merylinabarrel

I would like you to please admire the pumpkin I just carved. I got the pattern from Blade Diary where a guy named Posterchild posts stencils for graffiti and examples of how it looks actually painted on something. I like the site, but I'm not much of a tagger, so I altered one of the patterns and made it work for my pumpkin.

Step One: pick out a good pumpkin. Step Two: draw the pattern on the pumpkin.


Step Three: rip out the guts of the pumpkin. Step Four: very carefully carve the pumpkin.


Step Five: hold the pumpkin up as if it was your head. Step Six: light the pumpkin and see how it looks.

The gentlemen depicted is Alan Turing, who is considered the father of modern computer science... maybe you've heard of the Turing test for artificial intelligence? He was British and worked for the British secret service as a mathematician and cryptographer until he was convicted of being a homosexual (which he was and which was considered a mental illness under the law). To avoid being sent to prison, he had to agree to undergo estrogen hormone therapy and he did for a year, but the homosexuality conviction caused him to lose his security clearance and therefore to lose his job. He killed himself a year later by eating an apple poisoned with cyanide, which seems a little ornate, I think.

It's quite a sad story, but he makes a delightful pumpkin. The last time I carved one was four years ago and it had a pineapple on it. It was pretty nice, but I think Turing beats it, even though he looked better in the drawing phase than at the end of the process.