Let go of my Lego! (03/27)

Learned this one from Mentalfloss.com

LEGO blocks were invented by Ole Kirk Christiansen, a master carpenter who lived in Denmark. The word comes from the Danish words LEg and GOdt, which together means “play well.” They later discovered that in Latin,  Lego means “I put together.”

Read more about Legos:

Nathan Sawaya: The Art of the Brick

monkeyBLOGmonkeyDO

Peter Pan (03/01)

I have never even considered the possibility that the ‘Pan” in Peter Pan is based on Pan the Greek god of nature.

Pan is a figure who recurs through European culture, especialy after the Romantics. But he became a natural and pervasive Edwardian god: a playful wild outdorr hero that never ages, combining in one image the delights of rural and childhood retreat.

Mabel Lucie Attwell's illustration for "Peter Pan & Wendy" (1911)

Peter Pan, whose horned cap, rural attire and pan pipes are the only remnants of his descent from the Greek centaur, is the most eccentric  and the most human of all these creatures. He  could not have come about with out the cultural obsession with Pan, but he belongs as much to the popular archetype of the immortal young man which was developing in the 1880s when Barrie was forming literary ambitions.

From  Inventing Wonderland by Jackie Wullschlager

Maybe we should reconsider or consider some of our own cultural obsessions.