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.