- by Owen Morton
Well, while browsing through my website’s archives today, I happened upon that classic article from May last year, detailing 12 fun things to do with a corpse. I noticed that this was under the rather misleading headline of ‘101 Fun Things To Do With A Corpse’, implying that there would be 101 of these fun and exciting things to do with your corpse, whereas there were, in fact, only 12. Obviously, this level of inaccuracy is completely unacceptable, both on Heath the Rat’s Silly Page and elsewhere, and so the best I can do to attempt to redress the balance is to continue this series, with a further number of fun things to do with a corpse.
The same rules as last time apply: don’t even read this if all you’re likely to do thereafter is send me hate mail because you don’t like the idea of people playing with corpses. It’s all perfectly natural, anyway, and if you don’t like it, perhaps you ought to take a good hard look at yourself and try to determine why you’re so strange, before you go criticising other people.
So here we go.
13. Create a vast underground laboratory, and expend much effort inside trying to bring your corpse back to life, a la Doctor Frankenstein. If you succeed, you can sell your secret to medical science. If you fail, just convert your laboratory into a place where you make living people into corpses, rather than the other way round.
14. Build a life-size replica of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in your front room, dress your corpse in Starfleet uniform (why the hell is ‘Starfleet’ not underlined in red on Microsoft Word when ‘Starship’ is?), and seat it in the helmsman’s chair. Sit in the captain’s chair yourself, and issue orders to your corpse. If and when it fails to obey, start beating up your corpse, in an effort to teach it about Starfleet discipline.
15. Take it to the police station, and explain to the officer on duty that your corpse was found drunk and disorderly in your local pub, so you ‘taught it a lesson’. Nod and wink knowingly. Then run away, before they catch you. (Only recommended for those who enjoy a good dicing with the law.)
16. Rob it. Quite often, corpses are in possession of things like wallets and watches which you can acquire for your personal advantage. This is especially true of corpses that until seconds ago were not corpses, but are now because you converted them into corpses so you could steal their wallet and watch.
17. Cut off bits of the body and replace them with fruit and vegetables that look vaguely like the original body part (e.g. carrot for the nose, grapes for eyes, etc). Then put it in a greengrocer’s shop.
18. Stuff it, and put it up for display in a nice glass cabinet in your front garden. For the slightly more macabre, hang it from a tree in your front garden.
19. See how many iron filings you have to insert into its mouth before the corpse becomes magnetic. See if you can convert it into a compass.
20. Put it in an opaque box with no air holes and no food. This way, according to Schrodinger’s Principle of Uncertainty (or some such theory), your corpse will be both dead and alive. It will be both because you don’t know which. (This is what my friend Andrew Pearce once told me about a cat. If you put a cat in a box with no air holes and no food, and you can’t see the cat, it will then be both dead and alive, because you don’t know which. If you ask me, this is total bollocks, because the cat will be dead OR alive, but you don’t know which. It’s not both. But then, I’m not a physicist. On the other hand, if this is the sort of thing physicists waste their time doing and talking about, then really, I’d rather not be one. Although getting paid to put cats in boxes … I suppose I could learn to live with that. Anyway, it’s possible that this particular point doesn’t apply to corpses, because when you put the cat in the box, it’s alive. If you put a corpse in a box, it’s by definition dead. Actually, I suppose you could argue that – if this particular theory of quantum physics does apply to corpses – all the corpses that were ever buried in coffins are now both dead and alive. Voila! Your corpses return to life!)
21. Take it to a car compacter. This way, you can soon have a cuboid corpse, which is much easier to carry around. (By the way, ‘cuboid’ isn’t a word, in Microsoft Word’s opinion, although ‘cuboids’ is. Is there any logic at all to the way this thing works?)
22. Burn it. Some corpses actually appreciate this.
23. Sit outside your house, cradling your corpse, and sobbing, “Jonny, Jonny, how did it ever come to this? Why do you torment me so?”
24. Fit red LEDs beneath the skin of the corpse’s face, then turn them on. Your corpse will be given a fiendish red glow! Stand it in your window at night to attract passers-by.
Once again, I think that’s enough things to do with a corpse. It was all very fun, but really, please don’t do any of these things. Especially not to me.