But do they make it in argyle?

I know, I know, this is old.  But it's new to me!  And I so very rarely get to talk about caskets.

This is a coffin. A wool coffin.  This is one of many ways people are making burial of the dead a little more eco-friendly, and I have to admit, if you were to simply tell me that one could make coffins out of wool, I'd have expected something that looked like one of my great aunt's knitted scarves and not this elegant white casket.

Warming Up the Cold Touch of Death

Does it turn blue if you take the white pills?

First thing I thought about when I saw Ann Marinenko's ghost urns was the Android mascot.  No lie.  I think the description on the website I found these on is... strange.  They refer to the urns as "timeless like a pall," but I bet if you gave one of these to anyone who has attended their fair share of funerals they would disagree.

I will give them that they're whimsical and cute, if a bit unsettling.  Not a bad choice if they get off the ground.

Jack Bell gallery showcases awesome caskets...

I've showcased urns here before, but I don't think until now I've showcased caskets.

And this guy makes some awesome caskets, shaped like things like cars and airplanes and animals and... is that a cacao pod?  I don't know, I just know that it's made of awesome.  His name is Paa Joe.

Article can be found at Gawker which also has a link to the exhibition itself.

Just in time for Christmas!

What do you get for the death aficionado who seems to have everything?  A souvenir from the LA County Coroner.

Their sales have apparently been... well, dead.  Which makes sense because the last thing you want to see as you go to identify your dead next of kin at t he morgue is a rack of hats featuring chalk lines or a lapel pin featuring a foot with a toetag, so they don't really advertise it.  Until now. All they need is the right advertising.

From Yahoo! news:

The store has always been somewhat of a barebones operation. It evolved from a few coffee mugs and T-shirts the department had printed up to use as giveaways at conferences. Then people started requesting them and the department opened a small shop in a supply closet in 1993.

A following developed for the items that poke fun at death — there's nothing gory or bloody — and it landed in tourist guidebooks as a stop for unique souvenirs.

Tour buses stop there and tourists do seek it out. However, the shop's success has been limited by its location on the eastside of downtown Los Angeles amid a grimy strip of auto-glass businesses. The shop lacks a sign outside the coroner's office, a red-brick, century-old former hospital.

From a search I learned that they actually have an online version of the store at this location.  Which is cool until you realize that some of the merchandise doesn't actually make any sense. 

Wow, Oklahoma, really?

Yeah, this is a little late, but... interesting.

There's a shortage of one of the three drugs used to kill people on death row.  I don't know if you knew that, but you do now.  It's the part that serves as an anesthetic.  So a lot of death sentences are being delayed until more sodium thiopental is produced.

Oklahoma didn't want to wait, so they're considering using drugs used to euthanize animals such as pentobarbital to do the job, which sounds humane until you realize we don't really know the dose necessary to kill a human without it being cruel.

In court briefs filed on his behalf, attorneys argue that pentobarbital is unsafe and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. They say there have been numerous problems in executions across the country even with the drug that has been tested. Defense lawyers also say the new drug is not an ultra-short-acting barbiturate, as the law requires.

I find myself mildly amused by their argument that it is "unsafe" considering the whole point is to kill someone, but I digress.  The point is that there are complications even with the usual drugs they use, so introducing a new method could spell disaster whether you believe in capital punishment or not.

Article found on NPR.

How did you get here?

I have a strange obsession with Google Analytics, like many people running websites and blogs.  I just love seeing what barbaric search terms drove people to click on one of my links.  I have taken the liberty of screen shooting the top ten for this site:

Wow.  I am seriously tickled by this.  Besides the number five "Stuff Dead People Like" which I assume is all people who wanted to title their blog that, every major search cue is over this piece of crap satire piece.  On the bright side, this does mean that there are many, many people out there who are actually using search engines to question things.

And hey, at least it's better than one of my other blogs where the predominant search was for the word "lesbocution."

Freeze dry your pet for $395!

Or more, if you have a normal sized pet.

This is topical for me.  My beloved rat, Scotch, died recently and because the ground is frozen I cannot bury her.  She is instead in my freezer at the suggestion of my father.  Some think that's excessive, as she is in fact just a rat.

So imagine the thoughts going through my head when I saw this:

That is Foxy.  When she died, her owner Debbie was distraught.  But rather than bury Foxy, as most of us would have done, or have her cremated as we have done, Debbie went to Perpetual Pet, which for $395 (or more for a larger pet) will freeze dry your pet in a lifelike position so you can make him or her a permanent part of your home's decor.

Is this the extreme version of a rat in a freezer?

Down on the body farm, again.

So many memories of Anthro class.

Neatorama just posted this entry on a new body farm which is being created in Pennsylvania.

From the linked article in The Atlantic I learned that, although pre-donated bodies are preferred, unclaimed bodies with no next of kin are also donated to body farms.

I don't know if I consider that better or worse than what I learned in A Certain Kind of Death.

Ashes to ashes, dust to *beep* *beep*

It always warms my heart to see a last wish fulfilled that isn't utterly insane.

This guy, Melvin Baker, was carried to his funeral by JCB backhoe. Although he was cremated, he was put in a regular sized casket for the occasion.

My favorite quote from this article:

”After he died, I dreaded bringing it up with his family, but Jean just said ‘we’ve got to do it for him, Keith, he went on about it all the time’.

Via Neatorama.

Also, upon searching to see if this was legit as there weren't that many sources on this, I found a video on YouTube:

Felicity Marmaduke is a hoax. Really.

I would like to thank whoever wrote this article for the surge in web traffic as apparently for a little while everyone and their mother who wanted to know if this story was true wound up here at SDPL. That actually kind of terrifies me.  A few days later Snopes came forth with this article which also debunks the Felicity Marmaduke story as satire.

People have been posting this story on my Facebook a lot, my comments are below the blockquote:
Dead man in mortuary impregnates woman

The Rolling Stones said it best, “You, you make a dead man cum.” A 38 year old female mortuary worker is being held on $250,000 bond after becoming pregnant by one of her clients-a dead man. The alleged crime took place at the Mourning Glory Mortuary just outside of Lexington, Missouri. Police have charged Felicity Marmaduke with desecration of the dead and necrophilia.

A Google search for "Felicity Marmaduke" finds nothing but this article and blogs related to this article, so I'm forced to call this what scholarly jargon would term "bullshit."  When you read the rest of the site you get such articles as "Minnesota Vikings confront Brett Favre in shower" which details a story of the Minnesota Vikings holding Favre down in a shower to compare his genitals to those he allegedly sent to Jennifer Sterger.  As a Wisconsinite I have a hard time believing I wouldn't have heard this had it actually happened, so our source is satire, something like The Onion News (the primary difference being that The Onion is actually funny).

I do think it's important that this be mentioned, though, because there seems to be an unfortunately high number of people presenting this story as fact when it in fact is not.

Watch this gecko get eaten by ants

Hamilton looks for zombies, doesn't find them.

This blog is not dead.

Perhaps it ate a puffer fish and is in that awkward state where it looks dead but isn't.

I consider updating it often.

The problem is, of course, that I hadn't found anything interesting in the world of death lately.

It's a little late, I guess, but there's a documentary you can view online called Nzambi which is about Haitian zombies. Not going to lie, while it's very interesting from a social anthropological standpoint (something I do in fact enjoy), if you're hoping to see any real zombies here you aren't going to find them.

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI

Ha ha, puffer fish, get it?

One of the world's happiest cemeteries...

On Flickr, updated late August, discovered like most everything on this site at BoingBoing...

A Merry Cemetery

At this cemetery in Romania, the dead are memorialized with cheerful oak grave markers painted with happy images of the deceased.  I do have to say... this one's my favorite:

Dying in Space

How do you do it?  I mean, there are millions of ways you could die in space, but what about after?  Apparently the answer is promession.

I think I already posted something about promession... or maybe it's in the log of essays that are set for the future so I have license to be lazy when updating this blog (heh).  But I do remember one thing... it didn't mention outer space.  And that adds to its cool factor several times.

The basic plan:  Have a ceremony, put in a Star Trek-esque death capsule, hang it outside where nitrogen will freeze it solid, vibrate it until it crushes to powder, fold it (!!!), bring back into space capsule, return crispy freeze dried body to relatives.

Death in Space

Death By Caffeine

I recall finding this a really long time ago... but now that I have a death blog I guess it feels like something I should be spreading out more.

Death By Caffeine

Based on your body weight and a caffeinated product, this will tell you how many servings of that product will kill you... from just the caffeine alone.

My preferred poison is Coke Zero.  It would take 455 cans of Coke Zero to kill me.  One would think, of course, that I would die from fluid or aspartame poisoning before the caffeine got to me at that level.

A terrifying way to spread ashes.

What are those smoke signals off in the distance?!  Oh, wait, those aren't smoke signals... that's grandpa.

Release Urns from Cremation Solutions

Found this while on the same site looking at the Barack Obama shaped cremation urn.  It's a machine that spreads your ashes in a gigantic puff of dust which I guess looks kind of like smoke from a campfire.



Don't be too upset that I called this "terrifying." Even though it is. I mean, in my world, isn't "terrifying" just another word for "awesome?"

Now all they need is one shaped like a fire-breathing dragon.

The world's creepiest urn.

It's shaped and painted like your deceased loved ones.  Right now their example is shaped like Barack Obama, which is for some reason slightly more terrifying.

Personal Cremation Urns by Cremation Solutions

Death: Before and After

German photographers Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta took several photographs and interviews of people who were in their last few days of life.  These are some photographs of those people before death and after death.  The difference is so striking... that spark of life is far more than just animation.

Life Before Death, from Guardian.co.uk

15 Things You Didn't Know About The Dead

Via: Medical Insurance Blog

Spin in your grave.

This just in via BoingBoing... there's a company called And Vinyly which will press your cremated remains into vinyl records.

Am I the only one who is reminded of Ed Headrick being pressed into frisbees with this?  I think it's an awesome idea, personally, but can I get mine done into 3x5 floppy disks instead?

Anyone for sex after death?

Are you into sexual liberation? Meet the Necrocard.

Anyone For Sex After Death?

Yup, it's a donor card for alerting authorities that you are willing to donate your body for necrophiliac sexual experimentation.  Even has some checkboxes to make sure your personal sexual preferences are taken into account.  Viva la revolucion sexual!

These are pretty much tongue-in-cheek... but they do carry some very important points about consent.

New link... donate to a Body Farm

I'm a fan of having autonomous choice about what happens to your body... before and after death... so I guess I kind of collect places to donate them should you choose.

Randomly today I stumbled upon this.  It's a link to donate your body to the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Department.

Now, I both have a degree in Anthropology (not Forensic Anthropology, but Anthropology nonetheless) and have seen the show "Bones" more than once... and I know what that means.  BODY FARM.



Morbid though it may be, this is important work that helps solve crimes and solve the mysteries of human decomposition. And when you're finished decomposing, your bones are cleaned to go into a collection of donated bones.

Cue college memories...

And perhaps one of the worst pictures of me on the Internet.  Ahhh, those were the days.

--Jackson

So... When Will You Die?

Based on your age now, your sex, your BMI, and your status as a smoker or non-smoker this calculates about when you're going to die based on your life expectancy.

The Death Clock - When Am I Going To Die?

My projected death date based on this analysis? July 31, 2078.

Best I could have hoped for, I guess.

Don't you work at a morgue?

see more Comixed

Helping Around The House

I happened upon this essay explaining how Teotihuacan people used the bones of deceased relatives to make household items such as combs, spatulas, and buttons.

The bones found were usually those of relatives and not random travelers, so it's likely this fulfilled some sort of spiritual purpose by keeping your relatives around even after death.

This isn't exactly a scholarly essay, though.  Just a curiosity I guess.  Plus, I wouldn't go so far as to say making forks out of your dead is the same as not fearing death.

Wag Festival

Alright, I know this is a cop-out, but there's a major festival of the dead in my faith coming soon so I figured I would at least mention it.

The veneration of ancestors is, well, primal.  Before we had Gods, we had ancestors, and that has carried on today in many of the world's faiths.  And in many of those cases, specific holidays are set aside to honor the dead.  Most popular in my area are Halloween, Samhain, and El Dia de los Muertos, which fall at about the same time and are major death-veneration and spirit-appeasing festivals.

In my case, though, we have Wag.  Wag in a modern Kemetic's life involves such wonderful activities as praying for and to the Akhu (ancestors), putting small boats on a shrine pointed to Abydos, and giving offerings of flowers and alcohol.  It's also a celebration of the death and rebirth of Osiris.

Wag festival started tonight and continues until the 25th.  Dua Wesir! Dua Akhu!

Awesome comic book about human decomposition.

I found this gem on BoingBoing from about a half hour ago.  There's an artist named Ariyana Suvarnasuddhi who has drawn a comic called "Stages of Human Decomposition" which uses a sushi bar to illustrate the stages of... well, human decomposition.  It's delightful!

Dead Bodies Decorating The Living

I haven't updated in a few months and honestly I want to start it up again.  So for my "back from the dead" post, another story.

I love tattoos.  I have one, plan on another, and am instantly distracted by anybody who has visible tattoos.  I see one which, sadly enough, is clearly a memorial tattoo to a child who died.  I learned that it was the man's younger brother.

I also learned that he'd had had some of his brother's cremation ashes put into the ink.

So the fifth thing dead people like?  Decorating the living.

In case you think this isn't real, here's another example of the same thing.

Flush 'em down the toilet

This isn't a "new" idea because the article's really old (since the blog's relatively new I gotta catch up to the weirdness on the Internet that's been out there for so many years), but it was an eye-popper so I figured I'd post it anyway.

Newsvine:  Dissolving bodies with lye.

Alright.  So my philosophy for a while has been that a dead body is a dead body.  But this just feels weird to me.  Turning people into soup.  Yuck.

To be fair, though, there are remains left over which are similar to cremains.  So is it really any worse than burning somebody?  Probably not.

Waiting for the Coroner... A Really Long Time

Story time.  So seven years ago, while I was living in a dorm in college, my roommate decided to move out.  I was alone in the room for the remainder of the year, the other half of my room serving as an occasional closet for my roommate but otherwise it was as if I was in a single room.  I rarely talked to my parents, my professors didn't take attendance, and I didn't have much of a social life yet, so I suddenly had to ask myself the question... what would happen if I mysteriously died in my room?  Would anybody even notice?  Would my body just chillax until the stench alerted everyone on my floor of my untimely demise?

At that point I wrote on my Livejournal that if I ever went three days without writing, they should call my room phone to make sure nothing had happened to me, and if they couldn't get hold of me they should call my parents.  Yes, I was paranoid to an excessive degree.  But I mean, really, what would have happened?

Even worse, what would have happened if I were somewhere truly remote?  It's one thing to die in a dorm room... clearly people would know who I was.  What about those people who don't have any next of kin, don't have any friends, don't get out much, what happens when they die?

A Certain Kind of Death tackles those questions in a quite graphic but very educational way... the stories of decedents are pieced together from scraps of information found around their homes, paperwork is done, burial arrangements are made.  I do not recommend it to people with weak stomachs... but if you have that, I sort of wonder why you're reading a blog called "Stuff Dead People Like."

Ashes to pencils.

This one has been covered for a couple of years, but say you have a loved one who just loved to write and draw, and that loved one dies and is cremated.

What to do?  Well, Nadine Jarvis has an idea:

She can turn the contents of an average batch of cremains into about 240 pencils.  No need for your artistic loved ones to ever stop drawing!

The case they come in also doubles as a pencil sharpener and... well, an urn.

-- Setkheni

The motorcycle wake.

This, my friends, is the wake of a badass.  Rather than succumb to the usual prone position, David Colon was embalmed and propped on his favorite motorcycle.

You wish your funeral could be this awesome.

-- Setkheni

My inspiration: Cremain Diamonds

I start with this topic because it was my inspiration for all of this.

I was in second grade.  We were learning about rocks in my science class when my teacher explained that diamonds are made out of carbon.  I was one of those nerdy kids who would read nonfiction science books all day, so I raised my hand and asked "People are made of carbon, too.  Does that mean we could turn people into diamonds?"

She explained that, no, we could not turn people into diamonds.

It would be several years later before I realized that she was completely, totally wrong.  Enter LifeGem, a company which takes the cremains of your deceased loved ones and presses them into diamonds to be cut for jewelry.  Jack 1, Ms. Muelius 0.

That led me to a life-long fascination with the ways people deal with death, what we do with the "leftovers" when we are no longer using them, the taboos surrounding them, and of course the rapidly increasing number of creative things to do with a dead body.

That's what this blog is about.  The weird, interesting, and inspirational things that can be done to you when you die.  Maybe you'll find these posts interesting curiosities.  Maybe you're looking for inspiration.  Whatever the case, enjoy your stay.

-- Setkheni