But I won't, this time.

Someone could do a rant about the invisibility of bicyclists in car culture. We lose too many bicyclists in Tucson.

IMNSHO, the most neglected, extra-large clue-by-six Bible lesson is the repetition, over and over and over, of "remember when you were a stranger/slave in the land of Egypt." The rich will take care of themselves. The cutters of wood and drawers of water require our attention as well. [paraphrase]that things may go well with you in the land[/paraphrase].

When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands. When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing...
-- Deuteronomy 24:19

I wish mine was as eloquent, but reading that comment made me want to hurt someone. badly. My father happens to be an older man of limited means. In fact, he works as a dishwasher and often bikes to work.

The idea that this man has family who could have read that is making me incredibly upset. I swore off reading comments on news sites years ago, and for a reason...

But it also says in his 10 years working at the Crab Shack he never got a raise, a Christmas bonus, nada.

I don't think I can claim for myself Mr. Smith's virtues -- knowing what he liked, living within his means, being someone others could depend on -- and those seem like good things to aspire to.

Good on the newspaper for doing that obituary.

Why are people so sparing with compliments?

What end is served, especially at the passing of a life, when something as easily given as a simple compliment to the memory of another human being is refused? And how grating when (as in this case) the deserved compliment is replaced with an insult.

(Abi, I began to think you'd put Making Light on hiatus, as the last post was nearly one week old. Thanks for stoking the fire.)

As for this story, it shows the worst and the best of human nature, in the event, the original comment, the newspaper story and the comments thereon.

Neil in Chicago @ 2: Those are the parts I try to follow, along with e.g. "do not put a stumbling block before the blind, nor curse the deaf" - which the rabbis expanded on, to show how this means you shouldn't say bad things about someone when they are absent,, for example, since that is, effectively, the same thing.

The Kind Person in me hopes that the idiot who made the "better off dead" comment comes to understand the wrongness of his/her words. The Mean Person in me hopes that his/her obituary is shorter and far less graceful, whatever the accomplishments.

Well, cheap amusements aren't to be scorned, I suppose. Thanks to dcb and pm215 for doing the work!

More important, thanks for pointing out the original obituary and the story flowing from that.

What strikes me is that many people seem to treat strangers, anyone outside their circle of friends and family, as entertainment, as though other people were unreal, two-dimensional sitcom characters acting out simple plots for their amusement. Normal, non-sociopathic people don't talk (or even think) about the lives of human beings the way they might talk about movies, or books, or video games. It alarms me how often people show up in comment threads who don't seem aware of the difference.

Which seems, at least, an advance over automatically treating them as prey.

(And now I'm trying to remember the sf novel where the author comments that people who live their lives simply, with minimal waste of resources, have nominally achieved what we all supposedly long for, yet they are almost universally despised.)

"It should not be solely up to people like Mr. Smith's boss, who seems like an okay guy but conflicted by self-interest, to make sure that people like Mr. Smith are valued."

Yeah Tom, I think it should. We have a minimum wage because okay guys like Mr. Smith's boss *don't do what they should*.

Employers have obligation to more than the bottom line. Stockholders aren't the only people who matter. I don't accept that employers ought only do what they're forced to, and I think it's important to push against that principle. They expect more than that of their employees, and I expect more from them as people.

We can go back to a militant union movement and adversarial workplaces if those at the top really want to. It will take time, but just keep pushing.

Also, while you might well pay a dishwasher minimum wage on their first day, a more experienced worker should expect to be paid commensurate.

Also too, has it kept up with inflation? If not I'd say it's a paycut, not a raise.

I mention this largely in the hopes that someone in the Readertariat here would have actually seen this article, and could point me to an online source for it, or (failing that) the specific date it was published in the paper.

(...And I don't mean to diminish the amazing, moving nature of this obituary by the comparison. It was a marvelous article.)

(OT: Now that he's a Genius and everything, wouldn't it be a good book if someone published a "best-of" of Simon's journalism? Should sell lots of copies to Wire fans anyway.)

What an extraordinary change to make. The meditation on the gentleman thrown out of the chaise is a great bit of writing, and I can't imagine why it would be replaced.

Here's the passage in question:

Still, a theory was only a theory; one had got to find evidence to support it. One must at any rate be sure there was no evidence against it. First of all, could a man kill himself like that, simply by falling off a pair of steps?

Side by side with half-crown editions of English poets and philosophers, flanked on the right by Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and on the left by that handy police publication which dissects and catalogues crimes according to the method of their commission, stood, tall and menacing, the two blue volumes of Taylor's Medical Jurisprudence, that canon of uncanonical practice and Baedeker of the back doors to death. Kirk had often studied it in a dutiful readiness for the unexpected. Now he took it down and turned the pages of Volume I, till he came to the running head: "Intercranial Hæmorrhage—Violence or Disease." He was looking for the story of the gentleman who fell out of a chaise. Yes, here he was: he emerged with a kind of personality from the Report of Guy's Hospital for 1859:

"A gentleman was thrown out of a chaise, and fell upon his head with such violence as to stun him. After a short time he recovered his senses, and felt so much better that he entered the chaise again, and was driven to his father's house by a companion. He attempted to pass off the accident as of a trivial nature, but he soon began to feel heavy and drowsy, so that he was obliged to go to bed. His symptoms became more alarming, and he died in about an hour from effusion of blood in the brain."

Excellent and unfortunate gentleman, his name unknown, his features a blank, his life a mystery; embalmed for ever in a fame outlasting the gilded monuments of princes! He lived in his father's house, so was presumably unmarried and young—a bit of a swell, perhaps, wearing the fashionable new Inverness cape and the luxuriant silky side-whiskers which were just coming into favour. How did he come to be thrown out of the chaise? Did the horse bolt with him? Had he looked on the wine when it was red? The vehicle, we observe, was undamaged, and his companion at any rate sober enough to drive him home. A courageous gentleman (since he was resolute to enter the chaise again), a considerate gentleman (since he made light of the accident in order to spare his parents anxiety); his premature death must have occasioned much lamentation among the crinolines. No one could have guessed that, nearly eighty years later, a police superintendent in a rural district would be reading his brief epitaph: "A gentleman was thrown out of a chaise..."

What an extraordinary change to make.

I believe Abi is referring to the 12th edition of Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, not Busman's Honeymoon wherein the meditation is contained.

Kathy Mattea, Time Passes By (songwriters: Susan Longacre & Jonathan Blair Vezner)

(one of my favorite songs from an excellent album of the same title)

Time passes by, people pass on
At the drop of a tear, they're gone
...
Thoughts are like pennies we keep in our pockets
They're never worth nothing till we give them away

Lyrics

You are correct. My edition of Busman's Honeymoon, which is the Fifth Impression of the Coronet Crime Series edition, and thus the eleventy-jillionth edition of the book, has the scene precisely as ajay @31 transcribed it.

The "Intracranial Bleeding" section of my red, two-volume, seventh edition copy of Taylor's Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence (revised by Keith Simpson, 1965) contains the following case involving a lucid interval*:

N obl bs rvtug, cynlvat jvgu sryybj fpubbyoblf ng 4.30 c.z. jnf fgehpx ba gur yrsg grzcyr ol n unys-oevpx. Ur fgnttrerq naq sryy, zbzragnevyl pbaphffrq, ohg tbg gb uvf srrg naq ena ubzr. Ur ngr uvf riravat zrny ng 7 c.z., naq jrag gb orq ng 8.30 jvgubhg znxvat nal pbzcynvag. Ng 7.30 arkg zbeavat ur jnf sbhaq fvpx va orq, naq nf ur pbhyq abg or ebhfrq ur jnf erzbirq gb ubfcvgny, ohg ba neeviny jnf sbhaq gb or qrnq.

-----
* Rot-13'd because it's about a child, and death, and just...no. Not in plain text.

xkcd agrees