I miss Benny Hill.
Mitch Hedberg.
Kurt Cobain.
River Phoenix.
Carol Wayne (how, oh HOW, could she ever drown?)
Johnny Carson
Walter Cronkite
Tim Russert
Andy and Barney
Walt Kelly
Sam Cooke. I can’t technically miss him because he died before I was born. I still wish he were alive making more music though.
Marvin Gaye. Another great Soul musician gone to soon.
Carlin’s a good choice, I often find myself thinking what he would say about some of the idiocy-of-the-day.
For me, though, Douglas Adams. He went way too soon, and I grew up with Arthur and Zaphod. I loved the Dirk Gently books, as well, and it always felt like there was something missing from the universe after he died.
Michael Hedges.
Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Phil Hartman and Johnny Carson.
All great choices and I second George Carlin and Mitch Hedberg.
I’d also like to add John Ritter, Jackie Gleason, Sam Kinison, and Jimi Hendrix.
I miss Duane Allman!
If you read any of Salmon of Doubt, you would know that he had been told more than once, “But you are not in the universe, you’re in England.” He might have never actually been here.
Jim Henson
I think Adams is one of the more poignant losses. Not because he was a beloved author, but because he had turned his attention to environmental issues – his book Last Chance to See, about endangered species, is more heartrending than funny, and it made me tear up even when he was alive; I can’t read it again now.
My sense of things is that he was loved by a relatively youthful, relatively affluent, highly educated readership, and he had the potential to direct that readership’s attention and enormous resources toward desperate environmental crises…and then he fell over dead, and millions of highly capable people turned their attention back toward their own affairs. His death is exactly the sort of apparently-small-thing-that-begets-an-infuriating-cosmic-tragedy that he wrote about with such dazzling wit.
It’s an unmitigated loss for literature, geek culture, and perhaps all the living things of the earth.
Obviously, I have been in a coma, or just not checking into SMDB,When did he die?
Loved his work on Comedy Albums, especially Baseball vs Football.
Loved him as Rufus in Bill and Ted, as well as the Cabbie in Car Wash and the preist in Dogma.
June of 2008.
In addition to Carlin (who I met once, and he was as nice as could be. As an up-and-coming stand-up comedian, as I was at the time, it was like shaking hands with God. I know Carlin himself would hate to be characterized as such), I miss the best Roaster that Comedy Central ever featured:
Charles Schulz.
The three “Johns”. Candy, Ritter, and Cash.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Together and separately.
Stephen Jay Gould
Carl Sagan
Madeline Kahn
Shortly going to start missing Maeve Binchy. I would usually be looking forward to a new book about now.