More scary clowns...

Of all the posts I've ever posted, the one on scary clowns has had the most views. So, to scare all those clown-phobics out there -- just a little bit -- here are some more creepy clowns.

I absolutely adore this louche chap. And he wobbles too...

The rest of today's boys are from a Funny Face board game. I like them because they look to me as though they're based on real people.

Look at the sadness in those eyes...

In this game all the eyes, ears, mouths, noses and bow ties pop out and you spin a pointer to see which body part you replace next. By swivelling eyeballs and mismatching ears you can make some real grotesques. But the moveable parts have never been pushed out in my set, so I intend to keep them mint, I think. They're so beautiful, I've half a mind to frame them and hang them up.

Which one do you like best ... or fear the least, children?

Clowns, and scary clowns

I'm amazed to have received another present through the post. Lesley, another Postman's Knock friend, sent me this wonderful Seventies Ladybird book on clowns. It's a great book that I've not come across before and I'm very touched by Lesley's kind thought -- thank you.

Well, I took my new book to work and showed it to my friend that I work with. I know she suffers from 'coulrophobia' or fear of clowns. I'm afraid I find this quite amusing -- as long as there isn't a real scary clown coming through the door of our office (like Mr Jelly, the Psychoville clown, above), I think she can cope. She looked through the book and announced it to be 'wrongy wrong wrong'. Whereupon, I looked up 'fear of clowns' online and found a wealth of weirdness.

Children were consulted about the redecorating of a children's hospital in Sheffield -- clowns were the theme, but the kids rejected them out of hand and psychologists, following up with research, announced that children are frightened by clowns because they are similar to normal people but at the same time disturbingly different. This brought me to the concept of the 'uncanny valley', which conjured up wonderful images of a creepy location, a listless stream overshadowed by grotesque rock formations or some such, but in fact refers to a phenomenon in robotics: when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The 'valley' is a marked dip in a graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's human likeness. A strange concept, but you can see how it applies to clowns.

On eBay I found this nasty-looking fellow for sale -- for £144! I'd love him, but that price is out of my league.

I do find clowns disturbing but it's that that makes me like them and want to gather images of them around me. The creepy combination of merriment and hostility is a winner every time.
     Just to bring things back within the realms of sanity, I also found these ... lovely cushions:

One of a series of eight from here. There, nothing scary about that, is there?