Btw,

have you read Jessica Mitford's classic but dated by now expose of the funeral business: the American Way of Death?

My dad died this spring. A funeral director told my aged and "out of it" mother that she should go for the [much more expensive] option of burial, rather than cremation with the ashes placed in a small mausoleum niche, which she was leaning toward after she got hit with "sticker shock" at the cost estimate of casket, vault, grave, and headstone. The funeral director's rationale? When the terrorists and/or Saddam Hussein bomb America, the mausoleum and other buildings will be knocked down and reduced to rubble. I am NOT making this up, Larry. I understand that most clergymen who used to argue for the full burial routine as part of the Christian or specifically Catholic tradition no longer insist on this as they don't like to see old people on fixed incomes exploited by these vultures.