Otto von Hapsburg, we hardly knew ye.

1996: The year Randy Savage
redefined the craft.

What do Macho Man Randy Savage and Elizabeth Taylor have in common? If you said they both died this year you'd be correct but you'd be leaving out Randy Savage's contributions to the art of acting (and forgettting about the time Liz Taylor suplexed the Iron Skiek at Wrestlemania III). For a couple of years in the 90's Savage was the be-sunglassed face of Slim Jim brand mechanically separated meat tubes. Move over Elizabeth Taylor's corpse, 2011 will be remembered as the year we lost two titans of acting.

Anyway, since it's almost 2012, it's time to look back on the people who have died. Why? I don't know, it's like we all become old people who read the obituaries to each other in the morning.

"Look honey, Ethel Crandell died. Remember her from high school? God she was a bitch."

Above: Pssscht...nobodies. 

Of course, part of the tradition is that we only remember the passing of people who were super-rich, in the entertainment industry, or who murdered political rivals to achieve unlimited power (or a combination of the three, again see Elizabeth Taylor), so don't hold your breath waiting for a CNN retrospective to mention grandma; nobody cares. The rest of us simply pass into the long night unremarked and forgotten. So on to the list:

Ouch, not even a border skirmish.

Dead now are Steve Jobs, Anne 'Dragons of Pern' McCaffrey, Columbo (aka Peter Falk), Joe Simon, who co-created Captain America and Michael Gough (the guy who played Alfred in Tim Burton's Batman movies). Also dead is Austrian Archduke Otto von Hapsburg. Tragically, Otto's passing went largely unnoticed and unlike his Godfather and fellow Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, failed to plunge Europe into a World War.

In the terrible people who are now dead category we have Osama bin Laden and not one but two military-strong men/oppressive dictators.

Now that these guys are gone, the people of Libya and North Korea
can totally look forward to a free and democratic future...right?

"It's only cheating when Democrats do it."

-Newt Gingrich, out of his pie-hole

But it's not just the people who have left us. We can say good bye to the space shuttle program as well as America's non-commercial space aspirations. In the interests of making sure there's nothing good on TV, the SyFy channel has cancelled Caprica and Stargate Universe. Oh and we should pause to remember the concept of irony which was brutally murdered the moment Newt Gingrich opened his pie-hole about other people's marriages. It will be missed.



So much for 2011, I hope you enjoyed looking back on it because this New Year's will be our last. We survived several brushes with doomsday last year, but this one predicted by the Ancient Mayans is probably for real.

No one wearing a turtle neck could possibly be full of shit.