NO, people, these things do not happen in threes. They only seem to happen in threes because you keep resetting the counter when it reaches three! If the saying was “these things always happen in sevens”, everyone would be counting a few deaths further back and wondering who number 7 would be, and then when someone famous passes away, you’d shout, “Aha! Seven again!” and reset the counter.

Now there is, perhaps, something interesting in the common choice of three as the number in which groups of related “things” happen. Two is just coincidence, but three makes a pattern, which might just fire off a few extra neurons in the pattern-matching hardware we call our minds…

No, I’m not what you’d call a fan of his – I’ve been largely indifferent to his music, and found his later behavior (alleged and otherwise) to be creepy and sad at best. Fifty’s not a half bad run, but still, there’s a little pang of sadness for him in my cold, cold godless heathen heart. My condolences go out to his friends and loved ones, and to Farrah’s as well; those are the people who will have a missing place in their lives that will be remembered long after the rest of us have moved on to the next news cycle.

We lost Ed McMahon a few days ago, too, something I wouldn’t have mentioned except that I was reminded today of a story about him:

The navy sent my father to training outside Chicago in the year when the first Superbowl took place. He and a friend went into the city on leave on the night of the game and the first bar they found was a little more upscale than they might otherwise visit, but they settled on it because it had several TVs and wasn’t too crowded, so they could hear and see the game. Ed McMahon walked in just as things got started and sat down right next to them; they ended up watching Superbowl 1 with him, and he bought them drinks and sat and talked to them late into the night.

‘Nuff being said.

I’m talking about something much more deep and profound: Opus.

Yes, Opus the penguin, star of Bloom County, Outland, and eventually a comic strip of his very own. He retired this week; his creator, Berkely Breathed, decided that the world is going downhill fast, and he wanted to save Opus from being corrupted by what is to come. In a letter to the LA Times, he says:

I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.

and:

With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I’m suspending my comic strip to assist the nation. The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America’s kids. I call on John McCain to join me.

I’ve been a Bloom County (etc) fan since I first saw the strip in the 80s; in my mind it along with Calvin & Hobbes and possibly The Far Side – all tragically lost to us now – are the comic strips to which I’ll always compare all others, and probably to the newcomers’ detriment. Opus and his cohorts are childhood friends I’ll likely never see again except in old pictures, but in the years to come, whatever they hold, I’m sure I’ll think of them often.

Opus’ final comic strip is here.

A letter from Breathed on his web site has this to say:

Opus is napping. He sleeps in peace, dreaming of a world just ahead brimming with kindness and grace and ubiquitous bow ties.

Sleep well, Opus, and may your dreams come true for all of us. Except for the bow ties.

So what’s happened to finally break my silence? Conservative-pundit-inspired shooting? Nope. The irony and hypocrisy of the Bush admin trying to tell Russia that invading a sovereign nation is a no-no? Nope.

It’s this horrible, horrible website. Somebody found one of those list of web design “don’t”s and tried to squeeze in as many of them per page as possible. It burns.