I started working on OpenNMS on September 10th, 2001. Needless to say, my second day on the job is easy to remember.
Since then I start my day by hitting my RSS feeds to see what is in the news. Today I awoke to find out that George Carlin had died.
The news services are starting to pick up the story.
I am a big fan of Carlin. Part of it is due to his brilliance, but another has to deal with my admiration for people who are willing to take a chance and do something different, even if it is met with scorn, and in Carlin’s case, lawsuits.
My first date with my wife was to see Carlin from the second row at Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh. I am such a romantic.
So may we all hum the Seven Words today, and I hope that George is watching it all on Heavenly CNN.
I was not a fan of some of Carlin’s most recent work… the last couple of HBO specials I saw, it looked to me like he was losing the battle between biting humor and outright anger and bitterness… but I remain a huge fan of Carlin in general, and he’s a landmark figure in American counterculture.
By the way, if I have the timing right, I think that I was at that Carlin show at Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh myownself, although my seats weren’t quite as good. 🙂 (His opening line at the show was, “Did it ever occur to you that most of the people who are anti-abortion are people you wouldn’t want to f*** in the first place?”)
Did he have a poster for sale with something like “The Thousand Things You Can’t Say On TV” and he had it divided up into genres, like “Male Masturbation”? He read from that section and brought up a new one an audience member had suggested: “Shaking Hands with the Unemployed”.
I haven’t had HBO in a long time so I’m unaware of his recent work, but there was a period of time when he was very bitter and not as funny. I remember he was trying to prove that anything could be funny, and perhaps the least funny subject in the world is rape. So he attempted rape humor, which didn’t work.
But when he was on, he was on. As a frequent traveller I still think of him every time I hear the airline safety lecture.
Attendant: “Please check around your seating area for those personal belongings you might have brought on board”
Carlin: “Well, I might have brought my arrowhead collection, but I didn’t, so I’ll spend my time looking for those things I *did* bring on board”.
Priceless.