27 July 02025: An Inspiring Achievement
Celebrity Deathwatch (It's been a busy week): Malcolm-Jamal Warner: 14 emails. Ozzy Osbourne: 14. Hulk Hogan: 11. Chuck Mangione: 2. Arnold Palacios, governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands: 2. (The second one was updating the first one; they were from the same source.) Tom Lehrer , whose impact on my life exceeded all of the others combined by several orders of magnitude: 0. What I find very interesting about Tom's online obituaries is that the comment sections are virtually unanimous in mourning his loss. The first three folks above have some commenters who, while not exactly taking glee from their deaths, seem at least a little pleased in a "got what he deserved" kind of way. (In the case of M-JW, it seems to be linked to his sort-of defense of Bill Cosby a while back.) That's not the case with Lehrer. The I'net seems to be experiencing universal bereavement, as he described in "We Will All Go Together When ...