JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Some things that seem perfectly odd seem to take on another life, an extra life, when you put moveable things on it. For example, coffins that have anything “retractable” seems a little much. As corpse receptacles, coffins as a box seem, I guess, an odd thing–scooping out a body’s innards and replacing them with packing, toxic preservative, gums, paint, glue, plastic, rubber, wire, pins, needles and such seem to be a little on the extreme side, especially when you are going to put that body into a hole in the ground and cover it with dirt. What better thing than to enclose the corpse in a container so that the horrible idea will be further kept from deterioration? Then there’s the container for the coffin, and the slumber vault cement liner, and so on.
This weirdness turns professional (to paraphrase the Good Doctor) when movable/retractable bits are added to the coffin. In a long “is this really necessary?” list, one of the last/first would concern retractable legs on a coffin, or perhaps the retractable flower vases, or the inflatable puffy shirt. There’s a strange sociological history going on in the thousands of death/corpse/funeral-related reports from the U.S. Patent Office, which will make it much easier for the anthropologists of the future to understand our present concerns with death, or life.
[Most of the following patent reports are entirely understandable by their titles. The first in the list though needs a little explanatory help–this is a garment was made with numerous openings to accommodate different forms of corpse body shapers, including inflatable balloons, putty, clay and other material that would help the dead body look a little more not-dead.]
[And then of course the explanation of the thing, which has a distinct federal-ese flavoring.]
[I like this one because of the name association with the Norden bomb sight, a once-top secret improvement in delivering bombs dropped from planes, and which helped put many people into a coffin, if only figuratively.] />
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