And when I die...

[Drunk Monk]

...I want the brotherhood to be my pall bearers. Just keep that in mind for later, ok?

[El Dingo]

Bah!

You will be the last to go Mr. Athletic, healthy diet, herbal medicine, family man!

Good idea to plan ahead though. I wrote my funeral/burial wishes out somewhere. I'll post them here so there will be no malarky from those meddling Christians!

Mainly I want to be buried. It amuses me to think that my molecules are absorbed back into the Earth and consumed by small creatures therefore giving me eternal life!

ETERNAL LIFE I TELL YOU!

Cremation is for losers.

[Drunk Monk]

...Who will be the 1st to go? I just hope it's not Cole. And if it is, I hope he chooses other pall bearers.

I always dreamed of being embalmed. I think I'd make a great mummy.

[Haggis Killer]

Embalming does not equal mummification. Sorry. Today's version of dirt napping seems highly unlikely to result in DM found and put on display in a thousand years. Better to jump into a deep ice gorge down north pole way. But go deep in. What with the global warming, the fringes might be summer beach house land boom targets by the time we hit retirement age.

[Drunk Monk]

My father-in-law is way into cryogenics. He's active in it, keeps up with their journals and all, I think he's even been involved with a freeze or two. All the juices need to be extracted, then they are put on ice. Sometimes they only take the head. It's cheaper to keep a head frozen instead of a whole body. I find that doubly presumptive - first that they can bring you back and second that they could do anything with a decapitated head. Stacy is scheduled to be frozen - a gift from pops. I don't want to be frozen. I'm afraid of freezer burn. I've tasted what that does to meat. Imagine what it would do to your soft and tenders.

So embalming is out. I doubt I can get mummified anymore. I'm not getting frozen. Can I be fed to prisoners, maybe? No wait, that wouldn't have a need for pall bearers. Nevermind.

[Haggis Killer]

I hear Soylent Green is made out of people. They could probably use some volunteers.

[King Bob]

apparently you can get pets mummified: http://www.summum.org/mummification/pets/ Maybe if you paid them enough they would mummify you. Although it might be fake - who would open the container to find out?

[Drunk Monk]

Taiwan’s funeral strippers dance for a dead crowd

Cyriaque Lamar — Should you meet your demise in Taiwan, a funerary option open to you is the Electric Flower Car (EFC), a wheeled, neon-lit platform upon which pulchritudinous women strip down to their skivvies for the benefit of audiences...both living and deceased.

We spoke with University of South Carolina anthropologist Marc L. Moskowitz about this practice, which is detailed in his recent documentary Dancing for the Dead: Funeral Strippers in Taiwan. Moskowitz told us about the societal role of EFC entertainers, who often perform their titillating trade in front of the bereaved family and neighborhood passers-by.

In your experience, how common would you say it is for strippers to entertain at funerals? As Dancing for the Dead pointed out, other entertainers — like singers and musicians — are also hired to perform.

It's not at all common for urbanites, but in rural settings, most people have seen these performances. Actual full stripping has gone underground because there were laws enacted against full nudity in the mid-Eighties, so that isn't as popular as it once was. I didn't see any full stripping — though it is likely that this was in part because they knew I was filming at that time — but almost everyone I spoke with had seen full stripping. Most people in Taiwan categorize both the strippers and the singers as one group — as Electric Flower Car performers — the only people I spoke with who made a clear delineation between strippers and singers were the performers and managers themselves.

On average, how raunchy do these funeral stripteases get? It seemed like some routines were more cabaret/burlesque style, whereas other dances were more salacious.

In general, what I witnessed was two stages of performance. One was in the equivalent of a miniskirt and a dress top that ranged from something you might see average people wearing on their way to a friend's house to a bit more revealing. The second stage was inevitably bikinis. It's absolutely true, though, some of the performers emphasized their singing ability whereas others gyrated in fairly risqué ways. The third stage, that of full nudity, is something that everyone I spoke with had seen, but since that is now against the law the performers were careful not to do that when I was filming.

What's the strangest funeral striptease you've ever witnessed?

The two most surprising events both happened at celebrations for temple birthdays, not at funerals. On one occasion a performer walked into the audience to rub men's crotches and on another occasion a performer went into the audience to give men a lap dance, sitting on their laps and pressing the men's heads into her shaking breasts. I didn't include either of these scenes in the film because there was no way of doing it without revealing the women's identities and I didn't want to get them in trouble with the law.

How did you come to study this particular cultural phenomenon?

My first book was on religion and my second book was on pop music, so in some sense this project combined these two interests. When I decided to make a documentary this seemed like a wonderfully visual practice that would work well in a film. I also became interested because the Chinese press almost always attacked the practice, but no one I spoke with really seemed to care all that much so there was an immediate issue to deal with there.

In the documentary, you mention that EFCs are associated with lower gods. Are there any particular deities that associated with stripping EFCs?

I don't think there is a specific god that is associated with this practice, but you are absolutely right that it is in the domain of the lower gods. Lower gods are usually ghosts of real people who became gods because people worshipped them. Many of the higher gods were originally real people as well, but it happened centuries ago and these gods are more established. It's generally thought that higher gods, like Guanyin or Matzu, are more moral but that lower gods have all the vices that real people have, such as gambling and womanizing. If someone wants to pray for things that help others, such as protecting one's loved ones, one is more likely to ask a higher god for help. If one wants something that isn't quite so moral, such as help with gambling or prostitution, then one might go to lower gods for this.

There seems to be a tension in Taiwanese society — EFC entertainers are both celebrities and casually accepted, but they're also assailed as low culture and bad for public morality. Are there certain regions in Taiwan that are more accepting of EFC stripping?

In the early 1980s, when the practice came to public attention, it was pretty popular everywhere but in Taipei, Taiwan's capital in the north. Since laws were passed against it, it's rarer to find it in larger urban centers throughout Taiwan, though one can find the practice in the outskirts of most urban centers and in smaller cities and towns. It definitely has the association of being a working class form of entertainment. And you are absolutely right that it often becomes part of a discourse of the north and south in which the north is associated with more affluence, education, and participation with global culture, and the south is more associated with the working class, lack of education, and more local traditions. In some sense this isn't so different from stereotypes about the north and the south in the United States, I think.

Do people appreciate the supernatural component of the striptease and the way it relates to funeral traditions, or has it become mostly a secularized practice?

One of the things that I found to be really interesting about this practice was that people's explanations for why people hired Electric Car Performers varied tremendously. One person I interviewed told me that it was because a new ghost would get picked on by older ghosts so the performance was to distract the older ghosts to give the newer ghost time to get used to his environment without being harassed. Other people told me that the lower gods liked this kind of entertainment so that it was for them. Yet others said that the deceased liked that kind of activity when living so they wanted to send him off in style. Most people agreed that an important component of this is the Chinese and Taiwanese emphasis on hot and noisy (renao) which is the excitement of public events. In the West, we have this in rock concerts or amusement parks, in that the noise and the hustle and bustle is part of the fun. In Taiwan, all public events need to be hot and noisy to be a success, ranging from going to the beach to funerals, so temple events that we filmed frequently had Chinese Opera performing on one stage, Electric Flower Cars singing on another, and people noisily selling stuff all around them. It's really a sight to see.

I've noticed that American's first reaction to this is either laughter or outrage but I have to say I've come to be a fan — overall the level of singing was much better than I thought it would be and although there is something quite pleasing about wanting to celebrate someone's life rather than mourn their passing at a funeral. It seems to me that part of what is going on here is that in urban centers most people can afford to pay for entertainment but in poorer areas a concert ticket or even a movie ticket is outside of most people's budgets. The Electric Flower Car performances, and temple events more generally, are the only chance many of these people get for live entertainment. It's really striking that the songs that Electric Flower Car performers sing are often pop songs — some in English, Mandarin Chinese, Hokkien Chinese (Taiwanese), and Japanese.

So in many ways the practice speaks to a conception of the world in which the living and the dead are not really that far apart. But these events are providing live entertainment for a group of people who would normally be excluded from, say a live performance of Taiwan's latest pop songs, because they couldn't afford to buy a ticket.

When I was making the documentary part of what I was trying to do was to provide the other side of the story since almost all of the Chinese press coverage attacked the practice. On showing it to Western audiences there has been a small but vocal minority who are upset by the practice. The film is a good lesson in cultural relativism, then, in deciding what is acceptable cultural difference and what should be a global limit. I don't have the answer about where to draw the lines on these issues, but I'm glad I could help to ask some of the questions with this film.

http://io9.com/5819625/in-taiwan-you-can...ur-funeral

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

When I die I want cremated strippers to be buried with me.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

In a Viking longboat, perhaps?

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

In my old '64 Pontiac LeMans. So, yes.

[The Queen]

Cool. I had a '76 LeMans, once...

[Drunk Monk]

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Well, there ya go. I knew someone had a solution to this dilemma.

[Drunk Monk]

I hear Soylent Green is made out of people.  They could probably use some volunteers.

Good News, You Will Soon Be Able to Disrupt Eating Actual Food By Buying Soylent At Walmart
Soylent, the powder-based “food product” slash “meal replacement” that became all the rage for joyless Silicon Valley employees in recent years, will soon be offered in Walmart stores across the US.
Per the Verge, Soylent’s maker Rosa Foods announced on Wednesday that it is bringing the signature brand of packaged, flavored sludge—which takes its name from the disheartening 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green, where it’s eventually revealed the product’s key ingredient is uh, “long pig”—to 450 Walmart stores across the country. Soylent CEO Bryan Crowley added in a statement that the move is “a significant step in providing more ways for consumers to get access to our brand,” expanding beyond its current placement in 7-Eleven stores. 
Per Business Insider, Crowley added that he hopes the rollout will help make “unhealthy and unsustainable food voids obsolete for consumers everywhere.”
This is a curious pitch. As the Atlantic wrote in 2016, the idea that Soylent can actually replace meals just by ticking off a list of nutrients is widely derided by nutritionists. The concept is really more of an indictment of the kind of diet pushed by big box stores like Walmart, which tend to offer unhealthier food than grocery stores at a lower price.
In any case, meal replacement products are not a new concept. Soylent’s original success was really rebranding them as a way for overworked Silicon Valley engineers to cut out meal times so they could crunch harder, which is a deeply depressing concept. The best thing that could be said about it is that it’s healthier than a bad diet, but using it as your default meal go-to rather than an occasional meal replacement might leave you haunted by the absence of real food.
Soylent’s had a turbulent few years: While Silicon Valley keeps on pumping money into the company, it’s been banned in Canada for not meeting “meal replacement” requirements, and its CEO resigned in December 2017.
In any case, Walmart’s Soylent will initially be available in three flavors, if you’re into that: Cacao, Vanilla Latte, and Coffiest. The original flavor, which Business Insider describes as “consistently ‘okay’ at best,” will not be available.
[The Verge/Business Insider]
Discussion
I admit. I drink a Soylent for breakfast and I like it. I have no shame.