Putting animals to work

A reasonable person might presume that the Director would be happy with news of the overwhelming success of the previously mentioned Anatomy of Monsters.

Obviously reasonable people are in short supply around the museum in these dark days.

As an obviously unreasonable person, I expect nothing.

And luckily, as not a word have I received regarding the triumph of the new exhibit. Not a syllable! Not a solitary alphanumeric character!

Instead, we* are simply swamped with a superfluity of animal corpses in various states of dismemberment originating from various parts of the world. Not a word about what the Director might want done with the various animal parts she has dumped on us. Not an inkling as to why she might have acquired them in the first place. I can't even store the bits and bobs and wait until she returns -- the Oubliette is already brimfull to overflowing.

With my usual genius for organisation, I have, naturally, found a solution. I will have the animal corpses built into useful objects. I have already received the first shipments of commissions back. I was surprised at just how willing these young people are to do what it takes to get a chance in the world. They have transformed our unwanted carnage into useful objects that would grace any home or museum.

Miss Pokeno, (a fellow once-New Zealander and 80s pop star, so uncannily like myself that I had to doublecheck that she isn't just me moonlighting...) for instance, has transformed a useless limp dead bird into a very comfortable chaise lounge. I await her set of fox-stuffed armchairs with great anticipation.


I'm thinking of matching them with the sets of both fox and coyote pillows . Idiots have also looked at the bird/furniture combo -- This Seat is Taken indeed!


Atlason have transformed an annoying flock of sheep into useful stools...
Sarah Garzoni's chesterfield pig will make a great addition to the Boudoir:
But she gets extra points for the very fine swiss army knife (Homo Faber) she slipped into my hand on her way out.
Smaller furnishing items have not been overlooked either: Moooi have ponied up with a Horse Lamp:
Sebastian Errazuriz with a Duck lamp (Now if someone could just make a spider lamp, I'd be REALLY excited)
Carlee Fernandez's clothes basket Lola Isern will come in very handy

This is, of course, just the beginning! I'll keep you posted about new pieces of furniture as they arrive -- although I'll be rather busy for the next while researching Victorian taxidermy furniture...

Consultants on this element of the Museum's activities include:
Quigley's Cabinet's article on taxidermy furniture >
Crappy Taxidermy has an endless parade of stuffed goodness >

* And when I say 'we' I mean, of course, 'me' The rest of MoD's staff seem to have evaporated about the time that we stopped receiving any kind of regular paychecks. I haven't seen anyone from Janitorial for months and even that vicious little sneak Inky-Blinky has been very quiet. I have to admit that, as long as he spins his webs and organises his own collections well out of my way, I'd be happy to never see him again.

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New Educational Exhibit! getting inside Godzilla

Well Well Well!

It looks as though the Director has finally decided to get her hands dirty!

Here was I thinking that she would be searching the arid inlands of Mesopotamia, given that that's what she TOLD us, in the memo she left in my wastepaper bin, whilst all the time she has actually been big-game hunting in Japan.

And then she has the temerity to send her trophies back to me in a state of partial... partialness. Not that I'm pointing fingers, but it looks to me like someone got a little peckish.

Perhaps had a little midnight snack?

Gamera schnitzel, that I understand... but Mothera steaks!?

Anyway, as always, I struggle on, making the best of what I'm given. The museum must come first. Etc. etc.

However, in this instance, I think that you will agree with me when I say I made this particular sow's ear into silk pyjamas.

Taking the mutilated corpses, I have presented them as an educational exhibit. This exhibit will afford young visitors a thrilling learning experience.

A proper understanding of the anatomy of monsters has been too often overlooked in the past. But this ignorance is putting our young people into deadly peril.

This new exhibit An Anatomical Guide to Monsters, is appropriately supported by an especially commissioned publication of the same name (An Anatomical Guide to Monsters, 1967. Text: Shoji Otomo. Illustrator: Shogo Endo.) Each individual exhibit displays a full range of useful and educational signage and wall-labels. This isstate of the art new museology I'm making here!

My exhibit is bound to be a tremendous success, attracting that lucrative school audience to the Museum. Director de Plume will HAVE to give me a payrise now!

I expecting such huge interest, that I've commissioned a special structure for the exhibit. The Hunting Lodge will both commemorate the Director's prowess and provide a safe buffer for the more fragile exhibits in the rest of the museum.



Please view the rest of the exhibition An Anatomical Guide to Monsters at The Hunting Lodge



The historically inclined amongst the audience may also find this specimen A Hairy Monster, prepared by anatomist Tom Gauld, of more than passing interest.

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A Handy Guide to the 100 Most Popular Diatoms

Visual artist Heather Barnett and performance poet Will Holloway aren't as frightful as they sound. In fact they are endearingly enraptured with the very very small and have collaborated in an entire on- and off-line exhibition celebrating their shared passion. Small Worlds - the art of the invisible was a exhibition supported by Oxford University's Museum of the History of Science that drew attention to the Museum's microscopic holdings. Research staff on the project are completing a catalogue, with photographs, of the Museum’s large collection of microscopes and microscopical specimens that will also be on-line.

In the meantime, 100 All Time Diatom Greats is a magnification of a slide prepared in 1871 by J.D. Möller. A handy roll-over feature allows one to see both the scientific Latin names of these microscopic marvels, and the translation into English provided by Will Holloway.

It's going to come in very handy in identifying some of the elements of MoD's latest acquisition:


Magnificent isn't it! This magnified view was taken by Martin Mach from an historical slide by W. Watson&Sons, London. Without magnification, you can see only a faint ash-grey spot in the center of the black lacquer ring.

BTW Barnett and Holloway also provided me with the following fascinating fact which is currently providing fuel for much philosophical pondering.

Diatoms were also popular for testing the accuracy of microscope lenses – the creatures being used to investigate the microscope, rather than the other way round.

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Lust in the Dust

I may be in love! Just don’t tell Inky (as you know, he’s ridiculously easily upset …which can have catastrophic results for everyone else).

Whatever … thank jedi for the WorldWideWeb (yet another benefit that arachnids have given us, as Inky constantly reminds me)! Without it I would still be in ignorance of my soulmate, spiritual twin and fellow apassionato of all things dust. G. Carboni who, I must emphasis, I have not yet met in person… but it is only a matter of time and hunting him/her/it down, is a person who is wholly attuned to the quotidian beauty and infinite variety of micro-particulates.










Masquerading as a cheesy ‘science is FUN’ site, Carboni offers advice about how to collect dust as well as what to do with it once it’s in your possession. But, best of all, this doyen of dust has a terrific collection of particulate-porn – much of it gathered in the immediate environment.

All of this sub-micro splendour, however, simply provides the filigreed setting for what may be one of life’s enduring mysteries, possibly on a par with those of the Voynich Manuscript and how anyone of sane mind and goodwill could vote conservative. You will have spotted it immediately – as I did – yes, there in full 400X glory, Figure 8 is a scale from the wing of the butterfly that is the centrepiece and, arguably, emblem of Sir Hans Sloane’s Lepidoptera collection (currently housed by the NHM). The question is, “How did a fragment of this treasure end up on Carboni’s floor?"

Never one to resist a challenge (at least not if it won’t hurt and may involve food), I have taken it upon myself to solve this mystery. Luckily I think I can do this in parallel with my other duties (such as preparing new exhibits for MoD and tracking down the Skin Armour). So I’m off to the British Natural History Museum to find out what egregious breach of security allowed this minute sliver of history loose upon the world…

Would someone mind telling Inky where I am – and remind him to feed the diatoms?


PS Good scans of the Voynich Manuscript are hard to find. These are from the Yale Library and have been made more easily available as a flickr set by the public-spirited Daniel and Sarah Drucker, who are not only, respectively, studying the neural bases of similarity spaces and high-level vision, and psycholinguistics, but are also married and awesome. Really! They are! They are 3edges >

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Celeste Olalquiaga

Dust is what connects the dreams of yesteryear with the touch of nowadays. It is the aftermath of the collapse of illusions, a powdery cloud that rises abruptly and then begins falling on things, gently covering their bright, polished surfaces. Dust is like a soft carpet of snow that gradually coats the city, quieting its noise until we feel like we are inside a snow globe, the urban exterior transmuted into a magical interior where all time is suspended and space contained. Dust makes the outside inside by calling attention to the surface of things, a surface formerly deemed untouchable or simply ignored as a conduit to what was considered real: that essence which supposedly lies inside people and things, waiting to be discovered. Dust turns things inside out by exposing their bodies as more than mere shells or carriers, for only after dust settles on an object do we begin to long for its lost splendor, realizing how much of this forgotten object's beauty lay in the more external, concrete aspect of its existence, rather than in its hidden, attributed meaning.
Dust brings a little of the world into the enclosed quarters of objects. Belonging to the outside, the exterior, the street, dust constantly creeps into the sacred arena of private spaces as a reminder that there are no impermeable boundaries between life and death. It is a transparent veil that seduces with the promise of what lies behind it, which is never as good as the titillating offer. Dust makes palpable the elusive passing of time, the infinite pulverized particles that constitute its volatile matter catching their prey in a surprise embrace whose clingy hands, like an invisible net, leave no other mark than a delicate sheen of faint glitter. As it sticks to our fingertips, dust propels a vague state of retrospection, carrying us on its supple wings. A messenger of death, dust is the signature of lost time.

Celeste Olalquiaga: The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience, with Remarkable Objects of Art and Nature, Extraordinary Events, Eccentric Biography, and Original Theory, plus Many Wonderful Illustrations Selected by the Author and from the publication below.

"The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy by Eric Kraft, is one large work of fiction composed of many interconnected parts. Its parts are the memoirs and collected works of a fictional character, Peter Leroy, who tells an alternative version of his life story; explores the effect of imagination on perception, memory, hope, and fear; holds a fun-house mirror to scenes of life in the United States; ruminates upon the nature of the universe and the role of human consciousness within it; and prods and probes the painful world of time and place in search of the niches where hilarity hides. " More at the website ->

(And thanks to one of MoD's numerous (and sometimes numerate) minions for drawing our attention to this dusty fellow traveler. Mr Stewart, custodian of our 'Zymoglyphic Museum' sub-collection, take a bow.)

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Diatom Diatribe cont.

The flood of inquiries I have received about my diatom mural has been astonishing! Who would have thought that so many out there share my love for these astonishing microscopic lifeforms. But what’s not to love? Diatoms, like my other all-time favourite, slime mould, are neither fish nor fowl. Which is to say that they are neither plants nor animals, and are not bacteria or fungi either.

In fact they are one-celled protists which, like plants, contain chlorophyll but, uniquely, diatoms are encased in an asymmetric silica shell that is like a shoebox with a bottom and a slightly larger top.

Only infinitely more attractive and multimorphic.

Diatoms are, in fact, a major group of eukaryotic algae, and are one of the most common types of phytoplankton. Most diatoms are unicellular, although some form chains or simple colonies. Some even move around under their own power, although others rely on the kindness of the currents to keep them suspended where they’ll thrive. Not only are there more than 100000 species of the cute little critters, they are found everywhere that there’s water including on and in soil. Of course the average person’s closest noticable contact with them live is as the slippery brown stuff on rocks in rivers, but some lucky folk get to experience their efflorescent ‘red tides’. Dead they have a thousand and one uses around the home including making nail polish shiny. They make superior dust of course. They also have a fossil record stretching back to at least the Jurassic. Only slightly longer than my own, I’d like to point out.

Anyway, I could go on and on about them – especially since pointy-headed science types are now looking at using them as components of nano-machines, but it was the mural and diatoms use in cultural activities that have excited most of my correspondents.

I wish that I could claim to have invented diatom art instead of simply being its (potentially) greatest exponent, but unfortunately other’s achievements in the area are too well known. As everyone knows, diatom art has been HUGE since Victorian times, when well-brought up young ladies would produce kaleidoscopic slide mounts to delight and amuse their friends and family. Indeed, I myself learned the art from one such microscopic enthusiast. MoD, naturally, has a collection of these Victorian mounts – although it is small, I can safely claim it as unparalleled by any other held by a public institution. The example above provides an indication of the sheer visual excitement of these specimens.

Additionally, we have a small collection of note-worthy but unattributed pictorial mounts. This, of course, is housed near our collection of pictures constructed from butterfly wing scales.



I have to fly – there’s been a reported sighting of El Cacaracha Libre lurking near the Chambre Ardente! (Inky swears he’s dealt with the putative revolutionary, but frankly, I have my doubts). But when I’ll be back, and then I’ll show you around a few modern diatomic creations.

Diatom Art >
Nature’s Blueprint: Mimicking Nature's cleverest designs >
"Scientists Learning To Create Nanomaterials Based On Micro-Algae Patterns"
in Spacemart >
Becker's Diatom Index >
Montana Diatoms (mounted arrangements showing the effect of imaging under different conditions -- recommended! Also the home of the micromanipulator) >

PS A note to Norman Ingram Hendey: next time you want to donate a large number of diatoms to somewhere, I would much prefer it if you came straight to MoD rather than going to obscure institutions such as the Natural History Museum in London. Just because you're dead at 101 is no excuse! A forensic scientist of your calibre SHOULD have known better!

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Diatomic Disaster

WTF!

Did no one think that it was strange that I hadn’t been seen for a while? Did none of the highly-paid mooncalves that clutter Museum of Dust stop, for just ONE nanosecond, and thinks “Golly I wonder where the Director has got to?”

You would think that panic would ensue after the first day or so and that no effort would have been spared in a frantic attempt to ascertain my whereabouts. You’d think that a top-to-bottom search of the museum would have been the obvious first step, with a worldwide coordinated rescue effort planned if that failed.

You’d think.

Instead I’ve been trapped in the Oubliette for what seems like an eternity but turns out to have only (!) been a couple of months. I’m finally released by Inky, who has, at last, returned from the Space Race against Republic of Tinsleman (victorious I’m sure – although I’ve yet to hear his report), and discover that the place is deserted. Worse; I find the place strewn with evidence that El Cacaracha Libre seems to have moved in. He was MEANT to be managing the situation in RoT, instead he seems to have abandoned the whole thing to fritter his time festooning MY museum with pointless placards.

I’ve a good mind to invest in some Blackflag or other air-borne nerve gas…

Not to mention sacking the entire sorry bunch of useless oxygen-thieves who masquerade as museum staff. Especially Administration, who I specifically informed that I was ducking into the Oubliette to work on my magnum opus, a mural composed entirely of diatoms depicting Inky’s spectacular space victory with side panels celebrating peak moments in my favourite arachnid’s career. There I was, carefully positioning a rosette of dinoflagellate (Karenia brevis to be precise), revelling in the improvement that purchasing a Klaus Kemp Micromanipulator had made compared to the old pig’s-eyelash brush I’ve been using, when BANG! Not only had the door slammed shut but somehow it seemed to have locked and bolted itself. No matter how much I hammered on the door, shouted and even screamed, no one seemed to hear me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have made the soundproofing quite so industry-standard… Still you would imagine that SOMEONE would have come looking for me.

My incarceration has been a disaster on every level. Not only have the staff blatantly abandoned their duties, El Cacaracha Libre scuttled wild, and Dog only knows what has become of poor RoT without my benign protection, but I was forced to survive by eating my entire diatom collection. You have no idea how long it took to compile and what microscopic rarities it contained. Not to mention the sheer beauty of the mural that will now never be seen. I simply don’t have the heart to start over…

I’m attempting to comfort myself by reviewing our Haekel diatom exhibit – what would Art Nouveau have been without his inspiration? – and I suppose I’ll think of something.

Oh well, I suppose I’d better put on my happy face and go hear how Inky’s mission went.

Ernst Haeckel: Kunstformen der Natur 1899-1904 >

Giorno Nuovo Haeckel lithographs >

Addendum: I have discovered the direct supplier for my diatom micromanipulators and Zrax patented diatom mountant! MicrAP Enterprises >

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