Beyond Rivalry - death

RIP Harold Pinter, 1930-2008

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:15:00 -0500

"Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London."

I can only pray someone says this about me someday, that I found the "ominous in the everyday" and, perhaps, both the noise within silence and the silence within noise ...

Also:

BBC death notice

Guardian obit and primer

Odd and Ordinary Dead People

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:59:54 -0500

Like many people, my favourite section of the newspaper is the obituaries. Some papers are better than others, and the Portland Press Herald in Maine is one of the best I've found for homey, chatty, detailed, quirky obits. Among the 5-15 obits that appear most days are some people who have led unusual lives and who have done extraordinary and ordinary things. And then there are the descriptors, some of which appear in almost every obituary ("deceased was happiest when spending time with family" in obituaries written by ... well, the family) and some of which you'll only read once in a lifetime.

Some clips from obits I've enjoyed in the last week or two:

"He enjoyed watching Nascar and having a Bud Light. " (Lance Morton, b. 1948?)

"She collected music boxes, dolls and unicorns." (Roberta S. Potvin, b. 1926)

"In his spare time he enjoyed clock repair." (David L. Adams Sr., b. 1939)

"He was a brilliant applied mathematician and solved one of his mathematical problems on the Eniac. ... Between 1963 and 1968, he was the first solo circumnavigator to sail in a fiberglass boat. His trip took him through the Panama Canal, onto Cape Horn, and around…

RIP Jdimytai Damour (1974? - 2008)

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:30:00 -0500

You've probably heard about the Wal-Mart worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, who was trampled and crushed by a stampeding crowd of early-morning shoppers at a Long Island Wal-Mart on Black Friday -- shoppers who then "went on to scour the shelves for sales, even after being told a man had died." Damour died apparently of a heart attack of asphyxiation after the sliding glass doors he was holding shut shattered under the weight of the crowd of 2,000 or so who were trying to get in as the store opened at 5 a.m. for after-Thanksgiving sales. (Ludicrous comment by a Wal-Street employee in the store's electronic department: "'It was crazy. .. The deals weren't even that good.'")

Here's a bit of Damour's story, and here: "He loved to chat about movies, Japanese anime and politics. ... [H]e had a great sense of humor. ... He was the guy who was always lively." He was "an easygoing literature buff -- a fan of poetry and the late novelist Donald Goines -- who would put himself out for friends."

Recent Reading

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:55:00 -0500

Woman killed by husband's coffin (11 Nov.)

God's Facebook Wall (12 Nov.)

Apparent 6th severed foot found in British Columbia (12 Nov)

Two Dead in Argument Over 'Bama-LSU Game (10 Nov.)

The Essential 007: A Recap of all 22 Bond Movies (13 Nov.)

Unregulated Credit Default Swaps Led to Weakness (31 Oct.)

Exxon Mobil: Biggest profit in history (30 Oct.)

The age when children begin attempting to appear racially colour-blind (27 Oct)

The Quest for the Perfect Morning Routine: The first in a series on lifehacking, at Slate (12 Nov): "The advice here is not my own, but I have clicked on it."

When Alzheimer's Hits at 40 in the WSJ (14 Nov.)

and

"I don't remember a whole lot about that period; I appear to have bought a couple of truly depressing sweaters, the kind you only wear when all you really want is to curl up under the bed for several years..." (The Likeness, p. 47, Tana French)

(Photo: Recent Drinking: Ironstone Cabernet Franc 2004)

The Bali Bombers, Mimesis and Me

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:50:00 -0500

I've been reading in recent weeks about the so-called Bali Bombers, three men -- two brothers (commonly called Amrozi and Mukhlas) and an Imam/computer technician -- who were tried and found to be instrumental in the killing of 202 people -- most of whom were foreign nationals, including 88 Australians -- -- at nightclubs in a tourist area on the Indonesian island of Bali [in green] in 2002, to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. (Bali is overwhelmingly Hindu, however.) Another 209 people were injured. (More at Wikipedia)

For their roles in the crime, their execution, which may occur by this weekend has now occured, will be by ritualised firing squad on another Indonesian island, off Java, the spot (or perhaps three separate spots) in the woods already decked out with chairs and crosses, after five years of legal appeals that apparently the bombers themselves had no interest in, as they have said throughout that they are ready and happy to die as martyrs, preferrably by beheading, in the Islamic way. They admit the crime and show no remorse but have apologised for killing Indonesian Muslims during the attacks.

Meanwhile, their family and other supporters are surging towards the…

Can We Doubt How Weird Humans Are?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:35:35 -0500

Headline today:

Bombers get medical all-clear for death

What I'm Reading Lately ... Death, Death and Certainty

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:21:00 -0400

My irregular annotated link dump:

>> Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death by Jesse Bering in the 22 Oct. 2008 SciAm:

The crux: "So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the 'simulation constraint hypothesis,' is that in attempting to imagine what it's like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences -- because that's how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn't 'like' anything we've ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren't good enough."

Fun for the Whole Family: "In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. 'Just then,' we told them, 'he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.'"

What We Can't UnLearn: "Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn't cease to…

Hospice at the Carlyle!

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:32:23 -0400

THIS IS WHAT I WANT. OMG. Imagine.

"Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children's books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter."

Collective Violence - Examples - Part VIII

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:16:00 -0400

It's been six weeks since I last blogged about mob violence. I've been away most of that time, but no matter where we go or what we're doing, collective violence continues in many forms. Below are some of the latest incidents reported as mob violence or mob justice. (And here's why I'm doing it.)

August to the present (also December 2007, and in 1999): Violence against Christians continues in Orissa, on India's east coast, since the 23 Aug. assassination of a Hindu swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four of his followers: "Though Maoist insurgents took credit for the killing, Hindu extremists blamed Christians. They mounted mob attacks on churches, as well as homes and villages populated by Christians. More than 100 people reportedly have been beaten, hacked or burned to death since the mob violence began. It is estimated tens of thousands of Christians have fled their homes, many remaining in seclusion in forests and others in relief camps with police guards. ... Christians reportedly make up about 2.4 percent of the state's 36.7 million people." A BBC news report mentions the religious rivalry of the region: "Hindu groups have long accused Christian priests of bribing poor tribes and low-caste Hindus to…

Not What We Deserve

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:14:00 -0400

House: People get what they get. It's got nothing to do with what they deserve. (House MD, ep. 5x01, Death Changes Everything)

Reminds me of a (fictional?) poem quoted in a crime novel I read on my vacation:

"People don't die because they're bad.

They die because they're available." (The Falls, Ian Rankin)