Category: [RIP]

RIP Jimmy

Goodbye Mr Carter. I think that, in fairness, we can only describe his presidency as a mixed bag of some really good things but more kind of awful things, and a job he ultimately wasn’t really cut out for. Also in fairness, he did the best he could in the years that followed to make up for that. Hilariously, he also managed to outlive the writer of the above obit, with a note at the end advising the latter died in 2021, and from what I’ve seen on Bluesky this afternoon there’s at least two others in the same boat… I’ve known for years that news organisations have these prepared years in advance for particularly notable people, ever since this outstanding incident of 20+ years ago, so they can just roll them out when the subject pops their clogs; for the subject to live longer than their obituarist, though, is something I imagine is kind of rare. Anyway, RIP James Earl the younger; for all the things you got wrong, you’ll be remembered far better than any of your successors so far, especially Mushroom Cock.

RIP Vasco

I don’t suppose Mary Leunig is too bothered by the passing of her big brother somehow, given the abuse allegations she levelled against him years ago. To be honest, there was always something about Michael Leunig I never liked even though I could never pin down what, but his later antivaxxer statements were a kind of final straw, and whatever good he may have done and however I may have even agreed with some of his positions was kind of undone by that…

For example, here’s an item from 2015, so it’s not even from the Covid era when this bullshit really took off. And then there was this… interesting reaction to the SSM plebiscite in 2017:

This is actually the first I’m discovering this, and it’s… not endearing me any further to him, let’s put it that way. I also found him commenting in more detail here, where he seems to be trying to say that his problem is with the institution of marriage itself and he can’t understand why gay people want to engage in something so awful, but even so.

So yeah, never really a fan. Still, he was a cultural icon for a lot of years and a lot of people liked him even if I was always dubious, so I suppose I should acknowledge him leaving us, even unkindly…

Good night Clive

Clive Robertson has left the studio.

From his Talking Heads interview from a long time ago:

PETER THOMPSON: What are you interested in? Did you say want to say something through all of this?
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Um, I’d have to say the order of things especially at Channel 9, the order of news items. And if I said, “Look, this is really important”, I’d look at the camera and say, “This is a really important story” and set it up, and if it was an important story, then the audience think, “Oh this guy’s a good filter.” If you said, “Look, this is a silly item, I don’t know why we’re running it” and you run it and it is a silly item, you’ve got them. And it’s not a con. What that program did is different from most news programs is gave things what they really were worth.
PETER THOMPSON: But you were also by playing this role, undercutting the artifice what it is a lot of television.
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Oh, yeah, and did that go down well with the journalists? Have a guess Peter. “He’s ruling our station” and all that rubbish. I mean, we get a new item in at, say, 10.30 at night and I’d say, “By the way, you’ll see this at 6 o’clock tomorrow night” and they’ll say it’s the latest, “you know better”. “You can’t say things like that.” Well, you know, come on, so journalists are a bit thick as you know, Peter, you’ve worked with a few, they really are thick. I mean, they really should be sterilised.

I used to watch Clive back in the 80s when he was on commercial TV, because I was a slightly strange child drawn to programs that I wasn’t really old enough for. He may have been something of an influence on me. This is awfully sad.

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…