THURSDAY, MARCH 28. 2002
JAYPLAY
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 5B
Dead can send one last e-mail
Knight Ridder-Tribune
You log on, planning to start the morning with a quick check of your e-mail.
A message pops up from Uncle Ernie. The same Uncle Ernie who died a month ago.
Your computer may be even slower than you thought. Or perhaps it's proof of an afterlife — with computer access and an e-mail account, no less.
Actually, Uncle Ernie had the foresight to subscribe to Timelessmail.com, an Ohio company that will send out e-mails for customers after they've been permanently deleted from among the living. Electronic last words, as it were.
For an annual fee ranging from $12 to $24, depending on the level of service, people can create up to 60 individual e-mails that each can go to as many as 25 recipients upon the client's death. The e-mails are filed away, waiting for the client to be called to the
great beyond. The account stays alive as long as the client is—and as long as you keep up your subscription. Once the client passes on, the messages are sent and the account is closed. The messages can be updated by the client at any time.
Timelessmail.com's message seems to have struck a chord — its Web site, www.timelessmail.com, had 102,714 hits in January alone. But it hasn't translated into a huge number of subscribers — there have been about only three dozen sign ups. Company officials suspect that's because customers are reluctant to provide their Social Security numbers, on which the service hinges.
The service was started in November by Robert Walker, who first envisioned the idea of sending such messages about three years ago, after the death of his father.
But nothing came of the idea until last spring, when Walker's boss at Walsh University in North
Canton, Ohio, died unexpectedly.
"It was just the concept of having someone disappear so suddenly. I decided I had to do something with this idea," he said.
He left his job as director of information systems at Walsh in mid-September and spent the next two months getting Timelessmail.com set up. He launched the service in November.
The trigger mechanism that gets the e-mails sent is a person's Social Security number. Timelessmail.com has hired a company that each month purchases from the Social Security Administration a list of people who have died. The list is compared to Timelessmail's clients, and if there's a match, Walker will recheck before hitting the send button.
"It's secured, it's guaranteed to be secured and confidential," he said.
'Kamasutra'retranslated
The Associated Press
LONDON — More than 1,700 years after it was completed by an enigmatic Indian scribe, the Kamasutra is among the most famous Hindu books ever written — and, many believe, the most misunderstood.
Most who have encountered the book recall it as a do-it-yourself sex manual, an eye-opening encyclopedia of acrobatic positions.
— shake its saucy reputation and regain its status as a literary classic
Academics hope a frank new translation will help the Kamasutra — which means "treatise on desire"
"It's by far the most complete and interesting work about sexual psychology that has been written — a cross between 'The Joy of Sex' and
'Lady Chatterly's Lover,'" said Wendy Doniger, who translated the book from the original Sanskrit with psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar.
"The great misconception is that it is about the positions, which is the silliest part of the book, and a very short part of the book," she added.
Kamasutra was released today in Britain, and Oxford University Press will hit bookstores in the United States in June.
Written probably in 3rd-century Northern India by Vatsyayana Mallanaga, *Kamasutra catalogs sexual positions*, enumerates the varieties of kissing and expounds on the amorous role of scratching and biting.
But it also tells readers how to flirt, conduct a lovers' quarrel, seduce someone else's spouse and
blend potions to stimulate a sagging libido.
Doniger says the book's reputation has obscured its value as a work of literature. She says it can be read as a play in seven acts, following its male and female protagonists from seduction through separation, and as an idealized portrait of a sophisticated, monied society.
"Nooneinthis bookevergoestothe shop, one ever goes to see his mother. Allydo all day is plan for the night and get ready for it," she said, "It's like a Playboy Mansion life."
"It's an enormously complicated book on the psychology of sex, the psychology of erotic arousal."
And those illustrations — they were added much later.
"They're an afterthought," Doniger said. "A very famous afterthought."
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