Another one bites the dust

Philip Jose Farmer has died. As all the SF authors I came to love as a student die off, one by one, I start to feel my own mortality creeping up on me. Still, as PJF's best-known work (the Riverworld trilogy) dealt with a brilliantly-imagined afterlife perhaps that's not such a bad thing.

Things the Guardian obituary taught me:
1. that PJF wrote a story (The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod) which was a Tarzan story as it might have been written by William Burroughs rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs.
2. that Jimi Hendrix first encountered the phrase "purple haze" in a PJF book.