Andy Rooney: Our 'Lovably Cantankerous Commentator'

If Andy Rooney is in the "great beyond," he's probably picking a few bones about "all that harp-playing" and "the long line at the Pearly Gates," Frazier Moore muses for the AP. And why not? It was Rooney's unmistakable style during a 92-year-life and exceptional career: to "shrewdly observe the world" and "give voice to the everyday vexations and conundrums that afflict us all"—even if he did take unfair potshots or get a little mean at times.

Every Sunday on 60 Minutes, the syndicated columnist and author of 16 books griped about everyday nuisances—like oversized packages, the agonies of air travel, or the fact that "computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done." When he dismissed modern art or called Kurt Cobain's 1994 suicide a selfish act, we forgave him, because the "beetle-browed and rumpled" curmudgeon was more than a talking head. He was America's "lovably cantankerous commentator." (More Andy Rooney stories.)