Now that's sad - Andy Hallett, who played the green-skinned nice-guy demon Lorne in Buffy spinoff Angel, has died at the age of just 33.

Now Bill Frindall's dead (yes, you do - the statistician on TMS). Catrin and I were just talking about him the other day. Then again, just last night we were saying "who uses the Nokia ringtone these days? In a few years it'll be pure nostalgia." Of course, now we know.

It's John "Rumpole" Mortimer.

...has gone too. Classic quote:

Montalbán has described "the five stages of the actor" as follows:

The first stage is, Who is Ricardo Montalbán?.
The second stage is, Get me Ricardo Montalbán.
The third stage is, Get me a Ricardo Montalbán type.
The fourth stage is, Get me a young Ricardo Montalbán.
The fifth stage is, Who is Ricardo Montalbán?

In memory:

Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

is dead, alas...

Recovering slowly, still. It's still a bit painful, particularly if I forget it is and try to move too much or twist at all; and I get tired very quickly, but I'm feeling much better than I thought I would be.

I've spent the last couple of days sorting out VPN on this little Ubuntu laptop - which is not easy when you've got a rt2500 card and can't use NetworkManager - but now I can actually get some work done. In the meantime, I've been...

• Listening to Momus now he's making all his Creation stuff free, which is lovely. I've admired the man's blog for a long while, but never got into his music until I got the kick up the arse from "hey, it's free." I'm aware that his recent stuff is going to sound nothing like this, and that's a mystery I shall leave to the future.
• Saddened by the death of Majel Barrett Roddenberry.
• Playing Fable 2, a very odd game in which you have to keep having to interrupt your questing to go home, see your family and get a Proper Job.
• Getting random blood tests.
• Losing track of too many serial media - online comics, TV programmes, etc. - to worry about.
• Reading G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, about which there is something very surreal, in an underplayed way; or that could just be the drugs.

American author, dead. Now, he's not big over here - he's one of those American novelists who write great, sprawling works that we tend not to get into over here. His most famous work, Infinite Jest, sounds interesting (though quite a lot like Vonnegut). However, what really got me was this, a commencement address he gave in 2005 that someone posted to Metafilter, probably because of its prescient (but ultimately irrelevant) reference to suicide. The whole thing is well worth a read. Here's another excerpt:

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

And now he's dead - Don LaFontaine, the 'voice of the movies', has passed away. Going to the cinema will never be the same again. Really, he did all of them - at the rate of up to 60 a week.

This and Ken Campbell, too.

Now Richard Widmark's dead! Yes you do, he's the thin, blond bloke with the big forehead in all those westerns. 93, though!

Brilliant tribute to Peel here, by the London News Review, interleaved with anecdotes. If you read nothing else today, read that. Great stuff:

When you first listened to Peel, you presumed that it was for some strange group of people whose favourite music was all this new stuff. Then you'd hear Terence Trent d'Arby and he'd read out a letter complaining that there was too much / not enough techno / indie, and you'd get it. It's not about liking it all. That enormous openness, sometimes scary, sometimes unlistenable, always there: making teenagers appreciate this and reminding his showbiz colleagues that it's there: that counts for more than any band's career. Let's not look back for long. And the BBC can do a lot better as a tribute than a tacky on-screen graphic on BBC3. The only way to keep Peel's spirit alive is to, well, keep Peel's spirit alive. Don't put someone else who likes weird shit into a ghetto slot. Keep broadcasting people who like music, who are unconstrained by genre, sales or cultural significance. And who are also superb DJs. Apart from the dead air. And the wrong speeds. And losing the record he'd just announced.

I can't believe Mark E. Smith was on Newsnight last night. Peel's on the front page of just about everything this morning, too. Even Tony Blair had a catch in his throat. Just one more thing - what Andy Kershaw said on Channel 4 last night:

'The last time I saw him he looked absolutely worn out. We went to a cafe near Radio 1 and I said: "John, you look terrible." He said: "They've moved me from 11pm to one at night and the combination of that and Home Truths (his Radio 4 show) is killing me." He felt he had been marginalised.'

More here at XRRF.

Oh no... John Peel's dead. That's terrible - both for his family and friends, and for rock music. How did one man manage to remain consistently cool - no, ahead of cool - for 40 years? JP was like that guy at school a few years older than you who had the most eclectic and wonderful stuff in his record collection, which he'd bring in and let you borrow. He was like that to the whole British nation. If British music (all British music, after all he was a great champion of Welsh rock - particularily Datblygu - when no-one else outside Wales gave a monkeys) has any kind of reputation around the world today, it's because of him.
Radio 1 ran a brief newsflash, followed by the whole of Teenage Kicks. The proper version.