the end of the oldest men

Another mind numbing advertising class last night. To make matters all the worse, I had a headache before class began and it only got worse as the night wore on. Mr. Cop spent about 25 minutes talking about the DARE program that he has done in the schools (drug prevention) and Mr. Blackbox (the company he works for) continued to ask stupid question after stupid question, yet somehow managing to throw his company's name into every statement he made, like, 'so, is advertising really effective, because at Blackbox, we don't really advertise our name that much but we still do lots of business' and 'we do packaging at Blackbox, but when are we going to learn about what colors make you feel different things?'...ARGGHHH! Of course, in a sense I guess the advertising class really did deal with advertising last night...advertisements for Blackbox and the DARE program.

Anyway, I'd like to pay tribute to Joan Riudavets Moll and William Coates. William, who died a few weeks ago on Feb. 25, was 114 years old, the oldest man in America. Oddly enough, the oldest man in the world, Joan Riudvets Moll who was from Spain, died a couple of weeks later on Mar. 6, also at 114 years of age. Both were born in 1889.

To put this into perspective, both men's lives spanned three different centuries, having ushered in the beginning of both the 20th century and the 21st century and lived through 21 different presidencies and two World Wars (both in their 20's at the start of the first World War). I've heard my parents make mention of 'life before the television' but these two guys were old enough to actually remember life without electricity...Edison was still perfecting the light bulb in the 1880's.

You know, when I first went to college, I had this old station wagon that had been passed down through the family. The thing was falling apart from the outside...the front window wouldn't roll down, the inner roof fabric was starting to sag, the thing had over 200,000 miles on it, yet it ran perfectly. It even still had all of it's original spark plugs in it. And I guess people are a lot like cars in that respect. Every now and then a good one comes rolling off the assembly line.

Happy trails Joan and William!