World's Oldest Man Dies Again
This is one of my favorite news tropes, right up there with the venerable "bus plunge".
The "World's Oldest Man/Woman" dies every couple of months, but unless you actually think about it, then you like apparently many news editors might think it is an unusual event.
You never see "World's Youngest Person Born", because it happens more frequently (many times a day) and is one of the few superlatives that pretty much everyone held at one point in time, however fleetingly.
The real trick in being the "World's Oldest Man/Woman" is not so much in attaining the title, but in how long one holds on to it. Alas, few do for more than a few months.
Farewell, Yasutaro Koide.
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/01/yasutaro_koide_worlds_oldest_m.html
"The world's oldest man, a Japanese, died Tuesday at the age of 112 after suffering chronic heart problems, officials said.
Yasutaro Koide had said his secret to a long life was not to smoke, drink or overdo it."
As always, the story includes the "secret" of the individual involved, which tend to be all over the map. The actual "secret" is more along the lines of "not dying for a long time", given the range of those sorts of things. Here the admonition not to "overdo it" is sort of self-defeating, as it is clear that by reaching extreme age, one has overdone it at least in some sense.
= new reply since forum marked as read
