Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Oscar Levant's Ghost: Mind Pizza

"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

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Thistledown Press

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Chapters/Indigo
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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

The murdering Mom: welcome to 2013

Apparent murder-suicide leaves 3 dead in Ottawa community

Bodies of mother and 2 children found in basement of Stittsville home

CBC News

Posted: Jan 14, 2013 6:30 PM ET

Ottawa police are investigating what appears to be a double murder and suicide after the bodies of a woman and her two children were found in the basement of their west Ottawa home.

Police were called to the home at 25 Granite Ridge Dr. in the community of Stittsville at about 5:30 p.m. ET, according to a media release.

The father of the children found the bodies, police sources told CBC News, and was later questioned by police.

Investigators suspect the mother — identified by acquaintances as Alison Easton, though police sources say she also sometimes went by the name Alison Corchis — was responsible for the deaths of the couple's son Alex, 10, and daughter Katie, 6.

A sharp weapon was used, but police sources would not say what type. It was a "disturbing scene," they added.

A neighbour, Jeff Wilk, said the woman living at 25 Granite Ridge was a Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinator. She introduced herself to Wilk's family when they moved into the neighbourhood more than a year ago, and gave them a welcome package.

Daughter's 6th birthday last weekend

She was often seen walking her children to and from nearby Stittsville Public School on Granite Ridge Drive, Wilk said by phone.

Another neighbour, Tonya Marczak, said her daughter was Katie's best friend. They celebrated Katie's sixth birthday together last weekend.

Neighbour Tonya Marczak says her daughter was best friends with one of the victims. (CBC)

"They seemed like such nice people. To hear that there's three dead, it's just devastating," Marczak said. "I don't understand how this happens, I don't, especially when I've got little kids of my own."

Marczak said she told her children there was a fire at the home, and nothing else. She said her daughter was best friends with Katy, who had just celebrated her birthday with a fancy dress-up tea party last weekend.

"I honestly don't know what to tell them at this point," she said. "Do I send them to school tomorrow, do I not? I have no idea."

The two children went to school across the street. Katie was in kindergarten; Alex was in Grade 5. Neighbours said their mother stayed at home.

The major crimes unit is handling the investigation.

No further details were released.

The more I contemplate this hideous story - and believe me, I'm trying NOT to contemplate it too deeply - the more overwhelming the sick, twisting feeling in my gut becomes.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? I know this is not what you're supposed to ask. And I won't list all the school shootings and movie theatre shootings and political rally shootings and unbalanced kids all over the place opening fire because they're - what? "Disaffected"?

I won't list them because you already know. But why would a mother, a "nice" person, a block parent, do this to her children, hack them apart with a knife? People are exceedingly hard to kill, that is, if you have no firearms, and in good old non-violent, pacifistic Canada, we don't have any of those awful things around.

There has to be a reason. There has to be a reason why I NEVER read stories like this when I was a kid. My mother didn't have to tell me, "Your best friend, ummm, went away, and I'm afraid you'll never see her again."

The same best friend who had that nice birthday party just the week before. Then was hacked to pieces with a knife - by her mother.

Folks, are you listening? Stop texting for a second (because you're really not saying anything anyway). There is something wrong here, something terribly, disastrously wrong with people on a very significant and ever-escalating scale. Fifty years ago I remember there were vehement complaints that we had become a depersonalized, technology-driven society, that our every move was being scrutinized by a sinister Big Brother, and that there was "too much violence on television". Now violence is standard, along with rigorous denials that it does any harm. And no one seems to care any more that their every waking moment is studied and recorded.

So what the hell is going on?

Do all these horrific events somehow make such inexplicable acts "thinkable"? Do people just flip out, lose it, and why? Do people have no self-control any more? Is rage simmering beneath the surface in even the most unlikely individuals?

I push it away, as most people push it away, because we have to go on living, don't we? But I never had to explain this horror to my own children, who grew up in the '80s, not centuries ago.

In order to stay OK,to avoid an abyss of depression and horror, we all have to dance along the edge and pretend everything's fine, that it's just a few nut cases that we don't need to be bothered with.

But this wasn't some socially-isolated kid who lived in the basement of his parents' home and played video games all day. This wasn't some gun-obsessed sociopath who had been bullied for so long that one day he just snapped.

This was a MOTHER killing her KIDS. There is no reason, none whatsoever, that justifies her killing even one of them, let alone a sweet little girl fresh from her sixth birthday party. In a final act of ruthless nihilism, the mother then killed herself (the story doesn't say how).

It's nonsensical, aberrant, crazy. Craziness existed before now, of course, but not in this blatant, malignant, macabre way, and not to this extent, where stories like this are now coming out, not every month, not every week, but every day.

Do you want to know how I found this story? It was a slow day. I needed something to write about. I decided to peruse the daily news. Opened the page,and bam. There it was, the top story!

Senseless killing.

Again. And this time, the worst it could possibly be.

There has to be a "why", in spite of the fact that there is now a curious void around this subject. Social commentators aren't saying anything, aren't coming out with the often-tiresome theories they used to rant about 20 years ago.

They have been shocked into silence. Nobody knows what to say.

I have a few ideas, but I am always laughed out of the park when I propose them. We DO live in a void where gadgets are taking the place of human contact. We DO live in a culture where violence is such a commonplace, such a way of life that it has become virtually invisible. Like so many things, it passes without comment. We just don't notice any more.

It seems there is a new taboo: the taboo of "WHY". Don't go there, or we won't be able to cope with it at all.

We teeter on the edge. If we project fifty years into the future, will Earth even be recognizable? Global warming is just tickling our noses now. We have fucked the Earth, fucked it royal, and in spite of some late-blooming and valorous efforts to repent, I fear it's too late.

My grandchildren won't live to be grandparents because the earth will melt down and fall apart. Why do we see all these climactic disasters now, these floods, droughts, storms, these freakish tsunami-like conditions in places formerly given over to tourism and high-end shopping?

Oh, uh, ah. . .

Because the climate goes in cycles! It has always been this way -which means, of course, that everything will soon return to "normal". It'll all go back to four neatly-delineated seasons, green pastures and still waters, and a safe and predictable life on Sunnybrook Farm.

Don't think about the seven billion people disastrously overstraining the resources of the earth - the unbreathable toxic air in China just a bellwether for what's in store for us all in twenty years (or maybe less).

Soon tiny gas masks will replace those vibrating chairs as favorite gifts at baby showers. First it will be a joke by the late-night comedians. Then it will actually happen.

So how do you connect the entire world caving in on itself to people flipping out and hacking their six-year-old daughters to death with a knife? Underneath all the denial lives terror, and underneath that, a sense that it's all meaningless, even hopeless. If somebody gets in your way, just erase them.

It is a dehumanized world, a world where, deep down where they don't dare to go, people are terrified that there is no future.

There is more going on than mass environmental meltdown, of course. Terrorists still have the wherewithal to blow the whole thing up at the touch of a button (though "nuclear awareness" ceased to be a hot topic some time in the late '80s). Relationships are becoming frayed at the seams. Families are rocking on their bases, if in fact they have bases at all.

I would not go back to the days of Betty Crocker, and in spite of the fact that it's popular to blame women for every social disaster we've ever experienced, I don't think mothers are responsible for fucking up the family system forever.

It's the darkest impulses in the human heart, which have now been let out of the cage and even glorified. A bad guy with a gun, a good guy with a gun: how do you tell the difference?

Even the Nazis didn't do this to their children. They knew who the enemy was, and kept a bead on them. Unthinkable as their crimes were, they weren't anything like this.

There has never been anything like this.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

(CODA. I wanted to check my facts in the murder-suicide story, so opened the news page again. No story. Did some clicking around. No story. It had fallen right off the page.

But there were some "top stories" listed:

HMV
BBB
iPhone5
Detroit Auto Show
Golden Globes 2012 Red Carpet
Supreme Court
Hollande
Laurence Anyways
Lady Gaga
Lindsay Lohan

NOTE: these are NOT listed under Entertainment, but general news stories, things of interest, things of importance. Dead children just don't rate.)

Monday, January 14, 2013

Is there nowhere safe? The Welsh Bird Show Disaster

Mystery of the dead budgies: Dozens of prized birds drop off their perches in front of judges during show!

Horror: 38 budgies died during the bird show in North Wales (file picture)

Bird lovers and exhibitors watched in horror as 38 prize budgies keeled over and died during a show.

Owners and organisers rushed about getting their cages outside into the fresh air as the budgerigars began plummeting from their perches.

Fanciers feared a gas leak caused the tragedy.

But after investigations by plumbers, gas workers, fire authorities and environmental health officers, there was no explanation for what happened at the village hall event in Gwynedd, North Wales.

Retired pet shop owner Dave Cottrell, 55, who lost 10 birds at the show, said: 'I was preparing the certificates as the birds were being put in order when a steward came over and said he had a dead one.

'Then another steward came over said he had two or three dead.

'And within seconds a third steward said he had more dead.'

Mr Cottrell, who has 200 birds and been a fancier for 35 years, thinks a boiler or oven flue could have been temporarily blocked, forcing out fumes.

Robert Hughes, 34, - who organised the annual Gwynedd Budgerigar Society Open Show - said: 'The birds were spread across the hall.

'Five minutes after the first one died eleven more had gone, one was mine.

'We made the decision to get everything out of the hall because we had 350 cages so we saved a lot of birds.'

Small birds are especially vulnerable because of their tiny, sensitive respiratory systems.

Canaries were traditionally used by miners to test whether there were dangerous levels of carbon monoxide below ground.

Mr Hughes said: 'Nobody in the community has seen nor heard anything like this before. The hall has been given the all clear.

'It's bizarre. It has been really difficult to get over it.

'It takes a year to organise the show and it's a lot of work - but that's nothing compared to how you feel for some of the people who lost birds.'

A vet carried out checks on two casualties revealing they died from congestion and haemorrhaging of the lungs.

I can't tell you how I felt this morning when I came across this article. I plotzed.

I think it's particularly fitting - if anything good can be said to come of this disaster - that these birds died from gas fumes, following the tradition of all those gazillions of coal miners who died in the craggy Welsh - well, coal mines.

Such a mystery - so unfathomable. And yet, and yet.

I knew of two people who lost their prize birds in the same inexplicable way. One day Polly was screeching away on the perch irritating the hell out of everyone, and the next. . . hanging perpendicular in birdie rigor mortis.

As a matter of fact, a total of four birds bit the biscuit (or the cracker, whatever you want): two parrotlets, a cockatiel and a giant Macaw. One day they just croaked, for no discernable reason.

Nothing more discouraging than the sight of a dead bird on the cage floor. In case you think I'm insensitive, be it known that *I* am the proud owner of a bird, and though he's six years old he hasn't croaked yet.

In fact, I found the news item (plus the following tragic message boards) when trying to dig up a way to make a bird bath that he won't fill with crap.

Jasper is a star on the internet. Someone who loathes me once dug up (I keep using that term!) a photo of me from, I guess, my Facebook page, a funny, funny photo of me and Jasper, in which I'm making a certain face that seems to say: "oops, he could poop on me at any time!" This person republished my photo in an attempt to make me look like an Alzheimer-ridden and probably incontinent old crackpot.

It was the bird that did it.

The following posts taken from budgie-obsessed sites make me wonder if bird owners lack certain spelling and grammatical skills, I mean more than the general population (lol, omg, wtf). These excerpts are verbatim, no tampering to make them look worse. The first comment was so sad, I didn't have the heart to post any of the responses (which included "lmao" and "what is your question?").

Suggestions as to what to do with the tiny remains are creative, involving foot imprints and freezer containers. Backyard burying, pros and cons (including whether it's legal or not: can you see a SWAT team breaking down your door?) are discussed at length, including the possibility that Birdie might be a tasty if well-aged snack for a foraging raccoon.

I buried my budgie yesterday?

Hi, yesterday i buried my budgie and i dont know why but I keep thinking he is going to wake up in the coffin and be trapped and scared does anyone know how i can sop this from getting to me. I could hardly sleep because i kept thinking that i need help in how to stop thinking this awfull thing.

Resolved Question

My budgie died, what should I do with the body?

My budgie, Adam, has officially reunited with my other bird, Eve in heaven at 12:15ish? AM Sunday December 13, 2009.

I was wondering what should I do with the body. I had great respect for the little guy, though he thinks I'm annoying at times (biting my neck). I thought about burying him in my backyard but I'm not sure if it's legal here in Nevada. Is it?