JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.

The Royal Scottish Museum — The National Museum of Scotland — Great BBC Documentary — click, with glee:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDfogg
You know the algorithm is working its fingers to the bone, to suddenly pop this 2016 BBC documentary into my “why don’t you watch this?” queue. All right, algorithm; you win. I watched it. (No nasty commercials!)

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The history of Scottish silver; a Viking chess set; preserving a sperm whale skeleton to hang; Mary Queen of Scots, her harp; restoring Bonnie Prince Charlie’s tartan; meteorites; Audubon’s Birds of North America!!!; early Egyptology; the fashions of designer Jean Muir.
I was spellbound for an hour. Youse, will be too.

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In 2006 they built a handsome and PERFECT new addition to the venerable old pile on Chambers Street, to modernize and incorporate the collections of several other institutions. This made me glad, for it is in the tradition of Edinburgh, as a place that pools its intellectual history; it really led the world in mass public education, by exhibiting the evidence itself, the actual objects. (The Museum was founded from combining the old University collections with those of the Society of Antiquarians, and many other private sources, including the Crown.)

https://www.nms.ac.uk/national-museum-of-scotland/

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Students got in cheap when I was there, and I went browsing in the Museum about once a week. It was amazing – the fustiest possible, the Ur-fusty, Eminent Museum of Victorian Progress. That is not in any way a criticism — trilobites upon trilobites, Old Red Sandstone overlaying Silurian greywacke, extinct birds of the Southern Hemisphere; James Watt’s Steam Engine. The cultural, intellectual and natural history of the world lay open in those days for a geek’s kick-around visit. Glory be, and blessings on my folks.

There was a stuffed dodo, in a glass case. LESSON LEARNED.

Feathered costumes of Pacific Islanders. Bones….bones. Tons of what we would call steampunk: Newcomen engines, assaying tools, and on the ground floor two ancient locomotives: Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly, built to haul coal a few hundred feet out of the mine. Those engines were interpreted by a looped tape of a woman’s voice, so soporific and hypnotic, that it cast a kind of Druidic enchantment upon anyone foolish enough to enter the gallery. You were stuck to the spot, like Merlin, until you learned every detail of Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly from the drear Nimue’s spell. (None of this made the cut of the documentary, and bloody right. It’s much better now!)

Ken, one of my fondest days with you, ever, was spent crawling through here.

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