View from the North 40: A video menagerie of glassworks: My obsession

I didn’t expect to become obsessed with glass-making videos, yet here I am spending several hours a week watching Youtube videos of the folks at the Corning Museum of Glass make the most beautiful glassworks.

Just this morning I watched one of their glass artists, called gaffers, and his team of three or four students make one and a half elaborate blue-glass goblets in one hour and 14 minutes — like it was nothing.

They took metal rods, stuck them in a vat of molten glass, and through a cooperative ritual-slash-dance of spinning the metal, blowing air into the glass and stretching, pi...