Volume 24 · Number 3 · Spring 2007
End Notes
As the worm turns
Next time you catch an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, look for artwork hanging in the office of character Gil Grissom, night-shift supervisor of the forensics team. One of the paintings on the wall has ties to UC Davis. It’s Maggot Art, created by forensic entomologist and doctoral student Rebecca O’Flaherty.
The show’s producers commissioned the piece from O’Flaherty, who dips live maggots into colorful nontoxic paint, positions them on paper and lets the blowfly larvae do the rest.
She coined and trademarked Maggot Art after launching the art teaching curriculum program at the University of Hawaii in 2001. Since then, she has taught thousands of students, ranging from kindergartners to college students to law enforcement professionals. Her program at UC Davis’ annual Picnic Day draws more than 2,000
participants.
CSI character Grissom, portrayed by actor William Petersen, specializes in forensic entomology. But he wouldn’t find any trail of corpses from O’Flaherty’s artwork. As she tells children who take her Maggot Art workshops: No maggots are harmed in the making of the paintings.
For links to online exhibits of her paintings, click here.
Cool cows
How cool is your cow? The campus Mediation Services, which gives out squeezable cow stress toys, recently asked that question as part of a photo contest and got a stampede of responses—171 entries showing cows in a variety of poses, costumes, scenes and formations.
So many entries, in fact, that the contest judges had a hard time picking just two winners and added more prizes for six “r-udder ups.” A Web site displaying many of the entries received more than 4,300 visits.
The winning photo in the herd category was “Are U Our M-udders?” (above) with four of the tiny toys facing real cows at the campus dairy barn, submitted by Police Chief Annette Spicuzza and two other Police Department employees, Susan Wagler, management services officer, and Faith Maul, management analyst and executive assistant to the chief.
The top single cow entry was titled “Welcome to the Moodavi Center.” Library assistant Denice Leonard’s cow was wrapped in sandstone-like brown paper and wore a visor à la Mondavi’s entry overhang.
For a link to those and other cow contest photos, click here.
Calling all catalogs
If you’ve been saving your 1994–95, 1960–61, 1961–62, 1953–54 or older UC Davis catalogs all these years—but are ready to let go—Randall Larson-Maynard would like to hear from you.
Larson-Maynard, senior editor in the registrar’s office, is gathering old copies to scan and put online. His goal is to post electronic versions of every catalog issued since the campus’s birth as the University Farm in 1908–09.
Why? Because alumni need information from old catalogs more than you might think. The registrar’s office gets up to a dozen requests a week for course descriptions from years back, Larson-Maynard said. People typically need the information for employment or educational reasons.
Larson-Maynard hopes to post a century of catalogs by the time the campus celebrates its centennial in 2008–09.
So far, Larson-Maynard has gathered catalogs for most every year back to the mid-1950s, but he’s looking for catalogs for the remaining years—especially copies that he won’t have to give back. The bindings get cut off during an automated scanning process.
Contact Larson-Maynard at (530) 752-6141 or rllarsonmaynard@ucdavis.edu.
Photo: Karin Higgins/UC Davis
iPod Aggies
OK, you have a UC Davis T-shirt, a UC Davis hat, but how about a UC Davis iPod cover? They are available at the computer shop of the campus bookstore. The company iFanatic is making the covers, called Gamefacez, under license by the university, which receives a share of the sales revenue. The covers come in various sizes.