Adventures in an igloo

"The hour grows dark" I thought to myself the other day when I heard it on the news- yes, the news, yet again- that a 10-30 year old skeleton of a woman or a teenager had been discovered in the countryside near Reykjavík.

I wondered what kind of place my rock was becoming as I followed the horrid accounts of these newfound human remains. Who had indeed murdered this innocent? Then I thought to myself: "Heck, my rock isn't that populated, I mean, we pretty much know everyone. How, can somebody just get away with killing another person and dispose of the body out in the open without anyone noticing for all these years?"

And the plot thickened even more... it soon became apparent that the skeleton was not an entire skeleton but the upper part of a skull. Again, I started thinking about the creep that had chucked a skull in the wilderness, what had he done with the rest of her? (Naturally, I decided the culprit was a man because men are more likely to kill than women...forgive me for being so sexist when it comes to crime.) So, where was the rest of the poor gal? Was the killer still keeping her in some hidden place?

Yes, I thought to myself, there sure is some nasty business going on.

The next thing I knew, the reporters had discovered that the skull came from a trailer that had been blown to kingdom come in a storm earlier this year and that the owner of the trailer had been using the skull as an ashtray for some time. However, the owner had believed that the wretched thing had been animal bones (which I still feel doesn't make it OK, you know, using such remains for a nasty habit such as smoking).

The Mother Unit was pretty upset about the whole thing, and being an Icelander and therefore extremely superstitious, she concocted a theory on the downfall of the trailer: The storm was caused by the angry spirit of the ashtray..erm excuse me, the deceased individual. So, a chain of heartfelt and angry speeches on how sick and disgusting people are was pretty much everything that the Mother Unit had to say that day.

Yes, we were utterly shocked by these sickos who have no respect for the dead and felt that they got what they deserved by losing their trailer to the storm conjured up by the pissed off ghost; a just punishment for being such filthy buggers.

Little did we know that the skull and it's origin were too close to home...

It turned out that the skull was indeed, not that of a woman or teen that died 10-30 years ago, but rather that of, as the Mother Unit has always put it, a "Danish imbecile" that my dear old grandpa had stayed up all night boiling in a pot back in the 1920's.

Way back then, gramps was a student of medicine in our then nation's capital, Copenhagen, Denmark. As the story goes he had apparently diligently dissected a pauper and when there was little left of the poor chap, he got permission to boil the meat off the head and keep the skull.

After that he brought poor old Mr. Skelington back home and used the skull for paperclips and such in his pharmacy. Skully, then wound up as a candy bowl at my uncle's house and then, through his son's unsuspecting mother in law, as an ashtray in a trailer.

If one believes in ghosts, then I guess it could be said that Mr. Skelington's spirit was pretty open-minded right till the end: "Cut me up, boil my head, use me as a container for paperclips and candy...but darn it, use me as a cigarette bud storage and I'll mess up your trailer."

After days of talking about the horrible culprit, it turned out that the primus motor in the whole fiasco was gramps...

The moral of the story is, I suppose, don't throw stones if you are living in a glass-house but just don't know it.