British Museum London

I'll be heading back to London again soon (nearly exactly one year after my last visit), so I thought now would be a good time to share some of my favorite photos from the British Museum. Taken in wildly different exhibits, here you have everything from the Netherlands to Greece!

 

Konrad Adenauer

"History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided."

Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer, German Chancellor from 1949 - 1963, was the oldest democratically elected leader in world history. He was 73 at the time of his election.

In 1917, during World War I, he was mayor of Cologne, an office he lost when Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933. Persecuted for his criticism of the new regime, he was imprisoned in 1944 (some sources say he was in fact sent to a concentration camp), but was restored to his former office at the end of World War II. (Interestingly, he was restored to the position by U.S. military authorities, but it only took the British four months to remove him from office after they assumed control of the city. Apparently they hadn't appreciated the way he considered Germans their equals.)

Just a few years after his renewed fall from office he was appointed by the Bundestag as chancellor to Germany - by a majority of only one vote. He kept the office for fourteen years, founding the Bundeswehr (German army), bringing Germany into NATO, and bringing about the Élysée Treaty between West Germany and France. He was much criticized for refusing to even attempt unification between East and West Germany, believing that a strong, democratic West Germany allied with Western powers would act as a sort of magnet that would bring down the East German regime without the to him distasteful need to deal with the Soviet Union. He called his policy "Politik der Stärke" - Policy of Strength.

He is remembered as one of Germany's greatest Chancellors - indeed, in 2003 he was voted the "greatest German of all time" in a contest by the television broadcaster ZDF, for which more than three million votes were cast.

Andrew Tarusov

There's a lot of Disney fan-art out there, but the villains are less commonly depicted than the princesses. Originally from Russia, this California-based artist created pin-up versions of some of Disney's most iconic villains - and they look gorgeous! Check this out:

Lady Tremaine from Cinderella

The Evil Queen from Snow White

Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty

Mother Gothel from Tangled

Madame Medusa from The Rescuers

Ursula from The Little Mermaid

무시무시한

무시무시한 is a Korean word that, transliterated, looks like this: mushimushihan. 

Guess what it means? Hellacious, ghastly, horrific, and many other such synonyms. A word that sounds like "mushy"! (Of course, "Muschi" in German means vagina... You can imagine my classmates' reactions the first time I used the word "mushy" in English class...)

...That's pretty much all I have to say about mushimushihan. I just thought it was a neat word (and "hellacious" as well)! You're welcome?

Rob Gonsalves

Rob Gonsalves is a surrealist painter (or "painter of magic realism", as Wikipedia calls him) born in Toronto, Canada. His paintings really are magical, typically merging two different concepts and scenes into one image that needs to be seen to be believed. Let me share with you a few of my favorites, and look at his other beautiful work here!

Vi Hart

Victoria Hart is a self-described "recreational mathemusician", and does very neat things with - you guessed it! - math and music. Above is her video "Twelve Tones", a fascinating exploration of such songs as "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" accompanied by neat little bits of information and some very cute drawings. It's funny, it's engaging, it's really very interesting, so check it out!

She has many other videos on her YouTube channel, and funny blog posts about the making of these on her website, so feel free to explore further. (Mom, you would probably enjoy watching her "Doodle Music" video with the little two!)

William Butler Yeats

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet who recerived the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 as the first Irishman so honored. The Nobel Committee described his work as "always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."