Probably not coming to a Hallmark near you (maybe an Urban Outfitters)

I feel like I have had an unfair advantage over most people in terms of dealing with the Sandy Hook killings. See, for the last few weeks I've been reading a book on genocide.  Unlike the review that links to, I would not list "none" under "Cons," but it's nice synthesis/survey of the general topic.  I feel like it should have been released by the Journal of Obvious Results' publishing house, but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting or informative. Actually, prior to reading Becoming Evil, I read this (which is far better than the cover would suggest...though that is pretty much the most awesome cover ever. CONTROVERSY!)  Consequently, I was really already on a roll with the "thinking about the massacre of children" train.

Also, last week I skinned out a wild pig (several, actually, but I only did one mostly by myself ), dressed her in clothing, beat her 34 times with a length of rebar (I wanted to inflict damage on the bones, and managing to do that on a dead pig that's still covered in all her piggy-ness is NOT AS EASY AS YOU THINK), and buried her in a shallow grave.  The highlight of my day was when the retired Homicide Investigator who was giving me tips on skinning the pig asked, "Am I training a serial killer?"  I assured him that if I had learned one thing from studying forensic science, it's that being a serial killer who doesn't get caught is WAY too much work for me to ever consider it.

For a while now I've been working on an art project I call the "Massacre-A-Day" calendar.  The idea is in the vein of those "Inspirational Quote A Day" desk calendar things you see, but instead of your daily origami animal, you get a massacre that happened on that day.  The idea came to me last year when there was a particularly big outpouring of sentiment over the 10 year anniversary of September 11.  I wondered how many people comprehended that it was not a unique event. That I could probably find at LEAST one recorded civilian massacre for every day in the year. Bam. Massacre-A-Day.  I haven't been actively researching for it. I figure that given my line of work/study, the information will eventually find its way to me.

When I found out about the shooting, one of my first thoughts was simply, "this gets a day."

Anatomy of a Fake Geek Girl (aka Hipster Geekin’ It)

So it seems that the inane discussion of “fake geek girls” (known to locals as tidoffg or “Fgg”) has risen once again from the gloopy, gloppy, murky, mucky waters of the nerd loch. As an individual who lives in the muck (denizens also include illustrious figures like “the idiotic debate about nerd/geek/dork titles”), I’m getting annoyed at the repeated turbation enough to overcome my innate lazy nature and add my own swamp-gas bubbles to the tumult in the vain hope that possibly my small contribution will make the stench so utterly repulsive that people will back off and leave us swamp monsters alone.

One afternoon, Fgg and I were huddled over some decomposing hagfish and I asked her to show me the worst example of a fake geek girl that’d ever grown from a glorpy glob of her skimey muck. I have to admit, it was pretty bad.

Pay no attention to the Halloween decorations

For those of you who would argue that this is not a slutty enough costume to warrant derision, need I point out that not only is this hussy flaunting her ankles, her KNEES are showing?!!!! AND her clavicles!!!! Plus, this picture doesn’t showcase the posterior aspect. Plus, she straight out admitted to me that she wasn’t wearing as much makeup as she probably would at a Con.

Me: “What are you dressed as?”

Her: “I’m dressed as Six.”

Me: “Um….how many episodes of Battlestar Galactica have you actually watched?”

Her: “Four or five.”

No wonder. I mean, Six NEVER wore a jacket like that, and why bother bleaching your hair if you’re not even going to style it right, and WHAT is with those shoes?

 

5 inch Deck Shoes? WTF?

Obviously this girl was a Fake Geek Girl who didn’t care about canon at ALL and was just hanging around trying to look sexy and pick up boys. Or feed off their lascivious attention. Or something something legitimate rape. 

The incriminating evidence only got worse the longer I talked to her.  The only video/computer games she’s ever really played are Diablo II because (and I quote) her “boyfriend bought it for [her],” and she “once played Goldeneye for five hours.” She also mentioned some other things with made up names like Solarian and Loom, but I’m pretty sure those don’t actually exist.  She freely admitted she’d never played Zelda.

Her knowledge of comics wasn’t any better. Almost everything she knows about the DC and Marvel universes is either from her friends in college or movies or Wikipedia.  She had the audacity to try and fob me off with Classics Illustrated or Scrooge McDuck. He was in DuckTales, right? That’s not comic books, you dumb bitch! Speaking of books, she’s never actually sat down and read all of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  What a poser.

I wish I were good enough at Photoshop to make a “Number Six is not impressed” image. You’ll just have to imagine it.

NEITHER Number Six is impressed

 Be Seeing You.

Actual Thing I Actually Said

My mom was telling me about some NOVA special on Forensics in a state of crisis!!!!

Me: "Well, after crisis happens, then comes collapse, and that's when the decomposers come in. I'm playing the long game here, mom."

Closer to Harrisburg

They sell mate in bottles. I can't believe this stuff is legal.


That shirt was designed by Chris, the same friend who made the hat I'm wearing. It's the logo for her Roller Derby scrimmage team. I finally went to see her play last Friday. Or something...I don't really remember. I was mostly asleep because I'd already been out in the field for two days by that point and I was (and still am) only barely staying ahead of artifact inflow. I was tired. On the plus side, Chris' mom had made popcorn balls to sell & it turned out that they were the PERFECT field food. They use peanut butter as the lipid rather than regular butter, so it's like a punch in the face of quick energy, and it won't spoil if you leave it in your car in the sun. PLUS it has protein!!! I got really excited and ended up purchasing a total of something like 12 of them. Now, I admit that I may have consumed four of those in quick succession....make your own judgement. However, I was not ridiculously stoned as everybody proceeded to think I was. My insane excitement over finding a fab field food was not helping my case.

I don't remember if I mentioned on here that for the month of July I am running the field lab for the Foothill College Local Archaeology field school. Actually, I'm employed as a general factotum for the guy who's subcontracted the dig and my job isn't going to end when the field school does, and it's easiest to just refer to myself as "the lab". It's complicated. My ability to follow a line of reasoning like that is pretty much the reason I have my job.

Be Seeing You

Boil Update:

This weekend at the site, I was off on a jaunt (aka "going out to survey potential datums for the total station") [we will not address the confusing use of "datum" here. In short, when using the laser theodolite (that's the other name for a Total Station) one speaks of data points as "points" and the origin is the "datum."]with two of my students. The hilarity of the  hike is worth another post entirely, but suffice to say that we all learned something. And we did find a beautiful point that has incredible line-of-sight. You know what else is confusing? We're mostly digging up the remains from the production of projectile points, and we tend to refer to the finished pieces as just "points". WHY MUST EVERYTHING HAVE THE SAME NAME, BRUCE?!

Anyway, early on in the adventure we encountered some surprisingly fresh coyote droppings surrounded by distinct tufts of hair and containing chunks of a skull and a mandible.

Student: "That looks like rabbit hair."

My Brain: "If we can see the cheek-bones [that's not what they're called, but I'm not going to use words like "rostrum" here] of this thing, if it IS a bunny, they should be lacy-looking (technical term is "highly fenestrated". "Fenestrated" just means "with lots of little holes,"so highly fenestrated is...well...lacy-looking.)

Me: *Digs into poop with some sticks and extracts the jawbone and skull frag. [Though the poo was fairly fresh, the bones weren't actually covered in shit, so don't go all freaking out here. In fact, they still had little fragments of tissue attached. I bet their high fat content keeps them pretty separate from the other digestive stuffs]* I just so happened to have a collecting bag in my pocket.

My Lips: "ALL TEH PREVIOUS INFORMATION that went through my brain"

Guys, I've turned into my mom. Except without as much Latin. Does this make me a Protestant scientist? DISCUSS.

Be what you want would want....

.....but only if that's also what you want.

Yes, I know you leagues of adoring fans are thinking, "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, HANNAH?!" Trust me. It makes way more sense than a lot of the shit I hear around my job all day. Or think.

My awesome friend Erica ran the Western Costume Spring Western Costume Spring Yard Sale and it got featured in a piece by LA Weekly. Also, there is a photo of me wearing an awesome hat that actually turned out to have structurally weak spots at the crown and thus my head got a little sunburned.

Boil Update:
A while ago, I decided to try the cold-water maceration technique for defleshing specimens. My results from this test are as follows:
1. Small bones are even smaller than you think. Think coffee filter, not 1/16" screen.
2. They weren't kidding about the smell.

In other exciting news,  the other day I had a student say to me, "You know you've chosen the right major when it's okay to bring dead animals to school." ....I passed a squirrel this morning, but I would have had to do a major loop to come back around to get it. Now I'm kind-of regretting I didn't.
Somehow we're starting to edge towards having a zooarchaeology collection. Somehow I'm starting to learn stuff.

It's Computers All the Way Down

It's clear that the only time I really blog is when I'm trying to avoid writing something else. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to write a professional e-mail to people who actually want to hire me.  How does one say, "I have another offer. What are you willing to bid?" without sounding like an asshole? Also how does one say, "Yes. I would be willing to take on managing your field lab. I don't think I'm qualified, but clearly you do, which is adding to my sense of self-worth and encouraging me to milk you for all I can"?

In other news, Mammoth season has started again. We went out yesterday and cleaned up the site and took some auger samples of the marine stratum. At least, that's what was supposed to be happening. I don't know what ACTUALLY happened because I spent the entire day organizing sandbags. It was glorious.

We have a large number of sandbags full of dirt from the excavation.  When we put the dirt in, we wrote the provenience (ie what unit it came from/what was it associated with) on the bag in sharpie marker. Unfortunately, sun and heat wreak havoc on low grade plastics, and the bags have been outside for a YEAR, so even though they were under a tarp, the provenience on a whole bunch of bags got completely bleached off. There were also bags that still had traces of writing, but I had to sit there and puzzle out what the hell they said and then re-label them.  I was in hog heaven. No one bothered me and I was moving sandbags. The only downside is that I don't have the faintest idea what actually got done on the site.

It's too bad it's horribly unprofessional to send a tl;dr synopsis of the situation.

Be Seeing You

Why I Am Not Qualified

Hey guys! (...is anyone still reading this? If you are, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU??!!!)  Remember that student who wanted me to write her a recommendation? Well turns out that ACTUALLY she put me down as a reference and I have to fill out this questionnaire about whether she's qualified to get into a program. The kicker is that 1.I don't have any idea what exactly this program IS, and 2)It's asking me for assessments I can't make.

So, in true educator fashion, I proceeded to IGNORE IT FOR TWO WEEKS.

Now I'm forcing myself to sit down and write what will probably amount to about 100 words.

Except instead of writing that, I'm writing a blog post.