Microbes, they can kill you....

in science class at school we are studying microbes, and we found the funniest video of all time.

It is the Microbe Song, and it has frodo giving food poisoning to legolas, aragorn and gimili, and getting a lecture from dumbledore, and all this set to the music of Queen.

Playing with Clay in London

To maintain my sanity this year (what little remains to me), i signed up for a pottery class. Well, it was really a sculpture class, from a fab woman named Linda Zeff. You can check out her webpage here:  http://www.lindazeff.com/

So far, i haven't done any sculpture (in part because it requires some level of skill i do not yet have, as well as an ability to stick with a single project for a bit longer than my attention span currently lasts. 

However, Linda has a wheel sitting forlorn in the corner of the studio, so she has been letting me play with the wheel on my own (as long as I promised not to need any instruction on it). Yea! I do love to play in the mud!

So, my first 4 pieces are finished (all low fire, which is new for me, but....)  I brought them home today, and baptised the first of the two mugs:  a moment of peace and quiet shared with the dog. (notice that I am wearing the lovely necklace of glass beads that my sister Mary made for me.... nothing like a craft that is practical (adornment or beverage delivery!)

the staring contest...

Well, on reflection, maybe the encounter with Kiwi was not entirely peaceful.  She has those puppy dog eyes...... i am not sure if she was wanting me to pour her a cup, or just to put the cup down and throw the ball to her....  (well... actually I AM sure what she wanted, but I was in the mood to sit a while, so was pretending not to get the message.  i don't think she was fooled.

Alex and Rebecca at the British Museum - Part 3, Medieval England.

Well, the third tour on the "learning day at the British |Museum" Alex and I had last week was the Medieval Room.

The Lewis Chessmen

Funnily enough, we had a conversation earlier in the day (after seeing the board game in the Mesopotamian area) where Alex asked me who invented Chess, and I had to confess that I did not know.  I also did not know that we would find the answer in the Medieval England Tour.  The first stop was to this 12th century chess set made of walrus ivory and whale's tooth: The Lewis Chessmen.  Here, we learned that the game of chess originated in India.  We also learned that we can see from this chess set that there was way more traffic between cultures during the medieval times than we used to believe.  You can see here some of the meetings through the British uptake of an Indian game of strategy (to help generals learn about war).  The game was originally banned to the clergy, but eventually, the clergy makes it onto the board!   In the indian version of the game, the "Queen" would have been a General, and the "Bishop" would have been an elephant!  This set was probably from Norway, since the knights are biting on their shields... a practice of the norse bezerkers (designed to send them into a killing frenzy!)

Medieval drinking glass

It was also interesting learning about this drinking glass.  In some ways, it is not totally special: the kind of drinking glass that would have been used in the homes of many of the upper classes.  But in the mixing of materials and styles, and the text telling us who made it, there are again clues to understand commerce during those years, and the movement of styles, artists, materials, etc.  Didn't think it was possible to tell so much of the history of trade and daily life through a cup!



Reliquary for Beckett?

 There was also a great painting of the murder of  Thomas a Beckett in the Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.  They also had a reliquary... one of those lovely boxes into which the remains of a saint could be placed!  We got to hear how, after the murder, the other monks swooped in to soak up the left over blood and body parts in order to place them in reliquaries, and send them all over europe.  fun for me, since it was a flashback to the history course i took in university on the medieval church... and my bafflement as a 21 year old living in Belgium when i found myself watching profession of the holy blood.  |Yep.  Relics.  Interesting!



The Tring Tiles



We also had fun in front of the Tring Tiles.  These tiles look very 'cartoon', but were totally fun!   They are supposedly stories of Jesus as a child.  They work like cartoons.  Some of them have panels, and you can read them from left to right to follow the story.  Many of the stories show things like Jesus being bullied, Jesus using his powers to kill the bully, and then mary coming along and making jesus bring the person back to life.  uh.... "Bad Jesus!  You bring him back to life right now, and then go to your room!"  :-)  You can also see tiles where parents are trying to lock their kids up so they won't play with the young jesus (no doubt!   on these tiles, he kept 'accidentally' killing kids when he got mad at them!).  In one, the parents lock their kids up in an oven to protect them.  hmmm.... shades of hansel and gretel in THAT tale! 



not my choice of hat...

 And of course, no tour of the medieval era would be complete without a brief moment in front of a suit of mail.  The issue at this point was comparing the outfit of a knight from the chess set (when knights were riding stocky little ponies), to their later counterparts who were required to wear heavier armour because of the invention of the crossbow and longbow. 



Fishpool Hoard

 It didn't take too much imagination to construct a picture of knights fighting both for honor, and for piles of gold coins.  I loved the Fishpool Hoard, a glass case full of 1200 15th century gold coins, found somewhere in Nottingham in 1966.  I think these coins (from the war of the roses) would make a really fantastic necklace!   I suspect, had I been the one to find the hoard, that it would have arrived at the museum just short of the number of coins necessary for such a work of art!

Another Visit, and another week of theatre...

My mom (and aunt wyona and uncle greg) were here again for 5 days.  Lucky lucky me!  This time, there was just a bit less theatre than last time.... but it is all relative of course.  On their last visit, I think wyona might have managed 9 plays in 6 days, once we got the math sorted out.  I think that this time, it worked out to only one theatre performance per day. [hmm... now that I think about it, i am not sure that is true... they may have smuggled a few extra matinee performances in their as well]

Still, the group did drag me out with them for two of the nights: once to see Legally Blonde and The Pitmen Painters.   Legally Blonde was amazing campy fun.  I have taught the movie before, but think i might like the musical even better: there is something about its campy excess that really amplifies things.  Great fun.  And i am still thinking about Pitmen Painters.  What a great piece of theatre...Arta already wrote up a blogpost about our trip to the theatre (with a "P.S." from me), so you can find the story of that adventure on her blogpage.  http://larchhaven.blogspot.com/2011/12/pitmen-painters.html

Adventures in Baking

Toffee Trophy

What is THIS a picture of, you say?  Toffee?   Nope.  It is a trophy!  Well.... it is toffee AND a trophy.  You see, Duncan informed me today that he had committed me to making some sugary treat (caramel? toffee?) for the school bake sale.  OK.  .... I prefer to be given a bit more advance notice, but there you go.... it was still do-able. So on the way home from walking the dog, we stopped at Waitrose grocery store to pick up the basics: butter, cream, sugar, corn syrup.  The rest of the night basically involved hanging out in the kitchen waiting for the thermometer to mount up towards 'hard ball' or 'soft crack'. 


showing off the 4th to fall



Of course, i ended up trying to clean the kitchen at the same time.  Given my distraction, the sugar mixture went much closer to 'hard crack'.  It is still tasty, but with a bit more crunch than usual (approaching peanut brittle).  Still, Duncan proclaimed it a success (and ran off to the other room to watch Harry Potter with a plate of toffee. 

 He returned 15 minutes later in outrage, telling me that if I thought I was going to sell this stuff, I would going to have to also put up a sign warning potential customers that the toffee had the power to pull out your teeth.  With a flourish, he placed the trophy (a baby molar) in my hand.   Duncan declares that the tooth that was yanked out by the toffee was NOT the tooth that was wiggly, but the one beside it.  What ever the case may be, I think that brings the total up to 4 lost teeth in just about as many weeks. 

Yep.... adventures in baking.  Another trophy for my cabinet!

 

Alex and Rebecca at the British Museum - part 2, The Enlightenment Room

So... our second tour of the day (on our 'learning at the british museum' day) was the Enlightenment Room. I have walked past it many times, but never through it, and this despite the fact that my mom says it is her favourite room. I have no particular reason for that... I have just always been on the way to something else. But, this time, the 'timing' was right for Alex and I, so we waited at the door for the guide.

the glass roof at the British Museum

After the guide arrived, and while we were waiting for the others, we talked a bit about the amazing glass roof, and he told us that the triangles of glass in the roof are ALL different sizes. Also, because the roof contracts and expands as the room gets hotter or colder, the edges of the roof are not actually attached to the building, but are on rolling wheels, so the roof can move as it grows and shrinks over the course of the day. Now THAT is cool!

I also got a chance to ask the guide which of the tours he liked best. Not surprisingly, he said "this one!"  ;-)  He told us that he has spent years doing tours in 4 or 5 other areas of the museum, but that the enlightenment room was his favourite, but a tricky one to do because there is so much going on.  I can see why.  So... here are some of the things we liked/learned in the enlightenment room list of things we learned and saw.
 

Sir Hans Sloane



1. We learned about Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection was the foundation for the British Museum (in 1754).  He had a collection of 80,000 objects.  What?!   And apparently, he kept them all in his house?!   In the enlightenment room, there are 5,000 on display (which gives you some sense of just how much 'stuff' he had in his house!).  We also learned that Hans Sloane brought coco back from one of his voyages, and was responsible for adding sugar and milk for taste, turning it into hot chocolate (later becoming Cadbury's)...according to Duncan, the invention of hot chocolate gives the man a status higher than 'Sir' and something closer to a God. 



collection of shoes




portraits in different mediums (including walnuts)



2  Before the invention of the word 'museum', the collections of these enlightenment folk were referred to as "cabinets of curiosity", the 'curiosity' meaning only 'things about which the collector was curious'.  I loved it that the room is set up in a way to gather things together in a 'cabinet of curiosity' kind of way.  You can wander from cabinet to cabinet, seeing things gathered together in different ways.  We looked at one collection of shoes, and another collection of drawings (done on plates, wood, pill boxes, and even a walnut... yes... the head of the king carved into a nut... not sure what that says about the king, but there you go)

Watercolours by Maria Sibylla Merian



3. It was fun to learn about some of the female explorers, like Maria Sibylla Merian, who, with her daughter, travelled in 1699 to South American and spent her time doing watercolours of plants and insects (she is a significant contributor to the founding of the science of entymology... study of insects).  She also brought back tons of plant clippings who progeny can still be found in the Kew Gardens (which is funny since an attempt to bring plant clippings across the border these days is less likely to get you in the museum, and more like to get you in a jail cell)



Paper flowers

 4. From there, we spent time looking at the paper mosaic flowers made by Mary Delany.  Her pieces look like pressed flowers, but were totally made from paper.  I loved it that she only started making them when she turned 73.  ... the guide used the flowers to show us not only beautiful art, but to talk about the shift in practices around classification (and the adoption of the linean practice of giving two latinish names to plants).

5. i didn't get pictures, but there was a great discussion of fossils (plants and animals), and their challenge to the view that the world was created in 4000 BC.  it was fun listening to the ways certain fossils has been declared as 'devils toes' or 'devils tongues' or sea snakes turned to stone by St. Hilda.  it was really fun seeing how some people had taken a huge ammonite fossil, and carved away part of it to make it look more like it really DID have the head of a snake).  Also fun to hear how hand axes put an end to the debate (since they were at least 400,000 years old, and found along side elephant tusks).  The real fun here was looking at the ways that people were spending their time trying to learn about the world from the objects around them.  it is so less common these days to find THINGS in libraries.



an astrolabe



 model of the universe



6. We saw a cabinet filled up with astrolabes (an ancient muslim kind of compass/timepiece), a device to explain Newton's theory of light to the King (with a double prism to show that white light could be broken into colours, but not then combined back into white), and a model of the universe according to copernicus... wonders aplenty!

for sure, this is a room to return to...



Alex and Rebecca at the British Museum - Part 1... Roman Gods and Goddesses in England

Alex and I took a 'learning day' and headed off to the British Museum, where we went on three (yes, count 'em THREE) of the eye opener tours.


Votives (Roman influences)



First one was the "Romanized England" tour.  This was basically the period where Rome was busy colonizing England (roughly 100 to 400 AD).  We learned that 10% of Rome's soldiers were stationed in England, and that 70% of England's silver went to Rome.  Indeed, the guide talked about the golden age of english silver production (which was a bit odd.... to have a golden age of silver).  Still, it was fun looking at the little votive figures, looking at the ways in which the Brits adopted Roman gods, and practices of worship.

 

The Hinton St. Mary's Christ


We also got to get up close with the Hinton St Mary Mosaic.  It is one of the first known representations of Christ in the British Isles... it was fun listening to her explain how they can tell this one is Christ, rather than one of the Roman gods. ...part of the challenge for the mosaic maker would have been figuring out how to do a representation of someone he had never seen (as there were not yet lots of images around... it was easier to do roman gods since they all had attributes to help you recognize them: ie. lyre, arrows, trident, apples, etc).  We learned that the two letters behind his head are the first two letters of his name. We also learned that the romans invented concrete.  how did i not already know that?!


Senuna/Minerva



Also new to me was the "Ashwell Hoard".  In 2002, a guy out with a metal detector located a bunch of gold and silver wrapped in a bundle and buried in the ground.  He contacted the museum, who thus not only got their hands on this find, but could also learn more by exploring where the cache was found.  Amongst the jewelry and votive pieces was a votive statue named "Senuna".  Until 2002, she was apparently unknown.  They think now she was one of the local gods (celtic?) who was being worshipped alongside Minerva (the roman influenced goddess).... tells something about the mixing of local and foreign religious practices.  They don't know why the stuff was buried, but there you go.... always as much left unknow as stuff figured out.  Sort of like my life....