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Celebrity Death Challenge

Hunter S. Thompson vs Charles Bukowski

In this contest, one eagerly awaited for years by all poets and journalists of whatever school or hue, the journalist had the better of the early rounds with a series of cultured left and right jabs to southpaw Bukowski's leonine head. In round 4, Thompson lands a brilliant straight right to Bukowksi's chin but the German migr poet's thick beard prevents a KO and only sets him back momentarily on his heels, at the same time causing him to spit out a spent cigarette and some chewing gum. In round 7, Thompson doles out further punishment in a vicious barrage of scathing foul-mouthed jibes and invective, taunting Bukowski mercilessly for his diffuseness, obscurity and inability to write in a recognized metre and make pleasant sounding rhymes, for which he (Thompson that is) receives a warning from the referee (in my opinion this referee has a secret bias in favour of free verse).

Seemingly still ignoring the warning, Thompson resumes the taunting (together with the occasional perfidious punch into Bukowski's only functioning kidney, which veteran referee, Harold Bloom, seems to ignore) in the 8th, calling Bukowski a dead beat' poet to which Bukowski wittily replies I ain't no beat poet and I ain't dead yet, you goddam overrated two-bit dime-a-line hack' for which he also receives a warning from referee Bloom who reprimands him for lack of refinement and poor diction and threatens to disqualify him from the canon. Indifferent and unfazed, Bukowksi shakes his head, and steps back into the fray.

By the 10th round, with both fighters looking dazed and becoming increasingly inarticulate, there is a noticeable falling off in the intellectual quality of the mutual taunts, which give way to real physical blows and get more and more vicious, with journalist and poet sustaining severe damage to both head and body. At one point towards the end of the 13th round, referee Bloom looks tempted to intervene and stop the fight to save both men's literary careers but, to his everlasting credit and the delight of the baying 30,000 crowd packed into a medium-sized Las Vegas casino hall, he let the carnage continue.

By the end of the 13th round, it becomes painfully apparent that both fighters have been taking too much 'liquid refreshment' in between rounds, and toward the end of the 14th, collapse into each other's arms, fall onto their backs and choke to death in their own vomit before the paramedics can get to them.

Learn more about this author, Maximillion Mango-Chutney.
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