Category — Other Haunts

Occasionally, I’ll happen upon indications that the human species isn’t doomed. For instance, the bright minds behind the Zombie Squad are preparing for the zombie uprising *now* while there’s still time. For those who remain skeptical of the zombie menace, only because it hasn’t yet reached epidemic proportions, the Zombie Squad also performs acts of contemporary assistance, particularly disaster relief. I’m serious. They have canned food drives, donate blood (their own, presumably) in addition to having occasional movie nights. There are several chapters across the US and Ontario and it sounds like other chapters are forming.

Zombie Squad Public Service Announcement

This industrious designer takes parts from old motorcycles and creates these wonderfully strange end tables. They highly resemble the bio-mechanoid fantasies of H.R. Giger.

http://www.yesican.eu/product_listing_02.htm

Everyday for a whole year, a different skull appears on this wonderfully creative blog. Some are pieces of jewelry, some are actual skulls, some are pieces of origami, one was a computer typeface, another was a desktop pattern… you get the idea. All over the map in their media and let’s be frank, the quality of their execution but every post is a skull of some sort or another. It’s all free; it’s all fun. It’s likely the kind of thing that would appeal to someone who likes to read about nightmares and fear. The site has spawned a legion of similar projects but Skull-a-Day, as far as I can tell, was nearly the first.

Given my love of weird papercraft, one of my favorite entries is this one for a papercraft skull complete with an articulated jaw.

There are cool limited edition t-shirt to support the site, ones with the logo “Nevermore” and a bird (my guess is that it’s a raven) and, you guessed it, a skull.

Up until yesterday, everything I knew about grave robbing I learned from The Bodysnatcher (1945) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037549/ (an enjoyable thriller that was the last movie to feature both Karloff and Lugosi)Then I read Scott Carney’s work on the Bone Trade from India.

Scott Carney’s Blog

His piece in Wired

His piece on NPR

The guy really did his research, from the bizarrely fascinating process used to create world-class medical skeletons, to the (post)colonial economics of the business to the laws that supposedly limit the trade today. He wore out shoe leather, knocked on doors and saw and touched stuff that I suppose I’d rather not see or touch. This is journalism at its best, vital but not lurid though slightly off-beat, focused on the humans involved. The centuries old traffic in human skeletons was finally banned in India after one dealer started selling child skeletons in great quantities, quantities that could only have been acquired by murder. Understandably, folks got upset, VERY upset even attacking foreigners suspected of being involved. But wouldn’t the existing laws against murder have been enough to address this problem? Was it primarily people from the other castes upset at the financial boon?

What the reaction suggests to me is an underlying set of values and fears related to human remains. If I understand correctly, Hinduism considers dead bodies to be unclean, hence their disposal is relegated to the lowest castes. Christianity by contrast with its insistence on some form of bodily resurrection has tended to nearly venerate human remains, lest there not be enough “left” to be resurrected. (I have heard that the decay of remains is enough of a theological problem that at least one sect determined the minimum requirements for bodily resurrection were that the skull and both femurs be in tact. Allegedly, this determination somehow related to the skull and crossed bones of pirate and Masonic symbology.) Bones are also used, I think, by some forms of Buddhism to indicate the transient, illusory essence of reality. But the contrasting value system posed in these articles is the enlightened practices of Western medicine and education. And of course, good old fashioned economic value. The black market nature of this economy has helped prices rise greatly.

The final thing that I was left wondering about was how many folks die in India during any given year. It surely has to be enough to supply all the medical schools that want them, doesn’t it? Perhaps I’m naive as to the real scope of this market. The industry also sounds like a mature one, where a fully manufactured product is exported, in contrast to a more colonial system where raw materials are exported to be refined in foreign factories with the products re-imported. The only way the ban makes secular sense to me is if India wants to stock its medical schools first before supplying the rest of the world.

Anything that can spark such trains of thought is definitely worth reading, especially you’re intrigued by the idea of grave robbing.

From time to time, Mrs. Grimgnome is a doctor trapped inside a zombie-plagued town. She travels from building to building, in constant communication with a larger coalition of do-good-ing humans, trying to thwart the zombie menace. My dear wife, you see, is nearly addicted to a free on-line massively multi-player game called “Urban Dead.”

http://www.urbandead.com/

The game is basic, almost simplistic and easily overlooked by those thumb-twitching game-fiends who need flashy graphics to keep their attention. Since it’s web-based - and I know this isn’t unique to Urban Dead - it can be played on ANY computer that can traverse the Weird Wild Web which is refreshing in this era where games frequently require a platform upgrade. The game field is a three by three grid that represents the buildings and areas a player can see out of a relatively large city of Malton. (The Powers-That-Be prudently sealed off Malton shortly after the zombie’s started rising, y’know, to make sure things didn’t get REALLY out of hand.) Details about these areas appear in text and can be enhanced by certain objects, for instance binoculars. But only human players can use objects. Oh yes. In Urban Dead, players can also be zombies. In fact, human players turn into zombies when they are killed. And for that matter, zombies can be turned back into humans at “Revive Points”.

Since the object of the game is ongoing and so broadly construed, player groups have formed with other goals, some extremely idiosyncratic. Some are simple “neighborhood watch” type groups that keep the zombies out. There are zombie-based groups even that try to organize their destruction or give it a peculiar slant. One group, as I remember it, were scholars in life and hence they refuse to kill anyone found in a library, museum or school. A nice twist on the cliched zombie rally call “Brains!” These groups run their own websites that as far as I can see have no connection whatsoever to Kevan Davis, the guy behind Urban Dead. My wife’s group even appears to have a Firefox plugin that allows players to identify other group members in crowds as well as to track other kinds of information. They help each other, patrol their neighborhood of Malton, co-ordinate raids, heck, they might even have raves and tea-parties for all I know.

Kevan Davis keeps the site fun too with upgrades and special limited time events. For instance, on Hallowe’en for one day only, there were trick or treaters out, some wearing costumes, some knocking on heavily barricaded door for the stale candy that was available that day only from mall stores. Weird. But weirdly fun.

There is a relatively detailed WIKI for the game that can be found at:

http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Main_Page

Last year for Christmas, Mrs. Grimgnome got an Urban Dead t-shirt which she loves DEARLY, wears constantly — and washes occasionally. Get one for someone you love.

http://www.cafepress.com/kevandotorg/1180110

If you know comics, you likely associate the name Jack Kirby with super heroes but Monsterblog has taken its solemn duty to keep alive Kirby’s contribution to MONSTER comics. Yup. This site has sample scans from a whole slew of Kirby’s creatures with nary a spandex costume to be found among the pages. It’s an elegantly structured site and it’s great fun to browse.

http://monsterblog.oneroom.org/