Life insurance can be a wise and prudent way to mitigate risk and it can be a terrible investment vehicle. Don’t get left with too little coverage or the wrong kind with this easy guide. Continue reading
death
32 posts
I remember the first time I heard of Fred Phelps and his “church.” It was around the time of Matthew Shepard. The Westboro Baptist Church protested his funeral and wrote lots of horrid stuff about him. I was shocked that anyone could display such violently cruel behavior. Years later, they’ve managed to repeat the behavior so often that it’s lost its shock value somewhat, but it’s still inexcusable. Continue reading
It’s 2009. My mother retired and moved to Maui. Visiting her twice a year was expensive. During one visit, I decided to save some money and got a rental car from a place akin to Rent-A-Wreck. I got this purple jalopy of a Nissan Sentra. Continue reading
Val Patterson passed away on July 10th, but had the foresight to write his own obituary and he had a few things to get off his chest. His obituary is a model for how all future obituaries should be written.
We’ve all done things we regret and should have come clean about. For Val one of those things was a bit of burgling he did in 1971.
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Surely there’s a better word, or term, for this function than what I’ve come up with in the title here, but I can’t lay my hand on it just now.
What it is, is when someone has died or gone into a long-term care facility, and someone – you – has to go into the house and deal with its contents. The object is to get all the person’s belongings out of the home so it can be sold, or rented out again if it’s an apartment. Continue reading
The Dutch are at it again. Just creating weapons of mass destruction all willy nilly like. Now the guy wants to publish how he made it! The audacity of spreading knowledge! Seriously though, this guy took the bird flu, then modified it so that it can be contagious to people (maybe) through the air. Is that acceptable? Continue reading
Conrad Murray, M.D., was sentenced to four years in jail for the death of Michael Jackson.
Before an expressionless and haggard looking Murray, Judge Michael Pastor, at times reading from the criminal code and directly responding to the pleas for leniency made by Murray himself and those on his behalf, explained that it matters not that another doctor may have killed Jackson. He stated that he read both Dr. Murray’s book about this life, as well as a book about Michael Jackson’s life, and that the once competent physician Murray lost his way in a “medicine for money” scheme that resulted in Jackson’s death. Continue reading
As some of you know, I spent the past summer in Hong Kong. I was there for an internship helping people apply to the UN for refugee status. This will be nothing at all about that experience, although I could write for days about the refugee status determination process and its many faults, especially in Hong Kong. Instead, as I walked through the many food markets, I was reminded of some life lessons that I would like to share. Continue reading
If you’ve been to many funerals you know that emotions are raw and grief can easily tip over into hysteria. That hysteria usually takes the form of tears but it can also take the form of laughter. Fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve never walked away from a funeral without a funny story. This probably says a lot more about me than it does about any of the funerals I’ve been to. For me, something has always happened that let me get some of the energy out through laughter. I don’t think this makes me a bad person and I really don’t care if someone else thinks it does. If they do, I’m going to bet their funeral to age ratio isn’t as high as mine, but whatever. Continue reading
The gravestones can be seen now, from the far side of Meadow Lake. They rise, chunks of slate embedded into a green hill, into a blue sky, looking like a skyline for a town of the dead. Massive oak and weeping willows once gave the dead privacy, but those trees are no more. Continue reading