Not sure how your olfactory sensibilities are but my bet is the rotting-flesh stink of the corpse flower blooming in the Botanic Gardens will take your breath away.
Funny how people have been excited to check it out. Raw sewage, rotting flesh, smelly gym socks – why the devil would you?
And it’s on livestream. Kind of living dead zombie stuff, but it’s not the only corpse peculiarity this region boasts.
Take the vivianite crystal deposits around Demons Bluff at Anglesea. Supposedly good for ridding your carcass, mind and aura of negativity and unwanted energy. More fun is the fact it can also present as blue crystals on human corpses as the decomposing body reacts with iron. Like something from Pirates of the Caribbean.
If you like shiny blue stuff, you’ll love mother of pearl and its opalesque iridescence. Been studied out at Deakin by researchers trying to find a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak for wizardry such as stealth bombers and other military applications. The US Air Force was stumping up greenbacks for the work.
Waxy corpses are nothing new to shipwreck salvage crews encountering submerged bodies that won’t decompose due to a soapy substance formed by fat in bodies deprived of bacteria in Davy Jones Locker.
For rotting corpses, though, Loung Pordaeng, the glass-entombed monk I found at Koh Samui, should take the cake, what with all the heat and humidity since he died in 1973. But, nope, he’s cool as a cucumber in his sunglasses, well mummified and not much worse for wear than the 79 years when he passed.
He’d adhered to a special diet, perhaps tea from the Chinese lacquer tree used to polish tables and used by Japanese monks looking to mummify themselves. Talk about Menulog on steroids. Makes you wonder about the insides of those old winos who got by on metho and boot polish.
Speaking of food deliveries, you might watch how much yellow food you consume, especially the dusty Dorito variety. The journal Science tells us this tartrazine dye makes biological tissue transparent. If the Dorito dye can make mice skin transparent what’s it doing to your guts?
Of course, we all drank and scoffed from uranium crockery once. Beautiful green translucent radioactive stuff. Not sure how close it is to the vitreous glass-like nature of atomic waste these days but it’s unlikely to become popular again. I doubt it ever really turned your urine fluorescent green but it’s a fair bet it gave the hydrangeas a fright.
On the nuclear front, with all the sunspot geomagnetic action about lately, celestial iridescence is quite the thing. Curious for daughter number two, who travelled to Norway’s Tromso for the northern lights. Grabbed a few decent glimpses but the best action was on the plane flying home, with borealis flashes sitting like some green gremlin on the wingtip.
All that geomagnetic stuff’s not great for aeronautical systems but, hey, what would you rather be; a mummified mediaeval relic or a good-looking corpse?
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 12 November 2024
