Great Deals on Coffins at Costco

The timing is a bit odd for me to have come across this story today. After all, I just had to buy a coffin for my father less than two weeks ago. Maybe that's why I am not put off by this story. In fact, I had to buy more than just a coffin, I had to pay for mortuary services and an entire funeral.

There are no Costco's that I know of in Argentina. Even if there are, they wouldn't be anywhere near where my father lived. Every time I asked my father for an address, it would be a succession of "at the intersection of this street and that street, just up the road from the gas station, turn right and look for a small shack past a column of red berry shrubs."

In the end, the coffin my father received was a plain pine box - humble, simple and totally unpretentious. All qualities my father lacked in life. In a way, I figured I'd make one last attempt to instill in him traits I thought might aid him getting past security at the pearly gates.

To some, selling coffins at Florida's Costco may seem tasteless and even opportunistic, but in a competitive, free market environment, even the Grim Reaper has to take advantage of demographic opportunities. See news article on Costco Coffins.

So, what's my point here? Well, for one, you'd better pick out your own coffin ahead of time, because you never really know what revenge your children will take if they have to buy one for you. And secondly, if you are going to go the cheap route and buy one at Costco, go ahead and kill two birds with one stone (pun intended), and buy yourself a whole palette of discounted Lysol All-purpose cleaner while you're at it. Aisle 12, I believe.

The Last Gasp

In the early morning hours of July 22nd, 2007, a defeated and disease-ravaged man lay dead in his bed. Beside him, his nerve-shattered companion dialed a preset number on the man's cell phone.

My phone rang. It was 12:30 am. I almost didn't hear it. Nick Drake strummed his last stance on my iPod, and my Pit Bull and a German Shepherd were chasing a wild scent left on a butcher shop's brick wall.

My phone rang again. Standing under the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains and the yellow light of a half moon, I flipped open the cell phone and saw the caller ID, "Papi".

"Oh God, my father's dead."

I was right. He was.

"Papi" was no ordinary liar. He was, without exaggeration, the Mozart of liars. His fictional compositions were orchestral masterpieces of fib. As composer and conductor of his fabricated truths, my father was unrivaled below the equator. Yes, below the equator. My Papi was born, lived and died with all his lies in Argentina. Beautiful Argentina.

Hours before my father died, on July 21, he celebrated his 69th birthday by trying not to die. Papi was always afraid to die on his birthday. His mother, my grandmother, died on her birthday, and he couldn't shake the awful irony that that coincidence somehow represented. So on his birthday, my father held on for as long as he could to make sure the clock hand past the midnight mark. Life, in his opinion, had been sadistically cruel to him, and even though he nevr seemed to win at it's game, he wasn't planning on losing this time. There was no way that the cruel irony of his own mother's death would repeat itself in his life.

I called my father to wish him happy birthday only 6 hours before he died. He sounded awful. More awful than all the other times I called him and he sounded awful. The problem was, you never knew when he was faking his illnesses or not. This time, however, there was no mistaking the sounds of a man running away from the last gasp of life. He sounded so bad that after hanging up the phone, I started making plans to go down to Argentina. It had been six years since I had seen my father last, and though my wife and I had wanted to travel the year before, something always delayed our plans.

Papi adored my children the same way he adored his children. With all his might and always from afar. I think it was easier for him to be an exiled father than a real one. Self-exiled, of course. My father had a hard time living in truth, and he never wanted his children to really see what he himself could not face. That his life was an unfinished romance novel wrapped around a plot line of "would have's, should have's and could have's," and written by an unreliable narrator who was always running to stay one step ahead of his last gasp.

Me, I am in a mixed state of emotions. I'm thousands of miles away, and instead of attending the funeral, I attended to the arrangements and the payment. A few weeks before he passed, Papi made me promise to bury him properly. He didn't want to end up in the community pothole as he called the public cemetery.

Like most deaths, pain is accompanied by laughter and silly memories, but death also reminds us how ephemeral our physical experience really is, and it brings into focus our own use of that time. Death screams, "do all you can to not waste a single second."

For the most part, my father wasted his life and threw away his relationships. Just a few days ago I talked to him about regrets and he was defiant all the way. This time, I didn’t get upset, I just laughed and said, “well, I’m sure you’ll be changing your mind one day soon, just don’t forget to come back and let me know.”

Amazingly, Papi gave me a sign not even 24 hours after his passing. A little miracle of a sign that conceded, “Marcel, maybe you were right, but hey, I’m still here, so I guess somebody is going to give me a second chance.” Maybe one day I will write about this sign, but for right now, I'm happy to keep it to myself.

I've also decided that one day I am going to tell my kids everything about their grandfather. Yes, everything. Hopefully they will understand why, in spite of it all, I loved him strong.

Bang Bang Buddhist - Signs of the Apocalypse

Politics, power and the new world order have begun to encroach on one of the world's most peaceful religions/philosophies, Buddhism.

For years, the Sri Lankan government has been fighting the Tamil Tigers (a terrorist insurgency), without much support from Sri Lanka's religious leaders. Now, the call to arms has been taken up by a small political party of Buddhist monks.
See video for more.

Six Feet Over - Adventures in the Afterlife

Hilary Mantel, a reporter from UK's The Guardian Unlimited, wrote this skeptically tinged review of Mary Roach's skeptically tinged book on the many different areas of paranormal study. I haven't read it yet, but as long as it's not downright dismissive without looking at the current data available, then I think it could be a good read.

The Other Side
Hilary Mantel

When I was a small child at a Catholic school we were taught that the soul could not be weighed, measured, pictured nor described. Like a gas it permeated us, like a liquid it filled us to the brim. Like a sheet of glass, it could be marked or stained by venial sin, or etched by mortal sin - in the latter case, industrial-strength repentance would be needed to make it clear again. Intimate with every part of us, it was neither in us nor of us; when we died, it would go on, without the body. We learned this at the same time as we learned our times tables and how to tie our shoelaces, and most people could grasp the metaphors involved. But when the priest came for the annual religious examination, he would hold out a piece of chalk and ask us to "draw a soul"; there was always some dimwit who swaggered up to the blackboard.Descartes, among others, fell into the dimwit's error. He thought the soul was located in the pineal gland, or at least that the pineal gland was a sort of information hub for spirit; he came to this conclusion after hacking up a great many carcasses, bought in the butchers' shops of Amsterdam. The idea that the soul can be located, that it can be weighed, that it has colour and form, has persisted into the present century, as Mary Roach shows in her nimble excursion across the frontier into the next world. Is the soul, detached from the body, subject to the laws of gravity, or "relegated to an eternity among the derelict satellites and Nasa detritus"? Does the soul weigh 21 grams, as the title of the Hollywood movie suggests? Could the dead be heard if, as Edison thought, you could make a sort of psychic megaphone? At the end of the 19th century, and early in the 20th century, the air was full of disembodied voices, of invisible rays. Radios and telephones and X-rays were technological marvels; most people didn't understand them, but no one would accuse you of being a credulous fool if you claimed that your mother's voice was issuing from a bakelite handset.

Dreams, phantoms, omens, apparitions - perhaps these marginal, troubling phenomena could be quantified, analysed, explained? Freud, for one, wanted so much to be thought of as a scientist. But states of mind, let alone states of the soul, proved resistant to verification, and the dead seldom speak when the qualified and accredited are listening. Their communications as recorded by professional psychics are so banal and garbled that they must be regarded as a sly cosmic joke. "How is the weather?" a discarnate entity is asked, in one current, properly funded American research project. The answer comes from the Beyond: "It's like Florida without the humidity." Another shy spook confides: "I can wear pleated pants now." The afterlife's answer to "Do you engage in sexual behaviour?" is a little hesitant, but can be summed up as a disappointing "not really".

Roach is an American columnist and science writer. She had a religious upbringing, claims to have had nun paper dolls, and engaged in "the meagre fun of swapping a Carmelite wimple for a Benedictine chest bib". This over-privileged childhood has left her a little too pleased with herself and her "bad attitude." She is the naughtiest girl at psychic school - a weekend course in raising spirits - and like many psychics themselves, she has a big ego, and can even show off about her shortcomings: "My ignorance is not merely deep, it is broad; it is a vast ocean that takes in chemistry, physics, information theory, thermodynamics, all the many things a modern soul theorist must know." But she is energetic and canny in pursuit of haunted spell-checkers, spirit orbs, lab-induced temporal lobe seizures, electronic voice phenomena, ectoplasm, infrasound and near-death experiences. Skittish but smart, she knows how to navigate the marshy ground of self-delusion that is found between truth and lies, and she has captured the deep personal unpleasantness of many of the people who work in the spook trade - their aggressive irrationality, their intolerance, their unsubtle bullying tactics. But it is surprising she is not more impatient with her whole subject. It's easy to poke holes in supposedly scientific studies of mediumship, but perhaps they should not be undertaken at all. The afterlife has become a staple of trash TV and a branch of the leisure industry. It is no more useful to disbelieve in ghosts than to disbelieve in tenpin bowling or portable barbecues. A fair reaction to the puzzle of the afterlife is what Roach calls "the Big Shrug".

She touches, though, on some intriguing topics which could have merited further exploration - voice hearing, for instance, which recent Dutch research suggests is a phenomenon more widespread among the perfectly sane than anyone had imagined. "It could well be that the main difference between skeptics and believers is the neural structures they were born with." Some people will never see a ghost, and some people can't help it; reason with them as hard as you like, they will not deny the evidence of their senses. At the end of her tour of the afterlife, Roach believes "not much, but more than I believed a year ago". It is a mild conclusion to an entertaining book that is best when it is digressive. Her footnotes are a gruesome joy. It is worth reading Six Feet Over just to meet Frederick II of Sicily, a pioneer scientist of the 13th century, who used to give his guests a good dinner and then disembowel them, "wishing to know which had digested the better".

original article

· Hilary Mantel's most recent novel is Beyond Black (Harper Perennial)  

The biologist and the philosopher

E.O. Wilson is a biologist. Daniel C. Dennett is a philosopher. Both believe that understanding evolution is essential to understanding our humanity. Despite an incipient blizzard, they met up in the spring of 2004 to talk about God, evolution, incest, and of course, ants. This was their conversation.

Seed: E.O. Wilson + Daniel Dennett

Mac Attack

The iPhone is out. I don't have one and I'm jealous. I'm also ticked off that most of the folks who are lining up around the block at all the AT&T stores, are the same PC pounders whose parents once lined up at a Sears register to buy them an Apple Performa.

Few people will understand this post, as most people are either living outside my world or simply too dispassionate to care about a competition so petty and insignificant as the Mac vs. PC rivalry.

I've been a Mac guy since the Apple IIE in the mid 80's and have owned several different Macs since.

I'm a creative Mac guy, not a techie Mac guy, but I still worship Steve Jobs genius, and every time I see Bill Gates on the news, I can't help but to whisper "Nerd thief" inside my head. Yes, it's childish, but this is serious turf rivalry, Yo!

Speaking of that...

Here is a hilarious rap spoof of the whole Mac vs. PC battle. You know what side I'm on, so back off you DOS operating chumps!



And here is the rest of it.

Grieving Mom in "Afterlife" by Donald Antrim

Antrim has turned, in his nonfiction, toward a reckoning with the complicated grief brought on by the loss of a complicated parent. The seven chapters of "The Afterlife" are dominated by his mother, Louanne, who married and separated from Antrim's father twice and died of lung cancer in 2000. Her alcoholism, her smoking, her emotional volatility, her needy, proud, eccentric temperament — these all add up to a legacy that challenges Antrim's impulses toward clarity, irony and reserve.

Read more from The New York Times Book Review