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The perils of being a frozen head
Author: TriSec    Date: 10/03/2009 11:26:28

Good Morning!

October...and the end of the Outdoor Discovery School season at ol' LL Bean. Today's my last shift for the school, but the weather is going to be suck-o-licious, so I don't know if anything is going to be happening at the store today.

Fall is starting in earnest around these parts. Some leaves are starting to turn...it's opening weekend for the Topsfield Fair, and as it starts to get colder and darker, I often ponder the life cycle of this earth and its inhabitants....namely us.

Now sure, we'd all like to live forever, but that's just not a realistic option for most of us. I'm sure we're all young and mostly healthy....but have you given any thought at all to your final resting place? I know I'd like to be cremated, and perhaps have the ashes scattered around Kejimkujik National Park in Nova Scotia, but I suppose I have time to worry about that.

Or you could go the Gene Roddenberry route, and have your ashes vacuum-dessicated and pressed into a tiny capsule and shot into space. Cool and uber-geeky, but damn expensive.

Ah, I know. How about making like Walt Disney and having your body frozen, in the hopes that some future science can cure whatever killed you and bring you back to life? No wait...that's an urban legend...




Walt Disney's health had been deteriorating for many months before he finally agreed to enter St. Joseph hospital in California on November 2, 1966, for tests concerning the pain in his leg and neck. Doctors discovered a walnut-sized spot on the x-ray of his left lung and advised immediate surgery.

Disney left the hospital to attend to studio business for a few days, then re-entered St. Joseph on Sunday, November 6, for surgery the next day. During Monday morning's operation, doctors found his left lung to be cancerous and removed it. His oversized lymph nodes were an indication that Disney hadn't much longer to live. Brrrrrrr!

After two weeks of post-operative care, Disney was released from the hospital. He crossed the street to his studios and spent another ten days tending to studio business and visiting relatives before he grew too weak and had to return to St. Joseph on November 30. His health started to fail even more rapidly than expected, and drugs and cobalt treatments sapped what little strength he had left. Walt Disney died two weeks later when his circulatory system collapsed on the morning of December 15, 1966.

In the decades since Walt Disney's death, the claim that he arranged for his body to be frozen has become ubiquitous. Nearly everyone familiar with the name 'Walt Disney' has heard the story that Disney's corpse is stored in a deep-freeze chamber somewhere -- directly under Disneyland's "Pirates of the Caribbean" attraction is the most frequently mentioned site -- awaiting the day when science can repair the damage to his body and bring 'Uncle Walt' back to life.



But on the other hand.....how many of you know about the 'Splendid Splinter'?

Teddy Ballgame....the greatest hitter that ever lived, hero fighter pilot of WWII and Korea, John Glenn's flight lead, whatever you want to call him, left this earth on July 5, 2002. It would have been enough to have been buried with full military honors in a veteran's cemetery.

Unfortunately, his son John Henry Williams had other ideas. Ted's head was severed from his body and sent to the Alcor Life Extension Facility in Arizona. There it sits, in a soup of liquid nitrogen, waiting for that one in a billion chance.

Unless, of course, someone is swinging a monkey wrench at poor old Ted's frozen head.


PHOENIX (AP) -- A new book by a former employee of Alcor, the company that froze Ted Williams' remains, alleges the baseball Hall of Famer's body was mistreated by the company.

Larry Johnson says in the book "Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception and Death" that he watched an Alcor official swing a monkey wrench at Williams' frozen severed head to try to remove a tuna can stuck to it. The first swing accidentally struck the head, Johnson contends, and the second knocked the tuna can loose.

Alcor Life Extension Foundation of Scottsdale, Ariz., issued a statement on its Web site denying the allegations and promising legal action.

"Alcor denies allegations reported in the press that there was mistreatment of the remains of Ted Williams at Alcor," the company said. "Alcor will be litigating this and any other false allegations to the maximum extent of the law."

Johnson says he worked for Alcor for eight months in 2003, first as clinical director then as chief operating officer. He included several photographs in the book, including one of an upside down severed head, not Williams', that had what appeared to be a tuna can attached to it.

Johnson says Alcor used the cans, from a cat that lived on the premises, as pedestals for the heads.

Williams' head was being transferred from one container to another when the monkey wrench incident took place, Johnson said in the book. When the head was removed from the first container, Johnson described it.

"The disembodied face set in that awful, frozen scream looked nothing like any picture of Ted Williams I've ever seen," he wrote.

Johnson said that an Alcor employee tried in vain to remove the tuna can.

"Then he grabbed a monkey wrench, heaved a mighty swing, missing the tuna can completely but hitting the head dead center,' Johnson wrote. "Tiny pieces of frozen head sprayed around the room."

The next swing, Johnson wrote, knocked the can loose.

Johnson also contends that there was a significant crack in Williams' head. He also repeated an allegation he had made earlier that samples of Williams' DNA are missing from the facility.

Johnson, who says he wired himself surreptitiously the last few months of his employment, was the source for a story in Sports Illustrated in August, 2003, that said Williams' head had been severed and damaged.

At that time, Alcor officials said there never was mistreatment of any of those frozen at the facility. The company said that severing heads is a common practice in its preservation, and that cracking has been noted as a problem in the procedure and is not the result of any mishandling.



I dunno. Our time on this earth is finite and was always meant to be so. We can extend that life, make ourselves more comfortable, and healthier for a longer time, but the end result is always the same.

So where's your final resting place going to be?


 

23 comments (Latest Comment: 10/04/2009 04:30:36 by livingonli)
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