Well this is interesting

I feel like I need to make a public statement that I use cash and understand its worth (certainly from the time in my life when that’s all I could hope to have), but it’s true that in many cultures now, young people are not using their phones to call people or using cash for anything. Basic stuff that we all take for granted, is not passing down to the younger generations.

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For God’s sake, don’t lick your fingers as you turn the pages.

I’ll let someone else find the applicable Name of the Rose clip.

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Drat, I won’t be able to find it now, but on Twitter last weekends this woman posted a thread about how she attended a children’s birthday party, and a ten year old girl who was a guest invented a paper currency and was using it to trade toys (not her toys either!).

Other kids started making “counterfeit” currency and the whole thing fell apart in minutes.

The kids are all right.

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There is always the green option, advocated by Caitlin Doughty… especially since cremation has it’s own environmental consequences (less so than the now “traditional” embalming/body in a metal casket/casket in a concrete box, but still).

http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/resources/green-death-tech

caitlin-doughty-skull-eyebrows

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Yes, cremation is traditional in Japan and people still bury the remains.

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She’s one of my fave keyboardists. I follow her on Instagram and have seen her once in concert. She is still doing pretty good.

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https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Rise-of-the-Pedantic/245808/

get out your pitchforks, history adjuncts!

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I’m not sure what message I’m meant to take away here? Considering I’m very likely to join the ranks of history adjuncts rather soon.

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Well, do you feel compelled to evangelize your field on twitter? Is that sort of engagement with the public helpful or hurtful?

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Solution: become Jewish

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That solves the issue in the article, but not the issue in – for example – my personal example. No embalming fluid, sure…but you still can’t bury the body on your own land. Has to be cremation for that.

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I especially like the custom of unveiling the monument a year (or 11 months?) later. Family and friends get together to memorialize the dead, but there’s been time for grieving, so it can be a happy occasion of remembering.

We were able to personally design the stone for my MIL’s unveiling, because we had the time. All the important immediate things to do (funeral, emptying the apartment, will, etc.) were all done.

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My father is being cremated. The Neptune Society takes care of a lot of things for families, but they are not fast in returning the cremains. We are not worried about it. For myself, I believe that once the soul (spirit, person, consciousness, whatever we want to call it) has left the body, that body does not necessarily matter, but the wishes of the family become really important on this point. My father is not in a freezer waiting for cremation. My father now one of our blessed dead, an ancestor no longer tied to the physical plane. His body did what it needed to do, and now it is just matter.

He won’t have a service or a grave. His ashes will be scattered to the desert winds. So, there won’t be a place to visit him. But that means I can visit him anywhere. Mostly, I want to show him my bonsai trees and plants, so that’s where I talk to him most. His father is in a little mausoleum with the family name on it, but he is as much here in my office with me, as he is in that tiled crypt, to me. Every time I learn what a specific weed or native plant is called, and if it’s eaten or used for anything, he’s with me. We’re a long line of gardeners and people who will put any little growing thing in a container and see what it does.

Each person is different, and each episode of grief is different, of course. I went through the typical funeral stuff with my grandfather, and nothing about it helped my grief in any way. It was just a bizarre experience I had to go through to get to the other side, where I could actually mourn, in private in a way that he and I would have understood between us. It was him, me, and a bunch of leaf cutter ants doing their gardening thing, and that brought me some peace.

With my father, our family skipped every trapping of tradition that didn’t work for us. We ate food, listened to music, and talked and cried, and that was better for us than a regular funeral. When we scatter his ashes, we’ll probably have more food, more music and more laughing and crying, just with the addition of a hike up the butte. And, we will smoke a big joint in his honor. I’m glad he lasted long enough to enjoy his medicine legally, in his state.

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That was beautiful, thank you.

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Why, how dare they “evangelize” to people who have chosen to follow them to hear what they have to say. How dare they speak in public instead of staying behind the guilded doors of their ivory towers.

If you were on Twitter, you would know that you can block people or keywords if you don’t want to see such content. If you’re not, then you’re going out of your way to bitch about something that doesn’t affect you in the least, except for your own need to complain about it.

After all, horrors. People are communicating in a way I don’t approve of. Those novels, that rock and roll music, nothing but the creations of Satan himself.

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exactly. if an expert on medieval cities feels the urge to comment on trump’s walls and the medieviality of such, good for her.

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linked to in a recent aldaily post:

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First, I don’t… I’m not on twitter or FB or even instagram… so please explain why you expect me to answer for my entire fucking profession when it’s not something I actually do.

Second, why is it okay for literally everyone other profession to do so, but not historians? Why is it not okay for historians to actual contribute to the public discussion when it comes to what we actually do? Why is that an illegitimate use of our time with regards to public engagement? Should figures like Bruce Schneier shut up about cyber security, too, because people with actual expertise should shut up about what they are experts at?

I think that correcting misconceptions about the past is something that a HISTORIAN is absolutely suited to do, especially when it’s their field of study. Much better than people who think they understand all aspects of history because they read a million pop history books about the Nazis and know understand how thousands of years of history is to be understood. But hey, you do you and go take your history lessons from who ever you think best.

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of course not. And when I link to something, I may or may not endorse what the author is trying to say. In this instance, I wasn’t. I happen to like pedantry.

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