Archive for the ‘obituaries’ tag
Best Obit Ever? #
Via Clusterflock, Edward Merritt’s (presumably self-authored) obituary in the Dallas Morning News:
Merritt, Edward “Bruce” Born April 3, 1951 in North Carolina. He was one of eight children. His older sisters regularly beat him up, put him in dresses, and then forced him to walk to the drugstore to buy their Kotex and cigarettes. After graduation from high school he went on to lead a life of luxury in the United States Air Force. After excaping from the government he spent most of his life as a mechanic, husband, and father. Bruce Merritt never met a stranger, and in many ways was stranger than most. He is survived by one daughter, two grand- children, two ex-wives, unpaid taxes, and many loyal loving friends.
The Passing of a Language #
In memorializing Marie Smith, the last speaker of the Eyak language, The Economist takes a fun little journey through the language and the most basic aspects of linguistics.
BEYOND the town of Cordova, on Prince William Sound in south-eastern Alaska, the Copper River delta branches out in silt and swamp into the gulf. Marie Smith, growing up there, knew there was a particular word in Eyak, her language, for the silky, gummy mud that squished between her toes. It was c’a. The driftwood she found on the shore, ‘u’l, acquired a different name if it had a proper shape and was not a broken, tangled mass. If she got lost among the flat, winding creeks her panicky thoughts were not of north, south, east or west, but of “upriver”, “downstream”, and the tribes, Eskimo and Tlingit, who lived on either side. And if they asked her name it was not Marie but Udachkuqax*a’a’ch, “a sound that calls people from afar”.
Benazir Bhutto was no saint #
In a NY Times Op-Ed, William Dalrymple takes a small step toward correcting the too-rosy picture that has been painted of the late Ms. Bhutto:
Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan’s becoming the region’s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.