Thursday, December 27, 2007

179

I went to Future Shop to get some great deals today, as they have their super colossal Boxing Day sale. I couldn't figure out what was on sale. I wanted to pick up the Angel series on dvd as the Future Shop website said they were on for $14/season, but there were no signs that this was true in the store, nor could a sales person be found. The line up was 20-30 people deep, even though it was 4pm and the sale had been on for 10 hours. I left and went to HMV to discover that Angel was on for $15/season, so I bought first to third. I also got Fantastic Four, Rise of the Silver Surfer, as I think William and I will enjoy watching it again sometime ($10). This evening we watched "The Thirteenth Warrior" (borrowed from Kevin, thankfully didn't pay a rental on). It had a few moments that were fun, but we just couldn't figure out where the cave dwelling cannibals kept the hundred horses they rode into their raids with but kept hidden from farmers and vikings living a couple miles away? Speaking of swords and warriors, we put together William's dwarven mine Lego this evening. It comes with four great looking dwarves, some with two headed axes that required assembly, plus a couple of goblins and a troll. He has spikes for ears, William liked that. And speaking of well forged metal, Margaret was just reading that Tom Sukanen, the guy who built the steel ship near Moose Jaw, had such malnutrition in his last years while trying to complete this project that his teeth went wrong so he pulled them out and made steel dentures for himself. This isn't in the Sisu film that Christine is making, the prosthetics would have been very expensive even if she'd wanted to go with this angle. I wonder what they looked like? The only pictures I've seen of him are from earlier in his life, and I think his mouth was always closed anyways.

3 comments:

Chrystene said...

Heh, yes, the story about pulling his own teeth and making 'dentures' out of metal is part of the Sukanen legend. The image I have from various descriptions is of u-shaped troughs that slipped over his gums, kind of like those mold forms that are filled with alginate and pushed over your teeth at the dentists'. Apparently after a year or two of eating nothing but old wheat from the bottom of his storage houses and rotten horse meat Sukanen got scurvy, and after his teeth fell out (or were assisted out) he needed the metal plates to help him grind the dried wheat kernels that he was living on. At the Sukanen museum is a pair of pliers that he supposedly used to pull his own teeth with. His nephew Elmer wasn't sure that he had actually pulled his own teeth out or whether that was a legend; in any case I excluded this little gem as I didn't want to focus so much on the 'is he crazy or isn't he' question. Recently someone asked me, "Sukanen? Isn't he the guy who pulled his own teeth out with pliers?" So I knew I'd made the right choice.

Gerald Saul said...

There is also the issue that eating moldy grain that perhaps has ergot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot)that can be a hallucinogen. A blight of this caused by bad crops during a mini ice age in the dark ages (12th century) is suggested to have attributed to widespread madness, the writing of nutty apocrypha from the bible, and miracles witnessed by the people of that time period. In any case, if he wasn't crazy when he started his mission to build his ship, the process of building it may have taken its own tole.

Chrystene said...

Ha, that's right! I knew about ergot poisoning but I hadn't made any ergot-Sukanen connection, what a concept! Hmmmm... fascinating. Could have contributed to the part of the legend where he was getting paranoid near the end...