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What Happens After I Die?

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Does it get anymore nightmarish than this?

China's Death Buses Deliver Executions, Organ Harvesting On the Go

If you're a criminal in China, you'll want to avoid its new death buses, vehicles that carry out executions while streaming live video of them, then provide some privacy for organ harvesting.

The buses, of which over 40 are currently in use, are replacing firing squads as China's preferred method of execution. The buses provide a setup for lethal injections, and the acts are carried out on streaming video so local authorities can observe and ensure that everything is done legally.

This kind of thing makes my very psyche recoil. It's like some insane mashup of "Brazil's" industrious dystopia and the turbo-charged nihilism of "Mad Max."

Dumping Someone Is Hard, Even if That Someone Is a Sex Doll

Here's a tip: when disposing of a very lifelike sex doll, leaving it in a shallow grave bound up and wrapped in a sleeping bag is not the best way to do so. You know, because someone might stumble upon a sleeping bag with hair coming out of one end and feet coming out of the other and jump to a conclusion other than that you got sick of humping an inanimate object. In fact, that's just what happened to a would-be silicone heartbreaker in Japan.

Pope: Accept death "at the hour chosen by God'

While several European countries permit euthanasia, the Vatican vehemently maintains that life must continue to its natural end. The pope said in his homily that the ill should pray to find "the grace to accept, without fear or bitterness, to leave this world at the hour chosen by God."

If God's the one responsible for lives lost from cancer and AIDS and malnutrition, then, quite frankly, fuck God . . . or, more precisely, his costumed representative. Speaking for myself -- which, of course, is veritable anathema to religion -- I intend to go when I'm good and ready, thanks. (And if I'm lucky enough to be around when the fabled Singularity thing hits, maybe not even then . . . although, strangely enough, I get the feeling cybernetic immortality would piss off His Holiness at least as much as a dignified, relatively pain-free death. After all, the Vatican's nothing if not inconsistent, which should come as no surprise to anyone who's so much as glanced at that insipid book it's so fond of.)

On a related note, I can't help but think that perhaps even someone as deeply out-of-touch as the Pope might experience a change of heart -- one might even call it an epiphany -- if he was forced to spend his final years immersed in the grueling agony of chemotherapy in some dodgy nursing home . . . but that's probably too much to hope for.

Take it away, Pat!

Library of Dust

In 1913, Maisel explained, an Oregon state psychiatric institution began to cremate the remains of its unclaimed patients. Their ashes were then stored inside individual copper canisters and moved into a small room, where they were stacked onto pine shelves.

[. . .]

Over time, however, the canisters have begun to react chemically with the human ashes held inside them; this has thus created mold-like mineral outgrowths on the exterior surfaces of these otherwise gleaming cylinders.

There was a certain urgency to the project, then, as "the span of time that these canisters are going to be in this state is really finite," Maisel explained in the Archinect interview, "and the hospital is concerned that they're now basically corroding."

[. . .]

David Maisel's photographs of nearly 110 funereal copper canisters are a mineralogical delight. Bearded with a frost of subsidiary elements, their surfaces are now layered, phosphorescent, transformed. Unsettled archipelagos of mineral growths bloom like tumors from the sides and bottoms -- but is that metal one sees, or some species of fungus? The very nature of these canisters becomes suspect.

Company offers moon as final resting place

The moon could become a final resting place for some of mankind thanks to a commercial service that hopes to send human ashes to the lunar surface on robotic landers, the company said on Thursday.

Celestis, Inc., a company that pioneered the sending of cremated remains into suborbital space on rockets, said it would start a service to the surface of the moon that could begin as early as next year.

(Via Nerdshit.)

Animals In Formalin Preservation, a haunting gallery of specimens consigned to chemical oblivion. In dying, these creatures have transcended the boundaries of biological time and become cryptic signposts for a future inhabited solely by ghosts.

(Nick Redfern sent this my way.)

Army suicides highest in 26 years

The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its scheduled release Thursday, found there were 99 confirmed suicides among active duty soldiers during 2006, up from 88 the previous year and the highest number since the 102 suicides in 1991 at the time of the Persian Gulf War.

Jeez . . . they must not realize that God's on their side. Keep praying, folks!

Water way to go: Funeral bosses plan to boil bodies to dust

In the new process a silk coffin enters a chamber and is submerged in hundreds of litres of water mixed with potassium hydroxide, an alkali.

The body is then brought up to temperature. In two hours it turns into white dust.

Chemically, the process is similar to - but much faster than - natural decomposition.