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.

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 weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

GIDE (1951): ‘I am afraid my sentences are becoming grammatically incorrect.’

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

But, still, the algorithm works like magic–nary a request for cash from the NRA arrives, but rather far nobler requests for cash. The most recent delight spawned by its prescient demographic-tapping is the bargain rate offer for a National Geographic subscription. Best dollar-a-month purchase I’d made in some time. Until recently, my only experience with the magazine was as a porn-proxy back in grade school.

That grade school, incidentally, was recently the latest victim in a series of razings in my 800 person and counting prairie hometown that I may well never revisit. But this month’s issue of National Geographic provided a new kind of porn, a window into the world that I and countless others like me have left behind, for better or worse:

That’s the rub in rural North Dakota, a sense of things ebbing, of churches being abandoned, schools shutting down, towns becoming ruins. And all this decline exists amid a seeming statistical prosperity: Oil is booming, wheat prices are at record highs, and, as the average farm size grows, the land is studded with paper millionaires living in the lonely sweep of the plains, with surrounding community gone to the wind.

Today’s Question: An on-screen death you’d most like to avoid?¹
See if you can match the photo with the response:

Photos:

• “My top pick would be the shower scene in “Psycho.” Totally nude, defenseless, with no where to run and no help to call out to. The cold hard steel coming at the soft body is a total instant of helplessness” Ed. Note – Cold, hard steel & soft bodies? Sounds like a good time to me….
• “I guess the death in “Vanished,” a French film of a few years ago. The guy in question got buried alive trying to solve the disappearance of a girl. Super claustraphobic[sic].”
• “The death scene that scared me most was the little girl in red lying dead among ashes in “Schindler’s List” — which is a black-and-white scene movie.”
• “There is a scene in Star Wars where the characters are about to be crushed in a garbage smasher. I would hate to die in a garbage smasher.”
• “In the South American polemic “Viva La Muerte,” directed by Fernando Arabel, they took a chainsaw to the throat of a live cow and beheaded it in uncut, unblinking close-up, then gutted the carcass and had a naked woman climb inside to deliver a ponderous speech. No way, Jose.” Ed. Note – way to wrap it up with a tidy “No way, Jose”.
• “I would say the scene in one of my all-time favorite movies, where a tornado comes and one of the houses begins to pitch and flies through the air, spinning and spinning and landed on mean lady, and when her red ruby slippers were removed, her feet curled up.” Ed. Note – bonus points for using the phrase “all-time”. Double bonus points for leading with “I would say…”. I’ll be sure to tune in next week to find out what you actually said
• “Judging from my family medical history, I will probably die a natural death due to old age. I know that I will not be shot in the head, strangled, push over a cliff or bridge or be in car crashes in such thrillers as “Bourne Ultimatium.”" Ed Note. – I may have to come hunt you down and assassinate you. You know, to make a point.
• “Disembowelment. Mel Gibson on a slab of stone in “Braveheart,” being tortured and then disemboweled is not a way I would want to go. One did not need the gore to get a sense of how horrible a death that would be. I tend to doubt that the last word out of the mouth of someone in such a position would be “Freedom!”" Ed. Note – Studies at BMK Labs prove your suspicions correct. Nine out of Ten subjects literally screamed out “No Whammy!!”
• “At the beginning of “Cliffhanger,” a woman falls several thousand feet to her death — but not before spending the last two or three minutes of her life in sheer terror, knowing that the end is coming, and begging for someone to save her. I’ve never been afraid of heights, but falling from a great height is another matter.” Ed. Note – Clearly Cliffs don’t kill people. Gravity Kills People. Thanks for the distinction. As an aside, I assume massive cliffs on Uranus would pose less risk, due to the reduced mass. Though Uranus is a gas giant, so it’s probably a wash.

Oh yeah, answers here.

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.