Child Safety ads from the 50ies! I would have made them more gory, if we coddle our kids they’ll just grow up into weak, frightened wussies instead of strong, emotionally damaged sociopaths! You need to look out for those damn piles of leaves!
Here’s a safety video from1962 as a bonus if you have the time to watch it. A bunch of kids in weird monkey masks decides to ride their bikes to the park, but do they make it?
Michael Faherty died in his home in December 2010. His body was badly burned, but a fire in the nearby fireplace did not cause the blaze, forensic experts said. Scorch marks on the ceiling above the body and the floor below, and no trace of accelerant, led the coroner to return the controversial verdict, the first of its kind in Ireland, according to the BBC.
“This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation,” West Galway coroner Dr. Ciaran McLoughlin told a court Thursday.
I didn’t think “Spontaneous combustion” was accepted as a cause of death anymore. I’ve heard that it’s usual a case of older people who smoke and drink in bed, and pass out with the cigarette still burning. I don’t have a source on that though, but I’m a firm believer in Occam’s razor, even though there’s some awesome appeal to spontanious combustion because it just.sounds.so.badass.
I’ve started writing on my summary of my internship in Norrtälje, hopefully I will have finished it by the end of the evening so I can post it before I leave to Crete.
Iris’s funeral was today. I don’t really like funerals because all the ones I’ve been to have been religious, and I don’t believe in Christianity. I understand why people have Christian funerals, but to me saying that someone has been embraced, forgiven and found peace in this “God” person just makes me shrug. Why can’t they say something comforting to those who believe we just end? I know a plenty of comforting things about atheism and death that doesn’t give out the false hope that death somehow isn’t final and that we’ll meet each other again in a place without pain. I can see a lot of beauty in that we have seemingly randomly fallen into existence in this tiny blink of time together and that we during this brief flash of consciousness get to experience and affect the universe before we suddenly fade out again to give place for those who come after us.
Crappy cellphone photo,- very 21st century to take a photo of a casket at a funeral, but I couldn’t bring my proper camera. The ceremony was very small, just 12 people, and neither of us was very good at singing the psalms. Why do they make psalms so very difficult to sing? This is another great thing about atheism: If there actually was an afterlife and Iris WAS looking down upon us, she would have *facepalmed*. Aside from the singing I suppose it went pretty well. I didn’t feel particularly sad since she died a month ago, but my younger sister had make-up running down her face so I felt bad for her. She’s always been more openly emotional than me. We had cake afterwards though which seemed to cheer her up… and that’s my deep insight of today: When everyone’s gone, there’s always cake.
This is a short movie I found today. Tragically hilarious and disturbing:
The last weeks have been tougher than usual in school. We’re reading about neuro-patients now, which is a very diverse field. One week we’re reading about dysphagia (swallowing difficulties) and feeding each other jam; then we jump to aphasia which is difficult because the current theories on how language works are opposing each other and are much more abstract than e.g learning how the kidneys work. Neuro is also heavier than children’s speech deficiencies, because the patient’s tend to be much sicker. The most common illnesses in the patients that we’ll see are stroke, traumatic brain injury, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Huntingtons and ALS. A stroke patient can recover, but they’re dealing with so much other than the communicate difficulties, like paralyses and damaged cognitive abilities. The sound examples that we’ve listened to from patients with traumatic injuries came all from young men who had been hurt in car accidents, and years after the accident could barely even communicate with grunt-like sounds. Alzheimers, Parkinsons, Huntingtons and ALS are degenerative diseases, which means the rehabilitation is mostly focused on keeping the remaining functions as long as possible. Just reading about ALS is tragic because it’s such a horrible disease. The person’s nerve system breaks down, gradually causing a loss of function to every part of the body while the cognition remains intact. Most people are dead within 5 years.
I found out yesterday that a classmate’s husband might (probably ) be dying. We’ve all known that he has been sick because she’s been missing classes because she has to take care of their kids (the smallest isn’t even 1 years old, and the other is just 3) and be at the hospital. He was admitted shortly before Christmas, but the doctors didn’t know what was wrong with him. They took a biopsy a little over a week ago and it turned out to be a tumour. We found out during the study meeting yesterday (that she’s supposed to be a part of). She sent an email saying that tests had shown that it was glioblastoma multiforme class 4. The others in the group asked me to look it up since I was taking notes on my computer. They asked what the prognosis were and I said it’s at least better for people under 50, but I left out the part that it was still only a very few who survived for over 5 years. It just felt too strange basically reading about someone’s death sentence from Wikipedia. I don’t know her well and I’ve never met her husband, but I feel very bad for them and the kids. She’s been so strong whenever she talked about their situation. I really hope that her husband is one of the 4% that survive past 5 years.
No idea if this is real or not, but this photo is from this site, which says:
“Only in Indonesia (especially Toraja), a corpse is usually being carried up to the grave, but in Toraja, the corpse is woken up letting it tol walk to its grave (is rarely performed anymore)
The corpse is woken up using black magic. This is done because in Toraja the graves/cemetries is placed above limestones mountains.
The corpse walks by itself, and its guided by an expert in black magic behind it. But there is one prohibition, the corpse shouldn’t be appointed, once pointed, the corpse falls down and isn’t able to walk again.”
There’s a page on wikipedia about Toraja, which says that the town has very elaborate and expensive funerals, but nothing about walking deads (except the part about them believing that the soul lingers on in the town for a few days after death). Anyone who knows me know I love me some zombies, but also that I’m a cynic… so either the photo and the story is fake, or there’s actually a ritual but the black magic guy is a total fraud. Either way, this sounds like kind of a cool funeral rutine that I could see myself doing if it was an option. One last zombie walk through a highly populated area with a lot of kids before the final rest.
This is why I became a vegetarian, MWAHAHHAHAHA. I want those tiny vegetables to suffer more! It is, by the way, now 6 months since I decided to convert. I think I should get a badge or something, like a swimming badge or one of those AA coins.
The funny thing is that the night before I found this, I asked AMA:
“Scenario: Someone put a curse on you and you will in 5 minutes be transformed into a vegetable in someone’s kitchen, but you will have all your ordinary cognitive and sensory functions intact. You get to choose which vegetable to transform into. What do you choose and why?
I think it would be worst to be a potato, since people usually peel their skin off and then boil them, and if you’re really unlucky after you’ve been boiled they might make mashed potatoes out of you. I would therefore choose a vegetable that decayed quickly, so they either ate me or threw me away relatively fast. I don’t think a cucumber would be a good idea since they’re rather big and most people usually amputate them piece by piece over a span of several days. Because of this I would probably choose to be turned into a radish, plus a lot of people dislike them and aren’t going to eat them.”
The answers had 4 different trends:
One group picked a vegetable that was less likely to be eaten or prepared in painful ways: The most popular answer was brussel sprouts since most people would just throw them away.
Another group picked a vegetable after it’s ability to exert revenge on it’s reaper. One poster wanted to be a vegetable contaminated with Ecoli, another wanted to be a really potent onion that would sting the eyes of it’s perpetrator.
A third group of people picked vegetables after their likeliness to end up inside a woman’s vagina. Cucumbers and carrots were the only vegetables present in these answers.
The forth group of answers were replies to the posters in group 1 about how they would suffer in numerous ways if they ever ended up in their kitchen. Group 4 didn’t have a common vegetable, but several agreed that they would eat all the brussel sprouts in group 1.
… in other words, I’m not the only one who spends time thinking about these kinds of things.
I’m not ususlly THAT bothered by gore, but I hate when it pops up without a warning! Am bored tonight so I’m browsing WTF? OMGZ! because apparently I’m that masochistic. I usually avoid gore, but since they never use cuts for that shit and sneakingly place the photos where you don’t expect them, I’ve painfully groaned “Ggrhrhrhrrrohmygod…” three times this evening.
Seems like a good time for a gore post again, I guess. The theme is squished heads. I don’t really want to look at this shit again, so I’m just going to leave the links here and hope it goes to the right image.
Exhibit A) Flathead.
Exhibit B) Goggle eyes.
Exhibit C) Didn’t care to go back and search for the third one, but it wasn’t as bad as the first two, so I’m putting a unicorn chaser here instead. 
It sucks when kids die. I hadn’t even met the kid in question, and even I feel a bit melancholic today. Just some girl my sister knew casually. For some reason she climbed up a train and got electrocuted. I can’t imagine how the family is feeling. It’s terrifying how one could live the safest, suburban life ever and then out of nowhere the daughter your raised for 17 years does something stupid but normal in consideration to her age, and then she simply doesn’t exist any more. It just gives me a mild sense of panic to know that I could at any time get a phone call or a message saying that someone suddenly died. A lot of my friends drink a lot and takes risks and most of the time people just find it funny, and the probability that they’ll actually die from it is probably small, but it could happen and days like these it feels more real and probable than usual. All it takes is really a bad landing from a small fall when drunk to hit your head and not wake up again. I’m not saying that we should live our lives as carefully as we can to prevent it, but it’s worth considering that everything could just be gone in a second without the least bit of warning.
Nice and high and far apart 
