• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, August 28, 2016

Were it not for the super-cheesy Craigslist ad that screamed "Aggressive ad agency seeks aggressive companies looking for much faster growth!" I would never have stumbled upon the fact that there is an ad agency out there marketing gravestones with an embedded video screen designed to forever play messages from the dead person buried beneath the stone. 

Well, yes. The agency that has "a lot of experience handling the advertising for a variety of clients in many different fields...and we can help you get a lot more business a lot faster!" is called R.M. Barrows and is out with its Video Enhanced Gravemarker.  

According to the agency's Web site, this Gravemarker will have great impact:

1. The invention will change a major aspect of civilization. Cemeteries will come alive with stories told through video-tombstones.
2. It will change the way we look at life and death and it will even change the way history is told.
3. When people start recording their own obituaries for playback in video-tombstones, it will force them to examine their lives in ways they may not have even considered before.
4. It will also create two new industries: Manufacturing video-tombstones and Producing videos for use in video-tombstones. 

Weird? Or will Facebook be buying/copying this in the near future? The social network already offers a "memorialize" feature for the profiles of dead people. Why not extend that to a person's actual gravesite? 

The agency's president, Robert Barrows, has also written a yet-to-be published book entitled "Cemetery of Lies," which is a collection of confessions apparently based on videos Barrows has already produced in anticipation of his video gravestone becoming an actual thing. Confessions are said to include "life and love, sex and romance, good and evil, success and money, truth and lies and Heaven and Hell, with insights and advice about almost every aspect of our lives." 

OK I'm going to stop now. This is just too weird.