Texting From Beyond the Grave, On Your Headstone
Leave a message for your descendants 3,200 years from now?!? I guess you can assuming we don’t blow it all to hell, and our ape overloads are ruling the planet. This company has the same name as those language DVDs, but they are definitely thinking “long-term” … James Williams writes on Discovery News:
Generally a headstone conveys two very basic facts about the person interred below it — their name plus the two most important dates of their life. Thanks to some new technology, headstones can now convey much more that: a photo and note written by the deceased, delivered right to your phone.
The product is called RosettaStone and comes from a company called Objecs. If you were to purchase a RosettaStone, you’d receive what looks like a granite iPod with a few…
Keith Olbermann: ‘My Father Asked Me To Kill Him’ (Video)
Danny Shea writes on Huffington Post:
“Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.”
Keith Olbermann opened his emotional Special Comment on health care Wednesday with the story of his father’s six-month-long hospitalization suffering through a colon removal, pneumonia, kidney failure, liver failure, and many infections.
After a particularly difficult week, Olbermann said he went into his father’s hospital room to find him “thrashing his head back and forth” and mouthing the word “Help.”
“It was just too much for my father,” Olbermann said. “‘Stop this,’ he mouths. ‘Stop, stop, stop.’”
Olbermann said he resorted to gallows humor, asking his father, “What, you want me to smother you with a pillow?” And his father responded, mouthing, “Yes, kill me.”
Resurrected Man Claimed by Two Families
Chris Capps writes on Unexplainable.net:
A man who has allegedly come back from the dead after being murdered is being fought over by two families, each claiming him as their own son in Transkei. The man is being called Siviwe Ntwalana, a man who was murdered five years ago and also Lakitha Zokufa after another deceased son who allegedly came back from the dead. The story is too strange for fiction.
The man in dispute is currently residing at Mthatha General Hospital Mental Clinic under the name Lakitha Zokufa.
Apparently the man with two names’ testimony, when present, is not applicable in this situation, but it seems he isn’t particularly sure himself which of the families is correct. Interestingly, there is no real gain for either family financially for getting their son back,…
The Cat Who Could Predict Death
David Dosa, MD, a geriatrician since 2003 in Barrington, Rhode Island, has made the news recently with revelations of a cat that uncannily predicts death. His book Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat is excerpted in Readers Digest:
My faith in science and my own intellectual vanity led me to reject the notion that some four-legged feline possessed special powers. As a researcher, I’d been taught to consider facts dispassionately—to analyze them, form theories, and poke holes in them until new theories arose that were closer to the truth. From a scientific point of view, it seemed ludicrous that a cat could predict human death. It was much easier to say that Oscar was drawn to warm, quiet beds—cats sleep two thirds of the time anyway, right?
Still, there was a plausible biological explanation for the “sweet smell of death,” which was perhaps what Oscar had sensed. As cells die, carbohydrates are degraded into many different oxygenated compounds, including various types of ketones—chemical mixtures known for their fragrant aroma…
Oscar the ‘Death Cat’ Predicts 50 Deaths in Rhode Island Nursing Home
Tom Leonard writes in the Telegraph:
A cat with an uncanny ability to detect when nursing home patients are about to die has proven itself in around 50 cases by curling up with them in their final hours, according to a new book.
Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the New England nursing home wrong in their predictions over which patients were close to death.
The cat, now five and generally unsociable, was adopted as a kitten at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Providence, Rhode Island, which specialises in caring for people with severe dementia.
Dr Dosa first publicised Oscar’s gift in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in…
Nevermore? No Mystery Visitor to Poe’s Grave for First Time in 60 Years
You can get a more detailed description of the mystery on Wikipedia. Here’s the report from the Baltimore Sun:
A longtime tribute to Edgar Allan Poe may have come to an end with the absence of the “Poe Toaster,” who for more than half a century has marked the poet’s birthday by laying roses and a bottle of cognac at his original grave site.
This is the first time since Jan. 19, 1949 that the person, whose identity is unknown, failed to arrive, said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House.
“I was very annoyed,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since 1977, and there was no indication he wasn’t going to show up,” Jerome said.
The curator said the toaster usually arrives between midnight and 5:30 a.m. He said he arrived at Westminster Hall at 10:30 p.m., because one year the toaster left his offerings at 11:30 p.m.
He sometimes kneels at the tombstone or puts his hands on it, Jerome said. “There’s no elaborate ceremony — it’s very short and touching,” he said.
Does Atheism Offer As Much Comfort in Death As Religion?
Greta Christina writes on Alternet:
What is an appropriate atheist philosophy of death?
And how should atheists be talking about death with believers?
As regular readers know, I’ve been doing a project on Facebook: the Atheist Meme of the Day, in which I write pithy, Facebook-ready memes explaining one aspect of atheism or exploding one myth about it, and asking people to pass the memes on if they like. (BTW, if you’re on Facebook, friend me!)
Some of my Memes of the Day have generated disagreement from some atheists. Which is fine, of course. I don’t expect or want all atheists to agree about everything. Quite the contrary: one of the great things about atheism is that we have no central dogma that we all have to agree on, and no central authority that…
Green (Gross?) Cremation Method Produces Liquid Fertilizer
From Mother Nature Network:
There are an awful lot of people on the planet, and modern methods for disposing of human remains aren’t exactly earth-friendly. A new alternative to cremation and burial could change that — and even increase food production for those still living — if we can get past the ‘ick factor’ of liquefying our dead relatives.
“Resomation” is the process of disposing of human corpses through alkaline hydrolysis, which occurs when the body is sealed inside a vault-like tube filled with water and lye and steam-heated to 300 degrees. Three hours later, some powdery bone fragments and 200 gallons of fluid are all that remains.
Essentially, Resomation — which was developed by Scottish company Resomation Ltd. — is just like the natural process of decomposition, but on fast-forward. The fluid…
Ohio Has New Method Of Lethal Injection
LUCASVILLE, Ohio — State prison authorities are preparing to use a new method of lethal injection to execute a convicted killer next week.The change will make Ohio the only state in the nation to use the new method.
On Monday, reporters and photographers, including News Center 7, were allowed inside the Death House at Lucasville Correctional Facility, where the death penalty will be carried out. Prison officials readily admitted that Ohio will be the first state to use this lethal injection method for executions. They said it is both humane and effective.
Since the state began using the death penalty again in 1999, officials used a series of three drugs to execute inmates. First, to sedate and then to stop the heart and lungs.
Now, authorities are switching to a new…
Vietnamese Man Slept Beside Dead Wife For 5 Years
Mad news courtesy of Reuters:
HANOI (Reuters) – A Vietnamese man dug up his wife’s corpse and slept beside it for five years because he wanted to hug her in bed, an online newspaper reported on Thursday.
The 55-year-old man from a small town in the central province of Quang Nam opened up his wife’s grave in 2004, molded clay around the remains to give the figure of a woman, put clothes on her and then placed her in his bed, Vietnamnet.vn said.
The man, Le Van, told the website that after his wife died in 2003 he slept on top of her grave, but about 20 months later he worried about rain, wind and cold, so he decided to dig a tunnel into the grave “to sleep with her.”
His children found out,…
Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
I don’t usually link to book reviews but this one is fascinating. Check it out, from California Literary Review:
The clunky, oddball title is both intriguing and off-putting, the subtitle quaint and risible — evoking images of Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman excavating a plot in a downpour (“Young Frankenstein”) or possibly Oliver Hardy whacking Stan Laurel’s toe in the graveyard dirt (“Habeas Corpus”).
In this age of cremations, cryonic storage, and ashes shot into space, grave robbing seems to hail from another era. However, the theft of human remains persists as a rare but fascinating phenomenon.
… Still, it’s a shock to open Dickey’s book and learn that the skulls of some very prominent people — composers Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Joseph Haydn; painter Francisco Goya; Renaissance scholar and theologian Sir Thomas Browne; and scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg — were dug up, stolen, mutilated, handed from one person to another, and perhaps in some cases mislaid or lost forever.
How could this have happened?
[continues at California Literary Review]
Facebook Unveils Postmortem Profile Option
This past week, Facebook announced that they are now offering a “memorialization” option for the profiles of deceased users. Friends and family can “memorialize” the accounts of dead loved ones, so that they are locked from future logins, stripped of contact information, and no longer appears in “Suggestions” (i.e. ‘You haven’t poked Joe in a while! Click to send him a message!’). The dead person profile option is obviously ripe for abuse. Here’s what was written about it on the official Facebook blog:
If you have a friend or a family member whose profile should be memorialized, please contact us, so their memory can properly live on among their friends on Facebook. As time passes, the sting of losing someone you care about also fades but it never goes away.
…
The Art of Death
During the past weekend’s festivities, many of us decorated ourselves and our surroundings in the trappings of the dead. Sometimes, the dear and deceased return the favor, allowing their bones and belongings to be transformed into sacred, artistic installations that remind us of our own fleeting days.
All things must pass…
The WebUrbanist offers this handy countdown of the world’s most gorgeous (ghastly?) ossuaries.
Wal-Mart Starts Selling Caskets, Urns Online
USA Today reports:
MILWAUKEE — The world’s largest retailer wants to keep its customers even after they die.
Wal-Mart has started selling caskets on its website at prices that undercut many funeral homes, long the major seller of caskets.
The move follows a similar one by discount rival Costco, which also sells caskets on its site.
