the deathday party

Noble Prize winner and playwright Harold Pinter, age -2, done up and died today, failing in his life-long attempt to upstage Jesus. Ironically enough, Pinter's work has generally been called Pinteresque, a word coined for Sally Pinter, a plumber's assistant in Detroit. Pinter is best known for being Jewish, 'cause there are so very few of them in the entertainment world. Besides writing a bunch of obscure plays that, despite being fun to act in, are always the most dreadful of stuff to watch, he was likewise a pioneer in poetry that nobody read and crappy screenplays (seriously, has anyone else seen The French Lieutenant's Woman? Even Meryl Streep was subpar.)

In all seriousness, Harold Pinter had a massive influence on the world of pretentious theatre, helping to ensure that untalented actors everywhere can always fall back on forced pauses and surrealism when they are unable to make a conventional plot engaging. Perhaps the thing I like least about him is that his Wikipedia page is so goddamn unnecessarily massive and clearly oozing with uncontrollable fanboy argot. Czesław Miłosz's page is like, two paragraphs, and he won a Noble Prize too. (Though to be fair, he's got a silly name.) I'd also like to point out J.M. Coetzee's page, but only because there's a single quote that has sixteen citations. Sixteen!

And just in case you're curious, my favorite play of his is hands down Krapp's Last Tape, which A.) wasn't actually written by him and B.) also has an absurdly large Wikipedia page! What the hell is wrong with you fucking theatre people! As Shakespeare said, "brevity is the soul of wit, assholes."

Or, you know, something close to that.

this seems somewhat redundant

Edna Parker, age +35, the world's current oldest person, died a few days ago (when I was too lazy to update) of some cause or other. I didn't bother reading past the headline, to be honest, nor am I going to count her towards my tally. It's just been wicked slow this month (unfortunately?), and I thought I'd point out the ridiculousness of keeping track of the world's oldest person since they're basically in a constant state of death; whoever usurped Edna's dubious mantel could well enough be the subject of tomorrow's post, should I not be lazy as a sloth. It just seems kinda silly, is all, this whole cycle of man thing.

In other news, old people look disgusting.

mediocre literature suffers a tremendous blow

Novelist Michael Crichton, age -14, lost round one of his battle with cancer. A rematch has yet to be scheduled.

Crichton is best known as the go-to name when boorish literary folk want to talk about a hack writer (alongside the likes of Tom Clancy and Stephen King). And they're justified in this, because - despite having never read a Crichton book - I can pretty much assume he was garbage. Jurassic Park became a fluffed-up action flick and all his other direct-to-film "novels", steeped as they were in science fiction, were transformed into C-rate flicks (Congo, Timeline, The Andromeda Stain). Being a science fiction writer definitely didn't help his standings in the world-o-pretension, as demonstrated by our chart:

The Ladder of Pretension

~~ Shakespeare
~~ Proust
~~ Some Fancy Classical Novel
~~ Some Fancy Classical Novel You've Never Heard of
~~ Contemporary Literature
~~ Children's Literature
~~ Science Fiction
~~ Spy Fiction (outside of le Carre)
~~ Courtroom Fiction
~~ Horror Fiction
~~ Fantasy (outside of Tolkein)
~~ Romance
~~ Harry Potter

That's pretty low on the totem pole for 'ol Micky C, but at least he's mathematically ahead of people like Jude Deveraux or William F. Buckley Jr. What an accomplishment!

Still, I will throw Crichton a bone. According to his Wikipedia page, when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, Crichton felt that one of his professors was intentionally giving him low grades out of spite so he worked out an arrangement with another professor where he would hand in an essay by George Orwell pretending it was his own. The essay got a B-. That kind of chicanery, my friends, requires some balls. Bully for you, Mick. Bully for you.

and now we play the waiting game

Are you excited? I'm excited. I'm wildly excited. And I'll tell you folks why.

'cause soon, oh so soon, we here at The Joy of Death are going to have a big entry. A huge entry. A Presidential entry. We're going to be looking at the JFK of this century, people, the stuff that legends and Wikipedia pages are made of. Not only is he a champion of the African American community - not only is he the savior of the George Bush dynasty - not only is he young and full of promise - but he's the President of the Fucking United States to boot. How can you not be excited?

But first a word... to the Secret Service. Listen, I'm not happy this guy is going to get picked off in the middle of a huge crowd three years into his first term, a mere week before he planned to announce his bid for re-election. And that's not a slight against Joe Biden, who'll be tossed into this disillusioned America and savaged by the media for failing to meet the hoi polloi's wildly impossible demand for the perfect raceless, classless society they assumed President Obama would have brought to them with a full eight years. Nor will I be pleased thirty years down the line when some PhD publishes a retrospective of the Obama presidency and explains how even if he hadn't died, President Obama never would have been capable of providing this absurd utopia everyone assumed he was capable of in the wake of his demise. None of this will make me happy.

Well, maybe I'll be a little happy, because his death will give me a new entry. And allow me to point out how right I was when I wrote this article.

So yeah, I in no way endorse the untimely death of our forty-forth President. But let's face facts, folks... it's been a rough few decades for the skinheads in America. What big figures have they had the opportunity to off? Al Sharpton? Jesse Jackson? Is that really the best the political world has to offer in the terms of potential assassinations? It's no wonder they've been sitting on their hands since the Doctor; what have they had to work with? But now... now (again, Secret Service, I in no way am part of or have any information regarding any such designs) they have a prime figure to again bring this country to its knees and cause a devastating racial divide.

Anyway, congratulations to America's newest President, Barack (whose first name is underlined by Firefox as a spelling error) Obama.

We'll be waiting.

getting desperate

Okay, first off: this totally doesn't count. Second off: I noticed this news snippet earlier this morning and have been mulling whether to add it or not all day, because that's basically as hectic as one of my days gets. It's been an agonizingly slow month here at The Joy of Death, and I've constantly had to fight myself from reporting "fringe" deaths of Indian film critics and British footballers, these being basically all Wikipedia's recent deaths stub had to offer. So you might be asking, "why cave in to Jennifer Hudson, a chick who has only been in one movie?" Actually, let's elaborate: "why cave in to the death of not even Jennifer Hudson, but Jennifer Hudson's mother, Darnell Donnerson, age -23, and brother, Jason Hudson, age -51, when, I repeat, the chick has only been in one movie?"

It's simple, really. She didn't deserve that Oscar and I wanted everyone to know that. Now keep in mind, I haven't seen Dreamgirls (I = white), so it might not be totally fair of me to comment, but 1.) I eat fairness for breakfast and B.) Rinki Kikuchi was the fucking bomb in Babel (even though the movie sucked). I mean, that chick blew everyone else out of the water. So Jennifer Hudson is a sissy, young black woman who can also sing? Big deal. Rinko was a better actress by about a billion (again, I haven't seen Dreamgirls, but, you know, whatever). If I could say anything to Jennifer Hudson right now it'd be: "yo, sorry about all this shit and all -- like, death is really... um... it blows -- but you're just some flash-in-the-pan hack who'll turn out to be a huge bust in your next movie (hint: you aren't even working on one, you loser) and fade into the oblivion of C-star, celebrity-poker tournaments and unanswerable Oscar trivia questions about who won in what year. So basically fuck you times a billion. Oh, and if you don't like being picked on like this, then I guess you can just go cry to your mommy."


Though on further consideration, maybe I wouldn't add that last part.

do they make newman's own caskets, too?

First off, for those of you unaware, Paul Newman, age +3, was quite the babe magnet back in the day. On top of this, he studied at Yale under Lee Strasberg, served in the military, donated millions upon millions of dollars to charity, co-founded a camp for seriously ill children, managed an impressive career from his home in Connecticut (practically unheard-of), and, lest I forget, was a fucking amazing actor.

So I'm a little conflicted. See, my job here is to trivialize peoples' deaths and all that shit. Because it's fun or something. But Paulie doesn't give me a lot of angles to attack him from.

Unless you consider some of the names of his iconic characters: Butch, Hud, Brick... them some gay names, right, guys? Yeah? Pretty, uh, pretty lame character names you got there, Paul. Maybe you wanna.... not have.... been so gayish.

Totally nailed him with that one.

endnote indeed

Unfortunately Blogspot is giving me a hard time creating footnotes for this post, which I planned on using to shower down a barrage of unnecessary notations for every single world. Alas.




David Foster Wallace, age -34, who was perhaps best known for a 1000+ page novel containing lengthy, sprawling, uncontainable endnotes (Infinite Jest), was found hanged by his wife earlier today. One of the premier young writers of the 90s and early 2000s, Wallace always kinda bugged me. He seemed like the kinda guy who would be smug about their smartness and all the articles they got published in Harpers and blah blah blah. Dude was summa cum laude, postgraduate at Harvard, winner of a bunch of prestigious awards, but it seems to me that the only thing those fancy degrees taught him was how to tie a sturdy rope.

... too soon?

cheaters

The Joy of Death would like to take this opportunity to publicly condemn the experiments being conducted by the Harvard Medical School as we feel it will someday give an unfair advantage to living beings and further confuse an already obscure taxonomy by manipulating the status of non-living substances. Seriously, what happens if they take a -10 dead guy and use their hocus pocus Adobe LiveShop medicine and bring him back to life? IT THROWS OFF THE TALLY!

And while I only read about three sentences of that article -- and understood maybe one of them -- I want to make it perfectly clear that this bloge will not stand by such acrimonious behavior, acrimonious not being the word I wanted to use but am too lazy to grab a thesaurus and find one that makes more sense.

~~~

We would also like to apologize for the delay in postings since re-inception. The Joy of Death eagerly awaits a passing suitable enough for entry in our annals, but unfortunately the recent crop of deceased has been below average. While this bloge has yet to establish a clear definition of worthiness, it should be publicly noted that the likes of Robert Giroux, Anita Page, and Don Gutteridge just don't belong in such a prestigious group. Thank you for understanding.

mr. mustache

Okay, so, I never really liked Peanuts. It was kinda lame. And this isn't even the guy who wrote Peanuts. (Charles "Also Dead" Schultz.) But I don't mind saying -- based entirely on that picture -- that this guy is 1000% awesome. I mean, come on. Look at the mustache!

Anyway, Bill Meléndez, age +11, is the fella who animated Peanuts TV specials. Is that really note-worthy enough for this bloge?

I ask you to check that mustache out one more time. Yeah, he's note-worthy.

(Also, based on the fact that his middle name is Cuauhtemoc, I'm going to assume he's Mayan and put him down for whatever the hell their crazy religion is.)

this one's for you, don

It would take a titan of industry to bring this bloge back to life, and I could think of no one more suitable for such an honor than the incomparable Don LaFontaine, age -18. His words may not speak for himself, but his voice certainly does. Like Kelsey Grammar before him, this man made a career -- a career as impacting as any other big-name Hollywood star -- just by talking in his everyday voice. He's even lazier than a book on tape guy, basically. In honor of his enduring legacy, we bring you a commercial plug-in much rather than the billions upon billions of other, better videos available on YouTube.







For always and forever, Don. For always and forever.



(And for those of you who don't really think this is that big of a deal, try to imagine a world of trailers with guys like this at the helm, filthy germans:)

the tallies

Over/Under Tally

We here at The Joy of Death decided to hold a contest to determine a victor in the age old struggle of men and women against Death. And nothing is fairer than a cold, numerical study. Do establish this contest we first needed a fixed point that could be used as the "average" life expectancy. This over/under for human life was established at eighty years of age. We based this decision on fourteen centuries of study conducted by a team of hermetic monks. The difference between a person's actual death and the over/under is then counted and either added to or subtracted from the overall tally. The objective is to have as high a number as possible (thus indicating strong human longevity).

Don LaFontaine (-18 / -18)
Bill Meléndez (+11 / -7)
David Foster Wallace (-34 / -41)
Paul Newman (+3 / -38)
Michael Crichton (-16 / -54)
Harold Pinter (-2 / -56)
John Updike (-3 / -59)


TALLY TOTAL: -59


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The Religion Tally


As everyone knows, a person's religious affiliation determines what happens to them after death. The amount of faith one has in that affiliation as well as how well that person's deeds correspond to their religious creeds are also factors in the overall niceness of your post-life habitat. And while it's impossible to judge a person's amount of faith by any physical measure with real accuracy, we're not at all beyond counting the total number of human live stock accrued by each of the major religions. After our selected subjects graduate to a higher spiritual education, we make sure to document their religious affiliation to keep in a until-the-end-of-time tally, ultimately aiming to ask which religion is the greatest based entirely on admission. In the case of multiple affiliations (quasi-heathens), we determine whether to count one or both. Atheists are also tallied. When no affiliation is known, it's crudely guessed at based on attributes like facial hair and surname. Also, Catholics and Protestants were lumped together because, well, to guys like me it's basically the same thing.


The Religious Tally Chart

Religion	Total Souls Consumed
Christainity	3
Judaism	2
Maya	1
Unknown	1
Atheism	0
Hinduism	0
LDS	0
Islam	0
Quakerism	0
Scientology	0

Christanity

Don LaFontaine
Michael Crichton
John Updike

Judaism

Paul Newman
Harold Pinter

Maya

Bill Meléndez

Unknown

David Foster Wallace

ignore me#3

IGNORE ME!

about

The Joy of Death started in the winter of 1886 with the death of William Fraser Tolmie, noted surgeon and politician. Upon reviewing the corpse, Dr. Harold Eads was heard to mutter a mild retort, jesting that the pungent odor of Mr. Tolmie's decomposing body was most likely attributed to his massive consumption of cheese (for which he was well known). The callowness and blatant disregard for the timeliness of Mr. Tolmie's passing outraged his widow and remained a black mark on Dr. Eads' otherwise noteworthy reputation.


One-hundred-twenty years later this bloge was founded, thrived, and burned to the ground. Two years after that it was re-established with the demise of Don LaFontaine. And since that time, The Joy of Death has been determined to carry on the spirit of Dr. Harold Eads, denouncing and mocking the recently receased.


The Over/Under


Determined my decades of science and stolen from a Wikipedia article, the given life expectancy of any individual is roughly around eighty years. There is some natural variation depending on country of birth, residence, sex, and various other factors, but eighty seemed like a pretty easy number to remember. This is, in essence, the over/under on human existence, and as such all deaths are measured not in actual age, but age until/surpassing that important eighty-year mark. So someone who lives to be 97 would actually be +17, while someone who passed away at the age of 6 would be an impressive -74. Good going, kid.



The Tallies


Two separate tallies have been established in order to track man and woman's glorious battle against the Reaper. The first is the under/over, wherein all life exterminated after the age of eighty gives bonus points for humanity. Conversely, all life exterminated before the age of eight takes away points. At the end of time whichever side has the most points, humanity or Death, wins.


The other tally tracks the departed's religious affiliation. This way we can see how many of each unique and separate Deity's chosen children have been taken. Again, whichever major religion has the most tally points at the end of time wins. When religious affiliation is either unknown or dual, we make one up.


The Jackpot


Any reference to "The Jackpot" is slang for Heath Ledger, whose death was unfortunately before the time of The Joy of Death and thus not documented in our annals. While we are sad that we missed the opportunity to trivialize his legacy, we remained confident that another, younger, equally talented actor will meet their demise shortly.


A Note on Pronunciation


The proper "blog" is always noticeable pronounced "bloge" due to a speech impediment of mine.


Submissions


If you know of a recently deceased whose passing you'd like trivialized, feel free to contact us and we'll do our best to be of assistance.