gunston hall, mason neck, va

yves saint laurent or bo diddley? my clothes fetish notwithstanding, bo diddley, hands down. (c’mon, he once said this of accountants - or perhaps lawyers - “a dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun.”)

in thematically-related news, surgeons are reporting that ted kennedy’s surgery was “successful and accomplished [their] goals.” no discussion on what those goals were.

…without me running off to find the nearest old cemetery. i’ve done it at harper’s ferry, on macau, in barcelona, and now, of course, on block island.

one of my fascinations with cemeteries are as a source for vital stats. in the block island cemetery, for example, there is a single tripartite headstone for three sisters - triplets - born in may 1845 and all died during august of the same year. triplets. in 1845. wow.

another interesting thing in the cemetery here are the number of men with two wives. generally, the first died in her 20s (my guess is maternal mortality; g’s thinks ‘accident’ might account for some of them) and the second lived to a ripe old age. however, i don’t recall a single woman with two husbands. indeed, the men seem all rather long-lived… provided they reached their tenth birthday.

i also like looking at the names. the block island cemetery features two bathshebas as well as two variants on the name; a number of mercys and charitys, and a whole slew of elizabeths. among the men there’s an author, a deacon (hard to tell if it’s a proper name or a title), and the occasional uriah.

there’s neat stuff to be found in cemeteries. and you don’t even have to be buffy.

yesterday a woman sat on her stoop in NE dc, watching her six-year-old daughter cross the street. the girl was not in a crosswalk.

the girl was killed by a hit and run driver. the mother told the washington post:

“My baby is gone,” said Crysta’s mother, Christina Spencer. It happened, she said, “because somebody had to do a hit and run.”

Spencer said she was watching from the stoop of the family home on Sixth Street as her daughter tried to cross.

at 35, i still have difficulty jaywalking, even if there isn’t a car in sight. why? because when i was a preschooler and snuck down to the end of the block to cross the street without an adult, i caught holy hell from my mother. and it wasn’t just about never, ever, ever crossing without an adult, but also never, ever, ever crossing outside a crosswalk. mom was harsh. the lesson stuck.

ms. spencer, i’m sorry for your loss. but while the driver was the proximate cause of your daughter’s death, it’s possible she’d still be alive if you’d taught her what my mother taught me. what kind of parent sits on the stoop and allows her six year old to cross the street alone, in the middle of the street?

update: i’m not alone in this opinion, it seems.

and another politico bites the dust.

[at least this is still more of a photoblog than an obitblog. it’s got that going for it. which is nice.]

juanita millender-mcdonald, 68. cancer.

68 is not that old.

yes, what happened to the hokies was awful. now if the media would just stop treating it like a damn photo op (could you get more gorgeous than the saturated colors and silhouettes featured by cnn?) and lovefest (”beautiful, clever, talented victims honored” gushes one cnn video clip… [insert snide “what about the ugly, slow, talentless victims?” comment here]) and get back to coverage of the ongoing destruction of our country by the bush administration, i might be less grumpy.

yes, it was tragic. but to be perfectly honest, the coverage is making me - once again - sympathetic to the harrises and klebolds of the world. it’s certainly one way to achieve immortality.

update: according to the beeb, at least 157 people have been killed in a string of attacks in baghdad. and what’s the lead story on cnn? “gunman: ’suicidal’”

fuck.

the man who graphed hamlet. dead.

what the hell is this world coming to?

Dr LEE Jong-wook, Director-General of the World Health Organization, ha fallecido.
El Dr. Lee ha estado en el hospital desde la tarde del sábado, en que fue operado para remover un coagulo en su cerebro (Un hematoma subdural). El permanecí­a en Cuidados intensivos. A las 07.43 de esta mañana su fallecimiento, fue declarado.

Se puede enviar condolencias a la siguiente dirección: DrLee-tribute@who.int

so saith snopes. and snopes knows all.