Dear Amritsar,
Towards the end of his life, my grandpa Bluttmange (yeah, that's his real name - he's from Moosejaw) was not the nicest person. He used to hide his dentures in among the feminine hygiene products of the women who lived in the Raymondo Dentrifice Home for the Aged and Terminally Short of Cash; when he was caught, he claimed he thought he was putting them in a glass of water...a square glass of water that wasn't wet but did contain a lot of spray cans.
When people at the Home pointed out that the day before the dentures incident he had written in his diary, "Gonna play a trick on some uptight beyotches today," Grandpa Bluttmange claimed that chipmunks had stolen his diary and forged entries in it as revenge for his favouring the pigeons when he tossed bread crumbs to the animals during "nature time." He kept to this story even when it was pointed out that the there were no chipmunks within a 50 meter radius of the Home.
"What, you got sonar or something?" Grandpa Bluttmange groused. Actually, the Home does, but the residents who are protected by it aren't supposed to know that, so this confrontation ended in a stalemate.
Then, there was the incident with the atomic cheese grater, the stewardesses and the ternary Goldbach conjecture. You...uhh, you may remember seeing that one on CNN.
As bad as he was in life, Grandpa Bluttmange has been worse since he died.
The salesman at the Kamikaze Cemetery (he told us that the word meant "happy happy joy joy beyond life life") convinced us to get Grandpa Bluttmange's mind scanned just before he died. The scan was then put on a chip which animates his face on a screen built into his tombstone. When we visit the gravesite, it's like being with him again. Nobody in the family can really articulate why that's supposed to be a good thing.
Within a week, Grandpa Bluttmange's headstone had convinced the headstone of Erma Mae Woodpecker that her family didn't love her because they hadn't buried her in the shade of a tree, and that it was only a matter of time before the weather deteriorated her computer scan to the point where she was a gibbering wreck. They're headstones, for goodness' sake! They're made of granite! They'll be around long after global warming has forced humanity to find somewhere else to live!
I'd like to hear Grandpa Bluttmange complain about how infrequently we visit after that happens!
Then, when I took my 10 year-old son, Theosophilus, to see Grandpa Bluttmange's memorial, the old man told him, "Do yourself a favour and kill yourself now. Life is all downhill from here, kid." Now, arguably, that's true. Still, it wasn't appropriate. It didn't help that he added: "Course, even death ain't permanent, now. If you kill yourself in a fire, there's a good chance they won't be able to recreate your consciousness. Wanna know where your dad keeps his lighter?" Needless to say, Osoph was traumatized; I don't like the way he has looked at matches ever since.
So, what I want to know is this: if I set off an electromagnetic pulse in the vicinity of Grandpa Bluttmange's memorial, would frying his computer chip be like murdering him?
[name withheld pending explication of the legal ramifications of the answer to the question]
Hey, Babe,
We like to think that we want to remember our deceased loved ones as they were after they have passed on. However, unless they were Mother Teresa or Superman, there are usually aspects of them that we would rather bury deeper than nuclear waste. Not only that, but we would happily vote on enough appropriations to actually keep them safely stored there for the next 10,000 years.
Under ordinary circumstances, all we have to go on are our memories of our loved ones, and memories are as solid as guacamole in a hurricane. Unless, I suppose, the guacamole's atomic lattices had been rigidified with hypercooling processes, but, in that case, I wouldn't want to dip my nachos in it on Saturday night.
The problem with projecting your loved ones on their tombstones is that, like the guest who eats all of your nachos on Saturday night, their continued presence doesn't give you the chance to grieve their death. This leaves you in a limbo that keeps you from getting on with your life, and that's a bar that will never get high enough for you to dance under.
So, I say fry the bastard.
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: what do I look like, a lawyer? Although, judge's robes are so slimming...