Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: September 21, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Reading

  • The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis
    Set in Rome and Britannia at the turn of the first millennium, I’m sort of digging this story of a wayward Roman informer who sets out to do the right thing, even if it means pissing off his momma. This series has been widely lauded by historians and bookish folk alike, but one thing that is already kind of driving me nuts is Davis’ use of language by having the characters speak colloquially that would find home closer to our contemporary world rather than ancient Rome.

Watching

  • Burn Notice – Series finale.
    We discovered this series a couple of years ago and loved the narrative, the set-up, and that in some ways it was highly educational. Plus there was Bruce Campbell attached, so things aren’t all that bad. But as time wore on, so too did the story and we watched out of laziness rather than excitement. We’ve been missing an odd episode here and there because the storylines seemed to drag on, but we felt, out of loyalty to finish the series out. The ending wasn’t revolutionary or even a revelation, and it seemed wholly unsatisfying. But it did tie up things neatly, so there is that I suppose.
  • Doc Martin
    A cantankerous, blood squeamish doctor moves from London to Portwenn in Cornwall, and meets the towns colorful and endearingly quirky characters and even falls in love. There is nothing wholly original about the set up, but Martin Clunes is almost always a pleasure to watch and much like the Vicar of Dibley, you want to hit the local pub to find out the goings on in the village. Doc Martin is now starting its sixth season and you can find previous seasons on Amazon Prime, Netflix, and AcornTV.
  • She Wolves: England’s Early Queens
  • Britain’s Secret Homes
  • Boardwalk Empire

Weekly watching: QI, Peaky Blinders, The Bridge (US), Project Runway, The Newsroom, Sons of Anarchy, DaVinci’s Demons,  The Vampire Diaries

Links

x0x0,
lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 1998

One is silver, the other gold

Dear Internet,
Here is how it begins:
I was working on updating the Caravaggio Project and I was having difficulty remembering if I had been to a particular museum when I was in Rome in ’05. Since I, thankfully, have been cross-posting content over to Livejournal since 2001, I no longer have to depend on my often wrong memory.
As I read through the archives, what piqued my interest in this research was not necessarily finding a definitive answer to my question1, but that many of the people who were commenting on my posts at the time. I either lost contact with them over the years or the relationships had shifted in focus; where we may have once been super close and were now mere Facebook friends who wished each other “Happy Birthday!,” every year not because we genuinely remembered but because Facebook told us.
Continue reading “One is silver, the other gold”