I will Sunbathe on Your Grave !

OK, so "I will sunbathe on your grave" probably isn't as tough a threat as "I will spit/piss/dance on your grave but you might give it a shot next time you're bitching at somebody. When these two women did it they drew a lot of ire, one guy saying the women should be buried alive.
I see no problem with it as long as they clean off any oils they might have slimed the slabs with. Ths person taking the picture might have been the creepiest person in the mess.
Thig is, I have always liked bench type gravestones & I would hope people for generations to come might sit for a spell. No dress code, profanity, smoking, drinking AOK.
I don't know if sunbathing is allowed in cemeteries in general. Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery has some secluded areas currently but I don't know their rules.
Anyway, if you don't want people lying on your grave, you can always put iron spikes all over it.

How Low Can We Go ?WLWT reports that there have been people breaking into the parked cars of mourners at a couple cemeteries in Montgomery. People stealing metal & glass from monuments piss me off but this is really lame. heck, I even give drivers a pass when they come hurtling out of a cemetery & cut me off. I don't know if they're distraught or just stoned.
sheesh
WLWT story here

Apcalypse NOW!
In yet another bold bid to trigger the zombie apocalypse, gas drillers want to dig under the consecrated grounds of graveyards.
Proponents claim that deep underground, locked in ancient shale formations, are lucrative quantities of natural gas.They have also targeted parks, playgrounds, churches and residential backyards.
Opponents say cemeteries are hallowed ground that shouldn't be sullied by drilling activity. Some might say it's sacrilegious but if you worship money ~ I guess, it'd be ok.

Moose Son story here

Hats off to Wayne Coate's Recorder's Office for transferring the burial records of dead veterans to the intertubes. City Bleat reports the previously lost records

register the burial location of every veteran in the county who had served dating back to the Revolutionary War

The written records had been transferred to microfiche between the 1950s and ‘70s, and the map books were given to a local resident. Unfortunately the filmed records deteriorated over the years & the original books were lost.
Archiving is a PITA to put it mildly. It costs mney & the archives need to be updated from time to time (which costs more money). Eventually you have to decide what's worth keeping & what's not. Who knows what ancient knowledge has been lost due to the high cost of writing materials in the ancient world.
I haven't been to the HamCo library to look at the microfiched newspapers lately but the last time I did, the films weren't in great shape. Dunno if they had backups/masters or not. Just digitizing these suckers ain't foolproof either. Actually, you can be better off with old fashioned photography.
For now, one of the best things we can do is disseminate the info & Coates' crew's efforts are a step in the right direction.
And hats off to City Beat for publicizing their actions.

Over at The Daily Undertaker, they continue a series on making cemeteries relevant. In the latest entry they discuss Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver, BC. A 100+ yr old city owned cemetery of over 100 acres, they have invested some money into improving the site, are taking new interments and have even built an auditorium.
Perhaps this would be a model for Cincinnati's city owned Wesleyan Cemetery. It could be a better investment than the proposed city hall atrium if done right and could bring some life back to the long neglected graveyard.

Daily Undertaker post here.

TriCycle Hearse

Grrovy Green
yup - your dead arse can be carted off in a pedal powered hearse at Sunset Hills Cemetery in cloudy Eugene Oregon.

Problems With the Popular Dead
While most of us are aware of the problems of heavy traffic at the Pere Lachaise cemetery with throngs of people visiting the graves of famous people like Jim Morrison, cemeteries like that or Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery are pretty much set up for a good bit of traffic.
Smaller cemeteries, like Clark County, Ohio's Myers Cemetery in Pike Twp. aren't set up for heavy traffic. After the interment of Clark County Deputy Suzanne Hopper, their gravel roads haven't been able to hold up to the heavy traffic of mourners. They sought relief from the Clark County Sheriff's department and Sheriff Gene Kelly with the Clark County Engineer's office responded providing 4 truckloads of gravel that had been swept off public streets to resurface the roads in the cemetery incurring no capital costs to taxpayers.

In Heaven, Underground

I really want to see this movie. I really want to visit this cemetery. Weißensee Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery, was established in Berlin in 1880. After the Nazi pogrom of Jews came the commie occupation of Berlin. While interments continued the Jewish population dwindled & the commies did not care for the place. After 1990 efforts were made to clean the place up. After 50-60 years of neglect it had become a veritable forest.

Weißensee Cemetery

The Cemetery & Community Involvement

In a piece at The Daily Undertaker, Mr McNally points out, "A Cemetery remains relevant only when it is involved in the life of the community it serves." and goes on to illustrate his point with the story of a jazz service at a Delaware cemetery. Such events at funerals aren't too uncommon but in this case the deceased expired some 50 year ago.
Locally, Spring Grove Cemetery has a number of activities and the local Kiwanis have resurrected Memorial Day services at Wesleyan Cemetery but those are cemetery wide events. Dunno what their policies are for grave specific events like this jazz memorial.
Delaware Online article (and video) here.

I was just going to post this on PhaseBuch but they said my message was "spammy and abusive".

Chains

About a month ago I posted about Spring Grove Cemetery knocking down a good chunk of brick wall along Crawford Avenue. I wanted to wait till they got some grass or other landscaping in but they seem to have stalled out.
Anyway, here's some pics of their wonderful new chain link fence.


One nice thing is that you can see this one pond from the road now.

I have to admit the black fence does a good job of "disappearing" but it's just not as stately & cemeteryish as the old brick wall.

Memorial Day at Wesleyan Cemetery

Wesleyan Cemetery started out as a church graveyard for a Methodist church in downtown Cincinnati on Catherine Street. It was near where the P&G building stands today. They were running out of room & downtown real estate was prohibitively expensive so in the 1840s they moved out to what was then the middle of nowhere, Cumminsville. The caretaker was a good guy & moved out to the new cemetery. He took great care of the cemetery til he died. Then everything went to shit.
The cemetery fell into disrepair, records, if kept, were lost, people couldn't find graves, graves were being resold, graves were compromised, the Method Men abandoned the cemetery, caretakers raided the trust fund meant for upkeep...
Ultimately it fell into the hands of government & the city & county played hot potato with it til the city finally had it dumped on their lap. They cited maintenance costs that, per square foot, would have made mowing my lawn a $70 job.
Anyway, it's finally semi normal & for the past few years the Northside/College Hill Kiwanis have sponsored a Memorial Day service. There are veterans of every war the United States has fought in interred in the cemetery & for decades no such cervices were held there.
Thanks to all involved for doing this.

The Queen City Rainbow Band, MC Don Beische & Twin Towers Chaplain, Joe Boone


Kathy Dahl discusses the history of the cemetery


Sergeant Marcus Glasgow reflects on military service
Sergeant Glasgow prefaced his talk by hoping he didn't come off as a PTSD victim. nah.
Steve & Denise Driehaus attended as did Eric Kearney.

Funding City Parks
Over at UrbanCincy, Mr Simes has a post about the proposed upgrades for Washington Park. One of the issues is - only about half the funding is in place.
The park is managed by the city park board & financing with that entity is weird. Still money's tight all around these days.
Cincinnati has some lovely parks & is also home to some really nice cemeteries. One thing I think makes a city great is great architecture, art and statuary. On that last one, statuary, Cincinnati is pretty weak. OTOH, cemeteries like Spring Grove are treasure troves of statuary.
So, in an effort to get more statuary in the city & help pay for the parks, how about selling people graves in the public parks? Washington Park is a no brainer because it actually used to be a cemetery. Monuments could be as simple as a bench or giant angels blowing horns & stuff. Park planners could set up a kind of "form based" system with bold monuments in some places & monument benches, tables, drinking fountains, arches & stuff in appropriate places.
The sites would be more expensive than regular cemetery lots because the whole idea is to raise long term maintenance money & the deceased would get more face time with the living being in a park instead of being tucked away in a cemetery.
It's kinda like selling personalized pavers except bigger & more permanent. (My mom bought a paver for a museum & she is one of only a few who still has her name on the brick. Everybody else's wore off, but they put a trash can on my mom's so it is still in great shape!)
PS Spring Grove now has summer hours. Open late til 8 on Mondays & Thursdays.