Category Archives: Stories
My man of the week, Construction worker Jason Oglesbee dangles from a crane as he stretches his hand to a drowning woman caught in a swirl of water at the base of a dam. Her boat overturned and her husband died but not before he yelled to his wife to put on her life jacket. [...]
The 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 [...]
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 [...]
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…. It went along with her image in the press as an indomitable spirit with a charming personality But it was all a fraud that fooled many music critics that only came to light after her death last year – exposed by iTunes.
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…. 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.
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…. 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…. Police followed the trail of blood he left and arrested him for criminal mischief, criminal trespass and cemetery desecration.
”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.”… 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.
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…. 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.
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…. 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?
