I’m a Sucker for a Good Obituary
Written on July 14, 2008
Olive Riley, the world’s oldest blogger, has died. (via Neatorama)
Mohammed Al Shehri from Saudi Arabia writes this:
Our Australian colleague Olive Riley, the world’s oldest blogger, had died at the age of 108. She had lived through the first and second world wars, their revolutions and industries, their civility and destruction, their dictators and victims, and their happiness and sadness. She carried with her an archive of memories, more than a blog could hold. And then she discovered blogging and its thrill, especially at her age!Imagine with me, if blogging as the way it is today, had been available in the past and that Olive had continued to blog all those years, writing all her life experiences, feelings and incidents, from her youth until her death. How will her blog archive look like?
I am sure we would have been excited reading her diary when the Second World War started, her feelings, her reactions to what the newspapers wrote and her ideas about what was happening. It would have been enchanting to read a post about her first love; or what her feelings were when she saw the first television which was invented when she was 22 years old!
Bloggers are writing today’s history for tomorrow’s readers! And Olive in her blogging could have been the first witness to that era, had blogging been available then. How lucky are the readers of the future! I envy them! I wonder what made Olive start blogging after that advanced age?!
(Translation courtesy of Global Voices.)
Filed in: Uncategorized.



I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. . . . I recollect [Hodge] one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson's breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying 'why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;' and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, 'but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.'