At first, I wasn’t sure that I liked seeing billboards for the local funeral parlor’s cremation services.  They are near some of my favorite restaurants, and feature creepily tasteful urns. They have advertising slogans on them like “contact us for more information.” Cremation never seemed like the sort of thing you might need to see a billboard for.  It seemed like the sort of thing you would research on an “as-needed” basis.  Like “oh, my loved one has died, and also they specified that they would like to be cremated.  Let me get the phone book out and find out how one goes about doing that.”  A billboard suggests that cremation is something you might have had at the back of your mind, or worse, something you might not have considered at all. “Oh, you know what?  I have that loved one just laying around, all dead and whatnot, and seeing that billboard about cremation was a huge help!  I had no idea what to do up until I saw that helpful, informative, colorful billboard.” It just so happens that this is precisely the situation I was in recently. ( Read more )