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OPOSSUM STILL DEAD: I NEARLY KICK THE BUCKET (email the scientist)
The next morning I went out to the back corner of the yard and the smell seemed to be wafting towards a different neighbor's yard. And the smell, if anything was worse. I could see this was going to be a problem and for a brief moment my committment to the mighty task of science waned and I considered just burying the damned thing. But I have a noble goal, and so I will persevere until the neighbors complain or the police come by. Therefore I moved the bucket to the middle of our lawn. The thing inside (I was having a really hard time calling it an opossum any more) didn't just smell, it also looked pretty bad with an enormous swelling of maggots rising towards the bucket rim. The maggots did their work so quickly that by the time I got the digital camera on the job, the swelling had broken to reveal bones (please remember to click on the images to see the larger versions):
A closer look reveals that while the maggots are now bigger there are also few of them. I am far from an expert on social mores of the maggot world, but I suspect evil: Whilst the majority of the opossum is still available for buffet, I believe the maggots have fallen upon each other in an orgy of cannibalism.
Here's the closer look I promised:
Just to prove that I am a master of many kinds of technology, I also took a little movie of the monstrosity, which you can see here in Quicktime:
The smell was really bad and I had to try to figure out a way to contain it.
Calling upon the vicarious experiences I have gleaned from reading my significant other's collection of books (Histories of the attrocities of the Third Reich, a variety of True Crime novellas, and some dog-eared pornography) I procured a plastic bag and now the whole maceration contraption looks a bit like this:
Tomorrow I plan to go online and see if a bigger container is suggested by the rotting-flesh brigade of the bone-collectors. I have several other containers in mind and the experiment will continue!
Some Rubrics By Which we can Judge
the Hideosity of The Project |
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| Smell: Worse than the cow charnel-houses outside Coalinga |
Consistency: Varied, Icky, and moving. Rotten Tapioca
with meat lumps. |
Visual Appeal: I'd really rather watch soccer. |
Bloating: Bigger than Geraldo's ego |
Can the goddamned thing swell up any more?