Tourists in Ght: pics from the observatory museum

It is deep in the midst of exam time.  This, unlike in the US, is a really huge deal.  As near as I can tell, every course has a written exam that must be written in one (or more) 3-hour sessions during which you sit in a frigid, un-heated, gymnasium-sized hall with at least 5 score other people, while invigilating invigilators patrol around staring at you accusingly and prohibiting you from going to the bathroom.
It sucks.  For everyone.  Partly because – as far as I know – exams are very good ways of inducing task effects, meaning they're really great ways to test things other than how much students have learned, and thus really shoddy ways of actually assessing them.  But also, it makes a ton of paperwork for everyone – something South Africa seems to lead the world in.
So I'm headed off to the US today.  This is exciting, I hope.  But I'm either really great at packing, or really terrible at it, because it always gets done at the last minute.  So, my shuttle to the airport is at 3, and I haven't yet started.  Nor can I start, for in the process of the exam grading marking, 3 (hopefully not more) exams got shuffled into the wrong pile, and thus never got given to me to mark.  So I need to hang around until my colleague who discovered them in her pile brings them to me to mark so that I can, I suppose, give them back to her, because they're worth 70% of the students' course grade so it's horribly horrible if any of them gets lost.
But as a result of Sally running late, this means I have half an hour or so to kill.  So, a blog!



Last week, Al & me finally did (together) one of the few proper tourist attractions in Grahamstown - the observatory museum.  One of the things about Grahamstown is that it's like super English.  Like super Victorian English.  The observatory museum is pretty cool in one respect: they've got this thing called a Camera Obscura, which uses mirrors and lenses to basically make the Victorian equivalent of a closed-circuit tv camera.  Here's a really blurry picture I took of the diagram of how it works:

It is high up in a little turret atop this old house, up many, many, exceedingly small stairs.

You can't really see how cool this is from the pictures, but basically it uses a mirror and lenses to let you see all around the town.  Like a telescope at a 90 degree angle, I suppose.

Anyway, this camera obscura is of historical significance because it's the only authentic Victorian era camera obscura in the entire Southern hemisphere - and maybe one of only 2 in the world?  Something like that.  It was built by some doctor, and they used to use it to see where his carriage was in town so they could send out someone to fetch him if he was on housecalls during an emergency.  If ever I am stuck on a desert island, I will surely attempt to make one of these.
While the camera obscura is pretty cool, the rest of the museum is a festival of awkward displays and eerie victorian kitsch.
Case in point: this exhibit about prisms, which appears to be based around a Pink Floyd album cover:

Or this...thing.  Whatever it is.  There was no caption or anything explaining it. Possibly a chilly extra-terrestrial?  Or maybe a quagga.  Not entirely sure.

And then there's the displays of Victorian life.  Greetings from the uncanny valley.  Eeeghsih.

There were 4 or 5 rooms like this, but I couldn't bear to post pictures of them all.  Or to turn my back on the 'people' in the displays.
On the other hand, though, 'Victorian man of science' is possibly the best name for a super hero ever.

I can almost see him now, geologising vagabonds and ne'erdowells and ruffians amongabouts town.  This artist's rendition may have helped with that visual:

Anyway, Sally should be rocking up any moment with the exams to grade, so I will sign off.  This is maybe my last post for a while – I'll be in NJersey for a week and a half, then up to Boston for some crazy fool's wedding, then off to Nigeria to teach at the African Linguistics School.  Alyson will be with me part of the time, in some of those places, which makes the trip a weird constellation of airplane codes and hard to explain.  But when I come back, maybe pictures of Nigeria.



So long, winter.  Try to catch me next year, if you can.
Will out.