Japanese Hearses Are Quite Fascinating, Unbelievable Photos!!

I stumbled upon these photos of Japanese hearses last week. I have never saw anything like this!! Below is the photo galley and commentary from the website where I found the pictures.

Japanese hearses aren’t all mobile Buddhist temples. Some are fairly modest affairs, but these gilded shrine-on-wheels below take the religious to their final resting places in serious style.We’re interested in the gilded temple version of the Japanese hearse, not the pedestrian. The cars are built from either high-end Japanese executive cars or imported American luxo-barges, the Lincoln Continental being surprisingly popular. The style of the decorations vary based on region, but over-the-top decorative shrines are the norm. Of the ways to go out, we’re thinking this mixed with the desert firework canonstravaganza from Hunter S. Thompson’s send off is the way to go.

Check out the photos below.

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

Chicago Wins Cemetery Land for New O’Hare Runway

The City of Chicago on Monday was awarded possession of a 161-year-old cemetery that lies in the path of a future runway at O’Hare International Airport, and the relocation of about 1,200 graves could begin within weeks.

DuPage County Judge Hollis Webster ordered that the title of the 5.3-acre St. Johannes Cemetery in Addison Township be transferred from St. John’s United Church of Christ to the city. She also ordered that Chicago pay the church $630,000 for the land, which stands between two segments of a new runway already under construction.

The acquisition was considered one of the last major impediments to the $15 billion O’Hare Modernization Project.

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

Ride the Technology Wave to Improved Quality, Service

The best thing about today’s new technology is you can do so much more than was thought possible 10, or even 5 years ago. But also, what you can do today is so easy that you don’t need a degree from M.I.T. to use it.

You hardly hear anyone digging up that old expression, “he can’t even program a VCR.” I guess when the technology becomes obsolete so do the expressions. “He can’t even program a DVR” just doesn’t sound right. And besides, who can’t program a DVR? The old family VCR has joined items once thought of as household staples in the technology museum. I think the VCR is on display right along side of the fax machine. Does anyone use a fax machine any more? Really?

Twenty years ago, those households that had home computers used them pretty much super word processors. A 40-kilobite hard drive and 3 megabytes of RAM was all we were going to need, right? Now the home computer is the home entertainment center — a sound system, a TV, video player, video recorder, etc.

But technology is often boiled down into “bells and whistles” except when it answers the question, “how does this help me?”

As funeral directors, every firm’s mission revolves around providing the best possible service to families who are seeking a unique, personalized tribute to a loved one. Is there anything more disappointing to a family than going home after saying goodbye, thinking back at the service and concluding that funeral could have been for almost anyone — so rote, so generic.

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

CDTV – Episode #8 – Merchandising Guru’s Rich Kizer and Georganne Bender Share Tips to Make You More Profitable

CDTV is the world’s most fun funeral industry webshow, focused on industry trends, information, and products and how they can make funeral homes more profitable.

In this episode Ryan again turns his downtown Chicago hotel room into a low budget Hollywood set, and invited world renown merchandising guru’s Rich Kizer and Georganne Bender of Kizer and Bender to share some merchandising tips that will help make funeral professionals more profitable.

Georganne and Rich have been hired by industry associations like NFDA and CANA to assemble merchandising focus groups related to the funeral industry. Georganne and Rich themselves have also posed as “mystery shoppers” planning their own funerals to go deep inside many funeral home showrooms.

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

Cat Predicts 50 Deaths in RI Nursing Home

A cat with an uncanny ability to detect when nursing home patients are about to die has proven itself in around 50 cases by curling up with them in their final hours, according to a new book.

Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the New England nursing home wrong in their predictions over which patients were close to death. The cat, now five and generally unsociable, was adopted as a kitten at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Providence, Rhode Island, which specialises in caring for people with severe dementia.

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

This Has To Be Fake: Hearse Towed During Funeral

Reportedly this is not a fake image, but it is almost to ridiculous to believe. Think about it… A hearse being loaded up on a tow truck and being towed away for illegally parking in front of a church, while the funeral procession is walking out of the church? If this is a real image then I fell horrible for the family.

This image was posted two days ago on Twitter by user @mattpluskate. Looking at the guys Twiiter stream he seems to be just a normal guy. It doesn’t appear that he posted this in hopes of gaining any popularity from it either. Blow is a bigger picture of the alleged towing and also a link to a YouTube video of the towing.

There is speculation that this could be for some TV show but know one knows. Check it out below.

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

Accelerator Pedal Sticks As Toyota Slams Into Funeral Home

Becky Anne Lane, 46, was taken to Baptist Hospital of Cocke County on Wednesday for possible injuries following an accident at Manes Funeral Home in her 2008 Toyota Camry LE that she blamed on a stuck accelerator.

Lane told The Newport Plain Talk that her accelerator got “hung” as she was headed east on East Main Street at Court Avenue, at about 2:30 p.m., on her way to the Food City East store.

Lane said she had stopped for the stop sign on East Main Street at Court Avenue when she stepped on the gas pedal and it got stuck to the floor.

She said the steering wheel locked up, she lost control of the vehicle, clipped a Manes Funeral Home sign in the business’s parking lot, and ran into the building, doing considerable damage to its interior lobby.

Her Toyota was damaged on the left side and front of the vehicle when it plowed into the funeral home, according to a report by the Newport Police Department.

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

Teens Driving While Texting – Graphic PSA Video

It use to be that the number one cause of teen driving accidents was excessive speed. Now rapidly climbing the list of causes is text messaging. It seems that text messaging while driving is becoming a common thing, but with it comes tragedy. A study conducted by the Virginia-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that people using a cell phone while driving were four times more likely to get into an accident.

Being in the industry we are in, we unfortunately get to see the results of Texting While Driving, and the results are never good.

It is not just teenagers that find it difficult to not text and drive. Research conducted by Nationwide Insurance proposes that DWT (Driving While Texting) is generational, with 46 percent of drivers’ ages 16 to 17 admit to texting while driving, while just 14 percent of those ages 28 to 44 and only 2% percent of drivers ages 45 to 60 admitted to it. These numbers are in response to a massive statistics that suggest Driving While Texting becomes the killer monster in the road.

I myself admit to doing a lot of texting while driving, but after watching the video below, I will think twice about replying to the next text I get while behind the wheel.

Caution: The Video Below Is Very Graphic, but the reality of it hits home. This is reality and it happens a lot, please don’t let this happen to you…

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

Love, Honor, Cherish and Scatter?

Meeting planner Michelle Paris had checked into a hotel in Monarch Beach, Calif., for a business conference. One afternoon, she was able to break away and head down to the ocean, where she opened a plastic bag and allowed a handful of ashes to blow into the wind and onto the beach.

As a wave approached, sweeping away the gray-white dust, Ms. Paris felt her emotions swell. She stood for a moment, gazing into the Pacific. Then she returned to the hotel, where a colleague looked at her quizzically and asked, “What happened? It looks like you have Ash Wednesday on your face.”

Ms. Paris was unaware that the ashes had blown her way, but the realization felt comforting. “It’s my husband,” she told her colleague. “He just kissed me goodbye.”

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Via: www.ConnectingDirectors.com

Can You Afford To Die? – Infographic

An infographic from TermLifeInsurance.org takes data from the National Funeral Director’s Association and others, and uses it to compute the cost of the modern funeral.

Sadly, while the cost of a funeral was a mere 2% of median income in 1967, it’s grown to 14.8% in 2006.

Of course, if you don’t want to be buried you could always be cremated, and the map at the bottom shows the percentage of cremations by state.

See the full-size graphic after the break.

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Via: www.ConnectringDirectors.com