Thing #8: Mashups

I found checking out different kinds of mashups to be a lot of fun! I saw quite a few interesting ones, but I only explored two in detail. First I played around with Blubbr where you can create comics from images or search for tags in their archives and see what others have been made. Check out these cute dogs.

But the one I really loved was a travel mashup called The Shady Old Lady’s Guide to London, where I learned that St. Bride’s of Fleet Street with its tiered spire (see the above right photo) was the inspiration for the first tiered wedding cake. Who knew? And while browsing the “medical” category I also learned about Martin Van Butchell, an “eccentric dentist” who put his dead embalmed wife on display at his place of business at 56 Mount St. in order to attract more customers:

When his wife Mary died on January 14 1775, he decided to have her embalmed and turn her into an attraction to draw more customers. His teacher of surgery and anatomy Dr. William Hunter and Dr. William Cruikshank agreed to do the job and injected the body with preservatives and color additives that gave a glow to the corpse's cheeks, replaced her eyes with glass eyes and dressed her in a fine lace gown. The body was then embedded in a layer of plaster of Paris in a glass-topped coffin.

When he remarried, his new wife wasnt fond of it, and it went to a museum where it was destroyed in a bombing raid in WW2.

I wish I could go back to London and do a Shady Old Lady tour!