This makes my brain hurt. Cremation Solutions makes personalized urns for you to, you know, keep the cremated remains of your, you know, loved ones until you accidentally drink them thinking they’re chocolate milk or spill them all over the floor while being interviewed on TV.
And what’s the example Cremation Solutions decided to use? Inexplicably, they used someone who’s still alive. A sitting president, in fact. Say what?
If this is a hoax, it’s the best hoax ever. It is such a good hoax, in fact, that it takes F is for Fake, bends it over the Electric Cremated Remains Processor, and buggers it so hard Orson Welles is crying like a bitch inside his bust of himself. But if it’s real? Somebody needs therapy. Somebody needs lots and lots of therapy. And I think it’s me.
Oh, but what’s that you say? Your favorite president is Hilary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher or David Crosby? No, the hair won’t be a problem!
Personal urns can have hair added digitaly for short haired people, as in the sample of President Obama. For longer hair we can add a wig to your specifications.
You know who else “can add a wig to my specifications?” The RealDoll people. See what I’m getting at?
Or do you think putting hair on a chopped-off head made to hold human ashes keeps it from being at all creepy? Sure, my girlfriend would probably think it was creepy if I told her that if I’m ever dragged from the flaming wreckage of my Volkswagen, I’d like her to please ensure that I get “processed” and poured into the hacked-off head of someone I admire. Would that be cool?
“Gasp!!” she might say “You can’t mean — a BALD Neil Gaiman!!??!!”
“No way!” I’ll tell her. “Don’t be disgusting! I’ve been paying Amanda Palmer to raid his hairbrushes and Fed Ex me his hair. I’ll have a full wig by the time I kick off, don’t you worry. You’ll just have to take it off and shampoo it every six to eight weeks. Also brush it every day.”
So…that’s not creepy.
The idea, as I understand it, is that you, as the survivor, would create a 3-dimensional “sculpture” of your dead lover, parent, child, pet, or arch-enemy. You pour their ashes inside, and voila! You remember them always. Makes perfect sense, right?
But why Prez Obama? F is for Fuck If I Know!
I surmise that the hoped-for phenomenon, in the damaged minds of its conceivers, is not peculiar to Obama, he was just the first person they thought of. I guess the idea is, if your croaky-croaked loved one for some reason needs to kiss somebody’s ass even after being reduced to fucking ashes, this is the ideal way to do it. But is it worth making your survivors survive President Obama staring at them? Would he creep them out enough to make them turn him around to face the corner when they go to sleep? Or is it just the eyes — just put wraparound shades on the Prez, and we’re cool?
These urns are generated using a 3D imaging technique from just two photos of the deceased — or even just one, if that’s all you’ve got. Says Cremation Solutions: “We simply request from you a good photograph of the front of the persons face. If you have one or two from the side, then all the better.”
Right. Like, for instance, if all you’ve got is a blurry shot from the spycam you planted in your loved one‘s shower. “See, Paris Hilton? I loved you so much that even after I immolated myself on the front lawn of your Bel Air mansion, I then had my ashes poured into an urn designed to look like you — sleepy eye and all. Now I’ll be inside a 3D bust of you, always.”
But if they just had to make it a president, why Obama? Since the purpose — as far as I can tell — is to put your loved one’s ashes in a sculpture that looks just like your loved one, couldn’t they find a, you know, a dead president? Lincoln, Reagan, Herbert Hoover? Garfield? Pierce? McKinley? Adams, Jefferson, Washington? There are kind of a lot of them to choose from. Why’d they choose a live one, instead of, say, my favorite dead president, Benjamin Franklin?
If you want my opinion, it’s creepy enough to suggest that I pour my goddamn ashes in an urn that looks like my own severed head. What glue-sniffer decided it would there would be even more buckets of WIN in pouring my cremains into an urn that looks like the severed head of someone who’s still the fuck ALIVE?
That’s it! This puts me off cremation for good. I’m back to wanting to be eaten by vultures. End of discussion.
[Via Misty Dahl and John Shirley.]
Sadly, it’s not a hoax. Thank you for putting into words what I’ve thought in my head since this was announced as a potential product for the cremation consumer. Scary.