Wikipedia's List of Unusual Deaths . . . Interesting Reading

Wikipedia's List of Unusual Deaths

In 458 B.C., an eagle clutching a tortoise mistook "a bald head for a stone" and dropped its catch on the shiny cranium—which, unfortunately, topped the body of the Greek playwright Aeschylus. Thus did the great bird bring to a close the life of the legendary philosopher-scribe. But what an ending! This tale and others like it may, just may, "be apocryphal." But that doesn't diminish the enjoyment to be found in reading through Wikipedia's list of outlandish historical deaths (or the rumors thereof). From burial by book to drowning by wine, the famous fatalities recounted here are sure to amaze you. We all know Isadora Duncan departed this life thanks to her overreaching scarf, but how many culturally literate folk know of Frank Hayes, the jockey who suffered a heart attack, but still won the race? Or that Henry I loved lampreys that much? Read, enjoy, and keep an eye out for large birds of prey toting reptiles and winging overhead.

Gross Anatomy ... Do You Understand? I said, Gross Anatomy : )

"Most people remember their first kiss. Doctors remember their first cadaver. For Bruce Giffin, it was a 60-something man named Charlie. Good muscle tone. No pesky pathology. “And just the right amount of body fat,” Giffin said.

All in all, Giffin said, Charlie was an ideal cadaver for a young medical student learning the intricacies of human anatomy. Giffin, a professor of medicine at the University of Cincinnati, directs the College of Medicine’s body donation program. He’s also planning to be a donor himself.

Every year, the university receives 350 to 360 bodies donated for use in their medical education programs. Other medical schools are eliminating cadaver dissection programs because of cost and other concerns, but UC’s body donation program is one of the strongest in the nation.
The concept is macabre – volunteers donating their bodies to be cut up in anatomy classes – but what students learn from working with their first real cadaver is invaluable.

Most will be dissected in gross anatomy classes, said Gina Burg, coordinator of the donation program. Others will be used to help doctors perfect surgical techniques.

It’s a morbid concept, and there are endless possibilities for gruesome jokes. But, experts say, men and women like Charlie provide an invaluable educational resource for medical students as they learn how the body works.

The dissection process is an unparalleled chance for exploration: Learning the layers of skin, fat and muscle, the intricate connections between muscles, ligaments and bones, the endless tangles of blood vessels and nerves. Anatomy texts give medical students a general idea of what to expect, but no two bodies are alike, Giffin said. . . " { Enquirer Continue reading } (source)

Scamp "The Dog Who Can Sense Death," HMMMM, we have a contest ....

On Inside Edition today ..... A dog that can sense death (and they say he is better than Oscar the Cat (he has 42 deaths on record compared to Oscars 25 (at this date))). But any how, Scamp .... Isn't he cute : ) ?

Scamp is the live-in pet at an Ohio nursing home, but the Schnauzer doesn't just bring companionship to the lonely. He has an eerie gift that also allows him to bring comfort to the dying.Scamp can somehow sense when the end is near for one of the old folks. He then waits loyally by their bedside in the final hours.Scamp's owner, Deirdre Huth, is a staff member at the nursing home, The Pines, in Canton. Ohio. She says Scamp even tries to raise the alarm when he gets the feeling that one of the seniors is at death's door."He has either barked or he'll pace around the room. The only time he barks is when he's trying to tell us something's wrong," Huth told INSIDE EDITION.Yvette Notturno had a dear friend in the nursing home, and had heard stories about Scamp's gift. So when she got a call from a nurse that Scamp wouldn't leave her friends' bedside, she came right away knowing that her friend didn't have long,. Yvette's friend, Andrew Popa, died soon after.Another critter made the news recently performing a similar feat. A cat named Oscar is known to curl up on the bed right before a patient dies at a nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island. Oscar's gift was featured in a top medical journal after he predicted more than 20 deaths.But Scamp's record is even more amazing than Oscar's. Director of nursing Adeline Baker says Scamp has forecast practically every one of the 40 or so deaths that have occurred in the three years he's been at the home. She also insists Scamp's presence is welcomed by patients as the end draws near."It's not like he's a grim reaper," she said. "It's kind of comforting to know that maybe at the end of our lives, if we don't have family members, there will be somebody there to be with us."

Final Embrace .... thanks for embracing our blog!

Hey we were featured on the Final Embrace Blog! Thanks! First time I've been highlighted in a blog!!!!! Here's what he had so say! : )

"I’ve decided that my wisdom about the blog world is SOOOOO vast that I should share my knowledge and exceedingly good taste with you, the lesser mortals.

Um…. maybe that’s taking it a bit far.

But I want to share with you the great blogs I find. Especially if they’ve got some really kick…. um…. Kick-butt content.

So here’s one I just found, read for a few minutes (or hours, I wasn’t keeping track) and just had to share: Embalmed to the Max

Written by a mortuary student from Kansas, the site features recent topics ranging from death-predicting cats to the fifty worst eulogies to a profile of a journalist who writes obituaries.
Funny? Oh yeah!

Irreverant? Sometimes. And I like it. It’s good to hear the opinions and topics that interest new funeral professionals.

Check it out!"

The Coroner's Journal

Coroner's Journal: Forensics and the Art of Stalking Death is not a Baton Rouge CSI. It is much more disturbing! Dr. Louis Cataldie will take your hand and walk you through the daily life of a coroner. You will feel the human-ness of the victims, their families, and most of all, Dr. Cataldie. This book is not a fictional account of "how exciting and sexy it is to be a coroner". It is pain, frustration, fear, paranoia, courage, love, determination and a first hand view of good triumphing evil. Thank you Dr. Cataldie for having the courage to share your heart and soul with the rest of us who don't live in Baton Rouge. Thank you for reminding us that the evil that rips families apart is not fodder for drama. It is a call to work together and love one another.

"I'll Compost Your Corpse"

“I’ll Compost Your Corpse” – The (Organic) Demise of Ethical Man
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 04. 6.07

Culture & CelebrityWe have previously reported on the BBC’s Ethical Man, AKA Justin Rowlatt, here and here. While Justin is still very much alive and well, the time has come for him to bury his more altruistic alter-ego. In a fitting end to this educational series of reports, he explores an intriguing offer from a viewer – to compost his corpse. As it turns out, this isn’t that easy to do. The environmental problems of cremation and burial are duly discussed, in some detail:

“Apparently, the problem with the way a corpse decomposes at the bottom of a grave is that there isn’t enough oxygen to get a good aerobic compost going. The main by-products of aerobic decomposition include carbon dioxide and water meanwhile anaerobic decomposition produces methane - 23 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas as CO2.”

Nevertheless, it seems that burial or cremation really are the only legal options for disposing of a body in the UK at the present time. Things may be about to change however, as a radical new technique from Sweden may be introduced, involving freezing your body in liquid nitrogen, and then breaking it down into a biodegradable powder. John Crossham, however, is not impressed, arguing that there is too much embodied (sorry - I couldn't resist it) energy in the liquid nitrogen for this to make sense:

“Wouldn’t it be better just to get in a good butcher to cut the body into small and easily ‘compostable’ pieces?”

Ethical Man, may you rest in peace (or is that pieces?)… (source)

20 Things I Bet You Never Knew About Death

Just what you wanted to Read: 20 "INTERESTING" Things You Didn't Know About Death ..... might not want to read this over breakfast..... (I found #7 to be interesting)

09.01.2006

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Death

Newsflash: we're all going to die. But here are 20 things you didn't know
about kicking the bucket.

 1 The practice of burying the dead may date back 350,000 years, as evidenced by a 45-foot-deep pit in
Atapuerca, Spain, filled with the fossils of 27 hominids of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

2 Never say die: There are at least 200 euphemisms for death, including "to be in Abraham's bosom," "just add maggots," and "sleep with the Tribbles" (a Star Trek favorite).

3 No American has died of old age since 1951.

4 That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.

5 The trigger of death, in all cases, is lack of oxygen. Its decline may prompt muscle spasms, or the "agonal phase," from the Greek word agon, or contest.

6 Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.

7 So much for recycling: Burials in America deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid—formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—into the soil each year. Cremation pumps dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the air.

8 Alternatively . . . A Swedish company, Promessa, will freeze-dry your body in liquid nitrogen, pulverize it with high-frequency vibrations, and seal the resulting powder in a cornstarch
coffin. They claim this "ecological burial" will decompose in 6 to 12 months.

9 Zoroastrians in India leave out the bodies of the dead to be consumed by vultures.

10 The vultures are now dying off after eating cattle carcasses dosed with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory used to relieve fever in livestock.

11 Queen Victoria insisted on being buried with the bathrobe of her long-dead husband, Prince Albert, and a plaster cast of his hand.

12 If this doesn't work, we're trying in vitro! In Madagascar, families dig up the bones of dead relatives and parade them around the village in a ceremony called famadihana. The remains are then wrapped in a new shroud and reburied. The old shroud is given to a newly married, childless couple to cover the connubial bed.

13 During a railway expansion in Egypt in the 19th century, construction companies unearthed so many mummies that they used them as fuel for locomotives.

14 Well, yeah, there's a slight chance this could backfire: English philosopher Francis Bacon, a founder of the scientific method, died in 1626 of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow to see if cold would preserve it.

15 For organs to form during embryonic development, some cells must commit suicide. Without such programmed cell death, we would all be born with webbed feet, like ducks.

16 Waiting to exhale: In 1907 a Massachusetts doctor conducted an experiment with a specially designed deathbed and reported that the human body lost 21 grams upon dying. This has been widely held as fact ever since. It's not.

17 Buried alive: In 19th-century Europe there was so much anecdotal evidence that living people were mistakenly declared dead that cadavers were laid out in "hospitals for the dead" while attendants awaited signs of putrefaction.

18 Eighty percent of people in the United States die in a hospital.

19 If you can't make it here . . . More people commit suicide in New York City than are murdered.

20 It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began.

(Source: Discover Magazine)

Diamonds from cremated remains : ) Bid for a diamond made from Ludwig van Beethoven's hair!

I can't resist ... is it Robert DiNiro's famous line ... "Do you want a piece of me?" Well Life Gem put's a whole new spin on that line : )

Want to have your loved one with you always? No kidding ...Or think about this, passing your loved one down as an heirloom? You can. LifeGems.com has a process where they can turn your cremated ashes into diamonds....

Normally, carbon leaves the body in the form of carbon dioxide during the cremation process, says Mark Bouffard, a LifeGem spokesman. But a patented process that manipulates the oxygen level in the cremation oven allows the carbon to remain. Then, the carbon is collected, heated in a vacuum until it becomes pure graphite, and sent to a lab where a gem is created in six to eight weeks instead of the usual several million years. The diamonds are naturally light blue, but LifeGem is also creating red and yellow ones by removing boron and adding color to the gems. And the diamond owners won't have to worry about misplacing all that remains of Grandma or Grandpa. "Each person has enough carbon to make 50 to 100 life gems," Bouffard says. "We'll store the remaining carbon just in case."

And, right now: To showcase Life Gem's newest technology, they are creating three LifeGem diamonds with the carbon from Ludwig van Beethoven's hair! These will be the only three diamonds ever created from Beethoven’s carbon and could be considered the three most rare and valuable diamonds in the world. Go to their site for more info about this auction! (Click here)

Just remember... diamonds are forever .... (I think Shirley Bassey said that ; ) ) and it seems she is dead on!

"I Told You I Was Sick"

(Source)

Famous Suicides ... An Incomplete List

Suicides. It doesn't matter how rich, how poor, how unknown or known you are. It happens across the board of life. And, people have a desire to understand the "Why's?" "How Could They?" and so on. And you will never ever know. So for those who are interested in the "WHO?" And/or those who have a morbid curiousity, I present the following list of notable people who have definitely died intentionally by their own hand, regardless of the circumstances. Suicides committed under duress are included. Deaths by accident or misadventure are excluded. Individuals who might or might not have died by their own hand, or whose whose intention to die is in dispute, but who are widely believed to have deliberately killed themselves, may be listed under Possible suicides. Click here.

UNFORTUNATELY, this is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness. Revisions and sourced additions are welcome. (This list is from Wikipedia)

See also: List of famous deaths by accidental drug overdose and Lists of people by cause of death
See also: List of songs about suicide and List of films about suicide

DEAD? or ALIVE? Your guess is as good as mine!

This site tracks whether famous people are still alive or whether they have passed away. This site is quite interesting. You can track:

• Who you have outlived?
• Who Died in the last 6 months?
• By name
• By Date
• There are quizzes, and so much more

Who'd have thunk it? That death could be so entertaining! : )

Give them a "look" and "See." Visit the site here: Dead or Alive

20 Things You Didn't Know About . . . Death

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Death
Newsflash: we're all going to die. But here are 20 things you didn't know

about kicking the bucket.

1 The practice of burying the dead may date back 350,000 years, as evidenced by a 45-foot-deep pit in Atapuerca, Spain, filled with the fossils of 27 hominids of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

2 Never say die: There are at least 200 euphemisms for death, including "to be in Abraham's bosom," "just add maggots," and "sleep with the Tribbles" (a Star Trek favorite).
3 No American has died of old age since 1951.
4 That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.
5 The trigger of death, in all cases, is lack of oxygen. Its decline may prompt muscle spasms, or the "agonal phase," from the Greek word agon, or contest.
6 Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.
7 So much for recycling: Burials in America deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid—formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—into the soil each year. Cremation pumps dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the air.
8 Alternatively . . . A Swedish company, Promessa, will freeze-dry your body in liquid nitrogen, pulverize it with high-frequency vibrations, and seal the resulting powder in a cornstarch coffin. They claim this "ecological burial" will decompose in 6 to 12 months.
9 Zoroastrians in India leave out the bodies of the dead to be consumed by vultures.
10 The vultures are now dying off after eating cattle carcasses dosed with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory used to relieve fever in livestock.
11 Queen Victoria insisted on being buried with the bathrobe of her long-dead husband, Prince Albert, and a plaster cast of his hand.
12 If this doesn't work, we're trying in vitro! In Madagascar, families dig up the bones of dead relatives and parade them around the village in a ceremony called famadihana. The remains are then wrapped in a new shroud and reburied. The old shroud is given to a newly married, childless couple to cover the connubial bed.
13(*) During a railway expansion in Egypt in the 19th century, construction companies unearthed so many mummies that they used them as fuel for locomotives.
14 Well, yeah, there's a slight chance this could backfire: English philosopher Francis Bacon, a founder of the scientific method, died in 1626 of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow to see if cold would preserve it.
15 For organs to form during embryonic development, some cells must commit suicide. Without such programmed cell death, we would all be born with webbed feet, like ducks.
16 Waiting to exhale: In 1907 a Massachusetts doctor conducted an experiment with a specially designed deathbed and reported that the human body lost 21 grams upon dying. This has been widely held as fact ever since. It's not.
17 Buried alive: In 19th-century Europe there was so much anecdotal evidence that living people were mistakenly declared dead that cadavers were laid out in "hospitals for the dead" while attendants awaited signs of putrefaction.
18 Eighty percent of people in the United States die in a hospital.
19 If you can't make it here . . . More people commit suicide in New York City than are murdered.
20 It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began.

By LeeAundra Temescu
DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 09 September 2006

Beginings and Endings

You know the old sayind, "You are born to die." Cold hard fact. But there is also the saying, "You should celebrate death, and weep at a birth." Whoever "they" is, says this all the time. At any rate, this is a blog about celebrating life and death. Since I am in the "death" industry, funerals, I look at it a little different. And in doing so, this blog is for you. It's all the latest trends, where to go, how to go, and how you can choose to go. I hope you find it informative, educational and calming : )