And I thought my job was a conversation bombshell. After -e- pointed out the Dermisted Beetles on the Skulls Unlimited employee page, I swung back to take a look. All the employees seem happy and are posing in front of pristine skulls, except this one photo. I looked closer. Then enlarged the photo….
Yep. Their Master Flenser and Brain-remover Technician is standing behind a table piled with flayed monkey heads.
That must be some interesting conversation on the airplane. You know how it goes. You’re sitting next to someone. “Flying for business?”
“Yeah. Heading to a conference.”
“Oh really? What do you do?”
There’s a pause. “I’m a Master Flenser and Brain-remover Technician. What do you do?”
Relatedly, I was working on a story some years back, polled the lurkers who support me in email, and discovered that “flense” is the sort of word that only people from coastal Massachusetts have in their vocabulary. (Apparently, people from coastal Massachusetts, and morticians.)
Turns out I learned “flense” from the whaling industry, which has been functionally dead in coastal Massachusetts for a hundred years or more — and yet, the vocabulary persists.
No kidding. I had no idea.
Can we go back to the fake penis stuff? Right after I rinse by brain with bleach?
between the spiders and the monkey heads, the internets is getting tough.
My brother does that with birds. Okay, he’s actually a PhD who then studies their hormones to determine the causes and effects of stress, but “flenser” says so much more so succinctly.
He wouldn’t like that I told people that, by the way, so no one firebomb his house over it, as a personal favor to me.
I used to clean bird skeletons at a natural history museum. The beetles didn’t always do their jobs well, so we’d soak bones in water and let the remaining soft stuff rot off. Those moments of pouring off throught the sieve into the sink – whew! I would just laugh because it smelled SO BAD. But my least favorite part was tweezing the dead beetles out of the eagle sinuses. It just felt uncomfortable. You’d get boxes of eagle remains with the leg bands, too – those felt like their personal effects, it was very odd. I loved how the bones looked after they were all dry and their ID numbers were written on them. I could only label the larger birds’ bones – I didn’t have the hand control to do the sparrow-sized birds.