Mummy

The American Dime Museum's mass of miscellany has been sold to the four winds. At an auction on Monday, owner-curator Dick Horne raised more than $107,000 at auction, with a replica of a Coney Island Ferris wheel fetching the top price of $4,750 - not far ahead of a 9-foot Peruvian mummy ($3,000), a monkey automaton ($2,100), and an abstract finger painting by Betsy the Chimp ($1,750). Now that fate has banged down its gavel on the Dime, we wondered: What is Baltimore's quirkiest collection now?

When American Dime Museum owner-curator Dick Horne auctioned off his mass of oddities Monday, he raised $107,000 but kissed goodbye such wonders as a 9-foot Peruvian mummy ($3,000) and a monkey automaton ($2,100). Now that fate has banged down its gavel on the Dime, we wondered: What is Baltimore's quirkiest collection now? Do you own 3,241 pairs of bowling shoes? Is your cousin's basement overrun with Elvis hairpieces? Does your friend have an entire room devoted to gourds that resemble politicians?

Sykesville Middle School is inviting the community to circle the globe today without leaving town.Visitors to the Culture Cruisin' Festival in Cooper Park can shake hands with a mummy, charm a snake and dance around a Maypole. Pupils are offering tastes of international foods, strains of native music, snippets of Shakespeare -- all to give lessons in diversity.It started with the seventh-grade social studies teacher looking for innovative ways to research history, culture and geography."I didn't want to hear, `I gotta do a boring report on Sweden' from the kids," said teacher JoAnn Heller.

"The Mummy" could have been one heck of a thrill ride, if only its cast wasn't intent on being the Three Stooges.That the movie doesn't irretrievably sink under the weight of its woefully misplaced madcap antics is testimony to a special-effects team that continually outdoes itself and a villain who makes for one seriously mean undead machine.When "The Mummy" sticks to its source material, those walking advertisements for Ace bandages that have been wandering the streets of Cairo since Pharaoh's time, it's one cool flick.

Maryland's own mummy is back, tanned as ever after an 18-month stay on the West Coast.In its first local public appearance, the body of a Baltimore-area man mummified five years ago at the University of Maryland School of Medicine was the star of a two-day Egyptian festival that ended yesterday at Port Discovery, the downtown children's museum.Though most children's entertainment is "hands-on" or electronic these days, the mummy didn't have to do a thing to wow curious youths. Lying under a Plexiglas cover, the linen-wrapped body merely exposed one ankle and foot to show how brown and leathery its skin had become from the ancient embalming techniques used by Maryland and New York researchers.

Just in time for Halloween, "Under Wraps" (7 p.m.-8: 35 p.m., Disney) presents three 12-year- olds who discover a 3,000- year-old mummy and accidentally set him free. But he can't survive in the modern world, so they have to find a way to help him. The new made-for-cable family movie stars Bill Fagerbakke, Adam Wylie, Mario Yedidia and Clara Bryant.Pub Date: 10/25/97

WASHINGTON -- A young Inca girl whose 500-year-old body, clothed in brilliant finery, was found frozen on a Peruvian mountaintop last year died from a crushing blow to the head, a ritual sacrifice offered up to an Andean mountain.That was the long-awaited conclusion yesterday of a group of scientists who examined the mummy using a computerized X-ray at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.The girl's body, extraordinary for being so well-preserved, has captured international attention since an American archaeologist discovered it on an expedition in September.

Inaccuracies cited in mummy articleRichard O'Mara's May 14 article, "Wrapped up in mummies," contained inaccuracies concerning mummies in the collection of Goucher College.The article omitted mention of the fact that the partially unwrapped mummy of a woman on display in Gilman Hall at the Johns Hopkins University (known informally there as "Boris") and one of the mummies on view at the Walters Art Gallery are on loan from Goucher College. The Rev. John Franklin Goucher, the college's founder, received the mummies and other ancient Egyptian artifacts from an Egyptian museum.

CARSON CITY, Nev. -- Anthropologists at the Nevada State Museum say they have found the oldest known mummy in North America -- and they found it right on their own shelves.The mummy, known as the Spirit Cave man, had been found in a Nevada cave in 1940, but recent advances in radiocarbon dating allowed scientists to determine, to their amazement, that the remains they had thought dated back about 2,000 years were in fact more than 9,400 years old.The mummy's great age and excellent state of preservation will provide critical information about life at the end of the ice age, including an unsuspected sophisticated level of textile weaving and clues to the identity of some of the continent's earliest settlers, anthropologists said.

WISCASSET, Maine -- Nonesuch House Antiques is "a weird shop," owner Terry R. Lewis admits.Just off Route 1 in what bills itself as "the prettiest village in Maine," the store is considered an affront by some in this white-clapboard and green-shutter town.Its contents spill onto the sidewalk: cement statuary, including a 6-foot Statue of Liberty, and an old, red, wooden telephone booth.Inside are narrow paths through piles and piles of stuff so varied it defies cataloging.In just one section of the warren of rooms that make up the shop are duck decoys, a bird house, old books and magazines, dusty bottles, crockery, pots and pans, furniture, wooden boat models, a beer stein and an antique bilge pump from a schooner.

Trick or Treat on Monster Street By Danny Schnitzlein and illustrator Matt Faulkner Peachtree / 32 pages / ages 4-8 / $16.95 A boy who fears monsters and things that goes bump in the night dreads the approach of Halloween. While his older brothers dress in terrifying costumes, he wears a bunny suit when he goes out trick or treating. He thinks his worst fears are about to come true when he becomes lost in the woods. Creepy sounds, eerie trees, lightning and thunder send the boy running to the nearest house.

Three yetis, a yak and a couple of yuks. That's all you get in the way of original entertainment in The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, an extravagant and frenetic third entry in the franchise about adventurer Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his continuing fights with the embalmed yet undead. It's like an Indiana Jones movie without rhythm, wit or personality, just a desperate, headlong pace. It does have a sense of the ridiculous (one character declares "You guys are like mummy magnets!"

For years it has been a quiet mystery in a glass case at the Walters Art Museum, where it rested a few feet from a 4,000-year-old coffin in what is known as the Afterlife Room. But yesterday the 5-foot, 2,900-year-old mummy traveled by truck to University of Maryland Medical Center for its first-ever CT scan to see whether scientists can learn more about it - including whether "it" is a he or a she. For the mummy and its retinue, the biggest challenge was the same one facing everyone negotiating Baltimore's midday traffic: getting there in one piece.

When American Dime Museum owner-curator Dick Horne auctioned off his mass of oddities Monday, he raised $107,000 but kissed goodbye such wonders as a 9-foot Peruvian mummy ($3,000) and a monkey automaton ($2,100). Now that fate has banged down its gavel on the Dime, we wondered: What is Baltimore's quirkiest collection now? Do you own 3,241 pairs of bowling shoes? Is your cousin's basement overrun with Elvis hairpieces? Does your friend have an entire room devoted to gourds that resemble politicians?

The American Dime Museum's mass of miscellany has been sold to the four winds. At an auction on Monday, owner-curator Dick Horne raised more than $107,000 at auction, with a replica of a Coney Island Ferris wheel fetching the top price of $4,750 - not far ahead of a 9-foot Peruvian mummy ($3,000), a monkey automaton ($2,100), and an abstract finger painting by Betsy the Chimp ($1,750). Now that fate has banged down its gavel on the Dime, we wondered: What is Baltimore's quirkiest collection now?

BOONSBORO-- --This is it," the hand-painted sign declares, with an arrow directing passing vehicles to turn off the two-lane country road just past a ripening cornfield. Making that turn transports visitors into Maryland's past, ancient and recent. "This" is Crystal Grottoes, the state's only public cave, tucked into a rocky hill alongside South Mountain Creek just outside Boonsboro in Washington County. Here, for no more than a sawbuck, the curious can briefly escape the summer's heat by venturing underground, where it's a naturally cool 54.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Archaeologists in Peru have discovered a 15-century-old mummy of a tattooed Moche woman entombed with a dazzling collection of weapons and jewelry. The woman, clearly a member of royalty, was buried with a sacrificed teenage slave at her feet and surrounded by multiple signs of femininity, including precious jewelry, golden needles and bejeweled spindles and spindle whorls for spinning cotton. But her burial bundle also contained gilded copper-clad war clubs and finely crafted spear throwers -- objects never before seen in a Moche woman's tomb.

The American Dime Museum on Maryland Avenue opened its doors to visitors for the last time Saturday. A large crowd showed up to say farewell to the mummy, the giant baseball bat and the other attractions.

TV PICK-- THE MUMMY WHO MIGHT BE KING-- Could a mummy found in Niagara Falls be the remains of a pharaoh? (MPT, Tuesday 8 p.m.)

The seven Girl Scouts from Queen Anne's County and their chaperons trail Kirsten Schafer as she takes them into a gallery of Egyptian artifacts at the Walters Art Museum. Schafer, the museum's coordinator of children and family programs, gathers the scouts around a glass box with a human mummy preserved inside. Immediately they are fascinated, and even more so when Schafer leads them to a cat mummy. "I liked the Egyptian section, especially the mummies and hieroglyphics," says 10-year-old Megan McGill later in the tour.