Archive for December 4th, 2002
More from my buddy Reeves re: the guy who committed suicide Cask-of-Amontillado-style: “Don’t be silly. We’re talking about Italy in the early 50s. No one lived alone. They were still rebuilding from WWII, their economy was a shambles, and it’s a European country, you know, that place where people routinely live with their parents well into their 30s.”
You’re probably right, Reeves. I hadn’t thought about that.
My friend Reeves responds to the item below: “What’s most shocking is that no one in the man’s family seemed to notice THE ENTIRELY NEW WALL IN THEIR HOUSE.”
Ha. I assume he lived alone. And the new wall was in the cellar, after all, so it might’ve been easy to overlook.
Here’s an incredible story. 44 years ago, an Italian man was diagnosed with a terminal disease. He didn’t want to worry his family with news of his impending death, so he told them he was moving to America. Then he packed a couple suitcases, built a wall around himself in his home, and shot himself. And now his remains, along with a suicide note, have been found by a woman who bought the house and is doing renovations. This is straight out of Stephen King. Or, rather, straight out of Edgar Allan Poe.
Frontline’s “The Merchants of Cool” is a documentary about the creation and marketing of teen pop culture. I haven’t seen it, but I want to. On the show’s site, Robert McChesney, a media critic, discusses an argument I’d love to read more about: teenagers in non-commercial societies are happier than those in hyper-commercial ones, like ours.
Did “a race of long and narrow-headed humans”–Asians–populate the Americas before Native Americans?