THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AFP) – Thousands of bottles of rare cognac and other drink, some dating back to the French Revolution, went up for sale Friday, with its Dutch collector expected to reap several million dollars.

Describing it as the “largest collection of old liquors in the world,” a spokesman for Breda publisher Bay van der Bunt said around 5,000 bottles of cognac, whisky, armagnac and other liquors are to be sold for a total estimated price of $8 million (6 million euros).

Van der Bunt “promised his wife he’d sell his collection when she retired at age 65 and he’s making good on that promise,” Bart Laming told AFP.

He said that Van der Bunt, 63, who inherited part of the collection from his father and grandfather and stored it in a cellar at his home in the southwestern Dutch city, had no children to hand it to.

The collection includes a hand-blown 6-liter bottle of 1795 Brugerolle cognac believed to have been requisitioned by French revolutionary army officers.

“It is believed this bottle also accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on his campaigns and is the only one left in the world,” Laming said.

On its own, the bottle has an asking price of 138,000 euros, although Van der Bunt is hoping to negotiate a sale for most of the collection as a single lot.

Van der Bunt, who has been adding to the collection for the last 35 years, bought the Brugerolle at a Christie’s auction in Chicago in 1990.

The collector, who ironically does not drink alcohol, also bought bottles from famous restaurants such as Maxim’s in Paris and Le Cirque in New York, Laming said.

He said that several buyers have already shown interest, mainly from China and Russia.

However the oldest cognac, dating back to 1760, will not be for sale.

“That is a real heirloom. It stays with Mr. Van der Bunt,” he said.

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) – The schooner Western Union is sailing toward being named Florida’s official state flagship.

The Florida Senate unanimously passed a bill (SB 326) on Wednesday that would give that designation to the 130-foot long ship.

The Western Union is based in Key West where it’s being turned into a floating museum.

Construction of the yellow pine and mahogany ship began in Grand Cayman, but it was completed in Key West in 1939. It served as a cable vessel for the Western Union Telegraph Co. for 34 years.

It later was put to work as a charter boat.

The bill next goes to the House, where similar legislation is pending.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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HOUMA, La. (AP) – Replicas of two of the three ships that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World will be displayed next month in Houma.

The Nina and Pinta will be open to the public Feb. 17-26 at the Downtown Marina, and will depart on Feb. 27.

A statement from the Columbus Foundation says the Nina was built by hand and without power tools. The Pinta is larger than the ship used by Columbus. It was built recently in Brazil to accompany the Nina.

The vessels tour together as a sailing museum, providing education to school children and maritime enthusiasts about caravels, the broad-bowed three-masted ships used by Columbus and many early explorers.

After Texas visits in March, the ships will be in Lake Charles, La., on April 27-May 8 for the Contraband Days celebration.

Self-guided tours cost $6 to $8. Group tours are $4 per person. A minimum of 15 people is required for group tours.

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Online:

http://www.thenina.com

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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BUCHAREST, Romania – A bronze yak offered by China’s Mao Zedong and an African leopardskin are among official presents given to the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu that will be auctioned off in Bucharest on Thursday.

The Jan. 26 sale in the Romanian capital falls on what would have been Ceaucescu’s 94th birthday.

Enameled and silver doves given by the former Shah of Iran as well as a pen presented by Japan to Romania’s former strongman will also be offered to collectors, along with many other objects from Communist times (1947-1989).

Among the latter are posters promoting healthy food like fruit or holidays on the Black Sea as well as other “proletarian” artifacts.

The auction is called “Golden Age” in reference to the final years of Ceausescu’s rule, when propaganda pictured a thriving Romania whereas in reality people were suffering food shortages.

Ceausescu and his wife Elena fled Bucharest after mass street protests at the end of 1989, when the iron curtain fell across eastern Europe. They were executed on Christmas Day the same year.

“Whether we like it or not, the communist regime is a page of our history. This time we are proposing to think about it in a different way from history books and sociological analysis,” Alin Ciupala, an art expert for the Bucharest-based auction house ArtMark told AFP.

Some of the objects were auctioned in 1999 by the state body charged with dealing with the dictator’s goods and came back on the market through private owners.

Several works from the Romanian-born Victor Brauner, a Paris-based Surrealist painter will also go under the hammer in Bucharest the same day.

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WASHINGTON, (AFP) – A mysterious nocturnal visitor who used to visit the grave of American poet Edgar Allen Poe on his birthday and lay a rose in his memory failed to appear for the third consecutive year, U.S. media said.

After waiting up all night, the curator of the Poe museum in Baltimore officially declared on Thursday that the nighttime tradition was over.

“I more or less resigned myself that it was over with before tonight,” said curator Jeff Jerome, who has been curator of the Poe House since 1979.

“What I’ll miss most is the excitement of waiting to see if he’s going to show up,” he added to the Baltimore Sun.

Each year since 1949, the 100th anniversary of Poe’s birth, an often-times cloaked individual left a bottle of cognac and a few roses at the foot of Poe’s tomb, usually at night, in tribute to the legendary poet.

No one has ever been able to identify the mystery visitor. But a blurry photo on the wall of Poe’s house, now preserved as a museum, shows a mystery man leaving his tributes on the grave.

The original yearly visitor apparently died in 1998, but apparently passed the pilgrimage on to his two sons.

More than the 5,000 people visit the house every year where the author of The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum and the narrative poem, The Raven, spent part of his short life.

Poe—best known as a master of mystery and the macabre, but also considered to be the inventor of detective dramas—died in 1849 at the age of 40.

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ASHBURNHAM, Mass. (AP) – The value of listening to a Brahms piece on a 19th century Streicher grand piano must be heard.

Collecting grand pianos so one can hear what musical pieces from their respective eras would have sounded like on the instruments of their time may sound unusual to some.

It certainly did to WCVB Channel 5’s Chronicle, which has included Patricia and E. Michael Frederick’s collection of historical grand pianos in a segment on “Unusual Collections.”

The Fredericks say they love to have a chance to spread the word about their piano collection, which has attracted accomplished musicians and beginners alike from all over the U.S. and the world since opening their Historical Piano Study Center at the former Stevens Library Building at 30 Main St., adjacent to Town Hall, in 2000.

Just don’t call it a museum.

Though the pianos are very old, some dating as far back as the 1790s, the Fredericks say their pianos are meant to be played, rather than observed liked antiques on a shelf.

“I’m sure they make beautiful furniture, but looking at them that way is boring and dull,” E. Michael Frederick, 67, said.

“We didn’t get them to be eye candy,” Patricia Frederick, 68, said. “We got them because we wanted to see how music sounded when it was written.”

According to the Fredericks, people in the 1800s bought new pianos every few years, the same way people do with computers today, because they were constantly changing and evolving and new sound qualities were being sought.

In that era, they said, pianos from different countries, and even pianos from different makers within the same city, all sounded different, unlike the homogenous sounds of pianos made today.

“People today don’t want to play a piano in one city and have it sound and feel completely different in another,” Patricia Frederick said.

What they are losing out on, however, are the sounds composers intended them to hear when their pieces are played on the proper instruments, the Fredericks believe.

“When people come here and play on our pianos, they hear things in the music they’ve never heard before,” E. Michael Frederick said. “These effects were easy to accomplish with the piano the composer had, but the modern piano has different goals. Piano companies used to be managed by people who designed pianos. Today, the president is a businessman who couldn’t design a piano if his life depended on it. He relies on merchandising and what he thinks will sell.”

Patricia Frederick said keys on pianos in the past were much different from those of today. They often had rounded edges and didn’t require heavy plunking because the keys had shorter distances to drop and were lifting lighter hammers, resulting in a light, fluttery playing style. This change in design has affected the posture and style of most pianists, he said.

“We’re very slow, heavy and almost arthritic today in the way we perform,” he said. “The way people look at music has changed also. We tend to think of people in earlier periods as being more staid and respectable than they actually were.”

Recording is another factor that has changed people’s expectations about music, E. Michael Frederick said. Today, wrong notes can be digitally changed and performers are expected to sound as perfect and polished as their recordings suggest.

“Even the best pianists miss notes,” Patricia Frederick said. “People didn’t expect to have a canned, perfect performance each time.”

Before opening the center in 2000, the Fredericks lived with all of their pianos crammed inside the various rooms of their Water Street home, some turned on their sides to fit several in each room. Patricia Frederick has even created a layout map of the rooms of their house to show all of the inconvenient places where they had been stored.

Today, their collection includes 25 pieces—Brodmanns, Bosendorfers, Erards, Bluthners, Streichers and many others—at the Historical Piano Study Center and an additional nine still kept at home. The collection includes mainly Viennese and Parisian pianos, though there are some from London, Leipzig, New York and Boston. A piano makes it into their collection only if pieces from that time and location are still widely played and appreciated.

The Fredericks have been hosting historical piano concerts in the spring and fall at the Ashburnham Community Church at 9 Chapel St. since 1985. Interest has grown immensely over the years. Patricia Frederick said they began with only two or three shows each season and have expanded to six. The events last year averaged about 100 people per show, she said.

Though the Fredericks don’t plan on retiring anytime soon, they are looking for people or organizations interested in “protecting the ecological diversity in classical music” and keeping the center open once they do.

“To do something like this right, you have to create the people who will be your successors,” Patricia Frederick said, to ensure the pianos are properly cared for and preserved for future use.

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Online:http://www.frederickcollection.org

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) – Virtual visitors to Mount Rushmore can now explore even more remote areas of the memorial than some who see it in person.

Three-dimensional laser technology scans that captured every nook of the four presidential faces and other features of the monument last year mean that starting Tuesday, visitors will be able to take in-depth tours online of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in western South Dakota.

The portal, comprised of models of the monument, allows people remote access to the site to plan a visit or explore unusual areas, said Maureen McGee-Ballinger, the memorial’s director of interpretation and education. The monument draws about 3 million in-person visitors a year.

Online users are able to manipulate or dissect the three-dimensional models in various ways to learn more about the 60-foot granite carvings of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, McGee-Ballinger said.

Crews scanned the entire monument and other features of the park in 2010 for historic documentation and preservation.

“They physically scanned all the different aspects of the sculpture,” McGee-Ballinger said. “This is going to really enhance our preservation aspect.”

The project is a five-year collaboration between the National Park Service and CyArk, a nonprofit project of the Kacyra Family Foundation based in Orinda, Calif. The Scottish government also provided resources and technology to perform the 3-D laser documentation, McGee-Ballinger said.

Some of the sights and experiences that virtual visitors to the memorial will be able to take in that they couldn’t in person are climbing to the top of the structure or accessing the Hall of Records behind the presidents’ heads, said Elizabeth Lee, director of operations at CyArk.

Younger people are so accustomed to three-dimensional content because of video games that “being able to communicate about a historical site or the reservation work, you need something that is going to interest them or entice them,” Lee said.

“Just on the educational front, having 3-D media is a great way to engage the next generation,” she said.

The Kacyra Family Foundation, formed to foster humanitarian, cultural and scientific endeavors, has documented about 50 historical sites using state-of-the-art technology, including Pompeii in Italy and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. It says it is committed to preserving world heritage and freely disseminating the data.

The Mount Rushmore data will also be available to researchers and teachers who want to incorporate it into their lesson plans, McGee-Ballinger said.

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Online: http://archive.cyark.org/mount-rushmore-national-memorial-intro

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Follow Kristi Eaton on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kristieaton.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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MIAMI (AP) – NASA is questioning whether Apollo 13 commander James Lovell has the right to sell a 70-page checklist from the flight that includes his handwritten calculations that were crucial in guiding the damaged spacecraft back to Earth.

The document was sold by Heritage Auctions in November for more than $388,000, some 15 times its initial list price. The checklist gained great fame as part of a key dramatic scene in the 1995 film Apollo 13 in which actor Tom Hanks plays Lovell making the calculations.

After the sale, NASA contacted Heritage to ask whether Lovell had title to the checklist. Greg Rohan, president of Dallas-based Heritage, said Thursday the sale has been suspended pending the outcome of the inquiry. The checklist, he said, is being stored for now in the company’s vault.

Rohan said Lovell provided a signed affidavit that he had clear title to the ring-bound checklist, which is standard procedure. Heritage does robust business in space memorabilia and this is the first time NASA has ever raised questions about ownership of its items, he added.

“It’s one that is near and dear to our hearts,” Rohan said of the space collectibles business. “We, like a lot of people, consider these astronauts to be national heroes.”

The latest inquiry follows a federal lawsuit NASA filed last year in Miami against Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell seeking return of a camera he brought back from his 1971 moon mission. That lawsuit was settled in October when Mitchell agreed to give the camera to NASA, which in turn is donating it to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said the lawsuit and Lovell inquiry do not represent an aggressive, broad new agency effort to recover space items.

“It’s a challenge to continually monitor the growing auctions community, which is usually how these items come to light,” he said in an email. “This latest issue demonstrates a need to reach out to former astronauts and other former agency personnel who may have these kind of items.”

Lovell, 83, lives near Chicago and owns a restaurant bearing his name in Lake Forest, Ill. In an email Friday to The Associated Press, the former astronaut said he is “seeking a meeting with NASA administration to clear up this misunderstanding.” He did not elaborate.

The Apollo 13 moon mission was aborted about 200,000 miles from Earth when an oxygen tank exploded on April 13, 1970, causing another tank to fail and seriously jeopardizing the three-man crew’s ability to return home. Astronaut Jack Swigert famously said “Houston, we’ve had a problem here” after the explosion.

The crew was forced to move from the command ship into the attached lunar landing module for the return flight. Lovell’s calculations on the checklist were key in transferring navigation data from the command craft to the lunar module.

NASA has raised questions about title rights for three other space items Heritage had sold in the same November auction. Two were from Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikart: a lunar module identification plate that brought more than $13,000 and a hand controller that received a $22,705 bid. The space agency also targeted a fourth item, a hand glove worn by Alan Shepard during training for Apollo 14, that brought more than $19,000.

In an email to Heritage, NASA Deputy Chief Counsel Donna M. Shafer said there was no indication the agency had ever transferred ownership of any of the items to the astronauts.

“Only NASA has the authority to clear NASA property for sale,” Shafer said in the email, which was provided by NASA to The Associated Press.

She said the matter has been turned over to NASA’s Office of Inspector General, adding that “there is potential risk of the items being seized by the government until title issues have been resolved.”

In the Mitchell lawsuit, his attorney argued prior to the settlement that NASA officials told astronauts long ago they could keep certain equipment from the missions, and many such items wind up on auction house lists. A 1972 NASA memo seems to back up that claim, requiring only that the astronauts provide the agency with lists of items in their possession.

Apollo 15 astronauts were reprimanded after they took unauthorized, special envelopes to the moon with stamps that were given a special postal marking shortly after their return in 1971. They had a deal with a German stamp dealer who later sold them for $1,500 each.

Last month, the NASA inspector general reported that since 1970, more than 500 pieces of moon rocks, meteorites, comet chunks and other space material have been stolen or gone missing. The report said NASA needs to keep better track of some 26,000 samples sent to researchers and museums or the agency runs greater risk they will be lost.

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Follow Curt Anderson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Miamicurt

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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