for wunderkammer: a paleolithic flute

q: what were you doing 40,000 years ago when your stone age neighbors were rocking out on paleolithic flutes made out of woolly mammoth femurs? a: you were probably some stinking monkey scratching your hairy butt with pinecones.

in celebration of the fact that you and me have had a musical culture that spans over 40 millennia, let us start a paleolithic flute/theremin jam band. IT WILL BE A POLITICAL STATEMENT and we will rock out on the top of the sphinx wearing sequins and goat hides.

for wunderkammer: a northrop frye postage stamp

my seventeen year search for the elusive northrop frye postage stamp is finally over thanks to gold star comment-writer, slobone. also minted is frye’s fellow countryman (and intellectual sparring partner) marshall mcluhan. and now i am off to petition the united states government to start making its own line of literary theorists stamps instead of ugly little birds and boring flowers that nobody cares about. philately + literary criticism 4 life.

for wunderkammer: tableau synoptique d’oreilles d’a. bertillon

mysterious lurker, ramona has submitted this beatiful taxonomy of the ears of french criminals to the wunderkammer. says ramona:

The attached is for the wunderkammer – now I am suffering from anxiety that it is not sufficiently wunderful [editor’s note: ramona, stop being a dork].   I love it as its own thing, but i also particularly love the odd story of its creator, M. Alphonse Bertillon, who never let the obtuseness of lesser mortals (everyone else) stand in the way of his rampant o.c.d.   He was even written up by Ida Tarbell, a gobsmacking interview at which to have been a fly on the wall.   I would like to think that there are picturesque names for each characteristic shape, but I fear M. Bertillon had no room for poetry in his cataloguer’s soul.

one of the five hearts (a metaphor) of the ragbag is my obsession with the names of things. let you and i be the poets that bertillon was not. to wit:

my left ear is an emesis basin (fig. 3) and my right ear is somewhere between a bass clef (fig. 44) and a wilting orchid (fig . 16).

for wunderkammer: an “in god we rust” quarter—a die error on some of the kansas state quarters lead to this amusing happenstance.

for wunderkammer: a mame (mini) bonsai (pictured right, pictured left is, apparently, a bootleg recording of phish’s 1995 halloween concert—this DOES NOT go in the wunderkammer.)

sauce

for wunderkammer: a mummified rat king

mumblelard’s wunderkammer submission: authenticated trinitite (petrified atomic blast).

if anyone out there in internetville has a spare petrified atomic blast lying about and wants to send it to me, i will trade you a choco taco™ for it.

for wunderkammer: a sand fulgurite (“petrified lightning”).

for wunderkammer: an oliphant (a wind instrument from the middle ages made from elephants’ tusks or (allegedly) unicorns’ horns.)

the shaw phonetic alphabet

in his will, george bernard shaw instructed his executors to offer a reward of £500 for a totally new set of characters, not based on any previous alphabets, to represent all the sounds in the english language. some thought this to be shaw’s last sarcastic joke, and indeed this aspect of his will was contested. however, in 1958 a committee selected a submission. In 1962 penguin books published an edition of shaw’s androcles and the lion with english text in roman letters and the shaw phonetic alphabet on the facing pages. this was the only book ever printed in this type.

from the aiga journal of graphic design 15, no. 2.

for wunderkammer: a karner blue butterfly (a rare lepidoptera species that was first discovered by vladimir nabokov)

from parasols:

Juvenal Duskywing, a butterfly named after Juvenal, the Roman poet and satirist.

all literary butterflies are de facto wunderkammer material HOWEVER, this is one boring-looking butterfly. juvenal deserves more flair.

for wunderkammer: hot wheels rear loading 1969 volkswagen beach bomb ($72,000)

for wunderkammer: a pirolette of my profile (note: this IS NOT a pictrue of me)

for wunderkammer: a carbonado (a black diamond that came from outer space)