They did an episode about this on Boston Legal earlier this year. A company gave a woman a fake so she sued them.

As the show pointed out, people put the remains of their loved ones on a jar on the mantelpiece, I don't see this being much of a leap from that. Personally, I prefer the Big Lebowski (Donnie) method, I want my ashes to be blown in the faces of anyone who has ever annoyed me.

Thanks for the laugh.

Chris --  Ha! I saw this on Sullivan's site this morning (his title: "Die Fabulously"), and my first thought, in what I hope was a rare fit of pop-culture pendantry, was, no no, the correct title for this post is "Soylent Bling." Great minds, etc. ...

If you love someone, don't do anything to their body after they die--no embalming, no cremation, nuttin' honey. Rather, dump their remains in the desert, forest, or sea so that a multitude of life forms, big and small, might feast upon and prosper from them.

I want a turkey vulture to rip off a chunk of my face, gulp it down, and fly back to the nest to puke it down the throats of its young. I want flies to sit and sip, then take off in flight whereupon some are then swallowed mid-air by songbirds--one of which fails to notice that he has violated the airspace of a circling peregrine, who begins her gorgeous descent. I want a family of devout raccoons to float in on the scent of decomposition like pilgrims arriving at midnight Mass, drooling for joy at their carnal Eucharist. I want the worms to crawl in, the worms to crawl out. I want an orgy of ants to shimmer and swarm over me like northern lights raping the virginal Arctic night.

The late Zen raconteur Alan Watts once told of trying to build a little shack--simple, rectangular walls, nothing fancy--on a hillside near his home. He worked and worked and worked...until one night the wind howling off the Pacific made short work of it. Meanwhile a few feet away an old cypress, its limbs twisted into shapes of unimaginable complexity by decades of that same wind, withstood the gusts without so much as a creak.

So in death perhaps we should be what we resist being in life: chaotic, moist, fecund, responsive, resurrected, giving (i.e., the very opposite of a cold, clear, geometric diamond).

Bill, I believe that you'll find the post-mortem treatment of your dreams in India.

en.wikipedia.org/.../Towers_of_Silence

Wow, Dan, that's pretty cool. I had never heard of those towers, or the practice. Fascinating, these humans.

I took my idea in part from Edward Abbey, the cranky accidental environmentalist. Abbey's a patron saint of the more, um, proactive wing of the environmental movement.

Anyway, following his death his friends reportedly hauled his corpse into an Arizona desert and, per his instructions, dug a hole and dumped him in. Wine and the like may have been applied for ceremonial purposes.

That sounds a lot like the traditional Tibetan practice of sky burial, where the deceased is cut to pieces and fed to vultures, or exposed in a high place for the birds to come.

People have taken to carrying around gall stones, kidney stones, vials of blood, whatever so this isn't a stretch. I didn't think it was all that new because I recall considering this option a few years ago.  But in the end, I've settled on being compressed into something that gets placed onto a coral reef.  However, if I could find someone to do let me feed the tree, that's a good one too. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust...