Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Saw The "Treasures from a Lost Civilization" at the R.O.M.
In the morning I finished off the lengthy chapter dealing with the Font family of properties, and happy with the results. A solid piece of work.

As a treat, and since I am sans kids, I decided to head down to the R.O.M. in order to check out the Treasures from a Lost Civilization special exhibition. It’s about a previously unknown bronze-age civilization called the Sanxingdui centered in the southern Sichuan province. The bulk of the show is comprised of a number of enigmatic, stylized bronze “masks”, most of which are larger than life-size.

The exhibition as a whole is hampered by the fact that so little seems to be known about this particular culture, and I couldn’t help but wonder more about the context of these objects than was provided in the descriptive but terse messages that accompanied each object. This is an exhibition where a bit more imagination and interpretation would have been more helpful. It did give the R.O.M. a chance to show off some of their contemporaneous pieces from their vast Chinese collection in conjunction with the show, but I can’t say I came away with a real understanding of the people behind the masks.

On the way I headed over to Radio Shack and ended up buying an HP scanner. A double-whammy in terms of bad techie karma -- though for once the pricing from ol' RS seemed reasonable. And even though I think I vowed not to buy HP after having to buy new driver software for the one that got lost at work, it was all they had available and I wanted to tackle scanning the mound of computer books handed over to me late on Friday night by my editor from The Computer Paper.