Salon.com > Christopher Kemp

Freezer Culture

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:54:00 +0000

When Robert Ettinger froze his mother's body in 1977, she became the Cryonics Institute's first customer. Last year he froze his wife too, cooling her body to minus 196 degrees Celsius and storing it in an insulated tank of liquid nitrogen. For $35,000 Ettinger and his attentive staff will provide the same service for anyone. "Dead people don't have much fun," says Ettinger, the 82-year-old founder of the Cryonics

Institute. "It's not a question of whether you're happy now," he says. "I think in the future it's going to be better, not worse." Twenty miles northeast of Detroit, the institute sits atop a small patch of grass, backed by a screen of trees, squat and unremarkable. Few would guess from its drab exterior that it houses the bodies of 38 customers frozen and suspended in liquid nitrogen. Even fewer would guess that seven dogs and nine cats, equally frozen, are keeping them company. But since opening the institute almost 25 years ago,

Ettinger has seen membership grow steadily, and his team is performing more suspensions now than at any other time. "In recent years we've been getting maybe three or four a year, I guess," he says. Ettinger, like his patients and their pets, is waiting for the day they can all be revived. In much the same way as drowning patients can be resuscitated after long periods without breathing,

The dancing plant

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 20:30:00 +0000

Dr. Pradit Kampermpool marches through his plant nursery, past row upon row of exotic orchids, before stopping, his chest proudly puffed out, in front of an unremarkable, weedy-looking plant. This plant, he says gravely, cost him a fortune. He developed complicated breeding programs and followed them religiously for almost 10 years to produce it, he says. This plant, he says, is a dancing plant.

"It's a dancing plant!"

He pauses for effect. Meanwhile, the sun comes up over the green fields. The pointed little leaves of Kampermpool's dancing plant nod and bounce in the breeze. Somewhere, a bird warbles. Kampermpool is still waiting.

"This plant," he says again slowly for emphasis, "is a dancing plant."

Kampermpool stands maybe 5 and a half feet tall. He strides through the nursery, disappearing occasionally behind a screen of orchid stems to reappear seconds later on the other side, his green-and-white polka-dot shirt flashing between gaps in the swaying thicket.

Kurt Vonnegut: “My God, Vesuvius has erupted again!”

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 20:00:00 +0000

About three miles from author Kurt Vonnegut's apartment, teams of construction workers are still sifting through tons of steaming rubble 24 hours a day, trying to find the remains of those who perished in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

Vonnegut says the attack reminded him of Mount Vesuvius.

In February 1945, Vonnegut was witness to another pretty good imitation of Mount Vesuvius: the firebombing by Allied forces of Dresden, a town in eastern Germany, during the last months of World War II. More than 600,000 incendiary bombs later, the city looked more like the surface of the moon. Returning home to Indianapolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post and, seven years later, published his first novel, "Player Piano."

Studs Terkel: “We are not the Fortress America”

Wed, 21 Nov 2001 20:00:00 +0000

The career of Studs Terkel, 89, has spanned six decades. He has interviewed thousands of people and written 11 collections of oral histories, including "Working" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Good War," published in 1984.

Terkel's latest book is "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith." It explores cultural attitudes toward death and collects in one volume more than 60 interviews with ordinary people who share their thoughts on life, death and everything in between. Among his subjects, Terkel interviewed a firefighter, a cardiologist, a death-row parolee, a mortician, a cancer patient in remission, AIDS caseworkers and numerous others.

My mission: to interview the interviewer. With a record like Terkel's, such a proposition could be daunting, but it's not. Hard of hearing, he shouts down the phone in a friendly, wheezy voice, curses his hearing aid, asks me to speak up, to repeat myself, curses his hearing aid again and, at the same time, manages to talk at breakneck speed about anything and everything.

The Wayne Gretzky of cricket spitting

Fri, 10 Aug 2001 19:00:00 +0000

Serious cricket spitters always make sure to mark two important dates on their events calendars. The first, the largest and oldest get-together in competitive cricket spitting, is in April at Purdue University, in Lafayette, Ind., as part of the annual Bug Bowl festival, which celebrates everything entomological.

There, thousands of cricket spitters join together to see who can spit a dead cricket the farthest. After two days of competition, including qualifying rounds and a final spit-off, a winner finally emerges and is crowned the cricket spitting champion. Dejected, the losers limp home to work on their technique. Later in the year, some of them will travel to rural Pennsylvania where, each September, the cricket spitters gather again at Pennsylvania State University, which has held its own spit-off annually since 1998. The winner in Indiana reigns for a year, until the next spring, when hordes of hopeful challengers return to spit crickets more than 30 feet in a desperate bid for the title. But who are the cricket spitters? And why do they come here each year, migrating across the country to compete?

Robert Ballard

Tue, 24 Jul 2001 19:22:00 +0000

If it's underwater and it's lost, Robert Ballard will look for it. Since the 1970s, the undersea explorer has participated in more than 110 expeditions, searching for everything from sunken ships and buried treasures to the Loch Ness monster. He's found the wrecks of the RMS Titanic, the German battleship Bismarck and the American aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, and explored sunken luxury liners including the Lusitania, the Andrea Doria and the Brittanic.

He has never found Nessie, but we get the picture: Ballard finds ships. Ships galore. What drives someone to spend so much time at the bottom of the world, trapped under tons of water in complete darkness? Is he shy? He might be. Agoraphobic? He could be. Or is he just plain crazy?

In his 1987 book, "The Discovery of the Titanic," Ballard wrote: "My childhood idols were imaginary explorers at the technological frontiers of science -- people like Jules Verne's Captain Nemo and his Nautilus. As long as I can remember, I've been enthralled by the sea. But I've always been more interested in what goes on underneath the waves than on the surface."

Irvine Welsh

Mon, 09 Jul 2001 19:00:00 +0000

In 1993, Scottish author Irvine Welsh published "Trainspotting," and changed popular fiction forever. Written in the phonetic Scottish dialect, it told the story of Sick Boy, Begbie, Spud and Renton, four working-class substance abusers living in the government-housing schemes of Edinburgh, Scotland. The life of an Edinburgh "schemie" is a busy one; fights are fought, drinks are downed, pills are popped, speed is snorted and large amounts of heroin are purchased regularly from Mother Superior, a local dealer inventively named for the length of his drug habit.

Suddenly, football was "fitba," sexual intercourse was "gittin yer hole" and Irvine Welsh was famous. A film adaptation starring Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle and Johnny Lee Miller became one of the most memorable films of 1996, with ample doses of explicit drug use, inventive and relentless profanity, frantic sex and violence.

A collection of Welsh's short stories, "Acid House," was published in 1994, followed by his second novel, "Marabou Stork Nightmares" in 1995, and "Ecstasy," consisting of three drug-related novellas, in 1996.

Scott Carrier

Mon, 21 May 2001 19:00:00 +0000

Forget the treadmill. Scott Carrier prefers to run across the Utah plains, in pursuit of pronghorn antelopes. Under a relentless sun, Carrier, his brother and his friends fan out in formation across the scrubland, carefully select an antelope and start running. Except for a cheetah, nothing runs faster than a pronghorn antelope, he tells us, and there aren't too many cheetahs in Utah. They run. Ten minutes pass, the gap between the antelope and the runners widens, then half an hour, the sun gets hotter, the gap wider, the antelope gets away. Always.

Forming the framework of his first collection of nonfiction, "Running After Antelope," Carrier's attempts to catch antelopes appear throughout the book, interspersed with other articles previously published in Harper's and Esquire. Also included are several broadcast pieces from his 18-year stint as a contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and Public Radio International's "This American Life."

Freezer culture

Wed, 07 Mar 2001 20:00:00 +0000

"Dead people don't have much fun," says Ettinger, the 82-year-old founder of the Cryonics Institute. "It's not a question of whether you're happy now," he says. "I think in the future it's going to be better, not worse."

Twenty miles northeast of Detroit, the institute sits atop a small patch of grass, backed by a screen of trees, squat and unremarkable. Few would guess from its drab exterior that it houses the bodies of 38 customers frozen and suspended in liquid nitrogen. Even fewer would guess that seven dogs and nine cats, equally frozen, are keeping them company. But since opening the institute almost 25 years ago, Ettinger has seen membership grow steadily, and his team is performing more suspensions now than at any other time.

The bugs crawl in, the bugs crawl out

Wed, 13 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000

On a still Hawaii morning, a telephone rings, cutting through the silence; a body has been found dumped in a sugar cane field. M. Lee Goff dresses, gathers his kit and drives to the crime scene to collect maggots, beetles and other insect species from the decomposing corpse. Goff's movements are practiced, like a ritual; his hands are quick and confident. He has done this many times before.

A forensic entomologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa on the island of Oahu, Goff uses insect evidence to help police and medical examiners solve crimes. He is one of only a handful of forensic entomologists actively working in the field and conducting forensic research studies -- he calls the group the "Dirty Dozen." In Goff's recently published book, "A Fly for the Prosecution: How Insect Evidence Helps Solve Crimes," he outlines some common methods and applications of forensic entomology.

The number of forensic entomologists working with investigators is small because insects are involved in relatively few cases, Goff says. "You've got a limited period of time during the year when insects get involved," he says. "Some years I'll do about 10 or 11 cases, and other years it will be about 20 or 25." Despite variations from one year to the next, the average number of cases has increased over time, Goff says, as medical examiners and police have slowly begun to accept his sampling methods.