Sunday Morning Breakfast:

Variations on a theme

cinnamon roll is a nice touch.















Note: Gorilla Munch with banana and frozen cranberry juice ice cube in grapefruit juice.
















Honey peanut butter toast goes a long way, too.
















Simple, perfectly cooked bacon.

Thursday's Scrimshaw Identification Challenge:

Is this an authentic piece of scrimshaw?















(as always, click to enlarge)
















Provenance: the guy who brought this purchased it off of ebay from a dealer out of Honolulu. He did a bit of research on it, thought it was pretty neat, and, comforted by a money-back guarantee, decided to take a risk

Description: the handle is made from bone (you can tell bone from ivory because bone generally has capillary specks). The metal of the blade is ferric (just put a magnet up to it), which means it is partly or completely composed of of iron. The bone handle seems to be filled with a non-ferric metal, perhaps lead.

The knife was probably meant to be a skinning knife, hence the wide blade that allows space for a person’s fingers to keep clear when making cuts, and notches on the back of the blade for tearing hide.

There are a number of images carved into the knife. On the blade itself is a rather buxom mermaid, who—unfortunately—doesn’t show up too well on my picture.

















On the handle is a wide spiral pattern, in between which is written the author's name, the date, the ship, along with a carving of a little American flag and a hopeful little sperm whale.
































What's your diagnosis? It’s nearly impossible to tell whether or not a work is authentic based on a picture; you’ve really got to handle the object. So if you guessed the knife is authentic, you can comfortably blame the photo.

Here's how you can tell it's fake:

1. The metal is still burred, as if it were recently carved.
2. The pits in the metal occurred before the carving did (you can tell this by looking at how the lines travel across the metal under a magnifying glass), meaning the metal first corroded, and then carved. Why would a whaler carve on an unpolished knife?
   
3. The dye is brown—99.9% of authentic scrimshaw uses pitch black dye.
4. The name is inconsistent with the ship and date (you have to check actual records to find this out, or just have it miraculously memorized, like all the guys in the Whaling Library do).
5. The handle is unworn. It is odd for a workman’s tool to be completely unused—whalers rarely bring stuff on board that they aren’t going to be using!
6. The scrimshaw looks as if it were carved by a two-year-old. It’s really just not good scrimshaw.

So the poor guy is going to have to go see how good that money-back guarantee is. Hopefully it is good, but he made the mistake of having the knife shipped to him by FedEx. Never do this. Always use USPS. Why? Because if you ship a forgery via the United States Postal Service, you've officially perpetrated a federal crime, which a nice trump card to be able to pull out if you find yourself dealing with an obstinate refunder. However, if you use a private company such as FedEx, you are S.O.L.

Scrimshaw that is fake is cleverly called fakeshaw (as opposed to fungshaw, which is refers to scrimshaw carved out of fungus, which is not to be confused with funshaw, which is what I call the larger category of carved art).

In closing, here is a picture of the hopeful little sperm whale that lives on my door.

Case Closed on Coffee

How come no one ever told me that Starbucks Coffee was named after the stalwart first mate to Captain Ahab himself?!

Gordon Bowker, one of the founders of Starbucks, originally wanted to call his coffee shop the Pequod, but changed his mind. [Who wants a big, hot, steaming cup of “PEE-quod?”] My views on drinking Starbucks coffee have changed completely. No wonder Starbucks is so successful; they are the ultimate, American coffee.

















I used to avoid coffee—despite its deliciousness—in order to hold back yet another vice. No more! Recent studies from Harvard (so it must be true!) find that not only is coffee not bad for you, it’s actually good for you! Everything in moderation, friends—aurea mediocritas.

Granted, when I drink my coffee, I usually down it like a cheap beer: big gulps, little time. I’m not drinking it for deliciousness; I’m drinking it for results!

Now I can sip my coffee casually, guilt free with a corporation that really understands me!
*sip*

Auctions & Artifacts

It looks like my photo from the Over the Top museum auction/fund raiser made it into the paper (click to enlarge):














I'm excited to say that this will be the second time I’ve made it into the Standard Times, or as locals so affectionately call it, the Substandard Times. Neat!

Speaking of auctions, I made it up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire last Sunday for the Northeast Maritime Auction. It was great to see such a beautiful little town, and to spend the afternoon writing down the selling prices of numerous fantastic artifacts. My Director was kind enough to introduce me to a number of the big name maritime collectors who were at the auction. And then I got to see them in action:

“I see 85, 85, 85 can I get 90? 90 thousand. 90 thousand. Going to 95—gentleman in the blue, 95 grand anyone for 100k?—105, who’s got 105? No one? No one? This is a great deal here guys, a genuine X, really no more?—SOLD to 7732 for 105,000 thousand dollars!”

That’s basically the auction in a nutshell, with items selling for as little as 100$ to as much as 150k (or, if I had come the previous day, up to 300k). The highest selling items (75-125k scrimshaw sperm whale teeth) went to the collectors Stuart (my director) introduced me to, which was exciting in and of itself. What really took the cake was going to work the next day, only to find all those collectors had shown up with their newly purchased scrimshaw artifacts so Stuart could analyze them.

I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me: Stuart wrote the dictionary on scrimshaw, literally.

…and the sequel.

So I spent my Monday looking at hundred thousand dollar whale teeth under a microscope with maritime collector juggernauts, each armed with his own magnifying glass.

Tooth identification is pretty interesting. With a microscope, you can see exactly how the cuts were made into the tooth, exactly how the knife or tool responded to the surface of the tooth, and generally get an idea of the artist’s style. Close inspection of letter formation, or how the artist depicts eyes, or other characteristic features also helps to identify who the author might have been. Newly carved teeth are soft, and harden with age, allowing one to make long smooth cuts in its surface—so if you see scraping or fracturing, you can be pretty certain that the scrimshaw is a forgery. We took the teeth into the museum collections to compare them to a number of other teeth to see if we could find a common artist, but the comparison led us to believe that we’d come across a completely new artist altogether. I guess that means another entry for Stuart’s dictionary. He promises me I’ll be well versed in tooth identification by the time I leave here—a party trick that, no doubt, will leave the ladies swooning!

I got a chance to talk with a few of the collectors, and got an earful on auction dynamics. Basically, if you go into an auction without full knowledge of the artifacts that you want to purchase, how much they are worth, how much you are willing to spend, and especially who else is bidding, then you’re asking to be screwed.

I love this job because stuff is always just falling onto my desk, and it’s always cool. I walked into Stuart’s office the other day and he had a full on harpoon head just laying across his desk—“sure, touch it, poke it, see how it’s aligned, just put it back on my desk when you’re done.”

Thursday a lady came in who was a descendent of George Lyman Howland, (Howland is a big-name whaling family here in New Bedford). She had brought in her great-grandfather's liquor box, a wooden box divided into six compartments with nice glass bottles with frosted glass stoppers. A couple of them even had residual alcohol in them, one of them was still half full of gin! Basically, I was looking at the original, 19th century, Quaker six-pack.

Sundance Film Festival: Green Porno

I got this link from the Vassar Ultimate Frisbee Team mailing list, reminding me once again why I will never drop off the list, despite not being on the team.

Sundance Film Festival: Green Porno

It's not actually pornography. I haven't laughed this hard in a while. It might be better than my favorite YouTube video:

TISA - Obama

(Turn up your speakers, trust me.)

Mouse Hunt

I’ve been on a mouse hunt the past few days.

I remember when my dad used to set traps around the house, and I felt bad for the mice and rats he was killing.

No more.

These little buggers dart around in my peripheral vision. They think they’re so quick, but I know their game. Part of the problem is, when you live inside a library with a lot of important stuff on the floor below you, there is no room for messing around with any liability.

The mice did hit me back. I recently found a “bonus” prize: the half-decomposed, half-mummified body of a mouse who had been stuck to one of those glue traps and dragged himself under the fridge to die—it really must have been an awful way to go, but his revenge lasted weeks; I’d been wondering why my fridge smelled sour despite all my cleaning efforts.

I’m very convinced of the humanity of the classic spring snap mousetrap. There is really no quicker way to go. You take a bite, and it’s over before you even taste the cheese. I hope I go that quickly, I just hope that when I ultimately bite the cheese, mine comes with a small side of dignity.

I figured my journal would be a-okay without a picture gallery of my murder spree, so instead, here is a collection of shattered childhood fantasies:

Haircut

I got a haircut...
here: