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  • "An eye cap is a simple ten-cent piece of plastic. It is slightly larger than a contact lens, less flexible and considerably less comfortable. The plastic is repeatedly lanced through, so that small sharp spurs stick up from its surface. The spurs work on the same principle as those steel spikes that threaten Severe Tire Damage on behalf of rental car companies: The eyelid will come down over an eye cap, but, once closed, will not easily open back up. Eye caps were invented by a mortician to help dead people keep their eyes shut."

    --Mary Roach, Stiff

    BTW: a very informative, and funny, if somewhat macabre work!

    November 10, 2007

  • Ewww. Ewww! EWWWWW!!!

    (also, owww!)

    November 10, 2007

  • But, much better than having your dead uncle's eyes pop open as you are viewing him in his casket...

    November 10, 2007

  • My mom was a nurse and she trained in the 1940s. She said the nuns who taught her and her classmates also taught them how to prepare the dead, and one of the things they did was to put a few fibers from a cotton ball under the eyelids to keep them closed.

    Maybe that doesn't work as well as eye caps, I don't know. But it does seem a bit weird that someone went to all the trouble to invent and mass-produce eye caps.

    November 10, 2007

  • Skipvia, did you actually witness such an eye popping event?

    November 10, 2007

  • No, kad, but the possibility really creeps me out.

    November 10, 2007

  • *eyes watering*

    November 11, 2007

  • Remember when they used pennies to keep 'em down? Learned of that upon reading one of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries.

    November 11, 2007

  • Or from this George Harrison tune:

    "Now my advice for those who die,

    Declare the pennies on your eyes."

    November 11, 2007

  • I don't want nobody stealing the pennies from my eyes when I go. Everyone knows that they are left there as the fare for Charon's ferry across the Styx. Schwarzfahren in der Nachwelt? Hardly an auspicious beginning.

    November 11, 2007