Author Archives for nancy wisser

Cupcake-henge: You know you want it!

cupcake-henge

cupcakes and photo by tokyopop, with permission

It’s carbhenge, and you know you want it! But to get a taste of tokyopop’s yummy chocolate and strawberry cupcakes with candy Stonehenge, you would have had to be in her Art History class. We guess that these must have disappeared too soon for the sunset alignments to be checked!

Warning: do not click on tokyopop (Keri Chan)’s photostream link if you do not want to look at things like Chocolate Covered Cheesecake Pops, or Key Lime Pie Cupcakes, or Creme Brulee Birthday Pie, or an incredible-looking birthday cake with Domo Kun on top. There’s more like that. She’s a serious baker. You have been warned!

Food is distracting. Let’s think about henges. This is clearly a replica of Stonehenge as it is now, not as it was. Fallen stones abound and only short sequences of linteled stones remain in the circle. By the way, we see that Keri Chan lives just outside of Seattle, Washington. Of course.

Score: 5½. Cupcakes are a difficult medium, and tokyopop is the kind of person we like to keep on very friendly terms with. This is completely unrelated, Keri, but we have a birthday coming in early May. Ahem. 😉 Just sayin’.

3D Paper Model Stonehenge (and a small mystery solved)

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photo from Paper Landmarks promotional webpage

We may not get to post for a day or two, so a quick post this morning. You may remember some time ago we posted a page of links to replicas we didn’t have photo permissions for, Henges We Admire. One of them was a neatly done model of Stonehenge in its original state, which  we thought was of wood. It now appears that it may have been of paper, made from this kit. (For those who might enjoy horrifying the Clonehenge blog, this company also sells kits for Easter Island heads to add to your Stonehenge display!)

Of course, we aren’t looking at anything like the stone-by-stone detail of the Cardboard Stonehenge kit shown on the Cardboard Stonehenge blog, a great read featured here earlier. At the other end of the spectrum is this (to us) humourous item, in which you just cut out all but the base of the ‘stones’ and stand them up, made by a company with the evocative name L’Instant Durable. Ah, if only it were!

Still, this is an impressive model and if we’d had one we might have kept busy making it and avoided the embarrassment of starting Clonehenge. Alas for the world–one annoyance that might so easily have been averted!

Paper Landmarks‘ Stonehenge score: 7½ druids. Note that you can get it in several colours including gold, although why you wouldn’t choose the stone colour is beyond us. Unless you were just going to set it on fire anyway. In that case, do it safely! And send us pictures!

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Stonehenge at the Office Plaza, Renton, Washington State

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photo by Denise Zullig, with permission

In the center of the Southgate Office Plaza, a few blocks from the WOTC (Wizards of the Coast) headquarters, in Renton, Washington, stands this odd homage to Stonehenge, without even a plaque for explanation. We have been on the track of this sculpture/monument for months and only through the Flickr photostream of Rick Umali were we able to track it down.

renton-rick-umali[photo at left by Rick Umali] We got in touch with City of Renton Communications Director  Preeti Shridhar, who through Jennifer Davis Hayes was able to send us  great photos by Denise Zullig. It takes a village to do a Clonehenge post! Our thanks to all of you.

renton-3What else do we know? Almost nothing. It’s an odd one, an arc of trilithons made up of what appear to be cement blocks. Judging by the architecture of the building (nicknamed the Ziplock building–well, look at it!) in the lower photo, also by Zullig, we would guess that it’s been there a few decades. But who built it, how and why, are unknown to us. It’s Washington State, we’re tempted to say, so of course there’s a Stonehenge!

Score: 5 druids. It’s not at all accurate, but what a pleasant surpise to find something like this in a corporate setting! If we find out more, we’ll post it. In the meanime, props to the people of The Stonehenge State. Way to honour the ancients!

You can see it on Google Street View here.

Scrabble Henge

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henge and photo by David Lewis, aka Boggy

Tonight’s post goes out in memory of me mum! She was a wonderful mum and the meanest Scrabble opponent you could face. She loved those little words that effectively box you out of a whole area. But we digress! Do you see what this is? I hope we don’t have to spell it out for you. Har, har!

Boggy was ahead of his time when he made this two and a half years ago. He is also the fellow who brought you the wood block gardenhenge with the children’s animal story. The lettering with lintels incorporated is cleverly done, and the photo is nice with the reflections in the wood. For related humourous comments, see the photo in its original home on Flickr.

Score: 6 druids. Thank you, mother, for taking me to Stonehenge that time! I hope being able to use the new-ish word henging is improving your Scrabble scores in the afterlife!

Splash Stonehenge Replica, Monroe, Washington

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photo from the website of Falling Water Designs

Why couldn’t Stonehenge be a fountain? As a matter of fact, English Heritage, it is not too late! Make that tunnel you’d been planning a little smaller, put pipes in it, and have a water feature expert come in and design the water flow . . .

Well, maybe not, but to make up for it, Rick Perry, owner of Falling Water Designs in Monroe, Washington (yes, Washington! We’ll get back to that), outside Seattle, created this remarkable partial-Stonehenge-replica water feature of what looks like real stone to us. We know that Rick or someone he works with has a mild case of megalithia* because of other photos on the website.

This seems to be made of two trilithons at an angle to one another, a configuration we haven’t seen before. Score: 5½ druids. Yes, it is ridiculous, but that element of humour might help the thing remain a pleasure over time. Hmm . . . do you think, if we slow the water down, we could grow mosses?

Anyway, it is Washington State again. Despite Michigan’s desperate attempts at holding its title, like a woodhenge we’ve heard of but can’t seem to find and an odd snowmobile “hinge” that doesn’t quite make the henginess cut, it looks like Washington State has usurped the coveted title of The Stonehenge State. And we still have a Washington replica we have yet to show you! What is going on up there??

* a condition, rarely fatal unless combined with clumsiness, which creates a compulsion to erect megaliths

Stonehenge Under Glass

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photo and mini-replica from dewgardencrafts on Etsy, with permission

It’s like a little herd of Stonehenge on a hill! You can almost imagine tiny mysterious druids that only come out when you’re not around and put up megaliths. Awesome! This item threatens the Taipei Stonehenge sculpture‘s claim to the Cutest Stonehenge title.

terrarium-23The terrarium in the photo above, sadly, has been sold. The one to the left, however, is still for sale on Etsy, “the place to buy and sell things handmade”, as are others, including the less poetic but intriguingly-named Butt Crack Terrarium . . . Oops! We’re too easily distracted. Let’s stick with Stonehenge replicas and let others blog the butt cracks!

These mossy models are in some ways preferable to many of the more complete and accurate small replicas. The moss implies the charm of the landscape, the essential Stonehenge factor so often overlooked by replica makers, especially those on the left side of the Atlantic. As much as it has been co-opted by astronomers, Stonehenge wasn’t just about the sky–at least that’s our opinion, if we’re allowed one.

And now we have some scoring to do. Score: 6 druids. It may not be accurate, but gosh darn it, we like it, and we can do whatever we want. It’s our blog!

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PeopleHenge

Spring is coming. Sunny days and green fields are perfect for forming trilithons of people–circles of them, preferably. (Hint: use skinny people for lintels!) Greens at universities are perfect for this kind of nonsense. We’d love to post a photo of you and your friends doing a live henge. Go!

MagicHenge, the Gathering

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photo by David Morgan-Mar, aka dmmaus

We know– a bunch of you are saying, “OMG, lame!” But the connections between Wizards of the Coast, makers of the game Magic: the Gathering, and Stonehenge are real, if subtle. A post coming up in a few days will point up an aspect of that.

A henge of Magic card boxes appealed to us because games like Magic feed off the mystique of icons like Stonehenge. What, in a sense, has more real mana than the lurking stone beast of Salisbury Plain? There is a hopeful feeling here, as if this were an effort to bring to life the fantasies depicted on the cards!

This is not the first time we have mentioned and posted photos from the Thinghenge pool on Flickr. We are grateful to Mr. Morgan-Mar, the visionary behind its creation. It is not Flickr’s only such pool, and we will tell you what the other is when we remember it ourselves . . .

Score? We can only give this 4½ druids as a Stonehenge replica but there is a lot of blue mana in those lintels and uprights!

Stonehenge in Treave, Cornwall

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photo by Alan S., with permission

This height-challenged Stonehenge replica is one of several replicas of British megalithic antiquities built by a rather eccentric woman who ran the local holiday cottages in Treave.  What a relief to learn that she did not add any Easter Island heads! She wanted to make the circle larger, but couldn’t get planning permissions. Fortunately, in Wiltshire the original Stonehenge was grandfathered in.

The woman who built this circle was a dowser but when the Cornish Earth Mysteries Group visited in 2000, we’re told they got very bad vibes out of it. There’s not much to it—a ring with a few lintels. Score: 5½, almost a 6. Cornwall is full of real megaliths. What inspires people with the urge to henge? We at Clonehenge hope they don’t find the cure too soon!

[more photos of this replica can be seen here]