New York Times photog Bill Cunningham works the pit outside the funeral, which is set to start at 2:30 p.m., up at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.

Brooke Astor died this afternoon. She was 105. A grand life—one only slightly marred by having idiots in her family. [City Room]

D. D. Ryan, of fashion-world fame and Harpers Bazaar, passed away this morning. [Michael Gross]

Maybellined televangelista Tammy Faye Bakker Messner passed away on Friday. If you haven't seen this final interview with Larry King, fair warning: it's pretty creepy. Still, you have to admire the fact that she stuck with that look all the way to the end. You're in God's hands now, Tammy. Thanks for all the fun. [Bloomberg]

Beverly Sills, who embodied opera in New York for more than fifty years, has passed away at the age of 78. [NYT]

Fashion designer Liz Claiborne, 78, has passed away. [AP]

Not since Cleopatra first cast her spell upon both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony has the world seen a seductress the likes of Anna Nicole Smith. Gifted with the rare combination of beauty, drive, and rapier-like wit, Smith proved that a woman could outgrow her hardscrabble upbringing with a firm sense of herself and the refusal to accept any sort of failure.

The Legislature provides us with an array of verbal treasures. During a debate on a bill to stop out-of-wedlock children from getting welfare, Bob Eckhardt said, "It is not so much the natural bastards I worry about as the self-made ones." Craig Washington, filibustering one of those idiot flag-burning amendments, said, "I prefer those who would burn the flag and keep the Constitution to those who would tear up the Constitution and keep the flag." After yet another unsuccessful effort to modify the Texas sodomy law, the authors of a successful amendment were slapping backs and high-fiving. A voice from the press box said, "Sergeant, you must go over and reprimand both those men. Because under the amendments just passed by them, it is now illegal for a prick to touch an asshole in this state." The annual Waring Blender Award for Mixed Metaphor is always appreciated, as in: "If you throw the baby out with the bathwater, it will let the head of the camel into the tent." Then there was the special time we were having Disability Day to honor the handicapped, and Speaker Gib Lewis said to those in the wheelchairs wedged up into the balcony, "And now, would y'all stand and be recognized?"

Deborah Orin-Eilbeck, who spent the last eighteen years as the Post's Washington correspondent, has passed away due to complications from cancer. While we can't pretend to have been entranced by every line she wrote, she was a decent (and by Post standards, balanced) reporter who never forgot that she was writing about politics for Post readers: She tailored her analysis to fit that demographic, which is indeed a difficult skill to master. Her paper gives a fairly nice summary of her career; we hope her successor understands the size of the shoes which he or she is filling. Rest in peace, Deborah.