Recent hits from the World's Greatest Obits

Coccinelle was the first Frenchman to have a sex-change operation and went on to become celebrated as a singer, entertainer and Marilyn Monroe lookalike.

After her operation the French modified the law to enable the details on birth certificates to be amended following a change of sex, and she duly changed her name to Jacqueline-Charlotte — “née femme”.

The Earl of Mayo was born into a family descended from a “pirate queen” of Connemara.

He enjoyed a career in which he served as a Fleet Air Arm pilot at Suez, started a printing company and tried to become an MP in England; he then returned to the Ireland of his ancestors to run a marble company, finally retiring to breed deer at a chateau in south-west France.

The Reverend Canon Arthur Peacocke, who died on Saturday aged 81, made a significant contribution to the understanding of the structure of DNA during his early career as a scientist, though he became better known, after his ordination as an Anglican priest, as a leading advocate of the proposition that the antagonism between science and religion is based on a fallacy.

Lieutenant-Colonel John Pine-Coffin, who has died aged 85, had a distinguished and adventurous career in the King’s African Rifles and the Parachute Regiment.

When he came across a number of heavily bearded men hiding in a monastery, Pine-Coffin suspected that they were Eoka terrorists in disguise and asked his sergeant to give their beards a sharp tug. These all stayed firmly in place and he had to make a swift tactical withdrawal.

Ed Benedict, who has died aged 94, was the American animator who designed such iconic cartoon characters as Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss and Quick Draw McGraw.

Although generations of children grew up to love his creations, Benedict himself disliked the cartoons he made for the Hanna-Barbera partnership, and said he did not care particularly that people liked them so much.

All excerpts from Telegraph.co.uk

We're gonna be so creepy-cool!

la_sherazade is going to make our home anthropomorphic.

PieQuest 2006: Day 5, part 2 (the final for now)

On the final night of our trip, we managed to get lost in Charleston, WV. See, we knew the restaurant was on MacCorkle Rd, just off the highway. What we didn’t know was that MacCorkle Rd has about a dozen exits off the highway. We took the first one we came to, about 17 miles short of our goal.

After about an hour of wandering, backtracking, arguing, and asking directions of teenaged gas station attendants, we found an old guy in overalls who knew exactly where the Southern Kitchen was located.

The parking lot was abandoned, but as soon as we walked into this little diner filled with chicken figurines, we knew it was worth the trip.

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie was good, though not the best version we had. In a slight divergence, we had Apple Dumplings as our second choice (declaring it an honorary pie). It was a bit off, but I think it may have been a temporary aberration. It was very late, after all.

But, the atmosphere... ah, that made it all worth while.



Southern Kitchen, MacCorkle Av and 53rd, Charleston, WV 25304, 304-925-3154

And so concludes PieQuest 2006. There will be a PieQuest 2007, rest assured.

That 6 word story meme, the classic edition

And they lived happily ever after.