Welcome to the hundred-and-forty-fourth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #144, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!
D’oh!
After 34 seasons, the cast of characters in the cartoon “The Simpsons” and seem never-aging, but is one of them actually the reincarnation of a 3,000+-year-old Egyptian woman? A newly-discovered 3,400-year-old Egyptian mummy’s sarcophagus is making us wonder, as the drawing on the inner coffin lid looks suspiciously like Marge Simpson. She’s yellow, wearing a strapless green dress and has blue rectangle-shaped hair. All the OG Marge is missing are the red beaded necklace and shoes. Did this mummified person somehow become a beloved cartoon character in the afterlife? It makes you wonder … just as many people believe that several early episodes of the Simpsons have predicted the future. Woooo.
Speaking of buried treasures …
It has been determined that a 2019 archaeological excavation in Spain unearthed quite a treasure: the world’s oldest known wine. A tomb that was accidentally uncovered during a home renovation in Carmona was turned over to professional scientists, who found not only the “two-millenia-old wine,” but also cremated remains and a gold ring. Actually, the wine was found in the same urn container as the cremains of a male, while the ring was found in an urn holding a female’s cremains. They believe the wine to be a white, possibly containing gypsum, salt, and other ingredients Ancient Roman winemakers used to preserve their creations.
Caskets for vampires?
Well, guys, Titan Casket is once again proving itself to be the casket for the stars, as the company has now partnered with AMC to produce a custom casket coinciding with the network’s release of a new Interview with the Vampire series. The “Love is Immortal” casket is a 20-gauge maroon and gold design with a black velvet interior and gold hardware. A quote from the Vampire Lestat, “You will see death in all its beauty,” is inscribed in the lid. The $4,995 non-returnable casket is just one of the offerings at AMC’s Night Market, where Interview-themed merch is for sale — but only overnight. The AMC Day Market, for those who don’t melt in the sun, is open during business hours and features less “dark” items.
Add this to your preneed questionnaire
Glamour magazine has always wanted to help women be their most beautiful selves, and now, that includes after you die. In “The Aesthetics of Dying,” an article published by Glamour last week, the magazine encourages readers to make sure their skincare routines and makeup regimens are clearly detailed so those who are preparing the body for its last event don’t screw it up. “Despite the significance of beauty and fashion in modern-day culture, embalmers still rarely receive cosmetic instruction from decedents,” it says. It closes by encouraging readers to write down their cosmetic requests, saying, “Planning how you look at your funeral isn’t just for you—it’s also for your family.”
It’s no Six Feet Under
While we usually look forward to television shows and movies with a deathcare backdrop or theme, we can’t help but worry what sort of impact the upcoming Chop Shop series will have on the profession. Not because of the actors (consummate pros Christina Ricci and Hamish Linklater) but because it’s about the very sad, but very true, real-life story of David Sconce, the LA funeral director who used his family’s funeral home for highly-scandalous personal gain. Sconce was imprisoned after pleading guilty to a wide variety of horrible charges, including mass cremations, selling cremation metals and keeping the proceeds, and hiring a hit-man to take down a competitor … among other things. The series, which has no release date as of now, will be based on the 1991 book of the same name.
