Tuesday, December 29, 2015

RIP, Lemmy and (Meadowlark) Lemon

It must have been an interesting day for St. Peter at the gates of Heaven. We lost Meadowlark Lemon and Lemmy Kilmister yesterday.

How do you sum up Lemmy? I've always been fond of this quote:


There's always a place in the world for a cheerful reprobate and Lemmy was probably the exemplar of this type. As the leader of Motörhead, he played a no-nonsense version of headbang metal. He liked drinking and screwing around and was unapologetic about it. And he lived to be 70 years old, somehow. Another quote:
"People don't become better when they're dead; you just talk about them as if they are. But it's not true! People are still assholes, they're just dead assholes!"
So they are. I can't say that I listen to Lemmy's music very much, but I always appreciated his unvarnished, and I mean extremely unvarnished, wit. RIP.

Then there was Meadowlark Lemon, the Clown Prince of Basketball and the leader of the Harlem Globetrotters, who passed away yesterday at the age of 83. Kids of my generation saw a lot of the Harlem Globetrotters, between their regular appearances on ABC's Wide World of Sports program and their continual barnstorming. I saw them as a kid when they came to the Brown County Arena and Meadowlark was an amazing guy to watch:


The "games" against the hapless Washington Generals were always silly and a lot of the schtick was predictable, but the Globetrotters were all about entertainment and you couldn't help but smile when you watched them. Not many people can make that claim. RIP.

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