Terra Incognita

My new favorite famous last words.

Last week, Esquire magazine had a moving piece about Roger Ebert’s battle with cancer that has taken away his ability to speak, eat or drink (Ebert has more at his blog).  The refrain throughout the piece is that Ebert doesn’t remember the last words he spoke.

And early on in the piece there’s this passage:

He looks surprised that he can’t remember. He knows the last words Studs Terkel’s wife, Ida, muttered when she was wheeled into the operating room (“Louis, what have you gotten me into now?”), but Ebert doesn’t know what his own last words were.

Ida passed away ten years ago.  Studs followed in October 2008.  In his last interview, a week before his death, Studs had a few memorable last words as well:

The idiots! They label Saul Alinksy – the great neighborhood organizer – as a subversive! He’s been dead for 35 years and he was honored by the Catholic Church! He’s no subversive. Neither is Bill Ayers! That Sarah Palin – you know, she’s Joe McCarthy in drag!

And

Obama can’t be a moderate! He’s got to remember where he comes from! Obama, he has got to be pushed!

Keith Olbermann can polarize.  Especially when he gives Special Comments.  When he started giving them they were special because they were strongly liberal when cable news was overwhelmingly conservative.  Over time they became less and less special, and I thought they had lost their specialness when he began giving two “quick comments” every night on his show.

But this comment is gut-wrenching.  His comments on health-care reform have always been personal for him – he lost his mother last year, having a moving memorial to her on his show, and his father has been in intensive care for the last six months.  But this one is especially gut-wrenching.

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I’m fascinated by the region surrounding the Himalayas.  I’ve already mentioned the blog Field Force to Lhasa which printed the letters from Cecil Mainprise while on an expedition through Tibet.  The idea was that each letter would be posted on the date it was sent, so if a letter was sent on May 7, 1903, the blog would post that letter on May 7, 2009.  June 12, 1904 would be posted on June 12, 2010 and so on.  I also pointed to the Orwell Trust, which was doing the same thing with George Orwell’s diaries from 1938-42.

The Indian blog Varnam recently had a three part series about an Indian spy and an English tea planter dramatically crossing paths in Kashgar at the height of the Great Game.  The story is like out of a Kipling tale. (part 1, part 2, part 3)

For printing a word in the paper I’ve never seen before:  “Dyspeptic.”  Additional props for the alliterations later on in the piece: “chaotic quarreling and reckless rhetoric.”  I’m also pleased that the Times is willing to question one of its own (it is owned by News Corp which also owns Fox News which employs Sarah Palin as a contributor).

Just asking.

Bill Waterson, the man who drew “Calvin and Hobbes” for ten years is famously reclusive.  Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer had an interview with him.  He doesn’t regret ending the strip when he did and says that people still connect with the characters in it because he ended it at the right time.