Sunday, January 21, 2007
In my spare time I have been occupying myself lately on Wikimedia, which is the open source repository for multimedia files, and a companion (and complementary source of info) to Wikipedia. I had been organizing pictures I had taken just before Xmas at some of the Royal Ontario Museum's galleries on the site. In the end I managed to get a good collection together of most of the more significant items on display in the Egyptian and First Nations galleries there.
<flashback>Back in September 2005 I heard on the radio that the dinosaur gallery was going to close down for renovations. So I made a point of heading there with my camera in hand as I knew that what they were likely to replace the gallery with would be a lot different. Undoubtedly improved and updated, but I wanted to capture that the essence of what was undoubtedly a dated display, reminiscent of the state of the art circa the late 60s. There were the small dioramas featuring attacking dinosaurs set at about knee-height for me, designed for young kids to peer at and ponder. Then there was the display of a dino digger at the Hunter Quarry, his jack hammer now a museum-piece, and a fine layer of dust covering everything. Or the gallery of primate evolution, featuring black and white pictures of people from many different cultures arranged on branches of a tree of life, with a picture or two of a hippie chick solidly dating the display to another era. Or the full-sized dioramas featuring the bones of animals posed around a section of a mock LaBrea Tar Pit, clawing away at the unfortunate animals that had already succumbed. I took pictures of the lot, with the intention of putting together a mini-gallery on my own blog site at some point in the future.</flashback>
So I have all of these photos from the old dino gallery. I had even invested the time into putting photo-collages together of some of the larger displays. So I found the original pictures I had shot, did some judicious cropping and retouching of them in PhotoShop, and posted a bunch of them as the preferred PNG format to Wikimedia. Voila! an online gallery of what used to be on display at the ROM.The sole exception was an animated GIF file I had constructed of a peephole display showing an Australopithecus skull "morphing" using light and mirrors into the face of living female of that long-dead primate.
If you are interested in a tour of the old dino gallery at the ROM, go to (url) to see what I uploaded. Until the museum opens the new dino gallery (supposedly for sometime later this year) this will have to do.
Labels: Ancient Egypt, First Nations, Royal Ontario Museum, Wikimedia Commons
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Due to a scheduling snafu, I had to teach the second full-day session of my Information Architecture course at the U. of T. on the Thanksgiving long weekend. I was pleasantly surprised to see all of my students there, thinking I might not even have half the class turn up.
Afterwards, with no family to return home to (everyone had gone up north to the cottage at Deloro for the weekend, I decided to head over to the nearby Royal Ontario Museum and take some pictures in an unhurried manner. Here's some of what I took:
Protective cladding is being applied to the angled surfaces of the "crystal".
Jousting mural in the southwest quadrant of Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery. The image features the Directors of the museum at the time it was painted in the 1940s, and features Currelly himself (the man behind the tapestry).
A Hadrosaur skeleton "stranded" in the Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery while the new dino gallery is being built.
"Just arrived!" says the sign in the lower-left: A Triceratops skull giving a tantalizing glimpse of some of the new things to expect in the renovated dino gallery to come.
More signs of change as this glimpse of the former Insect Gallery, in the middle of being dismantled, shows.
This was a shock: finding that the European/Mediterranean ancient civilization galleries were closed and being renovated.
Bust of St. John the Baptist in the European Medieval Gallery
One of the Haidi Totem Poles -- with nobody on the stairs! (the place was far from full when I visited).
There was an installation in a newly opened gallery on the ground floor by the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. This and the next image are panoramas I stitched together from several photos of a couple of his larger pieces. This one greets the visitor to the gallery, and is a model of a fictional urban complex made out of rice-paper lanterns.
This one is called "Negatividad", made up of wooden toy trains.
The magnificent mosaic ceiling in the main foyer of the R.O.M.
Labels: Carlos Garaicoa, Hadrosaur, Haida, Information Architecture, Royal Ontario Museum, totem pole, Triceratops
Thursday, August 10, 2006
I went to pick up Annie and Vanessa from the last day of their camp at Harbourfont late this morning, and then on a lark took them for a ride on the top level of one of the double-decker tours.
They have been bugging me about going on one of these for well over a year now, and it seemed like it might be fun, so I forked over the necessary funds for a ride past some of the major tourist draws in the city on the yellow Shop-Dine-Tour Toronto Sightseeing Company's double-decker bus. We ended up getting on Front Street, just opposite SkyDome, and got off at the ROM about an hour or so later. Cost: pricey; the sort of thing you only do once.
The bus was a typical London double-decker type, painted yellow (another, rival tourist company keeps the traditional red colour) and has the top cut off. During the tour it became obvious that the reason for this was not just because of the open-air experience, but because there are some bridges and electrical lines the tour goes under that a full-sized bus would obviously run into (there were several occasions I ducked down in my seat, and at one point I found I could touch the top of the underside of a bridge). Low-lying branches around the Casa Loma area gently whacked everybody on the right side of the bus going there and back.
The kids were happy, and being on the top level of an open double-decker bus provides an interesting perspective for taking some interesting pictures of otherwise familiar Toronto sites. A selection is shown below:
On the Double-Decker Bus
Sun Newspaper Mural - Detail
Old Bank Façade
Extreme Close-Up of the Panasonic Theatre Sign
A Temporary Crane Over The R.O.M. Construction Site
We got off at the R.O.M. and spent the remainder of our day there, until closing time. Some new things/changes spotted there include new, small dino models of a Deinonychus antirrhopus and of a Pachycephalopod, in the Discovery Room area adjacent to the Maisaur exhibit, and that they are moving the live bug displays from the Insect Room into the Discovery Room as well.
 Deinonychus antirrhopus |  Pachycephalopod |
Labels: Deinonychus, double-decker bus, Maisaur, Pachycephalopod, Panasonic Theatre, Royal Ontario Museum, SkyDome, summer camp, Toronto Sun
Saturday, April 07, 2001
To the R.O.M. with Vanessa Again, Announcing the Trip to Britain!Today, Erika wanted to spend some "quality time" with her mother, so I whisked Vanessa away to "see dinosaurs" at the ROM again. This time Vanessa was thoroughly familiar with all of the places she wanted to go and see, and so we charged from exhibit to exhibit, first the Maiasaur, then to the Bat Cave, the Ontario wildlife area, the Franklin area, and so on. One of the new areas she went to today was the "Discovery area", where she had the most fun clearing the sand away from a dinosaur cast. Essentially, I think she just liked being in a sandbox! ;-) We also decided to become members, so now we can head back anytime -- and in addition to getting a discount from any purchase in the shops -- something I took advantage immediately, buying a magnetic dinosaur panorama for Vanessa, and a small plastic pre-Cambrian Anomolocarus which is now perched on top of my computer screen. Vanessa was a bit difficult to deal with today, and I had to calm her down several times over the day. I was also aware that I hadn't gotten enough sleep the previous night, and was subsequently easier to irritate, and so I did my best to take that into consideration as well. Notably though, that evening, she needed a "time out" during the dinner we had that night a Sauvignon down the street, and so I feel like it wasn't "just me". Being a Dad is not always easy. I told Erika about the money I got in royalties from my last book over dinner, and my plan to head to Britain for a week in May. It's primarily to see my relatives, so she is a bit wary of the trip, but will ensure that it is not just a trip for meeting relative, but for having fun as a family as well. A hunt on the Web after Vanessa was put to bed revealed some good Web sites out there about London, plus plenty to take Vanessa to, like the London Zoo, the London Aquarium, maybe be the Royal Botanical Gardens, possibly the V&A Museum, in addition to some local sites in Kent we are likely to go to. Got lots of works to do between now and then!
Labels: Anomolocarus, England, London, Maiasaur, Royal Ontario Museum, Sauvignon
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