Also, something that can fit into both a car and a garden.

I like it. I keep breaking into fits of giggles.

Your family is awesome.

Own sneakiness: a period of newly bought, unexpectedly fixer-upper house. Several months down the road and we're getting pretty settled. DH needs to be gone on a business trip for a few days.

When he got back, he got a demonstration that yes, one could indeed paint tiles. I de-aqua-fied the color with a base layer of tile paint, then gave them a color that provided a more interesting contrast with the toilet&bath fixtures.

The best part was the reaction when DH saw it. Made the intense, deadline-driven work entirely worth it.

Crazy(and very much admiring Martin's choice of statuary... as well as his choice to move on that idle thought of yours)Soph

The Winged Victory of Samothrace is special for me. Martin picked it knowing that.

When Patrick, Teresa, and I went to Paris last year, it was the only thing we were willing to trek through the Louvre to look at. (The Louvre is a sophisticated form of torture for anyone with mobility issues.)

It is, in my opinion, one of the finest things that the human race has ever produced. Alongside the Pantheon.

Ah, lovely. Not braining very well, so your further explanation is much appreciated.

Crazy(and continues looking at the pretty)Soph

Seems to be the season for such things. Spotted this on the way to work this morning. Seems to be cropping up elsewhere, too.

(And, yes, I know that you have never heard of it unless you've lived in New England or are over 80 years of age.)

To which I replied,

Or have read "Bored of the Rings," and had the jokes explained to you.

And it occurred to me that a whole lot of people on that particular board might never have read "Bored of the Rings," and so would not know what one says at that moment.

(Also, hi crazysoph!)

And now you can call it the Winged Victory of [Your Town], unless that would seem sacrilegious.

I can see the artistic decision there but it's still strange. It's become a translated text.

(I agree that this is a better decision than trying to update the jokes to the 2010s. That wouldn't sit right with anybody.)

For a dear friend's significant natal anniversary, I obtained a shelf-sized reproduction of that statue. It was received with much glee.

I have a habit of coming on these things when it's a reference to a reference of a reference. My first encounter with this particular one was back in the days of rec.arts.sf.fandom. I didn't actually realize it was from something until this discussion here.

I have a very fond memory of encountering a hand-cranked canal ferry that was just big enough for a few bikes and a few people. Very clever design--chains running to the boat from either shore.

You will treasure your trip. Thanks for writing it up.

There were a few more things I was itching to see at the Louvre, The Venus de Milo, Ben Franklin, a Stele of Hammurabi.

But the Nike was (with the de Milo) at the top of the list. We also saw the Mona Lisa. It' bigger than I thought.

That is a splendid thing. Much better than a shrubbery.

Look! What's that in the road?

A head?

Anybody got an Indian head penny?

… and similar images.

That said, I may not be wired right for Bored of the Rings. I bought it cheap in high school and made myself slog through every chapter, but it basically seemed like a lot of word salad with a few poo-and-fart-level jokes that involved people whose names vaguely resembled folks from the Trilogy. I tried it again about ten years later when I found it in a box, repacking, and still didn't find basically anything in it funny.

This may be generational.

Someday I will visit the Netherlands.

The same for me - I knew it was fannish, but not the source (I tried to read Bored of the Rings and stopped).

Not my style of lampoon.

But I still have fond memories. I don't remember the Winged Victory in it, though I do remember Moxie and Pepsi and Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt.

Satire and parody (with a very few exceptions) consistently fall flat for me, so I remember when Bored went around, but I didn't even bother picking it up. (Which is why I didn't recognize that that was a quote.)

(I often find things like that funnier when they've been disembodied from their origins. See also: Goon Show, Firesign Theater, and Monty Python references. I generally prefer them in their "random" form.)

Just be aware that the protags aren't very pleasant, and there are some potentially triggery bits.

JBWoodford, #10: You may tell your online acquaintance that there's a specialty-sodas store in Pasadena, CA which sells Moxie, so a lot of people in that area will have heard of it or even tried it. I did. It wasn't half bad; I'd order it again.

Elliott, #27: Or maybe not. I took a look at Bored of the Rings on the shelf when it first came out and didn't find anything in it worth spending money on. But then, I wasn't much of a fan of National Lampoon in general; their idea of humor didn't align with mine.

Similarly, I was on a bawdy-songs mailing list for a while some 15 or 20 years ago, but unsubscribed when it became obvious that their definition of "bawdy" was primarily frat-house bodily-function gags, which I classify as "crude" or "vulgar" rather than bawdy.

HRJ, #33: I do that too, mostly with movie- and TV-related stuff. I don't consume much in that area myself, but I have so many friends who do that I end up picking it up by osmosis.

It's not precisely the same, but you might find this article about attempts to recreate the (very bright) original colors of Greek sculpture.

The phenomenon is not limited to that time period; the actual "More cowbell!" sketch is, IMNSHO, also pretty stupid (though maybe that's because I find Will Farrell to be teeth-grindingly awful). OTOH, the one funny line that everyone remembers is kind of useful, in a Tamarian sort of way.

I've seen a reconstruction that posits that the Venus de Milo was originally spinning with a hand-spindle. I'm not particularly convinced (assuming that the "Venus" part is right), since spinning wasn't really one of her characteristics. More of a "not incompatible" judgement.

Part of the presentation included a discussion of differences between ancient Greek hand-spinning techniques and the currently popular "drop-spinning" method, so your doubts may address a different aspect of the question.

I'm not convinced. One, not the way one spins. One CAN spin that way, but it's a piss-poor way to do things if one wants to make a quantity of yarn. Yes, I admit artists play fast and loose with things, but... Spinning was a known function (a bedrock one), and it's one of those things which is more likely than not to be more accurately presented.

The other thing is the nature of mythic figures who spin. You have The fates (none of them young and lovely), Arachne, possibly presented in such a form. But that's pretty much it for spinning (Athena, Penelope, Helen, Philomena, etc. are presented as weavers: also women's work (though from at least the middle ages, perhaps in parallel with the rise of the spinning wheel women spun and men wove, but I digress). So Venus, not so much. Arachne, maybe; but she's not a really sympathetic figure in the mythology. Doesn't rule her out (after all, Adonis isn't either), but she's a minor figure.

Heather: I saw that piece, and while I like Barber's work, I've always had some quibbles with it*. Drop spinning is not new, and the imagery I've seen from Greek art looks a lot like the manner I use today. Standing, with the wool in front of me, and the spindle depending from the right hand, as the left controls the loose fiber being drafted through the right hand to the new yarn.

So I'd like to see the sources use to defend the idea this is based on "differences between ancient and modern uses of the drop spindle".

Yes, there are cultural differences in spinning methods, but there are limitations imposed by physics, the presented gap between the distaff hand and the drafting hand is huge. More to the point, with one arm broken flush to the shoulder there is no way to infer where that arm went. I've spun lots of places (subways, airplanes, ferries) and hipshot isn't comfortable for me. So if she was spinning, there was a huge amount of artistic license.

*in much of her writing I find leaps of logic which are plausible, but not completely supported by the evidence. That' fine, but she took many of those leaps and used them as support for other arguments, which she presented as concluded facts. A sort of circular reasoning. I don't impute intent to decieve. It feels a lot more like confirmation bias, of the sort the intel world gets when one source is talking to two people, each of whom is unaware the other is "confirming" something which only has one source.

I've re-read some of it since I started spinning more, and my quibbles are actually a bit greater than they were.

Clifton @ 26: that was my first reaction on following "Look!" to the picture. It didn't help that Return of the King was running on our cable recently enough to remind me just how overblown Jackson's filming of this scene was. Not that he didn't have encouragement from other examples of JRRT's prose....

OtterB @ 34: my wife and I were very amused some decades ago when picking through the result of a couple of fans merging their collections: two copies of BotR. No, we don't know whether they had a third to keep or just both tossed their separates.

The Lampoon when I was skimming it tended to the bludgeon rather than the scalpel. I remember them trying to satirize Mad and thinking the result looked like jealousy. OTOH, BotR did provide the name of a drink my gaming group came up with: "Hairy Toes", a glass of cranberry juice with a shot of "peach schnapps" (the DeKuyper liqueurish stuff, not real brandy).

on what the "Venus de Milo" was doing: can anyone cite an indication that the name is correct, rather than just an assumption made about a female statue not carrying the obvious attributes (shield/bow/sheaf) and/or dignity of all of the Greek goddesses who aren't Aphrodite? The Wikipedia article quotes early reports to dismiss them, but it doesn't give any indication that anyone ever did enough archaeology at the site to know what it was for. Why should it not be a mortal in a mortal activity (cf the many statues of athletes)?
      contra Terry, Wikipedia also suggests that a spindle would be an appropriate symbol for a goddess of human fertility -- but that's an argument I can't weigh.

Wikipedia being what it is, it's possible that that claim comes from the same source as the idea that she's spinning does in the first place, a book called Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. It's a pretty interesting book, and has some fascinating stuff in it, but there are also a few things about it that make me want to take it with a grain of salt.

For example, Barber talks about weaving a reconstruction of an existing Iron Age textile fragment, and mentions how frustrating the warping was because she kept having to count, "OK, now 17 in green, now 15 in brown, 16 in green, 18 in brown..." Then she sat down to weave and it was nice, simple, 16 shots of each color. She says it didn't even occur to her until she was weaving that maybe in the original the nice even "16 threads of each color" had been the warp, and the weft had been done by eye to match stripe widths. I know this is a picky thing to worry about, but it makes me slightly less inclined to take other statements in the book at face value. :)

Why should it not be a mortal in a mortal activity (cf the many statues of athletes)?

Um... because of the wings...?

The statue that CHip is referring to in #50 is the decidedly wingless Venus de Milo, not the Winged Victory that the thread started out discussing.

The Musée du Louvre launches online collection database and new website