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I was reading in the paper the other day about another option to, well, being dead. `` Think of it as an alternative to being eaten by worms or going up in smoke,'' says Dr. Gunther von Hagens.

Dr. Gunther wants your body. If he gets it, he'll use his secret method to remove all the soluble fat and water from your body and replace it with silicon substances that prolong the dead tissue indefinitely.

Then you can go on the road with Dr. Gunther, who exhibits bodies and parts of bodies -- organs and digestive systems, for example -- in scientific and educational expositions.

Think of them as modern-day mummies, not wrapped but translucent.

It's kind of morbid, but intriguing at the same time. You know, the great grandkids' kids can stop by and visit the next time you're in town. Speaking of being in town, you can see for yourself at month's end.

Dr. Gunther's sometimes controversial exhibit, Body Worlds 2, opens July 30 at the Museum of Science in Boston.

What a world '85

Feedback

A reader called to say he got a big kick out of my column last week about the world being just too clean. He said it brought back memories of when he was a kid.

`` I was living in New Jersey, across the street from an ice cream parlor, and my mother always liked a sugar cone with chocolate ice cream,'' said Bob Lipsett of North Attleboro.

One day he was coming back across the street with a cone in each hand and he dropped his mother's ice cream in the street.

He picked it up, brushed off the dirt and gave it to her.

Bobby, this tastes like it has dirt in it. Where did you get? she asked him, `` so I had to `fess up,'' he recalls.

`` We weren't afraid of getting sick back then,'' says Bob, 71. `` We're afraid of everything today.'' `` I refuse to live in a terrorist world.''

Right on, Bob.

Thanks for the papers

Thanks to Joan Provost for a copy of The Tribune-Democrat from Somerset, Pa., that she brought back from a vacation to Seven Springs.

`` My wife and sons went with me to Tennessee for my grandson's graduation in May,'' writes Frank Hicks, a fellow thespian. `` Took him back with us for a month vacation up North. I had some papers for you, but they got `lost' on the way home. When we took him back home last week I made sure to get some back safe.

`` Clinton, Tenn., is a nice little town between Knoxville and Oak Ridge.

`` We comics readers enjoyed the two full pages of `funnies,' in color yet, on a week day.

`` Also, check the cheap prices for houses down there. If it wasn't for the heat I'd consider moving there, but then I'd miss being in the Senior Center show with you every year (almost).

`` After driving down in that heat I think the greatest invention in the last 50 years is air conditioning for cars,'' he adds.

Quote of the week

`` Nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment.''

- French historian Alexis de Tocqueville,1840.

See you next week.