It’s the late 1960s, and a California TV repairman named Bob sees an opportunity to help people cheat death with the new science of cryonics. But freezing dead people isn’t easy. And apologizing for the mistakes you make along the way? Even harder.
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Bob Nelson, left, the president of the Cryonics Society of California, and Dr. Dante Brunola, a physician and biophysicist, demonstrate the cryogenic freezing process in 1967.
J. R. Eyerman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
You’re As Cold As Ice
In the late 1960s, a California TV repairman named Bob Nelson joined a group of enthusiasts who believed they could cheat death with a new technology called cryonics. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds. Harder still was admitting to the family members of people Bob had frozen that he'd screwed up. Sam Shaw reports. (42 minutes)
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Song:
You’re Willing To Sacrifice Our Love
There's a famous William Carlos Williams poem called "This is Just to Say." It's about, among other things, causing a loved one inconvenience and offering a non-apologizing apology. It's only three lines long, you've probably read it...the one about eating the plums in the icebox. Producer Sean Cole explains that this is possibly the most spoofed poem around. We asked some of our regular contributors to get into the act. Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Starlee Kine, Jonathan Goldstein, Shalom Auslander and Heather O'Neill all came up with their own variations of Williams's classic lines.
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Act One: Baby Scientists With Faulty Data
Act Two: Merci
Act Four: Life Sentence
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