Werner Herzog, Into the Abyss
The paradox of this film is that it is both unremittingly bleak and rigorously humane.
Safety is Serious
Are you being too safe or are you not being too safe enough?*
*Trick question: You’re already dead.
Venetian Vampires
A Manuscript called “De Masticatione Mortuorum, Latin for “The Chewing Dead,” offered helpful tips for those facing the walking (or chewing) dead, and prescribed practical treatments such as the aforementioned brick-in-mouth.
More on the art & gothic psychogeography of Venice.
Andy Rooney tweets from Stellar
“This waiting room is uncomfortable. And why does Heaven have old magazines? And why is there a chair reserved for Larry King? I’m hungry.”
Tito Rooney will read from a prepared statement.
Earlier this week, Andy Rooney had gone to the doctor complaining about shortness of breath and email and thumbtacks.
Andy Rooney may have died, but Yelp commenters will make sure his legacy lives on.
Matt:
(AP) Andy Rooney dead at 92 after a long battle with pretty much everything.
Matt:
Didja ever noti
WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T RETIRE
Did you ever wonder if retirement could kill you?
When I write my twitter retrospective it will be called The Hypocrisy of Death Jokes and Outrage.
“…and these graves. Do they have to be so narrow? I like a little wiggle room. And why always SIX feet? Why not seven? Or six and a half?”
Ask a Mortician
via Jezebel
All Hallows (I Saw Nick Drake)
Robyn Hitchcock. “I Saw Nick Drake.”
I saw him pass right through this place.
And we’re in bloom.
The Murder of Van Gogh
60 Minutes did a segment on the possibility that, contrary to historical assumption, Vincent Van
Gogh was murdered, or shot accidentally, rather than committed suicide. You can watch the second segment below the fold.
Here’s to the crazy ones
Steve Jobs version of the the Think Different ad that never aired.
headline of the day
Beetles Die During Sex With Beer Bottles
“Mr Peppermint died!”
read the email message I just received.
Mr. Peppermint (Jerry Haynes) hosted a long-running North Texas children’s TV program. He was a kinder, gentler Icky Twerp. He was also the father of Gibby Haynes.
Three for Today (Day Two)
Troy Davis died yesterday by the hand of justice. Many factions fought both sides. When does truth lie?
We write to you today with the overwhelming concern that an innocent person could be executed in Georgia tonight
Six former corrections officials wrote Georgia Corrections Officials and Governor Nathan Deal asking that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles reconsider the execution of Troy Davis:
We write to you as former wardens and corrections officials who have had direct involvement in executions. Like few others in this country, we understand that you have a job to do in carrying out the lawful orders of the judiciary. We also understand, from our own personal experiences, the awful lifelong repercussions that come from participating in the execution of prisoners. While most of the prisoners whose executions we participated in accepted responsibility for the crimes for which they were punished, some of us have also executed prisoners who maintained their innocence until the end. It is those cases that are most haunting to an executioner.
As of now, the execution has been postponed pending review from the Supreme Court.
Update: The Supreme Court Rejects the stay of execution.
(thanks, Tim)
headline of the day
Man wins dumpling eating contest, then dies
headline of the day, II
Two Denver men charged after taking their dead friend for a ride
Doubt is our product
How climate change denial equates to the tobacco industry.
I do not fear death
I found Roger Ebert’s essay on mortality (excerpted from his new book) to be quite a lovely catalyst for reflection.
quote out of context
Behind its flower box framed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.
(via marginal revolution)
Why is it that how people perceive themselves to be seen should have such a profound influence?
So Chochinov tried to answer those questions. As a psychiatrist at the University of Manitoba in Canada, he did study after study trying to tease out exactly what troubled people most about dying. What he found was that what people found most assaulting and annihilating was this idea that who they were would completely cease to exist after their death. And so Chochinov decided to do something about it.
He could have set the Guinness World Record for people who wanted to kill him
The story of Edgar Valdez, aka La Barbie, an American citizen who rose to the top of one of Mexico’s prominent drug cartels.
Like many Texans, Barbie grew up right across the border from Mexico, in the city of Laredo. The place feels like something from a Mexican postcard, with cobblestone plazas and picturesque waterfalls – except for the massive, multilane bridge to Mexico that cuts straight through town. Until the drug war, everyone in Laredo saw the two sides of the border as one; many families, after all, had blood ties in both Mexico and the States. As a kid, Barbie loved to visit Nuevo Laredo, a border town bustling with donkeys, food carts, girls in little embroidered dresses, shoeshine boys and the smell of roasting corn. It was like stepping into another world, and all you had to do was cross the bridge.
In high school, Barbie was in the popular crowd, horsing around in the breezeways outside of class and waging egg wars after school. On weekends, he went to keggers on ranches, played elaborate scavenger games and hung out with his steady sweetheart, Virginia Perez, a bubbly, blue-eyed blonde. He grew up in a middle-class development on the outskirts of Laredo, a kind of no man’s land where Burger Kings didn’t begin to sprout up until the Nineties. Even the people of Laredo considered it “Indian territory,” an area rife with dope and illegal immigrants. Barbie’s parents raised him and his five siblings in a tidy, orange-trimmed home with palm trees in the front. “They’re regular Ozzie and Harriets,” says Jose Baeza, a spokesman for the Laredo police department. “They’re business owners, PTA, morning-jog people.”
Here’s a link to the printer friendly version.
(via the browser)
The Blessed Virginal Creeper
St. Mary’s Cemetery. Galena, Illinois.
Meg Hourihan on the passing of her cat, Bodhi
The semester before I got Bodhi, I took the best class I’ve ever taken. We studied Buddhism, Deconstruction, Emily Dickenson, and Walt Whitman. I read every word of “Leaves of Grass” again and again, and in times of great sorrow I always come back to it:
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.All goes onward and outward–nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Advertisements for Suicide
From an essay by James Reich:
Suicide as a complex act has been disgracefully hijacked by the exploiters of the myth of Judas Iscariot, to the impoverishment of our moral orientation, our sympathy, ourselves. Luxury, Armani says, obscures the dead. Luxury obscures suicide. Suicide is a luxury that transfigures.
I Thought All Was Lost…
Danny and I were watching a movie this afternoon. I jumped over the back of the couch to retrieve my pillow, turned around and toppled my cocktail over the laptop. The glass broke on the floor, ice cubes laying over my keyboard sitting next to the arm of the couch. Danny rushed the laptop up to the hair-dryer as I mopped up the floor. A few hours ago, after, the laptop would not start up. I was trying to use his netbook and feeling really unhappy about it, it not having all my stuff on it. At worst, I pictured the laptop at the spa the next few days. But just now I thought, “I’ll try it once more.” Here I am! I guess a few more hours drying time made the difference.
TG! TG, almighty!
from the comments
I believe it is possible to love others more than one’s self. Is that healthy? Perhaps not, but if it isn’t I have no idea of how one might define such health. The fact that I might long to die as quickly as possible doesn’t mean that I therefore long for everybody to join me. Knowing I am loved, I would set aside my choice (if able to do so). If I believed my presence burdened others in a way that outweighed potential pain caused, I would go.
A sad feature of suicide is that it can come to appear in one’s mind as an inviting doorway. A person can even begin to rely on the comfort that doorway represents. No bad thing in one’s life, then, is ever larger than those few steps required to reach that passageway. It’s seductive, and it generates a kind of empty courage — an ability to go blank in the face of danger. But sometimes that ability to be fearless generates, ironically, a pleasure in life that makes one want to hold onto it for a while. Hence my reference to Dostoyevsky’s story.
nothing to see here, folks, move along
A block of ice four times the size of Manhattan has split off from a Greenland glacier and melted — an event so dramatic that it’s shocked the scientists who study the area.
