Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Guest Blogger: Dr. David Levy, Skyward

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: Guest Blogger: Dr. David Levy, Skyward: Once again, it is our pleasure to feature Dr. David Levy as our guest blogger. Skyward December 2018     Inner Starlight  ...

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: What I've Learned from Dolls

Dr. E's Doll Museum Blog: What I've Learned from Dolls: Devoting yourself to a hobby helps you learn a whole subset of skills in areas you never thought you'd be good. It dawned on ...

Rescued Food at the Supermarket

I saw something new earlier this week at the supermarket; rescued food being sold along side the regular displays of groceries and produce.  It was called "ugly" food, and included tomatoes and lemons.


Very interesting.  Here is the official website for food rescue if you are interested: http://www.foodrescue.net/

Public Domain

Thoughts on Toy Collecting via Tami Hoag's Dark Paradise

I recently picked up another Tami Hoag thriller; love her books when I want to immerse myself in escapist horror and mystery!  She is a friend of my friend, Kim Ostrum Bush, also a romance writer.  Kim was my mom’s student, and a doll collector.  I ran into her one time at the old Masonic Temple Women’s Club Antique Show where Ralph’s Antique Dolls used to set up.  Now, the MT is Terror at Skellington Manor, my favorite haunt, with great animatronics and an extensive doll collection.

 

The novel I’m reading is Dark Paradise, and it takes place in New Eden, Montana.  There is an attorney who is also a collector of many things, including toys.  His name is Miller Daggrepont.  Here are his thoughts on collecting:

 

This is where I keep my collections . .. I collect everything  Signs, toys, farm equipment you name it.  Never know when the next big rage will hit.  I made a killing on Indian artifacts when all the Hollywood types started moving in.  They think they’re going native when they hang an old horse blanket on the wall.  Damned fools, I say—not because of the collecting.  Nothing wrong with collecting.  They’re just damned fools in general!(95)

 

 

Here are some more links if you enjoy large toy collections.  Don’t forget the Strong National Museum of Play. http://www.museumofplay.org/

 

Jerry Greene world’ largest toy collection. https://rockandrolljunkie.com/2015/02/26/4109/

 

 

World’s largest toy museum Branson. https://www.bransonshows.com/activity/WorldsLargestToyMuseum.cfm

 

Toy soldiers: https://www.metro.news/worlds-largest-toy-soldier-collection-makes-a-killing/1038350/

 

 

 

Of Carving Pumpkins

Simple but effective.  I did one this year; haven't in ages!!

My favorite ghost and pumpkin model; I also have it as a blow mold lamp and candle.

Guest Blogger; Dr. David Levy- Skyward November 2018

Skyward

November 2018

 

More than two thousand years ago, getting loose change was about as easy as it is today. Hand a shopkeeper a silver dollar in today’s world, and you can expect four quarters in change.   What isn’t the same as today is the design of the coin one might want to get change for.  Hand the same shopkeeper a Roman coin from the first century, especially one with a bright comet engraved on its head, and one of two things might happen.  Either you’d get thrown out of the store, or the shopkeeper would treat you to dinner and then bequeath his children to you.  After all, if the shopkeeper read Shakespeare, he would know that the coin was celebrating Julius Caesar’s Great Comet, the comet that appeared in the northern sky during the games held shortly after the assassination of Juius Caesar on the Ides of March , March 15, 44 BC.  In Shakepeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar, Calpurnia even predicts the murder, and the comet: 

When beggars die, there are no comets seen;

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

In Shakespeare’s play,  Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 B.C.  The play mentions neither the games, nor that they were played in celebration of the new emperor, Augustus  Caesar.  A bright comet was visible in the northern sky during those games.  It was widely interpreted as Julius Caesar’s soul on its way to the stars.  At the time, comets were omens.  Calpurnia was well aware that her husband’s death could be preceded or followed by a bright comet.   And decades later, Seneca, in his anxiety to avoid execution by the suspicious Emperor Nero, insisted that the bright comet of A.D. 61 was a favorable omen to Nero.  (It didn’t work; Nero had Seneca put to death.)

An early NASA image of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

To engrave a comet on a coin may seem strange, but in fact, most people never get to see a bright comet, an apparition in the night with a head and flowing tail, in their entire lives.  I have.  My nights under the stars have been brightened by the light of more than two hundred comets.  Only a few of these comets were visible without the aid of a telescope, and most were only barely seen as specks of slowly moving haze.  But even these were magical.

Caesar Comet Coin, photo provided by Dr. David Levy.
The Caesar comet coin.  Thanks to Jeff Struve for his magnificent
image of the coin with Caesar's comet engraved upon it.

Comets have appeared in literature all over the world, in almost all languages, because writers since time began have seen comets and have become fascinated by them.  Writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, like James Joyce, and like me.  I caught the comet bug when I was twelve years old.  Our teacher in the sixth grade, Mr.  Powter, wanted us to give speeches.  The topic I chose was comets.  I was interested in their appearances in the sky, their appearances in history, in art, and in literature.   What I knew nothing about was their role in the origin of life on Earth.  I was far too young to consider the possibility that when comets collided with the Earth, their debris included the CHON particles –Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen—the alphabet of life.  Thirty-four years later, one of the comets I helped discover taught me that lesson as it careened into Jupiter in one of the biggest events in the history of science.  This comet didn’t get onto  a Roman coin, or even a modern one, but it did find its way onto a German stamp.   Not too bad for a tiny comet that wandered through the solar system for eons, gradually got attracted into an orbit about Jupiter, and then, in a series of explosions, reconstructed our understanding of how life could begin on a world.

An image of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts imprinted on a German stamp.