Posts Tagged ‘Holy Smoke’
From ashes to… well…
Readers may recall the craftsmen at Holy Smoke, who will pack the cremated remains of loved ones into firearms ammunition. The less ballistically-inclined might consider:
Be honest, it’s a little creepy when someone has a giant portrait of a long-deceased relative in their home, but if you really want to take the feeling of unease to another level, try incorporating the ashes of the person into their memorial portrait. Of course, if your family isn’t the type to line hallways with portraits of dead family members, you’re likely to end up decorating the attic.
While there are a number of companies that offer this service, such as Memories From Ashes who did the work above, they seem to go out of business on a regular basis, so you might want to talk to some local artists if you really want to get this done.
Other off-beat memorial options at Neatorama’s “The 10 Weirdest Things You Can Do With Your Ashes.”
As we drop the needle on a little Blue Oyster Cult, we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that barmaid Betsy Flanagan mixed the first “cocktail”: when a drunk waved at the tail feathers pinned to the wall behind the bar and asked for a glassful of “those cocktails,” she refilled his last order and stuck in one of the feathers.
By 1806, the descriptor had come into sufficiently wide use to appear in The Balance and Columbian Repository, a publication in Hudson, New York, in which an answer was provided to the question, “What is a cocktail?”:
Cocktail is a stimulating liquor composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called a bittered sling and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, inasmuch as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head. It is said, also to be of great use to a democratic candidate: because a person, having swallowed a glass of it, is ready to swallow any thing else.
Your correspondent is heading back across the Date Line and behind the Great Fire Wall, so service will be at best spotty until October 26 or thereabouts…
“Now, you can continue to protect your home and family even after you are gone”…
The craftsmen at Holy Smoke will take the cremated remains of a loved one and pack them into firearm ammunition: one pound of human ash yields 250 shotgun shells, 100 rifle cartridges, or 250 pistol cartridges. The company’s website avers…
The services provided by Holy Smoke are a fraction of the cost of what most funeral burial services cost – oftentimes saving families as much as 75% of traditional costs.
The ecological footprint caused by our service, as opposed to most of the current funeral interment methods, is virtually non-existent.
Now, you can continue to protect your home and family even after you are gone.
Or, as one of the company’s founders suggests in recounting how he conceived the service, one can use the remains to “share the death”:
My friend smiled and said “You know I’ve thought about this for some time and I want to be cremated. Then I want my ashes put into some turkey load shotgun shells and have someone that knows how to turkey hunt use the shotgun shells with my ashes to shoot a turkey. That way I will rest in peace knowing that the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second.”
[TotH to Gizmodo]
As we aim for the afterlife, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939 that physicists Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin develop a nuclear weapon. Their letter was delivered a couple of months later, and led to the formation of the Advisory Committee on Uranium (the “Briggs Uranium Committee”) and ultimately the Manhattan Project.
Einstein and Szilárd (source)
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen; this is your Captain screaming…
Bruce Dickinson is known for belting out “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter,” “Die With Your Boots On,” and “Holy Smoke.” So who better to become head of marketing at an airline business than the Iron Maiden frontman known as The Air-Raid Siren?
Mr Dickinson, 51, has landed the job at the Gatwick-based Astraeus Airlines, which leases planes and crews to carriers including British Airways, BMI and easyJet… He is already well known to Astraeus. Between gigs, Mr Dickinson flies its aircraft – running up 7,000 hours on Boeing 737 and 757 jets.
Read the full story in The Telegraph (and learn of Dickinson’s humanitarian relief flights here).
Dickinson and Iron Maiden, “Tailgunner”
As we buckle our seat belts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1990 that the Motion Picture Association of America replaced it’s “X” rating with “NC-17.” The MPAA’s (self-regulated) film rating system was created in 1968 to replace the Hays Code, which had been in force since the 30’s; the original version of the ratings assigned an “X” to films with content deemed to strong for non-adult audiences– e.g., Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris. But with the rise of the pornography industry, which often released its films with “X” (or “XXX”) badges, the “X” became synonymous with smut. When newspapers began to refuse to carry ads for any film with an “X” rating, films like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer found it very hard, their positive reviews notwithstanding, to get release. And so, the MPAA jettisoned the “X.” Henry and June was the first film to be released with an NC-17 rating.
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