they have a plan

Posted on July 21, 2009 - Filed Under Death, Robot Brains | Leave a Comment

During a recent visit, my sister told me a chronology posited by a friend’s 4 year old son:

First there were dinosaurs.
Next came cavemen.
Then came people.
Then there were people and robots.
Next there will just be robots.

(more or less – I may have misquoted). Speaking of which.

We Don’t Regret The Error

Posted on May 11, 2009 - Filed Under Death, Liberal Media Conspiracies, Writers | Leave a Comment

Bogus quote entered into wikipedia.
“Journalists” around the globe cut-n-paste.
Wikipedia fixes error.
Newspapers, not so much.

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose [...]

15 Years Ago

Posted on April 8, 2009 - Filed Under Death, Music | Leave a Comment

Kurt Cobain found dead 15 years ago today. MTV News reporting archive.

last words

Posted on November 22, 2008 - Filed Under Books, Death, Language | Leave a Comment

The OUP Blog brings word of the Oxford Book of Death, with excerpts of notable last words.
GIDE (1951): ‘I am afraid my sentences are becoming grammatically incorrect.’

death alert! (language edition)

Posted on November 18, 2008 - Filed Under Death, Language | Leave a Comment

I used skedaddle (in an email at work) just last week! Part of me feels like that guy from the past looking at his photo in the future where he is beginning to disappear.

shit

Posted on June 23, 2008 - Filed Under Death, Music | Leave a Comment

The Rake:
I thought at a certain point that his later material had gotten carelessly nihilistic; then I got a bit older. Now I see that he was just so damned disappointed, and that no one that disappointed is a nihilist.
Atlantic City

Ashes to Ashes

Posted on January 7, 2008 - Filed Under Death, For The Record, The En-Vir-On-Ment | Leave a Comment

There is an impressive, but flawed, database out there at work. Donate 20 bucks to the ASPCA, and within weeks, 8 different animal-protection agencies start to bombard me as frequently as Chase. The flaw being the annoying fact that the ASPCA becomes one of the 8 in the rotation–good to know that my [...]

minerals, ice deposits daily

Posted on December 3, 2007 - Filed Under Death, Music, Time Travel and The Intergalactic | Leave a Comment

Sometimes — in piques of egomania, no doubt — I consider what song(s) I would like played at my funeral. Summer Babe may be in my current top ten (power ranking in the works?). Trevor at Creekside Review takes us back a bit, digging up this Alex Ross New Yorker piece from ‘97 (along with [...]

Death Wishes

Posted on August 15, 2007 - Filed Under Contests, Death, Who's $.02? | Leave a Comment

[This is the inaugural edition of "Who's $.02" where you get to match the photo of the man on the street with the response to $.02. Kind of like liars club, dig? I'll even throw in one "fake" response. Bonuse points if you can separate it from the "real" ones. Be sure to send your [...]

It’s kind of dangerous to be an M.C.

Posted on August 11, 2007 - Filed Under Death, Statistics, Writers | Leave a Comment

Indeed, because an earlier productive optimum means that a writer can die younger without loss to his or her ultimate reputation, poets exhibit a life expectancy, across the globe and through history, about a half dozen years less than prose writers do.

RIP Lee Hazlewood

Posted on August 7, 2007 - Filed Under Death, Music | 1 Comment

Met up with a friend in Vegas this weekend who told me his brother is in a phase (actually “phase” is our condescending appellation for what I’m sure he believes is a permanent state) in which he refuses to listen to anything made after 1972. I could see the merit to the position, the [...]

Gay Bomb – $7,500,000

Posted on June 12, 2007 - Filed Under Death, Money, Sex, Vagaries of the Heart | Leave a Comment

The US Gov’t reportedly spent 7.5 million dollars trying to develop a gay bomb, proposed by the US Air Force in 1994, that would include a two pronged attack on enemy soldiers:

Include a chemical to make them gay.
Include an aphrodisiac so they would drop their arms & pants.

On the one hand, I have to give [...]

A whole lot of walking to do

Posted on June 6, 2007 - Filed Under Death, Drinking, Stickin' It To The Man | Leave a Comment

At bluoz blog: another liberated billboard

back to choking the chicken

Posted on March 29, 2007 - Filed Under Crime, Death, Vagaries of the Heart | Leave a Comment

A Half Moon Bay man who shot an ostrich to death after the flightless bird pummeled him and his friend when they trespassed on a coastal ranch was ordered released today after serving five months in jail for animal abuse.
Jonathon Porter, 20 — who prosecutors say killed for revenge after the bird humiliated him in [...]

Murder By Death By Robot

Posted on March 12, 2007 - Filed Under Death, Robot Brains | Leave a Comment

From the 30 Strangest Deaths (in HISTORY, no less):
Death by Robot
Robert Williams [wiki] was the first man ever killed by a robot. On January 25, 1979, Williams climbed into a storage rack at the Ford Motorâ€™s Flat Rock casting plant to retrieve a part because the parts-retrieval robot malfunctioned. Suddenly, the robot reactivated and slammed [...]

Burn ‘em (or don’t become famous)

Posted on January 25, 2007 - Filed Under Death, Writers | Leave a Comment

A large collection of Willa Cather’s letters have been donated to the University of Nebraska (despite her instructions for them to never be reprinted – which I guess is slightly different). This article gives a few revelations here and there including that “She had written the epilogue of “Sapphira and the Slave Girl” five years [...]

Executive Summary

Posted on January 12, 2007 - Filed Under Death, Politics, Robot Brains, Turf Wars | 1 Comment

Aside from warm woolen mittens, two of my favorite things: (1) Brevity (2) Robot Brains. Happily these two passions of mine collide in Microsoft Word’s “Auto-Summarize” feature, as brought to my attention by Maud Newton.
To make a long story short: here’s the “executive summary” of our state’s executive’s summary: “Our troops in Iraq have fought [...]

True Crime w/ The Hold Steady?

Posted on December 4, 2006 - Filed Under Books, Death, Music, Time Travel and The Intergalactic | Leave a Comment

In an interview with Pitchfork, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn talks about an idea for a novel that’s been bumping around his noggin:
I don’t want to say too much, but it’s a mystery, kind of. But it’s not like a detective story; it’s about people going back into their past. It takes place around a [...]