It’s halloween, the best time of the year, and since we are “that house” that everyone comes from other towns to see, each year have to get new stuff, and this year the newest animatronic is a 7.5’ tall (figure 2.5m for metric folks) megaladon (the ancestor of sharks) so It is cool and all, and I made it bursting from the sea by wrapping crinkled up plastic paint tarps (those cheap clear poly sheets) with color changing LED strips underneath flickering greens and blues. But then of course I had to make a snarky comment on the current times (What? Henry making a snarky comment on current events?) Our local waters are badly contaminated this year with toxic cyanobacteria due to the summer being virtual rain free, and if you go in that water it can produce chemical burns and poisoning, and even breathing the vapors are terrible. Well this weekend is the “Head of the Charles” race where rowing teams from all over the world compete on the Charles River (one of the rivers contaminated by the cyanobacteria). This is the river the famous song from my childhood “Dirty water” by Standells is about (it was an EPA Superfund site for a long time, now it is much, much cleaner at baseline, but the cyanobacteria are pretty bad).
So I took a skeleton which will be in the megaladon’s mouth, blotched it with glow-acrylic green paint and then made a cutout old-wooden-sign in Draftboard and engraved the wood grain (yes the irony of engraving woodgrain into wood…) anyway, the thing is being seen in the dark lit by UV LED panels so:
The sign (the letters are painted white with a skim coating of the glow-orange paint to be visible in the dark of halloween)
I might put more green paint lightly on the skeleton (I also realized I didn’t do the back as I had it on a table). I also might put dark brown paint over the grain marks to make them stand out more in the dark)
That skeleton is very angry that he died from cyanobacteria poisoning.
