One of my favorite comedians has died:

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN)—Comedian-actor George Carlin, known for his raunchy but insightful humor, died of heart failure Sunday in Los Angeles, his publicist said. He was 71.

Jeff Abraham says Carlin went into St. John’s Health Center on Sunday afternoon, complaining of chest pain. Carlin died at 5:55 p.m. PDT, The Associated Press reported.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,“ Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told the AP.

Carlin was best known for his routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television,“ which appeared in 1972’s “Class Clown” album.

When Carlin uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested for disturbing the peace, the AP reported. The comedy sketch prompted a landmark indecency case after WBAI-FM radio aired it in 1973.

The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where the justices ruled on a 5-to-4 vote that the sketch was “indecent but not obscene,“ giving the FCC broad leeway to determine what constituted indecency on the airwaves.

“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,“ Carlin said. “In the context of that era, it was daring.“

“It just sounds like a very self-serving kind of word. I don’t want to go around describing myself as a ‘groundbreaker’ or a ‘difference-maker’ because I’m not and I wasn’t,“ he said. “But I contributed to people who were saying things that weren’t supposed to be said.“

The title of this entry is what Carlin said he’d like folks to say upon hearing of his death so it seemed only appropriate. The following is a bit called “Modern Man” from one of his HBO specials:

He was a funny man and I’ll miss him greatly.

Get ready to cue the various editorial cartoonists depicting his arrival in Heaven in spite of the fact that he was an avowed atheist.

And another part of my childhood passes away:

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator dies at 69 - Yahoo! News

MILWAUKEE - Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.

He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.

Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.

I’ve not played D&D for years, but I spent years in my teens and early 20’s playing it along with a host of other pen and paper RPGs. I have many fond memories of hanging out with Bill, Bob, Tom, Mark, Daryl, Dan, and Herb rolling dice and consuming vast quantities of pizza and pop and arguing over rule interpretations. Probably explains my addiction to video games like World of Warcraft which is, in many ways, a pale imitation of those older days.

And, yes, I realize the title for this entry is a really bad joke, but you know I had to use it.

It’s a sad day for toilet paper obsessives everywhere as Dick Wilson, best known as the neurotic grocer who defended Charmin bathroom tissue from the groping clutches of lonely housewives, has passed away:

The man famous as TV’s “Mr. Whipple” died of natural causes at the Motion Picture & Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills, said his daughter Melanie Wilson, who is known for her role as a flight attendant on the ABC sitcom “Perfect Strangers.“

Wilson made more than 500 commercials as Mr. George Whipple, a man consumed with keeping bubbly housewives from fondling toilet paper. The punch line of most spots was that Whipple himself was a closeted Charmin-squeezer.

The first commercial aired in 1964 and by the time the campaign ended in 1985 the tag line and Wilson, a former Canadian airman and vaudeville veteran, were pop culture touchstones.

Seriously though, what the hell was up with those housewives? I mean, check this out:

The second woman in that first commercial looks like she’s on the verge of having an orgasm or something. Which just shows that people in commercials come from an entirely different planet.

The man known as “The Crocodile Hunter” has kicked the bucket, but interestingly enough it wasn’t a croc that got him:

The naturalist and television star Steve Irwin has died in a diving accident in far north Queensland. He was 44.

Police say he was stung through the heart by a stingray while diving off Port Douglas.

He was filming a documentary when the accident occurred around midday AEST near the Low Isles.

A helicopter arrived with paramedics on board to try to resuscitate him, but it was too late.

A more detailed account is available through The Sydney Morning Herald:

Friends believe he may have died instantly when struck by a stingray as he filmed a sequence for his eight-year-old daughter Bindi’s new TV series.

Irwin’s friend of 20 years, Ferre De Deyne said Irwin had been struck by the stingray while filming. “The stingray just happened to be swimming around and out of the blue whacked his tail at him,“ he said.

“It is absolutely tragic. I have dived so many times with stingrays and they are usually very placid things,“ he said.

...

Irwin had been filming a new documentary called Ocean’s Deadliest with friend and manager John Stainton at Batt Reef, off Port Douglas about 11am.

“He came over the top of a stingray and the stingray’s barb went up and went into his chest and put a hole into his heart,“ Mr Stainton said.

“It’s likely that he possibly died instantly when the barb hit him, and I don’t think that he ... felt any pain.

“He died doing what he loved best.“

That he did. I wasn’t a big fan of Irwin myself, but I did find him at least slightly amusing in how much he seemed to annoy everyone else. One thing that can’t be denied is how he had become a pop icon all around the world.

Big thanks to LJ19 for sending this in via email.

Looks like Bush will get to pick two new supreme court justices sooner than anyone thought. CNN is reporting that Chief Justice William Rehnquist is dead at the age of 80. His battle with thyroid cancer came to an end around 11PM this evening.

OK, perhaps now it’s time to be a bit worried.

I was saddened to hear that journalist Peter Jennings has passed away. It was Jennings’s work that first got me to start watching TV news and his broadcast was usually the first I’d turn to during any of the major crisis’s that occurred over the years. His work largely speaks for itself so there’s not a whole lot to say other than there’s one less reason to watch major network news broadcasts now.

That’s right folks, “Scotty”, the chief engineer aboard the USS Enterprise, died Wednesday. Granted, some might say we shouldn’t morn his passing as he was only an actor but he was, in reality, much more. A WWII veteran, James Doohan joined the Canadian Army just prior to the outbreak of war and even landed at Juno Beach as an artillery lieutenant with the first assault wave. He and his unit fought their way up the beach and through an anti-tank minefield were he was later machine-gunned taking six hits: four in the leg, one severing his right middle finger(which he managed to hide onscreen), and one to the chest which was stopped only by his silver cigarette case. Pretty cool huh? Anyway, it sucks that he’s dead and I thought he deserved more than just a blip on the news.

Christopher Reeve, best known for his role as Superman, passed away yesterday at the age of 52.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Superman character, but I have to admit that Reeve did a good job of bringing him to life and making him believable—at least for the first two movies before the series took a turn for the ridiculous. Reeve’s later advocacy for stem cell research after the accident that left him paralyzed is what really made him a hero, though.

  For the past two days 80% of the channels I get have been running tributes to that most beloved of Presidents, Ronald Reagan. I am actually restraining my hand not to put down in words just how much I reviled him and why, I spent much of yesterday working some of that venom out of my system while contributing eulogies to other blogs. Reagan was only marginally less vile than Bush II in so far as when he was feeding you crap he managed to spread it out thin and got all the lumps out so it went down smooth, even if you ended up gagging on the flavor. Our dear baby Bush serves it up nugget-style straight out of whatever special interest group or contributor he is currently sucking up to. Everything else about their politics is exactly the same.

  Before I finally made it to bed this morning an idea for a t-shirt and/or bumper sticker suddenly came to me, call it the atheist version of divine inspiration. I wonder though if this is too soon considering that a Republican saint still lies in state? Even though I detested the politician I do have sympathies for the family during this time because he was a human being who, I have to believe, had some good qualities. Besides, the idea was not NECESSARILY directed at Rayguns passing (though it will probably be assumed that it was) it just seemed like a clever bit of text to underscore the Bush environmental failings in an election year. And to take a cheap shot at Republican politics in general.

“Old Republicans never die, they just leach into the ground water to poison future generations”.

  On the back I see a portrait of Bush with a list of his environmental record like concert dates (if there is enough room). On second thought maybe it is too subtle.

There’s an interesting article on MSN Money about the Top-earning dead celebrities of 2003. Seems Elvis leads the pack of rotting famous people who still manage to crank out the bucks for their estates for the third year in a row. The complete top 10 list is as follows:

1. Elvis Presley - 40 Million
2. Charles Schulz - 32 Million
3. J.R.R. Tolkien - 22 Million
4. John Lennon - 19 Million
5. George Harrison - 16 Million
6. Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel - 16 Million
7. Dale Earnhardt - 15 Million
8. Tupac Shakur - 12 Million
9. Bob Marley - 9 Million
10. Marilyn Monroe - 8 Million

Meanwhile I continue to search for that ever elusive winning lottery ticket.

The man who played Tim Allen’s wisdom dispensing neighbor on the long running Home Improvement has passed away from lung cancer.

Not a good day for celebrities. While George Plimpton is better known to most folks as the author of Paper Lion, among other books, I will always remember him as the official pitchman for the Mattel Intelivision.

Looks like dieing of a heart attack at the age of 54 is a developing trend in the entertainment business. Robert Palmer passed away after returning from the United Kingdom. It was probably his addiction to love that did him in.

OK, that was a bad pun. I’m sorry.

So who the hell is Jane Barbe? She’s one of those people you didn’t know you knew. If you ever dialed a phone number that was disconnected or dialed it wrong then there’s a 90% chance you heard her voice and if you ever dialed up time or the weather on your phone then the chance was around 60% that her voice provided you with the info you were seeking. She was the Queen of phone recordings in a career that spanned 40 years.

I took a lot of pics at my friend Bill’s funeral visitations at the request of both family and friends. I also took several pictures from the wake immediately following the funeral. In all there are over 60 pictures totaling up to about 18 and a half megabytes. My intent is to upload some of the best pics to the memorial gallery I set up for Bill once I touch them up a bit, but I know a lot of friends and family would like to have all of the pictures I took instead of just a select few. So I’ve uploaded a zip file containing every picture to my site. My digital camera isn’t the world’s greatest, but I still think many of the pics turned out pretty good. To get it just click here to download it.