As a psychology student, I find myself OBSESSED with this show and other taboo things. There is currently a marathon of it on National Geographic right now and this episode is about taboos about the dead. There is a man who makes a living by selling things related to murderers-from dirt of a dump site to letters and autographs of the murderers themselves. There are people in the justice system trying to shut his business down and make it illegal to buy or sell the possessions of murderers.
I believe this man should be allowed to continue his business, because it is the legal distribution and true preservation of history. We, as humans, like to hide the negative parts of our history but it is as important-if not MORE important-than the “good” parts. These people trying to shut him down say that it isn’t right to make a profit from someone who caused so much suffering-but that is all any type of historical preservation is.
Why should Charles Manson’s letters be of a lesser value than an 18th or 19th century depiction of the Revolutionary war or photographs of Holocaust victims? It is all human history and it all deserves to be documented. The painters of the Revolutionary paintings were paid for their work and the photographers-unless specifically military controlled-were also paid for their photographs.
Murder will not stop happening just because we try to hide the evidence in a filing cabinet and the murderers will not change for the better just by being forgotten. If people had forgotten Jack the Ripper, his crimes would not have been less horrifying or grotesque-there would just be no one to remember how carnal and broken we can actually be as a species.
Love wherever you are.
painting the nails of a corpse
The gun that Aileen Wuornos used to murder her victims.
Images from the Body Farm by photographer Sally Mann.
An adult fly, a pupa case, and a maggot.
An old heart attack will appear as a white scar on the outside of the heart wall.
Chapel of Bones (Evora, Portugal)
A reverent grimness falls over every soul visiting this chapel (Capela dos Ossos) inside the Church of São Francisco. Its walls and columns are covered in artistically composed designs of bones from more than 5,000 exhumed skeletons. Meticulously placed ribs and tibias form the bands of arches. Tightly arranged skulls and vertebrae fill every gap. Each bone was arranged by a 16th-century Franciscan monk with a message (and a dark sense of humor): Life is temporary.
Chapel tours ($3) take you beneath the entrance’s warning, which is translated, “We bones, lying here, for yours we wait” and into the beautifully lit chapel. On one wall a child’s dried corpse hangs from a chain. That a display can be both gorgeous and gruesome at once is troubling. Here’s a 360-degree view.
![tuesday-johnson:
ca. 1863, [albumen portrait of a gentleman in a chainmail tunic, posing as a dying soldier], Adrien Constant de Rebecque
via the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photographs Collection](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m48j75KZL31qa51rdo1_500.jpg)
ca. 1863, [albumen portrait of a gentleman in a chainmail tunic, posing as a dying soldier], Adrien Constant de Rebecque
The gallbladder is opened to reveal these 4, yellow, multifaceted beautiful calculi (stones) that are about 1.5 cm in diameter each. The stones try to leave the gallbladder with the bile but can’t fit through the 0.2 cm opening of the cystic duct. This size difference causes the patient lots of pain and that is the reason for the surgery. The stones are intermixed with a dark brown bile. The color of the bile and stones always varies. The color corresponds to the composition of the stones. Usually yellow stones are made primarily of cholesterol and black/pigment stones are made primarily of of bilirubin.
The ring on this lady’s finger was the only evidence allowing the woman’s identification to be made after a plane crash. This was good enough for a positive I.D. becayse her son readily identified the ring.
It’s a Saturday
You know what that means
