Crafting With Human Hair
Victorian Hair Wreath
During the 19th century it was fashionable to incorporate human hair into brooches, watch chains, wreaths, and other objects that could be worn or displayed. Victorian Gothic explores the lost art of sentimental hairwork:
Mrs. Hamlin of Omaha, Nebraska left a rather curious heirloom to her descendants—an intricately woven bouquet composed entirely of human hair. Buried deep inside, each of its flowers is numbered with a tiny label corresponding one of fifteen names written on a separate index card; those of herself and her loved ones. More than a century ago, each of these people offered up their locks of brown or gray—literally, pieces of themselves—to provide the material for what would become a lasting symbol family unity.
The weaver need not have been the eccentric that one might suppose. On the contrary, she was likely to have been a conventional middle class lady going about her fancywork. She may have included a…
Top Five Regrets Of The Dying
The Guardian on the divide between the lives people should be living, and the lives they are living. A common theme: don’t become closed off emotionally in the name of routine or not making waves:
Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai.
Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. “When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently,” she says, “common themes surfaced again and again.”
Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I…
The Plan To Reanimate George Washington’s Corpse
Lauren Davis on io9 discusses U.S. Capitol designer William Thornton’s half-baked plan to bring George Washington back from the dead. Thornton’s idea was not enacted, but who knows what the future holds — in the decades to come, George Washington’s cadaver and Hitler’s brain may yet sit in a cafe somewhere sharing a conversation:
George Washington may have been America’s first president, but was he nearly America’s first zombie-in-chief? If William Thornton, physician and designer of the US Capitol, had had his way, Washington’s body would have been subjected a scientific experiment designed to bring the deceased former president back to life.
Washington’s body was not buried immediately after his death. The president may not have feared death, but he did fear being buried alive. Before he died, he commanded his secretary, Tobias Lear, to make sure that he would not be entombed less than three days after he died. In accordance with…
Woman ‘Cooked To Death’ At Guru’s Self-Improvement Seminar
Be careful what you consent to in the name of new age-y self actualization — it can go horribly wrong. From the National Post:
Quebec police officers have completed their report into the bizarre death of Chantale Lavigne — who was “cooked to death” at a personal development seminar.
Lavigne died in hospital after she and eight others in a personal-development seminar called Dying in Consciousness were covered with mud, wrapped in plastic, put under blankets and immobilized with their heads in cardboard boxes for about nine hours, under instructions to hyperventilate.
Gabrielle Frechette, a self-styled therapist, was the seminar’s operator. According to Radio-Canada, Frechette has been running self-improvement courses for about two decades, and claims to be channelling Melchisedech, a Biblical figure.
Turn Deceased Loved Ones’ Ashes Into Bullets
The 
Alabama-based company Holy Smoke will do just this, loading cremated remains into live shotgun rounds — allowing for numerous possibilities of sweetly perfect, Tarantino-esque posthumous vengeance:
My friend smiled and said “You know I’ve thought about this for some time and I want to be cremated. Then I want my ashes put into some turkey load shotgun shells and have someone that knows how to turkey hunt use the shotgun shells with my ashes to shoot a turkey. That way I will rest in peace knowing that the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second.”
I realized that my friend was describing almost exactly how I wanted my ashes to be spread. How perfect to have my family and friends honor me by using shotgun shells with a little bit of my ash in each one. Whether my shells get shot at…
Dead People Power: UK Crematorium to Sell Power for National Grid
Jasper Copping reports in the Telegraph:
Durham Crematorium wants to install turbines in two of its burners, which would use the heat generated during the cremation process to provide the same amount of electricity as would power 1,500 televisions.
A third burner is to be used to provide heating for the site’s chapel and its offices. The scheme would be the first of its kind in the UK but industry experts say that it could be followed by other similar projects.
Many crematoria are currently replacing their furnaces, to meet government targets on preventing mercury emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. Up to 16 per cent of all mercury emitted in the UK comes from crematoria because of fillings in teeth. Left unchecked, that figure is predicted to rise to 25 per cent by 2020.
Dead Man’s Twitter Feed Keeps Updating
Last week John Pospisil, the editor of Blorge.com, passed away, but his Twitter feed continued updating, since he’d configured it to re-tweet all the headlines from his group technology blog.
“Eventually I figured it out,” reports one technology blogger, “but it was a big shock to see more messages appearing from John himself on the day after he’d died.” They also dedicated their first ebook to Pospisil, a Thanksgiving children’s story, because “I’d always thought we’d watch the world changing together…”
Steve Jobs (Spiritually) Hated Power Switches
60 Minutes had a lengthy interview with Steve Jobs’ handpicked biographer Walter Isaacson (who has authored well received biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein). Video below and here’s an explanation for why your iPad or iPhone is a royal pain to turn off:
Walter Isaacson (Jobs’ biographer): I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden one day and he started talking about God. He said, “Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50–50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of — maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on. The he paused for a second and he said ‘yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone.’ He said — and paused again, and he said, “And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”
Making Everyday Objects Deadly: The Art of the Shiv
I’ve also heard them called shanks, the word itself, “shiv” or “shank,” intuitively sounds like their intended use, further relayed with these photos from this article by William Drenttel in Design Observer:
A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner’s closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque. They’re primitive, too — like outsider art, but produced deep on the inside.
The individual parts that make up a shiv tend to be everyday objects, innocent things furtively reconstituted as lethal weapons. Each design choice is essential, but what’s particularly notable is that shivs, at their core, are not so much evocations of minimalism as they are symbols of survivalism. A shiv is all about masked utility: it’s an innocuous object with improbably toxic intent (whether used to attack others or to protect oneself…)
British Man To Be Turned Into Mummy
This is the way to do it: live a rich and full life, and then be turned into a monster after dying. The Belfast Telegraph writes:
A former taxi driver has become the first person for 3,000 years to be mummified in the same way as the pharaohs. Alan Billis will be turned into a mummy over the space of a few months as his body is preserved using the techniques which the ancient Egyptians used on Tutankhamun.
Mr Billis had been terminally ill with cancer when he volunteered to undergo the procedure which a scientist has been working to recreate for many years. The 61-year-old from Torquay in Devon had the backing of his wife Jan, who said: “I’m the only woman in the country who’s got a mummy for a husband.”
Dr Stephen Buckley, a chemist and research fellow at York University, has spent 19 years trying to uncover the preservation techniques…
Spanish Blood Test Can Tell When You’ll Die. Maybe.
Three-dimensional molecular structure of a telomere (G-quadruplex). Credit: Giac83 (CC)
But do you really want to know? Giles Tremlett reports on the small Spanish biological research company at the center of claims that its blood test can predict the age you will die, for the Guardian:
As a taxi takes me across Madrid to the laboratories of Spain’s National Cancer Research Centre, I am fretting about the future. I am one of the first people in the world to provide a blood sample for a new test, which has been variously described as a predictor of how long I will live, a waste of time or a handy indicator of how well (or badly) my body is ageing. Today I get the results.
Some newspapers, to the dismay of the scientists involved, have gleefully announced that the test – which measures the telomeres (the protective caps on the ends of my chromosomes) –…
The 250-Year-Old Bagua Master
The other day I quite randomly came upon the story of Li Ching-Yuen, the bagua master that reportedly lived around 250 years. This from Wikipedia, or the NY Times Obituary:
He began gathering herbs in the mountain ranges at the age of ten, and also began learning of longevity methods, surviving on a diet of herbs and rice wine. He lived this way for the first 100 years of his life. In 1749, when he was 71 years old, he moved to Kai Xian to join the Chinese army as a teacher of the martial arts and as a tactical advisor.
One of his disciples, the Taiji Quan Master Da Liu told of Master Li’s story: at 130 years old Master Li encountered an older hermit, over 500 years old, in the mountains who taught him Baguazhang and a set of Qigong with breathing instructions, movements training coordinated with specific sounds, and dietary recommendations. Da Liu reports that his master said that his…
Irishman Dies Of Spontaneous Combustion (So Rules A Court of Law)
A most bizarre find from Annalee Newitz of io9.com:
A man in Galway, Ireland apparently died of spontaneous combustion last year in December. At least, according to a court ruling this week. Michael Faherty’s death had been a mystery because coroners and police couldn’t explain how the fire that killed him only seemed to have burned the man and his immediate surroundings.
Spontaneous combustion occurs when a person suddenly catches on fire without any external source of fire causing the blaze. There have been only a few hundred cases recorded throughout the world. The Irish Times reports: West Galway corner Dr Ciarán McLoughlin said he had never encountered such a case in the 25 years that he had been investigating deaths in the region …
Fear Of “Killer Phone Number” Spreads In Nigeria
No biggie, just let it go to voicemail. Via the BBC:
Nigeria’s authorities have been forced to reassure the public that a mobile phone number cannot kill, after rumors were spread…that several people had died when they answered calls with the ID 09141.
The regulatory body, the Nigerian Communications Commission, said this was “unimaginable” and “unscrupulous persons” were spreading fear.
A BBC reporter was unable to get through to the number.
Text messages gave conflicting accounts of the number of people killed when they answered the call – some put the death toll at seven while others put it at 10.
Florida Funeral Home Unveils New Body ‘Liquefaction’ Unit
There are many things to consider when taking care of funeral arrangements: did the person want to be buried, cremated, or liquidated? This ‘alkaline hydrolysis” unit is thought to be more environmentally friendly than the traditional cremation process. BBC News reports:
A Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial “alkaline hydrolysis” unit at a Florida funeral home.
The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water.
The facility has been installed at the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St Petersburg, and will be used for the first time in the coming weeks. It is hoped other units will follow in the US, Canada and Europe.
The makers claim the process produces a third less greenhouse gas than cremation, uses a seventh of the energy, and allows for the complete separation of dental amalgam for safe disposal.
Mercury from amalgam vaporised in crematoria is…
Which Is Better: Execution By Needle Or Electric Chair?
That’s the choice given to prisoners in Virginia. Guillaume Decamme reports for AFP:
JARRATT, Virginia — Behind a blue curtain, the electric chair patiently waits its turn to take a life, but on this night in a chamber of a Virginia prison, murder convict Jerry Jackson dies by the needle.
“Fifteen days prior to execution, the inmate is asked which execution method he chooses,” explains David Bass at the Greensville Correctional Center.
“He may choose between the electric chair and the lethal injection.” For the most part, Bass says, “they prefer the injection.”
The man in the dark suit, speaking in a soft southern twang, is all too aware that most of America’s death row inmates pick the poison over the pulse of electrocution.
Of the various execution methods currently in use in the United States — electricity, firing squad, hanging, lethal injection and lethal gas — injection has become the standard.
As an employee of the…
To Start Life Anew, Thais ‘Practice’ Death
Via Reuters:
For those facing a run of bad luck and wanting to start things over, one Thai temple has an unusual solution: “rehearse” death with a mock funeral, including lying down in a coffin.
Pram Manee temple in Nakorn Nayok province, 107 km northeast of Bangkok, holds two of the rituals every day: at exactly 9:09 a.m. and 1:09 p.m., since the number nine is believed by Thais to bring good luck.
Participants in a recent ritual stood in front of their designated coffins, holding flowers and praying for bad luck to go away, then asked to receive good luck.
All had paid 180 baht ($6) for the flowers, a white sheet and “merit set” — a collection of necessities sometimes including toothpaste, toothbrushes and food — to be offered to monks, and the promise of a better life …
