Teddy Ballgame

[cuervo72]

Boy, this is beyond sad at this point:

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/story?id=1595663

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Ex-employee: Alcor threatened to dispose of Ted's body
ESPN.com news services

The saga of Ted Williams' frozen body won't be ending anytime soon.

Former Alcor Life Extension Foundation employee Larry Johnson said company officials suggested, perhaps jokingly, they would ship Williams' body to John Henry Williams if the son didn't pay the money he still owes the company, The New York Times reported in Thursday's editions.

"One director said that if John Henry didn't pay, they should ship the body in a cardboard box to him, then to Bobbi-Jo [Williams Ferrell]," Johnson said in a telephone interview to the newspaper.

Johnson, formerly the Chief Operating Officer at Alcor, said in the report that John Henry Williams still owes the foundation $111,000. The entire preservation process costs $136,000.

Johnson also told The Times that he has seen Williams' frozen head.

"It's been in there for a year, and it's ghastly," he said.

According to a Sports Illustrated article, Williams' body was separated from his head in a procedure called neuroseparation.

Williams' body stands upright in a 9-foot tall cylindrical steel tank, which is filled with liquid nitrogen.

The head is stored in a separate steel can filled with liquid nitrogen. It has been shaved, drilled with holes and accidentally cracked 10 times, the magazine reported.

The company will not confirm that Williams is among those preserved at Alcor, but his presence was revealed in court documents when his oldest daughter challenged the decision to bring the body to the facility.

Carlos Mondragon, director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, said the company is looking into civil and criminal charges against Johnson for violating several confidentiality agreements.

"I know he was unhappy with his supervisor and upset that he wasn't paid enough. But when you have those problems, you go elsewhere," Mondragon told the newspaper.

Responding in the report, Johnson said, "Alcor has one fact right. I am disgruntled -- because of what happened to Ted and their cavalier mentality about breaking the law."

Johnson also accused Alcor of dumping illegal chemicals and bodily fluids behind its Scottsdale, Ariz., office in the report. Mondragon refuted the allegations and told the newspaper "we have nothing to hide."

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
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[JeeberD]

What's the big deal? I was neuroseparated years ago and it hasn't affected me at all...

Though I do hate having to type with my tongue...

[cuervo72]

Do you have ten cracks in your head? I hear they're worse than papercuts.

[Bee]

Originally posted by cuervo72
Do you have ten cracks in your head? I hear they're worse than papercuts.

Yes, but only 6 were accidental.

[Fritz]

"In the future, we will be able to restore people to full health. Unless, of course, someone has had their head severed, drilled, and cracked" ~ Popular Mechanics June 1975

[cuervo72]

Not from Popular Mechanics, but also from June, 1975:

A scant 100 or so persons throughout the world now use computerized conferencing on a regular basis. But the time may be fast approaching when far more people will be conferring through computers and we will begin to view computer conferencing as a "natural" way to interact.
-- An Altered State of Communication? June 1975, J. Vallee, Robert Johansen, and Kathleen Spangler.

[Fritz]

1975 was a prophetic year.

We've had a lot of success so far. We know what dangers to expect out there from black suns, neutron storms, radiation and the like, but if we think we know everything that goes on out there, we're making a terrible mistake! ~ John Koenig, Space 1999

[John Galt]

Wow, this is even a more bizarre threadjack than is normal for this board.

[Fritz]

thus spake John the pure

[cuervo72]

Eh, part of the fun in starting a thread is just to see where it will wind up.

[John Galt]

Originally posted by Fritz
thus spake John the pure

Hey, I can threadjack with the best of them, but comparing quotes about the future from 1975 in a thread about Ted Williams was a more impressive 'jack than most.

[cuervo72]

Taken from http://home.att.net/~thehessians/GoofyPredictions.html:

In the People's Almanac, the 1975 best-seller by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, these predictions were made:
15 crystal-ball psychics predicted, among other things, that the United States and Soviet Union would skirmish on the moon; New York City would sink into the ocean (three predicted this); the devil would rule the Earth between 1975 and 1978 (unless you count disco); London would be destroyed by a meteor; buses would be atomic powered; the Earth would end on Aug. 18, 1999.

"Ethel Johnson Meyers hit the nail on the head with: "There will be no sinkings of major cities," but that isn't my idea of prognostication. Following the psychics are another dozen pages of predictions by scientists and modern thinkers. These are less wrong, though they mostly achieve this by being more vague. Every prediction that time came anywhere near proving true is sandwiched between total inaccuracy.

Daniel Bell, a Harvard professor, saw "a services, rather than a goods, economy" and "less privacy." But he also predicted a bright future for supersonic transport and "a more hedonistic culture distrustful of the achievement-oriented technological world." I wish.
Mathematician D.G. Brennan did well. He saw computers small enough to fit "in a shoe box" by 2018. He was big on laser guidance, and he had a prediction that seemed as if he had somehow seen the CNN footage from the Gulf War. "It will be literally possible to put an intercontinental ballistic missile down a smokestack from a range of 6,000 miles." But he also saw hurricanes harnessed as weapons of war.

The general showing was atrocious. For all the predictions of colonies on the moon and men on Mars, not one scientist hinted the space program might collapse into its state of diminished shuttledom. The Soviet Union was always--always--depicted as a superpower that we would either go to war with or not. Its collapse was unimaginable.

And nobody saw the personal computer revolution just around the corner. Many of the experts were in the ballpark. They saw that something was happening. Southern Illinois University's John McHale noted that by the year 2000, "home video-computers will become available," which was really predicting the present, since the Altair 8800 was hailed as the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975. IBM's director of automation research, Charles DeCarlo, saw computers becoming smaller, more powerful and faster, concluding this would be "a real advantage for prosthetic medicine." Ouch. There was one eerie prediction. Hebrew University's Yehezkel Dror saw "in the U.S., a wave of civil violence aimed at schools, public facilities, government officials," which sounds like this year's headlines, though he saw it leading to chaos and a totalitarian state. Which goes to show that whatever the future brings, we always turn out to be made of stronger stuff than we ever imagined."

BY NEIL STEINBERG SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

[Solecismic]

"Someone will create a computer game potentially allowing would-be football general managers to trade and negotiate with virtual players, perhaps, even, watching that action unfold on a teletype printer." - Field and Stream, 1975

That one was pretty much on the mark, though the teletype did all but disappear by the early '80s.

[The Afoci]

Crawfish will have Laser Blasters instead of Claws.

Me 1975 as a fetus.