Fun With Language

Six year old Angie and her four year old brother, Joel, were sitting together in church. Joel giggled, sang and talked out loud. Finally, his big sister had had enough. “You’re not supposed to talk out loud in church.” “Why? Who’s going to stop me?” Joel asked. Angie pointed to the back of the church and said, “See those two men standing by the door? They’re hushers.”-  Liguorian magazine, The Lighter Side column

Quote of the Week

 

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.” – Carl Sandburg

Virtual Immortality

Yes, we can live on…forever…or at least as long as the internet exists. I’ve been cleaning up folders on my hard drive and came across a collection of some very strange but interesting articles on this topic of virtual immortality. Your cyberself now has the power to live on beyond your physical existence. We know we should be careful as to what we post, as our words might come back to haunt us, no pun intended. In the 4 articles listed below I will describe how.

Tweeting from the death bed – Capturing the last moments for eternity.

Virtual Mourning – Websites that let mourners reach out to family or to gather together virtually after someone dies.

Tweeting from beyond the grave – allowing a deceased to have a virtual avatar that continues to post, post-mortem.

Your words live on – Virtual Immortality through Facebook, blog posts, et al that never get taken off the Web.

My post today, “Tweeting from the death bed – Capturing the last moments for eternity.” references a posting by Art Caplan, who is from the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. He posted it to Medscape, an online medical reference website. His question was “In this world of constant communication, real time updates, and the need to be ‘connected’ here is a twist on the use of Twitter: is it ethical to tweet from someone’s deathbed?”

His article goes on to describe how it’s become common place for individuals related to the terminally ill person to send tweets and e-mails to update friends and relatives, with some going even farther by posting feeds to Youtube. Of course this is all possible because our devices have become small enough to take anywhere and Wifi connectivity is all pervasive. That wasn’t so even 5 years ago. But Caplan finds ethical problems with all this ability to document a person’s last hours in real time. Yes, he says, it is wonderful that family members not able to be there in person can be connected with a dying loved one. However, if the loved one is no longer able to make decisions, is that what the person would want? Hooked up to IVs and other devices, lying prone in a hospital or hospice bed, maybe not even conscious, is that how he or she wishes to be remembered?

He also states that it would be a good idea, in this technologically connected world, that everyone writes down directives as to what should be allowed and not allowed in those last days. My concern is not what family members see but that these photos, taken in the person’s most vulnerable moments are hardly a dignified representation of a human’s life. They then can become the final and eternal memory about that person. I surely wouldn’t want to be remembered by a picture of respirator tubing coming out of my mouth!

In my next post I’ll write about “Virtual Mourning”.

Quote of the Week

“You grow up the day you have the first real laugh – at yourself.” – Ethal Barrymore

Fun with words

As seen on Tee shirts in a catalogue:

Traveling 33 rpm in an iPod world

How to count to 10 in software:
1, 2, 3, 95, NT, 2000, XP, VISTA, 7, 8, 10

Quote of the Week

After my trip to Ground Zero on Fri 9^th I feel this quote about a city half way across the world from here describes accurately what it is like to walk that lower Manhattan area 15 years after 9/11:

“…marked today not so much by the destruction wrought by war but the rampant reconstruction that swallows up the past as wholesale as any bomb.” – Lina Mounzer in her Aramco magazine July/August issue article “Beirut Sounds Like This (a report on Labanese capital’s indie/alt music scene)

9/11

Keeping the Flame Alive

 

Like a beached whale the Oculus sits

Giving entry to the caverns beneath,

Sucking in people on the east perimeter of Ground Zero.

A recent addition to the rebuilding of sacred ground,

The whale yawns and gladly swallows the masses

Who now will shop in its belly’s mall.

 

The park on the South side

Was an afterthought to the relatively barren

View of the memorial below.

In a space of massive concrete and steel

Some colorful flowers might sooth the soul.

So walk its well-planned space,

Look at the growing things,

Turn and face the other side of what once was.

Can the pain of Ground Zero be that easily shut out?

 

What have we grown in this precious space?

Could any dreams have visualized what it’s become?

The Pit, became the Pile, became the “empty space”

Now to morph into a jumble of a NYC space

Never envisioned in the architect’s original plans.

 

Where smoke and fire rose.

Where DNA was smothered in concrete.

Where footprints were left in the dust…

We cannot turn it into the beauty it was before that day.

So remember the lost and keep an eternal flame

For them burning in our hearts.

Quote of the Week

 

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it the more you have.” – Maya Angelou

Remembering 9/11- 15th Anniversary

9/11 is only a few days away. Do you remember the days and weeks afterwards, where as a nation we came together to pray, to support our first responders, to voice our fears but also our pride in this great country? Do you remember what our president said as he stood on the Pile addressing those brave men and women who were doing a job no one should ever be asked to do. So what have we become 15 years later?

We now listen daily to two presidential candidates who spew such negative rhetoric that it makes me ashamed to consider that one of them will represent our nation. One rattles on with unedited negative comments, while the other carefully Clorox’s the message hoping to sound “above it all”. What I am pointing out has nothing to do with their policies or which one has the best agenda. I am saying that the vitriol these two individuals unleash with their words is poisoning our nation and making us the laughing stock across the globe.

But back to the topic of 9/11 and the 15^th anniversary. What we need on that day is to focus on its real meaning. We need to make that day a day of silence from all the verbal junk bombarding us. No speeches, no ads, no person trying to convince me that he/she is the best for the job. From the presidential candidates down to local mayoral races, please take a day off from all this verbal mudslinging. Read what 9/11 family members have to say about this in a very good article “Leading 9/11 Family Members Urge Trump, Clinton, Johnson, Stein to Observe Campaign Moratorium for 15th Anniversary of the September 11 Attacks”

We should join together on this Sept 11 and follow David Paine’s advice (president and co-founder of 9/11 Day):  “We believe the 9/11 community, along with the nation, deserves a day of peace and unity, as we collectively prepare to honor those lost on 9/11, the survivors, and the many who rose in service in response to the attacks.”

9/11 Day has also enlisted a group of 21 youth ambassadors who were born on the that day and are now almost 15 years old, to help spread the word to the next generation of Americans through social media.  “Nearly a quarter of all Americans today are under age 18, and most have no or very limited memories of the attacks and their immediate aftermath,” said Jay S. Winuk, executive vice president and co-founder of 9/11 Day. Click here to read the rest of the article.

So let us focus on the real meaning of that day: To keep those who are not with us forever in our hearts!

Quote of the Week

“We hope the 15th anniversary of 9/11 will be an important and solemn reminder that the differences that sometimes divide us pale in comparison to our common humanity,” –David Paine, president and co-founder of “9/11 Day”