Odd

A really disturbing dolls-head, found in the stamp sand at an old copper mill. June 1994. I've always been both drawn to and repelled by the weirdness of this picture, and I remember being a bit spooked even while taking it. This version is pretty much as-is, only gamma-shifted to enhance the B-W contrast a bit. Time and exposure to UV and the stamp sand had turned the doll head's hair pink and its vinyl skin a ruddy grey. If you click on the map link, you can actually see the stamp sand on the satellite view, stretching a half-mile out from the mill and several miles south along the Lake Superior shoreline. Couldn't get away with creating a moonscape like that nowadays.

A really disturbing dolls-head, found in the stamp sand at an old copper mill. June 1994. Added some severe manipulation of the color curves. Really brings out the eyes. And not in a good way.

Black swans (or maybe geese).

The day before I left Essen, I decided I had to find this place that I'd seen in a coffee-table book about the metro area. It was too weird to pass up. It was actually rather difficult to find, but I ended up stumbling across it just as I was about to give up, having walked through way too many garden allotments and gotten too many dirty looks. What this is is a (former) monument to the Freikorps or paramilitaries of the early interwar period, in ways the forerunners of the SA thug squads which Hitler later rode to power. The monument has long since been stripped of its bronze memorial plaques, and is now just a Stonehenge-like ring of brick columns topped with either concrete or stone ashlars. For scale, note the woman sitting on top of the ring, reading (just left of center).

Braaaaaaaaains!!! This was a work in progress, which I unfortunately neglected to photograph when complete. It's a chunk of Great Stuff insulating foam, sprayed in coils on a painter's dropcloth, and split while the foam was still rising with a piece of fishing line to form two lobes. The first attempt at painting it didn't quite take (as seen here, following a bath of ammonia to strip the shellac undercoat). But the second attempt was truly breathtaking -- a faintly greenish-gray undertone, with traces of arterial red and venous blue in the crenellations applied between several layers of clear shellac and finally overlaid with clear shellac mixed with a tiny amount of irridescent acrylic base. Glistening and not a little gruesome. It was a performance prop for a friend's kid. The completed item was mounted under a plastic display dome, with a number of wire "probes" attached to the crenellations, to form a "control unit". Regrettably, it was most likely destroyed in Katrina. Until I stumbled across this picture today, I hadn't thought to ask about it's status.

Beware of Finns bearing globes.

Who knew that West Texas had such a rich diversity of insect life?

Some bizarre and disturbing lifeform on the side of the Cameron summit.

This thing was about the size of a softball, and looked just like the unreal mushrooms you see in cartoons or the kitschy wallpaper in old ladies' kitchens. Who knew such things really existed?

Damned alien teenagers and their gang tags!

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

Must have been a doozy of a sin, whatever it was.

A caryatid holding up the roof in Mikulov

The famous bone chandelier at the center of the ossuary, which is reputed to contain at least one of every bone in the human body.

"Now, now...human skulls are not for baby to play with!"

The famous bone chandelier.

The famous bone chandelier. Regrettably, having no tripod, I wasn't able to get very good pictures of the massive bone pyramids in the corners of the ossuary.

The Schwarzenberg coat of arms, with one of the bone pyramids in the background.