Wednesday 23 May 2012

Modern minioning

So today I was back minioning at the Horniman Museum SCC.  I think the plan might have been to crack on with some specimen cross referencing, but as I hadn't been there and apparently Paolo had been 'busy' doing curator type things the room was a complete mess. Paolo could see my OCD kicking in, so before I started twitching he suggested "we" have a bit of a tidy.
Three hours later the bin was full and some progress had been made.  I was calm enough to confront the two lists and two piles of index cards whilst Paolo wrestled with MIMSY.
After half a hour I got to the foxes, and realised we hadn't yet looked at them so excitedly ran to the shelf to pull them out.  Emptying the contents on to the table (I mean box on table, but it was a flat surface) to be confronted with two bags of poo.
I'm not sure why they are in the collection, or for that matter the collectors obsession.  They were collected two years apart and from Nottingham.
Was this an exciting dietry experiment involving the comparison of fox faeces from around the country? Were the sixties concerned with the evolution of vulpes vulpes tastes?  Or was this an environmental conservation query?
The more burning question should probably be: why does the museum have TWO samples of fifty year old fox poo? And more importantly: why do we have to create records of their existance before we can dispose of them?
Hopefully the bin will have been emptied by friday...

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