Now Tim Curry

The actor known for Frankenfurter, Pennywise, Long John Silver, Wadsworth,Nigel Thornberry, Dr. Petrov, and many other roles has died at age 80.

Seriously, when is death coming for Trump? 

Damn

Dolly Parton has died at age 80.

While I cannot comment on her artistic accomplishments, I do not like and do not listen to Country Music, she was good people.

How Not to Speak Ill of the Dead

There is, of course, self restraint, but I prefer the tactic of opening up a can of whup ass on a malefactor why they are still (barely) living.(Is that a prebituary?)

This is what Joseph Gerth of the Louisville Courier Journal has decided to do with regard to Mitch McConnell.

Good on him.

Following the unexpected death of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham on July 11, it seemed that any criticism of the South Carolinian online garnered the same response — “How dare you say that about a guy who just died?”

It didn’t seem like it mattered if the criticism was legitimate or not, whether it was questioning his sexuality while voting against gay and lesbian rights issues, or whether it was his flip-flopping on Donald Trump and becoming one of his biggest supporters.

The reaction from Republicans was largely the same.

That got me thinking about Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was rumored to be dead or on life support or in a coma or whatever and was the odds-on favorite to beat Graham to the gates of hell in the days before Graham’s death.

And, so with McConnell allegedly on the mend, I figured I’d go ahead and tell you what I think about McConnell now — when no one can complain, “How dare you write that about a dead guy?”

………

And so, what to say about Mitch?

I wish the late Louisvillian, Hunter S. Thompson, were still around to tell the story of McConnell, the former Senate majority leader when he passes from the scene.

Thompson’s obituary upon the death of Richard Nixon was a master class in truth-telling. It painted Nixon as the detestable person he was, who nearly broke the government with his lies and his efforts to hold onto power at any cost.

Read Thompson's obit of Nixon.  It is a thing of beauty.

………

And McConnell is every bit the detestable figure that Nixon was.

But unlike Nixon, McConnell never paid for his sins that have damaged our nation’s trust in government, destroyed the country’s ability to have meaningful dialogue and cemented our nation’s politics as an arena in which winning is the only thing that matters.

In fact, for all of Nixon’s flaws and crimes, he proved that the system worked as he was held accountable for what he had done. It took real leadership to do that though — Republican Sens. Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and Rep. John Rhodes essentially forced him to resign.

The fall of Nixon was a triumph for our country.

It’s hard to imagine McConnell ever having the guts or the desire to protect the nation like Goldwater, Scott and Rhodes did that day in 1974 when they went to the White House and told Nixon it was over.

McConnell is someone who has done significant damage to our government and our society.

יִמַּח שְׁמו (May his name be effaced).

So, Lindsey Graham has Died Unexpectedly

It appears that it was an aortic dissection.

I could make a comment on the odd juxtaposition of this event and a significant anniversary in my life, but I won't, at least not outside my immediate family. 

What can you say about a man whose guiding star was the infliction of the horrors of war on brown and black people?

I guess one could say, "Bye Felicia!"

Stay Classy, My Friend

Robert Mueller died, and Trump gloated about it on Truth Social.

I have mixed emotions about both of these events.

I was never a fan of Mueller, and I have on occasion been somewhat less than charitable when hearing of some people's deaths. (And that's only going back to late 2022)

So, Trump exulting over Mueller's death is not a particularly extraordinary thing to my mind, though putting it out as a social media post while President of the United States of America does seem to be extreme, stupid, and self-destructive.

My sharing negative aspects of the recently dead to my reader(s), while not laudable, seems to be me Trump's post, which was just a happy dance, is a whole different level of cringe.

Donald Trump has been condemned as a “vile, disgusting man” and a “sick human being” after gloating over the death of Robert Mueller, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Mueller, a decorated Vietnam war veteran who led a politically explosive investigation into Trump, died on Friday aged 81, triggering a callous reaction from the US president.

“Robert Mueller just died,” Trump responded quickly on his Truth Social platform. “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”

Even by the president’s own norm-shredding standards, the comment was unusually harsh. There was a chorus of opprobrium from the “Never Trump” movement in his own Republican party.

I Would Have Paid to Hear Him Read a Phone Book

Actor Robert Duvall has died at the age of 85.

A marvelous and elegant actor who could convey with his eyes what might take another actor a soliloquy to convey.

He is my favorite John Watson, having played against Nicol Williamson's paranoid drug-addicted Sherlock Holmes in  The Seven Percent Solution.  (I always hated Nigel Bruce's buffoonish portrayal)

Also, go and watch The Judge, it's a great film.

Robert Duvall, who drew from a seemingly bottomless reservoir of acting craftsmanship to transform himself into a business-focused Mafia lawyer, a faded country singer, a cynical police detective, a bullying Marine pilot, a surfing-obsessed Vietnam commander, a mysterious Southern recluse and scores of other film, stage and television characters, died on Sunday. He was 95.

His death was announced in a statement by his wife, Luciana Duvall, who said he had died at home. She gave no other details. He had long lived on a sprawling horse farm in The Plains, in Fauquier County, Va., west of Washington.

There is a void in the theater world.

The World Has Become Marginally More Fact Based

The headline says it all, "Erich von Däniken, Who Claimed Aliens Visited Earth, Dies at 90. 

One less snollygoster peddling pablum to the world. 

Damn!

Howie Klein, former music executive and later a political activist, has died at age 77 of pancreatic cancer, not something I would wish on anyone.

My exposure to him was primarily as the proprietor of the blog Down With Tyranny,  but he was everywhere in pop music during his earlier career.  (Not sure what will happen to the site with him gone)

He and I were on the same page about the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

Howie Klein, a veteran record executive, radio DJ and political activist who was a leader in the famously artist-friendly Warner Music family during its golden era of the 1980s and early ‘90s, died Wednesday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, according to a social media post from his sister. He was 77.

He was a top executive at Sire Records during the label’s peak era — a time when the label had everyone from the Smiths and Depeche Mode to Madonna and Lou Reed on its roster — and later was president of Warner’s Reprise label from 1989 to 2001. He was a co-founder of the San Francisco-based 415 Records during the 1970s, and was a strong and vocal presence in the music industry’s anti-censorship efforts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, focusing on political activism in his later years.

You can read the rest of the article for his voluminous background in music, particularly Punk.

He occasionally wrote about music on DWT, and I wish that he had written something on the Ur-Punk band Death.

 

Inconceivable

Director, actor, and writer Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle, were found dead in their Los Angeles home.

It was apparently a homicide, and a family member is being questioned.

Dick Cheney has Died

While his legacy is profoundly troubling, since he has recently died, I would like to provide a summary of all the good works that he did in his political career.

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That is all.

 

Robert Redford has Died

I've seen a lot of his films, and I always thought that he was a movie star with the soul of a character actor.  (Meant as a compliment) 

Also, I agree with Charlie Pierce's recommendation regarding the most timley of his oeuvre, it's The Candidate, though 3 Days of the Condor comes close.

I'll leave a discussion of his activism to others better equipped to discuss that.

He was 89. 

The World Has Become a Better Place

And Hell has become a worse place, because Christofascist bitot James Dobson has died at age 89.

I'm sure that the neighborhood associations in Hell (Of course Hell has neighborhood associations) are trying to figure out a way to exclude him.

James Dobson, the founder of the Christian anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups Focus on the Family (FOF) and the Family Research Council (FRC), has died at the age of 89. Hailed as one of “the most influential evangelical leader[s] in America,” he considered same-sex marriage worse than terrorism and encouraged men to murder trans women.

Born in 1936 to a fundamentalist minister father in Shreveport, Louisiana, Dobson graduated with a doctoral degree in psychology from the University of Southern California in 1967, and gained notoriety in 1970 by writing Dare to Discipline, a book that urged parents to use corporeal punishment to “break the will” of their children; his book also encouraged parents to hit their kids more if they cried for longer than five minutes after their initial beating.

I know that it sounds trite, but there must be something behind that much projection.

FWIW, if there is a Hell, it existence or absence is not significant in normative Judaism, I do not think that Dobson is there.

If there is a Hell, then his soul was simply obliterated. 

Damn.

Terence Stamp had died at the age of 87.

I remember him for his role as William Harcourt in the IMHO underrated movie Alien Nation, along with James Caan and Mandy Patinkin. 

He also chewed the scenery with the best of cinematic villains in the first two Christopher Reed Superman movies.

Always fun to watch. 

Grace Under Pressure

Apollo 13 Commander James A. Lovell, Jr. has died at the age of 97.

He, along with John L. Swigert Jr. and Fred W. Haise Jr. had what could justifiably called the mother of all bad days at the office in 1970.

You might have seen the Tom Hanks movie. 

The World Has Become a Slightly Better Place

Because Terry Bollea has died at the age of 81.

He is probably better known by his stage name, Hulk Hogan.

A face (hero) inside the ring, and a heel outside of the ring, who colluded with literal vampire Peter Thiel to destroy Gawker, narked on unionization efforts in pro wrestling to Vince McMahon, and was caught spewing racist rants on video

………

Reports of Bollea's poor health were first circulated by the radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Followers of Bollea's post-wrestling career will recall that Clem and Bollea were once good friends and sometimes appeared together on Clem's Tampa-area radio show. In 2012, the two made headlines when Gawker reported that Clem had recorded a clandestine video of his wife, Heather, having sex with Bollea. A separate recording that became public years later captured Bollea making vile and racist remarks while in conversation with Heather.

Can I say here that any scandal involving, "Bubba the Love Sponge Clem," is going to appeal to me

Gawker published short edited clips from the video, and Bollea, backed financially by vampiric futurist freak Peter Thiel, sued Gawker's parent company for $100 million. A hometown Florida jury ruled in Bollea's favor. The fallout of this lawsuit led inexorably to the destruction of Gawker Media, the eventual rise of Jim Spanfeller as a cut-rate villain of the final chapter of the blog era, and, well, the establishment of this very website.

Bollea eventually seated himself, unsurprisingly, as a champion of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. He also managed the neat trick of retaining enough general public goodwill from his early wrestling days that it has rarely been considered particularly controversial or damaging to one's reputation to express ongoing affection for his Hulk Hogan character, despite all that has been learned about the performer. That is not to say that his shtick worked on everyone: At his final WWE appearance, at a Monday Night Raw event back in January, Bollea, in his Hogan character, was booed relentlessly by a Los Angeles crowd. But in a sign of his cultural resilience, and the broad mainstream acceptance of ideas and behaviors that a saner society might otherwise consider grounds for literal exile, he was then invited onto ESPN's most popular show to talk about the experience with the network's most prominent media personality.

Fundamentally, if Hulk Hogan had never existed, someone else would have been the face, and maybe they wouldn't have been Thiel's stooge and wouldn't have betrayed unionization efforts. 

Bummer

 Tom Lehrer has died at age 97.

Yeah, I Know, One Should Not Speak Ill of the Dead

But in the case of David Whorowitz (Horowitz) who has died at the age of 86, it's pretty hard to follow that cultural norm.

Given that Whorowitz, as I have referred to him throughout my time blogging, was a mentor and major influence on Stephen Miller, I do not feel any obligation to follow cultural norms.

I have never been able to figure how much of his schtick was honest belief and how much was a character he played for money, but in the end, it does not matter.

The fact that he was crucial in the creation of Stephen Miller is all you need to know about him.

Luckily, there is a Jewish saying that is appropriate for describing him, "יִמַּח שְׁמו",

No, I Don’t Think That the Couch F%$#er Murdered the Pope

Still, it does appear that people that Vice President Vance meets with have the life expectancy of Sean Bean in his movie roles.

Pope Francis died less than 24 hours after meeting him.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure that the next Pope will not be as good as Francis, he is arguably the best Pope since John XXIII, but I am certain that he will be a better Catholic than J.D. Vance.

Hell, I'm a better Catholic than J.D. Vance, and I'm Jewish. 

I will not be doing a play by play of the smoke coming from the Sistine Chapel.

One of the Greats

Gene Hackman has died at age 95.

He could be and do almost anything as an actor.

The World Just Got a Lot Less Weird

This is a bad thing.

I am referring, of course to the the death of director David Lynch, who appears to have died of complications of emphysema.

He was a singular talent.

Would that the studio executives had not fucked with Dune (1984).