Duquesne slide-show
26 April 2008
I’m finished with my freshman year of college in four days. In commemoration, here’s a slide-show of pictures I’ve taken this year.
Ad multos annos
21 April 2008
Today is the traditional anniversary for the founding of Rome. If the recognized authorities on the subject can be trusted, the city was established on 21 April 753 BC. That means that this is year 2761 AUC – ab urbe condita: “from the city having been founded.” Interestingly (at least to me), Rome’s special distinction as Urbs, that is, “The City,” comes from the early Latin word urvus, which denotes a furrow cut by a plow.
The story behind the plow business starts with Romulus and Remus. They have an entire early history involving being abandoned bastard god-children raised by a she-wolf, but I’ll focus on the city-founding part. Each had a different idea for where their city ought to be located. They determined that the best way to decide was to prophecy using vultures. Romulus saw six more than Remus and won the contest, so he started digging a furrow to mark the outskirts of the city, but Remus wasn’t happy about being an inferior bird-watcher, and started jumping over the boundaries to mock his brother.
Romulus decided the best way to handle this situation was to crush his brother’s skull with a spade and name the city Roma after himself (this is also what happens when you line-jump in grade-school dodge ball). You’d think two kids who grew up suckling the same wolf’s milk would have been more mutually attached, but who am I to judge? This is apparently the best way to found a city if you want to take over the world.
Duquesne’s sculptural masterpieces
18 April 2008
Perhaps you didn’t know this, but Duquesne University is host to what I would personally assess as the finest of campus sculpture in the city of Pittsburgh. To illustrate what I mean, I have planned a special post of some select pieces so you can get to know the artistic inheritance afforded to us Bluffites.
First, we have a statue of Father Joseph Strub. I’m going to go ahead and simplify his life story (but please, feel free to read the entire epic tale on Wikipedia!) – essentially the history is that he got kicked out of Germany, was talked into founding a college in Pittsburgh, left before the first building went up because the bishop didn’t like Germans, went to Arkansas where a drought and tornado destroyed his church, and died in Duquesne’s Old Main in 1890.
Duquesne has commemorated his role as founder by fashioning this fine representation of him out of… something. I’ve touched the thing in an attempt to identify the material, and the most I can come up with is that it resembles a sort of plastic, or maybe lots of chewing gum stuck together and shellacked. In any case, the Smithsonian Institution is of the opinion that it “needs treatment.” Whatever that means.
This is strange. I would have been able to guess that someone donated this even before seeing the plaque there, because I don’t understand what this has to do with a university, and even more specifically, Duquesne University. I don’t see many little kids reading with their dogs on Assumption Commons.
It’s also a difficult to make a guess about what this is supposed to represent. The joy of reading? Cool with me, but you would think a university would want something more along the lines of “The Awesome Power of Reading” or “God Giving Adam the Ability to Read” instead of this three-dimensional Norman Rockwell painting.
I think this is by the same artist. He must have been a fan of putting his work in strange and completely inappropriate places, because joyful little Mary Pappert is prancing around in the Bayer Rotunda (science building and lecture hall) instead of where she belongs.
Another bonus is what’s on that book she’s holding:
Veritas! Not a big reader – but I guess that’s all there is to know, right?
