People with Huge ear rings/ear stretching

Poor Uncle Tom wrote: »

They have part time jobs working as prizes in the carnival...

GodSaveTheQueen wrote: »

He said he won't already.

An Irish body-piercer has helped to solve a Bronze Age mystery. A series of enigmatic gold Ñboxesæ and Ñbobbinsæ dating back more than 3,000 years seem to have been ear-spools, worn in an enormously distended perforation through the lobe.

"I happened to see Paddy O'Donoghoe on the Late Late Show," Mary Cahill of the National Museum in Dublin explains in Archaeology Ireland. "My immediate reaction was to shout 'He is wearing the Ballinesker boxes in his ears'. " In fact Mr O'Donoghoe, who runs a piercing parlour called Bodyshock in Dublinºs Temple Bar district, was wearing a modern gold spool in a perforation nearly 3in across.

He joined Ms Cahill at the museum, which has one of the finest collections of prehistoric goldwork in Europe, and helped to identify several pieces as ancient ear-ornaments. One type, known as 'boxes', look very like a pillbox, with straight walls: a set from Mullingar are between 2in and 3in in diameter and an inch deep, and would have been held in the earlobe simply by the elasticity of the flesh.

A second type has slightly concave walls, so that the lobe would have been stretched over the rim before retracting back in place to hold the earspool tightly; a third kind has a relatively small central cylinder which was passed through the ear before the much wider outer and inner discs were attached.

All were made of thin sheet gold, decorated with sets of concentric circles: recent rock-art discoveries in Ireland have shown that a form of scribing compass was used to produce perfect circles. Similarly distended earlobes are known from many other cultures, ranging from the pre-Hispanic Maya and Aztec, who used jade and obsidian earspools as well as gold, to contemporary Swahili women in Kenya. "Some of us may be surprised that our Bronze Age ancestors were practitioners of body-piercing," Ms Cahill says. "In order to distend the earlobe to the required size the process must be carried out over a long period by hanging weights from the perforation. It can be painful, and carries the dangers inherent in any para-surgical procedure."

Other enigmatic gold objects may also have been fitted to various body parts, she suggests: "It is not too outrageous to propose that prehistoric people in Ireland may have pierced the rim of the ear, the septum and wings of the nose, or the mouth. Many of the ornaments may have been exclusive, based on sex, age or status: we do not know what symbolism they carried, but they embodied powerful meanings, perhaps even magic."

Poor Uncle Tom wrote: »

And other bits, in peoples minds at least......




I think the whole world's addicted to the drama,
Only attracted to the things that bring you trauma...