Life Done Right™

Photo by Ümit Yaldiz
A piece of advice to you older gentlemen who like to marry younger women: don’t forget to leave enough money in your will to your spouse so she can afford to live beyond her means without working forever. Randolph Hearst apparently didn’t leave his wife, Veronica Hearst, enough cash to run the [...]

What do you get when you mix a corporate billionaire with a car mechanic? Answer: A high concept movie about two guys itching to live before they kick the bucket and discover the ashes inside belong to them. The movie is called The Bucket List. It’s directed by Rob Reiner. It opens on Christmas, December [...]

Cigarettes used to be sold with all kinds of trade cards that usually formed a collection. Here’s two humorous cards that depict an undertaker and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Gasper. Both are smokers, so they probably ended up having their offspring bury them.

People have a way of accumulating stuff over the years, so much so, that the self-storage business is booming and the quaint tag sale has been supplanted by the mania of Ebay auction sales. There’s nothing like the thrill of stalking a treasured item on Ebay and snagging it in the final precious seconds of [...]

The problem: “My mom needs home care and it costs a lot of money.”
The setup: Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGB club in New York, died and left his daughter, Lisa Burgman, as executor of his will. Hilly’s mother, Kara, 82, was president of CBGB but signed over her shares in the company to [...]

She was known as the Queen of Mean, but it turns out death has revealed a soft side to Leona Helmsley. She willed her dog $12 million and cut her two grandkids out of the barking dog will. She also stated that she “be interred wearing my gold wedding band (which is never to be [...]

Death to a preacher is the ultimate test of faith in a world that constantly offers up atrocities that befuddle the human mind’s ability to reason. When it’s the preacher’s own wife on death’s bed, though, dying becomes a journey of will that takes more than a set of scriptures to sooth a restless soul. [...]

When you’re young, people are dying every day but somehow it all escapes your attention. The idea of reading obituaries to see if you know anyone is about as familiar as the name of an adult diaper. The older you get, though, the more it becomes obvious that life takes its toll on people in [...]

At first I didn’t know what to think of this guy who boarded a plane with his new wife for a honeymoon abroad. The more you read about him, though, the more you realize that he’s nothing more than a selfish a**hole. Big time. Here’s a guy who decided against doctor’s orders to put everyone [...]

In honor of Jerry Falwell’s recent demise, we hope you might find condolence in Michael Baisden’s first book, Never Satisfied: How & Why Men Cheat. We suggest reading this book as a metaphor for how Mr. Falwell cheated decent American citizens out of their Constitutional rights in the name of God almighty.
When religion becomes [...]

Colleges these days seem more like endowment whores than educational mistresses. Their cry for more and more money, though, makes them sound like a wolf-pimp in disguise. Now that campus real estate sprawls for miles, why not turn all that lawn into a memorial for alumni, literally. You have to chuckle at this college brand [...]

Britain is at the forefront of arguing over whether the cost of keeping someone alive later in life is worth the money. The idea is that, given the expense, wouldn’t society be better off just pulling the plug and allocating the money to younger people. Well, the future is here. Read about how a stroke [...]

Playwright Gino Dilorio’s new play, Apostasy, at Urban Stages, directed by Frances Hill takes a different approach to marketing itself from its previous incarnation at the New Jersey Rep. The Jewish star affixed to a Christian cross represented a provocative suggestion of the play’s thematic content.
The story involves a dying Jewish businesswoman who becomes [...]

There’s a touching entry in Anna Nicole Smith’s diaries that were just sold on Ebay. It’s the plea of a caregiver who lacks the ability to change her love’s deteriorating condition. Her love, of course, was no ordinary relationship. Billionaire James Howard Marshall II married Anna at the ripe age of 89. No harm, no [...]

It’s tough when your best friend is about to die. Words just seem like gasps of air that completely fail to communicate the emotion that lives inside you. How do you talk about anything without suggesting the end is really the end. It’s strange that for most of our lives we go about our business [...]

For all you CSI lovers, meet the father of forensic toxicology, Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila. He’s the one who founded the whole idea of mucking around in the details of a murder to figure out who done the deed. Arsenic was the poison of choice during Orfila’s day, but no one knew how to [...]

It’s not unusual to learn more about a person’s life after they die than while they were living. There’s a personal side to our lives that resides in the minds of only a few close friends and it’s up to them whether they choose to reveal any details about our inner nature.
Obit Magazine hasn’t [...]

The idea of getting buried is, um, kind of unappealing. To a drag queen, though, it’s just one more opportunity to play dress up and go out with a fashion bang. Here’s a funny ad that shows two undertakers arguing over her/his outfit.

Click here to watch the ad (you have to click on the [...]

Timothy Leary: The Art of Dying
Directed by: A.J. Catoline, O.B. Babbs
Cast: Jerry Garcia as himself, O.B. Babbs as himself, Ken Kesey as himself, more…
Produced by: David Herman
Synopsis
Dr. Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who became the LSD guru of the 1960s, who popularized the phrase - Turn On, Tune [...]

Gore Vidal was asked what his last words would be before he died. His answer: “I told you so!”