Brazil // Current

Plane to secretly watch Brazilian tribes

I know they are just trying to help, but this is still invasion of privacy and gives me the creeps! What are your thoughts? Is... more

ashcatash
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Athma-Pure Logics from Ramen for Teen Well-being

I say your Athma or Soul or Alma or Atma, whatever you call, that is your heart. The genetic predisposition of the human body is... more

AthmaPure
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Brazil becomes antipoverty showcase

Cumaru, Brazil - In the arid, impoverished expanse of northeast Brazil, Cumaru is the town no one's ever heard of. And once... more

bedeboop
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Farming superpower Brazil spreads its know-how

Planaltino, Brazil - As a young soil scientist, Edson Lobato looked out at the vast savanna of central Brazil and imagined fields... more

bedeboop
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Woman killed by husband's coffin

A Brazilian woman has died after being struck by her husband's coffin when the hearse they were travelling in was involved in... more

Sumiboom
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Woman killed by dead husband's coffin

Police say a woman has died on the way to a cemetery when a traffic accident hurled her husband's coffin against the back of... more

ebindelglass
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Small town, BIG grant

There are no roads, no major industry and no historical landmarks in Otjivero, a village about 150km east of Windhoek, the... more

PlusNews
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Brazilian government gives prostitutes advice

Brazil's Labour Ministry's website recently put up tips for sex workers, a trade that is legal. The suggestions included... more

nazbags
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Lewis Hamilton stays cool to take F1 title

The Briton held a seven-point lead over rival Felipe Massa going into the final race of the season, knowing he only had to finish... more

DonkeyPong
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Brazil inks deal to hunt for, produce oil in Cuba

Brazil's state-run oil company signed an agreement Friday to explore for oil in deep Caribbean waters north of Cuba that... more

TravG73
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Nasal Filters/Nose Filters/Refills for Airborne Allergies

The human nose and breathing system are not adapted to the present and quickly evolving environment. The harmful attacks on our... more

AthmaPure
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Man builds survival tomb to conquer taphephobia

"Under the shade of ficus trees stands the stone burial chapel that 73-year-old Freud de Melo built. Wind chimes tinkle above the wrought-iron door.

But it isn't a conventional final resting place. Inside the crypt, there's a TV, also a water pitcher and a fruit pantry. Fresh outdoor air flows in through four vents from the chapel roof. Within reach of the coffin are two makeshift megaphones -- plastic cones attached to tubes running out through the wall.

One Saturday recently, Mr. de Melo lay in the coffin, shouting into the cones in a voice that echoed into the countryside. "Help me! Come quick! I've been buried alive!"

See Mr. de Melo's burial vault, outfitted for survival in case of being buried alive.
It was only an equipment check -- not an actual emergency. Mr. de Melo, a resort operator and politician, built a burial vault he could survive in because he's gripped by a rare condition called taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive. "I have awful, awful nightmares of trying to dig myself out from underground," says Mr. de Melo, whose physician father named him, presciently, for the pioneer of dream analysis.

Mr. de Melo's life-affirming burial chapel has become one of the most talked about features of the eccentric tourist park he operates in Brazil's central hinterlands.

While Mr. de Melo's phobia may be over the top, fear of premature burial is one of the most chilling and persistent terrors. Fans of Halloween movie thrillers and people who relish a classic buried-alive story like the 1988 Dutch film "Spoorloos" ("The Vanishing"), have something in common with the ancient Greeks and Romans, who repeated tales of warriors and consuls, mistakenly thought dead, who rose up during their own funerals.

Fear of live burial crested in the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when medicine was comparatively unsophisticated and diseases like typhoid, cholera and plague sometimes caused people who were still alive to appear dead, says Melanie King, author of "The Dying Game: A Curious History of Death."

Overheated fiction stirred public fears about being buried alive. Edgar Allan Poe vividly evoked the claustrophobic terror of being trapped in a casket. "We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth -- we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost hell," he wrote in the short story "The Premature Burial."

See Mr. de Melo's spooky way of coping with his fear of being buried alive.
Such was his anxiety about waking up 6 feet under that George Washington left instructions that his body was not to be buried for three days after his passing, just to be safe. On foreign travels, the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen would leave a sign near his hotel bed reading "I am not dead" to make sure strangers didn't get the wrong idea.

In Germany around 1800, apparent death and premature burial were "given more attention than almost any other medical topic of the time," writes Jan Bondeson, author of the book "Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear." The Germans even set up a system of waiting mortuaries, or Leichenhäuser, where presumed corpses were laid out for observation for two or three days before burial, Dr. Bondeson writes. In one Munich mortuary, the bodies' fingers and toes were attached with strings to a great harmonium that would play if they stirred. The only time the bodies moved and the music sounded was when putrefaction set in and the corpses swelled up, he writes..."

Read the rest and see the video at link ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122540935432186161.html"Under the shade of ficus trees stands the stone burial chapel that 73-year-old Freud de Melo built. Wind chimes tinkle above... more