Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Tomstone (for Tombstone)

"If we ever pass out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone: 'America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership.'" So wrote Will Rogers shortly before his death. Tomstone for Tombstone got us looking for some of the more amusing epitaphs of the famous and departed. We knew Dorothy Parker's famous "Pardon my dust" and W.C. Fields "On the whole I'd rather be in Philadelphia" were both suggested by the departed, but not used. We had to go searching to find gems like Rodney Dangerfield's "There goes the neighborhood" and Jackie Gleason's "And away we go." Werner Heisenberg, inventor of the uncertainty principle, has a tombstone that reads "He lies here, somewhere." Perhaps the most apt is Mel Blanc's "That's all folks!" Tomstone is not yet found at the Typographical errors in library databases page at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typoscomplete.html, but when it is added, it will be found in the low probability section since there were three hits for it in OhioLINK this morning. The normal laws of probability do not hold in this case, because there are only five tomstones in WorldCat.
Today's photo shows the most famous resident of the Boot Hill Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona. The original can be found at http://www.pbase.com/terryballard/image/65856637 .

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