bookmark_borderHieroglyphics

In Turin, I spent a couple of hours visiting the Egyptian Museum, the largest outside Egypt (that is, better that the British Museum).

It was a fantastic experience – it was so huge and so comprehensive that I got a strong feeling of a lost world, and I left impressed and depressed.

Perhaps the most depressing bit was the huge amounts of Egyptian texts in hieroglyphics. If only I had studied a bit of Egyptian with Tine and Rasmus when I was still at university, I might have been able to understand a bit… 🙁

bookmark_borderPlastic food and cow tools

I don’t know why, but the photo on the right of Phyllis’s daughter Charlotte immediately reminded me of Gary Larson’s famous Cow Tools. (Click on the cartoon to read a biographical article about him in Salon, btw.)

I don’t know exactly why… Is it their facial expressions – half proud, half clueless? Is it the uselessness of the items in front of them? Is it the absurdity of the set-up?

I don’t know, but I know that the two pictures bring up exactly the same emotions in me, and I can sit staring at them for ages.