NECROLOG

This month, we say goodbye to an alumnus of Saturday Night Live who suffered from a rare delusional syndrome and record the lonely end of a nudist hermit and herbalist.

tOny ROSAtO

Actor Tony Rosato is the only famous person I’ve ever heard of to have suffered from Capgras Delusion, the so-called Imposter Syndrome [ Ft123:14, 133:16, 145:17 and p56-57 this issue]. When the syndrome is mentioned, the immediate response is to think of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on a Jack Finney novel. Finney, explaining the book’s origin in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, makes no mention of being familiar with the real delusion, but he might well have heard about it from a budding medical student during his days at Knox College in Galesburg in the Thirties. The syndrome also finds echoes in Shirley Jackson’s story “The Beautiful Stranger” and, later, Charles Beaumont’s Twilight Zone script “Person or Persons Unknown”. Capgras Syndrome is believed to have a biological basis, such as a lesion on the brain, possibly caused by some injury.

Rosato is best remembered in his adopted homeland of Canada, where he appeared on the cop show Night Heat for four years in the late Eighties, winning a Gemini Award. Before that, he was one of a handful of actors to appear on both of the USA’s top satirical shows of the Eighties, SCTV and Saturday Night Live (SNL). He had two memorable roles on Michael O’Donoghue’s notorious Hallowe’en episode of SNL, which introduced punk rock to Middle America via the band Fear. Since SNL was in ratings doldrums during Rosato’s tenure, it is likely that the actor reached his widest audience with his video game-related voiceovers, providing the voice of Luigi in the cartoon shows The Adventures of Super Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario World and a couple of characters in the Resident Evil 3 game. He did voices for a few dozen cartoon shows, including those spun off from movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Free Willy.

Rosato’s life took a bizarre turn in 2005, when he was arrested after stalking his wife Leah and their infant daughter. He had previously contacted the police to claim that his wife and daughter had been replaced by imposters. In some instances the Capgras sufferer turns hostile or violent towards the person he believes to be an imposter. Such was the case with Rosato. Though obviously suffering from mental illness, he was sent to Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee for two years, a judgement which Daniel Brodsky described as the longest ever given for criminal harassment in Canada. It is hard to imagine the toll that the trauma of living in prison would take on one who is suffering from such a mental illness, and it is hard to regard the sentence as anything other than cruel.

Rosato was confined to a psychiatric hospital for 19 months, and released in 2010. Happily, his condition seems to have improved, thanks to anti-psychotic medication. After his release he was reunited with his wife and continued to work in obscure TV and movie roles. He died of a heart attack. Antonio Rosato, actor and Capgras sufferer, born Naples, Italy 26 Dec 1954; died Toronto, Ontario 10 Jan 2017, aged 62. Brett taylor

PeteR O’neiLL

The body of Peter O’Neill (if that was his real name) was found in his remote dwelling in the Glenmalure Hills of Co Wicklow, Ireland, on 8 May 2015 after a local hotel reported he had not come to collect his post in a while. The hermit, who spoke with an English accent, had lived alone in the Wicklow Mountains for more than 20 years. He had built a hut where an old ruin once existed in the middle of the forest. “He was a wild-looking character but he was clean-shaven, his hair was as if he cut it himself,” said retired Garda Richard Galvin. “He complained he had been hunted out of everywhere.” He was a keen herbalist, and spent much of his time naked. He had been dead for several months; his last diary entry was for 18 January. He left behind hundreds of letters and books, all accompanied by complex notes, suggesting he was attempting to find some common thread. “He had questions of a religious nature that he was trying to suss out,” said Fr Oliver Crotty, a local parish priest. “I was amazed at the sheer scale of his knowledge. There are 37 other such men living in forests around Ireland. Maybe they’re telling us something very profound about the need to be in touch with our environment.” We are reminded of the Dark Age pillar saints of the desert. Peter O’Neill, nudist hermit, born c. 1945; died Wicklow mountains, c. Jan 2015, aged about 71.

JAmeS CROnin

Cronin shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics with Val Fitch, for demonstrating that there was a flaw in the central belief held by scientists almost since the time of Galileo: that the laws of physics are immutable. In the early 1960s Cronin and Fitch investigated unstable subatomic particles called kaons (or K mesons). These have a lifetime of only fractions of a second, but during that life they oscillate rapidly between kaons and their antimatter counterpart, antikaons. Conventional wisdom predicted that they would undergo the same number of transitions in each direction, but in fact the transition from antikaon to kaon occurred about half a per cent less frequently, thus violating CP symmetry, a principle that states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle. Thus after the (hypothetical) Big Bang, antimatter decayed more rapidly than matter, leaving behind the matter that constitutes the Universe rather than an infinite void. Hallelujah! James Watson Cronin, physicist, born Chicago 29 Sept 1931; died St Paul, MN 25 Aug 2016, aged 84.

JOSePh B KeLLeR

Joe Keller, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, developed mathematical formulæ to explain a wide range of contingencies, from the esoteric to the mundane. He was best known for his Geometrical Theory of Diffraction, a method for describing the propagation, scattering and diffraction of waves, especially as they bend around the edges and corners of an obstacle. The theory built on work he had done during and after World War II using

sonar to determine the presence and location of submarines and underwater land mines. He developed and used a mathematical method of approximation known as “asymptotic analysis” to tackle problems that cannot be solved exactly, and applied it to predict behaviour throughout the domains of science. He figured out how to make a teapot spout that doesn’t drip, for which he was awarded the Ig Nobel prize for Physics in 1999; he won a second Ig Nobel in 2012 for identifying the physical forces that make a jogger’s ponytail swing horizontally even though the jogger is oscillating vertically. He also worked out how earthworms (but not snakes) can wriggle even on glass. Joseph Bishop Keller, mathematician, born Paterson, NJ 31 July 1923; died Palo Alto CA 7 Sept 2016, aged 93.

Whitney Smith

Whitney Smith turned a childhood fascination with flags into a scholarly discipline of which he was the leading light. Aged 18, he gave it a name: vexillology, from the Latin for flag, vexillum. “Some of the kids thought I was weird,” he told People magazine in 1985. “But to be 13 years old and literally the only person in the Western world who knew what the flag of Bhutan looked like, well, this was my world.” As a political science undergraduate at Harvard, he designed a flag for newly independent Guyana. In 1961, with Gerhard Grahl, he created the bimonthly Flag Bulletin, the first journal of its kind. A year later he founded the Flag Research Center, a consulting firm that answered inquiries from filmmakers, historians and commercial flag makers.

He wrote the standard work, Flags Through the Ages and Across the World (1975), and 26 other books on the subject. In 2011, the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica noted that he was their most prolific contributor, having written more than 250 flag histories. Flags of a kind date back at least 5,000 years; Smith liked to cite an ancient Iranian one, made from copper. However, he argued that their modern significance started with the 16th century Dutch revolt against Spain. For the first time it was not a state or monarch being symbolised, but a people, a language, a culture and a cause. Whitney Smith Jr, vexillologist, born Arlington, MA 26 Feb 1940; died Peabody, MA 17 Nov 2016, aged 76.