Monday, April 12, 2010

Asbestos & Angel Dust


Malcolm McLaren passed away, the first true casualty of hipster asbestos poisoning - a that was primarily confined to the working class. Incidents of hipster asbestos poisoning will surely rise in the years to come, as the years pass and the time spent in squalid squats and basement punk rock venues comes to significantly impact the respiratory health of the slumming classes.

I was over at Mark Slutsky's place last night for a good friend's birthday party, and after one of the inevitable death of print conversations, he mentioned in passing that some of the most profitable targeted ads online were those pertaining to asbestos in general, and massive class action lawsuits about asbestos poisoning in particular. Always up for a challenge, I decided what with Malcolm McLaren's passing rumoured to have been the result of asbestos dust in the SEX shop he ran with Vivienne Westwood, that now would be the time to bring the formerly disparate worlds of and asbestos lawsuits together, y'know, in memory of Mr. McLaren. I guess the army of lawyers can kick up some serious indirect revenue streams while Googling every nook and cranny of the internet for people who might have been exposed to asbestos and are ready to lend their name to the cause.

Asbestosis, Mesothelioma, diffuse pleural thickening, and cancer are all linked to asbestos exposure, but there is great skepticism amongst many jurists and legal scholars as to how liability is to be determined. Given the . In the case of Malcolm McLaren, his companion Young Kim believes it specifically to have been because of the time he spent in his London clothing shop SEX, but as he was the owner of the shop and, one imagines, a particularly negligent shopkeeper at that, I don't know that his estate or his offspring would necessarily have much luck profiting from his passing. In a related note, here's a crazy story about Roger Ebert writing Who Killed Bambi with Russ Meyer.

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