Phil Frank has died, but a week after his announced retirement … and no, this isn’t going to sink in … though the sadness has … until spring, when the bears awaken from their winter slumbers at the Fog City Dumpster for their annual trip to Asphalt State Park (a.k.a.Yosemite) … which demanded the annual commandeering of a Muni bus, complete with hapless drive (donning their bandolera first, of course) issuing, once more, the treasured line,

“Bodges! We don’ need no steenkeng bodges!”

Or perhaps it was badges … no matter. The title, above, is the name of the law offices—Dilly, Dally, Dolittle and Stahl—of the feral pigs, who, being in the profession, carried fine briefcases and drove fast nasty cars. Beemers, of course. Frank had a way of weaving the actual pests of nature hereabouts into the world his strips created that utterly suited them. Utterly. Feral pigs, for those of you who don’t live in Marin or Sonoma County, are ugly, merciless, ever-hungry animals who will rip up anything to get at what they want, who will kill your dogs and are otherwise extremely single-minded.

And sweet Orwell, the feral cat who lived in Golden Gate Park, who embodied the left-over hippie-ness of the Park as well as the homeless who live there, with one eye out for the deal, but basically good of heart, in a way that … well, Frank always drew the truth.

Baba ReBop, sigh, whom we shall consult no more. Baba wore a propeller beanie, along with his flowing, guru-like robes, and always displayed his fax number … and damn it, I never faxed him. Farley himself, Frank’s alter-ego, played both observer and fool, and held the whole thing together, in his reportorial way.

Frank said in an interview that unlike Garry Trudeau, he didn’t skewer his subjects. Ah, yes, but he did. True, not in the fashion of Uncle Duke … but showed the foolishness of us all—including aging hippies. But most of all, Frank used us, human and non-human alike, in the same way he used himself … as instruments, gorgeously drawn instruments, of an apparently endless wit.

And then it ends. And we try to cope with that.

June 6, 1944 “Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it.”

—S.L.A. Marshall, via allthingsnews

April 12: See, I don’t get up in the morning. I get up and it’s morning for me … but, alas, not for most. By this hour, everyone knows Kurt Vonnegut has died, and probably a good many of you have burst into the same somewhat surprising tears.

Ah, but the heart remembers. I have always maintained, it has a memory like a horse. A writer whose worked you have loved, whose sayings became part of your sayings … regrettably, time has its way. But those tears? That pain at realizing he is gone? The body remembers. busy busy busy. A flesh diary. So it goes.

So much more steadfast than the mind of daily life.

Oh, my dear Mr. Rosewater, bless , keep.

Molly Ivins, Populist Texas Columnist, Dies at 62

After Patrick J. Buchanan, a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that America was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”

“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”

Oh Molly, I do think this is awful damn rude, leaving us like this. Can’t be helped, I know, but I do bitch. Miss you already. But your lines are going have something like eternal life: you’ll be quoted as long as politicians are fools.

“If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.”

And with proper attribution, gladly, gratefully. You’re the best, Molly Ivins. Rest In Peace.

That Mac PDA is going to come through, by hook or by crook—or maybe on a phone, I don’t care and I know you wouldn’t have; it takes guts to keep a silly dream alive, and by god, Apple is going to deliver. Something.

You were so great to read on Mac 360, warm and smart—and silver hair! Exactly what the Mac community needed! I, like a million others, am going to miss you … and that Mac PDA? You know I will always be …

Wishin’ and hopin’,
zo

“You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter.
I give you thanks for good and ill.
Eternal light in everything on earth.
As now, so on the day of my death.”

Czeslaw Milosz : June 1911—July 2004

“I lie on the beach there naked,
which I do sometimes
and I feel the wind coming over me
and I see the stars up above
and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night

it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe.”

— Marlon Brando : 1924—2004

{ fin }