So you think life is weird? It would appear that our desire to show respect and honor the dead is an instinct deeply encoded in our nature as humans. Even Neanderthal man, who walked the Earth more than 60,000 years ago, buried his loved ones with carefully arranged animal bones and flowers. Some of us, alas, choose to ignore that instinct. Take, for example, the case of Katherine Knight, a butcher who stabbed her boyfriend thirty-seven times, then invited his adult children to dinner and served them a nice stew of potatoes, vegetables, their father's boiled head, and his baked buttocks, filleted. Or David Galvan, whose drunk uncle permanently cured him of the hiccups by accidentally shooting him in the head. Or Jean-Louis Toubon, who choked to death on his girlfriend's edible panties. Maybe all of death is happenstance. Or maybe it's just life, filtering out the gene pool. Thinning the Herd: Tales of the Weirdly Departed is a delightfully irreverent collection of real-life anecdotes, facts, and observations regarding Death. You know . . . that thing that only happens to other people.