Thursday Things: Virtual Tour Edition
23 April 2020. Vol 2 No 17. By Dan McGirt. #37
Welcome to Thursday Things! This week we’ve got a grab bag of things to learn, places to see, and thoughts to ponder — all from the comfort of your own home!
Not included on this week’s tour. Photo by Clement Souchet on Unsplash
How did they make that brilliant blue ink you see in illuminated Medieval manuscripts? It is one of my absolute favorite colors, so I was quite intrigued to learn where it came from: The Mystery of a Medieval Blue Ink Has Been Solved
During hot, dry summers in southern Portugal, the key ingredient for medieval manuscripts grows by the roadside. It is called folium, or turnsole, and it’s derived from the fruit of Chrozophora tinctoria, a small plant that grows in the region. For centuries, folium was responsible for coloring everything from Bible scenes to, later, the rind of a popular Dutch cheese.
If you’ve got time on your hands and want to learn something new, here are 8 Harvard University courses you can take right now, for free:
The Architectural Imagination
Super-Earths and Life
Justice
Leaders of Learning
Using Python for Research
American Government
Humanitarian Response to Conflict and Disaster
The Opioid Crisis in America
The weird horror novel that outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula back in the day:
Bram Stoker’s Dracula has remained in print since it was first published in April 1897. A bestseller in its day, it has gone on to spawn countless derivatives and become one of the most indelible pop-cultural touchstones in recent history. Obviously. But, upon its first release, it was seriously outsold by another novel, a supernatural tale of possession and revenge called The Beetle, which fell out of print after 1960. And let me tell you, it’s something else.
I am intrigued. Tell me more…
Written by Richard Marsh, the author of extremely successful commercial short fiction during this era, The Beetle is actually rather like Dracula in form and plot. In addition to its being an epistolary novel, it is similarly about a seductive, inhuman, shape-shifting monster who arrives in England from the East, entrances a citizen into becoming its slave, and wages an attack on London society. And civilization’s only hope against this invader is a motley group of middle-class individuals (including one forward-thinking young woman and one expert on the supernatural), who must figure out what the creature actually is and ascertain why it has arrived to England, before finally destroying it.
Long story short — the monster is an ancient Egyptian priestess who can transform into a giant scarab beetle. Guillermo Del Toro should be all over this! I’ll be adding The Beetle to my long list of Victorian fiction I need to read. I am also intrigued by some of Richard Marsh’s other work:
Richard Marsh, who mostly wrote comedies and romances, published more than eighty novels during his lifetime … Most of his stories are no longer in print, with several exceptions, including his stories about a female, lip-reading, jujitsu-fighting detective named Judith Lee, whose adventures were published in The Strand starting in 1914.
Who doesn’t love lip-reading, jujitsu-fighting female detectives? Sign me up!
Speaking of ancient Egypt, here are some Egyptian landmarks you can tour virtually: Take a Free Virtual Tour of Five Egyptian Heritage Sites.
Speaking of Dracula, you can also take a virtual tour of one of the Romanian castles associated with the legend: Take a tour of beautiful Bran Castle in Romania
And speaking of creepy things: A UK Museum Challenged Bored Curators Worldwide to Share the Creepiest Objects in Their Collections. Things Got Really Weird, Fast Proceed at your own risk, because some of these objects will haunt you. Perhaps literally!
Obviously, I’m on a museums and history kick this week, so let’s close it out with this 1924 silent film from the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art in which curators donned armor from the museum’s collection: "A Visit to the Armor Galleries" was especially popular and includes memorable scenes: a Gothic armor steps out of its vitrine to answer visitors' questions about the collection, a seesaw with a small child on one end and a medieval mail shirt on the other demonstrates the relatively modest weight of armor, and a fully armored knight on horseback gallops through Central Park, with Belvedere Castle (the park's weather station) rising picturesquely in the background.”
Thank you for reading Thursday Things. See you next Thursday!