Is it ever going to get better?

[JHCC]

There’s a small but growing movement to develop and legalize composting human bodies as a more ecologically friendly alternative to cremation. The YouTube channel “Ask A Mortician” had a recent episode about this. 

As for cooking, so long as you get the whole thing above 140°F to kill all the bacteria, you should be fine. It won’t brown, but that’s why we have oxypropane torches. 

[ThomasPowers]

Shoot we always called that; "hiding the body"...

[JHCC]

Potayto, potahto.

[Frosty]

There was a serial killer, Canadian I believe that fed ex-girlfriend/lovers/call girls to his pigs. Some parts he composted, but not for long enough to eliminate the evidence. 

I haven't but I've eaten compost reheated meals and you couldn't put them in too soon or they'd cook more rather than just heat back up. The real trick was to make sure ALL the seams in the aluminum foil were on the bottom, bio-oven juices and steam weren't considered cuisine. 

You can get way more than 150f in a compost pile, rain will over stimulate the microbes. On the ranches they'd use a backhoe to spread a burning pile till it cooled and went out. 

That wasn't so easy in the burbs and the FD HATED burning compost piles, you can't drown one without digging it up and spreading it out some. Of course the owner of a boarding "ranch" or a hand might pile it back up once FD had signed off as out and left. 

They REALLY hated having to come back later the same day or the next. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[anvil]

I lived on the front range of the Rocky Mountains on the Rampart Range Rd. Every year or so, or more, a body was found. The newspaper stories always said it was found because a foot was sticking up. Sheesh    I never understood just why they never buried the whole body.

[JHCC]

Did whoever found the foot turn to their companions and say, “Hey, can you give me a hand?”

[Frosty]

Only once, they only gave him the finger.

Frosty The Lucky

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

On 12/9/2021 at 7:32 PM, JHCC said:

There’s a small but growing movement to develop and legalize composting human bodies as a more ecologically friendly alternative to cremation

I’ve never understood the rules and regulations on burial,

it’s outrageously high to bury and cremation is a waste of fuel, 

I don’t understand why you can’t just put the dead in a pine box or a canvas sack and  just stickem in the ground, or pile a load of rocks over em, 

it worked perfectly since humans bothered to even bury their dead, 

I’ve heard it’s about toxins leaching into the water, but come on really? 

at any given time during any given year there’s two tons of rotting dead, deer, raccoon, possum, skunk, dog, cat, ect…. Just between my house and town, 

I find it very hard to believe the rain isn’t washing any more harmful stuff off them into water ways? 

 if you added up the road kill in my state alone I’d bet it’s in the millions of tons a year   
An I figure there’s plenty of runoff going right into the local water sources carrying bacteria and whatever else with it, 

Lol, I’m sorry for going on a rant,

this is just a topic that’s always made me scratch my head and wonder why we don’t just go back to a simpler and much cheaper way of dealing with our dead 

[Daswulf]

I kind of agree TW. 

I was actually looking into this place where you can be buried under or beside a tree in a forest. I myself would prefer to just be buried in the dirt so i can just compost back into the earth. (That would work in my area but may not work well in other climates and soil types.)

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

 Me to Daswulf, 

just grab the pick an shovel throw me in the dirt and pile enough rocks up to keep the mangey coyotes from digging up an getting a free dinner outta me, 

   those thieving suckers done got off with enough of my chickens they don’t need me too!

but on the other hand, I guess when I’m gone I prolly won’t really care either way lol

[Daswulf]

Yeah I probably wouldn't care. They would help process my dead stinking corpse. 

[Frosty]

Bacteria that decompose human isn't the real concern, it's the diseases we carry they don't want passed on, say bubonic or worse pneumonic plague. Call it the Black Death, it pretty well ended in the late 14th. century later outbreaks didn't cause nearly the death toll. However even today people get really jumpy when a plague pit is discovered and yes viable Pestis bacteria is found.

Another believable and related reason to embalm or cremate every Body is to prevent the depredations of the undead. Removing the blood, organs especially heart and pickling the rest is a good way to prevent zombies especially vampires. There are LOTS of types of zombie you realize, Yes?

Cremation is even better insurance the undead won't rise and get you.

I believe beheading and burning does for the were, silver is supposed to be effective on most anything but not always the final solution. Fire is, nothing is completely fireproof. I don't believe but could be wrong.

Frosty The Lucky

 

 

[JHCC]

A naturally decaying body is a whole lot less toxic than one pumped full of formaldehyde. 

[Frosty]

A body pumped full of formaldehyde isn't infectious.

Frosty The Lucky

[JHCC]

Except in rare cases, a dead body isn’t either. 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

I told my wife to just drop me down the cave chimney, without a ground walk in entrance, near our property. The Karst topography in the Ozarks is riddled with such caves and they have been used for decades to hide things like bodies.

Our neighbor went down in that cave with a rope ladder and it was 150 feet to the trash pile that had many bones of animals and an old dugout canoe with a lake surrounding the pile, no treasure though.

[George N. M.]

Irondragon, as an old caver I can appreciate that.  My late wife and I met in the early '70s in an underground organization, the National Speleological Society.

There are a surprising number of laws regulating the disposal of dead human bodies.  A lot of them are the result of abuses of various cemetery associations regarding "perpetual" care.  There have been a lot of historical examples of abuses of families and remains.  Also, the regulations minimize the chance of legitimate remains from being mistaken for crime victims if they are discovered by a 3d party at a later date.  People can get pretty excited if someone starts digging up, unknowingly, what used to be a family graveyard.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Daswulf]

I'd think, buried in a good decomposing soil, that diseases and such wouldn't be much issue.  Sure a surface with decomposing bodies laying about and such could be bad. 

Burning with wood would be renewable. 

Burial in the desert makes mummies, in sealed boxed makes soap people, in frozen land makes Encino man... 

 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

My wife wants a Viking ship burial flaming arrows and all.

[Daswulf]

A guy I work with (Marine) also plans that, and if I remember correctly his wife as well.  

[JHCC]

3 hours ago, George N. M. said:

My late wife and I met in the early '70s in an underground organization, the National Speleological Society.

That explains your deep affection.

[ThomasPowers]

Exposure on a platform where the high UV and vultures will deal with it would work out here.  When I'm gone, I'm gone.  I told my family to cremate me and then uses the ashes to grit the walk next time it got icy...(Actually strew them in the old family cemetery in NW AR and add my name to the cenotaph there.)

[JHCC]

We did that with my beloved cousin Mary, who wanted her ashes sprinkled on her mother's grave. For such a tiny woman, she produced a LOT of ash.

(Fun fact I discovered when making the urn for my father's ashes: the industry standard for cremation urn volume is one cubic inch per pound of live body weight.)

[arkie]

Since this thread has turned morbid, I'll add my two bits...

Back when I lived in a BIG city, I worked in a 50 story building.  The elevator rides down to the ground level took a while.  There was a famous, elderly attorney working on our floor near the top.  As the elevator descended for lunch, the old attorney, who had been listening to the elevator music with us for quite a while, commented "That music borders on 'funerality'".  That was some 45 years ago and it's still burned in my memory!  I need to see if that term is in the dictionary......

[JHCC]

"Funereality" doesn't appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it's a theoretically valid form of "funeral", of which the OED says:

Quote

2. Appropriate for, or reminiscent of, a funeral; gloomy, mournful, melancholy.

Thus, "funereality" would be "appropriateness for a funeral; gloominess, mournfulness, melancholy."