Old George Is Up On the Roof

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death! What's that--a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards.

You should die first, get it out of the way.
Then you live in an old-age home.
You get kicked out when you're too young.
You get a gold watch.
You go to work.
You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement.
You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school.
You go to grade school.
You become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities.
You become a little baby, you go back into the womb.
You spend your last nine months floating.
.......and you finish off as an orgasm!

- George Carlin

Comrades, with a heavy heart I must report the death of another American great. Mr. George Carlin has left the building. Bought the farm. Told his last fart joke. Blasphemed his last deity. Or, as the man himself (a committed Frisbeetarian) would say, his frisbee's up on the roof and it ain't coming down. You can cross him out of your address books. Just wait 6 weeks first. (Another favorite hobby of his.)

I'm keeping this light, because that's what George did. (I would never say "that's what he would have wanted," because he would have skinned me alive and fed me to the Jesus-freaks if I did.) In fact, I'm reticent to even use a cliché like "Rest in Peace" because he'd have questioned that too ("How the hell else is someone supposed to rest??? Excitedly???")

That's what he did: questioned things. He examined, dissected, deconstructed, learned and of course, mocked. He could identify the most amazing discoveries in the most inane of topics:

• "Why is the man (or woman) who invests all your money called a broker?"
• "If a pig loses its voice, is it disgruntled?"
• "If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?"
• "What if there were no hypothetical questions?"

Needless to say ("Then why say it???"), George will be missed. Very few people in the world probably knew him personally, but everyone knew him to a degree, because he left it all on the stage. You knew the way he thought, the lengths to which he'd go to make a joke, and you've probably got at least 2 or 3 favorite jokes of his bouncing around in your skull at any given point during the day. As the man said, you are all diseased! But your disease is an ability to laugh at the world's absurdity, thanks in no small part to this demented genius.

So George, although it pains me to write this, we'll miss you, but we'll leave that frisbee on the roof, right where it is. It was some throw that got it up there, that's for sure.

To all the rest of you, I leave you with the closest thing to a blessing that George would ever voice:

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.


Here's a few more words of wisdom from the man himself:

On Death:


On Religion:


On the Seven Words You can Never Say on Television:

Tim Russert, You Will Be Missed

Tonight a giant in the world of news media passed away: Tim Russert, longtime host of "Meet the Press" and a major force in the NBC News family. Tim apparently died of a heart attack, at the age of 58, just this evening, after returning from a trip to Italy with this family.


I'm truly at a loss for words. I'll never forget watching Tim report the news and opinions of the world during the 2000 election, the tragedy of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the entire epic of the Iraq war, and most recently, the 2008 primary campaign. He was, in my eyes, the pinnacle of what a news journalist should be: informed, intuitive, patient and persistent. I learned more about the world by watching Tim Russert explain it to me.

I'm truly upset by this news - the world has suffered a great loss this evening.

Here is a nice tribute that NBC put together for Tim, which barely scratches the surface of this absolute titan:

YES WE CAN.

Dear Ledgers,

I haven't written in a while. I've been busy, distracted and otherwise occupied. But on the evening of such auspicious news, I'll make an exception.

Nice work, America. On to November!

Namasté,
D'Artagnan

PS - Please enjoy this old timey number from another fellow American: