Among recent obituaries, what about Teddy Pendergrass? Traditional obit writing always seems to fall down with great musicians, and the Pendergrass passing is no exception. The ledes have trouble summing up a sound. The story bodies have trouble charting all the albums and songs. Overall meaning gets lost. So, you have to pick and choose.

NPR's lede is best: "Teddy Pendergrass cheated death at least once."

Further in, the Post has a highlight but only by quoting a NYT Pareles concert review. "Compared with current rhythm-and-blues Romeos, Mr. Pendergrass was a soft-focus seducer, never calling for anything more explicit than sharing a shower. But when he moaned or insisted, 'Let me do what I want to do,' everyone knew what he meant."

Then you pause to create your own obit, and listen to the sultry Turn Off the Lights, ridiculous but supremely confident, on YouTube.

Elsewhere still, you run across Dan Gottlieb's Philly Inquirer memories.

Pendergrass came to Gottlieb, a therapist and Inky columnist, after the infamous car accident that left him quadriplegic. What Pendergrass knew was that Gottlieb had also been paralyzed in a car wreck, a few years earlier. What he didn't know was Gottlieb was having the same dark feelings about life. The therapy became a partnership of sorts.

You could then end up anywhere online, but I end up at Entertainment Weekly, moved, watching the Pendergass 1985 comeback at Live Aid.

We start our review in the Chicago Tribune with an obituary lede.

Jan C. Gabriel died Sunday.

Or as he might say, "Sunday! Sunday!! SUNDAY!!"

The voice of the once ubiquitous radio commercials for "Smoking U.S. 30" drag strip, Mr. Gabriel was also the longtime announcer at the old Santa Fe Speedway and the producer of "Super Chargers," a nationally syndicated motor sports television show.

In The New York Times, via Jess, another lede. Usually I don't exempt newspaper stories at this length. But the lede here is extended in high fashion, and I have no doubt you'll click through after reading.

Joe Rollino once lifted 475 pounds. He used neither his arms nor his legs but, reportedly, his teeth. With just one finger he raised up 635 pounds; with his back he moved 3,200. He bit down on quarters to bend them with his thumb.

People called him the Great Joe Rollino, the Mighty Joe Rollino and even the World’s Strongest Man, and what did it matter if at least one of those people was Mr. Rollino himself.

On Monday morning, Mr. Rollino went for a walk in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a daily routine. It was part of the Great Joe Rollino’s greatest feat, a display of physical dexterity and stamina so subtle that it revealed itself only if you happened to ask him his date of birth: March 19, 1905. He was 104 years old and counting.

A few minutes before 7 a.m., as Mr. Rollino was crossing Bay Ridge Parkway at 13th Avenue, a 1999 Ford Windstar minivan struck him. The police said he suffered fractures to his pelvis, chest, ribs and face, as well as head trauma. Unconscious, he was taken to Lutheran Medical Center, where he later died.

New York is a city of extraordinary lives and events, and here, indisputably, was one of them — one of the city’s strongest and oldest, struck down on a Monday morning by a minivan in Brooklyn.

One more lede from the Times, in the obit of a life-saving man, Mel Cuba: "The winds were whipping toward shore that summer day more than seven decades ago when 105 orphans from the Pride of Judea Home on Dumont Avenue in Brooklyn stepped off buses for what was supposed to be a gleeful romp at the beach in Rockaway, Queens."

A good week for NYT obits. You know the Los Angeles Times is my obit paper of choice (if one can have such a thing), but consider the edge grafs in the week's NYT obit for Donald Goerke, creator of SpaghettiOs.

Lede: "Donald Goerke, a Campbell Soup Company executive whose nonlinear approach to pasta resulted in SpaghettiOs, died Sunday at his home in Delran, N.J. He was 83."

Final graf: "Shapes considered and rejected by Mr. Goerke’s team included baseballs, cowboys, spacemen and stars."

I didn't know Rachel Wetzsteon, but I read her obituary in yesterday's New York Times and wondered some. "Rachel Wetzsteon, a prominent poet whose work was known for its mordant wit, formal elegance and cleareyed examination of the solitary yet defiant lives of single women, was found dead on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 42. Ms. Wetzsteon, who died apparently late on Dec. 24 or early on the 25th, committed suicide, said her mother, Sonja Wetzsteon. She had been severely depressed in recent months, partly over the breakup of a three-year romance, her mother said." The poem in her obit is good, but most moving for me now is "Love and Work" from The New Yorker.

"When I think of you I find the nearest lamp and turn it on."

If you don't have a registration, the poem is here as well.

"Lester D. Shubin, 84, a Justice Department researcher who turned a DuPont fabric intended for tires into the first truly effective bulletproof vests, saving the lives of more than 3,000 law enforcement officers, died after a heart attack at his Fairfax County home."

The Washington Post, via my parents' mention at Thanksgiving. Shubin was also among the troops that liberated Dachau, an early proponent of bomb-sniffing dogs and survived by his wife of 50 years. Cool life.

Also up there for me: Bob Twigg, 62, the USA TODAY reporter who won $9 million in the lottery. I'd somehow never heard his story around the office before. From the Post obit: "In January 1996, working a Sunday morning shift in the USA Today newsroom, he looked at a newswire story about the winning lottery numbers, 3-15-17-28-33-37."

The next day, a lawyer-friend verified the ticket with the state lottery office. Mr. Twigg begged off a news conference, wanting to break the news in his own paper.

Mr. Twigg wrote that he had been struggling with family medical bills, even though his company health insurance paid 80 percent of its cost. In addition to his journalism job, he had taken a part-time job at a hardware store and drove an eight-year-old Pontiac with 187,000 miles on the odometer that had just failed a state inspection. He had dropped out of the office Super Bowl pool because he had already lost $31.50 during the playoffs and didn't think he had the luck to pick the winner.

Can't find his story online anywhere, will keep looking.

Update: Found it in our internal archive. Will see if someone can pub it somewhere. Romenesko could like it. For now, an excerpt:

On the way home, I was over-the-edge careful. I barely reached 50 on the 55-mph highways. With the ticket tucked in my shirt pocket, I spent more than an hour driving the 38 miles from my office to home. And my wife, B.J., wasn't there.

I still had not told a soul. I felt ready to burst.

B.J. arrived about 30 minutes after I got home. When I told her we won, she shrieked and acted just like one of those people on the Publishers Clearing House commercials.

My declaration of this a week or two ago greatly amused friend Dave. Now, as the NYT boasts of the 1,200 obits staffers keep in the can, I must make my point for the LAT. What the LAT seems to care about all the time — and what the NYT seems to only care about sometimes — is the relatable human element. In LAT obituaries, a detail may not be a great achievement or milestone in a person's noteworthy life. A detail may just show how a noteworthy life modestly included a person.

On Rose Friedman, wife/collaborator: "Until Milton Friedman’s death in 2006 at 94, the two were rarely apart; they frequently held hands at academic conferences and in airports. She often had a more fiery public presence than the gentle style of her husband. Milton Friedman often said his wife was the only person who won arguments with him."

On Ed Reimers, whose cupped hands stood for Allstate: "After a hurricane, flood or other national disaster, 'he'd fly in, and they'd do their commercials,' [his daughter] said. 'I have pictures of him in a trench coat setting up and interviewing people, with the whole place sort of demolished around him.' "

On Karla Kushkin, children's author and illustrator: "At 4, she dictated her first poem, about a hydrangea bush outside their country house, to her mother.  ¶  Her father owned a small advertising agency."

On Riccardo Cassin, the Italian mountaineer: "Cassin left home at age 17 to work the bellows at a blacksmith forge in Lecco, a small Italian valley village nestled near the southeastern neck of Lake Como. His first passion had been boxing, but on the weekends, Cassin accompanied his ragtag group of friends that called themselves the 'Ragni Di Lecco,' or spiders of Lecco, on climbing trips to the smaller local 7,000-foot summits."

On Carlene Hutchins, master violin maker: "She insisted that the secret to their superior sound was not in the wood; not, as some experts speculated, in the bacteria that ate away at the wood, making it more permeable; not in the powdery pumice from Mount Vesuvius that Stradivari may or may not have used to thicken his varnish; and most certainly not in some mystical genius that only he and the other old Cremona masters possessed."

On Eleutherius Winance, an abbey founder: "A few years after arriving in Valyermo, Winance began to cultivate a garden using found or donated plants, including roses, herbs, cactuses, poplars and giant sequoias. He laid out the carpet of grass by hand, beginning with one square of sod from the abbey's pastures."

I write this half for love of obituaries and half for love of orangutans.

We need a rule. When the AP uses the word "some" in the lede, you deserve a better obit. Like: "John Quade, who played the heavy in some Clint Eastwood movies and was the sheriff in the television mini-series Roots, died on Aug. 9 at his home in the Southern California desert town of Rosamond," AP writes. NYT runs the obit at six grafs.

A.V. Club, meanwhile, gives two more reasons for a better obit. This line: "His most famous roles, naturally, were as 'heavies' in westerns like High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales, and he squared off against Clint Eastwood again as motorcycle gang leader 'Cholla' in the famed trucker-orangutan love stories Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can." And this line: "As he more or less retired from his acting career in the 1990s, Quade became an increasingly outspoken opponent of the U.S. government and a figurehead of the anti-New World Order movement, giving frequent lectures on the Constitution and, common law, and what he saw as the dangers of being forced to register for drivers’ licenses and Social Security cards."

Is everyone going to get behind that cause? Including his call for the repeal of the 14th Amendment? Heck no. But should his politics plus orangutan movies make for a complex life and interesting obituary? Yes. The LAT, the country's best obit paper, lets me down this time.

Media critics have all compared the Jackson coverages, so why can't we do the same with Oscar Mayer? Ever since I learned my beloved Caesar salad was named after someone not Julius C., I've had a soft spot for real people who've shared their names with products. So…

Best Oscar Mayer death story: Wisconsin State Journal.

After leaving Harvard University for health reasons, Mayer joined the family business in its Chicago accounting office in 1936.

“There were three accountants in the office and I was the flunky, making out payroll accounts by hand,” he said. “I’ve always felt I might have a little better understanding of what people in our plant have to do because I did it myself — I’ve always seen our employees as individuals and I respect the hard work they do.”

Best evidence there are more Oscar Mayers: Legacy.com. Coverage was clear this Oscar Mayer — while the one most responsible for the company's modern success — was the third Oscar Mayer to run the company. But Legacy's formal obituary turns up a few more to cheer: his son Oscar, his grandson Oscar and his great-grandson Oscar.

Best headline: "Meats His Maker" from who else but the New York Post. Best pop culture tribute: "Six Classic Oscar Mayer Wiener Commercials" from the Daily Beast. Best sidebar: "What other products were named for real people?" I had no idea about Mrs. Fields or Duncan Hines.

Best post-death rumor coverage: "TMZ: No Weinermobile at services for Oscar Meyer," from USAT's Drive On community (full disclosure: my team at work helps run the community), because it contained the best take on the rumor: "Too bad. When Carl Karcher, founder of the Carl's Jr. chain in the West that now also runs Hardee's, died, his services included free hamburgers for everybody. Heck, if Drive On were to kick the bucket, we'd be wanted to be buried in the Weinermobile. "

Best post-death controversy: PETA wanting to bury the Weinermobile.

Best memorial: "Remembering My Days as a Hotdogger," looking at the company's ethic, from a man whose first job out of college was driving the Wienermobile. "On my first day, upon landing in Madison, Wis. (home of the WMB corporate headquarters), all of the hotdoggers were greeted at the airport gate by Oscar Mayer executives…"

Best consistent mistake: "Weinermobile" instead of "wienermobile" in USAT, NPR and Time. Best resulting discovery: Wienermobile blog.

I sent typewriter-mad Lindsay the link to the New York Times obit for "Martin K. Tytell, Typewriter Wizard." Best obit I read last week.

When he retired in 2000, Mr. Tytell had practiced his recently vanishing craft for 70 years. For most of that time, he rented, repaired, rebuilt, reconfigured and restored typewriters in a second-floor shop at 116 Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, where a sign advertised “Psychoanalysis for Your Typewriter.”

There, at the Tytell Typewriter Company, he often worked seven days a week wearing a white lab coat and a bow tie, catering to customers like the writers Dorothy Parker and Richard Condon, the newsmen David Brinkley and Harrison Salisbury, and the political opponents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson. Letters addressed only to “Mr. Typewriter, New York” arrived there, too.

Mr. Tytell worked on typewriters that could reproduce dozens of different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages and dialects — including Farsi and Serbo-Croatian, Thai and Korean, Coptic and Sanskrit, and ancient and modern Greek. He often said that he kept 2 million typefaces in stock.

She responded with a story on Steve Kazmierski, the typewriter wizard of Chicago, who tells New City Chicago that he doesn't know how to type. "I never met a typewriter man that knew how to type," he says. But even if he has a site, he says typing on computers is worse.

Computers I hate. Oh yeah, 'cause you get in trouble with the computers. That's why everyone has much problems. The computers. Don't you know the problems we are having? With the teenagers. They get in and they deal with narcotics and they buy narcotics. They steal the banks from the people. They cheat people. On computers! That's why I don't trust computers … Computers do nothing. People have to do it.

Computers are nothing. People have to do it.

Hot Buttered Soul is the reason you buy a stereo. Even if you don't know the album when you buy that stereo, you make the purchase with the idea this kind of music exists somewhere in the universe.

The Isaac Hayes obits are only going to give the album a few lines, the same as his co-writing credits on Soul Man and Hold On, I'm Coming. But music and the arts always seem to bring out the oddness in obits that way. The style leads with the facts as the cumulative case for a full life and subverts the passion that brought the person's towering achievements and grace notes. Music exposes weakness here.

The art works on a canvas that goes pitch dark when silent, and the requirement to consolidate your expression — even if Walk On By runs a glorious 12 minutes — turns the recording details into footnotes.

Surveying the course of a life, the same model seems appropriate to consider, putting the relative footnotes in their place and interpreting passions as we may have lived but never concisely expressed them.

To have expressed them … that's why you end up on the front page. That's why the people buying the stereos find themselves wishing the sound field would cross whichever room needs the soul, day or night.

Obit of the week, in case you haven't read it: Les Crane, who'd somehow eluded my pop culture radar while alive. First real challenger to Johnny Carson. One-time husband of Tina Louise. Creator of Mavis Beacon. Grammy-winner for a much-parodied spoken word recording. Bonus in the NYT version: Air Force jet pilot.

Not planning to blog about Reno until I get home this weekend and offload some photos, but I couldn't start my day today with noting the obits. All Crane seemingly missed was elected office and a major sport. Double bonus: Mavis Beacon, not a real person (via Wikipedia). Triple bonus: Best reference in years.

Jim: How many words per minute does the average person type?
Pam: I type 90.
Jim: Shut up. Mavis Beacon doesn't even type 90.

And now … a list of extended Office quotes. Off to start the Reno day.