"He didn't carpet-bomb Cambodia"

Shane MacGowan and Henry Kissinger had pretty well nothing in common, except for dying within twenty-four hours of each other.

Because I'm a Canadian, and therefore blocked from news organizations on social media, I learned about the demise of MacGowan from actor Christopher Eccleston, who posted his picture on Instagram.  My heart sank, because I was rather a Pogues fan.  (I was rather surprised to hear that Henry Kissinger wasn't dead already, to tell you the truth; he was 100 years old, after all.)

Someone on Twitter - I continue to refuse to refer to it by its rather Teutonic rebranding - was nonplussed, not that either of the men had died, but that MacGowan had received rather more coverage and longer articles.  The wags were quick on their keyboards: "He wrote better songs."

One of them, and my personal favourite, is "Haunted" which was first recorded in 1986 with Cait O'Riordan.  Some years after getting kicked out of the Pogues for his legendary benders, MacGowan re-recorded the song with his friend Sinéad O'Connor (who later would report him to the police when she witnessed his taking heroin, but they were still friends when O'Connor died earlier this year.) 

You were so cool, you could have put out Vietnam.

Another tenuous link to Henry Kissinger?  (Nah.)