Lego – Life In A Word

Brick Wall Waterfall

If you were to spend an entire year in Rome, you could visit five churches every day and still miss out on some of the more than 1,600 within the city limits. You could also visit five piazzas (public squares) and never see all 2,000. If monuments are your thing, Rome has so many that instead of an actual count they simply say “more than any other city in the world”. And then we have Rome’s fountains. You could dip your hand in five a day and never see them all in a year. So here’s a better idea. Just spend a few hours at the Trevi and assume all of the others are second best.

I wouldn’t decree “best fountain in all of Rome” if I hadn’t been there and seen it for myself. I spent a college year in the Eternal City studying architecture, and you can’t help noticing the other elements of the city while you’re at it. Like fountains on every street corner. The Trevi Fountain was walking distance from the hotel/dorm we Americans lived in, so you can bet I stood before the Trevi’s gushing waterfalls many a day. Even a few nights.

Most people assume “Trevi” is an Italian word. It’s actually two words mashed into one. Tre = three, vie = ways. The Trevi is located at the intersection of three streets. It’s also the terminus for an aqueduct from ancient times. Water is picked up from a source outside of the city, carried over fourteen miles through the aqueduct, and deposited “with a splash” at the Trevi, to be further dispersed to the city underground.

Here’s a little more trivia on the Trevi. It was designed and built in the 1700s, on the back wall of a palace. It’s primary material is travertine stone (pricey!) quarried from nearby Tivoli. Besides the columns, arches, and niches along the wall, you have quite the trove of imagery going on over the water, with mythological creatures like tritons and hippocamps. I have no idea who the sculpted figures gazing down from either side are, but the big guy front and center is Oceanus, a pre-Olympian god.

If you’re a top-five tourist attraction in Rome, you must be pretty darned attractive for a city with countless places to visit. Maybe it’s the coin thing. Why do tourists stand with their backs to the fountain and toss three coins over their shoulder into the water (right hand, left shoulder)? Because legend says they’ll return to Rome some day if they do. “Legend” is really just Hollywood, from the movie Three Coins in the Fountain. But if you really know your Trevi trivia, you say the tossed coins follow the ancient tradition of honoring the gods of the waters, granting you safe passage home.

I’ve talked about the Trevi before, in Too Many Roads Lead to Rome. The fountain has become so popular you now need a ticket and a specific time to stand in front of it. But what I haven’t done before is build the Trevi. Last spring, the “architects” at LEGO immortalized the fountain in a 731-piece model, which I will construct over the next several blog posts. I haven’t put my hands on a piece of LEGO since Notre-Dame du Paris last January (which still beckons me to add its lighting kit). I might be a little rusty at this. The fountain might leak a little. But I’m up for a dip in this brick wall waterfall if you are.

Author’s Note: The title of this post was inspired by the strange-but-sweet Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. The movie included a little ditty my thirty-one year old daughter can still recite to this day: “Brick wall, waterfall, Dickie thinks he got it all but he don’t, and I do, so BOOM with that attitude. Peace punch, Cap’n Crunch, I’ve got something you can’t touch. Bang-bang choo-choo train, wind me up I do my thing. No Reese’s Pieces, 7-Up, you mess with me, I’ll mess you up.”

Some content sourced from the TripAdvisor.com article, “Everything you need to know about the Trevi Fountain coins”; IMDB, “the Internet Movie Database”; and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Finial Touch

In early January you walked into my blog, took a seat in a pew up front, and witnessed the longest church service in the history of France. From the first LEGO piece I laid as the cornerstone – a now-hidden flat black rectangle – to this week’s placement of the oversized finial on top of the roof, you watched – for almost two hundred years – the slow, somewhat steady rise of Notre-Dame de Paris. Time sure flies, doesn’t it? But at last we’ve made it to the end (or at least, the year 1345), where the pastor dismisses the congregation with a “Go in peace!”(which sounds much better than “Go in pieces!”)

Some reflection is in order today, especially since we’re talking about a building of faith. Our cathedral adventure over the last 19 weeks took us through 4,383 LEGO pieces and 393 steps of the instruction manual, snapped together in fifteen hours, resulting in a five-pound plastic model that – “thank heavens” – really does look like the famous French cathedral on the Seine River in Paris.

[Builder/blogger note: I chose my Spotify classical music playlist while I finished up the cathedral. The first selection was entirely fitting: Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”, because this really did feel like a graduation of sorts. But the second selection was eerily more fitting: the final chorus of Handel’s “Messiah”. Ha-a-a-a-a-llelujah indeed!]

Some of the photos here aren’t much different than last week’s, but only because bags 31-34… of 34 bags of pieces, were all about embellishment: capstones, pinnacles, tabernacles, finials, statuary, and all the other little architectural flourishes unique to a cathedral (plus a little landscape on the sidewalk). You know those cake decorator videos where a white cake sits on a spinner and you get to witness the slow, mesmerizing development of frosting, flowers, and such? That was me this week; spinning, applying, and fully decorating my cake… er, cathedral.

Here’s a good photo of some of this decor (and click on any of the photos to see everything better). To the far left you can see several of the pinnacles; the little spires all in a row high up. There are 30 pinnacles on the entire cathedral. To the right you can see a couple of the tabernacles (14 of those); the open box-like structures above the tiny drainpipes. And running along the first floor you can see capstones; the helmet-like headers on either side of the open bays. There are more capstones on Notre-Dame de Paris than any other decorative element (68!)

Here’s a look at the cathedral’s famous flying buttresses, the exterior structural elements keeping the building from falling in on itself. There are 28 buttresses, including 14 running around the chancel and apse on the east end. Just below the tabernacle boxes you see the drainpipes. There are 46 of those. During a good rainstorm this view would include an elegant line of waterfalls.

Remember those curious “stars on flagpoles” (or “magic wands”)? Here they are again, all grouped together just below the part of the towers housing the bells. There are 24 of them. You can also see one of the cathedral’s three majestic rose windows front and center. Finally, note the round “medallions” just under the curved arches on either side of the rose window. You’ll find 24 of those on Notre-Dame de Paris as well; several stamped proudly with a “LEGO” logo.

Okay, one more example of embellishment. Here you can see the 12 disciples in green, symmetrically positioned around the base of the finial (all facing inward). When I pulled these little guys out of the plastic bag I thought they were scale figures for down on the sidewalk, but instead they are the statuary I referred to when I first talked about the cathedral back in January.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say something about the model’s landscape elements. LEGO has come a long way since the boxy trees surrounding LEGO Fallingwater. These little “growees” are pretty sophisticated. Consider the tree in the middle. (Click on the photo for more detail). It’s made up of 37 LEGO pieces, including the trunk, branches, and leaves. Furthermore, the branches up against the cathedral are a darker green because, of course, that part of the tree is typically shaded.

Now then, before you “go in peace” I must mention one more thing; the so-called surprise I teased in last week’s post. Notre-Dame de Paris is such an elegant structure it deserves to be seen by day… and by night. Thanks to the good people at Briksmax, I am able to do just that: light up the cathedral from one end to the other. That’s the good news. The bad? I’m looking at another 2 instruction manuals and another 230 steps to get it done. Are you kidding me?

When I purchased the lights I figured they would be simply and cleverly inserted in and around the completed structure, but NO-O-O-O-O-O!!! (cue horror-movie music). In order to light up Notre Dame de Paris I must deconstruct the model. Again I say, are you kidding me? Here I finally complete my cathedral and now you want me to take it apart again? Sorry good readers; it’s just not something I can stomach right now. I’m going to sit and admire my completed cathedral while you settle for admiring the Briksmax photo above. You don’t place the finial on the roof of the catheral with a flourish, only to then remove the entire roof. Another church service for another time.

I leave you with one last look at our poor, unused, leftover pieces, all 48 of them in plastic-bagged captivity (but still trying to escape). I think they all ganged up and cried, “RUN FOR IT!”, because the 49th leftover – a tiny cluster of leaves from one of the trees – went skittering off the desk and onto the carpet below, where it immediately hushed and hid. I still haven’t found it, but no worries. The next time I walk into my office I’ll probably step on it with a satisfying crunch.

Running build time: 15 hrs. 6 min.

Total leftover pieces: 49

Pretty In Pink (and Green)

Here in the South, the arrival of spring has been declared with aplomb. You can already watch the grass grow, and it seems to need cutting every other day. But even more apparent, the blooms are everywhere. Pink azaleas (a staple at last weekend’s Masters golf tournament) run rampant. The roses have never been redder. And the giant flower heads of white hydrangeas will soon spring forth. This Easter week therefore, it seems appropriate for this blog to pay a visit to another cathedral: Saint Mary of the Flowers in Florence, Italy.

My LEGO creation of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris is quickly coming to a close, so I need to tour you through at least one or two more cathedrals before I’m done. The first, you may recall, was Saint John Lateran in Rome (read about that one in Tucked-Away Place to Pray). Today we’re a three-hour drive to the north, at Santa Maria dei Fiore. It’s no surprise my tour of the world’s prominent cathedrals continues in Italy. To be honest, the whole tour would do just fine if it never left the country.

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany, known for its stunning landscapes, world-class wines, and Renaissance art and architecture. Approaching the city from any direction, you cannot help but notice Santa Maria dei Fiore. The cathedral is not only one of the largest in the world, but its exterior is finished with marble panels of pink and green, giving the structure a light, airy contrast to the surrounding buildings. The church is crowned by a distinctive dome, which captures your attention even before the church itself.

The architect in me wants to highlight Santa Maria dei Fiore for the remarkable engineering that went into this massive structure. I could spend an entire post talking about the design of the dome alone. Consider, its structure is actually one inside of another. The brick-clad concrete shell you see from the outside is connected to the one you see from the inside by “chains” of stone, iron, and wood. With this approach, Santa Maria dei Fiore doesn’t require the flying buttresses so prominent in Notre-Dame de Paris (a structural element the Italians regarded as “ugly makeshifts”). And the dome’s four million bricks – which might seem heavy-handed (ha) – are a much lighter material than stone or tile.

There’s more to this cathedral than its dome, of course. The plan, a traditional Latin cross, includes three rounded apses surrounding the altar, each used as a chapel. The nave (sanctuary) is the length of two football fields; a vast interior space with single aisles on either side. The structural arches soar 75 feet above the seemingly endless marble floor. And perhaps most unusual, Santa Maria dei Fiore is actually a complex of three buildings. You enter the adjacent octagonal Baptistry of St. John through sets of bronze doors (which are replacements for the famous originals now residing in a nearby museum). And the slender free-standing Giotto’s Campanile (bell tower) is a decorated work of art in itself. All three structures blend together with those distinctive pink and green marble tiles.

If you’re ever fortunate enough to visit Saint Mary of the Flowers, be sure to purchase the ticket to climb to the top of the dome. Filippo Brunelleschi – the architect -included a narrow staircase between the two shells so you can reach the uppermost cupola for a spectacular view of Florence and the surrounding countryside. Brunelleschi designed other structures in his lifetime; churches, chapels, hospitals, and such, but the Florence Cathedral is his crowning achievement. It’s no wonder you’ll find his tomb right inside the entrance, alongside the more prominent players in Santa Maria’s storied history.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #12

(Read about the start of this “church service” in Highest Chair)

Oh my stars, the build was challenging today! Bags 22, 23, and 24 – of 34 bags of pieces, focused almost exclusively on the west facade and the rising of the bell towers. We added the final rose window (above the west entrance) and reinforced the upper reaches of the nave in anticipation of adding the roof.

So here’s a detail I didn’t expect. In Notre-Dame’s towers, just below the uppermost structure (where the bells live – still to be built), you have – how else can I say it? – “stars on flag poles”. Forty stars on flag poles, to be precise. When I dumped out Bag 24, I thought, “What the…?” as the pile of magic wands you see here appeared. Did LEGO mistakenly add pieces from a Harry Potter model into mine? A Disney perhaps? Nope. Look at the final photo. Every one of those stars is planted at the west end of the cathedral like palm trees; most of them in the bell towers. Nice detail, Notre-Dame. As for installing them? It’s tough enough to push little poles into LEGO holes one-by-one-by one, but then you have to rotate the stars precisely forty-five degrees from the plane of the cathedral walls. The engineers at LEGO are having a barrel of laughs at my expense.

By the way, we’ve made it to the year 1245 as we build the bell towers, almost a hundred years after laying the first cornerstone at the opposite end. And we are almost done. By the numbers we have ten bags of pieces to go, but by the look of the model we’re closer than that. They must be small bags of pieces. Whatever. I just hope they don’t contain any more stars on flagpoles.

Running build time: 12 hrs. 01 min.

Total leftover pieces: 32

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Tucked-Away Place to Pray

In trying economic times like these, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear about people using credit cards to pay their bills. After all, when you have more month at the end of the money you do what you must to stay above water. But it’s a bit of a fool’s game isn’t it, creating one debt to eliminate another? Its what we call robbing Peter to pay Paul. And speaking of the Christian apostles, let’s talk about robbing John to pay Peter.

As promised when I began construction of the LEGO model of Notre-Dame de Paris last month (read about how I started this project in Highest Chair), I’d like to pay homage to a few of the world’s prominent cathedrals along the way. These magnificent structures are places of worship at heart but oh-so-much more besides. Each can be completely different in look and location. My goal here is to not have you walk away from Notre-Dame thinking “seen one, seen them all”.

What better place to start than at the most significant cathedral in the world? I’ll give you three hints. It’s located in the middle of Rome. It serves as the seat of Rome’s bishop (who just happens to be Pope Francis). And it’s named for one of the most influential figures in the Bible. Okay, time’s up, let’s have it. Did you guess St. Peter’s?

If St. Peter’s was your guess, you’d be… incorrect, and in fact, incorrect three times over. The St. Peter’s you’re thinking of – the “largest and greatest” church in the world – is not even a cathedral (but merely a basilica). St. Peter’s is not even in Rome, since the Vatican is technically its own country. Finally, St. Peter’s is not the seat of the pope (or any other bishop), even though Francis does live close by. Instead, the award for most significant cathedral goes to Saint John Lateran.

The Lateran cathedral is about a 5K jog from St. Peter’s Square. In fact, if you were to make the walk from one church to the other you’d pass by several of Rome’s highlights. The Pantheon. The Trevi Fountain. Piazza Venezia. The Forum. The Colosseum. Eventually you’d be standing in front of the imposing facade you see above.

Click the photo to see the tiny tourists!

Saint John Lateran is old – even by Rome’s standards – first established in the mid-300s. It sits on the site of the former Lateran family palace. The cathedral survived several fires, earthquakes, and periods of deterioration, eventually retreating into the shadow of the grander St. Peter’s. In the 1700s the Lateran received a complete overhaul, including the facade you see today. But it has always served as the cathedral of Rome. In fact, a plaque near its ancient bronze doors deems (in Latin): “… mother and head of all churches in the city and the world.”

Like Notre-Dame de Paris, the Lateran boasts a lot more than just the structure itself. Giant statues of the twelve apostles line the interior of the sanctuary. Six popes are buried here. The ancient Egyptian obelisk in front of the church is the world’s tallest. Finally, the Lateran claims to have hosted significant relics of Christianity over its many years, including the Ark of the Covenant, the wooden table where Jesus hosted the Last Supper, and (for the less faint of heart) the skulls of St. Peter and St. Paul.

It goes without saying; a trip to Rome isn’t complete without a visit to St. Peter’s and its surrounds. The sheer size and elegance of the basilica is unparalleled and worth several hours (if not days) of your time. But now you know; Saint John Lateran also deserves your attention. It’d be a shame to travel all the way to Italy and back without claiminng a visit to the most significant cathedral in the world.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #6

(Read about the start of this “church service” in Highest Chair)

The model-building word of the day, boys and girls, is structure. Bag 9… of 34 bags of pieces, brought us face-to-face with the finished look of Notre-Dame de Paris’s iconic flying buttresses, installed carefully around the walls of the cathedral’s east end. Most of those “pasta bits” I showed you in our last visit amounted to fourteen (or about half) of the cathedral’s buttresses. They look like tiny cannons, don’t they?

Remember, the structural support of this cathedral is on the exterior, allowing for tall, thin walls, and more uninterrupted open space inside. Someone could come up with the ten coolest structural elements for buildings and I’d have buttresses “fly” to the top of the list.

If Notre-Dame’s parishioners felt a sudden sense of security and stability, it’s because the giant hand of Dave was buttressing the very walls around them as they worshiped. And if these structural elements aren’t elegant enough, they also house horizontal pipes to drain the water from the cathedral roof.

I keep referring to the cathedral’s “east end”, but now that we’re starting to see the finished product we should use proper terms for church architecture. We’ve effectively completed the chancel, which is the altar and surrounds to the east of the transept. Picture a giant Christian cross laying on the ground. The top of the cross is the chancel and the crossbar is the transept. The lower length of the cross, where most of the parishioners sit, is the nave. At the very bottom of the nave will be the bell towers.

Today’s build was not without its adventures. A small black piece escaped to my home office floor early on, prompting a prolonged hands-and-knees search. I swear I heard the piece clatter to the floor yet neither hands nor knees made the encounter. I was perplexed. Finally, with the aid of my handy-dandy iPhone flashlight, I found the crafty little devil way, way back in the dark central recess of my desk. This little guy was clearly making a move to freedom. Sorry, bud; it’s time to come home.

Finally, I thought the adjacent photo was worth including. Pretty much every single LEGO piece of Notre-Dame de Paris is unique in size and shape. Except this one. How does a singular “trademark” LEGO block end up amongst thousands of irregular pieces? Sadly, this piece was installed one level below the dark gray roof line of the chancel, which means you’ll never see it in the finished product. So I figured it deserved its moment of glory here instead.

Running build time: 5 hrs. 32 min.

Total leftover pieces: 23

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

(Not) Making Cents

The other day when I drove into town I felt a sneeze coming on, so I reached into my car’s pull-out coin drawer and grabbed a handkerchief. If I’d wanted a breath mint for my mouth or an eye drop for my contacts I’d reach into the same place. But I wouldn’t find quarters, dimes, nickels, or pennies anywhere in there. Come to think of it, someday soon I won’t find pennies anywhere at all.

You probably caught the headline in your news feed. The population growth of U.S. pennies is about to come to a grinding halt. Our country will no longer mint shiny new “Lincolns” for the first time since their debut in 1787. Two hundred years and change (ha) is a darned good run for a coin but the penny appears to have been done in by compelling arguments. One, the production cost is three times the face value. And two – and perhaps most humiliating – the penny’s face value has descended into, well, obsolescence.

There was a time not so long ago when I wouldn’t pass up a lost penny lying in the street. In addition to “free money” there was the old adage find a penny pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck. Today you’d better settle for just the luck because you can’t buy anything for pennies anymore. You’d be better off using them for more practical purposes like checking your tire tread depth or turning screws. My brother and his wife turned thousands of their pennies into a beautiful, copper-colored floor for their kitchen.

Speaking of copper (I’m easily distracted today) I had no idea pennies are no longer made of copper. They’re primarily zinc because of the rising cost of metals (yet they still cost three cents apiece?) You’d assume quarters, dimes, and nickels were made from an alloy of silver, lead, or aluminum, but – go figure – those coins are primarily copper.

Enough with the facts. I’m bummed to see the penny put out to pasture. Along with it goes a ton of childhood memories. You could roll pennies into coin wrappers and enjoy the thrill of exchanging the whole lot for paper bills at the bank. You could drop them into handheld banks for untold savings (and my banks were delightfully mechanical). Finally, you could walk into any 7-Eleven or drug store, hit the candy aisle, and find several “penny candy” choices. A chunk of Bazooka bubble gum, hard candies, or licorice whips could be purchased for just a few cents back then.

Practically speaking I’m on board with the penny’s retirement, because I can’t recall the last time I involved a cent in a financial transaction. If something costs $9.99, are you telling me you’d reach into your pocket and pay the $9.99 in cash and coin? Nope, you’d more likely hand over a ten-dollar bill and then what happens? You get a penny in return. What are you supposed to do with that?

Certain sayings will have to head out to pasture as well. An expensive item can no longer be described as “a pretty penny”. “A penny saved is a penny earned” literally has no value. A frugal person should now be described as a “quarter-pincher” (in case the nickel and dime are also on life support). And “pennies from heaven” certainly don’t describe good fortune anymore, even if the song of the same name will continue to be sung.

For my money, I hope car manufacturers continue to include coin drawers in their dashboards. I keep important things in there and I’d prefer not to change my ways. Then again maybe I should keep a few pennies in the drawer, if only for my childhood memories. Those will always have value.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #5

(Read about the start of this “church service” in Highest Chair)

I decided to have my lunch today while working through Bag 8… of 34 bags of pieces. That was a mistake. I reached for a LEGO piece, grabbed a little block of cheese instead, and Notre-Dame de Paris almost had cheddar in its walls. I immediately vowed food would go nowhere near the assembly ever again. It’s unnerving enough putting in the real pieces.

As I worked on the uppermost level you see here I used a little too much force, and a piece in the level below loosened and scampered down into the sanctuary. I shook, rattled, and rolled the entire cathedral trying to get it out but to now avail. Just before admitting defeat, the little devil finally emerged (he must’ve gone to confession). And here’s where I learned an unnerving truth: re-assembling pieces long after you’re supposed to can be near impossible. I had to tear down an entire wall to get the piece back in place. We’re working in close quarters here, people.

Today is also a good chapter to point out the tool to the right. It’s a “LEGO lever” (my words), designed to easily remove a piece from a place it wasn’t meant to go. I didn’t need my lever through the first seven bags, but today? Half a dozen times. My mind’s eye was off just a hair and I kept assembling pieces a quarter or half-inch off from where they were supposed to go. LEGO lever = life saver.

Bag 8 started slow and repetitious but finished grand and confident. In fact, I was so full of myself after the mere forty-five minutes of construction, I boldly plunged into Bag 9. Mistake. I mean, look at the pieces in this photo! Are these LEGOs or the little bits of pasta you find in your chicken soup? Seriously, we may be almost a quarter of the way through the bag count but the pieces are shrinking. Some Sunday soon the parishioners will look to the heavens and be burned by the giant magnifying glass above them.

Running build time: 4 hrs. 22 min.

Total leftover pieces: 17

Some content sourced from the CNN Business article, “Trump instructs Treasury to halt penny production”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

See You In (my) Church

When I went to Sunday school many, many years ago, they taught us the little ditty “Here Is The Church” (… here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people). You’d make a church with your hands pressed together as you sang, raising the steeple by extending and touching the tips of your pointer fingers. Today, sixty-odd years later, those same hands will build a cathedral – Notre-Dame de Paris. Granted my church is made from LEGO blocks and the entire model will be smaller than a cornerstone of the real Notre-Dame, but at least the steeple is made from more than fingers.

So then, “Here Is The Cathedral”… in its purchased form. The cardboard box you see is not what I would call huge, but it’s an ample residence for 4,383 plastic pieces. These pieces dwell in thirty-four separate plastic bag communities, just begging to be liberated. Buried underneath all these subdivisions (in the crypt, if you will) is the brick of an instruction manual, a veritable phone book of almost 300 pages. C’mon, you didn’t think we’d raise this cathedral in a single blog post, did you?

Mr. Instruction Manual could be called the mayor of this manufactured mess. He guides me on who gets together with who, when they get together, how they get together, and what it’s all supposed to look like as I go. Mr. Manual has pages and pages of impressive illustrations (like this one), but also some LOL ones (like the one below). I mean, check out the upper left corner. Am I really supposed to vigorously shake the bag out like that? The tiny residents will go running in all directions! We’re trying to create order from chaos here, people, not the other way around.

I expect all of the same challenges I encountered when I built the LEGO Grand Piano. I’ll think pieces are missing until somehow they appear right in front of me. I’ll connect pieces incorrectly and have to backtrack several steps to get them right. I’ll be left with extra pieces every now and then, and forever wonder if they were really “extra” or perhaps “overlooked”. And I’ll police plastic piles around the meager real estate of my home office desk. Maybe I require a shepherd’s crook or a bullhorn? I mean, it’s me versus 4,383 others so you can see how one or two of them are bound to escape.

Here’s a thoughtful aspect of LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris, and oh-so appealing to the architect in me. The model will be built in the same chronological order as the original was (instead of, say, from the ground up). The first twenty years of Notre-Dame’s construction produced only the rounded east end you see here, which served by itself as a functioning church. The next twenty years generated the full footprint but without the roof, towers, and other noteworthy exterior elements. The final sixty years brought everything across the finish line. So I’ll be building the LEGO model in the same order, only in a hundred days (or less) instead of a hundred years.

Before I snap Piece 1 onto Piece 2, let me dress down my many thousands of new plastic friends. Together they comprise nowhere near the largest of the LEGO sets. A model of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Castle is over 6,000 pieces. The LEGO Star Wars Millennium Falcon is over 7,500 pieces. LEGO Titanic (er, before it sank): 9,000 pieces. And standing regally at the top of the LEGO podium (and just a twenty-minute bus ride from Notre-Dame de Paris): the Eiffel Tower, the only LEGO model to exceed 10,000 pieces. To each of these top-tens I say non. Notre-Dame will be challenge enough for this builder/blogger.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #1

Now that we’ve had the prelude (so to speak) it’s time for the church service to begin! Bag #1 – of 34 bags of pieces – houses the first 100 or so of the little guys. LEGO thoughtfully opted for a sub-community in Bag #1 for the tiniest of residents (some of which are just begging for tweezers).

Mr. Instruction Manual (who is multilingual by the way; he speaks English, French, and Spanish), warns me to “… avoid danger of suffocation by keeping this bag away from babies and children!” Mr. Manual also wants me to know my thousand of pieces were manufactured in five different countries: Denmark (of course), Mexico, Hungary, China, and the Czech Republic.

It’s fair to say I haven’t stood in the LEGO “pulpit” for awhile. I snapped pieces together incorrectly at least three times today. I also thought I was missing pieces twice, and I fretted over the fact I ended up with two leftovers. Let’s hope our church service is smoother next week! In the meantime, here is the build of Bag #1. Not much to look at but at least it’s the foundation of the east end of the Cathedral. In 1163 Pope Alexander III oversaw the first stone being set in place. In 2025 nobody saw me do the same.

Bag #: 1

Running build time: 25:38.

Total leftover pieces: 2

Highest Chair

When we babysit our granddaughters here at the house, we tap into several items to make the job easier. A big basket of toys and stuffed animals sits in the corner of our living room. A dozen children’s books line the lowest shelf just waiting to tell their stories. Sesame Street is easily streamed on the nearby television. And at dinner time we roll out the high chair so everyone’s on the same level. So who would’ve thought a high chair would be my blog topic for today? Maybe you, if you know anything about cathedrals.

We’re almost there, loyal readers. I will lay the corner-block of my LEGO model of Notre-Dame de Paris next week. Why not this week, you ask? Because before we crack the seal on the giant box of pieces, we need to pay a little respect to the real Cathedral. I want you to know a few things about the stone and glass Notre-Dame before you witness the rising of the plastic one.

It’s a cathedral in the middle of Paris, Dave… what more do I need to know? Uh, a LOT more. To begin with, do you even know what a cathedral is? I didn’t (and I have a background in architecture, for gosh sake). It’s a big, giant church with stained glass and chapels and a raised altar, you say. Well yes, you’re right, but what makes a church a cathedral? Interestingly, it has nothing to do with the building itself. Instead, a cathedral is the seat of a bishop (the ordained clergy-person who presides over the surrounding parishes). For lack of a church this person could just as easily be in a small house and it would still be considered a cathedral.

Cathedrals really do have “high chairs” on their altars for the bishops (cathedra in Latin means “seat”) but Notre-Dame de Paris is much more than a place for furniture. First and foremost, it took a hundred years to construct (1163-1260). In that era the building evolved from the common Romanesque style of the period to the more elegant French Gothic. Notre-Dame feels unusually vertical and airy for a structure of its time and there’s a novel reason for this: flying buttresses.

Imagine Notre-Dame’s architect – Eugène Viollet-le-Duc – talking to the Paris city council in the twelfth century and saying, “Look guys, let’s think outside the box here… literally. The structural support for this church ought to be outside of the building instead of inside”. Why would the architect want this? Because the flying buttresses assume the structural load that was previously handled by short, thick interior walls. The result is taller, more dramatic spaces, filled with the light of high-up stained glass windows. In other words, flying buttresses allow Notre-Dame to “reach for the heavens” much better than its Romanesque predecessors.

There’s also more to this French “grande dame” than structure, of course. Notre-Dame has twenty-nine chapels surrounding the main sanctuary (that’s gonna take a lot of LEGO). It features three spectacular stained glass “rose” windows that would not be as large or as high were it not for those flying buttresses. Notre-Dame’s twin towers host ten massive bronze bells and they each have first names. “Emmanuel” (listen to his sound bite below) and “Marie” are so big they take up the entire south tower, while their eight ringing siblings all fit into the north tower.

Notre-Dame also has a central flèche, a spire not unlike the ones you see on more modest churches. This spire, however, is topped by a bronze rooster, which is not only the symbol of the French state but also a container for (supposedly) a small piece of the Crown of Thorns, worn by Jesus leading up to his crucifixion.

As you would expect, Notre-Dame de Paris hosts countless works of art, whether paintings or sculptures. Many of the sculptures are biblical scenes intended to educate the illiterate parishioners of the twelfth century. But my favorite sculptures may be those of the twelve apostles, way up high surrounding the base of the flèche and looking outwards towards Paris… all except one. St. Thomas – patron saint of architects – faces Notre-Dame itself, and was given the facial features of Viollet-le-Duc.

Okay, so now you know more about Notre-Dame de Paris than just the LEGO model. Considering there are over 500 Gothic cathedrals in Europe, it’s impressive to see Notre-Dame at the very top of at least one “Top Ten Cathedrals” list. We’ll visit some of those other “high chairs” in future posts, to add even more life to my pile of plastic pieces. In the meantime, my LEGO “church service” begins promptly at 10am next Thursday.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

You Can Say That Again

When I was a kid, I remember (or was told) I used creative pronunciations for common words. Instead of cinnamon I’d say cimm-anin. Instead of spaghetti it was bis-ketti. The library was the lie-berry. Maybe back then my excuse was in just learning to talk but I can’t play that card as an adult. So when someone says Feb-YOU-air-ee instead of Feb-ROO-air-ee, or Shur-BERT instead of Shur-BET, I tend to wince.

We’ve made it to the time of year where we reflect on the previous one, and we do so in year-in-review lists. “Most Influential People of 2024”. “Best Television Shows of 2024”. “Significant World Events of 2024”. And how about this one? Most Mispronounced Words of 2024. Thanks to Babbel, maker of language-learning platforms, the hard audio evidence doesn’t lie. Babbel came up with ten words people mispronounced over and over last year.

I could print Babbel’s list here, but it’d be a waste of your time so I’ll just hyperlink it instead. Eight of the words I never ever used in 2024 (and never will), and the only reason I spoke the other two was because they’re the last names of politicians featured in 2024 headlines. To be honest, the list made me question Babbel’s approach to learning languages. Are these the words promoting a budding English speaker’s proficiency?

Babbel also listed mispronounced words from other languages, including one of my favorites: espresso. Not sure how we Americans get that one wrong time after time, but we do. Maybe the myriad “ex-” words in the English language have us saying EX-presso but the concentrated coffee drink sounds exactly as it reads: ES-presso. Keep that in mind and your next Italian barista will be happy to serve you.

As long as we’re speaking Italiano let’s get another one right – al dente. When you want your pasta cooked just right; “not too soft but firm to the bite”, you describe it as ALL den-tay, not ALLA dawn-tay. I only know this because I learned Italian when I was in college. If I didn’t know better myself I’d probably go with AL dent.

As long as we’re talking foreign language mispronunciation, let’s correct another one. Notre-Dame de Paris, the medieval Catholic cathedral in the middle of Paris (and the middle of the River Seine), can be mispronounced so many ways it’s almost as devastating as the fire from which it was resurrected. On the surface it sounds something like NOH-tur daym day PEAR-iss, which is “English-French” at its absolute worst. In actual French it sounds like this: NOH-tr dam due PAH-ree, where the two “r”s almost sound like “l”s.

You never saw it coming but today’s language lesson is a segue to the topic I’ll be covering for the next several weeks and months. Notre-Dame de Paris is a magnificent structure and a renowned work of architecture. It’s also a new model created by the good people at LEGO. And speaking of good people (great, actually), my wife put that LEGO model under the Christmas tree for me this year.

For those who enjoyed the long journey of my building the LEGO Grand Piano (which I chronicled in Let’s Make Music!), and the shorter journey of the LEGO Fallingwater House (Perfect Harmony), I’ll be at it again as I attempt to rise Notre-Dame de Paris from the “ashes” of 4,383 plastic pieces. Won’t you join me on this foray into all things FRON-says? (That’s “French” for those of you who mispronounce it.) You’ll learn about the world’s cathedrals along the way, many of which took hundreds of years to construct. Let’s hope my own build of Notre-Dame de Paris is a whole lot shorter than that.

Some content sourced from the CNN World article, “These are the most mispronounced words of 2024”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Game, Set, Matches

The LEGO Eiffel Tower is the tallest of its model kits and undoubtedly the largest of its Architecture Series. At a deliberate count of 10,001 pieces, this behemoth is a whole lot more detailed than LEGO’s 2014 original, which clocked in at a mere 321 pieces. So imagine my awe (okay, and shock) when I learned about another Eiffel Tower model; one with a staggering 700,000 pieces. Suddenly 10,000 seems like a nice, reasonable number.

It’s true, of course. A Frenchman recently converted 700,000 matches into a model of the Eiffel Tower, in an attempt to break the world record for, naturally, “tallest matchstick Eiffel Tower”. (Is there a world record for everything these days?) I suppose I can get past the 700,000 matches – even if I can’t picture that many in one model – but what I can’t fathom is the eight years Richard Plaud sacrificed to build his creation. I’m picturing Monsieur Plaud waking up each morning, bidding adieu to his wife after a croissant and some French press coffee, and heading off to his studio to play with matches, a giant bottle of glue in hand. Day after day after day.

Our Frenchman’s accomplishment wouldn’t be so interesting if there weren’t a little drama thrown in for spice. Turns out his 23.6-foot model may not earn the world record after all. Why? Because Plaud cut the heads off the matchsticks as he built. When he got tired of cutting, he contacted a French “matchmaker” (ha) and asked if he could place a massive order of headless matches. And there’s the rub, fellow model builders. Guinness is disputing Plaud’s claim of the world record because the materials used can’t be purchased by you or me, should we try to build our own matchstick Eiffel Tower (but would we?)

Meanwhile, a 21.6-foot Eiffel Tower model built by Toufic Daher (coolest name ever) retains the world record. Daher’s model was completed in 2009 using six million (headed) matches. I have no idea how long it took him to build, but seriously, how long does it take to simply pick up six million little sticks, let alone shape and glue them into a replica of the Eiffel Tower?

Gustave Eiffel (another cool name) surely had no idea people like Plaud and Daher would be obsessed with his tower 135 years after the fact, in pursuit of world records. Frankly (“France-ly?”) Eiffel’s “Iron Lady” is impressive enough to stand on her own wrought-iron feet. After all, she’s among the most recognizable structures in the world. She surpassed the Washington Monument when she opened to the public in 1889, as “tallest human-made structure” (sadly, seventy years before Guinness started tallying world records). Today she still merits an entry in the world record book, albeit for a different reason:”Most Visited Monument with an Entrance Fee”.

There’s a touch of iron-y to this post. As much as I’m making blog fodder of these Eiffel Tower model builders, I’m tempted to become one myself. Not with headless matchsticks; the LEGO version. Several years ago I completed the LEGO U.S. Capitol Building (1,032 pieces), followed by the LEGO Grand Piano (3,662 pieces), and more recently, LEGO Fallingwater (811 pieces). I keep an eye on the LEGO catalog for other models of interest but not one calls to me… except La Dam de fer. But then I pause to ask myself, am I really willing to dive into a project that’s effectively one hundred bags of one hundred pieces each, where ever single piece dark grey? Stay tuned.

As for our French ami Richard Plaud, his eight years of pick-up sticks may not have been in vain after all. Guinness admits they might’ve been a little quick to dismiss his claim. In their words, they wanted to make sure “the playing field is level for everyone”. Playing field? Ah, so this Eiffel Tower model-building is a game, is it? For Plaud at least, I’d call it game, set, matches.

Some content sourced from the USA Today article, “8 years down the drain?…”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Lifeless Buds

I have a Venus flytrap named Frankie. He lives alone in a plastic cup on the patio table, happy in the humid air as he nabs the occasional bug. My wife’s nearby garden is boasting fruit, vegetables, and colorful blooms but I’m content to just watch my little tabletop carnivore do his thing. I’ll get to why I named my bud “Frankie” in a minute but let me just say this: At least he’s a live little bud. That’s more than a lot of people can say about their more imaginary friends.

Here’s a morsel of self-discovery for you, extracted from my several years of blog posts. I have a habit of referring to inanimate objects with terms of endearment. My most recent example: two weeks ago when I discovered the SpaceX satellites launching into outer space. I referred to those technological marvels as “little guys who talk to one another”, and, “when their time is done they’ll return home for a proper burial”. Whether this is just cheap entertainment or an effort to elicit empathy from you readers, I regularly inject life into the lifeless (or in this case, a soul into the metal and mechanical).

I didn’t have to scroll back very far to find other examples. My post a week before the satellites, Hail, Caesium, endeared of all things, a lost capsule of nuclear waste. First, I nicknamed the capsule “Little Caesar”. Then I re-nicknamed it “LC” and noted how detection equipment ultimately “…led the search team right to our little friend”. Were you more relieved to know the waste had been contained or that our little lost friend had finally been found?

Conifer Confetti, a post from last fall, lamented the hours I sacrifice to contain the untold number of pine cones on our property. I referred to the cones as “females” (because biologically, they really are) and in one frustrated burst of endearment, said “It’s like having the world’s biggest sorority row above my backyard, and every house is about to disgorge its girls for a giant party on the ground”. So which is it Dave, a whole lot of “yard waste” or thousands of “little ladies”?

The “poor” leftover pieces from the LEGO Grand Piano

Finally, my series of posts on building the LEGO Grand Piano and LEGO Fallingwater were rife with terms of endearment. All those plastic pieces were like little families bagged up in a single box; couples waiting to be married. At times I thought I lost “one of the little guys”, and I felt sorry for the leftovers who’d never realize their destiny of being a part of the completed model.

This topic was inspired by an article in The Atlantic about the spacecraft Cassini. Six years ago, Cassini completed a 13-year data-gathering cruise around Saturn and its moons. Utterly alone and running out of fuel, Cassini turned towards the planet, eventually burning up in the atmosphere. As NASA described the final moments, Cassini “fought to keep its antenna pointed at Earth as it transmitted its farewell”. An entire room of scientists at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory fell into tears. Cassini is the perfect example of – big word here – anthropomorphism. In simpler terms, the more “alive” a machine appears to be, the more empathetic the response from humans. Some robots are deliberately anthropomorphic, a subtopic we just don’t have enough words for today.

As I watch Frankie ingest another insect, it’s time to reveal the genesis of his name. Maybe you don’t remember Frankie Avalon in his prime but you do remember the 1970s movie Grease. Avalon showed up in a memorable scene, descending a staircase dressed in white while singing “Beauty School Dropout” to Didi Conn’s “Frenchy”. Guess what? Avalon had an even bigger hit: Venus. That song is a plea to the goddess of love to bring him romance; someone pretty and very much alive. Okay, so my Frankie isn’t pretty, but at least he’s alive. That’s more than I can say about all those other little buds who keep showing up in my blog posts.

Some content sourced from The Atlantic article, “How to Mourn a Space Robot”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.