One million bones

"I wish you were here to see this," wrote my friend Jody Arlington in an e-mail yesterday that included the photo above. Jody – who is now reviewing graphic novels for NPR – and I have been to many art exhibits together in and around Washington, D.C. This striking installation is a carpet of 1,018,260 human bones placed on the National Mall by volunteers on Saturday morning and on display until this afternoon. The bones are not real (they have been hand-crafted from diverse materials by many contributing artisans), but the genocide that they symbolize is real. New Mexico-based and socially conscious artist Naomi Natale began her project "One Million Bones" (VIDEOS HERE) in 2010 to raise awareness of the mass killing in Sudan, Congo, Burma, and Somalia. With preview installations in Albuquerque in New Orleans, the event on the National Mall began with the bone-laying ceremony and included a candlelight vigil, performances, and speeches by experts on human rights. "Natale hopes that viewers will not only confront a powerful, if morbid, symbol of faraway suffering, but recognize the fragility of our own lives, and our connectedness to victims we only hear about on the news. 'We belong to each other,' she says."

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While They Slept

I have known Jody Arlington (pictured with her husband Franck Cordes) since 1994. It was only recently that she revealed publicly that her brother killed their family when she was 16. He has spent the years since in prison. She has moved on, periodically writing the story herself (as her thesis, for instance). Now she has allowed Kathryn Harrison to tell it in While They Slept, which was published in June 2008. I reviewed it on nth position and it was reviewed in the New York Times. Jody has been featured on Good Morning America and in the Washington Post Magazine. Strong woman, horrifying story, great book.

Garden cemeteries

The gravestone of Swiss-American geologist Jules Marcou (1824-1898) in Mount Auburn Cemetery (above). A great 6-minute segment about Green-Wood Cemetery from the ongoing on-line video series The City Concealed, which explores the unseen corners of New York (below).

One day several years ago, Jody Arlington and I took a brown-bag lunch to beautiful Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. We perched on the stairs of a family tomb that took the shape of a rotunda and began to enjoy our sandwiches in the shady, picturesque setting. Almost immediately, we were chased away by a caretaker who lectured us about disrespecting the dead. I didn't have the presence of mind to counter with the history of garden cemeteries, but just have a look at the first paragraph of this article - which features Oak Hill and 5 other Washington-area cemeteries. The garden cemetery movement of the 19th c. was inspired by Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, with its artistic tombs and winding walkways. Graveyards, previously believed to emit an unhealthy miasma, drew visitors to enjoy the statuary and stonework in a landscaped setting. Garden cemeteries in the U.S. led to the public park system and two of the first - Mount Auburn in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Green-Wood in Brooklyn, New York - have been designated National Historic Landmarks. I have never been to Mount Auburn Cemetery, but did take a driving tour of Green-Wood Cemetery with my friend Kristina - the guard was going to deny us entry, since we didn't have relatives buried there, but I produced my membership card for the Association for Gravestone Studies (to which I have belonged since 1987) and he let us in. We didn't bring a lunch.

Speaking of taxidermy

Friends James Taylor, Jody Arlington, and Franck Cordes spent Saturday evening with me, and a good time was had by all. We talked about myriad curiosities and characters, sideshow performers, carnival mummies, and - of course - our favorite museum! Later in the evening, we discussed the fire that devastated the legendary Deyrolle taxidermy shop in Paris last year. Deyrolle (estab. 1831) is being restored and several rooms have reopened. This after 90% of the animal mounts were destroyed by faulty electrical wiring in the store next door. I realized I forgot to include this pertinent news in my recent taxidermy post.

Ray Bradbury

American author Ray Bradbury is still writing his "speculative fiction" despite a stroke in 1999. His 1957 novel Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite books, and there is a chapter in it that I find quite evocative. An old man named Colonel Freeleigh calls regularly from his wheelchair to a friend in Mexico City and asks him to hold the telephone out the window so he can hear the sounds of the street. The colonel explains, "You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city, it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And so it is good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living..." You can read most of this chapter on Google Books (search "Mexico City" and start reading on p. 130) and you can hear the sounds of the Mexico City street on sound-effect.com (click arrow to listen to 127-second preview). I first read this story as a teenager and was reminded of it while talking to Jody Arlington when she lived in Madrid in the late 1990s, so I reread it and faxed her a copy. I thought of it again last night when imagining what it would sound like to be on one of the ships in my rather tame post of yesterday...

Sculpture by Tim Hawkinson

I saw this sculpture at the urging of Jody Arlington, who brought me to the Hirshhorn Museum in 2001. It is only a couple of inches tall and would have piqued my interest--as do some of the artist's more anatomical pieces--even if I didn't know that Tim Hawkinson crafted it from his own fingernail clippings!

Field trips

I get around in my van, affectionately dubbed the "Mother Ship," which is equipped with hand controls, but I don't go far because I have no sense of direction and a fear of getting lost. I have enlisted friends and family to accompany me on my field trips, either in the Mother Ship or by air (in which case I use the manual wheelchair rather than my scooter "BeBe"). Here is a list of some of those companions and adventures:

Jody Arlington went with me to the Library of Congress to see an anthropodermic book (more about those later); to a local taxidermist to learn how his craft would apply to the human body; and has taken me to many cemeteries, galleries, and museums in the Washington, D.C. area.

Cris Hastings has gone to West Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee with me to see mummies; North Carolina to meet a carnival showman; to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia many times; and to Paris to see the catacombs, Musee Fragonard, and Pere LaChaise! She and my mom Donna Gritman drove me from Connecticut to Vermont to see the largest granite quarry in the world...

Maddy Biggs flew with me to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to see one of the premier documented human skeletal collections in the U.S. Katina Stockbridge and Janice Lane took me to a funeral museum and crematorium in rural Virginia. Chris Sweeters has accompanied me to the National Library of Medicine and the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

My sister and brother-in-law Melissa and Nicholas Heilweil brought me to the San Diego Museum of Man when I visited them in Santa Monica--and Melissa gave me a copy of Death in Yellowstone during a family trip, turning that into a field trip, too!

My dad and stepmother Jim and Sarah Quigley have accompanied me to Illinois to see Dickson Mounds, BodyWorlds, and the Museum of Funeral Customs; to Florida to see a forensic lab; to a funeral home in Indiana to see a mummy; and to Boston to make a presentation.

Thanks, everybody! And thanks to those I may have inadvertently forgotten~

Follow-ups

Oasis and Airbus 11/22/09 Here are more photos of the largest cruise ship in the world, Oasis of the Seas, which carries 18 of the largest lifeboats in the world. In a 1st for the cruise industry, children ages 3 to 11 are required to wear tracking devices aboard the vessel.

Eye news 11/21/09 A British man's vision was restored after 30 years when he was outfitted with a bionic eye last month.

Pishtaco 11/20/09 The Peruvian police have suspended their top organized crime investigator because he misled the public in the case of the "human fat killers" - rather than 60, there may have been just a single victim. A 7,000-year-old archaeological site in southern Germany has revealed controversial signs of cannibalism.

Alligator urban legends 11/14/09 Pictured here is a most impressive wedding cake shaped like an alligator.

Odd animals 11/4/09 Slightly more recognizable than the hairless bear is this featherless parrot.

Shackleton 10/28/09 Cambridge University scholars are tweeting daily diary entries of Antarctic explorer Robert F. Scott.

Maldives 10/18/09 Nepal held a cabinet meeting in the foothills of Mount Everest to bring attention to how global warming is affecting the Himilayas. Micronesia is another country at risk of going under due to global climate change.

Message in a bottle 10/4/09 Bottle wins a contest after travelling from New Jersey to North Carolina in 24 years.

Harps, played and painted 10/1/09 Here is a story about the royal harpist who held the position from 2004 to 2007 and here is a very recent story in the weird news about how she was burglarizing homes and hooked on heroin.

Pig butchering 9/1/09 A truck on a state road in New Zealand spilled its load, leaving 15km of offal 30cm thick in some places.

Victor Noir 8/10/09 In a follow-up to this post, I mentioned that the crypt above Marilyn Monroe's was being auctioned off. The news in late August was that the winning bid of $4.5 million had fallen through.

Jaws in 1916 8/8/09 Researchers at the University of Florida have studied 100s of shark jaws and are now confident they can identify the species of predator by examining the bite patterns on a victim.

Cemetery Scandal 7/16/09 More unidentified bodies have surfaced at Burr Oak Cemetery outside Chicago.

"Seven Pounds" 6/14/09 An Australian diver had to be airlifted to a hospital after he was stung by a deadly jellyfish - despite wearing a protective wetsuit that covered everything but his face and hands. As this video shows, Japan is experiencing swarms of giant jellyfish off its shores.

Vultures 5/4/09 A woman in Laurel, Maryland, refuses to stop feeding the flock of 60 vultures that are roosting in her neighborhood.

Dolly the sheep 5/2/09 To reduce greenhouse emissions, Australian scientists are breeding a sheep that burps less.

Chihuahuas in the weird news 5/2/09 The Canadian owner of a chihuahua fights to have it recognized as a service dog. The latest fashion trend among chihuahuas is the hoodie.

Ouroboros 4/27/09 In imitation of the ouroboros, a snake chokes on its own tail.

Bears in the news 4/24/09 Florida state wildlife officials are warning the public that it is illegal to take possession of a bear carcass, after one citizen removed roadkill from the highway and skinned and butchered it.

Marlin Perkins 4/21/09 The sandhill cranes stopped traffic one recent morning as they did their mating dance right on my street. My friend Cris had a little Marlin Perkins moment of her own when a hawk allowed her to get very close to him and his fresh kill the other morning.

Giants 4/17/09 The tallest man in Britain has landed a role in the play "Jack and the Beanstalk."

James G. Mundie's cabinet 4/17/09 Katherine Dunn - author of Geek Love, a novel featuring conjoined twins and other human marvels - recently used her boxing skills to fend off a purse-snatcher.

Hokey Pokey 3/29/09 The disputed writer of the song, Robert Degen, has died in Pennsylvania at the age of 104.

Kangaroo home invasion 3/15/09 Objections have been raised in Australia about the marketing and sale of a new kangaroo- and emu-flavored chip.

Designer legs 3/15/09 A hydraulic prosthesis allows a man to continue his activities as a cowboy.

Pompeii mosaic 3/8/09 You can walk the streets of Pompeii remotely thanks to Google Maps.

Spider prey 3/7/09 A colony of 150 3" cave spiders that took up residence in a derelict orchid house 10 years ago are being returned to the pothole in the U.K. from whence they originated.

The Mole People 3/4/09 A woman in Derby, U.K., took up residence for 5 months in a tent on a traffic roundabout - complete with a TV/DVD and solar shower. Meanwhile, my friend Val works with the homeless and just told me about their charity's newly published Rights Guide for Rough Sleepers.

Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday 2/12/09 The body of an Austrian billionaire has been stolen from his grave and held for ransom.

Edward C. Johnson 2/8/09 These photographs of an American embalming school in the 1940s were brought to my attention by friend and follower Angie McLachlan.

Timbuktu 1/28/09 A South African filmmaker has completed a documentary about the manuscripts of Timbuktu.

Ancient animals 1/19/09 A 146-year-old tortoise named "Kiki," known for his demonstrative lovemaking, has died in a French zoo.

Elephants eat Christmas trees! 12/29/09 High winds knocked a Christmas tree down on a car in Berlin, Germany.

Rats! 12/20/08 Two stars of a British reality show filmed in Australia have been charged with animal cruelty after serving up a meal of rats to their fellow contestants.

Albinos 11/18/08 A recent report estimates that as many as 10,000 albinos are in hiding in east Africa.

Amputation 10/19/08 British scientists have just unveiled the first bionic fingers.

While They Slept 9/20/08 The book that tells the story of the murder of my friend Jody Arlington's family is now available in paperback.

Health Diary I finally posted a new entry to my health diary. Here is an article about the testing of the MS "blood blockage" theory.