DIH's morning routine is very simple. Get up, feed dog, make coffee. Tap computer awake. Check email, weather forecast, Drudge. And of course, check the LA Times, for the obituaries.
Ah, the obits. The "Irish Sports Page," as my father used to say. Your chance to gloat that, as of yet another dawn, you are not the featured item. Hurray for you!
The LA Times is a fun source because of the Hollywood connection. Every once in a while they write up the death of some actor or bit player you saw in one movie when you were seven years old, and the question "what the heck was his name" has been bugging you ever since. Now you, like the deceased, can have some peace.
But today the LAT outdid itself. Today they published the weirdest obituary of all time. In all my years of red-blooded Celtic deathwatching I've never seen anything like it. The link is
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-karman18-2008may18,0,4488738.story
if you're interested. In the meantime,a few excerpts should give you the idea.
"Harvey Karman, a flamboyant psychologist whose invention made a key contribution to women's reproductive health, particularly by making abortions simpler, cheaper and less painful, died May 6 at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. He was 84.
"Activist, inventor, educator and rogue, Karman was drawn to the plight of women facing unwanted pregnancy in the 1950s,
In the early 1970s he developed a soft, flexible tube, or cannula, for a device that was widely adopted in the United States and developing countries to perform early abortions. In 1972 [he] was part of a humanitarian mission to terminate the pregnancies of 1,500 Bangladesh women and girls who had been raped by Pakistani soldiers. His cannula is still widely used today.
"Karman's name is not known, yet his ingenuity and to some extent his courage has made safe abortion available to literally millions of women around the world.
"Karman also had many detractors, particularly because of his attempt to revolutionize second-trimester abortions with a device called the super coil, which was inserted into the uterus and expanded when exposed to moisture, causing a miscarriage. It caused serious complications, including hemorrhaging and infection, when it was used on about a dozen women in Philadelphia on Mother's Day in 1972.
[And now for the money quote:]
"Karman was born Harvey Walters on April 26, 1924, in the tiny northwest Oregon town of Clatskanie. He did not know his father, and his mother, who led a transient lifestyle, often left him in orphanages. "
What can I say?
What do you all say?
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