New and Improved Celebrity Death Pool 2005

[SlaveNoMore]

LessinSF
Most importantly of all, though, is that he was funny. Fall down, side-splitting laughter that you wanted to share with your friends. You lent his books out. You quoted them. And you wanted to have the opening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas memorized, and few writers ever evoke that kind of response:

This I'll wholeheartedly agree with.

Originally posted by LessinSF
There are few writers that I have enjoyed more over time, despite some of his later ramblings, and few writers that probably had a greater effect on me, hence the avatar. Even his later ramblings (such as his column for the SF Examiner in the '80s) would sometimes have incredible bon mots of insight and evocative prose. See also, "The Curse of Lono."

He unrelentingly told it like he thought it was, right or wrong, and he had no problem ramping up the hyperbole and polemic to make his point. Moreover, he was willing to risk personal opprobrium by talking about his own foibles. He made it ok tio admit that you like mushrooms, acid, pot, and booze, and that you thought you would like mescaline if you could find any, and adrenochrome if it was real. (Although, my experience with ether sucked.) Further, how many people are willing to be beat up by the Hells Angels in order to get the story right? Not Tom Wolfe. Not Norman Mailer. Not Gabriel Vasuqez fucking Hughes (or whatever his name is).

Most importantly of all, though, is that he was funny. Fall down, side-splitting laughter that you wanted to share with your friends. You lent his books out. You quoted them. And you wanted to have the opening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas memorized, and few writers ever evoke that kind of response:

"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. But the only thing that worried me was the ether. There is nothing more irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we would be getting into that rotten stuff sooner or later."

Concur, and while Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is one of my favorite books, I don't think HST would have written "I am Charlotte Rampling" or whatever.

I used to buy all of his books but I though that he really started to suck in the nineties (never read his memoir) and stopped reading him after the Fear and Loathing Reagan or a book or two after. But beinga world class bedshitter, I always fly the Zoo Plane.

I wonder if he shot himself in honor of Hemingway?

[megaloman]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Former Dolphins punter Reggie Roby, dead at 43.

I hate this shit and they come in 3s. first Reggie White, now Reggie Roby. Reggie Jackson better bunker down with his docter for a while, til the storm blows over.

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Paigow,

Maybe I was wrong to use "right." He did claim Kerry and McGovern'd win their election races. There are only so many synonyms for honest. I remain rather Caulfield-esque, even in my advancing age, and HST called out the "phonies," so I liked his voice.

Whilst whoring as I do, reveling in dishonest horseshit day in day out, it's just nice to read an honest voice.

Fuck it. I'm done with it,
SD

Don't worry honey, it wasn't me. You may vent and adulate all you want. Come to momma. Just spare me the Caulfield shit.

[megaloman]

Originally posted by LessinSF
You quoted them. And you wanted to have the opening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas memorized, and few writers ever evoke that kind of response:

"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline,......

I have some appreciation of the 20/20 hindsight longings of those too young to have been on the front lines of the cultural revolution for the libertine excess of that quote, but in a nod towards appreciating the timeless, I would take the following as the best first lines of a book:

"IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Reading the latter reduces Thompson's writing to something that one might find on a bathroom stall, albeit the bathroom stall of an honors HS or that school from FAME or someplace like that.

Dickens represents eternal literary excellence, HST a free-spirited existentialist's POV from a brief moment in the sun. I admit to enjoying Uncle Duke's irreverant wit when I was a youth, but with each passing year I find myself turning back to the likes of Dickens in lieu of the incoherent drug-addled muses of my schoolboy days.

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by megaloman
Dickens represents eternal literary excellence, HST a free-spirited existentialist's POV from a brief moment in the sun. I admit to enjoying Uncle Duke's irreverant wit when I was a youth, but with each passing year I find myself turning back to the likes of Dickens in lieu of the incoherent drug-addled muses of my schoolboy days.

Atticus?

Originally posted by Gattigap
Atticus?

YOu should have kept the part referring to the bedshitting (or cultural excesses) to really drive this joke home .

[LessinSF]

Originally posted by megaloman
[Praise for Dickens, and a Tale of Two Cities in particular.]

Most socks go on ignore eventually, but you just hastened your journey. I'm not sure whether Dickens or Steinbeck is worse. Both are execrable. To prove my point, I would read Austen over either. Blech.

[megaloman]

Originally posted by LessinSF
Most socks go on ignore eventually, but you just hastened your journey. I'm not sure whether Dickens or Steinbeck is worse. Both are execrable. To prove my point, I would read Austen over either. Blech.

Ignore away, but I would suggest bookmarking this post and re-reading it in 30 years. In any place other than the old babyboomers retirement home, the mention of HST will evoke a universal "who?", while the mention of Dickens, or for that matter Austen will resonate as vibrantly as they do today.

HST, while mildly entertaining, was a generational chimera, destined to flame out as a bitter memory of a bygone and irrelevantly failed counterculture movement. Even he was aware of his team's ultimate loss and his own growing irrelevance and he responded with the typical gracelessly self-absorbed bitterness and ad hominen hatred of his 60s ilk (an affectation that your post mimics brilliantly-perhaps you should move to NewYork with the rest of the narcisstic CotUers). He is no better than Ward Churchill. Just older. And deader.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
This I'll wholeheartedly agree with.

3.

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by megaloman
Ignore away, but I would suggest bookmarking this post and re-reading it in 30 years. In any place other than the old babyboomers retirement home, the mention of HST will evoke a universal "who?", while the mention of Dickens, or for that matter Austen will resonate as vibrantly as they do today.

I would 2 this, but I've never read a single page of HST. Or Austen. Primarily because the people who recommended each to me in college made such horrendously poor decisions in their respective personal lives at the time that I assumed they were incapable of judging good and bad.

Rebus sic stantibus.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
I would 2 this, but I've never read a single page of HST. Or Austen. Primarily because the people who recommended each to me in college made such horrendously poor decisions in their respective personal lives at the time that I assumed they were incapable of judging good and bad.

Rebus sic stantibus.

If all you took away from HST was the drugs and the absurd stories, you missed the point. You really missed the point.

I've read a wall of books in my life but only one voice stood apart. His prose was like a fucking sledgehammer. He never gets credit for the way he made the fucking words MOVE across the page. No other writer flat out exhausted the reader like Thompson did. F&LinLV is not by far even close to his best book, or his finest work. For that, you should flip through The Great Shark Hunt and read "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved."

To the stupid cur who wrote that HST was the poster boy for a failed counter culture movement, you're right. He bought into a lifestyle that's unpopular. But unlike you, you smug little shit, posting on a chat board while you suck ass at your little job to pay for your little life, he did things his own way. You and I - we never did that. Our lives aren't our own. Maybe HST was a sad charicature in his old age. But what are you? I mean, really, what talent did you flash upon the big screen? What set you apart from the crowd? You're a fucking dime a dozen lawyer. Where are you to stand in judgment? You're just another suit - dead in 70 years. You won't even be remembered by anyone other than your goddamned family. What was the grand point of your existence? You may as well have been a weed. You'll levae nothing but issue, who, if they learn from you, will lead equally insignificant lives. Another upper middle class "striver," thinking you've got it made in the shade. Fool.

I may be no better ultimately, but I admit it. You don't want to respect anyone who lived on his own terms because it makes you confront the fact that you don't.

Now, shred me. Go ahead. Call me a crazy fucking idealist, an immature lunatic, a pompous arse. You have to, don't you? You have to reinforce the facade that you're living the American Dream, don't you. Keep kidding yourself.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
To the stupid cur who wrote that HST was the poster boy for a failed counter culture movement, you're right. He bought into a lifestyle that's unpopular. But unlike you, you smug little shit, posting on a chat board while you suck ass at your little job to pay for your little life, he did things his own way. You and I - we never did that. Our lives aren't our own. Maybe HST was a sad charicature in his old age. But what are you? I mean, really, what talent did you flash upon the big screen? What set you apart from the crowd? You're a fucking dime a dozen lawyer. Where are you to stand in judgment?

I was almost on jeopardy..

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by megaloman
I have some appreciation of the 20/20 hindsight longings of those too young to have been on the front lines of the cultural revolution for the libertine excess of that quote, but in a nod towards appreciating the timeless, I would take the following as the best first lines of a book:

"IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Reading the latter reduces Thompson's writing to something that one might find on a bathroom stall, albeit the bathroom stall of an honors HS or that school from FAME or someplace like that.

Dickens represents eternal literary excellence, HST a free-spirited existentialist's POV from a brief moment in the sun. I admit to enjoying Uncle Duke's irreverant wit when I was a youth, but with each passing year I find myself turning back to the likes of Dickens in lieu of the incoherent drug-addled muses of my schoolboy days.

Dickens? What are you, in fucking ninth grade? His shit is as dated as Thompson's will be in 100 years.

How 'bout Goodbye Mr. Chips or Last of the Mohicans? Are you fucking citing to your high school Summer reading list?

[megaloman]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Dickens? What are you, in fucking ninth grade? His shit is as dated as Thompson's will be in 100 years.

How 'bout Goodbye Mr. Chips or Last of the Mohicans? Are you fucking citing to your high school Summer reading list?

Well done sir, assuming you are a product of our nation’s esteemed union controlled education system I suggest you volunteer to be the poster boy for home schooling. A symbolic cautionary warning to anyone who would dare send their children to an outside school.

Comparing a third rate drug addled psychotic hack to one of the greatest writers in history, a man whose skills at character development and attention to detail were matched by few to none is an exercise in stupidity, but at a base level, HST lived a life of amorality and shined as a beacon for rresponsibility and the liberal destruction of American values for many dunderheaded youth (like you) to myopically follow. Dickens on the other hand lived an exemplary life in letters as a man of morality and faith. His writing illustrated a firm grasp of the concept that personal choice in a life is important and choice has consequence. A lesson modern day society needs to relearn.

Unfortunately PC loonies like you and other the HST dilettantish acolytes are more concerned with tearing down the foundations of our rich moral cultural heritage in the name of sex, drugs and moral relativism.

Physician, heal thyself.