Educational materials.

This is all geekchick's fault.

She directed me to the Internet Moving Images Archive, source of a bewildering number of short public domain films. These are the movies you probably watched in elementary school - ten or twenty minutes long, showcasing the glories of corn production or how bread is made... or how to achieve social conformity, or why nuclear war is survivable.

They're strangely hypnotic. I've been mostly watching two kinds of movies: the social guidance kind, of which the most entertaining example so far has been 1947's Are You Popular? ("No. Girls who park in cars are not popular."), and the civil defense kind, in which we learn that we'll be just fine in a nuclear attack as long as we follow proper procedure.

The eeriest nuclear attack movie I've seen so far is the 1951 film Atomic Alert, aimed at elementary school children. "Everyone is in on this. Strangers will understand... if you can't get into a house, get behind a wall - on the side away from the city." "Stretch out. Cover your eyes and neck. Do not look at the blast. In about one minute, the immediate danger is past. Then head for safer cover. Get indoors if you can. Shed your outer garments - they may have radioactive particles."

The most surreal aspect of this movie is that adults barely appear. We see children closing the living room drapes to protect against fallout and retreating under a table in the basement, rows of apartment house children filing into an inside hallway and covering their heads with their jackets, children outside falling to the ground with their hands over the backs of their necks as a brilliant flash fills the sky. At the very end, the children under the basement table answer the door to a couple of Civil Defense adults, who assure them that their parents are fine and that the radiation levels in their home are safe. Otherwise it's as if we're in a science fictional world in which the blast has killed off all the grown-ups.

The longer movie About Fallout, from 1963, is aimed at adults. It reassures us that radiation is nothing new - we've always been in contact with radiation from space. Happy people at a beach, bathed in radiation, underscore the essential innocuous nature of it all. In a nuclear attack, we are cautioned, we'll be exposed to dangerous radioactive fallout - but the radioactivity will quickly diminish and everything will be all right. We just need to build a fallout shelter and spend two weeks there. "Fallout accidentally swallowed with water or food will do you no immediate harm, but it is still wiser to wash, wipe, or peel foods to remove fallout particles." "If you were to be caught outside, ordinary clothing would keep fallout particles from touching your skin. Fallout particles can then be brushed off." (image of a man removing his overcoat and shoes before entering the fallout shelter.)

I'm wondering now if the people making these movies really believed them.

Another good day.

I spent a long time this morning cuddling and talking with curiousangel. Then he headed off to his In Nomine game and I headed down to the harbor for a date with Ben. We decided to take advantage of our date being scheduled during daylight hours, and went off to the Baltimore Museum of Art. I'd never been there, and I was quite pleasantly surprised.

(In the first place, hooray for reasonable security procedures. An extremely polite man hurried up to me as we entered the exhibit: "Ma'am, may I assist you in checking your umbrella?" It turns out that they're not permitted on the exhibit floors (makes sense; they don't want you poking at the art), but what a difference from "Hey, you can't take that in here!" And they turned out to have a locking umbrella rack: you put your umbrella in and a locking cuff snaps around it, and then you remove the key and carry it with you. I was charmed.)

We looked at odds and ends on the first floor: African and Oceanic art, the miniatures room (a dozen perfectly rendered 1:12" rooms depicting the 17th-19th centuries), some American decorative arts, all pleasant enough. But emerging on the second floor, we were awestruck. I'd never even heard of the Antioch mosaics, but apparently in the 1930s the BMA joined several other groups in excavating hundreds of elaborate mosaic floors from the Roman city of Antioch. They're beautiful. Created from tens of thousands of tiny chips of naturally colored stone, they have elaborate borders and patterns, human and animal figures... and not the stylized sorts of figures you'd think would suit a mosaic, but lavishly detailed, subtly shaded, almost three-dimensional. And the details of the excavation process was just as remarkable: they glued a piece of cloth to each mosaic, then dug it out and flipped it over, scraped off the ancient concrete and poured fresh concrete, and then removed the cloth and washed off the glue. We're talking about tens of thousands of tiny stone chips that had to stay in place. Amazing.

We went from there to the Cone Collection, art collected by a pair of Baltimore sisters in the early 20th century. They were major patrons of Matisse throughout the entire length of his career, and the museum is displaying a hundred or more Matisse paintings, sketches, and bronzes. There was also a nice presentation of the lives of these sisters, who - well, I don't want to imply too much, but they dressed mannishly, never married, and the exhibit mentioned more than once that they were good friends with Gertrude Stein.

We spent the early part of the evening on the boat, and then as darkness fell we went over to the Inner Harbor in Ben's dinghy. There's a big waterfront festival going on, people and music and bright lights and all kinds of things happening. Even late in the evening, people are out in paddleboats (some dragon-shaped) with little lights on them. The Constellation, the US Navy's last sailing warship, presides over the harbor, against a backdrop of brightly lit office buildings downtown. We got oysters, clams, steamed shrimp, and Sam Adams beer at a raw bar, and sat on a balcony watching the festival crowds swirl below.

I realized, driving home, that my fun-activity dates are nearly all with Ben. When I see wcg and curiousangel, it's much more likely to involve quiet afternoons or evenings at home. That's not to say that those dates aren't enjoyable, but I should probably try to make sure that I'm more even-handed in how I make plans.