Watch out for those supper Pharisees

"What are you making for dinner?" Meg asked me.
"I'm making rellenos and fajitas, but you're something of a Pharisee about rellenos, so you may not get any," I informed her.
"A Pharisee?" Jonathan asked.
I considered. "I think I meant Philistine."
"How much legalism can you fit into a relleno?" he demanded.

My writing, elsewhere

My two most recent posts over at HSLDA: falling in love with pharaohs and nature studies.

Egypt

I like the Macbeth poster in the background.

Here are some pictures from school the past few days. Having a Playmobil sphinx set adds a lot to the ambiance.

Meg's and my genuine Thutmosid-style bezel ring!

I wrote her cartouche on it. We figured it out using only the phonetic hieroglyphs, not messing with the ideograms and whatnot. The letters read, "MEG."

MY apple tree, all mine

We were listening to the Andrews Sisters' "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," when Meg commented. "What a selfish singer she is!"

The lyrics, for those of you not familiar with this WWII classic, go "Don't sit under the apple tree/With anyone else but me, anyone else but me, anyone else but me/ Don't sit under the apple tree/ Till I come marching home." I usually consider this a fairly reasonable request, but then I mentally file this song under "Love Songs," or possibly "Soldier Love Songs," which have a different standard of selfishness than "Toddler Life." Apparently. The recipient may or may not cooperate, but it's more about whether they're waiting for the soldier to come home in a romantic sort of way, and less about possession of the apple tree. Per se.

Anyway, I asked Meg why it sounded selfish. "Because she won't let anyone sit there but her."

There you go.

Historical discussion

Tonight at dinner, I ranted (briefly) about Henry the Eighth's burning of libraries as he dissolved the monasteries. (How many manuscripts of Beowulf might we HAVE if he hadn't been such a dork??)
"Henry the Eighth was a corkscrew!" Jonathan announced.
Meg agreed with us. "Yeah, he was sharp and wasn't careful with his words."

All conversational roads lead to Octonauts

Meg managed to boggle even me today by bringing in the Octonauts. It all started so innocently, too. We were listening to a CD of Greatest Hits of 1949 and I had to try to explain the whip-cracks in the Mule Train song. That led to a description of a whip, which led to Indiana Jones, which led to the Ark of the Covenant. Then we had to talk about the real Ark, as opposed to the Spielberg version, which led us directly to the Meg version.

Me: "It was a box covered inside and out with gold, and it had two long sticks to carry it by. There were statues of two angels on top. And Moses put the Ten Commandments inside."
Meg: "Why?"
Me: "Because that was how God told them to make it."
Meg:  "They should have colored pictures of Octonauts and put them on the box. That would have been more fun."

Boggle, boggle. I pointed out that Octonauts hadn't been invented yet, and furthermore God wanted people to think about Him when they saw the box, and they could make statues of angels but they couldn't make statues of God because they didn't know what He looked like. Meg still felt Octonauts would be much cooler.

Jonathan, inventively, said that angels are like Octonauts in a lot of ways: they go on missions, they help people --
Meg: "The way angels are NOT like Octonauts is that they DON'T HELP SEA CREATURES. They could probably help a land creature, but they aren't much of a swimmer."

She was listening to that story about Henry II

Meg just emerged wearing her knight's helmet over a pink giraffe-spotted fluffy blanket on her head. She got right in my face and said, "I am the Emperor the Second. 'Cuz the Emperor the First died."

The peacemaker

Our golden bust of Bismarck usually wears Meg's lei and necklaces, but tonight Jonathan found them jumbled in the living room and picked them up. Meg came running over in alarm.

"No, Daddy! They're mine!"
"No. Bismarck's."
She grinned suddenly. "Okay."

That's Bismarck, still averting crises a hundred-some-odd years after his death. Not bad at all.

Egyptology

Pyramids came into the discussion this morning, so I went and found my Guide to the Valley of the Kings* for Meg to look at the pictures.

Meg: "Oh! This is nice, Mommy, but I don't have a king."
Jonathan: "You don't need to have a king. The Egyptians provided their own."



*Which is not where the pyramids are, but it's the book I had.

Macbeth rises (in discussion)

Lars over at Brandywine is talking about Macbeth. Somebody tried to reconcile the Scots and Viking chronologies, but he doesn't buy it.  I'm inclined to agree with Lars because the odds of Macbeth dying in bed are so very, very low, but I know nothing whatever of the Orkneyinga Saga or Jarl Thorfinn, so there you have it.

I am, however, always happy to talk about Macbeth.

The first step into a larger universe

We started Narnia today. I didn't quite know if Meg was ready for a chapter book, but she likes picture books and is able to follow the story  of such classics as If You Give a Pig a Party and Fancy Nancy. She'll sit with them herself, identifying the pictures and (half the time) reciting the text for that page, so I thought it was worth trying, at least. I got out The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and started reading aloud.

We counted the children - Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy - on our fingers, and talked about their riding the train to the Professor's house. We talked about the owl sound Lucy heard and made owl noises ourselves. We talked about exploring big houses and what wardrobes and fauns are and examined the illustrations closely. We made it all the way to chapter two and started having tea with Mr. Tumnus before she got restless, so we put it away and went and had a glorious tea of our own, with a fried egg and croissants with honey, lemon curd, or Nutella. All in all, it was a highly successful introduction to Narnia. I'm so pleased I could just about cry.

I hadn't ever put this together before, but I realized Lucy's meal with Tumnus was especially notable because back home in England, she was under wartime rations! A cake with sugar on top would have been a particular treat for her. I'm so glad we're not rationed these days.

I love it

Downton Abbey. season two, episode one. Jonathan has spent the entire episode saying things like, "If you ever find your army double-parked in Flanders in August, remember the water table is only about an inch below the surface" and "I'm just saying, if I had been Kaiser, world history would have turned out differently." I love Jonathan.

"The mother of all comic books"

The Bayeux tapestry is up and scrollable. I had no idea it was so long and narrow. It's "Like the mother of all comic books," says the incomparable Lars Walker.

I'm just delighted over it, actually. The illustrations crack me up, especially with the Latin which is mostly quite manageable ("Hic portatur corpus Eadvvardi Regis," and sure enough, there's a bunch of dudes porting the aforementioned regal corpus).

Possibly I have a warped and morbid sense of humor. Seriously though, this is awesome.

My new friend

Meet my new friend.
This is a bust of Otto von Bismarck back when he was, um, something before he was made a prince in 1871. We got it at a white elephant exchange last night from a guy who got it from a history professor who'd had it for years, who'd gotten it from somebody who'd had it for many years before that. There's speculation the bust is actually from before 1871, since it's not of Bismarck with his later title.

Or history professors just like "snapshot" busts.

Either way, I needed Bismarck. I've been kind of wanting a bust for a while, and I took a fancy to him and his peeling gold paint. And his mustache. At first we couldn't read his label properly and thought he was a Nazi friend of Himmler's, and I liked him then. I mean, I could always paint him and give him silly hats. But after the gentleman who brought the bust explained he was Bismarck, I was really glad I'd stolen him from Nathan Curby. Would you believe, no one tried to steal the bust away from me? Bismarck is awesome. It's not like he was a singing Justin Bieber toothbrush (true story).

Since my camera charger is still MIA, you get this photo courtesy of my cell phone.

What goes around

Jonathan picked up a pile of old design textbooks a while back and I was deeply entertained by this one. It's copyright 1944, and the author has definite opinions. She starts out delineating, in great detail, each stylistic era from about 1650 - 1900, all of which look alike. But then she gets to Victorian style. I have to quote.

"Victoria's interest in art was negligible and the style which bears her name, as ruling Queen, does her no honor in its conglomeration of decorative gingerbread. Intermingled are Greek, Egyptian, Turkish, French, and Venetian ideas used indiscriminately.

"Houses were as folderol outside as they were within. The height of the Victorian Period is now considered the low-ebb of good taste in decoration. It makes you dizzy with its merry-go-round of unrelated ideas, grotesque furniture, heavy colors, mantels, pianos swooning with silk scarves, millinery windows and stuffed parrots!

"A full vote of disfavor, however, is unfair, for there are many of the plainer settees, chairs, tables, and chests... which are not overly ornate and do have definite charm. ...If you own some Victorian pieces and will carefully combine them with a modern treatment of 'unstuffed' rooms and windows, the effect is, paradoxically, naive, sophisticated and charming." Decorating for You by Florence B. Terhune, page 50.

You can't really blame Florence. Well, you can. But her entire book is about how you should pick an era and stick to it, and on top of it she's writing from born-again modernist taste, so I suppose it's natural she'd detest cheerful Victorian eclecticism. I think it's funny how we've gone back to it. Mexican textiles on a curvy Louis the Whatever chair? Cool! Interiors inspired by Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra? Fun. Chinese paper lanterns in a hot pink room? Good for you!

Abby and I were just talking about how we're part of the generation that mixes pattern and color perfectly happily. Yep.

100 years of style

There's something about zipping-through-history videos that sucks me right in. This is a nifty one - 100 years of fashion (and dancing!). Well worth a watch or three. Catch what the guy does for WWII.

100 Years/Style/East London