Some weirdly cutesy and disturbing videos

Comedy Break

From George Takei and related comments on Facebook:

New Entertainments

In addition to the blogs below that I follow frequently as well as NPR's Science Friday and Radiolab, here are a few new places I've been finding entertainment:

The History Blog--concentrates on objects in history:
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/

The BBC show In Our Time
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl

And to delve into historical fiction:

Penny Dreadful, a magical victorian universe of anatomy, urbanism, vampires, ancient languages, etc. etc.:

And The Knick, a much more realistic medical drama set in early 20th century New York:

Fantastical Giant Worms

We are all familiar with some giant worm or another--particularly the ones from pop culture. But these aren't new imaginations. Some of them are based on much earlier legendary stories of giant worms such as the minhocão. 

And there is new evidence that paleozoic sand worms existed in the soils of England.

The Architecture of Game of Thrones

Architizer looks at the basic places where Game of Thrones filmed in order to figure out what places were inspirations for King's Landing, Astapor, "The North", etc.

Le Mag thinks various cities or courts stand for specific places in Europe.

If you can't remember what the places look like, see the various title sequence videos where the cities emerge like automated toys.

Qarth

The armillary sphere that acts as the sun over this sequence is itself taken from Renaissance designs, such as the amazing one in the Museo Galileo.

Intro scene armillary sphere

Museo Galileo armillary sphere

Brief Statement Regarding Penny Dreadful

There is a new show by Showtime called Penny Dreadful. The name comes from cheap, sensational novels. The show is dramatic enough to earn the name, but has a great deal of historical and literary references to pique the interest of historians of science and medicine.

 Within the first episode, resurrection men, vampires, egyptologists, tarot readers, and Victor Frankenstein and his empathy-worthy recreation appear. Justice is done to all in some sense: The resurrection men are working in squalid and secretive conditions, the major vampires are very much like their early literary counterparts, the Egyptian scholar is set at the British Museum (fairly enough), and Mr. Frankenstein names his lovely little project "Adam" as a sort of nod to Mary Shelley's so-called monster who was obliquely, and of his own accord, given that title. 

Viewers will also get to see characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula imbedded into the plot. I only wonder how many historians were on the budget...

The Man Who Read Stories From Bones

From the New York Times:

With ghoulish geniality, Clyde Snow liked to say that bones made good witnesses, never lying, never forgetting, and that a skeleton, no matter how old, could sketch the tale of a human life, revealing how it had been lived, how long it had lasted, what traumas it had endured and especially how it had ended.
...
“Bones can be puzzles,” he told The New York Times in 1991, “but they never lie, and they don’t smell bad.”
...
“Witnesses may forget throughout the years, but the dead, those skeletons, they don’t forget,” he told The Times in 2002. “Their testimony is silent, but it is also very eloquent.”

No doubt he was an inspiration to Kathy Reichs, who is a forensic anthropologist and the novelist who wrote the books on which the TV show Bones is based on.

And for a Dolly Parton song to go with it: 

Medieval Medicine and Popular Culture

First of all, THIS VIDEO starring Steve Martin as Theodoric of York. And we all know the Bring Out Your Dead scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

But then there's Phone Call to the Fourteenth Century.

And this Leech Collector.

And then, for a lack of knowledge regarding popular culture, here's some medieval torture.

The Academic Obsession with Mad Men

First, I would like to point out that Mad Men has some amazing art historical conversations and images throughout. It's hard for an art historian to forget the scene when the underlings sneak in to Cooper's office to see the Rothko, when visitors catch sight of The Fisherman's Wife, etc. And the artworks themselves have spawned a blog just to keep track of them: http://artofmadmen.wordpress.com/

But both academics and libraries have combined a love of mad men with scholarly inquiry. Duke University Library's Rubenstein Rare Book Library has created Mad Men Mondays to use the show as a jumping off point for investigations into parts of collection that corroborate the ideas floating around in the 60s: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/tag/mad-men/

And Duke University Press came out recently with a volume called Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing

The Art Historical Fantasy of Grand Budapest Hotel

Firstly, Boy with Apple may now be my favorite forgery of all time (with the forgery of the Northern Renaissance style triptych at the Palmer Museum of Art). This is partially everyone was meant to know it was fake--it was made for a movie--but also because it is convincing in its details. The Guardian delicately threw a few examples out there in their article Is The Grand Budapest Hotel's 'Boy with Apple' artwork plausible? See The Gallerist on this as well.

Boy with Apple, Michael Taylor

And this was one among many forgeries, others giving a nod to Gustav Klimt and Caspar David Friedrich as noted by the folks blogging for Sotheby's.

The most notable was Two Lesbians Masturbating, a nod by Rich Pellegrino to Egon Schiele.

Two Lesbians Masturbating, Rich Pellegrino

Portrait of Wally, Egon Schiele

But the movie was a graphic design whirlpool of Eastern European pre-war imagery. The Creative Review looks at many of the painstakingly rendered props in Designing for The Grand Budapest Hotel. And they look at more images of little details like keychains, perfume, etc. at The Warholian.