KUNSTKAMMER KID

GHOST DOG!

What every child wants for Halloween.

Photo: Ghost Dog of Prospect Park by David Klein. On display at Site: Brooklyn’s 2nd Annual Hand Pulled Prints: The Current Practice in Printmaking.

MR. BABOON IS WAITING

FAVORITE MONSTER #4: SCONE CREATURES FROM HELL

What may be the weirdest alien encounter ever recorded took place not in the backwoods of mainland USA, but on a country road near Domsten, Sweden on December 20, 1958.

Hans Gustavsson, 25, and Stig Rydberg, 30, driving home from a dance around 3 AM, saw a saucer-shaped craft set on a tripod in a clearing in the woods. Leaving the car to get a closer look, they were immediately attacked by four lead-gray spongy creatures about 4 feet tall. “They seemed to lack extremities, looking sort of like scones or skittles...” Although the scone-things clutched them firmly, “it was difficult to defend oneself because one got no real hold on the jellylike creatures.” The frantic hand-to-pseudopod combat ended once Rydberg broke away and blasted the car horn. The scone-men skittered away back to the saucer which rose straight up in the sky and disappeared. A perfunctory investigation by the Swedish military was inconclusive.

SHOW ME THE DOUGH

Nothing says loving like some hot buttered buns from the oven.

The horror. The horror.

True that.

Molly’s paean to the Fortean Times was a refreshing voice in the otherwise utterly predictable NY Times Magazine. More here:

TWO HEADS BETTER THAN NONE

If you’ve ever wondered what a cabinet of curiosities exhibition would look like at the Brooklyn Historical Society, you got something of a preview at last week’s lecture “Tales from the Vault: The Skeletons in Our Closets.”

Unfortunately, most of the natural history items collected by the BHS (nee Long Island Historical Society) were deaccessioned over the last century, but there are approximately 8,000 treasures (artifacts) still hidden away from the public. A number were displayed just for the event, including gold dust from the Great Gold Rush, a napkin with Abraham Lincoln’s blood, and these two wax heads from the old World in Wax Musee at Coney Island. Donated by owner Lillie Santangelo, one is a likeness of Nat King Cole, the other is either a smiling serial killer or the possible next victim of a serial killer. The experts were uncertain.

SPIDER SISTERS

Can’t help but see a connection between these Spider Women creations of artist Liz Craft and the Old Witch from EC Comic’s Haunt of Fear. Distant relative perhaps?

VAMPIRE SQUID FROM HELL

Fearsome looking vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) looking right at you.

From Louis Joubin’s Resultats des Campagnes Scientifiques accomplies sur son yacht par Albert 1er Prince Souverain de Monaco (1905?).

HERE KITTY KITTY

Where can you find a stuffed two-faced kitty (a Walter Potter original making its American debut), Weimar erotica, and the five-volume Physica Sacra (not as rare as the Necronomicon, but exceedingly bizarre)?

You can find them all and dozens of other oddities gathered at the new exhibition, The Collector's Cabinet, opening January 24-March 29 at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. If you've got $40 you can grab preview party tickets for the show tomorrow night.

ANDROIDS AND MARTIANS, OH MY!

Silly Martians! Non-humans grasping at humanity was the subject of the provocative Some Are More Human, one of my favorite offerings at this year's NY International Fringe Festival. Best scene: Android hunter and Martian boy both pretending to be what they're not while watching a Little League game. Show's over, but you can enjoy writer and director Matt Bayer's gallery of disturbing paintings here. Monsters distinctly less than human. 

A MORBID MUSEUM GROWS IN BROOKLYN

A collection of all things strange and wonderful (a place after my own heart), the Morbid Anatomy Museum is celebrating its first week anniversary today in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. "Surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture" because, really, someone has to do it, this jewel box of a museum displays all manner of chilling and grisly mementos of mortality--from death masks and human skulls to deformed animals and postmortem photographs. You think they may be having problems finding a night security guard?

THE AURORA AIRSHIP

About 117 years ago practically to the day, something extraordinary crashed in Aurora, Texas. Here's what happened according to the local papers:

From the Dallas Morning News, April 17, 1897

About 6 o'clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing around the country. It was traveling due north and much nearer the earth than before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour, and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed over the public square and when it reached the north part of town it collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went into pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge's flower garden. The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard and, while his remains were badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world. Mr. T.J. Weems, the U.S. Army Signal Service officer at this place and an authority on astronomy gives it as his opinion that the pilot was a native of the planet Mars. Papers found on his person, evidently the records of his travels, are written in some unknown hieroglyphics and cannot be deciphered. This ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several tons. The town is today full of people who are viewing the wreckage and gathering specimens of strange metal from the debris. The pilot's funeral will take place tomorrow.

R.I.P. little alien pilot. Maybe one day we'll uncover what really happened to you.