Matti Karel

Apologies for the delay/ top 10 uses for a dead person.

Ok i know that if you check this blog I have been very slow in my writings as late. My computer decided to take a huge poo on me. So it was in the shop for 2 weeks ... and then they lost it in shipping. i decided i would never have made it through the stone age. This may be why intelligence is such a new concept, why humanity has taken such leaps and bounds since the emergence from our caves. People like myself would rather be stuck to our computers with our ideas and hopes then out in the jungle hunting like good little neanderthals. I want to see the movie "Idiocrisy" (not sure on the spelling). It focuses on this idea of intelligence being bred out of people due to our own thought absorption. i could see that. If anyone knows where i can get this movie or when it is rentable. Anyway I have my computer back and am happier than a clam (never really understood this expression) Today i will share with you 10 uses for a dead person! - interesting ideas from our forefathers: - When D.H. Lawrence died his lover Frieda had his ashes tipped into a concrete mixer and incorporated into her new mantlepiece. - In 1891 French surgeon Dr Varlot developed a method of preserving corpses by covering them with a thin layer or metal (in effect, he was electroplating the dead). Dr Varlot's technique involved making the body conductive by exposing it to silver nitrate, then immersing it in a galvanic bath of copper sulphate, producing a millimeter thick coating of copper "a brilliant red copper finish or exceptional strength ad durability." - In ancient Rome, where human blodd was perscribed for epilepsy, epileptics hung around near the exit gates of public arenas so they could drink the by lood or slain gladiators as they were dragged out. - In midieval Europe, it was fashinable to eat and rub bits of Egyptian mummy into your body for medical purposes. It was recommended as a cure for abscesses, fractures, contusions, paralysis, migraine, sore throats, nausea, ulcers, and disorders or the liver and spleen. Mummy trafficking became a lucrative and highly organized business. The bottom finally fell out of the mummy market in the late 17th century when people found out that dealers were selling "fake" mummy from recently murdered slaves. - Elizabethan medical text books recommended an alternative cure-all: powdered human skull dissolved in red wine. - British farmers were "processing" human corpses to create raw materials long before the Nazis thought of it. On November 18, 1822 the Observer reported that the Napoleonic battlefields of Leipzig, Austerlitz and Waterloo had been "swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse which he rode" and that hundreds of tons of bones had been shipped to Yorkshire bone-grinders to make fertilizer for farmers. After the siege of Plevna in 1877 a newspaper casually reported that "30 tons of human bones, comprising of 30,000 skeletons, have just landed at Bristol from Plevna." - German scientists involved in car safety research at the University of Heidelberg routinely use human crash dummies, including the corpses of children. Researchers in other countries have condemned the practice of smashing human cadavers into brick walls as abhorrent, but it hasn't prevented many to see the results. - When the mistress of 19th century novelist Eugene Sue died, she willed him her skin, with instructions that he should bind a book with it..... He did. - The philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham lamented the wasteful business of burying dead people. He suggeste that every man, if properly embalmed, could be used as hi own commemorative bust or statue. he called them "autoicons" The possibilies, Bentham proposed, was that portraits could be replaced with actual head ".... many generations depositied on a few shelves or a modest sized cupboard." When Bentham died he put his money where his mouth was and had his own body donated for research of this process, embalmed, dressed, and put in a glass case. his head had to be replaced with a wax replica due to the grim expression it had taken during the embalming process. Bentham's physician, Dr Southwood Smith, kept the body until his own death in 1850, when it was presented to University College, London. - The size of a regulation soccer ball, roughly the same size as a man's head, arrived at by design: the first football ever used in England was the head of a Danish brigand.

Posted at 03:32PM Aug 15, 2007 by Matti M Karel in General  |  Comments[3]