Category: [RIP]

RIP Dr. Grant

Actor Sam Neill, star of Jurassic Park, dies

Actor Sam Neill, who starred in My Brilliant Career and Jurassic Park, has died aged 78.
A post made to his social media account on Monday afternoon said he had died in Sydney “surrounded by his family”.
“The loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer free,” the statement, posted to Instagram, said. […]
In 2023, Neill revealed he had been diagnosed with angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in early 2022.
He entered remission later that year after a rare anti-cancer drug worked, but needed ongoing infusion treatment.
He announced in April he was cancer-free.
The actor was also knighted in 2022, becoming Sir Sam Neill.
“I said I didn’t want the title for 10 or 12 years,” he said in 2023.
“Then when I thought I was dying a couple of years ago I thought, ‘Oh bugger it, I may as well go out with the title,’ so I changed my mind.”

A damn shame. I’ve seen far more people grieve for him than I have for that Lindsey Graham fellow; Sam seems to have been one of the good guys of his industry, and that’s always a bad thing to lose. I’m guessing that cancer and the treatment for same did him no favours and probably took a few years off him, but at least he was free of it before the end.

An unexpected twist

American politics has been a bit weird of late, or at any rate weirder than usual:

Is Mitch McConnell dead?
This shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. The response is either “yes”, “no” or something along the lines of “he’s on life support but appears to be brain dead”.
However, while it may be a straightforward question, nobody close to the Kentucky senator seems keen on delivering a clear answer. On 14 June, the 84-year-old senator was hospitalized for a medical event. According to a new video and eyewitness account, McConnell was loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher after a possible cardiac arrest at his home. Almost a month later, McConnell’s condition is shrouded in mystery and the source of much speculation.
The mystery deepened this week when Trump ally and far-right influencer Laura Loomer made the explosive claim on Twiter/X that McConnell is “officially brain dead”. Desiree Townsend, an independent journalist who first reported that emergency services had been called to a house linked to McConnell, said she had “heard the same thing from my sources for days”. Townsend added that she was camped out at the hospital waiting for McConnell to be taken off life support.
A number of Republicans have rushed to dispute Loomer and Townsend’s allegations. On Tuesday, majority leader John Thune’s representative claimed he’d spoken to Mitch the previous day and “[t]hey had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security”. Senate Republican whip John Barrasso and political commentator Scott Jennings have also said they had 20-minute phone calls with McConnell on important topics.
Has McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, also had a nice 20-minute chat with her husband recently? That’s unclear. Chao left for China two days before McConnell was hospitalized and didn’t exactly rush back to his bedside to feed him grapes and offer moral support. In a statement issued on Tuesday, she said: “The Senator’s health did not warrant an immediate return to the US.” […]
Why isn’t McConnell’s team being more transparent? One hypothesis is that the silence is strategic because Republicans don’t want to risk a special election. McConnell is retiring from the Senate and his successor will be decided in a November election between Republican congressman Andy Barr and Democrat Charles Booker – with Barr widely favoured to win the seat. If it turns out that McConnell is unfit for office, Kentucky law states that there would have to be a special election to fill the rest of his term. This would be risky for Republicans because of how unpredictable special elections are. So, the thinking goes, they’d prefer to wait out the election clock.

This peculiar situation just got further complicated by Mitch’s fellow senator Lindsey Graham:

Lindsey Graham, a longtime US senator and key ally of Donald Trump, has died from a sudden illness, his office said on Sunday. He had just turned 71.
Graham’s abrupt death will send shock waves through Washington and the Republican party. He had served in the Senate since 2003, representing South Carolina, and was running for re-election in November.
“On the evening of Saturday 11 July, US senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness,” his office said in a statement. “Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period.” […]
He briefly sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and was initially a sharp critic of Trump, then the insurgent frontrunner. He condemned Trump as a “jackass”, “a race-baiting bigot” and “the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican party”, memorably warning on Twitter: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” Trump, in turn, dismissed Graham as an “idiot” and a “lightweight”.
But the relationship was transformed after Trump entered the White House and Graham became one of the president’s closest confidants. He emerged as a key adviser on foreign policy, particularly Iran and Russia. He also rallied the defence of Trump’s embattled nominee for the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh, in 2018.
Graham wobbled only after Trump’s supporters staged an insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an effort to overturn his election defeat. The senator declared: “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey – I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president but today, first thing you’ll see. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
His rebellion did not last, however, and he refused to vote to convict Trump at the subsequent impeachment trial. He was again quick to endorse Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

So there you go, two of the worst individuals in TrumpCorp, one’s dead of something mysterious and the other may as well be if he isn’t already. I feel like they were taken by surprise with Graham’s death, too sudden and unexpected to cover up in the same way, which I suspect they would’ve also tried to do. But Graham’s passing will be less complicated than whatever’s wrong with McConnell, cos S. Carolina law says the state governor can just replace the former with a new senator; conversely, Kentucky’s governor can’t do any such thing, which is why they need the special election the Republicans are apparently afraid of losing (or indeed winning if Thomas Massie should stand, cos he’s not an automatic Trump yes-man, particularly over the Epstein files, and they don’t want that).

But that election must be held by a certain day, and there is a theory that the regime is holding off confirming Mitch’s passing until after that date so they don’t have to have it. And we’re talking about the Mushroom Cock regime here, so this sort of cynicism on their part seems perfectly believable. In the meantime, Congress is about to come back and I fear not only that Mitch will continue to be conspicuous by his absence, but the Democrats will just as conspicuously fail to capitalise on it too… still, I’ll give Lindsey Graham this much: him dying was a somewhat extreme way to briefly distract people from McConnell’s probable passing, but it’s been effective…

Victor goes west

Victor Willis, frontman of Village People, dies age 74

Victor Willis, the lead singer of the Village People, has died age 74. The group shared the news in a statement: “Victor passed on Monday 30 June 2026 of a short but aggressive illness,” they said. “Privacy is requested.”
The writer of what were widely accepted as canonical gay anthems in YMCA and Macho Man – also performed in costumes of hyper-masculine male stereotypes – Willis refuted the idea that YMCA was a gay anthem and threatened to sue “each and every news organisation” that made the claim.
“As I’ve said numerous times in the past, that is a false assumption based on the fact that my writing partner was gay, and some (not all) of Village People were gay, and that the first Village People album was totally about gay life,” he said in 2024. […]
Willis had a flip-flopping approach to Donald Trump’s use of YMCA in his campaigns and pageantry. After approving its use for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, Willis retracted his support as the Black Lives Matter movement came to prominence, but then changed his tune again.
He repeatedly said he was ideologically opposed to Trump – and in 2024 supported Kamala Harris – but admitted the that president’s use of the track had “greatly benefited the song”. In 2025, the Village People performed at the Turning Point USA ball to mark the president’s second inauguration, as well as the pre-inauguration rally.
On Wednesday, Trump posted a tribute to Willis on Truth Social, writing: “He was a great and happy guy who loved that I used his groups song, YMCA, at my Rallies. We will think of Victor every time YMCA is played, like today, and all throughout this July Fourth Birthday week.”

Well, I hope that whatever money he made from the song’s latter-day resurgence was worth the loss of his soul.

RIP Texas Ranger

Death got Chuck Norrised… er, Chuck Norris has left us a few days after turning 86. I’m not going to expend many tears over the news, cos he was frankly a piece of far-right shit (I don’t think anyone who wrote for World Net Daily could be described any other way) who produced his own martial arts system that included a code of conduct he didn’t live up to himself. He did some decent philanthropic things and was obviously an icon of martial arts and movies; shame he was so happy to tarnish his legacy the way he did.

RIP Boo Radley

Robert Duvall has left us, at the fairly grand age of 95 and after 70 years on stage and screen. Quite a body of work, maybe not so many big roles in his later films (though he did get an Oscar nomination in 2015), but he kept pretty solidly working until just a few years ago… but until I saw this posted on Bluesky, I never knew about one of his more amusing parts:

Not only was Duvall the Corleone family consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather, he was Marlon Brando’s cue card wrangler as well. Brando was already infamous for his use of cue cards, cos he claimed that only knowing the broad outline of a scene actually made his performances more realistic rather than just being the sign of gross laziness most of his colleagues thought it was. And, as you can see above, it appears that even being a major part of the cast didn’t mean you wouldn’t get drafted to hold Marlon’s cards for him at some point. RIP Bob.

RIP Dilbert

News is just coming through that Scott Adams has checked out… he acknowledged less than a year ago that he had prostate cancer with bone metastasis, the same sort that Joe Biden has but Adams claimed he’d been living with it for longer than Biden had, or at any rate longer than Biden had admitted to having it… that was a fairly vicious story some conservative shitheads were spreading when Biden’s own diagnosis was announced last year, i.e. that he’d been living with it for a lot longer than that and had been Keeping It Secret From The American People, a heinous crime that the present incumbent is not currently also committing, being so open and honest about his increasing and increasingly obvious health issues as he is.

And you’d think that having the same kind of cancer as someone else would make you sympathetic towards them, you’d understand what they were suffering cos you were suffering the same. (Obviously I have that sort of sympathy when I read about other people suffering strokes like I did.) But Scott Adams was a mean-spirited prick who clearly couldn’t resist shitty point-scoring even in the midst of his own impending death. I regret having kind of liked Dilbert once. And I’ll bet Adams would’ve been livid to know that Biden outlived him. And because I am also a mean-spirited prick at times, I choose to see him off with this… adulterated edition of his most famous creation:

EDIT later on Wednesday…

I mean… you don’t even have to have a master’s in history (though I have a BA with history as a second major), you just need a bit of basic knowledge of what happened in the first half of the 20th century… and I feel sure Scott Adams had a good enough education to have known that at one point (he was born only 12 years after WW2 ended). I wonder when and how he forgot, just like too many others have forgotten the Nazis were the bad guys in that conflict.

Speaking of whom…

Because OF COURSE this White House would not only post a shitty AI picture in his memory, but they’d post one that… well, gets Dilbert wrong. OBVIOUSLY.

Gone to the gods

Erich von Däniken finally abandoned this planet the other day at the fairly good age of 90. Don’t know if I was aware that he’d still been with us up to now, but if I was it was pretty dimly… apparently he remained fairly popular in Europe long after Anglophone readers started losing interest in him during the 80s, and his frankly dubious influence will no doubt linger longer than it should. How dubious? Well…

“The evolutionists say that man descends from monkeys. Yet who has ever seen a white monkey? Or a dark ape with curly hair such as the black race has?”
“Were the extraterrestrials able to opt between different races from the beginning? Did they endow different human groups with different abilities to survive in different climatic and geographical conditions?”
”Today it is assumed that primitive men had dark skins.”
“Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?”
“Nearly all negroes are musical: they have rhythm in their blood.”
“I quite understand that I am playing with dynamite if I ask whether the extraterrestrials ‘allotted’ specific tasks to the basic races from the very beginning, i.e. programmed them with special abilities.”
“I am not a racialist… Yet my thirst for knowledge enables me to ignore the taboo on asking racial questions simply because it is untimely and dangerous… why are we like we are?
“Once this basic question is accepted, we cannot and should not avoid the explosive sequel: is there a chosen race?”
“A black family emigrates from its home in the tropical zone of the earth and settles in a cooler region. Pigments change down the generations, dark skins become light, perhaps so light, the negroids become white. Dark skin, say the racial specialists, no longer being necessary as a protection against the sun. OK, but in his new environment the black man would also have to lose his curly hair, his prominent dark eyes and protruding lips, otherwise he could never become a white man. But it’s all quite simple, someone will tell me. The black breeds with a white and there you are…”

That’s a series of quotes from von D.’s 1979 book Signs of the Gods collected by his “nemesis” Jason Colavito; I’ve often seen it said that the whole ancient astronauts thing and its later Graham Hancock-type lost civilisations variant relies on frankly racist assumptions and, well, Erich was clearly not above expressing some of those outright. I have my own issues with Jason Colavito (particularly his assertion that the ancient astronauts scene von D. popularised really stemmed from H.P. Lovecraft by way of Pauwels & Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians; whatever their own assertions about their fondness for HPL, they actually barely mention him in that book and spend a lot more time on Charles Fort), but he is right to call this bullshit out. In his own words:

Von Däniken asserts that the “extraterrestrials did choose a specific race.” He won’t say what that race is, but he leans heavily on Jewish claims to be the chosen people, which we have just seen him connect to the white (European) race. There can only be one conclusion, even if unstated. He then advocates eugenics, suggesting that modern genetic research will advise which combinations of races “are beneficial and which should be eliminated.” He seriously asks whether the aliens want “strict segregation” of the races, and he advocates human cloning to perpetuate the very best superior specimens in the event of disaster.
We know from documents I obtained from the National Archives that in these years von Däniken secretly tried to influence the U.S. Republican Party to use his alien theories to energize voters to support conservative politics, particularly in opposing creeping socialism. We also know from his recent books that he remains uncomfortable with changing gender norms, writing as he did in 2009’s Twilight of the Gods that if Islamic prophecy were correct the world would have already ended because “women act like men and the men act like women.”
Also in that 2009 book, Erich von Däniken decried efforts to link him to racism: “And suddenly Erich von Däniken is associated with idiotic racists, as if the ‘heavenly seed’ were my idea and I had made up the ‘chosen ones’ myself.” Well, I think that the racism claim has a bit more to it than that.

Parenthetically I was very interested to discover last night that when Chariots of the Gods? was finally published in 1968, it had actually been heavily rewritten by von D.’s editor, one Wilhelm Roggersdorf, a movie screenwriter who was also known as Wilhelm Utermann, under which name he had worked a few decades earlier at the Völkischer Beobachter… also known as the official newspaper of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1919 to 1945. For whatever it may be worth…

RIP Ace

The Grateful Dead are increasingly living up to the latter half of their name, with the passing of Bob Weir. It must be said that he did pretty well out of that group considering he got kicked out of it briefly early on, though since the rest of the band played under a different name for those gigs without him that meant he still played every show the Grateful Dead ever did…