musings

Thoughts on the passing of P.J. O'Rourke

I'm wistfully saddened at the news that P.J. O'Rourke died today — wistful because I always wanted to meet him but never got down to doing something about it.

His writing was the single reason I subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine in my student days at Princeton in the 1980s — a path which introduced me to Gonzo journalism which in turn led me to discover Hunter S. Thompson.

I'm not going to go into his life story as there's enough of that documented elsewhere. I'm just going to briefly quote some of his work.

The price of doing business…

An acquaintance of mine has become the southern African partner for nice piece of European technology in the off-grid energy space. He asked me whether I would be willing to spread the word to potential customers, and I responded: "Sure. What's the entry-level price per unit?"

So here we are, on a Saturday afternoon, having a conference call with his German partner who proceeds to tell me about how brilliant his product is and its life expectancy is 20 years or more versus 5 years for the competition before I finally cut him short.

Picture of the author