(((((Lixy))))))

Another more colourful story, this one's from the CBC:

ASPEN, COLO. - Hunter S. Thompson, the U.S. writer who pioneered the super-subjective form of journalism known as "gonzo", has killed himself, his son said.

In a statement released to the Aspen Daily News, Juan Thompson said his father shot himself to death in his home in Aspen, Colo. on Sunday night. He was 67.

The newspaper said the Pitkin County police confirmed the suicide.

Thompson is credited with pioneering "gonzo journalism," a highly subjective and over-the-top style that makes writers – and their opinions – essential parts of the narrative.

He first vaulted to fame with his non-fiction book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966) – after riding with the bikers for a year to gather material.

But he's most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – which purported to be a work of fiction, but was a thinly disguised, gonzo compilation of two road trips that Hunter made to Las Vegas with a friend.

In their trunk, according to the book: "Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ...A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" – all of which they manage to consume on the short trip.

A gifted chronicler of depravity in American Life, some of Thompson's other works included Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973) – about the 1972 presidential election campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern – and Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s (1989).

Thompson was born in 1937 in Louisville, Ky.

He served in the U.S. Air Force for a short time as a young man, then began working as a freelance journalist.

He seemed to have rubbed shoulders with almost every famous counterculture figure in the 1960s, from beat poet Allen Ginsberg to New Journalist Tom Wolfe to Ken Kesey (including hanging out with the Merry Pranksters and participating in Kesey's first LSD tests).

He inspired a number of films, including Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) with Bill Murray playing Thompson and British director Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp as the Thompson character, Raoul Duke.

He was also the model for the character "Duke" in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.

Thompson's most recent book was Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004).