Iain Banks has terminal cancer

bummer

cancer seems to be going around...recently Sam Simon also announced he had terminal cancer
 
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.​
Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.
To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.:D​
That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, “Not by foot, I hope!”:D

siskel died and i guess i just lost track of ebert...i had never read that... he was moved by great minds obviously... i love humans that think... :D
 
Ebert continued to be a regular on the Howard Stern Show even after Siskel passed away (they were both on and those were hysterical appearances). Somewhere there's a TED video of Ebert discussing the technology of his new voice after his cancer operation on his jaw

for fans of Iain Banks:
http://friends.banksophilia.com/
 
Alas, Mr. Banks has lost his battle:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22835047

Sad news and from a personal point of view, no more wonderful Culture novels.

And in a somewhat coincidental twist:
After announcing his illness in April, Banks asked his publishers to bring forward the release date of his latest novel, The Quarry, so he could see it on the shelves.
On Sunday, it was revealed the book describes the final weeks of the life of a man in his 40s who has terminal cancer.
Speaking to the BBC's Kirsty Wark, Banks said he was some 87,000 words into writing the book when he was diagnosed with his own illness.

"I had no inkling. So it wasn't as though this is a response to the disease or anything, the book had been kind of ready to go," he said.
"And then 10,000 words from the end, as it turned out, I suddenly discovered that I had cancer."
Click to expand...

Another fantastic writer gone.

R. I. P.
 
Here he is talking to Kirsty Wark a few weeks ago:

 
I was going around my Google+ and noticed that last year Iain and others had a "Hangout"

for those without G+

 
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