Same Story, Different Details

This is kind of a sad one (2).

The remains of Hedviga Golik were found last month in her apartment in Croatia. According to reports she had made herself a cup of tea, sat down in her armchair to watch some tv, and must have passed away.

Having been born in 1924, there is nothign too surprising about all of this. In fact it isn’t much of a story until you start to get into the details. Golik was reported missing and was last seen by a neighbor… back in 1966. Although officially reported missing, apparently either no one ever did anything to try and locate her, or in their search for her the police did not enter her apartment.

Fast forward 42 years to May 2008 and the police and some bailiffs are busting down her door to try and help figure out who owns the apartment only to find Golik in her armchair dead now for as long as she had lived.

Besides a few cobwebs, her apartment appeared just as it had been in 1966, a virtual time capsule, with her cup of tea still on the table in front of her.

According to the authorities: “So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in.”

Okay, I thought I was done with this, until I did a search for a picture and found the CNN article, which isn’t exactly the same story.

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If I Die Before I Wake Send These Emails to My Family

Don’t ask which part of the web I have been trolling to find this type of stuff*.

First we have PostExpression, whose tag line is a little eeri: “Death Ends A Life, Not A Relationship.”

Post Expression allows you to communicate with people after you’ve died. It gives you the opportunity to communicate final words of encouragement, confession and love; or private information that may get lost if you pass away.

Okay, so it definitely triggers the creep-o-meter. Basically you sign up for a year with Post Expression and create as many “Multimedia messages” as you like. Then you set a date for the messages to be sent and give the trigger key to a friend who will activate it after you have passed on. Kind of gimmicky, and I would think not really a priority for some one who knows they are going to die. Although thoughtful, at 19 Eur for a year (so you need to know you are going to die within that year) it is also a bit pricey. Plus I would imagine their are easier ways to go about this, like in a last will and testament.

Then their is JustIncaseIDie (JIID). A bit more light hearted (you can tell by the image they have at the top of their page of a stick figure being stabbed in the chest by another stick figure. Read more »

Arthur C. Clarke: RIP

Sir Arthur was quoted as saying religion was “a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species”, and he left written instructions that his funeral be completely secular.