‘Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died’

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Art Buchwald, the renowned American humourist, who passed away on Thursday, wrote a final column that he asked not be distributed until after he died. The piece was written on February 8 last year shortly after Buchwald decided to check into a hospice. He eventually left the hospice, of course, and resumed his syndicated column.

Here’s the full text of his final column here: Buchwald’s Farewell Column, Written to Be Released at Death

Buchwald also announced his own death in a New York Times video obituary posted on the New York Times site. “Hi, I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died,” the late columnist tells Tim Weiner, the interviewer.

Watch Art Buchwald’s video obituary here

Jeff Jarvis says the idea of a video obit, getting people to talk first person about no longer being around, is an “absolutely wonderful idea“: “The final indignity could be having one’s obit edited. So maybe a video obit is the best idea.”

Quite a transformation from the age when Sumanta Sen, then with Reuters, went upto Satyajit Ray and asked him to vet his own obit for the new agency’s morgue!

‘If you want peace, prepare for war’

At a time when political correctnesses rages in our campuses, and everybody seems to smoke the collective peace pipe, Nobel laureate Professor Robert J Aumann‘s invocation of the Game Theory to explain why we need war is worth recounting again.

“If you want peace, you have to increase the cost of going to war for the other side. Lower the threshold by talking peace all the time, and you encourage the other side to go to war.

“What prevented the Cold War from getting hot, cracks Aumann, was the presence of bombers with nuclear bombs patrolling the skies!�”

“He invokes Winston Churchill who said, “If you want peace, prepare for war� It may sound facetious, but the fact that there’s been no world war in the last six decades should count for something.”

Read the full article here: War is peace