God to Jack: You Can’t Quit – You’re Fired

Or
Dr. Death meets Mr. Death
(Additional accolades a la Monty)
GHI Patron Saint Jack Kevorkian, who figured out how to beat escalating malpractice insurance premiums, has died of a pulmonary embolism at the age of 83. As a pathologist, he was able to combine his need for samples with the unpleasantness of old age and disease by developing a contraption of bottles, tubes, wires and mortal coils located in motel rooms and vans to help the elderly, the terminally ill and the really bored end their suffering. While Big Pharma, fearing losing paying customers, and Republican death penalty advocates, who didn’t want to give up their monopoly on scheduling death, wailed about injustice, but at the time the laws around assisted suicide were vague at best, and he beat charges 3 different times. Kevorkian may have been able to start franchising walk-up death clinics - based on the look of the device and the intended outcome, the GHI would have advocated calling them Stills – had he not operated the machine on a patient in an interview on 60 Minutes. At that point, he was no longer assisting, but murdering, in the eyes of the Michigan jurors who finally shut him down. But not before he whacked 130 “patients,” though impatients seems more accurate. To put that in perspective, that leaves him just 1 shy of the confirmed combined total of John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, Gary “Green River Killer” Ridgway and Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez. Kevorkian was credited with challenging the social taboo on fruitless discussions of end of life issues, unless you live in Oregon, Washington or Montana or have a family doctor willing to spend 8 years in prison to prove a point. Thankfully he was good at killing people because he was godawful as an artist: http://networkedblogs.com/gYGuv.