this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
726 points (99.2% liked)

Greentext

4450 readers
1259 users here now

This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 123 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Look and see if your state has at home Burial services. If they do tell them you want to bury the body at home and you do not want it embalmed. Then buy an absolute fuck ton of Dermestid beetles online. Then, get ready for the horrid smell as they eat the flesh off of your father's rotting corpse over the course of a year or more.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Didn't we have a community for unethical life pro tips? This comment would be a perfect post there.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't see what is unethical about it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

It's probably not what his father wanted

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago

Well he should have considered that before dying. Its about personal responsibility.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago

We don't know that, and imo that hardly matters now as they are dead and never coming back. They no longer have wants, needs, or feelings.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago
  • unethical death pro tips
[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I guess I'm gonna have to talk to my apartment's landlord first.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago

It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Imagine a neighbor who’s annoying dog barks in their yard sometimes.

Now imagine a neighbor who’s fathers’s rotting corpse is slowly being eaten by beetles over the course of a year or more.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

If you bury the body first it should take away a good chunk of the smell but you have to bury it in like a mesh cage almost so the bones and stuff can't be slowly moved over time by the beetles.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 103 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It's actually the exact opposite to what he says. In the US you can do almost anything you want with human remains, while in Europe it's much more restricted. In Denmark for example, you have to have the body/ashes buried in a licensed cemetery. You can't keep the ashes yourself, you can't bury them in your backyard, you can't spread them at some random special place (except for the sea in rare circumstances).

[–] [email protected] 75 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Also... what awesome displays? Does he think knight armour in museums has bones inside it?

[–] NuWuX 53 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well yes of course, how else are they going to get the armor to stand up? /s

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There are minimum wage employees inside, working in shifts.
They moonlight as living statues in the city center.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

There are quite a few places in Europe decorated with bones and even on display corpses.

For instance: https://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/10/01/the_catacombs_of_capuchin_monastery_in_palermo_sicily.html

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (6 children)

The reason for restrictions in Denmark is to protect our clean ground water. If people could just place dead corpses or ashes everywhere, the drinking water would be polluted with heavy metals and other chemicals.

[–] Kecessa 18 points 2 months ago

In Denmark heavy metal is for your ears only!

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 87 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Pretty sure this is legal, they just wouldn't release an unembalmed corpse for health reasons.

Wouldn't OP just have to find a qualified mortician willing to do the work?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You can absolutely get the corpse unembalmed but you won't find any mortician willing to do this. You can do it yourself with a ton of Dermestid beetles, though, but it's gonna smell awful.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago (2 children)

There's gotta be a service that does this, though.

With some searching around, I found this place in Oklahoma: https://skullcleaning.com/

They mainly deal with hunting trophies but their price list covers almost every vertebrate animal you could think of: https://skullcleaning.com/services/skull-cleaning-pricelist/

"Human" is conspicuously absent, of course, but then you go to the "Skeletal Articulation" page and the first photo is of a fucking Centaur lmfao: https://skullcleaning.com/services/skeleton-articulation/

I feel like if you called up and asked, you at leastwouldn't get a hard "no". I'd bet good money that they've done work on human cadavers before.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I love the suspicious amount of research you put into this

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

What can I say, it nerd-sniped me.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Human remains will only be accepted from bona-fide educational facilities. Contact us for more details.

Likely an explicit no. :(

[–] [email protected] 68 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Apparently there's no federal law (in the US) banning the ownership of human bones because up until the mid to late 20th century it was apparently common practice for med students to purchase real human bones for their studies. Most of them apparently came from India, until the country banned the export of human remains, which must have played a part in causing the practice to fall out of style.

If anyone has anything to correct/add, please do so. This was just a quick google search out of morbid curiosity

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I know the POTC ride had a bunch of real skulls (and a few are still there) because, at the time, they were cheaper and easier to get then good looking fakes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

there was apparently one amusement park ride that ended up getting its hands on a literal corpse of a human, only to be discovered when one of the arms broke off while someone was moving it.

apparently, the corpse in particular, was that of a notorious criminal who nobody really liked, so some fuckwit decided it would be funny to preserve his body and put it up for exhibition. And then it just kinda, continued from there, until it was discovered.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The reason India stopped that is because they realized they were exporting way too many human skeletons and way too many child skeletons in that, so they eventually realized that this meant there were mass murders involved. India to this day has problems with that but it's become better.

Here's an interview of a guy who went underground to familiarize himself with the problem and even talked to a bunch of people involved. It's a great video :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP76ekb_DxI

[–] TheSlad 13 points 2 months ago

My highschool biology classroom had the skeleton of an indian tween in a closet. It had been professionally skeletonized and rigged up and everything. The bio teacher swore it was there when he started teaching and that he doesnt know anything about it...

He also had a human fetus preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

they can keep the meat

I just want the skeleton

Peak autismo mode

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (8 children)

What if I put it in my will that I want my skeleton turned into a kick ass statue in a WH40K style marine suit?

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (8 children)

.....how would a coroner go about removing a skeleton without destroying the body? I'm pretty sure this is nowhere in a coroner job description. I'd tell him the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

So what you're saying is that Anon just asked the wrong person.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (3 children)

You Can’t Keep Your Parents’ Skulls [Caitlin Doughty | September 4, 2019 | theatlantic.com]

Under U.S. law, it’s nearly impossible to get permission to decapitate and de-flesh a relative’s remains.

Abuse-of-corpse laws exist for a reason. They protect people’s bodies from being mistreated (ahem, necrophilia). They also prevent a corpse from being snatched from the morgue and used for research or public exhibition without the dead person’s consent. History is littered with such violations. Medical professionals have stolen corpses and even dug up fresh graves to get bodies for dissection and research. Then there are cases like that of Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century Mexican woman with a condition called hypertrichosis, which caused hair to grow all over her face and body. After she died, her husband saw that there was money to be made by displaying Pastrana in freak shows, so he took her embalmed and taxidermied corpse on world tour. Pastrana had ceased to be regarded as human; her corpse had become a possession.

So where do skulls on bookcases come from? In the United States, no federal law prevents owning, buying, or selling human remains, unless the remains are Native American. Otherwise, whether you’re able to sell or own human remains is decided by each individual state. At least 38 states have laws that should prevent the sale of human remains, but in reality the laws are vague, confusing, and enforced at random. In one seven-month period in 2012–13, 454 human skulls were listed on eBay, with an average opening bid of just under $650 (eBay subsequently banned the practice).

If there were any legal wiggle room that might allow a person to get Dad’s head liberated from its fleshy shell, Tanya Marsh would know how to find it. Marsh is a law professor and the expert on human-remains law. “I will argue with you all day long,” she told me, “that it isn’t legal in any state in the United States to reduce a human head to a skull.”^[[1] https://archive.ph/SE19g]

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Literally 1984

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I want my funeral to be a roast (comedic) but my fiancee said no :\

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

So your fiancée has already planned your funeral...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Your height varies a surprising amount as your spinal column compresses - this seems to be more pronounced in tall people (not sure why - we don't have extra vertebrae).

As an example, measure your height in the morning and before you go to bed.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

im gonna force (post mortem) whatever morgue that has to deal with my body upon death to rip all my teeth out so i can send them to my friends.

I've got worse ideas. Apparently there's a company or was, idk if it's still around that would preserve tats from the skin of the now longer alive individual. I'm really tempted to get a tattoo of a dashed grid on my back, with numbered squares (2x2inches per square for example) just so i can tell people that when i die it's going to be removed, segmented, preserved, and then sent to people that knew me.

[–] Lighttrails 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Going to have to update my will

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

This podcast goes into some good detail about how and why it's illegal in the context of the guy being an investigative journalist ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP76ekb_DxI )

load more comments
view more: next ›