"

…At my uncle’s Oklahoma funeral, the bereaved were invited to bring music that, for them, evoked the departed. My mother had the funeral director play Let It Be. My uncle’s cousin - also his widow, yay! - played some morose Sarah McLachlan thing. And one of my uncle’s drinking buddies, evidently intending to play Free Bird, had brought the wrong Lynyrd Skynyrd tape, and just picked what he deemed to be the next most thematically appropriate tune: That Smell.

So at my uncle’s open casket funeral, we were hearing “ooh that smell, ooh that smell, ooh that smell… the smell of death surrounds yoooouuuu…”

And the weirdest part was: everyone acting like this was normal, sort of swaying and humming in recognition. (During which time I was also nursing my then-infant daughter. That, they thought, was beyond weird. But That Smell? And the fact that the funeral had a bouncer? A-OK!)…

"
— Me, spilling more fragments from the Oklahoma Funeral story I keep threatening to write. This time, in comments on a fascinating screenshot via SeoulBrother’s flickr (apologies for the excessive comment, SB), which had addressed the phenomenon of (often wildly inappropriate) “context aware” advertising, specificially in a NYT obituary.