Afterlife achievers

For the last 160 years Jeremy Bentham's dead body has been schlepped to London's University College annual board meetings. To ensure he would continue to have a say in the institution's future, the British philosopher and father of Utilitarianism made clear his wishes that his body be dissected for medical research and his skeleton reassembled and put on display in a glass-front wooden cabinet and subsequently wheeled to the college's board meetings each year.

Bizarre? Yes. But Bentham is not the only one to have made unconventional plans for his afterlife. Others have concocted even wackier ways to ensure their lives and work live on, long after they meet their maker.

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Take Mark Gruenwald. A respected editor at Marvel Comics, Gruenwald asked that his ashes be mixed with the ink used to print the trade paperback version of Squadron Supreme. Since succumbing to a heart attack in 1996, his remains have been distributed via more than 4,000 copies of the comic book.

Townsend M. Zink, a deceased lawyer from Iowa, used his death to tell us how he really felt about the opposite sex. Zink left $100,000 to create a trust fund used to fund the "Zink Womanless Library," a library that bars women from entry and bans any book or furnishing created by a woman. (Not surprisingly, Zink left only $5 to his wife and daughter).

Image: Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

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