Post-Babylonian Pediment

Post-Babylonian Artifact is a term my friend Brad Massengill came up with years and years and years ago. I have, in my 'collection,' a couple of Brad's PBAs, and am now happily making my own.

After eleven years of living in this lovely little house, I am finally getting around to putting up the trim. Why, you may wonder, has it taken me eleven years to get around to doing this? The truth is that I have paid for this to be done twice, and it never got done. Other things got done instead; there were some misunderstandings about what could be done for how much, and, well, it came down to me having to do it myself... Which meant I needed the tools to do it... And then I cut my hand off with the table saw... (No, no, not quite... It just seemed that way.) (There's a post about that somewhere here.)

So, finally, having overcome my reluctance to use the table saw again, I finished the floor, which meant I could do the trim. Then I decided I wanted to do the beadboard, which meant more trim, and then I had a vision... A vision of things sitting on top of the doors. Carved things. Suns. Moons. Stars. Hearts. Hands. All sorts of visions filled my head. Unfortunately, I don't carve and I'm not about to start trying. I do, however, have a jig saw, and thought perhaps I could create the thing I had seen with it.

It's a pediment. I'm not sure why something that goes on top of something is called a 'pediment.' It seems to me that a pediment should be at the foot of something,  but what do I know?

Somehow the whole Post-Babylonian thing is much in my mind these days. I have been reading with sheer and utter delight the Thursday Next series by Jason Fforde. It's a series of alternate reality detective novels set in a England in the mid-eighties where literature is much, much more important than it is in the generally accepted reality of 02010. (This blog is and always will be Y10K compliant.) (Unless I forget.) Don't bother if you're not into books or alternate reality or silliness. The books are sort of a cross between Philip K Dick and Brazil but in a literary vein. I loved PK in college, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik.