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.