IN FRATERNAM MEAM: INTERESTING INFO WORTH KNOWING

IN FRATERNAM MEAM

Saturday, March 25, 2006

INTERESTING INFO WORTH KNOWING

EIGHT GREAT FINDS OF THE 90'S

1.) IN A FARMER'S FIELD.
In 1820 a Greek peasant name Yorgos was digging in his field on the island of Milos when he unearthed several carved blocks of stone. He burrowed deeper and found four statues -- three figures of Hermes and one of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Three weeks later, the Choiseul archeologists expedition arrive by ship, purchased the Aphrodite, and took it to France. Louis XVIII gae it the name Venus de Milo and presented it to the Louvre in Paris, where it became one of the most famouse works of arts in the world.

2.) BENEATH A STREET.
On February 21, 1978, electrical workers were putting down lines on a busy street corner in Mexico City when they discovered a twenty ton stone bas-relief of the Aztec night goddess, Coyolxauhqui. It is believed to have been sculpted in the early 15th century and burried prior to the destruction of the Aztec civilization by the Spanish conquistadors in 1521, The stone was moved 200 yards from the site to the Museum of the Great Temple.

3.) IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND.
In 1978 more than 500 motion pictures dating from 1903 to 1929 were dug out of a hole in the ground in Dawson city, Yukon. Under normal circumstances, the 35 mm nitrate films would have been destroyed, but the permafrost preserved them perfectly.

4.) UNDER A BED.
Joanne Perez, the widow of vaudeville performer Pepito the Spanish clown, cleaned out the area underneath her bead and discovered the only existing copy of the pilot for the TV series, I LOVE LUCY, Pepito had coached Lucille Ball and had guest starred in the pilot. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, had given the copy to Pepito as a gist in 1951 and it has remained under the bed for thirty nine years.

5.) ON A WALL.
A middle aged couple in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked an art prospector to appraise a painting in their home. While he was there he examined another painting that the couple had thought was a reproduction of a work by Vincent Van Gogh. It turned out to be an 1886 original. On March 10, 1991 the painting Still Life with Flowers sold at auction for $1,400,000.

6.) IN A TRUNK IN AN ATTIC.
In 1961 Barbara Testa, a Hollywood librarian, inherited six steamer trunks that had belonged to her grandfather James Fraser Gluck, a Buffalo, New York, lawyer wjo died in 1895. Over the next three decades she gradually sifted through the contents of the trunks, until one day in the fall of 1990 she came upon a 665 pages that turned out to be the original hand written manuscript of the first half of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The two halves of the great American nover were finally reunited at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Libary.

7.) AT A FLEA MARKET.
A Philadelphia financil analyst was broswing at a flea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, when he was attracted by a wooden picture frame. He paid four dollars for it. Back at his home, he removed the old torn painting in the frame and found a folded document between the canvass and the wood backing it turned out to be a 1976 copy of the Declaration of Independence -- one of only twenty four known to remain. On June 13, 1991, Sotheby's auction house in New York sold the copy for $2,420,000.

8.) ABOVE A COPYING MACHINE.
For sixty years a painting of Niagara Falls had hung unappreciared in Eno Memorial Hall in Old Lyme, Coonecticut, most recently above a copying machine. In April 1991, a local gallery owner walked into the building and recognized it as a previously unkown work of John Frederick Kensett. The 1855 oil is estimated to be worth almost $1 million.

(Source: Book Of Lists by David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace)

posted by infraternam meam @ 11:43 PM

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