Beavis 1 of Chicago
Jun. 25th, 2006 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
browngirlI just read the MOST AWESOME thing ever while eating my lunch. The Mummified Rat. It's ten pages of clear photos and snarky commentary as a webcomicist and her husband (interracial couple, btw) mummify their recently deceased pet rat according to Egyptian custom. Complete with scarab and unguents and shwabtis and four layers of bandages.
I was delighted, amused, and charmed. Maybe I'll do such a project myself sometime.
*watches the cat run away from me*
*laughs*
I was delighted, amused, and charmed. Maybe I'll do such a project myself sometime.
*watches the cat run away from me*
*laughs*
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 08:52 pm (UTC)babbling
Date: 2006-06-25 08:59 pm (UTC)1. *sniff* It makes me remember my dead rats. Even though the last couple were black berks, not buff variegated like Beavis. The gigantic testicles and the cold whiteness of their feet bring it back. Not in a bad way, just in an I-miss-them way.
2. Wow, did they not know how tough mammal fur/skin/etc is? Like, why you need scissors and a scalpel? I opted out of dissection both times in high school, and even I knew that. And how about some rounded tweezers instead of your fingers? Also, uh, gloves?
3. Why doesn't some helpful person* photoblog *that* for an educational website? A dissection, I mean. For those of us who abstained because of the value of the animal's life, not because we were squeamish. * And by person, I mean qualified person with a rat or frog who'd already been slated for dissection or else a pet dead of natural causes like this one.
4. I think Beavis I might have had megacolon. It's genetically linked to variegated / spotted rats. And while I've never seen a rat's large intestine before, they mentioned in the comments that it was swollen, and it did look it.
5. I have this scientific/morbid wish they did a blow-up photo of the lung picture, so I could see the texture close up. Because yep, that's myco all right: a rodent strain of the same bacterium that causes pneumonia in humans, number one killer of pet rats, and I want to know what the lesions look like close up. The references describe it as a 'raspberry' texture.
6. Yeah, I can understand why they wouldn't want to do the brain bit. There was a chapter in one of the earlier Rat Health Care Books about rat dissection, and I can't remember how she described getting the skull open (it didn't involve a nutcracker; she was looking for pituary tumours) and it didn't sound fun or easy.
7. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. He was a most excellent fellow.
8. The comedy of errors thing: does this ever *not* happen when folks are caring for their dead? I want to know. Are there graves without graveyard humour? When my grandmother died, I remember sounding like a Valley Girl talking to the receptionist at the nursing home, and that the woman next door had dementia and was loudly moaning the whole time we waited; and there's this extremely moving account of a home cremation in The Pagan Book of Living and Dying in which at one point they accidentally froze the body.
9. Wow, he turned out beautiful.
Random link
Date: 2006-06-26 12:18 pm (UTC)http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/nyregion/26brazil.html
Mark S.
Re: Random link
Date: 2006-07-05 01:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-27 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-27 05:44 am (UTC)