Life after death and the supreme pizza

This just in from the Examiner.com - Trending topics this week:  A brain surgeon says the afterlife is real.  And, Pizza Hut offers lifetime pizza. 

Now that’s my kind of news!   

Doesn’t it just take away the fear of death?  Relax!  You know everything will be OK if there’s Eternal Pepperoni!   

Maybe that was what Felix Baumgartner was thinking about right before he stepped away from his own personal Red Bull space pod.  Twenty-four miles up.  Eight hundred miles an hour.  Free falling.  He must have been contemplating life everlasting and a fresh calzone. 

Actually, I heard he’s a big romantic.  Just at that moment when you can’t take it back, he reported saying to himself, “I don’t want to die in front of my girlfriend.”   

But…but…Then why would you…?  Oh never mind. 

Now I don’t have a death wish, but I do have a death thought.  Totally unbidden you understand.  Still, almost every day “it” crosses my mind somehow, someway. 

For example, we recently bought a mattress with a 25-year warranty.  That’ll give you pause for a death thought.  This could be THE mattress.  If I’m lucky that is, and meet my demise while at home, smiling in my sleep, dreaming of a Chicago-style pan pie with everything on it. 

I often think of death when I’m at the gym, but not my own.  It’s not exactly that I’m wishing actual death on anyone.  It’s more like that commercial where an unwanted nuisance just goes “poof!”  There go those muscled-up guys who wear sweatbands and flex the tattoos on their biceps.  No more toned young women with ponytails and other things bouncing.  Abracadabra!  It’s satisfying. 

And I guess some might say I dramatize my near-death experiences in the U-Jam class.  Maybe I don’t have to bend from the waist and gulp oxygen quite so often.  No true need to hold up my hand for all to pause and watch as I declare my imminent end.  OK.  Whatever.  You try U-Jam. 

But I’m not preoccupied.  I’m not!  It’s natural to think about death and dying every day, isn’t it?  Admit it.  I’m not the only one. 

My center for rationalization has kicked in to assure me that we all do it – we all think of our own unraveling. 

I figure it’s a common train of thought or we wouldn’t have so many euphemisms for “passing away.”  You know, like the Eskimos and snow.  Or, MontyPython and the parrot.  

Or, maybe it’s unique to of those of us who’ve crossed a particular threshold:  More yesterdays than tomorrows.  A person occupying that spot on the timeline of life can’t help thinking about, you know, let’s see…what’s a gentle way of putting it - joining the crowd invisible (my own personal favorite nickname for “going to meet your maker”).   

An upbeat tidbit in the life-and-death dilemma comes from DiscoverMagazine’s online edition.  They report that reverse aging is not a physical impossibility, but merely a technological challenge. 

So, it appears that baby booming lab geeks are also mulling over the phenomenon of expiration.  They’re no doubt working on some kind of gadget we’ll clamp onto our heads to regenerate tired old sagging cell structure and pink up the gray matter.  Or maybe they’ll invent an immortality pill.  Either way.   

Perhaps they’ll wrap us in aluminum foil like Miles Monroe in “Sleeper” and freeze dry us in anticipation of death defying scientific innovation. 

I figure it’ll be a metabolism thingamajig.  Discover says a lifetime spans 1.5 billion heartbeats, give or take.  That’s true for any and all living beings.  Humming birds, grizzly bears, retired high school principals…all the same.  Critters with shorter lifespans just get their 1.5 billion in a lot faster than the rest of us.  So logically, all we need is an H.G. Wells sort of slow everything down pacemaker.  

The guy in the article actually said that he doesn’t expect to live forever, but when it comes to his grandkids “all bets are off!”   

Ha ha ha!  It’s just so much fun not to fret over the inevitable. 

Oh well.  There’s no point in getting morbid about it.   

After all, even when we do tuck it in, there’s always the pizza.

 

Let the Buyer Beware!

I feel like Miles Monroe, owner of the Happy Carrot Health-Food store in Woody Allen’s classic comedy/satire, “Sleeper.”  Miles lived in Manhattan in 1973; he was cryogenically frozen without his consent; awakened 200 years later, only to find that everything he knew was wrong. 

In their efforts to revive him, the 22^nd century doctors who “thawed” him prescribed chocolate and cigarettes!  He refused, of course, coming from the birth of the health food mania of the 1970’s.  But they assured him that the latest scientific research proved nicotine and cocoa beans to be most healthful and rejuvenating.

So it made his abstinence seem futile.  Hmmm.   

And what about all those organic herbs, vitamin supplements, and gag-inducing blended concoctions he must have choked down in the name of well-being?  Had it all been in vain?    

Flash forward, or back to the present, or wherever we are in relation to that fictional scenario:  Reuters Health now reports that a University of Connecticut researcher who studied the link between decelerated aging and a substance found in red wine has committed 145 acts of data fabrication and falsification, throwing most of his findings into doubt.  

That’s right.  Dipak K. Das, who directed the university's Cardiovascular Research Center, studied the substance resveratrol, touted as a means to slow aging and maintain good health as people get older.  A Las Vegas resveratrol maker, Longevinex, has promoted Das's research, and he appears in a lengthy video they produced hyping the nutrient as the next aspirin - “The sliced bread of the Viagra & Botox set.”  I beg your pardon?! 

Thank heavens for the tipster who alerted UConn and the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, which investigates alleged misconduct by federal grant recipients.  They’ve in turn notified 11 journals that published Das's work, including “The Journal of Antioxidants & Redox Signaling.”  Really. 

Shocking for the world of science.  But more important for us: resveratrol in red wine is not the lost secret of eternal youth we were promised. 

Great.  That’s just great. 

Red wine won’t keep me young.  Thank you so much, Dr. Das.  I threw myself into that regimen wholeheartedly!  It’s very discouraging.  And it’s a dilemma:  Should I abstain, or not?  Will we find out next year that, oops, resveratrol really does reverse the sands of time?   

What axiom of wisdom is next to be debunked?  I’m not lankier in my flare-leg jeans?  Minimizers maximize?  They told me I’d look great, but am I just another tubby girl in a V-neck sweater and vertical stripes?!  

For years we thought a golden tan was the hallmark of glowing health.  But no.   

Public schools served grilled cheese sandwiches and tater tots to untold thousands of innocent children.  Now we’re informed that government-issued pasteurized processed “cheese food” and potatoes deep-fried in animal lard aren’t the nutritional dynamos we were led to believe.  Or are they? 

We used to be able to trust our mortgage lenders.  Yikes.  Next they’ll tell me the Nigerian National Petroleum Company isn’t going to transfer $47,000,000 into my bank account, after all. 

Of course, I kind of knew about the Nigerians, anyway.  I barely considered their proposal, though I felt for the Nigerian civil servants who emailed me, being forbidden to operate a foreign bank account and all.  That’s why they needed my help in the first place.  

My 25% of $47million?  That’s about; let’s see, by my calculations, $11million and change.  I could use that kind of dough.  But still, I’m skeptical.  Why did they pay so much for the mineral rights to begin with?  Everyone knows you get your contingencies in place before you tie up your capital! 

And it’s common knowledge that to be a legitimate transferee of such moneys according to Nigerian law, a person like me would have to be a current depositor of at least $100,000 in a Nigerian bank.  Pretty inconvenient.   

They said they’d be most grateful for my assistance, but I just don’t know anymore, now that I’m off the cabernet. 

A person can’t be too careful.  You put your faith in something only to find it reversed on appeal.  Even worse - it was fabricated and falsified from the outset.   

From now on, I’m sticking with the tried and true:  I’ll drink my sloe gin fizz, wear my most forgiving black, and keep my money in the henhouse with the eggs in a variety of baskets.  

No, no!  I won’t be fooled again.