CURIOSITY: Intaglio Ring

CULTURE: The Athens Archaeological Museum

CULTURE: The Athens Archaeological Museum II

COMMENT/CULTURE: New Yorker Cartoon

COMMENT/CULTURE: New Yorker Cartoon

COMMENT/CULTURE: New Yorker Cartoon

COMMENT: China/USA

COMMENT: A Fisherman in Patmos

Cheering in mid-Winter

CURIOSITY: Eleonora's Falcons

On the cliffs of Patmos there is a colony of Eleonora's Falcons (Falco Eleonorae), the most elegant of birds with a wingspan of 87-104cm. 

They go high, high, high and hover - suddenly swooping down over the cliffs - where they breed every summer. 

They winter in Madagascar & fly over the Sahara, the Equatorial forests, to Kenya and Mozambique, the total distance flown up to 9000km for a single one-way trip!

COMMENT: Conchita Wurst

Austrian pop star Conchita Wurst - was it ever thus? 

LIVING BY DESIGN: Glimpses of JS Patmos House Indoors & Out

COMMENT

An elegant dandy in Museum Street, WC1. 

CLEARING OUT OF POSTCARDS... with apologies to my friends

TRAVEL / CURIOSITY: Cisterns

CISTERNS that fill with rain water
 - the only way to store water for a
 millennium in Patmos, Greece
 [now topped up by water brought to the island by tanker]

GARDENS: Voodoo Lily [Amorphophallus konjac]

A curious plant in flower in my London garden...Paul, who looks after my house, says: "It has a delicate scent of rotting flesh and attracts every fly in the area. When I first caught a whiff of it I started looking for a decomposing corpse".

COMMENT: The British Museum

Room 1 - The Enlightenment Gallery - one of the best rooms in London.  Completed in 1828, it was designed by Robert Smirke to house the library of King George III.  It is now a cabinet of curiosities on a vast scale.  Discovering the world in the 18th Century...

On to a preview of Ice Age Art, the oldest figurative art that are staggeringly 10,000 to 40,000 years old.  A very moving collection of some 130 objects on loan from Germany, France, the Czech Republic and Siberia.

From February 7 - May 26, 2013. DO NOT MISS. 

http://www.britishmuseum.org/?gclid=CPyWk-i7sLUCFY3LtAodemwAoQ

CURIOSITY: The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

 


If in Oxford, do go to see a Victorian oddity.

Housed in an amazing iron structure, The Pitt Rivers Museum - the University of Oxford's collection of anthropology and world archaeology. Except for one or two attempts, everything is shown in a very old-fashioned higgledy piggledy way...
worth a whirl!

Clockwise: Glass bottles containing samples of pigments used by Andaman Islanders and Australian Aboriginies for painting their bodies, collected in the 1870's and 1890's, a carved and painted wooden figure of a rhinoceros hornbill [c. 1923, Sarawak, Malaysia], Interior of an unfinished mudhif, Rumailiya Marshes, Southern Iraq [1955]     

The Pitt Rivers Museum

http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/