Showing posts with label taxidermy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label taxidermy. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Friday, February 26, 2016
One dead possum: will trade for chocolate
Dead opossums, and other strange things you could be swapping on Bunz Trading Zone
BY STEVE KUPFERMAN
FEBRUARY 23, 2016 AT 2:26 PM
http://torontolife.com/city/life/bunz-trading-zone-opossum/
Bunz Trading Zone, an unlisted Facebook group where users can barter their stuff for anything except money, has become Toronto’s worst-kept secret. With over 30,000 users on Facebook and a claimed 12,000 on the new Bunz iOS app, the group generates dozens of new postings every day, most of which are attempts to swap mundane items like kitchen appliances and used clothing. Still, more eccentric trades are commonplace, with people exchanging opened packages of birth control pills, half-eaten foodstuffs and even dead animal carcasses. It’s currently impossible to join the group without administrator approval, so here, for those on the outside, are some highlights from the past few weeks, some of them potentially NSFW:
Dead Animals
The trade: This post didn’t lead directly to a trade. But later that same day…
Dead Opossum
The trade: The yoga instructor and amateur taxidermist who made the post seeking dead mammals snapped up this unlucky critter in exchange for a chocolate bar.
Nintendo 3DS
The trade: In exchange for the 3DS, this Bunz user agreed to deliver coffee to someone at their office for a month.
Birth Control Pills
The trade: The user accepted three subway tokens.
Pizza
The trade: Someone exchanged a tall can of beer for this.
A Boat
The trade: None yet, but there have been a number of offers, including a Jeep Grand Cherokee, a trip to Australia, and free movie-production services.
Mannequin Heads
The trade: The user couldn’t find anyone willing to take all of the heads, but someone gave her four tall cans of beer for one of them.
Intercity Key Delivery
The ask: When a Montreal-based designer forgot to give keys to her catsitter before she took off for Toronto, she decided to canvass Bunz for a lead on someone travelling in the opposite direction.
The trade: Bunz itself didn’t lead to a solution, in this case, but the user was able to find someone through another online group, who delivered the key in exchange for a used Montreal monthly transit pass.
The trade: Bunz itself didn’t lead to a solution, in this case, but the user was able to find someone through another online group, who delivered the key in exchange for a used Montreal monthly transit pass.
Massive Collection of VHS Pornography
The trade: None yet, but the user is in negotiations for a Bluetooth speaker.
Bag of Used Dildos
The trade: In exchange for her dildo collection, the user accepted some frozen pizzas.
Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Taxidermy gone horribly wrong
This is a cheap sort of post, but I'll do it anyway. There are thousands of these pictures on the net, on hundreds of sites, and most of them are now examples of people TRYING to botch taxidermy and make it look funny. My personal favorites are motheaten, threadbare, cheaply-made-with-corners-cut, and perhaps sincere attempts to represent the spirit of the flyblown dead carcass of something.
Not everyone knows how to match the teeth to the animal. Maybe a set of human dentures was cheaper to find than actual polar bear teeth. Break out the Polident.
An awful lot of these, the ones I favor I mean, depict cats of various sorts, domestic or wild. I don't know what this one is. It's someone's idea of what a cat's face looks like. The measuring tape is a mystery to me.
I don't know exactly what it is about this one, but it creeps the bejeezus out of me. Some taxidermists, at least in the bad old days, liked to anthro - anthropo- anthropomorph- oh hell, they liked to give human traits to animals, so maybe that's what's going on here. Reminds me of Snagglepuss, or Snaggletooth, or whatever his name was. A definite Hanna-Barbera look.
Wrong size eyes.
Meow, meow, meow.
I don't often favor the "deliberately cute" school of taxidermy, but there's something about this one. I think it's the zipper, combined with the Burt Lancaster facial expression.
This is a member of the Royal Family who stuck its paw in a lightsocket and became electrified. Obviously it used to be a corgi. Too bad we had to put it down, its eyes were too close together.
A good example of a "What-Is-It".
.
What scares me so much is that I think this guy really tried. Maybe it was even his dog. The fact you can see through its ear creeps me out even more. (Note the nose, or rather the absence of one.)
We can't possibly include them all, but this is a classic not to be missed. Either the donkey was in a bad way and had to run around on its hind legs, or the taxidermist lost the front legs, or lost interest, or else he just ran out of embalming fluid.
This isn't a replica of the subject of that great children's story, Misty of Chincoteague. This IS Misty of Chincoteague. I think I'm going to be sick.
For reasons unknown, this is my favorite. The tubular head, seamlike mouth and drainpipe neck are iconic, as is the stuffing pouring out of its nostrils.
Never was this a moose. Ever.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
"Here, kitty, kitty": when taxidermy goes terribly wrong
I don't know how I stumble onto these things. What was I looking for? Not THIS. Not this "what-is-it", unidentifiable: maybe an otter with the mumps.
There is a whole art form out there - in fact, you may have seen some of it in old museums (reminding me of Dylan Thomas and his "museum that should have been in a museum"). In those days, "lifelike" expressions mattered more than anatomical accuracy, often with truly hideous results.
There are sooooooooooooooooooo many of these photos out now, probably due to a Facebook page called Taxidermy Gone Wrong. Now it has mushroomed like amanita, blossomed like a patch of lethal bacteria on a petri dish. Bad taxidermy: it's everywhere!
I think Norman Bates was the gold standard of taxidermy, posing his owls and other predatory birds in such realistic ways that it made your scalp prickle. One pictures him sitting there with his little needle and thread, and that stuffing that my mother used to call "cott'n batt'n". And, of course, scissors and a knife
Killing and gutting the birds doesn't bear thinking about.
But bad taxidermy (not the meticulous kind Norman practiced in the Bates Motel) is now a kind of found art. There are lots of cutesy poses where squirrels fire six-guns and rats pose as the Pope, but I'm not too fond of them because they're obviously supposed to be kitschy and bad. Some of these examples look like earnest attempts, which only adds to their horror. Pets are the worst. Did someone actually pay for this, to have Fido or Fluffy rendered Satanic for all time?
Somebody must have had the thought, somewhere, sometime, that this was a good way to stuff a dead pet. It may have been someone's idea of human-looking eyes. Fine, if your favorite human is a raving lunatic! That second one looks like he had one too many caramel macchiattos at Starbuck's.
As with the Royal Family, some of these cats should have been strangled at birth. With their deranged expression and eyes set too close together, they're obviously as inbred as the Hapsburgs. In fact, the puma (above) looks like he's about to go marry his favorite niece.
Oh Lor', oh Lor'. . . a polar bear with a hangover, a prehistoric Muppet, a tubular moose. . . Did this taxidermist ever SEE a moose, did he have any idea what one looked like?
. The shrivelled, sunken, dessicated, dusty, shabby, moth-eaten, mummified look of
bad taxidermy is awful enough without these demonic leers.
Taxidermy slippers! These were either made from the world's biggest moles,
or meant to fit a Chinese woman in the 17th century.
Another "what-is-it?". Don't know what happened to its nose.
My personal favorite. It's easy to see how it died, but. . .
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)