Your money's no good here, just write about me

Signal-boost for lesser_celery: Not One of Us is still alive!

Good things about yesterday: started the second season of Twin Peaks with gaudior and rushthatspeaks and made dandelion greens for dinner, sautéed with capers and garlic and lemon juice and vermouth (and cooked to death so that I could chew them) and served over wild garlic pasta. Received a care package of CDs and dried fish from yhlee. Watched Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) with derspatchel. Someday we are going to program a Busby Berkeley marathon and everyone is going to stagger out of the theater seeing kaleidoscopic reflections of the sexiest pianos in the world.

Good things about today: walked into Harvard Square and back despite the blasting cold (bright-skied, sidewalks full of pigeons; I need to start carrying a camera) and spent the afternoon with my father at the Harvard Semitic Museum, which I had never properly visited before. It's free to the public. The first floor has a cutaway reconstruction of an Iron Age Israelite house—complete with sheep penned on the lower level; the family sleeps above where there is a niche in the wall for the household shrine, a meal is laid out and the loom stands ready for weaving—with accompanying descriptions of royal palaces and a painted reconstruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem. A retrospective of archaeological excavations at Giza is arrayed up the walls of the stairwell. We went straight to the third floor, because it's where the casts of Mesopotamian monuments are on display along with a selection of pottery, glassware, and metalworking from Cyprus. (As a direct result, I have just lent my father a book on ancient Cyprus. I thought I had another, but couldn't find it; my mother thinks I lent it to him years ago.) There is a wall-to-wall mural reproducing the decoration of the archaic bichrome jug where two sailors are depicted transporting a cargo of amphorae and a third is depicted taking a dump on a fish. Please remember at all times that the ancient world was so much more dignified than our own. The second floor features a new exhibit dedicated to the creation of the museum itself, starting with the private collections of the museum's founder David Gordon Lyon. I'm sorry not to have seen Nuzi and the Hurrians, but I suppose this is what happens when you live in a city for decades and completely miss that a museum exists. I had a lot of soup dumplings for dinner and just finished making a very fluffy bread pudding with Boston brown bread. I now own a 1946 system route map for the Boston Elevated Railway.

Richard III is being reburied in Leicester. Whatever the disagreements over his resting place, it sounds as though the ceremony was done well. It is making my mother happy; she has always cared about him.