Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Or should that be good riddance to bad rubbish? Depends on your voting preferences perhaps. Well, mine are fairly well known.

He died from "...complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease." He had already had one heart transplant in 2012 after a long history of cardiovascular disease.

Aside from masterminding the 2003 war in Iraq with no solid basis in facts, Cheney served as an aide to Richard Nixon, stayed as deputy White House chief of staff under Gerald Ford, then Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush with a unanimous Senate vote of 92-0. He also served six terms as a House member rising to become minority party whip.

I will say some good things about him, surprisingly:
-He softened his views on LGBTQ issues when one of his daughters came out
-He voted for Harris in the 2024 election
-He absolutely loathed our current president, stating “In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said.

“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big. I know it. He knows it, and deep down, I think most Republicans know.”

Amusingly, starting yesterday the Doonesbury reruns on the Washington Post web site began the series of a Walden reunion where the returning grads are dividing themselves in the tent between pro- and anti- Bush supporters. Rather ironic timing.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/04/politics/dick-cheney-death-obit

The Jane Goodall Institute confirmed her death earlier today of natural causes, she was on a speaking tour in California.

What an amazing life and career! She never attended university, instead she completed secretarial school and did odd jobs in London until she visited a friend's family farm in Kenya in 1956. While there, she met archeologist Louis Leakey, who hired her as an assistant and secretary. He had been interested in sending a researcher to study wild chimpanzees in Tanzania and assigned Jane the task in 1960.

Three months into her observations, she saw one "stick a long grass stem into a termite mound, withdraw it, and eat what he’d pulled out. 

“It was so obvious that he was actually using a grass stem as a tool,” Goodall wrote. 

When she cabled Leakey about the discovery, he famously wrote back: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Because of this and other significant findings, she was admitted into the doctoral program at Cambridge in 1961 despite not having an undergraduate degree.

Amongst her honors were "the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II appointed her a dame of the British empire."

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jane-goodall-dead-obituary-1235439125/

At the end of September, Typepad goes dark. And with it, all of the blogs that have been accumulated over the last 22 years.

Interestingly, their front page has buttons for Start Now and Pricing & Sign Up, but they stopped taking new accounts several years ago while reassuring then-current users that the service would continue on. At least until the end of September.

Their Need Help? page has info about the shutdown, including refunds for people who have paid beyond the shutdown date and information on exporting your blog.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/one-time-wordpress-competitor-typepad-ends-its-slide-into-obscurity-by-shutting-down/

Chuck was 84 and passed away in his sleep. The Grammy-winning jazz-man was best known for two numbers, Feels So Good and Bellavia, the latter named after his mother. Feels So Good spent 25 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 and peaked at #4! Mangione also "composed and performed “Give it All You Got,” which was the theme song for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York."

An excellent career. He passed away in his sleep on July 22 at the age of 84. While it may have happened, I never heard of him having any problems with drugs or the law.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/24/entertainment/chuck-mangione-death


Tom Lerher had an amazing life. He was a math prodigy and entered Harvard at the age of 15, completing his Masters at 18. He did not complete his doctorate, preferring to remain a grad student. He taught at various universities throughout his career, mainly settling in Santa Cruz, CA. But he was also an amazing musical political satirist with a very sharp POV. His music career was fairly short, lasting from the '50s through the early '70s, his music remains tremendously popular even though he wrote only 37 songs over 20 years and made only 109 public performances.

He also composed music for The Electric Company and for This Was The Week That Was.

He passed away Saturday at the age of 97. His friend who announced his death 'did not disclose the cause'. I find this an utterly ridiculous statement - LERHER WAS NINTEY-SEVEN! HE WAS BLOODY OLD AND HIS BODY WAS KIND OF TIRED OF KEEPING HIM ALIVE!

One brilliant thing that Lehrer did a few years ago, and I posted about it here, was that he released all of his music to the public domain! Recordings, lyrics, everything! All of it released for the enjoyment of all, forever. I thought it was a truly magnanimous gesture.

I had heard that he said that he stopped making music when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, saying 'There's nothing left to parody.' I don't know if that's true.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/27/entertainment/tom-lehrer-death

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/07/27/2347205/tom-lehrer-satirical-songwriter-and-mathematician-dies-at-age-97

Brian was the last of the three Wilson brothers, Brian played bass, Carl lead guitar and Dennis drums. The other two members of the Beach Boys, Mike Love - a cousin - and Al Jardine, are still alive.

Brian has been in a medical conservatorship for the last year. Trouble with alcohol and drugs probably accelerated things. He met his last wife at a car dealership where she was working, which began a chapter where it was found that Wilson's psychiatrist was exploiting him and his finances, eventually resulting in a restraining order. When his wife died, Wilson entered into a decline, finally culminating in the conservatorship.

There's so much that can be said about The Beach Boys and their influence on music and various groups and musicians, and their being a core for surf/beach music in the '60s. I spent a few hours tonight revising a bunch of my Beach Boys music for my band in Lord of the Rings Online and adding some more songs to my catalog, I think I'll be performing them tomorrow night in an impromptu concert as I need to do some testing on my band as I've been having some system problems.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/brian-wilson-beach-boys-dead-1234810073/

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/brian-wilson-beach-boys-visionary-165711806.html

National Novel Writing Month, held in November, has thrown in the towel and is no more. They put forth the challenge of writing 50,000 words in that month and offered a word count tool to measure your progress and awarded badges for the accomplishment.

However, the last few years have been turbulent, a questionable sponsor came on-board and then a flirtation with AI with a very dubious endorsement by the organization caused a large boycott last year. A general downturn in arts sponsorship over the years, and now no NaNo.

It's possible someone else will come up with a new name and organization, if so, we can only hope they adhere to a stronger code of ethics.

https://gizmodo.com/longtime-writing-community-nanowrimo-shuts-down-after-ai-drama-2000583619

Wow. Now, 95 is an extremely respectable age, but this is a weird one, and I'm just going to quote the Rolling Stone article:

"The actor, his wife of 34 years, Betsy Arakawa, and their dog were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Wednesday, according to Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza. A cause of death was not immediately available, though authorities confirmed there was no indication of foul play.

So I'm guessing either suicide(s) or probably gas leak, the latter being the cause of death of Weird Al Yankovic's parents a few years ago. Pretty tragic, it happened while he was on tour - and he kept the tour going and completed it, but stopped all press interviews after the shows.

His career was just too long and storied to sum up. His first Oscar nomination was playing Clyde's older brother Buck in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), his first win was 1971's The French Connection. The Poseidon Adventure, Superman and Superman II as Lex Luthor, Reds, Mississippi Burning, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the list goes on. For awards: five Oscar nominations (two wins), three Golden Globes (as well as a Cecil B. DeMille Award), and two BAFTAs.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/gene-hackman-obituary-1234810413/

David Lynch passed away today, no cause of death given but it was known he suffered from severe emphysema from years of smoking.

Lynch is best known for bringing us such iconic films as Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, and the Twin Peaks TV series. He also made the first film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, which was quite the spectacle though a miserable box office flop.

The Rolling Stone obit is a very interesting read. He wasn't really my cup of chai, but he was a rather revolutionary film maker and I can respect that even if his films weren't my thing.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/david-lynch-lynch-dead-obituary-1235238117/

Hard to imagine what programming would be like without his contribution to programming languages!

"Kurtz began teaching at Dartmouth upon receiving his PhD. After a few years, he and fellow professor John Kemeny developed the original version of the Dartmouth Timesharing System (DTSS), a method of sharing computer access across a network and a requirement for allowing multiple students access to BASIC."

At the time, there were only professional programming languages, such as assembler, possibly Fortran and RPG, available. They wanted to open the world of computers to students who weren't mathematicians or computer scientists to see what they could learn.

And boy, did they ever!

https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-thomas-e-kurtz-1928-2024/

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/11/20/0528224/thomas-e-kurtz-co-inventor-of-basic-dies-at-96

Melanie, also known as Melanie Safka, was a singer/song writer/musician in the folk, pop, and country genres.

From her Wikipedia page: "Melanie is widely known for the 1971–72 global hit "Brand New Key"; her 1970 version of the Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday"; her composition "What Have They Done to My Song Ma"; and her 1970 international breakthrough hit "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)", which was inspired by her experience of performing at the 1969 Woodstock music festival.[3][4]"

She passed away early this year on January 23 of an unspecified illness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanie_(singer)