Simon and Ivan

Monopoly

2012-02-13T17:16:00.001-05:00

I've lost this game too many times to like it, but the Monopoly exhibit at the Museum of Play was really cool. The original 1933 board, hand-drawn by Charles Darrow, was round. It is extremely surreal to see the familiar illustrations on this board, just slightly different.

The original chance cards were not quite as decorative.

I do so love small things made big (in addition to big things made small).

The Landlord's Game was the precursor to Monopoly. It was patented by Elizabeth Magie, who hoped it would demonstrate the inherent problems in a system of land ownership in which rich people own everything and rent bits of it to poor people. This kind of game was popular in the early twentieth century, and people even made their own boards at home. The exhibit noted that Ivy League students played it, but changed the rules so that the winner was the person who could get the most money.

Probably the reason I never liked it is I'm basically a socialist.

The Harsh Truth

2012-02-09T05:03:00.003-05:00

A little while ago, Simon P. told me she had gotten engaged (!); a few days later we had this exchange over text:

Simon P.: I've just realized I will never marry Ari Shapiro.

Me: Ari Shapiro is gay. You never were going to marry Ari Shapiro.

Simon P.: BUT NOW IT'S SO REAL!

Don't worry, Simon P. You and Ari will always have NPR.

Toy Safari

2012-02-07T03:53:00.000-05:00

When I was in fifth grade I did a project on Teddy Roosevelt. I remember this project with great fondness because I recreated the entire Roosevelt family in Playmobil form. As I recall, that was entirely unnecessary, but it was a lot of fun. I tied little nametags around their necks, and I remember looking sadly at Teddy's son Quentin and thinking, "Poor little Quentin, you're going to die in World War I and your father will never recover!" I was quite affected, for some reason, by the deaths of presidential children. I still get depressed when I think about Calvin Coolidge, Jr., who got a blister playing tennis with his brother, and died a week later from blood poisoning at the age of sixteen. Friends, always wear socks with sneakers. YOU COULD DIE OTHERWISE.

Anyway, the Museum of Play has this great Teddy Roosevelt action figure, for lack of a better term, which would have been really useful to me during that project.

Tiny Teddy Roosevelt

Tiny Teddy Roosevelt's tiny lion and tiny hilarious hippo

The museum also has a collection of fantastic miniature animals, which also brings back childhood memories. I had a set of little plastic animals that I used to play with. They were the subject of my first epic story, which I'm pretty sure is lost to the ages, and thank goodness, because I think everyone had names like "Ella the Elephant," which is just humiliating. I am sure if I had had animals made with real fur, like these, I would have been inspired to give Ella a better name, and I'd probably be published by now. SIGH.

I don't know what this is. It looks like a cross between a hyena and a wild boar.

Obviously the use of real fur in the creation of toys is inappropriate, BUT . . .

this camel is adorable and I want one.

I'm not sure about these either. Wild boars? They don't have very piggy noses.
Bison crossed with bears? The lack of teeth an horns in this collection
makes the animals quite difficult to identify.

I believe these terrifying creatures are supposed to be slavering after human flesh,

but I think it looks more like they're surprised but DELIGHTED to see you!

I have all kinds of questions about what these animals are made of, and how, and why, and where they came from, but Margaret Woodbury Strong's collection is really just a "collection" and less of a "museum," in that they don't give much information about anything. I'd like to wander through with an antiques expert some time and see what it's really all about.

Updates on important matters

2012-01-31T09:01:00.006-05:00

1. Here are some additions to my collection of library doodles:

2. I thought you would all like to know that the pillars on the Masonic temple (previously featured in this exciting post) have now been replaced with brand-new wooden, or more likely wood-covered, pillars that are shiny and lovely, and most importantly, match. My only complaint is that they're square, and I kind of miss the classic round pillars. But at least the roof isn't sagging anymore.

3. Our local Mary Kay representative seems to have traded in her pink Cadillac for a pink SUV of some kind. I hope this will prove marginally less embarrassing to her unfortunate son.

Miniatures!

2012-01-27T19:45:00.002-05:00

The non-terrifying portion of Margaret Woodbury Strong's collection is the dollhouse portion. You may translate everything I say in this post as, "Aaaaaaaah look how wee!"

One thing I was never really interested in when it came to dollhouses, somewhat predictably, was the dolls. They can't stand up without help, they have to lean on things if they don't have stands. And stands look stupid. Plus, they're never as realistic as the furnishings, so they kind of ruin the illusion. Having said that, I like the lady on the second floor. She is quite elegant.

I'd never seen a Spanish dollhouse before. Or is this Mexican?

I should really learn to read the signs.

Tiny bed. Tiny mattress. Tiny pillow. I bet it once had tiny sheets, too.

I really enjoy kitchen fixtures from the 1930s for some reason -- both in miniature and full-sized. I think I have a refrigerator like that in my own collection, but it's been so long since I've looked through it that I can't quite remember. I'm sure my parents would love for me to find out . . . and then remove it all from their house.

I've composed a haiku concerning this tureen. Here it is:

Beautiful tureen

Color of cream and mustard

I'd buy you for real

This looks cozy. Back to that tureen though, isn't that a great tureen?
My god, what a tureen.

The lighting in this photo makes this room look, to me, weirdly real.

If only that doll weren't there, you'd never know it was a dollhouse.

SEE?! Dolls are stupid.

One dollhouse was just a huge room decorated like a nineteenth-century ballroom.

It was pretty much adorable, but not adorable enough for a haiku.

Bonus Doll

2012-01-26T18:04:00.000-05:00

This doll is not in Margaret Woodbury Strong's collection. It's in the National Toy Hall of Fame, in a sort of tableau into which the museum has worked just about every possible toy. Which is fine. But what possessed them to represent the Statue of Liberty like this is a mystery that can't ever be solved.

Probable misquotation from Rich, guessing at the thought process behind this:

"I know! Let's wrap a harlot in a flag!"

I believe his theory to be correct. But I also believe it's not an inaccurate representation of this country's fundamental cultural values. So maybe they were making a statement.

Margaret Woodbury Strong's Slumbering Army

2012-01-25T15:54:00.086-05:00

Remember that time when I went into the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh and scared myself silly with old dolls? Well. If you'd like to replicate that experience for yourself, you don't have to go all the way to Scotland. You'll find all the terrifying dolls you need, in excess, in Margaret Woodbury Strong's doll collection.

Let's talk about Ms. Strong for a moment. She lived from 1897 to 1968. The Strong Museum website says that she was born into "a wealthy family of collectors," which makes me immediately think of the room in the Vanderbilt museum filled with thousands of inert marine animals floating in formaldehyde. By "inert," I mean "dead." That room is every bit as creepy and weird as it is marvelous and impressive. I picture Vanderbilt as having some kind of mania of accumulation, not in the sense of hoarding, but in the sense that he knew he had enough money to own everything on the planet, including nature itself, and he went about systematically acquiring it. There's a kind of collecting that seems to be particular to the very, very wealthy, and I believe a collection of twenty-seven thousand dolls falls into that category.

However.

Apparently when Strong got the idea for a museum, she was going to have it in a wing of her house, and it was going to be called, "The Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum of Fascination," and that name would have been quite accurate. The dolls are fascinating. Unfortunately, looking through my pictures, I discovered that I appear to have self-edited for the pretty dolls, and only took a few pictures of the most fascinating (i.e., horrifying) ones. The ones I have are decently horrifying, though. We'll work up to them.

Some of the dolls are quite beautiful.

Grace Kelly and the Prince of Monaco, in clothes that had to have been stitched by mice.

Henry VIII with Catherine Parr, one of the wives he neglected to murder
probably because he died first.

Please note the more-or-less anatomically-correct proportions of these dolls.

You won't be seeing that again for a while.

My, what long arms you have.

Oh . . . oh, dear.

These two are really rather exquisite. Look at his face! So expressive and perfect!
If only his wife didn't have that unfortunate witchy hue.

I have nothing snotty to say about this pair;

I think they're hilariously adorable.

On to the weirdness.

The head on the right wants to tell you that resistance is futile.
You will be assimilated.

The head on the left has no idea anything's wrong at all.

WHAT ON EARTH.

OH DEAR GOD.

Notice that the doll behind the addlepated human sphinx is looking at it very angrily.

I wouldn't want to share a glass case with that thing either.

Come to think of it, what with all the inert creatures in glass cases

this is very like Vanderbilt's, uh, Zoo of Death, if you will.

Can you imagine the horrors if they came alive and broke free

no wait let's not imagine that.

Of course this post is going to end with inappropriate uses of hair. Having been born in 1897, Margaret Woodbury Strong grew up in the heyday of inappropriate hair use. I made that up, I have no idea when the heyday of inappropriate hair use began and ended. But I know for a fact that it was going on when she was a child. Have a look at this charming photo of Strong as a little girl, with her beloved doll Mabel.

It's so much less cute when you discover, as the caption forces you to do, that Mabel had a wig made of Margaret's hair. I honestly think it's weird stuff like this that paved the way for the progressive income tax. Somebody had to curb the eccentricities of the wealthy when their inappropriateness began to reach egregious levels.

Butterfly Garden

2012-01-23T08:31:00.011-05:00

The last time I went to the butterfly garden at the Strong Museum of Play, I was with Ivan and I did not have a camera. I have learned since then! But all I learned was to bring my camera; I haven't learned how to take good pictures, especially of butterflies. Are you aware of how infrequently butterflies sit still? I sure am. Most of my pictures look like this:

This is a red lacewing, not that you can tell.

Harumph. The turtles, however, were cooperative.

This spot is the best spot and no other spot will do.

Another 48 hours in here and he'll confess, trust me.

Since the butterfly garden is sweltering hot, it doubles nicely as a greenhouse. Otherwise they probably could not call it a garden. It would be a butterfly warehouse. Which no one would pay to see, especially if there was no soothing spa music playing. In the garden, they had a lot of orchids, as well as these flowers that I think might be a kind of shrimp plant, even though their bracts are green and their flowers aren't nearly as alien-looking as golden shrimp plants:

It's misleading because the bracts are green, like leaves.
They may be undercover.

They also had this strange round species of flower that was very attractive to butterflies:

That leaf is a butterfly, by the way. And some people doubt evolution, pffft!

I did manage to get one pretty nice butterfly shot, and a moth:

I can't figure out what these are and it's really annoying me.

Giant Owl (a confusing name, in my opinion)

A blue morpho landed on my shoe, which I seem to remember happening the last time, too. They must be the friendliest of all the butterflies, because I tried to hug several of the others, and they weren't having it.

Coming Soon

2012-01-19T22:08:00.001-05:00

Coming soon if I remember to write it over the weekend: an epic post about the Strong Museum of Play. It will include:

butterflies
turtles
bracts (I think)
historic dolls of the terrifying, horrifying, and mystifying varieties
miniatures
the original Monopoly
video of a Unicorn Tang
an unexpected but familiar friend (no, not an alpaca)
yet another inappropriate use of hair

and, as a bonus,

you will get to find out whom my friend Rich referred to as "a harlot in a flag," a phrase that is still making me laugh intermittently with no prompting at all

Fish Tank

2012-01-17T19:08:00.000-05:00

Fish

Other fishy thing

AND MY AXE!

2012-01-13T06:15:00.021-05:00

When the trailer for Fellowship of the Ring came out, this scene was in it (only Gimli did not say his line twice):

I'm not sure why, but Matt and I found this hysterical, to the point that when we went to go see the movie in the theater, this line made us both laugh out loud. No one else laughed, but that's probably because they were overwhelmed by the magnificence of film and whatnot. Now that it's been ten years, apparently other people find this line funny, too. It's something about Gimli, I don't know. He's so angry, already, and he hasn't even gotten started yet. Wait til people start tossing you around, Gimli; then there will be something to be angry about!

Anyway, when I was looking for library graffiti, I came across this, and I laughed out loud again. I was not expecting to see this on a wall.

Accidentally Gaming the System

2012-01-11T07:01:00.103-05:00

Because I work in an awesome place that doesn't want me to die of a preventable illness while still on their insurance, they offer free biometric screenings once a year, and if they think you need it, they refer you to a free program to help you with whatever your problem is. They pay you to do the screening, and they pay you for the programs you complete. It is a pretty sweet deal . . . which I accidentally discovered how to maximize.

Part of the screening is testing your BMI. However, I forgot about that part when they weighed me. At the doctor's office, if you take off your winter coat and your shoes and your purse in order to get a reading that is within ten pounds of being accurate, they laugh at you, as if you're vain. (Another reason to leave my doctor? Yes.) So, having been socially conditioned to get weighed with everything on, I just hopped on that scale and rolled my eyes when a number came up that was definitely ten pounds higher than normal.

When the nurse was done testing me for everything, she looked up my BMI, and it was a tenth of a point into the overweight category. A tenth of a point, with ten pounds of extra non-bodyweight-stuff on me. This means two things. First, I'm eligible for a free program where someone will encourage me to exercise by saying nice things to me over the phone, and second, I got a ten-minute lecture on keeping to "best practices" regarding my eating habits, not to eat prepackaged food, and to have lots of fiber. I did not mind being eligible for the program because the numbers are what they are, as far as she knows. But I was somewhat affronted by the lecture. I wanted to say, "By prepackaged food, are you talking about the plastic bag that the celery comes in?" But I am not rude, so I let her go on and on about the dangers of heart disease, while I thought about how I had been noticing how loose all my pants were. (And in fact, when I went home and weighed myself, I did came in even lower than I thought I would. So there!)

She sent me off, steaming gently, with a little form to fill out about which programs I would like to take advantage of. And that's when I remembered, hey! I get paid for this farce! I will essentially get a hundred dollars to take off my coat. While this was entirely inadvertent and I would give up the hundred dollars not to have been lectured about not doing things that I never do, I am now tempted to put weights in my pockets next time, because eating unhealthy pays more. Then when I lose sixty pounds in a week, and I can tell the person on the phone IT'S A MIRACLE, LADY!!! I'M CURED!!

It is also tempting to do absolutely nothing and take the money as payment for emotional damages, but I figure if I'm in the program anyway, I might as well let them encourage me to lose another eight pounds. Then I'll be smack in the middle of the healthy range . . . and I'll get half or a third of the amount of money I could if I was less healthy. There is something about this system of rewards that isn't quite right.

L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

2012-01-09T20:52:00.000-05:00

From The Little Prince: "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

In Which the Arbiter of Inappropriateness Misjudges Slightly But Is Still Almost Always Right

2012-01-05T07:49:00.082-05:00

This story comes in three parts.

Part One: Around my birthday, I got a delicious-smelling package from my dear friend The Clergy, and inside it were these absolutely adorable and classy tins. And as a bonus, the tins were full of tea! It was like a double present.

Part Two: Also around my birthday, as I may have mentioned, my dear friend Simon P. came to visit. Simon P. and I exhausted ourselves so much that by her last night here, we spent an entire hour just laughing. At nothing in particular. Like little girls at a slumber party. Who've just had a lot of cider and donuts. (It was Halloween.) During the exhaustion-induced hilarity, we had a worrying exchange in which Simon P. suggested an inappropriate use of food as she is wont to do. I reported the exchange live on Facebook, and I reproduce it here (I like to use primary source material whenever I can):

Click on this image if it's too small to read.

We had just discovered that more things than bacon could be inappropriate, and I was convinced that cider-tea fell into that category -- inappropriate, improper, and everything else with a negative prefix!

Part Three: A few days later, I opened up The Clergy's Hot Cinnamon Sunset and brewed a nice cuppa. And I drank some. And I said to myself HOLY MOTHER THAT IS SPICY. And then a thought came into my head for which I wholeheartedly blame Simon P. Because that thought was, "It's as if this tea needs to be brewed in something more substantial than water . . . UH OH."

Friends, I admit to you that I put that teabag into a mug of hot cider.

It was delicious.

So I am forced to concede that my sense of the inappropriate is not absolutely infallible. But there is no one else I trust to take up the role as Arbiter of Inappropriateness because the rest of you have repeatedly failed to recognize the most vile and egregious instances of inappropriateness even when they're staring you in the face. Take, for example, what I got in my stocking this Christmas:

There is no way I'm letting you people decide for yourselves what's appropriate and what isn't. You obviously have no idea what you're doing.

What ho what ho what ho!

2012-01-03T23:02:00.000-05:00

Never fear, old sports; this period of neglect is OVER. I have nine hundred things to blog about and I will never leave you alone again. Well, that is not even a half-truth. I have three things to blog about, one of which I can't remember right now, and I will leave you alone again tomorrow because it's an even day and I'm not a blogging machine after all. But there's still no reason to fear, because we have nothing to fear but fear itself, and mushrooms.

You may recall that we left off with library graffiti. I have a good deal more of this, and the supply is constantly replenishing itself. In honor of today's frigid temperatures, I offer this sentiment from the stairwell in the old stacks:

This is at the bottom of the stairwell. At the top of the stairwell is the first half of the sentence, but I didn't see that part at first because it's poorly lit. So I thought someone had hit upon an all-purpose excuse and decided to share it with her fellow students. Professor nagging you for a paper? But it's the dead of winter, you've been hibernating. Accidentally got addicted to ritalin? But it's the dead of winter, you've got to stay awake somehow. Crashed your car? Of course you did; it's the dead of winter. You can't be blamed for anything in the dead of winter because, come on, it's the dead of winter. Just let it go. We need to concentrate on survival.

Here's the first half of the sentence, and someone's rebuttal:

So the first half of "but it's the dead of winter" is, "It smells like spring." And then someone argues that it smells, instead, like Rochester, which I get the distinct sense is meant as an insult, although I'm not sure how the entire city of Rochester could smell bad. I can personally attest to the stairwell smelling, looking, and feeling like the innards of an interwar passenger liner, but I've never once walked outside in the city and thought to myself, "Boy, smells like Rochester all right, phew!" So I don't know what that's about, but I guess for the situations in which the "but it's the dead of winter" excuse doesn't work, you could use "smells like Rochester." Being peer-pressured into imbibing something foul? No, thank you, smells like Rochester. Rode your bike through a flower bed? Got disoriented due to the smell of Rochester. Late for work? Woke up, smelled Rochester, lost the will to live.

I was going to say that you never know, one of these brilliant minds might cure cancer someday, but then I realized the ones that will cure cancer probably aren't hanging out in the humanities library. Which makes me want to go check out the graffiti in the science library and see what's happening over there . . .

Uncertainty Principle

2011-11-23T19:21:00.001-05:00

"Heisenberg may have slept here" is written in at least three places in the library. To someone, or several someones, this is a very arresting joke. I am not sure why the joke revolves around Heisenberg possibly sleeping somewhere; I believe it would work with Heisenberg possibly doing anything, as long as it's not certain whether he did it or not, or where. (The Heisenberg's principle says you can only know the position of a particle or its rate of change, but never both at once.) This is, nevertheless, the format the joke usually takes, which I know because I checked with the internet. A better joke is the one that goes: "Heisenberg was pulled over for speeding outside of Munich. The officer asked, 'Do you know how fast you were going?' And Heisenberg said, 'No, but I know where I am.'" Thanks, internet.

Catalog Card Doodles

2011-11-21T20:15:00.002-05:00

My job has some unusual perks. One of them is getting to see what people doodle on the old catalog cards we put out as scrap paper. Here's what I've collected in the past six months or so.

This is the first one I found. No context, no explanation, just a flamingo.

Some express universal feelings.

Everyone feels this way when they do research.

Actually, I think everyone feels this way most of the time.

Others make no particular sense.

I like the noses.

I found these all on separate days.

By the time I found the third I was like HELLO ALREADY, JEEZ.

Psychoanalysis and the occult.

I do not know why he is saying "poop."

I found this the same day as the robot above.

Was there a late-night robot-drawing contest?

This guy turned up again several days later.

I keep hoping I'll see him again, but no luck yet.

Where are you?

I take this as a personal compliment on my job performance,

because I try to never leave out dull pencils.

. . . Yes, my job is deeply challenging.

There are also often six or eight cards with someone's math homework all over them. It's funny the places you come to expect to see math when you work at a university. It's just lying around everywhere. If only osmosis actually worked.

Paper Tardis

2011-11-20T14:44:00.001-05:00

So I have this fantastic co-worker. How fantastic? The other day we discovered that someone had planned a department potluck and already invited people and her response was, "Well! It's a parfait accompli!" Hahahahahaha. For this joke alone she deserves a big thank-you, but she has also been a really great friend lately, and is also my source for new Doctor Who episodes. So I thought it would be nice to make her a Tardis-shaped card to say thanks.

As with most cards, this turned out to be a serious project. It required re-thinking several times, and in fact several of the pieces pictured below didn't even end up in the final product. But you can see generally where I was going with it.

I was working off of a picture I got from the interwebs, which I traced on the paper. Thank goodness I finally found my Exacto knife, which was hiding in plain sight for three months in spite of the fact that I searched my entire apartment several times. I would not have been able to do those windows with a box-cutter, which I have been known to resort to.

I wasn't originally planning to add as many layers as I did, but it ended up looking much more realistic with more texture. The trickiest part is gluing pieces on in the right order, because there is no ungluing. The whole time I was very very nervous I was going to do something backwards and have to start over.

I started to get kind of giddy at this point. It looks like a Tardis!

The windows are translucent paper. Most worthwhile ninety-nine cents I ever spent in my life. Also, thank goodness somebody else has recreated the instructions on the door, and the St. John's Ambulance sign, because I wouldn't have gotten them right. The St. John's Ambulance sign makes this definitively an Eleventh-Doctor tardis, because the set decorators added it back for him. For the handle and the lock, I had to use tweezers. Let us just say I do not have the hands of a surgeon.

Here's the finished product! I very nearly forgot the police box sign, because it's not like it's an identifying feature or anything. And it's a little ripply from the glue, even though I used as little as I could. But overall, I have to admit, I'm quite pleased with it. I never know how these projects are going to come out, but this one was actually better than I was hoping for.

To compare, a picture of the real tardis:

Now, if only I can figure out how to make it bigger on the inside . . .

Fat Man Made of Paper

2011-11-17T22:10:00.000-05:00

This is a long and largely pointless story. The preparations for the Halloween party at work involved cutting about four thousand ravens out of black construction paper. To accomplish this in a timely fashion, we had a couple of raven-cutting sessions, one of which took place during a webinar. But it turned out the sound of cutting paper was too loud, so we had to stop. The webinar did not involve a picture, so once we stopped cutting, there was nothing to do but sit there and listen. Many of us confessed to each other later that we do not listen well when we are not doing anything else. In order to stay awake, I spent about twenty minutes braiding the fringe on my scarf. Then I realized there were a bunch of paper scraps in front of me. And I was so incredibly bored I started making shapes out of them. Most of them were semi-deformed faces BUT then this fat man appeared, and I thought he seemed nice, so I took him home. The end.

Inappropriate Uses - Not Just for Bacon Anymore!

2011-11-09T07:09:00.097-05:00

When Simon P. was here, we made a very important discovery. Inappropriateness is not limited to uses of bacon! Many things are inappropriately used, and this blog is here to alert you when such uses occur. I know this will come as a great surprise to many of you, so I'll ease you in to this new concept with a bacon-related example. My friends, Matt and Adam, and I recently spotted this truck driving next to us on the highway.

Even people who find all uses of bacon appropriate have to draw a line somewhere

This is what is known as an inappropriate use of a pig in advertising. It should be clear why this use is inappropriate: this is a pig who is dancing in a belt of sausages made of its brethren. If the pig were merely encased in chocolate, then it would be a simple inappropriate use of bacon, but these people have gone much further. They have crossed a line of inappropriateness regarding pigs that it isn't about taste buds anymore. It is about MORALITY! This pig is clearly a traitor to its species, and I haven't even gone into the bizarre and upsetting ramifications of its walking on two legs. Friends, never use a pig inappropriately in advertising. It is wrong.

Simon P. and I stumbled upon many an inappropriate use during her visit here. So many that I made notes. Notes that no longer make sense to me. For example, "inappropriate use of heat - xmas lights, soap." You can tell just from these words being near each other that this is undoubtedly inappropriate, but I am not entirely clear on the context. I think it might have involved a microwave, though. The microwave, being relatively new technology, is prone to being used inappropriately, and you should always consult your sense of appropriateness carefully before using it. If you are about to cause something to explode or melt in your kitchen, you are using your microwave inappropriately. However, if you are outside and have taken the ncessary safety precautions, your risk of inappropriateness is reduced.

My list of inappropriate uses also says "sticks." I admit I am not sure what I meant by this. We did spend about half an hour surgically removing a microscopic splinter from Simon P.'s finger, so it may have come out of that gruesome experience.

You could also call this an inappropriate use of eyebrow tweezers, but we were in a pinch

When the surgery was over, the patient applied a poultice of baking soda, as advised by the internet, to draw out the remains of the splinter, which may or may not have fallen apart during removal. (It was too small to tell.) This was an appropriate use of baking soda. The patient then applied a bacon-shaped bandage to the wound, which was not appropriate at all, but the patient was probably too woozy from the anesthesia to display proper judgment. Not that Simon P. has ever displayed a reliable sense of what is and is not inappropriate . . .

FOR EXAMPLE, while we were in the carriage house at Sonnenberg, we developed a difference of opinion regarding this:

Only appropriate if you are a zombie

According to the explanation, this is a tiny, one-person carriage used in the winter to get the mail. Simon P. finds this both appropriate and practical. Why would I not agree? What is not appropriate about this? I will tell you. It's the wheels. This is an inappropriate use of wheels, because this is not a carriage. This is very obviously a coffin. It is funereally-colored, long, only fits one person, and covers that person from head to toe, narrowing at the feet. This is a coffin, and it is not appropriate to put wheels on a coffin. If you do that, you are asking for an undignified accident involving the coffin rolling merrily down a hill with you chasing after it, leaving behind a crowd of scandalized mourners, of whom at least one is going to have to help you put the body back in, because of course it is going to fall out at the bottom of the hill when the coffin hits a rock, a tree, a curb or, god help you, a passing car. And you will have to explain why, when you put wheels on it, you did not also include a seatbelt. And a horn. If I have to explain why this is not appropriate, there is no hope for you.

But there are many things that are universally inappropriate in this day and age, and Simon P. and I agreed that hair receivers are one of those things. There is a disturbingly large collection of these in the mansion at Sonnenberg, displayed openly in the upstairs hall as if they are something to be proud of. They are not! For they are inappropriate! Victorian ladies used to pull out the hair caught in their hairbrushes and collect it in these porcelain receptacles for later use, either in stuffing something or creating some kind of monstrous "toy" or "jewelry" or "artistic" "object." This is bad enough when you use your own hair. But using someone else's hair, or hair you have cut from a deceased friend or relative (wasn't putting wheels on their coffin enough of an affront?), is taking sentimentality to a grotesque level.

Hair receptacle on the left; hair "art" on the right

This is a pretty clear-cut case of inappropriate, I think, although there is one thing I should add. I went to an art exhibit recently that consisted entirely of art made of extreme materials like bones and soap and dollar bills and cereal. One piece was a wall hanging in the shape of a New Orleans shotgun house, woven out of hair. My friend and my sister and I all liked this piece. But there are two reasons it was not inappropriate: (1) It was made of hair extensions found outside a salon shortly after Hurricane Katrina, which means it was making a deliberately unsettling Statement, and (2) it was on the same wall as the painting made with menstrual blood, and everything near that painting seemed appropriate by comparison. These, evidently, are the only conditions under which the use of detatched hair is appropriate. All other uses are inappropriate. A good rule of thumb is, if you have to ask yourself, "Would I need to compare this to a painting made with human bodily fluids to make it seem appropriate?" stop what you're weaving, eating, advertising, microwaving, or attaching wheels to, because it's not appropriate.

Other inappropriate uses include the following:
Inappropriate use of a civil rights leader (a bar called Freddy D's)
Inappropriate use of dessert (ice cream in the winter)
Inappropriate use of garlic (garlic ice cream)
Inappropriate use of beets #1 (beet ice cream)
Inappropriate use of beets #2 (beets in dishes involving beans)

As you can see, one inappropriate use tends to beget another, and ice cream is a very sensitive food that can easily become inappropriate if you're not careful. Same goes for beets. And microwaves. You should be alert to situations that can become inappropriate very quickly, such as funerals and your morning hair-brushing session, and keep a close eye on advertising, which is often inappropriate even when it isn't endorsing cannibalism among helpless animals. If we all remain vigilant, we can safeguard ourselves from being influenced by these inappropriate uses and retain our sense of what is appropriate (chocolate cake, always) and what is not (usually bacon). Good luck to you.

Nevermore

2011-11-07T09:01:00.077-05:00

For the two weeks before Halloween, I cut out and posted about nine hundred million ravens all over the library to advertise our annual Scare Fair. I must have formed an addiction, because on the evening of my birthday, I found myself enlisting my entire family and Simon P. to help me make a raven costume to wear to the party.

Simon P. found a fantastic deal on some kind of foamy-rubbery thing earlier in the day. It was the perfect size. After much consultation, we decided this was a decent approximation of raven wings. While my parents and I traced and cut this out, Simon P. made me an awesome beak.

Photo by Simon P.

Scare Fair is the only time of year undergrads get to go up in the tower. I was allowed to take Simon P. up before all the students got there. The first time I went up I swear my knees were shaking slightly because I had developed a sudden and unprecedented fear of heights. This time, being a bird, I felt perfectly at home.

Photo by Simon P.

The bird flapped a lot and tried to take off into the wind, but Simon P., notorious killjoy, advised strenuously against this. The bird, somewhat vexed, satisfied itself with having its picture taken a lot instead.

Photo by Simon P.

It took its wings off to go into Wegman's later, but put them on again to walk around the village. It now feels uncomfortable without them, and wears them about the house. It is so convinced that wings are the new Snuggies, it's thinking of making a second pair for guests.

More Fall Scenes at Sonnenberg

2011-11-03T20:13:00.000-04:00

Fall Flowers at Sonnenberg

2011-11-01T19:14:00.000-04:00

While my good friend and loyal reader Simon P. was here visiting, we took a trip to Sonnenberg Gardens. I was worried it might not be so lovely at the end of October, but it absolutely was. Simon P. was terribly patient while I took multiple pictures of every third flower, especially considering how cold it was. After this, we had to spend two hours eating crepes in front of a fire to warm up, which was a terrible hardship.

I am working my way through all of Simply Crepes's berry-related menu items one by one.

Halloween 2011

2011-10-31T21:43:00.056-04:00

Every year at work, there's a huge Halloween party that involves a ridiculous amount of effort on the part of staff all focused on just getting students to figure out how to use call numbers. This tree was created by the good folks at the Art Library. You'll notice the lower left side is particularly well-barked. That's because I barked it personally and have the glue gun wounds to prove it. All I can say is, thank goodness I didn't bark the wrong tree. (If I have not yet made this joke to you in person, don't worry, because I will.)

Simon P., who was visiting, came to work with me. Here at the photo booth, she made use of excess costume parts to impersonate a crab in the ocean. I genuinely believe this to be among the best costumes I have ever seen.

When we got home, we took a walk through town to look at all the Halloween costumes and decorations. There were two adorable firefighters, and one Viking in a horned hat and a fur coat. On the corner in front of the Catholic church, there were a couple of princesses with a tent handing out candy. They had a lot of penguins. I still haven't figured out why, although I don't see why not.

The people who are always awesome were awesome again this year. Not pictured: the ghost in the coffin, the legs sticking straight out of the ground, the jack o'lantern with a pig face (and ears), and the animation of a skull opening and closing its mouth in one of the upper windows.

It is very hard to take good pictures at night with my camera, so I had to stick to houses that were well-lit. There was only one. After making a quick lap around the neighborhood, Simon P. and I went home. We were so exhausted by our exciting day that we pretty much giggled until I fell into my bed and went unconscious, possibly while still talking. I hear that I suggested morally questionable means of funding the magnificent shop that Simon P. intend someday to open, but I deny all knowledge of it. I am still very tired, which is what I will blame for the disjointed nature of this post.

10 Awesome Things at PumpkinPalooza

2011-10-25T09:12:00.006-04:00

PumpkinPalooza, in Lyons, is one of the most interestingly odd festivals I've ever been to, and I've been to some odd ones. It seems like a bunch of people got together and made a list of things that are awesome, and decided to do them all in one day in mid-autumn. The first thing on that list was dressing up cars.

The second thing was having literary-themed scarecrows tied to every lamp post. This is the fellow from the cover of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. I was impressed.

The third thing was to have a pumpkin race in the canal.

The fourth thing was to have the little floating pumpkins miss the current, drift into the lock, and completely fail to race anywhere at all; whereupon the Fire and Rescue people spent fifteen minutes catching them all in a net so they could relaunch. This interlude was much more fun that any race could possibly have been.

The fifth thing was to leave pumpkin guts strewn about everywhere so it looked like the townspeople of Lyons go around massacring vegetables in the same way that the undead massacre brains.

I have to skip the sixth thing, which had something to do with catapulting pumpkins over the canal, and the seventh thing, which is rolling a load of pumpkins down a huge hill, because we missed both of them.

NEXT YEAR FOR SURE.

The eighth thing was to give me the strange experience of seeing the Joker and a policeman hanging around together having a good time. Suspicious.

The ninth thing was this domesticated goose. Enough said.

And the tenth this was this little train of young'uns that wove its way back and forth through town and never failed to be (1) hilarious, and (2) adorable. Each little half-barrel has a horn to honk. As Adam said, the guy driving the tractor has the best job in the world.

The end.

Excerpts

2011-10-21T07:58:00.000-04:00

For many weeks I was reading this anthology of travel writing by women. I fished it out of a box at a garage sale. The box contained this booka and about 50 copies of Louis L'Amour novels, which is a combination I do not really understand. I thought it looked pretty cool, so I traded fifty cents for it, and I read the parts that were good, and skimmed the parts that were boring, and I'm very glad I did. For there were some parts that were really good.

1. Mary Kingsley
Mary Kingsley cared for her ailing parents for the first thirty years of her life. When they died, six weeks apart, she went to West Africa. It was 1892, and she did not think she was a feminist, even though it seems to me that she behaved like one. I'm quoting her not for her politics, but for her sense of humor. On her way through the jungle to collect fish, she and her group must cross a swamp by walking on a submerged log:

"All of us save one, need I say that one was myself, effected this with safety. As for me, when I was at the beginning of the submerged bridge, and busily laying about in my mind for an opinion as to whether it was better to walk on a slippery tree trunk you could see, or on one you could not, I was hurled off by that inexorable fate that demands of me a personal acquaintance with fluvial and paludal ground deposits; whereupon I took a header, and am thereby able to inform the world, that there is between fifteen and twenty feet of water on either side of that log. I conscientiously went in on one side and came up on the other. The log, I conjecture, is dum or ebony, and it is some fifty feet long; anyhow it is some sort of wood that won't float. I really cannot be expected, by the most exigent of scientific friends, to go botanising under water without a proper outfit."

2. Willa Cather
Everybody knows who Willa Cather is. I even read My Antonia, although I do not remember what it was about, except Nebraska I think. Willa Cather went to Europe with a friend in 1902, and wrote this about a French village called Lavandou:

"I am sure I do not know why a wretched fishing village, with nothing but green pines and blue sea and a sky of porcelain, should mean more than a dozen places that I have wanted to see all my life. No books have ever been written about Lavandou, no music or pictures ever came from here, but I know well enough that I shall yearn for it long after I have forgotten London and Paris. One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame."

3. Kate O'Brien
Kate O'Brien was an Irish writer whose work I will have to look up, not just because some were banned in Ireland (sex! between ladies!) but because of this fantastic description of her suffering in the company of a fellow traveler on the way to Salamanca, Spain. (It makes little difference, but it was 1937, and she was 40, in case you wondered.)

"Boredom is of two kinds, passive and active. The passive kind tells on one in the end, but the active is immediate agony, and leaves a cicatrice that is liable to throb again if touched later in life. I am rather subject to active boredom -- but the scar inflicted by the Barber of Salamanca is one of my worst, and will never be completely insensitive. . . . I have sometimes believed that I could see shadows spead under people's eyes when they were being frantically bored. I have seen faces age and sag under the onslaught of amiable extrovertism -- and then I've known exactly what was happening in the victims' heads. Well, the Barber turned night into day that night. He told me the seating capacity of every restaurant and cinema in Salamanca. He told me the names of all the films which has come to those cinemas since their inception -- and his own opinion on them. He told me the names of all the cafes and hotels, of all the doctors, dentists, lawyers, chemists, and shoeblacks [this goes on] . . . And when the frantic business was over, when there had been about five sweet minutes of the silence and absence of the Barber, to be told that for two hours there could be no kind of reviving drink! Is it odd if I decided to hate Salamanca?"

4. Beryl Markham
Beryl Markham was the first person to fly east to west across the Atlantic alone. She was apparently kind of a remarkable person, admired by Hemingway even, who I don't imagine admired that many women, so I guess that's saying something. (I think it's saying Hemingway's a mysogenist.) While hunting in Africa (with Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen's ex-husband Bror Blixen) she and "Blix" have a close encounter with a rampaging elephant. (Heavily edited for length.)

"In an open place, it might have been possible to dodge, but not here. I stood behind Blix with my hands on his waist according to his instructions. But I knew it wasn't any good. The elephant's ears were spread wide now, his trunk was up and extended toward us, and he began the elephant scream of anger which is so terrifying as to hold you silent where you stand. It occured to me that this was the instant to shoot. Blix never moved. He held his rifle steady and began to chant some of the most striking blasphemy I have ever heard. It was colorful, original, and delivered with finesse, but I felt that this was a badly chosen moment to test it on an elephant. The elephant advanced, Blix released more oaths (this time in Swedish), and I trembled. There was no rifle shot. "I may have to shoot him," Blix announced, and the remark struck me as an understatement of classic magnificence. [The elephant screams again, startling its friends, who believe there's a danger and run away; he joins them, leaving Beryl and Blix safe, but irritable.] I foreswore the historic propriety of my sex to ask a rude question: "I think you're the best hunter in Africa, Blickie, but sometimes your humor is gruesome. Why in hell didn't you shoot?" He stared upward into the leaves of the boabob tree and sighed like a poet in love. "There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- 'Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die.'"

Beryl did not, somehow, shoot him on the spot.

Pictures in which Very Little is Distinguishable Except for Lanterns

2011-10-19T06:00:00.001-04:00

The Most Inappropriate Use of Bacon I Have Ever Encountered

2011-10-17T06:00:00.000-04:00

List of things this is more wrong than:
1. Everything

Lazy Acre Alpacas Open House

2011-10-11T06:09:00.001-04:00

I want to live here.

The reason I want to live here is because 87 alpacas also live here,
and I think we could have a good time together.

For example, I would be friends with this gal.
In fact, I would probably start doing my hair like her,
because she obviously knows style.

The antique tractor collection is only temporary, unfortunately.

This is a part of an intake air-cleaning thingamajigger. The dirt particles get filtered out and dumped in this jar before they get to the engine and slowly destroy it.
Also, it's photogenically rustic.

Alpaca males communing at the fence. I learned that males produce better fiber because their bodies are never busy gestating other living things or feeding them. It makes a lot of sense, but I never thought about it before. I thought it was rather interesting that you can read female alpaca fiber kind of like the rings of a tree stump.

Who says alpacas aren't romantic?

Alpaca fiber is so soft it feels like nothing.

I want to live here so much.

Alpacas are very curious and they were fascinated by this guy's beagle.

Suri alpacas are my favorite, if only because of their adorable mopheads.

Risk Aversity

2011-10-05T22:50:00.007-04:00

Remember when I was going over investment plans for my [nonexistant] retirement funds five years ago and there was that question about risk aversity and I was like, "I AM VERY RISK-AVERSE. YOU CAN'T BE MORE RISK-AVERSE THAN ME WITHOUT HAVING A MENTAL CONDITION. IN FACT, I MIGHT HAVE A MENTAL CONDITION REGARDING RISK." Remember when I took that tour of the subway and it was darker than dark, darker-than-the-bowels-of-the-earth dark and Christi and I had to hold hands? Remember when I told you about that balloonist who shot up in the air very very fast and was all, "I can hear myself living," and then he never did it again? Well, these fond memories will all be relevant to this post, because in this post I shall describe what it is like when you go into this as a person who is very risk-averse:

Tunnel of doom for the risk-averse among us.

This is a drainage tunnel. To make you all feel better, it's very large. I know you're thinking of that part in that book (I don't remember what book, maybe The Princess and the Goblin), where it takes about five pages for a character to squeeze through this teeny teeny tiny passageway deep underground, and just reading it is enough to make you hyperventilate. It was not like that at all. It was several feet tall and several feet wide -- probably about the size of a subway car, or a bit bigger.

This was taken on the way out, but I can't remember if that light is the
tunnel entrance in front of me or someone's headlamp behind me.

The plan was to walk to the end and then take pictures on the way back, so my first photos are of the very end. But before we get there, let me address my risk-aversity and what it was like to watch the point of light to recede behind me and know that eventually we were going to turn, and that even the pinprick was going to disappear.

It was like this:
I'm going to have a panic attack.
I'm going to have a panic attack.
I'm going to have a panic attack.
I wonder why I'm not having a panic attack.
This place is sort of awesome.
But I'm definitely going to have a panic attack any minute now.
Hopefully not before I take this photo.

And so on, until being there actually became kind of prosaic and my main concern changed from possible death to really wanting to dump the water out of my boots. Even in my highly risk-averse state I have to admit there are not many ways to die or even be injured there unless someone specifically takes you there to murder you. But let's not dwell on that! What was scary about it was simply that it was very dark, and just plain creepy. For example:

Cripes.

There's something about this that kind of turns the blood cold, right? The spikes are presumably there to hold rocks up that have since fallen, which we were walking over. Comforting! Fortunately, this process seems to happen in slow motion, over fairly long periods of time. The spikes appear to be working themselves out of the rock, probably because they're rusting and getting smaller. Another slow process.

This was also creepy:

As was once spoken to me with great certitude: "Orange is the color of evil!"

It's an orange stalactite forming on some kind iron fixture that kind of looks like it once held flourescent lights. The creepy part about this is the clear passage of time, as if you were in a cave. It just feels strange.

The most spectacularly creepy part of the trek was the end of the tunnel, where all the water streams into a tall, circular, concrete room with a huge pillar in the middle of it:

There was quite a lot of water coming down; it was hard to hear.

Let's pause here, at the end of a pitch-dark, mile-long tunnel, looking at this gloomy drainage chamber a hundred feet underground, and consider some things like, for example, what is the point of this? Well, as Ben Franklin says, what is the point of babies? Urban exploration tends to be about decay, but this tunnel is defined less by its decay, which is not extreme, than by a quality of unseen-ness. Standing at the end of it is the polar opposite of waiting in a line to pass by the Mona Lisa. There is zero pretense: it isn't looked-at, cared-for, cleaned, or even visited except by teenagers and purse thieves. Its aesthetics are accidental rather than strategic; nobody is trying to make you think anything about it or see it in a particular light or context. It's a mineral-stained pillar in a pool of water far below a spectactularly unremarkable road, and that's it. It's beautiful because it's surreal; it's surreal because we're walking around on what we think is solid earth, but underneath there are strange scenes like this that you only ever get to -- normally -- through books or movies. When you're looking at it with your own eyes, you get that feeling that everyone has sometimes and later forgets about: that there's a lot going on in the world that would surprise you, even if you feel like you are pretty in touch with things. You're never as in touch as you think you are. And thank goodness for that.

Fortunately, we didn't stand there considering very long. There wasn't enough light to take good pictures, and if you can't take good pictures, there's no reason to hang out there. It may be surreal and beautiful and all that, but it isn't really pleasant. It was here that we noticed the yellow algae on the rocks, which didn't seem good. (Upon some serious Googling I've concluded that it was nothing worse than golden alga, which is totally harmless unless you breathe through gills. You could swim in it if you wanted to.)

On the way back, we stopped for pictures at a couple of interesting places. The first was this dreadful-colored waterfall that looks rather toxic but is probably orange because of iron in the limestone. Having said that with considerable certainty, I will add that I refrained from licking it just in case.

Believe it or not, the patterns made by sediment simultaneously depositing itself and being worn away (this was the concensus as to what was happening; earth science teachers, please leave corrections in the comments) were actually rather lovely, especially with a steady stream of water rippling over them.

Except for this part where the rock seems to have grown a set of intestines. (Shudder.)

There was a similar place closer to the opening, where everything was coated in pock-marked mineral drippings.

In vertical places, it had the same ripply pattern. Yes, that's a beer can at the top of the frame. For extra yuck, it has a centipede on it.

Lest you forget how dark it was when camera flashes were not going off:

It. was. so. dark.

Not long after that interlude, we reached the end, and some of us (me) were incredibly relieved that we had neither died nor embarrassed ourselves with a panic attack. When we got home and researched the brightly-colored substances we had seen, and assured ourselves we had come into contact with precisely nothing toxic, we (I) felt pretty okay.

Two explorers reach the waterfall at the end of the tunnel.

The third explorer joins them.

The fourth explorer joins them.

The fourth explorer's boots did her ZERO good and now need to be bleached.

The Tunnel of Risk turns out to be the Tunnel of Interesting Mineral Formations.

I may have exaggerated my risk-aversity for the purposes of this post. I was in no danger of having a panic attack, although I did feel significantly more comfortable when I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. However, the discovery of the yellow algae was apparently a moment of some anxiety for me. After I washed off my feet but before I researched what the algae was, one night intervened. During that night, I dreamed that I woke up and found cakes of uranium piled on my nightstand. I like the way my subconscious goes from "a worrisome shade of algae" to "certain death by uranium exposure." Once risk-averse, always risk-averse. Unless there is really really cool stuff around the bend of the tunnel.

The Macedon Lumberjack Festival

2011-10-03T21:47:00.002-04:00

A few weeks ago I went to a lumberjack festival. I do not know exactly what a lumberjack festival is, even after having been to one, but it seems to revolve around very strong people mutilating the corpses of innocent trees for cash prizes. There was also food, Civil War reenactors, and a petting zoo. And that's what I love about events with the word "festival" in them. You really just never know.

There was a lot of heavy-duty equipment there, like this thing that cuts trees into big long planks. Here, it's just getting started on a new long and barely skimming the top off of it. You can see the planks that are already cut in the foreground. It's pretty impressive, but the setup time sort of deflates the excitement. Why does everything cool seem to involve so much waiting? I hate waiting.

This is a log-splitter, I guess. The setup for this is less boring because the machine picks up the log itself, which is pretty sweet. Then the whatchamacallit slowly pushes the log toward the whooseywhatsit and it splits. Lazy, for sure, but very satisfying.

In my experience of what lumberjacks do for fun (yes, I do have experience of this) splitting logs while standing on them is right up there. And it is impressive. These women were amazing, especially the one who came in last, and just kept hacking and hacking at that log until she split it, even though it was quite hot and she was completely exhausted and had already lost by several minutes. I was so enthralled I forgot to take any pictures of her. This is the woman who won. She is a personal trainer. She was admirable.

Then there was a two-man saw competition, which was serious business, as you can tell from the fact that the men involved are the size of Paul Bunyan. Before competing I'm pretty sure they ate seventy-five pancakes apiece and then drank a small river dry. (In reality, I have no memory of what Paul Bunyan is supposed to have done. I think there was an ox involved. The pancakes I'm just guessing on.)

Actually, now that I look at this picture, these aren't the hugest guys. I was, again, too amazed to take pictures of the really awesome stuff, although I did at one point take video with one hand and in-focus photos with the other, for which I think I should have won money.

Somewhere in the background people were throwing axes, which is an activity I have a strong romantic attachment to on account of watching so much Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman during my formative years. But it was hard to pay attention to that while the hot saw competition was going on, which should tell you how incredible it was. A hot saw is a chain saw that has had its motor swapped out for a ridiculously large motor from some other piece of equipment. For example, this hot saw is running on a snowmobile motor.

Years ago, when Ivan and I were watching the extras on the Lord of the Rings DVD, we laughed a lot at the part where two special effects guys recall an argument about what Nazgul should look like:

Guy one: And I told him birds don't have spines coming off their elbows like that, and their wings don't fold properly.

Guy two: And I said, "Shut up, Ben. It looks cool."

Well, it is just as wrong to put a snowmobile motor on a chain saw as it is to give birds elbow-spines. First of all, their ability to cut things is -- counterintuitively -- diminished in direct proportion to how absurdly large the motor is. Second, more money you spend on pimping out your chain saw -- once again, counterintuitively -- the less effectively it works. But, undeniably, it is cool.

The noise was incredible. I could either protect my ears or take photos, and sometimes I had to take photos. This one left me partially deaf for about five minutes. Likewise, the exhaust fumes were choking (har har). But the POWER! It seemed like any of those hot saws would cut the logs themselves if their human owners let go of them. And after they reduced their designated log to dust, they would just keep going until they had deforested Canada. If, that is, they worked. One never got past the start-em-up stage, one died in the middle, and none of the monster-saws won the competition for speed. The winner was modestly-sized and cost about seven bucks to modify.

The hot saw competition marked the end of the show, and the beginning of the petting zoo portion of the day. For some strange reason they did not have an alpaca (?!), but they did have these two adorable duckies:

which I could not stop photographing. There was also a miniature horse and a stumpy little miniature horse colt. They brought to mind my days at miniature horse camp, and my stupid horse Sweet-n-Low. To this day, when I think of her, it is with decided frosty feelings, although I do not remember why. I just remember thinking that she was not sweet. Maybe she kicked me once. Or maybe I just hated her dumb name. Left to my own devices I'm sure I would've called her Buttercup or something. Anyway. The wee little colt was adorable and obviously would never kick anyone.

I never understood what miniature horses were for or why they existed -- until the Macedon Lumberjack Festival. Now it is clear to me that although the average, unadorned miniature horse is generally useless, you could easily transform it into a valuable plowhorse with the simple addition of a pull cord and a snowmobile motor. It certainly would've improved Sweet-n-Low. She'd still be mean, but at least she'd be cool.

Behold Colonial Revelry!

2011-09-23T05:22:00.127-04:00

I don't know how long the Mendon Station Festival has been going on for, because I always miss it. This year I saw this poster, was delighted by the fact that it did not use Comic Sans and was not printed on pale green 8.5 x 11 paper, i.e. it was actually designed on purpose by someone, and decided that I would go. Just to support that kind of thing.

The fact that I showed up just in time for the Revolutionary War reenactment was not coincidental. Look how cute. They didn't reenact the entire war, thank goodness . . .

. . . because it takes approximately five and a half years to load a musket. We'd have been there into the next century.

Apparently there was very little chance you'd actually get hit with a musket ball during battle. Or, to be more specific, there was very little chance you'd get hit by the guy who was aiming at you. You might get hit by the guy next to the guy who was aiming at you, who was aiming at some other guy. Muskets are not known for their accuracy. Nevertheless, I don't think I'd feel particularly safe, considering that your chances of getting hit go up a lot when there are a few hundred of these coming at you all at once.

They got their bayonets out and it was terrifying, I tell you. All seven of them. Plus the drummer. Terrifying.

This guy reminded me of George Washington. Yes, I know he's clearly a redcoat. Sacrilege! and whatnot.

When all the pretend violence was over, I wandered around and stumbled across this guy who makes stuff out of horn. Like spoons. Apparently they last forever; they just need to be oiled every so often. The fellow who made them was distracted by the tar he had all over his hands. I'm not sure why he had tar on his hands, but I'm sure there was a very good reason. In the end, he very reluctantly poured a bit of whiskey out of a tiny keg to clean his hand with, grumbling about the waste. I don't think he was in character.

He had also done some rather interesting carvings. I suppose this was some kind of hunting horn or something. Really, he was very distracted.

Who should I meet in my travels but my old friend, Meridian! He smiled for me and asked how I was, and we talked about politics and the economy for a little while, and agreed to meet again in the spring, if not before.

Over at the reenactor's camp, I decided that if I must ever fight in a war, I would like to be the guy that gets the tent the size of a small merry-go-round.

There was a lady there with an array of items, which she could not answer any questions about because she was just holding down the fort for someone else. So I don't know anything about any of this beyond the obvious. Mostly I just wanted to know whether that one pin was bent on purpose or by accident.

For a bunch of dirty soldiers and "camp followers," as they're called, they had some lovely dishes.

Afterwards I went and watched some amateurs learn how to shoot muskets, but decided to leave after only a couple because ten years had passed and I could feel my hair turning gray. I didn't stuff mine face with barbecue or applaud gallant horsemanship, but the colonial revelry was pretty decent, and I might go again next year just to see if that guy has gotten the tar off yet.

"You take a chance getting up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan."

2011-09-21T13:27:00.000-04:00

I'm home with a cold and I've been watching stupid movies. Selection from the end credits of Naked Gun:

I dunno, this seemed funnier to me than most of the movie, but it might be the amount of Sudafed I've taken.

The Best Balloon of All Balloons Ever

2011-09-19T07:15:00.007-04:00

Brief video clip; less than a minute; no sound.

Festival of Balloons

2011-09-15T06:31:00.004-04:00

I finally made it to the Festival of Balloons this year.

It was exciting not only because hot air balloons are awesome,

but because I recently read all about the history of hot air balloons,

which was utterly fascinating.

The first paper balloon was launched in 1783,

and was powered hot air rather than hydrogen.

It flew for ten minutes and drew a huge crowd.

The president of the Royal Society (a scientific organization) thought
balloons would be most useful in making heavy things lighter;
i.e. a wagon "normally requiring eight horses to pull it
might need only two horses with a Montgolfier attached."

In 1783, half the city of Paris turned out for the second ever balloon launch.

Dr. Alexandre Charles, one of the co-pilots, later wrote:

"Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity

that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off.

I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its trouble for ever. . . .

My companion Monsieur Robert murmured to me -- I'm finished with the Earth.

From now on it's the sky for me! Such utter calm. Such immensity!"

When they landed, M. Robert stepped out, and the balloon shot upwards

with Dr. Charles in it, rising 10,000 feet in ten minutes.

Dr. Charles wrote:

"I was the first man ever to see the sun set twice in the same day.

The cold was intense and dry, but supportable.

I had acute pain in my right ear and jaw.

But I examined all my sensations calmly.

I could hear myself living, so to speak."

He was back in a little over half an hour. He didn't fly again.

Ben Franklin was the American Ambassador to Paris at the time.

He said, "Someone asked me -- what's the use of a balloon?

I replied -- what's the use of a new born baby?"

An early showman, Vincent Lunardi, caused a stir one afternoon in England.

"Lunardi drifted north-westwards across London and into Hertfordshire,

eating legs of chicken and drinking champagne, and occasionally

trying to 'row' his balloon with a pair of aerial oars.

One of the oars broke and started a rumour

that he had jumped to his death.

It was said that the King broke off a cabinet meeting . . .

while a jury in north London hastily brought in a not-guilty verdict

so it could run out of the courthouse and watch."

Horace Walpole, the Gothic novelist, was not infected by ballomania.

"Well! I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings

for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction

for the human race -- as is so often the case of refinements of discoveries in Science."

Nevertheless, he instructed his servants to call him when there was a balloon overhead,

so he could wave.

In 1785, a Frenchman and an Englishman attempted the first Channel crossing. Together.

"Quite early on, each accidentally managed to drop the other's national flag

over the side of the basket, and then profusely apologised."

The flight took two hours, and they just barely made it,

having thrown everything out of the basket, including nearly all their clothes.

Erasmus Darwin, physician, mediocre poet, and grandfather of Charles Darwin,

wrote this of ballooning:

The calm Philosopher in ether sails,

Views broader stars and breathes in purer gales;

Sees like a map in many a waving line,

Round earth's blue plains her lucid waters shine;

Sees at his feet the forky lightning glow

And hears innocuous thunder roar below.

Quotes and practically everything else from Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder.

Coming Soon

2011-09-13T07:08:00.002-04:00

Photos from the New York State Festival of Balloons! They will not all look like a hand-colored 1950s postcard . . . although maybe they should.

Bigger on the Inside

2011-09-09T05:15:00.008-04:00

There are two sections to the library I work in: the old stacks and the new stacks. The old stacks are pretty old, and the new stacks are not getting any younger. Recently, there was a flurry of e-mails concerning renaming the stacks because from the perspective of an incoming first-year, "old" and "even older" aren't different enough. It was decided that their names would be changed to the "blue stacks" and the "yellow stacks." These, naturally, are the school colors.

Like all school colors, these are ugly colors. These are the colors of welcome banners, sports uniforms, and "signage," not the colors of interior design. When I heard they were going to be buying paint in these colors, I was downright alarmed.

When I started my first year of college, our library had just been entirely refinished. It looked like a cathedral to begin with, and when it was done, it looked like a cathedral crossed with a banquet hall crossed with a comfortable modern living room.

Photo by my father

Not only that, but it has secret passageways with circular staircases! This is a magnificent library that I was very lucky to spend many late nights translating Beowulf in. I am more than a little sad my current library does not look anything like this. It has some lovely features, some very nice sections, and a whole lot more books, but when you walk around in the old and new stacks, you do not particularly feel like you're in a "cathedral of learning" like Vassar's library was designed to be.

I was sitting at my desk regretting this when a co-worker came tearing into my cubicle. "You have to come see something," she said. "I can't tell you what it is. But you have to come see it RIGHT NOW."

I'm always ready to go see something, especially if it involves not doing real work, so I followed her past the horrible yellow paint in the new stacks, and into the old stacks, where they were painting the elevators blue. Knowing the outcome of the yellow, I assumed that the outcome of the blue was even worse -- so bad it was worth getting up from your desk to marvel at.

But that is not why she brought me there. She brought me there because the fresh paint on the elevator revealed its resemblance to something we had never noticed before.

Photo by co-worker; Pigeon of Anonymity by me

Okay, so it's not an exact match. And we couldn't put the "pull to open" sign on the correct side for fear it would get smushed when the door opened. And if we'd had more time, we could have done a much better imitation, overall, but still! Our library may be mostly ugly and the blue and yellow paint may have been an aesthetically disastrous idea, BUT NOW WE HAVE A TARDIS. That makes everything better.

Niagara Falls Addendum

2011-09-07T04:58:00.000-04:00

Two extra things:

1.One of these things is not like the others.

2. "The power!" Twenty seconds of video from outside and inside the falls.

Yes, my camera takes terrible terrible video. Sorry about that.

Hedgehogs Abroad . . . For About Six Hours

2011-09-05T09:38:00.012-04:00

Ivan and I went to Canada last weekend. Mainly to get maple sugar candies, but also they have these giant waterfalls there that we thought we might as well look at.

We looked at them from the outside.

We looked at them from the inside.

We looked at them close up.

We looked at them far away.

We went shopping.

Niagara Falls has to be one of the most horrendously commercialized tourist hotspots in the world. I'm basing this claim on the sheer amount of crap in the fifty-seven tourist shops closing in on the falls. If they sold quality souvenirs, I would be the first to defend them. I love tourist traps. There is nothing I like more than a museum shop . . . even, sometimes, the museum itself. But these tourists shops were selling things for $12.99 that clearly cost ten cents for someone's eight-year-old to manufacture in their basement. Or they were just scams, like the Niagara Falls Souvenir Water ("This water survived a plunge over Niagara Falls.") It comes in water-color and "illuminated," which means it has food coloring in it.

I ASK YOU. WHAT IDIOT WOULD BUY THIS?! As Ivan pointed out, that can't be real Niagara River water, because there is no disgusting foam-sludge in it. And if it IS real Niagara River water, you probably don't want it in your house, because there is a whole episode of This American Life about the chemical plants that dump terrible things into that water when nobody's looking. Or something. I have a bad memory. Anyway, if you shouldn't be drinking it, why would you want it? What are you going to do with it? There isn't much to do with it except keep it around to remind you of a Lesson Learned: stop buying useless crap at tourist traps! Buy maple sugar candy instead!

I developed an obsession with soft maple sugar in Vermont, when I saw some and was suddenly seized with a desire to EAT IT ALL. My sister and I used to get them in our stockings at Christmas, but I hadn't had any for many years. Now I've discovered that one a day keeps the cookies away, because it's so sweet you cannot possibly eat anything else afterwards. Perfect end-of-meal treat.

Ivan and I thought we were going to have to content ourselves with overpriced boxes that only had five in them, but then Ivan discovered "the mother lode."

The hedgehogs returned to their native land very happy indeed.

My grandmother has a green thumb.

2011-08-31T10:04:00.003-04:00

Bawk.

2011-08-29T21:24:00.001-04:00

My camera has just returned from an extended vacation on Long Island. I was almost entirely unable to blog without it, so I'm very glad it's back. I hope it had a good time, but it's hard to tell what its expressions mean. All it ever really does is wink.

There are two photos my camera was holding hostage in its absence, that I wanted to post when I was posting about Vermont:

1. This is Henry VIII, formerly Hildegarde. Evidently chicks look gender-neutral for quite some time.

I'm Henery the eighth, I am.

2. These are three of Henry VIII's six cohabiting hens.

Something fascinating is happening stage left.

Henrygarde and the hens live at my cousin's house in Vermont, where they huddle in a quite spacious shelter, get their food delivered for free, and have access to excellent constellations. I am a bit jealous. The chickens have it better than I do.

The Fish in Question

2011-08-12T18:47:00.000-04:00

This is the original fish that I was thinking of in the previous post. If I have never posted this picture before, I will be shocked, because this remains one of my most favorite pictures ever. It's a terribly old flattened fish, you guys! You can thank my sister for telling me to take this picture. Or she might have taken it herself with my camera. All I remember is that she was there and she is responsible.

Microsoft Office 2010 Adds Unique Feature For Your Dead-Fish-Themed Design Needs

2011-08-12T15:52:00.000-04:00

Derangement

2011-08-11T14:05:00.002-04:00

Sometimes academic databases are extremely picky about your search terms. For example, in the MLA International Bibiliography, you can search for "Doyle, Arthur Conan" and get zero results, even though MLA is all about literature, and Arthur Conan Doyle is an incredibly well-known writer. You know he's in there, you just can't get at him.

Fortunately, MLA provides a "thesaurus" that allows you to look up the correct way to enter your search term. Arthur Conan Doyle, apparently, should be listed as "Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur." GOOD GRIEF.

It seems a lot of people are frustrated by this system, and here is how you can tell: MLA gives you access to a list of all the search terms that other people have used. The idea is that you can use this to double-check that you're spelling things right, or see if someone else has figured out a better search term for your topic. But the side effect is that it also captures the deranged ravings of frustrated researchers for all posterity. If you just type in "A," you are provided with this nice selection of anguished cries from English majors:

Finding things like this is one of the hidden joys of working with databases. (One of about about two.)

Everybody Likes Bears

2011-07-29T09:21:00.008-04:00

Even deformed ones.

Everybody likes berries.

Everybody likes books.

I can't figure out a convincing way to make this start with B,

but I'm sure everybody likes it all the same.

Everybody Likes Buttons

2011-07-27T08:48:00.030-04:00

It's funny how buttons you wouldn't be caught dead wearing can be completely mesmerizing if you put them in a little dish in a crazy store full of twinkle lights and bolts of gauzy pastel fabric. Something just comes over you.

The best thing about this store was the variety of little dishes and drinks trays.

Also some of the buttons were not ugly.

Some of them.

It was kind of like being inside a giant treasure chest.

Full of silver!

And plastic!

And these dreadful yet magnificent lamps! My taste was completely torn in two the whole time I was there.

Everybody Likes Beads

2011-07-25T20:22:00.001-04:00

Red beads

Blue beads

Rainbow beads


Pigeon

This may not be a pigeon. I Googled both pigeon and dove relentlessly until I figured out that doves and pigeons are basically the same bird, and apparently neither of them look like this even though I thought they did. Googling "bird with lumpy head" got me a picture of a deer with antlers. Someone please tell me what this is.

Mees Observatory

2011-07-13T18:54:00.003-04:00

Last Friday, I enlisted some loyal comrades in a trip to the Mees Observatory, about forty minutes south from me in the Bristol Hills. It's run by the University of Rochester, but they don't use it for much anymore, having moved on to bigger and better things like looking at space . . . from space. (How novel!) They give free tours most summer weekends, from eight o'clock onward until the end of time, if the enthusiasm of our tour guide is any indication.

The Mees Observatory was built on land originally owned by Frank Gannett, of Gannett Newspapers. I would have gone there just for the grounds, which were beautiful and very well-maintained. If we'd gotten there maybe two hours earlier and it had been clearer, I would have taken a lovely picture of the view of what must have been either Honeoye Lake or Canandaigua Lake . . . but we didn't and it wasn't and my picture is terrible. You will have to go and see it for yourself. It's very nice. If they had tea parties on that patio, I'd pay to go.

The Gannett Lodge (a name I just made up) is strange. It's as if a charming rural cabin collided with a 1960s astronomy department storage room, which I think is almost exactly what happened.

I want to film something here very badly.

And then they threw in a piano and some trees because why not?

You have to put the piano in a room by itself or it interferes with Science.

It's a very odd little place, but it has a pleasant atmosphere. There was a talk that went on for perhaps an hour or so about what's in the sky, what's in our sky, and what's in our sky tonight (the list gets progressively smaller). By that time it was getting fairly dark, so we trekked up to the observatory in our cars, and waited a bit while they fiddled with the telescope. That's when we stood around and took pictures of the incredibly old equipment that controls it.


Anna: "Is that a ZIP DRIVE?!"

Adam: "This chair is so . . . SCIENCE!"

Me, in an unrelated conversation with myself: "That is a great-looking phone."

Then we went up and saw the telescope. Now, I have to admit that my favorite part of this whole adventure was simply stargazing on the balcony around the observatory, because it is rarely dark enough to see anything where I live. Out there I could pick out the Little Dipper, which was exciting, because I can never remember where it is. We also learned about Arcturus and the Summer Triangle (made up of Vega, Deneb, and Altair), and space junk. Space junk is impressively fast. There are eight thousand pieces of space junk floating in our sky. I find this depressing, because like, must we pollute even space? But space junk is also cool, because like, we have been to space, man. Mixed feelings.

Anyway. The observatory looks like this, photo courtesy of Matt, who has a much better camera than I do and has kindly donated his skills to Simon & Ivan:

Stranger: "Guys, when you drove up, did this place remind you of the hatch from Lost?"

The moon was rather bright, which interfered a little, but it was also very pretty. The top part of the observatory turns by remote control, which impressed us all very much. Some of us might have been more impressed by that than by the vastness of space, not pointing fingers. The telescope inside looks like this (photo by Matt):

The red lights are to keep your eyes from readjusting to bright light between views.

I should have written down what we saw, because now I've forgotten. One was the moon, I know that much. It is obviously very recognizable. Then we looked at Saturn. Then we looked at two stars, one of which was yellow and one of which was blue, but they were very very very small. Then we looked at a star cluster of some kind. It had 300 million stars in it. It looked like a patch of mist. And thennnnnnn . . . there was something else. Once someone referred to it as schmutz ("I can't see it . . . wait, is it this schmutz? I thought that was stuff on the lens"), we all started calling it that, and I forgot its real name. It was almost impossible to see.

What made me want to go here, aside from the fact that it's just cool, is that I had been reading about William and Caroline Herschel in Richard Holmes's amazingly fascinating and marvelous book Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. (It is honestly one of the best books I have ever read; if I haven't recommended it to you in person, which I probably have, I am recommending it now.) I may do a whole post on the Herschel siblings another time, but I bring them up now because what impressed me is that this telescope we looked through on Friday was a modern piece of equipment, professionally manufactured, and pretty large as things go. And it was so difficult to see anything with it that we were reduced to calling quite marvelous astronomical objects "schmutz." More than two hundred years ago, William Herschel built a forty foot telescope by hand -- imagine making a mirror by hand, I didn't even know it was possible -- and managed to see things like the polar ice caps on Mars, a new moon of Saturn, and various star clusters very far away. Granted, Herschel also thought there was a civilization living on the moon, but still: now that I know how difficult it is to see through modern equipment, I am doubly impressed by all the things Herschel discovered with equipment he built himself. Not to mention the fact that he built something forty feet long when a whole university didn't spring for anything longer than ten. And I'm pretty sure they didn't make it themselves.

William made another telescope for his sister Caroline, much smaller than his -- smaller even than the one at Mees -- and with it she discovered eight comets, a whole galaxy that's so far away it's expressed in numbers and letters that don't make sense to me, and 560 stars the astronomers before her had not seen. Had she been given a forty-footer of her own, goodness knows what she might have seen. She was also a very talented singer, the first woman to receive a professional salary from the king of England, the recipient of two medals, and an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, which, as you can imagine, was not accustomed to including women in any of their doings. When she was young, her parents thought she should be their uneducated servant for the rest of their earthly lives. That did not work out for them.

But I've gotten sidetracked. Caroline Herschel fascinates me. The point is, the Mees Observatory is really cool, and getting to see the moon up close was amazing, and you should all go and donate five dollars, because they really want to clean their lenses.

Doctor Who is Always Pertinent

2011-07-11T16:13:00.002-04:00

Me, yesterday:

Mr. Magpie: "I just want things back like they used to be!"

I have been watching a lot of Doctor Who while lying like a ragdoll in my big blue chair moaning quietly to myself which always makes me feel better when I'm sick. My pathetic condition has not stopped me from making some observations about the happenings on this show that are now driving me insane:

1. All alien races are always entirely homogenous. While this does explain why the Doctor likes humans so much (they are legitimately the most interesting of all the species on the show), it seems highly unlikely from an evolutionary point of view.

2. Whenever the Doctor says something is impossible ("But it cawn't be! That's impossible!"), it clearly isn't, because it's right in front of him. Duh.

3. Whenever the Doctor says some alien is the last of its kind, ninety million more of them come barging in with lasers. Really, I'm starting not to trust his judgment.

4. Also, why are so many aliens the last of their kind? What is going around killing all but one of everything? Half the time it seems to be the Time Lords, which leads me to believe the Time Lords were rotten people and maybe I shouldn't be so sad that the Doctor is the last of his kind, because his kind were evidently quite dangerous.

5. Aliens are always hungry, and what they are hungry for is humans. I am willing to believe that they want human brainpower or something, but I am not willing to buy that they want human flesh. Why would you land on this planet and eat humans? Humans are not meaty, not in relation to, say, cows. How about an episode where instead of having to save the entire human race (again), the Doctor has to save all of bovine kind?

I can't think of anything else. Which is pretty good, as far as a list of complaints born of a cranky and feverish state go. My list of complaints for Spooks is much longer. Starting with, is it really necessary to play Arabic flute music every time you show a terrorist? Come on.

Food Cop

2011-07-07T18:41:00.000-04:00

I try to avoid writing blog posts that involve my co-workers -- because I don't want to get dooced, become famous, and make a million dollars, that would be terrible -- but I can't resist this one.

-----------------------------------------
From: Co-Worker
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2011 2:52 PM
To: Department
Subject: Food Cop: Report for 5/6/11

Detected odor of decay in local food-cooling unit; searched premises.

Apprehended a small, over-age salad and a sack with moldy fruit. Perps removed.

Am currently monitoring takeout noodles.

- Food Cop

-----------------------------------------
From: Simon
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2011 4:16 PM
To: Food Cop
Subject: RE: Food Cop: Report for 5/6/11

I have been trying to remember to remove those takeout noodles for the better part of a week. I’ll do it before I go home today. Thanks for the reminder, Food Cop!

-----------------------------------------
From: Food Cop
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2011 4:16 PM
To: Simon
Subject: RE: Food Cop: Report for 5/6/11

Just doing my job, ma'am.

- FC

Photos from Letchworth

2011-07-05T18:45:00.001-04:00

(As usual, they look better full-size.)

I may

have photoshopped

some of these

slightly too much.

More Murders in Libraries!

2011-07-01T18:30:00.002-04:00

Every time I go down in what I like to call the Deep Stacks (two floors underground, all the way in the back where you are like five miles from an exit) I get freaked out by the shelvers. They are very quiet, so you never know they're there until you pass a row and someone's in it. Usually they don't hear you coming because they're listening to iPods, so they whip their heads around to look at you because you've alarmed them, and that alarms you, and soon everyone is alarmed. This is the least creepy situation.

The medium-creepy situation is when you are minding your own business in the Old English section, and you see someone pass by, four stacks over, just like the alien in Signs, where you just barely see it and it's gone and you don't really know what it was. You assume (in my case) that it's human, but you have been watching a lot of Doctor Who lately, and you are not willing to bet on it.

The maximum-creepy situation is when you are walking down a long corridor with shelves on both sides, and suddenly you realize someone is standing in the shadowy part by the service elevator. She is standing completely still, with her back to you. She does not move the entire time you are walking toward her. You divert to the section you were heading for, spend about fifteen minutes there, and come back out again. And she is still standing in the same position, not moving, not making a sound. Down there in the deep stacks, your brain becomes slower, no doubt because of the increased air pressure (you know like in the ocean and stuff, it's just like that) and you assume there are only possible two outcomes to this situation:

(1) She has died standing up, and I am about to realize my lifelong fear of discovering a dead body (thank you so much, Stand By Me).

(2) She has been bitten by a zombie, and when she inevitably lurches around and faces me, she'll be dead-eyed and bloody, and maybe holding someone's unattached arm . . . and then she will devour my brain.

Neither of these things happened, however. I think probably she was texting. So the outcome was what it always is: I think to myself, "There is a short story or murder mystery in this for someone who writes short stories or murder mysteries, which I do not."

I read a murder mystery once that took place in a library - an academic one even, I believe. It was called something like Death by Dewey Decimal* and on the cover it had a picture of someone's arm flopping out of a card catalogue or something equally ridiculous, which was 100% of the reason I got it out. I didn't like it much, but that was because of the rampant sexism disguised as feminism, which became grating. (It was old.) However, it made me think that, considering the sort of people who write books, there should be more novels about libraries . . . and murder. The Name of the Rose should qualify, I guess, but significant portions of it are deadly boring so it doesn't count. And Miriam Grace Monfredo wrote a series about a librarian in Seneca Falls in the 1840s who always ends up solving a murder. But the murder isn't usually in the library.

So. You heard it here first: MORE MURDERS IN LIBRARIES! They are perfect: lots of silent, dark, isolated places where screaming might well not be heard; all kinds of nooks and crannies and stairwells and elevators you could get stalked through; nice sturdy wooden furniture to vault over or throw at people; and if you tried hard you could probably work in a suspenseful scene of database searching, in which the search terms would be escape AND ("serial killer" OR "homicidal maniac") and of course you would want the full text for that because who could do a proper job hunting down citations under that kind of pressure.

On that note, I think I might have to start packing heat at work. Also, I now have a better answer for people who whine that interlibrary loan takes too long. UNLESS YOU ARE BEING CHASED THROUGH LEVEL B BY AN AXE-WIELDING LUNATIC, YOUR DEADLINE DOESN'T INTEREST ME.

*Addendum: The title was Dewey Decimated, which I think we can all agree is genius. It's by Charles A. Goodrum. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he has probably, since 1977, become more progressive in his views on women. At any rate, here's the cover that induced me to read it, as if the title weren't enough:

Pig Latin

2011-06-27T18:03:00.002-04:00

Today I was introduced to Bacon Ipsum: A Meatier Lorem Ipsum Generator. It is disgusting, but pure genius. Lorem ipsum, as we all know, is screwed-up meaningless Latin used by graphic designers as filler text for when they want to judge how a block of text looks without being influenced by the content. I believe it is now chiefly used as the basis for amusing stories that designers tell each other at bars, where they spend a lot of time, because they deal with clients who do not understand that they are not supposed to be able to read filler text.

Aside: This brings to mind a joke someone told me at Kalamazoo once. "When I was young I learned both Latin and Greek. To this day, I can still tell them apart!" The man who told me this looked like Colonel Sanders, but more menacing. I think it's probably funnier if Colonel Sanders' evil twin is telling it to you.

Anyway, Bacon Ipsum gives you a nice variety of options. First, there is the "All Meat" choice, which goes like this:

Ham hock beef ribs pork belly jerky. Chuck brisket andouille bresaola, pork headcheese flank tongue corned beef. Ground round biltong tri-tip shank. Tongue cow rump, salami corned beef spare ribs drumstick. Strip steak tongue cow bacon pork flank. Shankle short ribs jerky ham, ribeye t-bone sausage pork belly tri-tip hamburger tenderloin headcheese tongue chicken. Tenderloin chuck fatback, tail corned beef ham hock shoulder spare ribs salami strip steak shank brisket meatloaf swine.

And then there is the "Meat and Filler" choice, which I prefer, as it is more mellifluous:

Strip steak ham hock pancetta t-bone fugiat biltong, dolore tri-tip consectetur. Pork chop consectetur bresaola officia consequat. Commodo shankle short loin cow pastrami t-bone pork, hamburger tongue ut do laborum bacon shoulder. Salami qui sunt, chuck voluptate ribeye duis sed. Veniam irure ut qui voluptate enim in minim. Corned beef ullamco hamburger, aute nulla cupidatat eiusmod dolore. Cupidatat dolore irure voluptate ad.

(I particularly like, "Salami qui sunt, chuck voluptate ribeye duis sed." Why, Catullus himself could have written that, for it is beautiful and revolting at the same time.)

You also have the option to begin with "Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet," in case you are really attached to the beginning of the vegetarian* lorem ipsum, which of course we all are:

Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet ut aliquip pork chop, sirloin andouille magna short loin adipisicing ham commodo enim jerky sausage cow. Aliquip duis sed, aliqua headcheese nostrud nisi sirloin.

Cicero would undoubtedly call this inappropriate (whilst rolling over in his grave), but as there is no actual taste involved, and it allowed me to make that FANTASTIC PIG LATIN JOKE above, I'm all for it.

----
*There is actually a vegetarian version. It goes like this:

Veggies sunt bona vobis, proinde vos postulo esse magis garbanzo groundnut summer purslane winter purslane lettuce.

AND there's a vegan version ("all filler, no killer") which offers both English and Linnean names. I mean really, I am about dying of geeky glee.

English: Leaves, lentil mustard salsify jícama welsh onion swiss chard orache earthnut pea melokhia courgette garlic. Land cress nopal - broccoli rabe polk lizard's tail - rutabaga scallion

Linnean: Solanum melongena brassica rapa alboglabra group. Cyperus esculentus colocasia esculenta portulaca oleracea dioscorea spp. Pisum sativum lablab purpureus

Guess what else there is. Yes: there is an ipsum devoted entirely to fish, which is for some reason strangely funny and may also work if you need a quick source for insults. (You marblefish warty angler, you!)

Mud cat; coelacanth moonfish electric eel, spookfish deepwater stingray emperor bream orbicular batfish albacore zebra pleco. Demoiselle roach torrent catfish rohu roach marblefish warty angler yellowtail kingfish. Cobia rockweed gunnel freshwater flyingfish Bigscale pomfret tang grayling catalufa mud cat man-of-war fish flagblenny opaleye spotted dogfis.

On that note, I have to go. I'm hungry.

Ah, Memories

2011-06-23T21:38:00.000-04:00

At long last, I have gotten a new phone. But now is not the time to talk about that. First I must eulogize my old phone. My old phone and I have been through many things together. There was that period where I could only take calls standing in a certain spot next to my chair. Not in the chair, of course, but next to the chair. There was that period where I would get cut off four times during one conversation. There was that period where I had to charge it daily, when I wasn't even using it, because its battery ran down at three times the speed of a normal phone. Happy times!

I feel like there should be a genre of jokes like the "yo momma so fat" jokes, except instead it would be like, "yo phone so old . . . it has an antenna." Yo phone so old, it only has eighteen buttons. Yo phone so old, it has buttons. Yo phone so old, you can't type parentheses on it. Yo phone so old, you can cover its whole screen with your thumb. Yo phone so old, it folds out. Yo phone so old, it can't take pictures. Yo phone so old, it doesn't have a calendar. Yo phone so old, it can't play music. Yo phone so old, you wait to answer it on three rings because you can't be sure it isn't a party line.

My phone is really old. My phone is so old I couldn't get my contacts and old texts off it, so I had to take pictures of the good ones.

This is like practically my first text ever. Sent to me by my boss. While I was sitting next to her. While we were manning the booth at the medieval conference at Kalamazoo.

This was followed by "Bill O'Reilly waxes his legs," which is almost certainly not true, and moreover not our business if it is, but we were really, really bored. Hence this text from Matt during that conference: "Personality assignment of the hour: Ann Coulter, drunk, and convinced she has a parrot on her shoulder."

Others that amuse me, and probably only me, include:

From Ivan: New favorite word for fin-footed mammals: pinnipeds. Second only to “dugongs” in awesomeness.

Also from Ivan: It’s all fun and games til someone drops their pants in the fire.

Also also from Ivan: We’ll just shave a normal cake. It will be fantastic.

From Matt: Gatie. Hdjekn. I aqe upridemfnxd. Ru are akso sassz. Pleare enej kibke ne jtj!? <3Matt

Also from Matt: Was Ingrid Dutch? I can’t remember . . . (This really is only funny to me. But I find it hilarious.)

From Katie P, who never texts me, but felt it was important that I know who she was sitting across from on the train: Dark hair, olive skin, super light eyes, and no smart phone.

And this one, from Dan, who was standing outside my door at the time:

Goodbye, phone. You have served me well. Sort of.

Just Checking In

2011-06-22T07:00:00.034-04:00

In case you wondered how Meridian: The Original Alpaca is doing, he is as handsome as ever.

His profile is still very distinguished.

And he has a healthy appetite:

My sister tells me one of her coworkers recently started an alpaca farm out of the blue. I anticipate this happening to me someday. I imagine it is like waking up one morning and realizing that everything is now clear. All the things you thought you wanted were just nonsense. What do you really need in life? To have a good-tempered and huggable alpaca nearby at all times. That is all. That, and maybe a capybara, a tiny house, and a snap-bracelet watch. Nothing else matters.

Halfway There

2011-06-21T02:47:00.003-04:00

We have snacks at the office-- nothing fancy, but there's a good assortment of crackers, chips and granola bars. And apparently we also have someone at the office watching their weight, because half-eaten packets of food keep showing up in the snack basket. And someone, fed up with these rejected bags of partially handled comestibles, put up a sign... a warrant if you will, for "The Half Bandit", wanted for the crime of eating half of something and putting it back-- like anyone else would want it. This sign was seen as universally clever and stayed fixed to the cupboard door for several weeks. And today, I went to the kitchen for a coffee and found this:
Whoever ripped that sign in half... please be my friend?

Teeny Tiny

2011-06-13T20:05:00.000-04:00

My dear friend and pen pal Natalie recently went to Ecuador. She wrote me a beautiful letter about her adventures and included some incredible pictures, including one of some butterflies that I honestly thought were fancy hair combs someone had for some reason dropped on the ground. I'm a bit slow sometimes.

Anyway, inside the envelope there were also these wee folks:

Look how tiny! They are about an inch tall. They look like worry dolls, but they don't seem to be worrying. I like them. I'm going to put them with my little alpaca (who is the size of a skyscraper to them, but whatever) and it will be my Very Small Exhibit of Very Small Things From and/or Relating to South America.

Great Giver of the Alpacas Keeps On Giving

2011-06-09T06:00:00.004-04:00

My second issue of Alpacas Magazine has arrived. In this issue I learned about:

Attracting a barn-full to my farm event
It turns out that marketing in the alpaca industry is exactly like marketing in any other industry. Personally, I don't see why you would even need to market alpacas. If you just put up a sign that says HILARIOUS-LOOKING ANIMALS NEXT LEFT that would probably do it, right? Who wouldn't stop in?

Reinforcement in Applied Behavioral Analysis
The behavioral articles are always my favorite. Last time we learned about berserk alpacas. This time we learned how not to freak out alpacas so that they won't even come near you. Tip: don't lunge forward and hug them. They don't like that. In fact, nobody really likes that.

Sustainable Farming
"Can you make money out of your manure? You bet! Call it 'Pacapoo' and sell it to the local gardners and small farm producers." This name is a winner. I would totally do this. Apparently there are big bucks in poo.

Fiber
Fiber as in alpaca fleece, not "how to make your alpaca eat bran muffins." The guy who came up with "Cotton: the fabric of our lives" has been enlisted to give a boost to the alpaca fiber industry. I am all for this, but I foresee one problem. Every single garment shown in the magazine is hideously ugly. There may be places where people would wear these things and not feel shame, but to reach the rest of the country I would recommend moving away from the colors of the seventies.

Bizarre(ly Effective) Advertising
Once again, there is some exemplary advertising, and I am not being funny about this. I genuinely love these ads and they would work on me if I were at leisure to purchase alpacas. Also, they happen to be very weird.

Joe Camel's cousin, Vinny Alpaca, with his bingo babe, Ginger. They always promise each other they won't blow their winnings on fresh blackberry brambles this time, but then they can't help themselves.


In some alternate universe, there's a statue of this in the Louvre, because the "farmer with an alpaca head" is a powerful, yet mysterious, figure in the ancient mythology of that world.

There was also an ad for a 3.5 million dollar alpaca ranch in Oregon. It had lovely gardens, mountain views, and of course alpacas. If they threw in a capybara and a maybe just a small paddock of unicorns, I would take out a loan.

Linwood Gardens

2011-06-07T06:03:00.000-04:00

Tree peonies

Every year, Linwood Gardens holds a Tree Peony Festival, and last weekend I finally got around to going. It's on the estate of the Gratwick family, who built it in the early 1900s. They were a wealthy family from Buffalo, and Linwood Gardens was their summer home for many years. Right before the Depression, they lost all their money, and decided to move there. One family member still lives on the property.

Large feline

William Henry Gratwick III was an artsy fellow, and created new gardens, added sculptures, developed the Rare Plants Nursery, and became obsessed with tree peonies. "Obsessed" is not a word that the brochure uses, but there are a lot of tree peonies, and at least three of the sculptures are of tree peonies.

Folded-up tree peony bud

Not to mention, it takes twenty-five years of grafting and whatnot to create the color peonies that he wanted. Apparently they only naturally come in a few pinkish colors. He went for yellow, and eventually he got it.

This is not yellow. This is pinkish-yellowy-dawn. Better, I think.

In addition to obsessing over flowers, Mr. Gratwick III displayed a rather unique personality. In the house, there is a room he bought from Louis Comfort Tiffany's son (all the rich people, they're pals), which the son had disassembled and brought over from a manor in Europe. Gratwick really just wanted the fireplace, which was the only part that was being used, but Tiffany the Younger said, "Sure, I'll sell you the fireplace, but you have to take the rest of the room, too. It's in my garage." Okay, I don't know if he had a garage. But I'm trying to illustrate the ridiculousness of this. It cost $13,000 then, which is something like $165,000 now. I'm not saying it wasn't a nice room. It was a nice room. But it wasn't even that big, and half of what's great about it is the view, which it didn't have when he bought it.

You can see the view reflected in the glass. Sort of. It is the Genesee Valley, apparently.

This Gratwick person was kind of a hoot. When the local railroad stopped using its station, he tried to buy it. But they wouldn't sell it to him. So he and a friend when down in the middle of the night and stole it. They used it as a pool house and then a shed. I'm not quite sure what struck his fancy, as it's not much to look at, but it makes a good story, and I can believe a shed that really speaks to your soul, as this one evidently did to his, is hard to come by.

Victorian cupolas repurposed as play houses. Presumably not stolen, but who knows?

There was also the obligatory walled garden. I love obligatory walled gardens. I wish I could have an obligatory walled garden, but at my pay rate, they make exceptions as to your obligations. In the gift shop you can buy a book of old pictures of what life used to be like there, which is entitled something like "This place sure must have been pretty . . . when it was kept up properly." It's true, it does suffer from a lack of money. It also suffers from fire: the "big house" is only a third as big as it used to be. The rest burned down in the 1973. I'm certainly not happy there's no money and that the house caught fire, but it is sort of atmospheric the way it is. The house looks modest, like a large farmhouse, and the gardens are lovely without being intimidatingly regal. You don't feel that you should have worn a hoop skirt just to fit in with your surroundings.

The bricks in the obligatory walled garden have shifted and now resemble beaten dirt paths.

The air of dilapidation is slightly melancholy, which suits old houses that nobody lives in. It would be indecent if one forgot that people used to live there -- who threw parties and had the philharmonic down to play by the lily pond and planted vegetables and spent twenty-five years creating a yellow peony -- and aren't there anymore. The book of old pictures testifies to a lively, cheerful, and interesting family. If that period is over, then by golly, the fountains should be left to grow moss just out of respect.

Is it moss? Or is it algae? They must be related.

As delightful as all this is, my favorite part was the idea of having breakfast on the terrace with the whole valley in front of you, or sitting out on the lawn and reading a book on Sunday afternoon. The tour guide said that you can see Rochester on a clear day. The day I went was distantly hazy but blue-skied most of the time, and breezy and very pleasant; excellent for wandering around taking pictures.

To the left of this photo are four librarians. The office is obviously following me around.

It only takes a couple of hours to see everything, so after I took five thousand pictures, I had a slice of lemon icebox cake from their extremely enticing display of incredibly quaint food and went home. It was the perfect day.

Of Symbols and Snails

2011-06-06T18:31:00.003-04:00

Italian word for the "at" symbol: chiocciola. Bonus meaning: snail. It really does look like a snail...

I learned this word by watching many hours of an Italian children's show called "L'albero Azzurro" where a talking Dodo implores me to write him a letter. 'Tis strange the ways we absorb language.

Sweet Succulents

2011-06-03T18:33:00.005-04:00

Succulents are exceptionally easy to grow in southern California. They don't need much water, they're super hearty, and the way you grow more of 'em-- chop off a piece of another succulent, leave it on the table and wait for it to grow some roots.

This process was a mystery to me, until I asked a friend of mine how to grow succulents-- and in response, she went to her backyard, chopped off a bunch of bits and handed them to me. Good to know. And I lovingly waited for them to grow roots, and when they did, I planted the little munchkins in my dirt patch. And I waited. For about two months. And they looked the same the whole time. Still green, still rooting. Still chugging along.
And then this morning, the gardeners came.

And I can't express to you the extent of the devastation. My dirt patch was like a horror film. I had to dig the poor little bodies of my plants from under two inches of soil. Some of them chopped in half, some of them uprooted-- their new growth exposed to our harsh world for the first time. But I was so proud of them! My babies growing extra arms!
I reassembled them as best I could... here's hoping they survive their second replanting.
Good luck little guys-- I'm pulling for you.

The Ham Sandwich Hallelujah

2011-06-02T22:27:00.001-04:00

I've witnessed some strange things in this town. There was the time that guy drove into the Masonic Temple. There was the time I was sleeping in the living room and I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a megaphone saying WE HAVE YOU PARTIALLY SURROUNDED. There were all those times I heard bagpipes and couldn't figure out why. There was the time our local Tim Riggins rode down the sidewalk shirtless on his bike and caused a woman in her car to forget to go at the green light. And, my personal favorite, the time I saw the drunken fool walk into a brick wall and bounce off again. But last night was truly surreal.

I was sitting at my desk, writing an e-mail, when I happened to glance out my window and saw two guys with huge packs, the kind you hike around Europe with. I was trying to figure out how they got here when I realized that one of them was wearing a top hat with a red feather in it. The other one had a hat that I described on Facebook as a "Holmesian affair" only because I couldn't think of a better term fast enough. In fact, it looked like something a troubador would wear. That is the word that I thought at the time, "troubador," and I think it was because of the hat.

I didn't think they actually were anything of the kind . . . until they stopped on the stoop across the street and the tophatted one set down an instrument case. Then he took out a banjo. Then he tuned it. Then they put some money in the case and set it out on the step. The other one got out a harmonica. By this point I was just staring, open-mouthed. Anyone who has lived here will probably understand why. We do not have buskers in this town. We simply do not. It doesn't happen. But it was happening. They started to play.

Twenty minutes later, they were still there. I don't know what happened, but something came over me. I guess I was so fascinated by the very idea of buskers in this town, with hats, that my desperation to know how this had come about grew stronger than my normal fear of striking up conversations with strangers. I gathered what cash I had -- all of three dollars -- and went down and put it in their case. And I stayed for three hours.

On closer inspection, I discovered that the tophatted banjo-player was curly-haired and bearded, dressed in dark plaid, with tattoos of f-holes on his forearms. I said, "Where are you from?" and he said, "Burlington, Vermont," and I thought Yes. You could not be from anywhere else. That was James. Dylan played the harmonica, and he was from everywhere. He had "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" on one arm and something about bearing no malice on the other. He's spending the summer travelling with James, and will go back to school in the fall, where he is triple-majoring in photography, documentary something or other, and something else. (I'm a great listener.) Dylan was brightly sunburned, and was concerned that there was cement dust in his hair. There wasn't. James and Dylan were at the very beginning of a hitchhiking journey from Vermont to Washington state, where they planned to attend a "big hippie party" for like a month. James has lived off his banjo, on and off, for three years or so, and imparted a few helpful tips on sleeping in abandoned buildings (crack addicts are an issue) and finding food for free (dumpsters).

They knew a pretty incredible number of songs, and remembered the lyrics for the most part. They were fans of Tom Waits, and a lot of songs were about whiskey and revenge. I didn't know most of them, but somewhere in the middle, Dylan did absolutely beautiful renditions of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More" and "Slumber, My Darling." Two things about this: I didn't know the same guy who wrote "Camptown Races" was capable of such lyricism, and I didn't know harmonicas were capable of such lyricism either. I think that was my favorite part. Dylan was very smart and funny, and he learned all his songs by ear, and happily admitted to playing with tons of emotion, and even did an impression of himself being overly emotional about a sad song which was kind of hilarious. I wish I could convey this better. James, by contrast, had once locked himself in a room for six months with a hundred-year-old book on how music works, and now suspects he's lost his ear for emotion on account of knowing too much about the notes. To hear him, you wouldn't think so. They were both very talented, but they don't play festivals. James has stage fright.

A couple of people came by and gave them some cash, but it was a windy night and there weren't a lot of pedestrians. At one point, a guy parked his car in half of a parking place and hopped out to listen. He was barefoot. I kind of wanted to know what his deal was, but after a few minutes, he gave them a rather generous check, and drove away. Later, someone driving by chucked a ham sandwich out the window. We were not sure whether it was generous or obnoxious. So they sang a song about the sandwich, which was deeply moving. It went like this:

Ham sandwich
Ham sandwich
Ham sandwich
Ham sandwich
Ham saaa-aaa-aaandwich!

Then James sang another song about the ham sandwich, this time to the tune of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." I wish I could remember the lyrics, many of which where original, but all I remember now is, "It's a cold and it's a broken ham sandwich." There might have been a part about, "It's a warm and it's a moldy ham sandwich," which was closer to the truth. It was warm. Evidently it wasn't moldy, because they ate it.

At some point James got out his trumpet and put on his sunglasses and posed for Dylan's pictures as a blind jazz player, which was not convincing. His trumpet skills are a work in progress, but it is hard to dislike the sound of an even moderately-good trumpet under a streetlamp at night. He also had the rubber part of a plunger to serve as a damper. He said some stuff about having soaked the plunger six times in vinegar and soap. For some reason I thought this process did something to plunger that made it a better damper. Because I am an idiot, it wasn't until I was in bed later that it occured to me: the plunger was used! The part of the story that involved him bravely licking it then made more sense.

I learned a great deal about hitchhiking (it is illegal to hitchhike on I90 until Ohio, or something like that, which is why they were here waiting for a friend to pick them up and take them out of the state), harmonicas (they come in different keys! I never realized that), Stephen Foster (see above), Tom Waits (wrote unbelievably depressing songs on his honeymoon), how many pop songs use the same four chords (they sang quite a lot of Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version), and more about hitchhiking (if you are not actually in the road, it is technically legal). Oh, and James also claimed that it is not totally inappropriate to eat hot sauce with pineapple (I disagree).

Eventually I had to go to bed, but when I got inside I really could not stop thinking about how readily they ate a tiny ham sandwich thrown to them out of a passing car, and how they had sung for me for three hours, and how I only had three dollars, so I made some rice, heated up some leftovers to dump on top of it, and brought them some food. I told them it would not hurt my feelings if they put hot sauce in it (they carry it with them). They were genuinely surprised and very thankful, as all they had was peanuts. In the morning, I opened my door and saw the two plastic containers there on the sidewalk, and had a very strange moment. That actually happened?

Tonight I kind of missed them. Their music was great, and they were good company. I always feel sympathetic toward people who are not traditionally employed, and these two were particularly pleasant, interesting, and talented people. Happily, Dylan gave me his blog address, so I will be following their travels. It would be rather sad to meet people like that, feed them, and know they're going to disappear in the middle of the night and you will never, ever know what happened to them. So Dylan had better update his blog.

Violets and Blues

2011-06-01T21:24:00.007-04:00

So back in my crazy mixed up college years, I learned a lot about the undertones of dye. I gathered this information from a year or so of adding blue streaks to the back of my head. The process began with a application of the traditional Manic Panic BLUE dye . Sadly, blue Manic Panic streaks fade to dingy green Manic Panic streaks... and your "cool cred" falls significantly when you look like "swamp thing". Now PURPLE Manic Panic on the other hand, fades to a lovely shade of blue and keeps you looking... like an 18-year-old with an eyebrow ring and blue hair. Which was totally what I was going for.

I've recently returned to the dying process with a crop of formerly white shirts that were cluttering my closet. I usually shy away from purchasing white clothing because it takes me about 45 seconds to spill coffee or chocolate or some other impossible substance down the middle, rendering the clothing unwearable forever. But my new thrifty solution is to dye all my rejected clothing black. My first attempt at this went well, but it turns out RIT dye you leave in a cupboard for two years doesn't really stay black, but becomes a lovely shade of midnight blue. Turns out, midnight blue tshirts are really cool and hide coffee stains well. Yay.

For my second attempt at shirt rejuvenation I bought a brand new bottle of black dye, boiled my clothing, and then threw them in the wash machine to set... and because my white bathmat was looking a little tired, I threw that in for a cycle too. I figured it would pick up the excess dye, turn midnight blue and match the rest of my decor (decorating theme for my apartment: salvaged IKEA chic) quite well.

Sadly, the undertone of the new bottle of dye was not blue, but red, leaving my hacked bathmat a garish shade of purple.

I left this on my floor for a day before I decided it was hurting my eyes and tossed it in the closet... I can't bring myself to throw it out... I suppose it will join my next batch of beverage stained clothing... perhaps forest green undertones would even everything out...

Light My Fire (The Non-Spork Version)

2011-05-30T05:07:00.004-04:00

So I finally came to terms with the fact that I'm living in California semi-permanently and stopped subletting/crashing at friend's apartments... and I've (semi-permanently) settled in a little 1940's bungalow that's so California it hurts. It lives amidst a pack of other bungalows, and each bungalow has a tiny garden-- people compost... people grow vegetables... everyone uses the clothesline to dry their clothes. The rent is cheap and the owners "honestly don't believe there's any lead paint left." Dude, I cannot express to you how much I LOVE this place.

But the one worrisome aspect of my new apartment (is not that the kitchen is so small I can't open the fridge door all the way) is the slight odor of gas that came and went for the first three months of residency... the smell had no correlation to heat or stove or shower... no real centralized point of stink... I would just walk in from getting the mail and go "that's not quite right." I finally called my landlord after a friend confirmed her apartment was the same way-- it was probably the pilot light in my 1940's heating system. A heating system so ancient you have to turn it on with a little key inserted in the grate.

Super high-tech.

So two maintenance men showed up at my little apartment at an obscenely early hour and commenced to light my furnace. Biff looked at it first and exclaimed, "gosh, I hate this model... they must have had a special tool for lighting these things." Chuck looked at it next, "we can probably just throw something down there and it will catch." Biff looks at me "I've seen people do this one... you just turn the gas on and light a match and it goes pfhwhoom (large explosion gesture) and it's all good..." I gave him a look that said "I am tired and that is a terrible plan," and he and Chuck went back to the drawing board. Sadly, the drawing board led them back to the first plan-- turning the gas on and dropping lit things into my heater... Italian flash cards I'd (hopefully) memorized, popsicle sticks they found in the community garbage... coupons for the local grocery store, "one of these things is bound to catch," they said, as my apartment started to smell more and more like a forest fire. Finally, the pilot light caught (a combination of the slow burning popsicle stick and a quarter turn of the gas key). "We'll stick around til the popsicle stick burns out."

Thanks guys.

And there you have it, I have a working heating system just in time for summer.

This is not about Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry, but if I tell you what it is about, you won't read it.

2011-05-23T22:25:00.001-04:00

This is going to be one of those roundabout posts where I spend several unnecessary paragraphs setting up a single quote. At least I'm warning you this time so you won't be disappointed at the end because you already knew it wasn't working up to much.

My non-poetic interest in Samuel Taylor Coleridge started when I began reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, which is the most interesting book I have read maybe ever. I know I say that about all the books I read, but this one is seriously great! It's about the history of science during the Enlightenment, which is interesting because during that period, they were still referring to scientists as "philosophers" and thought that heat was an invisible substance named "caloric" and that electricity was an invisible fluid called "electricity." Basically, if you didn't know what was going on, you declared it invisible and gave it a name. Sometimes it worked out, and sometimes it didn't.

What is also interesting, and more to my point, is how many of the Romantic poets show up in this book alongside the scientists, and how many scientists wrote poetry. Disciplines we now think of as opposites were happily united, as if the poet and the scientist were just different kinds of philosophers. I knew from the one class I took on the Romantics that there was a strong connection between science and poetry during that period, but even so, I was surprised at first how often Coleridge came up in the chapter on Humphrey Davy, the chemist who discovered nitrous oxide. Then I thought about it a little and I realized: nothing makes more sense than Coleridge, famous for his opium addiction, getting to be pals with Davy, who, in the name of science of course, inhaled vast, vast amounts of nitrous oxide. Or as it is better known, laughing gas. Unfortunately, Davy was too busy making himself and all his friends artificially hilarious to realize it would make a great anesthetic, and surgeons went on giving their patients nothing but whiskey for another fifty years. Then they started using ether. Nitrous oxide wasn't involved in anesthesia until 1876. That seems totally ridiculous, but then again, someone only just invented a rib-spreader that doesn't break the ribs, like, last week. Clearly we have some distance to go before we are doing the full-on Beverly Crusher and healing people with a painless, non-invasive magic beam.

Anyway, while I was reading this, I realized I knew almost nothing about Coleridge except for his opium addiction. I know Byron, Keats, and Shelley all died very young, and it seemed likely Coleridge did, too, considering his obvious issues. But in fact, he lived to be 61, which is twice the average age of a Romantic poet. Many felicitations to him for surviving so long, especially since it was not easy. Everywhere I looked, people were constantly referring to his terrible health problems, which they blamed on his being a drug addict. I do not doubt being a drug addict is bad for your health, but I started to think maybe he was getting a bad rap. No one ever said what his health problems were, just that he was always "in poor health." Then they would allude to his being morally and spiritually impaired, as if that could cause a physical ailment.

Well, this kind of mystery DRIVES ME NUTS. I subsequently discovered that Coleridge wrote about his health constantly, and if no modern doctor could diagnose him from what is basically the world's most well-written medical chart, I was going to be very annoyed. During my hour at the reference desk today, I asked myself a reference question, "What was wrong with Coleridge?" and then I set about answering it. Here is what I found out: he got a cavity, or cavities, which gave him sinus infections and also infected his tonsils. His tooth was pulled, but somewhere along the way, the infection very likely got into his bones and gave him osteomyelitis, which means bone infection, which is redundant because I just said that, but I like the word. It reminds me we are probably due for another disease week.

But back to poor, suffering Coleridge: on top of what the first article called "chronic sepsis," Coleridge probably also had something else. This is where it gets slightly confusing. Coleridge had one of two types of cholera, neither of which were really cholera, and neither of which he actually had. Thus sayeth article number two. Though Coleridge was convinced he had cholera, what really caused his symptoms was opium withdrawal; he used to quit cold turkey every so often. The symptoms are the same. I could not convince myself to read thirty-five pages on the effects of cholera, so I must omit the specific details. Let's just say, Coleridge should have either quite the opium altogether or not at all. It would have been much less gruesome.

In regard to the moral matter of becoming an opium addict, if I had terribly painful rheumatism due to an ongoing whole-body infection, starting at the age of 24 and lasting almost forty years, I might treat opium like the eighteenth-century equivalent of medical marijuana, too. Plus, severe pain is a much better reason to trot on down to the Pneumatic Institute every evening and get a noseful of happy-making gas than "science" is. (To be fair to Davy, he really did think laughing gas was curative, and when he finally realized it wasn't, he moved on to more productive work.)

Now we're coming to the part which is the entire point. I could have just said, "This is funny," and left it at that, but I felt you needed to know about Coleridge's personal issues because you never know when you'll be on Jeopardy or something. This is Coleridge's account of his general ill-health, early on, right after he's had a bad tooth extracted. The "it" he refers to in this letter is pain:

"On Friday it only niggled, as if the chief had departed from a conquered place and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corsica, and a few struggling pains only remained. But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death pangs he transpierced me, and then he became a wolf, and lay a-gnawing at my bones!"

My favorite part is a shower of arrowy death pangs. I'm sure I would not laugh if he were in front of me, suffering in my face, but a shower of arrowy death pangs. I mean my goodness. You'd think the man was a Romantic poet . . . or on drugs . . . or both.

He admits in his next letter: "I wrote you on Saturday night under the immediate inspiration of laudanum, and wrote you a flighty letter, but yet one most accurately descriptive of both facts and feelings." I believe both claims. It's tempting to think he couldn't have been feeling that terrible if he was lying around thinking, "How shall I conclude my pain-as-military-commander conceit? Ah yes, I think 'his name is Legion' would be dramatically Biblical." I've read a lot about writers, and they all cope with adversity by thinking about either how best to describe it later, or how it matches up with what has been described before. The "giant-fiend of a hundred hands" is a reference to the Hekatonkheires, three giants who, in Greek mythology, helped overthrow the Titans. I admit the allusions do convince me that he was in a whole lot of pain. But I also admit that I laughed. A shower of arrowy death pangs. That is immortal.

The two articles I read, or in the case of the cholera one, skimmed with one eye shut, are these:

John D. Rea's "Coleridge's Health," Modern Language Notes, January 1930.
G. S. Rousseau's "Coleridge's Choleras: Cholera Morbus, Asiatic Cholera, and Dysentary in Eighteenth-Century England," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Summer 2003.

Incidentally, cholera morbus, Asiatic cholera, and dysentary are all in the running for Disease of the Year, so if you have a preference I will consider your comment a vote, and also did you catch that clever if disgusting pun? I tell you I am on fire here.

Compost Can Be Art Too

2011-05-23T08:38:00.049-04:00

Rush Rhees Tower Tour

2011-05-20T07:23:00.002-04:00

There are two times of year that the Rush Rhees Library lets you go up to the top of the building and see the view, and one of them is right before graduation. I was lucky to go up on a day when it wasn't raining and horrible. It did rain on graduation, by the way. Apparently it was the worst graduation weather in like a million years. That's what I heard on Monday anyway when the volunteers were still trying to get dry.

The tower is rather high up and the railings did not seem adequate to me. The view was good, though. I only wish that the majority of the campus wasn't built in the sixties and seventies, architecture's awkward phase.

It is slightly confusing that the river is in three directions. It also runs past the quad in the first picture. You can also see the airport runways in direction. This funny-shaped building is named after Susan B. Anthony. It is referred to as Sue B. I think if we called Frederick Douglass Freddy D. then we could write lovely rhyming couplets about civil rights in the nineteenth century.

The river runs through the background of this picture too, behind the stadium, even though you can barely tell that it's there.

On the way up in the tower I got to stop and watch the carillon lady play the carillon. I didn't realize the campus had a carillon until it started playing as I walked out the door one day. I think it's a beautiful, happy, Christmasy sound, but one of my student workers referred to it as "that creepy Halloween music that plays sometimes," so to each her own. I told the carillon lady that my great-grandfather played the carillon, and she let me into the booth to look at it. She said I could take lessons if I wanted, but I'm not sure I'm coordinated enough. However, if I can get the university to pay for it, it would be fun. I wonder how I can word my application to take carillon lessons so that it sounds like it's necessary for my job. That may take some doing.

Anyway, in case you wanted to know what the view was like from the tower, now you do. It is possible to go higher up, to where the carillon bells are, but it is strictly repairmen-only up there. Unless you are an engineering student who sneaks off during a tour, apparently. Honestly, the inside of the tower is basically just hollow with some enormous steel girders in it, and it is not a place I would want to go climbing around in. The carillon booth is just kind of hanging there in empty space (or at least, that's how it feels). To go higher you have to go up a teeny tiny circular stairwell and after that, it is not clear to me. I'm picturing people hanging onto swinging bells for dear life. It does not appeal. HAHAHA I am rocking the puns this week.

Incidentally, in Googling Rush Rhees, president of the university from 1900 to 1935, I discovered that he had a son, also named Rush Rhees. During his father's tenure, Rush Rhees the Younger was expelled from the university for asking, as Wikipedia puts it, "insolent questions." I would like to know what family dinners were like after that. He moved to the UK, became best friends with Wittgenstein, and ended up at Cambridge, so I guess you could say it worked out for him.

Dioramas at the RMSC

2011-05-18T22:01:00.002-04:00

The best thing about the RMSC, in my opinion, is the amount of dioramas. I happen to be a sucker for miniatures, but these really are quite impressive. The diorama of Rochester circa, um, The Olden Days (sometimes I forget to read the plaques) perfectly captures the interminable gray hopelessness of midwinter in western New York. I mean that in a good way. It's very artistic!

This is the Erie Canal, which used to go over the aquaduct in the middle of the city. The aquaduct is now the Broad Street Bridge, which crosses the Genesee. When I walked through the abandoned subway, I walked across the top of the aquaduct in the diorama -- Broad Street is on a layer above it. I have absolutely no idea what those buildings are. There was a diagram, but a small child was leaning on it and I thought it would be rude to shove him over to take a picture.

And this is a view down Fitzhugh Street, which crosses Main two streets over from Exchange. I'm pretty sure none of these buildings are there anymore, except possibly for the church on the left. I wouldn't know Fitzhugh Street from any other random street downtown, but GoogleMaps and RocWiki suggest that that church is St. Luke and St. Simon Cyrene Episcopal Church, standing since 1824.

But the purpose of including this picture was really to point out the birds circling the steeple of the church on the right. Nice touch.

I suspect this is an early mill at High Falls. I forgot to read the plaque again. I get so excited by the tiny little frozen people! Undoubtedly this mill burned down at some point; such is the fate of all mills.

Interestingly (or not, according to your tastes), there was an exhibit in Rare Books at work where you could go and see a sketch of High Falls from before the area was settled. Oh look, they were kind enough to put it on their website where I can steal it. Voila:

This is cute for two reasons: (1) The artist put himself in his own sketch. (2) The artist is wearing a tricorner hat. What's less cute is that this guy, as I recall, was led to this place by a helpful Native American guide, whose people were soon thereafter cheated out of all their land, bit by bit.

But back in the days before Europeans came and quite literally ruined everything, the RMSC tells us that there was a lot of this going on:

There are several dioramas like these, all of which are really cool, but this is my favorite. I wish I knew who was involved in making it, because I would like to give them credit. These figures are incredibly charming.

These, I think, are Iroquois. Again, I did not read anything. But they're making longhouses so it seems like a safe bet. There are also, among others, Pueblo Indians, Plains Indians, and what I think are Pacific Northwest Indians. I'm confused as to why we have totem poles here when they are apparently a tradition in the Pacific Northwest, but I guess it's possible Wikipedia might be leaving stuff out. You'd think someone with access to nine gazillion reference resources would be able to figure this out, but it's 9:30 and I'm tired.

Lest these lovely dioramas suggest otherwise, I want to reiterate that the RMSC should still be considered creepy by including this . . . lovely creature.

The fact that he is fake and comes with his surroundings attached to his feet means he counts as a tiny little diorama of his own. A creepy one. If you are sensitive to the idea of primitive mammals crawling all over the earth, I recommend skipping the geological history and heading straight for the local history dioramas. They are very soothing.