Egads.

So the plastinated specimen frenzy has finally reached my little corner of the universe. I don't know how I feel about this. I watched a shudderingly gory video at the NY Times site that featured vats of dead animals and humans with sheets of white skin sloughing off them and a bunch of Chinese men and women working busily away on corpses.

It is all just very weird.

Oddly enough, I actually was onto this whole plastination thing well before the general public, courtesy of Dr. Moo. There's a plastinated specimen lab in the veterinary school at Cornell, and they've got tubs of dog and cat parts (indcluding sawed-in-half ones and some with the spines attached) for study. I picked them up. They feel all waxy and greasy and hard, and the kitties especially look like they've been just soaked in melted candle wax. They also look very, very dead. And creepy. There's also a dead dog in a vat of formaldehyde there and some giant elephant bones.

I'm certainly tougher than the Moo in some ways, but when it comes to the world of dead animals, she wins.