Wahunsonacock wore WHAT?!?

The title of this entry is the title I wish I could give my first essay of grad school. Unfortunately in England, or perhaps just in the University of Leicester Department of Museum Studies, we have to title our essays with the question that was set. Thus my title will be: ‘Choose one object now in a museum. Describe, analyse and critically discuss the object’s biography and social life since its production.’

Somehow it just lacks snazz in comparison.

The object I’m doing is this little beauty, aka ‘Powhatan’s Mantle’, an object that is so exquisitely documented that it is referred to with quotation marks in half of the official literature. I saw it in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and became kind of obsessed with it, mostly because I’d never heard of it before and the way it’s presented in the museum is as if it’s 100% real, no doubt about it, Powhatan sooo totally wore this like OMG. I was originally doing an essay where I was grappling with the big questions like ‘What is material culture?’, but then I saw that I could do this and immediately reverted back to academic type. I get to write an essay about cabinets of curiosity and cultural imperialism and Jamestown. If only I could have worked Catch-22 in there somewhere (I admit, that would have been a long-shot) we might have hit all the essay g-spots.

I think it’s time for a new Nerdgasms banner. I’m sure I only think this because I need something else to do to procrastinate now that I’ve written this entry. Still, stay tuned. Or just come back in a month, which seems like a more efficient use of your time.

Edit: Or you could just look now, as apparently I felt compelled to change it immediately. It’s a bit dreary, but yay cabinets of curiosity!

The World Series of Ketchup

When I was but a wee lass I thought that there really was a game called Ketchup. It was what adults played when they had fallen behind. As someone who is ostensibly an adult (I have all of the parts, at any rate) and who has fallen behind rather hideously, I think it is time for a little first-class sporting action in the recently renamed Heinz Arena.

Please bear with me as I try to tie up all the loose ends I have left in previous entries. This could get ugly!

•  Hullo Interweb! and Artery Clogging Sausage Stuffing don’t really have any loose ends. The stuffing is still delicious and lethal, and the only question that might arise from the first entry is that of which person I am in the photograph. The answer is, of course, the attractive one. Or the one on the left. Whichever.

• Why I Can’t Be Arsed To Come Up With a Witty Headline asks the age old question of “what the heck is this blog about?” Like most cosmic queries, it has proven unanswerable. So sorry. I still love the New York Public Library as much as I did when I made this entry, though I have not looked at the available Rosetta Stone software even once. What can I say; I am a lazy American and my monolingualism is imprinted on my DNA.

• Next up was my pièce de résistance, Not So Live Satire Blogging, also known as the only entry of mine ever read by more than a dozen people. Well whaddaya know! Apparently The 1/2 Hour News Hour was picked up by the Fox News Channel, which has been airing it ever since. (Thanks Wikipedia!) I couldn’t be bothered to sit through it again, not to mention that it airs in the same time slot as The Tudors, and I can think of very few television shows that take precedence over Jonathan Rhys Meyers frolicking shirtless and being Machiavellian. Also, um, all that history.

• A Soul Crushing Work of Staggering Idiocy. Where to begin? I’m still pretty idiotic. However, I did finish my personal statements, did hear back from my recommenders, and have been accepted by my top three Museum Studies programs. Oops, programmes. I will most likely be accepting a place at the University of Leicester for the 2007-2008 MA course. Now of course I must stress over finances, visas, health, housing, fitting my copious belongings into one suitcase, etc. I never did make a follow-up entry on the International Spy Museum, but suffice it to say that I got to crawl through an air duct. It kind of shames the museum dork in me, but that was probably the most satisfying experience I have ever had in a museum, and I could have done something similar in a local junkyard. There was probably less of a tetanus risk in the museum though. (Really that’s just me being facetious. I’m a big advocate of making museums more interactive, though that line between Disney World and Learning is a little blurry and hard to pin down. I’m not going to even pretend to start on this topic… I’m supposed to be tying up loose ends not raising more questions!)

• I was such a huge cock-tease in Peaceable Kingdom. What kind of person promises sensationally titled entries like “Fisticuffs with Jesus: 5 People Who Want to Sucker-punch the Lord” and then doesn’t deliver? A real bastard, that’s who.

• Have I mentioned that I managed to finish my personal statement? Because I have. It doesn’t have anything to do with The Universal Curatorial Impulse, though I’m still trying to work out how to build my Master’s thesis around this (completely made-up) concept. You wouldn’t know it from this particular blog, but I am a great fan of making up concepts. If I were a great philosophical genius (or just a genius) I could take these crackpot ideas and turn them into accepted scholarship, but instead I am a passably intelligent crackpot, so I turn them into blog posts.

• I am not even going to attempt to re-type the title of this entry, but know that in the interim my grandmother has attempted to set me up with (among others) distant relatives, parents of my mother’s students, and 40 year old men. There is some overlap in these categories, particularly the “40 year old men” one.

• I came in last place in all my NCAA pools, much as I predicted I would. Also, I still find the kid who plays Harry Potter to be disconcertingly attractive. I console myself with the fact that his haircut in the upcoming Order of the Phoenix movie was a regrettable choice that causes his head to somewhat resemble a penis.

• I never actually experienced Saturday, Computerless Saturday, as I unsurprisingly chickened out and checked the weather online. It was all downhill from there. It was in this entry that I mentioned my “upcoming trip to Costa Rica.” I went and I had a great time. As you might have noticed from the entry previous to this one, there were monkeys there. There were AN OBSCENE NUMBER OF MONKEYS there. This might require more significant follow-up than I can provide in this bulleted list. No promises, of course.

• Unsurprisingly, the majority of Americans do not think the solution to school shootings such as the tragedy at Virginia Tech is to arm students to the teeth so that they can return fire. After those involved had time to mourn, I am pleased that public opinion blew in this direction.

Just so everyone is aware, there is some large and scary bug flying around my room right now. I thought you might like to be informed. Also this entry has not been proofread. At all. I didn’t even intend to write it right now… I wanted to go to bed!

The Universal Curatorial Impulse: An Excercise in Futility

I am trying trying trying to write my personal statement for grad school. I only have about 120 words. The problems? Well, laziness and procrastination spring to mind, but there are actually two main ones:

1) You might not be able to tell from this blog, but I don’t like talking about myself. I can blog because I have a highly developed tendency towards self-deprecation; I can talk about myself if I am talking shit. I can’t brag, except if I am being sarcastic and giving myself left-handed compliments. I really don’t think I am lacking anything in the self-esteem department, but writing 1000 words about how awesome I am and how I plan to revolutionize the field of museum studies? Not my forte.

2) I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE UNIVERSAL CURATORIAL IMPULSE. This is my current theory on life, the universe, and everything. It is nebulous at best, but it is my pet theory and I want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about my internships and classes and where I see myself in 10 years, I want to spew BS! I want to write an essay, not a personal statement!

All that said, Jesus is going to have to wait for his sucker punch. Sorry, James Cameron.