Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for March 11, 2025

Today’s subjects: death and taxes.

Did the wise a$$ move to a hill in a Hispanic neighborhood?

I prefer Woody Allen’s comment, I don’t want to achieve immortality through my works, I want to achieve it by not dying.

Just live a life of abstinence, healthy eating, and no vices. You will not live forever, but it will sure seem like it.

Nothing wrong with dying, it’s the process that worries me!

The Good Place be like

I genuinely gotta disagree with this. I don’t want to die. I fear death. I want to keep learning, traveling and creating.

I’d say the fate worse than death is not being allowed to live because you’re too busy forced to toil in order to survive.

Tough. I cannot die unless you take my head and, with it, my power.…. Riffing on a line from Highlander. I should go downstairs and pull some memories from my DVD set of the Highlander TV series

Who lives forever anyway.

Freddy Mercury

You may die, but the taxes are forever.

Nah, I’d rather be immortal. Endless video games for me. Plus, I’d have a ton of stories to tell since I was actually live back then.

I don’t want to live forever if governed by this sh!t show!!!

If you die and go to heaven, you will have to occupy yourself for eternity. It doesn’t sound pleasant. Assuming there are libraries and that there is a finite number of books, you will have to re-read the same things an infinite number of times.

Indeed. All your friends and family would be gone, and it would be hard to relate to those who know nothing of the world you came from (the past). Even today, young adults can’t seem to connect with previous generations—if they’ve never seen or heard of something it’s either totally new, or it doesn’t exist.

I’m okay with the dying part. I just don’t want to see it coming.

So I’m hoping for a meteor strike.

I want to live to 150 and bleed social security dry.

People die who have never died before!

“Fame! I want to live forever”!

I want to live long enough to see the last politician strangled with the last religious pontiff’s innards. Then, we shall be free…

Both Rat and Pig are able to stand on the hill at an impossible angle. Do you think they have glue on their feet?

Has the Wise A** ever had a Spanish sign before?

Outliving everyone will just leave you alone and friendless.

As far as wanting to live forever……I hope you have unlimited wealth, because it will cost plenty.

I’d only want immortality if it spread out to family.

It’d be better if they could not only cure aging, but also restore our youth to our twenty something bodies.

Also seems boring. Any eternal life no matter where.

At 78, I’ll tell you there is a wisdom that comes. “It seems, as one becomes older/That the past has a different pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence.”— T S Eliot. One starts to see one’s life as a unity, and one starts to see the complexities of this reality as intermingled. Death is a logical step.

I’ve been a character in this play for over 70 years, I would just like to see how the whole thing turns out.

Absolutely agree 100%.

In Gulliver’s Travels, one island has a race of immortals, born with a black circle on their foreheads. It’s considered a horrible curse.

This wise @ss seems to be getting his advice from Dear Abby…

When I was a child and was told I would live forever in heaven, it really bothered me—it almost felt like a punishment.

From Wikipedia: The myth goes that Eos fell in love with and abducted Tithonus, a handsome prince from Troy, either the brother or the son of King Laomedon (the father of Priam). She went with a request to Zeus, asking him to make Tithonus immortal for her sake. Zeus agreed and granted her wish, but Eos foolishly forgot to ask for eternal youth as well for her beloved. So for a while the two lived happily in her palace, but their happiness eventually came to an end when Tithonus’ hair started turning grey as he aged, and Eos ceased to visit him in their bed. Despite that, the goddess kept him around and nourished him with food and ambrosia; Tithonus never died as he had gained immortality as Zeus promised, but he kept aging and shrivelling, and was soon unable to even move. In the end, Eos locked him up in a chamber, where he withered away alone, forever a helpless old man. Out of pity, she turned him into a small bug, a cicada

My friend, we each live forever. The question is, “Where?” Who do you say that Jesus is? That will determine the outcome.

It probably would. Imagine paying taxes until the end of the world, and then floating through space aimlessly.

How about living forever with Rat?

If there are any other fans of “The Good Place” out there, Todd May’s book Death, which is referenced in the show (May himself makes a cameo in the final episode), is an accessible philosophy text, and deals at length with why immortality would suck.

Well, that all depends, and assumes you’re living on this Earth as it is now. And it would be even worse if you stayed alive while your body kept degenerating around you.

Living under a fascist tyrant.

And I like God’s promise to do away with death and pain when he has his kingdom take over the world, putting Jesus in charge of helping us make the whole earth a paradise

I agree with the Wise A**

How are there so many likes?

There is a Greek myth about that. The protagonist got immortality but not eternal youth.

Got that right……

I’ll take my chances.

Nobody wants to hear about taxes, Rat.

In a literal sense.

tRump won’t be happy!!!!! :-)

Having to live forever is indeed a fate worse than death. To be young forever, on the other hand… Though I guess the best fate would be to be young as long as you want to be :-)

There are so many things worse than death!

If a person had good health (mentally and physically) and never aged past their prime, and a reasonable standard of life, ask them on which specific day they would like to die. If their answer is “When I get bored or unhappy”… many would be dead already. Not many would give up the chance of eternal life. The public in general considered “Highlander” a rather stupid series. An immortal whose “reward” was to grow old and die? No thank you, Hollywood.