This month things are getting a little spooky… nerd style! Come to our next event on October 15th and start getting in the Halloween spirit. There will be spooky stories, decomposition, and
We will also have a nerdy costume contest! Free admission if you dress up as your favorite nerdy person or thing! Doors open at Pachamama’s Alton Ballroom at 7:30 pm and presentations start at 8 pm. $1 cover for uncostumed nerds.
Presentations include:
Larry Brow: “The Mysterious Case of Amaziah Stevens: Specific, Targeted Research and . . . the Other Kind”
While processing the family papers of Professor E.H.S. Bailey, KU’s first full-time Chemistry teacher, the name “Amaziah Stevens” popped up in a few documents. Why was a mid-nineteenth century farmer from western Illinois included in the collected documents of a family from Connecticut? And why did his mother-in-law, Charity Birdsey Miller, specifically exclude him from benefitting from her will? Was he a wickedly bad man, or just devilishly handsome and misunderstood? Where do we look to find the answers?
Larry M. Brow is a 2011 graduate of the KU Museum Studies MA program and as of 2013, a Certified Archivist. His work at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas involves processing incoming collections to make them available to researchers for decades, and even centuries, to come. He is also a graduate of Grinnell College, 1980, the University of Iowa, 1988 & 1989, and Lawrence High School, 1976. A former Ceramics instructor at the Lawrence Arts Center, some of his bowls will be available for purchase at their upcoming Souper Bowl fundraiser.
Rose McSweeney: “Maggot Growth Rates, Tissue Types, and Time of Death – It’s not nearly as simple as you think”
If you watch crime TV, you’ve probably seen a scientist pick a bug off a some poor decomposed corpse and make a comment about due to its age when the sorry bugger bit the dust. Well, I hate to say it, but just like most science on TV it’s not quite that simple. I’ll be explaining how it’s not that straightforward and in some case just plain untrue. For the weak of stomach, there will be talk of maggots, rotting flesh, and statistics.
Rose McSweeney likes chocolate, reading, making jewelry, and poking dead things with a stick.
Seth Martin: “Cosmic Terror! Why H.P. Lovecraft is your favorite horror writer you’ve never read.”
He died destitute and alone, but H.P. Lovecraft exists on a plane with Poe as an influencer of the Horror genre. His works have been turned in to movies, referenced in some of the best known video games in history, and inspired some of the best known horror writers of our day. Find out why you love his work, even if you’ve never heard of him.
Seth Martin has handled hazardous waste, urine, dead bodies, and half-digested grass straight from a living cow’s rumen; perhaps explains his odd obsession with the terrifying and eldritch tales and mythos created by H. P. Lovecraft.