Did you know there’s a band dedicated to making mariachi-style covers of video game and pop culture themes? I didn’t, until today. And, boy, Mariachi Entertainment System is brilliant! Here is just one of their recent productions: the throne room theme from the end of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope:
“There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can’t unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.”
– Joanna Russ: The Female Man
A somber view of what it’s to be an intelligent, determined woman in a world run by men who don’t recognize their value.
Russ, Joanna: The Female Man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975, p. 151.
Bede’s World, a small museum in Jarrow, Tyne & Wear, Northumbria, dedicated to the Venerable Bede and 7th-century England, shut down its operations in February 2016.
In addition to indoor exhibits, the museum includes several replica wattle and daub buildings, modeled on structures excavated in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria and built with original materials and contemporary methods. On the grounds there is also a herb garden and a working farm with a small collection of rare breed animals resembling those that lived 1,300 years ago.
“It is with great regret that the Trustee Board took the decision for Bedes World [sic] to cease operation from Friday 12 February 2016 due to a lack of funds.
“Steps are being taken to put the company into administration through the appointment of an Insolvency Practitioner.
“The Trustee Board have made arrangements for the immediate care of the farm animals and the security of the site.
“The Board would like thank all staff, volunteers and stakeholders for their hard work and dedication to Bedes World. [sic]”
Fortunately, only a few weeks afterwards better news surfaced: a new operator was found to run the site. At this writing it isn’t clear what their plans for Bede’s World are, though. (Follow this link to read the statement by Groundwork South Tyneside and Newcastle, the new operator.)
As the middle of the semester approaches and assignments start coming due, the e-mails start coming in. Students start coming to me before or after class or poking their heads into my office between classes. I know what they’re going to ask. Some of them know the word for it; others just know what they need: a few more days to work on their papers and projects. An extension.
There’s always a reason. The flu. Grandmother passed away. Father in the hospital. Car trouble. I know pretty much what they’re going to say before they even open their mouths. And I know what I’m going to say, too: yes. Always yes. I never ask for proof (though my students will often bring me notes and I will look at them out of respect). Anyone who asks can have a few extra days.
I have known professors who take pride in never having granted an extension, or if they do they want to see the doctor’s note and the obituary in the newspaper and they will run the story down like an investigative journalist tracking a political scandal. For them, deadlines are deadlines: the line past which you’d better be dead and have a note from God if your paper isn’t done. I respect my fellow professors who teach this way, but it’s not my way.
According to Comic-Con International, Tove Jansson, a Finnish visual artist and author, has been selected by the Eisner Award judges to be automatically inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame for 2016. Hooray, Tove!
Jansson (1914-2001) is best known as the creator of the incredibly popular Moomins books and comics. Besides Jansson, there’s a second automatic inductee: Carl Burgos, Golden Age creator of The Human Torch.
In addition, the judges have also chosen 14 nominees from which voters will select four to be inducted in the Hall of Fame. Visit the Comic-Con International: San Diego Eisner Awards page for details. The ceremony takes place July 22, 2016, in San Diego.
I wrote last week about what a fantastic thing it is to have a wealth of primary sources stored in libraries and museums, nowadays increasingly being made available online. For completeness’s sake, it needs to be mentioned that it’s not only library and museum professionals that share quality research or materials online.
Below I list a (very) few linguistic and historical resources put together by dedicated private individuals. They’re all diligent in documenting their steps and sources, and providing info and links for those interested in finding more. Thorough documentation is, again, not a surefire way to avoid mistakes, but it does allow tracking sources and re-creating the research.
Lacus Curtius – classical Greek and Latin texts, three dictionaries, and materials on Roman Britain, Roman military history, and ancient astronomy, to name but a few
Omniglot – alphabets, languages, useful phrases and much more
The Inca empire of South America was connected by a network of roads used by chasqui runners and pack llamas carrying messages and supplies around the empire. The Inca, creating their empire in the Andes mountains, faced challenges unlike those of flat-land and river-valley empires, among which was the problem of crossing numerous steep mountain valleys and rivers that ran dangerously swift in the flood season. Their solution to this problem was: rope bridges.
Suspension rope bridges spanned rivers and valleys, the longest reaching a length of 45 meters. They were made with ropes twisted out of grass and had to be rebuilt every year or two. The rebuilding was dangerous work that was assigned to local villagers as part of their obligation to the empire. Most Inca bridges have long since been replaced with modern structures, but one, the Q’iswa Chaka over the Apurimac River in Peru, is still rebuilt every year by local people as a way of preserving their heritage.
“A celebration of pilots, captains, engineers, crew members, and the spacecraft they love to fly. (And race, and crash, and fix, and play in, and fight in, and…)”
It’s a great time to be a geek – not only are more SFFnal stories than before being published and adapted to the screen and stage, but making, remixing, and sharing our own content is incredibly easy.
“A Day in Pompeii” is an 8-minute high-definition video on how a series of eruptions wiped out Pompeii over 48 hours, produced by Museum Victoria (Melbourne Museum) and Zero One Animation for an exhibition at Melbourne Museum in 2009.
It would’ve been more stunning with changes in the POV rather than a static camera, but it was still interesting.
To accompany the exhibit, Melbourne Museum produced a wealth of additional online material.
Unfortunately there’s currently no index page, but articles are still available on the Museum website (do a search for Pompeii). For example, House of the Vine is a nifty virtual recreation of a beautiful Pompeian house. And did you know that Pompeii had running water and lavatories? There is even a replica of a loaf of bread from Pompeii:
After Melbourne, the exhibition traveled to other places. The Western Australian Museum also built a helpful site, still fully available, to go with their 2010 version in Perth.
Complementary views can be found from photos of the current state of the city at Pompeii in Pictures, website by Jackie and Bob Dunn. (Getting to the photos themselves takes a bit of clicking through the menus, but they’re there.)
Images: Box, (c) Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei via Melbourne Museum (House of Julius Polybius, Pompeii; original iron and bronze fittings and wood reconstruction). Loaf of bread via Melbourne Museum (bakery in Pompeii; plaster copy of an original, carbonized loaf)
The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?
I really love the Internet for research. It connects us to materials and people around the world. As a visual person, I find the availability of photographs and other visualizations on just about any subject especially gratifying. You can visit places and eras that you physically may not be able to.
One of the invaluable services libraries and museums provide, especially now that more of their collections are being digitized, is access to historical periods and obscure topics. (Like the Peter Parker collection of 80 paintings of Chinese patients with large tumors or other major deformities – that’s not a joke!)
And that’s only the beginning – using library and museum websites and digital collections to find primary sources for research has other benefits as well:
Copious metadata: the provenance (origins and history) of documents or items, including details like dates, original creators, owners, and chain of custody, are clearly marked when known, and when unknown, that is clearly stated, too.
Materials that physical items were made of are also given, often with information on the techniques involved or links to further reading in connection with museum exhibits.
Many libraries and museums group items in their digital collections into more easily browsable subgroups, for example by era, style, type, or topic.
Copyright information is easily available: any limitations to re-using the materials are clearly given. There are also collections that concentrate on items that are in public domain.
If digital materials are made available for re-using, often there are multiple formats, sizes, or resolutions. That’s great service!
Sets of search results are often smaller than online in general. Finding an answer is faster!
Digital collections are created by professionals. While this doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility of errors, online materials at libraries and museums are researched, curated, and checked, which increases the reliability of the information provided.
If additional information or clarification is needed, it’s the job of museums and libraries to at least try to help. That’s literally why they’re there!
Below are just some amazing digital collections from museums and libraries around the world:
Image: The Drawbridge via NYPL (The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections; 1748-1751; etching; by Giovanni Battista Piranesi)
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
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