Want to go into the afterlife with a bang? Or just make it technologically easy for visitors to your gravestone to learn more about you? Some innovative US entrepreneurs can help.
Since July, Holy Smoke, founded by a couple of game wardens in Stockton, Alabama, has offered a unique service: stuffing cremation ashes into pistol bullets or shotgun cartridges.
Thad Holmes, 56, and Clem Parnell, 58, came up with the idea while talking about funerals.
Photo: AFP
照片:法新社
“I want my ashes put into some turkey-load shotgun shells and have someone that knows how to turkey hunt use the shotgun shells with my ashes to shoot a turkey,” Parnell said.
“That way I will rest in peace knowing that the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second.”
Holy Smoke offers no actual cremation services, but it does promise “care and reverence” when it funnels your ashes, or those of your loved ones, into either 100 rifle cartridges or 250 pistol cartridges or shotgun shells — all “high quality, hand loaded.”
Prices start at US$850 (NT$26,000) for what Holy Smoke calls an eco-friendly product.
Enquiries are running in the hundreds, notably from hunters, target and clay-pigeon shooters and military personnel in Canada and the US, Holmes said.
In a more traditional vein, but keeping up with the technological zeitgeist, former IBM engineers Greg Young and Zachary Garbow have come up with the idea of affixing QR codes onto gravestones.
Such “quick response” codes are square matrix barcodes, seen most frequently in advertising, that can be photographed with a smartphone in order to call up further information on a website.
In a cemetery, affixed to a gravestone, the QR code becomes a “remembrance code” — a portal to photographs, obituaries and messages of condolences which remain on a funeral home’s servers.
It’s “an entirely unique approach to memorializing a life lived,” says Funeral Innovations, the company founded by Young and Garbow to promote the concept.
(AFP)
要不要砰地一聲進入來世呢?還是讓造訪你墓碑的訪客,利用科技之便,立刻就能對你有更多的瞭解?一些創新的美國企業家,能幫你實現願望。
兩位狩獵監督官在阿拉巴馬州史塔克頓所創辦的公司「神聖之煙」,已從七月起經提供一個特別服務:將火化後的骨灰填進子彈或是霰彈彈殼內。
五十六歲的泰德‧霍姆斯與五十八歲的克雷姆‧巴奈爾在談論葬禮時,想出這個點子。
巴奈爾表示:「我希望我的骨灰能被填入霰彈槍彈殼,讓懂得獵捕火雞的人使用含有我骨灰的槍彈,射擊火雞。」
他說:「若得知被射擊的火雞死前,最後看到的是我以每秒九百公尺速率對牠尖叫,如此我將得以安息。」
「神聖之煙」不提供火葬服務,但該公司在將你的或是你喜愛的人的骨灰,填進彈殼時,保證堅守「關懷與尊嚴」的態度。
「神聖之煙」這個宣稱不損害生態環境的商品,價格從八百五十美元(新台幣兩萬六千元)起跳。
霍姆斯表示,該商品詢問度高達數百人,其中以獵人、標靶與射泥鴿射手,以及來自加拿大與美國的軍方人員為主。
在保留傳統特色並兼顧科技日新月異的時代精神下,前IBM工程師葛雷格‧楊與札克利‧葛爾伯想出在墓碑上附上QR條碼的點子。
這種「快速反應」條碼呈方形矩陣狀,最常應用在廣告上,用智慧型手機對著條碼拍照,即可從網路上讀取更多資訊。
附加在墓園墓碑上的QR條碼,成為一個「懷念條碼」─這是個大門,進入即可一窺留在殯儀館伺服器裡的照片、訃聞與慰問留言。
由楊與葛爾伯創立的「葬儀創意社」表示,該點子是「一個全然獨特的方法,紀念一位曾經活著的人。」
(法新社/翻譯:林亞蒂)
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