In true Consolation Champs style, I’m probably number 13. But thanks to my Brazilian (I think) friend Carmela for the link and the shout-out. At least I think it’s a shout-out.
Author: James McNally
Dead Funny
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Welcome to the sixth stop on the Virtual Book Tour for Mary Roach’s book.
I loved the book. Mary manages to impart a lot of scientific knowledge while never quite losing her “holy crap, I’m sitting here with a dead guy” attitude. She’s very very funny, but never disrespectful. So many of the situations she finds herself in while researching the book are just inherently strange and therefore ready to be mined for black black humour.
She explains in the introduction that “this is a book about notable achievements made while dead.” Here is an excerpt that highlights a not-so-notable achievement, but which made me laugh. Roach is talking about gas, and how it’s caused by bacteria in our gut feeding on what we’ve eaten. After death, the bacteria begins to feed on us:
The difference is that when we’re alive, we expel that gas. The dead, lacking workable stomach muscles and sphincters and bedmates to annoy, do not. Cannot. So the gas builds up and the belly bloats. I ask Arpad why the gas wouldn’t just get forced out eventually. He explains that the small intestine has pretty much collapsed and sealed itself off. Or that there might be “something” blocking its egress. Though he allows, with some prodding, that a little bad air often does, in fact, slip out, and so, as a matter of record, it can be said that dead people fart. It needn’t be, but it can.
As you can see, this is a great book. And even though fans of Six Feet Under might know a few of these things, there’s much more for them (us!) in here. The history of embalming, dissection, grave-robbing, human crash-test dummies; it’s all here.
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is not really about scatalogical humour, despite my choice of excerpt. It’s a funny and insightful book born out of the morbid curiosity about death that all of us share.
Mortgage Blues
Brooke and I have had the whole “renting versus buying” discussion several (dozen) times over the past few years, and I’ve never been convinced of the value of owning real estate. But last weekend, I let myself be talked into going to look at some condos that are being built very close to our (rented) apartment.
Surprisingly, after checking out the floor plans and prices, I was interested. We live in a pricier section of the most expensive city in Canada, so $200,000 for a one-bedroom condo, slightly larger than our current place, actually seemed reasonable. We currently pay almost $1100 in rent each month. I figured that if we could get away with paying no more than $1600-$1800/month, it might make sense for us.
What I didn’t count on was the deposit/down payment. The condo isn’t built yet, and expected occupancy isn’t until the spring of 2005, at the earliest. But they still want a $30,000 deposit, spread over eight months. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have that sort of cash laying around. Even if we were able to borrow it, paying it back over two years (before we’d have to start paying our mortgage) would be more expensive than the mortgage, since we’d still have to pay our rent at the same time. What’s worse, I found out that upon moving in to the finished condo, we have to pay another $20,000. Where is this money supposed to come from? We’d be first-time home buyers, and we don’t own any assets at all. Our credit history is exemplary, but somehow, the idea of trying to put $50,000 on our lines of credit seems insane.
People talk about how rent is just like throwing your money away. But after looking at interest rates, amortization periods, and condominium “maintenence fees,” I’m pretty convinced that we’d be throwing away at least as much money each month as we do now. All this hasn’t helped to console my wife, though…
CC is 3!
Consolation Champs celebrated its third birthday on Monday, July 7. Coincidentally, yesterday around midnight, we welcomed our 100,000th visitor. More likely, we welcomed Google for the 74,379th time. Either way, a nice milestone.
Virtual Book Tour
Today marks the beginning of the first Virtual Book Tour. The idea is for a group of people to progressively share their thoughts on a single, recently-published book. In this case, the book is called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. First up is Mike. Check out his thoughts on this fascinating book.
I just got my copy today, and I’ll be participating a week from now, on Monday July 14. I hope you’ll come back to see what I thought of Stiff.