Death doesn't take a holiday

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il is dead. Couldn't have happened to a stranger guy.

Former dissident turned national leader Vaclav Havel died on Sunday.

Mr. Havel spent five years in and out of Communist prisons, lived for two decades under close secret-police surveillance and endured the suppression of his plays and essays. He served 14 years as president, wrote 19 plays, inspired a film and a rap song and remained one of his generation’s most seductively nonconformist writers.

Now that's a resumé.

Closer to (my) home, Warren Hellman died. Hellman was a financier who was perhaps best known for sponsoring the ever more successful Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco.

You have to respect Havel, but I'll probably miss Hellman the most. Hellman's generosity made the San Francisco Bay Area a better place for all of us to live.

He bankrolled San Francisco ballot measures that reformed the city's pension system and created an underground parking garage beneath Golden Gate Park. He funded the San Francisco Free Clinic and helped set up an endowment to support aquatic sports at UC Berkeley, where he played water polo as a student. Concerned about dwindling local news coverage in the Internet age, he helped form the Bay Citizen online journalism site.

(The underground parking garage is still controversial, but the Bay Citizen is nothing short of a wonder.)

If you still need convincing of Hellman's (and his family's) goodwill, try this on for size:

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the San Francisco Free Clinic, the Bay Citizen and the San Francisco School Alliance. The family also requests a donation of blood or platelets to a local blood bank.

The world is a poorer place without Havel and Hellman. As for Kim Jong-Il -- good riddance. North Koreans are a tiny step closer to rejoining the human race. Only a tiny step, though.

[UPDATE: the Bay Citizen's obituary of Warren Hellman is, unsurprisingly, a lot better than SFGate's.]