O-tanjoobi omedetoo
O-tanjoobi omedetoo
O-tanjoobi, Princess Aiko
O-tanjoobi omedetoo


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 2:30 PM

I knew I'd seen those critters before. I had been admiring the new heroic-scale bronze lions that are being installed at the entrance of the National Zoo. They were grand pieces of public art. Still, I was puzzled; the castings seemed new, but the style was early-20th century. Then, riding home from the Kennedy Center with friends, I spotted the cast concrete lions on the Taft Memorial Bridge. They were the same beasts. Bingo!

A quick web search clarified the situation. The original Taft Bridge lions, sculpted by Roland Hinton Perry in 1907, had fallen into disrepair. Spanish-born artist Reinaldo López-Carrizo, working from Perry's original drawings and maquettes, resculpted the cast concrete figures, which were fabricated by the Lehigh Cement Company and installed on the bridge in July, 2000.

National Zoo director Lucy Spelman then met López-Carrizo, and together they worked to find a way to re-cast the lions in bronze for the Zoo's entrance. The sculptures, and the rest of the entrance renovation, are privately funded.

The bronzes are magnificent. The metal holds fine detail much better than concrete does, and the low pedestals let you get close to admire the bold, elegant shapes or to pat the gigantic paws. Mouse and I, returning from the Zoo Bar's Blues night, took one look at the proud patriarch pictured above and burst into a chorus of "If I were the king of the forrrrest!"


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:42 PM

Art, or merely something like it?

A group of 42 life-sized bronze figures [registration required] of the framers of the Constitution is a central attraction of the new National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The room-sized work, which is now nearing completion, was created from plaster casts of the heads and bodies of posed actors and dressed in custom-made period clothes before being cast in bronze.

The call for bids for this piece specifies realism and solidity, but says little about art. It seems to me that what we have here is not a work of art but a huge photocopy in bronze, akin to waxworks of the Last Supper. But art comes full-circle: Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is making photographic portraits of figures in wax museums, works which step back over the border from craft into imaginative creation.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 2:22 PM

Mayumi Oda was born in Tokyo in 1941, and came to the United States in 1966. She now lives either in northern California or Hawaii; the online biographies differ. What she definitely does, and does exquisitely, is make prints -- mostly of goddesses and garden subjects. I ran into her work by accident, while searching for information on the Shinto kami Benten.

Although she is a living artist, the best collection of information on her life and work is at the Women's Early Art site. Examples of her graphic work can be seen here, here, here, here and here.

Ms Oda is also a prominent anti-nuclear activist. Her biography is available from the usual sources.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:41 PM

The ethical development department

"Development", in museum terminology, is the gentle art of asking people for money. Given the falling level of government support, museums have been asking for a lot of it recently. And sometimes the money comes with tangled strings attached.

Such stories have been much in the news lately. The Smithsonian, in particular, has been criticized for appearing to sell its principles for large amounts of cash. Now the American Association of Museums has stepped into the argument with its new ethical guidelines for donations, released today, which stipulate that donors should not benefit from their philanthropy at the expense of the integrity of the recipient institution.

Of course donors expect to receive some benefit, tangible or otherwise, for their generosity, else they have no motivation. Can we raise the needed millions with handshakes, bronze plaques and behind-the-scenes tours? One almost pities the upper administration.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:21 PM

One born every minute

A pleasant place to waste a foggy November afternoon: the Museum of Hoaxes, a worthy successor to dime museums everywhere and Barnum's extinct American Museum.

Like most such institutions, the Museum of Hoaxes is not a charity endeavor: they have a book. But large amounts of material are available on the site for free. There's also a nice weblog of current hoaxes. Their newest addition: test your hoax-detection skills with their interactive test.

(Readers of this space will recognize a picture of Ted Heuvelman's bear, which the test considers genuine. However, note that it only asks whether the images have been digitally altered; it doesn't deal with the authenticity of cover stories.)


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:07 PM

Demons to the right of us. Demons to the left of us

It's not funny, I know. It's sad, and it's scary, and it speaks of my own deep intellectual arrogance that I find this appalling. I hope we're all clear on that. That said, on to the subject:

So, what do frogs, owls, unicorns, rock music, candles and paisley have in common? They are all (like many other things) manifestations of demons. [Warning: this site plays music] Demons, it seems, are lurking all about us: in our thoughts, in our computers, in the picture of Marilyn Monroe over the bed. We must find them and cast them out. This site tells how to do it. I honestly don't believe this is a joke.

And even if it were, there are others who take it all quite seriously. There are communities. And there are children involved. This kind of thing brings back bad memories of Jonestown.

As for owls and frogs, Saint Eucherius of Lyons had some opinions. He agreed about the frogs -- they are demons, and also heretics. The owl, however, is Christ: "I am made like an owl in its dwelling." And unicorns, like owls, are holy.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 6:33 PM

Mr. Smithson as Goliath

There have been a number of news items lately in which the Smithsonian, the 900-pound gorilla of the museum world, has been in competition with small local museums for artifacts and collections. In some cases, such as the contest for the rescue cage used in the Pennsylvania mine disaster, the Smithsonian backs off.

Toward the Huntington Free Library in the Bronx, however, the giant has not been so forgiving. To be fair about it, the Smithsonian has a case. As the repository for the George Gustav Heye collection of Native American artifacts, it believed that it would receive Heye's library too. However, Mr. Heye's stepson had deposited the books at the Huntington around 1930, where they form a major research collection. The Huntington considers the collection to be a permanent bequest. And fighting the case in the courts has pretty much eaten up all of their endowment.

The Heye books include some unique items. An annotated copy of the Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary written by Father Alonso de Molina in the 1650's is being filmed by OCLC's Preservation Resources branch. Other items are just as fascinating, and one can understand the Smithsonian's conviction that such treasures are better off in a large national museum. But one does have sympathy for the Huntington.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:57 PM

More scientific news from my alma mater: UC Santa Cruz researcher Janet L. Leonard studies the studies the sexual biology of banana slugs (Ariolimax columbianus), which seem to speciate through sexual selection of their impressive hermaphroditic genitalia.

Anyone who has spent time on the UCSC campus has encountered these charismatic yellow mollucs. They're not only the official campus mascot, they're the inspiration for many fine products [more], artistic expressions [more], and local cultural organizations.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 9:15 AM

Of cells and the sun

Two nice science/natural history sites:

Cells Alive!, a commercial source of still and moving images of microbiological subjects, includes real-time "web-cams" of dividing cancer and bacterial cells. These are actually recorded images served out over time, but they are still fascinating. [Select Activities from the main menu, then Cell cams.]

The Institute for Solar Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is hosting a series of spectacular solar images from a recent article in Nature. These are the highest-resolution images of the sun's surface ever published.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 1:28 PM

Our very own Tama-chan

Less marvelous than an Arctic seal in Tokyo, but still surprising: California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) are swimming up the Sacramento River as far as the state capital, far from salt water. Marine mammal experts speculate that they are pursuing spawning salmon.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 1:15 PM

Who swims there? Friend or foe?

The mental abilities of pinnipeds grow steadily more impressive. Harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) in Canada can distinguish the calls of "safe" killer whales that eat only fish from those of "dangerous" ones on the prowl for seal meat. They do this, apparently, by remembering the calls of familiar individuals. Safe but unfamiliar groups of orcas are treated as if they were dangerous, while local fish-eaters are ignored. More accounts of this study are here and here. Listen to .wav files of the orca calls used in this experiment here. And while you're there, enjoy this soulful call of a grey seal (Halichoerus grypus).


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:47 PM

Archives of the coast

To say the California Coastal Records Project is ambitious is to indulge in understatement. Its compilers are photographing the California coastline -- every mile of it -- from helicopters, and posting the results in an interactive database. They are already well along toward their goal, with most of the outer coast covered except for a bit north of Point Conception; still to do are the coasts of the Channel Islands, San Francisco Bay and other smaller bays and inlets.

Here's the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. (The cottage where I spent my junior year is somewhere in that mass of trees. I was wakened every Saturday by the first descent of the roller-coaster.) And here is Point Reyes Lighthouse. And San Francisco, from the perspective of the nude beach. (No, you can't see anything. But it's fun to imagine.)


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:33 PM

A small and transient paranoia

It was shortly after nine when the sound of voices drew me out of my office and into the reading room. The rest of the staff were lined up by the window-wall, discussing the parade of emergency vehicles below and the carousel of helicopters above. The head archivist said that the Smithsonian Metro station was closed. So were the major roads near it, and the access to and from Virginia. But what was happening?

Anyone who has witnessed a developing news story knows how out-of-date even "breaking news" sites are. There was nothing on the radio. Nothing on the Internet. There were only our own observations, and the occasional rumors brought by people drifting in for a view. "There's a car with a bomb near Agriculture." Truth or speculation? By this time the number of emergency vehicles made any story up to and including a military invasion seem plausible.

Of course it turned out to be harmless. Just another guy who said he had a bomb, and didn't. A classic case of crisis interruptus. By ten o'clock, DC was getting back to normal. The emergency vehicles dispersed; the helicopters clattered off to wherever helicopters migrate when nothing is happening. A lone broadcast van sat near the Department of Energy with its aerial extended. Colleagues who had been trapped in traffic wandered in like straggling cattle. By now, the story was starting to hit the breaking news sites and the front page of the online Washington "Post". Which means it was old news, already half forgotten.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:12 PM

Cultural attractions are where you find them

In an effort to attract Japanese tourists to Wales, tourism consultants EuroWales arranged for a delegation of Japanese travel writers and travel agents to visit Ewe-phoria, a sheep-based tourist attraction featuring fourteen different breeds of ram, a shearing display and a sheepdog demonstration. The reaction of the Japanese visitors was not recorded.

I'm sure it's only a coincidence that gay sheep [more] have been making headlines in Asia. Sheep are exciting even if they aren't hentai sheep, ne?


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:41 PM

Jeweled flies

It was a post in Metafilter that started it. French artist Hubert Duprat has been constructing sculptures by providing caddis fly larvae (Order Trichoptera) with bits of gold and precious stones. By moving the larvae among tanks with different kinds of material, he has induced them to create elegant banded cases with rows of pearls and inset turquoise. The artist explains his creation in an interview with Christian Besson. Duprat's spangled caddis larvae are an example of Bioart [PDF], a controversial field which includes such creations as Eduardo Kac's luminous rabbit.

All of this sent me careering around the net for more examples of caddis flies in art. And, the net being what it is, I actually found some. Rae Hunter's lovely Caddis Case is a mixed-media basket. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the artistic representations of caddis larvae are fishing lures.

Shakespeare knew about caddis flies:

CADDIS - worsted galloon, so called because it resembles the caddis-worm

And galloon is a narrow ornamental fabric used for trimming clothes. You learn such things on the net, not to mention the departmental unabridged dictionary.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 4:25 PM

Why, of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. -- Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg trials [source]

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 10:56 AM

Augury bloggerel

News stories, especially those touching on our relation to the natural world, seem to fall in meaningful conjunctions, in constellation-patterns, into the debatable lands between divination and poetry. You don't know what they mean, though something certainly seems to be meant. Or rather, what is meant is the familiar tale of "We've messed it all up," which has always been obvious and is now far beyond hope of repair. But sometimes there seems to be a motion, as of a great fish below the surface, hinting dream-connections.

This one's an old story, as net-news goes, but I only read it last night in the current issue of "New Scientist". Cirrus clouds are suddenly interesting; they're reflecting a lot more light and heat than we thought they did. And we know this now because in the three-day ban of air traffic after September 11, 2001, the cirrus caused by contrails dispersed and the world's temperature variation increased by two degrees Fahrenheit. It was a vast, elegant, and completely unplanned experiment. We can only hope it is also unrepeatable.

Meanwhile, the West Nile encephalitus virus is spreading. A harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) in a Camden, New Jersey aquarium died of West Nile on September 22. This is the first confirmed case of a marine mammal dying of the disease, which usually affects birds. Sirrus, the twelve-year-old seal, was perfectly healthy before contracting the illness, perhaps though mosquito bites. West Nile may have also contributed to the September 2 death of a 23-year-old Gray Seal (Halichoerus grypus) at the National Zoo. (Poor thing -- I hadn't realized we had lost one.)

So all of us are looking at mosquitoes the way we looked at deer ticks a few years ago, when Lyme Disease began to edge in from the woodlands. We drain the ponds and put on heavy socks. We lock our doors and windows. But nature intrudes, sometimes quite literally. On October 30, two deer broke through the plate glass window of a Washington, DC, McDonald's, a mile and a half north of the Capitol. The injured animals had to be euthanized. Nobody knows where they came from.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 9:01 AM

Googlism poetry

Googlism, which mines Google's search engines for Internet recreation, can be a great source of creative raw material. I ran the phrase National Air and Space Museum though its word-grinder, and impressed at how much the results sounded like poetry. I rearranged the lines, deleted redundant or uninteresting ones, corrected capitalization and added punctuation and connecting words. The rest is straight off the web:

The National Air and Space Museum

The National Air and Space Museum
  is the Air/Space portion of the Smithsonian Institute.
It's located on the National Mall at 7th and Independence Ave,
  open daily and is free to all.
It is visited by over 8 million people annually:
  it is the most visited museum in the world

One of the 16 in the Smithsonian complex,
  it's colossal in its expanse and scope.
It's going through its first major overhaul in 24 years,
  looking forward to building a new educational facility at the Dulles Center.
It's the only place to see such marvels as actual spacesuits.
It is full of airplanes

The National Air and Space Museum
  is one such place; displaying life;
  is a significant recognition of his academic career (and we are proud of his accomplishments),
  is proud to be the first:
  is a center for research into the history.

The National Air and Space Museum
  is not prepared to display the Enola Gay intact and without political trappings,
  is not responsible for any errors created in or damage to the materials as a result of their use.
It is this nation's shrine to aviation:
  it is all about spin.

It is grateful for the support of Orbital Sciences Corporation in making this evening possible.
It is offering a grant of $5.
It is a national treasure;
  it is also available.

The National Air and Space Museum
  is America's first.
It's my favorite:
  an exciting place to visit.
It is quite simple.
It is the best.

posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 3:10 PM

Cryptid bears

Since the really big dead bear urban legend posts (see below), I've been noticing bear links. And some of them do seem obliquely relevant to the previous matter.

There is an extensive web-literature on cryptid bears -- unknown bear species of great size or ferocity, or bears reported from parts of the world which have no bears. An example of the latter is the Nandi bear reported from east Africa, possibly even by Herodotus and Pliny. The Nandi Bear may or may not be a bear -- it has also been described as an enormous hyena, an aardvark, a baboon, or even a chalicothere, an animal otherwise extinct.

One of those who speculated on the Nandi Bear was Bernard Heuvelmans. Perhaps best known for his 1955 book On the Track of Unknown Animals (recently reprinted, but still terribly expensive), Heuvelmans coined the term "cryptozoology" and was one of its leading advocates. I suspect that "Ted Heuvelmans", the probably fictious airman who shot the almost certainly fictitious giant Alaskan Brown Bear, was an homage to Bernard.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:19 PM

Pinniped the memorious

Can sea lions recall lessons they learned half a lifetime past? Considering the difficulty I have recalling high school French or differential calculus, it seems unlikely. But a recent study at UC Santa Cruz's Long Marine Laboratory reveals that Rio, a 17-year-old female California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus) recalls shape-matching lessons she learned ten years ago.

Assuming that Rio is not another Clever Hans, this would make pinnipeds the most memorious non-human creatures on earth.


posted by Barbara Weitbrecht at 5:06 PM