Sky Burial at Wesleyan Cemetery ?

This bird, eating roadkill on Colerain Avenue near Cincinnati's Wesleyan Cemetery has been identified as a Black Vulture - a breed that has been absent SW Ohio for some time.
Turkey Vultures have resided here steadily.
While Cincinnati doesn't want to inter people in the cemetery nor invest in an auditorium / chapel, or outdoor cremation ovens, or a , people composting device, maybe performing sky burials at the rear of the cemetery would be a good source of revenue for the city with little investment.
What is a sky burial?
In the mountains of Tibet, burial & cremation aren't too handy due to shallow soil so they take their ded out, chop 'em up & throw the pieces to the buzzards, vultures, birds who eat them up.
They free the soul & provide nutrition for the birds.
With more carnivorous birds in the area it could offer people a new & exciting way to dispense with their remains.

The Post Mortem Sexbot

So what happens to your sex robot after you die? Does you spouse want it? Does your spouse even know about it?
It could be auctioned off with the rest of your estate. You could will it to your kid. In the event that your bot was modeled after your spouse, that could lead to some weird oedipal issues. Of course, if the bot can do more than sex, it might just become the kid;s robo-nanny.
Of course, you can take it with you, although as AI evolves, it might raise some ethical issues. you could turn the unit off or entomb it & let the batteries wear out. That might make visits to the cemetery interesting as one would hear ever fainter noises coming from crypts & graves.
Of course not all cemeteries would accept them. The inheritor of the sexbot come nannybot might want a nonfunctioning unit interred in a family plot. After all, it might have lasted multiple generations.
The used bot's AI also might make comparisons to it's previous owners that might put off the new owners. "OOH, that's not how your daddy did that"
The funeral director will be faced with the issue of the surviving sexbot attending the funeral & timing that with the transferring of the property.
Which leads to another issie - What if the owner wants to set his robot free? Ptobably not an issue with the current line of animatronics, but down the road? No doubt many sexbots will have skimpy maid outfits in their wardrobe but will they have marketable skills? Might grandpa's sexbot just wind up turning tricks at Third & Main untill Chinese gangsterbots kidnap the unit & part it out?
Just the idea of having sex with machines might be an issue for some folks now, but we need to look at the long term implications, too.

Amateur Funeral Pyres for Pets

A neighbor decided to dispose of his dead dog via open air cremation. Instead of doing his research, he used an accelerant and burned up most of his back yard and melted the siding off his garage. The pup's corpse was fairly intact when the fire department arrived.
The guy was drunk & stoned so, of course, he attacked the fire fighters. Flames were reported 20-30 feet high & threatening trees.
This is probably illegal in your town in the first place, but if you insist on doing this, do your homework. You need a hot fire not a big fire & you will need to attend the fire for about a day doing some stirring as you go.

Scatter Your Ashes ?

Want your ashes scattered? >Mesoloft REALLY scatter your ashes - like - from space!
And they record video, too.

Death Cafes

Some folks from Arlington Memorial Gardens in Cincinnati discuss their monthly 'Death Cafes' on WVXU.

Goodbye Earl

So, this chick is proposing a new funeral / body disposing concept for her thesis. She's calling it The Urban Death Project
The idea is to return your body to the earth by dumping it into a giant composting bin full of wood chips. The compost would then be redistributed to family & the community.
No expensive funeral tying up loads of resources & putting scary chemicals into the ground.
The idea of carrying the body up 2-3 flights of ramp gives me the impression that the designer has never been a pall bearer, tho…
Anyway, there's probably room to install something like this in the city owned Wesleyan Cemetery in Cincinnati.

Death Tech

I posted about this earlier, but here you can just watch & listen to Dr. John Troyer talk all the same shit that was in the Atlantic article. The early adoption of technologies by the death industry seems only rivaled by the sex industry. Think of that.
The biomass eating robots might com in handy when everybody in Texas dies of ebola.
I'm still hoping for the evolving music & speech shit.

I'm Gonna Be a Diamond Some Day

Yet another new way to dispose of your carcass when you die. Get cremated & then have your cremains pounded down & heated up till you wind up with a diamond suitable for jewelry or whatever. Have your spouse put it in a necklace and you can still 'hang around' after you're gone.
It would be an interesting plot development in a murder mystery about a black widow type serial killer.
Anyway, it ain't cheap.

Read more here.

Selling Luxury Caskets

probably NSFW
I'm guessing that the funeral industry in Poland is heavily dominated by men. Of course Poland also boasts the highest number of exorcists per capita in the world. 2015 marks Lindner's 5th year of glamour / nudie calendars for their 'luxury' caskets. I don't know if luxury means multiple cup holders, USB connections or what.
So, do the exorcists have calendars?

Rethinking Death

The history of the funeral process is interesting in this TedX chat but the stats on materials 6 ft under is pretty amazing.
Wood for 4M homes, 90M tons of steel, 2B tons of concrete, 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid/yr…
Mr Wilde (of the Wilde Funeral Home, LOL) also discusses green & DIY funerals.

Spring Grove Cemetery Annual Cruise In

The 9th annual Spring Grove Cemetery Cruise In is nigh upon us, Sunday, October 12, 3PM - 7PM.
"Quimbob, that date sounds familiar…"
Of course, fair reader, it's (Uncle) Al Crowley's birthday!
While I doubt they will celebrate that with a portable rock wall climbing thingy or a cat blood drinking contest, there will be grub, (recorded) music, tram rides, hayrides, and lots of cars.
While one would expect a lot of hearses, there are, but, unfortunately, not that many.
There is no official motorcycle show, but in the past, there is a pretty good showing of bikes that make for a show in itself.
People argue over this kind of event at a cemetery because it defeats the 'eternal rest' aspect of a cemetery and smacks of self promotion on the part of the cemetery. On the other hand, it makes the cemetery more relevant to the community & the cars are older and lend themselves to the past & ancestry that is kind of an aspect of a cemetery, too.

I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.
—The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, Ch. 66

What do you want for your last ride?

1 in 15 funerals use non-traditional hearses.
Could custom vehicles lure people away from cremation?
Unfortunately funeral prices continue to increase and cremation is becoming more popular every day, so maybe funerals & processions featuring special vehicles may become a popular oddity for the wealthy that might attract attention from the lower castes. Maybe Funerals of the Starz could be a hit & those guys who customize cars on the History Channel can get in on the act.

Guardian article here

Drive Thru Visitations

When I first heard about the Paradise Funeral Home's drive through visitation system on NPR, I thought, great, more lazy, asocial, car addicts…
This article at WLWT, gets into it a little more & points out the service is additional & geared towards people who can't make the regular services.
Seems like there could be some odd scheduling problems if it caught on. Maybe they would need some sort of turntable if there were multiple stiffs to display. Unhappy relatives could vandalize the equipment. Neighbors might will complain about the music.
It seems ok in the light the director puts it in, but will it be abused by the lazy, asocial, car addicts, eating take out while paying last respects to uncle Joe?

UPDATE: Connecting Directors article cites problems with vandalism at other drive thru funeral homes.

cemeteries in the future

A recent article in The Atlantic asked what's in store for the future urban cemetery.
One of the biggies involves media & display tech.
When I was a kid, I envisioned a granite juke box. But back then the electronics were bulky & fragile and would not long survive the elements of the midwest. A lot of those issues have been eliminated lately. 2 media things that would be kinda cool, would be LED screens playing an ever evolving fractal animation. I think this could be applied to music as well.
One of the things in the article is holograms of the deceased. Couple this with the AI tech some weirdohs are developing so you can talk with your virtual dead loved one. add in the evolving fractal component and you can converse with your dearly departed as their conversation becomes some oddly recognizable Jabberwocky.
If you think cemeteries are creepy now - the future looks dark.

Open Season on the Funeral Industry

Not content with crashing into hearses and terrorizing funeral processions, motorists are taking their genocidal hysteria up a notch by slamming their vehicles directly into the funeral homes in Middletown.
The mad blood lust of the homicidal auto-cyborg has acquired a taste for formaldehyde, too.

Dodds Monuments

Kind of a cool ad for a memorial company. I like the way it pushes the traditional, the eternal, and the contemporary in just a few seconds.
FWIW, this business is in Xenia, OH. When the town got creamed by a tornado in the spring of 1974, everything across the street from the seriously cool building got flattened. Dodds stood firm with not even a broken window.

Let's Kill the Dead !

Motorists, not content with slaughtering live people, have decided the dead should be added to their litany of mayhem. This TBoning went beyond running a static light up in the air but careened past police with flashing lights as it smashed into a hearse leading a funeral procession injuring a priest & funeral director in the process. No doubt the careless motorist added more stress to the loved ones of the deceased.

WKRP story here.

Should Cincinnati Build a Floating Necropolis ?

yeah, I know most of the river belongs to KY but what the heck?
This Necropolis is meant to float in the middle of the Dead Sea.
This Columbarioum is designed to float off the shore of Hong Kong.
We might have to go with a columbarium due to size constraints and we absolutely can't let Jeff Ruby run the thing, but it would add a lot of appeal to the riverfront and add an alternative to people's choices for interment. Given Cincinnati's and Cincinnatian's connection to the Ohio River, it seems a lot of people would want to connect their remains to the river.

High Tech Urns

With the advent of 3D printing, 3D scanning & modeling, your funerary urn designs about limitless nowadays. Imagine an urn shaped like your head? Your skull? Your BUTT!?!?!
Foreverence made a giant Devo hat for Bob Casale's cremains. Not too impressive but it's a start for what crematiophiles can do in the future.

Bodybags Redux

Last summer there was a case where an Ohio woman used a Kentucky funeral home to cremate her son & had the funeral director split the ashes into 4 bags. The woman was infuriated that he used leftover WalMart bags while the funeral director was kind of freaked out about splitting up the remains.
How the laws in Ohio & Kentucky apply here, I don't know. I couldn't find anything in Ohio about splitting up cremated remains.
You cannot commingle multiple people's remains but you can scatter ashes where other people's ashes have already been scattered which sounds like commingling to me but what do I know?
In Florida the court recently ruled that cremated remains are not 'property' and, as such, cannot be divided. That makes sense to me but then I am more into burial so maybe that influences my opinion as I wouldn't dream of being chopped up and sending an arm here & a leg there.
Meanwhile, I think Ohio should go back to the drawing board.

Florida case here

Ohio/Kentucky case here

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