Goddamn, now Silvio Berlusconi’s gone to join the choir invisble. Him, Kaczynski and Robertson are a remarkable trifecta of shit people to have all died around the same time, and no tears should be shed for any of them, especially not the direct enabler of fascism.
And the Unabomber has gone to join Pat Robertson. Suicide, according to some sources, which seems a bit… late in the day for that option, he’d already been in jail for 27 years, but then again Rudolf Hess took even longer to check himself out of Spandau. I’ve never done anything to warrant spending the rest of my life in jail, so I’ll confess to not knowing the psychological effects of doing so and why you might suddenly snap after decades…
Anyway, there goes someone else whose passing I won’t celebrate or mourn; I don’t have much if any time for anti-technology people who don’t seem to see the irony in needing technology to promulgate their beliefs, and even less time for people who kill other people in the name of those beliefs… Equally, though, I don’t think he was entirely wrong about technology being a catastrophe; after all, technology made it possible for Charlie Kirk to do this:
Fucking ghoul. As I was saying just the other day about the mental illness of the American right…
Far-right religious nut, author, broadcaster, conspiracy crank and all-round cancer Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson is dead, and frankly it took the old cunt long enough. Though I hold to the belief that you really shouldn’t celebrate people’s deaths, I also hold to the belief that you really shouldn’t mourn some people’s deaths either; and equally I can understand when people do think it’s a good thing.
Jesus fuck. It’s been a few days for people dying, hasn’t it? Now we can add Tina Turner to the list… we actually nearly lost her in 2016 due to kidney problems when her husband donated one of his own and basically bought her seven more years on Earth. Good man, Erwin. Ike would never have done that for her. And obviously her finally breaking away from Ike in the mid-70s was the best thing she could’ve done; I actually never realised until today that he owned her name. He not only renamed young Anna Mae (or was it Martha Nell?) Bullock, he trademarked the name Tina Turner so that if she tried to leave him he could just replace her and she wouldn’t be able to work under that name again. Just like KISS copyrighting the old makeup for Ace Frehley and Peter Criss so Paul & Gene can use it on whatever ringers they get to replace those two. She made a point of demanding the name in the divorce, and won it despite Ike’s efforts.
I had no idea in the 80s, cos I was still too young, to realise just what it meant for her to become big in the 80s; I don’t know if I was even aware that she’d had a career before that, or maybe I was dimly aware that Ike had been a thing but it was only a dim awareness if that… certainly I didn’t appreciate that this was her rebounding from years of abuse and lack of solo commercial success on her own by the end of the 70s, having a mega hit of an album released by a record label that hadn’t even wanted her… and that she was in her mid-40s by the time she was doing this. She’d undeniably earned it by then. Here she is in 2009, still having it at nearly 70:
PISS. I know he was on the downhill slide to 100, but this is still painful. He should’ve lived just those few more years to become the world’s most disreputable centenarian. RIP you great deeply problematic fave.
(Post title stolen from someone on Twitter who is clearly smarter than me)
Anyway, Rolf Harris died…
…in fact he apparently did so on the 10th of the month; the family opted to wait until he was safely in the ground before making it public. Can’t imagine why they might want to do that, I’m sure it’s completely unrelated to him being a convicted and unrepentant pedophile whose funeral might’ve been the target of protests if people had known where and when it was happening…
News is coming through of the passing of Andy Rourke, bassist for The Smiths, aged 59 from pancreatic cancer. Poor bastard, screwed over by Morrissey & Marr and then screwed over by what I presume was a combination of bad legal advice and his smack habit needing urgent fulfilment, settling for less than a hundred grand while Mike Joyce ended up with a million pounds because he insisted on fighting on. Marr at least posted a nice farewell message to him; I haven’t seen anything similar yet from Stephen Patrick but I can’t imagine it being terribly kind somehow if/when he does acknowledge it… (EDIT: happy to have been proven wrong about this.)
RIP Mark Stewart. This photo comes courtesy of Phil King (from Lush, etc) on Instagram, with no indication of exactly where/when (though presumably a Pop Group show), but it certainly looks like what I’ve heard of his music…
Barry Humphries died. To be honest I don’t recall ever finding him that funny, and the progressiveness of his aesthetic tastes (he basically came from Dada) was somehow not matched by his politics… I see quite a few people on Twitter using his passing to fire shots in the culture war against trans people and “wokeness” etc, and given some of his later in life comments, he might even have been OK with that.
Bob Maguire, professional crusty old bugger and much loved Catholic priest who made the critical error of taking his vocation seriously and caring for people, has left us at the age of 88, and he shouldn’t have done. By several accounts, he was ousted from his own Father Bob Maguire Foundation last week, and was apparently unaware of the fact himself until it was reported on social media. I feel there’s more to the story regarding what’s happened and why it’s happened now, but the foundation appears to have pulled off an absolute cunt act against an old man in declining health during his last days, and indeed probably helped make them his last days.
I think it’s appropriate to let John Safran have the last word, since he helped bring the old boy to the nation’s attention, and he shall miss him more than most of us.
EDIT: Well, actually, let’s give the p.s. to the Foundation themselves, who I’ve now seen issued a statement the other day:
“…The issues at stake were thoroughly canvassed and considered at a recent VCAT Hearing in which Fr Bob participated. The result of that hearing was that Fr Bob’s family were granted Guardianship in relation to where he lives and what care he gets. VCAT does not make such decisions lightly. It relies on a number of medical views of Fr Bob’s physical and mental condition.
Of particular relevance is that the VCAT decision means that Fr Bob is no longer eligible to be a Board member (or Chairman) of the Foundation. This is a legal dictate under the Guardianship and Administration Act 2019.
I don’t know about anyone else, but that reads to me like a tacit admission that, yeah, the Foundation kind of lied a bit in their previous statement about Bob “stepping down”. If this is a VCAT rule (and it may be, I don’t actually know) that he had to step down, why didn’t they say as much earlier? I also thought this was an interesting further remark after denying all the claims being made against them:
Those familiar with Fr Bob’s mental state are not surprised by recent comments attributed to him. Fr Bob has always been someone who ‘comes out swinging’ in any context. However, in recent times his opinions have taken on an eccentric flavour.
And, obviously, I’m not familiar with his mental state, which I’m guessing was indeed less than optimal, but I do smell a hint of well-poisoning here despite that.
Incidentally, it’s nearly 9.30pm as I write these last words and I find it interesting, shall we say, that I’ve seen no word (at least not on the SMH site, The Age, News.com.au or the Guardian) from any representatives of the Catholic church here in Australia, or from their representatives in the Liberal party, or from anyone in the Liberal party in general (all I’ve seen from the latter is a comment from the Victorian opposition leader John Pesutto) so far today. Weird how quick they were to praise that pedophile enabler a couple of months ago but not Bob now, eh. (I’d be a lot more OK with Bob getting a state funeral than I was the other guy, I must say.) Maybe the church’s media team are just trying to find a way of expressing sadness over his passing without admitting what they really thought of him…
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