morbid facts of life

Today I noticed that the majority of my classes are heavy on the dark undertones. 

Zooarchaeology: bones of once cute animals

Shakespeare: tragedies in which everyone dies

American novel: blahblahblah Holocaust blahblahblah Atomic Bomb

Nomadic Strategies: how to destroy the world, aka global warming

See what I mean?

I'm not really sure what that says about me 

(probably something just as foreboding)

but I thought I'd share my more favorite 
slightly distasteful facts of the day. 

1.  In the David Tennant (post Doctor Who) production of Hamlet, the skull from a real person was used for the line: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio" in act five. No joke. Apparently some crazy pianist actually bequeathed his skull, and just his skull, to the Royal Shakespeare Company, specifically for use in Act 5 of Hamlet. David Tennant was the only Hamlet ballsy enough to use it so far. 


2. Not only does the opossum, of the order Didelphimorphia, have an extra bone known as the epipubic bone, but it also has a forked penis. 

3. This Pre-Raphaelite painting which is based on Ophelia's death in Hamlet was painted by Millais. To get the appearance of clothes floating in water he made the model, Elizabeth Siddal, lay fully clothed in a bathtub in the middle of winter. She got pneumonia and ten days later died (according to my professor, but according to Wikipedia she actually died like 4 years later). Such is art.  Her husband was Rossetti and apparently he was so wrought with grief by her death that he buried all the poems he wrote about her with her in her grave. Then a few years later he wanted the poems again so he dug up her grave to retrieve them as well as a lock of her hair which was apparently still red. Romantic? The jury's still out on that one...