Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, has died of pancreatic cancer at the too-young age of 61. If you can’t quite recall these things, she flew aboard space shuttle Challenger on only its second mission in 1983, and again on Challenger in 1984. She was scheduled for a third flight, but that was scuttled following the Challenger disaster in ’86. She served on the presidential commission that investigated that accident, then retired from NASA in ’87. She was subsequently recalled from academia to serve on the board that investigated the loss of space shuttle Columbia in 2003.

She’s often called a role model for girls (for understandable reasons), but I have to say this boy always considered her a hero as well, right up there with all the male astronauts, as she deserved. It’s a shame kids today are more likely to look up to the Kardashians than a woman — than a person — like this. A brave and determined person who championed education and science and did her best to push back the frontier — all sorts of frontiers — just a little more for the rest of us.

Goddamn cancer. It’s getting personal now.

I’ve just learned that 2012 began with the passing yesterday of the legendary swordmaster Bob Anderson, who trained and/or doubled for every Hollywood swashbuckler from Errol Flynn to Orlando Bloom during his long life. Mr. Anderson was an Olympic fencer who started working in movies in the 1950s as a stunt double on Errol Flynn’s Master of Ballantrae. (He was notoriously known for a time as “the man who stabbed Errol Flynn” because of a minor on-set accident.) Of somewhat more relevance to we nerdy Gen-Xers, Anderson doubled for Dave Prowse as Darth Vader during the climatic lightsaber duels in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. (He wasn’t credited, but no less a source than Mark Hamill — the guy on the other end of Vader’s saber — has reported it was so.) He also trained actors and choreographed fights for The Princess Bride, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the 1993 version of The Three Musketeers (that’d be the one with Charlie Sheen and Keifer Sutherland), the two Antonio Banderas Zorro flicks, and, of course, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. He even trained Lindsay Lohan, of all people, for a scene in the remake of Disney’s The Parent Trap.

Anderson’s work first came to my attention as a result of my mid-1990s obsession with the Highlander franchise — he was Sean Connery’s fight double in the original Highlander film, and he worked with the star of the Highlander TV series, Adrian Paul, during that show’s first season. As I read up on him, I was impressed by how many of my favorite films he’d had a hand in. In a sense, he’s had more influence on my cinematic tastes than any other single individual. What an amazing career this man had.

Anderson was 89 years old.

The actor Robert Culp, who unexpectedly died a couple weeks ago at the age of 79, has long struck me as an example of an increasingly rare type of American male. Like Peter Graves, who also recently passed away, Culp always seemed to project an air of confident masculinity. Or masculine confidence, if you’d prefer. Either way, he was a good old-fashioned “man’s man.” Not macho, with all the arrogance, cruelty, and phoniness often implied by that term, and not misogynistic, either, but simply a man who had no hang-ups about being a man. It was a trait of his generation, I think, something as instinctive for them as breathing. And they were the last generation for whom carrying the Y chromosome would come so easily.

Now, I’ve got nothing against feminism per se — I think the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s was both necessary and generally resulted in positive change — but it did make being a man considerably more complicated for those males who grew up in the aftermath, especially those of us who looked to pop culture for guidance. What the hell were we supposed to be like, anyway? The sensitive Alan Alda/Phil Donohue intellectual types that were lauded in the ’70s as “the new man,” or the reactionary, bodybuilding action heroes who took over the big screen in the ’80s? How can we be kind and noble without being self-loathing and tortured, strong without being hypermasculinized caricatures? I’m 40 years old and I’m still trying to find the proper balance between those extremes, to figure out just what being a man is all about.

But guys like Robert Culp, Peter Graves, Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Clint Eastwood — God, yes, Clint! — they just seemed to come into the world already knowing. No, that’s not quite right… they wouldn’t have even wondered how to be a man. They simply were. And that I think is the secret of their enduring appeal, the reason why we still think they’re cool even now, years after the prime of their careers and even, in many cases, their deaths. I admire men like this, and I envy them. And I’m really starting to miss them now that there are so few of them left.

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