Digital Dying By: Justin Nobel

by Justin Nobel

Joseph Stalin, the evil Russian dictator, died on March 5, 1953, the same day as Sergei Prokofiev, a Russian pianist considered by some to be the greatest composer of the 20th century. All the flowers and musicians in Moscow were reserved for Stalin's funeral, which meant Prokofiev got paper flowers and a taped recording.

Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835; the same day Halley's Comet streaked the sky. The comet, a jumble of rocks and ice more than 100,000 kilometers across, boomeranged back into space and returned 74 years later, on April 21, 1910, the day Twain died.

Last week, a funeral procession to mark the 100th anniversary of his death was held in Elmira, New York, where the wealthy family he married into once lived. It featured horse-drawn carriages and mourners with black umbrellas (rain fell during his real funeral). The odds of being born and dying on the same day as a comet that comes once a century may seem low, but Twain, who developed an interest in parapsychology after his brother perished in a steamboat explosion he had foreseen in a dream, seemed to have expected it. “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835,” he said, a year before his death, “It is coming again next year, and…it will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet.” Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Transporting corpses to faraway homelands has long been problematic. Ancient peoples from England to the Amazon blazed arrow-straight paths known as corpse roads. Dangers included ghostly creatures such as Jack O' Lantern, Joan of the Wad and Jenny Burn-tail.

Gita Jarrant's 91 year-old husband Willi was wearing sunglasses and seated in a wheelchair when security officials at Liverpool Airport noticed he was dead. The couple and their daughter Anke were trying to board a plane for Berlin. The two women were arrested on the charge of failing to give notification of a death. They claimed they thought Willi was still alive. “He was pale,” said Anke last week, “but he wasn't dead.”

Transporting corpses to faraway homelands for burial is a rite that goes back centuries, but the road there has always been problematic. In Medieval Britain, corpse roads connected rural villages to faraway cemeteries, which were located at large churches in the heart of the parish. Tariffs were charged and costly corpse carriers often had to be hired. Dangers along the way were many. Spirits were thought to move just above the ground and in a straight line. Fences, walls and buildings could disturb their movement, as could bends in the road. As a result, routes ran straight as an arrow, even over steep peaks and swampland. Read the rest of this entry »