The very idea that a baby body requires different fluids than a full-grown corpse somehow arouses my fancy. The concepts of death and infancy are heavy on my mind these days, as my generation comes into power, as my father shakes his massive head and warns that gas and food prices will never go down again, that this is what he was warning us about since the fifties.

I think he prays that this isn’t the End of History. At some point, he says (or I remember him saying, admittedly different things), innovation and notable incidents will cease to occur or we will become inured to them, and history will stop. There will no longer be anything worth recording. Humanity will subside into limbo.

This video (and stupidly enjoyable track) must have cost at least a cool million, but the Backstreet Boys didn’t care. They were riding high on Lou Perlman’s buggery adoration, they had legions of teenage girls at their beck and call, and it was the nineties, so nobody bothered telling them (to their faces) how stupid they looked, acted, and sounded.

When you’re that rich, that vaunted, and that young, what can you do? Why, a Thriller rip-off that will live in infamy for a chosen few, of course. Namely, me and the rest of the malcontents who were impressionable youth during that cursed era.

And by impressionable, I mean we thought backflipping werewolves were pretty much the golden apex of comedy. We still think that.

Why am I posting this on Cthursday? Pay attention to the gangly gentleman in the deceptively intellectual glasses, with the briefcase and the obsession with staring away from the camera at exactly a ninety-degree angle. I assume he’s supposed to be some sort of Jekyll/Hyde manifestation, but his bifurcation is less monstrous than it is piscean. My hypothesis is that some concept artist snuck that one past the board, giggling into his dog-eared copy of the Compleat Works of Lovecraft the while.

But I don’t think backflipping werewolves had to be snuck past anyone.

I think I speak for everyone at ectomo when I say that no house of any worth is complete without its own corpse hallway. Located in Sicily, the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo illustrate why. Built in the 16th century after the Capuchin monastery outgrew its cemetery, and housing its first corpse in 1599, that of the mummified Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, it soon became a burial place of note for anyone who was anyone in Palermo.

Relatives paid annual fees to keep their quondam loved ones in their proper places. However, if payment was not forthcoming, the body was stored in a considerably less dignified manner, such as a shelf. The catacombs are divided into seven different categories: Men, Women, Virgins, Children, Priests, Monks, and Professionals. Corpses are propped up in niches, lie on shelves, and hang up on the walls. The bodies run the gamut from skeletons to the extremely well preserved; a prime example of this being that of Rosalia Lombardo, one of the last to be interred. Two years old when she died in the 1920s, her body is still remarkably intact. How this was accomplished is unknown as the embalmer, Professor Alfredo Salafia, took his method with him to his grave.

The catacombs have become a popular tourist attraction and I can see why. Seems like a good place to bring a book and just, you know, chill.

King’s Capuchins’ Catacombs of Palermo Italy [Kimberly King] : Kircher Society