She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
When I die, I want to buried in a cardboard coffin three feet under my favorite garden. I want tulips and strawberries to be my headstone. That's just my choice. Other people want less... ephemeral monuments to their time here. That's fine. Everyone is different, and a cemetery provides a green space for cities, lets urban wildlife find a niche, and gives the families of those passed a place to remember their loved ones.
I have no problem with cemeteries. Now, hermetically sealed coffins and arsenic filled corpses, that's another matter. However, that's not the main thrust of my message for today. Today, I want to talk about crime, punishment, and the existence of serendipitous synergy in the universe.
A man, one 22 year old Michael David Schreiber, for no particular reason, decided to get drunk. Then, again for no particular reason, he decided to break into Calumet Park cemetery in Merrillville, Indiana. Then, again for reasons inexplicable, he decided to start breaking headstones.
After breaking thirteen headstones, he decided to go for just one more. This is the part of the story that I like.
Police officers found Michael unconscious, with broken legs, underneath that fourteenth headstone. It took five officers to lift the thousand pound weight.
The family name of the stone left a "V" imprinted into Michael's thigh.
Dear readers, I had been feeling a bit down lately, and I didn't know exactly what to write about for almost a week. Then, like manna from heaven, a story like this comes along.
I'm feeling better.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
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schadenfreude
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3 comments:
I'm fairly sure arsenic is no longer the embalmer's choice. The standard for years has been Formalyn. aka 33% Formaldehyde solution. Add a bit of pink color and some rosey perfume and your on your way temporary rot halting bliss. Not that it's any better from the enviromental stand point but unlikly to give the emblamer those nasty white lines on the fingernails and other symptoms of aresenic poisoning.
V really is for Vendetta...
We're going to put my mom's ashes in a bowling trophy and cart it around as the family "booby prize." Talk about your glory.
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