Evidence of Afterlife

Doctor claims he has evidence of afterlife that may convince skeptics without any active faith

In a new book “Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences.”  medical doctor Jeffrey Long claims
that accounts of near-death experiences play out remarkably similarly among the people who have had them, crossing age and cultural boundaries to such a degree that they can’t be chalked up simply to everyone having seen the same Hollywood movie.
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In his book, Long details nine lines of evidence that he says send a “consistent message of an afterlife.” Among them are crystal-clear recollections, heightened senses, reunions with deceased family members and long-lasting effects after the person is brought back to life.
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Long noted that he was especially fascinated that very small children who have near-death experiences almost always recount the same stories as adults, even if the concept of death isn’t fully formed in their minds.
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Long, a radiation oncologist, said that writing his book has actually made him a better doctor, as well as a believer in the afterlife.

“[It] profoundly changed me as a physician,” he said. “I could fight cancer more courageously. I found patients who died, it wasn’t the end. It made me more compassionate and more confident.”

His interview with Time magazine

Medically speaking, what is a near-death experience?
A near-death experience has two components. The person has to be near death, which means physically compromised so severely that permanent death would occur if they did not improve: they're unconscious, or often clinically dead, with an absence of heartbeat and breathing. The second component [is that] at the time they're having a close brush with death, they have an experience. [It is] generally lucid [and] highly organized.

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You say this research has affected you a lot on a personal level. How?
I'm a physician who fights cancer. In spite of our best efforts, not everybody is going to be cured. My absolute understanding that there is an afterlife for all of us — and a wonderful afterlife — helps me face cancer, this terribly frightening and threatening disease, with more courage than I've ever faced it with before. I can be a better physician for my patients.
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You raise the idea that your work could have profound implications for religion. But is whether there is life after death really a scientific question, or a theological one?
I think we have an interesting blend. [This research] directly addresses what religions have been telling us for millenniums to accept on faith: that there is an afterlife, that there is some order and purpose to this universe, that there's some reason and purpose for us being here in earthly life. We're finding verification, if you will, for what so many religions have been saying. It's an important step toward bringing science and religion together.

Last words from family in rented Toyota

"We’re in a Lexus… and we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck… there’s no brakes… we’re approaching the intersection …. Hold on … hold on and pray … pray.’"

Last words before family died in Lexus crash

A harrowing phone call from a family just seconds before they were killed in a car crash caused when the accelerator pedal in a Toyota vehicle became stuck has been made public.
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Mark Saylor, 45, died alongside his wife Cleofe, also 45, their daughter Mahala, 13, and Mrs Saylor’s brother Chris Lastrella when the hired Toyota Lexus they were travelling in accelerated out of control on a highway in San Diego.
In the emergency call, Mr Lastrella is heard saying: ‘We’re in a Lexus… and we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck… there’s no brakes… we’re approaching the intersection …. Hold on … hold on and pray … pray.’

The recording adds to the public relations disaster that has enveloped the Japanese car maker since it recalled 4.5 million vehicles across the world because of 'sticky accelerator' problems. 

Louis Auchincloss, R.I.P.

I consider Louis Auchincloss one of the finest writers of our times.  He wrote some 50 books over his life while a full time practicing lawyer and I have about 20 of them.  I began reading him while working at a law firm on Wall Street just so I could begin to understand the old line New York WASP.    The insights I gained were invaluable and soon I became hooked on his literary ability to tell revealing stories about a segment  of the population that is otherwise opaque.

Of hIs most famous book, The Rector of Justin,  Jonathan Yardley wrote in the Washington Post
"The Rector of Justin" is a "prep school novel" in the same way that "Moby-Dick" is a "whaling novel." It uses the environment of a fictitious Episcopal school for boys, Justin Martyr -- "named for the early martyr and scholar who tried to reconcile the thinking of the Greek philosophers with the doctrines of Christ" -- to explore grand, universal themes, all of them centered on its protagonist, the school's founding father, Francis Prescott. It is, I now realize, a minor masterpiece of 20th-century literature.

AP obituary by Hillel Italie

He wrote more than 50 books, averaging about one a year after the end of World War II, and crafted such accomplished works as the novel "The Rector of Justin" and the memoir "A Writer's Capital," not to mention biographies, literary criticism and short stories. He was a four-time fiction finalist for the National Book Award, his nominated novels including "The Embezzler" and "The House of Five Talents."

"I'm rather inclined to be edgy when I'm not writing," Auchincloss said in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press. "In (a) ... book on Jack Kennedy, it says he told (British) Prime Minister (Harold) Macmillan that if he didn't have a girl every three days he'd get headaches. I thought that was rather extreme, but writing is little bit like that for me."

Auchincloss lived up to the old world ideal of being "useful," bearing the various titles of writer, attorney, community leader and family man. He was a partner at the Wall Street firm of Hawkins, Delafield & Wood and the father of three. He served as president of both the Museum of the City of New York and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Last of His Kind by Kevin Mims

In many ways Louis Auchincloss was more like a 19th century man of letters than a 20th century one. He didn’t publish a big self-important mega-tome every ten years that attempted to reinvent the art of fiction a la Pynchon or DeLillo. Instead he reliably produced a new book (sometimes two) in just about every year of his literary career. His first book was published in 1947. His latest was published in 2008. Like Jane Austen he focused on the foibles and frailties of the small segment of society on which he was an expert. He tilled a small patch of literary ground but from it he brought forth nourishing and abundant fruit.

New York Times obituary by Holcomb B. Noble,

Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92
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Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. “Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.”
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The author Bruce Bawer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Auchincloss had the bad luck to live “in a time when the protagonists of literary fiction tend to be middle- or lower-class.”

“These days,” he added, “the general public, though fascinated by the superficial trappings of privilege, seems to have little interest in the deeper truths with which Mr. Auchincloss is passionately concerned — with, that is, the beliefs, principles, hypocrisies, prejudices and assorted strengths and defects of character that typify the American WASP civilization that produced what was for a long time the country’s undisputed ruling class.”

“Class prejudice” was Mr. Auchincloss’s response to his critics. “That business of objecting to the subject material or the people that an author writes about is purely class prejudice,” he said in an interview in 1997, “and you will note that it always disappears with an author’s death. Nobody holds it against Henry James or Edith Wharton or Thackeray or Marcel Proust.”
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He dropped out of Yale before his senior year and entered the University of Virginia law school.  To his surprise he found he liked the law, particularly estates law, and in 1941, after earning a law degree, he joined the Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. When World War II began Mr. Auchincloss enlisted in the Navy. He served in Naval intelligence, then commanded a craft that shuttled troops and the wounded across the English Channel during the Normandy invasion.

He also was the recipient of the 2005 Medal of  Arts.

"'If I die tomorrow, I'll know I'll die happy, because my degree's in the works"

That's what New Hampshire resident Harriet Richardson Ames said from the hospice where she was being cared for when told that Keene State was researching her coursework to see whether it could award her the diploma Mrs Ames so    desired.

Her daughter said,  "She had what I call a 'bucket list,' and that was the last thing on it."

  She got her college degree one day before dying, three weeks after turning 100.

What lies on the other side

Explaining death

A sick man turned to his doctor as he was preparing to leave the examination room and said, "'Doctor, I am afraid to die. Tell me what lies on the other side."

Very quietly, the doctor said, "I don't know."

"You don't know? You're a Christian man, and don't know what's on the other side?'

The doctor was holding the handle of the door. On the other side came a sound of scratching and whining, and as he opened the door, a dog sprang into the room and leaped on him with an eager show of gladness.

Turning to the patient, the doctor said, "Did you notice my dog? He's never been in this room before. He didn't know what was inside. He knew nothing except that his master was here, and when the door opened, he sprang in without fear. I know little of what is on the other side of death, But I do know one thing... I know my Master is there and that is enough."

J.D. Salinger. R.I.P.

New York Times obituary by Charles McGrath who calls Salinger the "Garbo of Letters" a wonderful phrase

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.
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Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
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In 1974 when, trying to fend off the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories, he told a reporter from The Times: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
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Depending on one’s point of view, he was either a crackpot or the American Tolstoy, who had turned silence itself into his most eloquent work of art

London Times obituary

After receiving critical acclaim for his short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish, which was published in The New Yorker in 1948, J. D. Salinger shot to worldwide fame with his novel The Catcher in the Rye, which appeared in 1951. With its disenchanted adolescent anti-hero, perpetually at war with adulthood, especially as embodied in his own parents, it seemed to encapsulate the mood of an entire generation. Perhaps more remarkably it simultaneously exercised a considerable effect on that generation’s behaviour.
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He attended three universities: New York, Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania), and Columbia. The result of this was, he later tersely wrote, “no degrees”.

In the spring of 1942, a few months after America had been drawn into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the US Army, where he was to serve until demobilisation in 1946. After training he was posted to the 12th Infantry Regiment in the Fourth Infantry Division of the US Army — most of the time as a staff sergeant — through five campaigns. As the build-up of American forces in Britain developed apace with the preparations for the Allied invasion of occupied Europe, he was stationed in England, at Tiverton, Devon, and he was among those who landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
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He saw service throughout the Allied advance through North West Europe, notably during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45. He was assigned to a counter-intelligence unit in which he interrogated German prisoners. His wartime experiences, which included witnessing the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, affected him deeply. He later told his daughter: “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nostrils — no matter how long you live.”

AP obituary by Hillel Italie

"The Catcher in the Rye," with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made "Catcher" a featured selection, advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight — and concern."

Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy," Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing — more than 60 million copies worldwide — and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams — to never grow up.
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Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. "Catcher" presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap.
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The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the door. ..Meanwhile, he was refusing interviews, instructing his agent to forward no fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing in a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through seclusion.
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes," Holden says in "Catcher."
"That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. I'd build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made."
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Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's "Dreamcatcher" portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues.
Ms. Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."

Indeed, Jemima Lewis writes in the Telegraph, The reclusive novelist could hardly have made himself more interesting if he'd tried,

David Warren speaks of the pernicious effects of the perpetual adolescence of Holden Caulfield

The book has had a remarkable and, to my mind, infernal influence on society, owing in part to its author's literary skill in the manipulation of colloquial language, in part to the emotional and even hormonal power in that peculiar explosion of sex and ego that is adolescent narcissism itself. The proof is in the pudding, and the fact that Catcher in the Rye went on to inspire at least three celebrity assassins (Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr., and Robert John Bardo), along with who knows how many "little league" psychos and suicides, speaks to its real power.

Now the question is what will happen to all his unpublished novels and manuscripts?  We'll be hearing about J.D. Salinger for years to come

Robert Parker, author of Spenser, R.I.P.

While I was away, Robert Parker died, a good death, writing at his desk.

Who among us hasn't spent enjoyable hours with his richly imagined character Spenser?

New York Times obit on the Prolific Author Who Created Spenser

Robert B. Parker, the best-selling mystery writer who created Spenser, a tough, glib Boston private detective who was the hero of nearly 40 novels, died Monday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 77.

The cause was a heart attack, said his agent of 37 years, Helen Brann. She said that Mr. Parker had been thought to be in splendid health, and that he died at his desk, working on a book. He wrote five pages a day, every day but Sunday, she said.

Mr. Parker wrote more than 60 books all told, including westerns and young-adult novels, but he churned out entertaining detective stories with a remarkable alacrity that made him one of the country’s most popular writers.
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A conscious throwback to hard-boiled detectives like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, but with a sensitivity born of the age of feminism and civil rights, Spenser is a bruiser in body but a softie at heart, someone who never shies from danger or walks away from a threat to the innocent. Mr. Parker gave him many of his own traits. Spenser is an admirer of any kind of expertise. He believes in psychotherapy. He’s a great cook. He’s a boxer, a weightlifter and a jogger, a consumer of doughnuts and coffee, a privately indulgent appreciator (from a distance) of pretty women, a Red Sox fan, a dog lover. (Mr. Parker owned a series of short-haired pointers, all named Pearl, like their fictional incarnation.)

Most crucially, Spenser is faithful in love (to his longtime companion, Susan Silverman, a psychologist) and in friendship (to his frequent partner in anti-crime, a dazzlingly charming, morally idiosyncratic black man named Hawk). And usually with the two of them as seconds, he has remained indomitable, vanquishing crime bosses, drug dealers, sex fiends, cold-blooded killers, corrupt politicians and several other varieties of villain.
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Robert Brown Parker was a large man of large appetites that were nonetheless satisfied with relative ease. He was as unpretentious and self-aware as Spenser, his agent, Ms. Brann said.

“All he needed to be happy was his family and writing,” she said. “There were always wonderful things in his refrigerator. People were always after him to do cookbooks.” She paused.

“He loved doughnuts,” she said.

Kate Mattes, founder and owner of Kate's Mystery Books, on The humor and generosity of Robert Parker

Before Bob, the hard-boiled private eye was a loner who couldn’t trust anyone, and mainly fought crime and corruption on the West Coast. Bob changed all that. He was the first to tinker with the image of the American hard-boiled detective when, in the 1970s, he created Spenser - a knight-errant with equal parts honor and humor. Bob created a “family’’ for Spenser, which included a monogamous relationship with a feminist, a best friend who was black and a young boy, abandoned by his parents, who Spenser “adopted’’ and supported in his desire to become a ballet dancer. Up until then, private detectives didn’t have anyone they could count on, or who depended on them, especially over time, in one book after another. Today it seems almost passé, but Bob breathed new life into the genre, paving the way for most crime writers today.

Bob did more than open creative doors, though. He wrote blurbs for young writers, helped them find editors and agents, and helped them navigate the tricky worlds of TV and film. As he became more prosperous, he and his wife, Joan, supported local arts and community groups with their many donations. Neither of them looked for attention for their generosity. They did what they could to help.

Boston Globe obit by Gary Goshgarian, A man of virtue and wit.

This week it’s a little dimmer in Boston. A brilliant light is out. A literary light. Robert B. Parker, extraordinarily successful author of dozens of books about Boston sleuth Spenser, as well as other novels and young adult stories, died on Monday at his writing desk. There isn’t a bookstore or airport in the free world that doesn’t have his titles on their shelves. And although he didn’t put Boston on the map, he helped keep it there, making this great city accessible to the reading public - its glory and feisty independence, its rich and varied culture, its history and beloved teams. Collectively, his Spenser books are a symphony to this city by the sea.

But I didn’t know Bob Parker just through his novels. He was my oldest and closest friend
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He wrote about the things that were most important to him: love, family, and human decency. Behind the scenes, he lived a quiet, simple, and ordered life, spending most of his days at his writing desk, surrounded by photos of Joan and his sons, his dog Pearl on the couch. It was a life well-composed, just as he had wanted it - and perhaps his most successful creation.

So was his death - in a brilliant flash at his keyboard.

Stung by bee, wakes in coffin

A BEEKEEPER had a shock when he woke up in a COFFIN after he was knocked out by a sting.

Dimwit medics pronounced 76-year-old Jozef Guzy DEAD when he fell unconscious after he was stung by a bee in southern Poland.

And un-bee-lievably Jozef was packed into a coffin and driven to his local undertakers.

is wife Ludmila said: "I could not believe it when they said he was dead and the doctor put a white sheet over him and three hours later local undertakers pulled up and put him in a coffin and closed the lid."

Lucklily the mistake was noticed when a panicked Jozef woke up and started shouting.

Undertaker Darius Charon said: "He was shouting and banging on the coffin - he made enough noise to raise the dead so we couldn't miss him."

He said: "He had a lucky escape - there is not a lot of air in those coffins. And he did need medical attention."

Polish Ambulance Service spokesman Jerzy Wisniewski said the emergency doctor involved had apologised.

He added that the medic had not taken the cold weather into account, saying: "The patient was not apparently breathing and the body had cooled - the usual characteristics of death."

Mr Guzy said: "The undertaker saved my life. The first thing I did when I got out of hospital was take him a pot of honey."

Homeless veteran saved 5 in fire

A former Marine, he struggled with the drink and lived homeless for years under a Cleveland bridge, a father of five children.

Ray Vivier began to put his life back on track with a job as a welder and a room at a boarding house. When an arsonist set the boarding house ablaze, it was Ray who saved five people from that house and lost his life in so doing.  His body lay unclaimed

Thanks to a soup kitchen volunteer, he was given a proper burial and 15 years later, his ashes were inurned at Arlington National Cemetery with full honors.

Homeless veteran who saved 5 in fire laid to rest.

Creator of SpaghettiOs dies

He touched all our lives at one time or another.

Donald Goerke, Creator of SpaghettiOs, Dies at 83

Donald Goerke, a Campbell Soup Company executive whose nonlinear approach to pasta resulted in SpaghettiOs, died Sunday at his home in Delran, N.J. He was 83.

In 35 years at Campbell, Donald Goerke refashioned spaghetti for children with SpaghettiOs and also created Chunky soup. The cause was heart failure, his son David said.

Introduced in 1965, SpaghettiOs has been a fixture in the American pantry ever since. Its memorable advertising jingle — “Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs!” — sung by the pop singer Jimmie Rodgers, is indelibly lodged in the public consciousness. More than 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs are sold each year,

He Ordered His Own Murder

Looks like the Guatemalan lawyer I wrote about last year in Lawyer Forsees His Murder, Makes YouTube Video, conned everyone.

He Ordered His Own Murder.

Rodrigo Rosenberg became a household name in Guatemala after he posthumously accused the President and First Lady of ordering his Mother's Day murder last year. His words, left behind in a video taped days before he was shot to death on a tree-lined boulevard, sent tens of thousands of protesters into the streets and sparked youth-led reform movements. But the case that once seemed powerful enough to topple a presidency came to a bizarre end on Jan. 12 as investigators concluded that Rosenberg, distraught over the murder of his girlfriend and her father, ordered his own death.

An eight-month investigation found that Rosenberg asked two cousins of his ex-wife to arrange the killing of a man who was extorting and threatening him. The extortionist was fictitious, though, and Rosenberg was actually planning his own assassination. Unaware that the target was Rosenberg, the cousins contracted 11 hit men, more than half of whom are former or current military or police officers, to carry out the killing, investigators said.

The investigation cleared President Alvaro Colom and his accused accomplices of any involvement. "This was the most serious crisis of my political career," Colom tells TIME. "Fortunately, I'm patient. My government has emerged strengthened."

"The dead are everywhere"

The suffering in Haiti continues unabated as Haitian families struggle to find, bury their dead

Some of the dead in this shattered city line the roads, carefully placed garments shrouding their faces. Others are carried into the hills for quick burials. Hundreds are arrayed in a macabre tangle of limbs outside a morgue, just feet from the grievously wounded.

The living and the dead here share the same space — the sidewalks, the public plazas, the hospitals. The living are frightened of being inside in case another earthquake hits; the dead are everywhere.

On the doorstep of a pharmacy, six bodies were lined up shoulder to shoulder. On the body of one woman, covered in a sheet, rested a small bundle, the tiny leg of an infant sticking out of the wrap.

“It’s beyond description. The disaster, the damage, is just so overwhelming,” said Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in Haiti. “Everyone has a scarf or something, because the smell is unbearable. … You literally have bodies all over the place.”

The international Red Cross estimates up to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday’s earthquake. For now, few know what to do with the bodies. People say they’re being left on roadsides and doorsteps so relatives who may have survived can find them, or for families to find transportation for burials.

Some families wouldn’t wait. Relatives of one woman who was killed in the earthquake dug her grave about 20 feet (6 meters) from the road, her body wrapped in a sheet and strapped to a door. Across the street, others dug graves and built a bonfire to keep away flies and ward off the stench.

The Mourners' Bench

In Born Toward Dying Richard John Neuhaus writes about his first experience of dying.  Worth reading and rereading

A measure of reticence and silence is in order. There is a time simply to be present to death—whether one's own or that of others—without any felt urgencies about doing something about it or getting over it. The Preacher had it right: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . . a time to mourn, and a time to dance." The time of mourning should be given its due. One may be permitted to wonder about the wisdom of contemporary funeral rites that hurry to the dancing, displacing sorrow with the determined affirmation of resurrection hope, supplying a ready answer to a question that has not been given time to understand itself. One may even long for the Dies Irae, the sequence at the old Requiem Mass. Dies irae, dies illa / Solvet saeclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla: "Day of wrath and terror looming / Heaven and earth to ash consuming / Seer's and Psalmist's true foredooming."

The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we can take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but around it. Traditions of wisdom encourage us to stay with death a while. Among observant Jews, for instance, those closest to the deceased observe shiva for seven days following the death. During shiva one does not work, bathe, put on shoes, engage in intercourse, read Torah, or have his hair cut. The mourners are to behave as though they themselves had died. The first response to death is to give inconsolable grief its due. Such grief is assimilated during the seven days of shiva, and then tempered by a month of more moderate mourning. After a year all mourning is set aside, except for the praying of kaddish, the prayer for the dead, on the anniversary of the death.

In The Blood of the Lamb, Peter de Vries calls us to "the recognition of how long, how very long, is the mourners' bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship—all of us, brief links ourselves, in the eternal pity." From the pity we may hope that wisdom has been distilled, a wisdom from which we can benefit when we take our place on the mourners' bench.

Eric Rohmer R.I.P.

New York Times obituary

Eric Rohmer, a Leading Filmmaker of the French New Wave, Dies at 89

Photograph: H Mandelbaum/Rex Features

In a statement Monday, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said of Mr. Rohmer, “Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclastic, light and serious, sentimental and moralistic, he created the ‘Rohmer’ style, which will outlive him.”

Mr. Rohmer’s most famous film in America remains “My Night at Maud’s,” a 1969 black-and-white feature set in the grim industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand. It tells the story of a shy young engineer (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who passes a snowbound evening in the home of his best friend’s lover, an attractive, free-thinking divorcée (Françoise Fabian).

The conversation, filmed by Mr. Rohmer in a series of unobtrusively composed long takes, covers philosophy, religion and morality, and while the flow of words takes on a distinctly seductive subtext at times, the encounter ends without a physical consummation. But the pair form a bond that movingly re-emerges five years later, when they meet again in a brief postscript that closes the film.

London Telegraph obituary

Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday aged 89, became the most durable film-maker of the French New Wave. Although he was overshadowed at first by more apparently innovative figures – Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol – he outlasted them, and in his seventies was still making movies the public wanted to see. By that time, Truffaut had died, while Godard and Chabrol had lost their edge.
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But the conversations that peppered his films were not made up of party small-talk; on the contrary, they were generally conducted on a high philosophical plane, and were more likely to turn on pages from Pascal than on recipes or fashion. Rohmer, like Bresson, was a Roman Catholic film-maker rather than a film-maker who happened to be Roman Catholic.
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Youthful and exuberant though his films were, and fixated on love and personal affinities, none was ever about sex. That whole dimension of life was missing. Rohmer's characters fell in love only with each other's minds. He gave the impression that physical attraction, everywhere apparent in the films of Truffaut and Chabrol, was somehow beneath him.

He put the heads on Pez

Who knew that Pez was a Viennese candy marketed to adults as an alternative to smoking?

The idea to market the candy to children in dispensers with heads and feet came from the United States, and Curtis Allina, a survivor of concentration camps made it happen.

Curtis Allin, 87, Put Heads on Pez Dispensers.

Introduced into the United States in the early 1950s, Pez sold fitfully. Then someone thought of remarketing it as a children’s candy, in fruit flavors, packed in whimsical dispensers. It fell to Mr. Allina to persuade the home office in Vienna, by all accounts a conservative outfit that took sober pride in its grown-up mint.

Mr. Allina prevailed, and the first two character dispensers, Santa Claus and a robot known as the Space Trooper, were introduced in 1955. Unlike today’s plain-stemmed, headed-and-footed dispensers, both were full-body figures, completely sculptured from top to toe.

Killed by elephant

A rampaging elephant kills a Long Island woman and the 1-year-old daughter she held in her arms

The family was hiking on a nature trail about 1 mile from the Castle Forest Lodge, where the family was vacationing, said the owner, Melia van Laar.

"The elephant emerged from the bush at full speed without any warning," van Laar said. "Everybody ran away, but the lady, burdened by the weight of the baby, perhaps, or in panic, was not able to run fast enough."

Officials identified the woman as Sharon Brown, 39, and said her daughter's name was Margaux. Brown, originally from Miller Place, LI, and her husband are listed as faculty members at the International School of Kenya. Friends and colleagues at the American-curriculum K-12 school held a memorial service yesterday.


Walking tours of Kenya's many national parks are common, though hikers are advised to have an armed guard with them if the park is known to have elephants, said Kentice Tikolo, a spokeswoman for the Kenya Wildlife Service.
"It was a lone elephant, and lone elephants can be quite dangerous," Tikolo said. "It probably felt quite threatened."

What a tragedy on a family outing.  Condolences to her grieving family.

The Science of Bereavement

Resilience, Not Misery, in Coping With Death

Orthodox psychology has long emphasized the grim slog in store for those who must live without the people they cannot live without. Freud called it “grief work,” a process of painfully severing the emotional ties to the deceased. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross mapped out five morose stages of effective grieving.

But if you actually talk to the bereaved, says George A. Bonanno, you find these classic perspectives are pure — well, Dr. Bonanno doesn’t actually say baloney, but so he implies in his fascinating and readable overview of what he calls “the science of bereavement.”
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A professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, Dr. Bonanno has now interviewed hundreds of bereaved people, following some for years before and after the fact, looking for patterns.

His conclusion: the bereaved are far more resilient than anyone — including Freud, and the bereaved themselves — would ever have imagined.
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Not so, Dr. Bonanno maintains. In contrast to the grim slog of Freudian grief work, the natural sadness that actually follows a death is not a thick soup of tears and depression. People can be sad at times, fine at other times. The level of fluctuation is “nothing short of spectacular”; the prevalence of joy is “striking.”

Golden mafia coffin

Pallbearers carry the golden casket containing the body of gunned down Nick Rizzuto

Son of Canada's supreme Mafia boss carried to funeral in golden coffin

The son of Canada's most powerful Mafia boss has been laid to rest in a golden coffin.

With a heavy police presence the body of Nick Rizzuto, son of Montreal Mafia head Vito Rizzuto, was carried through the streets of the city's Little Italy neighbourhood yesterday.

Nick, was standing next to a black Mercedes last Monday when a gunman approached him and fire several shots into him. He died at the scene and the killer has still not been caught.
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This turnout shows respect,' Padulo said. 'In the eye of God he's a great person. It was a beautiful service.'

His father Vito is currently serving a sentence in Colorado for racketeering related three Mafia murders in 1981 and was not seen at the funeral.

This doesn't seem to be a very good idea to me.  How long before some wayward youths brimming with testosterone decide this is one grave worth robbing?