Friday, May 27, 2016
Thursday, May 26, 2016
The American Dead in Foreign Fields
The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, May 26, 2016, Page A13, OPINION:
The American Dead in Foreign Fields
On Memorial Day or any other day, the cemeteries for those Americans who fell in battle offer profound lessons.
The cemetery for American soldiers who died in the invasion of Normandy, France, in 1944. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
If you have not ever done so, I urge you to program into your next trip abroad a visit to an American military cemetery. There are quite a few in Europe, and some in Asia. You can find a list online.
These cemeteries are settings of an awesome serenity and beauty, immaculately kept by the American Battle Monuments Commission. As Americans, we must thank the architects who designed these settings and the workers who over the decades and to this day have kept them in their immaculate condition.
My wife, born in China and reared in Taiwan, and I, born in Germany and a longtime U.S. citizen, first visited the World War II cemeteries when our American-born children were young. We would tell them: Here rest some of the warriors who sacrificed their lives so that your parents and people in many parts of the world would be free from tyranny and could pursue their dreams in freedom. We made it clear to our children that this was not just a grown-up talk—that it was real and part of their proud heritage.
The lesson must have stuck. Last year our eldest child, now a fully grown man, urged me to come along to visit the battlegrounds in Germany, near the Belgian border, where U.S. troops fought so bravely and where so many of them—too many—met their early death.
This time we visited the large American cemetery near the Belgian town of Henri-Chapelle, about 20 miles west of the German city of Aachen. There rest the warriors who fell in the brutal, four-month-long battle of the Hürtgen Forest, followed by the Battle of the Bulge and the eventual push of American forces all the way to the Rhine River.
You can walk along the gravel paths of these cemeteries, and among the thousands of markers—crosses and Stars of David—beneath which the warriors rest. Pick a marker at random and adopt the soldier whose name is chiseled into that marker. Make him your father, or brother, or cousin, or a friend. Imagine him alive, and how you might have hugged him as he shipped out to the distant front.
However brutal his death may have been, you will draw solace from knowing that he rests here, in this serene setting, alongside his buddies who shared his fate. You may even imagine that somehow, don’t ask how, the fallen soldier may know that you are visiting him, to pay your respects.
You may not be able to suppress some tears; I never can. Perhaps in my case it is because I have taught American college freshman for so many years that I can vividly imagine the warriors alive, playing boisterously when they were not fighting or resting, dreaming of some sweetheart they left behind, and imagining what they might do with their lives when the war finally ended and they could go home again. Perhaps it is also because they met their untimely death because of the murderous deeds my birth country had inflicted upon the world at that time. It deepens my sorrow.
But whatever emotions you may bring to a visit there and take away from it, I promise that you will not soon forget it.
You will come away with renewed and strengthened respect for those of your fellow Americans willing to wear the nation’s military uniform and to bear the ultimate sacrifice one can make for one’s country. If you are a student, you will look with fresh eyes at the few among your classmates in the ROTC, learning, along with their regular studies, how to become officers in America’s armed forces.
And you will reflect deeply on our nation’s role in the world. Whatever our flaws as a people have been in the past and still are today, you will realize, standing there among the thousands of gravestones, that in the sweep of history, ours is a grand nation of which you can and should be proud.
Mr. Reinhardt is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University.
Facing Death, With "Being Mortal"'s Dr.-Author's Help - Atul Gawande
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, May 22, 2016, CURRENTS section, Page C4, Opinion/Commentary:
“Being Mortal” at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, June
16. It is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.samaritannj.org.
Facing our last chapter, with doctor-author’s help
Sally Friedman is a writer in Moorestown
File Photograph
At arecent reunion with my “besties” from childhood — two sets of sisters — we covered a lot of ground: reflections on who we are now, who we were way back when, our parents, our worst and best romances.
And then we addressed the elephant in the room: death.
Only with our closest and most trusted friends does this come up. One doesn’t ask a casual colleague, “So what do you think you’ll die of?” Or “What’s in your advance directive?”
But with four women who grew up cheek to jowl in Philadelphia rowhouses, and who have shared every life passage, even death is invited into the conversation.
After all, we know one another better than almost anyone else.
So on a spring afternoon, we shared our visions of dying, now that the youngest of us is in her early 70s, and the oldest was celebrating her 80th birthday on that very day. And an 80th birthday tends to inspire awe, disbelief, and, yes, inevitably thoughts of endings.
So I assumed, a week later, that I was definitely ready to face an evening based on Being Mortal, the wonderful, must-read book about how medicine and mortality inevitably connect — and sometimes collide.
The doctor-author, Atul Gawande, has been hailed for encouraging us to face the inevitable with what critics and readers have lauded as riveting honesty.
I convinced my husband that we had to go to this viewing of a documentary inspired by Gawande’s book and produced by Frontline. He was not delighted. And, frankly, neither was I.
But we both recognized that this was a higher priority than flopping down in the den to watch the political shenanigans that are our daily fodder on CNN.
It wasn’t easy to walk into a Cherry Hill synagogue where Samaritan, a pioneering hospice in Burlington County, had arranged for several of these community gatherings. Definitely missing was the usual social buzz, even before the lights dimmed and the screen came on.
Then the silence grew dense.
We were watching several families on that screen as they traveled through the process of watching a loved one die. Yes, die. No euphemisms like passing away in this film.
For a while, I didn’t even look at my husband. Nor did he turn to me. We sailed separately on this voyage into the pain of loss as we watched husbands and wives move through the most painful of passages of all: saying those unimaginable goodbyes to one another.
One unexpected insight was what doctors themselves were going through as they faced what for some is the ultimate medical defeat: not only losing a patient, but also being unable to find a way to tell that patient the unvarnished truth.
One challenge for some of these doctors is finding how to take away false hope, yet preserve — well, what? That was the question. When hope is gone, what is left?
When we watched a 34-year-old mother on that screen who had managed to live through a pregnancy while an aggressive cancer was destroying her lungs, who had held her baby in her arms, and knew all the while that she would not live to see that baby walk or talk, what is there to say?
That’s the vignette that finally got me to reach for my husband’s hand — and not let go.
Certainly not when a grandmother had dreamed in her hospital bed of taking her grandchild to Disneyland.
And then to have that dream snatched away by the miserable result of one of those scans that “reads” our bodies and sees that plan — and so many others — obliterated. Yes, unbearable.
There was so much pain in the Being Mortal screening. And so much wisdom.
Death is our universal life experience. And this young surgeon, this remarkable Atul Gawande, wanted us to accept that. He wanted to have doctors find wise and compassionate ways to guide us to our own answers. He wanted us to think about how we wanted that last experience to be.
After the screening, there was initially just silence. The kind one seldom experiences in a crowded room.
And once we had caught our communal breath, there was a conversation with a panel of social workers, physicians, and even those who train medical students in one of the most essential courses: not anatomy, not physiology or pathology, but how to help a patient die.
For the healers — and for us — it’s the ultimate lesson of being mortal. pinegander@aol.com
Samaritan has scheduled another showing of“Being Mortal” at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, June
16. It is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.samaritannj.org.
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Rock Out In Your Coffin For Eternity - Catacombo Sound System
CataCoffin keeps you rockin' six feet under
CataCombo Sound System Coffin Lets You Party To Spotify In The Afterlife
The dance of death eventually envelops us all, but until now there wasn’t any music.
That’s all changing, thanks to Swedish company Pause Ljud & Bild, which is offering coffins complete with speakers and a streaming Spotify account to keep the tunes rocking in the grave, MyFoxNY reports. For $30,000, audiophiles can jam all afterlife long in one of these special coffins, known as the CataCombo Sound System and featuring two-way speakers and a “divine” subwoofer.
Friends and relatives of the deceased can even select songs to play using Spotify that will then go out over the coffin’s speakers via a wireless 4G Internet connection embedded in the person’s gravestone, according to the company’s website.
Fredrik Hjelmquist, CEO of Pause, has vowed to be buried in one of the coffins and is allowing strangers to add to his “Pause 4-Ever” playlist. As Silicon Republic points out, it now features such fitting songs as Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” and Jon Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” — but at only 931 songs for all eternity, Hjelmquist better hope the list is set on repeat.
The CataCombo Sound System first made headlines back in December 2012, before it included the addition of Spotify. The idea was lampooned on “The Colbert Report,” where Stephen Colbert summed up his take on the product: “If you just spend enough money, death will be pleasant.”
Friday, May 20, 2016
Dead End sign before Gravestone "FIN" Lio by Mark Tatulli, May 20, 2016
Lio by Mark Tatulli, May 20, 2016 Via @GoComics: One of the many great comics you can read for free at GoComics.com! Follow us for giveaways & giggles.
Lio by Mark Tatulli
- May 20, 2016
- From Beginning
Designers Speak From the Grave-To Make the Dead Talk !!
Designers Speak From the Grave
The concept sounds as though it could stretch credulity. But as chief curator of fashion and textiles at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Ms. Golbin has both feet planted solidly on the ground. No spooky seances here.Ms. Golbin draws from interviews,...
Curator Pamela Golbin has done that in her latest book, in which she “interviews” 11 famous deceased fashion designers from their graves.
The concept sounds as though it could stretch credulity. But as chief curator of fashion and textiles at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Ms. Golbin has both feet planted solidly on the ground. No spooky seances here.
Ms. Golbin draws from interviews, biographies and autobiographies with designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Balmain and Gabrielle Chanel to answer her questions. Her literary contrivance is like a spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. In her primly polite style, Ms. Golbin manages to coax her interview subjects to revelations that make them seem very much alive. “Couture Confessions: Fashion Legends In Their Own Words” will be published early next month by Rizzoli Ex Libris.
The best part of “Confessions” is that the chats could have taken place last week for “People” magazine. “Are drugs inherent to fashion and its stressful environment?” Ms. Golbin asks the late Lee Alexander McQueen, whose 2010 suicide raised questions about job pressure and drug-taking in the fashion industry.
“The job is a drug in itself, and drugs are part of the job,” Mr. McQueen replies in blunt words taken from two interviews, according to the book’s careful end notes. “Yeah. I do drugs. Yeah, I’ve experienced everything there is to experience. Don’t tell me there’s anyone in my business who hasn’t.”
The idea for “Confessions” came from Ms. Golbin’s 2009 exhibit on Madeleine Vionnet, for which she published an imaginary Q&A in the museum’s program. “I got fan mail for Madeleine Vionnet,” who died at 98 in 1975, Ms. Golbin says. “People wrote and said, ‘Would you give this to her?’ ” Initially perplexed, she concluded people were responding to the lively conversational tone, so different from most curatorial texts.
The approach may lead a reader to conclude that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yves Saint Laurent worried in 2002 that fashion had become “all show and not enough content.” Paul Poiret, who died in Paris in 1944, fussed that fast pace of fashion left him too little time to design.
Mr. Poiret, who banished the corset and introduced dresses designed for brassieres, was nonetheless not quite as revolutionary as he is recalled to be. “Are there fashions you do not appreciate?” Ms. Golbin asks.
“Yes, I am against short skirts,” Mr. Poiret complains, in a comment taken from a 1925 interview in Harper’s Bazaar. “A sad sight!”
Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com
This is Us
Posted May 18 2016 — 9:04 AM EDT
Months before its premiere, This Is Us is already fall’s most popular new show – at least according to online video views.
On Facebook alone, the trailer for NBC’s dramedy series has garnered over 17 million views in less than three days — a record for a new fall show. On YouTube, the clip has been watched over 2.6 million times. (The video is also available to stream on NBC.com, but that site’s player doesn’t feature a view counter.) As Deadline noted, the Facebook streams break the record set last year by Legends of Tomorrow.
Out of all the trailers for the 2016-17 season, This Is Us has only been bested by Fox’s Prison Break reboot — 20 million views on Facebook, 4.3 million on YouTube — which already has a legion of fans from its 2005-09 run.
NBC debuted This Is Us’ clip alongside trailers for its fresh crop of new fall shows during the network’s Upfronts presentation on Monday. Although the video is over two minutes long, it doesn’t reveal much about the plot, which NBC says centers on characters whose “life stories intertwine in curious ways” — one of them being that they share the same birthdays.
Despite this mystery, the massive interest in the trailer can be attributed to a number of notable factors, especially its cast. The show features lead roles for Milo Ventimiglia (who is shown naked in the first few seconds of the teaser) and Mandy Moore, a legacy star for millennials, having emerged on the pop music scene in the late ’90s alongside Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and going on to star in hit movies such as Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember.
This Is Us comes from writer Dan Fogelman and directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, who were behind 2011’s Crazy, Stupid, Lovestarring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Much like that film, the This Is Us trailer pulls on heartstrings with humor and pathos, capturing raw emotion in relatable experiences — including one woman’s struggle with her weight, plus a man’s attempt to find the father who abandoned him.
This Is Us premieres this fall on NBC.
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Diagnosis CANCER Philly.com blog
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Tuesday, May 3, 2016
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