And here’s our Bizarre News piece for today:
Report: Book says Ted Williams’ head mistreated
The Associated Press
Posted: Friday, Oct. 02, 2009NEW YORK The New York Daily News is reporting that Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams’ severed head was mistreated at an Arizona cryonics facility, according to details from a new book.
In “Frozen,” Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams’ head, which had been severed and frozen for storage, was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams’ frozen head with a monkey wrench.
Williams, the last player to hit over .400 in a season, died in 2002 at age 83 and had his remains sent to Alcor for cryogenic storage in the hope that future generations would develop the technology to revive him.
OK. So let me get this.
First, Ted Williams dies. Second, he wills his body to Alcor to be frozen in hopes that someday he will be revived. Third, his head is severed from his body while at Alcor. Fourth, some lab tech uses Williams’ frozen, severed head for batting practice, just for shits and giggles.
What’s really disturbing about this is not that someone would take a monkey wrench to the frozen head of a former baseball Hall of Famer. While this is certainly in poor taste and truly disgusting—in a way, it is hardly bizarre; if you’re working in a cryogenics facility, you’re definitely not the average guy-next-door. The word “desensitized” comes to mind here.
What is most disturbing about this is that Ted Williams’ head is in a freezer, to hopefully one day be defrosted. And then what? If his head survives the defrost without freezer burn, will it then need plastic surgery to fix the monkey wrench incident and do a little lift (he was 83 when he died)? Will they transplant the head to another defrosted body (and what happens to that body’s head)? Will they harvest a newly-dead body for the transplant, attach the head and revive the whole thing? What if the new body belonged to an 18-year-old? Are they going to put an 83-year-old head on it? Oh yeah, and small detail aside, but when did we perfect total head transplants?
Call me jaded, pessimistic, totally 20th century, but how nice would it have been if Williams had chosen to send a few kids to college to study organ and limb transplantation for THE LIVING, instead of spending hundreds of thousands to freeze his head? Wouldn’t that have been cool, pun fully intended?
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