by Sara Morrison

A good six thousand or so years ago, Northern Europe was covered in swamp-like, stagnant pools of dead plant. These bogs happened to be great places to get rid of stuff, and so our ancestors, being not much different than we are today, really, filled them with refuse and the occasional body.

We’re not exactly sure why those bodies were put there. The prevailing theory is they were human sacrifices, but it’s entirely possible that bogs were just convenient places to store dead people. Either way, there they stayed, buried and preserved for thousands of years, just waiting for the chance to scare the crap out of an eight-year-old girl whose father should have known better than to keep a book of bog body photos out for her to read, which is how I met the Bog Men.

The anaerobic environment of the bogs meant that any organic material sucked into them remained remarkably free of decomposition — so much so that we can determine, in some cases, their last meal. Some were so well preserved that, when found — usually by some poor, unsuspecting Scottish peat cutter — they were thought to be recent murder victims.

They were, then, a fantastic window into the lives of humans thousands of years ago — what they wore, what they ate, what they used for hair gel (imported plant oil and pine resin made for a decent mohawk) — which was what attracted my dad’s interest in them. He brought The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People home from the library. I saw him reading it and, wanting to be as smart as he was, asked if I could read it, too. He handed it to me and walked away, oblivious to the damage he’d done.

Obviously, I flipped to the photo section of the book first, full of large, full-color photos of various bog bodies. Yes, there was Tollund Man, the rock star of the bog body world. His head is so well-preserved, it is often said, that he looks like he could simply be sleeping.

But this is a lie! Yes, Tollund Man’s facial features have stayed remarkably intact, down to the chin stubble and the furrowed brow. But his skin is black, dyed from soaking in dark bog chemicals for the last six millennia, and he’s naked except for a belt, a wool cap, and the noose that ended his life, which is still tightly wrapped around his neck. And there’s the rest of his body, distorted and twisted from being crushed under the weight of the bog for so long, then partially destroyed by the excavation process. Aside from his head and feet, Tollund Man is skeletonized, wrapped in leathery flaps of skin stretched tightly over his bones. The effect is a half-skeleton, half-flesh man-creature so much more terrifying than if it had just been one or the other.

Old Croghan Man photographed by Mark Healey.

Tollund Man is the least frightening bog man, or woman, on offer. We have dozens of horrible, disgusting bog bodies, complete with photos that I don’t suggest you look at if you are an impressionable child with a wild imagination.

Oh, look! There’s Red Franz, who is basically a skull with long red hair on his head, chin, and Larry Hagman-length eyebrows. And Lindow Man, with his squashed face-thing and the lower half of his body missing. Old Croghan Man is just a torso with arms, his well-preserved entrails spilling out. Grauballe Man’s gaping, ear-to-ear throat wound looks like it was cut only yesterday; his head is stuck twisted backwards. Damendorf Man has been pressed completely flat by the weight of the bog, turning him into the worst version of Flat Stanley you could possibly imagine.

There are a few teenagers, like Yde Girl, and even children, like the stab-wound-ridden Kayhausen Boy. When he died, he was about the same age as I was when I first saw him in my dad’s book. We could have been playmates, but for the fact that he was the scariest thing I’d ever seen in my life, and dead.

And yet, I couldn’t look away, so I kept reading. Then night came, and I put the book down and went to bed.

In my dreams, I could see the Bog Men just as clearly. They’d come to life and were doing that old school zombie shuffle-walk towards my house. I imagined walking around my backyard one day, stepping on the wrong spot of that muddy, probably bog-like, patch by the trees, and a black, leathery hand with bone fingers shooting out of the earth, grabbing my ankle, and pulling me down below, where all his disgusting scary friends were waiting for me — empty sockets where their eyes used to be, noses smashed sideways, mouths frozen open and screaming.

I didn’t get much sleep that night, nor for the following several nights. Dad returned the book to the library, probably after getting an earful from Mom about what constitutes age-appropriate reading material for an eight-year-old and the dangers of underestimating his daughter’s vivid imagination. After that, there was an unspoken rule in our family that we would never speak of the Bog Men again and Bog Men books were not to be brought home from the library. If an occasional special about Bog Men came on the TV, the channel was quickly changed.

We didn’t even play Boggle.

Clonycavan Man photographed by Mark Healey.

As those Scottish peat cutters found out, Bog Men don’t stay buried forever. Fifteen years later, I was driving along Santa Monica Boulevard in my red Ford Focus when I saw it — an advertisement for an upcoming exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles: “The Mysterious Bog People.”

And there was an artist’s reconstruction of that horrible Yde Girl’s face. And it wasn’t just one ad, either; the streetlights were festooned with banners for the exhibit. Everywhere I drove, Yde Girl’s face — and the dates when she and five of her terrible friends were stopping by my city on their triumphant world tour — was hanging down from the lampposts. For the next six months, I would be sleeping just a few miles away from my nightmares.

As there was no escape, I decided to use this as an opportunity. I had a chance to actually face my childhood fear in the desiccated flesh. Yde Girl was only 4’7″. When she was alive, she had scoliosis. As a bog body, she didn’t even have legs or arms — just feet, a right hand, a torso and her head. I felt like I could totally take her in a fight if she happened to reanimate during our face-to-partial-face meeting. I was braver now than when I was eight. I would go to the museum and see the Bog Men.

I wasn’t about to go alone. My dad was in town for a business trip, and stayed over an extra day. We went to the Natural History Museum. He held my hand as we walked inside.

Sara Morrison is a journalist in New York City.

★★ Dimness laced with occasional unexpected colors. Morning was mild, though the sun was weakened by clouds. The air smelled of dampened leaves. Within an hour or two, it was fully overcast, thick and yellowish. The leaves on Prince Street had turned, in their passage through autumn, to the pale green of new spring growth. Spots of pink appeared in the otherwise gloomy late sky. The 1 trains were running 10 or more minutes apart, but walking was a decent enough option, as the clouds went to iodine purple.

“A new study finds that people are viewed as more attractive when they are part of a group, rather than alone.”

Boy, this guy sure has a problem with Boston.

I enjoy the way they just sort of drop in the story about the guy who died in Room 1111 towards the end of the piece. Like, “I dunno, it’s still pretty thin, anyone die here? Oh, great!” Anyway, I’m scared, hold me, etc.

“For men, more texting doesn’t necessarily mean a better relationship. And they don’t just get tired of receiving texts; their relationship satisfaction is also lower when they send a lot of texts themselves. ‘We’re wondering if this means men disconnect and replace in-person conversations with more texting,’ [some researcher] said. ‘Maybe as they exit the relationship, they text more frequently because that’s a safer form of communication. We don’t know why, that is just a conjecture.’”

“What men want is eyebrows — or ‘guybrows,’ as Mr. Gafni calls them — that look polished but not at all tweezed.”

by Howard Mittelmark

I needed to replace my printer in a hurry, so I went to the Best Buy on Union Square. I’d done my research and figured I’d be in and out lickety-split, but they didn’t have any of the printers I’d read about on www.cnet.com, so I looked around for somebody to help me. It was just like people say. All the salespeople were either talking to each other or making themselves scarce. When I finally got one young guy to help me, he proceeded to read out loud the specs from the same signs I’d just read myself! He was no help, and I still didn’t know which of the printers was better than the others. I left in disgust.

But I still needed a printer, so I crossed Fourteenth Street and headed into the Staples on the other side of Union Square. Maybe I’d have better luck there.

At first, it was just like at Best Buy. I couldn’t find anyone to help me. So I started reading through all the signs again, trying to look things up on my smartphone, and I’d finally decided on a Brother black-and-white laser printer, on sale for $79, when I heard somebody say “Can I help you, sir?”

He was a slim, neat, middle-aged guy, with a name tag that said “Sam,” and an accent that might have been from somewhere in Africa by way of England, but what do I know? I’m no expert on accents. Anyway, he sounded classy, and he wore his red Staples shirt with, I don’t know, a bit of dignity. There was something about him I liked right away. And, boy, did he know his stuff. He told me all about my options, and steered me away from the Brother. He recommended a slightly more expensive Canon unit, a multi-function model also on sale. I hesitated, because who needs all those bells and whistles? Who even uses a fax anymore? But he told me about a customer who had bought one of these last week, for his office, and had just come in yesterday to buy another for his home, and then he started on another story about another satisfied customer, and I put up my hands and said “Okay, okay, you win, I give up.” He grinned at me, and I grinned back. He had this sparkle in his eyes that said “I know you know I’m hustling you, but I’m so good at it we’re having fun, right?”

He went in back and got me my unit, I bought the thing, we shook hands, and I took it home.

It took me a couple of hours to set it up, and when I started to gather up all the packing materials, I realized that I’d kept a pen he’d given me to use when I was paying. It wasn’t one of those Staples stick pens from the counter, either, it was a pen he’d taken from his shirt pocket, nothing too fancy, but it was the kind that clicked in and out, and it had a little heft to it. It was a nice pen. I’d really liked the guy, so a few days later when I was walking through the farmer’s market in Union Square I popped into Staples to return it. He’d been really helpful.

When I got there, I asked a young guy with messy hair if Sam was working that day. He told me there wasn’t anybody who worked there named Sam. “That’s impossible,” I said. “He sold me a printer just the other day, and I came in to return his pen.” I showed him the pen.

He took it from me and said, “Wait just a minute. I’ll go ask my manager.”

I watched him walk toward the back of the store, where he approached another guy in a red Staples shirt, a slightly older guy, and said something to him and pointed toward me. The older guy took the pen from the kid, and as he looked at it, his eyes widened and his face grew pale. He walked toward me. I watched him come, confused by the deep sadness that replaced the shock in his eyes.

“Sir,” he said, when he reached me, “there used to be a salesman named Sam here. But he transferred to the Thirty-Fourth Street store three years ago.”

I didn’t know what to say, and so I left. All this time later, nobody’s ever explained it to my satisfaction. Mostly I just don’t talk about it anymore. But there’s one more thing. That printer’s always worked perfectly, and I haven’t had to replace the toner cartridge yet, and it’s lasted a lot longer than you’d normally expect one to last.

Howard Mittelmark is the author of Age of Consent and How Not To Write A Novel.

“Dell admits laptops smell of cat pee”

“After making a string of big-budget videos with high-profile guests for songs from The Next Day, David Bowie pared all the way down to DIY on his latest clip, spending just $12.99 on visuals for the James Murphy remix of ‘Love Is Lost.’ Written, shot and edited by Bowie (with help from his assistant and a friend) in his Manhattan office last weekend, the video features puppets from what a publicist calls ‘his legendary archive.’ And how did they calculate that $12.99 figure? That was apparently the cost of the thumb drive to which Bowie transferred the finished video Monday morning.”
 — Everything I’ve seen about this video notes how inexpensive it was to produce, which seems totally unsurprising if you take two seconds to think about the cover of the album the song come from.