i LOVE this blog!! I don’t know who the guy is, but he blogs a different skull picture everyday. I can honestly say that 99.9% of the skulls are damn creative. He sure has an eye for skulls. I reckon that you can share the skull pictures you have with him too. So skull away people.
Here’s a few of my favourites from Skull-A-Day
Of all nursery rhymes, I’ve always felt that this one had a touch of eerie-ness to it. I associate it to horror movies where children ghosts are involved. Imagining them, shiny white translucent figures, singing and playing at the abandoned playground, in the middle of the night. The wind blowing stongly, leaves rustling, the swing swinging with no one sitting on it. The children singing in their soft echoey voices, giggling as they all fall down. *shudders* eeek creepy.
So I did a bit of research to find out more about this nursery rhyme. And as it turns out, the association of horror to it has been developed by others a long time ago. Although most have argued that this supposed urban legend is not true, the creepy tale behind it sure does give the nursery rhyme character.
Ring a ring o’roses,
A pocketful of posies,
ah-tishoo, ah-tishoo,
We all fall down
“Ring a Ring O’Roses” or “Ring Around the Rosie” is a nursery rhyme or folksong and playground game that first appeared in print in 1881 but was recited to the current tune at least as early as the 179os. Its origin is often mistakenly connected to the bubonic plague.
The words of Ring a Ring O’Roses differ by region, although the tune remains consistent. The playground game that accompanies these verses also changes by region, but the most common form consists of participants standing a circle and holding hands, followed by skipping in one direction as they sing the tune that accompanies these verses. At the end of the line We all fall down, the group usually falls down into a heap.
plague interpretation
A popular misinterpretation connects the poem with the Great Plague of London in 1665, or perhaps earlier outbreaks of bubonic plague in England; however, there is no evidence that Ring a Ring O’Roses and the plague were connected, until it was proposed in the 20th century. Regardless, this interpretation has entered into popular culture and is often used to reference the plague obliquely. This plague link seems to originate with the movement for finding origins of folk-songs, which was popular in the early 20th century. For example, according to the common forms of the plague interpretation, the ‘falling down’ has always involved dropping to the ground as the rhyme is recited, evoking the death from the plague. This conjecture has evolved into a complex explanation suggesting possible plague interpretations for every line.
According to this interpretation, the first line evokes the round red rash that would break out on the skin of plague victims. The second line’s “pocket full of posies” would have been a pocket in the garment of a victim filled with something fragrant, such as flowers that aimed to conceal the smell from the sores and the dying people. Alternatively it referred to the common belief that fresh-smelling flowers, nosegays, and pomanders would purify the air around them thus warding off disease as was believed from the miasma theory of disease . A third possibility includes the idea that “posies” are derived from an Old English word for pus, in which case the pocket would be referring to the swelling sore. Finally: “atishoo, atishoo,” the sneezing before “we all fall down”, the eventual succumbing to death.
European and 19th century versions of the rhyme suggest that this ‘fall’ was not a literal falling down, but a curtsy or other form of bending movement that was common in other dramatic singing games. Moreover, due to the wide variety of versions sharing the same dance and the same tune, the Opies and many scholars since conclude that the tune and the dance-game form the core of ‘Ring a Ring O’Roses’, rather than the words which are popular today. Before 1898 there appeared to be no English-language standardisation of the words, and Lady Gomme collected 12 versions of the game, only one of which is similar to the ones that are conjecturally linked to the plague.
The plague interpretation is generally considered by scholars to be completely baseless. It is first cited in 1951 by Peter Opie and Iona Opie. It thus forms an important reference for 20th and 21st century culture, but has never been authentically linked to any early version of the rhyme, and the evidence points strongly against it.
Germany, December 13, 2002
Germans woke up on Thursday to the traumatic news that a man had killed and eaten another man with the victim’s approval. The deed was allegedly recorded on video.
For a day at least, Germans may have forgotten about their economic woes as the country found itself hitting the headlines over an altogether more frightening story.
Police have arrested a man who claims to have killed and eaten a friend and recorded the deed on video, allegedly with the victim’s approval. The 41-year-old suspect from the picturesque Hessian town of Rotenburg told police that he met his 42-year-old victim, microchip engineer from Berlin, via the Internet. He said they shared homosexual and cannibalistic leanings.
Police said they found the video along with deep-frozen flesh and skeletal remains when they searched the suspect’s flat. The video allegedly shows the suspect and the victim agreeing on the murder. Forensic experts are searching the house and surrounding areas for the remains of other possible victims.
internet clue
The killing goes back to 2001. Police only stumbled across it after the man placed another ad in the Internet looking for a man willing to allow himself to be killed and eaten.
The last alleged case of cannibalism in Germany dates back to 1995 when a 33-year-old man standing trial for murder and robbery claimed to have eaten parts of his victim, however, his claim was never proven.
Police say the suspect is not mentally disturbed. A spokesman said had that been the case he would have been placed in a psychiatric unit instead of a detention cell.
The man is being held on suspicion of murder which carries a life sentence. Should his story check out, he would only face a charge of so-called murder by demand. A conviction would be punishable by a maximum of five years in prison.
Berlin, May 11, 2005
A man who was inspired by a high-profile cannibal case to kill and dismember a man he met on the Internet was convicted of murder today and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The Berlin state court ordered Ralf Meyer, 41, into psychiatric care.
Meyer, who went on trial last week, had acknowledged killing Joe Ritzkowsky, a 33-year-old music teacher from Berlin who answered an Internet solicitation for sadomasochistic sex.
Meyer “must be dealt with accordingly and locked away,” presiding Judge Peter Faust said as he announced the verdict.
Meyer’s defence team said he was inspired by the case of Armin Meiwes, who was convicted in January 2004 in western Germany of killing and eating a man he met on the Internet.
In the Berlin case, Ritzkowsky’s corpse was dismembered and parts were stored in Meyer’s refrigerator in his apartment in the working class Neukoelln neighbourhood, but Meyer testified that, after the killing, he was too disgusted to actually eat the body parts.
“My biggest mistake was that I didn’t go into psychiatric care at the right time,” Meyer said in a closing statement to the court. He added that “I would like to apologise to the people who knew him, his friends and his mother.”
Ritzkowsky was likely suffocated, but a doctor testified he could not be certain of the exact cause of death because the corpse was so badly mutilated.
Harp’s Hill is near the Pond River in western Muhlenberg County, Ky., not far from Highway 62. There is a crossing in the road near Dixon named Harp’s Head and one of the crossing roads is named Harp’s Head Road. Some miles away, the precise location lost to time, there is a cave known as Harp’s House. To tell how these places earned their names is to tell the story of Micajah (Big) and Wiley (Little) Harp, America’s first known serial killers.
They passed for brothers, but were cousins, sons of brothers John and William Harpe, Scottish immigrants to Orange County, N.C. The boys were named William (Micajah/Big), son of John, and Joshua (Wiley/Little), son of William. Big Harp and Little Harp left home as young men in 1775, aiming to become overseers of slaves in Virginia. Career plans diverted by the American Revolution, the Harps instead became Tory outlaws in a gang that roved the North Carolina countryside, raping farmers’ daughters, pillaging livestock and crops, and burning farmhouses. In the attempted kidnapping of one young girl by a Tory rape gang, Little Harp was shot and wounded by local Patriot Captain James Wood.
In 1780, the British took the Tory irregulars and their Cherokee allies into their ranks. The Harps fought under Tarleton’s command at King’s Mountain, near the Carolinas’ border, in October; in the Battle of Blackstocks in November, and in January 1781 in the Battle of Cowpens. Shortly after Cowpens, the Harps left the army and joined up with their Cherokee confederates, taking part in the Indian raid on Station Bluff, now Nashville, Tenn. They soon returned to North Carolina, where they kidnapped Captain Wood’s daughter, Susan, and another local girl, Maria Davidson. The kidnapped women would serve as wives to the Harps until the bitter end.
The Harps took the women across the Appalachians to the Cherokee-Chickamauga town of Nickjack, in the vicinity of what is now Chattanooga, Tenn. Along the way, a member of the gang, Moses Doss, objected to the brutal treatment of the women and the Harps killed him. The Harps, with their wives, lived in the Indian village at Nickjack for over a decade. In that time, they participated in British-backed Indian raids on Kentucky settlers west of the mountains, such as the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782. Later they took part in the Indian attack on Bledsoe’s Lick in Tennessee. The night before the Americans finally wiped out Nickjack in 1794, the Harps received warning and managed to escape with their women before the battle.
While living at Nickjack, both women had given birth twice; each time, the fathers murdered their babies. Counted with Moses Doss, the four infanticides made five known killings before 1797, or so, when the Harps settled in a cabin on Beaver’s Creek near the frontier capital of Knoxville, Tenn. On June 1, 1797 Little Harp legitimately married Sally Rice, the daughter of a local minister, bringing the number of Harp wives to three.
a killing rampage
After two killings, one in Knox County and one on the Wilderness Trail, the Harps left Tennessee in December 1798 for Kentucky, where they killed two traveling men from Maryland. The Harps liked to gut their victims and fill their stomach cavities with rocks to weight them down so they’d sink in a river.
When they stopped for breakfast on Dec. 12, 1798 at John Farris’ Wayside House near the Big Rock Castle River, despite the thieving and killing along the way, the Harps were hungry and flat broke, filthy and bedraggled. But there was a kind and generous young man who was staying at the inn who invited them to be his guests at his table.
His name was John Langford. He was traveling from Virginia to pay a visit to a friend in Crab Orchard, Ky. A halfway house, such as Farris’, was a place many travelers stopped and waited in order to join up with others heading in the same direction. It was wild and dangerous countryside and earned its name, The Wilderness. Two cattle drovers found Langford’s mutilated corpse in The Wilderness two days later, when their cattle shied off Boone’s Trace into the woods at the scent of blood.
The body was taken back to John Farris’ Wayside House and the innkeeper pointed the way to the Harps and their women, who were apprehended outside Crab Orchard. All five were imprisoned, but the Harp men managed to escape, leaving their women to face justice alone. The Harps fled for the barely settled and ill-defined Henderson County, Ky. Eventually, the Harp wives were released, escorted out of town with three infants born in jail, and one gift horse among them.
As abused and frightened women are wont to do, they immediately swapped the horse for a canoe, traveled west along the Green River toward the Ohio River, and a reunion with the husbands Harp at a pirates’ den called Cave-In-The-Rock on the Illinois side.
The Kentucky frontier had gone on alert after the Langford killing and the Harps’s subsequent escape from the law in Danville. Kentucky Gov. James Garrard ordered out a posse after the Harps. The posse caught up with the Harps in a cane field in Central Kentucky, but the posse members were too afraid to try to capture them, allowing them to get away through the cane.
In disgust, one of the posse members, Henry Scaggs, went to the home of Col. Daniel Trabue, a Revolutionary War veteran and wilderness pioneer, who lived near the present Columbia in Adair County, to report the posse’s cowardice.
As Scaggs sat in Trabue’s house discussing the critical situation, Trabue’s young son’s dog, covered in blood, came limping into the yard. The dog had left the house earlier with Trabue’s 13-year-old son, John, who had been sent along the old buffalo trace to borrow some flour and seed beans from a neighbor. About two weeks later the boy’s body was found, decomposed, dismembered, and dumped in a sinkhole. The seed beans were there, but the flour was gone.
In response to the boy’s murder, the governor issued a $300 reward on each of the Harp heads.
In the reward notice issued at Frankfort, Ky., Micajah Harp was described as being about six feet tall, as robustly built with an erect carriage, about 32 years old, with short black hair growing low on his forehead. He wore “a striped nankeen coat, dark blue woolen stockings, leggins of drab cloth and trousers of the same as the coat.” Wiley was “very meagre in the face…looks older but really younger, and has likewise a downcast countenance. He had on a coat of the same stuff as his brother’s, and had a drab surtout coat over the close-bodied one.”
Moving north, the Harps killed a man named Edmonton, a settler named Stump, and, upon reaching the Potts Plantation near the mouth of the Saline River, they killed three men sitting around a campfire. Meanwhile, the posse, out after the Harps on their race across the state, summarily hanged some dozen criminals along the way, and ran a host of outlaws out of Kentucky. They stopped just short of Cave-in-The-Rock, on the Illinois side of the Ohio River, or they might have had the Harps that day.
This limestone opening in a bluff above the Ohio River at its junction with the Saline, was a well-known natural landmark throughout the 18th century, a rest stop for river travelers migrating west. Beginning in the 1790s and until the 1830s, it was home base to an entire corporation of river pirates. In 1798, the most famous among them was Samuel Mason, a Revolutionary War veteran turned river bandit. His large sign outside invited weary travelers to “Wilson’s Liquor Vault and House for Entertainment.” His unwary victims were beaten and robbed in the cave, and sometimes they lived to tell about it.
Mason’s favorite prey was the slow-moving flatboats laden with produce for Natchez and New Orleans. Pretending to be local pilots guiding the boats through shallow parts of the rapidly flowing and eddy-ridden Ohio, the pirate/pilot would steer the craft onto a shoal, where Mason’s gang would pick it clean and take the goods to market themselves. With the arrival of the Harps and their three wives and three babies, the relatively non-violent ways of the river pirates took a murderous turn. After a few Harp games of taking travelers to the top of the bluff, stripping them naked, and throwing them off, they were politely asked to leave.
The final stretch of slaughter took place soon after this, in July 1798, when the Harps returned to Eastern Tennessee. The victims included a farmer named Bradbury; a man named Hardin; a boy named Coffey; William Ballard, who was cut open, filled with stones, and dumped in the Holston River; James Brassel, with his throat ripped apart on Brassel’s Knob; John Tully, father of eight. On the Marrowbone Creek in south central Kentucky, John Graves and his teenaged son, out planting crops, had their heads axed. Moving toward Logan County, the Harps came upon a little girl, whom they killed, as they did a young slave on his way to the mill. Once in Logan County, near today’s Adairville, near the Whippoorwill River, they butchered an entire migrating family asleep in their camp, but for one son who survived.
Stopping at a spot on land owned by Samuel Wilson on the Mud River near Russellville, they rested, thinking what to do to escape the posse in close pursuit. (The clearing in which the Harps rested later became a staging ground for Methodist revivals.) Sally’s four-month-old daughter was fretful, perhaps hungry. Big Harp took the baby from her mother’s arms, swung her by her tiny ankles, and brained her little head against the trunk of a tree.
still, the killing continued
A man named Trowbridge who’d gone for salt at Robertson’s Lick, his torso hollowed out, loaded with stones and sunk in Highland Creek; Maj. William Love, an overnight guest at the Stegall home in Webster County, who snored; the Stegall’s baby who cried; Mrs. Stegall who screamed when she saw her infant’s throat was slit. Gilmore and Hudgens, returning from the salt lick with their hounds, came upon the Harps. Pretending to be the posse, the Harps accused the two men of being Harps, arrested, and executed them. As they prepared to kill settler George Smith, near where the Harps were living in the cave that came to be known as Harp’s Home, the posse rode in.
After a chase, the posse left Big Harp’s body on Harp’s Hill, took his head to the crossroads, Harp’s Head, and displayed it there on Harp’s Head Road, attached to an oak tree, for the sober contemplation of passers-by. Before dying, Big Harp confessed to 20 murders, probably not counting the babies. Estimates are as high as 40, but usually around 30.
The three captive Harp wives lived on: Sally Rice returning to her family in Knoxville, remarrying, and migrating west with her new husband and her father, by way of Cave-In-The-Rock; Maria Davidson, called Betsey Roberts, marrying, moving to Illinois and raising a large family; Susan Wood becoming a weaver, raising her surviving daughter in Tennessee, and dying there.
As for Wiley, Little Harp, he rejoined the pirate Mason at Cave-In-The-Rock for about four years, when he showed up in Natchez with Mason’s head for the reward money. Little Harp was recognized, hanged, cut down, and decapitated, his own head impaled along the side of the Natchez Trace outside Old Greenville in Mississippi Territory, as a warning to outlaws.
At least that is one story of the end of Wylie Harp, and it makes a good ending to the story of The Harps, Big and Little.
The US military has devised a way to ensure its troops in battle need never go hungry – with dried food that can be rehydrated using dirty water or urine.
The meal comes in a pouch that filters out 99.9% of most toxins, says New Scientist magazine.
The aim is to reduce the amount of water soldiers need to carry.
The firm behind it says soldiers should only use urine as last resort – as the membrane can not filter out urea, which in the long term causes kidney damage.
“The pouch – containing chicken and rice – relies on osmosis to filter the water or urine,” the New Scientist Magazine reported.
The liquid passes through a membrane, thin sheets of a cellulose-based plastic with gaps just 0.5 nanometres wide.
It means only clean water can reach the food, and the bacteria is left behind.
‘Indestructible sandwich’
The idea has come from the Combat Feeding Directorate, part of the US Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts.
The organisation is also the brains behind the “indestructible sandwich”, which can stay fresh for three years.
A spokeswoman said the dehydrated pouches would reduce the current weight of 3.5kg for a day’s food supply of three meals, to 0.4kg.
But Hydration Technology Inc, in Albany, Oregon, which made the membrane, warned it is too coarse to filter out urea so soldiers should only use urine in an absolute emergency.
Engineer Ed Beaudry was quoted by the New Scientist as saying that the body would not find using urine to rehydrate food toxic in the short term, but in the long term it would cause kidney damage.
the purpose
The Mütter Museum was founded to educate future doctors about anatomy and human medical anomalies. Today, it serves as a valuable resource for educating and enlightening the public about our medical past and telling important stories about what it means to be human. The Mütter Museum embodies The College of Physicians of Philadelphia ’s mission to advance the cause of health, and uphold the ideals and heritage of medicine.
history
In 1858, Thomas Dent Mütter, retired Professor of Surgery at Jefferson Medical College , presented his personal collection of unique anatomic and pathological materials to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia . Our collection now boasts over 20,000 unforgettable objects. These include fluid-preserved anatomical and pathological specimens; skeletal and dried specimens, medical instruments and apparati; anatomical and pathological models in plaster, wax, papier-mâché, and plastic; memorabilia of famous scientists and physicians; medical illustrations, photographs, prints, and portraits. In addition, we offer changing exhibits on a variety of medical and historical topics.
treasures
Our one-of-a-kind treasures include:
The Saint Valentine’s Day massacre is the name given to the shooting of seven people (six of them gangsters) as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois in the winter of 1929: the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by Bugs Moran. Former members of the Egan’s Rats gang were also suspected to play a large role in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, assisting Al Capone.
On the morning of Friday, February 14,1929 St. Valentine’s Day, six members of George ‘Bugs’ Moran’s gang and a mechanic who happened to be at the scene were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the S-M-C Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side. They were then shot and killed by five members of Al Capone’s gang (three of whom were dressed as police officers). When one of the dying men, Frank “Tight Lips” Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, “Nobody shot me.” Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida at the time.
the shootings
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre resulted from a plan devised by Al Capone’s gang member Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn to eliminate Bugs Moran, the boss of the North Side Gang and Capone’s main rival. The massacre was planned by McGurn partly in retaliation for an unsuccessful attempt by Frank and his brother Peter Gusenberg to murder him a month earlier. The rivalry between Moran and Capone for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging business led Capone to accept McGurn’s plan.
The plan was to lure Moran and his men to the SMC Cartage warehouse on North Clark Street on the pretext of receiving hijacked bootleg whiskey. A five-man team led by Fred “Killer” Burke would then enter the building, three disguised as police officers, and kill Moran and his men. The chief architects of the plan, McGurn and Capone, would be well away from the murder scene when it happened. Before Moran and his boys were set to arrive, Capone placed lookouts in the apartments across the street from the warehouse. Wishing to keep the lookouts inconspicuous, Capone had hired two thugs, Harry Keywell and his brother Phil, for this job.
At around 10:30 on St. Valentine’s day, five members of the McGurn gang drove to the warehouse in a stolen police car; three were dressed in police uniforms and two in street clothes. The Moran gang had already arrived at the warehouse. However, Moran himself was not inside. One account states that Moran was supposedly watching the warehouse, spotted the police car and fled the scene. Another account was that Moran was simply late getting there.
In any case, one of McGurn’s lookouts confused one of Moran’s men for Moran himself; he then signaled McGurn’s men and they approached the warehouse. The three phony cops, carrying shotguns, entered the warehouse. Inside they found six members of Moran’s gang and a seventh man who was actually a mechanic fixing one of the cars, and not a gangster at all. It was actually the leader of the Purple Gang that called Moran for the delivery of booze. The phony cops told the seven men to line up facing the back wall; there was apparently no resistance as the Moran men thought their captors were real cops. Then the Capone men in street clothes quietly entered, pulled off their coats, and starting shooting with their Thompson sub-machine guns. All seven men were killed in a storm of two hundred bullets, some one hundred of which found their targets, and two shotgun shells according to the coroner’s report.
To show by-standers that everything was under control, the two Capone men in street clothes came out with their hands up, led by the three phony cops. The only survivor in the warehouse was Johnny May’s Alsatian dog, named High Roller. When the real cops arrived, they first heard the dog howling. On entering the warehouse, they found the dog trapped under a beer truck and the floor covered with blood, bullet shells, and corpses. The victims were identified as James Clark (AKA Albert Kachellek), Frank “Tight Lips” Gusenberg, Peter Gusenberg, Adam Heyer, Johnny May,Reinhart Schwimmer, and Al Weinshank.
Commenting later on the massacre, Capone reportedly said “I don’t give a damn killing those people”.
aftermath
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre marked the beginning of the end to Moran’s power. Although Moran suffered a heavy blow, he still managed to still keep control of his territory until the early 1930’s, when control passed to the Chicago Outfit under Frank Nitti. The massacre also brought the belated and full attention of the federal government to bear on Capone and his criminal activities. In 1931, Capone was convicted of income tax evasion and went to prison for 11 years. The massacre no doubt took down both Moran and Capone and left the bloody turf war they had with each other with a stalemate.
The garage, which stood at 2122 N. Clark Street, was demolished in 1967; the site is now a landscaped parking lot for a nursing home. The wall used for the shooting was dismantled brick by brick, sold at auction, and shipped to George Patey of Vancouver, a Canadian businessman. Patey used these bricks in the men’s restroom wall of the Banjo Palace, a bar with a Roaring Twenties theme. After the bar closed, Patey began trying to sell the bricks as souvenirs.
The guns, weapons, and other evidence taken from the scene of the massacre are currently being held in the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department in Michigan.
No one was ever arrested for the St. Valentine’s Day murders.
