Comments on: Passed on in 2025. https://nathanshumate.com/passed-on-in-2025/ I make things, and I make things up. Thu, 08 Jan 2026 08:27:38 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 By: RK https://nathanshumate.com/passed-on-in-2025/#comment-8416 Thu, 08 Jan 2026 08:27:38 +0000 https://nathanshumate.com/?p=48901#comment-8416 What’s particularly impressive about this list is just how many of these names I recognize without having to look them up. Tom Lehrer was one of my Boomer parents’ favorite comedians too, but that’s just one among many names I recognize from their generation’s celebrities (e.g. my late mother had a “biggest hits” LP of Connie Francis songs). Meanwhile, we who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s remember Ozzy Osbourne, Hulk Hogan, Val Kilmer, and Rob Reiner. Jim Shooter I recall from my comics fandom days as the guy who reorganized Marvel Comics into the corporate powerhouse it became (for good or ill), James Dobson I remember from his videos they played on a big screen at the evangelical church I attended back in the 1980s, and Jane Goodall I particularly recall as that gal who studied primates in part because of that one Far Side comic Gary Larson did showing one such primate’s wife accusing him of “conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp” after finding one of her hairs on him (much to Goodall’s amusement, though the Executive Director at her Institute was mortified and fired off an angry letter to the editor at one of the papers running the strip at the time).

Then, of course, there’s the odd name from my grandparents’ time like Brigitte Bardot and (to a lesser extent) Robert Redford, though my parents would naturally recognize them too. As is often the case (e.g. Mikhail Gorbachev back in 2022), there’s also the odd name that had me saying “That guy was still alive!?” this year, which is Graham Greene… until I realized the obituary was talking about an actor famous for being in Dances With Wolves (a guy I didn’t actually remember) instead of the annoyingly highbrow novelist on my required reading list for a course I took back in college (who’d already kicked off back in 1991). That’s kinda like what happened when Michael Moore died in 2013; no, not the fat and disgustingly hypocritical maker of far-left agitprop flicks, but the Michael “Micky” Moore who worked on the original Indiana Jones movie trilogy.

Speaking of politics, a few of these are names that only got famous this year because of their being murdered, and those murders stirring up massive political controversies, namely Chuck Mangione, Iryna Zarutska, and Charlie Kirk. Here’s hoping we won’t have any more like that this year, though I wouldn’t place any bets on that hope. Political powder kegs are everywhere, and with seemingly nearly everybody in the world on the internet these days, far too many online agitators seem overly eager to play with matches.

]]>