If I weren’t planning to donate my body to science or be cremated or get dumped into the ocean for the hagfish to eat me, I’d want a funeral at the Ahlgrim Family Funeral Home in Palatine, Illinois. They have a miniature golf course in the basement! You can also play pinball and shuffleboard!
Absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, the article mentions that they don’t serve beer, which means that they are missing one of the essential sacraments of a good funeral.
Only when the whiskey’s run out.
That’s about 10 minutes from me here at work. Maybe I’ll pop over on lunch. Or maybe not. Good sense of humor though. And there are plenty of liquor stores along Northwest Highway, in case you can BYOB.
I thought that you were going to have your body eaten by vultures? I plan on organ donation, then cremation.
Here’s my personal dream funeral:
I’d like to have all of my friends gathered on a boat off the coast of Florida, with liquor and beer served for about 4 hours of partying prior to the big ceremony. The ceremony would then consist of blasting one of my songs over the boat’s loud speakers, at the end of which, my naked body is launched out of a cannon to helicopter out to the horizon. Oh, and there should be a banner saying “Goodbye Old Chum!” Then the DJ should announce the resumption of drinks, dancing and deep sea fishing, returning to land only when the booze runs out.
What are other people’s plans/wishes?
How about donating your remains to Mary’s giant seagoing roly-poly bugs?
I guess I’m too much of a traditionalist. I’ve actually asked to have have my urn put in the family plot.
I like a suggestion a Kiwi acquaintance of mine had put in his will. He wants his body to be used for pharmaceutical testing or similar experiments if he’s braindead. But apparently that’s not legal yet. I think I’ll put that in if I ever need to do a revision. (I’m a registered organ donor, of course, but if the parts don’t work well enough, I don’t see why they shouldn’t get to run some fun poisons through the tubes before switching off the machines.)
After reading Mary Roach’s book Stiff, I decided on composting. But it’s not available in Canada yet.
At my grandfather’s viewing I went to the kids room and played Double Dragon and Duck Hunt.
Whoa, they have a Defender machine. Almost heaven except
no beer
My uncle’s dying wish – he wanted me on his lap. He was in the electric chair…. I tell ya I get no respect… no respect…
I’m donating my body to science fiction.
Hmmm, how about scattering my ashes over human crops. Maybe then my atoms will be re-incorporated into a human brain and I can achieve chemical immortality. :p
Funerals should be held in bars, should they not? And actually, I think that it happens from time to time.
Either celebrate a life via the only spirits for which we have evidence, or drown out your sorrow at your loss (or the alternative that could be left unmentioned, drink because you really didn’t care about the person). It’s up to you.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Glen, we’d have more funerals in bars if smoking were allowed. Inconvenient to move to the cremation site. :p
from the Wikipedia entry under
Palatine, Illinois: “During the
early 1990s, Palatine along with
neighboring Rolling Meadows & far
northern suburb Zion was under
attack from atheist activist
Rob Sherman over its village seal
& …flag, which had a Christian
cross, among other things, inside
an outline of an eagle…While
Rolling Meadows & Zion developed
new seals with the crosses removed,
Palatine has since been without an
official seal or flag…”
I thought it sounded familiar.
While perhaps not as much fun as a funeral home with a miniature golf course, the combination of a funeral home and squirrel taxidermy museum has got to be the weirdest:
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2247
(The owner has since died but the collection lives on and here’s a write up from a more recent visit:)
http://extremecraft.typepad.com/extreme_craft/2008/06/death-and-taxidermy.html
(Strangely enough, thefuneral home’s website doesn’t mention all the dead squirrels in the basement. Maybe they thought it would be bad for business.)
What a great name for a funeral home – AhlGRIM!
If possible I’d like to have a simple above ground burial (after native american tradition)- the body being pleasingly draped, secured to branches, about two thirds up, in a lovely oak tree.
@jidashdee: I can only guess “old chum” is not only sentimental but descriptive, at that point. But what if your friends reel you back in while they’re fishing? Do they get to stuff and mount you?
That depends on what you mean by “mount”.
Denyse is getting my brain in the post when I die. It’ll be dead mush but very useful compared to the present vacuum.
Whenever I go through Canton, Ohio, I see the sign for Wackerly Funeral Home. The name always makes me wish that they had the motto, “You whack ’em, we stack ’em.”
Also, the sign is in neon. So my idea isn’t really outside their tackiness threshold, I think.
My plans is to do the zombie slide, after that a quick cremation no ceremony and have my ashes hauled to the tundra in alaska to be dumped.
The golf course has a “haunted” theme! Let’s all go to the basement of a funeral home and played haunted mini-golf. That’s not creepy.
Anyway, they say the playroom is off-limits during actual funerals.
Twisted minds think alike. I’ve told my wife since the day we got married I want to be shot out of a cannon, but into my grave from point-blank range.
I also had a friend who said he wanted to be blown up and whoever caught the biggest piece would inherit his fortune.
After organ donation and medical research have finished with me I really want to be buried, not burnt; I hate the idea of adding to global warming.
Although my coven and I were having some gruesome fun with the idea of tying my remains, loosely, to a wild camel herd and letting it go in the desert to be scattered as carrion.
With a picnic for the people and camels beforehand.
I’ve been encouraging sons numbers three and four to have a rendition of the Portal song (‘Still alive’) with the live ones gloating over their still being alive when I’m dead. With a recording of a few particular lines being played from the depths of whatever compostible box I happen to be in.
Damn! No playing minigolf with grandpa’s glass eyeball.
If you like the place that much,PZ, mightn’t it be a better plan to go there BEFORE you die?
@jidashdee: At that point, what do you care? I’m with Diogenes on this.
I want to have one helluva wake – with my friends bringing homebrew and some of my favorite microbrews, including Great Basin Brewing Co., Silver Peak Brewery, Fifty-Fifty, Buckbean, Moose’s Tooth, and a keg of Alaskan Amber.
Behind the scenes, I’ve been harvested, rendered, and the bones donated to my high school (or university – haven’t decided). I also like the idea of being composted and being experimented on – if I’m brain dead (ir maybe even if I’m not, but definitely on my way out). Cannons are an amusing idea, too.
Some great ideas, but that’s hardly surprising in this crowd. . . – g^2
@Antiochus, I was woefully ignorant of Diogenes (other than he existed and, I hope, pronunciation), and I am now slightly less so, thanks to you.
After skimming his Wikipedia entry, particularly that relating to his death, as a dog trainer, I would really like “a pillar on which rested a dog.” Much like Hachikō, except for me, not the dog. – g^2
Or cephalopods.
@kiyaroru, you can see if you can donate your body to a body farm, where they study how bodies decompose when exposed to the elements. As close to compost as you’ll get.
I want to donate my body to science too. Let those students have a giggle and learn to cut properly.
I just read that if they harvest anything for use in other people, they most likely won’t use your body for research/teaching afterwards. So perhaps some people will want to make that choice themselves.
These kinds of things never work out well. See, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9w1DrVEM64
After my organs are harvested I want my body cremated and the ashes scattered at sea.
# 22-Oh yay, ICP! Saw them on Aquateens last night. But anyway, it’s the body farm for me. Two within easy driving distance of Austin. One allows vultures, one doesn’t, but the one that does is far too close to my point of origin.
Chicago actor Del Close (A Legend In His Own Town) willed that when he died his skull should be detached, cleaned up, and donated to the Goodman Theater to appear as Yorick in all productions of Hamlet on condition that he be given credit in the cast list.
Don’t forget leaving your body to the so-called “Body Farm,” which I believe is near Knoxville, TN. Always better for some sort of science to benefit from my dead meat than to be pickled, put into a high-priced decorative box and put into a hole.