From Ben Jones’s “Benblog“:
That is our challenge, unique in the cosmos, to know that our own brief existence is simply a moment in time, and to experience that breath in the universe with a smile, knowing that we will fade once again into the oneness, floating someday, cosmic dust in a snowflake, minerals floating the phloem, breathed ourselves in and out of the ever unfolding universe.
To counterbalance that last one Read More »
From “Mental Health Association of Portland“:
Over 3,500 copper canisters like these hold the cremated remains of patients of the Oregon State Hospital that went unclaimed by their families and friends. They sit on shelves in an abandoned building on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. They symbolize the loneliness, isolation, shame and despair too many patients of the hospital experienced.
Our members are helping find a final resting place for the remains. We have helped families find their lost relatives. We’re pressing the hospital and the state to create a suitable memorial. We’ve demanded former, current and future patients be advised and consulted about the creation of a memorial, its site, design and any ceremony.
From The New York Times‘ “Long-Forgotten Reminders Of the Mentally Ill in Oregon”:
Next to the old mortuary, where the dead were once washed and prepared for burial or cremation, is a locked room without a name.
Inside the room, in a dim and dusty corner of one of many abandoned buildings on the decaying campus of the Oregon State Hospital here, are 3,489 copper urns, the shiny metal dull and smeared with corrosion, the canisters turning green.
The urns hold the ashes of mental patients who died here from the late 1880’s to the mid-1970’s. The remains were unclaimed by families who had long abandoned their sick relatives, when they were alive and after they were dead.
The urns have engraved serial numbers pressed into the tops of the cans. The lowest number on the urns still stored in the room is 01, the highest 5,118. Over the decades, about 1,600 families have reclaimed urns containing their relatives’ ashes, but those left are lined up meticulously on wood shelves. Short strips of masking tape with storage information are affixed to each shelf: ”Vault #2, Shelf #36, plus four unmarked urns,” one piece of tattered tape says.
Most of the labels that once displayed the full names of the dead patients have been washed off by water damage or peeled away by time. Still, a few frayed labels are legible: among the urns stored on one shelf are a Bess, a Ben and an Andrew.
3500 forgotten cans Read More »
From BBC News’ “Europe’s chill linked to disease“:
Europe’s “Little Ice Age” may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study.
Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands, says.
The Little Ice Age was a period of some 300 years when Europe experienced a dip in average temperatures. …
“Between AD 1200 to 1300, we see a decrease in stomata and a sharp rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, due to deforestation we think,” says Dr van Hoof, whose findings are published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.
But after AD 1350, the team found the pattern reversed, suggesting that atmospheric carbon dioxide fell, perhaps due to reforestation following the plague.
The researchers think that this drop in carbon dioxide levels could help to explain a cooling in the climate over the following centuries.
Did plague cause the Little Ice Age? Read More »
From “Mummified woman died naturally“:
A woman whose mummified body was dressed in a white gown and placed in front of a television for 2½ years died from heart disease. …
Officials never suspected abuse or foul play after finding Johannas Pope, 61, in her Madisonville home Jan. 4.
Pope told her caretaker, Kathy Painter, she didn’t want to be buried because she believed she would come back to life. …
Painter left Pope’s body in a chair in an air-conditioned room on the second floor of their Davies Place home.
Investigators learned that Painter took care of Pope’s body – trying to preserve it.
Owens said Painter put on gloves and removed the maggots from Pope’s body daily.
He said she used bug spray when they became too numerous to remove by hand. Investigators found 17 cans of bug spray in the house, he said. …
Painter even bought Pope new clothes just before officials discovered her body.
“She bought new clothes because she thought this was the time period she was coming back,” Owens said.
Family members kept a window air conditioner running to keep Pope’s body cool until about two months ago, when it broke, Owens said. Heating vents were covered during winter.
Some friends and relatives who visited were told Pope was upstairs, ill, Owens said. …
There is no Ohio law mandating the reporting of a dead body.
From “Stone Age tribe kills fishermen“:
ONE of the world’s last Stone Age tribes has murdered two fishermen whose boat drifted on to a desert island in the Indian Ocean.
The Sentinelese, thought to number between 50 and 200, have rebuffed all contact with the modern world, firing a shower of arrows at anyone who comes within range.
They are believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated and appear to have survived the 2004 Asian tsunami. …
Fellow fishermen said they dropped anchor for the night on January 25 but fell into a deep sleep, probably helped by large amounts of alcohol. During the night their anchor, a rock tied to a rope, failed to hold their open-topped boat against the currents and they drifted towards the island.
“As day broke, fellow fishermen say they tried to shout at the men and warn them they were in danger,” said Samir Acharya, the head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, an environmental organisation. “However they did not respond – they were probably drunk – and the boat drifted into the shallows where they were attacked and killed.”
The Indian coast guard tried to recover the bodies using a helicopter but was met by a hail of arrows.
Photographs shot from the helicopter show the near-naked tribesmen rushing to fire. But the downdraught from its rotors exposed the two fishermen buried in shallow graves and not roasted and eaten, as local rumour suggested. …
Environmental groups urged the authorities to leave the bodies and respect the five-kilometre exclusion zone thrown around the island. In the 1980s and early 1990s many Sentinelese were killed in skirmishes with armed salvage operators who visited the island after a shipwreck. Since then the tribesmen have remained virtually undisturbed.
The last remaining Stone Age tribesmen Read More »
From New Scientist‘s “Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive“:
A parasitic worm that makes the grasshopper it invades jump into water and commit suicide does so by chemically influencing its brain, a study of the insects’ proteins reveal.
The parasitic Nematomorph hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) develops inside land-dwelling grasshoppers and crickets until the time comes for the worm to transform into an aquatic adult. Somehow mature hairworms brainwash their hosts into behaving in way they never usually would – causing them to seek out and plunge into water.
Once in the water the mature hairworms – which are three to four times longer that their hosts when extended – emerge and swim away to find a mate, leaving their host dead or dying in the water. …
Now Biron and his colleagues have shown that the worm brainwashes the grasshopper by producing proteins which directly and indirectly affect the grasshopper’s central nervous system.
Forced to commit suicide by brain parasites Read More »
From Ask Yahoo!:
According to the CIA World Factbook, as of July, 2005, there were approximately 6,446,131,400 people on the planet, and the death rate was approximately 8.78 deaths per 1,000 people a year. According to our nifty desktop calculator, that works out to roughly 56,597,034 people leaving us every year. That’s about a 155,000 a day. …
The legal information resource ItsMyLife.com offers some interesting mortality statistics for the United States. Of the 2,400,000-plus Americans who die each year, over 45,000 are killed in transport accidents. The number of homicides, poisonings, and drunk driving fatalities are roughly the same, at around 17,000 each. Perhaps more surprisingly, a stunning 178,000 Americans die from medical or hospital error every year. …
The United Nations also offers a 2005 World Health Report. One of its key findings: this year almost 11 million children under the age of five will die from a preventable disease.
How many people die each year in the world? Read More »
From BBC News:
A man lay dead in his flat for 15 months before his body was found.
Recording an open verdict into the death of Derek Perkins, 63, coroner Dr Nigel Chapman said he had never known a body to be undiscovered for so long.
The exact date of Mr Perkins’ death is unknown, but a newspaper found near his body was dated 31 December, 2002. …
In a written statement, Nottingham City Council said they had tried to make contact during the past six months by letter, phone and visits.
It said faster rent arrears procedures should help the council investigate problems sooner.
From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A convicted murderer being held in Atlanta is refusing to sign a waiver the district attorney says it needs to release the remains of an 8-year-old East Texas boy.
Without the waiver, the family of Chad Choice cannot hold a funeral, although the boy was killed more than a decade ago.
Patrick Horn’s attorney has made repeated efforts over the past month to get the man now serving a life federal prison sentence in Georgia for unrelated crimes to sign the waiver.
But those efforts have been ignored …
Chad was shot in 1991, and buried in a shallow grave behind a house where Horn’s family lived. Horn then tormented the Choice family for years, sending ransom notes and placing Chad’s skull on the doorstep of the Choices’ home on the fourth anniversary of the boy’s disappearance.
The boy’s fate wasn’t revealed until 1996 while Horn was in Smith County Jail serving time for other crimes.
The waiver is necessary because the body parts were found five years after the boy’s death, and those remains were crucial evidence used to convict Horn.
A horrid legal conundrum Read More »
From PCWorld.com:
Imagine receiving a new e-mail from an old friend that begins, ‘By the time you read this, I will have passed on.’
It could happen, as a result of a new Internet service called TimelessMail.com . Through this new service (which costs $12 to $24 annually), subscribers create and store e-mail messages containing their final adieu to friends and family. After a subscriber has bought the farm, his or her messages are forwarded to the intended recipients following a verification of Social Security Administration death records. …
Greetings from beyond Read More »
From Ohio.com:
It was 11:15 p.m. on a warm June night in 1950, and the area of Times Square was buzzing with people leaving the theaters.
Suddenly, in the midst of traffic appeared an odd-looking man, about 30 years old. He wore mutton-chop whiskers and quaint clothing that had gone out of style decades before.
The man gawked at his surroundings, and then tried to dash away from the cars. He was struck by a cab and killed.
Police found on the dead man antique currency, business cards in the name of Rudolph Fentz, and a letter addressed to Fentz postmarked in 1876.
Assuming the man was Fentz, police sought the next of kin. But Fentz wasn’t listed in the telephone directory, and no one at the address on the business card and letter knew him.
Capt. Hubert V. Rihm eventually turned up a 1939 phone book listing a Rudolph Fentz Jr. When Rihm located the junior’s widow, she told him her father-in-law had vanished in 1876 after going out for a smoke.
That knowledge in hand, Rihm dug into old police files and found the missing-person report from 1876. The address given was the same as that on the dead man’s business cards.
More proof of time travel? Read More »
From the Maybe-it’s-not-a-good-idea-to-keep-flesh-eating-lizards-as-pets dep’t.:
Several flesh-eating pet lizards were found feasting on the corpse of their owner in his apartment, police said.
Police were called to Ronald Huff’s apartment in Newark, Delaware, on Wednesday after a relative became worried because Huff failed to show up for work, investigators said.
Officers found Huff’s body on the floor, with his pet Nile monitor lizards feeding on his flesh. The state medical examiner is investigating the cause of death. … [CNN]
Why I stick with shih-tzus Read More »
Scotland’s worst poet, William Topaz McGonagall: From “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time. …
Or here’s a few lines from “Glasgow”:
And as for the statue of Sir Walter Scott that stands in George Square,
It is a handsome statue — few with it can compare,
And most elegant to be seen,
And close beside it stands the statue of Her Majesty the Queen. …
Read more at a site dedicated to William McGonagall, or just search Google. [William McGonagall]
Another awful poet Read More »
From John Shirley:
Immortality? Maybe. There’s one company …: “There’s that UCSF scientist who keeps cropping up with roundworms. Now and then you hear something new about her and her program: Cynthia Kenyon. She’s started a company called Elixir. She’s working on ways to tweak a gene called daf-2 which controls how well cells repair themselves over time. This gene gets shut off somehow–she’s trying to turn it back on, I take it…She did it in roundworms first. Now she’s done it in mice, vastly extending their lifespans. Daf-2 apparently controls a host of proteins and hormones that repair cells, eliminate free radicals, destroy bacteria and so on. All this may be far more complex in humans than in animals though…
If it works, chances are that it’ll be so expensive that it won’t appreciably add to overpopulation. Only a few people will be able to afford it. The rich will become semi-immortal. The poor may be kept in ignorance about how this is done, lest revolution demand everyone gets relative immortality. This partial suppression of the relevant biotech can be justified, perhaps: not only for reasons of space and sufficient resources in an overpopulated Earth, but for reasons of encouraging genetic diversity–mortality is motivation for reproducing. The human race seems to need death…
The social perils of immortality Read More »
I was walking around on Wash U’s campus a while back – I don’t remember where, exactly – when I looked down and noticed that I was walking over bricks that had been “donated” by folks who had given money to WU. This is standard practice a lot of places: donate $$$, get a brick with a message on it written by you.
As I walked, I was struck by the idea that many of the bricks were dedicated to people who had died. Further, one day all of the people listed on those bricks would be dead. Although it was a macabre thought, I realized that this was a walkway of the dead.
A walkway of the dead Read More »