Morbid Monday

I happened upon a great article titled "The Man Who Dissolved His Wife"...

On May 7th, Adolph reported his wife missing, but her family suspected foul play. Police questioned relatives and friends and searched the city for Louise Luetgert or her remains.

During a search of Luetgert’s factory on May 15th, a watchman suggested they look in a steam vat in the cellar that was used to dip sausages. The police looked inside, and found that the vat was filled halfway with a putrid-smelling, reddish-brown liquid. When the police pulled a plug near the bottom of the vat, on the outside, the slimy liquid and small pieces of bone fell out. Inside the cauldron, police found a gold ring with L.L. engraved on the inside.

But it turns out that article is just one in a series of Morbid Monday articles from Atlas Obscura.

They've a bunch of sick, sick articles, most of which are worth a read.

Long live the long peace

The Fallen of World War II from Neil Halloran on Vimeo.

We live in a time of historic peace.

May we say that for decades to come.

...if you need reminding of that, check out the above video and the associated website.

Nepal Annapurna: Climbing disaster toll reaches 39

This one isn't technically about Mt Everest, but it's in the range.

This past week saw a disaster kill at least thirty-nine hikers/climbers/eco-tourists in Nepal when the weather turned far nastier than they were prepared for.

Remember, kids: DON'T GO TO NEPAL.

DON'T HIKE OR CLIMB MOUNTAINS YOU AREN'T PREPARED FOR.

YOU WILL DIE.

Songs of Death

Astride a pale horse... from PHSChemGuy on 8tracks Radio.

No reason here, no worries...just looking for good playlists.

Songs of Death from 8Tracks

People don't die on a television show

Posted on Sunday on Futility Closet:

During an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, publisher and organic gardening advocate J.I. Rodale boasted, “I’m in such good health that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday and I laughed all the way.” When Cavett’s next guest, New York Post columnist Pete Hamill, joined them on the couch, Rodale made a snoring sound. Hamill told Cavett, “This looks bad.”

“The audience laughed at that. I didn’t, because I knew Rodale was dead,” Cavett wrote later in the New York Times. “To this day, I don’t know how I knew. I thought, ‘Good God, I’m in charge here. What do I do?’ Next thing I knew I was holding his wrist, thinking, I don’t know anything about what a wrist is supposed to feel like.”

Rodale had died of a heart attack. The episode was never aired.

I'll admit that I was skeptical. Futility Closet is usually very reliable, though, so I went hunting to remove any doubt in my head.

Turns out it's entirely true - at least according to Dick Cavett who should certainly know. He's told the story on radio shows...



...written an op-ed in the New York Times about it...

...and Wikipedia has most of the details...

...but Cavett's never released the footage...not online, not on air, never.

He did, however, successfully avoided telling a joke when looking to get Mr Rodale some medical attention. Dick Cavett, ever professional.

Gun control...my thoughts

This is largely coming together as a stream of consciousness. I don't know that I can be entirely rational about this...

The school shooting in Newtown, CT was a tragedy.

I certainly responded to it differently, though, than did many people, partially I'm sure because of my background.

I don't have children of my own. I don't teach at an elementary school, and in all honesty I don't always empathize well with people this distant from me. Our principal was in the hallway crying the afternoon of the shooting. I, on the other hand, was just thinking that these were people I didn't know. It was tragic for them to have died and horrific for them to have died this way, but these were people I didn't know.

Mass shootings like this both are and are not rare.

Since 1982 (source and source) there have been sixty-one mass shootings - at least four people killed by a single shooter - since 1982. Thirty years...sixty shootings...two a year.

That is both far too frequent to be ignored and far too rare to be of earth-shaking concern. Yes, we should legislate to reduce the chances of these events happening again, but we shouldn't focus on large-number killings to the exclusion of the far more frequent gun deaths that occur in drips and drabs - one or two at a time - all year long, every day of the year.

Mother Jones has done a great job of building a statistical profile of these sixty-plus events...

• 49 of the 62 listed shooters obtained their weapons legally
• 103 of the 145 total weapons used were semiautomatic handguns or assault weapons
• gun ownership - as a percentage of population - is declining while gun ownership - as a measure or total guns owned in the US - is rising...perhaps people are becoming more set in their gun-owning, gun-stockpiling ways

You can see an interactive map of all the events and a chronological listing of all the shooters and victims on Mother Jones's website.

After the weekend PHS put out two large banners and invited our students to sign them, messages and condolences for the people of Sandy Hook and Newtown, banners to be mailed to Sandy Hook so that they could...

Because they need to...

I have absolutely no idea why Sandy Hook would want our banners, no idea what they are going to do with our banners or all the snowflakes.

I remember reading about the impromptu memorial at the Oklahoma City bombing site, at the Murrah   Federal Building. People of the community piled thousands of things...stuffed animals, photos, mementos, things...on the chain link fence surrounding the bombing site. The items from that fence were - and as far as I can tell still are - "cleaned, catalogued and used in some way that fits with the mission of the memorial."

With all that we've heard is being sent to Newtown - stuffed animals, cards, wooden angels, snowflakes, giant signed banners - the people there will have to make a decision of their own: whether to keep everything, throw it all away, or pick and choose what matters and what doesn't.

They don't need our banners adding to that burden.

On a spectacularly good day in the United States, a dozen people are killed with guns.

• January 1 - 24 killed
• December 31 - 20 killed
• December 30 - 26 killed
• December 29 - 32 killed
• December 27 - 35 killed
• December 18 - 12 killed - the quietest day since Newtown, four days later

Slate has been tracking these deaths every day since Newtown. They show the deaths in icons, male and female, adult and child symbols.

This is where we should be focusing our policy attention. If we take the nineteen days of full data on that page as an average, we have 416 killings - an average of 22 a day. In a year, that's more than 8000 people a day killed with guns in the United States.

This is the bigger tragedy and the one that should be leading our legislative conversations.

Thanks, as is so often the case, to NPR for pointing this post out.

The Journal News in Westchester and Rockland counties of New York published an interactive map of every person possessing a legal pistol permit in those counties. It isn't necessarily a map of handguns or handgun owners, but it is permit holders.

The public reaction was interesting and almost universally negative.

The map is just information. It isn't condemnation. It isn't celebration, but people clearly saw it as one of those depending on what they brought to the information.

• How about a map of the editorial staff and publishers of Gannett and Journal News with names and addresses of their families...
• This is CRAZY!! why in the world would you post every licensed gun owner information?? What do you hope to accomplish by doing this. This is the type of thing you do for sex offenders not law abiding gun owners. What next? should i hang a flag outside my house that says I own a gun? I am canceling my subscription with your paper today!!!
• So should we start wearing yellow stars of david so the general public can be aware of who we are??
• We live in a free society. I am not at all ashamed of my ownership of a few handguns. While I understand the right of the local newspaper to post this, given to them by the first amendment of the very constitution that gives us legal license holders the right to possess the firearms they have published for all to see. While I totally agree (in principle) with their right to access this information, I think that the actions and reasoning behind this are not only questionable, but as a subscriber to their local newspaper, I think its irresponsible to post this information.
• Yeah, but where are the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Communists and Unionists?

Personally, I view this the way I view most sunshine laws. Sunshine, in general, is good. Everyone benefits from sunshine on the dirty cracks and actions, and anyone who is committing good actions shouldn't be worried about a little sunshine.

We require registration for legal ownership of guns. As long as we do that, any records such as these are public - to be seen by any of us.

From Greg Easterbrook on ESPN...

"Today, the number of concealed-carry permits is the highest it's ever been, at eight million, and the homicide rate is the lowest it's been in four decades."

Both facts are true -- but does one explain the other? Read this remarkable pre-Newtown article that escaped notice because it ran in a Saturday edition of The Wall Street Journal (Saturday is the week's lowest readership day). Shootings, the Journal reported, have risen almost 50 percent in the United States during the past decade -- which ought to be perceived as a shocking increase in gun crime. Yet homicides are declining, because fewer people who have been shot are dying of their wounds.

Improved medical care, the proliferation of hospital trauma centers and more helicopter ambulances are among factors improving the odds that a gunshot victim will live. Unlike on TV shows, where a bad guy who is shot expires instantaneously, an adult gunshot victim may survive the initial trauma. If bleeding is stanched and the victim reaches an emergency room in the "golden hour" before complications, chances of living are favorable. Especially important to improved survival of gunshot victims, the Journal reported, is that large numbers of medics who served in Afghanistan and Iraq have come home and taken jobs as EMTs. They have all-too-realistic training in keeping gunshot victims alive -- something the Army and Marine medical staffs have gotten much better at.

It may be that research and training on ways to save people hit by bullets represent an unintended consequence of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But two and two usually equal four, and putting these two articles together suggests it is medical progress, not the proliferation of guns, that is the first cause of declining homicide rates.

Cause and effect is notoriously difficult to guarantee and notoriously easy to misread.

Increase in gun ownership and a decrease in gun deaths at the same time doesn't necessarily mean that one lead to the other.

As always, post hoc ergo propter hoc.

From JoBlo.com...



and a re-edited version...

Final thoughts...

• I have never owned a gun. I have only shot an air rifle and then at empty cardboard boxes a few times nearly thirty years ago. I don't come from guns. I don't know or understand guns. I don't feel afraid in my home.
• We must eliminate guns from our society - real guns, fictional guns, toy guns.
• Legislating real guns retroactively is going to be amazingly difficult to get short of prying them from gun owners' cold, dead hands.
• I understand that the second amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, but that doesn't mean that we have the right to bear assault weapons. 
• When the second amendment was written and ratified, we had just come out of a war with a King, we had just overthrown a tyrant and wanted to ensure that we didn't have to do it again. I'm not sure we have that same need at this point. It seems blasphemous to suggest overturning an amendment to the constitution, particularly one of the bill of rights, but I'm pretty close to saying that we need to do just that.

The one we will miss most

Wonderful remembrance piece about Adam Yauch, the celebrity passing from 2012 that most mattered to me.

Check, check, check it out...

Update: Things I Didn't Know About Mount Everest

I'm fascinated by Mount Everest and our stupidly human desire to summit the deadly mountain.

Today, I came across this gem: "There are over 200 bodies on Mount Everest, and they're used as landmarks".

If you're curious, you can see more photos of some of the bodies on these posts.

Sadness part final

The above printed remarks were written for President Richard Nixon in case something went wrong with the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and stranded the astronauts there. We had absolutely no hopes of recovering the men if such an accident had occurred, and those men knew that. They knew that they were heading further from home than any human ever had before and that they were entirely on their own the whole way.

As a nation we entrusted our greatest adventure to our greatest men, men who became our heroes, inspiring generations of scientists and military men because they had their feet in both camps having been trained as engineers and airplane pilots before being sent into the wild, black yonder.

When the men came home, they had the world at their fingertips, finding themselves in demand for endorsements, appearances, speaking engagements, and every possible opportunity for moneymaking believable. This era - those of the second seven as well as the original nine - is wonderfully told in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.

And there was Neil Armstrong choosing to disappear from the public eye and requiring his accomplishments to speak for themselves, to eschew the greatest of possible famous lives. Instead, he moved back to Ohio and lived not thirty miles from where I eventually made my home, making occasional appearances - most notably in the last few years when he was chosen for and humbly served jury duty, simply and quickly acknowledging the assembled press before heading into the courthouse.

When, this past week, Neil Armstrong passed on, we lost one of our greatest and most private Americans. His family released the following statement after his passing:

“We are heartbroken to share the news that Neil Armstrong has passed away following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures.

“Neil was our loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend.

“Neil Armstrong was also a reluctant American hero who always believed he was just doing his job. He served his Nation proudly, as a navy fighter pilot, test pilot, and astronaut. He also found success back home in his native Ohio in business and academia, and became a community leader in Cincinnati.

“He remained an advocate of aviation and exploration throughout his life and never lost his boyhood wonder of these pursuits.

“As much as Neil cherished his privacy, he always appreciated the expressions of good will from people around the world and from all walks of life.

“While we mourn the loss of a very good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.

“For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”

I promise I'll stop posting about the man for at least a while, but I thank so many folks on the intertubes for posting their tributes to Armstrong. Here's the last one I'll point out, from the Sci-ence site.

Nearly a century gone

Thanks to 5chw4r7z for posting today about the 98th anniversary of the passing of the last passenger pigeon, Martha, at the Cincinnati Zoo.

I didn't know that, as 5chw4r7z posted, the last Carolina parakeet died in the same aviary four years later.

Sadness part 5

From NPR...

Sadness part 4

From Esquire...

Sadness part 3

From iconicphotos...

Sadness continues...

From flickr...

Sadness...

Apparently Randal's actuarial tables weren't quite right...

Very sad to see that Neil Armstrong passed away today.

In memoriam

(source)

G'Night, Pete Postlethwaite

Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com

Goodnight, Mr Kobayashi.

Movie Videos & Movie Scenes at MOVIECLIPS.com


Goodnight, Fergie the Florist .



Goodnight, Danny.



Goodnight, Roland Tembo.



Goodnight, Giuseppe Conlon.

Thirty years

Changing the channel one last time

There was a time when it was shocking to see something other than videos on MTV.

Remote Control was the first non-musical show that MTV ever ran.

And now, the great Ken Ober has passed onward.

In memorium

I am nothing if not sarcastic and derivative.

About once a week, we get an email on our school system saying that somebody has passed away.  Some former principal, the wife of a coworker, the third cousin of a former lunch lady at a school that doesn't exist anymore but with whom some people still around may have worked.

For most of these, I just glance to make sure it's not anybody I know - most of whom wouldn't tell the PR folks in the district anyway - and hit delete.  For one a couple of weeks ago, however, I was impressed with the sheer volume of things said about the departed, the husband of a woman who apparently works at our alternative school (an entirely computer-based school of last chance for our more challenging youths).

In the honor of this passing, I offer my own, entirely fabricated, thoroughly plagiarized version of his write-up in the Cincinnati Enquirer...

We have learned of the passing of Mr. Lonnie Dusch, husband of Karlen (redacted) (Heritage Elementary, but not the Heritage in the Princeton district).

The Cincinnati Enquirer write-up is shown below:

DUSCH Robert L, husband of Karlen (redacted) who wouldn’t take his last name because it’s Dusch. Owner of LeRoy, Harlan, and Aylah. Son of Robert (Little Bob) Dusch and (redacted) who actually took the name Dusch and then gave it back even though they didn’t get divorced or anything. Brother of Amellia Dusch. Grandson of Robert (Big Bob) Dusch – not Sr because the middle name changed from Frederick to Fred – and Gertie Dusch, Helen Goehe and Lorenz Henry Goehe (pronounced gay which isn’t really much better than Dusch). Also survived by additional family, friends, and brothers and sisters in Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Visitation will be held in room 519 at Princeton High School from 4-8pm on Thursday, November 19, where Lonnie will be arranged as though he were still teaching and you can rest in desks where thousands of his students slept. Nondenominational services will be held at Miami University on the first hole of the disc golf course on Saturday, November 21 at 8am so no one has to miss school but everyone has to get up early and get the day started. Discs will be available to all attendees for after the services.

Lonnie Dusch was anything but the usual teacher.

He loved to blow stuff up but actually tried to make sure his students knew what was happening and why. He commissioned the building of a big spinner wheel, a lazy susan tornado of fire, and other things that he didn’t have the skills to build himself. He really just hated to get his hands dirty.

“He was the best hire I ever made. His mere presence elevated the science department to a place where we could consistently almost meet state minimum competency,” said Rebecca Heckman. “Plus, he could be cuttingly sarcastic and immature, yet people would constantly look to him for guidance and trust his ideas and untitled leadership.”

Mr. Dusch, 44, became ill after leading a spelunking expedition through recently discovered caves below the future site of Princeton High School’s new campus. He contracted man-bird-cavepig-flu which developed into walking pneumonia, sitting pneumonia, lying down pneumonia, and eventually into curling on his side wheezing pneumonia. Mr. Dusch spent 43 days at school since the contraction of his illness, continuing to say that he “didn’t feel too bad” before succumbing to the disease during a staff meeting.

Mr. Dusch met his future bride, Karlen, when both were members of Mrs VanOsdol’s honors English class in seventh grade where she mocked him for his white tube socks pulled up to above his husky calves. Mr. Dusch enjoyed playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons at the time.

But it was his love of playing around on the internet his sister remembers.

“He was always on,” she said.

He founded a blog on Blogger, she said, and then got involved in posting the most inane observations and banal commentary.

“What people will remember Lonnie by is sarcasm…sarcasm and devastating good looks. The two things people will remember Lonnie by are sarcasm, devastating good looks, and a fanatical devotion to Princeton High School, always willing to go in on a Sunday to grade notebooks after putting them off for a week, attending soccer games and high school musicals so he could post thousands of almost in-focus, marginally framed photos on the school website,” she said.

“He was always wanting to put his touch on things.”

This included editing coworkers’ presentations – whether they asked or not, commenting on blog posts from former students and overseeing the redesign of the Princeton High School website, especially when he had students to do the actual work for him, his favorite method of working.

Mr. Dusch was not the senior chemistry instructor – having been beaten to Princeton by his long-time neighbor, Doug Studer. Before that, he was the chemistry instructor at Mount Healthy High School and at Terre Haute South Vigo High School in Indiana.

His sister, Amellia, saw the teacher potential in her brother when they were children.

“He just talked and talked. He wanted people to do things his way and to always tell them what he knew,” she said. “He was an absolute know-it-all.”

Mr. Dusch is survived by Karlen, his wife of 19 years, dogs Harlan and LeRoy, cat Aylah, and a rosemary bush that he was really proud of.

Visitation is 4-8pm Thursday in room 519 of Princeton High School, 11080 Chester Rd, Cincinnati. The scattering of his ashes is at 8am Saturday at Miami University disc golf course’s first tee.