wow. i am completely... speechless. what a strange thing to do... my first thought was what about the bone fragments but I guess it's all just dust... and that's just weird... and it's, well, at least it's a family member!!! my favorite part is where he says that every thing new sounding is a load of crap. he also looks like he's wearing purple eyeshadow, but i think it's the blue light. i see captain jack sparrow for sure.

A few years ago, I read an interesting Guardian interview that claimed that Richards was actually quite lucid and normal in a one-on-one setting, and used the stumbling waster routine as a kind of media shield. I started giving him the benefit of the doubt, but between falling out of the tree, his Ronettes induction speech and now this, I've kinda had it with this shit, be it schtick shit or not.

"You put the lime in the coconut..." he's definitely out there. Too bad he didn't fall out of the tree years previous. It might have explained a lot more.

I dunno, am I the only person whose response to this is "Well, yes, of course"? This is Keith Richards. It would be more surprising if he DIDN'T snort his father's ashes!

Incidentally, ashes basically look just like kitty litter. I'm just sayin'.

Come on ... somebody's pulling somebody's leg.

im happy he called the libertines shit.

Well, I don't know. Everything you do with people's dead bodies is weird, one way or another. Not saying that I would have done it, just that I bet it's not the strangest ritual out there.

And by which I don't mean to say that I believe he really necessarily did such a thing. But I wouldn't be that surprised if he had.

Good points, Mark. I read in the Economist last year the thing I would like to do with my body. There's some place over there where you can simply be placed in a decomposable box and then have a tree planted atop your decomposing body. To me, that makes sense.

That sounds nice, but it's tough to get it, I bet. I bet there's whole industries lined up that'll go to the mat to see that your decomposing body ends in much more lasting, trademarked materials--perhaps with Top 40 hits piped in for only a small additional fee.

The New Yorker had an interesting piece a year or so about the "green" funeral industry. i'm with you, Mr. Mod. Dig a hole and say goodbye, yo.

From today's NY Times:

Richards Denies Snorting His Dad's Ashes

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 4, 2007

Filed at 2:14 p.m. ET

LONDON (AP) -- Off the cuff or up the nose? That was the question Wednesday as Keith Richards said he was joking when he described snorting his father's ashes along with a hit of cocaine.

''It was an off-the-cuff remark, a joke, and it is not true. File under April Fool's joke,'' said Bernard Doherty, a Rolling Stones spokesman, about Richards' quote in NME magazine.

But the magazine said on its Web site that the remark was ''no quip, but came about after much thinking'' by the 63-year-old guitarist.

''He didn't offer the information, I had to ask him a couple of questions to get the information out of him,'' said interviewer Mark Beaumont. ''He didn't come straight out with that.''

In the interview, Richards was quoted as saying: ''The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father.''

''He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared ... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive.''

Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.

In a statement posted on the Rolling Stones Web site, Richards said:

''The complete story is lost in the usual slanting! The truth of the matter is that I planted a sturdy English Oak. I took the lid off the box of ashes and he is now growing oak trees and would love me for it!!! I was trying to say how tight Bert and I were. That tight!!! I wouldn't take cocaine at this point in my life unless I wished to commit suicide.''

Indeed, re: Green Funerals, I heard some years back that morticians were finding that people were decomposing slower than they used to because of the amount of preservatives in the diet. Apocrypha or not, I won't venture, but stranger things are true. That article in the New Yorker was very interesting. Also talked about burial being done vertically, to decrease the footprint of the cemetary. That one should please fundamentalists, because you're already on your feet for the call! Other than a clause that Michael Jackson can't buy my skeleton, I don't have a lot of preference. I have no religious reason to feel this way, but being eaten by worms in the ground seems natural, but being eaten by, say, vultures above ground seems undignified and icky. Gee, maybe I do have preferences at that. But I am superstitious enough to believe that if I go to spell them out and write them down, I'd likely get hit by a truck crossing the street to buy a pen. What haf Keef wrought?