(Roughly) Daily

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.

source

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…