msc

Its because you both have the gut feeling this year is a bit 2016 like, but can't see the blatant Headline Death of the Year that defines it ala Bowie and Prince in 2016.

I can't even say it once without tripping up.

Look the jokes not going to last much longer now he's dead...

Great work. I keep forgetting Laurie Johnson (composer of many memorable TV theme tunes such as The Avengers and The Professionals) is still with us.

In lieu of the super healthy Mr Bennett going a year on the DL without any posts: Tony Bennett seems to think that Tony Bennett is a bad pick on this years DL.

Aye with Blake from Blake's 7 and Iain Cuthbertson as the bad guy. Obviously I saw it some time after the 70s but it held up really well imo.

Not actually Wikipedia but the Dr Who Guide claims Children of the Stones co-writer Trevor Ray died in 2019. Anyone seen anything to back this up at all? My search skills are failing at it.

Unlike a number of directors from that period of time on the show, he actually showed a fair bit of promise. Good visual eye, dynamic use of the cameras, strong casting impulses, etc. He was relatively new to directing. Unfortunately his illness took over soon after Planet of Fire in 1984 so his career was pretty much over by the age of 41 thanks to cancer.

I think it was originally meant to be just the sperm donor (although they knew who it was, they asked him as he was a friend...) but the press got really interested in who the "father" was and started guessing randomly so in 2000 they went and said it was David Crosby with Crosby's consent. He didn't take, and wasn't intended to take, the active role of parent, but it's still his biological offspring he knew about so you can see why there'd be remorse.

Might not be Checkmate yet but it's certainly Check. I could do with Peter Tobin taking one for the team, and universe, here.

A QO will move TJS within 9 points of the top and 7 months still to go.

Oh we've all been there. Posting something and thinking "this is hilarious", then check back later and it got tumbleweed. Then another day you post some really daft joke or other and come back to a dozen likes!

How's Milton Keynes these days then? Still a shithole?

Darwin Award for 2020 is surely done and dusted already. Woman in North Carolina dies after going to pet an alligator. It ended exactly as you think it might have done. Wildlife expert guy with the best "fucking duh" response too:

New series of Marigold Hotel produces more OAP celebs: Britt Ekland - Wobbly on her feet and seems away with the fairies, so...no change there? Duncan Bannatyne - Actually looks healthier now than when he has having all those heart attacks. Lost a lot of weigh though, especially around the face and throat. Dame Zandra Rhodes - Is 79 and has pink hair. Must be dementia or something. Has frail shrunken hands. Paul Chuckle Henry Blofeld - Looks older than 80. Had to retire suddenly few years back. Now has the old man slur interrupting his famous diction. Later on during a visit to a coffee shop he looked like a ghost in an M.R. James adaptation. John Altman - Has the permanent red eyes of a perpetual pisshead. Susie Blake - She's only 70 and looks a decade younger, I think she's on this for the free food and holiday. Spends most of her time working on an allotment apparently. Barbara Dickson - Hides behind sunglasses and a big hat. She thought India was a desert, apparently. Mind you, the first series hasn't seen off any of its dead on their feet celebs yet, so watch this far healthier batch of celebs drop dead overnight...

We can apparently now add long term deadpool favourite Irving Kanarek, Manson's lawyer, to the centenarian list. I assumed there'd be some newspaper story about this somewhere in the world but fuck all.

M'lords and lady, Mr Gravel is a 2 time Democratic Senator from the 1970s. He came back into vogue in the last decade with 2 (limited) Presidential runs and a focus on youth social media to push Democratic causes, hence his being a far bigger name to Rad and Joey's generation than to older folk. Sort of a Twitter American Tony Benn type for the under 25s, I think? Anyhow I had heard of him somehow, because the name stands out. EDIT - Oh yeah, he released the Pentagon Papers what brought about the end of the Vietnam War and the start of the Watergate stuff iirc. Anyhow, notable, but not in Britain.

Well given this is an election year, if he hasn't run his last Presidential race it'll be quite notable in 2024!

It all feels like if we get to next year with only a few more Crem style declarations of doomsday the forum will be relieved.

Really showing your age on Obamacare, Joey. "A half measure of any reasonable healthcare reform" caused the US to lose its fucking shit, including your right wing Democrats (mostly led by Joe Lieberman in those days) which made even passing that night to impossible. The Republicans ran in the 2010 midterms on "Obama's going to take your health care away" and won a landslide in the House and took the healthcare vote out of contention in the Senate by making it 51-49 and leaving the usual suspects on the Blue team to refuse to back it. At the same time as he became President, Obama was left with 3 major things he wanted to do: roll back the civil liberty infringes from the Bush era, stop the recession turning into a major US depression worse than the 1930s, and expand healthcare. He started trying the first one with his first Presidential speech. The middle one took precedent and the Obama Administration bailed out several major employers in the Rust Belt to stop the economy tipping over, and he had to fight Republicans in the Senate tooth and nail for that one too. Because the Senate was so against even small changes like "let's not make most people in one of the major cities unemployed" it took time to get past the gridlock. In 2020, you can look and say that Obama should have used more executive orders like Trump does to get what he wants, but that wasn't how Presidents operated, on the whole, but it's also forgetting that Obama did use a lot of them. One of the first was to ensure the US operated under the Geneva Convention, for a reminder of how much things had slipped in the 2000s. But yeah, 2009 is a prime example of what happens when a progressive candidate wins the White House. The careerists in Washington try to block even common sense stuff. Obama wanted a public health care option, he managed to expand slightly Medicaid for the first in 50 years (admittedly to 100 million people, many of whom rely on it as a life and death thing, so you know, lets not mock the poor here), and he had to fight to the death to even get that far. I don't doubt your beliefs or values. I will add that sincerity is overrated. Many great progressive acts have been passed by charlatans, and many great sincere progressives (I refer to Barack above) have been absolutely stuck in the mire of trying to get anything done. A Harold Wilson who got X, Y and Z done for political gambit reasons was more successful than a Tony Benn who fervently believed in them, but never got close to power. So let's look at Trump's record. Concentration camps, which I forgot last time we spoke on this matter. Don't get shrill and mention the Nazis, folks, a concentration camp is merely a place you concentrate lots of people with inadequate resources to keep them out of the way. The executions and forced labour are additional extras. These mass detention centres are, and you'd expect Biden to shut them down immediately - that's not even a partisan issue (although Trump and MItch try to make it so) as Republicans like John McCain opposed the proposals in the past. He's a climate change denialist, but of the Bolsonaro style, who actively go the opposite way out of spite. His foreign policy has been so cack-handed and inept he has nearly led the world to the brink of war three times (earlier this year, when he was trying to rile up N Korea, and with his continued meddling in the Middle East) in ways that no US President has bumbled so often before. Besides that, his own voters voted for him for isolationism against Hawk Clinton. He's be the least isolationist President since Roosevelt who fought a World War! He tore up a peace treaty which would have aided the US in foreign policy, in the treasury and in their goals in the Middle East, because Obama pushed for it. His basic financial incompetence is another issue which keeps cropping up too. He misunderstands the concept of tariffs, thinking they can punish non-Americans not realising US farmers are losing money en masse from them. The same people in the Rust Belt who voted for him, and whose local economies are struggling en masse as their farms rely on low trade between countries Trump is in a strop with, and cheap labour that his ICE department keep locking up in detention centres. Also, on a personal economic level, his fucking around with the US dollar in the last few years has cost me a pretty penny in admin costs that wouldn't have otherwise existed thanks to the increase in red tape, so the fiscal conservative part of me thinks he's a fucking cunt too. As for the racial dimension, well, I am not a black American so obviously much of this is something I can only imagine. But when folk who actually are tell me that Biden is far better on the matter than Trump, and that they fear for their lives under day to day in Trump's America, I try not to brush it off, because that's their life experience after all. And it may yet be a decisive issue in the next election. He also wasted all that money on the useless wall which doesn't work, but that probably distracted him from even further damage to the world economy, so you know... (Although, I often laugh to find out the Mexico wall is very popular in Alaska but not so popular in fucking Texas or Arizona where its being built!) Also, on coronavirus, I know many of the worlds nations are in a fight to be rubbish over it, but... at least Boris Johnson doesn't suggest bleach can help. So even if you don't view Donald Trump as an existential threat to the world, he's a menace to most normal peoples money that should be avoided at most causes, and supports several dodgy policies and friends that shouldn't be in high office. So, Joe Biden instead. Ironically, given recent events, some of his great achievements were in confronting domestic abuse in the 90s when no one wanted to. He was also the first elected White House official, President or Vice President, in history to publicly back gay marriage. He was one of the first in the Senate to actively push for climate change proposals back when it was unsexy. He pushed for action against Milosevic on humanitarian grounds when people looked the other way. He fought at Obama's side in many meetings over aforementioned impending depression in 2009, and was one of the main reasons General Motors stayed open and prevent the state of Michigan falling into a depression followed by the rest of the country. He managed to pass one of the only gun control laws the US has ever managed, on assault weapons, which Bush Jr allowed to expire. He authored the Violence Against Women Act. He introduced the tracking of paedophiles in the country as a Federal issue so they could no longer jump state and disappear. The Violent Crime Act did lead to results unforeseen at the time (prison overcrowding, the gaming of the system to screw over poorer defendants) but had been intended to deal with an epidemic in drugs crimes in the 1990s. As with the good parts of the Act above, and indeed the Dont Ask Dont Tell Clinton proposals, they were designed to protect vulnerable people against abuse. It's just that the US system is very good at abusing good intentions. He also was an early and strong advocate of campaign finance reform, something close to your heart Joey, as being one of the less financially well off Senators in his time he was stunned by how much open bribery corrupt folk would try and offer the vulnerable. Biden is what I'd call a pragmatic hawk. He supported action in Bosnia on humanitarian grounds (as did I for the record), he supported action in Afghanistan because that's where Bin Laden was (he escaped from the country while the US was in it), and he supported Iraq because he got conned by the fake intelligence, like many other honourable people, although he also stated that once you are and got rid of the President, you can't just leave the vaccum unintended - which is true. He opposed the original Gulf War interference, he opposed warmongering against Iran, and those who use the Israel/Palestine troubles for sabre rattling. As your typical wishy washy live and let live type, I am resigned to the US getting involved militarily in the world. Jimmy Carter is the only US President not to send the US troops into battle. I'd rather someone who judges the issues on a case by case issue and tries to look at the long term picture, then a bumbling narcissist. On the matter of race relations, have you seen Biden's black vote. The American black voter, on majority (they aren''t a collective Borg mass after all) seem to view Bidens whole hearted support of the first black President as mattering more on his standing than events from the 70s. Robert Byrd was mourned as a key ally of Obama, and his career started in the 1950s as the Klans man in Washington. People are allowed to grow in their views and become better people. But again, not my life experience to talk about, just noting thats the general view. So, if Biden is likely better on foreign policy, race relations, the economy, dealing with national crises like the Coronavirus, the climate, and the dollar in your pocket, is he really not much better than Trump? Or is this a case of the left denouncing Wilson for being no better than a Tory, all the while homosexuality was decriminalised and job security was enshrined in law? As for things you like, well, Biden's vowed to carry on Obama's fight for a public option on health care. Its hidden in the legalise on his website because health care reform freaks out Democratic voters who seem very susceptible to the Republican myth that any reform will leave that person without any health care, but it includes taking on the drug companies on the ludicrous prices for day to day necessary medicines in the US, continuing the Medicare/Medicaid expansion, and allowing the important of drugs from outside the US which will again decrease the health care costs for millions, and restoring the funding on HIV research that Trump rescinded. (Fucks sake, I didn't even know about that one, is Trump an equal opportunity cunt or something?) He is swivelling quickly in recent weeks to supporting the cancelation of student loan debt (it works differently in the US than from here) that was one of Bernie's big campaign things. Now you wanted proof this would happen in office, but really what you have here is a politician sensing the way the wind is blowing. On the matter of proof, he's also on record and has the history to back it of supporting gun control, introducing basic normal country stuff like background checks on people who buy guns, not allowing them to buy war weaponry online, and not allowing the mentally ill to buy automatics. Crazy policies... But other than casually point out the vast differences in the two mens policies - I've deliberately ignored their personal defects to avoid a tit for tat thing here - and pointing out stuff you support that the campaign is starting to back, there's really nothing else we can do.

I remember stupid things far easier for some reason.

Years ago there was Jamie Mitchell's death in Eastenders but as it was one of the B plot romances, they strung out the guy dying on life support for weeks or even months. Every episode or so you'd get an update. "He's really not well, he's even worse, he's on life support, he's got even worse than the last time, his health has decline even further" without somehow dying until they did the big People Crying in Hospital Scene around Christmas time. Anyhow, I am reminded of it here.

*shakes fist at sky* GOOSEBERRY!!!!

Did you ever watch Sean Micallef's show in the 90s? There's a sketch all this reminds me of: Doctor: I'm afraid your son has died. Mum: How? He only came in with a sprained ankle! Doctor: Well, I'm afraid there were complications. Mum: What sort of complications? Doctor: I threw him out the window.

I knew but that's because his reason for leaving Newsnight in 2014 was that as he was pushing 65 he wanted to reduce his workload. I think he genuinely enjoys doing University Challenge, but other than that he picks and chooses limited stuff to do now. The only way you can really tell he's aging so far is that his hair is getting whiter.