Rev. Syung Myung Me also has an excellent recommendation on the comments for the Signal 30 post. I had to share this on the front page too – because it sounds like a must-have to me!
“On a similar tip to the Car Crashes book, have you ever seen Negativland’s book/CD Deathsentences of the Polished & Structurally Weak? It’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done, and, well, I just about adore almost everything they’ve ever done. The CD isn’t the thrust of the project — though it’s not bad, it’s not sample-based, and really noisy, so something different than you’d expect from them — the book is.
“The book is a collection of photos; they went to junk yards, and took photographs of car wrecks, then looked in the wrecks for detritus of their previous owners. The layout is the car on the left page of the spread, the item on the right, along with a transcription of what it says (as random people’s handwriting is often hard enough to read when it’s not on crumpled paper taken from old, wrecked cars). It’s REALLY cool — I highly recommend checking it out.”
Sounds like the kind of project I might dream up! Great stuff – and the website has a few samples. I just ordered a copy of it for myself. They are available for purchase from the website.
Library
On my “Signal 30” post, I mentioned one of my all-time favorite morbid books: Car Crashes and Other Sad Stories. This is a collection of photographs of car crashes taken in the ’40s and ’50s by Mell Kilpatrick. In the comments to this post, Jim kindly shared a link to the wonderful blog Dull Tool Dim Bulb which contains newly discovered photographs by Kilpatrick taken with a dashboard cam. Although the photos aren’t the usual gory stuff, they are still very interesting. There’s something about car crashes from that era that are uniquely fascinating. The cars were such huge hunks of metal that it seems amazing they could be twisted and mangled so thoroughly, and the lack of seatbelts made for some extremely peculiar fates for the unfortunate passengers. Compelling stuff!
Mell Kilpatrick Dashboard Camera
Web
Today’s Automated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Robert Williams was the first man ever killed by a robot. On January 25, 1979, Williams climbed into a storage rack at the Ford Motor’s Flat Rock casting plant to retrieve a part because the parts-retrieval robot malfunctioned. Suddenly, the robot reactivated and slammed its arm into Williams’ head, killing him instantly.
The second death by robot happened just a couple of years afterwards in 1981. Kenji Urada, a 37-year-old Japanese maintenance engineer was working on a broken robot at a Kawasaki plant when he failed to turn it off. The robot’s mechanical arm accidentally pushed him into a grinding machine.
Culled from: Neatorama
Generously submitted by: Bex
Never trust a robot, I always say! It hasn’t failed me yet.
Facts
I apologize for my absence the last couple of weeks. My surgical leave ended and I went back to a maelstrom at work, which has zapped much of my free time. In addition, I’ve been working on a photo project for an upcoming Chicago ghost book by Ursula Bielski, so there hasn’t been much time for the blog. However, the oppressive heat appears set to lift this week and I can see a comforting fog beginning to roll in very soon. I’ll make it up to you with some nifty goodies in the near future.
Sundry
Emily sent me a link to an entry on the Surgical Technologists blog that displays photos and descriptions of 20 of the most frightening devices ever to tear a human body asunder. I’m not sure which is the most horrifying, but with names like “Tonsil Guillotine,” “Scarificator,” and “Artificial Leech”… well, let’s just be glad that we didn’t need surgery back in those days!
20 Scary Old School Surgical Tools
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“My grandfather passed away in 2003, but we can’t really classify it as ‘passing away’. One evening that year we got a frantic call from my grandma that my grandfather had fallen and needed to be rushed to the hospital. We hurried to my grandparents house and as soon as we pulled up we knew something bad happened. The sidewalk into the doorway of the house was full of droplets of blood, and when we went inside there was even more blood. They had all tile floors and there was a blood trail leading us to his room. They had already taken him in the ambulance by this time. Inside his room it was like a horror film. My aunt was mopping up the blood but that honestly wasn’t helping. There was blood on the ceiling, blood on the walls, blood on the furniture and even the tv which was very far from his bed where it happened. The floor looked as if someone had poured buckets and buckets – well you get it. In the end my grandmother had to throw away everything in the room, including both the box spring and mattress.
“The cops came later on to investigate the scene because it didn’t appear as if someone had just fallen and hit their head. You’re probably wondering what happened… Well we found out later that while he was resting something busted in his stomach which the doctors believe was a aneurysm. My grandmother said that blood just came gushing out of his mouth and nose everywhere. He must have freaked out (understandably) and jolted up maybe to find a way to stop it. He slipped on the blood that he had already sprayed on the flood and fell, hitting his head on the sharp corner of his end table which took a chunk of meat out of his forehead.
“The most ironic part of it was he died two days after my grandmothers birthday. Also, he was a very violent man; he was abusive and had even put a gun up to his son’s head, pulled the trigger but it jammed. Maybe it was karma’s way of saying happy birthday to my grandma.
“P.S. His death certificate says Cause Of Death was Cancer.
Does that sound like cancer to you?”
I think it could definitely be some sort of damned dramatic stomach cancer. Talk about leaving a mark when you go!
My Brush With Morbidity archives are available to peruse at The Asylum Eclectica. If you have a perfectly ghastly story you’d like to share, contact The Comtesse.
Brush
