Q: How am I taking Charlton Heston's gun?

A:

R.I.P.: Charlton Heston (1923-2008).

Q: Is the free world's most loathed enemy finally dead?

A: I just received a phone call from my close personal friend Fidel Castro, who is reporting to T.A.M.S.Y. exclusively that Perez Hilton is dead.

The official announcement will be made sometime in the next 65 years.

Everyone in Los Angeles, please be mindful of each other's flaws, and keep your cocaine intake below .05 grams.

UPDATE: Fidel just texted me this photo:

Q: Why did You take my adorable, loving kitten from me in the prime of her youth?

A: Leave Your answer in the comments. Thanks.

Oh, try to keep the parables to a minimum.

Q: Anybody seen a knight pass this way? I saw him playing chess with Death yesterday.

Ingmar Bergman: "You sunk my battleship."

A: Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman — the auteur behind many brilliant classic films you have not seen — has expired at 89. His daughter reports he died peacefully, presumably following a game of chess with an eerie hooded figure on a dark, austere landscape. From the obit:

In Europe, movie directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut helped break visual and narrative rules, but Mr. Bergman stood out for dreamy and often disturbingly psychological films that expressed emotional isolation and modern spiritual crisis.

Women were especially prominent in Mr. Bergman's films and not as cardboard heroines. Confused by their doubts and desires, sometimes entirely driven by their passions, Mr. Bergman's female characters usually stood on the brink of mental collapse. Meanwhile, his men were often hapless bystanders, incapable of understanding their own lives, much less those of anyone around them.

"The people in my films are exactly like myself -- creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking," Mr. Bergman once said. "Mostly they're body, with a little hollow for the soul."

To Mr. Bergman, solace was only possible through erotic and intellectual connections, but this was complicated when people cloak their true emotions...

Intriguing. It entices me to take my Criterion Edition of The Seventh Seal out of its Gatsbyesque plastic wrap one of these days. Until now, I only owned it so artsy girls would think I possess a vast and mysterious intellect.

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On a related note, I have recently discovered, and become totally obsessed with, Scott Walker's 1969 album Scott 4. One of the best tracks is the Bergman-inspired, Spanish-flavored opener.

Scott Walker
The Seventh Seal

Scott 4, 1969

Sonically, it makes a nice companion to another song I've been way into lately, the White Stripes' "Conquest". And of course I identify with the mysterious and intellectually vast lyrics.

Q: The most shocking fictional murder of 2007 not to involve Parepin?

BREAKING: Herbert F. Kornfeld, beloved Onion columnist, dead at 34.

Q: And is it not thus the perfect metaphor for life?

Ash-tronauts: That's one giant leap for man, one small step for mankind.

A: The late James Doohan, who portrayed Scotty on Star Trek, today had his ashes blasted into space, temporarily, by Houston-based Space Services Inc.

REUTERS: "The company charges $495 to send a portion of a person's ashes into suborbital space... Capsules containing the ashes are retrieved, mounted on plaques and given back to relatives."

Huh. That seems like an awful lot of energy and effort to devote to a journey that, by the end, takes you nowhere.

Q: David Halberstam: Journalist...OR WAS HE!?

A: That's just what the Germans want you to believe!

INSIDEBAYAREA.COM: Reputed Journalist Killed in Crash

Okay, let's do our friends over at insidebayarea.com a favor and brush up on some vocab.

Reputed: putative: commonly put forth or accepted as true on inconclusive grounds; "the foundling's putative father"; "the reputed (or purported) author of the book"; "the supposed date of birth".

Saying David Halberstam was a "reputed journalist" suggests that his status as a journalist is in question. It's like saying, "Alleged Former President of Russia Dies of Heart Failure". It only makes sense if InsideBayArea hates David Halberstam.

(Which would be unthinkable, since Halberstam was one of the great truth-tellers in an age of "inoperative" statements, and a superlative chronicler of sports in an age of dumb white guys who don't know a goddamned thing about sports. His sudden accidental death is unquestionably tragic.)

Reputed journalist David Halberstam, left, allegedly wore glasses while reporting from what he claimed was the Mekong Delta.

A certain unnamed sexy teenage friend of mine suggests that the copy editor here meant to use the adjective "reputed" as a form of the noun "repute," "the state of being held in high esteem and honor." But you can't just go around turning nouns into adjectives! IT WOULD BE MASS CHAOS!!!

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KNBC: Police Kill Reputed Gang Member in Shootout

Alas, he was among our most esteemed Crips.

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MORE ON DAVID HALBERSTAM:

• A Skeptical Vietnam Voice Still Echoes in the Fog of Iraq [NYT]
• The Salon Interview: David Halberstam
• Halberstam on Journalism [NYT]
• Halberstam talks to Steve Inskeep about the parallels between today and the Vietnam era [NPR]
• Interview: Halberstam's Hit Streak Continues [Powells]
• The Best and the Brightest and other books by David Halberstam [Amazon]

Q: Does someone still love you, Boris Yeltsin?

Yeah, I know Russians don't drink Absolut. Just go with it.

A: I sort of hate this band (sorry, greater blogging community), but what the hell. It's a special occasion.

Someone Still Loves You
Boris Yeltsin
"Oregon Girl"
Broom, 2006

"Oregon Girl" once appeared on The O.C. It is perhaps the least distasteful song on the band's much bloggihooed debut album, Broom, which you can buy here, or whatever.

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So hey, former president of Russia Boris Yeltsin is dead at 76. My condolences go out to anybody who still loved him.

Yeltsin will go down in history as Russia's first democratically elected leader evs, and the country's most politically progressive and least dictatorial since, oh, the guy who came immediately before him. He drank a lot of vodka, he killed a lot of Chechnyans, he drank a lot more vodka, he fixed a bunch of things, he fucked up a bunch of things, he resigned when everyone was distracted by Y2K terror, he drank a lot of vodka and he generally left Americans confused as to whether they were supposed to like him.

We thought he seemed like a swell guy — he never threatened to crush us, and he was always smiling and waving friendly hand signals.


At least, I think they were friendly hand signals. It's a fine line between the peace sign and "I'll take two vodkas."

One thing we can never take away from Mr. Yeltsin is his proving to the Western world that Russians named Boris aren't all bumbling caricatures who hang out with women named Natasha.


Some of them, we learned, hang out with women named Naina.

Ah, but Boris, comrade — I keed, I keed. I'm sure it couldn't have been easy, the whole trying to build a newly de-Commied nation of 140 million from the ground up thing. Your administration may have been riddled with corruption and confusion, but old Soviet habits die hard, I'm sure. Hell, just look at the dude running things now.

POSTSCRIPT: Further reading...

• Yeltsin Factoids [Reuters]
• Comments on his passing from world leaders [Guardian]
• Comments on his passing from crazy CNN viewers [CNN]
• "Yeltsin known for gaffes, off-colour jokes" [Reuters/ABC]

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PREVIOUSLY IN OBITS: Don Ho, shocker of monkeys.

Q: How does the Bush administration define loyalty?

A: The Voice reports on some of the criteria employed by Karl Rove and the Bush White House in choosing, and weeding out, U.S. Attorneys.

Of course, as with candidates for any W.-appointed gig, inexperience is forgivable so long as you're "loyal." But loyalty, as defined by Alberto Gonzales and Team Dubya, isn't just a matter of being Republican or targeting Dems; it's also a willingness to implement administration dogma into the justice system, with a shoehorn if necessary.

Drink the Kool Aid, man: Karl Rove's Just-Us Department

For Roslynn Mauskopf, one of New York's two U.S. Attorneys, keeping the White House's love has been pretty simple. Like they say in Sin City, sometimes standing up for your friends means killing a whole lot of people.

While Mauskopf did not score well on the gun, immigration, and public corruption standards that the DOJ claims it uses to evaluate prosecutors, she was at the top of the charts by a standard the department has not acknowledged that it employs: enthusiasm for the death penalty. Her office has sought the death penalty against at least 16 defendants...The judge in one of those cases called the decision to seek the death penalty "absurd," just as another judge declared in a 2004 case that he was "deeply troubled" by the government's death penalty application.

The attorney general, not Mauskopf, makes the final decision in death penalty cases, acting on the recommendation of the U.S. Attorney. But Mauskopf's aggressive support of the Bush efforts to "federalize the death penalty" has helped make New York one of the three states with the most cases. The use of these cases as a DOJ measure of U.S. Attorney performance became clear in a department e-mail that derided one of the dismissed U.S. Attorneys for expressing "differences of opinion about when to seek the death penalty." The Los Angeles Times reported that three of the fired eight disagreed with Justice on capital cases.

Mauskopf's hard-on for tax-sponsored executions isn't lost on the White House, and her loyalty is already paying dividends: She's currently a nominee for federal judge — a lifetime appointment. Bush and Rove may be out of the White House soon, but unfortunately for the justice system, their heckova-jobisms will linger for decades.

Q: And you thought it was hard out there for a pimp?

A: Just try being a ho!

It was bad enough when it was just the nappy-headed hos getting all laughed at by the racist core of corporate media. But if there's anything worse than a moderately popular morning disc jockey making an offhanded derogatory comment about you, it's death.

So as rough of a week it's been for continental hos, it's been even rougher for the Pacific Islander Hos. By which I mean the Don Hos. By which I mean Don Ho has died.

Ho down: Bad week for guys named Don, hos and Don Ho

Via the Washington Post:

Don Ho, the entertainer whose vivid shirts, baritone voice and easygoing manner came to symbolize his native Hawaii to millions of visitors, died last night. He was 76.

Ho, who had performed steadily since the 1960s and could be found several nights a week performing at a Waikiki hotel, suffered a heart attack, Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann told the Honolulu Advertiser.

It's like I've said a thousand times before, down-low hos always come in twos. And by "a thousand times before," I of course mean "whenever I'm calling for prostitutes." By which I of course mean several hundred times before. And if you're wondering why I always ask for two, it's because I order prostitutes from Little Caesar's.

Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right, a man has died. Have some respect, for God's sake. Interesting side note to Mr. Ho's obit:

In recent years, he had heart problems and underwent experimental stem cell treatments in Thailand in December 2005.

He told reporters that he had scarcely been able to walk and would have been finished without the procedure, which reportedly involved injecting cells from his blood into his weakened heart. He was said to have learned about it on the Internet and said it was his "last hope."

Tune in to Rush Limbaugh on Monday, when Rush will claim than Don Ho is exaggerating the effects of death. In other news, President Bush is an idiot.

Q: What do Don Imus and Kurt Vonnegut have in common?

A: They're both famous Americans! Also:

• Several thousand consecutive bad hair days.
• Imus was a champion of radio aired during breakfast; Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions.
• Recent career setbacks.
• Black humor.

Q: How did Kurt Vonnegut die?

A: The official word is that Kurt Vonnegut died of "suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago." T.A.M.S.Y. suspect this is all an allegorically minded cover, and that he actually died of disgust.

Either that, or he simply succumbed to superfluousness, having suddenly discovered the world around him to be even more preposterous than he could ever have conceived of in a novel.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut (1922—2007).

Q: Will rhymes that keep their secrets unfold behind the clouds?

A: For a few years there, I was very frightened of my own impending death. Not that I had a sense it was going to happen in the near future, or suddenly and without warning, even though I knew it might. Just the idea that it would happen at all. I was panicked by the concept of the finite, or our days being numbered, of the inevitable countdown that was part of every day of earth.

Most of all, I was very worried about who would maintain this blog, and whether my death would thus lead to the formation of a suicide cult six billion strong.

But then I got to thinking about how far we'd come in such a short period of time. A hundred years ago, who'd have known that one could soon travel 'round the globe in a matter of hours? Twenty years from now, who would have thought it'd be possible that we'd today be able to carry the entire Beatles, Rolling Stones and Elvis catalog on a metallic square smaller than a credit card? Think of the recent advancements in medical possibility: the Tommy John surgeries performed, the tiny cameras stuck into our orifices, the whatever else the medical industry is capable of these days.

And suddenly I realized something: All of these things seem commonplace now, and yet not too long ago, they would have appeared as unbelievable as immortality.

And then I read an article in an airline magazine about the scientific pursuit of immortality, and how it sought to find an explanation for why our cells get old and die. Because if you could create a means by which those cells regenerated themselves (for instance, tiny robotic cells replacing the natural ones or what have you), human beings wouldn't have to age or even die.

The only things in life that are certain are death and taxes, and possibly only taxes, and possibly not even taxes. Nothing is beyond the range of human possibility, and it was upon this belief that I have chosen to base my deluded bliss.

So when I saw this story on Digg, "If You're Alive in 20 years, you may be able to Live Forever," the only thing that struck me as unusual was that the person who posted it does not seem to understand the concept of capitalization. Granted, I have barely skimmed the headlines of the attached article — Human Immortality: A Scientific Reality? — nor do I plan to read it, as I'm sure it doesn't make a bit of goddamned sense.

Because it doesn't even matter. Maybe the key to immortality is not in the tiny robotic cells, or whatever else is in that article. Maybe it's a matter of mapping the human brain, and finding a way to back-up its contents like a hard drive. Or maybe time and space and energy and matter are themselves the hard drive; maybe we've left an indelible mark upon reality that the scientists of five hundred years from now will be able to trace and recreate in a petri dish, where we will all live once more. Or maybe we're all going to heaven. Whatever. It doesn't even matter how. It doesn't even matter if. It only matters that you decide death does not actually exist.

And you might say, But Dean, that doesn't make sense. You're living in a fantasy world.

To which I respond, Shhhhhhh. Don't wake the baby. The baby is sleeping. The baby is sleeping, and dreaming of a rainbow. And there upon the rainbow is the answer to our neverending story.



Oh, but just for the record, the guy who say that we shouldn't have to pay taxes just because it's not in the Constitution or whatever is obviously a crazy person.

Q: How are we dealing with Anna Nicole Smith's death?

A: Earlier this week, I lamented the fact that so many people were trying to make themselves believe Anna Nicole Smith hadn't died at all. So I'm relieved to report that I'm no longer receiving many Google hits for "Anna Nicole Smith alive". The first step is acceptance!

The next step is, of course, hosting a séance.


I tried calling her myself, but St. Peter said she was in the bath.

Q: Is Anna Nicole Smith our generation's Elvis?

A: Aside from the struggles with drug abuse and weight fluctuation, dead sex symbols Anna Nicole and Elvis might have something new in common: not being dead.

Or more specifically, crazy people thinking they're not dead. That's the impression I get from T.A.M.S.Y.'s newly most popular Google hit: anna nicole smith alive.

Both Smith and Presley famously enjoyed phoenix-esque resurgences, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised if America's still waiting for the most unlikely Comeback Special yet. A nation can dream, can't it?

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RELATED: Thanks to you, beloved readers, for making last week T.A.M.S.Y.'s second-most-visited, most-commented-on week ever. At this rate of ad-revenue growth, I'm certain I'll be able to retire comfortably by 2044.

RELATED #2: As I finished writing that, I received an email saying I'm one of the finalists for my most recent submission to Overheard in New York's ongoing headline contest. I can't even remember what my entry was, but suffice to say it was probably disgusting.

Anyway: Welcome, OiNY readers! Please enjoy your time here, and For Fuck's Sake, Buy Some Wine^TM.¹

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¹ This message brought to you by Wine®. Wine^®: It Gets You Drunk^TM.

Q: Is Anna Nicole Smith alive?

Anna Nicole Smith, R.I.P.

A: Yikes. No.

UPDATE: Stop defacing her Wikipedia entry, you detachedly ironic bastards.

Q: Is Daniel Stern dead?

A: Lest there be confusion:

Daniel Stern,
actor (Home Alone): Alive.

Daniel Stern,
author (Twice Told Tales: Stories): Dead.

Daniel Stern,
pen name of Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny, Vicomtesse de Flavigny (Histoire de la Révolution de 1848): Banging Franz Liszt in heaven.

For the record, the status of Daniel N. Stern, child psychologist and baby diarist, is unknown. Meanwhile, the Sterns, Boston's indie rock quintet, are alive and well.

PRE-ORDER: A Book for Daniel Stern, a very timely literary tribute to the novelist, short story writer, ex-music mogul, and University of Houston professor who died last week at 79.

Q: But seriously, what the hell is going on with these gas-related disasters and dead birds?

A: I was both amused and slightly frightened by this pair of Wonkette posts Monday, noting that there was a ton of fucked-up shit going on pretty much everywhere in the world, much of it involving natural gas mishaps (slash mercaptan mishaps).

One standout disaster was that of Austin, Texas, where the downtown area had to be shut down as the streets were suddenly littered with the corpses of 60 birds, all dead for no known reason. Which is, you know, a little creepy.

So it was even creepier when the news broke that the same thing was happening around the same time on the other side of the globe, in Esperance, Australia -- except in Esperance, it wasn't just 60 birds. It was, like, all of them. Said local Michelle Crisp, "We literally didn't have any birds left to die."
For some reason, very few media outlets or bloggers seem to be noting the strange connection here.¹ But is anyone else starting to feel like this is the opening 15 minutes to an apocalyptic disaster movie? I'm particularly concerned for my precocious daughter Dakota Fanning, to whom I've never been a very good father.

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While I'm on the subject of weird coincidences: A couple of days ago, these two unrelated, yet totally dueling, stories popped up in my RSS feeder, literally one item apart:

• Black Diamonds Are From Outer Space [Discovery.ca]
• Black Diamonds Are From Inner Cleveland [IRockCleveland]

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¹ Or possibly all of them are talking about it. I'm way behind in my reading.

Q: Why did they execute Saddam Hussein so suddenly?

A: Nouri al-Maliki had Saddam in his office Celebrity Death Pool. He had to work fast, because Jalal Talabani had totally struck gold with James Brown.

RELATED: You have less than 11 hours to submit your 2007 Lee Atwater Invitational Death Pool selections at stiffs.com. The entry fee is $15, for a grand prize of $2,007. Which sounds to me like horrible pot odds, but whatever.

I'm off to Chicago for the night, to wring out '06 and ring in '07. See you suckas next year.

Q: Has Papa got a brand new bag?

A: Yes. But it's a body bag.

James Brown: 'I feel...not so good.'

As you've already heard, James Brown is dead, after succumbing to a five-decade-battle with insolent backing musicians. That's bad news for funk, but good news for the rave scene's L.A. Style, who're enjoying a (first and final) resurgence thanks to the sudden relevance of their 1991 hit, "James Brown Is Dead."


Seriously? This was a hit song? What is wrong with you, early 1990s?

Anyway, just to get that horrible taste of rave out of your mouth, here's my favorite James Brown song.

James Brown - Don't Be a Dropout
Star Time, 1991

Star Time, also from 1991, is one of the greatest box sets of all time. Check it out.

RELATED: Terry Gross ran a nice tribute to the Hardest Working Man in Show Business on Fresh Air today; listen to it here.

OH, ANDBYTHEWAY: Gerald Ford = also dead. Sorry I don't have any mp3s relevant to that. Ford did appear on The Simpsons, but I can't find a picture of it on the Internets.