Someone presented this to the class today:

I love Eddie Izzard and this is soo good, I feel fellow archaeology students will enjoy this:

This may seem odd...

But I follow some rather strange things on tumblr. One of those being the http://www.obitoftheday.com/ this is a tumblr page that shows famous, interesting and unique people's obits (very relevant to a class about death). Very interesting stuff. It is mostly just a way to show off the lives of interesting people. 

The most recent one I was looking at was about the man who died twice. 

Lincoln Hall after being brought to hospital From www.obitoftheday.com.

This is the story of Lincoln Hall, a man who climbed Everest twice, only to be left behind thought to be dead the second time. The next day a different expedition on their way up found him sitting with his legs dangling over a cliff still conscious. Amazing. Apparently he lost 8 fingers due to frostbite (sorry about the photo guys) as well as a few toes. He also has lasting memory problems, but that is incredible considering what happened to him. 

Because of this amazing article I started perusing the sites to find other interesting people. I found the obituary of the "Last Madam of the Chicken Ranch." The story of the real life woman who inspired the musical "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." This is the musical that later inspired the 1982 movie of the same title featuring Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. A whore house musical extravaganza. I stumbled upon this movie one night and it was the most amazing thing to find by accident in the middle of the night. 

Incredible.

I'll leave you with a clip of this. (I know I got off track, but it is really hilarious and amazing). 

Some Dolly Parton Goodness. 

Too cute not to post somewhere!

Found the image at: http://365times3oflaw.blogspot.ca/

This may not be entirely appropriate for the website, but I had to post it somewhere. This little vampire bat is just so cute.

I should really stay off google...

The other day I was reading some old tweets of mine (I tweet, deal with it) and I came across one from that I posted at the beginning of the semester: "Ugh. Should not have googled 'hermetically sealed coffin." Looking at this I thought it might actually make an interesting blog post. 

Why am I so grossed out by the idea and why what is up with the internet?!

Once I started googling hermetically sealed coffins though, I found that I was much less disturbed. I thought I was desensitized to grossness before this semester, but nearing the end I realize how much more of it I understand; or at least have covered in so much detail that it just can't gross me out anymore (well, I say that, but don't test me please). This semester I not only have our class on the archaeology of death, but as well I have a class on the anthropology of zombies, and forensic osteology. Mix that with the details of the project my group is doing on vampire burials and well... it's not all that gross anymore. 

I did find myself in that corner of the internet that sort of weirded me out. I know I should have been ready for it since well... you can find anything on the internet if you look. Through various links and articles I got pretty deep into the funerary part of the internet. Let me at least share some of the more interesting sites that I found, it was pretty fun perusing through them. 

From the Readers Digest article below.

The first link I want to share is an article done by the Reader's Digest website:

13 Things The Funeral Director Won't Tell You.

This article follows the basic framework they use for a number of articles to help people find good deals and learn the in's and out's of whatever it is they are looking to purchase. For instance they also have links to 13 things your Car Mechanic won't tell you and 13 things your computer guy won't tell you. It was interesting though because it just points out the amount of unnecessary things that are included in funerals and how easy it is to avoid them. It forces you to remember that funeral directors are salespeople, they provide a service but they also want to make as much money as they can from you. Why not up-sell the grieving widow some ridiculous extravagant casket for her husband, that is at least a few more thousand dollars onto her bill! 

If you look at that list you will possibly be led down the same rabbit hole that I was: Walmart sells coffins. Thats right, Walmart.com (not .ca only the America Walmart website sells coffins... I checked...) sells coffins that you can order easily off the internet. 

Personally I like this stainless steel one. Not that I would want a casket. Or would need one that costs $2000 US.

Not only does it sell caskets, but it also has a variety of different styles of urns, even some with clocks on them (???), and 'keepsakes' which are like miniature urns (I guess?).

I guess so you can keep it with you?

This is not something I ever would have thought to look for on Walmart.com. Even Costco.com sells caskets. 

After this I just went too far. I googled: Strange funerals. 

To be honest a lot of the things I came up with were just those joke websites that are there to shock you and make you laugh, therefore there was a lot of funeral rituals posted and things written about them that were fairly... ethnocentric. This was especially the case in regards to the tradition of creatively shaped coffins in Ghana that Meredith posted about earlier in the semester. 

My favorite thing that I found was the tradition of the hanging coffin left from the Bo people of China. 

Thanks fuckyeahantiques.tumblr.com for the picture.

I will leave you here with this clip (aww yeah bringing it right back around to archaeology):

Where's Waldo? Early Dealings with Death.

My first pet when I was just little was a hamster named Waldo.

Not Waldo. Just the cutest happiest hamster. Seriously. Link to Original.

I was too little to remember him, but in my head he will always be that first pet. The story that I have always been told was that one day when there was some construction going on at our house, someone (I can't remember whether it was a neighbour girl, a babysitter, or just a family friend) forgot to close his cage and Waldo got out. With so much commotion going on in the house and the door being kept open for the guys moving things in and out as they worked, no one would have noticed a tiny little furry buddy scurry out the door. At least that is the theory, no one in my family could ever definitively answer the question "Where's Waldo?"

As I started growing up I was aware of the fact (television and my generation of course) that parents would lie about pets deaths to their children who they felt were too young to deal with the idea of death. I talked to my mom about it as it related to Waldo and even now she assures me that Waldo just disappeared, and that he probably got out of his cage and ran away. I thought about it and what is harder for a child: a pet dying and having to learn about death, or a pet just disappearing with no explanation? Either way it means a little kid has to deal with the fact that something that was there is now gone.

The idea of children and how they are introduced or sheltered from the concept of death is one that I find extremely interesting. I took an english class on children's literature and we covered the material from the oldest to the newest looking at the roots of children's literature. That was the most shocking introduction to a course I think I have ever experienced. When we think of children's literature we think of the kinds of things we had when we were growing up. For instance later in the course we read "The Hobbit," and "The Paper Bag Princess," classics that I read when I was little. What we started with was the kind of depressing and dark stories like those from the brothers Grimm and their Fairy Tales and other tales that are filled with death and hopeless endings. These are not the Disney versions of my childhood. They remind me of Edward Gorey and his gruesome alphabet:

We were forced to confront the fact that children were not always looked at as innocent as we view children today. They did not live in the kind of world that sheltered them from everything sad or scary, it was right there in their world all the time. For the beginnings of children's literature it made sense as a necessary tool to teach children about death. Childhood mortality rates were much higher and therefore being a child in the past meant that you had to deal with death eventually, chances are that not all of your friends or your siblings were going to make it.

Knowing that even in the last few centuries the idea of children and their 'innocence' has changed dramatically makes it easier to look at different cultures and how they might look at death and childhood. If something that we take for granted with children in our own culture has changed so much what does that say about the way in which we do look at children. Just because we can shelter them from the bad things that we don't want to acknowledge, does that necessarily mean we should be doing that?

Questioning "Vampire" Discoveries.

I had a tough time finding websites that were more than just blogs for this assigned post. Since our project is about Vampires and archaeology I thought I would be able to find some really interesting sites that were more than pop-culture fan sites or small blog posts. Unfortunately my searching did not come up with anything that really fit what I was looking for. I ended up deciding on a blog post about the problems with sensationalizing the concept of 'Vampire' burials to gain notice and public popularity about the dig site. It outlines the argument as well as including a letter written by an expert, critiquing a recent 'vampire' find. But since it is just a blog post, I decided to look at the website as a whole to mark it with the rubric. The website is called Publishing Archaeology and posts information about professional publishing issues in Archaeology.

For analysis I would probably give the page a 7. While good material is given the posts are fairly short and only really look at the surface of each full topic. Because all of the posts are on different subjects it makes the amount of analysis for each of them pretty basic. It falls somewhere between a 'good' and a 'very good' on our rubric. It works for the site but does not really fit what we are looking for for our site.

In the content and background information I would give this site a 10. The information included is from peer reviewed articles and academic sources. The site also uses their information in an interesting and clear way in order to present new and interesting ideas. As I explained in the last section, the site is meant to give pretty short descriptions of interesting new ideas and concepts in Archaeology, this lends itself well to our marking system because it is very clear and concise in the descriptions of the ideas presented.

The resources section would receive full marks because there are more than 2 articles used as resources for each post that cover a cross-disciplinary approach to the concepts. As well it is clear and well laid out and you can find the sources used for each one at the bottom of each post.

Navigation is pretty simple here since it is a blog, so therefore if you are at the main page you just keep scrolling down to get to different articles. The site also includes a sidebar with a few things I found useful for navigation, specifically the "Labels" which has tags for each post so that you can navigate old posts easily. I would give this section a 4 because I would have likes a little bit more accessibility in the form of a search bar to search old articles quicker and the presentation is a little boring, but overall it works well.

The only other section is on teamwork and since this site it put together by more than one person I will give it full marks for teamwork! Go Team!

The website provides interesting information from academic sources in a concise way. It includes pictures every now and then to keep the site fun and interesting:

A cute picture that I found on the site and figured it would represent the site as a whole pretty well. 

And while I found the site relatively bland and boring, the sources are very good, the layout was clear, and the information was easily accessible. 28.5/32.5

The site: Publishing Archaeology. Contributors: Cindy, Michael E. Smith. URL: publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com