The Morthouse

From Morbid Anatomy: A coin-operated automaton, likely from the 1920s, of a mortuary, complete with corpses on tables, busy morticians, and mourners bobbing their heads. Click through to see more pictures.

Image source: Skinner Auctioneers, via Morbid Anatomy.

Today’s Links

Here you go. The first one is really important:

• Morbid Anatomy Library needs your help after severe water sprinkler damage following a fire in their Brooklyn building. They are accepting donations of money, time, talent, books, and artifacts.
• “Titanic vs. Lusitania: Who Survived and Why?”: Smithsonian takes a look at the two maritime disasters (from 1912 and 1915, respectively). Interesting: “The passengers of the Lusitania had less than 20 minutes before their ship sank, and in such a life-and-death situation, social scientists say, ‘self-interested reactions predominate.’ It didn’t matter what the captain ordered. […] The Titanic, though, sank slowly enough for social norms to hold sway.”
• This is very sad: “Taiwan Woman Commits Suicide While on Facebook” (via Order of the Good Death on, well, Facebook): “Lin’s last Facebook entries show her chatting with nine friends, alerting them to her gradual asphyxiation. One picture uploaded from her mobile phone depicts a charcoal barbecue burning next to two stuffed animals.”
• Related: “On the Challenges of Studying Suicide” (via Maria Popova/Brain Picker on Twitter)
• Fascinating post over on Life and Six Months about handling the preserved, tattooed skin of a long-dead person: “What appears here as ‘goose-flesh’—a skin sensation associated with both surface feelings of cold and visceral fear or horror —is frozen in the moment of death through the speedy preservation of the excised fragment. What I am actually seeing and feeling as I examine this skin is the presence of a very familiar living skin-sensation—except in this case it is caused by rigor mortis of the arrector pili muscles in the dermis. My own skin prickles at the thought. This specimen was likely removed in haste, soon after death and under rudimentary surgical conditions.”

Today’s Links

Thought I’d start doing link-roundup posts somewhere on the spectrum between occasional and frequent. This is the kind of stuff I already post on Facebook and Twitter, so if you like this sort of thing, consider liking and/or following me over theres.

Here you go:

• Summer was the most dangerous time for Tudors (BBC News): Fun ways to die in Tudor England! Best sentence: “Dr Gunn’s previous study highlighted a number of strange ways that people died, in accidents involving archery, dancing bears and early handguns.”
• Police plea on macabre book find (BBC News): A 300-year-old ledger bound in human skin, found in the middle of a road in Leeds. “In the 18th and 19th Centuries it was common to bind accounts of murder trials in the killer’s skin —known as anthropodermic bibliopegy.”
• NPR did a story on what can happen to our Facebook and Flickr accounts when we go to the Big Cloud in the Sky.
• If you aren’t already following Caitlin Doughty on Twitter or Facebook, you should be.

Advice Needed: How Important Are Names?

I recently realized how cheap domain names could be, so last week I bought a domain name for one of my other Tumblrs, one that gets only a fraction of the traffic that this Tumblr gets. Even so, I like having it, and it feels simpler and more “official.” (As much as I love the Tumblr platform, I’d really prefer for “.tumblr.com” not to weigh down the URLs of my blogs.)

Why haven’t I gotten a domain name for this Tumblr?

Well, I’ve hit a bit of a conundrum. I started this blog almost a year ago as a way to share my interest in things like bog bodies, catacombs, and exhumations, not thinking I’d end up with many (or any) readers. Sadly, I didn’t put too much thought (or research) into the naming of the thing. I called it “The Ossuary” because ossuaries are interesting, and ossuary is just a pretty neat word. (Also, “theossuary” wasn’t yet taken on Tumblr, and “ossuary” was.)

I should have done my homework, because it turns out there are a handful of what appear to be well established sites on the Web known as “The Ossuary”:

• ossuary.com: Called “The Ossuary.” Nicely designed site; interesting, morbid content. 
• the-ossuary.com: Also called “The Ossuary.” This appears to be a concert photographer’s site.
• If you type in theossuary.com, you get redirected to a site called “Best Horror Movies.” Appears to be a well established forum for horror movie fans.

So, I’m starting to wonder if I should change the name of this site. I want a name that represents this blog creatively and relevantly—a name that I can easily use as a “name.com” domain, but one that doesn’t step on anyone else’s toes or risk being confused with someone else’s site. 

Here’s why I’m writing this: I’d really like to hear your opinions. Do you think changing the name really matters or could possibly confuse people? I’m thinking I should probably keep my Tumblr-based URL as theossuary.tumblr.com, but this could redirect to the new domain. 

What do you guys think? And what do you think I ought to call it? (Send me a Tumblr message, email me at theossuaryblog [at] gmail [etc], or reply here.)