Norwich Cathedral Receives A Historic Visitor

 

 

Norwich Cathedral made a lasting impression on me. While staying in Cromer, I learned much of its fascinating history during a day-trip back in 2017. Later on during that vacation, when we had moved base-camp and were staying much farther away, I found I yearned for a second visit. 

So my wife and I made the long drive back to Norwich, and experienced the Cathedral's wonder one more time.

 

Dippy the Dinosaur (from Twitter)

Currently, the cathedral is displaying an entirely different form of history. A traveling exhibit, called Dippy The Dinosaur, is now on display inside Norwich Cathedral. As a Diplodocus, Dippy is a friendly dinosaur with a congenial temperament.

Just as important, Dippy is a herbivore, and never eats people.

 

Dippy the Dinosaur (from Twitter)

While learning about the history of a building that dates back nearly a thousand years, visitors can learn about an animal that lived millions of years ago. While learning about the religious and cultural issues that worshipers and civic leaders faced in bygone eras, visitors can learn about a Diplodocus that lived in an entirely different period.

The Jurassic Period, to be specific.

As you would expect of the gracious folks at Norwich Cathedral, they are not charging admission to see Dippy the Dinosaur. I believe you just need to book your visit in advance. That way, Dippy can eat her meals undisturbed at regular intervals, and tantalized tourists won't get between her and her food.

 

With Covid-19 still making travel (and travel plans) difficult, it's unlikely you'll see me there. Thankfully, folks who can't make it to Norwich Cathedral by the time Dippy leaves in October can follow Dippy's tour progress on Twitter, or read the latest Dippy news on the Cathedral website. As a cathedral-and-dinosaur loved, that sounds like a win-win to me.

Or, to paraphrase George on the TV series Peppa Pig: "Cathedral. Dinosaur. Grrr!"

 

Now, only only question remains. What will Dippy use as for a water bowl? I wonder if it will be as beautiful, or as shiny, as the Cathedral baptismal font that was once used in a local chocolate factory?

I guess I'll have to check in regularly on the cathedral website and Twitter to find out.

Dragon Dave

Related Links

Dippy on Twitter

Norwich Cathedral website

The Dinosaur Picnic

Security passed-through, 

Boarding passes in hand,

We lugged our carry-ons,

Up to the gate.

While others shook,

Anxious to fly,

I felt reluctant,

To leave home behind.

So out came the sketchbook.

Crowds and noises faded,

And reluctance departed,

Amid dreams of home.

Dragon Dave

Another Year, Another Dinosaur

Pepper: I wonder what Mistress is working on.
Salt: Let's take down her knitting bag and have a look.

Salt: Mistress has been so busy lately. Maybe we should help her as a New Year's Day present.
Pepper: How? We don't know what she's making.
Salt: We're Daleks. We can figure it out if we work together.
Pepper: Oh, all right. I suppose I can help.

Pepper: These are weird shapes.
Salt: Yes, but it's pretty clear these pieces need to be stuffed.

Pepper: Are you sure you're sewing the pieces together correctly?
Salt: If I'm in error, I can always disassemble it and start again.

Salt: Alert! Alert! I've created a monster!
Pepper: Yeah, I'm not so sure he wants to be disassembled.

Pepper: Good, you're conscious again. Meet Alice the Allosaurus. I finished her for you.
Salt: Good, kind Allosaurus. You know I was just kidding about disassembling you, right?
Pepper: Don't forget you called her a monster.
Salt: Uh, I think you can stop helping now.

Salt & Pepper Dalek

Related Dragon Cache entries
When Daleks Knit
Dinosaur Knitting
Another Year, Another Dalek

Dinosaur Knitting

A guest blog by Dragon Dave's wife

While travelling in England last year I came across a book I thought would be fun to own.

Imagine my delight when I received the book as a birthday present.

Wow!!! Look at all those dinosaurs!

After opening the book, and looking at all of the magnificent beasts that I could knit, I went to my yarn stash to see what would be suitable for the chosen project. 

Well, I did find purple and yellow in my yarn stash.

Hear my needles click and clack as my fingers move the yarn over the needles.  Knit, knit, knit and soon a body is nearly finished.

 I think more yarn will be needed to finish the beast.

A little more work and a little more yarn and soon a dinosaur is waiting to be assembled.

So now assembly time has arrived and I do wish the book would give a little more instruction on the placing and securing the parts.

Caution!! Steggy gets a little prickly while being assembled.

Soon the assembling is completed and a handsome dinosaur is ready to meet the world.

Steggy showing off his good side.

Steggy finds some new friends to play with.

Now, which dinosaur shall I knit next?

Dragon Dave's Wife

Iron Dalek Vs. Triceratops

Oh, hey, you caught me a little early today.  Okay, I know I'm late, don't rub it in.  But I suppose I can talk while I put the last finishing touches on my picture.

People have asked me why I've chosen to draw two pictures involving Daleks and Dinosaurs.  Well, as a beginning artist, I tend to draw what I know, and my friends and I have visited a lot of planets.  Some were clearly at prehistoric periods, and we met (and occasionally fought) some amazing and fearsome monsters.  My Master and Mistress also love Doctor Who (Okay, he's on the Daleks' Most Wanted List, but they like him), and one of their favorite stories is "Invasion of the Dinosaurs." Also, I recently finished the Ray Bradbury collection Dinosaur Tales, so perhaps I've drawn inspiration from stories and illustrations in that volume.  But why a artist does something isn't always clear.  Believe it or not, sometimes we just put our pencils to paper, with a vague idea of what we'd like to create, and we're as surprised by the end result as everyone else.  

Phew!  There we go.  Finished!  (Finally).  It's not a perfect picture, but I suppose every creative venture we undertake is a learning process. Occasionally someone like da Vinci or J.R.R. Tolkien will devote a decade or more to a painting or story.  For me, as a beginning artist, I'm just trying to master the basics in each drawing, and then moving on to the next.  At any rate, I'm glad I finished this drawing, and got to share it with you.  I hope you like it, and that my work (of greatness) inspires you to pick up your own pencils, and draw a picture of your own.  

Maybe even a picture involving Daleks and Dinosaurs?

May your day be filled with discoveries and adventures!

The Dalek Artist

Ray Bradbury on Ray Harryhausen

Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen bonded over their mutual love of dinosaurs, and remained lifelong friends.  When Harryhausen took charge of special effects for “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” he told the producers about “The Fog Horn,” a Bradbury story that contained similar plot elements to those in their movie.  So the producers paid Bradbury for the rights to film his story, and both men could say that, in a way, they had worked together.  In his Foreward to Dinosaur Tales, Ray Harryhausen writes, “Hopefully the Fates have in store another subject, yet unborn, that will bring us together professionally once again.”

Most of us have an idealized view of Ray Harryhausen.  With our near instant-access to information and movies, we can easily recognize the superiority of Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation, and judge how well it holds up against contemporary techniques.  But before the Internet and the Home Video market, it wasn’t always so easy to learn about those who worked behind the camera.  Harryhausen often locked himself away in his one-man studio for weeks at a time, and still had to oversee scripts and the director’s working methods to ensure that his animated creations would seamlessly intercut with live action.  Despite such high level involvement in the production process, it was still the film’s director who got the name recognition.  Ray Harryhausen was just one of many listed in the credits. 

While some recognized his brilliance, in his era Sci-fi films were usually geared toward children.  Thus, he was rarely assigned to an A-list film.  Instead, he worked on B-movies, with smaller budgets and (usually) a no-name cast.  His films would be paired with the bigger-budget, star-vehicle A-movies for release in first-run cinemas, or distributed directly to second-run theaters.  Several of his movies, such as “The Three Worlds of Gulliver,” “Mysterious Island,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” and “First Men in the Moon” were box office disappointments.  Despite the commercial success of 1981’s “Clash of the Titans,” the studios decided the overwhelming success of newer special effects techniques, such as those used by the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, represented the future, and refused to back any more of his films.

The artist Moebius brings to life cantankerous
film producer Joe Clarence,
and the dinosaur model he criticizes and covets,
in "Tyrannosaurus Rex."

With “Tyrannosaurus Rex,” the final story in Dinosaur Tales, Ray Bradbury introduces us to Terwilliger, a man who animates dinosaurs for feature films.  Terwilliger never gets enough money to pay for his equipment, let alone to enjoy a life anywhere near as glamorous as that of the producers who hire him.  After his latest boss forces him to work at a loss, he nags Terwilliger to let him have his model dinosaur when the production finishes.  He also forces the man to repeatedly change the dinosaur’s features, dragging him further behind schedule each time, and thereby consigning his former work to the trash.  Despite all the abuse, Terwilliger carries on, because he loves his dinosaurs, and he loves his work.  Ray Bradbury claims he wrote the story because of how one producer treated his friend, so perhaps it sheds more light on a man whose fame continues to spread, and whose work we appreciate more and more, because he didn’t care about things like money or fame.  He loved his creatures, and stories they allowed him to tell.  For him, that was enough.

After "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," Ray Harryhausen animated dinosaurs in two more films: “One Million Years B.C.” and “The Valley of Gwanji.”  Still, I can’t help but wonder what might have been, had "the Fates" smiled on Harryhausen and Bradbury, and allowed them to really make a movie together.

Dragon Dave

Related Dragon Cache entries
Five Essential Ray Harryhausen Films

Related Internet Links

The artist called Moebius

Ray Bradbury on Art

Kenneth Smith introduces us to
Bradbury's Dinosaur celebration

In his introduction to Dinosaur Tales, Ray Bradbury likens most of 20th century art to a Chinese dinner.  An hour after leaving the museum, he was hungry again.

When Bradbury visited art galleries, he found that he enjoyed Pre-Raphaelite paintings, a 19^th Century movement that celebrated heart-felt affection for subjects, rather than defining art in clinical and mechanistic terms.  “I was satisfied by nothing less than story, symbol, metaphor as found in all [Pre-Raphaelite] works…I raced backward through London and Paris, with Gustave Dore and Grandville, to knock heads with John Martin and try to replan the morals of Gin Lane and Fleet Street with Hogarth, or frolic in Louis’ court with Callot.  Goya drove me to war, sat with me at bullfights, rode me on witch-brooms, and I was never the same.” 

William Stout's Illustration for
"A Sound of Thunder"

Pre-Raphaelite art clearly resonated with Bradbury, which makes his approval of the artists who illustrated Dinosaur Tales all the more significant.  “When this book’s editor showed me illustrated samples of these glorious beasts, I could not resist.  The ghost of Harold Foster, who drew Tarzan for six years back in the early 1930s spoke to me.  It said: Remember my dinosaurs that trudged your midnight bed and flew your ceiling skies!  The ghosts of the creators of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon said just about the same thing.  My comic-collections, still gathered and waiting in my basement, fifty years later, reminded me of my first, art-oriented passions.  [Edmund] Dulac, [Gustaf] Tenggren, and [Arthur] Rackham raised this child from the crib on.”  (The latter three illustrated books children’s books and Fairy Tale collections that Bradbury grew up reading).

Overton Loyd's imagery dances above
"Lo, the Dear, Daft Dinosaurs!"

What Dinosaur Tales lacks in text-length, it makes up for with single- and double-page Black & White illustrations.  In addition to the cover art, William Stout energizes and deepens the mood of the classic Time Travel story “A Sound of Thunder.”  Steranko helps us feel for the sea monster that confuses the lighthouse for another of its kind in “The Fog Horn.”  Moebius illustrates “Tyrannosaurus Rex,” a story in which Bradbury pays homage to his life-long friend Ray Harryhausen.  Overton Loyd and Gahan Wilson add whimsy to two light-hearted poems: “Lo, the Dear, Daft Dinosaurs!” and “What if I Said: The Dinosaur’s Not Dead.”  My favorite story in the book, “Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” also contains my favorite artwork.  It’s hard to not compare David Wiesner’s lavish illustrations to those old Pre-Rafaelite masters.  Lastly, Kenneth Smith enlivens the parts of the book we might otherwise skim through to get to the good stuff: the title page, the table of contents, Ray Harryhausen’s Foreward, and Ray Bradbury’s Introduction.    

Alongside Bradbury, David Wiesner asks
"Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?"

Ray Bradbury sounds like a man ever hungry for new learning experiences.  He found those, to a certain extent, in art galleries and museums.  But he also never forgot the illustrators he loved as a child, who breathed life into the stories he read, and inspired him to spend his life telling stories to all of us.  Dinosaur Tales reminds us that we should never feel ashamed, or too grown up, to enjoy the simpler forms of literature, such as children’s stories and comic books.

Dragon Dave

Related Internet Links
More Kenneth Smith artwork
William Stout's website
Fan Page for Overton Loyd
David Wiesner's website

Ray Bradbury Loves Dinosaurs

If there’s one thing I share with Ray Bradbury, it’s a love of dinosaurs.  In his introduction to Dinosaur Tales, he states that it’s his All Time Favorite Subject.  Bradbury admits he doesn’t know why seeing “King Kong” in the cinema awakened a lifetime love of the extinct creatures.  But he credits Dinosaurs with much of his later success as an author, and two stories in particular helped make his name in both Science Fiction literature and Hollywood. 

As Bradbury says, “I accept the fact, and proclaim it quietly, that without dinosaurs my life would have been nothing at all.  Dinosaurs started me on the track to becoming a writer.  Dinosaurs helped push me along that track to acceptance.  And a dinosaur who fell in love with the sound of a lighthouse foghorn in a story called “The Fog Horn,” which I wrote and published in 1950, changed my life, my income, and my way of writing forever.” 

This seems rather a sweeping statement, and perhaps a little inaccurate, as a quick review of Bradbury’s short fiction Bibliography shows that he sold a great many stories before he wrote “The Fog Horn.”  But then, in regard to the other great 1950s Dinosaur story for which he is known, “A Sound of Thunder,” he describes the process of writing it as an experiment. 

“I simply sat down to my typewriter one morning, with no idea where I would wind up, and hammered together a Time Machine, and shot my hunters back a few million years to see what would happen.  Three hours later, after a butterfly had been stepped on, making it one of the first, and unconscious, ecology stories, the tale was done, the beast slain, and all political history changed forever.”  

So perhaps “A Sound of Thunder” influenced the way he approached writing.  Today, the latter story is regarded as one of the All Time Great Time Travel Stories.  But it is the former, “The Fog Horn,” that influenced the 1953 movie “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” and drew the interest of movie director John Huston, who hired Bradbury to write the script for his 1956 adaptation of “Moby Dick.” 

Ray Bradbury became a highly respected Science Fiction author, with hundreds of stories published.  He would go on to forge a significant career in Hollywood.  He's become a pop culture icon: most people recognize his name, and smile when they hear it.  So perhaps Bradbury’s statement isn’t so sweeping after all.  Perhaps Dinosaurs were primarily responsible for all his later successes as an author.  But it was only when he found a way to write about the subject he knew and loved best that people recognized that love, that enthusiasm, and responded to it.  If only each of us, myself included, could understand what we care about most of all, and find a way to channel that love to make others’ lives better.   But then, Bradbury began writing stories in the late 1930s.  His two career-changing Dinosaur stories wouldn’t arrive until the early 1950s.  His example suggests that the process of discovering one’s true love, and unlocking the means of expressing it, is no easy task, or the work of a moment.

Dragon Dave

Dinosaur Tales includes those two classic stories, two poems, two later stories, and wealth of Dinosaur illustrations.  

Related Internet Links

Ray Bradbury Bibliography

Inspector Lewis at the Oxford Natural History Museum: Part 3

In “Down Among the Fearful,” the way a postgraduate student was murdered leads Lewis and Hathaway to the Oxford Natural History Museum.  There they speak with a man named Kanan Dutta, an advocate for Euthanasia, who has an office off the second floor landing.  Then they walk down hallways that overlook the displays on the museum floor.

I loved all the museum's architectural features.  I was particularly intrigued by the columns lining the second floor landing.  Each is carved from a different type of stone.  Altogether, they represent the mineral diversity of the United Kingdom.

Porphyrite from Scotland

Schorl Rock from Carnmoor, Cornwall

Ophicalcite (Serpentine) from Connemara, Ireland

The museum is closed right now, as work is being done to its roof.  It’ll be interesting to see how the museum looks on our next visit, when that process is complete.  I wonder how the new roof may change the overall look of the interior, if I’ll see any new notable aspects to the interior architecture, and how the exhibits may have been changed. 

If you've enjoyed this brief tour of the Oxford Natural History Museum, I hope you get to go there some day.  Personally, I can’t wait to return!

Dragon (Dino-lovin’) Dave