Scatter Brained

1886:
 With her trademark elegance and ambiguity, Emily 
Dickinson says, “I must go in, the fog is rising.”
1900:
  Th
  e great playwright Oscar Wilde (full name: Oscar 
Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde) is dying in a garishly deco-
rated hotel room. With his last measure of strength, he turns 
to a companion and says, “Either this wallpaper goes—or 
I do.”
1906:
 After his nurse notes that he seems to be feeling much 
better, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen replies, “On the 
contrary,” and dies.
1923:
 Pancho Villa is assassinated in Parral, Mexico. “Don’t 
let it end like this,” he says in parting. “Tell them I said some-
thing.” Let that be a lesson: It’s never too early to prepare 
your last words.
1955:
  Th
 e poet Paul Claudel dies just after uttering the 
memorable question, “Doctor, do you think it could have been 
the sausage?”
1993:
 Murderer Th
 omas J. Grasso, who asked to be sen-
tenced to death, gets his wish. But he doesn’t get his last 
wish: “I did not get my SpaghettiOs. I got spaghetti. I want 
the press to know this!”

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Grasso, incidentally, grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was 
the site of the greatest Putt-Putt round ever played. Profes-
sional putter (there are such things) Daryl Freeman once 
went 95 under par in a two-day tournament there in 1973, 
acing two-thirds of the holes. Speaking of which . . .