Free Republic

Sir Michael Palin has plans in place for his inevitable death. The 82-year-old star of the British comedy troupe Monty Python revealed that he’s organized his will and instructed his loved ones on what to do when he dies following his wife’s passing in 2023. Speaking on the podcast “On the Marie Curie Couch,” Palin got real about his end-of-life arrangements, noting that losing his significant other has helped his family be more open about the end. “I do think about death, and the family are rather wonderful about it: ‘Have you made a will? Can I be in your...

The group of scientists from the UK, France and Canada who studied the strange case of the man with "chronic deja vu" think one possible cause of the phenomenon could be anxiety. The man's condition was so persistent he avoided watching television, listening to the radio and reading newspapers because he felt he had "encountered it all before". Dr Chris Moulin, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the University of Bourgogne who worked on the study, says the man had a history of depression and anxiety, and had once taken the drug LSD whilst at university, but was otherwise completely healthy. "This...

Watching the livestream of Monty Python's last ever performance on GOLD, it was impossible not to experience a tingle of sadness. So this was it, the final performance by the most influential comedy troupe of all time. Forty-odd years since Monty Python's Flying Circus revolutionized television humour and unleashed a legion of surreal catchphrases John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Michael Palin departed the stage at London's O2 Arena to the strains of their darkly hilarious (or is it hilariously dark?) anthem Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. Watching the swan-song was a 15,000 live...

What's with the recent trend of tagging articles with palin or sarahpalin that have nothing to do with Sarah Palin? If your article has nothing to do with Palin, please don't tag it as such. It's bad enough that journalists use her name to get hits to their articles or as a cheap source of writing material. We don't need that attitude here too. Just because people want to increase traffic to their posts, doesn't mean they should tag their posted articles with palin or sarahpalin. This just clutters the keyword/tagging system.

Michael Palin and Terry Jones have complained that Chris Christie, the Republican candidate for the New Jersey governorship, used clips from a Monty Python sketch in a campaign advertisement. Mr Christie, who hopes to unseat his Democratic rival Jon Corzine as governor in an election on Tuesday, removed the video from his website and YouTube page hours after complaints from Michael Palin and Terry Jones. The offending advertisement featured Palin in a vintage Monty Python's Flying Circus piece as a television presenter asking viewers if they had ever suffered from déjà vu and then repeating the question several times. Mr...

Michael Palin's New Europe has been rapped by the BBC Trust's editorial standards committee over its portrayal of the role of Serbia in the Balkan conflict in the 1990s. Palin's most recent travelogue was "political commentary rather than a travel series" and gave an inaccurate account of the war in the 1990s Balkan conflict, according to one complainant. Comments made by Palin about the destruction of a bridge at Mostar, Bosnia in 1993 came in for criticism from the complainant. Palin's comments were made in 'War and Peace', the first episode of the series, which was broadcast on BBC1 in...