Lost Head to Skull Collector

The University of Chicago Press has issued a paperback edition of The Skull Collectors, just the type of book Open Grave enjoys.  Author Ann Fabian  reports the collecting habits of Philadelphia physician Samuel George Morton and his 1,000 skulls acquired from around the globe.  Dr. Morton was intent on cataloging racial differences and just might have had a pre-determined outcome in mind.

His work was re-evaluated in 1978 by Stephen Jay Gould who used updated statistical analysis to find the skulls about equal among the five groups Morton identified.  Gould also noted Morton selectively included or excluded specimens and rounded off data.  His analysis was published in The Mismeasure of Man published in 1981 and revised with a new introduction in 1996.

After reading about Samuel Morton's skull-typing work, one possible impulse would be to hasten to the Biodiversity Heritage Library at Internet Archive to read online or download a copy of Crania Americana.

Though Morton's comparative study of the skulls of aboriginal peoples in North and South America is flawed science, at least there are stunning illustrations.

Photograph of a lithograph illustration from Crania Americana.
Photo: University of Pennsylvania Museum 

Scuba Cemetery

Eternal Reefs and other companies like Great Burial Reef  and Living Reef Memorial offer underwater memorials for the deceased.  Reef balls or other concrete structures hold remains of family members or a community. The cremated remains mixed with concrete to create a reef ball weigh more than 50 pounds and sit underwater in a hive shape structure that can weight up to 4,000 pounds.  It's not going to get lost at sea.

Burial Reef
Photo: treehugger.com

Ancient Burying Ground of Hartford, Connecticut

Wonder if  Skull and Bones, the secret society for boys-not-yet-men at Yale University

Skull and Bones, Yale University
Photo: en.Wikipedia.org

ever cruised the 30-odd miles from New Haven up to Hartford to practice their skulduggery at the Ancient Burying Ground of Hartford?

The Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven was closer  -- there's even a section just for Yale College -- but can't you just see those rich bad-lads tossing bootleg bubbly in Dick's Stutz-Bearcat and motoring to Connecticut's other city on a midnight lark?   

Gravestones of the Lawrence family
Ancient Burying Ground, Hartford, Connecticut
Photo: Connecticut Historical Society
and Connecticut History online

Dating to 1640 and continuing to the 1800s, the burial ground is the oldest historic landmark in Hartford.

The headstones range from plain style with just the facts about the deceased to stones with carved ornamentation of death's heads, angels and cherubs.  Ground stones, tablets and table stones mark the final resting places of Hartford's early English and French Huguenot settlers.

A brochure produced by the Ancient Burying Ground Association outlines a self-guided walking tour with detailed information  on notable headstones, genealogy and regional history.

A short video on the graveyard provides historic and cultural orientation.

More information:

Connecticut Visit - Ancient Burying Ground of Hartford

Connecticut Historical Society Museum & Library

Connecticut History

Holy Casket Makers!

Wood coffin made at Saint Joseph Abbey.
Photo: CatholicNewsAgency.com

The 37 monks at Saint Joseph Abbey near Covington, Louisiana support their monastery by selling simple handmade wooden caskets.  The relatively modest coffins sell for $1,500 to $2,000 -- far less than the typical burial casket with all the trimmings offered on the funeral director's sales floor.

The state's funeral directors believed they had a lock on the sale of coffins, caskets and other trappings of burial.  The Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors tried to shut down coffin making and selling at the monastery, citing a state regulation crafted to benefit the funeral directors and embalmers, that the casket market is only open to licensed funeral directors. 

The monks enlisted the help of the Institute for Justice to initiate a legal action to repudiate the state-wide grip the funeral managers had on all funeral-related business.

"The great deference due state economic regulation does not demand judicial blindness to the history of a challenged rule ... nor does it require courts to accept nonsensical explanations for naked transfers of wealth," Circuit Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham wrote, referring to the long sweet deal the funeral directors held over all aspects of funeral services and equipment in Louisiana. 

As of March, 2013, the monks can make 

Saint Joseph Abbey monks at work.
Photo: ReligionNews.com

and sell the wooden coffins and the funeral directors can't stop them.  As reported in Religion News.com, the  Appeal in the U.S. Fifth Circuit came out on the side of consumers and the monastery-based small business: "Funeral homes, not independent sellers, have been the problem for consumers with their bundling of product and markups of caskets. The “grant of an exclusive right of sale (for licensed funeral directors) adds nothing to protect consumers and puts them at a greater risk of abuse including exploitative prices.”

The "coffin cartel" --as one blogger put it-- funeral directors aren't going to let their cash cow go easily. In July, 2013, the Times-Picayune reports, the Louisiana embalmers and funeral directors petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn federal district and appeals court rulings in favor of the monks' right to free enterprise, the making and selling of wood caskets.

More:

Barnes, Robert. A victory for monks in fight over caskets. The Washington Post, October 25, 2012, p. A3.

Sullivan, Laura (host). Louisiana Abbey Finally Able to Sell its Caskets. All Things Considered. National Public Radio, March 31, 2013.

Busted Funeral Business on Auction Block :: Caddy Hearse for Sale

Buy a slightly used hearse or a plain brown box.  A Lancaster, Pennsylvania funeral business is auctioning equipment and assets to cover debts of "crooked" funeral business owner.

Sewers :: Private or Public Services?

Curbside "night soil" collectors. 19th c.

What Goes In, Comes Out.

WASTE WATER SYSTEMS IN THE US

Body parts in sewers?  Why is this happening?  People used to be sensible enough to dispose of spare of body parts by digging a hole with a shovel. 

Turns my stomach to think the waste water system is being used to flush body parts away.  Wastewater gets hit with a few sacks of chlorine and a spin through the filter - wash cycle to return as drinking water.  

Ick!   A tour of your local wastewater treatment plant is instructive.  Can they catch and remove everything that goes into wastewater? Check out a "purified" water bottler too.  Or,  learn how to purify water yourself.  

We can't live without water and there's not enough of it.

And who owns the clean tap water resources and waste water systems that serve your suburb, city, town or farm?  It's probably not "the Gubber-mint."

How does the waste water system work in the US, anyway?  Mostly, it's owned by private companies. Some small, some ginormous.   A great rush to privatize US waste water systems occurred in the early to mid-1990s when the Clean Water Act was up for renewal.  Big international water companies snapped up small US water companies and especially waste water treatment where the profits flow.

In the decade since the U.S. has been flushing cash down the gasping maw of the wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the scalp money to nearby countries like Pakistan, Israel and Kyrghistan, more than a few towns and cities in the Continental U.S. are selling off water and waste water treatment systems.  The cities and towns just can't afford the burden.

Grand Rapids is one example.  Other towns are in the market reports USA Today.  Economies of scale, and reduced work forces, enable larger water management companies to improve the net income from water treatment and wastewater management.

Politics involved in privatization of water includes fresh and waste water systems owned by corporations based in foreign countries, not in itself a bad thing, but when things go wrong, it's helpful to have a decision maker in the same zip code.  Or not.  Proximity doesn't guarantee dedicated or informed management.

Severn Trent Services, the current name for a very experienced British water treatment company, states it understands the North American wastewater treatment and water market.   Veolia Environnement offers similar water management services.  Actually, STS and Veolia, to name just two companies in a large, prosperous industry, doubtless offer high-quality water management services.  Europe, with its concentrated urban populations, developed filtered wastewater treatment more than 200 years ago.  Scotland first, in 1804.

Scotland, England, France, and other nations established functioning municipal water and sewer systems long before flush toilets were a universal commodity in U.S. households. 
U.S. municipalities developed a faster waste filtering system in 1890. 

Human waste pushed outside a residential compound during Winter for collection in Spring.

The class division of effective wastewater treatment in America tells another story. Analysis of U.S. census data in 1970 indicates about 10% of U.S. households relied on a privy or similar, especially in states with low per capita income.     The insidious and under-reported concentration of residual pharmaceuticals in U.S. drinking water also deserves inquiry and remediation.  Maybe by 2180?

What do economics of privatization mean for municipalities? Competition among towns to attract the best deal from multinational water management corporations shopping for a bargain water service.  And there may be issue concerning regulatory authority for these companies exploring the US market.

What does privatization mean for taxpayers?  Often, higher water supply and  wastewater treatment fees, with curtailed service.
 

Figure it out:  who owns your tap water and who owns the sewer service in your neighborhood?  Consider installing  a composting toilet (Made in the USA) and go off the wastewater grid.

Your Virtual Estate 

Do you have a plan for dealing with your online presence?  Virtual assets and information need attention.  Leaving your heirs the passwords might not be enough.

From Gmail to Twitter, Facebook to LI, with all our blogs, emails and other online accounts, most active people maintain a deep online presence that someone will need to cope with after you flit away from this life.

Who cares, you may be thinking.  It may not matter at all.  You may snicker at the idea of leaving a professional profile or Facebook antics to survive in the cloud until electricity and fiber optics are replaced with some other format for passing digi-bytes.

Consider, though, that your virtual assets are worth annotating to help your estate manager and heirs handle this aspect of your public self with dignity and as you intend.

Check it out!

The Washington Examiner carried this WSJ column of July  28, 2012.
Smart Money ran this on Aug 28, 2012.
Access to Facebook after death.  Mercury News. March 15, 2012.
Mange online assets before you die.  Techlicious .  July 18, 2012.