Velcro

Velcro, the name brand hook-and-loop fastener, was invented way back in 1941 when Swiss engineer George de Mestral (1907-1990) became curious about the burrs that stuck to his dog's fur and looked at them under a microscope. It took him 10 years to perfect the "zipperless zipper," a reversible binding that is usually made of nylon or polyester. The word "velcro" has become generic, even though it is still a registered trademark. In addition to being used on clothing, it has been used in artificial heart surgery, nuclear power plants, and the space shuttle. A square 2" x 2" can hold 175 lbs. More recently, a sliding engaging fastener was designed that is 8 times stronger and makes no noise when it is disengaged. But even that has recently been improved. A square meter of a new steel version called Metaklett can hold 35 tons! The original Velcro, though, is cited as the only commercial success until recently in the field of biomimetics - the application of methods and systems found in nature to engineering and technology. For other examples of technology inspired by animals, click here.

Collyer brothers

I've begun watching a new series on A&E called "Hoarders," which so far hasn't featured any animal hoarders like those I have blogged about. Each episode focuses on a couple of cases of the compulsive hoarding of belongings - packrats gone wild! - and attempts to clean up their houses and treat their disorders. My friend Cris reminded me of the Collyer brothers, a case so classic that "Collyer mansion" has become slang among firefighters for a house excessively packed with junk and trash.

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Homer Lusk Collyer (1881-1947) and Langley Collyer (1885-1947) were eccentric and reclusive brothers living in a brownstone in Harlem, New York. The gas, telephone, electricity, and water were turned off in 1939 for nonpayment. Stacks of newspapers piled up, awaiting the return of Homer's sight, which he had lost in the early 1930's and which Langley was trying to restore with a diet of 100 oranges per week. The house already contained all the remnants of their father's gynecological practice and to this they added junk they collected from the street, cardboard and other refuse, and furniture. When an anonymous tipster insisted in 1947 that there was a corpse at the residence, police excavated their way inside and found the remains of Homer, but he had died less than 10 hours earlier. It took them more than 2 weeks to find the source of the odor: the body of Langley, decaying and being eaten by rats just 10 feet from where his brother had been found. Homer had died of malnutrition, dehydration, and cardiac arrest, but Langley had been killed by one of his own booby-traps several days earlier.

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In total, 103 tons of stuff was removed from the house, of which $2,000 worth was salvageable. Items included:

• 25,000 books and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some decades old
• 14 pianos, both grand and upright, and other musical instruments
• An x-ray machine, camera equipment, and a gramophone
• Parts of a horse-drawn carriage, a sewing machine, a wine press, and a Model-T
• Bicycles, baby carriages, chandeliers, bowling balls, umbrellas, and clocks
• Dress-making dummies and hundreds of yards of fabric
• Tapestries, portraits, and plaster busts
• Their mother's hope chests
• Human organs preserved in jars
• Guns and ammunition
• 8 live cats

The Collyer brothers' estate (cash, jewelry, securities, etc.) was worth a total of $91,000. The brothers have been portrayed in fiction and nonfiction, in plays and films. One of my favorite movies, Unstrung Heroes, is a direct homage to the Collyers.

Rock of Ages granite quarry

Quite a few years ago, I roped my Mom and my friend Cris into driving from Mom's bed & breakfast in Connecticut to Barre, Vermont, on a daytrip. It took longer than expected to get there and it started snowing, so the return trip was a bit treacherous, but the objective was met - I wanted to see the largest granite quarry in the world! At 50 acres and 600' deep, with a combined quarrying, manufacturing, and retail operation, that claim to fame belongs to the Rock of Ages quarry, and that quarry continues to produce great numbers of gravestones, among other things. Here is a gallery of Rock of Ages markers and memorials, with color swatches of the granite types available from other quarries. The history of the quarry dates back to 1885, but the Rock of Ages name was taken in 1914, when the company undertook a major advertising campaign to promote its granite for memorials that were guaranteed against checking, cracking, and discoloration. Within a decade, name-brand recognition had people flocking to see the Rock of Ages quarry. Visitors then were escorted to a platform overlooking the "hole"; visitors now - more than 100,000 per year - may take a guided quarry tour and a self-guided tour through the visitor's center and the memorial design studio (video here). Granite is the most durable of all natural rocks and is used around the world in cemeteries, some of which only allow granite markers. This post was prompted by a visit from a friend named Sally, who works in the local cemetery. I am deaccessioning some of my artifacts as my Mom and I pull together my "museum" in its new location, and I gave Sally the collage I made from photos I took during that daytrip to the quarry, along with a core sample of the distinctive gray Barre granite. I kept the square sample engraved with a "Q."

Wimpole's folly

Let's talk about something tame today - follies. Follies are fanciful architectural structures that aren't intended for housing or shelter, but merely as decorative structures. They were typical of 18th c. English gardens and French landscape gardening, and consisted of temples, pagodas, pyramids, or - my particular favorite - ruins. There are links to photos and descriptions of several follies here. The one pictured is Wimpole's folly, built by Lord Chancellor, 1st Earl of Hardwicke, Philip Yorke on his 2,500-acre estate in Cambridgeshire, England. The gothic ruin was designed in 1751 by noted folly architect Sanderson Miller (1716-1780) and features 200' of ruins and a 4-storey tower. The folly was meant to be viewed from the drawing room of Wimpole Hall, which is now owned by the National Trust and open to the public. Today, follies have fierce advocates: a website called Follies and Monuments; a blog called The Folly Fancier; a book by Gwyn Headley, who says, "A folly is a state of mind, not an architectural style"; and the Folly Fellowship, a pressure group to protect, preserve, and promote follies, grottoes, and garden buildings. Long live follies!

The biting off of fingers

I am greatly appalled by recent news reports of people venting their frustration by biting off a person's finger. This happened most recently on Wednesday at a health care protest in Thousand Oaks, California: a demonstrator bit off the fingertip of a 65-year-old man. Also in September, a minor league football player bit off the finger of a jailer in Pasco, Washington. And it happened last month in Cape Coral, Florida: a patient bit the tip of his doctor's finger off for refusing to write a prescription. In 2005, a fan of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, irate that the rap group had canceled a performance, nearly bit off the finger of one of its members. Over the summer, two women got in a fist fight in Long Beach, California, and the 28-year-old bit off the finger of her teenaged opponent.
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The legal term for this kind of assault is mayhem, the crime of wilfully inflicting a bodily injury on another so as to cripple or mutilate the victim. The criminal is usually charged with aggravated assault or aggravated battery, which can carry a 30-year prison sentence. A Staten Island man who bit off half the index finger of police officer in an Atlantic City, New Jersey, casino in 2007 just received a 15-year sentence for assault (7 years of it for the biting incident). In most of these cases, the victim's finger cannot be reattached because of the danger of infection. Human bites are often more dangerous than animal bites. But I would submit that the people who do this are animals.

Grave and golem

Today we have a guest post by Loren Rhoads. For 10 years, Loren edited the cult nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues, a collection drawn from the magazine, is due from Scribner on Sept. 29th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon.

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Jews first came to Prague as free traders in the 10th c. They lived peacefully along the trade routes below Vysehrad Castle until Christian crusaders destroyed their settlement at the end of the 11th c. Afraid to lose the money the Jewish settlers generated, the nobility invited them to shift their homes to the city's Old Town, which then became the first ghetto - 3 centuries before the word was coined in Venice. Medieval Christians believed Jews had killed Christ, and continued to use Christian blood in their rituals. The Passover lamb was considered a euphemism for Christ and it was widely imagined that unless the Jews were locked behind ghetto walls at night, Christian infants would end up on Passover plates. As the Middle Ages melted into the Renaissance, interest in the Kabbalah swelled among both the Jews and Christians of Prague. It was in this atmosphere that Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1512-1609) became chief rabbi of the ghetto in 1597. Legends sprang up around Rabbi Loew (pronounced "lurve"), who was said to be one of only four men since Adam to see the Garden of Eden. While there, he was granted the shem - the secret name of God, which can create life. When the ghetto was once again menaced due to Christian bigotry, the Rabbi and two apprentices formed a champion out of the muddy banks of the Vltava River. This artificial man served faithfully, protecting the Jews from slander and worse...until something went wrong one night and Rabbi Loew had to rip the shem - variously a clay tablet or a scrap of paper - from behind the golem's teeth.

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Founded in 1478, the Beth-Haim (Hebrew for "House of Life") served as the only Jewish graveyard in Prague for 3 centuries. Penned in on all sides, the Old Jewish Cemetery could only increase in height and contains 12 layers of graves. Some 12,000 surviving gravestones (see photos above) totter over an estimated 20,000 to 100,00 burials. The most visited of these - a tomb of pink stone guarded by lions - is that of Rabbi Loew. When I visited, pebbles, coins, and scraps of paper covered every flat surface. I've read several explanations of the custom of placing pebbles on graves. The simplest appeared in Mystical Stonescapes by Freema Gottlieb: "Vegetation fades, but stones are as close as matter gets to eternity." In Old Bohemian and Moravian Jewish Cemeteries, the ritual is traced back to the Hebrews wandering in the desert after Moses led them out of Egypt. Those who fell during the 40-year trek were interred along the wayside, and those who passed the grave added a rock as a way of keeping the burial mound inviolable. While the Nazis demolished many Jewish graveyards, this one - and Rabbi Loew's tomb - was spared and was intended to become a museum to the extinct race. Now overseen by the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Czech Republic, the graveyard welcomes 10,000 visitors each year. Most bring pebbles in their pockets for Rabbi Loew.

Medical and art photography

"The Kiss" (1982) by American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin and "Dissected Head in Soup Plate" (1905) by American physician Howard Brundage, M.D., discussed in Rachel A. Derner, "Joel-Peter Witkin and Dr. Stanley B. Burns: A Language of Body Parts in History of Photography 23:3 (1999): 245-253.

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I read a very good paper (referenced above) the other day which compared the medical photographs in the Burns Archive with the fine art photography of Joel-Peter Witkin, in light of the fact that Burns and Witkin collaborated on the book Masterpieces of Medical Photography. Bear with me as I use my blog as a vehicle for synthesizing the main points of the article...

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The author of this paper examines how art and medicine both allow bodies to represent something other than - and independent of - the persons who inhabit them. For instance, through the medium of photography, the body becomes the equivalent of its pathological condition. Photography arrests the surface of the body in space and time, and medicine uses the camera to freeze the medical interpretation of the body. Derner separates medical photography into three categories: practical (routine medical images like x-rays, used to diagnose disease), justified (before and after images, for instance, used to justify medical treatment), and spectacular (images that have no discernable clinical value, but represent medicine's authority over dead bodies). She points out that the medicalized human body is socially constructed, yet seemlessly naturalized: we see medical meaning as inherent to a body, rather than applied to it. But in fact the narratives of the body are embedded even in medical images, as when "Dissected Head in Soup Plate" conjures up visions of the story of Salome or the paintings of Gericault. It is assumed that the subject matter was collected by disinterested doctors and that the medical context therefore erases responsibility for the head's identity. Such photos speak a language of body parts, for instance symbolic of preservation.

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The visual morpheme of the severed head makes several appearances in the work of artist Joel-Peter Witkin. In his photographs, he creates still lifes using the medicalized body (or parts of it) to make it aesthetically elegant - rendering severed limbs the equivalent of fruit. He presents the viewer an allegory of natural versus pathological using imagery that - by the seemingly objective authority of medicine - gives us permission to look. Witkin's stance is that he didn't do anything - that the head already existed and it was the pathologist who cut it in half, he just happened to be there with a camera. But this is contradicted by the positioning of the head, and also by his overworking of the surface, such as drawing the missing body outside the frame of the photo, betraying his anxiety about the beheading. Witkin tells the story that the head of an auto accident victim rolled to his feet as a child, but his mother refutes this. Whether or not the memory is real, it informs the exposure of the photograph, denying it (as art) the objectivity that the medical photo claims by virtue of the assumption that its interpretation did not occur until after the photograph was taken. Nevertheless, art validates Witkin's composition, medicine validates his materials.

Wood chipper fatalities

Perusing the weird news this morning, I was saddened to hear about yet another accidental death by wood chipper - this time James Vician, 37, while working yesterday in Atwood, Indiana. While this end is the stuff of laughs in films like "Fargo," and all-too-real murderers have been known to dispose of their victims by sending them through the chipper, the simple accident while on the job is horrific enough - and far too common. Here is just a sampling:

• 4/29/2004 Gordon McKay, 51, in Tampa, Florida
• 5/4/2005 Julio Jimenez, 42, in New Windsor, New York*
• 12/28/2005 Brian Ganiard Morse, 54, in Loveland, Colorado
• 8/22/06 Jeremiah Sanders, 30, Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin
• 11/7/2007 Gabriel Gonzalez-Ferrer, 24, in Tustin, California
• 2/29/2009 Henry A. Aguilar, 31, in Edison, New Jersey

There have been dozens of deaths and nearly 200 accidents in the last 20 years due to chippers, which can swallow a 20" branch in 1 second. The most common mistakes made by tree care workers are to wear gloves or loose clothing that can get snagged on a branch, to stand in front rather than on the side of the intake, and to use a foot to kick a stubborn piece of wood or untangle a jam in the feed tray. OSHA has also identified the issues and recommended training, and wood chipper manufacturers have put a number of different safety devices in place, including feed control bars, feed tray extensions, flaps or curtains, and emergency pull ropes. But in the end, extreme caution is needed when working with these monstrous machines to avoid what coroners have called "complete morselization."

*The coroner who investigated this case is named Kevin Quigley - no relation.

Pig butchering

I found this item in the weird news intriguing, perhaps because it is anatomical. During the restoration last summer of the painting "Barn Interior" by Dutch artist Egbert van der Poel (1621-1664), conservator Barry Bauman discovered that the original image of a butchered and stretched pig had been painted over (see detail, top), likely by another artist at the request of one of the painting's wealthier owners. On his website, Bauman notes that flayed pigs or oxen would have been a common sight in the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th c., and gathers images of similar genre paintings. But on another level, the image of a slaughtered ox suspended on a wooden support - like those painted by van der Poel's contemporary, Rembrandt (above, 2nd image) - would have been understood as symbols of the crucifixion of Christ and of the transient nature of life itself. Today, the slaughtering and butchering of meat is carried out in an industrial setting, but you can still learn how to cut up the carcass on your own (above, 3rd image, click for details). Incidentally, Roald Dahl wrote a great short story (spoiler here) about a slaughterhouse, and autistic Temple Grandin, who has great insight into animals' minds, has revolutionized the design of slaughterhouses with her book Humane Livestock Handling.

The creeps

The creeps. Also, The willies. idiom. A sensation of horror, fear, or repugnance that suggests the feeling of insects crawling on one's skin.

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Of these two old photographs, it is the one at the top that gives you the creeps, right? But by the end of this post, they both will...

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1. The Parsons Family, murdered in Texas Co., Missouri, on October 12, 1906. Carney Parsons, his wife Minnie (nee Strange), and their 3 sons were killed by Jodie Hamilton, who worked and lived with them as sharecroppers. Minnie got pregnant and Carney sold their share to Hamilton to move closer to his wife's home. Parsons gave Hamilton a shotgun and $25 in exchange for a saddle on the day of the murder. Feeling he had been cheated, 20-year-old Hamilton ambushed the family at 2pm about 2 miles east of Success, Missouri. He shot Mr. Parsons in the leg with the shotgun, then bludgeoned him to death with its barrel. He hit the 2 older boys with the gun barrel, then cut their throats with their father's knife. Then he threw a blanket over Mrs. Parsons and killed her with an axe. Lastly, he beat the baby to death, after which he rifled Mr. Parson's pockets for the $25, a gold watch, and some spectacles. Hamilton hid the Parsons' wagon in the brush, then came back at midnight, hitched up, and drove it to the Piney River, into which he threw the bodies of all 5 of his victims. The bodies of 2 of the children were found by fishermen within an hour. Two days later, Hamilton was arrested, was nearly lynched, attempted suicide, and confessed to the murders. Jurors in his trial reached a verdict within an hour, and he was sentenced to be hanged. Hamilton took a great interest in his imminent execution and inspected the gallows. He was hanged with what was considered great composure at 11am on December 21, 1906, in Houston, Missouri. The attending crowd was afterward allowed to view his body, the rope was cut up and sold as souvenirs, and postcards were made of the hanging and the murdered Parsons family.

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2. The ripped tent of the ill-fated 9-person ski and hiking party after what became known as the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959. On January 27th of that year, a group of ten experienced Russian hikers (8 men and 2 women) set out across the Ural Mountains by foot to reach a particular slope. One man turned back early on because of health issues, but the rest followed leader Igor Dyatlov. They stored food and provisions for the return journey in a valley, but never had the opportunity to use them. The group began their climb, but lost their way in the weather and deviated west, setting up camp on a mountain prophetically called Kholat Syakhl [Mountain of the Dead]. It was there that a search party found their tent, diaries, and cameras. The tent had been ripped open from the inside and the hikers had exited of their own accord, with no signs of a struggle and no other human footprints in the snow. Two of the hikers' bodies were found 1.5km away near the remains of a fire, dressed only in their underwear (which had high doses of radioactive contamination); three more were found apparently returning to the camp and the remaining four were located further away 4 months later. Six had died of hypothermia; one had major skull damage and two had major chest fractures (requiring extreme force, but showing no external signs). One of the women was missing her tongue. The hair of each of the bodies had turned gray and their skin had taken on an orange glow. The Soviets sealed the case files until 1990 and the mystery has still not been solved.

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The catalysts for this post were two items that recently appeared in the weird news - both using the word "creepy." The first link was to a set of post-mortem photographs. I have collected such photos for years and have more than one of a deceased child in the parent's lap, but although I knew that eyes were sometimes painted on the closed lids to simulate life, I somehow missed the fact that stands were occasionally used to prop dead children and adults upright for photographs. The second link was to an account of some mysterious deaths that was written last year. And again, although I have subscribed to Fortean Times for 20 years, I had never heard of this case. When I searched for the right photo for the blog, I found this one that appears rather mundane unless you know the story. Hence, the comparison...and the conclusion that I would rather have the creeps than the vapors!

Pavlov's dog

I seem to use the phrase "Pavlov's dog" quite a bit and decided to look up the science behind it - and to see if the dog in question was immortalized in a photograph. As you can see above, the answer to that is yes. Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) used several dogs in his experiments, but one of his subjects appears in harness behind him and another, with surgically implanted saliva catch tube, was prepared and mounted as an exhibit at the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia. The expression "Pavlov's dog" describes a person who reacts reflexively rather than reflectively to a situation. It refers to the results of the conditioning that Pavlov used to cause dogs to salivate upon simply hearing a bell (or a whistle, metronome, or tuning fork), after repeatedly pairing the noise with a stimulus (food). The experiment paved the way for an objective science of behavior, but it was his other research on the digestive system that garnered Pavlov the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Pavlov has achieved immortality in behavioral science and popular parlance, but he was well aware of his own mortality. Conscious to the end, he asked one of his students to record his subjective experiences as he lay on his deathbed.

The vapors

The fainting couch (a.k.a. recamier) is so named because it was an appropriate support for women who swooned. Swooning was one of the many symptoms of female hysteria, which you may read more about in my post on wandering wombs. The condition of female hysteria was identified by the ancient Greeks, but the Victorians preferred the expression "the vapors," which could consist of any combination of the following complaints: anxiety, behavioral problems, depression, digestive issues, fainting, fluid retention, insomnia, irritability, loss of appetite (for food or for sex), muscle spasm, shortness of breath, and tremors - many of which are now relieved by Pamprin. While some of these signs may indicate clinical depression or bipolar disorder to today's sufferers, "Currently, the vapors are not recognized as a medical diagnosis," advises Wisegeek.com. The modern reader may also be led to believe that the expression refers merely to flatulence, but this is refuted on Fanny & Vera's Site for New Civilians. Nevertheless, there have been several cases of "the vapors" in the weird news recently:

• Last Saturday, the wind shifted as pepper spray was released in a routing training exercise by the Mount Carmel Borough Police Deparment, provoking a severe asthma attack in a woman sitting in her backyard in Diamondtown, Pennsylvania, who required emergency services.
• On Monday, a woman in Niceville, Florida, was arrested for battery after unleashing a 9-oz. can of Glade Potpourri Air Freshener on a neighbor who repeatedly smokes cigarettes outside her door. "I will do it again, and take it all the way to the Supreme Court," said the woman, "because I have the right to breathe fresh air."
• And on Tuesday, a chlorine leak at a sewer treatment plant in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, prompted the evacuation of the sunbathers at clothing-optional Gunnison Beach, and their relocation to North Beach, which does have a dress code.

Hand me my smelling salts...

World's heaviest insects

Quigley at your service this morning to settle some contentious claims about weighty insects in the weird news. Earlier this year, the giant weta was put forth as one of the heaviest insects in the world, weighing in at more than 70 grams. Today, an article is making the rounds suggesting that the giant burrowing cockroach - as the largest cockroach and weighing only 35 grams - may be the world's heaviest insect. These are both outclassed by the goliath beetle (pictured), which can weigh up to 100 grams in the larval stage. With help from Wikipedia (and no help from the Guinness Book of World Records, which has a most confounding website), I have compiled a list of insects by weight:

• Goliath beetle (larval) Goliathus goliatus +115g
• Hercules beetle Dynastes hercules 85g
• Giant weta Deinacrida heteracantha 75g
• Stick insect Phobaeticus kirbyii 72g
• Queen Alexandra's birdwing butterfly (larval) Ornithoptera alexandrae 58g
• Atlas moth (larval) Attacus atlas 58g
• Giant burrowing cockroach Macropanesthia rhinoceros 36g

These would all lose to the goliath birdeater, at 120 grams, except that spiders are not insects! But even this pales in comparison to the 452 gram (1 lb.) dragonflies that used to take flight in the prehistoric past!

Wampum

Contrary to what you may have learned in grade school - and how the word is used in the vernacular today, wampum was not "Indian money." Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands tribes used the strings of sacred shell beads not as currency, but contracts. Wampum belts were exchanged to symbolize engagement or marriage, validate treaties, or signify war or peace. For instance, the parallel stripes on the Two Row Wampum Treaty Belt between the whites and the natives represent the paths of their vessels containing their customs and laws - the canoe and the sailing vessel - neither of which should outpace the other, and each of which should remain separate and equal forever. Wampum belts also served as memory aids in story-telling and were worn for ritual decoration. No mere money belts or fashion accessories, these. It was the European settlers who realized how much the wampum belts meant to the natives, assigned value to them, and mass-produced them. But it was their symbolism which mattered most, and still does: along with their skeletal remains, Native American tribes have requested repatriation of wampum belts. I daresay you will not use the word "wampum" the same way again...that is, if you ever use it. Like me, you may just want to say it out loud a few times.

Rene Magritte

I always got a kick out of the paintings of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte (1898-1967). I was looking over my Mom's shoulder today at a furniture catalog she was perusing and saw some styles of what I like to call "fainting couches." They immediately reminded me of Magritte's portrait of Madame Recamier (top), which parodies an unfinished portrait from 1800 by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825). But to my delight, I have found that she was not the only subject to be depicted as a coffin by Magritte. Above are two similar paintings from a series called "Perspective" and the originals which they parodied: "Portrait of Madame Recamier," 1802 by Francois Gerard (1770-1837) and "The Balcony," c. 1868-1869 by Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Ironically, it is David's painting that springs to mind first, though the painter left it unfinished when he found out Gerard was painting the same subject. The surname of the woman in question, Jeanne-Francoise Julie Adelaide Recamier* (1777-1849), has become synonymous with the couch upon which she sat.

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*Unfortunately, the new version of Internet Explorer that I downloaded no longer allows me to copy diacritics to my posts, so please excuse the lack of accents in the French names.