Motifs and traditions: Guardian Angel

"Heilige Schutzengel" might be the most commonly known version of the motif of the Guardian Angel, and it's from Germany in the late 19th century, but the history of these images hasn't yet been tracked well. There are many versions, and I saw a new one in the grocery store this week:



There are many variations—older boy, younger girl, different bridges, different hair and coloring on the angel—but there is usually a broken bridge, water, darkness and trees.

This cartoon version has a touch of water and a rock showing through the hole in the bridge, but behind the angel is a cloth of stars, suggestive of Our Lady of Guadalupe with her starry cloak.

I think the older versions are comforting for parents. This new one is kid-friendly, not so scary. The kids are still in the German clothes, with the basket, with the red napkin, but the scary storm and waterfall are darkness are all gone.

This is marked in wikipedia as having been a German postcard from 1900. The candle in the center above is very similar, but has a higher waterfall, and more colorful clothing.


The star above the angel's head is in many of the variants. It creates a sort of halo. Most of the art I've seen is of the permutation above—movement toward the left, two children, broken bridge. Below is one that has bridge (solid, but no handrail), waterfall, star over the angel, but the costumes are more classical—the angel's is the art deco style Greek/Roman (some art historian should feel free to leave a clarifying note), and the child has the scrip and staff of a medieval pilgrim. Barefoot, as matches the tradition of the child on the bridge, but the bag and walking stick don't suggest "on the way home" so much as being on a journey.


If the building up the valley is a school, maybe the bag is lunch. I think it's a church, though, by the spire and window. This one is not "right," by guardian-angel-art standards, but it does have long red hair and a star above the angel.

In a box at my house, I have a collection of years worth of guardian angel art picked up to save to compare. Maybe I'll scan or photograph some of it and bring it here, so I've put tags on this post for future connections.

To google for more images, you could try these in addition to "guardian angel art"—Heilige Schutzengel or Angelito de la Guarda. "Angelito" doesn't mean the angel is male, because (I believe) angels are non-sexual, non-gender creatures, and the noun is masculine.

Handles of screwdrivers

In the U.S., plastic screwdriver handles follow on the shape of wooden handles.

In the U.K. that's true too, only their wooden handles were round, rather than square.



[photo from car boot sale late May 2013]

My idea pile

This blog was started six years ago, and only has 70 posts. I went to check.

There are sixteen posts started and not finished (drafts, not published yet). That's a high percentage of uncompleted ideas! I still might finish them, or I might not. Some are waiting for photos, or linke.

It's not a minimalist life, collecting things. I'm afraid I will leave a mess when I go. A mess on my desk, kind of a mess online, but there are some treasures, too.

I could, I suppose, just put these things on my own personal blog, but I like having them in a collection of collections.

The project that has taken my energy and time in recent years is Just Add Light and Stir, and if anyone comes by here and isn't aware of that one, you might want to go there and subscribe. Thanks!

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The Library at Alexandria, and RCA Victor

Twice in two days someone said, in my house, "The Library at Alexandria." One was me, to Keith, in a conversation about how bad I should feel if I decide to dump all my 36 years' worth of saved papers and artifacts from the local and regional history of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Oh... I have stuff from five years before I joined, too, given to me by people who wanted to dump their collections, and knew I had one.

The next day, a friend was over talking to Marty and me and mentioned the mystery of what might've been in that library.

In the course of a long conversationa bout saved things, and lost things, I mentioned the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archives. Neither Marty nor Bo knew about it. I use it frequently.

Today, planning to send them a link to it, I was in looking to see where it's backed up, because we had talked about that, too. When I first knew about the Internet Archive, I read that it was at The Prisidio, in San Francisco, which doesn't seem geographically stable. I guessed that it might be backed up in Bouler or some high-plateau sort of facility. I was in there reading about the history of the Internet Archives and some courtroom commentary and uses, and saw, at the bottom, a link to the Official mirror of the Wayback Machine at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina . Huh!

Then I looked up the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and found that it's a real (and really big) place, built as close as they could figure or get to where the original library was. That seems like as bad an idea as storing the internet archives in San Francisco, which seems prone to fire, earthquake, mudslide and maybe tsunami. Being on a historic military compound won't save them from any of that. So the backup is where the LAST Alexandrian library sank into the swamp! Mediterranean! Or burned. Or gradually declined. But I had already read, by then, that there was a backup at Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, or that that's where it all lives now, maybe.

The Wayback Machine is named after one on Rocky and Bullwinkle that sounded like that, but looked like WABAC. Rocky and Bullwinkle didn't time travel; they weren't in those segments. A boy named Sherman would be taken into history by Mr. Peabody, a dog. I found a list of their destinations, and was sad to see they didn't travel to the Library at Alexandria. They did visit Cleopatra. Amazon Prime will show that and two other adventures here, free with Amazon Prime, $1.99 otherwise, and probably unavailable to some portion of humans on earth, in 2013.

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, tile art found while they were excavating to build the new library:

>

That looks plenty enough like this:

I know what the second dog is looking at, and listening to. WHAT is that gold mouse-hotel-looking thing the top dog is posed with? Another thing mentioned last night is how long gold lasts. In a fairly recent conversation with Will Geusz, we were talking about how long tile lasts, if you don't drop it and break it, because an artist has put some of my words on tile plaques (here).

Here's an image from a better angle, with explanation:
A Beautiful Mosaic in the New Library of Alexandria

So here's what I intended to send to Bo and Marty. The oldest stored version of my unschooling web page: http://expage.com/RadicalUnschooling. Marty was 11. He's 24 now.

Here's the page that hosts the Wayback Machine: archive.org

And in a related topic, also at the Internet Archive, people can upload sound files, and many of my conference presentations are there (if you search Sandra Dodd and maybe add unschooling). http://archive.org/details/BigNoisyPeace

Sheep to bus to play to Singapore to movie

Retronaut had a photo of "Sheep on the strand" (in London in 1923). One of the busses had an ad for "The Unfair Sex." I thought it might be a movie, but it wasn't... yet.

I googled "The Unfair Sex" and 1923, and found a newspaper article describing a production of the play in 1931, but it mentions ..."'The Unfair Sex,' the Savoy Theatre Success of 1925..."

You might need to click an "I agree" box to see it, but the site seems safe and stable.

The play, which had a character who was obsessed with films, was made into a silent movie in 1926. http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Article/straitstimes19310330.2.9.aspx I googled "The Unfair Sex" and 1923, and found a newspaper article describing a production of the play in 1931, but it mentions ..."'The Unfair Sex,' the Savoy Theatre Success of 1925..." (You might need to click an "I agree" box to see it, but the site seems safe and stable.)

The play, which had a character who was obsessed with films, was made into a silent movie in 1926. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017499/

Nita Naldi was one of the stars. Someone has created a web presence for her (her photo is on IMDB, and there's a beautiful website).

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I could have kept following trails. Some of that will stay in my mind, though, and the idea that something from the 1920's could have such a web presence says something interesting about the progress of the internet.

Put things online! Add to our shared wealth of information.

International incident, with ducks

Amsterdam, Australia, France... Netherlander ducks, Just Add Light and Stir, England and New Mexico, 85 years.

So... Julie Daniel sent me some photos to us in Just Add Light and Stir. This one would've have been legible at the small size I use for that blog, but I liked it, so I thought I should share it. Then I wondered what it's about. An act of kindness? Lack of dedication to one's nation? Sports! Conservation. Connections? Different readers will connect it to different things in their thoughts and lives.

I don't know where the sign exists (where Julie took the photo), and I don't know who loved the story enough to make sure money was spent on a sign that would be there a long time. Wikipedia says this, about that (and some other things):

Pearce won all of his races with relative ease. He defeated his first opponent Walter Flinsch of Germany by 12 lengths and his second opponent Danish rower Schwartz by 8 lengths. In the quarter final he was easily beating French opponent Saurin when a family of ducks strayed into his lane. Pearce momentarily stopped rowing to let the ducks pass; he still won by 20 lengths and broke the course record. In the semifinals, Pearce was pressed by David Collett of Great Britain, winning by three-quarters of a length (roughly 1.5 sec). In the finals he became the first Australian to win gold in the single sculls by defeating Kenneth Myers of the United States by 9.8 seconds. In winning he established a new Olympic record, some 25 seconds faster than the previous mark. This also earned him the Philadelphia Gold Cup, which represented the amateur champion of the world. He was awarded an Honorary Life Membership of the Sydney Rowing Club.

That was sweet, about the ducks. Had he lost the story would have a different tone. But he didn't have teammates to be angry about it; he was there alone. And he could've been even better prepared, but there were rules then that aren't now:

In preparation for the 1928 Olympics, Pearce attempted to enter the Diamond Sculls at the Henley Royal Regatta, but was barred as he was a carpenter by trade: the rule relating to amateur status then in force barred anyone "Who is or has been by trade or employment for wages a mechanic, artisan or labourer." This socially discriminatory wording was deleted in 1937.

One thing leads to another!

Rum Tum Tugger hooks up

One of my favorite correpondents, Colleen Prieto, sent me this note:

Hi Sandra –

So I played Rum Tum Tugger in the lyrics game, and then I was sitting on the couch singing it along to myself.

Robbie right away asked “what is that song?? I LOVE it!!!!”

I pulled it up online so he could hear it sung better than he’d hear it from me :-) and I told him it’s from the musical Cats which I had gone to see when I was little. He wanted to know right away if we could go see the show. He went to see his first theater show (A Christmas Carol at a small local theater) just last weekend and now he’s ready for another and knows just what he wants the next one to be!

Hopefully we’ll be able to find it playing, maybe in Boston, in the near future. And until then, I’ve added a filmed DVD version to our Netflix queue which should be fun to watch.

A happy consequence of a fun game – we have something new and interesting to go and do together!

Colleen :-)

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Here's documentation of when Holly got to see Cats: http://sandradodd.com/eastyorkshire

Somewhere there's a photo of her posing with the make-up kit she bought at the theatre, with her face "catted up." I'm putting this note here in hopes that when I find the photo I'll bring it here.

A week ago, Holly and I saw Emma Fuller star as Annie in a Landmark production of that musical, in Albuquerque. Her mom, Beth, was in the company and played four parts. Emma is unschooled. Though Holly had seen her a couple of times this year, the last time I had been with Emma was in London in the summer of 2011. She was wearing a pink raincoat she had bought in Paris. In the musical, the Warbucks house provides Annie with a new coat, which she loves, and it was also pink, but fancier, and longer. But seeing her with that coat saying "I LOVE IT!" reminded me of her other pink coat, in London, not so far from where Holly and I saw Cats.

I could go on, connecting one thing to another. If you could, too, that will help you with lateral thinking—with your own learning, and that of people around you.

Keep your ideas bouncing in unpredictable directions! Let them spring and fly.

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NOTE: For years I ran a lyrics game on a blog, but eventually it was repetitive and we started getting World of Warcraft gold farmers' spam, and too much other spam, so I closed it. But the tricks and procedures I had honed keeping that blog up led directly to my ability create and maintain Just Add Light and Stir, which is my favorite project and is over two years old now.

I've started a page for song lyrics play on facebook, here: Lyrics Game, Goofin' with Songs

For any reader who doesn't have Rum Tum Tugger in mind already, here it is: