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Claire Ramsey's avatar

TWO YEARS? And the snotty-minded mylar balloon is still there? We are not amused. And, no one asked, exactly, but in my cabinet of curiosities I have a small oval cabochon glazed with something John Ruskin was experimenting with and it says Ruskin on the back. Someday it will be a glowing piece of adornment. He was kind of snooty about metaphors applied to flowers, apparently, but he had some ideas about color. Also a serious ego about color.

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Brian Bouldrey's avatar

Yes, those mylar balloons are not... eco-friendly, for starters. I love Ruskin, or perhaps I should say, I'm FASCINATED by Ruskin. I went through a phase in the oughties where I read nearly all of it, and there's a lot. In fact, arguably, he wrote the first book about eco-friendliness, warning about the smokestacks ruining the environment at the height of the industrial revolution--people fought it and fought it and then conceded that he might be right at which point he just didn't want to talk about it--GAME BOARD THROWING. How did you get hold of the cabochon?

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Claire Ramsey's avatar

During my long phase of watching 30 seasons of Antiques Road Trip on PBS I realized that there were old pieces of jewelry using Ruskin cabochons out there - kind of a lot of stuff from the era (some of it retailed by Liberty) and other stuff by Charles Horner and Theodore Dresser and J. Ruskin. So I poked around on ebay and found a cab that was clearly taken out of a brooch - the back has globs of dried glue. (Perhaps it was separated from its holder during a Game Board Throwing situation). The seller was somewhere in England, and I had a space in my collection for it so I bought it. Postage was pricey. It's a really pretty forest green.

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Stephen Davis's avatar

Quotidian sounds like the name of an old English board or card game; most likely caused Cromwell to upset the table.

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Richard Fox's avatar

I certainly remember William Cullen Bryant! We were assigned to read & comment on "Thanatopsis" in my eighth grade (!) English class. "To be a brother to the insensible rock!" That was the last year we formally studied poetry in my elementary & high school days. The "narrow house," indeed!

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