Question: "If you could live forever, would you and why?"

Answer: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever,
because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever,
but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."

- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest
 

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Travel Bag

A British firm is behind an exhibition of some of the world's weirdest coffins in Germany.  An exhibition of Crazy Coffins has gone on display at a museum there.  Each of the caskets was made by Nottingham-based coffin-makers Vic Fearn and Co.

They include coffins in the shape of a sports bag, a kite, a canal boat, a guitar - and even a skip.  Each was created in response to requests from people wanting tailor-made coffins.  The Crazy Coffins exhibition is on display at a museum in Kassel, central Germany, until September 4.

She was just playing...

Source: ananova.com

Death in the Celebrity Age

Are you worried about the future glut of obituaries in national newspapers?  Because I sure am.  Think about it: because of our networked world and mass media, there are so many more nationally known people than there were 30, 40, or 50 years ago.  Fifty years ago, to be famous you had to be a politician, a movie star, a sports star, a general/admiral, a writer, a musician, a TV star, or rich.  These days, we have many more popular sports, more sports teams, more movies are being made, there are 2 - 3 orders of magnitude more TV channels and programs, more music, more musical genres, more books are being written, and there's more rich people.  Plus, these days people routinely become famous for appearing in advertising, designing things, being good cooks, yammering away on the internet, et cetera.  A year's worth of guests on Hollywood Squares - there's 2,300 people right there that probably wouldn't have been famous in 1953, and that's just one show.

Frankly, I don't know how we're all going to handle this.  Chances are in 15 - 20 years, someone famous whose work you enjoyed or whom you admired or who had a huge influence on who you are as a person will die each day... and probably even more than one a day.  And that's just you.  Many other famous people will have died that day who mean something to other people.  Will we all just be in a constant state of mourning?  Will the NY Times national obituary section swell to 30 pages a day?  As members of the human species, we're used to dealing with the death of people we "know" in amounts in the low hundreds over the course of a lifetime.  With higher life expectancies and the increased number of people known to each of us (particularly in the hypernetworked part of the world), how are we going to handle it when several thousand people we know die over the course of our lifetime?

Source: kottke.org 30 June 2005

For articles related to ageing, including feats that can be accomplished, and a non-spiritual look at what happens after death - funerals, jerky, popsicles, fertiliser, ashes, orbit or dust - click the "Up" button below to take you to the Index page for this Older and Under section.