Also from BoingBoing, Another article on Victorian postmortem photography, real and fake - yes, there are counterfeit dead baby pictures out there.

Ghost Babies
Mark Dery
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/25/ghost-babies.html

The traffic in dead babies is booming, on eBay.

There are daguerreotypes of dead babies, ambrotypes of dead babies, tintypes of dead babies, cartes de visite of dead babies, cabinet cards of dead babies; dead babies from the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the roaring '20s...

From BoingBoing 

Skeleton cutlery

Cory Doctorow at 1:11 PM Tuesday, Mar 29, 2011 

Artist André Lassen's created a set of sinister, skeleton-adorned flatware that Raven Armoury is selling in stainless steel or bronze (a carving set is coming soon). Great for your evil overlord dinner parties!

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/29/skeleton-cutlery.html

Funeral Divas

From Slate.  The steadily and relentlessly evolving demographics of death care.

http://www.slate.com/id/2289454/pagenum/all/#p2

How women are returning to the death care industry in droves.

By Vinnie Rotondaro Posted Friday, March 25, 2011, at 1:34 PM ET

In October 2010, Muneerah Warner founded Funeral Divas Inc., a social group for women in the death care industry. At the Divas' website black and pink coffin mugs, hoodies, and umbrellas can be bought, and members can enroll in a funeral director mentorship program. According to the site, the group's mission is "to encourage and uplift every woman in the funeral service industry and have fun at the same time!" So far 300 women have joined. This July many of them will be meeting in Laguna Beach, Calif., for the Funeral Divas' first-ever retreat.

A bevy of women whooping it up at a spa and resort in the golden state is hardly the image that comes to mind when one thinks of funeral work...

Desecration, attacks at ancient Jewish cemetery

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42225252/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Desecration, attacks at ancient Jewish cemetery

By JOSH LEDERMAN Associated Press The Associated Press

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 6:55 AM EDT

JERUSALEM (AP) — A wide patch of steep hillside overlooking Jerusalem's Old City holds row after row of graves. Biblical prophets, revered rabbis and a prime minister are buried there. Yet many of the tombstones have been smashed, litter is strewn around and tethered donkeys defecate on top of graves...

Why We Write About Grief

Another recent New Yorker article about writing and grief:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/weekinreview/27grief.html?_r=2

Why We Write About Grief
by JOYCE CAROL OATES and MEGHAN O’ROURKE  •  Feb. 26, 2011 

Two new first-person accounts about coping with the loss of a loved one are Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story,” ¹about the death of her husband, Raymond Smith, (published earlier this month), and Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye,” about mourning her mother (to be published in April). Their books add to a growing genre that includes Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking”² (2005), David Rieff’s “Swimming in a Sea of Death”³ (2008), Anne Roiphe’s “Epilogue” ⁴(2008) and Roland Barthes’s posthumous “Mourning Diary”⁵ (2010), to name a few recent examples.
In an e-mail conversation, Ms. Oates and Ms. O’Rourke discussed how they wrote about their own grief and why the literature of loss resonates with readers today. The dialog, which has been edited for length and clarity, began by asking them what led them to write about their experiences.

Story's End

From the New Yorker via Arts and Letters Daily, very good essay about the death of a loved one, writing, and remembering.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/weekinreview/27grief.html?_r=1

Writing a mother’s death.
by Meghan O’Rourke March 7, 2011

My mother died on Christmas Day, at home, around three in the afternoon. In the first months afterward, I felt an intense desire to write down the story of her death, to tell it over and over to friends. I jotted down stray thoughts and memories in the middle of the night. Even during her last weeks, I found myself squirrelling away her words, all her distinctive expressions: “I love you to death” and “Is that our wind I hear?”....

A nightmare at a Bradenton man's funeral

From FARK

A nightmare at a Bradenton man's funeral

Reported by: Jennifer Schwan
Email: jschwan@mysuncoast.com
Last Update: 5:55 pm
WWSB

BRADENTON, Fla. – The Washington Family was already in mourning after having lost the man they called Pops. Then at his burial, something happened that they say you only see in horror movies...

Death claims bluesman Pinetop Perkins at last.

Obituary Dept.:
Durable Mississippi Delta bluesman Pinetop Perkins has passed away, aged 97.

I saw him once a few years ago at Casbeer's, frail and thin but still an impressive artist well into his 90s. May we all do so well.

LA Times:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/03/pinetop-perkins-dies-one-of-the-last-links-to-the-first-generation-of-american-blues.html

Reuters:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/21/people-perkins-idUSN0137469020110321?pageNumber=2

Houston Press:
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/rocks/2011/03/pinetop_perkins.php?page=2

PinetopPerkins.com:
http://www.pinetopperkins.com/pabio.htm

New Death Ritual Found in Himalaya—27 De-fleshed Humans In high cliffside caves, explorers find 1,500-year-old bones.

From National Geographic:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110301-himalayas-caves-defleshed-skeletons-science-nepal-mustang/

Also see:

http://www.gorkhapatra.org.np/rising.detail.php?article_id=46829&cat_id=4

The remains of 27 ancient men, women, and children have been found in cliffside caves in Nepal. Many of the bones bear cut marks that point to a previously unknown Himalayan death ritual, experts say.
The corpses—many of which had been stripped of flesh—were placed in the high mortuaries some 1,500 years ago, the team announced Friday.

Nearly 67 percent of the bodies' had been defleshed, most likely with a metal knife, say the researchers, who found the remains in 2010.

After the de-fleshing process, the corpses had been neatly laid to rest on wide wooden shelves, the researchers speculate. But due to centuries of exposure to the elements, the bones and bunks—and much of the caves themselves—had collapsed by the time the team entered the chambers...

Why do people tell sick jokes about tragedies?

From the ever-astute writers at the BBC, about how the human mind copes with devastating horrors:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12775389

Tasteless tweets about the Japanese tsunami have landed celebrities in trouble. So what makes people tell sick jokes about terrible disasters?

Have you heard the one about the tsunami that killed thousands of people?
If not, someone might have told you a gag about the threat of nuclear meltdown. Or any other horrific event that happens to make the headlines.
Death, destruction and widespread devastation may be the unfunniest subject matters imaginable. Yet for some people they make up a comedy sub-genre...

Hi, Welcome to my blog

I've been thinking about this for some time. Being a hopeless news junkie, I frequently come across articles or other info that I think the SAC Mortuary Science students would enjoy. But since I'm no longer working there and not running the listserv any more, I have no way of communicating. I hope it's not hubris to think that someone would be interested in these stories...so I've started this blog. Later on when I get time hopefully I can make it look moldier, right now it's using the Blogger defaults. So here we go...