Decomposition v preservation

We all understand about fillers in newspapers, that they're just odd snippets poked in when there's a space around the actual news. No-one expects them to be anything especially current, no matter how much they pretend to be announcing something. But this one, today, in the NZ Herald? Tch. This is something I wrote about here almost exactly three years ago when I came across it at Vermilionville in Lafayette - and it was hardly a new development even then. Surely the discovery had already got around, in the scientific/environmentalist community? More than a bit disappointing, if not. Stuff like this should be shared, immediately. Er, like vaccine recipes...?

There was another newspaper connection on Saturday, also in the Herald, but this time of genuine interest. Regular 😃 readers will recall - indeed, may still be traumatised by - my blog entry about my visit to Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok again almost exactly five years ago. Not, thankfully, for medical treatment, but to gawp, as respectfully as possible, at the exhibits in the Department of Anatomy's museum there. It was full of astonishing, horrifying and deeply interesting preserved bodies of people who had been born with, and died of, terrible deformities. 

Most of them, anyway, and many of those, sadly, babies. But there were a few exceptions, and I clearly remember standing in front of the telephone box-like glass case in the photo below, studying the mummified corpse of this murderer/cannibal. Except, now it seems maybe he wasn't - instead, it turns out he was yet another victim of what seems to be the world-wide phenomenon of, shall we say, over-enthusiastic police detective work. So today I officially transfer poor Si Ouey into the same category as the other sad exhibits at Siriraj.