who died this week, in a single, dead-on-target paragraph. It’s worth a look…