Quirky (alone?) interests

Eww... though I haven't read that book, I kind of cringe at thinking of myself anywhere in range of that notion -- the "quirkyalones". But in doing the Interest Meme, I kept not wanting to DO all of the "every ten" interests (the rule, apparently, was to explain why you like random interests on your LJ userpage -- if you have ten or fewer, explain them all; if you have 50 to 75, explain every fifth one; if you have above 75, explain every tenth one...). That's too fucking many, for me. So I decided to follow Gordonzola, 2003 ©, and use my unshared interests. Maybe I'll add a few randomish ones I WANT to explain.

Alistair Chisholm is my best friend, and he put MY name in HIS interest list, so I retaliated. What can I say about Alistair? A lot. But I'll content myself with saying that we became conscious socialists around the same time -- age 14 -- in places wildly distant and different, and him without the benefit of being a red diaper baby. But his path in was so adorable: he was a teenage Bennite! Tony Benn, Labour socialist and scion of the Wedgwood family. God, I love Britain for its wacky class follies. Anyway, he's brilliant and hilarious and a daddy now.

antiwar politics I should really leave this off; it's only "unshared" because I didn't hyphenate it or something. Multiple spellings and idiosyncratic punctuation make LJ crazy.

bog man How can no one but me have this? Does he have some other name? The Tollund Bog Man? This is that Iron Age criminal (so they suspect) killed, or sacrificed, in a peat bog in Friesland or somewhere like that, Jutland, whatever -- is that Denmark? Yeah. Anyway, his body was perfectly preserved, umm, well, in the way that leather is perfectly preserved. He's a very dark brown. You can see his features, his hair, his clothes, his cap, how he's trussed up, the garroting rope around his neck, and the wicker withies or whatever was used to stop him roaming as a ghost. I love stuff like that -- material remnants of ancient history -- I'm big on mummies, too, and he's basically an unintentional Northern European mummy. I like the Ice Man, too, from the Alps cave. Just ignore the "Do We Need A New Definition of Agriscience?" bit and scroll down, and here's a good image and description.

Florence Kelley She lived in Hull House, with Jane Addams et al, and was a socialist who became a factory inspector and worked for labor reform laws. She also did door to door sociological research with the rest of the women for this amazing study of the immigrant communities around that Halstead Street neighborhood. AND she translated some of Engels' work -- possibly The Conditions of the Working Class in England. That's all just too fucking cool. Here she is.

Gundestrup Cauldron Like the Bog Man (literally), I don't understand why no one has this. Are there no wannabe archaeologists on LiveJournal? The Gundestrup Cauldron was discovered not too far from the Bog Man, and is an Iron Age relic -- a series of beautiful hammered and worked silver plates that when put together form a huge ritual cauldron with images of the Celtic gods on its sides. The work is really confusing to art historians, because the themes are Celtic, but the artistry seems to be Scythian or something. It was either offered as a sacrifice or buried for some other reason in a peat bog in what is now the Netherlands. I'll try to link to an image. Here.

Inessa Armand She was a Russian Revolutionary, wife of the bourgeoisie, who became Lenin's lover. Alexandra Kollontai was either sympathetic to this relationship, or thought it emblematic of the problems of women revolutionaries and relationship dramas, because she fictionalized it (thinly) in A Great Love. Okay, in this case, I take NO responsibility for the site, but it's surprisingly hard to find a decent web resource about Inessa Armand. This is at least an okay canned biography. Maybe I'll read the Pearson bio. Here's that site.

Mama's Royal Cafe is a hipster cafe near me. For a long time I avoided going there because of the high level of hipsterness. Now I've embraced it (not that I, myself, have become in any sense hip -- just that I can be around such folk without gritting my teeth too much) and it does have strong aspects of being a community spot, too. It has its regulars, who are regular people. It has good coffee if you get there early enough, and bad, too strong coffee if you don't. It has overpriced good food. And I like the manager and the waitstaff a lot. No photo available. Also it has a yearly napkin art contest which someday I plan to enter.

Richard Cuffari was a fantastic illustrator of young adult fiction books. I will buy ANY book that I see that he's illustrated. He used a gorgeous pen and ink wash technique that relied a lot on line and shadow and an almost pre-Raphaelite purity of profile... I WISH I could point you to any of his drawings. I'll look, but I'm pretty sure I cannot. Two of the titles he illustrated: Betsy Byars' The TV Kid. Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard (one of my favorite YAF books, in any case, and one which brings the Child ballad about sisters deluded by jealousy, and the basis for myths of "people under the hill", or fairies, to life). I can't find an image. God, I wish I had a scanner.