Posts Tagged ‘taxidermy’
“Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines”*…
… they do, however, run more terrestrial risks. The weasel above (a stone marten) hopped over a substation fence at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and was electrocuted by an 18,000 volt transformer (an incident that knocked out power at the facility). Lest its notoriety fade, the once-weasel is about to go on display at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum.
The stone marten is the latest dead animal to go on display at the museum. It joins a sparrow that was shot after it sabotaged a world record attempt by knocking over 23,000 dominoes; a hedgehog that got fatally stuck in a McDonalds McFlurry pot, and a catfish that fell victim to a group of men in the Netherlands who developed a tradition for drinking vast amounts of beer and swallowing fish from their aquarium. The catfish turned out to be armored, and on being swallowed raised its spines. The defense did not save the fish, but it put the 28-year-old man who tried to swallow it in intensive care for a week…
The tale is preserved in full at: “Totally stuffed: Cern’s electrocuted weasel to go on display.”
* Steven Wright
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As we hold the pose, we might spare a thought for David Wilkinson; he died on this date in 1852. A mechanical engineer and machinist, Wilkinson (no known relation to your correspondent) played a key role in the development of machine tools in the U.S. (initially in the textile industry): he invented the metal lathe and process for cutting screws.
“What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin”*…
A Ferris wheel of chipmunks, formerly part of the Dead Pals of Sam Sanfillippo
Last October, Atlas Obscura co-presented a Rogue Taxidermy Fair with its fellow Brooklyn-based (and former Roughly Daily subject) Morbid Anatomy in celebration of a new book on “rogue taxidermy.”
The Crucified Sheep
Read more about– and see more of– the Fair at “The Crucified Sheep, Tattooed Frogs, and Crocheted Skeletons of a Rogue Taxidermy Fair in Brooklyn,” and revisit (R)Ds earlier look at rogue taxidermy here.
* Mark Twain
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As we strike a pose, we might recall that it was on this date in 1697 that Isaac Newton received and solved Jean Bernoulli’s brachistochrone problem. The Swiss mathematician Bernoulli had challenged his colleagues to solve it within six months. Newton not only solved the problem before going to bed that same night, but in doing so, invented a new branch of mathematics called the calculus of variations. He had resolved the issue of specifying the curve connecting two points displayed from each other laterally, along which a body, acted upon only by gravity, would fall in the shortest time. Newton, age 55, sent the solution to be published, at his request, anonymously. But the brilliant originality of the work betrayed his identity, for when Bernoulli saw the solution he commented, “We recognize the lion by his claw.”
“But when I make a good [taxidermy] mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said, Let such critter be dead, and I said, ‘F**k You, he can still play the banjo”*…
Afke and Floris met as students at Rietveld Academie. They began collaborating under the name This Work Must Be Designed by Idiots, incorporating dead animals in their work for shock value. Here, a peacock’s plumage turns into a beautiful garment.
This isn’t your gun-toting great-uncle’s taxidermy: there are no hunting trophies mounted on smoking den walls or Teddy Roosevelt-inspired museum dioramas. In Taxidermy Art: A Rogue’s Guide to the Work, the Culture, and How to Do It Yourself, Robert Marbury introduces a world of bionic crocodiles, pigs in Chanel bowties, impalas with human faces, and polar bears climbing on refrigerators (get it?).
In 2004, with two friends, Marbury established the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists (MART). In the decade since, Rogue Taxidermy–a genre of pop-surrealism that fuses traditional taxidermy with mixed-media sculpture–has evolved into a veritable subculture of people obsessed with turning dead animals into art. “Not since the Victorian era has taxidermy been so popular,” Marbury writes in the book’s introduction. (The Victorian era saw a trend of taxidermists like Walter Potter [see also here] making anthropomorphic tableaux of squirrels smoking cigars and kittens having tea parties.)…
See many more examples– and find out why taxidermy has become again as popular as it was in the Victorian Era– at “Inside The Bizarre World Of Rogue Taxidermy.”
* Christopher Buehlman, Those Across the River
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As we ponder retrospective reanimation, we might send carefully calculated birthday greetings to Lewis Fry Richardson; he was born on this date in 1881. A mathematician, physicist, and psychologist, he is best remembered for pioneering the modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting. Richardson’s interest in weather led him to propose a scheme for forecasting using differential equations, the method used today, though when he published Weather Prediction by Numerical Process in 1922, suitably fast computing was unavailable. Indeed, his proof-of-concept– a retrospective “forecast” of the weather on May 20, 1910– took three months to complete by hand. (in fairness, Richardson did the analysis in his free time while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I.) With the advent of modern computing in the 1950’s, his ideas took hold. Still the ENIAC (the first real modern computer) took 24 hours to compute a daily forecast. But as computing got speedier, forecasting became more practical.
Richardson also yoked his forecasting techniques to his pacifist principles, developing a method of “predicting” war. He is considered (with folks like Quincy Wright and Kenneth Boulding) a father of the scientific analysis of conflict.
And Richardson helped lay the foundations for other fields and innovations: his work on coastlines and borders was influential on Mandelbrot’s development of fractal geometry; and his method for the detection of icebergs anticipated the development of sonar.
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