Tag Archives: museum

‘Angels & Demons’ summons a $48 million bow

Ron Howard’s "Angels & Demons" soared to a $48 million opening this weekend, narrowly edging out a stellar $43 million second-week performance by "Star Trek," according to estimates by Hollywood.com Box Office. While hardly miraculous, Angels’ solid bow is the second-best opening of Tom Hanks’ career, behind “The Da Vinci Code’s” $77.1 million debut in 2006. Despite receiving better reviews than its predecessor, ‘Angels’ was widely expected to fly lower than ‘Da Vinci’ on account of the cooled-off controversy over the religious subject matter in Dan Brown’s novels

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The Art and Heart of Blind Photographers

Blind photography: the very concept sounds like an oxymoron. But an intriguing and often striking exhibition of photographs in Riverside, California, argues that it emanates from the core of contemporary art. The show “Sight Unseen,” at the California Museum of Photography until Aug.

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Archaeologists show off rare Roman find

Archaeologists excavating a site in East London have made an "extremely rare and unprecedented" find — a delicately detailed dish made of hundreds of pieces of tiny glass petals, the Museum of London Docklands announced Wednesday. The “millefiori” dish (the name means “thousand flowers”) was found buried in the grave of a Roman Londoner, the museum said. Based on the other grave goods found at the site, archaeologists believe the person buried there was wealthy, the museum said

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Sale fails to bail out last Titanic survivor

The last living survivor of the Titanic earned only a small fraction of what auctioneers hoped to raise when she sold her final remaining mementos of the doomed ship to pay nursing home bills. The 17 items belonging to 97-year-old Millvina Dean sold for about $8,000 on Saturday, according to auctioneer Alan Aldridge — not enough to pay for two months at her nursing home.

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Swiss Minimalist Peter Zumthor Wins the Pritzker Architecture’s Top Prize

If further proof were needed that the world is in a chastened mood these days, there’s this: the Pritzker Architecture Prize, one of the most prestigious honors in the field, will go this year to Peter Zumthor of Switzerland. At 65, Zumthor is to architecture what Samuel Beckett is to literature, a man who has set out to draw maximum impact from a bare minimum of means.

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Reports of sexual assault in military rise in 2008

Reports of sexual assault among U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan rose 26 percent from the previous year, according to an annual Pentagon report presented to Congress on Tuesday. Hesperonychus elizabethae, a 4.4-pound (2-kilogram) creature with razor-like claws, ran through the swamps and forests of southeastern Alberta, Canada, during the late Cretaceous period, the researchers said.

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50-year-old Barbie, based on ‘gag toy for men’

Roll out the pink carpet, grab a feather boa and throw open those Malibu Dream House doors. It’s Barbie’s 50th, and the iconic doll, unveiled today in her latest swimsuit, has plenty to celebrate. Only this American institution could have inspired Barbara Karleskint, 48, to spend nearly $700 so she and one of her dolls could wear matching red chiffon gowns and capes at an annual collectors gathering

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Indian-American hotelier plans Gandhi bid

Indian-American hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal said Wednesday he plans to bid on several belongings of Mahatma Gandhi scheduled for auction in New York Thursday, with the goal of returning them to India. “The idea is to get them back as a community and donate [them] to India,” Chatwal told CNN, adding that he would welcome other members of the Indian community in the United States to join him in his auction effort. Chatwal said if he obtains the items, he plans to give them to the museum where some of Gandhi’s items are kept

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