Tom Dempsey, who kicked a 63-yard FG in 1970. That record stood for the rest of the century, and then some.
Donald Trump’s refusal to follow CDC guidelines resulted in his death several weeks ago. He’s been replaced by an Animatron originally destined for the Hall of Presidents at Disney World. It has been reported that Disney folks figured they might as well get some use out of the electronic dummy before Mickey World gets permanently mothballed.
As members of the press have noted, Trump’s Animatronic visage has been trotted out to recent press briefings. Aids have been seen wheeling it in, replacing batteries and lubricating the machine’s jaw joints. Extra spray tan has been strategically applied to cover the loose wires going to the brain pan. Nonetheless, the robot has successfully convinced millions of dimwitted Americans that everything is just hunky-dory in Peoria. It has been noted that if you watch closely the words you hear are not the words coming out of his mouth. There have been some lip-sync/deep fake issues. Give 'em another couple of weeks, they’ll work the bugs out. Come November, those of us left will properly hail and glorify our new King-for-Life, our Grand Imperial Poobah, Our Most Magnificent Trump!
Moderator Note
Keep politics and political pot-shots out of the Quarantine Zone. Try the Politics and Elections forum next time.
Unfortunately, John Prine has died of the disease. I’ve been dreading this since I heard he had been hospitalized.
The New York Times has section on Those We’ve Lost to the Coronavirus (Coronavirus coverage is outside the paywall). In terms of fame, John Prine is high up on the list.
Perhaps not the most famous, but perhaps the most heartbreakingly ironic is Dr. John Murray, a physician who pioneered many of the respiratory therapies that are being used to treat the disease.
Thanks for this link Billdo. Interesting. Not many names that I recognize, and NFL kicker Tom Dempsey is not on their list as of just now.
ETA — the only name on that list that I recognize is Joe Diffie.
To me its Rudy Gobert. March 11 was a harrowing night: within one hour he got it, the NBA shut down, Trump gave that awful speech that almost totally crashed the Dow Jones, and Tom Hanks got it. Within 24 hours the world was completely different. But its when Gobert got it and the NBA shut down I knew we were suddenly in deep shit.
RIP…way too young!
I’ve been a huge John Prine fan for years and his music played a huge part in some very important times in my life. This is hitting me really hard, I’m sure combined with all the generalized stress of everything going on right now. I’m so sad.
Linda Tripp has just died.
Wait, at first it was said she was very ill with the virus. Now it is being reported she died of an undisclosed terminal illness.
My reaction exactly.
Reportedly, she had breast cancer.
Wikipedia sez pancreatic cancer.
Source: Linda Tripp, whistleblower in Clinton sex scandal, dead at 70 from cancer
That COVID caused her death hasn’t been proven, although it sure sounds suspicious.
RIP, Charlotte. You were a medical pioneer without knowing it.
Yeah, John Prine is the first death of someone I had even heard of before, and I really liked him.
I wish people would read the subject line carefully and distinguish between people who have contracted the virus (which in some cases may be not much more than a minor passing illness) and those who have died.
Mathematician John Conway, of Conway’s Game of Life fame.
Not yet confirmed by news sites, but tweeted by people who knew him.
…Tim Brooke-Taylor. Dammit. 
This is a big one for me. I remember when the Game of Life article in Martin Gardner’s column came out. People were programming it all over the place (including me).
The Math dept. at one college I worked at had him visit for a couple of days. He gave talks, etc. He was absolutely marvelous to hear.
I guess he had more than 3 neighbors with coronavirus.
That’s… an oddly appropriate thought. Assuming the news is true, that probably is more less the cause of his death.
He was on the faculty at Princeton when my husband was a graduate student there. He used to make up games involving coins on a grid, and challenge all and sundry to play him. Sometimes you wanted to make an unbroken path from here to there. Sometimes they were more like “life”. I played him a few times, and he always destroyed me. But he was a nice guy, and fun to hang out with, so I would go back and be destroyed again.
He was also a terrific public speaker.
Goddam it. Conway was one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, and was productive in a vast range of areas of math. Most people know him from his Game of Life but he did a lot of groundbreaking work in the area of game theory, knot theory, group theory and many other areas. He invented surreal numbers, Conway’s arrow notation, the Conway polynomial for knots, the Conway polyhedron notation for classifying polyhedrons, and much more.
He also gave us the game of Sprouts, an absolutely outstanding, IMHO, paper and pencil game.