From "Tomb of Tutankhamen," by Howard Carter, arrived at this morning after reading an article in my local paper, "Buttons, propeller caps and a straight jacket: UW begins archiving jokester Leon Varjian's hidden hoard" that begins:
A tall, tousled computer scientist, a university archivist and a curious New York retiree converged upon a warehouse off Cottage Grove Road on Madison’s East Side one day last August.
Scott Mindock, David Null and Doris Cross had never met, but they were about to share a Howard Carter moment, thanks to the hoarding instincts of the late Leon Varjian, the jokester who tapped Madison’s funny bone in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Carter was the Egyptologist who opened the Tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. When he got the first peek inside, he was asked “Can you see anything?” Struggling for words, all he could say was “Yes, wonderful things.”
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8 comments:
Null, the UW-Madison archivist
An archivist named Null?? Retrieval might be unreliable.
In the early '70s I knew an old guy who lived with his sister in a house on Gilman St. where they both had grown up. Neither they nor their parents ever threw away old newspapers or magazines, so there were only a few rooms in the place that weren't full of the stuff. Eventually the Madison fire inspector made them clean the place out. Dumpster after dumpster of old newspapers and magazines came out of there. The old boy told me that in one room they uncovered a piano that he remembered from when he was a child.
What gave mothers the rampant belief that they had the right to throw out their son's baseball card collections without permission?
If they only thought about the dental work entailed in curating the collection.
I recall the first time I saw a movie played on a laptop computer. It was The Mummy (1999, Brendan Frasier), while the movie was still in theatrical release. A friend at work had downloaded about 3000 movies onto various hard drives from the nascent streaming sources of the day, and it was fun being a pirate.
Thanks, King Tut!
For a moment I thought the headline was about Trump's living room.
Gold, Jerry! Gold!
That was the first modern discovery of an unlooted tomb.
Just what are you getting up to, Professor?
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