Won't You Be My Neighbor

I don't get out much.

Still, there are some strange things in my neighborhood. Simply on my way to the mall there are a surprising number of oddities. For example, there is a building next to the Museum of Science that I like to think of as the Dungeon of Science.



From the amount of ivy on that building, I have to guess that "Unauthorized Persons KEEP OUT" sign was placed there a good 6 decades ago; as they were constructing the Museum of Good Science, they had to have a place to trap all the Bad Science so that it wouldn't get out. There could be more mundane explanations, of course; it could just be where they keep the vampire.

If we continue along to the other side of the river, we come to this:



In the game Eternal Darkness, there is a point at which the villain must construct what he terms the "Pillar of Flesh", a grisly monument made of concrete and still-living people, designed to focus the evil energies required to bring his dark god forth to this world. You know, to raze it down to its component atoms and re-make it in its own image, etc. So, imagine my surprise when I discovered I live right next to a miniature; let's call it a "Pillar of Souls", since clearly whole bodies aren't trapped in there. You can see that most of the folks involved are smiling for the camera:



but there are a few who let their true feelings slip through:



Seriously, there is no inscription anywhere on this monument, nor any plaque in the area to explain what it is supposed to represent. Why would you make a sculpture of a group of people's heads smashed together in various states of dismay and/or amusement and then put that on a footpath near a mall? Why, I ask you? I note that it is pointed towards the sky - perhaps some kind of spectral battery for a weapon that shoots ghosts at the sun?

I am not an expert but I do not think that shooting ghosts at the sun would do anything, and if it did, it would not be a thing that is good for anyone.