OED DEFINITION: RHUBARB - 4. a. The word ‘rhubarb’ as repeated by actors to give the
impression of murmurous hubbub or conversation.
4. d. slang. Nonsense, worthless stuff.
I've mentioned on the blog in the past that I go to the Texas Renaissance Festival every year, and occasionally make a trip up to the Dallas-Fort Worth area to Scarborough Faire, but this past weekend I visited the Sherwood Forest Faire that opened near Austin just last year. And for a faire only in its second year, I was pretty impressed with what they've accomplished already. And it was really nice to visit a faire that only required about a 30 minute car ride, as opposed to 2 to 3 hours!
I think it is a common staple of faires to have a Royal Mint where they do demonstrations and/or make custom coins and medallions, and this faire was no exception. I was just casually glancing through the available designs to have struck into a medallion when a familiar face caught my eye - Elizabeth I! I then noticed the Tudor rose design and decided I had to have one made. I opted for the bronze with antique patina (they dip it in sulfuric acid and then polish) and you can see the final product below. I'm still sorting through the 250 pictures I took (we had really good seats for the falconry show, so I snapped a lot of pics - I love digital cameras!) and I'll tweet out a link when I get them all uploaded to my Flickr account.
Image of Tycho Brahe from the University of Texas at Austin Department of Astronomy image collection
This is another one of those stories that comes along every so often that allows me to geek out from both the history and science perspective (and in this case, my actual career science field - astronomy!). Tycho is one of those interesting characters of science that seems to cause endless fascination, so I'm not surprised to see this. And yes, he's the one who famously had a metal replacement nose after losing the flesh one in a duel!
From The BBC:
Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe exhumed to solve mystery
Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman who served as royal mathematician to the Bohemian Emperor Rudolf II.
He was thought to have died of a bladder infection, but a previous exhumation found traces of mercury in his hair.
A team of Danish and Czech scientists hope to solve the mystery by analysing bone, hair and clothing samples.
Tycho was born Tyge Ottesen Brahe in 1546 in Scania, which at the time was a Danish province, and studied astronomy at the University of Copenhagen, as well as German academic institutions.
He catalogued more than 1,000 new stars and his stellar and planetary observations helped lay the foundations of early modern astronomy.
...
Professor Jens Vellev, from Aarhus University, is leading the team of scientists and archaeologists which opened the tomb in Tyn Church on Monday.
He says he hopes to get better samples of hair and bones than were taken in 1901.
The use of the latest technology to test the samples may also help shed more light on the mystery of the astronomer's death, although Professor Vellev is not promising anything.
"Perhaps, we will be able to come close to an answer, but I don't think we will get a final answer to that question," he said.
The scientists also hope to determine what kind of metal Brahe's prosthesis was made of - it was commonly believed to have been gold and silver, but others suggested it might have contained copper.
I first caught wind of the awesomeness that is W00tstock through following Wil Wheaton and Adam Savage on Twitter (@wilw and @donttrythis) and kept hoping they would find their way to Austin eventually. I would say that Austin can hold its own as a very geeky city and was deserving of this celebration of all things geek. It took a year, but they finally made it! I was disappointed that Wil couldn't be here (he's been filming The Big Bang Theory and Eureka - and since I love those shows, I forgive him), but boy did Austin hit the jackpot with our guest 'Wil Wheaton' - we had Neil Gaiman! Although I still haven't read the Sandman comics, I've been a fan of Neil Gaiman's for a while now. I've listened to several of his works on audiobooks, including several that he has read himself. Having an author read their own works is sometimes hit-or-miss, but Neil Gaiman is a wonderful reader so getting to hear him read a couple of short stories live was a real treat!
I also got a picture of him wearing a monkey hat. Yeah, a monkey hat (you had to be there to really understand...):
(click for a larger version and to see the amazing number of views the photo has had since Neil retweeted me when I posted it to Twitter - major fangirl geek out moment!!)
And a short video of Neil giving an unenthusiastic pirate "Arr" with the monkey hat on - again, you had to be there to understand (including why he was pretending to be very put out to have to wear the hat and say "Arr"):
Needless to say, I had a wonderful time and I'm pretty sure I haven't laughed that hard and that long for quite a while! And it was sure a much better way to spend election night than sitting at home hearing the results come in.
This year I was involved in the planning of the watermelon drop, so I had a good opportunity to figure out how I wanted to film it. I decided for the "top-down view" this time:
Related to my post below: The Harry Ransom Center has started a campaign to raise money to help preserve the five costumes from "Gone With the Wind" in their collection, including the Green Curtain Dress pictured above. They are planning an exhibition for 2014 to mark the 75th anniversary of the movie that I'm already looking forward to! I donated $10 to the fund since I would love to be able to see the original costumes as part of the exhibit.
Update August 30: They reached the goal in three weeks! They have a cool map of where all the donations came from - my $10 is part of the 174 in Texas. :)
A week or so ago I finally made it over to the Harry Ransom Center's Making Movies exhibition. It's wonderful that I can see such great things on my lunch break by just walking to the other side of campus!
The HRC has had the Gone With the Wind collection for a long time and has acquired many other movie-related collections over the years, and a few years ago Robert De Niro gave the library a lot of items from his movie making-career. The exhibition featured a lot of items from their collection ranging from early scripts, to costumes, to a pamphlet from Mount Rushmore used as research for North by Northwest.
I only had my iPhone to take pictures, so I just grabbed a couple of shots of costumes. Below on the left is a dress worn my one of my favorite actresses, Deborah Kerr, in one of her signature roles - An Affair to Remember with Cary Grant (pretty much my all-time favorite actor). And on the right, the infamous "Red Dress" from Gone With the Wind. One thing that you can't really see in my picture is just how TINY Vivien Leigh's waist was. You can get an idea in the movie in the scenes where she's being laced up in her corset, but seeing it on a model right in front of you really puts it into scale. It was pretty amazing to be able to stand a foot away from that iconic costume!
