Famous Last Words

I was looking through the last words list on Wikipedia the other day. There were a lot that really were not that interesting, but I thought these ones were quite funny.

Wait a minute . . . .
Who: Pope Alexander VI

Am I dying, or is this my birthday?
Who: Lady Nancy Astor
Note: In her final illness, she awoke on her deathbed to see her family at her bedside.

Die, I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
Who: John Barrymore

Je vais ou je vas mourir, l'un et l'autre se dit ou se disent. (French)
Translation : I am about to--or I am going to--die: either expression is correct.
Who: Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian

Now why did I do that?
Who: General William Erskine
Note: Said after he jumped from a window in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1813.

Das ist nicht wahr! Ich werde in der Montur sterben? (German)
Translation: That's not true! I'm gonna die in this dress?
Who: Frederik William I of Prussia

No! I didn't come here to make a speech. I came here to die.
Who: Crawford Goldsby, a.k.a. Cherokee Bill, when asked if he had anything to say before he was hanged.

I am dying. Please . . . bring me a toothpick.
Who: Alfred Jarry, absurdist writer and playwright

I wish I was skiing. [Nurse: "Oh, Mr. Laurel, do you ski?"] No, but I'd rather be skiing than doing what I'm doing.
Who: Stan Laurel, before dying of a heart attack

This isn't Hamlet, you know. It's not meant to go into the bloody ear.
Who: Actor Laurence Olivier supposedly said this when a nurse, attempting to moisten his lips, mis-aimed.
Note: In Shakespeare's play Hamlet, the title character's father is killed when poison is dripped into his ear while asleep.

All right then, I'll say it: Dante makes me sick.
Who: Lope de Vega, famous playwright, on being assured that the end was very near

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
Who: Oscar Wilde
Variation: These curtains are killing me, one of us has got to go.
Popular variation often found in "Famous Last Words"-lists: "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do."
Notes: Mr. Wilde said this in the Left Bank hotel where he died on November 30, 1900, the wallpaper has since been removed and the room re-furnished in the style of one of Mr. Wilde's London flats.
Quibble: He actually said this a couple of weeks before his death…
He was also reported to have ordered a bottle of the hotel's most expensive champagne to later say: I am dying beyond my means.

Die, my dear? Why, that's the last thing I'll do!
Who: Groucho Marx

Happiness

Something that makes me happy is . . . hanging out with old friends.

Cindy's Message

Another message!

Hi Squoze! This is Cindy.
The outside is cold and windy.
I just wanted to tell you a story;
I will share it later in all its glory.

It's all about loving your parents

When we first watched Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, we did not get the logic of the movie's tagline: "It's all about loving your parents." While we thought this was a good moral, we hadn't become acquainted enough with Indian culture to understand how it applied to this movie. We thought the movie was more about parents making life difficult for no good reason than about them being lovable. While I now know more about Indian culture and can understand how in that context the tagline makes sense for that movie, I have also come to think of that tagline as a kind of tagline for all Indian movies. After all, there's hardly an Indian movie I watch where I don't finish it thinking to myself, "Wow, thank Heaven for my parents! I love my parents a lot!" Movie characters usually love their parents a lot, but theirs don't deserve it nearly as much as mine do.

Dad hands down beats every movie dad I've ever seen. The other night I watched a movie called Chhalia, and the dad in that movie refused to recognize the girl as his daughter because she'd been stranded in Pakistan for five years and who knows what might have happened to her there. He also refused to let his wife recognize her. It reminded me strongly of when I watched Seven Brides for Seven Brothers with my family as a little girl. In that movie some girls get kidnapped by some brothers, and the brothers stop the girls' pursuing family members by causing an avalanche that cuts off the mountain pass, so that the families have to wait for several months before they can go rescue them. I remember Dad saying after we watched that movie that if it had been his daughter captured, he wouldn't have gone home because an avalanche had blocked the path--he would have not stopped until he'd found a way around it somehow. (The dad in Parugu also has this mentality of stopping at nothing to get his daughter back, but he's quite violent about it, and his daughter would not have eloped in the first place if he hadn't been so unapproachable. So Dad's still way more awesome.) In fact, the only movie dads I can think of who come close to Dad's awesomeness are the ones in Vivah, and Dad's still better because he has a better sense of humor.

The contrast isn't quite so great between Mom and the movie moms--movie moms tend to be pretty ideal--but I still think Mom is no less than any of them. She can cook with the best of them. She makes sacrifices for us, although she takes care of herself too doesn't overdo it like some of the martyr mothers, who invariably end up wearing themselves out so much that they become a burden. She avoided a lot of filmi problems by not marrying a rascal. She loves her family just as much as any movie mom, and she's achieved all these tasks with seven children rather than the typical filmi two or three.

Thanks, Mom and Dad! I love you guys!