mental invalid

so what do you want to call them?? injuns?? seriously though, whats wrong with indians? natives sounds to treasure island to me...

seeks beat me to the punch...

youre a fucking idiot..... what i am saying again corky is that if the fucking state can condem a man to death, then the man deserves a right to elect the person who is deciding his fate... and if you say a person is mature enough to die, then certainly he is mature enough to buy porn, smokes or booze... i dont even know what you are fucking ranting about...

echo*

i just dont understand the argument that a 17 or 16 or 15 year is responsible for his actions, and they cant vote, or sign up for the army, buy smokes, porn or booze... if they are so responsible that the state can impose the death penalty, then arent they responsible enough to elect who the state is? i mean if thats your logic, then fine, but do away with the social double standards... you cant have your cake and it eat too...

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story...hunter/steadman ESPN.com: Page 2 Friday, February 25, 2005 Farewell, Hunter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 2 Long-time friend Ralph Steadman is the satirical cartoonist who illustrated several of Hunter S. Thompson's books, including "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." This remembrance originally appeared in the British newspaper The Independent earlier this week. "I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time," he told me many years ago, and I knew he meant it. It wasn't a case of if but when. He didn't reckon he would make it beyond 30, anyway, so he lived it all in the fast lane. There were no first, second, third and top gears in a car -- just overdrive. He was in a hurry. Drive your stake into a darkened heart in a red Mercedes Benz. The blackness hides a speeding tramp. The savage beast pretends. But never mind the nights, my love, because they never really happened anyway. So we wrote in a Beverly Hills house one drunken night. I wrote the stanzas -- he wrote the chorus. Don't write, Ralph, he said. You'll bring shame on your family. "Those Weird and Twisted Nights." That was the song. Yesterday morning, Sunday, I had just finished signing the 1,200 limitation pages for a Taschen version of "The Curse of LONO," which Hunter had signed so uncharacteristically -- obedient and mechanical, over the month of December. I thought that was very strange. He has to be cajoled like a child to do anything like that, so I drew his portrait across the last sheet, glaring out, his two eyes in the two O's of LONO, put the cigarette holder with the long Dunhill prodding upwards in his grimacing mouth, signed it with and extra flourish and closed the last of the four boxes. The old bastard! He waited to make sure I had finished the task, then he signed himself off. I knew it was too good to be true. Now I will be expected the build the monstrous cannon in Woody Creek, a hundred-foot-high column of steel tubes, with the big red fist on its top and his ashes placed in a fire bomb in its palm. Two thumbs, Ralph! Don't forget the two thumbs!! It was the Gonzo fist and he really believes I can do it! Such were his demands as he tipped at his windmills. People were f------ with his beloved Constitution, and he was born to banish the geeks who were doing it. In that way, he was a real live American. A pioneer, frontiersman, last of the cowboys, even a conservative redneck with a huge and raging mind, taking the easy way out and mythologizing himself at the same time. He spent a lot of his early years of rejection writing, verbatim, excerpts from Hemingway, Faulkner and Conrad, trying to imagine what it was like to write some classic text. He could be very persuasive. As a boy, he was hired by the milkman to collect outstanding bills from the citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, but he was shunned by his neighbours and, especially, the literary establishment in the town, so he had a score to settle. I had only just arrived in America in late April of 1970, and was staying with a friend in the Hamptons to decompress. I got a call from JC Suares, art editor of Scanlan's magazine in New York. He said, "How'd ya like to go to the Kentucky Derby with an ex-Hell's Angel who just shaved his head and cover the race? His name is Hunter S. Thompson and he wants an artist to nail the decadent, depraved faces of the local establishment who meet there. He doesn't want a photographer. He wants something weird and we've seen your work." Ralph Steadman and Hunter Thompson were made for each other. The editor, Don Goddard, had been the New York Times foreign editor and he thought I was naïve enough to take this on. I was looking for work -- so I went. Finding Hunter � or, indeed, anyone covering the prestigious Kentucky Derby who is not a bona fide registered journalist, was no easy matter; and trying to explain my reasons for being there was even worse, especially as I was under the impression that this was an official trip and I was an accredited press man. Why shouldn't I think that? I assumed that Scanlan's was an established magazine. I had been watching someone chalk racing results on a blackboard while I sipped a beer, and I was about to turn and get myself another when a voice like no other I had ever heard cut into my thoughts and sank its teeth into my brain. It was a cross between a slurred Karate chop and gritty molasses. "Um . . . er you . . . er . . . wouldn't be from England . . . er . . . would you . . . er . . . an artist . . . maybe . . . er . . . what the!!" I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. "Holy s---!" he exclaimed. "They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him." We took a beer together and sat in the press box. Somehow, he had got our accreditation and we were in. He asked me if I gambled and I said, only once in 1952. I put two shillings on Early Mist to win in our Derby, and I did. I picked a horse but didn't bet and it won, so then I picked another, backed it with a dollar, and lost. "That's why I don't gamble," I said. "I thought you had been picked up," he replied. "Picked up??" I didn't quite understand. "Er . . . yes. The police here are pretty keen. They tend to take an interest in something different. The . . . er . . . um . . . the beard. Not many of them around these parts. Not these days, anyway." I was beginning to take in the whole of the man's appearance, and his was a little different, too. Certainly not what I was expecting. No time-worn leather, shining with old sump oil. No manic tattoo across a bare upper arm, and strangely no hint of menace. This man had an impressive head chiselled from one piece of bone, and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy-brimmed sun hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multi-coloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near 6-foot-6 of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand. Arthritis was to plague him all his life, as was the football knee injury which left him with one leg shorter than the other. But it never truly encumbered his physical rage or his action-packed approach to a deep respect and love of writing -- and righteousness. We found the decadent, depraved faces of Louisville by the end of the first week we spent together. They were staring at us from a mirror in the gent's toilet on the infield, where the rest of the riffraff, who are not eligible to stand in the privileged boxes of the chosen few, spent their time at the races, just like us. We spent many assignments together, bucking the trend, against the cheats and liars, the bagmen and the cronies � me, an alien from the old country; and him raging against the coming of the light. "F--- them, Ralph," he would say. "We are not like the others." Well, he wasn't anyway, but I was easily led. Before "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" we tried to cover the America's Yacht Race in Rhode Island for Scanlan's (who were just about to go bust and get onto Richard Nixon's blacklist), from a three-masted schooner, a rock band on board for distraction, booze and, for Hunter, whatever he was gobbling at the time. I was seasick and Hunter was fine. I asked him what he was taking and he gave me one. It was psilocybin, a psychedelic hallucinogen, my first and only drug trip apart from Librium. I was the artist from England, so I had a job to do. He handed me two spray paint canisters. "What do I do with these?" "You're the artist, Ralph. Do what you want, but you must do it on the side of one of those multi-million dollar yachts, moored hardly 50 yards away from where we are." "How about F--- THE POPE?" I said, now seeing in my mind red snarling dogs attacking a musician singing at a piano dressed as a nun at a shore-bound bar. "Are you a Catholic, Ralph??" "No," I replied. "It's just the first thing that came to mind." So that was the plan and we made it to the boats and I stood up in the little dinghy with the spray cans and shook them, as one does. They made a clicking sound and alerted a guard. "We must flee, Ralph! There'll be pigs everywhere. We have failed." He pulled fiercely on the oars and fell backwards with legs in the air. He righted himself and started rowing again. We made it back to our boat; and then while I was gabbling insanely, he was writing down all the gibberish that I uttered. I was now a basket case and we had to get back to shore and flee. Hunter shot off two Leery distress flares into the harbour and we hailed a boat just coming in. The flares set fire to one of the boats, causing an emergency fire rescue as we got to dry land. There's more and I won't go on, but I guess that was the genesis of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Such a wild game was possible, but it needed all the genius and application of Hunter S. Thompson to make it live. He has done that and he has proved that a redneck Southern gentleman who has the fire in his belly and the indignation in his soul can make it happen. I had the good fortune to meet one of the great originals of American Literature. Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late 20th Century. Time will sort the bastard out. I have always known that one day I would know this journey; but yesterday, I did not know that it would be today . . . I leave it to others more qualified than me to assess and appraise his monumental literary legacy.

fucker got away.... damn it!!!

*battles thrashing marlin in hopes of stress freeness

i miss the wisdom of hesh

good for you man.... i got one currently on the hook and bait and im hoping that i can reel this marlin of an apartment in... *fingers crossed....

it wasnt lies...lying is when the other person doesnt know that you are not tellin the truth... rather it was full of dramatic hyperboles and over dramatizations....the fabrications were to help drive home utter insanity of life and the events he was covering... lying is what you do to get of work, imagination is what you use to convey a clear idea to the sometimes absract and make the intangible tangible.... and yeah, have a laugh over it as well...

ESPN.com: Page 2 Friday, February 25, 2005 Farewell, Hunter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 2 Long-time friend Ralph Steadman is the satirical cartoonist who illustrated several of Hunter S. Thompson's books, including "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." This remembrance originally appeared in the British newspaper The Independent earlier this week. "I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time," he told me many years ago, and I knew he meant it. It wasn't a case of if but when. He didn't reckon he would make it beyond 30, anyway, so he lived it all in the fast lane. There were no first, second, third and top gears in a car -- just overdrive. He was in a hurry. Drive your stake into a darkened heart in a red Mercedes Benz. The blackness hides a speeding tramp. The savage beast pretends. But never mind the nights, my love, because they never really happened anyway. So we wrote in a Beverly Hills house one drunken night. I wrote the stanzas -- he wrote the chorus. Don't write, Ralph, he said. You'll bring shame on your family. Remembering Hunter Page 2 contacted several of Hunter S. Thompson's closest friends for their recollections: "60 Minutes" reporter Ed Bradley Political correspondent William Greider Former presidential candidate George McGovern Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay Satirical cartoonist Ralph Steadman Skiing commentator Bob Beattle Page 2's Eric Neel Page 2's Bill Simmons ESPN Executive Editor John Walsh "Those Weird and Twisted Nights." That was the song. Yesterday morning, Sunday, I had just finished signing the 1,200 limitation pages for a Taschen version of "The Curse of LONO," which Hunter had signed so uncharacteristically -- obedient and mechanical, over the month of December. I thought that was very strange. He has to be cajoled like a child to do anything like that, so I drew his portrait across the last sheet, glaring out, his two eyes in the two O's of LONO, put the cigarette holder with the long Dunhill prodding upwards in his grimacing mouth, signed it with and extra flourish and closed the last of the four boxes. The old bastard! He waited to make sure I had finished the task, then he signed himself off. I knew it was too good to be true. Now I will be expected the build the monstrous cannon in Woody Creek, a hundred-foot-high column of steel tubes, with the big red fist on its top and his ashes placed in a fire bomb in its palm. Two thumbs, Ralph! Don't forget the two thumbs!! It was the Gonzo fist and he really believes I can do it! Such were his demands as he tipped at his windmills. People were f------ with his beloved Constitution, and he was born to banish the geeks who were doing it. In that way, he was a real live American. A pioneer, frontiersman, last of the cowboys, even a conservative redneck with a huge and raging mind, taking the easy way out and mythologizing himself at the same time. He spent a lot of his early years of rejection writing, verbatim, excerpts from Hemingway, Faulkner and Conrad, trying to imagine what it was like to write some classic text. He could be very persuasive. As a boy, he was hired by the milkman to collect outstanding bills from the citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, but he was shunned by his neighbours and, especially, the literary establishment in the town, so he had a score to settle. Donations In lieu of flowers and gifts, donations can be made to: The Hunter S. Thompson Foundation P.O. Box 220 Woody Creek, CO 81656 I had only just arrived in America in late April of 1970, and was staying with a friend in the Hamptons to decompress. I got a call from JC Suares, art editor of Scanlan's magazine in New York. He said, "How'd ya like to go to the Kentucky Derby with an ex-Hell's Angel who just shaved his head and cover the race? His name is Hunter S. Thompson and he wants an artist to nail the decadent, depraved faces of the local establishment who meet there. He doesn't want a photographer. He wants something weird and we've seen your work." Ralph Steadman and Hunter Thompson were made for each other. The editor, Don Goddard, had been the New York Times foreign editor and he thought I was naïve enough to take this on. I was looking for work -- so I went. Finding Hunter � or, indeed, anyone covering the prestigious Kentucky Derby who is not a bona fide registered journalist, was no easy matter; and trying to explain my reasons for being there was even worse, especially as I was under the impression that this was an official trip and I was an accredited press man. Why shouldn't I think that? I assumed that Scanlan's was an established magazine. I had been watching someone chalk racing results on a blackboard while I sipped a beer, and I was about to turn and get myself another when a voice like no other I had ever heard cut into my thoughts and sank its teeth into my brain. It was a cross between a slurred Karate chop and gritty molasses. "Um . . . er you . . . er . . . wouldn't be from England . . . er . . . would you . . . er . . . an artist . . . maybe . . . er . . . what the!!" I had turned around and two fierce eyes, firmly socketed inside a bullet-shaped head, were staring at a strange growth I was nurturing on the end of my chin. "Holy s---!" he exclaimed. "They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with string warts and I guess I've found him." We took a beer together and sat in the press box. Somehow, he had got our accreditation and we were in. He asked me if I gambled and I said, only once in 1952. I put two shillings on Early Mist to win in our Derby, and I did. I picked a horse but didn't bet and it won, so then I picked another, backed it with a dollar, and lost. "That's why I don't gamble," I said. "I thought you had been picked up," he replied. "Picked up??" I didn't quite understand. "Er . . . yes. The police here are pretty keen. They tend to take an interest in something different. The . . . er . . . um . . . the beard. Not many of them around these parts. Not these days, anyway." I was beginning to take in the whole of the man's appearance, and his was a little different, too. Certainly not what I was expecting. No time-worn leather, shining with old sump oil. No manic tattoo across a bare upper arm, and strangely no hint of menace. This man had an impressive head chiselled from one piece of bone, and the top part was covered down to his eyes by a floppy-brimmed sun hat. His top half was draped in a loose-fitting hunting jacket of multi-coloured patchwork. He wore seersucker blue pants, and the whole torso was pivoted on a pair of huge white plimsolls with a fine red trim around the bulkheads. Damn near 6-foot-6 of solid bone and meat holding a beaten-up leather bag across his knee and a loaded cigarette holder between the arthritic fingers of his other hand. Arthritis was to plague him all his life, as was the football knee injury which left him with one leg shorter than the other. But it never truly encumbered his physical rage or his action-packed approach to a deep respect and love of writing -- and righteousness. We found the decadent, depraved faces of Louisville by the end of the first week we spent together. They were staring at us from a mirror in the gent's toilet on the infield, where the rest of the riffraff, who are not eligible to stand in the privileged boxes of the chosen few, spent their time at the races, just like us. We spent many assignments together, bucking the trend, against the cheats and liars, the bagmen and the cronies � me, an alien from the old country; and him raging against the coming of the light. "F--- them, Ralph," he would say. "We are not like the others." Well, he wasn't anyway, but I was easily led. Before "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" we tried to cover the America's Yacht Race in Rhode Island for Scanlan's (who were just about to go bust and get onto Richard Nixon's blacklist), from a three-masted schooner, a rock band on board for distraction, booze and, for Hunter, whatever he was gobbling at the time. I was seasick and Hunter was fine. I asked him what he was taking and he gave me one. It was psilocybin, a psychedelic hallucinogen, my first and only drug trip apart from Librium. I was the artist from England, so I had a job to do. He handed me two spray paint canisters. "What do I do with these?" "You're the artist, Ralph. Do what you want, but you must do it on the side of one of those multi-million dollar yachts, moored hardly 50 yards away from where we are." "How about F--- THE POPE?" I said, now seeing in my mind red snarling dogs attacking a musician singing at a piano dressed as a nun at a shore-bound bar. "Are you a Catholic, Ralph??" "No," I replied. "It's just the first thing that came to mind." So that was the plan and we made it to the boats and I stood up in the little dinghy with the spray cans and shook them, as one does. They made a clicking sound and alerted a guard. "We must flee, Ralph! There'll be pigs everywhere. We have failed." He pulled fiercely on the oars and fell backwards with legs in the air. He righted himself and started rowing again. We made it back to our boat; and then while I was gabbling insanely, he was writing down all the gibberish that I uttered. I was now a basket case and we had to get back to shore and flee. Hunter shot off two Leery distress flares into the harbour and we hailed a boat just coming in. The flares set fire to one of the boats, causing an emergency fire rescue as we got to dry land. There's more and I won't go on, but I guess that was the genesis of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Such a wild game was possible, but it needed all the genius and application of Hunter S. Thompson to make it live. He has done that and he has proved that a redneck Southern gentleman who has the fire in his belly and the indignation in his soul can make it happen. I had the good fortune to meet one of the great originals of American Literature. Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late 20th Century. Time will sort the bastard out. I have always known that one day I would know this journey; but yesterday, I did not know that it would be today . . . I leave it to others more qualified than me to assess and appraise his monumental literary legacy.

hahahahaha

yep....and ditto what zesto said...

from the new york times February 22, 2005 AN APPRECIATION The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and Outrage By DAVID CARR unter S. Thompson died on Sunday, alone with a gun in his kitchen in Woody Creek, Colo. In doing so, he added heft to a legend that came to obscure his gifts as one of journalism's most influential practitioners. Somewhere beneath the cartoon - he was Uncle Duke in the Doonesbury strip, of course, but Bill Murray inked him well in the 1980 film "Where the Buffalo Roam" - and a lifestyle dominated by a long and sophisticated romance with drugs, Mr. Thompson managed to change the course of American journalism. Of all of the so-called practitioners of New Journalism, Mr. Thompson was the one who was willing to insert himself and his capacious reserve of outrage into the middle of every story. In his articles for Rolling Stone and his seminal 1973 book, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" Mr. Thompson threw himself at the conventions of political reporting. Not only was he not neutral, he was angry, an avenging proxy for the American polity. Brick by brick, he tore away a wall - since rebuilt - that made politics seem like a low-stakes minstrel show. "He spent his life in search of an honest man, and he seldom found any," said James Silberman, his longtime editor and publisher at Random House and Summit Books. As a writer though, Mr. Thompson met plenty of honest digressions, and engaged them all to their fullest. He would begin with a premise - Richard Nixon was doing Satan's handiwork, for instance - and then in writing about it, tumble through the Tet Offensive, the drugs from the previous night he was trying to fight through, Hubert Humphrey's alleged spinelessness, Nixon's surprising knowledge of the N.F.L., and the fecklessness of his editors, before landing the entire rococo mix in one tidy package, like a gift. His assignments always became quests. It was not enough for him to journey south to Cozumel off the Yucatán Peninsula to write about rich white men hunting sharks; he also had to retrieve 50 doses of MDA, a drug he was fond of, that he had stashed in the shark pool of the aquarium the last time he was on the island. Mr. Thompson managed to live and write his own version of the Heisenberg principle: That the observer not only changes events by his presence, but his presence also frequently surpasses the event in terms of importance. Like many contemporary American writers, Mr. Thompson lived the bell curve of a writer's life. Long after the "Fear and Loathing" rubric had been arrayed over everything from shark fishing, the Hell's Angels and Las Vegas, he was hounded by the fact that his moment - a white hot one where in which he found himself face to face with a shark or George McGovern - had passed. His friends would continue to drop by Woody Creek, his remote, mountainous salon near Aspen for smart, engaging talk accompanied by the explosives, narcotics and weaponry Mr. Thompson counted as enduring hobbies. Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes" was one of them, and said yesterday that Thompson's menace was overestimated, that it was frequently overwhelmed by courtliness. George Plimpton was a frequent visitor, as was Walter Isaacson. Even the town sheriff was welcome, as long as he called ahead so Mr. Thompson could tidy the premises. For a generation of American students, Mr. Thompson made journalism seem like a dangerous, fantastic occupation, in the process transforming an avocation that was mostly populated by doughy white men in short-sleeve white button-downs and bad ties into something fit for those who smoked Dunhills at the end of cigarette holders and wore sunglasses regardless of the time of day. It is to his credit or blame that many aspiring journalists showed up to cover their first, second, and sometimes third local city council meetings in bowling shirts and bad sunglasses (no names need be mentioned here), along with their notebooks. For all of the pharmacological foundations of his stories, Mr. Thompson was a reporter, taking to the task of finding out what other people knew with an avidity that earned the respect of even those who found his personal hobbies reprehensible. Hunter S. Thompson knew stuff and wrote about it in a way that could leave his colleagues breathless and vowing to do better. He had a gift for sentence writing, and he tended to write a lot of them. But his loquaciousness was not restricted to articles and books. In "Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist," his memoir published in 2000 which was composed of correspondence, it became clear how in his hands even the lowly expense report, usually a relentlessly banal document, could be a thing of beauty. To Mr. Thompson, it was all true, every word of it. Maybe not literally, you-can-look-it-up true, but true in a way that the bean counters would never understand. Friends say that he appeared to be relatively happy of late, and was fully engaged in the writing projects he had before him. But a chronic series of physical infirmities - he had to use a wheelchair at times - left him feeling that he was finally being maneuvered by forces he could not medicate or write into obscurity. And his suicide had its own terrible logic. A man who was so intent on generating a remarkable voice that he retyped Hemingway's novels just to understand how it was done, gave a final bit of dramatic tribute in turning a gun on himself.

jesus youre all depressing... the guy was 67, he lived longer then most, and he lived harder then anyone... it really shouldnt come as a suprise, you think hunter was gonna let old age take him down? not a chance... so lets toast rum, smoke cigarettes, do something no matter how small out of the norm, rail against injustice and reread the classics of unkie duke... long live hunter!

i finally heard a dedication that summed it all up: at about 9:50, don imus was wrapping up his show, and he had been talking about hunter, and he goes, "okay this is it, this is one for ole hunter" and he play the whole "happiness is a warm gun" and closed the show with it... everything else i came across just seems pointless... from one of my favorites writers to another: Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2113865/ obit Hunter Thompson The minuteman of the Rockies. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005, at 10:11 AM PT In early August of 1990 I went to Aspen, Colo., to cover what looked as if it would be a rather banal summit involving Margaret Thatcher and George Bush. (The meeting was to be enlivened by the announcement of the forcible annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, who would go on to trouble our tranquility for another 13 years.) While the banal bit was still going on, the city invited the visiting press hacks for a cocktail reception at the top of an imposing mountain. Stepping off the ski lift, I was met by immaculate specimens of young American womanhood, holding silver trays and flashing perfect dentition. What would I like? I thought a gin and tonic would meet the case. "Sir, that would be inappropriate." In what respect? "At this altitude gin would be very much more toxic than at ground level." In that case, I said, make it a double. The very slight contraction of the freeze-frame smile made it plain that I was wasting my time: It was the early days of the brave new America that knew what was best for you. Spurning the chardonnay and stepping straight back onto the ski lift, I was soon back in town and then, after a short drive, making a turn opposite the Woody Creek Inn (easily spotted by the pig on its roof). And there, at the very fringe of habitation, was Owl Farm and its genial proprietor, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Once inside these well-armed precincts, I could drink and smoke and ingest any damn thing I liked. I finished a fairly long evening by doing some friendly target-practice, with laser-guided high-velocity rifles, in the company of my host. An empty bottle didn't stand any more of a chance outside than a full one would have had within. It was vertiginous, for me, to be able to move from one America to another, in point of time and also of place, so rapidly. It had been in 1970 that Thompson first ran for local office in Aspen, and stood against the wave of bourgeoisification that would soon make it a place where the locals could no longer afford to live. Local police officials tried to harass him in numberless ways, only to find that they were dealing not with some hippie or freak, but with one of the charter members of the Colorado National Rifle Association. Thompson was to pursue this feud, with absolutely Corsican persistence, for many decades. If he had done nothing else, he might be remembered as a village Hampden, or a minuteman of the Rockies. But, as Carey McWilliams of The Nation had recognized a long time before, Hunter was more than just a "character." His proposal to write about the Hell's Angels for the magazine, once accepted, was more than a brilliant piece of observant and participant journalism. It helped to curtain-raise the '60s, and perhaps most especially the hectic excess of that decade in California. Keen as he was on the herbivorous and antimilitarist side of that moment, Thompson wasn't at all blind to the noir aspect, and helped prepare readers for the Manson and Altamont dimension. He'd been in this mood since at least November 22, 1963, when he first employed the words "fear and loathing" to express the way he felt about whomever it was who had murdered the president. "The only things I've ever been arrested for," said Hunter in one late interview, "were things I didn't do." It would take a very long article to describe all the deeds for which he could have been indicted, and all the days and nights when he could well have ended up dead. I hope that it isn't true that he became depressed and miserable about the pain and immobility of a broken leg, and that the only lethal crime he ever committed was against himself in a dark hour, but the thing seems depressingly plausible, and there would always have been a firearm, and ammo, within easy reach. I'm not that crazy about the gonzo school, or any other version of the new journalism either, but Thompson's signature style was not always, or not entirely, about faxing unedited notes or having his life insurance cancelled by Jan Wenner. He was, above all, a highly polished hater, and could fuel himself as well as ignite others with his sheer contempt for Richard Nixon and all that he stood for. This involved, for some years, a life where there was almost no distance between belief and action. And it is why his 1972 book on the campaign trail holds up so well. But even then he knew, as he was to keep repeating, that "the wave" of the insurgent '60s— "a fantastic, universal sense that whatever we were doing was right: that we were winning"—was a wave that had not only "broken" but had "rolled back." This was a rapture that was hard to recapture. In Wayne Ewing's oddly effective movie, Breakfast with Hunter, it is possible to detect the sensation of diminishing returns. The old enrage doesn't really look that comfortable as he is card-indexed by the historian Douglas Brinkley (who edited his collected letters, for Chrissake) or venerated as an icon by George Plimpton. He doesn't even seem all that keen on being played by Johnny Depp in the celluloid version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He's fine when hanging out with Warren Zevon, but he appears a bit lost when he's discharging fire extinguishers, or hurling blown-up fuck-dolls around the scenery, as if this sort of thing was expected of him. "He was never one to hang around when it was time to go," a mutual friend e-mailed me on Monday. The realization that this might have occurred to him before it occurred to us is a very melancholy one. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate. His most recent book is Love, Poverty and War. He is also the author of A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq and of Blood, Class and Empire.

do you think it will pass? its so unrepublican when you think about it...

yep, sounds like seeks.... keep your eye open johnny i think they may be coming around in spring... article in sundays new york times about all thats cool in music from montreal: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/arts/music/06carr.html?

is the internet rumor true that its based on you beards... i remember you telling me something about getting shot at once while doing some wall and using your can as a flamethrower... maybe i was drunk...

hopefully this is a sign of desperation... a hysterical one at that...

some minor burns in the ear....from the FIRE!!

i already saw the matrix....

no, but they mentioned that they were on it....thats why they went on way later...im gonna try and tape it tonite on cnbc great line last night: "so we bumped maroon5 from conan tonight...." they are playing irving plaza tonite for the tr-staters...sold out, but nothing is ever "sold-out"

go check this band out....http://www.arcadefire.com/ their cd is good, funeral....but live, the sound is almost overwhelming....sick show like god speed but with less absract with vocals, like sigur ros but more rocking....i dunno i got like 3 hours of sleep... check em out... also check out the dears....same gig whats up the canadian export of rocking bands over the past few years, all having this eclectic sounds... anymore i should be aware of??