Work-related: Styrofoam coffin

The flower shop asked me to take this photo a couple weeks ago. This is an Isabel Bloom figurine, or statue (is it still a "figurine" if it's two feet long?), or whatever, that they were unpacking, and something about the hands folded over the chest and the form-fitting styrofoam block struck them as amusing. They have senses of humor over there.

I don't know whether Isabel Bloom is well-known in the gardening world; work is the only place I can think of where I've seen her stuff, and I don't recall hearing it mentioned on the other garden blogs. Though in fairness, I've only actively searched for it once in my life, today when I was hunting for the website, so I wouldn't really know.

This got me to thinking, though: why not styrofoam coffins for real? I mean, it's waterproof, longer-lasting than wood, cheaper to make and transport, potentially made from recycled materials, gentler on the pallbearers, and easy to claw your way out of if you were accidentally buried alive or became a vampire, which is an important but oft-neglected consideration. (Imagine how many vampires are out there right now, killing time in their coffins waiting for the wood to rot: that's got to be kind of boring.) Plus it would protect against shipping damage. I'm sure St. Peter (or whoever has his job, but in Hell) would appreciate that. Granted it's not the most attractive material, but you could cover it with a wood veneer of some kind easily enough.

It would not a good choice to bury in areas subject to heavy flooding or erosion, obviously. I'm intrigued by the mental image of a thousand eight-by-five-foot, corpse-filled styrofoam blocks bobbing along atop raging floodwaters, but there are probably solid public sanitation arguments to be made against it. I dunno. There's a good idea in all this somewhere, I'm just positive.