Saturday, July 10
Fr. Kircher, SJ, interpreted (with imaginative inaccuracy) the hieroglyphs on the so-called Pamphilian obelisk (now in Piazza Navona), shown here in this period engraving.
Submarine Concerto for Jesuit Water Organ, and Mice on Toast
Big Pine Key hosts Underwater Music Festival. Honest. And this quote explains everything: "We use a lot of New Age music. It just seems to sound good underwater." Next time I listen to Enya, I'll just make sure my ears are full of bilge. *** Read all about Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher's automatic water-organs here. Kircher, incidentally, decyphered (incorrectly) the hieroglyphs on the obelisks in Piazza Navona, with the Fountain of the Four Rivers, and in Piazza della Minerva, the one with the baby elephant beneath it.*** More on Fr. Kircher and his magical Musaeum at the Roman College, which featured a "catoptric theater," a mechanical clock which played Ave Maris Stella, a speaking statue, and a primitive funhouse mirror. *** Last, and least, we have the truly surreal Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, a post-modern kunstkammer which mixes the fictive and the real with startling results, housing information on bizarre psychological theories, horns grown by human freaks, mice on toast, a microminiature sculpture of the Pope and an exhibit on LA trailer parks entitled Garden of Eden on Wheels. Currently housing an exhibit on the very real Padre Kircher (which includes mention of his unorthodox if eye-catching description of God as "the Central Magnet of the Universe"), it also features displays cataloguing the scientific career of Geoffrey Sonnabend, who seems to not have any existence outside of an elaborate academic joke. Weird.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
