Eideard

Police said they will search Thursday for what is left of the cremated remains of a man and two dogs that robbers stole from a Florida house and then snorted after mistakenly thinking it was cocaine.

Members of the Marion County sheriff’s department dive team say they will search a lake in the area where they think the remainder of the ashes may have been dumped.

Are they going to run the water through a filter?

The robbery occurred in December in a home in the central Florida area of Silver Springs, the sheriff department said in a statement. A robbery crew ransacked the home taking electronics, jewelry and the cremated ashes of the homeowner’s father and two Great Danes.

“During the investigation, detectives learned that the ashes were taken because the suspects mistook the ashes for either cocaine or heroin. It was soon discovered that the suspects snorted some of the ashes believing they were snorting cocaine,” a sheriff’s department statement said.

Three teens and two juveniles were arrested in the case.

For a grand total of five idiots.

Undertakers in the Austrian capital say they’re planning to use a crematorium to help heat their new headquarters.

Bestattung Wien spokesman Juergen Sild says cremation requires generating very high temperatures and that the idea, in times of environmental awareness, is to put the excess energy created to good use instead of letting it go to waste.

Sild added Friday that the headquarters, to be situated next to the crematorium and due to be completed next year, would also be warmed with gas.

Well, you need a backup when there aren’t sufficient cremations to keep the place toasty.

Want to be cremated, but worry that your ashes will just end up sitting in some boring urn?

Fear not! Have a look at these 10 bizarre places that ashes have gone.

1. Into a comic book

When longtime Marvel Comics editor Mark Gruenwald died in 1996, he left an interesting final wish: he wanted to have his ashes mixed into the ink used in one of Marvel’s titles. The company obliged by reprinting a 1985 collection of the Gruenwald-penned Squadron Supreme with the specially prepared ink in 1997. Gruenwald’s widow, Catherine, wrote in the book’s foreword, “He has truly become one with the story.”

2. Into fireworks

Writer Hunter S. Thompson literally went out with a bang. Thompson’s appropriately gonzo 2005 memorial service featured a fireworks show in which each boom and crack dispersed some of the writer’s ashes. Johnny Depp underwrote the fireworks display at a cost of $2 million.

3. Into a Pringles can

The name Fredric Baur may not ring any bells, but you know his most famous creation. In 1966 Baur invented the Pringles can so Procter & Gamble could ship its new chips without using bags.

Baur was so proud of the achievement that he told his children he wanted to be buried in the iconic can. When he died in 2008 at 89, they honored his wishes by placing his ashes in a Pringles can before burying them…

It’s a great list. Though I probably wouldn’t consider this last one:

10. Up Keith Richards’ nose?

In 2007 music mag NME asked Rolling Stones guitarist to name the strangest thing he’d ever snorted. The reporter was probably expecting an odd answer given Richards’ legendary proclivity for partying, but Richards’ response was a jaw-dropper.

Richards told the magazine, “The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.”

Har!

California funeral directors are eager to start offering clients a new natural and greener way to dispose of their loved ones’ remains, but they need a change in state law first.

Funeral homes and crematoria want to use a liquid chemical process to dissolve bodies instead of cremating them with fire.

“It’s green. It’s clean. It’s environmentally friendly and it reduces the carbon footprint,” said California state Assemblyman Jeff Miller (R-Corona), who wrote legislation to make the so-called bio-cremation method legal.

Miller said his bill was prompted by a funeral home director in his district who might may buy a bio-cremation machine. The measure would broaden the definition of cremation to include the use of either both fire or and water…

Though no one has started using bio-cremation commercially, the technology already has grabbed the funeral industry’s attention, said Bob Achermann, executive director of the California Funeral Directors Assn.

“There will be consumer demand,” he said, especially among people who have personal or environmental qualms about combustion cremation.

One advantage of bio-cremation to the state’s 1,000 funeral homes and crematoria is that it doesn’t require them to go through the difficult and expensive procedure for obtaining air emission permits from local air pollution agencies.

Sounds neat to me. A couple hundred dollar$ more than traditional cremation. So they say.

I’d love to be poured on the ground next to my favorite tree.

This is from their “gallery” – which doesn’t include the garage

A Maryland funeral home has lost its license after investigators found about 40 bodies stacked on top of each other, leaking fluid, in a garage, a state official said.

The state Board of Morticians and Funeral Directors revoked the license of Chambers Funeral Home & Crematorium in Riverdale, Maryland after an April 26 visit to the site.

Hari Close, president of the the state funeral board, told CNN Tuesday that some of the bodies were cadavers who had been donated to a local university for research. Other bodies came from other funeral homes, Close said…

When investigators inspected the funeral home they were warned by an employee, who told them, “Don’t get upset about all the bodies in there,” according to documents released by the state funeral board.

Inside the room was a “large pile, approximately 12 by 12 feet, of body bags containing human remains strewn on the floor of the garage in front of a removal van. There was visible leakage from the body bags as well as a pungent odor,” the documents said.

“The investigator also observed writing on some of the body bags,” they said. “However, fluid leakage from the body bags caused the writing to smear and become illegible. As a result, it was not immediately possible to determine the identity of the remains.”

There will be a hearing at the end of the month to determine whether the funeral home will get its license back, Close said.

The state of the bodies is a crime. Whether or not they get their license back – of course – is a question of politics.

Albuquerque Police are trying to find out if an Albuquerque company that handles bodies donated for medical research tried to dump body parts in Kansas City.

BioCare’s owner, Paul Montaño, was arrested Wednesday night on three fraud charges…

Questions arose about Montano’s business after several body parts showed up in Kansas City, Kansas.

First a head and torso showed up at a facility called Stericycle, a company that incinerates medical waste, but not body parts. Then police stopped a shipment to the plant last week, containing 30 drums full of body parts. Six heads were in the shipment. The labels on the drums were from BioCare in Albuquerque…

Fraud charges would be filed if authorities believe the company lied to the families of people that donated their bodies to BioCare, according to police.

“The person, my loved one, that BioCare gave me in my urn, is that my loved one or not? Or did you give me someone else,” Police spokeswoman Nadine Hamby said.

The Kansas City coroner worries about that as well. He identified an arm Tuesday because it still had a tag on it with the name of an Albuquerque funeral home. The funeral home told the coroner it thought it cremated the man’s body after BioCare returned his remains in a box in September. The funeral home then gave the ashes back to the family.

The coroner in Kansas said Wednesday that the six heads are in good condition and he should be able to identify them through photos. Records from BioCare may speed the process along.

Montaño’s hustle was simple enough. He advertised free cremation if people donated bodies to scientific research.

At this point in time, it looks like he was just adding whatever was left from research to containers of medical waste shipped to Stericycle – and giving folks ashes from someone or something else.

Forensic Anthropological Research Center trainees

Coroners and medical examiners across the country are reporting spikes in the number of unclaimed bodies and indigent burials, with states, counties and private funeral homes having to foot the bill when families cannot.

The increase comes as governments short on cash are cutting other social service programs, with some municipalities dipping into emergency and reserve funds to help cover the costs of burials or cremations…

About a dozen states now subsidize the burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies, including Illinois, Massachusetts, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Most of the state programs provide disposition services to people on Medicaid, a cost that has grown along with Medicaid rolls…

Already in 2009, Wisconsin has paid for 15 percent more cremations than it did last year, as the number of Medicaid recipients grew by more than 95,000 people since the end of January…

The majority of burials and cremations, however, are handled on the city, county, town or township level, an added economic stress as many places face down wide budget gaps…

Many places are turning to cremation, which averages a third to half the price of a burial. However, they will accommodate families’ requests for burial…

RTFA. Hard times affect every aspect of life.

Though there are some interesting solutions – I must admit. Check out the “body farm” in Tennessee.

The High Court will consider a legal challenge from a 70-year-old Hindu today that would allow him to have an open-air cremation when he dies. The judicial review at the Royal Courts of Justice will hear a case brought by Davender Kumar Ghai, founder of the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society, who wants the law changed to allow traditional Hindu funeral pyres in Britain.

Newcastle City Council has refused him a permit to be cremated in line with Hindu ritual, arguing that a pyre outside a crematorium is prohibited by the 1902 Cremation Act.

Although there have been Hindu cremations in the the past in Britain, in recent years the authorities have become stricter about enforcing the rules. There are more than 600,000 Hindus in Britain and many families pay thousands of pounds to fly the bodies of their loved ones to India for a traditional cremation.

Three years ago the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute after Mr Ghai organised a funeral pyre in Northumberland for Rajpal Mehat, 31, from India.

Hindus believe that cremation is essential to free the soul from the body after death. The dead person’s oldest son is usually expected to light the fire. Monks and children, having no children of their own, are sometimes buried instead of cremated. The pyre must take place at a site on which the sun shines directly at noon and which is close to running water.

Yup. Let’s expand the precedence of religious law over secular, national law. We followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster have a few rituals of our own we’d like to introduce – in the States and the U.K.

Or does the number of member of a religion – registered to vote – enter into the equation?

UPDATE: The High Court has ruled against Mr. Ghai’s request.

The abandoned ashes are stacked floor to ceiling in the basement of the Graham, Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors, tucked neatly on wooden shelves and tables and in an unused dumbwaiter.

Someone loved the people once, enough to have their bodies cremated, and then promptly forgot or decided they didn’t want them. “The fact is, if no one claims them, there’s nothing you can do with them,” said funeral director Peter Stefan of Worcester. “You can’t throw them away. They could be Uncle Freddy’s ashes. They could come and sue you.”

Storage or disposal of abandoned ashes is a growing national problem as the number of cremations is on the rise. Even in states that allow the burial or scattering of abandoned ashes, some funeral homes store them for years, hoping one day to place them in the hands of a relative.

Funeral directors worry that the regulations don’t carry the protections of a law, so they have been holding on to the ashes, just in case.

Although some of the forgotten ashes in the basement of his funeral home date to the 1890s, some are more recent, Stefan said.
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