for wunderkammer: ancient greek lead sling bullets with a winged thunderbolt engraved on one side and the inscription “take that” (δεξαι) on the other.

other sling slogans include “ouch” and “for pompey’s backside!”

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photo source: wikipedia. more ancient greek fun with slogan embossery can be found here.

for wunderkammer: police-issued victorian smelling salts

on one hand, corsets can give you a silhouette that will make hourglasses stop telling the time out of jealousy. on the other hand, they will also reduce the oxygen flow to your brain and cause you to lose consciousness for a few terrifying minutes.

fortunately, because of all the fainting going on around the british empire, constables were issued amonia-based smelling salts to jolt awake the many fainting women that they would encounter on their daily beats.

the specimen above is reminiscent of a bottle of bubbles and is stamped with the crown insignia. there are, however, some very interesting private smelling salts bottles also worthy of the wunderkammer. 

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photo source: bbc news

for wunderkammer: a victorian moustache guard.

what you need to understand about the differences between the victorian moustache and the ironic ones that you see hanging around park slope these days is that the victorians were deadly serious about their moutaches, oftentimes going to great pains to dye them just right, wax them perfectly, and curl them precisely. when a hairy dandy supped from his teacup, he was putting his exquisitely quaffed lip hair in peril. the hot tea could melt the wax, wilt the ‘stache, and send streaks of toxic hair dye into his favourite earl grey.

the solution was found in the moustache cup which had a special built-in guard. eventually, this guard was made portable so that if you were invited to tea at the estate of those not fortunate enough to own moustache prophylactic drinkware, you could plunk in your own and save the day.

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the book, mustache cups: timeless victorian treasures, is a great resource for collecting and is apparently the best guide since dorothy’s hammond’s 1972 book on the same subject.

also: you can instapaper this moustache cup essay for later perusal.

for wunderkammer: leprosy colony money. and you thought the russian beard tokens were the most oddball currency going…well take a gander at this panamanian leper cash.

back when the united states was uniting the seas by digging ditches in panama, somebody was like, “what do we do with all these nasty lepers?” and then somebody else was like, “let’s send them to leper island!” and then a third person was like, “wait a second, even though the lepers can’t leave the island, their money might. we could get leper cooties!” and that’s why between 1919 and 1952, the united states minted special leper tokens.

in the end, the lepers had the last laugh because the 50 leper cent coin above recently sold on ebay for $1,000.

for both wunderkammer & bestiary: a khao manee, a rare breed of cat from thailand noted for its 700-year royal pedigree and pure white fur. also, due to a freaky genetic defect, they have different coloured eyes. it is whispered that if one of these rare cats meets your gaze, you will temporarily understand all things.

for wunderkammer: nábrókarstafur—lucky “corpsepants” made from the skin of a dead man that yield a never-ending supply of cash money.

the first thing that you gotta understand is that you can’t just go to your closest abercrombie & fitch and ask the bro there to hook you up with a pair of corpsepants—you need to make them yourself. and making yourself corpsepants is no easy thing. the recipe goes something like this:

1. find a homeboy of yours that is willing to let you make trousers out of his skin when he kicks the bucket. as an incentive you can promise him your own skin if you die first (see tontine).
2. wait until said homeboy kicks the bucket.
3. once he is buried, you must secretly exhume his corpse, flay it from the waist down, and make yourself a pair of lovely trousers.
4. put them on. if you are lucky, you will look like this or this, but most likely you will look like this.
5. like the great d.r.m. software of the 21st century, your corpsepants are useless until you activate them. and like the great d.r.m. software of the 21st century, activation is a tedious and humiliating process: you must steal a coin from a poor widow during christmas, easter, or pentecost WHILE her minister is reading his sermon. now all that remains to do is to place the coin in the <ahem> scrotal sack of your new corpsepants (you did keep the genitals didn’t you). 
6. if you followed these directions precisely, a flood of new coins will continually jangle out of your pants like the payout from a vegas slot machine.
7. you can now live the good life in a tuscan villa—but remember: once you take off your trousers, they will stop producing coins for you forever. :(

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source (enn-ess-eff-double-you-exlcamation point). see also: this wikipædia article. in addition, a (ghastly) picture of real-life nábrókarstafur can be found here.

for wunderkammer: a 1705 “borodoráia”—a russian beard token

check it players: my halloween costume this year is mostly likely going to be “raynor with a beard” or some variation on this like “raynor with a soul patch” or “raynor with picadilly weepers.” to make my guise complete, i thought i’d mint myself this russian beard token so if anyone dressed in a sexy tsarina costume demands to know if i paid my beard tax i can be like: “da, female comrade.” (or whatever). and then we will toast to mikhail bakunin and i will slurp vodka out of her cupped hands, and she will nurse it from my infused whiskers as if chawing raw sugar cane.

with this image lingering, i will now tell you the provenance of the russian beard coin. or—even better—i will let some smithsonian copywriter do it for me:

[Beard tokens were] issued at the time when Peter [the Great] had ordered the boyars (Russian nobility) and commoners to shave their traditional beards as part of his program to modernize Russia. If they wished to keep their beards, they had to pay a tax. For nobility and merchants, the tax could be as high as 100 rubles annually; for commoners it was much lower — as little as 1 kopek… The tax was strongly opposed by the Russian Orthodox Church and led to several citizen revolts.

the tokens were inscribed with two phrases: the obvious: “the beard tax has been taken” and the propagandic “the beard is a superfluous burden”.

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also related: lettuce not forget the the hair powder tax 
more about russian coins here

for wunderkammer: a koteka (a decorative penis sheath made from a gourd) because if there’s one thing that the wunderkammer needs more of, it’s ornaments for one to decorate one’s penis with.

bonus koteka nugget from wikipædia »

In 1971-1972 the government of New Guinea launched “Operasi Koteka” (“Operation Penis Gourd”) which consisted primarily of trying to encourage the people to wear shorts and shirts because such clothes were considered more “modern.” But the people did not have changes of clothing, did not have soap, and were unfamiliar with the care of such clothes so the unwashed clothing caused skin diseases. There were also reports of men wearing the shorts as hats and the women using the dresses as carrying bags.

effyu operation penis gourd—stop trying to tell my friends what they can and can’t wear on their penises.

for wunderkammer: an ancient roman penis ring—a triple penis ornament for you to decorate your penis with.

for wunderkammer: a paleolithic flute

q: what were you doing 40,000 years ago when your stone age neighbors were rocking out on paleolithic flutes made out of woolly mammoth femurs? a: you were probably some stinking monkey scratching your hairy butt with pinecones.

in celebration of the fact that you and me have had a musical culture that spans over 40 millennia, let us start a paleolithic flute/theremin jam band. IT WILL BE A POLITICAL STATEMENT and we will rock out on the top of the sphinx wearing sequins and goat hides.

for wunderkammer: a northrop frye postage stamp

my seventeen year search for the elusive northrop frye postage stamp is finally over thanks to gold star comment-writer, slobone. also minted is frye’s fellow countryman (and intellectual sparring partner) marshall mcluhan. and now i am off to petition the united states government to start making its own line of literary theorists stamps instead of ugly little birds and boring flowers that nobody cares about. philately + literary criticism 4 life.

for wunderkammer: tableau synoptique d’oreilles d’a. bertillon

mysterious lurker, ramona has submitted this beatiful taxonomy of the ears of french criminals to the wunderkammer. says ramona:

The attached is for the wunderkammer – now I am suffering from anxiety that it is not sufficiently wunderful [editor’s note: ramona, stop being a dork].   I love it as its own thing, but i also particularly love the odd story of its creator, M. Alphonse Bertillon, who never let the obtuseness of lesser mortals (everyone else) stand in the way of his rampant o.c.d.   He was even written up by Ida Tarbell, a gobsmacking interview at which to have been a fly on the wall.   I would like to think that there are picturesque names for each characteristic shape, but I fear M. Bertillon had no room for poetry in his cataloguer’s soul.

one of the five hearts (a metaphor) of the ragbag is my obsession with the names of things. let you and i be the poets that bertillon was not. to wit:

my left ear is an emesis basin (fig. 3) and my right ear is somewhere between a bass clef (fig. 44) and a wilting orchid (fig . 16).

for wunderkammer: an “in god we rust” quarter—a die error on some of the kansas state quarters led to this amusing happenstance.

for wunderkammer: a mame (mini) bonsai (pictured right, pictured left is, apparently, a bootleg recording of phish’s 1995 halloween concert—this DOES NOT go in the wunderkammer.)

sauce