PEOPLE DIE.

When I was growing up, and really ever since, people I've known used to make fun of the Bee Gees all the time. And yeah, I guess there was a lot to make fun of, on the face of it. There's the high-higher-&-dogpitched harmonies, their Eurovision hair, and the fact that while lots of people tried to sound like them, no one actually could do it with any authority.

Truth was, the Bee Gees were really, really good. They were genuinely great songwriters, and when you hear other people cover their songs, that fact becomes clear. Sure, they sounded fey and geeky. They paved the way for thousands of hours of crappy disco and techno to see the light of the glitter ball. But talk about creating a genre and filling it completely. The death of Maurice Gibb ends a legendary run. These guys had basically free passes to the top of the world's pop charts for more than three decades, and their place in the pantheon of popular music was assured long before the great cash-in that was Saturday Night Fever came down the pike.

So it's kind of sad that, upon Maurice's death, the surviving brothers are taking their grief public with questions about the care that their brother got. The guy was a rock star. He lived hard. It comes with the business. He also got the best care money could buy. But it sounds like he didn't ask for it as often as he could have.

Read Sue's excellent rant about this stuff. I've not been coherent lately, not like she has.