How to disappear while being useful!

Sometimes I have morbid thoughts — too morbid for this blog. Yes, I am constrained by an inexplicable form of self censorship I cannot define, but which often prevents me from spewing forth public utterances I might come to regret.

But the morbid thoughts which have been plaguing me lately were very pleasantly distracted by this mini headline:

Corpse-dissolving machine invented

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Does that old saying apply to building a better corpse-dissolving machine as well? Resomation Ltd. hopes so. The Scottish company installed its machine in a St. Petersburg, Fla., funeral home and hopes the system will be legalized in other jurisdictions. The alkaline hydrolysis unit liquefies a body’s soft tissues and flushes the sterile liquid into the municipal water system. The bones and other hard parts are left behind to be crushed. Company founder Sandy Sullivan says the machine lets people express their environmental concerns “in a very positive and I think personal way.” Sounds good, as long as they don’t put a Soylent Green factory next door.

That looked both interesting and fun, even though I’m not quite ready to be liquidated. So I clicked on the link, and read about how easy it can be to simply disappear and go right down the sewer.

Since the dawn of civilization, we have disposed of our dead primarily in two ways: burial and burning. Now, there’s another option: liquefaction.

Resomation Ltd., a Scottish company, has installed its first commercial “alkaline hydrolysis” unit at a Florida funeral home.

According to the BBC, the unit works by submerging corpses in a heated, pressurized solution of water and potassium hydroxide, which liquefies all the soft tissue in less than three hours. The bones are then removed from the unit and processed in a “cremulator,” the same machine that crushes bone fragments into ash following cremation. Metals in artificial joints, dental fillings and implants are removed also.

The liquefied body tissue can then be poured into the municipal water system. Tests show that it’s sterile and contains no remnants of DNA.

Developers of the alkaline hydrolysis technology are billing it as an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation. They claim the process produces a third less greenhouse gas than cremation, uses one-seventh of the energy and allows for the complete separation and disposal of dental amalgam — the mercury-containing metal alloy used to fill cavities. Mercury released by amalgam during cremation is a significant source of airborne mercury pollution.

There they go with environmental politics. Must they? Just I was trying to escape from politics? But if they insist, OK.  As if I care, for the sake of argument, just how significant a source of pollution is dental mercury? As significant a source as will eventually be the mercury released by compact fluorescent lights? (400 million cfls were sold in in the U.S. in 2009 alone.) And where did the mercury come from anyway? Humans did not create the element; they took it from the ground. It used to be used as medicine, put in coins, and even in cosmetics. I used to play with it when I was a kid. Today a SWAT team would be called.

And they can have my mercury amalgams when they… Hmm, maybe I should watch my mouth there.

Why aren’t we all dead yet?

One morbid topic at a time. The issue here is making dead people disappear, right? A guy who claimed to know about these things told me that smelting furnaces are a great way to get people to vaporize. I realize that most of us don’t have access to steel furnaces, but this guy said that Jimmy Hoffa went into one after he was stuffed into a car trunk of a car that got smelted. How true this is, no one will ever know, but if it is true that Hoffa went into a furnace with scrap metal, there wouldn’t be any pieces of Hoffa to find anywhere, would there? Even in cases where it is known that someone fell into such a furnace, there is nothing for investigators to find:

A steel worker died after accidently falling into a melting furnace at a steel company in Dangjin, South Chungcheong Province, Tuesday.

The worker only identified as Kim, 29, missed his step and fell into a five-meter-high electronic blast furnace while melting scrap metal, his colleagues said.

The furnace held molten steel at over 1,600 degrees Celsius and the National Institute of Scientific Investigation looking into the accident said it would be impossible to retrieve Kim’s body from the furnace due to the extremely high temperature.

Falling into something like this means really disappearing!

Whether it’s good for the environment, who knows? The dental amalgam issue aside, the only “carbon footprint” worry might be over whether the corpses would add too much carbon the steel, because the percentage of carbon in the steel ultimately has to be measured precisely. I doubt the addition of corpses would pose an insurmountable obstacle though, because carbon is only 18% of the human body, and is in any event necessary for slag formation that’s an inherent byproduct of the process.  So being thrown into a steel furnace would probably have zero effect on the environment.

Another environmentally clean way to disappear would be to get thrown in with animal carcasses at a rendering plant.

Try to find Hoffa in here:

(Or for that matter, in a bar of soap.)

And if the idea is to both completely disappear and be useful at the same time, then how about being swallowed whole by a large python? There is no reason a 20 foot python couldn’t make an occasional large meal out of a human corpse, and while digestion would take time, becoming snake shit certainly has its merits.

The above mess came from a beautiful Pine Snake named Megatron, who isn’t big enough to eat anyone. But a large python kept in an ordinary-sized room might oblige. Especially if the corpse had been pre-scented with its normal food (maybe by rubbing with rodents — although captive bred Burmese pythons can be persuaded to eat almost anything). Hope I’m not giving any bad guys ideas here.

Maybe I should cheer up and write about politics.

MORE: Speaking of mercury as a cosmetic, a cosmetic widely used for religious reasons (called “Sindoor“) contains mercury.

Sindoor contains mercury, in it which is the only metal found in liquid form. When sindoor is applied in the hair-parting, mercury present in it, acts as a medicine because it is known for removing stress and strain and keeps the brain alert and active also.

The custom of filling sindoor in the hair parting is followed only after marriage because as soon as tying the nuptial knot, the free spirited girl suddenly gets transformed into a responsible wife and a daughter-in-law who has to take care of everybody present in her new home. Thus, under such responsibilities she sometimes get pressurized.

The mercury in the sindoor helps in cooling her down, bringing to her the mental peace .Hence sindoor having mercury in it works as a therapeutic medicine to deal with the pressures of new life by keeping the mind calm, composed and poised.

Only an anti-religious bigot could object to that!

Or this:

Physiological Significance of Sindoor
It is interesting to note that that the application of sindoor by married women carries physiological significance too. This is so because Sindoor is prepared by mixing turmeric-lime and the metal mercury. Due to its intrinsic properties, mercury, besides controlling blood pressure also activates sexual drive. This also explains why Sindoor is prohibited for the widows. For best results, Sindoor should be applied right upto the pituitary gland where all our feelings are centered.

Cool. Perhaps deficiencies of feelings can be cured.

MORE: I spoke too soon. It appears that anti-religious zealots at the FDA are on a rampage against bindi.

AND MORE: While I hate to sound political in such an apolitical post, I have a question.

What kind of government will make us feel ashamed of our dental fillings and not allow us to put a mercury-containing dot on our foreheads, while forcing us to have mercury in our lightbulbs?