First, TIME Magazine had an article this week, “What Happens to Your Facebook Profile After You Die”. Apparently if a user dies and the family can submit proof like an obituary, the profile can either be removed completely or converted into a memorial. The user then won’t show up in Facebook’s suggestions, and information like status updates won’t show up in Facebook’s news feed. This came out of complaints by users who were getting suggestions to reconnect with deceased users.

I think this whole notion of what we do with deceased people in the virtual, social world is really interesting, and you might also want to check out an older TIME article on How to Manage Your Online Life When You’re Dead. In developing ideas for our project, we’ve been grappling with the notion of a similar memorial-like page to be offered by Legacy.com. We’ll have to come up with a sensitive proposal for this idea but it’s an idea that cannot be ignored given such clear online trends in that direction.

The second trend I came across occurs has to do with how we deal with our dead in real-life. For a couple of years I lived across the street from a cemetery. I’ve often wondered — don’t ask me why — if cemeteries ever run out of space. Well apparently they do. The City of London cemetery is running out of space and has found an unusual solution by offering families to reuse old graves for their loved-one.  Think about it. Would you be willing to put your loved one in a stranger’s grave? Or better yet, would you be OK with a stranger being buried in your grave 75 years after you were buried in the same spot? Pretty disturbing to think about isn’t it? But this is a real solution to a very real problem.

One cemetery has already been forced into this practice out of sustainability issues, so this most likely will be a problem for many others sooner or later. I’ve always wondered why people insist on burying loved ones when cremation is so much cleaner, so much cheaper and we don’t have to allot whole plots of land to death. One reason, I think, is a religious one. Judaism, my religion, forbids cremation all together. Sooner or later, however, as the world gets more crowded, so will the number of the dead, and we may be forced to reevaluate and change all the ways we currently deal with our dead.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Elizabeth Clare Wulf, a.k.a. Elizabeth Prophet died last week, and rated an obit in the NY Times this weekend.

Elizabeth Prophet was the founder of a church called “Church Universal and Triumphant,” which, as far as I can tell, seems to have been a conglomeration of a bunch of different religious aspects from a variety of traditions; she mixed her Christianity with her Buddhism, a little theosophy, and, from the sound of it, a little bit of greek mythology for good measure.

She got some press in the ’80s for predicting a nuclear doomsday due to war with the Soviet Union, and she made that classic mistake of cult leaders and actually named the date of the apocalypse.

From the NYT obit:

In the late 1980s, Mrs. Prophet issued warnings of an impending nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the United States. More than 2,000 of her followers left their homes and gathered at the church’s compound near Corwin Springs, Mont., near the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park. There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in underground bomb shelters.

Mounting tensions with local residents subsided when the predicted attack did not occur, and church members began returning home. At the same time, a looming face-off with the United States government was averted when church leaders agreed not to store weapons in return for a reinstatement of the church’s tax-exempt status, which had been revoked in 1987.

So, why is this interesting to me?  I first encountered Prophet through audio recordings that were made at some of the ceremonies she presided over.  Those recordings became somewhat well-known when they first were sampled by Negativland in their song “Michael Jackson,” and then later re-sampled by pop star Fat Boy Slim for a breakbeat song of the same name.

The audio in question comes from a bootleg recording called “Sounds of the American Doomsday Cult, Vol. 14″.  It can be downloaded in it’s entirety here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?myethnymmzy

It seems they were quite upset about rock music, and were calling on the powers that be to provide protection against the harm they perceived and to condemn, in Prophet’s own words, “the misuse of the 4/4 time signature”.

Here’s the way I encountered it.  (Note, this is a collage piece that incorporates some of the doomsday recordings; it contains other bits and pieces as well.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, in honor of those who prefer more artful and colorful ways to talk about death (and with kudos to Ian) I give you my top ten list of favorite euphemisms for death:

1. Shuffle off this mortal coil
2. Give up the ghost
3. Kick the bucket
4. At room temperature
5. Dirt nap
6. Se le congeló la sonrisa (to get a frozen smile.)
7. Bought a pine condo
8. Turn up one’s toes
9. Moved into upper management
10. Eating the grass by the roots

What are your favorites?