The Nightmare Before Christmas Tombstone Nightlight – $7.95

Christmas is coming! Sandy Claws is busy making his list and checking it twice. It looks like Jack Skellington is both naughty and nice.

Attention The Nightmare Before Christmas fans! Let Jack light up your life with The Nightmare Before Christmas Tombstone Nightlight from the NeatoShop.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fantastic The Nightmare Before Christmas items.

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Spooky Corks (Set of 3) - $24.95

Here are the perfect Halloween item for your favorite wine lover: the Spooky Corks wine bottle stoppers exclusively from the NeatoShop. The handmade wine corks feature a pumpkin, a tombstone, and a witch's hat. They're handmade and handpainted by local indie artists here in California (made in USA - yay!) and are unfrighteningly priced at just $9.95 a piece (save $5 when you buy all three)

Link | More fun Halloween stuff

Yoav Medan didn’t know what to say when his mother died — seemed that there just wasn’t enough room on the tombstone to write what the family felt best suited her. So the medical technology executive thought outside of the box (or rectangle, as it were) and after talking it over with relatives, decided to put a QR code on her grave. It links to an ever-changing web page about his mother and features pictures from her life and reminiscences from family and friends.

Over time, Medan hopes the QR code and memorial site will help create a lasting history of his mother that will live on for generations. “I was most concerned about 20 or 40 years from now, how will she be remembered. … [I wanted to put] what’s in our memory into a place that doesn’t forget,” he said.

The QR code itself is a laser engraving, filled with a black paste, and sits behind a piece of glass on the tombstone. “The guy who built the tombstone, he wants to make a business out of it,” Medan said.

He thinks the idea could catch on based on the feedback he’s been hearing. “People identify with this way of keeping the memory of someone and actually making it dynamic and evolving with time as you remember more,” he said. The QR code-enabled tombstone adds a new twist to the growing number of services we’ve seen emerge that are designed to help us decide what happens to our online identity after we die and create digital tributes to our lost loved ones.

Link — via Mashable

For most sports fans the worst that could happen when a referee makes a bad call during a game is that your team would lose. However in the days of the ancient Gladiators a bad call by the “summa rudis” (referee) could mean death.

According to Carter, most gladiatorial bouts weren’t necessarily meant to be played to the death, although fatal wounds were all too common. He argues that there were some fairly specific rules in place for the fights. One key aspect of the fights was submission, in which the vanquished gladiator could appeal to the patron of the fight for mercy, and if approved could then leave the arena. That’s along the same basic lines as the famous “thumbs up”/”thumbs down” decision at the end of a gladiatorial fight, which is the one “rule” you almost always see in movie depictions of the fights.

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Who says that cemeteries have to be all drab and morbid? Take a look at these colorful and "happy" cemetery in Sapânta, Romania:

Originally begun by a peasant grave carver named Stan Petras in the 1930s, and carried on today by the Pop family, the cemetery has become one of the most popular tourism attractions in rural Romania, with tour buses pulling up and unloading foreigners hourly. [...]

The grave markers in the cemetery in Sapânta are carved and painted with scenes of the deceased accompanied by a poem describing their fate in Maramures dialect. About half of them have two painted sides – one showing the deceased as they were in life, and the other showing either the way they died or illustrating some quirk that made them the talk of the village.

Dumneazu blog has the story: Link

Previously on Neatorama: Strange Funeral Rites From Around the World, 10 Most Fascinating Tombs in the World

Time is tight if you are just starting to make Halloween decorations, but this one can be ready in a day. Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has instructions for making your own concrete tombstone! It might not be fancy enough for an actual grave, but it is sturdy and customizable for Halloween. Link

Who says that cemeteries have to be all somber? Check out these colorful tombstones in the cemetery outside of Chichicastenango in Guatemala, as taken by photographer and avid traveler Susan Hardman.

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Most Fascinating Tombs in the World