A most excellent weekend
Feb. 17th, 2010 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73I will try to keep this short, in the interests of not taking the rest of this week to write up one post. But we had a really nice 3-day-weekend.
Saturday, we played with our D&D group. We finished mopping up the goblin caves, and Lady Karen accidentally got pulled into a mystical pool that a wizard had asked us to check out. Stuff happened; mostly through luck, I ended up doing what needed to be done. Because other members of the group may see this entry before we play again next weekend, that's about all I can safely say about it, excepting that the blue tattoo-like mark on Lady Karen's arm was a result of doing stuff in the pool. Oh, and Lady Karen likes the tattoo mark - her eyes can flash blue now!
Sunday, we went to see Avatar 3D. I have not been so completely enthralled by a nearly 3-hour movie in a long long time. (I think the last time was probably when I went to see Fellowship of the Ring.) And it's similarly rare for me to want to go back in and watch a movie a second time immediately after seeing it. Sure, the story has been done and the biology is more than a little silly. But that doesn't get in the way of (1) the visual pretties, and (2) the sweep of the story. I got completely caught up in it, never paying any attention to my water bottle or granola bar.
Monday, we went to see the King Tutankhamun exhibit. We'd been a bit spoiled on Egypt exhibits by our visit a few years ago to the enormous permanent exhibit at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. (That exhibit has, if I recall correctly, over a dozen mummies, lots of papyrus and engravings, and just rooms and rooms and rooms of artifacts from everyday life in ancient Egypt. It really is a must-see if you're interested in Egyptology and happen to be in the area.) The traveling Tut exhibit is - of necessity - a lot smaller than the Field installation, coming in at around 150 artifacts. And a relatively small fraction of stuff in the exhibit is from the actual tomb of King Tut; the majority are from the tombs of some of his relatives.
That said, there's some really neat and interesting stuff from both the relatives and Tut's tomb. The gold leaf mummy case of his great-grandmother is large and gold enough to impress just about anyone, and her death mask (photo 4 of 9 in this National Geographic photo collection of stuff in the exhibit) is quite lovely; we think Queen Tuyu must have been a pretty content woman at the end of her days. One highlight for me was a bunch of shabti (little figurines buried with the deceased, intended to carry out labor in the afterlife). Two things occurred to me with regards to them. First, with the variety of shabti on display, there surely must have been a "Street of the Shabti Artisans" in the marketplace of Thebes. Second, Tut had a shabti with decorated with the crook and flail, the symbols of kingship. That one must have been for days in the afterlife when he felt like taking the day off from being king! The other thing I really liked was seeing some of the furniture, including the box shown in photo 5 of 9 of the above-linked collection. I'm a sucker for inlay and carving work in furniture of just about every period - the symmetric designs, intricacy, and delicacy really appeal to me, and I couldn't recall ever seeing fancy Egyptian furniture like this before. Two things that struck me about the furniture were, first, looking at that box and a table in particular, you could imagine from the wear and fading that they were a few hundred years old... then you looked at the dates and realized they were over five thousand years old; second, claw feet have been stylish in furniture for a long, long time.
As we went through the exhibit, met occasionally by Howard Carter's words about the great find of Tut's tomb back in 1922, I was enlightened as to the source of inspiration for David Macauley's satiric future-archaeological work, Motel of the Mysteries. I read this marvelous book back when I was in sixth or seventh grade - long after the 1970s tour of the Tutankhamun artifacts - and so was unfamiliar with the famous phrases, '"Can you see anything?" "Yes... Wonderful things"' and "Everywhere was the gleam of gold." The first gets used word for word by Macauley's hero Howard Carson in response to his assistant, and the second is alchemically mutated from gold to plastic, as is only proper in a 1970s multiplex motel (complete with an unbroken seal on the door of Tomb 22: DO NOT DISTURB). The brilliance of the book was further displayed by the requisite gift shop at the end of the exhibit, where replicas of or inspired-by artifacts in the exhibit ranged from the reasonably nice (Bastet statuettes, none of which were in the exhibit itself) to the appallingly bad (merely a very bad replica of the coffinette) to the ridiculous (Kids! Make your very own shabti!). Macauley captures the feel of such gift shops to a veritable T in the last section of his book. Having seen the new traveling exhibit, I clearly need to reread this gem next time we visit my folks in Boston.
The other interesting bit about Tut is that his likely cause of death was announced yesterday: malaria, piled on top of the genetic mess that results when you have parents who are first-degree relatives (brother and sister, in this case). Poor kid!
The only bad thing about our visit is that, while the King Tut tickets included admission to the rest of the De Young museum, the rest of the museum was closed since it was a Monday! And we paid holiday-high prices for our tickets, too. :( The only thing I can do in return is to pass out the promotional code we used to get a discount on the tickets; email me if you're interested.
Monday evening, I played with Inkwell Ideas' free online version Coat of Arms Design Studio to implement a coat of arms for Lady Karen, heir-apparent to the March of Schwartzburg. I'd had a moderately clear idea of what I wanted ever since our GM![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cerebralpaladin told me I could design it myself, but had to make allowances for the label of heir (the upturned crown up top). Anyway, the userpic today is the result, which I'm really pretty pleased with.
Off to a busy work week!
Saturday, we played with our D&D group. We finished mopping up the goblin caves, and Lady Karen accidentally got pulled into a mystical pool that a wizard had asked us to check out. Stuff happened; mostly through luck, I ended up doing what needed to be done. Because other members of the group may see this entry before we play again next weekend, that's about all I can safely say about it, excepting that the blue tattoo-like mark on Lady Karen's arm was a result of doing stuff in the pool. Oh, and Lady Karen likes the tattoo mark - her eyes can flash blue now!
Sunday, we went to see Avatar 3D. I have not been so completely enthralled by a nearly 3-hour movie in a long long time. (I think the last time was probably when I went to see Fellowship of the Ring.) And it's similarly rare for me to want to go back in and watch a movie a second time immediately after seeing it. Sure, the story has been done and the biology is more than a little silly. But that doesn't get in the way of (1) the visual pretties, and (2) the sweep of the story. I got completely caught up in it, never paying any attention to my water bottle or granola bar.
Monday, we went to see the King Tutankhamun exhibit. We'd been a bit spoiled on Egypt exhibits by our visit a few years ago to the enormous permanent exhibit at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. (That exhibit has, if I recall correctly, over a dozen mummies, lots of papyrus and engravings, and just rooms and rooms and rooms of artifacts from everyday life in ancient Egypt. It really is a must-see if you're interested in Egyptology and happen to be in the area.) The traveling Tut exhibit is - of necessity - a lot smaller than the Field installation, coming in at around 150 artifacts. And a relatively small fraction of stuff in the exhibit is from the actual tomb of King Tut; the majority are from the tombs of some of his relatives.
That said, there's some really neat and interesting stuff from both the relatives and Tut's tomb. The gold leaf mummy case of his great-grandmother is large and gold enough to impress just about anyone, and her death mask (photo 4 of 9 in this National Geographic photo collection of stuff in the exhibit) is quite lovely; we think Queen Tuyu must have been a pretty content woman at the end of her days. One highlight for me was a bunch of shabti (little figurines buried with the deceased, intended to carry out labor in the afterlife). Two things occurred to me with regards to them. First, with the variety of shabti on display, there surely must have been a "Street of the Shabti Artisans" in the marketplace of Thebes. Second, Tut had a shabti with decorated with the crook and flail, the symbols of kingship. That one must have been for days in the afterlife when he felt like taking the day off from being king! The other thing I really liked was seeing some of the furniture, including the box shown in photo 5 of 9 of the above-linked collection. I'm a sucker for inlay and carving work in furniture of just about every period - the symmetric designs, intricacy, and delicacy really appeal to me, and I couldn't recall ever seeing fancy Egyptian furniture like this before. Two things that struck me about the furniture were, first, looking at that box and a table in particular, you could imagine from the wear and fading that they were a few hundred years old... then you looked at the dates and realized they were over five thousand years old; second, claw feet have been stylish in furniture for a long, long time.
As we went through the exhibit, met occasionally by Howard Carter's words about the great find of Tut's tomb back in 1922, I was enlightened as to the source of inspiration for David Macauley's satiric future-archaeological work, Motel of the Mysteries. I read this marvelous book back when I was in sixth or seventh grade - long after the 1970s tour of the Tutankhamun artifacts - and so was unfamiliar with the famous phrases, '"Can you see anything?" "Yes... Wonderful things"' and "Everywhere was the gleam of gold." The first gets used word for word by Macauley's hero Howard Carson in response to his assistant, and the second is alchemically mutated from gold to plastic, as is only proper in a 1970s multiplex motel (complete with an unbroken seal on the door of Tomb 22: DO NOT DISTURB). The brilliance of the book was further displayed by the requisite gift shop at the end of the exhibit, where replicas of or inspired-by artifacts in the exhibit ranged from the reasonably nice (Bastet statuettes, none of which were in the exhibit itself) to the appallingly bad (merely a very bad replica of the coffinette) to the ridiculous (Kids! Make your very own shabti!). Macauley captures the feel of such gift shops to a veritable T in the last section of his book. Having seen the new traveling exhibit, I clearly need to reread this gem next time we visit my folks in Boston.
The other interesting bit about Tut is that his likely cause of death was announced yesterday: malaria, piled on top of the genetic mess that results when you have parents who are first-degree relatives (brother and sister, in this case). Poor kid!
The only bad thing about our visit is that, while the King Tut tickets included admission to the rest of the De Young museum, the rest of the museum was closed since it was a Monday! And we paid holiday-high prices for our tickets, too. :( The only thing I can do in return is to pass out the promotional code we used to get a discount on the tickets; email me if you're interested.
Monday evening, I played with Inkwell Ideas' free online version Coat of Arms Design Studio to implement a coat of arms for Lady Karen, heir-apparent to the March of Schwartzburg. I'd had a moderately clear idea of what I wanted ever since our GM
cerebralpaladin told me I could design it myself, but had to make allowances for the label of heir (the upturned crown up top). Anyway, the userpic today is the result, which I'm really pretty pleased with. Off to a busy work week!
