Obituaries

Damn...that breaks the heart.

Steve Cropper at 84. Probably the greatest soul guitarist ever to live. Co-wrote many of the soul classics of the 60s like (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay, In The Midnight Hour, Green Onions, Knock on Wood etc Oddly enough, later generations probably know him best as the lead guitarist with the Blues Brothers.

After Cropper and the passing of Tom Stoppard a few days ago, it breaks my heart to see so many artistic giants being called to heaven. Pretty soon, we'll just have Keith Richards and the cockroaches as survivors.

I noticed that one.

Oh damn. Tom Stoppard was one of the greatest writers in the English Language. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the funniest plays ever written.

Heads...

Heads...

Heads...

I'm also a big fan of his adapted screenplay for Enigma. His screenplay and John Barry's score really captured the quiet desperation of the British People during the worst parts of WWII.

Sir Tom Stoppard, playwright famed for his wit and depth, dies at 88

Ethan Browne - R.I.P.

Fuzzy zoeller rip

when he was about a year old I put my oldest son on the back of a galapagas turtle at the san diego zoo and the turtle started walking away and i had to grab my son. i wonder if it was the same one

Awww i hate when critters pass.

Internationally recognized reggae artist and actor, Jimmy Cliff, has passed away at 81.

The world is a little less bright, now.

Gramma, a Galapagos tortoise who was known as the Queen of the San Diego Zoo, has died at 141

German cult film actor Udo Kier, 81

Raggae music legend Jimmy Cliff. RIP

"Former NBA and Wake Forest star Rodney Rogers has died at age 54, the university announced Saturday.

Rogers passed away from natural causes related to a spinal cord injury he sustained in 2008, his wife, Faye, said in the announcement.

Rogers played in the NBA for 12 seasons and was named the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year in the 1999-2000 season. Prior to his NBA career, Rogers became a Wake Forest legend in his college days.

"Rodney Rogers, an NBA legend who played 12 years in the league, passed away on November 21, 2025 from natural causes related to the spinal cord injury he sustained on November 28, 2008," Faye Rogers said in a statement."

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Life is fragile and not promised.

He crashed his dirtbike which changed and shortened his life.

After my last car accident, I have started driving slower. There's no rush and I have more time to react with more control.

Mark Cereceda.

We'll revisit this topic in perhaps 3-6 months....

“ Brilliant people can be overcome by emotional means. Even if those emotions come from within.”

Anyone can be overcome by emotion. That’s why we have Law and Science.

Paul Tagliabue, who served as NFL commissioner from 1989 until 2006, died Sunday morning at the age of 84, his family announced.

Tagliabue was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2018. His cause of death is being listed as heart failure complicated by Parkinson's.

"Tough news this AM former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue died this Morning in his Chevy Chase, Maryland home. He was 84," FOX Sports insider Jay Glazer said on X/Twitter. "Apparent cause of death was heart failure complicated by Parkinson’s Disease. He leaves behind wife Chandler, son Drew and daughter Emily. RIP Commissioner Tagliabue."

Originally a lawyer for the NFL, Tagliabue replaced the iconic Pete Rozelle as commissioner and presided over the league for nearly two decades.

For our shared unusual hobby - it is appropriate to note James Watson’s passing - given how much time we expend arranging our exchanging DNA dress rehearsals.

The Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA died on November 7, 2025, in East Northport, NY. Watson, a key figure in molecular biology, is memorialized for his groundbreaking discovery with Francis Crick, while – as noted in earlier posts - also facing renewed discussion of his controversial views on race and gender that damaged his reputation later in his career.

Brilliant people can be overcome by emotional means. Even if those emotions come from within. In his case it was simply a sense of infallibility arising from his celebrity, where people often didn't feel empowered to challenge his wacky ideas. If nobody argues with you, it can be easy to feel like you're always right.

You see this to an extent in a lot of physicians. Others around them - especially laypeople - treat them like they are gods. After a while, a lot of them start to feel like they are. I've butted heads with a lot of MDs/DOs - and even worse - chiropractors - who act like they are so infallible that anyone asking them if they are sure about something - even well outside of their training - is a personal insult.

Sorry about the long post, but I like telling stories, so here are two.

I was hurt in the lab exactly once in my chemistry career. It was only vaguely related to being a chemist- I was trying to un-stuck two pieces of glassware and one broke, causing me to stab myself in the hand. The glassware was pristine clean so it was more similar to a kitchen accident than a chemistry one. Anyway- off to the ER I go. I get four stitches in my hand. The doctor records it as 6 cm.

Um. Dude. I grew up in Canada and I'm a chemist. That's not even 2 cm. This was during the brief phase of my dual career and I knew a bit about medical coding. He was upping the size of the wound to get paid more. i.e. health care fraud. I laughed "that's not 6 cm". This guy flipped his shit on me. "Yes it is. Centimeters are really small. Are you a doctor? What do YOU know?". Am I a doctor? Well, in terms of measuring centimeters I'm every bit as much as him. I was so startled i said nothing. I wish I had.

The other one was potentially more serious. My wife has a known allergy to beta lactam antibiotics, although most doctors don't know them by that name. So she just says penicillins and cephalosporins and she is mostly covered. Anyway - she needed antibiotics for some reason and the doctor wrote her a script for I think cefalazolin.

I went back to the doctor and said she was allergic to cephalosporins. He insisted that it wasn't. This was pre-smartphone days so I didn't really know what to do, but he could tell I wasn't happy with his answer. He then said "it's a macrolide tetracycline".

He probably thought he could dazzle me with those words and I'd just leave. Not only do I know what those words mean but I know that anyone who uses both to describe anything is either a bullshitter or doesn't know themselves what they mean. Again, I said nothing, but my facial expression must have given something away. He got agitated and quickly wrote a script for erythromycin (which IS a macrolide) and asked if that made me happy.

Uh. Yeah sort of. At least MY wife won't be given a drug she's allergic to. Hopefully he looked these things up after I left and didn't repeat the mistake with someone else.

Stepping on one’s own dick seems less than brilliant.

I don't have any special knowledge of his later in life controversies that hasn't been widely reported, as alluded to by Ms. GGMM.

But since she didn't fully answer...

In the last 20 years of his life he repeatedly made a lot of claims connecting racial genetics to traits such as intelligence. I'm not sure they could accurately be referred to as eugenics, but they were certainly poorly supported and based upon obsolete ideas, probably leftovers from his youth - bearing in mind he was born in the 1920s.

He's considered a prime example of what is often referred to as Nobel disease, which is where a lauded invididual (usually but not always a scientist) has their ego inflated so heavily by recognition of their genius that they start to not draw distinctions between their own conjectures and proper scientific theory and act like they are experts in fields rather distantly connected to their actual expertise.

Other prime examples whose legacy we continue to deal with are Linus Pauling (who so heavily promoted vitamin c as a cure for everything that bullshit like Emergen-C continues to be widely sold) and Kary Mullis, whose statements about AIDS and viruses contributed heavily to AIDS denialism and, more recently, COVID misinformation.

Does it have to be Mr. Wizard?

Because I remember several times Mr. Watson stepped on his own eugenics espousing dick.

What other ideas? Do tell us Mr. Wizard.

James Watson, of Watson and Crick fame, at age 97.

Well, "fame" as far as chemists go. Nobel prize for correctly solving the structure of DNA.

Also famous for other... um.. ideas. No Nobel for those, though.

Dick “Never Hunt With Me” Cheney