Cremation Alternative: Try 'Liquefaction'

Its name sounds almost like a new kitchen gizmo, but the Resomator is ... not that. The machine is being pitched as a greener alternative to cremation, and the first one in the US will be in use soon at a funeral home in St. Petersburg, Florida, reports the BBC. The Resomator uses a solution of alkaline water and potassium hydroxide that gets heated and pressurized to liquify a corpse in about three hours.

Probably the strangest part to the uninitiated: The resulting liquid gets poured down a regular drain into the sewage system, though that solution is said to be sterile and to contain no DNA. Bone fragments do remain, but they get pulverized the same way they would in the cremation process. Florida is one of seven states that have approved the machine, and its Scottish maker hopes to be shipping more elsewhere to the US, as well as Canada and Europe. The BBC link has an explainer video.

Note:  Sort of sounds like War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise's) when the machines take humans in and spray them back out all over stuff. It had a red web look. 

You've got red on you: Except the use of the laser beam death ray seems counter-intuitive in light of the later revelation that the aliens want to harvest people in cages and spray their blood all over the land in a gory fine red mist, like some grotesque febreeze. First of all – this is very dickish behaviour for conquerors – it’s just not cricket. Imagine if this is what we did during the invasion of Iraq, there would be protests for sure. Second of all, if they aren’t doing this just for fun, then presumably they need to be squirting people juice all over the planet and maybe they shouldn’t have evaporated half of the population already. At some point you have to imagine one of the aliens shouting ‘Wait guys stop! Oh fuck it we needed those!’ Just because you can death-ray people doesn’t mean you always should. If the aim was to get blood everywhere then the tripods would have been better off with chainsaws – and also that would be an amazing film.

The duo has to deal with the disposal of a body, and Pinkman appeals to White's knowledge of science to solve the problem. "It seems to me our best course of action would be chemical discorporation," White says, and he gives instructions for Pinkman to pick up a polyethylene tub to hold the body. This seems silly, since "any decent acid" would eat right through the plastic, according to the young addict, so he simply places the body in his bathtub, along with a gun and a healthy amount of hydrofluoric acid.