Motives for attending a funeral

"John Le Mesurier wishes it to be known that he conked out on November 15th. He sadly misses family and friends."    — John Le Mesurier (1912-83), British actor. His death announcement

“Man dies of cold, not of darkness.”
~Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life  


Take a look around you. It’s a new day. Work stations around you are like the waiting rooms for God  ...

The Seventh Day, by Yu Hua.  Perhaps our obsession with all things Mortuary runs deep  : “Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest.” 

The Quote Investigator relates this story. “In 1953 an Associated Press reporter described his experiences in Moscow after the death of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The journalist reported the caustic comment of an unnamed Russian:
I saw Muscovites by the countless thousands shuffle through the cold March days and nights, in long lines that stretched for miles into the suburbs, to see the dead body of the grim dictator.
One Russian whispered to me: “They’ve come to make sure he’s really dead.”

“Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. … Madame Bovary is a loser. Julien Sorel is a loser. I am doing only the same job. Losers are more fascinating. Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance.” Via Jill and Carlos -   The Total Losers Like Jozef Imrich ;-) 

At the age of 38, a slacker — a man of chat and gossip, not moral seriousness — become a great literary artist. The puzzle of Proust... Prost »

“The move has a practical effect: It extends the copyright from Jan. 1, when it is set to expire in most of Europe, to the end of 2050. Copyrights in Europe generally end 70 years after an author’s death. Anne Frank died 70 years ago at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp, and Otto Frank died in 1980. Extending the copyright would block others from being able to publish the book without paying royalties or receiving permission.” The New York Times extending date of death ...

You should run from these three crazy managers... Anyone who spends enough time in the workforce will end up with a crazy boss who makes life difficult for themselves and appear to want to drive everyone around them crazy as well My Dear Watson

The work-life see-saw, Alex Kelly, PS News,3 November 2015. The catchphrase of work-life balance is meaningless without any context, and what constitutes the perfect balance for one employee or team might be disastrous for another See Saws

How being busy makes you unproductive ... Research shows being too busy actually reduces efficiency because when you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully The only place that does not have stress is cemetery ... 

 “Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious…a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” 

Ghost Village

“Grief doesn’t only disturb life; it disturbs the way we talk about life. As myriad aspects of our existence are questioned and reexamined in the wake of a death, so too is our relationship with the language we rely on for our grief’s expression.” This track-by-track take on Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell from The Rumpus is really just a magnificent, emotive piece on elegy.

Sinead O'Connor attempts suicide 

Speaking of grief as if Imrich surname in English was not bad enough when you work as employee of a crown and your email reads as aimrich@parliament.nsw.gov.au phuc dat bich the Australian man with a name so awkward no one believes-him

Malchkin czeching (sic) Pech Merle Fog

Twice a century, if we’re lucky, a writer comes along who re-enchants us with the glory and grandeur of this world; who helps us remember, in our hearts and our bones, that we are of this earth and this earth is of us and the bond between the two is the wellspring of life’s most rewarding wisdom. In the nineteenth century, that writer was Henry David Thoreau; in the second half of the twentieth, Annie Dillard. Lodged between them is Henry Beston (June 1, 1888–April 15, 1968) — an exceptionally bewitching bridge-builder between humanity and nature, whose words remain some of the most pleasurable prose ever written.

There is one principle which our world would do well to remember, for it is of first importance whether one sharpens a pencil, builds a house, bakes bread, or lays the intended foundations for Utopia. It is this — that what we make is conditioned by the means we use making it. We may have the best intentions in the world, but if we sharpen our pencils with a dull knife or build a house with a faulty rule, the pencil will be badly sharpened and the house will have an odd little way of opening doors by itself and leaning to one side.
~Henry Beston - almost same philosophy as Henri Hennequin ...

Jeremy Corbyn aims for ‘democratic revolution’ with Labour Party The Telegraph.

 E.coli Isn’t Chipotle’s Only Problem Bloomberg

Dana Stevens: “If by ‘we’ you mean ‘I,’ then yes, probably. … When we mourn the early death of a writer who was just beginning to find his or her true voice, we’re also mourning, by implication, every work that author never finished, or never started.”Benjamin Moser: “A dead young writer is, above all, a dead human being. … And the fine line that separates romance from treacle is the same that divides mourning from kitsch; to cross it is to glorify a heart-rending death instead of remembering the achievements of a life.” New York Times Book Review

Ta-Nehesi Coates, who won for Between the World and Me: “The best part of writing is really to educate yourself. I don’t want to be anybody’s expert. I came in to learn.” The New York Times 

When Belgian police requested social media silence during a series of anti-terrorism raids on Sunday, people complied but by tweeting pictures of their cats tagged #BrusselsLockdown.

Metadata Surveillance Didn’t Stop the Paris Attacks Slate

Qantas 737 “tailstrike” was caused by iPad data entry fail Ars Technica

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