This article sheds theoretical and empirical light on the ritual media events constructed around deaths of three Cold War political leaders in 1980s: Finnish president, Urho Kekkonen (1900–1986), Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme (1927–1986), Soviet Union general secretary, Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982). Investigating news articles published first days after each death broke, as well funeral for...

We study the relation between approximate joint diagonalization of self-adjoint matrices and the norm of their commutator, and show that almost commuting self-adjoint matrices are almost jointly diagonalizable by a unitary matrix.