2016: In Memoriam

Talk about 2016 being a cursed year started around the time Trump won the election (I think).  But all those deaths the last week of 2016 started to make it seem really eerie.

2016 is now being called "the year of death".
I was talking about this at work, and one of my co-workers mentioned that there's a theory somewhere on the Internet that sort of explains all this in a kind of logical way.  I haven't run across it before (apparently it's out on the Internet somewhere) but I'll try and summarize what my co-worker told me.
Apparently the age of mass media began in the 1960s and 70s.  Television had been around since the 1950s, of course, but apparently the full programming schedule didn't really explode until until the late 1960s.
From about the late 1960s onwards, there were a lot more celebrities in the popular consciousness.  And now that we are 50 years on from the late 1960s, nature is beginning to exact her revenge.
So according to this theory, it's going to be worse every year from here on out.

Anyway, throughout this past year, I've been taking note of it on this blog whenever someone died who I felt was meaningful to me in some way.  It's not a complete list (I missed some people who had been meaningful to me--Harper Lee, for instance), but for what it's worth, it's below.

* Dean Jones here.  (Actually Dean Jones died in September 2015.  But I didn't find out about it until 2016).

* Alan Rickman here.

* Paul Kantner and Toly Anderson here.

* Darwyn Cooke here.

* Muhammad Ali here.

* Anton Yelchin here.

* Elie Weisel here.

* Gene Wilder here.

* Phyllis Schlafly here.

* Tom Hayden here.

* Fidel Castro here.

* George Michael here.

* Carrie Fisher here.

* Richard Adams here.