Gleanings: Obama, Buchwald, and Burnin Man tries green:
- Senator Barak Obama is all but in for the 2008 presidential race. Here’s the video where he makes the announcement.
- Humorist Art Buchwald has died. The New York Times has included a video obituary from Buchwald himself which is part of the newspaper’s new project to get liviing video testimonies from famous people about their lives. A little on the end of his life…
But perhaps no year of his life was as remarkable as the last. It became something of an extended curtain call. Last February doctors told him he had only a few weeks to live. “I decided to move into a hospice and go quietly into the night,” he wrote three months later. “For reasons that even the doctors can’t explain, my kidneys kept working.”
“Refusing dialysis, he continued to write his column, reflecting on his mortality while keeping his humor even as he lost a leg. He spent the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, published a book, “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” in the fall and attended a memorial for an old friend, the reporter R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times. He gave interviews and looked on as his life was celebrated.
“The French ambassador gave me the literary equivalent of the Legion of Honor,” he wrote. “The National Hospice Association made me man of the year. I never realized dying was so much fun.”
- According to a recent article, the majority of American women are single, not married. In 2005, married people became a minority in America for the first time in the nation’s history.
- Cooling Man is an attempt to make the annual Burning Man festival a carbon neutral city.
- Booksfree.com is trying to do for books what Netflix did for movies. Anybody tried this (via Written Road).