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My boss is vacationing in Cabo San Lucas next week. With all the Mexican killings in the news recently, I hope he got a good deal on the room.

¡Olé!

‘Deadliest Catch’ captain Phil Harris dies at age 53

— USATODAY.com

Never saw his TV show but he was great as the voice of Baloo in The Jungle Book!

♫ Look for the (clap) Bare Ne-cess-ities . . . ♫

Say hi to Bing Crosby in hell!

Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a longtime fixture on the House subcommittee that oversees Pentagon spending, died after complications from gallbladder surgery, according to his office. He was 77.

The Democratic congressman recently underwent scheduled laparoscopic surgery at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to remove his gallbladder. The procedure was “routine minimally invasive surgery,” but doctors “hit his intestines,” a source close to the late congressman told CNN.

— CNN.com

OMG I HAD THAT SAME OPERATION I COULD HAVE DIED!!!

On a lighter note, how ironic is it that the president loses a pro-ObamaCare vote due to medical error in a government-run hospital?

Sharks kill man kite-surfing off south Florida

— Reuters

Some people say life is too short. I say if you’ve got time for inane activities like kite-surfing, your life has already gone on way too long . . .

A Columbus man has been charged with killing a teen who was out with friends throwing eggs at cars on the Hilltop three years ago.

— The Columbus Dispatch

In other news, Columbus police report a significant decrease in the number of people throwing eggs at cars.

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “To-morrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“Fly ball, center field! Erstad says he’s got it! Erstad makes the catch! The Anaheim Angels are the champions of baseball!”

Heiress Casey Johnson dead at 30

— Los Angeles Times

I myself have an heir named Casey, the main differences being that he’s a boy and he’s still alive.

This is definitely another blow to the idea that being fabulously well-to-do is a guarantee of any sort of happiness in life . . .

• Time marches on!! We are all dying!!! We are coming to the end of our lives!!! Happy New Year!!! #

• Never Say Never: http://bit.ly/75vYNw #
• r @eddiepepitone: my grandmother was such a beautiful woman, so beautiful, unfortunately she was killed by people I owe money to. #

Tiger Woods and Chris Henry are just the latest examples.

“Your role model,” I say to my son, “should be that guy in the Miller Lite commercial who saves his beer and lets his girlfriend drop off a cliff.”

I will actually give you a speech made up entirely–almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. . . .

“Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I’m so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That’s true, and what I’m going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you–particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people–you’re going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you.

“And by the way, we are going to have to–if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive, so we’re going to let you die. [applause]

“Also, I’m going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid–we already have a lot of bargaining leverage–to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [applause] Thank you.”

— Robert Reich

Man pronounced dead at hospital

— JSOnline

What Happens to Your Facebook Profile When You Die?

— Yahoo! News

I plan to post updates from the afterlife. Example: “Why is everything red?”

Buffalo police have identified the victim of a fatal shooting in the city’s Schiller Park neighborhood early Saturday.

Killed was Mister Rogers, 23, of Buffalo.

— The Buffalo News

Police are seeking a man named Captain Kangaroo for questioning . . .

• Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you: http://bit.ly/GbV7P #

Man accused of almost beheading best friend, setting him on fire

— Orange County Register

Didn’t kill porn star, mime says

— Philadelphia Daily News

[HT: BOTWT]

Sometimes I’ll say something to my son, who’s 16 now, ask him a question . . . I know he’s heard me but he doesn’t answer. So I wait or I ask him again, and when I do get an answer, I can’t understand it because he’s mumbling.

Someone was telling me that she works with a boy whose mother shot all of his siblings. Why didn’t she shoot him too, you ask? I don’t know — out of ammo?

To be sure, killing your own children is taking things too far, but I’ll bet you that boy answers up promptly when his mom says something to him . . .

• The place is Southern California. The time is the present. These things never change… #
• Don't bring a shoe to a gunfight: Iraqi 'shoe-thrower' shot dead by US forces http://is.gd/3liJF #