Examiner.com - Death be not proud - 5/12/08

[mydeathspace]

 

http://www.examiner.com/x-302-Scam-Examiner~y2008m5d12-Death-be-not-proud

[size=15pt]Death be not proud[/size]

Internet Buzz Examiner Joshua McIntire's article on melting bodies with lye, pressure and heat for a greener funeral reminded me of one of the best scams perpetrated on the media ever.

Joey Scaggs, who made hoax press releases into an art form, proposed a global chain of funeral theme parks in 1999. Clients could design their own creative graves for visitors' amusement.

Designer Mary Dresser envisioned cremated remains in a giant ant farm; another proposed a fiber optic cable running from his unembalmed body to a monitor where people could view his decomposition. (Hopefully after lunch at Heaven's Gate Café or Dante's Grill.)

Scaggs claimed his goal was exposing the greedy scamming of the death care industry; sort of a prankster version of Jessica Mitford's 1963 exposé, The American Way of Death (updated in 1998.)   

Perhaps this hoax presaged MySpace leading to unaffiliated MyDeathSpace.com, a site where the anonymous often mock the deceased. Truth is stranger, after all.

Check out the www.Finalcurtain.com website that fooled 40 newspapers, 19 radio stations, 10 magazines, and 6 television crews with its death theme park designs.

[Nomad]

"the anonymous often mock the deceased"

Obviously he doesn't make a point to read something before he makes generalizations about it.  I wonder where he went to school for journalism, if he did at all.

[mydeathspace]

Someone informed the writer that they were off base and magically, the reference to MDS has been removed from the article.

Hurray!

[leapfreak]

I may just be really dumb but why have they even put MDS in there?  It doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the article.  It seems to be talking about hoaxes and then they've randomly thrown in MDS.  Wait!  Are we a hoax?!