Stupido 54
It's my birthday, and I'm very definitely sliding out of late middle-age and into the cool, musty hinterlands of being properly old. The vultures are now wheeling high over head. Bird saliva drops onto my silvery hair. They're making that noise eagles do in films. You know the one. Here's a list of people I've outlived this year: B a be Ruth, George Michael, Lenin, Tchaikovsky, Ivan the Terrible, Mary Shelley, Descartes, Maria Callas and Jack Ruby. They all died at 53. It's safe to say all those people are more famous than me. Well, Ivan the Terrible was terrible and, you know, only famous through an accident of birth. Jack Ruby seems like a dick. Babe Ruth hit a ball with a stick for a job, and I can't respect that. But the rest did pretty well. I was going to say that Descartes, in his short(ish) life, even found time to sleep in an oven. But I then made the foolish mistake of fact-checking something I definitely knew about Descartes, and it turned out...
