Posted on 05/16/2012 8:59:54 AM PDT by Brandonmark
Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.
The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who...
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I better get on the Facebook wagon. Sounds like I'm missing out not being connected with close family and friends!
Neither do I. If I choose to connect with my family and friends I pick up the phone and we plan a get-together. That simple.
If this cannot be arranged for work schedules then we chat on the phone and catch up until we can meet.
I want to see a face or hear a voice from my frineds and family. It does make a difference.
“I think our sense of community started falling apart long before Facebook”.
I have always wondered if people weren’t distanced before Facebook and that made FB more attractive to some. For example, my parents grew up in a town filled with relatives.. Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, second Cousins... etc. People today may be more distanced from relatives geographically. People may also have less time to simply get to know neighbors and socialize with them. Facebook promised a way of “friending” hundreds if not thousands of people. Sort of sad.
“I don’t Facebook and I don’t tweet. Waste of time”
In case you didn’t get the memo, Free Republic is “social media”, like it or not.
Just more perceived anonymity here, so you get the “I shot and killed my neighbor’s pets, buried them, and my neighbors never knew what happened to them, HAHAHA!” posts, like yours, and the inevitable cringeworthy sado-homo prison anal rape/torture/murder fantasy posts to be meted out as “justice” that one frequently sees here on crime threads.
You won’t see a lot of posts like those of FB or Twitter.
It’s all just information, useful or not. How one uses these outlets to disseminate or gather information is their business.
Pat Bertram’s take on these article sums it up well http://ptbertram.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/facebook-makes-us-fill-in-the-blank/
I agree on Facebook, disagree on Twitter. Hash tags make information on any important topic readily available to everyone. People often think Twitter is like Facebook, with mundane status updates, but it is far more powerful from a spontaneous information and action standpoint.
I cancelled my Facebook account Saturday after hearing the co-founder moved to Singapore to avoid US taxes. That and the fact employers are now asking for your ID and password.
My children are not happy because now they must send photos to me and call when there is a family event rather than relying on FB posts
Now that we're there, makes you wonder what the next future will bring.
Let’s be clear about one thing in particular - I take no particular pleasure (although there is some satisfaction in it) in having to put down an undisciplined animal whose owner couldn’t be bothered to restrain in a responsible manner. When it comes to a choice between my horses and an animal who has, despite two warnings to its owner repeatedly run them in their turnout, there is only one answer. Idaho law explicitly supports it. Note that although we share the area with coyotes we have yet to shoot one because they don’t bother our livestock.
I therefore have no qualms whatsoever about taking such action. Same deal with feral cats we can’t catch and other critters hazardous to our own.
As for anonymity, you may have noticed that I publish my essays under my own name for all to see. I retain my screen name for the sake of convenience only, as it is a recognizable handle.
In conclusion, take your snarky response and stuff it. You clearly have no understanding of life in the country and the circumstances and responsibilities that accompany it.
Yvette Vickers (August 26, 1928 – 2010 ?)
Sometimes, I'm not so sure I want to find out.
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