From Harper’s Weekly Review:
Israeli police raided a Christmas party in Haifa, confiscating equipment and arresting a Palestinian man dressed as Santa Claus; a man dressed as Santa Claus was stopped by police for drunk driving in Rivne, Ukraine; and an Indiana state senator posted an AI-generated image of himself body-slamming Santa Claus on Christmas morning.
From Harper’s Weekly Review:
In Ghana, a self-declared prophet, who solicited money from his followers to build arks ahead of what he said would be a Christmas Day rapture, announced that the apocalypse had been postponed and used the donations to instead purchase a Mercedes.
My sister, Doctor Deb, a serious physician with our family sense of absurdist humor, called from her car to tell me this:
When driving through Sleepy Hollow, she has passed a store called Ashes to Glasses without thinking more about it, other than to wonder what the store’s business is. Today, she noticed what the store says it does.
Ashes to Glasses takes the ashes from your cremated loved one(s), which could of course also be your pet(s), and turns them into…glassware. Like, a vase. After a short sharp shocked silence (from me, absorbing this), our conversation went something like this:
“Why don’t they bypass the morticians and cremate the body themselves?” A one-stop shop.
“People are so freaky.”
“But really inventive. However, there are many inventions that nobody was asking for.”
“If they can do a vase, why not wine glasses?” Or chandeliers?
“If somebody brought in ashes from a fireplace and didn’t tell them, could they make glassware out of it or is it only corpse ashes that can make glass?”
Well, I decided to get clarification and asked Perplexity, “There’s a shop in Sleepy Hollow called Ashes to Glass. What does it do?” The answer was far more horrible than anything my sister and I came up with. From Perplexity:
Ashes to Glasses is typically a memorial glass business that incorporates a small amount of human or pet cremation ashes into custom glass items such as jewelry, ornaments, or decorative keepsakes. These studios usually invite families to send or bring a tablespoon or so of ashes, which are then carefully fused into molten glass to create a visible swirl or layer within the finished piece.
Jewelry?
