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Deathday Newspapers

Birthday present of the paper printed on the day of your death
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The Death Clock gives you a doubtless most inaccurate death date, mine being the eighth of April two thousand and fifty-seven. Whereas it is generally implausible to anticipate most of the contents of any newspaper which might be printed on the day of one's death, certain things can be more or less guaranteed or forecast. The possibilities include the following:

* Planned events such as the Olympics, elections in fixed term countries and release of government papers under the thirty-year rule.

* More or less completely predictable events such as the position of the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft, eclipses, horoscopes - a horoscope of the forecast day of one's death is entirely feasible.

* Extrapolations of current trends such as divorce rates, secularisation, inflation, crime, climate change, population.

* Articles worded so vaguely and generally that they could be interpreted as true no matter what.

* Same old same old stuff which always happens such as political scandals, celebrity gossip and war in the Middle East.

* In some cases, seasonal events such as Christmas, Easter and Eid will occur on the death date.

* An obituary of the recipient of the newspaper based on where their life is going at the moment, anticipating events such as promotion or the lack thereof, how long their marriage is likely to last and what they are likely to die of, health problems and so forth based on their current lifestyle, occupation and the like.

The irony is, of course, that in many cases by the time of a person's death, newspapers in their current form will probably have ceased to exist, so i anticipate that if this were to be put into action, it will eventually become the only kind of physical newspaper worthy of the name which exists and the old style newspaper which purports to cover real events will be forgotten.

The value of this newspaper could be similar to the memento mori or Dickens' ghost of Christmas yet to come, as a dreadful warning of where the recipient's life or the world is going. Actual forecasts could be modified according to personal beliefs, such as scepticism or otherwise about global warming or belief in a fixed date of the end of the world. Someone could be depicted as suffering from COPD, heart disease or other diseases derived from the realistic risk of those conditions developing based on their current lifestyle, or they could be warned of an impending trend towards separation, unemployment or of less personal events such as the depletion of the planet's indium resources, thereby motivating them into doing something about that lot. Alternatively, it might just be a cheery affirmation that they should carry on doing what they're doing now because if things continue in this manner, they will be the next Pope or something.

Nostradamus, St Malachy, JW or whatever type of prediction will also be available as news items, belief system permitting.

nineteenthly, Mar 14 2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event [hippo, Mar 15 2013]

http://www.livescie...780-odds-dying.html [hippo, Mar 15 2013]

[link]






       That'd be fun as a prank and make the whole thing much easier. It could also be included probabilistically in a way corresponding to how likely it is in a given lifespan. Same could apply to supervolcanoes and other mass extinction events.
nineteenthly, Mar 14 2013
  

       [bigsleep and 19thly] Your chance of dying in a big meteor impact is only about 1 in 200,000 (see links) - so less likely than dying as a result of a bee sting (1 in 100,000), but much more likely than dying in a tsunami (1 in 500,000).
hippo, Mar 15 2013
  

       Good point. Unfortunately 1 in 200,000 doesn't mean 35,000 out of 7 billion - it means, say 5 billion people dying all at once every 10 million years, or something.
hippo, Mar 15 2013
  

       //Your chance of dying in a big meteor impact is only about 1 in 200,000//   

       No, your chances of dying in a big meteor impact are probably 1 in a few hundred. However, the chance of the big meteor impact happening is quite low.
MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 15 2013
  

       The chances of someone standing in a football field in Barwell on Christmas Eve 'sixty-five dying of a meteorite impact would've been quite a bit higher than that, but it's nineteen nautical miles from Rutland.
nineteenthly, Mar 16 2013
  

       This idea should have been simply the spreading of newspapers on the floor before autoerotic asphyxiation. Then your death will be all over the papers.
rcarty, Mar 16 2013
  

       It will be, but not for that exact reason.
nineteenthly, Mar 16 2013
  

       The newspaper is spread out on your floor, your clothes are heaped to one side, in the doorway. The sheets slip a little on the lino as you clamber down to all fours, roll onto your back. You grab your penis in your left hand, your right hand pulls on the belt that is looped around your neck. Both hands yank and as your mind fills with a barrage of erotic imagery your head lolls to one side and you happen, in the process of blacking out, to read your own obituary: "... Died 16 March 2013, of autoerotic asphyxiation. His corpse was found by his sister."
calum, Mar 16 2013
  

       Writes itself, doesn't it?
nineteenthly, Mar 16 2013
  

       2013 Described the darkness void online, Autoerotically Asphyxiatied.
rcarty, Mar 16 2013
  
      
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