Aeneas of Ilium

A cat makes its way through the corridor of the Girdle Wall of the Temple of Horus at Behdet.

Statue of Alexander the Great

Statue of Alexander the Great riding Bucephalus and carrying the Angel of Peace.

"It is said that Alexander the Great had a dream in which he recalled the lines from Homer's Iliad of 'an island, Pharos, by the surging sea.' Alexander had come to Egypt to drive out the Persians and to him, this dream was an omen. He wanted to build a new city by the sea, and chose this location near a small village called Rhakotis. That city was the world-famous Alexandria. Although much is gone, Alexandria still astounds."

Philae Temple Complex

The temple complex was dismantled and moved to nearby Agilkia Island as part of the UNESCO Nubia Campaign project, protecting this and other complexes before the 1970 completion of the Aswan High Dam.

Ancient Roman helmet worn by the elite Roman cavalry (equites Romani). 2000 years old

I talked with someone who’d been in the industry since the 80s and they told me about how technological changes had revolutionized the industry.  waiting for a fax or the mailman throttled the amount of work you could get done in an hour.  there would be days where salaried people could simply go home because they needed to wait to hear back from someone.  if you lost a form or simply didn’t have it, you’d have to, you guessed it, call someone and wait for it to arrive.  the same was true if you were trying to track down information.  you’d better hope that whoever called was near their desk or checked their messages that day.  

now, don’t get me wrong.  I love email and having access to the internet.  however, one of its effects is that the standards for employees have gone up in exchange for nothing.  the reasoning goes that if you can get twice as much done in a day, you should.  in industries and occupations with high turnover, people will blame everything but the workload.  oh, it’s the hours.  it’s the pay.  certainly it can’t be the constant interruptions in your working day brought to you by email saps concentration all day long.  it can’t be that a workload once distributed onto two employees is now placed on the back of one.

When you first come into the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY you find the exhibit “Seeing America”.  Here at the entrance is the amazing marble statue of a larger than life woman entitled “The West Wind” by Thomas Ridgeway Gould.   Gould was a famous America sculptor who was born in Boston in 1818 and was a simple merchant and then decided to move to Italy and become a sculptor where he lived until 1881.  He made at least 7 “The West Wind” sculptures in marble and this was the last.  It has 32 stars around the waist of the American commissioned piece and was completed in 1876 for the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia.  It represents the Westward drive America had at the time.  

Scientist bakes sourdough bread with yeast derived from 4500 year old Egyptian pottery