"The Incident" with "the good blokes"

Brett Harrison sends this on Thursday, Oct 16, 2008:

"This is for everyone at YSU; I was shocked & saddened to hear of the death of Rick Pirko. We had great fun together for about a week at the FPSPACE conference in 1996. Rick's quiet yet mischievous sense of humour was the source of much amusement, especially when we were ribbing Rob Landis. :) I still remember the fun we had on the bus trips to various sites, sitting in the back of the bus, swapping jokes with the Russians, and Rick & I doing innumerable Monty Python sketches together from memory, to the astonishment of all. Rick, of course, was instrumental in "The Incident" where the 3 of us, under cover of darkness, and every minute fearing arrest, stuck a map of Tasmania high up on a Russian monument - a harmless prank which became legendary on that trip. The story has been retold by me many times since (and then retold by others, I have now heard), and so I (and others who never met him) will always remember Rick fondly as a partner in crime. I really envy you & anybody who got to work with Rick; he was, as we say in Australia, "a good bloke", fun to be with, competent yet unassuming, and the kind of fellow whom you'd be happy to have with you in any situation. I kept in touch with Rick only a little after FPSPACE96, and I regret that I didn't manage to visit him when I visited the US last year. I'm sure many people have great stories about Rick; and the ones from Moscow will continue to be told Down Under.
cheers,---Brett Harrison
***** " ' I don't appreciate poetry--I don't mind admitting that now; I don't understand poetry. We studied it in high school and college, but they never told us why it was good. I got A's on all the exams--'Hail to thee blithe spirit, bird thou never wert'-- what the hell does that mean? I have no idea.'-Tom Lehrer"