Dead Pool 2025

[Syt]

Nah, he's just pretending. Soon, he'll get up, put his hand to his ears, hear the crowd cheer him on and rise up to vanquish the Undertaker.

 

[jimmy olsen]

Ozzy Osbourne.

Glad he made it for his last gig.

Not really to my taste at all but I very much enjoyed the photos and clips of him at his last gig:


RIP

Warpigs reamins relevant to this day

https://youtu.be/LQUXuQ6Zd9w?si=4PJGGgyc3CIUK0ss

[Savonarola]

RIP Tom Lehrer, he took us on wings of song and helped us forget, for a while, our drab, wretched lives.

[frunk]

RIP Tom Lehrer, he took us on wings of song and helped us forget, for a while, our drab, wretched lives.

RIP Tom Lehrer.  I think we should all pour one out for the inventor of the Jello Shot.  Supposedly he also cited Lobachevsky in one of his recently unclassified papers for the NSA.

[Savonarola]

RIP Tom Lehrer.  I think we should all pour one out for the inventor of the Jello Shot.  Supposedly he also cited Lobachevsky in one of his recently unclassified papers for the NSA.

It would have been better if he hadn't cited him and just used the quote.

[frunk]

RIP Tom Lehrer.  I think we should all pour one out for the inventor of the Jello Shot.  Supposedly he also cited Lobachevsky in one of his recently unclassified papers for the NSA.

It would have been better if he hadn't cited him and just used the quote.

In 1957, while working for the National Security Agency, Lehrer coauthored a paper in which he snuck in the song's line "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" into the reference section as an uncited and unpublished paper by Lobachevsky.

[Savonarola]

RIP Tom Lehrer.  I think we should all pour one out for the inventor of the Jello Shot.  Supposedly he also cited Lobachevsky in one of his recently unclassified papers for the NSA.

It would have been better if he hadn't cited him and just used the quote.

In 1957, while working for the National Security Agency, Lehrer coauthored a paper in which he snuck in the song's line "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" into the reference section as an uncited and unpublished paper by Lobachevsky.

[viper37]

And they say AI is killing research with fake citations?  

[Syt]

I was not familiar with Tom Lehrer, but one of his songs caught my eye - "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", because there's an Austrian song by Georg Kreisler (who had many darkly humorous songs, as are popular in Vienna) of the same title. Kreisler left Austria in '38 and spent time in New York and Harvard around the same time as Lehrer. Still, the Austrian song is different in lyrics and it seems to just be a coincidence (Kreisler's song is more a pastiche of cozy Viennese songs about spending a lovely afternoon in the park with your loved one; another of his songs is "Wie schön wäre Wien ohne Wiener" (how nice would Vienna be without the Viennese) where he fantasizes about the city's population having been eradicated by a disease or similar ).

[Sheilbh]

Very specifically, nichely British, but RIP Allan Ahlberg. Reading this obituary and especially seeing some of these covers really brought back some of the earliest books I read:

Allan Ahlberg obituary: prolific children's author
Mischievous writer, who with his illustrator wife Janet produced more than 150 books including Peepo! and The Jolly Postman, dies aged 87
The Times
Thursday July 31 2025, 6.28pm, The Times

"Back then to Paddington/ Weather wet and mild/ Brand-new mother/ Second-hand child."

This was how the children's poet and writer Allan Ahlberg described the day his adoptive mother collected him from his Croydon orphanage. Born in 1938 to a young single mother unable to cope, Allan, still a baby, then became part of a poor but upright working-class family living in the Black Country town of Oldbury. There were no books — apart from Allan's regular Sunday school prizes to come — and not much conversation. But there was stability, care and affection however sternly administered. He went on to write many lovingly detailed poems on the smells, textures, tastes and toys of his childhood. His only adult book, The Bucket, based on these memories, is a mini-masterpiece of the nostalgic genre.

Aged ten, he discovered he was adopted after being taunted by a fellow pupil passing on comments heard at home. Angry with his parents for keeping this from him, he came to feel something of a cuckoo in the nest, reading avidly and dreaming of becoming a writer rather than watching television with his parents.


Peepo! was a baby's view of the world

His abiding passion for football was not shared by his younger brother Andrew, also adopted. With little else in common, the two never got on and remained separate as adults. Ahlberg eventually appreciated his parents' love and was at his mother's bedside when she died. His father, a gentle, hard-working labourer, died earlier. An affectionate but remote figure, he was described by Ahlberg in a poem as My Invisible Dad.

Leaving Oldbury Grammar School aged 17 with A-level passes in science, he opted for three years of National Service which meant he could send more pay to his mother, no longer working as a house and office cleaner. He was briefly a postman, gravedigger and plumber's mate before deciding aged 22 to overcome his shyness and become a primary school teacher. While at Sunderland Teacher Training College learning his future craft, he met Janet Hall, a talented artist. They married in 1969.

A natural and popular teacher, Ahlberg loved his job. Still too shy herself to take up teaching, Janet illustrated make-and-do junior craft books but longed to try stories instead. When he was ten years into his successful career in the classroom, she asked her husband to write her one. This he did, surprising himself with how easily it came. Determined to do more, he gave up teaching. Many rejection slips were to arrive in the next anxious 18 months before three titles were accepted in one week, all by different publishers.

Burglar Bill, the pick of the bunch, was based on a story Ahlberg had once told his class. It features a benign middle-aged thief who steals everything, including fish and chips, cups of tea and finally, by accident, a baby. Everything ends happily, with Bill now together with Burglar Betty, the baby's mother, returning everything he had previously stolen to start a new life. Janet's watercolour illustrations, firmly outlined in pen or pencil, expertly bring to life favourite details from their joint past. The rounded faces and ready smiles of her characters amply reflect the high good humour of Ahlberg's text.

The illustrations for their next joint effort, Each Peach Pear Plum, won Janet the Kate Greenaway Medal for 1978. Ahlberg's deceptively simple poems here combine simplicity of form with his unique brand of quirky humour. They describe characters from nursery rhymes and fairy stories playing I Spy with each other from page to page, with Janet's luminous illustrations the perfect accompaniment.

This book was later chosen as one of its ten best titles on the award's 50th anniversary. Finding the stories behind nursery rhymes and putting the rhymes into fairy stories worked brilliantly at a time, sadly no longer true, when most children were still familiar with such traditional fare. Its success gave the couple much needed financial security for their future as the most productive and creative husband and wife team yet in British children's literature.

Peepo! was also a bestseller. It affectionately details the typical domestic sights a baby might once have witnessed at a time of tin baths, coal buckets and cluttered front rooms. Told in verse, a circular punched-out hole on the middle of each page gives readers a glimpse of what's to come once they turn over. It is still wartime, with Dad wearing his army uniform as he kisses his baby son good night. Written in about four weeks, it took Janet many more months to get the illustrations right for historical detail. The book came out to ecstatic reviews.


He revisited his childhood in The Boyhood of Burglar Bill

By now there was daughter Jessica, who early on showed great interest in a Mothercare catalogue. Thinking outside the box once again, the couple came up with The Baby's Catalogue, published in 1982. Illustrated pages on a variety of Mums, Dads, Pets, Teas, Prams and other child-friendly entries accompany numerous pictures of five different babies breastfeeding, on their potties, in the bath and otherwise getting on positively with their young lives apart from the moment when one of them is pictured in mid-howl. Fully involved in the publishing and printing process, advising on type size, paper quality, colour reproduction, covers and even binding, the Ahlbergs were now in a position to make sure they were always listened to.


The Jolly Christmas Postman, illustrated by Janet Ahlberg, 1991

Jessica also had a hand in an even greater success. Watching his daughter in her high chair playing with the morning post, pulling out letters and then forcing them back into their envelopes, Ahlberg came up with the idea for The Jolly Postman, or Other People's Letters. This took little time to write but up to three years of experimenting with paper-engineering before it was completed. Real letters in real envelopes stuck onto the page accompany short, easy-rhyming poems which include Goldilocks apologising to the Three Bears and Jack taunting the Giant over his beanstalk exploits. There is also a threatening solicitor's letter written on behalf of Little Red Riding Hood warning off the Big Bad Wolf. Superbly illustrated in full comic vein and selling over six million copies, its sequel The Jolly Christmas Postman won Janet the Kate Greenaway Medal for the second time.

Many more joint publications followed as well as individual efforts, with Ahlberg working with other illustrators including Fritz Wegner and Raymond Briggs. He also brought out two collections of verse, Please Mrs Butler and I Heard it in the Playground, both drawing on his memories of teaching. But their work together stopped in 1994 with Janet's death from breast cancer at 50 years old.

Working through his initially disabling grief, Ahlberg found relief in bringing out Janet's Last Book, a privately printed personal selection from her lifetime of creativity. Going on to work on two books with his daughter Jessica, now also an illustrator, he eventually found happiness again after marrying Vanessa Clarke, formerly his editor at Walker Books. Slim, mild-mannered and boyishly handsome to the end, he is survived by Vanessa, Jessica, two stepdaughters, Saskia and Johanna, and two granddaughters.

In 2014 he declined the Booktrust's Lifetime Achievement Award because it had Amazon as its main sponsor. Moving from Bath to Lewes, East Sussex, to be near his Brighton-based daughter, he still wrote in his shed every day despite the onset of Parkinson's disease. My Brother's Ghost and The Boyhood of Burglar Bill both memorably revisit his childhood, this time in story form. But as in a late poem, there were more times now when "The phone rings/ But never long enough/ For the Slow man."

His readership remained huge. In the Philippa Pearce Lecture given in Cambridge in 2016 he quoted a letter received from Mia, a child aged he guessed about seven. "I love all the books that you make. I really love them all and they are so good. I love them all." She spoke here for all the many other young fans of his over 150 titles.

(George) Allan Ahlberg, children's poet and writer, was born on June 5, 1938. He died on July 29, 2025, aged 87

Although seeing all the covers today, my favourite was definitely Funnybones with the big skeleton, little skeleton and dog skeleton living in the dark dark house down the dark dark street in the dark dark town. Also remember reading his poems in primary school - Please Mrs Butler, Picking Teams.

And I think at the minute when the trend is very much celebrity authored books for kids that, from what I can tell, are variable at best - it's a reminder of the love and care and craft of books for young children.

[Sheilbh]

RIP Terence Stamp

[grumbler]