Links, Curiosities & Mixed Wonders – 20

Oct27

Monday morning according to Gustave Doré.

First of all some quick updates on my upcoming activities.

On November 1st, together with my friend Luca Cableri, I will be a guest of the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival. We will talk about wunderkammer and space, in a conference entitled The Space Cabinet of Curiosities. — November 1st, 10 am, Teatro Miela in piazza L. Amedeo Duca degli Abruzzi 3, Trieste.
On November 3rd I will speak at Sadistique, the BDSM party organized every first Sunday of the month by Ayzad. The title of my speech: “Pains are my delight”: Erotics of martyrdom. Obviously, given the private context, access is forbidden to the curious and to those who have no intention of participating in the party. Consult prices, rules of conduct and dress code on the event’s official page. — November 3rd, 3-8 pm, Nautilus Club, via Mondovì 7, Milano.
[BTW, Ayzad recently launched his own podcast Exploring Unusual Sex, you can listen to it on Spreaker and Spotify]
I remind you that on November 14 we will inaugurate the collective art exhib REQVIEM at Mirabilia Gallery in Rome. The exhibition, organized by l’Arca degli Esposti and curated by Eliana Urbano Raimondi and myself, will feature works by 10 international artists within the context of the only Roman wunderkammer. — November 14th, 7 pm, Galleria Mirabilia, via di San Teodoro 15, Roma.

Without further ado let’s start with our selection of links & weirdness!

In his encyclopedia of natural history L’univers. Les infiniment grands et les infiniments petits (1865) Felix A. Pouchet recounts this case which allegedly happened in 1838 in the French Alps: “A little girl, five years old, called Marie Delex, was playing with one of her companions on a mossy slope of the mountain, when all at once an eagle swooped down upon her and carried her away in spite of the cries and presence of her young friends. Some peasants, hearing her screams, hastened to the spot but sought in vain for the child, for they found nothing but one of her shoes on the edge of a precipice. The child was not carried to the eagle’s nest, where only the two eagles were seen surrounded by heaps of goat and sheep bones. It was not until two months later that a shepherd discovered the corpse of Marie Delec, frightfully mutilared, and lying upon a rock half a league from where she had been borne off.“
The Halloween special which caused the death of a young boy, pushing the BBC to pretend it never even aired: a nice video tells its story. (Thanks Johnny!)
Fungi that turn insects into zombies: I’ve already written about them a few years ago in my little ebook (remember it?). But this video about the cute Entomophthora muscae has some truly spectacular images.

Seal your grandfather in a glass cube, place it on the lawn instead of garden gnomes; or use his head as a “paper weight or as a door stop“. A 1903 patent which strangely enough didn’t catch on.
If you are a bit paranoid by nature, don’t read the following sentence: a Japanese stalker who had been harrassing a pop star managed to find out the woman’s address by studying the reflections in her pupils every time she posted a selfie.
Hollywood’s most famous femme fatale of the silent era was also a goth: the dark sex appeal of Theda Bara.
When the obsession for shows becomes art: here are some of the fiberglass sculptures by Costa Magarakis. (Thanks Eliana!)

Italian creativity really tops itself when it’s time to put up a scam. A small business car ran over a wild boar in the Gallura countryside, forest rangers were alerted so that the accident damage could be reimbursed by the municipality. It turned out the boar had been just taken out of a freezer. (Article in Italian, via Batisfera)
In 1929, the Australian writer Arthur Upfield was planning a detective story and while chatting with a friend he came up with a method for the perfect murder. So perfect in fact, that his novel couldn’t even work, because the detective in the the story would never have solved the case. He needed to find a flaw, one small detail that could expose the culprit. To get out of the impasse the frustrated writer began to discuss the plot with various people. Little did he know that one of these listeners would soon decide to test the method himself, by killing three men.
I sometimes think back to a little book I had as a kid, Idées Noires by Franquin. Here is an example of the Belgian cartoonist‘s very dark humor.

“The law is clear: everyone who kills another person will have his head cut off.”

A little anecdote on the healing power of music. At the end of the 1950s the great pioneer of free jazz Sun Ra (who claimed to be an alien from Saturn) played a gig at Chicago mental hospital, as an experiment of musical therapy. It is said that a patient, who hadn’t moved or talked in years, got up from her chair, walked over to the piano, and shouted: “You call that music?“
What would you like to happen to your social media accounts after your death? Here is a handy guide to digital death discussing your various options. (Thanks Kaylee!)
The more we study plants, the more we get the idea that they could have come kind of conscience. I will quote the opening of this article from last year, including all the relative links: “Under poor soil conditions, the pea seems to be able to assess risk. The sensitive plant can make memories and learn to stop recoiling if you mess with it enough. The Venus fly trap appears to count when insects trigger its trap. And plants can communicate with one another and with caterpillars. Now, a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of anesthetics, including the types that are used when you undergo surgery.“
If this isn’t enough, meet the mold with 720 sexes.

In the photo above, model Liliana Orsi exhibits the new “atomic hairdo” created by the Roman hairdresser Eusebio De Luca in 1951, and inspired by the atomic mushrooms of the infamous Bikini atoll tests. Apparently, making this masterpiece of dubious taste took 12 hours of coiffure.
If you can read Italian, I’ve been interviewed by Obiettivo Investigazione, a forensic science magazine.
Sophie Blanchard was the first female professional aeronaut, and made 67 ascents in a balloon. She died in 1819 when, while flying over the rooftops of Paris in her hydrogen-inflated balloon, she had the not-so-bright idea of lighting fireworks.
The always excellent Elizabeth Harper wrote a nice piece on the Sanctuary of the Beheaded in Palermo.

An since we’re talking about beheadings, I took the above photograph at Vienna’s Kriminalmuseum di Vienna. It is the head of criminal Frank Zahlheim, and on the cultural implications of this kind of specimens I wrote a post last year that you might want to re-read if you’ve got five minutes.
Greta Thunberg becomes a pretext to clarify what autism and Asperger’s syndrome really are (article in Italian).
In England, back in the days, whenever someone died in the family the first thing to do was tell the bees.
To conclude, I leave you with a picture of a beautiful Egyptian mummified phallus (circa 664-332 a.C.). See you next time!

ILLUSTRATI GENESIS: Day 5

Sep22

Seven little lessons to rediscover our everyday life.
Seven days for the Creation… of a new perspective.

DAY 5 – THE ANIMALS OF WATER AND HEAVENS

The well-known detail: Around April-May, when plants become luxuriant again after winter hibernation, for many people the nightmare starts again: rhinitis, asthma, conjunctivitis. If you don’t know anyone who is allergic to pollens, maybe you are the one: in Italy, about one person out of five suffers from this chronic disease.

Dandelion seed – photography by Matthias Kabel

The background: Pollens cause the majority of allergies, but it is wrong to assume that these tiny grains are the only little creatures flying in the wind.

In 1910 some German scholars had already discovered some algae that live in the air; in the 1960s Malcolm Brown of the University of Austin, Texas, noticed that some types of clouds contained certain species of algae along with many other microbes.
Actually, a beautiful and seemingly clear sky is not only crossed by flocks of birds: to date, 1,000 species of bacteria (with a concentration of about 500 per m³), 40,000 varieties of fungal spores and hundreds of algae have been detected in the air, along with mosses, protozoans and liverworts.
Not to mention the most minute insects or those spiders that produce a spider’s web and let it swing until a draught lifts them in flight and then drops them off many miles away.

Aerobiologists, who study this biodiversity throbbing in the atmosphere, use the term ‘aeroplankton’ to define these floating organic particles as a whole, by analogy with the floating aquatic organisms carried by sea currents or freshwater pools.
Aeroplankton literally means “wandering in the air”: although unable to fly autonomously, some of these living creatures eat, evacuate and even reproduce in the sky.

The Fifth Lesson: Try and imagine that the sky is like the sea. Trees and plants grow attached to the seabed, mammals and other land creatures crawl and walk over them. We are also there, submerged under thousands of meters of an ethereal substance, where countless tiny creatures frantically move. Above the surface of this enormous ocean that covers everything, nothing is left but the sidereal cold.
This image – which is not so visionary, as we have learned – may not provide a relief against allergy symptoms … but our small daily problems are going to be less burdensome when looked at from this perspective, bearing in mind that we are part of a strange, absurd, gigantic bubble in which everything is impregnated with life.