A Trip to Kelvingrove in Glasgow, 25-11-06

Today I visited Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, which has reopened this year after extensive renovation. I took along my mum and my Auntie Dot, for a girl's day out.

The Central Hall has two wings coming from it; we first went into the Expressions Gallery where lots of sculptures and busts were on display. Above all these were suspended lots of white heads, called "Expressions", obviously specially commisioned!



Close-up of some of the heads:



Below this, I loved the grasping sculpture "The Harpy Celaeno", by Mary Pownall:



Stopping to pose awhile:


I'm afraid I didn't get this girl's name:



This is a sad sculpture called "Motherless" by George Lawson (apologies for the toothy grins):



I was very pleased to see a section for Prehistoric items; axes, flints, and Aberdeenshire carved balls... and this big chunk of Rock Art which originally came from near Dumbarton, at a place called Greenland. Shame about the chalk...



The other "wing" was the Life Gallery, which had a real Spitfire suspended above - well - a load of stuffed animals. They had tried to arrange them in an interesting way at least; Dot got quite a shock when she turned and saw this badger! Then mum made friends with it:



The Life Gallery:



There was a nice variety of Paintings in the gallery, from Van Gogh to Lowry and Rembrandt... Not much modern stuff at all though.
There was a huge painting called "The Paps of Jura", by William McTaggart:



And of course there was the Hollywood attraction that is Salvador Dali's Christ of St John and the Cross, and Avril Paton's Windows in the West, which is chock full of detail.

If "Reading Aloud" by Albert Moore was on display I didn't see it here; although I saw it last time and was amazed at the size of it. Here's a gratuitous pasting from the Kelvingrove website:



So now to the facilities: well the loos were great but both cubicles I went into had broken locks!
The coffee shop in the main Hall took ages in the queue in order to buy frozen sandwiches. Downstairs in the Cafe we had more success; I'm told the soup was lovely and I can say the Haggis, Neeps and Tatties was bloody gorgeous!

Shops: there is one downstairs near the Cafe which appeared to be for school trips and postcard buyers; meanwhile the one near the back door (facing the Huntarian) was bursting with top quality souvenirs.

So, the parking was up after 4 hours and we headed to Glasgow Fort for some retail indulgences to end the day, before braving the gales and driving rain to head south.

Six Degrees of Separation

I woke up this morning (da, da-ra-ra-RA!) and I was thinking about Six Degrees of Separation, and how one would turn this into a website. It would be a fantastic website along the lines of Friends Reunited and be a search engine where you could put in your name and it would tell you how you are linked to someone else on the planet, as long as they had entered their details. Of course, upon registering you would be required to record everyone you know, including birth dates and locations. Then on the famous end, people could be linked by movies etc. Each link would have to be verified by providing evidence e.g. photos or references.

I was half awake, half asleep, working the potential maths problem in my head. My brain was in danger of exploding, which is when I woke properly, and realised it was an insane idea!!!

Turns out I wasn't the first to think of it (no shock there). Wiki says that there was an early website called sixdegrees.com which was like a social networking website that bit the dust. It probably imploded. Of course I had also (after a bit of memory-digging) heard of the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon".

I might look up the TV series and the film or the play etc... it's a concept that fascinates me.

Who do you know?