A Celebration of The Life of Mr. Big Dubya, On This, The Occasion Of His Passing

By now, most of you will have heard that we've lost one of our best and brightest. Mr. Big Dubya, known to his lovely wife and beautiful children as "Warren" and "Father" respectively, known to his friends as Mr. Big Dubya, known to the Pennsylvania legal system as "Paul Murchison", and known to his bookie as "that guy that lost $59,920 on Destination Alpo in the fifth race at Santa Anita", has, sadly, left the confines of this mortal coil. He was 40 years old. Our friendship is, of course, well documented. I remember it well, that fateful day when we first crossed paths. That game of mumblety-peg, the likes of which the people of Lisbon had never seen. The thinly veiled insult (for the record, I do enjoy a good Imitation Krab Salad, as do a great many learned men). Pistols at dawn on the field of honor. That fateful misfire, and the good laugh that followed. Thus was our friendship forged. We shared a bond that few will ever know - him saving my life during that fateful day on the Edmund Fitzgerald, me giving him the last of my Wint-O-Green Breath Savers that one time. Sadly, I'll never get that Breath Saver back. Because, really, $1.00 a pack? Who am I, Croesus?

Mr. Big Dubya was a man of action, not words. Here was a man who every year made the pilgrimage to Salt Lake City to visit the grave of his idol, Wilfred Brimley. (Being informed, years later, that Mr. Brimley was not in fact dead would have broken a lesser man; Mr. Big Dubya took it in stride, and continued to make the trek, a testament to the man's tenacity.) Here was a man who took his duties as an astronaut seriously, and yet never failed to make the men and women of Mission Control laugh, even on the most difficult of missions, with his unique variations on the time-honored "fart in a spacesuit" theme. Running with the bulls through the streets of Pamplona, tracking the yeti across the treacherous slopes of the Himalayas, hunting U-boats in his makeshift patrol boat off the Cuban shores (an act of courage that would later be immortalized in a classic song by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton) - this was a life well lived.

A wise man once said that it's better to burn than fade away; he also said "unda gleeben glauben globen", or some such, and though I have no idea what either of those two things mean, they seem fitting. Farewell, Mr. Big Dubya. 40 years on this earth was far too short a time. Unless you were a dog. Then, fuck, dude. You'd have been a really old dog. (ETA 5/4/07 6:50 a.m.: my intern has informed me that Mr. Big Dubya is actually not dead, but celebrating his 40th birthday. We apologize for the error.)