Museum windows for sale

The Museum of Antigua and Barbuda is raising funds to replace 52 ailing windows before hurricane season.

The museum, also the island’s first courthouse, is the oldest building in St. John’s dating back to the 1750s.

Archaeologist and curator of the Dockyard Museum Dr. Reginald Murphy said that the building’s age has caused the windows to suffer. “Over time all of our windows have suffered terribly. They are made of wood and right now they are being held together by the termites, who are sort of holding hands. There is nothing else holding these in so they have to be changed.”

Agnes Meeker of the Historical Society said the windows are double hung sash windows of large proportion in a neo-classical structure. They are 52 in total and the replacement cost has been estimated at around $3,000 each, not including installation.

The old windows will be made into decorative mirrors and sold to raise funds for building maintenance.

Submitted for your approval

A play, inspired by current events, a play that for 6 decades swung like strange fruit from the wide, gnarled branches network censorship, a play that has now drawn one ragged breath in Ithaca College.

Okay so I reek at trying to copy Rod Serling’s style. Hopefully the actors at Ithaca College who have finally performed “Noon on Doomsday”, Serling’s play inspired by the lynching of Emmet Till.

Serling’s Till story was initially accepted and approved by the producers of ABC’s “The United States Steel Hour,” for which he’d already written several well-received scripts.

But when it was reported that Serling was writing about the Till case, thousands of protests poured in, mostly from members of the White Citizens Council, a Southern white supremacist organization, said Johnston.

Serling produced three “Doomsday” scripts. The first two were for the stage, said Johnston. In the original, the victim was a college-aged black man. Serling’s language and descriptions also were more coarse and idiomatic in the original version, she said.

When it ran on television in April 1956, “Noon on Doomsday” was so watered down as to be meaningless, Johnston said.

The location was changed to New England. The murdered Jew was transformed into an unnamed foreigner. The word “lynch” was excised from the script, as was anything deemed “too Southern” in connotation. The villain was softened to “just a good decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong,” Johnston said.

Two years later, Serling tried again to examine the extreme consequences of prejudice enmeshed in Till’s saga. His new effort was titled “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” and he offered it to CBS for “Playhouse 90.”

But CBS executives again eviscerated the script — changing the central character to a Mexican boy who falls in love from afar with a white shopkeeper’s wife[.]

Ithaca College has a huge Rod Serling archive.

Mummified dinosaur

Skin and all! It looks alligatory.

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota—a duckbilled dinosaur found in southwestern North Dakota in 1999 and announced to the public last December (see story)—is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron.

It’s among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

The fossil is still embedded in blocks of rock. Excavating with toothbrushes takes a long time.

Original Tintin art for $442,000

It’s an oil painting of the cover art for Tintin in America, done by the hand of Hergé himself and it goes on sale tomorrow.

There are a lot of pictures missing, I regret to say, but the auction catalogue is a sight to behold for anyone interested in European comics.

I recognize several of my favorite Tintin covers, which means the cover art was consistent for quite a few decades, mainly after the first couple of printings.