I love this: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything:

That’s your moment of understanding that you’ll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there’s something being performed somewhere in the world that you’re not seeing that you would love.

It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.

Christopher Hitchens: “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”

Mark Pilgrim’s sad, beautiful elegy for a 25-year friend.

Terry Pratchett is hoping he can die on his own terms:

And so I have vowed that rather than let Alzheimer’s take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the Brompton Cocktail some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.

I hope for his sake that he can. Everybody should be allowed to opt out early, stigma-free, legal-entanglement-free.

A dozen chimpanzees, not known for being still or quiet, watch in silence as a dead (heart attack) “prominent figure” from their group is wheeled away:

Dr. Marc Bekoff, of the University of Colorado, says:

That animals and humans share many traits including emotions is merely an extension of Charles Darwin’s accepted ideas about evolutionary continuity, that the differences between species are differences in degree rather than differences in kind. The seemingly natural human urge to impart emotions on to animals, far from obscuring the “true” nature of animals, may actually reflect a very accurate way of knowing.

I have nothing to add to what Jason Kottke says in this post. I can't stop watching it either. Not sure what that says about me. Read, watch, enjoy (?).