Humpty dumpty back together again
Putting Humpty Back Together-Buffalo Bill Center of the West
by Stephanie Cashman
We all know the old nursery rhyme.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
And just like Humpty Dumpty, one simple tap from the duster and she was, shattered and strewn upon the floor. It seemed as if she would suffer the same fate as Humpty Dumpty and could not be put back together again. Unlike this childhood fable, the Lone Star Earth Mother by Rose Pecos-Sun Rhodes of Jemez could indeed be put back together again, for she was made of stronger stuff than Humpty Dumpty: stoneware.
Today, the breaking of an object such as with the
Lone Star Earth Mother does not signal the end of its life. There are trained individuals, called art conservators, who specialize in repairing, stabilizing, and cleaning art as well as historical objects. Here at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, there is a phenomenal art conservation internship program that allows for those perusing a career in art conservation to learn the valuable skills required in this field. I was lucky enough to be one such intern this summer, and as such I was able to perform a conservation treatment on the Lone Star Earth Mother.
Before any treatment can begin, you must first determine what you are working with. To do this a condition report is created. This provides dimensions and physical descriptions, and catalogs any damages to the object as well as the type of treatment that will be performed. Then, images must be taken before the treatment is carried out. This ensures that later conservators will be able to visually determine what was done as well as show the exact state that the object was in before treatment. The images are then added to the report, which is then sent to the owner for approval. Once you have said approval, the real fun can begin.
In the case of the Lone Star Earth Mother, the first thing was to clean all of the fragments. You want to make sure that there is no dirt or grime on the exposed edges of the fragment. If dirt or grime is present, the fragments will not fit together as they should. Once clean, the fragments are then placed together. However, at this point no adhesive is used. This exercise is to determine the best way in which to put the Earth Mother back together. If I simply started adhering fragments together willy nilly, I could end up with one piece that would not fit in, and then I would have to remove the adhesive and start all over again.
Lone Star Earth Mother During TreatmentDuring this process I discovered that the statue is comprised of two pieces, one with the neck and head of the Earth Mother and the other the clothes. I would have to repair the interior structure of the head and neck first; otherwise, it would never have fit into the cloth-like elements. There was a large crack on the base of the neck.
This was most likely formed during the bisque process. In order to provide additional support, a patch was applied on the interior. Once the patch was secured, the head and neck pieces were adhered together and placed in the cloth-like exterior. Then, all the other fragments were reattached in the order that had been determined earlier.
One would think that at this point the treatment was complete. For all intents and purposes the sculpture is back together. This however, was not the end of the Lone Star Earth Mother’s stay in the conservation lab. Not all of her fragments had been recovered, and as such there were losses or holes. There were also losses along the fragment joints, therefore I filled losses and then painted over them to match the existing surface. This visually integrates the losses and the sculpture no longer appears damaged. All of the materials used are easily reversible so that if someone does not like what was done, or the repairs ever fail, they could be removed without damaging the object.
Once the treatment is completed more photographs are taken to show what was done to the object. Sometimes, the transformation from start to finish is truly astonishing. The conservator compiles a treatment report that includes the before and after photographs, a description of exactly what was done, and notes on the materials used. That report then accompanies the object for the remainder of its life so that future conservators will know exactly what was done.
Lone Star Earth Mother After Treatment, FrontLone Star Earth Mother After Treatment, BackSpecial thanks to J. Schaefer for allowing me to work on and write about the Lone Star Earth Mother.
Filed Under: Conservation, Staff Tagged With: conservation, conservation internship, Lone Star Earth Mother, Rose Pecos- Sun Rhodes, stoneware
About Stephanie Cashman
Stephanie Cashman is a recent graduate of the University of Denver with a bachelors of fine arts. She is currently working towards applying to graduate school in art conservation.
Putting It Together Again – Now I Know
If you grew up in the United States or likely anywhere else in the English-speaking world, you’ve heard the tale of Humpty Dumpty, the egg-man pictured above from a 1904 illustration. If you haven’t, for some reason or another, here’s a common version of the nursery rhyme:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
It’s a short, simple, AABB rhyme. Easy to remember, too, so it’s no mystery as to why it’s well-known. But there is a mystery buried within those twenty-six words, or, more accurately, omitted from them. Everyone agrees that Humpty Dumpty is an egg. But the rhyme doesn’t actually tell us that.
Where does that come from?
On its face, there’s no reason for the rhyme to be about an egg or egg-man. If any one of us had a great fall off a wall at the time of king’s men riding on horseback, there’s good reason to think that we’d be irreparably broken.
And to the extent that the Humpty Dumpty story is a parable, “don’t sit atop walls” is a much better lesson than “try not to turn into an egg-person.” So that’s probably not what’s going on here. The origins of the rhyme date back to at least 1797, but the original words, below, similarly do not say that the wall-sitting Mr. Dumpty is an egg:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Four-score Men and Four-score more,
Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.
But by 1871, Humpty Dumpty’s oval-shaped status appears well entrenched. That year, Lewis Carroll published “Through the Looking Glass,” the sequel to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and a classic in its own right. At one point, Alice sees an egg-like thing in the distance, and walks toward it:
HOWEVER, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and, when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself.
‘It can’t be anybody else!’ she said to herself. ‘I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face!’
Because really, even in Wonderland or in that world beyond the other side of the mirror, there aren’t a lot of egg-men.
The likely explanation, per the trivia-mavens at the Straight Dope, is that the rhyme was never intended to be a parable. Rather, they find, it was a riddle — “riddling rhymes were a popular source of entertainment for many centuries.” Going to the rhyme itself, the earliest known version references “four-score Men and Four-score more” — that’s 160 total — is the rhymes way of saying that despite dramatic amounts of available resources, the problem surprisingly couldn’t be solved. The way it makes sense is if you “solve” the puzzle, concluding that Humpty Dumpty wasn’t any regular man, but one with the cranial fortitude of an egg. (In fact, in “Through the Looking Glass,” Humpty Dumpty himself finds it ridiculous that anything could happen to him, because if he fell, the king would surely take steps necessary to repair him.
) Makes sense, kind of.
And while there’s some evidence that may not be the case — here’s a picture from an 1877 children’s book showing Humpty as a young, non-egg boy — the image above buttresses the claim set forth by the Straight Dope. The image, from a 1902 Mother Goose book, clearly identifies Humpty Dumpty as an egg and does so in a way to suggest that the rhyme is a riddle. It’s just one you already knew the answer to — but, probably not why.
Bonus fact: Mother Goose never existed — she’s a fictional poet (perhaps named as such due to the popularity of Old Mother Hubbard) who acts as a stand-in for the nanny-ish, motherly figure. References to “Mother Goose” (in various languages, most often French) date back to the early-1600s, but don’t tell that to tour guides in Boston. Many highlight the gravestone of a “Mary Goose,” who died in 1690 in her forties (see the gravestone here), as being the final resting place of the Mother Goose, but that’s not rooted in anything close to verifiable history.
From the Archives: And The Oscar Doesn’t Go To: When a movie’s director wanted to be credited as “Humpty Dumpty.”
Related: A collection of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. 4.8 stars on 85 reviews.
Dictionary of Humpty Dumpty - Humpty Dumpty
Hello again!
This is Alya Vereshchetina, editor-in-chief of the children's literary and art magazine for bilingual children aged 2-6 (and their parents) "Humpty Dumpty".
Today I really want to tell you about our Glossary section.
This rubric was one of the first ones that was invented when creating the concept of our magazine. And for the third year now, faithfully, he has been serving on the pages of Humpty Dumpty. However, during its existence, it was she who underwent the most obvious changes.
So, a dictionary! Agree, this is the most logical heading for a magazine addressed to bilingual children. Already someone, and they from the very first babble became adept at translating words from the coordinate system of one language into another.
Initially, when we came up with our dictionary, we wanted to make it a platform for children's self-expression: according to our audacious plan, it was supposed to be a Baby-Russian dictionary, in which children from all over the world were invited to take part.
Probably, only the lazy did not quote Korney Chukovsky: "A brilliant linguist lives in every child." So, 2 brilliant linguists (or more) live in a bilingual - a brilliant linguist for each language. Feeling, living and seeing the system of not one, but several languages at once, our beloved bilinguals, with an even greater scope than other children, approach the process of word creation. This is not about mixing words from different languages in one sentence, we are more interested in borrowing the rules of word formation from one language to “improve” the words of another. Every mother in the "piggy bank" will find children's pearls - mutant words that have taken the best from several languages in order to more accurately and vividly reflect the meaning of the word.
Then these words for a long time (if not forever) remain in use in the family circle, surprising casual and uninitiated in the secret of its creation, a random listener.
Therefore, in the first season of our magazine - in 2019 - we invited our readers to send such interesting words to the editors of Shaltai Dumpty in order to publish them on the pages of the magazine in the Glossary section. Stock up on patience and ... failed. By the time our readers were swinging, the year had almost flown by, and the rubric was being replenished very sparingly.
It's good that our idea was by no means new (we didn't pretend to). In the wake of working on this column, we met a wonderful children's author Tamara Gilfanova, who a few years earlier had the idea to collect interesting children's words and their meanings and create a Malyshkovo-Russian dictionary (so far everything sounds very similar, right?), but not in prose, but in verse. And it turned out such mischievous and catchy poems that we simply could not help but invite them to our rubric.
And so the poems and rare guests, children's words, sent by our first readers, were printed on one page. At some point, the main “dictionary work” moved to our instagram @shaltay_boltay_uk, where we received very interesting comments with new words, so interesting that Tamara could not resist and created as many as 2 new poems for the words that she liked the most - Ulyoga (Snail) from 2-year-old Sasha and Netudam (Suitcase) from 2-year-old Alice. Both winners became not just muses-inspirers for new poems, but also received a book by Tamara Gilfanova "Malyshkovo-Russian dictionary in verse" as a gift.
Although our expectations were not met, we were nevertheless satisfied with the result. The rubric was not abandoned, but in the next season - 2020 - it was modified. Now, in the Glossary section, we gave definitions to allegorical words and expressions, talked about the history of their origin - with an obligatory illustration in verse (we really liked this format, which spontaneously arose in 2019).
Now the heading began to include a cognitive and educational element. Together with Humpty Dumpty, the children not only learned where the crayfish hibernate, where the washing machine flew, or why the trace caught a cold, but also got the opportunity to put their knowledge into practice: here, on the spread, we offered options for using these words in an independent neighboring rubric or asked tricky questions for their understanding. But understanding and competent use of phraseological units not only decorates speech, but raises knowledge of the language to a higher level.
And here is the third season of our magazine - the year 2021. This year, despite all the pandemics, closed borders and quarantines, we at Shaltai-Boltai declared the year of travel. Each issue is dedicated to some geographical region in which our readers live. Through poems and fairy tales, as well as informative articles and stories, we introduce children to the basics of geography, as well as highlight the traditions and culture of the “host country”.
And such an immersion would be incomplete without getting to know the language. Therefore, our vocabulary has changed again and this time it has appeared as a phrase book. We decided to give it the simplest words that may come in handy on a trip to a particular country. But they couldn’t just give up old habits either - we’ll present this phrasebook in verse, then we’ll add a note according to some interesting expression. In general, do not switch)
It turns out that our Dictionary, like the language itself, is dynamic and changeable. What awaits us next year? We don’t know yet, but we will listen with pleasure to the opinion of our readers, which format they liked the most. By the way, we have not abandoned our ambitious plan to collect the “Malyshkovo-Russian Dictionary of Humpty Dumpty” at all. Interesting words can still be sent to our editorial office at [email protected]. The most unusual words will be published in our special issue "Humpty Dumpty: Children" (I will definitely tell you about this project too!).
Read our magazine, watch the video attachment to it on our YouTube channel shaltay-boltay.com/YouTube, follow us on Instagram @shaltay_boltay_uk and on Facebook @ShaltayBoltayChildrenMagazine. On the site shaltay-boltay.com you can download absolutely free of charge the electronic issue of the magazine "Adventures in the Animal World". It so happened that this number without a dictionary. But here is our dictionary in all three formats from other issues:
- Dictionary-Winter-fun
- Dictionary-New Year's Carnival
- Vocabulary-Fabulous-Britain
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Tale of a brave hare - long ears, short tail
€ 4.5
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Creative assignments for the stories of Nikolai Nosov: Dreamers, Fedya's task, Living hat, Entertainers
€ 7.5
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Additional tasks based on the book by Polina Gelfreikh "Grandmother of the cat Vasily"
€ 4.5
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Non-children's prescriptions and tautograms
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Depths of lakes
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Silent book, graphic guide and ABC of emotions
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Cooking together!
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Draw your spring
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Aspects of preparing children for testing
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"Humpty Dumpty" and around it.
Versions - analytical portal POLIT.RU Members of the Shaltai-Boltai hacker group living in the Baltic States and Thailand have been put on the wanted list. They are suspected of obtaining illegal access to computer information (Article 272 of the Criminal Code of Russia).
The Rosbalt news agency was the first to disseminate information about this, referring to its sources. On January 29, it also announced the detention of Vladimir Anikeev, who is considered the leader of Shaltai-Boltai. According to the agency, from Anikeev’s testimony, it turned out that Sergey Mikhailov, deputy head of the FSB information security center, is connected with the group. It is assumed that it was he who supplied the information that the hackers partly made public, and partly sent for sale to Ukraine.
"Humpty Dumpty" is suspected of disseminating information that the hackers called information from the mail of the assistant to the President of Russia Vladislav Surkov.
As recalled by the RBC news agency, the hackers claimed that in 2013-2014, in correspondence with his assistant Karpov, Surkov discussed plans to destabilize the situation in Ukraine and seize territories. However, commenting on these messages, the press secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov said that Surkov does not use e-mail.
Vladimir Anikeev
Photo from a personal page in the social network
The era of web revelations is ending - the turn of Telegram-cospirology is coming. This opinion was expressed by Polit.ru analyst Vasily Izmailov, commenting on the information about the detention of a man who is considered the leader of the Shaltai-Boltai group.
“Every story has its ending. This is the end of the story, which was once translated from the English original by Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak: "All the royal cavalry, all the royal army ...". Well, you remember what's next. In general, they collected Humpty. Or rather, they took it.
A lot has already been said on this subject, including a lot of interesting things, a lot of funny things. All of this is freely available. And I would like to draw attention to several aspects that, perhaps, have remained a little aside from the attention of colleagues.
Aspect one. Every high-profile case - and the Humpty Dumpty case is certainly high-profile - is the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. I believe that in this case, the story of "Humpty Dumpty" in a certain sense means the end of the web, more precisely, the end of web revelations. That is, this is such a huge era that began, if you remember the most striking, "Kompromat.Ru", and which, as it seems to me, ends with "Humpty Dumpty".
Why this happens is generally clear. Carriers are being transformed. Models of control are changing. The transparency of what we usually call the Web is increasing, and games of anonymity and lack of control in the web space are already perceived as completely obscene.
That is, it is quite clear that this is an imitation of some kind of independence and, if you like, recklessness. Why imitation, what kind of imitation, to what extent - this is not so important. It's just quite obvious that the level of trust in projects like "Humpty Dumpty" on the web is not enough. Because, as someone very correctly said yesterday in the comments on the news on the topic (I’m afraid I won’t refer to a specific colleague - not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t remember who exactly wrote it): the story of “Humpty Dumpty ” shows that if someone has exclusive information and is not in the FSB, then this is the FSB itself.
Anonymous International's blog page
Unfortunately, this is becoming a commonplace for all such exposing projects on the web. Apparently, the web is being replaced by Telegram-cospirology. There are several channels - at least two (I will not name them so as not to attract additional interest to them) - which now specialize in approximately the same thing. Moreover, what is interesting: it is approximately clear which tower in the Kremlin the first of these channels works for, and which the second one works for. And it's very funny to watch their polemics, dialogue and, apparently, a dispute about what kind of money someone will master faster. But, again, that's another story.
Therefore, the first lesson is that the web is not exactly dying, but it is being given boundaries. And the borders of Telegram channels have not yet been laid. And I think that all the following movements will be carried out in this space.
The second story that is interesting in connection with Shaltai Dumpty is its goals. Pay attention to whom they worked against, namely, the compromising evidence against whom they published. I would take Surkov a little aside in this case, since the history there is complex and, in general, what is called muddy or unclear. It is known that Vladislav Yuryevich does not seem to use e-mail - so, at least, they told us.
But for everything else - leaks on Life, leaks on Prokopenko, leaks on Potupchik and - the beneficiary of all these possible revelations is quite obvious. Well, or not a beneficiary, but rather their goal. And this is the person or the structure that is not in favor now. Nevertheless, events are taking place that take this person and the communities controlled by him, including the media and experts, out of the blow of some special services.
Does this mean that a global transformation is taking place in the market for the biases of the security forces? I don't know, but it might mean. Does it mean that a fundamentally new configuration is emerging within the power block, namely, a global update, let’s say, of managers and, of course, a global update of budgeting, and, in connection with this, some cleansing of everything that has been done before is announced? Not excluded.
In other words, it is quite possible that the Shaltai Dumpty story may mean, among other things, that such “humanitarian” projects within the framework of the power bloc will now be carried out not only on other media, but also on other grounds and possibly other people as well.
And if so, then it is necessary, as they say, "firmly and resolutely to part with the past."
Maybe so. Maybe not. Every time we talk about projects like Shaltai Dumpty, we are still forced to wander through three or maybe four pine trees, not fully understanding what we are talking about. Perhaps it's about something else. Perhaps the point is that the new leaders of the domestic political bloc (I hardly believe this, but it can be assumed) are trying to lay some new foundations for the corporate game, and for this they, for some time (or maybe permanently, whatever happens in our country!) was given carte blanche to interact with the specialized security forces.
This would be logical, but in my opinion too optimistic to be true. On the other hand, this would mean a complete reset of the political space and setting new conditions for the game - as it was done in 2002 or 2003, when the oligarchs were gathered and it was explained to them that now we live like this. We know one person who didn't listen; We know what happened to him afterwards.
In general, we all know. Hypothetically, since something like this was done once, something similar could be done a second time. But this is very, well, very hard to believe.
XIV Congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. 2004
kremlin.ru
Although - what just does not happen. And in this sense, the “Humpty Dumpty” case can be a very important indicator of the changes that (again, hypothetically) are taking place in connection with the emergence of a new domestic political team.
And finally. I would like to repeat the immortal words of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol "It's boring to live in this world, gentlemen." Since, of course, "Humpty Dumpty" was funny, and without it it will become not only sadder, but somehow a little more sober and a little less funny. Well, the number of amusements in our lives is decreasing!
Maybe not bad though. And some other stories are waiting for us (and they are definitely waiting for us) in some other places, with some other people.
