(please follow this link to the Kircher Society.)
In a very bizarre coincidence, some fiction I wrote years ago seems to have a real-world counterpart (which was completely unknown to me when I wrote the fiction).
The good people over at the fantastic blog The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society have posted about Ole Worm, a Renaissance collector of curiosities. In their post, they reproduce the frontispiece from his Museum Wormianum(1655) (a catalogue of the collection he assembled in his Danish home), and it shows, near the upper-left-hand-corner, a baby polar bear suspended from the ceiling.
Here is page 23 (which is the last in a series of pages (17, 18 & 19) that describes the character Gene Folderfeld’s lifework: The Museum of Strange, Wonderful & Useless Things (a collection housed in his home)) from my epic novelette A Determination of Parts (2002):
Like clockwork, Gene thinks as he grunts out of bed. It’s Monday, laundry day, and after breakfast, he sorts the hots from the warms from the colds and trudges downstairs. The washer and dryer are in a room adjacent to the museum, and there’s a sign on the door that reads, Beware of Polar Bear! Do Not Enter!
Inside the room, hanging from a track that runs from the ceiling in the back of the room to the door jamb, is an item that Gene usually only shows annoying children.
He bought the item from a taxidermist in Arkansas whose shop was next to a cemetery. It was already mounted on the track, and the sign was part of the bargain.
The taxidermist, Orlan Todder, told Gene that he’d stuffed the piece for a man who had never come back to pick it up, and he couldn’t figure out why, as it was some of his best work.
The piece was a baby polar bear, ill-gotten gains from a hunting trip to the Alaskan tundra. Orlan, according to the man’s wishes, had posed it as if it were attacking: claws exposed, mouth open wide. When the man didn’t show, Orlan decided to mount it on the track, put it in his back room, and then booby-trap the door of that room so that anyone who opened it would be faced with a flying attack polar bear. Orlan thought it was real funny until he forgot about it one day, and it smacked him in the head. Hurt more’n a po-lice baton, he told Gene.
Gene, laundry basket in hand, opens the door to the utility room, waits for the bear to fly its course, then resets it and starts his washing. He always does the hot load first, and every time he pours the bleach, he thinks it looks really cold.
This is not the first time content (so-called) on my website or blog has jived with content (real) at The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Please also see this post from them, and this post from me (although this example is far less strange).
[This post was edited on 03.15.10. Most of the links in this post are broken, and now the tooltip text says so.]
