Legacy MattersThe problems starts when someone in Florida died and Laura Todd's social security number was accidently typed in.
Woman Says Being Dead Ruins Her Life
The IRS says I'm dead. Everybody says I'm dead," she said.
She said being dead off and on has made everyday life a hassle. She said her bank closed her credit card account and attached a note of sympathy: "Please accept our condolences on the death of Laura Todd."
David Kipen explores Mark Twain's lifelong preoccupation with death in Twain's most chilling time was a fall in San Francisco
A cheerful approach it isn't, but a careful scrutiny of Twain's life and career discloses a man fascinated with suicide, murder, funerals, wakes, corpses, damnation and reincarnation to a degree well beyond mere morbidity. Rumors of Mark Twain's obsession with death cannot possibly be exaggerated.
Ultimately, of course, death is one of the few things we all have in common. However, Twain survived a youth more shadowed by mortality than many, and they were deaths of a particularly immediate and grisly kind.
Not only did his forbidding father, Judge Clemens, die of pneumonia when Twain was 11, but Twain is said to have witnessed the autopsy through a keyhole. Not only was he at his "sinless" brother Henry's bedside as he lay dying after a steamboat explosion, but Twain would forever blame himself for getting Henry his fateful job on board.
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But the uncanniest evidence for Twain's fixation on mortal matters is simply this: that in his two most enduring books, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and its habitually underrated junior partner, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," both title characters essentially attend their own funerals
Twain came very close to suicide in San Francisco in 1866.Â
When Twain put the pistol to his head that day in San Francisco, he couldn't know that he was holding the future of American literature at gunpoint. No man in that position ever knows just how much one bullet can wing. As always, best not to chance it.
Joyce Hatto was a little known pianist in London when she fell ill and moved to New Zealand.
Her recordings, CDs made when she was in her late 60s and 70s, are staggering, showing a masterful technique, a preternatural ability to adapt to different styles and a depth of musical insight hardly seen elsewhere.
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Little wonder that when she at last succumbed to her cancer last year at age 77 — recording Beethoven’s Sonata No. 26, “Les Adieux,” from a wheelchair in her last days — The Guardian called her “one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced.” Nice touch, that, playing Beethoven’s farewell sonata from a wheelchair. It went along with her image in the press as an indomitable spirit with a charming personality
In her obituary, the Guardian called her "one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced...Her legacy is a discography that in quantity, musical range and consistent quality has been equalled by few pianists in history.
But it was all a fraud that fooled many music critics that only came to light after her death last year - exposed by iTunes.
You have to read Shoot the Piano Player to find out how.
Now it appears her widower William Barrington Coupe passed off other people's recordings as his wife's to give her the illusion of a great end to an unfairly overlooked career. Or at least that's what he said in a letter to Gramophone Magazine
Now he deeply regrets what has happened. He feels that he has acted stupidly, dishonestly and unlawfully. However, he maintains that his wife knew nothing of the deception
The ramen noodle, a dish of "effortless purity" that attains a "state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water" and satisfies more than 100 million people every day was invented by a single man who died last week at 96 in Japan.
Mr. Noodle is appreciated in the New York Times.
Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything.
His Times obituary is here
Momofuku Ando, who — to the delight of dormitory students and other kitchen-resistant customers worldwide — invented those small packets of preflavored dried noodles that require just a three-minute boil, died Friday at a hospital in Osaka, Japan. Mr. Ando, the founder of the Nissin Food Products Company, was 96.
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In July 2005, the company vacuum-packed portions of instant noodles so that a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi, could have them on the space shuttle Discovery. Mr. Ando said at the time, “I’ve realized my dream that noodles can go into space.”
Update: There's an unofficial ramen website here whose founder Matt Fischer says,
Instant Ramen is more than a food for cash-strapped college students (although thats where many of us “picked up the habit”). My neighbor’s health-conscious (and pregnant) wife has gone back to ramen as a comfort food. I offer my final proof of the widespread consumption of ramen, with this data from the Wikipedia: an estimated 70 Billion servings were sold in 2004. That’s enough ramen for about 11 servings per person per year! So, when you consider that ramen is just a simple food or a minor invention, think of what other things in the world have grown from 1 to 70,000,000 servings in the past 49 years.
From a New York Times book review by Russell Shorto of 
"Mayflower : A Story of Courage, Community, and War" (Nathaniel Philbrick)
Not long after the Pilgrims set anchor in the harbor they called Plymouth in 1620, the Wampanoag leader Massasoit paid them a visit near their makeshift settlement and made a wary offer of friendship.
It took several months for two of the Pilgrims to venture into the wilderness and return the gesture. When they did, they noticed circular pits alongside the trails, which, the natives told them, were storytelling devices. Each of these "memory holes" was dug at a place where a remarkable act had occurred; every time Indians passed by these spots, they recounted the deeds.
The Pilgrims, Nathaniel Philbrick says in his vivid and remarkably fresh retelling of the story of the earnest band of English men and women who became saddled with the sobriquet of America's founders, "began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past."
Some people leave fingerprints, Adam Warner left his finger.
Over Memorial Day, Warner had himself a good time toppling some 53 headstones in an upstate N.Yl. cemetery until one fell on him severing his finger.
Police followed the trail of blood he left and arrested him for criminal mischief, criminal trespass and cemetery desecration.
David Dornstein, while at Brown, had an idea for a fictional autobiography.
''The idea?" his brother would write later. ''An unknown young writer dies in a plane crash leaving behind lots of notebooks and bits of stories, and the narrator sets out to piece it all together into a story of the unknown writer's life."
Only 25 when the Libyan terrorists blew Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland in 1968, David Dornstein fell 6 miles to earth.
Fortunately, he had left lots of notebooks and story ideas from which his brother Ken pieced together David's life and his own.
From Beyond Biography, a book review by Daniel Akst in the Boston Globe
Ken didn't just visit the remains of the Boeing aircraft and determine where David sat in relation to the fateful load of Semtex explosives. He pored over his brother's most private writings. He interviewed David's friends. He tracked down his brother's childhood sexual abuser. He became romantically involved with not one but two of David's main love interests. Eventually he married one of them.
"The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky : A True Story" (Ken Dornstein)
Some years ago, the father of a friend of mine brought a fairly enormous house in the middle of Bodmin Moor, a sort of Georgian/Regency house built on the site of an older farmhouse.
In the capacious cellars they found half a dozen very large barrels. 'Oh, good!' said mother. 'We can cut them in half and plant orange trees in them.'
So they set to work to cut the barrels in half, but they found that one of them was not empty, so they set it up and borrowed the necessary equipment from the local pub. The cellar filled with a rich, heady Jamaican odour.
'Rum, by God!' said the father. It was indeed, so they decided to take advantage of some fifty gallons of the stuff before cutting the barrel in half.
About a year later, after gallons of rum punch, flip and butter had been consumed, it was getting hard to get any more rum out of the barrel, even by tipping it up with wedges. So they cut it in half, and found in it the well-preserved body of a man.
The legend of drinking liquor from a barrel used to preserve a body has a long history. Barbara Mikkelson tells you all including what "tapping the Admiral" means.
Chris Rose tells us what is it like driving by the "haunting messages and mystical artifacts [that] adorn the homes of neighborhoods struggling to come back from the dead. Via Ernie the Attorney
I drive around and try to figure out those Byzantine markings and symbols that the cops and the National Guard spray-painted on all the houses around here, cryptic communications that tell the story of who or what was or wasn't inside the house when the floodwater rose to the ceiling.
In some cases, there's no interpretation needed. There's one I pass on St. Roch Avenue in the 8th Ward at least once a week. It says: "1 dead in attic."
That certainly sums up the situation. No mystery there.
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I wonder who eventually came and took 1 Dead in Attic away. Who knows? Hell, with the way things run around here -- I wonder if anyone has come to take 1 Dead in Attic away.
And who claimed him or her? Who grieved over 1 Dead in Attic and who buried 1 Dead in Attic?
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I wonder if I ever met 1 Dead in Attic. Maybe in the course of my job or maybe at a Saints game or maybe we once stood next to each other at a Mardi Gras parade or maybe we once flipped each other off in a traffic jam.
1 Dead in Attic could have been my mail carrier, a waitress at my favorite restaurant or the guy who burglarized my house a couple years ago. Who knows?
My wife, she's right. I've got to quit just randomly driving around. This can't be helping anything.
On the other hand, there are the Mardi Gras Indians
On several desolate streets that I drive down, I see where some folks have returned to a few of the homes and they haven't bothered to put their furniture and appliances out on the curb -- what's the point, really? -- but they have retrieved their tattered and muddy Indian suits and sequins and feathers and they have nailed them to the fronts of their houses.
The colors of these displays is startling because everything else in the 8th is gray. The streets, the walls, the cars, even the trees. Just gray.
So the oranges and blues and greens of the Indian costumes are something beautiful to behold, like the first flowers to bloom after the fallout. I don't know what the significance of these displays is, but they hold a mystical fascination for me.
He changed his mind about going to the market so he could check on his cattle says the AP.
"While I was emptying wtaer, I walked up to check on my hay. Then I saw something red hanging on the fence" said William King, a cattle farmer in Tennessee.
When he walked closer, he saw an unconscious woman covered in blood.
"I hollered at her but she never did move or anything. I thought she had been shot. I thought she was dead"
He called the police and he and the officer cut Shelley Morales, 23, out the barbed wire and she began to regain consciousness telling them she had been there for 2 days.
She's still in intensive care with memories flitting in and out so nobody knows yet how and why she got caught in the fence with a broken leg.
Was it just chance that she was found? What good forces caused William King NOT to go to the market?
BeliefNet explains the differences among ghosts. There are spirits of the dead, crisis apparitions, phantoms, poltergeists and psychic residue.
This is just too weird, I'm just going to excerpt this story, Something you don't see too often.
TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - A motorcyclist with a helmet-wearing corpse strapped to his back crashed in this Mexican city on the U.S. border on Friday and fled on foot, setting off a police murder hunt.
The unidentified driver was trying to ride with the body through the center of Tijuana, south of San Diego, California., when he lost control rounding a curve.
He fled the scene, leaving the dead passenger on the curb. Police said the corpse, which had head injuries and bore strangulation marks, had died at least six hours earlier.
"When the police arrived they took the helmet off the corpse, believing at first that he had died in the crash," said Francisco Castro, a spokesman for the Baja California state police's homicide division.
"But he had adhesive tape stuck to his face, a knife wound to his forehead, and showed signs of strangulation," he added.
Castro said the dead man had wraps of methamphetamine in his pocket and an unkempt appearance, which led investigators to believe the killing was drug related.
"We think the killer was trying to take the body to a more deserted area to dispose of it," he said.
From the Onion
Project manager Ron Butler left behind a 48-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining his tragic decision to commit suicide, coworkers reported Tuesday.
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In the presentation's first section, a three-dimensional bar graph illustrated the growth of Butler's sorrow during the two years since his wife and only child died in a car accident.
"We all got Ron's message loud and clear when that JPEG of his wife wipe-transitioned to a photo of her tombstone," coworker Anne Thibideux said.
This story will give you the chills and give you some sense of the power of your personal Legacy Archives and the marvelous hand of fate.
A fiery book, a daughter's soul, the 30 year sore of a military intelligence officer and a publishing phenomenon in Vietnam. Vietnamese family reunites with fallen daughter by Elliott Blackburn.
Doan Ngoc Tram fell to her knees before the small cardboard box.
Her three daughters crowded close, holding her, as two small bone clasps were carefully undone and the lid of the box lifted. Two small, brown books sat side by side.
Ngoc Tram wept. The stoic woman clutched the diaries of her eldest daughter against her chest for the first time.
"This is the spirit of my sister," her daughter Dang Hien Tram later said through an interpreter. "This is my sister's soul."
The family had traveled thousands of miles from home to see the memoirs Wednesday, now held at the Texas Tech Vietnam Center.
The diaries hold the intimate details of the last few years of a young battlefield surgeon's life. They describe hiding in a trench filled with water to the neck, reciting poetry to pass the time. They share the private anguish of a young doctor's losing war on death.
They are of skies of fire and cratered earth, of battle-ravaged hospitals staffed with revolutionary fervor, of the love of family and country.
They are tales captured by an enemy that protected them for three decades; two diaries that joined two families separated by war.
A fiery book
Fred Whitehurst was standing before a drum of burning documents when his life changed.
A fiery book
Fred Whitehurst was standing before a drum of burning documents when his life changed.
Whitehurst was a military intelligence officer in his twenties, a self-described country boy from North Carolina who arrived in Vietnam in March 1969. As a non-commissioned officer in military intelligence, he interviewed prisoners and combed through captured documents with the help of South Vietnamese translators.
Documents with military value were sent to Saigon, but there was no place to store the captured poetry, letters from home and personal documents written by North Vietnamese soldiers or sympathizers.
Whitehurst routinely burned thousands of such documents in a 55-gallon barrel on the site, per military orders. But he was struck when a translator thumbed through a diary he had picked up from the pile and stopped him.
"Don't burn this one, Fred," Whitehurst remembered him saying. "It has fire in it already."
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The sore
Fred held on to the diary for more than 30 years, hoping to return the book to Thuy's family.
"It was one of those unfinished things; it was like a sore that continued to bother and bother him," Robert said. "We talked about it on and on for 30 years."
At first, there was no way to find the family - Vietnam was off limits during the 1970s, he said. Fred considered a book or movie based on the diaries to attract the attention of the family. He dreamed of using any profit from the deal to build a hospital in Vietnam, a dream he now sheepishly described as childish.
"That's a stupid idea, a movie idea," Fred said.
The translations grew more refined. Robert, a riverboat pilot in the Vietnam War, spoke the language. Now a tugboat captain in New Orleans, he would spend each month he wasn't at sea translating the diaries his brother had recovered, struggling with his rusty Vietnamese and immersed in the story.
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Finding Madam Tram
Ted Engelmann woke up to a ringing cell phone and splitting headache.
It was late April. Engelmann was in Vietnam hoping to complete the last phase of his life's work: a 37-year book project chronicling the changing memorials and scenes from four countries ravaged by the Vietnam War. He too was a Vietnam War veteran, an Air Force sergeant who directed air strikes.
Only a few days earlier, Engelmann had briefly met Fred and Robert Whitehurst. The social studies teacher listened to their hour-long presentation on the diary at the symposium, and volunteered to take a CD of scanned images to Hanoi.
It was late April. Engelmann was in Vietnam hoping to complete the last phase of his life's work: a 37-year book project chronicling the changing memorials and scenes from four countries ravaged by the Vietnam War. He too was a Vietnam War veteran, an Air Force sergeant who directed air strikes.
Only a few days earlier, Engelmann had briefly met Fred and Robert Whitehurst. The social studies teacher listened to their hour-long presentation on the diary at the symposium, and volunteered to take a CD of scanned images to Hanoi.
Now he was awake with a searing stress headache and Dang Thuy Tram's very excited sister on the phone.
"When can you be here?" she asked.
Engelmann said he moved every six months or so to different countries, and had developed contacts in Vietnam. He had landed in Hanoi carrying the disc, and sought the help of Lady Borden, a Quaker with good connections in the country.
Engelmann explained his mission to two of her assistants, expecting little. They called a hospital on the outskirts of the city referenced in the first recovered diary, but made no immediate progress, so he left. He was now in Ho Chi Minh City (previously Saigon), where he planned to shoot his final frames on the 37th anniversary of the fall of the capital.
The phone call was confusing, but the woman was insistent, he remembered.
"Then I realized who they were," Engelmann said. "Half my brain was hurting like hell, and the other half was trying to figure out how to help."
Tram's sisters and brother-in-law picked him up at the Hanoi airport. They traveled to a narrow concrete home with cream-colored walls. Engelmann carried his laptop and the CD of diary images in through the front door to a living room, and almost stepped back out in shock.
The house was packed with relatives and television camera crews.
"There were just so many people in there, and I didn't know who any of the people were," Engelmann said.
The entire home was not much larger than a typical American living room, he said. About 15 or 20 people crowded a small den of cushioned chairs and couches. A vase of white flowers - Thuy's favorite, he was told - stood next to one couch. Beyond was a small kitchen with a large table set for a great meal. Upstairs, under a ceiling that made the 6-foot-1-inch Engelmann bend over to stand, were bedrooms.
He took the place of honor at a kitchen table. He turned on his laptop, loaded the CD, and showed the family the two folders of images of the diaries.
"After that, I moved out of the way," Engelmann said.
Tears welled in the eyes of Thuy's mother, a gentle but strong 81-year-old matriarch, he said. He learned that earlier that year, in three major Vietnamese newspapers, the family had participated in news articles asking if anyone had any information about their fallen daughter. For months there had been no response.
Now an American veteran, an enemy soldier, had appeared unannounced to hand them their daughter's most intimate thoughts and memories on a disk.
"Here's a mom who's getting something back about her daughter," Engelmann said. "I was the guy who was able to give it to her, and I was just overwhelmed."
The believable hero
Ted Engelmann changed his plans, and finished his book with photographs from a trip he took with the Tram family to honor Thuy's grave. Fred Whitehurst was overjoyed to learn that the family had been almost immediately found, and traveled with his brother to Vietnam in August to meet the mother and sisters of the author who had haunted him.
Fred worried for years that the family would simply accept the diaries and then close the door. He returned with an adopted mother and sisters, he said.
"They really adopted us," Fred said. "How crazy is that?"
They quickly learned that the diaries had touched more than the Whitehurst family.
A normal press run for books in Vietnam is 1,000 - maybe 5,000 for very popular novels, said Quang Phu Van, a professor of Vietnamese Language and Literature in the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies.
The Dang Thuy Tram diaries, published this summer, have hit 200,000 according to the Vietnam Center.
Unlike previously published stories of war heroes issued by the government, tales of almost superhuman sacrifice and dedication, Vietnamese can relate to the stories of Thuy Tram and another recently published diary from a North Vietnamese soldier, Van said.
"This is something very genuine, and that's become a phenomenon in Vietnam," he said, adding that his father carries a copy of the diaries with him. "Someone who shared a loss of innocence, the guilt; this is something that people have a chance to see something different. Everyone talks about it."
Such stories are rare, said Vietnam Center associate director Stephen Maxner, though he wondered if more diaries kept by American soldiers would come forward after this.
Changing lives
The family wiped tears from their eyes and leafed through the diaries Wednesday morning at the Texas Tech Vietnam Center. At first overwhelmed with emotion, Thuy Tram's sisters thanked the archivists for preserving her diaries. Kim Tram hoped the stories would help bring the U.S. and Vietnam closer.
The Tram family found their sister and daughter again. The two handmade books with clean blue cursive writing had soul, they said.
"When we came to touch the diary, I had a feeling she'd come back with us," Kim Tram said through an interpreter.
Though they were not present, the experience had changed the Whitehurst brothers, too.
"I understand a lot more about the whole thing I was involved in as a young man because of this," Robert said. "I don't think I'll ever completely let go of it."
Fred dismisses his role in the story: "All I am is the camel that carried the water across the desert." He does not want closure from the war, does not want to forget what happened, he said. He does not want accolades.
He wants his mother to meet his adopted mother, which they will do later this week. And he takes joy in one final bit of serendipity - the popularity of the books has inspired a drive to build a hospital in Dang Thuy Tram's name, he said.
"Every flipping penny of it is going to a hospital in Pho Cuong," Whitehurst marveled. "My foolish, kind of childish dream of hospital beds in Duc Pho, it's coming true. To continue her life's work through such a bizarre path - me? It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck."
From the American Digest, reposted, a personal memory of September 11 from Brooklyn Heights, seeing it all in real time and real space. Gerard Van Der Leun, The Wind in the Heights
In time, everyone had passed by as well and the street was empty except for the settling smoke. I looked outside the window where a small maple grew and noticed that its leaves were covered with small yellow flecks. I looked down at the sill outside the windows and saw the yellow flecks there as well.
At some point in the next few minutes it dawned on me that there would be no bodies to speak of found in the incinerating rubble across the river. I knew then -- as certainly as I have even known anything -- that all those who had still been in the towers had gone into the smoke and that, in some way, the gleaming bits of yellow ash were their tokens, were what they had become.
And I knew that all they had become had fallen upon us as we ran in the smoke; that we had breathed them in when the wind reached us; that they were covering the houses and the sills and the cars and the sidewalks and the benches and the shrubs and the trees all about us.
What they had become was what the wind without a storm had left behind. Now that it had passed everything was, again, silent and calm with the blue sky above the houses on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights beginning to emerge from the fading smoke as the breeze of the harbor shifted the plume away from us and moved it uptown, into Manhattan, leaving the Heights again as an elite enclave, above and to the side of New York City.
The yellow flecks stayed like small stars on the surface of everything in the Heights for three days until the first rains came on a late afternoon to wash them away. I walked out into that rain and back down Pierrepont to the Promenade where for months the fires would burn across the river. The rain came straight down and there was no wind. As I walked down the sidewalk I noticed the rainwater running off the trees and the buildings and moving down the gutter to the drains that would take it to the harbor and the sea. And that water was, for only a minute or so before it ran clear, the color of gold.
Don't miss this story by Gerard Van der Leun the namesake of an uncle he never knew. The Name in the Stone
Cut into the stone amongst a tally of the dead.
If you have an unusual name, there's nothing that prepares you for seeing it in a list of the dead on a summer Sunday afternoon in Battery Park in 1975. I don't really remember the feeling except to know that, for many long moments, I became suddenly chilled.
When that passed, I knew why my name was in the stone. I'd always known why, but I'd never known about the stone or the names cut into it.
"Gerard Van der Leun" was, of course, not me. He was someone else entirely. Someone who had been born, lived, and died before I was even conceived. He was my father's middle brother. He was what my family had given to stop Fascism, Totalitarianism and genocide in the Second World War. He was one of their three sons. He was dead before he was 22 years old. His body never recovered, the exact time and place of his death over the Atlantic, unknown.
From Monastic Skete, The Tap on the Shoulder. a moving story by Brother Dan in Tennessee.
It was one of those requests for a 6 a.m. visit before surgery. Some of these can be strange, like the man who didn't want prayer but just a witness as he changed his will and wrote it on a napkin.
This request was a bit unusual. They wanted me to walk with the patient from his room to surgery. After our short conversation and prayer the attendant began moving the bed toward the door. When it was almost to the door I reached out to Maria, the patient Rick's wife, and said, "Here is a prayer by Thomas Merton I often pass out to patients.
She glanced at the prayer, then her husband Rick began to cry. Maria said, "last night before he went to sleep he said I wish I had that prayer by Thomas Merton." Tears came to my eyes then. I knew something special was going on.
What is it like to be facing death in Iraq? What do the soldiers go through? What are the stories you're not hearing?
Michael Yon tells us in Gates of Fire.
Reaching around the corner, I fired three shots into the shop. The third bullet pierced a propane canister, which jumped up in the air and began spinning violently. It came straight at my head but somehow missed, flying out of the shop as a high-pressure jet of propane hit me in the face. The goggles saved my eyes. I gulped in deeply.
Gerard Vanderleun says it's one of the greatest pieces of front-line reporting in the past 60 years and without a doubt the single greatest dispatch to come out of the Iraq war.
He's right.
Michael Yon has found his purpose and is making his legacy alongside American troops stabilizing the situation in Iraq.
Hats off to Michael and all the soldiers at Deuce Four.
The son of a spy tries to unravel the puzzle of his paternity.
From His Father's Secrets
Fathers as foreign entities: It's a familiar theme. But in his book, My Father the Spy which is subtitled "An Investigative Memoir," Richardson, now 50, takes us deep into the life of a CIA agent, both professional and personal, noble and tragic.
Others knew his father in ways he could only imagine. They knew a completely different man.
"I was jealous, more than anything else," he says. "I loved that he was like that" -- like the man in the early letters. "I loved that guy. And yet that was not a guy I ever met.
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One day, he's sitting on his father's patio, chatting amid the bougainvillea and lemon trees. They're chatting about Vietnam, sort of. And the son decides to ask his father the big question.
"I asked him how he felt about the blood on his hands," Richardson recalls in the interview.
In the book, he writes: "I'm thinking in a general sense about Diem and the war. But he looks hurt and puzzled and doesn't answer. Later, mom gets angry at me. 'He never killed anyone or ordered anyone to be killed. You know that.' "
But he didn't know that. Not even at the very end in 1998, when his dad is dying and gasping for breath and the son is sitting on the edge of the bed. So much he would never know.
When you begin to write the stories of your life and your family, wonderful things can happen.
From the Washington Post, Faded Sketch Propels Families Across a Racial Divide, by Sudarsan Raghavan.
An elderly black woman drove up to the sand-colored mansion of a frail old white man in Prince George's County. She parked and walked slowly to the back entrance, as if by instinct. Under one arm, she carried a framed, faded sketch. Under the other, a roll of genealogy charts.
The sketch was of her great-great-grandparents, Basil and Lizzie Wood. They were long dead when Anna Holmes was born, but she had come to know them like her shadow.
Oden Bowie had met Basil and Lizzie. They worked for his family and may have been his ancestors' slaves. But until that chilly day in February 2002, Holmes had resisted asking for Bowie's help in writing this chapter of her family's history. For much of her life, reaching out to the white world meant crossing into a forbidding realm.
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It also unearthed something within her that had been buried by decades of discrimination.
"If you bonded with someone, you're going to be bonded whether they are black or white," she said.
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She is writing an autobiography to pass on to her descendants. She wants them "to know where they came from," she said, because "this is who they are." She will proudly tell them how they are now connected to one of Maryland's first families. She will tell them how Eugene Roberts now calls her "extended family."
One day, she sat her grandchildren down and told them about the kind white man whose gift she unravels every day.
"He could have just said, 'Oh, yeah, they are buried over here,' and that's the end of that," she told them. "He could have closed the door.
"But he didn't choose to do that."
I can't think of a single comment to this deliciously written story from the BBC
He came into this world naked, spent much of his time in it nude, but will - against his specific wishes - depart it fully clothed.
Robert Norton, of Pekin, Illinois, was often prosecuted during his lifetime for gardening and wandering outside his house in the nude.
The 82-year-old said he wanted to be buried in his birthday suit - but his family are having none of it.
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Brenda Loete said she never spoke to Norton despite living next door to him for more than a decade.
"We didn't really know him. We just had him arrested," she said.
She had spent years taking her daughter to the park rather than letting her play in the garden because of the naked old man next door, she said.
"Normally, if we had him arrested in the spring he'd be gone for the summer and we wouldn't have to worry about him until the next spring."
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The cycle of arrest and prosecution lasted over four decades, until the World War II veteran was admitted to a nursing home.
He fought 20 arrests for indecency since his first in 1962, arguing that he had a constitutional right to public nakedness, the Associated Press reported.
A big round of applause to Dr. Peter Grossman, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, for what he accomplished with a badly burned Aghani girl named Zubaida.
After the Iranian doctors sent her home to die, her father approached the Americans.
The amazing transformation can be seen in three photos.
Zubaida was featured on ABC's 20:20 and you can see the video here
and learn the whole story, a great legacy in the making.
The story isn't really about the miracles of medicine and surgery. It is bigger than that, much bigger. It is the story of the human potential to do good, in all of us. It is the story of how we, using the gifts and capabilities we have, can achieve that potential
To understand what a story from your life told honestly and written beautifully can mean to others, read the comments after the story.
And that has made all the difference (seeing Jesus through a porn star).
An extraordinary story by Natala who thought she found God as a Christian only to realize she had become a Pharisee. It's long and well worth it.
and at the time i had desperately wanted the story to end, in this way:
"and then marie prayed the sinners prayer, and she stopped every thing she was doing, and became a missionary who now helps young girls."
that is what i wanted.
but instead, perhaps the beauty of god is not only found in the neatly packaged salvation stories. perhaps the beauty of god, is instead found in the depth and ugliness of our lives.
god is found in the sadness, the messy parts, the depression the anger, and the hurt.
and in the mess that was marie's life....
seeing jesus in her was not hard.
she was loving, caring, and honest.
she would have done anything for me.
and the truth is that before i was a christian i would have done anything for her.
Just back from vacation, a Romanian man learned he had lost his job because he had been declared dead.
Valentin Lefter, 20, from Focsani, said he was shocked because he'd only been away for two weeks.
He returned from his summer break to find a letter from wine-bottling company Prodecam Vanatori.
"The letter, addressed to my wife, apologised for my passing away and said any outstanding payments would be sent to her within the next month," said Lefter.
When he rang company bosses, they apologised and said the letter had been sent out because of a computer error.
But they said he could not have his job back because they had already employed someone in his place, reported local media.
He now plans to sue the company for £10,000.
She refused to be slaughtered like the others. She fought against death, regained her freedom in a "daring James Bond-style escape", swam to a small island and survived for weeks on daffodils.
Her Welsh name is Myfanwy - hard to pronounce unless you're Welsh, hard to forget when you think of her courage and spirit.
Myfanwy, is a ewe, a female sheep who refused to go along with the other sheep, has now been adopted as the farm pet, safe from the slaughterhouse. Daring Escape
According to the BBC, her farmer Philip Robinson said,
"You get to know the problem sheep but she had not shown herself before. We decided to give her a reprieve - she's like a pet now, out in the field with the rams but you can't really get near her.
"She's a bit lively and a bit of a runner!"
I'll say.
Crews demolishing old military barracks on this sprawling base near Paso Robles stumbled on a surprising find: wallets.
Tumbling out of heating ducts suspended from the ceilings, the wallets were stuffed with remarkably well-preserved personal belongings dating from World War II and the Korean War.
Love letters. Religious medals. Base passes. High school identification cards. Driver's licenses. Dog tags. Snapshots. Tips for surviving an atomic blast.
The only thing missing was money.
........
Air Ducts Hide a Trove of Memories
The fact that there is no money in any of these wallets leads us to believe they were stolen," said California Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Tom Murotake. "The thefts usually involved a trusting guy from a small town who set his wallet down, then got distracted.
"Someone else, in one fluid motion, nabbed the wallet, snatched the cash and chucked the rest into the heating duct overhead."
Over the decades, the heat turned the leather into something resembling beef jerky, but left everything inside intact.
Murotake, who is in charge of tracking down the owners, said the wallets become instant "touchstones,"
The week's going by faster than I thought. While I was out yesterday, the Carnival of Vanities hosted by John Behan, the Commonwealth Conservative and the Internet's first elected blogger, went live. My post Time Travelling at MIT and digital stories was among the Cream of the Crop.
An actual headline and story. Death pleads guilty to cheating cemetery. Death will be sentenced on July 11, 2005. Stay tuned
You'd be surprised at the number of people who believe this story about 54 year old Childress Wanamaker who died of starvation because he couldn't tear himself away from his computer. I link, Therefore I am.
He was glued to his computer 24/7," she said tearfully. "He was so afraid he was going to miss an opportunity to contribute a comment or start a discussion, that he just stopped eating." She added that Wanamaker's last words were "OK Picard, stick that in your pipe and smoke it..."
In what must be a record, Wanamaker was linked into to over 15,250 other community members, many of whom he exchanged notes with daily. He also contributed to 375 blogs and was expected to start an online column about the impact of interactive communications on health, when he died.
A virtual memorial service will be held online at a date to be determined.
I think I need a new category for funeral jokes I want to passalong.
A woman was leaving a convenience store with her morning coffee when she noticed a most unusual funeral procession approaching the nearby cemetery.
A long black hearse was followed by a second long black hearse about 50 feet behind the first one. Behind the second hearse was a solitary woman walking a pit bull on a leash. Behind her, a short distance back, were about 200 women walking single file.
The woman couldn't stand her curiosity. She respectfully approached the woman walking the dog and said,
"I am so sorry for your loss", I know now is a bad time to disturb you, but I've never seen a funeral like this.
Whose funeral is it?"
"My husband's."
"What happened to him?"
The woman replied, "My dog attacked and killed him."
She inquired further, "Well, who is in the second hearse?"
The woman answered, "My mother-in-law. She was trying to help my husband when the dog turned on her."
A poignant and thoughtful moment of silence passed between the two women.
"Can I borrow the dog?"
"Get in line."
By 1955 up to 67,700 German children had been fathered by US soldiers. It's a scandal that even today there is no legal agreement between Germany and the US regarding paternity claims.
Like many of the children fathered by occupying soldiers, Anthoefer grew up in an orphanage in Germany without knowing his father. "In Germany in the 1950s, if you were an unwed mother, the state usually took custody of your child," he explained. His father, an American stationed in Rastadt, had wanted to marry his mother. "But as soon as a serviceman got a woman pregnant, he would be transferred, and the army would refuse to pass on any information," he said. "If you kept asking, they would maintain they no longer had any records."
As a teenager, Anthoefer was determined to locate his father. "The American authorities deliberately gave me misleading information," he said. "They just gave me the runaround." In 1971, he got a visa to visit the US and finally tracked down his father. But it was too late. He discovered his father, the mayor of a small town in West Virginia, had died just weeks previously.
After collecting enough evidence to convince the German courts this man was indeed his father, Germany recognized the paternity claim, although the US didn't. Twenty years later, Anthoefer went to court and got permission to have his father's body exhumed for DNA testing. He had to wait three years for the result, and in the meantime, he was arrested as an illegal immigrant and deported. Today, he is still barred entry to the States, which means he cannot pursue his quest to prove his parentage.
"If I can prove I am my father's son, then I am an American citizen," he said. "It's the only connection I have to my father -- the inheritance of his nationality. I belong to nowhere, and all I want is American citizenship. That's all I want."
A not-so-great Legacy.
If you are harboring a secret that you DON'T want your family and friends to know about EVER, but you need to tell someone, try PostSecret.
PostSecret is a ongoing community art blog where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Of course, there's no way to check on the truth of what's in them, but fascinating nonetheless.
Roger Cohen, a reporter for the International Herald Tribune, tells a family story about Pope John Paul II when he was a seminary student in Poland and the Jewish girl he saved.
Edith Zierer was 13 years old when she emerged from a Nazi labor camp on the verge of death, scarcely able to walk.
Death was approaching, but a young man approached first, "very good looking," as she recalled, and vigorous. He wore a long robe and appeared to be a priest. "Why are you here?" he asked. "What are you doing?" Edith said she was trying to get to Krakow to find her parents.
The man disappeared. He came back with a cup of tea. Edith drank. He said he could help her get to Krakow. Again the mysterious benefactor went away, returning with bread and cheese. They talked about the advancing Soviet Army. Edith said she believed that her parents and younger sister, Judith, were alive.
"Try to stand," the man said. Edith tried and failed. He carried her to another village, where he put her in the cattle car of a train bound for Krakow. Another family was there. The man got in beside Edith, covered her with his cloak and made a small fire.
----------
Edith fled from Karol Wojtyla when they arrived at Krakow in 1945. The family on the train, also Jews, had warned her that he might take her off to "the cloisters." She recalls him calling out, "Edyta, Edyta!" - the Polish form of her name - as she hid behind large containers of milk.
But hiding was not forgetting. She wrote his name in a diary, her savior, and in 1978, when she read in a copy of Paris-Match that he had become pope, she broke into tears
Kids are amazing. Here's a passalong story from Beliefnet
Last week I took my children to a restaurant. My six-year-old son asked if he could say grace. As we bowed our heads he said, "God is good. God is great. Thank you for the food, and I would even thank you more if Mom gets us ice cream for dessert. And liberty and justice for all! Amen!"
Along with the laughter from the other customers nearby, I heard a woman remark, "That's what's wrong with this country. Kids today don't even know how to pray. Asking God for ice cream! Why, I never!"
Hearing this, my son burst into tears and asked me, "Did I do it wrong? Is God mad at me?"
As I held him and assured him that he had done a terrific job and God was certainly not mad at him, an elderly gentleman approached the table. He winked at my son and said, "I happen to know that God thought that was a great prayer."
"Really?" my son asked.
"Cross my heart." Then in theatrical whisper he added, indicating the woman whose remark had started this whole thing, "Too bad she never asks God for ice cream. A little ice cream is good for the soul sometimes."
Naturally, I bought my kids ice cream at the end of the meal. My son stared at his for a moment and then did something I will remember the rest of my life. He picked up his sundae and without a word walked over and placed it in front of the woman. With a big smile he told her, "Here, this is for you. Ice cream is good for the soul sometimes, and my soul is good already."
J.K Rowling's desk is messier than mine and a lot more fun with "portkeys" that transport you to different areas of her site. Her links page is the coolest one I've ever seen with living pictures and books that when clicked on open to display information. Move your cursor around to see the many hidden delights - even in her trash can. What she has done with her short biography would make any scrapbooking enthusiast proud. If your kids or nieces and nephews are Harry Potter fans, this official JK Rowling site will delight them. You can amaze them with Harry Potter arcana and even store them (the arcana that is, not your kids) in your own scrapbook on the site.
I know, I know for real fans, it's just marking time until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Book 6 is published on July 16, 2005.
Because I'm constantly marvelling at the scope and breadth and depth of the human experience, from time to time, I plan to bring you a collection of stories to show you what I mean. Here is the first collection.
If you have any good stories, pass them along to me.
Her Jewish parents were forced to flee the Nazis in war-time Greece. The little baby Reina Gilberta was protected first by a family friend and later by nuns at the Convent of St Joseph together with Mama Lina who baptised her to get the proper papers the Nazis required. While war waged throughout Europe, Reina had a happy, secure and loving childhood. After the war, she reunited with her real parents thanks to one courageous nun and after 40 years reunited with Lina's family.
...with your words, your letter, your voice on the telephone, my mother came to life again, my little sister, she loved you so much and you loved her too...She loved you so much she said "no" to my father and me when we wanted to keep you. Little Gilberta, you said your first words in our house. Instinctively you said "mama," to the woman who was holding you in her lap. And she, lovingly, said "no, I'm only mamma-Lina. Your real mother will come back." The whole story
After your 17 year old mother has aborted you, you survive but are not expected to live. After being placed with a foster family, you learn how to walk. Today, you train for marathons and have become a song-wrier and performer. Everyone wants to hear Gianna Jessen's story. Caution, this is a pro-life story
My biological parents made some really poor choices," she said. "I forgive them for what they did (but) I live every day with the result of the 'choice' that my biological mother made 27 years ago. So it's ridiculous to think our choices on a moment-by-moment basis only affect us. They always affect someone else, for good or ill."
Hanneke A 19 year old nurse in Holland is drawn to a 40 year woman in a coma who had no living relatives. Night after night, Hanneka talked to the woman in a coma and told her all about her parents who had died in a car crash when she was quite young. There's an extraordinary twist in the story of the Voice in the Night.
What makes him do it? Listen to what Don Vermilyea, a 54 year old man from West Virginia, has to say after walking 10 years and 13,000 miles
People think this is Donnie's Big Adventure, but it isn't. It isn't that at all. This is real. I hurt 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I hurt all night and all day.
Want to go on a ten year walk all by yourself? Wanna talk about scary? Try doing this."
There isn't a day that goes by that I don't dream of quitting,
We need to slow down and stop taking care of each other more,
Not just as Christians but just as human beings."
The last is a "passalong" - which according to Beliefnet is one of those emails that have been forwarded so often, no one knows their origin or veracity It's called The Miracle of the Deer and how they are drawn to the purest, most loving heart.
We will be hearing many more amazing stories like this one. Via The Command Post doing its usual wonderful job as a newsblog collective with this post by Alan Brain.
From The Australian: Woman releases son in tsunami
An Australian woman was forced to let go of one of her children to save another when a wall of water struck their Thai holiday destination. Jillian Searle, of Perth, was near her Phuket hotel pool with sons Lachie, five, and Blake, two, when the tsunami hit on Sunday. Her husband Brad watched the calamity unfold from the vantage point of his first-floor room. Ms Searle was faced with a terrible choice as she fought to stay alive amid the raging waters. "I knew I had to let go of one of them and I just thought I'd better let go of the one that's the oldest," she told Sky News. "A lady grabbed hold of him for a moment but she had to let him go because she was going under. "And I was screaming, trying to find him, and we thought he was dead." Sky News said Lachie was found safe two hours later after surviving the raging torrent by clinging to a door.
How lucky she was. Consider the parents looking for their children in the make-shift morgues. This photograph by Jason Smith on assignment from The Sydney Morning Herald via Tim Blair doing his usual splendid job in Australia.
I've often thought that all of us pay too little attention to the goodness of people around us. Not surprisingly, William Wordsworth said it a lot better, "The best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love."
Consider the large ripple effects of two good men. Spirit of America was founded by Chief Wiggles and now run by Jim Hake with a mission is to extend the goodwill of the American people to assist those advancing freedom and peace broad. You choose the project you want to support from providing sewing machines to carpentry tools to library books and you can rest assured that 100% of your donation goes to the project you want.
We live in a world that is more interconnected than we can ever imagine. A quick check in the mail that someone sent to Spirit of America for toys to Iraqi children just may have saved the lives of many soldiers. This story about a brave little girl with a teddy bear comes from BlackFive, the paratrooper of love and is called The Heart of America.
Via Seamus, this email is a thank you from a Marine Gunnery Sergeant in Iraq. It was sent two days ago:
Just wanted to write to you and tell you another story about an experience we had over here.
As you know, I asked for toys for the Iraqi children over here and several people (Americans that support us) sent them over by the box. On each patrol we take through the city, we take as many toys as will fit in our pockets and hand them out as we can. The kids take the toys and run to show them off as if they were worth a million bucks. We are as friendly as we can be to everyone we see, but especially so with the kids. Most of them don't have any idea what is going on and are completely innocent in all of this.
On one such patrol, our lead security vehicle stopped in the middle of the street. This is not normal and is very unsafe, so the following vehicles began to inquire over the radio. The lead vehicle reported a little girl sitting in the road and said she just would not budge. The command vehicle told the lead to simply go around her and to be kind as they did. The street was wide enough to allow this maneuver and so they waved to her as they drove around.
As the vehicles went around her, I soon saw her sitting there and in her arms she was clutching a little bear that we had handed her a few patrols back. Feeling an immediate connection to the girl, I radioed that we were going to stop. The rest of the convoy paused and I got out the make sure she was OK. The little girl looked scared and concerned, but there was a warmth in her eyes toward me. As I knelt down to talk to her, she moved over and pointed to a mine in the road.
Immediately a cordon was set as the Marine convoy assumed a defensive posture around the site. The mine was destroyed in place.
It was the heart of an American that sent that toy. It was the heart of an American that gave that toy to that little girl. It was the heart of an American that protected that convoy from that mine. Sure, she was a little Iraqi girl and she had no knowledge of purple mountain's majesty or fruited plains. It was a heart of acceptance, of tolerance, of peace and grace, even through the inconveniences of conflict that saved that convoy from hitting that mine. Those attributes are what keep Americans hearts beating. She may have no affiliation at all with the United States, but she knows what it is to be brave and if we can continue to support her and her new government, she will know what it is to be free. Isn't that what Americans are, the free and the brave?
If you sent over a toy or a Marine (US Service member) you took part in this. You are a reason that Iraq has to believe in a better future. Thank you so much for supporting us and for supporting our cause over here.
Semper Fi,
Mark
GySgt / USMC
Before today, I never heard of Utah Phillips which I think is one of the all time great names I've ever heard. I was reading Chris Corrigan in Stories as Expressions of Our Truth who told a story about Utah Phillips
Years ago I heard Utah Philips tell a story. He told of a time when he was a young man and he had an opportunity to visit a cowboy who knew dozens of songs from the great cattle drives of the 19th century. The cowboy lived in a small house in New Mexico and was dying. It was a tremendous opportunity to get these songs from the mouth of a man who had been on these cattle drives so Phillips arranged a visit.
When he arrived at the cowboy’s house he was met at the door by a nurse who said that although the cowboy was in poor health, he was looking forward to the visit. It would take a few minutes to get him ready so Phillips was invited to make himself at home in the living room.
Phillips began perusing the bookshelves and was immediately struck by the huge number of books from the ultra conservative John Birch Society. His initial reaction was to ask himself what he was doing there, about to have a conversation with a man who was bound to feed him political babble that Phillips would find deeply offensive.
And then he caught himself and he realized that he wasn’t there to talk politics with the cowboy, he was there to get songs. He realized that talking politics with the cowboy would only result in a conversation full of canned ideas recited from a book. Phillips was after the truth, and in concluding the story he said, “if you ask people about what they truly know. They will always tell you the truth.” And what they truly know is not contained in the books they read, it is contained in the stories about who they are and what they do and what is close to their heart.
That story has informed my approach to learning about what is important to people ever since. Whether I am working in a consultation process or helping a team find their way through a project, I’ll always go to the stories of the people in the room, and invite that level of truth to come forward.
Chris Corrigan, a Celtic Indian, is a consultant using stories to facilitate organizational and community change particularly with the aboriginal or First Nation communities in Canada with a blog called Parking Lot.
Who could resist finding out more about Utah Phillips, a folk musician who describes himself as the "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest" and by others as a true eclectic, archivist, historian, activist, philosopher, hobo, tramp, member of the IWW, and just about everything in between. Visit Utah and listen to moose turd pie
Some of best obituary writers in the world were gathered in New Mexico last weekend for the Sixth Annual Great Obituary Writers International Conference. Here's a first hand account of what happened when they heard the news that President Reagan had died.
via Buzzmachine's "Six column inches under"
(This links to the original article in the UK's Media Guardia but a cumbersome registration process is required).
Gasps of astonishment, cries of surprise, uproar and confusion. Several delegates sprinted to the hotel lobby's public call boxes or grabbed cellphones. The bringer of the news was surrounded and peppered with questions. Bullamore's presentation was ruined. Finally, he grabbed the microphone and bellowed: "Reagan's dead and he'll be deader. Let's go on with the show."
He resumed his slides, but it wasn't the same. The 40th president of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan, had died inconveniently and thrust obituarists into disarray. But really, they loved it. One delegate, her eyes sparkling, gushed: "Isn't this just wild?"
I've never been to the beaches of Omaha or Normandy. Even though I've read a lot about D-Day, I am most moved at just seeing pictures of the thousands of graves of brave young Americans who died so we and Europe could be free.
Now I can listen tol first person accounts of what it was like to prepare for and then storm the beach. Thanks to the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress, the stories of ordinary people in extraordinary times are preserved.
If you know of a vet who served in WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf,
encourage them to contribute their stories.
With WW2 veterans dying every day, the Library of Congress
has embarked on an ambitious project to collect the wartime memories of ordinary people. Aging Veterans tell their stories for posterity Gregg Zoroya of USA TODAY writes
His recorded words have been shipped to the Library of Congress), making the Pendergasts participants in one of the broadest national efforts to preserve eyewitness accounts of Americans serving in war. It seeks the stories of those who served in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.
And unlike many academic efforts, in which historians or trained researchers conduct the interviews, the Library of Congress enlists sons, daughters, friends and students to do the work......
''People don't think about history until it's about to be gone,'' says Sarah Rouse, a senior program officer with the Library of Congress Veterans History Project.
And time is running out. Jim Parkel, president of the 35 million-member AARP, says that although an estimated 19 million men and women who are veterans of American wars are alive today, they are dying at the rate of 1,600 a day. With their passing, he says, ''you are losing a history that is very important.''....
The Library of Congress program, barely two years old, may be the most ambitious effort both in scope -- covering every major American war of the 20th century -- and in method, appealing to the public for broad participation. It also carries the imprimatur of a government project within the nation's largest and most prestigious library.
Partially financed by a $3 million AARP grant and supported and promoted by chapters in that organization and service groups like Veterans of Foreign Wars, the program focuses on gathering oral histories as well as photographs, letters and war diaries.
A Web site (www.loc.gov/folklife/vets/) offers start-up kits with sample questions and guidelines: ''Find a quiet, well-lit room to use for the interview. Avoid rooms with fluorescent lights, chiming clocks, or heating and cooling systems that are noisy. . . . Try to keep your questions short. Avoid complicated, multipart questions.''
David Isay is a 38 year old radio producer who wanted to "take oral history and put it in the hands of regular people." Winner of a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, and inspired by the 1930's Federal Writers Project, he developed StoryCorps to celebrate the lives of the uncelebrated. As Studs Terkel said, "[T]he ones who make the world go around, these millions of people who have never expressed themselves." (See David Taylor's article "Hear Here" in the Smithsonian, June, 2004). Photos are great but static. Nothing compares to the sound of a voice, especially when it's telling a great story.
New York City's Grand Central Station now has a tiny recording studio next to track 14 where more than 600 stories have been recorded. You can make an interview appointment on the website, get interviewing tips, then professionally record your interview with the help with an interview facilitor, get a CD of the interview and, with your permission, a copy goes to the Library of Congress. All for $10. You can also listen to excerpts from interviews on the website.
When I was a young girl, we had a record called Pardon My Blooper. My siblings and I rolled around laughing at a pompous announcer who introduced the President of the U.S as Hooobert Heeever. We guffawed at any toilet joke.
About a good third of them we didn't get at all but my father across the room had tears rolling down his face trying to control his laughter.
This is one of the funniest emails if a bit raunchy, I’ve ever gotten. I don't know where it originated