Oh, those wacky Eastern Europeans! Check out this website, which is a photofantasm of kaliedoscopic perversion and apocalyptic horror.

Okay, it’s an album of church shots. I’ve been reading more HP Lovecraft, okay? No wonder he sent all his nutty villains to stay with The Baron in the mountains of Hungary: in that context, even Charles Dexter Ward would seem wholesome. Hmmm, wonder if he has a blog? Guy Fawkes does, and Ward seems the type. In any case, I’m ashamed to say the 3-D images on Page Two of the photosite defeat me; I must need the special glasses or something.

I’ve been engaged in a lively discussion of UK nuclear policy over on BoJo’s Blog and the point I keep coming back to is the durability and toxicity of the waste. I’d be in favour of nukes, aggressively so, if only we could figure out how to design nuclear reactors which produced only stable, harmless waste or zero waste, as is now the standard in, ferinstance, many pulp mills. So I am in favour of nuclear research, very much so, since without it we’ll be stuck rebuilding an old 60’s designed something that will eventually produce enough waste to poison the entire planet; unfortunately, the waste products will last longer than any language or civilization. Indeed, they will last longer than written language has been in existence. So, how to deal with it, and how to warn people away from it?

You don’t recognize any of these startling cultural icons from the distant past; you don’t know who made them, or what they symbolize. Hell, you don’t even know that they’re cultural icons, but the whole scene briefly scares the bejesus out of you. Then, like Howard Carter stumbling on the tomb of Tutankhamen, you experience a serious rush of exhilaration, aggravated by a serious case of the heebie-jeebies, as you realize that you’ve just chanced on a history-making breakthrough, a discovery of earthshaking significance. So, which do you do? 1) Immediately pack up the entire expedition and evacuate the area never to return? 2) Waste no time in commencing a major archaeological dig and cementing your place in history?

Amazingly enough, the folks over at the U.S. Department of Energy are banking on curious humans (or whomever) from future millennia to go for Door No. 1. 

Right. Just a little nervous-making. Not to mention the rising oceans may eventually reach the buried waste and suddenly turn the seas into aquatic X-Men jamborees. Not to mention that the Russians and the Chinese are responsible for a significant proportion of the world’s nuclear waste disposal, and we all know how very methodical and efficient the Russians and the Chinese are, how impeccable the quality of their work and attention to detail, and of course how stable their own civilizations at the current time. We can all sleep a little easier…if we have enough whisky.

The Czech Republic. It’s a blog about the Czech Republic. And recycling. And nuclear waste. And HP Lovecraft because, at bottom, isn’t everything about HP Lovecraft? He’s the Socrates of the 20th Century, with August Derleth as his Plato, which only goes to show you how very far we’ve come.

Sometimes, I think the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid isle of ignorance amidst black seas of chaos, and it is not meant that we voyage far. HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

The Czechs had something. They had, back in 1280, a jar full of dirt from the Holy Land. And they spread it around the graveyard of a particular church, wanting to extra-holify their already-technically-holy ground. And holy cadavers, Batman, it was a huge hit! Bodies came from all over Europe to be buried there, which musta made quite a fragrant convoy back in the days before aircon; or did the kids just ask Grandma one day, “So, how’re you feeling, Gran?” and if she said anything other than, “Strong enough to wrestle a bear in my underwear” they packed her off to Sedlec whether she felt like a short Czech sortie or not. Put her on the wagon train with “Please bury at Sedlec when dead” around her neck in Latin or something? Nice. That’s planning for the future.

Well, all these dead people were great for PR, but kinda rough on the graveyard. After all, even stacking them six deep (which is hard when they’re only buried six feet down) you have only so much room in a graveyard, and they obviously couldn’t expand it without going all the way back to the Holy Land for more Extra-Holy Dirt, so they said screwit and became creative with the waste.

Thusly:

By 1318, more than 30,000 bodies were buried there and by 1511, it had become necessary to remove the older bones to make place for the new ones. These later became the material for the macabre creations. In 1870 a local woodcarver was hired by the Duke of Shwartzenberg to decorate the inside of the church with the human remains (approximately 40,000 sets of bones).

Now, forgive me, but it’s been quite some time since I was a regular at church, and I am no longer familiar with the terminolgy. Which reminds me to do that blog entry comparing M.R. James to Gene Roddenberry; all I remember is the line, “Ah, the narthex. That’s where they keep the dilithium crystals.” Anyway, I do not know, exactly, what a monstrance is, but I do know if I had to make one up it would look something like this one, which is actually labelled “Monstrance,” and indeed, what person, no matter how categorically narrow-minded, could argue that it is, indeed, a monstrance? Is it perhaps from the same root as “remonstrance” and does it perhaps mean the Dark Age Croatian equivalent of “Kids, don’t try this at home”? Perhaps they should ship it to Utah?

In any case, unless we find a way to make glow-in-the-dark art out of depleted Uranium and other by-products of nuclear fission, or we find a practical use for tumours once and for all (staffing the White House doesn’t count), we had better bring this level of creativity to the disposal of the waste. Despite the levels of fossil fuel-based pollutants in the air, I’m not holding my breath.

Kids, don’t try this at home.