Posts tagged as Death
A Sad Cat And Dog Story
"The legal battle over the ownership of a cat in Stornoway has come to an end after the death of a key witness – a dog." This story does not end happily, in case you couldn't tell.
More About Funerals
Max Rivlin-Nadler, who recently wrote for us about the National Funeral Directors Conference, talks to New Hampshire Public Radio about the way we are laid to rest now.
What Remains: Conversations With America's Funeral Directors
Walking into McCormick Place, Chicago’s half-hangar, half-labyrinth convention center, I looked at the schedule to find that I had just missed “Canadians Do Cremation Right.” The 130th National Funeral Directors Conference, was underway; held each year in a different city, the conference brings together funeral directors from across the country for three days of presentations, trade talk, awards and camaraderie. After shaking off my initial disappointment at having missed the Canadian talk, I scanned the remaining workshops. After passing on “Marketing Your Cemetery: Connecting With Your Community” and “Managing Mass Fatality Situations,” I circled “The Difference Is In The Details,” an embalming workshop. READ MORE
People Most Likely To Die In 2012, According To A Death Pool
Once again: For this particular annual death pool (now in its fourth year!), points are awarded for each “correctly” chosen person at a rate of 100 minus age at death. This may account for some skewing youthward. There were 31 entries this year. READ MORE
Trinity
I.
On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb test took place in the Tularosa Basin of the Jornada del Muerto desert near Socorro, New Mexico. Just three weeks later, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be bombed: the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in war. The test was code-named Trinity, and it forced a radical shift in the way that human beings came to regard their place on earth; from that day onward, for almost seventy years, we've lived in the uneasy knowledge that a very few people might gain the power to destroy all civilization—all life, even. The events of this day produced the chief wellspring of every kind of modern-day political and cultural anxiety, cynicism and depression. At that moment, humankind was forced to grow up, whether we knew it or not.
In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the bongo-playing, safecracking amateur magician and Nobel-prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman recalled his experiences at the Trinity test site. He was twenty-seven years old.
READ MOREHurry Up And Name These Things Before They Die
"It was once the lingua franca of science, used to name animals and plants with precision. But now botanists will no longer be required to provide Latin descriptions of new species. The move is part of a major effort to speed up the process of naming new plants – because in many cases it is feared they might die out before they are officially recognised."
A Friendly Reminder About Death
Lately I have been thinking a lot about death. The triggering event, appropriately, involved cigarettes; the store in which I attempted to procure a new pack only had my brand in soft pack. I mean, yes, I could have gotten 100s, but I always feel like I am done smoking 100s before the cigarette itself is finished and then there's that awkward moment where you stand there self-consciously smoking a cigarette in which you are no longer interested and the cigarette itself feels bad because it's not its fault that they made it longer than the normal cigarette and what kind of cigarette wants to be smoked by someone who is ambivalent at best about finishing it anyway? Also it knows that soon it will be thrust to the ground and stepped on to be extinguished forever. It's a nasty, brutal and short life for a cigarette, even a long one. But I digress. READ MORE
Kate Bush, "Misty"
The claymation video for this two-minute segment of the new Kate Bush song "Misty" is surprisingly realistic. The song, which is 13 minutes long on Bush's new album, 50 Words for Snow, is sung from the perspective of a woman who falls in love with a snowman. The love is doomed, of course, as all love is, by death. (As no. 1 Kate Bush fan Big Boi said recently to Awl pal Doree Shafrir, her new music "is just very somber and very chill.") And it is sad, in the video, the melting, which would indeed happen if a person hugged all up on a snowman under the covers. It's sad just like real life is sad. But the most realistic part is in the beginning, when Bush wakes up in the middle of the night to find to find that a snowman has climbed into her bed. She does a great double-take, which, yes, again, one would.
It Is For A Variety Of Reasons That October Is So Totally Awesome
Hooray! It’s October, which really is a terrific month. It seems to get better and better every year, October. (Or maybe it’s just that all the others get worse and worse, and maybe October does, too. But a bit less dramatically so.) A smarter, more contemplative person might note that as we get older we’re more inclined to appreciate stuff like falling leaves, and the slowing of nature’s life cycles. One might make a date to go walk in the woods somewhere, to take full advantage of this fleeting blip of pleasant weather we get before the gloom and bitter cold of too-short winter days afflict us all with seasonal affective disorder. Again. READ MORE
