I don’t do this too often, but just for today I’d like to announce that we’re having an extra-special holiday weekend run of images over at Infernal Wonders, which I like to describe as my “squickblog,” the place where I run imagery that many people would find a bit disturbing — or perhaps, a whole lot disturbing — but which has some sort of appeal for me. You can find a lot of icky fetishes and erotic horror over there. And I’m putting up a post every hour on the hour beginning at noon ET Friday and continuing through 6 a.m. ET Tuesday.

As usual for these long runs, the honor of the first post is given to an image of Santa Muerte, who presides as patroness of the blog:

[Dia de Los Muertos by DolceCarmella.]

The presence of Her deathly image today strikes me as particularly appropriate (it might strike more wholesome people as particularly inappropriate) because today, as many of you will know, is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. At first light on this day tens of thousands of young British and Commonwealth men climbed out of their trenches and walked into a hail of German machine-gun and artillery fire. By the end of the day perhaps 20,000 of them would be dead. If you’re an American, you might better appreciate the trauma by trying to imagine an event which killed 120,000 young American men on a single day.

[Soldat und Tod, by Hans Larwin (1873-1938).]

But perhaps that’s a sentiment more appropriate for yet another blog of mine that decent and wholesome people ought not to read.