Turkey Trots & Spice-Scented Mummies | 4M #177

Welcome to the hundred-and-seventy-seventh edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #177, 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!

Steal this idea

We love sharing ways that your peers are engaging with their communities, and this one, a scrapbooking workshop hosted by a death doula, looks like a fabulous idea:

MDGA?

Spoiler alert: The Berkowitz Report should not be your first option for fact-based news. Despite the satirical subtitle, “Home of Truth,” this Substack hilariously spoofs pretty much any topic, and deathcare isn’t off limits. A recent post about the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as director Health and Human Services for example, includes a quote from a fictitious deathcare group the Report dubs the “National Alliance of Funeral Directors,” reading: “For years, the funeral industry has suffered as a result of the Democratic Party’s unabashed anti-death agenda,” the group said in an official statement. “We are confident that Secretary Kennedy will make death great again.”

RIP Duo

First, they (briefly) killed Mr. Peanut. Then we all watched in horror as a Pop-Tart toasted itself to death at an NCAA playoff game (and returned this year as a gnarly corpse). Now the language learning app Duolingo is following in the murder-your-mascot trend with the announcement that Duo, the Duolingo owl, has died after being “cruelly” run over by a Cybertruck. To verify the death, the Duolingo marketing team shared images of the green plush owl with wide x-ed out eyes, lying in a Cybertruck-shaped cardboard box. The post went viral and attracted sympathetic interaction from other brands as well as singer Dua Lipa, on whose behalf Duolingo requested privacy during this difficult time.

Turkey trio

Then there’s this video, which was captured by a member of the Eickhof Columbaria as he worked on a columbarium installation in North Dakota. We’ll just leave it right here:

Now you know

They say that once you’ve smelled death, you’ll never forget that odor, but the smell being referred to in that saying probably wouldn’t be referred to as “woody,” “spicy,” or “sweet.” However, those are the notes that human and electronic sniffers detected when they smelled nine Egyptian mummified bodies, according to a study published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The study sought to learn more about ancient embalming practices in order to improve preservation techniques.