"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and conservation science with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone.
"It was a tendency of hobbit-holes to get cluttered up; for which the custom of giving so many birthday-presents was largely responsible. Not, of course, that the birthday-presents were always new; there were one or two old mathoms of forgotten uses that had circulated all around the district; but Bilbo had usually given new presents and kept those that he received."
Apparently J.R.R. Tolkien is to blame for those regifted presents among coworkers come Secret Santa Season. A mathom to a hobbit is something for which one really has no use, or for which the use has been forgotton, but is passed along (if parted with at all) rather than tossed out. A mathom-house like the one the hobbits maintain at Michel Delving is really just a cabinet of curiosities by another name. It is a fine line between a meaningful heirloom and a mathom, and the difference between the two is the story that goes with the item. Here, then, is the 8th "Mathom Edition" of Cabinet of Curiosities, the blog carnival that dares you gift us with the stories behind your own mathoms.
"It is a beautiful piece in very bad condition, a Connecticut weapon made probably in the late 1700's It was given a special place in my collection. On the top of barrel there is a German silver inlay and this is inscribed with J.LORD, this is why the dealer in Tribes Hill new I would want it."
Over in the forums at Straight Razor Place, the smooth skinned devotees of wet shaving are geeking over their ancestral shaving gear. Though one commenter notes "Hehe, I can't help thinking that most of my family would consider such an item no different than an old toothbrush rather than an heirloom." Good thing other folks do. I have a couple of my grandfather's, but they are definitely just for looking at.
"My Halmoni (Grandmother) gave this bottle of ginseng liquor as a gift long ago when my parents were newlyweds. My dad always had plans to open this bottle and have a drink when he retired from the Army. My dad didn't have the heart, I guess, to open the bottle since it had been with us from the start. Dad gave the ginseng liquor to K when we were newlyweds. K had the intention of opening the bottle when he graduated from college. The big day came and went and the bottle still remained intact without a drop missing. K, too, didn't have the heart to open the bottle. Unintentionally, this gift had been turned into a heirloom."
Vintage Lane Stitchesshows off some heirloom needlework and observes; "Imagine making and sewing lots of these, by hand, with feather stitch onto a big piece of material to make a bed spread, this big.Lots of patience required I think. My husbands Nan made this quite a few years ago using some of the material out of his mum's and aunties old dresses." Gorgeous stuff and wonderful memories.
"In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit." At the Art Institute of Chicago, reports Hyperexperience there are holes in the wall that offer windows into miniature rooms of exquisite detail.
"The lilliputian rooms stand out in the city of big shoulder, not only for their size but because they only depict domestic, traditionally feminine spaces, namely kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms, and are filled with cues of the woman’s place in these societies. Most rooms feature a pace for sewing, writing letter, or cooking; almost all contain furniture for receiving groups of people, as well as children’s toys scattered about, but none contains any tools which may have been associated with manual labor, industry and the male place. The Thorne rooms stand as a micro-monuments to domesticity, a striking counterpoint to Chicago’s contribution to our modern monumental vocabulary: the skyscraper, towering emblem of commerce and industry and anything but domestic or feminine in form or function."
Then there is the "house as mathom", such as the semi-detached in Headington, England that Out The Blog leads us to with the 25' shark impailed in its roof...
"No one living in Headington notices it much any more, but it caused a tremendous stir both locally and nationally on the day it appeared. It had been winched up by a crane overnight, and although the police were aware of what was going on they were powerless to do anything, as there is no law to prevent a man from putting a shark on his own roof."
Praises be. I'm going to remember that when I decide to do some home improvements. Go here to see how the shark has eluded the best efforts of the municipal planning board to have it removed since 1986.
Damn Data / Cabinet of Wonders rolled out another installment in its marvelous Compendium of Curiosities series on May 20th. Doctor Doolittle would be proud of this edition, and it even has the classic YouTube drama in which a pride of lions, some crocodiles, and a herd of Cape buffalo mix it up at a Kruger waterhole. Not to be missed, especially the surprise ending.
But if you do have a hankering to go somewhere curious and exotic, AdmirableIndia recommends Chennakesava temple at Belur, Hoysaleswara temple at Halebid and Castle Rock Homestay, Chikmagalur.
So, if you've got, say, a shiny gold ring you can't bear to part with, it may be a mathom. Or it may be The One. Either way, we want to know about it.
Cabinet of Curiosities will be on summer holiday until September. If you would like to host a future edition, by all means be our guest. And if your eye falls on a bargain, pick it up. of such things are mathoms made.
The 8th Cabinet of Curiosities Blog Carnival will be here at Walking the Berkshires on Monday, June 16st. The deadline for you to send your nominations & submissions is 12:00 p.m. ET Sunday the 15th. We are going to call this one the Mathom edition, which fans of Tolkien know refers to something for which Hobbits have no immediate use but are unwilling to throw away.
"Bilbo had a corslet of mithril-rings that Thorin gave him. I wonder what became of it?"
Any mathoms, heirlooms, keepsakes and ephemera you might have stashed away with a good story to go with them would be most welcome. But we'll also take your story about your marriage to the Eiffel Tower. Just spare us the wedding night photos...
Americans have a longstanding fondness for David and Goliath stories, particularly those in which our scrappy homegrown underdogs beard the oppressing giant. They are an established part of our national myth and cultural heritage. Longfellow captivates his readers with tales of "...how the farmers gave them ball for ball / From behind each fence and farmyard wall" and turned back the British after Concord. "John Henry drove his fifteen feet, An' the steam drill only made nine, Lawd, Lawd..." And for those of us or a certain age or older, The Miracle on Ice. Even after suffering tremendous losses, we are quick to salvage something of our own, such as Doolittle's bombing raid on Japan, a forlorn hope that became a great propaganda victory just 4 months after Peal Harbor.
Local history abounds with these stories, from Sybil Ludington's Ride to Barbara Fritchie waving the flag of Union at Stonewall's confederates as they marched toward Pennsylvania. I came across a classic tale of this sort recently from the maritime history of Massachusetts during the War of 1812, the story of the two daughters of a lighthouse keeper who by pluck and invention saved their town from the British marauders. The tale, like all good yarns, may have grown in the telling, but young Rebecca and Abigail Bates are widely remembered in New England lore, poetry and folksong as the "American Army of Two".
The story goes that Simeon Bates was the keeper of the lighthouse at Scituate on the shores of Massachusetts Bay and lived there with his family during the War of 1812. He had a number of children, but the two principals in this tale are Rebecca, who based on her obituary would have been about 20 at the time this story takes place, and Abigail, who was about 13. Early in September, 1814, a British warship was sighted offshore and prepared to launch barges toward the lighthouse. Simeon Bates was away from the Lighthouse and only his wife and the two girls were on hand. The girls, knowing the militia would not get there in time, decided to hide from view and play a fife and drum to make the enemy think the soldiers were coming. They struck up Yankee Doodle, the British ceased to row, and the warship recalled them and left, much to the joy of the young saviors of Scituate, the Army of Two.
It is a wonderful story. It delighted young readers of St. Nicholas Magazine, which ran the story "Rebecca the Drummer" in July 1874 written by Charles Barnard and based on an elderly Rebecca Bates' recollection of the event. Rebecca Bates went so far as to sell affidavits of her story for 10 cents. There were apparently contemporary doubters of the tale, as well as at least one modern one. Nonetheless, Becky's sister Abby (who survived her) was reportedly borne to her grave by uniformed G.A.R. veterans and since then her account has been widely repeated as if factual. If the extensive research by the Scituate Historical Society concludes the story is likely true, we are not likely to settle the matter further with some on-line sleuthing, but let us see what further details we can add from the historic record.
The blockading British apparently approached Scituate by sea on three occasions between June 11 and July 9th in 1814. The June 11th raid two place as barges from two British ships entered Scituate harbor and burned or carried off a number of vessels. Captain John Mason, a boy of about 9 years at the time of the raid, later recalled that the British took three fishing vessels as prizes - "Orient", "Sophronia", and his own father's "Rosebud", and burned five or six others. A History of Scituate published in 1831 says that "ten vessels, fishing and coastal craft, were lost". Mason also stated that the barges belonged to the British frigate "Nymph" and 74 gun "La Hogue", though the latter named vessel has not been discovered among the navy list at the time and the Scituate History referenced above claims they came from the 74-gun "Bulwark".
It is not clear whether he was referring to this raid or a subsequent landing, but a biographical entry for Captain Mason records that he "remembered once when a fleet of these boats were coming in, that the women began to carry off their beds and furniture, but an officer in one of the British boats cried out, "Good women don't carry your beds off, we ain't going to hurt you." The British did not disembark when burning the ships in the harbor on June 11th. Six days later on June 17th, according to committee reports from the 30th United States Congress; "a British ship-of-war, two brigs, and several small craft came to anchor near Scituate harbor..." Col. John Barstow's militia were called out on July 9th when a British warship, variously identified as the "Bulwark" by some and by Congress as the "Nymph", demanded provisions from the town which were not furnished. The militia remained on guard that summer but the British did not reappear.
It is no wonder that these three events became tangled up in people's minds. Whether "Bulwark" or "Nymph" demanded vegetables or burned ships is a matter for those with access to the logs in the admiralty records. As to the fourth and final British approach - the one reportedly thwarted by the musical Becky and Abby Bates - that took place in late summer, either August or early September, and is recalled by one additional eye-witness, Ensign Otis, who "upon rising early saw a English ship anchoring off the harbor and warned the inhabitants of the little village." The version of the story printed in St. Nicholas (which has Rebecca as the drummer, unlike other accounts where she is said to have played the fife), also describes the British arriving offshore in the morning at low tide, and only launching boats at high tide around 2 p.m. This tale conflates events from previous raids and was written to inspire young readers with the heroism of the Bates girls so must be taken with a heavy dose of salt.
C. Wellington Furlong, who as a small boy summered in Scituate, later recalled;
"Next door to the Merritts lived Becky Bates, then a very old woman, who, in boyish wonderment I often watched her pull her corn cob pipe and listen to her story. During this war the British four gun HMS Bulwark in 1814 sent boats into the harbor and burned the shipping because the selectmen of the town, descendants of the Men of Kent, obstinately refused their demand for supplies. Not long after, Becky told me, another British warship, the HMS La Hogue appeared, dropped anchor a mile or so offshore and her barges loaded with marines pulled toward the harbor with obvious intention of burning the town. Becky, then about 16 was alone in the lighthouse with her younger sister Abigail. Becky quickly seized her brother’s fife and her younger sister Abigail the drum. Sneaking out of their lighthouse home they followed behind the cedar covered sand hills of the point, beating a lively tattoo to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” The marines, who had believed the town undefended, hearing the rhythmic strains wafted toward the ship’s boat, thought the town garrison was marching out, returned to the ship and the La Hogue sailed away."
Whether or not things transpired as later remembered and long repeated, no churlish iconoclast has definitively debunked the legend of the American Army of Two, and far be it from me to do so. Becky and Abby Bates remain heroines in the hearts of many, and why not?
Bluefish, that is. David Churbuck placates the fickle fates by offering the first Blue of the season back to Neptune. Carpenters nail a tree branch to the ridge board of a new house to bestow good luck, so why not kiss a fish?
"To the May-pole let us on, The time is swift and will be gone!"
"All fair lasses have lads to attend 'em, Jolly, brave dancers who can amend 'em."
"Come together, come, sweet lass, Let us trip it on the grass."
- Traditional Bryn Mawr May Day Song, last heard by me (and probably frumiousb) on Grand May Day, 1990. The one day when Mawrters wear white.
This morning, though, the greeny grass in my part of the southern Berkshires, or northern Litchfield Hills if you prefer, is white with hoarfrost. Even the hardy spring ephemerals are drooping from the cold. It is shaping up to be a chilly day but bright and clear. If I do end up tripping it on the grass with my sweet lass, we'll likely be bundled up.
Cabinet of Curiosities #6 is experiencing technical delays but will be posted at Bioephemera later this week. For those who can't wait to get their monthly dose of the unusual, the exotic, the incredible stuff we have hoarded away in our attics or on our hard drives, you could do far worse than to pay a visit Cryptozoology.com for the latest Bigfoot news, and see how your 10 ten list of favorite monsters compares with the one posted at LiveScience. Personally, I've always been partial to Dryads, Naiads and Oreads, such as the lovely Echo, above, being ignored by Narcissus. Very Pre-Raphaelite of me, I know.
Welcome, lords and ladies, to April's bimonthly "Early Modern" edition of Carnivalesque. The Early Modern period, as all good historians know, refers to that glorious span of three centuries (1500 - 1800 CE) during which the English learned to appreciate the many virtues of vegetables:
Before: "Beware of green sallets & rawe fruytes for they wyll make your soverayne seke." - Boke of Kervynge (1500)
After: "Then, says she, I believe there is a piece of cold buttock and carrot which will fit you - Nothing better, answered Jones, but I should be obliged if you would let it be fried. To which the landlady consented, and said smiling, she was glad to see him so well recovered: for the sweetness of our hero's temper was almost irresistible, besides, she was really no ill-humoured woman at the Bottom..." - Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)
There is a profound difference, I am sure you will agree, and no doubt the English and Film majors among you caught Fielding's consummate metaphorical pairing of food and sex. Those were the days. The Swiss perfected martial arts for the masses and Henry VIII wore a codpiece. This is not dry, academic bunk, friends; this is hot and heavy history, with content good for a1,000 hits an hour, or at least another bodice-ripping season of The Tudors. Why everyone doesn't blog about this stuff is beyond me. It's all in the delivery. "Give me my long sword, ho!"
This was also a period of profound climate change, during which the "Little Ice Age" in Europe put an end to medieval wine production in southern Britain, with winter carnivals on the frozen Thames cold comfort in exchange for frequent crop failures and advancing glaciers that swallowed alpine towns. It was a time of adaptation and expansion, when new world tomatoes forever changed Italian cuisine and London had to burn to save it from devastating plague. Pop music, then as now, was hardly children's fare, as witness this charming bit of ribaldry by Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605), reintroduced to modern ears by the great (though alas, presently scorpion-stung) Richard Thompson in his 1,000 years of Popular Music:
So ben mi ch' à bon tempo Al so ma basta mo' So ben ch' è favorito Ahimè, no' l posso dir Saluti e baciamani son tutti indarno a fè Passeggia pur chi vuole che 'l tempo perderà
Take my word for it [those of you who do not read archaic Italian]; for all the cheatin' going on, this could be a Country and Western standard.
Not to be outdone, Executed Today offers up Major Thomas Weir, who "had had a distinguished military career and an exactingly pious public life among Edinburgh’s strictest Presbyterians. So it came as something of a surprise when, after being struck by an illness, he up and copped to a lifelong sexual relationship with his sister Jean … and a lifetime of hitherto unknown black arts, powered by a Satanic walking-staff. He was so far from being suspect that town elders at first thought him daft." This prior pillar of society was ultimately strangled and burned at the stake in 1670. Elliot Spitzer, on the other hand, will probably get a book deal out of his double life as "Client 9", or at least his own talk show.
"Human occupation of the site dates to prehistoric times but some of the activity uncovered was more recent. A stone-lined spring that may have been a “holy well” was full of offerings from the 17th century, including 125 strips of cloth from dresses, cherry stones and nail clippings.
There was evidence that the well had been filled and the site destroyed to hide what went on there.
Each of the feather pits, which are“ about 40cm square by 17cm deep (15 by 6in), have been carefully lined with the intact pelt of one swan and contain other bird remains."
Natalie Bennett of Philbilon delights in the harmonic convergence of three of her main interests - women, nature and history - in Sylvia Bowerbanks’ Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England. Quoth she; "this is an impeccable well though-out, academic book, that examines its characters in the terms of their own time, while applying understanding and research of the following centuries." High praise indeed.
Serendipities finds another great read and exploration of Vision in Early Modern Culture in Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007). "The book argues that contrary to what theories of the rationalization of sight and the invention of perspective suggests, vision came to be characterized by unreliability and uncertainty in the early modern period."
"The Portuguese were well aware of the precariousness of their situation. Their technology – fortifications, weaponry, and sailing ships armed with artillery – was of little advantage in African conditions. In confined coastal waters and on rivers, the sailing ships were vulnerable to concentrated attacks by large war canoes and often fell prey to determined African parties. Metal armour was a torment in a tropical climate. The late 15th and early 16th century firearms were often too clumsy to have more than a psychological effect against small or moving targets.While the Portuguese certainly could look after themselves militarily, African weaponry and tactics were still highly effective against them, and poisoned arrows caused horrible damage."
Although the early modern period in Japan has a different chronology and influences all its own, this post by Pink Tentacle struck me as worthy of inclusion in an Early Modern Carnivalesque, and not just because I am also the progenitor of the Cabinet of Curiosities blog carnival, where anything that has to do with mythical 16th century disease critters would surely find a home.
Follow the Knox Trail - This web site contains a page for each of several dozen locations along his journey through NY and MA where bronze plaques were installed in the 1920's. Parochial plug: Knox and the boys slogged through the southern Berkshires on their way to Boston.
This June is the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Carillon. 1,000 reenactors can't be wrong. See you at Fort Ti.
Investigations of a Dog delves into the historiography of the English Revolution as seen through the lens of the far Left. Read the whole thing, especially to get to the coda: "Seventeenth-century England was so far from consensus that even the weather was ideologically contested."
The next edition of will be of the ancient/ medieval sort at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe. Be sure to submit your finest for May's edition, and if you like you may use the handy submission form. Bon Appétit!
Strap on those brass goggles and gas up the zeppelin, honey. The 5th edition of Cabinet of Curiosities is heavily into Steampunk. What could be more curious than a branch of speculative fiction spawning an entire alternative lifestyle for retro, do-it-yourselfers with a flair for dark wood and brass rivets?
Steampunk is a fantasy genre where form trumps function and sword canes co-exist with ray-guns and pith helmets. It is also a style of art and design. The Boston Globe describes it this way:
"Steampunk has its roots in science fiction literature, where it describes a corner of the genre obsessed with Victoriana and the idea that the computer age evolved alongside the industrial. Steampunk stories, which started appearing with regularity in the 1980s, eschew clean and orderly visions of the future in favor of gas-lighted streets, steam engines belching toxic smoke, and dastardly villains inventing strange technologies. Dirigibles rule the air, and the upper classes employ clockwork servants to serve their meals."
Steampunk tips its hat to the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as well as Twain, Lovecraft and, one assumes, Frank L Baum, whose oeuvre has many beloved Steampunk elements (Tin Man, Tik-Tok and those great green goggles). Films like Wild Wild West and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, while box office duds, are classics of Steampunk sensibility. 19th-century inventors Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison are often cited as Steampunk idols, but I would think there would be ample room in the pantheon for Alexander Graham Bell:
"Alexander Graham Bell Note the name and note it well Father of the modern age His inventions are all the rage Of course there was the telephone He’d be famous for that alone But there’s 50 other things as well From Alexander Graham Bell"
From there you can follow links to the wondrous creations of AlexCF, a retrofuture cryptozoological assemblage artist, who will be more than happy to show you his wares. His necropathic spectregraph (shown at left and auctioned at eBay) looks particularly handy for all you spiritualists.
If you are really having trouble with gaslight poltergeists, then Ectoplasmosis! recommends you call a Steampunk ghostbuster. The gentleman in question (pictured at right) was spotted at the 2007 San Diego Comic Con last summer.
"Beautiful, weird, hand-machined -- this is not just art attached to an existing quartz movement, but a fully realized working pendulum clock out of brass and rice paper. The particular clock's inspiration is based on the calligraphy of the numbers."
Steampunk is where the cool kids from shop class go to play. The grand master of this gears 'n goggles breed of engineers is Jake Von Slatt, proprietor of The Steampunk Workshop where keyboards get tricked out in electrolytic etched brass and fellow DIYers take his ideas and run with them.
The most recent elaboration on a Von Slatt theme is this much envied MacMini monitor and keyboard, pimped out in Steampunk glory by Dave Veloz.
All it needs is a Steampunk furnace mouse with glowing LED coal!
If you are not handy at hand-tooling machinery, you can still get your Steampunk on with all sorts of fanciful garb through the Aether Emporium.
The Heliograph profiles some Steampunk fashion pinups from photographer Kat Bret if you are in need of further inspiration.
Nor is the Steampunk aesthetic restricted to some Anglo-American tech-nexus. From Uruguay, Marie shares some fantastical Steampunk illumination devices.
Given all this mad tinkering, it is not surprising that Penny Dreadfully Steampunk is all the rage at Esty: purveyors-at-large of all things handmade.
Going Like Sixty observes that late boomers, like Steampunk itself, are "suitably old, but mysteriously advanced."
You can get your very own Pavoni PG-16 Romantica 16-cup Espresso Machine in brass for just under 1K at Amazon - a must have for the Steampunk dream kitchen - or maybe you can get your gauntlets on this Etienne Louis, mechanical hedgehog looking design (at right), previewed at ESP Visuals. Actually, it looks even more like a WWI era anti-ship mine to me, but maybe the coffee is just that potent.
Janice Brown of Cow Hampshire is a collector of Granite State historical oddities, and for this edition of Cabinet of Curiosities she offers up a cautionary tale of the perils of 19th-century self-doctoring in Hanover NH: Death by Sponge in 1851.
"The more I research this old framed piece of embroidery, the more I wish I could "hear" all the stories of the inmates who had a hand in making it. I fear my telling of just this part of the story is only the beginning of some tales unlike any heard before. Everyone says "if walls could talk" but this is a case of wishing that individual threads sewn into a simple cottage scene could tell the story of the individual who stitched the thread into the picture."
"There is a beautiful surfeit of things of brass and wood, and apparently the museum itself is reached through a medieval church with beautiful flying machines (such as the Eole bat-plane...) hanging from intricately carved ceilings. A visual feast; where beauty and science are dramatically entwined, where history smells of varnish, tarnish and soot, and where three-wheeled steam carriages rest proudly next to hand-cranked cinomatographs."
Louis Roderiguez of ...What I Know Now explains the primary function of the Smithsonian to his UK readers as preserving the Junk of the Nation that defines a people. That sounds very much like the function of my house, except it preserves the junk that defines me.
The Museum of Hoaxes shares this Victorian poster for S. Watson's American Museum of Living Curiosities, complete with Australians in what could only be described as their native dress if they were from an alternate universe (click to enlarge).
And then there is the private collection of China's Dr. Liu Dalin, a professor and sociologist at Shanghai University, who is also curator of more than 1,000 objects housed in The Ancient China Sex Culture Museum.
"...if like me, you like to collect things from the natural world, a search for “Coyote Skull” brings back about 91,300 images. Searching for a skull to put into your very own cabinet of curiosity? Searching “Coyote Skull Retail” brings back over 66,000 sites, but you may want to further qualify your search terms. As of my typing this, there are nearly twenty different human x-ray images for sale on eBay (over a dozen of them in eBay Stores). In fact, on eBay, you can find things like crocodile teeth, meteorites, or the disarticulated skeleton of various small mammals. Building your own Wunderkammer is just a PayPal account away...."
Some people use the World Wide Wunderkammer to amass virtual collections of the most remarkable things, like Ethan Persoff's 21 image assortment of paper-based condom envelopes from the 1930s-1940s. If any were made in China, no doubt Dr. Dalin could find a place for them in his Shanghai Museum.
Also at EP.TC, a collection of comics with problems that includes my personal favorite: a 1956/1962 Planned Parenthood comic about birth control called Escape from Fear with the lowbrow lead-in: "Joan and Ken Harper's marriage was on the rocks - because they loved each other!"
Jessica Palmer, whose delicious blog Bioephemera makes her the ideal host for the 6th Edition of CofC in April, shares some of mixed-media artist Ron Pippin's Steampunk creations in this post From the Mad Taxidermist's Attic.
Famous Ankles discovers that the Forbes Magazine Building on 5th Avenue houses Malcolm Forbes' renowned toy collection.
"The first stuff was toy boats. Magnificent, wondrous, perfect toy boats. Hundreds of them. They were exclusively not modern. I didn’t notice anything that looked less than 50 years old. Most looked much older than that. I got the feeling that these were Malcolm’s and, being raised a child of wealth, he got every one he ever wanted (and he wanted a lot of them). They were shown with very few placards, but mostly as if to say: “I got a zillion of these things, here they are in bulk. My collection is the greatest in the world!”
And, by George, it probably is. They were mostly steamship-type boats and they looked like they had a complete life and a wonderful time on small ponds throughout NYC over the years. None of them, at least offhand, looked like a true collector might want them: absolutely pristine and without blemish. Instead, they looked like they had been played with a lot by a boy (or a bunch of boys) with every intention of enjoying them to the max."
L.H. Crawley of The Virtual Dime Museum has just the sort of post that I had in mind when I launched this carnival. She proudly displays samples from her Cabinet of Curiosities: Yellowstone Park Stickers, circa 1940, part of a collection of sixty souvenir stickers brought back by her grandparents who made a trip there from New York by train.
"The Dom Museum’s Kunst und Wunderkammer is the lovingly recreated and restored collection once belonging to the villainous Archbishop Wolf Dietrich. Wolf Dietrich held the title of Archbishop from 1587-1612, and it was he who tore down the original Salzburg Cathedral after it was ravaged by fire, and had it rebuilt in baroque style. Today the magnificent Cathedral is the centerpiece of Mozart’s hometown (and the site of the troubled composer’s baptism). But in the late 1500s, the archbishop’s decision to tear down the damaged cathedral enraged the citizens of Salzburg. He showed complete disregard for valuable sculptures and gravestones, destroying them all. His construction crew didn’t stop at gravestones, as they plowed up the entire cathedral cemetery, unearthing and dumping the bones of the dead atop the debris. The citizens had their revenge years later, when Wolf Dietrich was arrested and imprisoned over salt mining rights; the very salt mines which gave Salzburg its namesake and 16th century riches."
March is when most of the United States springs forward with Daylight Savings Time, so be sure to recalibrate your TDAH-meter and remember that not everything that happens in alternate Steampunk time lines stays in alternate Steampunk time lines...
And that concludes this Steampunk-inspired edition of Cabinet of Curiosities. If you like what you've seen, why not check out the links to previous editions of Cabinet of Curiosities here? Be sure to wind up your rosewood laptops for the April edition, hosted by Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera. Get out your collection of mechanical mice, dust off your rattle bags and submit your entries for the 6th Cabinet of Curiosities directly to Jennifer at cicada AT bioephemera DOT com or via the handy pneumatic submission form. Let me know if you'd like to take a future edition out for a spin and I'll make sure there's plenty of coal in the hopper.
And if you need any more convincing that Alexander Graham Bell was ever so Steampunk, just crank up your graham-o-phone and sing along with RT...
"...Graham Bell, Alexander, It is tantamount to slander To call him just a scientist Why his inventions top the list Edison, he was a thief And Tesla nuts beyond belief But Alexander was a gent So philanthropic, so well meant
Founded Science Magazine Wrote a book for kids Because he was a caring fellow Gave a hand to Helen Keller Of course there was the telephone He’d be famous for that alone But there’s 50 other things as well From Alexander Graham Bell..."
Cabinet of Curiosities comes home to roost at Walking the Berkshires for its 5th edition on March 17th. Submissions may be sent here or to me directly at greensleevesenviro AT sbcglobal DOT net by midday on Sunday the 16th. This carnival has built up a great head of steam, and all it lacks is your post, dear reader, on the strange and unusual accumulations stashed away in your steamer trunks or proudly on display as virtual conversation pieces. Or perhaps you have encountered someone else's wunderkammer that deserves the spotlight. Bring it on, be it ever so weird and wonderful. Tell me why you have kept your children's baby teeth or why you are custom converting a Gaslight Justice League. That's why we're here.
Somewhere in the multiverse, the polyhedral dice rolled for Gary Gygax. The man whose Dungeons & Dragons was the progenitor of an entire genre of role-playing games has died at 69.
I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons. Back in the analog 1970's, all that virtual reality required were some odd-shaped dice, pencils, graph paper, and above all a passion for all things swords and sorcery and someone to share it with. While the power of persistent digital worlds has supplanted the bibliocentric medium that Gygax created, it owes a tremendous debt to D&D (as D&D, it must be said, owes another to Tolkien).
The ability to imagine oneself as someone else in another time and place where other rules apply and the only limits are your creativity and that of your companions and the Dungeon Master who spins the tale held great appeal. Game speed was never the same as real time, for it took longer to compute the results of medieval combat than the actual melee. It was a game that rewarded preparation and often ran late at night. The best part was the unpredictable element of how players might tackle a challenge or outwit the creator of the adventure (who was very often me, as I loved being the Dungeon Master).
It mostly happens in MMORPG's, now, and as one who still hefts a virtual axe now and then and stomps off on quests in such places, there is much that technology adds to the experience. But role-playing itself has taken a back seat to gaining reputation and advancing in power, and no one responds to my dwarf Sterkfontein in character. No self-respecting D&D dwarf would say "Woot!"
Gygax gave lovers of swords and sorcery the keys to our imaginations and pointed us toward the open road.
(Tip o' the chainmail coif to Tigerhawk, who knew his way around the Monster Manual back in the day.)
"It was a tendency of hobbit-holes to get cluttered up; for which the custom of giving so many birthday-presents was largely responsible. Not, of course, that the birthday-presents were always new; there were one or two old mathoms of forgotten uses that had circulated all around the district; but Bilbo had usually given new presents and kept those that he received." 
Mr. Lord of Lord and Lady starts us off with the remarkable story of how he unravelled the genealogy of a family heirloom: a flintlock. 
Zay MoMo has what may be the quintessential mathom: a family heirloom that curses your root!
depict domestic, traditionally feminine spaces, namely kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms, and are filled with cues of the woman’s place in these societies. Most rooms feature a pace for sewing, writing letter, or cooking; almost all contain furniture for receiving groups of people, as well as children’s toys scattered about, but none contains any tools which may have been associated with manual labor, industry and the male place. The Thorne rooms stand as a micro-monuments to domesticity, a striking counterpoint to Chicago’s contribution to our modern monumental vocabulary: the skyscraper, towering emblem of commerce and industry and anything but domestic or feminine in form or function."
Then there is the "house as mathom", such as the semi-detached in Headington, England that Out The Blog leads us to with the 25' shark impailed in its roof... 
you the bug.
So, if you've got, say, a shiny gold ring you can't bear to part with, it may be a mathom. Or it may be The One. Either way, we want to know about it. 
will be of the ancient/ medieval sort at 
