I am … unhindered by talent

We just finished two consecutive day trips to London (Friday and yesterday) and I’m thoroughly tired, and full of undigested photos. This fellow, one of the few I have processed, is from the Egyptian mummification exhibit at the British Museum (Rooms 62 and 63).

On Friday we started down in Greenwich. It was our first time through the Docklands on the DLR — it would be nice to walk those canals and take photos — and our first time to the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian. I wish we’d had more time there - it was a beautiful day and there was a ton of cool stuff one could see. Time was tight, though, so we zoomed off to the British Museum before rush hour hit, and spent the rest of the evening there.

While WeatherGirl wandered the museum, however, Sub-Evil and I snuck off and bought tickets for Avenue Q at the Noël Coward Theatre for the following night. He’s been keen to see that ever sense we got here, and it was nice to finally make that happen, but it did mean two consecutive days into London, which is frankly pretty tiring.

Yesterday Sub-Evil and I started at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology on the UCL campus. Sub-Evil is very into Egyptian history, writing, artifacts, etc., so he really wanted to see this. It’s a very cool collection, but pretty desperately in need of a new home, with the collection crammed into old victorian cabinets and spilling down an emergency exit staircase! Next was the British Library, which was just tremendous! The King’s Library alone was worth the (free) price of admission, and the display of the treasures (Magna Carta, illuminated manuscripts, handwritten scores, drafts, diaries, and letters by amazing folks) was really wonderful.

After all that we grabbed some dinner and then headed off to Avenue Q! We both had listened to the soundtrack about a zillion times, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. The production was tons of fun, however, and watching the puppet masters sing, dance, act, and run the puppets at the same time reminded me of the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels :-).

Now we pack and organize, for tomorrow we’re off to Methwold Old Vicarage for our first stay in a Landmark Trust property!

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After a long day of being cultural and scientific in London with Kildegaards a few weeks ago, we got on the Tube back to Liverpool Street and the train back to Colchester. Looking across into the next car on the Underground, I was surprised to learn that a volcano was expected to erupt in Rome!

Turns out it’s a reference to a rugby player in an international match. And here I thought it was gonna be Pompeii all over again, but with more automobiles.

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I realize that I’m fashionably late for Darwin Day (12 Feb), but I offer cool-scary dinosaur skeletons and flesh-eating beetles in apology!

We were in London Friday to see the Kildegaards who (a) are friends of ours from Morris, (b) are living in Denmark this year on sabbatical, and (c) were in London for a week. We had a wonderful day, which included time in both the Natural History Museum (NHM - where the photo above was taken) and the V&A.

As part of our time in the NHM, we toured the wonderful Darwin Centre. (See the nifty connection? See? See? :->) This included amazing cool things such as a giant squid in a tank, loads of great big animals (mostly fish) preserved in equally big custom-made glass jars (including a Coelacanth and a whole jar of platypi), and flesh-eating beetles! They have a whole room of incubators of flesh-eating beetles that they use to clean specimens without damaging the skeletal structure. And to top off this festival of biological delights, they have a real-time beetle-cam where you can watch the little critters roaming around over the carcass of the moment (in a grainy, low-res format, to be sure), busily contributing to the scientific process. I suspect, in fact, that they will, in their oblivious fashion, will probably contribute more to science than someone like Huckabee.

I want to thank our tour guide (whose name I, sadly but predictably, have forgotten), as she did a great job. She was full of useful information, and handled our numerous questions gracefully and informatively.

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While we were in London, Sub-Evil Boy and I went out to Leicester Square early Saturday morning to get some cheap theatre tickets. We were there an hour before they opened, so we wandered around some, stumbling upon Trafalgar Square along the way. Standing in the square was the annual Xmas tree from Norway, and (quite surprisingly) sitting in the tree was a hawk there in the center of London.

Turns out that that it was there on "official business", being used to scare off the great squadrons of pigeons that frequent the square. It was clearly successful in the sense that the pigeons were all up wheeling in the distance. We had a nice chat with the hawk’s handler, and I asked him about the long term effectiveness of this approach. Apparently presence of food outweighs threat to life and wing.

The handler talked about walking through a veritable carpet of pigeons drawn by a couple with a large bag of seeds, completely unmoved by the presence of the hawk. Recently he saw a truck passing slowly in front of the National Gallery kill 13 pigeons who refused to move because of a large supply of corn on the road. We didn’t see any actual attacks when we were there, but the handler did say that it’s not uncommon for the hawk to get a pigeon or two out of a visit.

Below is the handler calling the hawk down from the top of the National Gallery. That’s a small (dead) baby chick in his right hand, which is the hawk’s treat when it comes down to him.

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We’re back from an excellent little 24 hour whirlwind visit to the Mighty Metropolis aka London. Most of it was spent in the British Museum, where we had tickets to see the Chinese terra cotta army. No photos from that, but it was quite remarkable and absolutely worth it.

I took lots of photos (many quite mediocre, or worse) in other parts of the British Museum, including this in a small temporary exhibit right by the entrace called "Divine Cat". This bronze egyptian scuplture was donated to the Museum by a Major Gayer-Anderson, who "was a keen restorer of ancient metal objects". Recent analysis (including X-rays) revealed that the good Major jammed a metal cylinder in the head to give it more strength, repaired a major crack, and applied a thick layer of green paint to help hide the repairs.

Oh.

An excellent little exhibit, and a nice example of the many complexities of managing a collection such as theirs.

And the cat was cool too.

I’ve posted the whole unedited lot up on my Flickr events account, and will post tidied up versions of some of the more interesting ones to my “main” Flickr account.

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On my Twitter stream this morning was this from kjell_:

“The disappearance of age-old pleasures and privileges is the first unmistakable sign of progress.” -Bernard Rudofsky

followed by this from Vaguery:

scanning an 1850 Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, just ’cause. And for the Agassiz

Of course it’s convenient that Vaguery’s Twitter things have a very high proportion of “scanning some cool old document to save it for the world”. Still, I thought it was cool :-).

And I don’t know what the rest of you are doing this evening, but we’re going to the British Museum to see the Chinese terra cotta army (or the bit of it that’s on display there at the moment)! You never know, I might take a photo (or 200).

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