../../../..//2008/07/30/its-really-not-a-good/
It’s really not a good week for Delta: when a flight from Los Angeles to Atlanta prepared for landing early this morning, the crew discovered the body of a 61-year-old woman locked in a bathroom. Cause of death is still being determined. [SFGate] (Thanks to Gino and Lee!)
The Mount Auburn Funeral Home in Stickney, Illinois, mixed up the tags on a couple of bodies, so that when mourners showed up to view 91-year-old Lillian Grogan on Monday, they instead saw a different lady wearing Grogan’s clothes and jewelry. When a granddaughter tried to find out what the funeral home had done with the real Grogan, she discovered the woman had already been buried. She was exhumed and reburied yesterday. Hey, at least cremation wasn’t involved.
If you bought, or your pet ate, pet food recalled after March 17, 2007, keep tabs on this $24 million settlement. This would be the pet food purposely cut with melamine, a (poisonous) byproduct of coal production, because it made the food look it was higher in protein and was cheaper than actual protein. The case is called Re: Pet Food Products Liability Litigation, MDL Docket No. 1850, Civil Action No. 07-2867 (NLH). The final hearing is on October 14, 2008. The final date for submitting a claim form will be November 24, 2008. To see if you’re eligible, check the list of recalled products affected by the settlement (PDF). Food by Nestle-Purina, Royal Canin, Sierra Pet products, Chenangono Valley Pet Food, CJ Foods, Diamond Pet Food, Hill’s, American Nutrition, and Del Monte are on the list. Claim forms and more can be found at PetFoodSettlement.com.
Thanks to a change in federal rules 18 months ago, it’s now much easier to find out details of so-called “golden coffins,” which are—yes, this is real—posthumous payouts to CEOs that can climb into the hundreds of millions. Brian Roberts of Comcast will receive $298.1 million if he dies in office; Robert Iger of Disney will receive $62.4 million; Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon will receive $43.4 million. Ha ha, life insurance is for paupers!
GlaxoSmithKline is buying a U.S. biotechnology company that is researching resveratrol, the chemical compound found in red wine that may retard the aging process. The CEO of the company says that “drugs that mimic resveratrol, by activating enzymes called sirtuins, could ‘treat in a safe, natural new way, many of the major killers of western society.'” We can’t wait to see the commercials that GSK puts out for this one.
Yesterday’s story of the death of a passenger on board an American Airlines flight continued to unfold throughout the day, and now CNN has posted an article that addresses some of the questions people were asking about in-flight emergencies in general. CNN spoke with several experts in the area where medicine overlaps with the airline industry to find out how airlines prepare for the inevitable really sick passenger.
A 44-year-old Brooklyn woman was returning from vacation in Haiti when she began to have trouble breathing. According to her cousin who was on the flight with her, she was refused help twice by the flight attendant, then she was brought two oxygen tanks with masks—but both were empty. Her cousin requested an emergency landing, but before they could touch down in Miami she was dead, so the plane continued to JFK. The airline isn’t commenting on why the emergency tanks were empty in the first place. “After the flight attendant refused to administer oxygen to Ms. Desir, she became distressed, pleading, ‘Don’t let me die,’ Mr. Oliver recalled.”
Karen Turner wants to know why Walmart employees told her that their bathroom stalls were unoccupied, even though they contained the body of Karen’s husband, 41-year-old airline mechanic Steven Turner. Karen needlessly spent hours searching for her husband, who went missing after dropping off his car that morning for an oil change. Walmart has yet to respond to a letter Karen sent in September. No condolences, no explanation. Nothing but silence.
Rachel’s stepsister passed away last April, but when she called to cancel her pre-paid mobile account Virgin told her that instead of sending in a death certificate, she should just shut off the phone and ignore it. After 90 days of inactivity, it would automatically be canceled. “I asked if they wouldn’t take a death certificate to close the account, but I was assured that it would be faster to simply let the account run out.” Instead, they added some sort of extra minutes promotion to the account that extended it to the present, so ten months later, it’s still active.
These three hilariously morbid print ads are for Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, by Canadian ad agency ACLC.
Sprint wants Tracey Stewart to keep paying her dead father’s cellphone bill. Sprint is not completely heartless: they offered to cut his monthly rate to $10 until the contract expires in September.
Prepaid funeral plans are the “extended service warranties” of the funeral industry—profitable for the funeral home but often useless.
The former owner of a funeral home in Princeton, British Columbia, has been charged with fraud for handing out random urns of ashes to his customers. The funeral home had been shut down in 2005 for operating without a license, but since it’s rather difficult to spot the “wrong” ashes by sight, the problem wasn’t discovered until another funeral home began to sort through the leftover inventory and found over 50 urns that had been labeled unclaimed.
Toy injuries were responsible for 22 deaths and 220,500 emergency room visits in 2006, according to a report from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The report looked at injuries affecting children under 15 and found that most deaths were caused by asphyxiation or collisions associated with riding toys, scooters, toy pegs, and rubber balls.
If you’re married and the two of you own your house, is your legal title recorded as “joint tenants” or “community property”? If you bought it recently, odds are good it’s “community property” (and it should also include “with right of survivorship”).
A new Bankrate national poll says that 57% of Americans don’t have wills, even though 76% of respondents said they considered it an important thing to have. This writer doesn’t have a will, but then again, I don’t have kids, and my “heirlooms” are all made by consumer electronic companies. What about people with offspring? It’s even worse: 69% of parents with kids under the age of 18 don’t have wills, even though 88% of them say it’s important.
Don’t set up an irrevocable funeral trust through your insurance company, says MarketWatch columnist Chuck Jaffe.
Part of 
