Acclaimed African-American photographer/film director/author/composer Gordon Parks, who turned his semi-autobiographical novel The Learning Tree into a film, and who also directed the original Shaft movie and a handful of other blaxploitation flicks, has died at 93. Cancer.

Also, African music legend Ali Farka Toure, the progenitor of "Mali blues" who was one of the continent's four or five most important popular music ambassadors, has died at 66 (or 67, nobody knows his actual date of birth). Bone cancer.

Christopher Reeve's widow Dana Reeve also went at 44. Lung cancer.

I've been talking about impending death so much lately, you'd think I was my mom.