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Was he single-minded? Most definitely. An extremist? Quite probably. But in my opinion, he was one of the most significant activists for civil rights in my lifetime. He advocated not for the rights of a single group but for the rights of all humans to make a uniquely important decision with dignity and grace.

Rest in peace, Dr. Jack Kevorkian:

Ultimately, Dr. Kevorkian’s said his belief regarding a patient’s right to die had a simple premise: it was in the Constitution, unwritten but guaranteed by the Ninth Amendment which states that Americans are not excluded from rights that are not specifically enumerated in the constitution.

“There have been many constitutional scholars over time that have believed that the Ninth Amendment deserves more respect, but Dr. Kevorkian took it further than most lawyers and most constitutional scholars would take it,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard professor and lawyer who was an adviser in several of Dr. Kevorkian’s legal battles, and corresponded with him while he was in jail.

“He was part of the Civil Rights movement — although he did it in his own way,” Dershowitz added. “He didn’t lead marches, he didn’t get other people to follow him, instead he put his own body in the line of fire, and there are not many people who would do that. In the years that come, his views may become more mainstream.”

If any of you are interested, you can make donations supporting the right of Americans to decide to end their suffering with a modicum of peace by giving to Death with Dignity.

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Activist, poet, and one of the fathers of hip-hop; Gil Scott-Heron has died at 62.

"Who?" you might ask.

Why, he of course:



Have to admit: The first time I heard that poem, it was on television.

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Oh Lord...Not Randy "The Macho Man Savage".

How I remember him:

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William Young who died at 74 certainly led an interesting life to say the least:

After serving with the US Army in Germany, William was recruited to the CIA on his father's recommendation in 1958. As he was fluent in five local languages, he was employed as an interpreter and "tribal expert" and was soon put in charge of covert operations in the tribal border areas of Burma, Thailand and Laos.

Early on in the Vietnam War, Laos became strategically important as a route for North Vietnamese communist forces travelling to and from South Vietnam. In an effort to block off this so-called "Ho Chi Minh trail" and aid anti–communist forces in the separate civil war that had been raging between the Communist Pathet Lao and the Laotian government since the early 1950s, Young was deputed to enlist the help of the hill tribesmen in the region. As Laos was officially "neutral" in the Vietnam War, the operations remained top secret.

In 1960 Young approached Vang Pao, the highest ranking member of the Hmong tribe in the Laotian army, who agreed to help recruit his fellow tribesmen (other recruits came from the Yao and Lahu tribes). To build up the army, Vang Pao and CIA operatives, including Young, flew to scattered hill communities in helicopters and light aircraft, offering guns, rice and money in exchange for recruits. Dozens of crude landing strips for the CIA-backed "Air America" campaign were hacked out of the forest – including the base at Long Tieng, which grew into a small city: "It had brothels and bars, casinos – everything a serviceman could ask for," Young recalled. "But it had a church, too." Tens of thousands of tribesmen would die during the campaign, which remains one of the least-known chapters in the annals of the Vietnam War. 

Seriously...Read it in full. Won't take but a moment. 

The Dead, Non-Human Edition

Whenever I write about this sort of thing, my pageviews plummet as I'm revealed to be an outlandishly terrible person, completely detached from concepts like "cute" or "adorable" or "endangered" but what the hell? Into the breach once more!

I have a somewhat notorious dislike for pandas. They're filthy, mean spirited and can't even be bothered to breed with one another. If there's a more inconvenient species alive, I am unaware.

That said, an old one has died.

Perhaps my dreams of a coat might be that much closer?

The Dead

Famed playboy, Gunter Sachs has died at 78. He committed suicide rather than deal with the gradual degeneration of Alzheimer's disease.

Clearly, he lived his life fully. Because you know, he was a playboy and all that. I mention him because that seems like such an unusual designation these days. It seems as though we've become to serious as a species to entertain the idea of people that are rich and content to simply be very, very rich. Nowadays, it seems if someone isn't slapping their name on a charity dedicated to something dreadful and drear or having their picture taken with starving children, they simply don't make the cut somehow.

I don't know that I would necessarily advocate for a resurgence of the idle rich but frankly...It feels like we're missing something when we don't have a group that simply has fun. Fabulous, fabulous fun.

From the piece:

The veteran Riviera man and journalist Taki Theodoracopulos, who first met Sachs onboard the late shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos’s yacht Creole, once described Sachs to me as “a great gambler, a good skier, and bobsleigher.” I was questioning Theodoracopulos for a film I was trying to make at the time about playboys. One of the themes that emerged in our conversation was the playboy’s capacity to savor life’s pleasures in an unqualified way. Theodoracopulos explained that for these men life was purely about living for the delight of good times without distraction. That achievement became the highlight of a satisfying existence.

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Swiss...uh..."Spy Chief" Albert Bachmann has died. He was 81. Though derided as almost wondrously ineffective it does sound as though he had fun at least.

After being appointed to run Swiss intelligence in 1976, he created Project 26, a secret army of 2,000 resistance fighters trained to wage guerrilla warfare against Soviet troops in the event of an invasion.

To ensure the survival of the Swiss state, he bought Liss Ard, a 200-acre estate near Cork, to serve as a refuge and headquarters for a government in exile and, in the basement of one of its two Georgian houses, a vault for Switzerland’s gold reserves.

Loyalists regarded Colonel Bachmann as a fearless visionary. Others agreed with the intelligence agent who dismissed his former boss as “a glorified Boy Scout who saw evil everywhere and believed that he alone possessed the absolute truth about national defense.”

Colonel Bachmann came to grief after sending one of his operatives, a management consultant named Kurt Schilling, to spy on Austrian troops carrying out maneuvers near the town of St. Pölten in November 1979.

The need for cloak-and-dagger secrecy was unclear, since the Austrian government had invited observers from all over the Eastern bloc to watch the operations. Mr. Schilling, equipped with maps, binoculars and a notebook, nevertheless spent several days snooping around military barracks and command posts before the Austrian police pounced.

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Front woman for legendary punk band the X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene has died at 53.

I'm sure everybody else is quite sensibly running with links to "Oh Bondage, Up Yours" so I'm going to mix things up a bit with...



Respect your elders, kids!

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One year anniversary of the death of Guru.

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If you're like a huge number of people, you probably wasted at least a little of your time recently largely thanks to Gerald A. Lawson, inventor of cartridges for video game systems.

After inventing Demolition Derby, Mr. Lawson was put in charge of the company’s video game division. He and his team came up with cartridges that could be loaded with different game programs and then inserted into the console one at a time. This allowed the company to sell individual games separately from the console itself, a business model that remains the cornerstone of the video game industry. 

Some of you may be too young to recall how miserable gaming was prior to the invention of the cartridge. Here's a good primer.  

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It's a two-fer! Frankly, I'm not sure that either will be particularly missed.

First off, we have religious leader, Kenneth Grant, who basically played Robin to Aleister Crowley's Batman. Crowley for those of you who mercifully don't know, was the founder of the mystical order, Ordo Templi Orientis; a magically inclined group that I think mostly served as an excuse for orgies and drug use.

Personally, I don't have any problem with people looking for excuses for orgies and drug use it's their business entirely, as far as I'm concerned.. However, when you garish up the simple act of screwing and getting high with ridiculous rituals, funny costumes, absurd claims to magical abilities and references to extraterrestrial god-things, it's just plain silly.  

Frankly, I've often wondered if the whole thing isn't a practical joke.

From there, we move onto sweet, old lady; Dorothea Puente. She was a kindly older woman that rented out her home in Sacramento to other elderly people that were down on their luck. Eventually, it was discovered that she was very serious about collecting her rent on time. Very serious indeed.

The Dead, Non-Human Edition

Bad news though there isn't much to say about it. However, I feel compelled to chime in on it.

Knut the polar bear has died due to unknown causes. He was four.

He came to the worlds attention as a cub because....Well, hell! I mean just look at him!

I should note that he's also the unofficial mascot of Punchinnaface Press. For a more recent photo, please take a look at the header.

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Augustus Owsley Stanley III has died. He was 76.

Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on Jan. 19, 1935, to a patrician Kentucky family. His paternal grandfather, for whom he was named, was a congressman, governor of Kentucky and United States senator. (Somewhat prophetically, given his grandson’s future pursuits, the elder Mr. Stanley was a vigorous public foe of Prohibition.) 

Young Owsley, whose adolescent hirsuteness caused him to be known ever after as Bear, was sent to a military preparatory school in Maryland. He was expelled in the ninth grade for furnishing the alcohol that, as he told Rolling Stone in 2007, had nearly all his classmates “blasted out of their minds” on homecoming weekend.

And from there, young Owlsey went on to mass produce earth shattering acid. How earth shattering? John Lennon had him on a life-long retainer. The Grateful Dead parted company with him when his personal practices got too weird.

So kids...let's have a chat about drugs, shall we?

I've certainly done my fair share drugs. Not an extraordinary amount by any means. But I would say that compared to the general population, I've probably done more than most and quite a bit, quite a bit less indeed than a sizable few.

So my advice on drugs?

Probably, you should avoid them. It's your own call ultimately of course. Frankly, I don't think that what anybody chooses to ingest into their body is any of my business. And certainly, the fact that there happens to be a pretty strong consumer demand for drugs might mean that I just don't get the appeal. That's nothing to do with anything though. If you like them, have at them. It's your own look out as far as I'm concerned.

But I just don't really dig them that much. I always found that the circumstances involved in taking drugs (a crazy couple of weeks with a pair of necrophiliacs and some heroin for example), always proved much more interesting than the drugs themselves.

Hi Mom and Dad. I'm sure you're reading.

Ultimately, drugs just always seemed so very boring to me. Maybe I just never did them right. I dunno. They just never seemed nearly as interesting by themselves as whatever was going on around me.

Which leads me to acid.

In my opinion, acid is probably the most lauded bridge to nowhere in the history of pharmaceuticals.

Every time I hear or read someone describe it as somehow "mind expanding" I think back to all the time I spent getting lost in the cereal aisle of a supermarket or staring at my hands waving back and forth before my face or listening to power lines hum as though they might impart a special wisdom.

Who knows? Maybe they do.

But for me, it's just a cavalcade of embarrassing recollections.

So ultimately...Do whatever drugs you want. Smoke crack, shoot heroin, smoke pot, pop pills, lick toads, go to church. Whatever works for you. Just accept that if and when you are drooling on yourself, you're not having a profound experience. You're embarrassing yourself.

The Dead

Let' face it. The poster is funnier in German

Tura Satana, star of "Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" had died at 72.

A pretty interesting life to say the least! Besides the internment during WWII, the reform school, the stripping, the modeling, the Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra dating and naturally, a bit of acting, comes this particular bit that would have worked perfectly in any one of her movies:

One evening, just before her 10th birthday, she was sent out by her mother to buy some bread. On the way home she was raped by a gang of teenagers. The five youths were never prosecuted, although in interviews she claimed that over the course of the next 15 years, she tracked down each of her assailants and exacted an unspecified revenge.

The Dead

Not much to say about this one. He was an anonymous person who used the internet to touch an awful lot of people, myself included. Today is the day he's chosen to take his life under Oregon's Death with Dignity law rather than suffer any longer.

Rest in peace Lucidending.



Inasmuch as his ability to die with some dignity was made at least partially possible by these people, I encourage anyone that feels the urge to send a donation their way.

The Dead

Alberto Granado, Che Guevara's companion during the events that would lead to the "Motorcycle Diaries" has died. He was 88.

He may very well have been a perfectly lovely man. I tend to assume that 99% of the population is composed of perfectly lovely people that though they may disagree on the means, have ends that include improving the lives of people at large.

Che Guevara is not one of those people. People that say things like this, are removed from my list of generally OK folks:

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

Next time you see someone in a Che shirt, kick him in the shins.

The Dead, Non-Human Edition

Unfortunately, it's a species.

The Eastern Cougar has been removed from the Endangered Species List and placed on the much lengthier Extinct Species List.

There are arguments that the Eastern Cougar was not in fact, a separate species from the Western variety. That sort of misses the central point though: No more cougars.

The Dead

Brunette bombshell, Jane Russell passed away yesterday. Her life in clips.

The Dead

Frank Buckles, the last American World War I veteran, has died at 110.

Though he had a pretty quiet time during the war, never coming closer to the Western Front than 30 miles, he inadvertently had a much more involved time during World War II when working for steamship companies:

He traveled widely over the years, working for steamship companies, and he was on business in Manila when the Japanese occupied it following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He was imprisoned by the Japanese, losing more than 50 pounds, before being liberated by an American airborne unit in February 1945.

The Dead, Sue Edition

Nicholas Courtney, the longest serving actor on "Dr. Who" has died. He played Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and appeared first in 1969, continuing to play the role for the next 30 years until his final appearance in the Arthurian themed "Battlefield".

His military character served as a counter to Dr. Who's pacifist though in the end, they came to respect each other on a professional basis as well as personally.

And now a tiny confession:

I consider myself a "Dr. Who" fan. That said, I haven't the slightest idea who Brgadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart was. No idea. Completely clueless.

Frankly, though I have fond childhood memories of the original versions, I can't say that I really became interested in the show until the more recent updates.

That said, I have to give respect where it's due. Mr. Courtney served a huge role in the creation of what has become a true pillar of the science fiction universe. So though I have to admit that I was previously ignorant of his role, I have to say that I already miss him.