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While in London for a few days during this past week, I was out looking around, sometimes at random, sometimes with a planned destination, but always easily sidetracked. Although it is not Halloween, and I'm not a fundamentally morbid sort of person, for some reason I kept stumbling on some scenes or stories related to mortality, that terminal end to the human condition.
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This first photo is from a churchyard which although just a few minutes walk from some of the biggest tourist attractions in London, is probably one of the least visited sites in that city. I thought the story was rather fascinating. One could perhaps even say, with no pun intended, that is a rather shocking story. What do you think ?
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I would fear, in the case of good gentleman Bacon above, that there may have been, as is often the case in such situations, some jokes which may have circulated at the time, despite the tragic nature of the event. Some wag would likely have asked, "Did you hear about Bacon ? He got grilled last night". I also thought, when seeing this memorial stone, of a line from a song which I've mentioned previously in these pages, The Wheel, by the Grateful Dead, which goes :
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"The wheel is turning and you can't slow down
You can't let go and you can't hold on
You can't go back and you can't stand still
If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will"
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Another more recent case, which just happened last week, will also, I fear, become the butt of any number of jokes in poor taste, despite the tragedy involved. Walking by the entrance to Waterloo Station, I couldn't help but notice the headlines placarded there about a woman being killed by a buttock implant operation. To learn more I picked up one of the free newspapers there. (since when are newspapers free ?) I was appalled to learn that a 20 year old British woman had flown to Philadelphia, my home town in the states, to have silicone injected into her posterior, presumably to increase the volume and roundness of it, in an illegal procedure performed in a hotel room. Shortly after having the injections of silicone, she died of an apparent heart attack.
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What sad and deranged times we live in, when a young woman, who in all probability had a perfectly fine and functional (for sitting on) posterior, felt she had to spend a small fortune in plane fare and the scandalous cost of doing so, to get a foreign substance pumped into her body to, supposedly, enhance her appearance to members of the opposite sex. We live in a world getting sicker by the minute, I'm afraid to say. The perpetrator of the procedure apparently disappeared, with the money of course, shortly after the young lady fell ill.
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It used to be that grisly headlines sold newspapers. Now they give them away, but they must need to keep their circulation numbers up in order to sell advertising space in their free paper.
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While out strolling in London I came across a number of skulls in various places, not that I was particularly looking for them, they just sort of appeared. So, along the lines of works of art which incorporated skulls into them centuries ago, illustrating the Vanitas theme, or the biblical quote, "Vanitas vanitatum, omnius vanitas", I offer you the following images to contemplate. This first was right on the banks of the Thames, at the entrance to some sort of horror show. (I didn't go in...)
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These next four were inside the British Museum, where we stopped to have a peek at the Elgin marbles, the Assyrian bas reliefs from Nineveh, and some Egyptian mummies, among other marvels. This first one was supposedly from an Aztec treasure trove, but was determined to be a fake. (Lynne, It might look great in sunglasses, no ?)
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This next mask was created on a real skull . . .
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Am not sure what this was all about . . .
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Ancient Egyptian skulls . . .
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This last was from the same graveyard where William Bacon's memorial stone was. Vanitas.
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