Before his mug shot disappears from the Murderers' Row atop our blog, we want to say farewell to our colleague Joe Holley, who has just left the Post to begin plying the journalistic trade as a political writer for the Houston Chronicle.

Joe, as longtime readers know, is a Texan and our resident expert on Texiana of all sorts. His stories are legion, starting with the lede on the very first obit he wrote here:

Tony De La Rosa, 72, a Tejano musician who helped bring conjunto music from the isolated ranchlands of the South Texas brush country to loud and lively urban dance halls throughout the Southwest, died June 2 during heart surgery at Christus Spohn Hospital-Memorial in Corpus Christi, Tex.

He was also fearless in writing about a member of a menage a trois (read deep into the story). But mostly, he was a great colleague and friend who shared the survivor humor of the obits desk, which should be fabulous preparation for Texas political races.

At Salon, Garrison Keillor writes of autumn -- and obits:

"That is what fall means in St. Paul, Minn. It's maple trees telling us about mortality and that life is short and can't be put on Pause and each of us is as fragile and forgettable as a maple tree. We go racing past them fighting our petty battles for power and parking spaces, and then we die (arghh) and people glance at the obit and if you're young, like Keats and Shelley, they feel a little twinge, and if you aren't they don't, and then they go back to telling their kids about the importance of correct spelling and grammar, which every good parent should do."

It would be hard to overestimate the power and influence of Mercedes Sosa, the Argentinian-born folk singer who died October 4 at age 74. As Adam Bernstein recounts in The Post, she released 70 albums over a career spanning nearly six decades. Known for her rich contralto voice and her extraordinary versatility, she sang Argentinian tango, Brazilian bossa nova, Cuban nueva trova and rock. Her songs often addressed the political struggles of oppressed people, particularly in Latin America, where she was known as "the voice of the voiceless ones."

Among the many speeches Bill Safire wrote for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew was one he was surely glad Nixon never had to give. On the occasion of the Apollo moon landing in July 1969, he wrote two speeches -- one congratulating the astronauts and one eulogizing their sacrifce in case the moonwalkers missed the rendezvous with the orbiting command module to return to Earth.

Among the sentiments: "These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice."

Safire, the longtime columnist for the New York Times, died in Rockville Sunday at age 79.

It's easy to conjure up the names of the notorious who've been responsible for the deaths of millions -- think Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot -- but what about the name of a man responsible for saving millions? As writer Gregg Easterbrook noted in 1997, "America has three living winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, two universally renowned and the other so little celebrated that not one person in a hundred would be likely to pick his face out of a lineup, or even recognize his name." The famous Nobel laureates were Elie Wiesel and Henry Kissinger. The relative unknown was Norman Borlaug.

Borlaug, who died in Dallas Saturday night at age 95, was an agronomist whose discoveries sparked the Green Revolution and who by showing developing nations how to increase food production saved literally millions of lives from starvation. Easterbrook argued that he saved more lives than any person who ever lived.

In recent years he was a professor at Texas A&M University and continued writing and advising students until shortly before his death. He didn't become any better known than he was a dozen years ago, at least in this country, although in developing nations around the world he was considered one of the most significant Americans of our time..