Aussie columnist Bob Ellis files a non-love letter to New York:

Heath Ledger at 28, Dylan Thomas at 39, died of drugs mis-prescribed by New York doctors; John Hargreaves at 50, Peter Allen at 48 of AIDS caught in New York’s bath-houses; Peter Finch at 60 of heart-strain making a New York film. John Lennon was shot dead there; Russell Crowe, booked and shamed for throwing a phone at a clerk, all but lost his stardom there.
What is it about New York?

Gotcha. Anyone else?

Marilyn Monroe learned the Method there, and such unwieldy pretension and such drug use she died at 36. Judy Garland frequently attempted suicide there, and died at 47.
What is it about New York?

Er, hang on. Didn’t Judy die in London, like Mama Cass and that Member of Parliament who auto-erotically asphyxiated? What is it about London? Hey, never mind, Mr Ellis is riffing now:

New York has no time for failure. New York has no room for losers.
Mohamed Atta aimed a plane at a New York tower, and died at 32…
A New Yorker, Franklin Roosevelt, sent back boatloads of frantic Jewish refugees to Nazi Germany. The Holocaust followed, the state of Israel, 9/11, the current wars.

Curse you, FDR, you Brooklynite Jew-hating Zionist! Look at what New York has robbed us of:

I miss the plays and poems Dylan Thomas never wrote. A New York doctor killed him with the wrong injection, the way they do. I miss the films Heath might have made until he was eighty. I miss his Hamlet, his Roo in The Doll, the films he might have directed, the rude Oscar speech he never made.

I miss the planes Mohammed Atta will never fly, with Judy Garland throwing up in the toilet and Peter Allen sashaying down the aisle singing “When my baby, when my baby smiles at me, I go to Rio”…

(via Tim Blair)