More Black Death

(Oh my word, what a monumental pita this passport thing is. Note to self, never ever let this thing expire ever again.)

More from The Great Mortality:

On the second day of illness, Kutluk awoke with a terrible pain in his groin; overnight, a hard, apple-sized lump had formed between his navel and his penis. That afternoon, when Magnu-Kelka probed the tumor with a finger, the pain was so terrible, Kutluk rolled over on his side and vomited again.

Toward evening, Kutluk developed a new symptom; he began to cough up thick knots of bloody mucus. The coughing continued for several hours. As night gathered around the lake, a sweaty, feverish Kutluk fell into delirium; he imagined he saw people hanging by their tongues from trees of fire, burning in furnaces, smothering in foul-smelling smoke, being swallowed by monstrous fish, gnawed by demons, and bitten by serpents. The next morning, while Kutluk was reliving the terrible dream, the cough returned -- this time even more fiercely. By early afternoon, Kutluk's lips and chin had become caked with blood, and the inside of his chest felt as if it had been seared by a hot iron. That night, while Magnu-Kelka was sponging Kutluk, the tumor on his groin gurgled.

For a moment Magnu-Kelka wondered if the swelling were alive; quickly, she made the sign of the cross. On the fourth day of his illness, Kutluk stained his straw bed with a bloody anal leakage, but Magnu-Kelka failed to notice. After vomiting twice in the morning, she slept until dark. When she awoke again, it was to the sound of crickets chirping in the evening darkness; she listened for a moment, then vomited on herself. On the fifth day of his illness, Kutluk was near death. All day Magnu-Kelka lay on a straw mat on the other side of the cottage, listening to her husband's hacking cough and breathing in the fetid air. Toward evening Kutluk made a strange rattling sound in his throat and the cottage fell silent.

As Magnu-Kelka gazed at her husband's still body, she felt an odd sensation -- like the fluttering of butterfly wings against the inside of her chest. A moment later, she began to cough. (41)

("The Glass-works temporary hospital during 1894 Hong Kong bubonic plague" Source)

Eczema Vaccinatum

Coffee flavored cream, crunching altoids, listening to Ed Alleyne-Johnson, reading the CDC website. What a lovely Sunday...

Anyway, this raised an eyebrow. Apparently if one has eczema (I do) one should not get the smallpox vaccination in non-emergency situations because of the risk of developing this rare but life-threatening condition. Filing under Good To Know.







Further Reading: Finding May Help Eczema Sufferers Tolerate Smallpox Vaccine

CDC Page

Smallpox: A Digital Guide

Disaster & Recovery

Referenced in TGM, "Disaster & Recovery: The Black Death in Western Europe", the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission study on thermonuclear war.

Apparently, the center might hold. But color me skeptical.

Also, one of the most daunting things about this reading is the geography. First couple of chapters are very heavy with it. I'm stupid about this stuff and was prepared to just ignore it but there are all these handy pictures available on Google Images.

The Great Mortality

Currently reading -- The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, John Kelly



Captivating, brilliantly written, poetically gruesome, gruesomely poetic. Very detailed account of what we call the Black Death. Not just the spread, the symptoms and devastation it wrought but the preface. This is the really fascinating part, what were the things that led up to the Plague. These things that might've contributed to susceptibility and turned epi into pan(demic). It's not just the usual suspects like superstition or sanitation, some of it came as quite a surprise to me.

And what's really tilting my head is seeing parallels to those precursors today, every day. Makes me think something bad is on its way. "We see death coming into our midst like black smoke," a Welsh poet wrote, "a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance."

But I'll get to that. Need to log some stuff as I go. Quotes, some miscellaneous references, photos, etc. Following from the book:

That night there is a splash off the aft side of the ship, then a second; no one raises an alarm as the bodies sink below the surface in a cone of rippling moonlight.

As the days lengthen and the disease takes hold, men begin to turn on one another, as they will later in Europe, when the plague arrives. There are beatings, murders, summary executions, mutinies; only the progress of the pestilence prevents complete anarchy. Men become to ill to kill, then to ill to work. A helmsman with a neck bubo is strapped to the helm; a ship's carpenter with a bloody cough, to his bench. A rigger shaking with fever is lashed to the mast.

Gradually each escaping vessel becomes a menagerie of grotesques. Everywhere there are delirious men who talk to the wind and stain their pants with bloody anal leakages; and weeping men who cry out for absent mothers and wives and children; and cursing men who blaspheme God, wave their fists at an indifferent sky, and burble blood when they cough. There are men who ooze pus from facial and body sores and stink to high heaven; lethargic men who stare listlessly into the cruel, grey sea; mad men who laugh hysterically and dig filthy fingernails into purple, mottled flesh; and dead men, whose bloated bodies roll back and forth across pitching decks until they hit a rail or mast and burst open like pinatas. (24)

(Photo from THIS article, description "a man who suffered bubonic plague during the outbreak in Algeria in 2003.")

Kelly writes:

The plague generation wrote about their experiences with a directness and urgency that, 700 years after the fact, retains the power to astonish, and haunt. After watching packs of wild dogs paw at the newly dug graves of the plague dead, a part-time tax collector in Siena wrote, “This is the end of the world.”

Starting Your Funeral Career

Via William the FuneralApprentice, Oklahoma-specific but some advice that probably applies to other states.



This is a great youtube channel, not a lot but what he has is really interesting.

Swamp People

I spent some formative years of young childhood in Ormond Beach, Florida. Rather undeveloped at the time, we were deep in an area best described as swamp land. I suspect that's why the History Channel series Swamp People caught my eye. I didn't know what to expect but ended up watching all of season 1 in one sitting.

Takes place in Louisiana. Love the accents, the focus on family/tradition and respect for the swamp. If asked earlier I would have said hunters kind of freak me out but these folks are just earning a living. Willie was my favorite, something really kick-ass and cute about him. I swear that cigarette must be growing out of his mouth, it is always there.

The show is not as annoying as this video. I let it load and then just skipped around:



Aside from the people the other awesome thing about this was the food. Accomplice and I got a real taste for Cajun cooking when we went to N'awlins in November. Red beans and rice, gumbo, jambalaya, lots of shrimp, crawfish, sausage and of course gator. Not too many restaurant choices here in Colorado but I did find Cajun Grocer online.

Encounters at the End of the World

Inspired by Bizzarro's comment, this is well worth mentioning. Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World is a great accompaniment to Big Dead Place. Taking place in Antarctica. While not exclusively about it, there is a big chunk of run time devoted to McMurdo Station so you can see a lot of what's described in the book.

Great film, stunningly gorgeous, breath-taking, alienesque footage of under-ice, ice caves, Erebus, etc. The interviewees don't seem as eccentric or persnickety as the characters in the book but entertaining in their own way. There is some insight into what brings these outliers together here too, the appeal of such a desolate place. Soundtrack and narration (Herzog) just adds to the otherworldly beauty.

"And there's many things about this place that are very unusual, and one of the things that I find very fascinating is how quiet it gets. It's the quietest place. When the wind is down, when there's no wind, it wakes you up in the middle of the night because there's no wind, and there's no sound at all, and if you walk out on the ice, you can hear your own heartbeat, that's how still it is."

Also features one of my all-time favorite scenes, a little fella I can relate to, the "deranged" quixotic penguin:



I know a little something about people thinking I'm disoriented and in places I shouldn't be.

If only ALL humans honored the rules: Do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still and let him go on his way.

And at exactly 1:50, I remembered what it was like to look back at my original colony one last time. Then turn and head straight towards the mountains.

Big Dead Place

"You have come to the pristine and stark seventh continent with images of adventure involving physical endurance and rugged beauty. It is the middle of the night on a Wednesday, and you wake up to pee. You emerge from the women's room. A man in the hall runs past you with a frozen pig under his arm, pursued by a lurching drunk clown."

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange & Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson



What a delightfully bizarre book, a memoir of the author's time working at McMurdo Station, U.S. science research facility. The overall theme is that it isn't the cold or the conditions that are the hardest to weather. The bureaucracy is what will drive you mad. "I have never heard of one returnee who finally quit because it's the world's highest, driest, coldest, or whatever. People leave because of the bullshit."

His awesomely entertaining anecdotes illustrate this over and over in such surreal fashion. Johnson kind of jumps all over the place, flipping back and forth between Antarctic history and contemporary. But it works, really brings into sharp focus the utter absurdity of some of the now-stuff that employees have to deal with.

This book is packed with a ton of morbid factoids, mostly about historical expeditions and physical and psychological symptoms/conditions of prolonged exposure to and/or residence in this climate.

On December 14, 1912, Antarctica explorers Douglas Mawson and Xavier Mertz stood at the edge of a 200-foot-deep crevasse in the ice.

'We are in dire peril, Xavier.'

'Yes,' said Mertz, 'We shall have to eat the dogs.'

The third member of their expedition had just fallen into the crevasse - with most of their food. Their initial goal of surveying a 500-mile stretch of Adelie Land suddenly became impractical, and they set out for their base camp on the coast.

They fed their dogs with pieces of clothing until the dogs grew too weak, and then butchered one after another to feed the remaining dogs and themselves. They sawed the paws off with a knife and boiled them into soup, then took turns spooning out the brains and gnawing on the skulls, and frying the livers.

Unbeknownst to them, the dog livers contained toxic levels of Vitamin A. As a result, the men's flesh and hair began to litter the bottom of their tent at night. Pus-filled cracks opened on their faces. Their scrotums bled.

It was not long before Mertz went mad. He could no longer help pull the sledges and he would no longer eat. In his journal he wrote, 'I cannot eat of the dogs any longer.'

When Mawson tried to coax him to drink some 'Beef Tea,' Mertz screamed, 'It is of the dogs! They make me ill because I eat their flesh!'

Mawson put Mertz on the sledge, which he pulled on his hands and knees through the twinkling white brutality. In their tent Mertz howled gibberish and filled his pants with dysentery. On morning Mertz screamed at Mawson, 'Am I a man- or a dog? You think I have no courage because I cannot walk - but I show you, I show... ' and bit off part of his little finger and spat it onto the floor of the tent.

Before he died, Mertz screamed, 'Ears, ears! Earache!'

Mawson cleaned up. He was alone now and suffering from fingers black with frostbite, loose teeth, and snowblindness. The soles of his feet were falling off.

(65)

-----------------------

... the 'Winter-Over Syndrome,' the name for all staring, grunting, and absentmindedness from April or so, and which the Antarctican simply calls 'getting toasty,' or less frequently, 'T3.' The term, 'T3' comes from the change in T3 thyroid hormone levels triggered by prolonged exposure to cold and darkness, which reduces the body's activity so as to preserve energy. What this means is that in June or July your clothes get heavier and the air around your legs turns to mud.

[...]

The study describes 'long-eye' or the 'Antarctic stare' as 'the occurrence of mild hypnotic states,' which have been observed in Antarctic expeditions as early as 1900. This is perhaps the spookiest of winter traits, when we leave off in the middle of our sentences to stare at the wall or ceiling. Thousands of half-sentences disappear into the void during winter, and the winter-over seldom tries to retrieve them. By July or August your story is finished, not when the narrative finds closure, but when you stop talking. Everyone seems to understand, and no one comments on the behavior.

The study also cites another study claiming that '... approximately 5% of winter-over personnel experience symptoms that fulfill DSM criteria for a psychiatric disorder and are severe enough to warrant clinical intervention.'

(168)

A great supplement (not a replacement) to the book is the website, Big Dead Place Dot Com. It is packed full of weirdness in the same flavor as the book. The intro section on the Winter Psyche Eval is priceless. Website has pictures too.

Me and Cletus

On recent travels, had the total unfiltered pure rainbow bright happy joy of meeting family of dear close wonderful friends and fellow Nightbreed DB and MB. This is me and Cletus with Bianca looking on.

Utrechtse Krop

Backstory (via HERE):

`Utrechtse Krop` (Utrecht goitre) was the name given to a thyroid condition once common in the Dutch town of Utrecht, due to a deficiency of iodine in drinking water. The exhibition Utrechtse Krop in De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal centred around the appeal of illness and the fragility of our physical being. The photographs on display came from the archives of Utrecht`s university hospital – records of medical disorders, photographed since circa 1890.

All photos found HERE, many more at the link.

Die Moritat von Mackie Messer

a.k.a "Mack the Knife". Muchas gracias to accomplice for finding this for me.

Spine Tingling

I need to remake Roderick. Roderick has a hunchback. Logging photos for reference:

Below, scoliosis not kyphosis but still beautiful



The rest of these all come from an article titled "Treatment of hardware exposure after severe infections in spine surgery with pedicled muscular flaps". Hello, Dr. Frankenstein, so freakin' cool.

Henry

Henry Gibson (1935-2009)



Henry is one of those actors that just makes me happy every time I see him. He is so adorable -- his smile, his ears, the crinkle between his eyebrows. His role in The Burbs as Dr. Klopek seemed so quintessential, my absolute favorite. I saw him again this morning while watching the TV series Eerie, Indiana (which is awesome for about five thousand different reason). Actually the show and Henry share the same kind of light, happy spookiness I love. Makes me think of monster kids, Creepshow, horror movie model kits, all that jazz.