In the belief that the end of the year is best celebrated by staring into the implacable face of death, here’s a roundup of 2009’s most egregious overstatements and lame eulogies written about people whose latest error in life was to pass away.

1. The New York Times on TV star Farrah Fawcett:

She first became famous when a poster of her in a red bathing suit, leonine mane flying, sold more than twice as many copies as posters of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable combined.

To be candid, the obituary’s focus on Fawcett’s “leonine mane” seems to ignore one or two key — a-hem — points about the image in question.

2. Johann Hari on playwright Harold Pinter:

Goodbye. Harold. Pinter. You shouldn’t. Have defended. Milosevic.

Fourteen hundred words in to his caustic screed, Hari’s attempt to mock Pinter’s terse manner of verbal punctuation fails pitifully.

3. Ice-T on star Michael Jackson:

One of my friends said, No matter how tough you are, Michael Jackson will have the biggest gangster in the front row screaming like a bitch at his concert.

That’s how I like my gangsters: screaming.

4. Lionel Tiger on anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss:

His looming presence was like a bath of sun’s rays in late afternoon in early autumn.

Reading that sentence is like watching a group of middle-aged men at the pool about to take their shirts off.

5. The Wall Street Journal on wordsmith William Safire:

A competitor who had our back when we needed him.

In return, perhaps Journal could have had Safire’s back when it came to avoiding lazy, extinct idioms like “had our back.”

6. A.O. Scott on filmmaker John Hughes:

John Hughes was our Godard, the filmmaker who crystallized our attitudes and anxieties with just the right blend of teasing and sympathy.

You can take a film critic out of the suburbs, folks, you just can’t take the suburbs out of the critic.

7. Gore Vidal on novelist John Updike:

Updike’s work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up.

Someday, I hope to be this deliriously in love with my own opinion.

8. Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey on Defense Secretary Robert McNamara:

I am not saddened by his loss.

Now that’s a cheering show of sentimental restraint.

Your work is done, 2009. Rest. In. Peace.

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