WORLD'S OLDEST PERSON!!!!

...

StanM, I now have a new life goal – thanking u.

<3

Headline in about 100 years: WORLD'S OLDEST WOMAN KNITS HATS FOR HER PROSIMIAN PETS

http://img375.imageshack.us/img375/7256/walterwebmedium.jpg

http://watch.montanapbs.org/video/1486986189/

just watched this longish interview with Walter Breuning, who's now the third oldest person in the world. I'm sure millions of men from his era had similar life stories — born in East Butthole Montana in 1896; quit school in tenth grade to support his family; got a job on the railroad in 1913; managed not to be drafted during World War I; stayed employed (with a pay cut) throughout the Depression. the difference is that most of his peers died about 50 years ago, and for him to be able to speak for an entire, nearly extinct generation is a strange thing. he doesn't come across as fogeyish or resistant to new technology in spite of witnessing crises like the loss of thousands of railway jobs due to diesel and computers.

key nugget of wisdom from a guy who's been asked "meaning of life"-type questions countless times:

"If you don't think about some of these things [i.e. politics & social issues], you lose your perspective. If you don't use your mind a little bit, it's going to deteriorate to beat the devil. the more you use your mind and your body, the longer you're gonna understand what's going on in the country. and don't just sit down in the rocking chair, 'cause if you do, you won't last too long."

those hearing aids and Coke bottle glasses probably make a huge difference w/r/t staying sane and alert at that age, too.

it will sadden me when nobody born before 1900 is alive

only 58 (validated, documented) people born in the 19th century are alive today, says Wikipedia; I doubt any will be left in another six years, and why not let 'em rest? all the ones on record are from either Japan, Western Europe, the USA, or some other part of the English-speaking world, partly because of the long lifespans and exhaustive record-keeping in those places and partly because claims from countries like China and Russian tend to be written off as fraudulent attempts to flaunt their high standards-of-living. to be fair, the USSR did a lot of lifespan-related fibbing back in the day. and so did Thomas Parr.

Walter Breuning RIP

shouldn't there be a way to carbon test the unverified oldest people in the world?

read this as WORLD'S OLDEST PROFESSION!!!!!

This thread prompted me to go back and reread the thread I made about my grandmother, and recall how cool ILXors can occasionally be.

the patronizing respect given to elderly people is kind of depressing

it's like people being kind to animals b/c they are so non-threatening

if i can't envy you then i will feel sentimental towards you

for about the past year now, the world's oldest person has been 115-year-old Besse Cooper, of Georgia.

http://i46.tinypic.com/1zvzv2d.jpg

Besse, a daughter of Richard Brown and Angie Berry Brown, was born in Sullivan County on Aug. 26, 1896, and lived on the banks of the Watauga River for several years. She and her siblings enjoyed the benefits of living near and playing in the river.

According to Besse's son Sidney: "In November 1900 while Mother was four years old, her aunt and uncle convinced her parents to move to Arkansas, known as the 'Land of Opportunity.' The two families built a large houseboat alongside the river for the journey. It was fabricated upside down, turned over and then placed on the river. This attracted a lot of attention from neighbors and friends.

"Their journey took them down the Watauga River and into the Tennessee River. They had a rudder and guided the boat with a big pole. They docked at night and traveled by day. Besse remembered being tied around the waist to keep her from falling off the boat. One night, the weather was so cold that the river froze delaying them for three days."

When the two families reached Chattanooga, they became stuck on a sandbar at low tide causing Mr. Brown to go into town to get assistance. He was advised against going to Arkansas because of a high number of Yellow Fever cases there. They abandoned their journey, sold the houseboat and rented a house for about a year while Mr. Brown worked in the city as a carpenter.

They decided to return to the Johnson City area. In 1906, the Brown family moved to the Boones Creek community where they built a two-story wood house on 15 acres of land on a hill along what is now called Brown Road. Besse attended Boones Creek School, graduating in 1913.

Miss Brown enrolled at East Tennessee Normal School (which had opened just two years prior). She rode the CC&O train between Gray Station and Johnson City on weekends and boarded with her aunt in Johnson City during the week. She commuted to and from the Normal School on a trolley. She greatly admired school president, Sidney J. Gilbreath, later naming a son after him.

After earning a teacher’s certificate, Besse taught at a school in Tiger Valley, TN, between Hampton and Roan Mountain, and rode the Tweetsie narrow gauge railroad to and from there each weekend. When she exited the train, she had to walk and carry a suitcase another five miles to her boarding house in all kinds of weather.

the world's oldest man (Jiroemon Kimura, of Japan) seems to be in great shape for his age. He even said a few words in English at his 115th birthday party in April.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeYpPXAySNg

it's still kinda humbling (or something) that only one person we know of has ever lived past the age of 120, and that was 15+ years ago. I wonder how long it will be before someone else comes close to breaking the record.

actually here he is speaking English ("thank you very much. you are very kind man!")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgSoycOKZv8

seems like a cool dude to me

RIP Besse Cooper :(

Jiroemon Kimura continues to be a cool dude (now the world's oldest person and the oldest man on record)

http://i50.tinypic.com/namaq.jpg

RIP Jiroemon Kimura :(

now there are only 9 people left from the 1800s

I was sad to see this dude go. He seemed much more vibrant and with it than most of the recent oldest living people

eminently quotable, too:

"It's important to let things happen naturally. Even if you have strong ambitions, things won't always go the way you hope."

"I cherish each day. What I most desire is for people across the world to recall my name just for a moment."

"Thanks to everyone, I'm able to keep breathing. Let me stay in this world as long as possible."

it must be a surreal experience (for someone who's still "with it") to get yearly visits from reporters who want you to divulge the secret to your long life and drop some snippets of your supreme wisdom (which usually just amounts to sayings you've known since you were a kid, like "mind your own business" or "be kind to others" — being really really old doesn't necessarily make you a sage). but it's interesting to see a world's oldest person who can appreciate his celebrity and engage with the media in a playful way, or use his position as a chance to make political statements like Henry Allingham did. the idea of becoming a million times more interesting just by breathing for a really long time appeals to me, not that I plan to ever live that long.

by coincidence, the '127-year-old' Chinese woman Luo Meizhen died on the same day as Kimura, but it's very unlikely that she was as old as she said she was.

123 year old Bolivian man:

http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-bolivia-oldest-person-123-20130815,0,4445976.story

As for Flores, he says he very much misses his wife, who died more than a decade ago. One of his children is still living, 67-year-old Cecilio. Most of his 40 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren have moved away from his small Bolivian hamlet.

kanu is 25

obligatory "world's oldest person turns 116 for the third year in a row" post:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/worlds-oldest-person-116-birthday-japan

http://i.imgur.com/nHsLNwO.jpg

and now there are only 5 living people who can prove they were born in the 1800s

Oldest people are full of shit. They're confidence that how they specifically chose to live is why they are the oldest. Like they've figured out the secret formula! And they never get sick.

yeah, it's shocking that people born in the 1890s don't understand how genes affect longevity, and it's even more shocking that British tabloid writers are using "oldest azn person cites sushi, rice, meditation, and those little zen sand gardens as the secret to a long life" as the angle for their stories

that doesn't really make for much of a story though

Breaking: Oldest Person in the World Always Bragging About Age, Doesn't Understand They're Simply Lucky, and is Full of Shit

lol

funny tho how the worlds oldest person never chows down on bacon and cheese like

in a parallel universe the oldest person in the world brags that they smoke every day and drink heavily and it never affected them, and the world takes them seriously and everyone starts drinking and smoking constantly in an effort to live longer. strict global regulations go into effect mandating heavy drinking and smoking, and the first causalities are the people who can't hold their liquor and are immediately disappeared by the govt. over the years liver and lung cancer rates skyrocket but no one is willing to admit the mistake. the new oldest person in the world is 74 and addresses a massive tv audience in a room that's so smoky that she's practically invisible. her poisoned raspy voice brags

also in this parallel world the Big One actually happened and the bragging old tyrant lives on the Island of California. The Island of California!!

ppl that develop tolerance to these new conditions will eventually beat the diseases, it's the only way

http://i.imgur.com/wnQYr7D.jpg

"oops I lost my birth certificate ¯(°_o)/¯" ~ 127-year-old Leandra Becerra Lumbreras, the oldest person to have ever lived

Family say secrets to her long life are lots of sleep, keeping active, singing to relatives and eating sweets.

And the birthday girl's secret to a long life is eating well, chewing on chocolate, sleeping for days on end and never getting married, according to her family.

OLDEST PEOPLE STILL FULL OF SHIT.

I want to know how your life is miserable, oldest person. Riddle me that oldest person.

114 yr old digestive system obv

Some day an interviewer will ask the same old inane question of an extremely old person, "to what do you attribute the secret of your living so long" and the extremely old person will answer, "go away, you're an idiot". Some sweet day, I can feel it coming.

"The secret is to have been born an extremely long time ago."

I don't know if it's going to suck or not when the World's Oldest Person is all hep and meta and self-aware of the century-old narrative of being the World's Oldest Person and answers back to the reporter, "Oh, you know. Smoke weed every day, drink a gallon of bleach once a year and keep pullin' on that pork -- amirite? *winks at camera, dies*"

the only reason to become very old is to take pleasure in fulfilling the lifelong goal to really tell off an inept journalist who asks stupid quesitons

Weird to think that for me, that person won't be born until 2070 or so.

if they even still have journalists then, haha amirite? *winks, dies*

you 2070'er why i oughtta, you weren't even there for the great space rebellion of the 2060s, why i'm so old i was old then and i'm old now, i'm ooooooold and miserable and you don't even know how to ask good questions

wait, this chick is a full 5 years older than the previous oldest person ever?? i am skeptical

no spring chick

yeah, the odds that she's actually 127 are vanishingly small. dubious 120+-year-old claims like hers make the news several times a year (like the amazing 123-year old Bolivian man and the amazing 126-year-old Brazilian man) without amounting to anything. almost all of them come from countries with poor or nonexistent birth documentation where the government makes little effort to keep track of its citizens' ages. this lady has a government ID card from 2009 that says she was born in 1887, but who's to say that she didn't add 15 or 20 years to her age (possibly using the identity of her mother or older sister) so that she'd be eligible for a pension earlier in life? now that she's reached a record-breaking age, it's too late to change her story, and her local government and media are unlikely question her claim because they stand to benefit from the publicity.

it's possible that the real world's oldest person is some 118-year-old from a developing nation who doesn't have any records to back up their claim, but Guinness isn't going to verify their age just because they "seem honest".

tl;dr this lady is probably 105-ish years old but she is FULL OF SHIT and she needs an internet person like me to put her in her place

They'll just have to count the growth rings in her femur after she dies.

most drinking Americans don't care about how 'good' a drink is, quality wise

you could piss in a cup and mix it with coke and tell people it's Jack and diet and they'll just shrug and say "seems legit" and chug it

in van gogh's era the most popular drink among artists was absinthe which can definitely rot your brain

Strindberg's "Inferno" suggests as much.

shocked to discover that some late 19th century painters were frequently getting pissed on absinthe in Parisienne cafes.

Relevant to our interests here. The tips for a good life idea is obviously a well-worn cliche, but it's interesting to hear from and see such a broad range of possible future contenders for WORLD'S OLDEST PERSON!!!!

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/feb/18/100-centenarians-100-tips-for-a-life-well-lived

reading the entries of the folks who died between interview and publication and sadly moving their suggestions from the good column to the bad

I noticed some gray hairs this morning. Pretty soon I’ll be posted about here I guess.

Who is the oldest person on ilx

robert christgau

Dick Van Dyke, but he posts under a display name you wouldn't expect

CerebalCaustic?

no that's Jordan Peterson

Who is the oldest person regularly posting on ILX?

The world's oldest living man is now a britisher. It's the fish & chips that do it.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/05/briton-says-becoming-worlds-oldest-man-at-111-is-pure-luck

That’s a good old person!

John Alfred Tinniswood, who was born in 1912 – the same year the Titanic sank – insist the secret to his long life is “pure luck”. He obtained the title of world’s oldest man after 112-year-old Gisaburo Sonobe, from Japan, was confirmed to have died on 31 March.

actually, Grauniad, the chronology was more like

-March 31: the world's second oldest living man, Gisaburo Sonabe (112, Japan), dies, never having made it to the #1 spot (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lucky_(Daft_Punk_song)#Commercial_performance)

-April 2: the world's oldest living man and fourth oldest man ever, Juan Vicente Pérez Mora (114, Venezuela), dies. his death is announced later that same day

-April 4: Sonobe's death is announced. later that same day, Guinness rushes to John Tinniswood's nursing home to award him the title of world's oldest living man

retired British-Indian marathon runner Fauja Singh, whose claimed 1911-04-01 birthdate would make him more than a year older than Tinniswood, sighs and jogs another lap around his couch

Let's organise a fight to the death between these two to settle the issue. On December 31, 2026.