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'Longest Living Human' Says He Is Ready For Death At 145 (telegraph.co.uk)

Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes an article from The Telegraph: An Indonesian man who claims to be the longest living human in recorded history has described how he "just wants to die". Mbah Gotho, from Sragen in central Java, was born on December 31, 1870, according to the date of birth on his identity card. Now officials at the local record office say they have finally been able to confirm that remarkable date as genuine. If independently confirmed, the findings would make Mr Gotho a staggering 145 years old -- and the longest lived human in recorded history.
"One of Mr Gotho's grandsons said his grandfather has been preparing for his death ever since he was 122," according to the article. Though he lived long enough to meet his great-great grandchildren, he's already outlived four wives, all 10 of his brothers and sisters, and all of his children.

4 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Captain Kirk says... by queazocotal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Quoting without permission Rob Landley:
    http://lists.celinuxforum.org/...

    "I'm sorry, I'm confused by the CONCEPT of having a shortage of TODO items.
    This is just the top of my head _Linux_ stuff, and doesn't include purely-me
    items like learning LUA. I want to get a mac and learn THAT stuff. I want to
    get my master's degree so I can become a full-time college professor when I'm
    ready to retire from programming. I want to write multiple books. I want to
    start a third convention so I have an excuse to wave the Cartoon Guide to
    Federal Spectrum Policy at people
    (http://www.newamerica.net/files/archive/Pub_File_1555_1.pdf). I want to learn
    to draw so I can start a webcomic. I have enormous stacks of books to read.
    I need to watch the rest of Mythbusters, catch up on the new Dr. Who, and play
    Dragon Age. I want to garden and cook and bike and swim. I want to get rich
    and start the world's largest nudist resort. I want to dig up the recording
    of the time I got Neil Gaiman to say "By Grabthar's hammer, you shall be
    avenged" into a microphone (after his reading of Crazy Hair at Penguicon 2)
    and also get Ralph Nader to say "Luke, I am your Father" into another
    microphone. I need to completely redo my website (and make a "random cool
    stuff" page listing http://sidhefaer.livejournal.c... and
    http://theglen.livejournal.com... and so on...)

    Theres... a shortage of stuff to do somewhere?

    Really?

    How does that work?
    "

  2. Re:Captain Kirk says... by whoever57 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My father was 100 years of when he died. Up until the last 4 months of his life, he was living semi-independently. He lived in his own house, with people coming in to help him with such things as cleaning and preparing meals; other than that, he looked after himself.

    I am terrified of the prospect. As some point, I should start living a more risky lifestyle, since 3 out of 4 of my grandparents lived well into their '90s. Maybe I can kill myself in my early '90s through a skydiving accident or something.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  3. Re:Extraordinary claims require ... by Ken+McE · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Occams' razor is politely suggesting that at some point the ID card belonging to Mr. Mbah Gotho Sr. was passed along to Mr Mbah Gotho Jr. That appears to be what happened with all those ancient rural Soviets. Some of those back country/outside all their life people age fast. If they took Dads card after he passed, they could skip the draft. Voila, country towns with a lot of 104 year old men.

  4. Birth certificates are mostly joke in some places by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I am from India. My uncle suddenly lopped off 25 years from his age.

    He was working as a village karnam a hereditary village official assisting land tax office and other official government work. A coupld of decades after the independence, the government decided to abolish the heridiatry position and regularize them all as "village officers". Part of the application process was filling documents for age and dates of birth. My dad told him government retiremnet age was 58 and he would be retired in 13 years or so. He did not want to suffer the loss of income. One of the official forms of documentation for date of birth was an affidavit fron the village karnam. So he issued himself an affidavit proclaiming him to be 20 years old!. Only adverse consequence was his traditional Hindu ceremonies he had to do as he turned 60 all had to be done in secret, lest the government becomes aware of his true age!

    Was thinking all the birthers could have gone to Kenya. The could find a local dynamic_cast(village karnam) to issue birth certificates for any one for any date.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact