Funerals are expensive. To my family and friends; I’d rather my funeral have an open bar, a band, and a gigantic velvet painting of me than an open casket and a bunch of people crying. I’d also consider the possibility of you sending my ashes to the moon in a bullet-like canister (see above photo).

Granted it wouldn’t be all my ashes, just a small quantity of my ashes. Maybe like my hand or something. Then freeze my head and send the rest of my body to the organ donor place and conveniently disappear when they try to give you my corpse back after they harvest my organs. Then they can worry about disposing of everything.

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A bunch of Welsh Jedi—no comment—have bought a plot of land on the moon for the purpose of training new members of their Galactic Church. The land, purchased from “an official moon real estate seller” (me, actually) has already been incorporated into a micronation, sorta like Sealand, which ThePirateBay tried to buy a while ago. The state already has a constitution, government and royal family. I guess, then, we can assume it’ll be a constitutional monarchy, not unlike the UK.

Why do we care? First of all, I don’t, but I do recognize that the Star Wars and tech-savvy universes cross paths more often than not.

No matter, I just saw Fernando Torres score his 20th BPL goal of the season, which will be the highlight of the day, Jedi or no Jedi.

Welsh Jedis set up space colony [The Inquirer]

Ten teams have been announced as contenders to a chunk of Google’s coveted $30 million Lunar X PRIZE. The stipulations of the competition include, most importantly, that a team’s robotic craft must be privately funded and able to land on the moon and travel at least 500 meters while sending video, images, and data back to Earth. Bonus points for any team that makes it to the dark side of the moon to grab some footage of the alien bases there. Woot!

The first ten teams include members from Romania, the US, the UK, and Italy. The prize money will be divvied up into a $20 million grand prize, a $5 million second place prize, and another $5 million in bonus prizes. The $20 million grand prize is good until December 31st, 2012. After that, it drops to $15 million until December 31st, 2014. If nobody’s claimed the prize by then, the contest is over and everyone mopes for a while.

The X PRIZE Foundation Announces Official Contenders in Private Moon Race [X PRIZE Foundation]

Came across this unique watch on BoingBoing. Only 99 of these watches were made and are named after 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler. He’s the dude who came up with the formulas for the Laws of Planetary Motion. Big stuff.

Johannes’ timepiece doesn’t come cheap though. It’s more than $100,000 per watch, but the design is magnificent. Check out how the watch works:

A flexible spring bends from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn to reveal the part of the Earth lit by the Sun and to indicate the time and place of sunrise and sunset. The moon rotates around the Earth.

The dragon hand indicates the eclipses of the sun and the moon. The perpetual calendar completes one turn each year.

Kepler $100k wristwatch [BoingBoing]

Healing Moon [Product Page, via Shiny Shiny]