Welcome to the Boneyard, friends, where all manner of subjects – mostly arts/leisure/media – get dug up and pawed at randomly and attempts might even be made to “unite the joints,” so to speak. Here’s a small image of our mascot, Timothy Spall, who plays Mr. Venus in the BBC’s 1998 production of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Mr. Venus is what Dickens calls a “preserver of [dead] animals” and an “articulator” of skeletons. He continues on about the character like this: “The face looking up is a sallow face with weak eyes, surmounted by a tangle of reddish-dusty hair. The owner of the face has no cravat on, and has opened his tumbled shirt-collar to work with more ease.” Venus is a bitter sad-sack, and he spends most of the story involved in a conspiracy against our heroes, the Boffins. But he changes his ways in the end.