I made a quick run to St Cloud today, to visit Spirit Halloween after Hallowe’en, when they are busy dumping everything left over at half price. Get out there quick! Like any mysterious fantasy shop, it’s going to vanish, leaving only a dusty empty space off an abandoned alleyway — our local stores disappear on November 3rd. I stocked up on weird fake spider crap for next year’s celebration.
More importantly, my wife sent me on a mission to get a new vacuum cleaner, because our old one is busted.
Is that where the lower half of that human skeleton went then is it? Into the understandably busted vacuum cleaner? No wonder it broke! ;-)
Usually happens to penis-bearers, StevoR.
cf. https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2021/01/28/the_dangers_of_masturbating_with_a_vacuum_cleaner_657673.html
For skeletons, Spirit closes Nov 3rd but graveyards are open year-round.
bcw bcw @#3
Good grief that takes me back, to the 80s when I was on a Community Programme* scheme and we got sent to a job clearing out the very overgrown graveyard of a church with falling numbers of elderly parishioners who couldn’t do the work themselves. So we set to clearing mostly bramble thickets by strimming the tops then mattocking out the roots. Bitterly cold east facing hillside, with that fine snow gusting around, along with the odd sleet shower. Anyway I’ve got my head down working my strip when there’s a call for me to go over to where the foreman and a couple of the guys were gathered, so off I went to find them gathered round a bone. The foreman was consulting me on the grounds that as a woman I cooked so I knew about animal bones (!), he also knew I’d done a biology degree so that combination made me the best qualified person present to assess the bone. He really really wanted me to reassure them that it was just the bone from a Sunday roast joint that some fox had pinched out of the rubbish and brought to the shelter of the blackberry jungle to consume. There were three reasons I couldn’t do that, the bone although broken showed no signs of being chewed, it was clearly uncooked, and even more clearly it was a human humerus. After a half-hearted attempt to persuade me I was wrong as more of the gang gathered round to find out what was going on, the foreman made the only decision he could, so the gang gathered our tools and went to sit in the blessedly warm^ church hall drinking coffee while the foreman phoned the minister and the police. It turned out that some years before the church yard had been disturbed, it was thought by someone after skulls, one had been found rolling down the road by a horrified local who alerted the minister, and while they’d tried to find all of the bones and rebury them, see falling numbers, elderly parishioners and the overgrown nature of the church yard. Anyway we got the rest of the day off, then finished the job while finding a few more bones that looked like ribs to me, and in due course solemnly reburried the bones while the minister did his thing. And all of us admitted that we always wondered, as we dug holes on the derelict sites we usually dealt with, whether this would be the day we’d turn up some poor sod who’d ‘disappeared’.
A Government sponsored attempt to get the unemployed on benefits into work, you got I think an extra £10 on top of your regular single person benefit of (again I think) £33 a week benefit for the privilege of working a little less than a full week doing some sort of socially useful activity. The scheme I was on mostly did derelict site clearing (not so much demolition as getting rid of rubbish), preparation, and then planting up native trees and shrubs.
^ It wasn’t warm, but it was out of the bitter wind so it felt warm to us, plus the coffee while cheap instant was hot.