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SCIENCE MARCHES FORWARD: OPOSSUM REMAINS INERT - A VIDEO DIE-RY (email the scientist)
My significant other passed along a little book to me last night. It's called "Perfect Crimes" and it includes a lovely section on Jeffrey Dahmer which explains how he started his criminal career.
Reducing animal bodies to bones.
It is a dangerous path I have chosen, but I will persevere.
I will carefully watch for changes in personality, however. One has already occurred - I have become a pretty compulsive handwasher.
And I won't be having the Blood Pudding.
So I guess that is really two changes. This experiment is sort of like wearing the LOTR ring of power (it changes you, for the 7 folks who didn't see the movie). Except that instead of a ring I have a bucket of offal and instead of power I have stench. I suppose when the bucket of offal starts to dry out I'll be left with a pretty gruesome ring.
Which won't bother the Jindo who, even with the bucket-of-death in the middle of the yard, continues to be calm and collected:
That dog scares me sometimes.
Anyway, I rush out to see what changes have occurred in the experiment and what I see looks less like a boiling cauldron and more like a "normal" thing rotting (This here is in Real Video, so some quality has been sacrificed for small bandwidth):
latest video ( downloadable - featuring a general shot of the whole thing and then the brave and intrepid search of one maggot for just the 'right' hole in the thing that once was an opossum)
I don't know about anyone else, but I can barely look at this kind of thing without thinking of Dick Cheney running into hiding after 9/11.
I'd love to take some shots of what this looks like at night (because science does not recognize the clock!), but my significant other has become squeamish about the whole deal and increasingly spends time locked in the bathroom weeping or on the cell phone complaining about me to friends and family.
Observations: Things seems to be slowing down a bit. I mean this in a meta (an anagram for "meat" -- which alarms me in some obscure way) sense as the video clearly shows that maggots continue to rush frantically about as though they have some place to go. The maggots kind of remind me of commuters that way. But the "thing that used to be an opossum" is no longer changing as quickly as it once did. If there can be torpor to death, my ex-opossum has achieved it, or a zen-like state similar to it.
Some Rubrics By Which we can Judge
the Hideosity of The Project |
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| Smell: Just generally like death .. which I'm getting pretty used to. |
Consistency: Something that combines all the unfortunate aspects of swiss and limburger cheeses mixed with charnel-house droppings. I'm guessing, of course, cause there's no way I'm actually touching the damned thing. My sleep is troubled enough already. |
Visual Appeal: The swirling evil and useless trundling of maggots ones sees at a Republican Convention (Or a Democratic one, if you prefer). |
Bloating: Pretty much hidden underwater.. so I'll say Shelley Winters in "The Poseidon Adventure" or Moby Dick post-spearing. |
Will the maggots make it: redux?