Beginning Again

Over the last few years I've had little time for messing about in blogs, and this one has suffered more than the others. But I "retired" at the end of the Spring Quarter, and am now teaching part-time where I've spent the last twenty years as a full-time faculty member.

What this means is that I'm out of excuses. And because my interests in the oddities of human materialism hasn't abated one single bit, I fully intend to get back to documenting my discoveries in the Cabinet. I keep running into amazing, interesting, troubling, astonishing (enter more adjectives here) things in my often random travels through the 'verse--especially since I've become a full-fledged MOOC junkie. The most recent effort was a course on Sagas and Space sponsored by the University of Zurich through Coursera.  It focused on Norse sagas and the concept of space recorded in them; the material was fascinating and did more to kickstart my aging brainwaves than anything in recent memory. The opening image is a tribute to the experience: a sea monster (a whale being attacted by orcas?) from Olaus Magnus's very early map of the north, the Carta Marina.

I loved the course's structure (it was only eight weeks long) and the fact that I got to learn stuff I never really imagined was out there.  It tied in well with both my interest in William Morris (he translated a number of Icelandic sagas) and in maps, and reminded me why I started writing this blog in the first place. Not only that, it will help me set my students straight about Marvel's version of the Norse cosmology when next I get to teach the Myth class (maybe once a year now).

So now things are really coming together. I've spent the last couple of hours cleaning up the rolls on the sidebar, and have eliminated a couple of categories and several now-defunct blogs.  A few I was reluctant to eliminate altogether, even though they're no longer active, so I created an archive to house them. In future I'll update the lists with some of my new discoveries, but will leave you with this morsel discovered during the Sagas and Space adventure: The Monstrous Sea Pig from Idols of the Cave (recently added to the blog roll).

More sooner, rather than later. 

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by OlofE.