One of the things I like best about this blog is getting emails from readers who know something that I don’t. Here are a couple of things I learned from them recently.

First, alert reader Mike Loeb (’63) figured out the location of the castle in the Lindsey Blayney picture I posted last week. It’s the Landshut Castle, over looking the town of Bernkastel-kues in the Mosel Valley. This is a pretty big town in the middle Mosel region, and unsurprisingly it’s a prominent wine producing area, known for its Reislings. Every September the town hosts a big wine festival that includes a fireworks display from up at the Castle. Here’s a link to a story about last year’s festival. It sounds fabulous! I can’t go this year, but I promise I will someday. For purposes of historical research and what not. Here’s the view today. It’s considerably less spooky:

Another alert reader, Rice’s fine General Counsel, Richard Zansitis, wrote in response to an earlier post about the Faculty Chamber. He noted that he had recently been in the Faculty Room in Nassau Hall at Princeton and that it bore a striking resemblance to Rice’s. This was interesting to me because that room assumed it’s present form in 1906, while Edgar Lovett was still there. It underwent a major renovation under Princeton’s President Woodrow Wilson and it’s opening was celebrated with a great deal of pomp. Here’s a link to a small pamphlet that was made on that occasion that includes a picture of the room as Lovett saw it. And here it is today:

Both of these rooms were inspired, generally, by the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. The model was probably pretty widely used, but it’s interesting to see the similarities.

And finally, here’s one from me. This is a picture of a real carillon, the one at Iowa State:

Just as a reminder, here’s the size of the electronic carillon played by Roland Pomerat at Rice in the 1960s:

That's Grungy's hand.