Category: [RIP]

This year’s unlamented billionaire

WOOF.  That is quite the ratio. The late Brian Thompson has kind of turned into 2024’s Stockton Rush, an obscenely rich man who came to a premature end and no one seems unduly unhappy about that fact. The main difference is that this time someone else did it:

The CEO of UnitedHealthcare, one of the US’s largest health insurers, was shot dead on Wednesday in midtown Manhattan, police confirmed in a press conference.
Brian Thompson, 50, was shot outside the Hilton hotel at 1335 Avenue of the Americas just after 6.45am after arriving early for the company’s annual investor conference. A man wearing a mask approached him and fired at him repeatedly, police said.
Police said they believe Thompson was targeted in the attack. This was a “brazen, targeted attack”, New York’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said, adding that this “does not appear to be a random act of violence”. […]
Officials have said that no arrests have been made yet and that the investigation is continuing. The motive is currently unknown.
Thompson’s wife, Paulette Thompson, told NBC News her husband had received threats.
“There had been some threats,” she said. “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details. I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.”

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to threaten this guy… oh, UnitedHealthcare is one of the worst health insurers in the US? Bad even by American standards?

Oh. I mean… I suppose that indicates they are paying two thirds of the claims they get, but still. From that Gizmodo article:

Other comments got more personal, with people sharing their stories of being denied coverage by UnitedHealthcare and having to pay large sums of money to survive: “My uncle paid you guys for 22 years without missing a single payment and then when he died you denied his life insurance claim. You even had the nerve to cash a check from him the week he died. Scum bags. Sometimes you get what you deserve. I hope all of you suffer the way my mom has for the past year she has had to endure the nightmare of losing her brother and then almost filing for bankruptcy due to your denial of a life insurance claim paid punctually and faithfully for 22 years. Then you turn around and spit on his corpse. Your empathy claim has been denied. I hope you all get what’s coming.” […]
UnitedHealthcare insures over 49 million Americans, and the company generated $281 billion in revenue last year, according to the Associated Press. The insurance giant is notorious for denying coverage, deploying an artificial intelligence tool that has an error rate of roughly 90%, according to a lawsuit filed last year.

Ah. Gizmodo also tries to rationalise why people are enjoying the show:

It makes sense that Americans might be more loose with their sense of decorum these days. The re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency signaled a kind of right-wing populist nihilism as the Republican leader embraced conspiracy theories, threatened to go after his political enemies, and demonized immigrants in wildly racist ways. The sometimes celebratory attitude of such a broad swath of Americans on Wednesday felt like an embrace of that same sort of nihilism.

But I don’t really believe that cos all this “lol, fuck this guy” reaction online is similar to what we saw last year with the whole Titan sub thing and I don’t think we can entirely blame that on Mushroom Cock’s ascension. Back when Titan happened, this piece speculated on the frankly unpleasant humour people found in it and noted that the amounts of money involved in buying a place on the death ship and how almost all of them were billionaires made it hard to empathise with them. Billionaires are so far removed from most people that even when something objectively terrible happens to them we just can’t care too much about them. I find myself feeling about this, too, like I did with the Titan story; I remain kind unhappy about the idea of actively enjoying someone’s murder, and I remain equally unable to extend fellow feelings towards Brian Thompson. Especially since the latter was actively involved in damaging other people’s lives.

Anyway, for some reason UHC appears to have scrubbed all the information about their other board members from its website, almost like they’re worried someone might go after them next or something. But, from what I read online, Thompson was in town for some company board meeting or something, and the meeting went ahead at the scheduled time anyway despite the fact that Thompson had, you know, just been murdered outside the building where the meeting was going ahead. If this bit is true, then that really gives this sort of vibe:

So maybe the board were less bothered about him than they were themselves? I don’t know. Fuck the lot of them. I’m out of thoughts and prayers for these people.

RIP Quincy Jones

As I noted when he celebrated his 90th birthday last year, Quincy Jones did well for a man who was supposedly dying of not one but two brain aneurysms in 1974, beating them and living another 50 years… his passing the other day has obviously generated a lot of comment on social media, amidst which I saw someone saying about how they were discovering just how much music he was behind, and, well, I made my own discovery:

I have known this piece of music for years (I gather it was the Austin Powers movies that brought it back), but have never known what it was, never knew its name, and consequently had even less idea who might’ve written it; indeed, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was actually a recent composition like a bit of stock music or something pastiching 60s lounge music or some such. But then last night Youtube suggested this somewhat randomly, so I clicked on the video… and OH! It’s THAT music! It’s ACTUAL 60s music! And Quincy Jones wrote it? I will indeed be damned. So if other people are amazed to discover some of the things “Q” was responsible for, so am I…

RIP Paul Di’Anno

Apparently even he agreed Bruce Dickinson was the definitive Maiden vocalist, but let’s not discount his own good work out front of them on those first two albums; and, to be fair, he was in the band a lot longer than most of the other early members of the band, which was a chaotic affair that didn’t really settle down until a couple of years after this stuff…

RIP the Angel of Frequency

And it’s goodbye to Ollie Olsen, pioneer of electronic and experimental music in Australia since the punk era. He’s been an exceedingly ill man for a lot of years now with multiple system atrophy, so his passing isn’t surprising, but still it’s another door closed on that time and place…


Firstly, here’s one I’ve only just discovered via a friend on FB: Olsen’s own Whirlywirld version of “Rooms for the Memory”, which would be redone by a certain Michael Hutchence from INXS for the Dogs in Space soundtrack…


…and the aforementioned pop hit version. Obviously sounds much bigger and more mid-80. I love this. I also love that it was a top ten chart hit here when the film was rated R, so a bunch of Hutchence’s younger fans wouldn’t even have been able to see it…



Logically, therefore, we continue with the other great Hutchence/Olsen collaboration, Max Q. “Only fear under another name…”


And we probably shouldn’t overlook Ecco Homo, which Olsen put together for another kind of extraordinary figure, Troy Davies…


This was where Olsen went in the 90s, you can kind of hear it starting to happen on “Sometimes” but he started properly trancing out with Third Eye and the Psy-Harmonics label…


I can’t find a Youtube video for The Reals, Olsen’s first band in which he played guitar, and whose “Nothing to Say” (on the old Do the Pop Redux compilation from years ag0—try hunting that up) has one of the most obnoxious guitar sounds I’ve ever heard (and granted that recording is a rehearsal demo so not an even remotely professional one, but still), so I’m ending us instead where we began with Whirlywirld. RIP Ian.

RIP George… Somethingorother

The legendary George Negus has left us; alas, I had no idea he’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s and was basically non-verbal for his last few years. Never a good way to go, but even worse when communicating with people was your job. Apparently someone miscommunicated with Channel 10, though:

George NEBUS? Who’s he? Well done, you professional television network, you…

I find our lack of James Earl Jones disappointing

One of the great voices of Hollywood (I mean, with all due respect to Dave Prowse, George Lucas was right to redub him as Darth Vader with Jones’ voice), and one I who didn’t know until now was afflicted with a stutter so bad he was effectively mute for several years of his childhood, even into high school; he just refused to talk cos he knew people would just laugh at him.

Full credit to you, sir, cos you surely overcame.

RIP Herbie Flowers

One of the 70s’ favourite session men has left us with… well, hundreds of recordings to his credit. And what recordings, too. He’s probably most famous, of course, for Mr Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”…

…in which he plays both electric and acoustic double bass because, as he said later, he got paid two session fees because he played two instruments. The really cunning trick, though, was playing the electric bassline one tenth above the upright bass, thus producing that very particular bass sound. He did a similar trick with this…

…where he doubled the bass parts again (as well as his session fee!), only an octave apart this time, but the slapback echo applied here makes all the difference, and the bass really is the main instrument, almost serving like the whole rhythm section by itself (I’m not even sure if there are actual drums on here or not). Genuinely stunning production even 50 years after the fact, manages to sound completely like 1973 but also like the future still to come. But then there was this which came before either of those two…

…which I’d never actually given a proper listen to before last night, until I saw someone mention it on Threads and they said something about the detuning solo. And holy shit they were right; not only does brother Herbie kick off proceedings with a truly mean and great riff, there’s a bit where Flowers detunes his bass while playing it and just… goddamn. (Parenthetically, what a cast list on this recording, Chris Spedding and Klaus Voorman on guitar, Jimmy Webb on piano, that tragic unfortunate Jim Gordon on drums—how good is he here?) Hell of a career young Brian had.

RIP… actually no, FUCK Alain Delon

Alain Delon died the other day, and that made me realise that I knew practically nothing about him other than his having been an actor. Obviously I’d seen some of his films, but didn’t really know much otherwise. So I thought I’d look him up on Wiki, and, well, YIKES. Man was a piece of work. And of shit. Those pretty-boy looks got him places but they hid something fantastically unpleasant too… anyway, this story came out today:

The late French actor Alain Delon’s wish that his pet dog be put down and buried with him has been rejected by his children after an outcry from animal rights campaigners.
The actor, who died aged 88 on Sunday, had said he wished the animal, a 10-year-old Belgian malinois called Loubo, to be “put to sleep” and laid in his grave in the cemetery of his home in the village of Douchy in the Loiret.
On Tuesday, after activists expressed dismay at the prospect of a healthy animal being put down and offered to find the dog a new home, it was announced Loubo would live.
The Brigitte Bardot Foundation said Delon’s daughter Anouchka had confirmed the family would keep the dog.
“I’ve just had Anouchka Delon on the phone and she has told me that Loubo is part of the family and will be kept. The dog will not be put down,” a foundation spokesperson said. […]
“He’s my end of life dog … I love him like a child,” Delon told Paris Match in 2018. “I’ve had 50 dogs in my life, but I have a special relationship with this one. He misses me when I’m not there.”
He added: “If I die before him, I’ll ask the vet to take us away together. He’ll put him to sleep in my arms. I’d rather do that than know that he’ll let himself die on my grave with so much suffering.”
After that interview, the animal association 30 Million Friends condemned what it called the “convenience” euthanasia of a perfectly healthy dog, saying it hoped Loubo would be adopted.

I’m genuinely flabbergasted by this. Some fucking animal lover, eh? At that age, I’m guessing Loubo doesn’t have a lot of time left to him anyway (Malinois apparently live 10-14 years), but unless he was as terribly unwell as Delon was, I don’t see any need to accelerate his ending like that just to satifsy his owner’s ego. So yeah, fuck Alain Delon. Like I said, I didn’t know much about him before he died, and I think I was better off…