MUMMIES!!

are they the best meme ever, or what? (more later)

:(

i missed this programme but i love the idea of self-mummifying - not for a good few years but when the time comes, it's quite a considerate thing to do - think of the time money and effort you'll save your kids

i. when i went to the british museum as small mark s w.parents i made a decision not to look at the egyptian mummy so as not to frighten myself that night => i studiously looked at everything else in the room (my smaller sistrah tht i wz v.feeble and a weed)
ii. THE BOG PEOPLE BY P.V.GLOB!! Glob was a Danish scholar connected w.the Cobra group and the Situationists!! There's a poem by Seamus Heaney abt Grauballe Man ("poured the thick river of himself" ?) and a couple of the others.
iii. DJ ÖTZI!!
iv. The Japanese Buddhist monks live on nothing but pinebark for months/years — so were all resinous inside plus v.emaciated — then they went down into a hole and ate arsenic powder, which kills the stomach bacteria off as well as them. They rang a little bell as long as they lived; when the bell no longer sounded, the other monks covered up the hole for three years. If mummification was successful, then they got put in a little grotto in the temple and revered. If not, then they were secretly buried. It's been illegal since the 1890s.
v. The whole Curse of the Mummy thing goes back to a story by Bram Stoker (I think). Conan Doyle also wrote one: which sppoked me as a schoolkid — the museum keeper thinks he sees a malevolent living glint in its eye as he passes through the room it's kept in. (It's Aztec, though, I think, not Egyptian...)
vi. As a kid — aged 7? — I recall the trailers for Hammer's "The Mummy" after I'd just seen something like The Incredible Journey, or similar. It involved a lot of furnaces being stoked, as I recall.

You WOULD remind me of that Bog Man in the British Museum. CREEPIEST GUY EVER. I had nightmares about him for, like, a year after I saw him. I am both drawn to and repelled by mummies, bog men, ice men, etc. I get all curious to see them, then I can't stop seeing them in my mind, eeeeeeh...

Whenever archaeologists find bodies, there's always a lot of paperwork to do with the local police. When the chap in the British Museum was found, he was listed in the paperwork under the name 'Pete Marsh'.

A few years earlier, a partly-preserved human head was found in the same bog. The police took one look at it and thought 'oh yes?', because about ten years before a woman living nearby had gone missing. The police were convinced her husband had killed her, but had no evidence at all - not even a body. So, as soon as this head popped up, they went round, arrested him, and told him they'd found a head. He immediately confessed to murdering his wife and burying her body in the bog; a few months later, he must have been mightily pissed off when the routine tests later showed that the head was actually a couple of thousand years old.

me as the mummy

http://www3.sympatico.ca/mark.slutsky/mummysmall.jpg