Tag Archives: putrefaction

Have you seen my buttonhook?

1:15 update – Damn. This is why I don’t blog before coffee. Just corrected some crazyass typos and grammatical loop-di-loops. Sorry.

Today’s Cul de Sac comic strip reminds me of a pre-dawn breakfast conversation long ago at the Mummy Congress about how, once you reach in + vigorously stir up the brains w your hook, you can just pour them out of the skull.

The pathologists and anthropologists at the table despaired of ever getting the public to understand this because many people have little science education, which makes TV hospital and crime shows their primary reference point, so they don’t actually understand anatomical structures or the textures of putrefaction.

What I most remember about the breakfast was the way some computer scientists from another conference who had accidentally joined us got paler and paler until someone in our group patted one of them on the hand and tried to reassure him by saying something along the lines of, “If it makes you feel less squeamish dear, you can continue to believe your brains can be removed in chunks with a hook.”

I don’t believe it did.

Anyway, here’s the comic strip that made me laugh today: Cul de Sac: March 24, 2013.

Thanks to Matthew Francis for tweeting this link.

(I stayed on EST the whole week I was in San Diego at the Congress, which is the only way I was able to be so lucid at these early breakfasts before our 8 a.m. symposium start time each day).