March 2005 Archive

31 March - Le Chat Domestique



Where would we be without Friends of the Museum? FOM Marilyn Graskowiak kindly donated this charming 19th century French print showing the various moods and expressions of the Cat Domestic, and FOM Lisa Grossman kindly translated it for us:

LE CHAT DOMESTIQUE ET SON CARACTÈRE -
The Domestic Cat and its Character

l'Indifférence - Indifference

La Décision - Determination

La Bonne Humeur - Good Spirits

La Colère - Anger

La Joie complète - Complete Joy

La Ruse - Cunning

La Franchise - Frankness

La Méfiance - Distrust

Le Chagrin - Sorrow

La Joie - Joy

La Flatterie - Flattery

La Paresse - Laziness

I couldn't discover the artist through a cursory web search, but did find this:



Little resin cat maquettes based on the print, available for purchase -

28 March - Depressing Weather Report



The rain it raineth every day, and bloody depressing it is, too. Picturesque, though - our colleague Martha Norbeck-Wallingford captured this webcam shot of the view from the Fellow's Lounge - looks like the scene in

Even though today [March 25] was Greek Independence Day, the Greek Foreign Minister and Minister of Defense reportedly spent the day in emergency meetings with Dr Rice and a senior defense official here in DC. Every day over the last couple of months, swarms of Turkish fighters have been violating Greek and Bulgarian airspace, and this Tuesday the Turks weren't intercepted until they were right over Athens and Thessalonica. Last week the Hellenic Navy received delivery of their new HDW Type 214 Attack Submarine from Germany. The Greeks are near bankruptcy after the expenses of the Olympics and the purchase of the four new submarines and several new surface vessels.

The 214 is the most technologically advanced submarine in use today. It uses the new Siemens Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) Fuel Cells. The PEM fuel cells are known for their very efficient conversion of hydrogen into electricity for the submarine's electric motors. They produce virtually no sound while doing so, and consequently the effective detection range of many of the current passive acoustic sonobuoys is reduced. With the Hellenic Navy conducting an impromptu exercise in the Aegean next week, the Bulgarian Black Sea Fleet conducting training next week, coinciding with large military maneuvers planned in southern Bulgaria, added to the fact that the Greek Minister of Defense met with his Israeli counterpart last week, I am thinking that Terry Schiavo and Michael Jackson might just get pushed to the second page next week.

Right now we're also trying to guess - just for fun - exactly when the Israelis are going to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. They moved a military satellite over Iraq two weeks ago and have concluded some training exercizes that were being run in the Negev. They have bought a sufficiency of bunker busting bombs from us that can penetrate most underground facilities. The only question is will we wink or shoot as they fly over us in Iraq? Most Israeli military operations are very predictable in that they are all simple refinements of previous ones that worked well, oddly enough, and their attack on the Osirak complex in Iraq paid off pretty decent dividends for decades after a very small investment.

Shawish Taha Idris showed conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in September 1933 in arresting an armed policeman. A native non-commissioned officer in charge of a police guard temporarily lost his self-control, and after loading his rifle with nine rounds of ball ammunition ran amok. The guard, not being able to deal with the situation themselves, sent word to Taha Idris who immediately came to their assistance. He was unable to approach without being seen. The non-commissioned officer aimed at Taha Idris at a few paces distance and pulled the trigger, but for some reason the cartridge did not explode and Taha Idris eventually ran in and disarmed the man. (2.3.34)

25 March - Not a Podcast

25 March - Historic Health Equipment



Friend of the Museum Mario Rups found this ancient ad for the Janus Health-Lifter, an early exercise device briefly manufactured in Washington Grove - we have one in the Museum, though it's not currently on exhibit - have wanted to try to attempt to lift my health with it, but, frankly, it doesn't look very safe.

Apologies for the gap in posting, lately - I've been horribly occupied with a project that may not be discussed here or elsewhere at this time - sorry, I mean at this point in time. Meanwhile, enjoy

A Gallant Plumber
John George Hinge
Hinge was engaged with another man, at the Borstal Institution, Feltham, in removing an obstruction which had occurred in a gas main, when an explosion occurred, hurling Hinge out of the door of the building where they were working. The other man was thrown against the opposite wall, and his escape jeopardized by the flaming gas between him and the door. Hinge pluckily returned to his rescue, and succeeded in helping him out. He then, although badly burnt and nearly collapsing, took steps to cut off the pressure of the gas, thereby preventing the possibility of further explosions, which might have caused very serious loss of life. (1.10.14)

19 March - Squidcam; Squid News



What fun! Observe a live squid,

18 March - Don't Touch That Dial



Once again, for your listening streaming pleasure, Janus Museum Radio returns to the air.

Day after day I receive letters calling for stuff that is more 'popular', 'more in touch with the ordinary people'. 'Give us,' a reader says, 'something that may interest and help us in our daily lives.'

Very well. Let us admit openly that it is almost your nightly experience either to be brought home or to be saddled with the task of 'seeing' an inebriated friend 'right'.

Look at my picture. Your 'friend' has consumed forty-eight pints and has now fallen down on the broad of his back. To-day's Hint is this: DON'T lift his head as is being done in this illustration. Keep his body completely horizontal. If you lift his head and shoulders, you'll probably spill some.

We are devoted to searching for the Chinese antique, it can make the whole world understand the culture of extensive knowledge and profound scholarship of China to hope for. We auction our items here, is for wanting those to understand the Chinese culture but had no the Chinese friend understands the cultural opportunity in China. And hope to make more friends find out about Chinese culture through here. We certainly is it realize more friend to feel like too.

Offer the best item is my biggest hanker, please enjoy bidding!!! thank you!!!

Speaking of The Ramp Adventure, I am happy to tell you that I found them in the Essex Street Market today, and ate them tonight with a small roasted rack of lamb. The ramps were steamed for four minutes and then held in cold water until I was ready for them. I julienned bacon and fried it, draining the finished product on paper towels and retaining the bacon grease. Then, when I was ready for them, I re-heated the grease, sauteed the ramps quickly until they turned brown at the bottom, tossed them in the bacon and served them with the lamb.

Well worth it, let me tell you!

13 March - Old Khottabych


Old Khottabych Appears in a Moscow Apartment

See, Hassan Abdurrahman ibn Khottab - Old Khottabych - is an ancient genie, imprisoned in a bottle, stuck at the bottom of the Moskva River. And then Young Pioneer Volka, an excellent diver, finds the bottle and takes it home to his large state-provided apartment. Volka opens the bottle and releases Old Khottabych, who is grateful in the extreme. Old Khottabych swears eternal service to Young Pioneer Volka - when he learns that Young Pioneer Volka has been having problems with some of his little school comrades, Old Khottabych proposes a possible solution:




Haw! Young Pioneer Volka explains to Old Khottabych that Modern Soviet Man does not turn opponent into scabby jackal! Old Khottabych will continue to have problems reconciling old repressive genie system with Modern Soviet ideals - it is very funny!




Old Khottabych replaces his retrograde genie clothing with Young Pioneer Volka's grandfather's clothes, including a rather nice panama that I wish I had. Then Young Pioneer Volka takes Old Khottabych to state circus! Old Khottabych enjoys himself tremendously at circus - loves his first Eskimo Pie (that's what it's called in the subtitles, really it is), above - buys the entire tray - eats them all! Then Old Khottabych, disgusted by the feeble efforts of State Circus Magician, performs marvelous magic, delighting audience of Modern Soviet Extras! Head of Circus Collective wants to hire Old Khottabych, but Old Khottabych gets sick from too many Eskimo Pies! Haw! Haw! It is so funny!




Old Khottabych goes to football match, grows bored, and magically transports Young Pioneer Volka and his rather alarming sausage, above, to the game. Old Khottabych interferes magically with the game - balls rain down from sky! Goals magically grow to allow excessive scoring! Home team wins!




Look! Dmitri Shostakovich, composer of famous Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, has rare cameo role as disgruntled football fan! Above, Dmitri Shostakovich is kissed by happy fan! How we laughed! Magical football match is very funny, but so un-Soviet! So Young Pioneer Volka makes Old Khottabych magically makes all football fans, even Dmitri Shostakovich, forget all football magic. How useful forgetfulness is to Modern Soviet Man!

12 March - The Great War in Color



It is generally thought that World War I was fought in black and white and occasionally in sepia, but Stern Magazine

11 March - On the Air, Again, for Some Reason

11 March - Ramps Update


Waynesville, North Carolina ramps festival

Friend of the Museum Dr. John Herrera, lead scientist of the famous Myersville, Maryland

7 March - Nostalgie des Ramps


H. Burchard, the Squire of Pecker Wood

Friend of the Museum Hank Burchard, also known as

I know much, much more about ramps than I want to. About 25 years ago I went for an early spring trout-fishing expedition in the Dolly Sods area of West Virginia's Cranberry Backcountry. A friend flew us out in his private plane. We had reserved a wilderness cabin in the state park, which could be reached only by an 8-mile hike. "Cabin" is misleading; it was more like the open-sided shelters along the Appalachian Trail. It stood beside a burbling trout stream that was to be heavily stocked with keeper fish. We were going to have a trout orgy, a week of trout, trout, trout. Most of what we packed in was oil and implements for cooking trout, plus coffee and a few, a very few, staples.

Well, the rains were light that spring, and the stream flow was so low that the leaves of the previous fall were making the water too acid for trout to endure. We got rain and sleet day after day, but it didn't signify, what was needed was rain upstream. So they stocked no trout. We quickly consumed our rice and dehydrated potatoes and whatever. My companions were extremely woodswise, but the season was so early that the only things growing were skunk cabbage and... ramps.

For four days we ate almost aught but ramps. Raw ramps, boiled ramps, roasted ramps, fried ramps, steamed ramps. Ramp salad, ramp soup, ramp stew, ramp mush. Ramps are a very pleasant side dish, but ramps three times a day, day after day, is more than the most rampant fanatic could wish. We hung in because the ranger kept coming by saying it looked like they'd be stocking trout that afternoon, or next morning. They never did, and come the seventh day we hiked out to meet the plane It began to fog up, and by the time we got to the trailhead it was obvious no plane could land on the pasture where the pickup was to have been made.

However, in those days there were interurban buses, and by and by one came along and stopped for us. It was packed, with standing room only and not much of that, but a few minutes after we boarded there was magically a good deal of space around us. You see, we had only been able to make the most cursory ablutions -- bathing in the icy stream was forbidden, even had we the fortitude -- so we were a week stale. But that was the least of it. Ramps are famous -- infamous -- for the persistent, penetrating and devastating body odor they create. Garlic ain't innit. Think musk. Consider skunk. And we were ramped up to the max. The driver opened his window, out of which he would periodically stick his head, holding his breath between times. I believe a significant number of passengers bailed before their destinations.

Night came on. Eventually we arrived at the Charleston airport, which was closed. But a cleaning man let us in to use the phone at the Hertz counter. All we got was a recording saying thanks for calling Hertz, the office was closed. However, at the Avis counter, the agent had been fool enough to post his home phone number. We called, and he said he'd be right out. It happened that all the full-size rental cars, necessary to accomadate our huge backpacks, were at the downtown office, so he drove us there in his own car. We had by then become acutely aware of what Lazarusarian pariahs we were, and sat stinking in mute shame. But the agent, a perfect hero, chattered away amiably whenever he could manage a breath. The man was a paragon of grace under pressure. He acted as though -- he made us almost believe -- that nothing could have suited him better than to leave his dinner, wife and family and come out in the sleety dark to accomodate three grubby, incredibly foul-smelling wayfarers.

When I got home my wife drove me from the house and made me strip naked in the yard (next day she trashed my clothes and pack). Even after a shower that exhausted our extravagant 80-gallon hot-water tank she made me sleep on the porch. Next day, after a brief encounter, I was sent home by my kindly editor with instructions to write a reeking ramp feature and to take my sweet time about it.

I did. It was three full days, during which I performed all sorts of sweaty exercises, bathing morning, noon and night, before my wife pronounced me fit for society and my children would suffer their father's embrace. During my exile I also wrote a letter to Avis describing in grateful detail the heroic service we had received from their agent, who had tried harder. It was printed in the company magazine, and soon the agent was promoted to, as I recall, the Cincinnati office. He wrote me an effusive letter, asserting that I had rescued him from obscurity. He sent me Christmas cards for 20 years, and eventually became a vice president.

So yes, ramps are moderately good.

6 March - Bride & Prejudice


Martin Henderson as Darcy and Aishwarya Rai as Lalita in Bride & Prejudice

We saw Gurinder Chadha's

Oh oh oh oh! See it. See it. SEE IT! BUY IT! It is absolutely delicious. It's bloody adorable. I don't know whether I have the moral courage to say so to our pals, because it may be too chicky-flicky for their heightened intellectual sensibilities, but sheesh did we enjoy it. It's big and pretty and gaudy and noisy and unabashed and shameless - a Lydia Bennet of a movie - but it's also very sweet, and it's a perfectly charming adaptation of the book, affectionate, respectful, yet gently tongue-in-cheek. Somebody really understood the task at hand. Somebody got it exactly right. Who, me, snotty Austen purist? Nah, not this time: I just enjoyed the hell out of it. Funny when you think how outraged I was by the BBC's introduction of the infamous "pond scene" in their otherwise well-done miniseries version; here I found nothing jarring, not even the chorus of happy drag queens, not even the elephants with "Just Married" signs dangling on their rumps.

I especially love the way the characters have been translated to fit the time and place. Mrs. Bennet is delicious as Mrs. Bakshi (Nadira Babbar), a whining online-matchmaking sari'd old busybody; Mr. Collins (here Mr. Kholi, played by Nitin Chandra Ganatra) a perfect caricature of every modern girl's worst Am'RIKan-assimilated nightmare (though under the bombast he turns out to be a "kinder, gentler" Mr. Collins than Jane Austen's: this movie is so good-natured it can't bear to be really nasty to anyone - not even Wickham). Lady Catherine appears as a lethal Beverly Hills matron - cute star turn for Marsha Mason.

You could tell from the get-go that the house was not made up of Austen readers - at least, they didn't burst out larfing at the initial tête-à-tête between the two oldest Bakshi daughters, which Jaya opens by sighing to Lalita, "Mama assumes that just because a young man is rich he must be looking for a wife." Or at the end of Maia's achingly funny Cobra Dance (Quicktime video), when her father gently tells her she has entertained the company long enough. (Pity, I think: the better you know the original, the more pleasure you'll get out of the film's direct references and its oddly faithful rendering of much of the dialogue. OTOH, there's certainly plenty to enjoy without that, to judge from the general hilarity of the rest of the audience.) I of course larfed myself silly at such moments, making quite the spectacle of myself.

For some reason I hadn't expected it to be in English; only the first big production number, which was a traditional Hindi kind of thing (sung in Hindi), was subtitled. The rest of the numbers are new-Bollywood style (at least so I gather, not that I have anything to compare them to) and are very lively, in some cases so bad they're good - the Bakshi girls' moonlit white-pajama'd production number "No Life Without Wife" springs to mind. (Then again, couldn't nothin' be hoakier than the English girl's musical turn in Lagaan. WRM, I was fascinated by the big chunk of outtake, on the Lagaan DVD, with such a radically different version of the plot - different and in some ways more powerful and real. Wonder why they changed it so drastically. But I digress.) Be sure and watch the credits - they're done over outtakes of on-set horsing around by cast & crew, all infectious laughter, utterly engaging.

You gotta see it. You gotta love it.

4 March - On the Air, Again

3 March - Famous Artist Visits The Museum


Richard Thompson

The Washington Post's

2 March - Chubby Chinese Cherub Update



Our intern Zoe was cataloging our ephemera collection today and came across the horrifically cute label pictured above, produced by the China National Textile Import and Export Corporation - quite a coincidence, coming as it does so soon after we posted Friend of the Museum Lisa's

The identity of the mystery squid, bigger than calamari but smaller than the fabled giant squid, remains a puzzle.

Cephalopod biologist Michael Vecchione of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., wrote in an e-mail to Widder that he was unable to identify it after viewing the seven-second video and consulting with other experts. It has body and tentacle characteristics different from any known squids, Widder said.

"The thing to appreciate is something this large to be totally unknown is phenomenal and just such an obvious indication of how little we understand about what's in our oceans," she said.

1 March - A Recent Acquisition


The Penitent - Die Beichte im Walde

Blanche Dubois always depended on the kindness of strangers*, but The Janus Museum takes what it can get from the generous Friends of The Museum.

The talented artist to whose genius we are indebted for the present subject, would probably smile if he were asked if the scene represented in the picture was taken from a real story, or if the persons ever had any existence except in his own fertile imagination. Lessing is one of the few painters of the German school, who possesses the art of relating a complete story in a single scene; and in this, lies the great secret of the fascination which his pictures ever produce on the mind of the spectator...

...As we again gaze upon the picture, a story recurs to our memory, which was related to us some years ago during our rambles in southern Germany, and which, if we are not greatly mistaken, has afforded Lessing the hint out of which tills delightful composition has arisen. The story is connected with one of the most beautilul valleys in Franconia, situated in the midst of wooded mountains and romantic cliffs, and in which stands the picturesque ruins of the ancient cloister of Eberach, formerly one of the most wealthy in the holy Roman empire.

"Father Clement gazed for a moment on the pale features of the stranger, and with a loud cry of joy threw himself into his arms; while the young ministrant, the only witness of the scene, wondered at the strange likeness between the ascetic countenance of the monk, and the pale and care worn features of the soldier.

"'Burchard!' cried the priest.

"'Frederic!'

"'Yes, I am Frederic,' sobbed the monk, embracing his long lost brother.

"Frederic, who still lives, to repent the headstrong passions which drove his brother to attempt a murder, and to wander like Cain, a fugitive upon the face of the earth; and who as father Clement, has long bid farewell to the pomps and vanities of a sinful world. Burchard returned his brother's embrace, and related how, haunted day and night by remorse for his supposed crime, he had in vain sought death upon the field of battle, and had at length felt himself irresistibly impelled to return to the place where he had shot his brother, in order to make a fancied atonement for one crime by the commission of another. We shall make no attempt to describe the strange mixture of feelings winch pervaded the breasts of the two brothers at this unexpected meeting. Burchard returned with Frederic to Eberach, and on the following day was admitted into the monastery as a novice. Renewed affection replaced the painful feelings under which the two brothers had labored for so many years, and they passed the rest of their lives respected by their clerical brethren and revered by the neighboring peasantry. Frederic, or as he was called in the monastery, Clement, became eventually Abbot of Eberach, and after a lapse of more than thirty years gave the last absolution to his brother, and accompanied his remains to the rave [sic. Perhaps "grave"? T.S-Z]. He survived Burchard many years, nor did he quit the world which he was supposed so long since to have forsaken, till he had attained the unusual age of ninety years."