Shala K. Howell's Blog, page 16
November 8, 2019
50 States of Public Art: The Josephine Sculpture Garden in Frankfort, Kentucky
I realized this week that it’s been a while since I wrote a public art post for Caterpickles, and that I really missed doing those. While watching the election returns out of Kentucky this past week, I found myself wondering what the public art looked like over there. That’s how I learned that Frankfort, KY boasts one of this nation’s most interesting and kid-friendly open-air public art collections.
Josephine Sculpture Garden in Frankfort, Kentucky
[image error]Emma McClellan’s fabricated sculpture, Suspended in Water or Air (2008) is shown against a twilight sky in this striking photograph by Andrew Marsh. (Photo via Nashville Arts Magazine.)
Title: Suspended in Water or Air, 2008
Artist: Emma McClellan
Location: Josephine Sculpture Garden, Frankfort, Kentucky
Photo Source: Photograph by Andrew Marsh, via Nashville Arts
The Josephine Sculpture Garden is a nonprofit sculpture park located on 26 acres of former farmland just outside of Frankfort, Kentucky. Free and open 365 days a year from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., this outdoor public art museum welcomes children and dogs alike to explore the 35 sculptures and murals housed across the property. Dotted around the landscape, you’ll also find a dozen interactive artworks for you and your family to explore.
Rather than maintain a standard permanent collection, the park’s founder, Melanie VanHouten, prefers to create a rotating collection made up of works loaned to her on a temporary basis from various artists. This approach gives her the flexibility to showcase a larger variety of work from local artists at all stages of their careers. According to the Josephine Sculpture Garden website, although the garden typically only has about three dozen staged artworks on site at any given time, more than 70 different artists have already exhibited samples of their work at the garden.
For those of you who want to pair your art viewing with a structured activity of some sort, Josephine Sculpture Garden hosts a variety of events during the year, including the STEAM Festival and International Sculpture day in April, the SoundScape music festival in June, and the Fall Arts Festival in September. The Garden also hosts guided nature tours, night sky tours, scavenger hunts, and a variety of workshops and classes year-round.
Want to see the Josephine Sculpture Garden yourself?
The Josephine Sculpture Garden is located at 3355 Lawrenceburg Road, Frankfort, KY 40601 (just off I-64 and Hwy 127 South).
Before you go, be sure to visit the garden’s website to browse their calendar of events and check out their current crop of scavenger hunts, interactive art projects, and other activities for kids.
Oh, and don’t forget the bug spray. You’ll need to wear good walking shoes too. One of the core missions of the Josephine Sculpture Garden is to preserve the natural Kentucky landscape. You will find lots of public art here, but the paths you’ll travel to view it will be mown, not paved.
Related Links:
Large-Scale Sculptures Transform this Frankfort, KY Landscape into a Unique Art Experience (Nashville Arts)Josephine Sculpture Garden website What’s That, Mom?: How to use public art to engage your children with the world around them… without being an artist yourself by Shala Howell (Did you know I had a book about this? It’s full of tips for viewing public art with kids ages 3-10. This link takes you to Amazon, but it’s also available on IndieBound.) What’s That, Mom? (The Journal): Field Notes from your Encounters with Public Art out in the Wild by Shala Howell (A customized journal for viewing public art with kids. This link takes you to Amazon, but you can also find it on IndieBound.)
November 1, 2019
Are dogs really descended from wolves?
While reading David Quammen’s illustrated edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species a few months ago, I learned that not only was Darwin an avid breeder of fancy pigeons, but also that Darwin thought that the sheer variety of domesticated dog breeds meant that dogs couldn’t have evolved from a common ancestor.
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This surprised me.
The idea that dogs descended from a common ancestor — specifically some sort of prehistoric wolf — is so deeply encoded in my background scientific assumptions that I just assumed that Darwin must have started it.
Learning that he didn’t has me questioning all sorts of things. Starting with the most basic — my own ability to read.
Maybe I just misread that bit
After all, Darwin used the the immense variations that humans bred into their fancy pigeons as the basis for his theory of artificial selection (the precursor for his theory of natural selection). Faced with all that diversity, Darwin was still able to point to a single pigeon species — the rock pigeon — and say (essentially), “That’s the one. Fancy pigeons all evolved from that bird there.”
From this, it seems logical to assume that Darwin would also have been unfazed by the diversity in domesticated dog breeds. Surely he would have also been able to say, “yes, truly, it is simply amazing what we breeders can achieve when we put our minds to it,” and see that the logical arguments he used to deduce to a common pigeon ancestor could also apply to dogs.
Nope. Let’s go to the source:
“I do not believe, as we shall presently see, that all our dogs have descended from any one wild species; but, in the case of some other domestic races, there is presumptive, or even strong evidence in favour of this view.”
Darwin, On the Origin of the Species, p. 24
I really don’t see how Darwin could have been much clearer. He was not the person who first proposed that dogs were descended from wolves. As far as Darwin could tell, dogs didn’t have a common ancestor at all.
So now I’m wondering if scientists still think dogs are descended from wolves at all.
Are dogs descended from wolves?
Yes, but perhaps not the wolf we originally thought.
For years, dogs have been described as being descended from the grey wolf. But according to a 2015 LiveScience article, Ancient Wolf DNA Could Solve Dog Origin Mystery, a recent DNA study suggests that instead of being descended from the grey wolf, dogs may simply share a common ancestor with it — specifically a certain prehistoric wolf that lived in Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula more than 27,000 years ago.
“Genetic evidence from an ancient wolf bone discovered lying on the tundra in Siberia’s Taimyr Peninsula reveals that wolves and dogs split from their common ancestor at least 27,000 years ago.
…
“Scientists once thought that dogs descended from gray wolves. Now, through genetic studies, researchers know that dogs and wolves share a common ancestor instead of a direct lineage.”
Becky Oskin, “Ancient Wolf DNA Could Solve Dog Origin Mystery”, LiveScience, 21 May 2015
The really cool thing is that according to this LiveScience article, certain breeds of dogs, including Siberian huskies, Chinese Shar-Peis, Greenland dogs, and the Finnish spitz still carry genes that can be traced directly back to this ancient Taimyr wolf.
[image error]Not sure what a Finnish Spitz looks like? Yeah, me either. So I found this photo of Ch Toveri Arvokas , a Finnish Spitz owned by Mrs Joan Bateman on Wikipedia. (Photo by sannse at the City of Birmingham Championship Dog Show, 29th August 2003)
Did you notice the part where I said only some dog breeds carry genes that can be traced back to this ancient wolf?
Yeah, it turns out the question of how dogs are descended from wolves is much more complicated than I expected.
As far as I can tell, scientists still believe that dogs are descended from an extinct wolf species that lived between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago. But there’s a lot of disagreement over where and when dogs were domesticated.
A 2013 article in the journal Nature argues that European hunter-gatherers first domesticated dogs some 20,000 years ago. Two years later, another study was published in Nature that said, no, domestic dogs probably actually originated in the southern portion of East Asia some 33,000 years ago. Yet another study, published in 2015 in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) points to a third possible location — Central Asia. A 2016 study published in Science suggests that dogs were domesticated from two separate wolf populations in two different parts of the Old World.
Clearly, scientists haven’t quite figured out where and when dogs first appeared in the fossil record, or how dogs became domesticated in the first place. Given all this, I find myself having more sympathy with Darwin’s argument that no one common ancestor could possibly account for all the variations in modern dog breeds. And that’s before my husband pointed out that there’s extensive debate about the role epigenetics (chemical modifications made to DNA that don’t change the basic base-pair sequence) may have played in the development of modern dogs as well.
The question of how dogs became domesticated seems like a story worth digging into. But it’s also a pretty complicated one, so I’d better save it for another day.
[image error]I had never heard of Greenland dogs before writing this post, so I found a picture of one on Wikipedia for us. Meet Greenland Dog, Alaskan Sunrise, photographed at Kelltara at the City of Birmingham Championship Dog Show, 30th August 2003. (Photo by sannse via Wikipedia)
Related Links:
“Why was Darwin so obsessed with pigeons?” (Caterpickles)Ancient Wolf DNA Could Solve Dog Origin Mystery (LiveScience)How Accurate is Alpha’s Theory of Dog Domestication (Smithsonian Magazine)How Epigenetics Is Improving our Understanding of Domestication in Animals (What Is Epigenetics)Out of southern East Asia: The natural history of domestic dogs across the world (Nature)Genetic structure of village dogs reveals a Central Asian domestication origin (PNAS)Prehistoric genome reveal European origin of dogs (Nature)Genome and archeological evidence suggest dual origin of domestic dogs (Science)
October 25, 2019
Book Review: Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius
Genre: Middle grade fiction, mystery
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Year Published: 2018
Format: Hardback
Original Language: Swedish
Translator: Peter Graves
Awards: Batchelder Award, 2018
Source: Library
Link: The Murderer’s Ape (Goodreads)
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“Sally Jones is not only a loyal friend, she’s an extraordinary individual. In overalls or in a maharaja’s turban, this unique gorilla moves among humans without speaking but understanding everything. She and the Chief are devoted comrades who operate a cargo boat. A job they are offered pays big bucks, but the deal ends badly, and the Chief is falsely convicted of murder.
For Sally Jones this is the start of a harrowing quest for survival and to clear the Chief’s name. Powerful forces are working against her, and they will do anything to protect their secrets.”
From the book description on Goodreads
What I thought of The Murderer’s Ape
I’ll confess, the thought of a literate gorilla traveling around the world to prove the innocence of her former ship captain seemed a little far-fetched to me. But Wegelius builds the events in this novel so carefully one after another that suspending my disbelief didn’t prove to be any trouble at all. Which is really remarkable, considering all of the marvelous places Sally Jones oh-so-plausibly travels to in the course of proving the Chief’s innocence: London, Lisbon, Alexandria, Port Said, Karachi, Bombay, and Cochin.
I typically give a book somewhere between 50 and 100 pages to build its world and hook me on its story before I give up on it. Wegelius had me hooked in the first 145 words.
“The other day the Chief gave me an old typewriter, a 1908 Underwood No. 5. He’d bought it from a scrap merchant down by the harbor, here in Lisbon. Several of the keys were broken and the release lever was missing, but the Chief knows I like fixing broken things.
“It’s taken me a couple of evenings to mend my Underwood No. 5, and this is the first time I’ve written anything on it. Several of the keys still stick, but a pair of pliers and a few drops of oil will soon put them right.
“That will have to wait until tomorrow. It’s already dark outside my cabin window. The lights from the vessels lying at anchor are reflecting in the black water. I’ve strung my hammock and I’m about to climb in it.
“I hope I don’t have those horrible dreams again tonight.”
From The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius, p. xxiii.
Those four opening paragraphs are fairly typical of Wegelius’ narrative style throughout the 589 pages that follow. Sally Jones is a remarkably efficient, practical, and enticing narrator.
It’s fascinating to watch Sally Jones form friendships with the various humans who take the time to learn to communicate with her, and patiently work her way past the setbacks imposed upon her by the people who treat her as just another animal. I particularly enjoyed seeing how their interactions with Sally Jones changed the people closest to her, from the reclusive kind-hearted Ana Molina who finds the courage to pursue a singing career on-stage to the utterly self-indulgent Maharaja of Cochin, who in the course of his relationship with Sally Jones finds himself thinking about how his actions affect others for what is clearly the first time in his life.
You may have noticed that I said this book was 589 pages. Don’t rule it out based on length. It’s middle grade fiction, which means the text is a bit larger, the pages a bit smaller, and the sentences relatively simple. Add in a tightly-paced narrative and periodic illustrations from the author, and the result is a book that reads much more quickly than you’d expect from its page count. I tore through this book in two sittings on a recent weekend.
[image error]Illustration from The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius. In this image, Sally Jones sits on a staircase and watches out the window for a person she believes could help prove the Chief’s innocence. (Illustration: Jakob Wegelius)
Who would enjoy this book?
Anyone looking for a mystery suitable for middle grade readersAnyone looking for a book told from an animal’s point of view
About the Author and the Translator
Jakob Wegelius is a Swedish writer and illustrator who lives and works in the small village of Mörtfors. In Sweden, he was awarded the August Prize for Best Children’s Book and the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize for The Murderer’s Ape. It is also an International Youth Library White Raven Selection.
Peter Graves is a translator from the Scandinavian languages known n particular for his translations of novels by August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf. He has received many Swedish Academy prizes for his translations.
(Bios reprinted from the inside jacket cover of The Murderer’s Ape.)
Related Links
Book trailer for The Murderer’s Ape (Youtube via Pushkin Press)More book reviews on Caterpickles
September 27, 2019
“What do I have to do to get a job in government?”
Caterpickles archives clean-out continues this week, with a seven-year-old conversation in which my daughter asks whether one day she could make money making money.
Mommyo: “Why do you ask?”
The Five-Year-Old: “I want to make money.”
Mommyo: “Well, you’ll need to go to college, work hard, and study.”
The Five-Year-Old: “But I already know how to draw the pictures.”
Mommyo: “What pictures?”
The Five-Year-Old, impatiently: “On the money. I just don’t know how they make so many copies of it.”
Mommyo: “Oh. You mean you actually want to make money.”
The Five-Year-Old: “Yes.”
Mommyo: “So what you really want to know is how do you get a job at the federal mint?”
The Five-Year-Old: “Oh, is that where they make the money?”
Turns out the U.S. Mint hires people from all sorts of backgrounds
Admittedly, I mostly wrote this conversation down because I was in the habit of posting funny things my daughter said on the blog on Saturday mornings at the time, so was always looking for new material. But, in case you’d like to know too, the U.S. Mint employs people with a wide range of backgrounds and a wide variety of skills.
It turns out you don’t have to be an artist to help manufacture official U.S. currency. According the U.S. Mint’s website, chemists, information technology specialists, financial managers, mechanics, machinists, marketers, sales people, security officers, and human resource professionals all have plenty of work to do when it comes to creating and securing the currency that keeps our economic engine humming.
Learn more at the Careers at the United States Mint website.
Related Links:
Careers at the United States Mint (U.S. Mint)The Eight-Year-Old goes on strike (Caterpickles)
September 22, 2019
Wildly out of context quote from sometime in my past
Diving through the Caterpickles Archives certainly is entertaining. Here’s another random quote from sometime in our past….
Overheard at Caterpickles Central during school vacation week:
The Six-Year-Old, panicked: “Mommyo! Quick! I need to make a bunny seatbelt!”
September 20, 2019
“Can we hatch our own giganotosaurus egg?”
While cleaning out the Caterpickles archives this past week, I found this stub of a conversation from the spring of 2015.
“Mommyo,” The Eight-Year-Old asked, one fine afternoon as we were shopping for Easter egg supplies, “Why do we have to dye Easter eggs every year? Why can’t we ever do something fun, like hatch our own giganotosaurus egg?”
[image error]Yes, Mommyo, why can’t we have one of these guys roaming the house? I’m sure he and Canelo would get along just fine. (Art: “Giganotosaurus carolinii” is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Mommyo: “Hmm…. does your imagination still work?”
The Eight-Year-Old, earnestly: “Ninety percent of the time.”
Mommyo: “Ok then. Let’s get to work.”
Sadly, the Caterpickles archives did not record what, if anything happened next. I suspect that since we still have our cat and we don’t have an enormous dinosaur that any eggs that were hatched were imaginary. Still it got me wondering…
How hard would it be to craft our own dinosaur egg?
While this draft post has been lying neglected in the Caterpickles archives, How To has published a great video on YouTube that explains how to make these dinosaur eggs using a balloon, water bottle, plaster of paris, clay, foam, paint, and miscellaneous hand tools.
(The description for the video includes a complete list of supplies, for those of you interested in doing this at home.)
[image error]Dinosaur egg as shown in How To’s YouTube video. (Image from the How To video.)
We think those eggs look pretty amazing. Much better than your average dyed Easter egg.
The video takes only 12 minutes to watch, but it looks like the project itself will take a weekend or maybe a school vacation week to complete. Although to be fair, you’ll spend much of that time waiting for the resin that encases the eyes to dry.
This is one craft project parents will want to do alongside their middle schoolers.
Although the individual steps in this project look relatively simple, there are a lot of them. Some of the supplies will need careful handling as well — the saw, hammer, and epoxy/resin combo come to mind. (I suppose we could also get into some trouble with those paints.)
Still, it looks like fun to us.
Have you done this or something similar?
If so, we’d love to hear how it went. And of course, if The Twelve-Year-Old is able to talk me into hatching our own dinosaur egg over Thanksgiving break, I’ll tell you all about it. Eventually.
Related Links:
What to do with your old buttons, or Christmas crafts ALREADY? (Caterpickles)
September 18, 2019
Wordless Wednesday: Middle school metaphors
My daughter left me this butter sculpture by the toaster this morning. The more I contemplated it the more I realized that it was the perfect metaphor for middle school.
Seen from the right angle, it looks just like a person stretching both hands to the sky and yelling, “FREEDOM!” Awesome, right?
Seen from another, it just seems… well, ooky.
It’s the perfect middle school metaphor: Awesome and ooky.
[image error]My daughter’s butter sculpture in situ. One day, she’ll start noticing she did stuff like this and clean her messes up right away. What will I do for middle school metaphors then? (Photo: Shala Howell, Butter Sculpture: The Twelve-Year-Old Howell)
Related Links:
More Wordless Wednesday on Caterpickles
September 13, 2019
Book Review: Bunnicula by James Howe
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Listening Library, 2004
Format: Audiobook
Narrator: Victor Garber
From the Bunnicula (Bunnicula #1) book description on Goodreads:
“ BEWARE THE HARE! Is he or isn’t he a vampire?
“Before it’s too late, Harold the dog and Chester the cat must find out the truth about the newest pet in the Monroe household — a suspicious-looking bunny with unusual habits… and fangs!”
From the Howliday Inn (Bunnicula #2) book description on Goodreads
“Not a great place to visit, and you wouldn’t want to live there
“The Monroes have gone on vacation, leaving Harold and Chester at Chateau Bow-Wow — not exactly a four-star hotel. On the animals’ very first night there, the silence is pierced by a peculiar wake-up call — an unearthly howl that makes Chester observe that the place should be called Howliday Inn.
“But the mysterious cries in the night (Chester is convinced there are werewolves afoot) are just the beginning of the frightening goings-on. Soon animals start disappearing, and there are whispers of murder. Is checkout time at Chateau Bow-Wow going to come earlier than Harold and Chester anticipated?”
From The Celery Stalks At Midnight (Bunnicula #3) book description on Goodreads:
“HARE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW
“Bunnicula is missing! Chester is convinced all the world’s vegetables are in danger of being drained of their life juices and turned into zombies. Soon he has Harold and Howie running around sticking toothpicks through hearts of lettuce and any other veggie in sight. Of course, Chester has been known to be wrong before…but you can never be too careful when there’s a vampire bunny at large!”
What I thought
Every time my daughter picks one of these up, she spends the afternoon collapsed in laughter. I really thought it was just a phase, but after three years of witnessing this, I’ve decided her joy in Bunnicula is here to stay. So after hearing her revisit The Celery Stalks at Midnight over the summer (again and again and again), I decided it was high time I learned for myself what all the fuss was about.
Oh my goodness. The Bunnicula books are glorious, pet-driven, pun-ridden narrative messes and I, like my now 12-year-old, adore every single page of them.
I listened to it as an audiobook, and (of Alias fame) makes an absolutely wonderful Harold. He somehow manages to sound snooty and clueless all at once. A truly spectacular performance.
Who would enjoy this book
People looking for an entertaining and just-silly-enough animal story
September 11, 2019
Wordless Wednesday: Public art you can run around in is the best kind of public art
Spotted somewhere in Palo Alto…
[image error]Whiplash (2016) by North Carolina artist Patrick Dougherty (Photo: Shala Howell)
Related Links:
More Wordless Wednesdays on CaterpicklesMore information about Whiplash by Patrick Dougherty (City of Palo Alto, CA)
