Very nice Swedish model railroad

A giant miniature train place

When EH and her family were here last year we visited Northlandz, an amazing model train museum here in New Jersey.  Now there is a little movie about it and how they photographed it. Watch it.

Here are some photos from this great place.  Visit Northlandz if you have the chance, even if you have never liked model trains. (More photos from our visit here.)

Lava and smoke

exhibit about Hawaiian volcano eruption, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

A little corner exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago tried to showcase the lava eruptions in Hawaii using darkness, glow lights and LED lights. Did they succeed? What do you think?

When I was walking these exhibits I was thinking that most of these dioramas are missing the impressions of so many of our senses - there need to be scents, sounds, winds, and the feeling of touch to really get the real experience.

Just looking doesn't really do it. But being in Hawaii and smelling the sulfur, stepping on crunchy lava cinder sand and feeling the warm wind is a different thing. Couldn't exhibits try to invoke some of this too? I am not sure how to do the noise and smell or the warm wind, but I bet in the future there will be movie theaters with smell makers, fans, and boxes you can put your hands into to feel any texture or surface (ick, imagine that, anything slimy or gory...).  Virtual but real.  Still, that wouldn't be the real thing.  But I have always thought that to teach history, an experience such as walking down the street in 1850s New York would tell you a lot more about history than any book. 

I love the animal dioramas with stuffed beasts and painted backgrounds with a few silk flowers at museums, but it only gives you maybe 10% of the experience of being outside in nature. It is great that parents take their kids to museums, but they should even more just take them outside to many different kinds of places (and not be afraid of rain, ticks, dirt, germs, and toxic plants). How can you describe something to a kid that has never had that experience? You can't describe sulfur smell, it is unknown to you until you have actually smelled the rotten egg smell from a stinking boiling pot in Yellowstone. So, let's get out more. And put a sulfur smelling station next to the lava exhibit.

Volcanoes and other odd and ends

I am sitting here at home with a sinus infection and in between doing work work, gardening, and walking on the road to get fresh air, doing dishes and drinking tea, and sleeping and sniffling with a headache, I find little gems online.

How about this modelmaker, using body parts as backgrounds: ski slope, paint job, and bee keeper?

And this old photo of a combined beer garden, barbeque joint and gas station from 1940's Louisiana? I bet that bbq was good, not so sure about the beer :).

And in case you haven't noticed yet, a volcano is erupting on Iceland, and the three last times this volcano has erupted it is followed by the giant and dangerous volcano Katla erupting under its glacier, which in the past has led to 'little ice ages' with very cold winters the following years.  Keep yourself posted on this... 

Katla was also the name of the fire-spouting fierceful dragon in the faraway country Narnia in Astrid Lindgren's book The Brothers Lionheart, a book I loved as a kid and still have in my bookcase.

The postcard is from 1918, the last time Katla erupted on Iceland.

Art in Chicago: The Thorne Rooms

At the Institute for Art in Chicago there is a famous collection of about 50 miniature rooms made in the early 1900s. They are inset in the wall and only backlighted with light coming in from windows in the back or the side walls, so there is no lightning at all in the room themselves. I took some photos, without flash, so they are grainy (sorry about that), but I think you get the idea. The rooms were designed by the wife of the owner of a fancy department store in Chicago, Marshall Field's, and the Montgomery Ward stores (like Ahlens in Stockholm), and she hired artisans to make the furniture, walls, needlepoint, etc. All items where handmade, and often of the correct type of wood. After a lot of digging in the book I have I found out her maiden name was Narcissa Niblack, but she is always mentioned as Mrs. James Ward Thorne in our book.

I loved this collection, which I had never heard about before. I just happened to run into it when I was visiting and saw the sign "Thorne Miniature Rooms". The scale is 1 inch = 1 foot, a scale she started to use that later became standard for miniature works like this and dollhouses. There are other of these rooms at other museums across the country, so now I have more places I need to visit.
She started with making a series of European rooms from different periods (Louis XIV, Victorian British, etc.) but those didn't interest me as much as the American rooms she designed later. I especially liked the kitchen. They looked 'lived in', cozy, and the light coming in from the windows made them look so welcoming. Below is the New Mexico Dining Room (c. 1940). She was very exact with the details, so note the beams, the typical adobe fireplace, and the rugs. Below is the Pennsylvania kitchen (1752), which looks like something that could have been from this area in New Jersey's area too. It is a kitchen in a Pennsylvania Dutch house (Amish, or similar). Look at the glass on the table, it is probably only 4 mm high, and still copies the original design.
And here is a third kitchen, this one a Massachusetts living room and kitchen (1675-1700). Look at the typical elliptic rugs, you can still see them used around here. This kitchen is supposed to represent a Pilgrim kitchen in the Boston area about 50 years after they first settled. Glass was very expensive since it had to be imported, so windows were small and of many small pieces of glass.
And, for comparison, a English COttage Kitchen from the Queen Anne period (1702-1714). In the book I got it says that the hooked rugs on the floor are not typical of this kitchen, since they were invented in America and only available later. Instead floors like this had dry grass or sedges strewn over them, which was swept out when it got too dirty. But I bet that didn't look as neat.