Shuffling Off

So I have been watching Chasing Mummies on the Historeality Channel lately. It features the Only Egyptologist in the World, Zahi Fucking Hawass. Zahi Hawass has been a mystery to me for years and years, probably as big as any of the mysteries of Egypt. Is he a scholar? A publicity hound? An archaeologist? A shrewd politician?

If you have seen any show on Ancient Egypt in the last several decades, Zahi Fucking Hawass is right there in it. He is the Supreme Director of Old Shit in Egypt, and it appears that if you want to do any archaeology in Egypt at all 1) you have to get his permission personally and 2) he gets all the credit for whatever you find. Everyone seems to kowtow to him, but it's not clear if this is out of respect or fear of being ejected from the country forever. If you have decided to become an Egyptologist, I'm guessing being thrown out of Egypt forever is probably a bad career move. Either way, he does all the interviews on all the TV channels, decides where all the tourists can and can't go, and announces all the discoveries.

Chasing Mummies, if you haven't seen it, is a pseudoreality show about a documentary crew and a bunch of young "architectural fellows" who follow Zahi Fucking Hawass around Egypt, doing the exciting things that an archaeologist does. Some Internet Detectives have determined that many of the "archaeological fellows" are actually actors, although most of them seem to have undergraduate degrees in some vaguely related subject like "anthropology." The show seems more than a little scripted, and the "archaeology" done seems to consist mostly of using Zahi Fucking Hawass' special access to take cameras and these young actors into fragile ancient environments that are already well-documented. Lesson 1: they don't have bathrooms in the upper five chambers of the Great Pyramid. Most of the time, the "archaeological fellows" seem desperately ignorant of even basic facts about Ancient Egypt, although it's not clear whether this is genuine naivete or a scriptwriter trying to find an excuse to reveal some backstory to the audience. I know little about archaeology, but if - as an actor or a scientist - someone gave me the opportunity to go there and explore ancient places, I'd sit down and read a half-dozen books beforehand so I could be informed.

To top it all off, they apparently showed Zahi Fucking Hawass video of Gordon Ramsay doing his "Hell's Kitchen" bit and told him to replicate that, so he spends much of the show really putting the 'ass' in Hawass. Actually, he's not always an ass - he's more bipolar. If a "fellow" demonstrates the slightest bit of Discovery Channel knowledge about Egypt, he lavishes him or her with praise and invites them to go tromping through yet-another fragile historical site. If a fellow screws up, it's a major tongue-lashing. Is this really him, or is it a bad act? Or a little of both? The mystery of Zahi Fucking Hawass continues.

As fake as the show is, they do occasionally show a discovery or retrieval of a real artifact. As always, the true work of archaeology is done by an army of badly-dressed grad students and hundreds of identical guys, all named Abdul, who toil away in the hot desert sun all day long with shovels, brushes, and dental picks. They dug up a wonderfully-preserved Roman period mummy, including painted sarcophagus, an event that was treated with all the reverence of a purchase of jorts at Wal-Mart.

FOCUS: The Egyptians were a culture obsessed with death. How do you want your remains to be handled when you go? Buried? Cremated? If so, what do you want done with your ashes? Do you want some shot into space? Or turned into a gemstone? Or, like one WWE referee who died about 10 years ago, do you want them mixed in with the pyrotechnics for Monday Night Raw? What about Mummification? Or maybe Plastination?

 

I don't like the thought of cremation. Plus it's carbon polluting and I've had enough of hearing about that for one lifetime, I don't want to take it with me into the afterlife.

I always liked the thought of being worm food.

But I heard a little while ago a process has been developed to turn you into a liquid, billed as something like "liquid cremation".

So now I wanna be a meat slurpee.

 

I like the idea of Sky Burial.

<a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial</a>

 

I'm studying abroad in Cairo right now. Sometimes I feel like the entire country is like this. It's like stepping into Bizarro World where nothing makes sense.

I want my ashes to be shot into space, if it's feasible when I die. The fact that pieces of my body will be traveling into the cosmos forever is just mind-boggling.

 

I don' think I or anybody should really care too much about our remains. Buried or cremated, it doesn't matter. You're dead. When worms are eating you, it's probably hard to care about how you're taking it.

 

I think I've mentioned it before, but I want the corpse to be cremated and then separated. Try to get some put into some iron to make a blade, and take the rest of the stuff and make a crystal out of it. Set the crystal into the pommel, and you're good to go.

Of course, it won't matter, since I'd be, well, dead; but it'd be pretty much the most awesome "burial" ever.

 

I'm to be cremated and my ashes are to be spread in a specific part of the Atlantic Ocean via Cape Ray, Newfoundland. Wife™ told me to draw her a map. It's comforting to know that she'll grant my request, but I'm kind of offended that she's assuming that I'll die first.

The bitch.

 

I've got a few ideas. Here's to dying rich so my shitbag kids will have to follow through if they want my doubloons.

- After cremation, fill my remains with glitter and confetti, ask Rip Taylor to use me in his act. "Ohhhuhhh GAWD he got ever-uh-ree-where!"

- Fill my body with sawdust, cure me with salt, add nitrates, and turn me into a 6 foot dry Italian Salami. Will never spoil.

- Viking funeral. That'd be boss. All my friends around, drinking, send me off to sea and light the pyre by flaming arrow. If I die landlocked, just use somebody's pool.

- Donate my body to science. But with a caveat. I'm to be spring loaded for first year students.

- Sneak me into Paul Newman's lemon orchard. My remains will fertilize the lemons that millions drink in the lemonade. An entire generation of people drinking my crud.

- Dip my corpse in an epoxy or plaster. Harden my body so I'm doing a jumping High 5 with a likeness of Andre The Giant.

- Just bury me next to my father and grandfather. If they don't object. Plant a shade tree over the stone. Make sure Smithers is buried alive in the space at the foot of the coffin.

 

For a while, I was pretty adamant about wanting to be buried, mainly because I wanted my surviving relatives to have a place where they could visit me. But then I realized that I would have to choose to be with my mom (who's at her church's graveyard) or with the rest of my family (who are in the Jewish graveyard), and, uh, I didn't feel like thinking about that anymore. Also, from a hippie-ish standpoint, burying is pretty wasteful. Then, I read Stiff, which is a book about cadavers basically, (I posted about it in the book thread, it's good, you should read it), and there was a whole chapter about what happens when you rot and I was so thoroughly grossed out and upset that now I'm pretty much completely turned off of the idea of getting buried.

So now, what I really want is to be turned into a tree. I am absolutely convinced that I read that people can do this somewhere. I remember it's something along the lines of being cremated and then using the ashes as, like, fertilizer to grow a tree. But I've tried looking for it again, and I can't find anything. I still think it would be nice, though.

 

I think a traditional burial is a huge waste of space and money. That being said, I've instructed my wife to do whatever the hell she wants with my remains, as I won't be around to give a shit one way or the other.

 

You could always go out like Tupac:

At least you're bringing some joy to the world after your death. Might help getting into heaven.

 

I've said this to my family before, but when I go I want to be burned up. My worst fear is that something will go wrong, I won't be dead, and I'll wake up inside a coffin.

Fuck that.

Burn my shit up completely. Burn me twice. Then take whatever is left and toss it in a coffee can for all I care.

 

I always figured I would like something simple, nothing extravagant.

When I die, I want to be buried under a tree, preferably under a tree that has some sort of poisonous fruit. After the tree matures and is larger than the average human, I want someone to brutally cut down the tree (preferably using some form of explosive). After finding the remnants of my tree, I would like to be used as fuel a steam powered car that is driven by a giant platypus (by then, those things should be able to drive, right?) and have it drive off a cliff.

On the way down, while falling, I want the fireworks that are located in the trunk to fire causing the steam car to seem like a falling rocket as it plummets it's way towards the cold, hard earth below. Upon impact, the six hundred pounds of TNT to explode, kind of like in the movies but way cooler and bigger.

Then I want the giant platypus to be buried under the same kind of tree that I was buried under and repeat the process everytime the tree is big enough to power a steam powered car.

 

When my uncle died he was cremated and everyone spread out his ashes wherever they felt they shared a moment with him. It was very touching. Seems like a nice way to go to me.

 

I want my body to be donated to science, but fuck being a cadaver for a bunch of first year assholes. I want to be in the Bodies exhibit and have my organs/muscles/whatever they decide on display, travelling the states. That'd be pretty cool.

 

A funeral pyre through which I'm somehow cremated and snorted off Kate Beckinsale's ass by Olivia Wilde after which they go into a Maltob fueled lesbo frenzy. Or a small quiet ceremony where all my loved ones blah blah blah...

 

I just want to be put in the ground wrapped in a blanket and have a tree grown over me. But only if they create a new species of tree and name it after me.

 

I'm pretty cool with whatever as long as the following two conditions are met:

a) As few usable organs as possible stay with my body, and

b) No priest is involved saying fatuous prayers for my sake.

The second one is more a matter of principle.

 

I second the notion of having organs donated to others. Seems the best way to go, help someone else out. This got me thinking though. I would like to live long. If you're super old, do they even want your organs? If old people need organ transplants, do they use other old people's or is always better to go young? Intuitively, it would seem to make sense that you would want it within a certain number of years. Doctors? Any insight?