More on the Classification of Spiders: A Holistic Approach

It's time to revisit the classification system for spiders. The original proposal overlooks the need for situational ratings. These are vital if we wish to discuss encounters with spiders in their totality. Classifying spiders according to visual cues provides us with an understanding only of the spider, not the overall threat inherent in the circumstances under which the confrontation occurs.

For example. This morning. I had an experience. I had just gotten up and I didn't have my glasses on. La la la, I brush my teeth, everything is very nice, it's a beautiful day, etc. etc. Then I see something out of the corner of my eye that looks like a gnat on the wall. But it's a gnat, so whatever, la la la, my teeth are so happy and clean, hooray. Brush brush brush scrub scrub scrub.

Then I put on my glasses and catch this cheeky category two halfway through a descent from the ceiling, frozen in midair like he thinks the stupid thing that can't see won't notice him if he doesn't move his legs. And he has a lot of leg he could move. He is a mother of a daddy longlegs. Under ordinary circumstances this would be a startling but easily rectifiable problem. When, on the other hand, your function is limited by not being entirely awake and suffering from visual impairment, a whole new set of possible complications arises, namely these: (1) I could have walked into it, (2) it could have landed on my face, and (3) if properly aligned I could have swallowed it.

So, it was a category two, but extenuating circumstances made it seem much more like a category three. However, referring to it as a category three wouldn't be accurate and it's important to be accurate. You can't radio headquarters and tell them you've got a category three (over!) when you've technically got a category two, because the troopers they send will be on the lookout for the wrong spider and could be taken by surprise. I believe this demonstrates a clear need for the aforementioned situational rating.

It seems to me that the best solution is a number/letter pairing, where the number is the category corresponding to visual assessment, and the letter indicates the danger level according to real-life conditions. Off the top of my head I'm going to list a few possible circumstances you may wish to denote when categorizing run-ins with spiders:

A. Spider chooses to infiltrate when the enemy is incapacitated in some way, whether tired, sick, drunk, or not wearing glasses
B. Spider launches offensive when you don't have time to deal with him, and then disappears while you're gone, leaving you with the almost certain prospect of being ambushed later
C. Spider turns up in a totally inappropriate place, such as a shoe, a cupboard, a bed, or your lap
D. Spider appears with undue suddenness, ex. dropping from the ceiling
E. Spider jumps (although these are usually small, I'm assigning them a higher rating because they're wretchedly difficult to kill)
F. Spider lays eggs (applies to any and all such occurrences within a one-mile radius of your person, and includes even the mere suspicion of such an occurrence)
Z. Spider makes sneak attack during sleep (this is the ultimate nightmare scenario, qualifying it for the highest possible ranking)

Fortunately this morning only brought a 2A: relatively minor. To live in this apartment, however, is to live under the constant threat of a 1F-3F, which is not pretty: these hideous creatures for some unknown reason multiply wildly by the electrical wires outside my window. After today's incident I refortified the place by spraying deterrent around the windows, but the daddy longlegs tend to come in under the door from downstairs, so tomorrow it's out with the vacuum cleaner and goodbye to situations rated A through E. F obviously will be ongoing, and Z . . . there's no stopping Z.

easter egg

The most useless help menu ever, but it's nice to keep things lighthearted when you're on the verge of pulling your hair out.

Eyeball FAIL

Lately my right eye has been twitchy and strained. Since it obviously isn't beriberi, my first thought was BRAIN TUMOR. Think of the blog post I could write about being awake while my skull is opened! But it is not a brain tumor. I went to my marvelous eye doctor and he explained it like this: "There's this number. Most people are a 6. You're an 18." And then he gave me a piece of card stock and a cat toy.

These are for convergence exercises. The instructions are nearly unintelligible. At the top it says "The Normalization of Fusion in True Space," which sounds like the title of a philosophy of art paper to me. It goes on to discuss physiological diplopia and how you have to train your eyes to see double vision when they're out of alignment, so that they will automatically go back into alignment, like the eyes of normal people who are sixes. I am to return to the office in three weeks at which time I have been informed there will be a test. I hate failing tests, so if you see me and I'm staring cross-eyed at my thumbs, it's because I'm studying.

The Second of June

The only thing open on the way to work was Burger King. Our boss did not give us the day off. Plan for retaliation was a sick day on the 4th of July. 4th of July is a Sunday. Life: it is hard.

Under the Sea

Ivan sent me an article about this creature in an e-mail entitled "meet the bone-eating snot-flower worm." When people send you things like this it means they are much too well acquainted with your bizarre interests. (Cf. This message my sister sent me recently: "I was watching Medium and the main character kept hearing pig squeals every time she saw a man bite into a sandwich that had bacon on it. And I thought of you. Don't you feel flattered?" Yes, yes I do.) Anyway, apparently this thing eats the bones of dead whales. Someone's got to.

The New York Times' Scientist at Work blog has been talking about nudibranchs lately. My aunt tells me the term "nudibranch" refers to naked gills. If I actually read the blog rather than just skimming through going "ooooh, aaaaah" at the pictures, I might have picked that up. Nudibranchs, also known by the less attractive term "sea slug," evidently come in endless fascinating variety, of which this is merely one example. Although you couldn't pay me to touch one, I think they're beeeoootiful. At some point when I go back and read the blog, I will tell you what they do. My guess is they eat stuff. Slowly.

Prosciutto e Melone

Cantaloupe wrapped in Prosciutto-- I'm just gonna go ahead and say it: BETTER THAN BACON CHOCOLATE.

Haunted

I have a theory that the places you found mysterious in your childhood will always be more mysterious to you than new any place you are first acquainted with as an adult, however interesting that new place is.

And by "mysterious," what I really mean, in most cases, is "terrifying."

When I was little, family vacations mainly consisted of visiting relatives, and they all lived in houses older than the one I grew up in. The advantage to living in a house that only dates back to a few years before you were born is this: you can be pretty sure no one is buried in the basement. I didn't even know such a thing was possible until I read that book about Bernie Magruder and the Bessledorf Hotel in which Bernie discovers a body under the dirt floor of the basement. Thanks a lot, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor! Our basement was concrete, so even if there were bodies under it, they were not going to come up through it, which was of considerable concern to me. Other people's basements were another story entirely -- their basements, their houses, and in some cases the entire property the house was on.

In the case of my great-aunt's house, I remember finding quite a lot of things distinctly creepy. Again, this is partly due to reading. In seventh grade we had to do a poetry project, and I accidentally read a poem called "Ghost House," which starts with this:

I dwell in a lonely house I know,

That vanished many summer ago,

And left no trace but the cellar walls,

And a cellar in which the daylight falls

And purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

I immediately thought of my great-aunt's house and the crumbling old barn foundation behind it. The poem goes on to describe the situation of house with alarming accuracy, and then casually throws in some "mute folk" whose names are written on gravestones and who wander around "slow and sad." To this day I still cannot separate my idea of the house from the feeling in that poem. Although I absolutely do not believe in ghosts, I do believe in poetry, and the poem was very effective in creeping me out. Thanks a lot, Robert Frost!

But the ghost house was only one of many, many things that scared me. Let's talk about the pump house. I do not have any reliable memories of the pump house, I could not draw you a picture of the pump house, I am not totally clear on what the pump house is all about or if it's still in use. But just the words pump house make me think of a dark, spider-filled shack on the edge of a dim pine forest, with a deep black hole inside that might -- yes, of course -- have someone in it. The only good poem I ever wrote involved the pump house and its aura of doom, and because of that I now find it more foreboding than ever. Thanks a lot, Simon!

Was the inside of the house safe, at least? Goodness, no! First of all, someone at some point decided that a nice decoration for the study (where my sister and I often slept) would be a flying squirrel. Stuffed. I mean taxidermied, to be clear. It hung from a hook in the middle of the ceiling, body a bit bigger than a bat's, webby wings all stiff, nefarious thoughts going around in its head. I could not sleep in the same room with it. People kept telling me that it was dead and therefore couldn't hurt me. But there ain't no "therefore" about it. In the world of my childhood, bunnies could suck the juice out of vegetables and there were such things as tesseracts. It didn't seem out of the realm of possibility that the squirrel was not permanently dead and frankly I found it a bit naive of everyone to think it was.

That was the main threat on the first floor. On the second floor, I fell victim to the misapprehension that the rat closet was for rats, not to keep rats out. Oh, how I wish someone had made that clear a bit earlier on. But that was a comparatively small problem next to the fact that the north bedroom (where my sister and I also sometimes slept) contained the creepiest portrait on the face of the earth. It was this . . . girl. I do not know how to describe her so as to adequately communicate the fear she inspired. Her hair is ratty, first of all, and her whole demeanor is plain shifty. She's posing for a portrait, but she's not looking at the painter like a normal person. Her eyes are aimed at someone outside of the painting whom she is clearly plotting to murder, and her mouth is craftily turned up in delight at the thought of it.

Now, Freud tells a story about a time he caught a glimpse of himself as a reflection in the window of a train compartment, and his first instinctual feeling, before he realized he was looking at himself, was vehement dislike and distrust. This is supposed to demonstrate the state of being of "uncanny" -- when something familiar becomes unfamiliar and threatening. I think Freud would say my problem with this painting is that the model, if she ever existed, was once my age and is now dead, as I will be at some point, and it's the fact that I identify with her yet can't conceive of sharing her fate that makes her absolutely repugnant.

But that's Freud. My opinion is that she's a psycho-killer. Run run run run run run run away.

Recently-ish, this house changed hands. Last weekend, my sister paid a visit. On Monday, she called me mysteriously and said, "I have something for you," but she wouldn't tell me what it was, because she "wanted to see my face." Advice: if anyone ever says this to you, run run run run run run run away. It means the Girl Murderer has tracked you down.

Apparently my cousin found her face-down on the dresser below where she's supposed to hang. Here is the conversation I imagine happening:

Cousin: Someone must have been scared of this or something.

Sister: Yes! Yes! It was my sister!

Cousin: You want it?

Sister: Yes! It will bring her great horror!

And so it did. Thanks a lot, guys! I made the mistake of leaving it face up on my desk and every time I go by it gives me the shivers. It would be significantly less scary if I could figure out what it was -- who painted it, and when, and, for God's sake, why. But it's some sort of reproduction, there's no signature, and nothing on the back of the frame. It's like she came into being on her own just to scare the crap out of me.

I have to admit I became slightly reconciled to her while studying her for clues, but squirrels will fly before I hang her up in my house. She'll be face down in a drawer where she belongs.

Further developments here.

Fancy Footwear

I have a friend from California stopping through Rome in a few weeks and she asked me what sort of footwear the Italians were wearing. I made it very clear that as an American, and especially as a Californian wearing flip flops EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR, blending in here simply wasn't an option. Roman women somehow manage to navigate tourists and cobblestones and insane motorinos all while wearing the highest high heels.

And when they're not wearing stilettos, they seem partial to these eyesores:

I think your euro is better spent on gelato and birkenstocks.

Pranzo

Gelato with pine nuts. Pizza al taglio with zucchini flowers.

I can only hope lunch will always be this lovely.

This draft . . .

. . . has some problems.

Trippa

For some reason local dishes come up every time I'm chatting with my roommates, and they've been very good about letting me know what I should sample while out and about-- the cappuccino down the street, the brioche and gelato across the way, the cacio e pepe near work, and the one dish everyone seems to fear: tripe. I know we've discussed tripe on three separate occasions, but I promptly forget the ingredients, as one is much better off thinking of espresso and pizza than things like tripe.

Saturday evening we ended up at a party with a buffet, and someone suggested I try the local dish in the brown bowl. I was all "when in rome" and got in line. As I was putting some on my plate an Italian woman looked at me and said "brava! mangia!"... I have two interpretations of this event: either she was excited I was trying something as disgusting as tripe, or she was mad that I took the spoon-- sarcasm in other languages is difficult.

I handed off the serving utensil, consumed my tripe and then asked the roommate what exactly I had put in my mouth. And with his response I can safely say I won't be eating it again. Tripe has the charm and texture of raw chicken skins in a nice tomato sauce. All I could think of was an episode of Taste of America about chitlins . The tag line was "Martha Lou's Chitlins, 100% poo free!".

Here's hoping the same sort of quality control for the Roma version.

Time To Bring in the Laundry

Storm's a comin'.

Disease Week: Beriberi

Here at Simon & Ivan we take our blog very seriously and approach all posts with dignified scientific detachment and profound gravity. As evidence please take this conversation in which we finally hit upon a suitable Disease of the Year:

SIMON: oh man
pellagra: the disease of the three D's
dermatitis, diarrhea, and dementia
holy crap, no pun intended
and it gives you amnesia!
IVAN: how about jumping frenchman disorder
ooo pellagra
sounds exotic
SIMON: jumping frenchman disorder?
what is that?!
oh my god: beriberi: it makes people walk in "a sheep-like fashion"
IVAN: LOL!
yes-- that one
the sheep one

Yep, we picked "the sheep one." It is not the most gruesome thing ever, but it has a great name and it involves walking like a sheep, and that's all we require of our favorite things, including diseases.

Beriberi has been around for at least 4,000 years. It comes in two varieties, wet and dry, like cat food. The dry kind affects the central nervous system and causes paralysis, and the wet kind affects your heart and makes you swell and gives you a fever.  So, there's no good kind, and even if you get better you might end up with Korsakoff's psychosis. Symptoms of Korsakoff's psychosis include apathy, amnesia, ataxia, lack of insight (I do not understand how this is a symptom), and confabulation. According to our friend Wikipedia, confabulation "is the spontaneous narrative report of events that never happened." In short: the sheep disease can make you crazy.

The sheep disease has nothing to do with sheep, actually. Plague, Pox, and Pestilence speculates that "beriberi" may come from the Malay word for "sheep" because the paralysis makes people walk strangely. I'm not honestly sure how a human being could walk in a sheep-like fashion even if he or she wanted to, but I will leave the experimentations up to our loyal readers. Please report back, preferably with video.

Beriberi is caused by thiamine deficiency, which is why it tends to afflict populations who subsist mainly on rice. Thiamine is found in the hulls of rice grains, but if the hulls are too efficiently removed, all the thiamine goes with it. It is particularly bad when the process is mechanized and the grains are rinsed or "polished." This in combination of a diet that includes a lot of raw fish, which counteracts thiamine, is not good. As you may expect, Asia was a marvelous place to develop a thiamine deficiency right up to the 1970s. Others at risk are those who are extremely active and alcoholics, the first because they use so much energy, and the second because they can't absorb thiamine very well. The book also observes that "an alcoholic may fail to consume a wide variety of foods," but even cereal is fortified these days so I don't think that's a good excuse. If you live on a ship, in an asylum, or are in the military you should also watch out (only applicable to readers living in the nineteenth century).

In the 1930s, an American chemist named Robert R. Williams figured out how to synthesize thiamine, and after that we were well on our way toward vitamin-fortified food. In the United States, flour is now enriched with thiamine so that we don't all die. Alternatively this may be a communist plot, like water flouridation. If given the choice between communism and walking like a toothless sheep, I will take communism.

What have we learned from this? Eat lots of different stuff. The number of diseases in this book that come from dietary deficiencies is really alarming. Then again, quite a few also come from crop fungi, so you could also take away the message that you're damned if you eat and damned if you don't. An early runner-up in the contest for Disease of the Year was ergotism (that's ergotism, not egotism, a condition also manifesting in lack of insight), which comes from a fungus on cereal crops. It makes your skin blister and your blood vessels constrict -- so that's one vote against eating. Meanwhile, the jumping Frenchmen disorder mentioned by Ivan above, seems only to occur in lumber camps -- one vote against lumber camps, which I didn't even know were a threat.

As for pellagra, I think we know all we want to know about that.

Go ye forth, fair readers, and diagnose! Or just accuse! As long as you get to say "beriberi" at least once a day, it's all the same to us.

Disease Week: Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull

Preliminary notes: This is really quite gross in some parts. Also, I have taken dreadful liberties with the quotes and strung distant sentences together in a most unprofessional manner—otherwise this would have been longer, and it's already very long.

I’m not sure why this gruesome book instantly appealed to me when I read a review of it two years ago in Book Forum, but it stuck in my head, and when it unexpectedly turned up at a used book sale last month, I latched onto it and guarded it possessively all the way to the counter. The coincidence of finding it so unexpectedly made me suspicious of further unlikelihoods, namely that there could well be another person in this obscure little town yearning for a 1939 Hungarian brain tumor memoir, and I might have to fight for it. I can say now it would have been worth it. It is marvelous.

I don’t know much about Karinthy, since he was Hungarian and I read a regrettable lack of foreign books, but the internet tells me this much: he was the first person to propose the theory that any two people on earth can be connected in six steps. In other words, without him we would not have The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. However, I believe he had other, more notable achievements, such as being a well-known writer and humorist (or, as someone joked to him, tumorist). At the time of his illness, he was so beloved in Budapest that the newspapers published updates of his ongoing brain surgery in Stockholm. Also, he translated Winnie-the-Pooh into Hungarian.

I would really just like to type the entire book into this box so that you can simply read it for yourself. In addition to having a splendid sense of humor, Karinthy does not gloss over the more vain and silly and superstitious aspects of his nature, without which anyone’s narration of such a trial would be unbearably saintlike. Moreover, his imaginative temperament seems miraculously well-suited to this subject. His account goes beyond the surrealism of simply having a brain tumor to begin with, into hallucinations and dreams that seem like they should be inexpressible—yet he manages to express them. And he manages to elevate episodes of fainting and retching to that bizarre other world in which impossible things, like brain tumors, happen and are nearly fun to hear about. This metaphor is overused, but it’s really like having Dante as a guide through hell.

The process starts out when Karinthy hallucinates the sound of a passing train. This progresses to peculiar sensations of unreality, headaches, fainting spells, and being unable to walk straight. At some point he goes to visit his wife who is studying at a clinic—the sort of clinics they have in Fitzgerald novels—and is shown a few of the unfortunates confined there. After meeting a man with a brain tumor, he diagnoses himself: “The pale, vacant face of the dying man reminded me of my own expression as I had seen it lately in my mirror while shaving. With a foolish grimace, like a man who pretends to belittle some achievement he is boasting about, I said to my wife: ‘Aranka, I’ve got a tumor on the brain.’”

Aranka mocks him for being a hypochondriac, telling him if he had a brain tumor he’d be retching and fainting. He does not mention to her that he has been doing exactly these things, because he doesn’t really want to have a brain tumor. But inevitably, bits and pieces of the diagnosis come together. He ends up back at his wife’s clinic as a patient, a depressing irony: “On that very staircase I had stood three weeks ago. I could not rid myself of the notion that the trouble began only when I spoke about it. Not only was it born at that moment, but as a direct result of my having given it a name. The anxious, eerie sensation that weighed on me as I passed down those echoing corridors was exactly like that experienced by a criminal revisiting the scene of his crime.” Throughout the book he uses a rather clever metaphor of the patient as a suspected criminal. After his first foreboding examination, the doctor wears the “expression a judge might have when called upon in his official capacity to try a friend on some serious criminal charge. For the life of me, I could not defend myself, though I felt certain I was innocent.”

Skipping on, he ends up going to Stockholm to be operated on by a famous neurosurgeon named Olivecrona. I imagine travelling by train from Budapest to Stockholm with a nauseating and disorienting brain tumor must have been pretty awful, but he seems to have slept most of the time and had extremely symbolic dreams. One is a series of vignettes in which he’s looking for something, and although it’s quite obvious he’s looking for his tumor, and he knows it, there’s always something in the way of his expressing it. For example, he has a long discussion about it with Al Capone, who has stolen it and kept it in a strong-box—but “all the time, the rascal would pretend we were talking about the Lindbergh baby.” It’s worth noting that Karinthy read a lot of Freud.

Onward to the grossness! Finally he gets to Stockholm and meets the famous surgeon, Olivecrona. After several days of delusions and increasing blindness, Karinthy gets his operation. He is less than eager to have it because they can’t use anesthesia and he is supposed to try not to pass out. They wheel him into the operating room, whispering together in an aggravating manner. Then they start trepanning his skull to drain the fluid from his brain cavity. This is the part where you truly begin to admire his fortitude: “There was an infernal scream as the steel plunged into my skull. It sank more and more rapidly through the bone, and the pitch of its scream became louder and more piercing every second. I had just time to say to myself that it must be the electric trephine. They needn’t have bothered to be so discreet about their whispering . . . !” I honestly, sincerely, completely unsarcastically cannot imagine not throwing up or going unconscious at this point. And that was just the drilling of a little hole.

Next, Olivecrona removes parts of the skull: “A straining sensation, a feeling of pressure, a cracking sound, a terrific wrench. This process was repeated many times. Each cracking sound reminded me of taking the lid off a jam jar.” At this point Karinthy starts thinking specifically of ways to remain conscious, and begins to be annoyed that no one seems to be paying much attention to him. “How much longer were these gentlemen going to fumble about in my skull? Couldn’t they do me the honor now and again of telling me what they were doing with my head? After all, I had been invited to this party, too . . .” Operating on the brain without anesthesia doesn’t hurt because there are no nerves in the brain, but as Karinthy observes, it doesn’t seem right: “It was impossible for a man to be lying here with his skull open and his brain exposed to the outer world—impossible for him to lie here and live. It was impossible, incredible, indecent, for him to remain alive—and not merely alive, but conscious and in his right mind. It wasn’t decent or natural.” Then he starts thinking about ducks.

He does eventually go unconscious, but the operation is successful, the tumor is benign, and he wakes up later that day. However, it somehow seems to him that twelve days have passed, and he becomes extremely irate that everyone is lying to him about how long he has been recovering. “I felt a bitter grievance against the world. Did they think I was going to swallow anything now, just because my brain had been operated on . . . ?” He is peevishly indignant through much of the book, which is both understandable and amusing.

The tale of woe winds down rather quickly after the surgery. He recovers his sense of taste, and although Olivecrona suspects he will not regain his sight, he regains it while still in the hospital. He becomes teary-eyed at everything, and tries to communicate to a Swede with gestures how beautiful life is. She thinks he wants to know where the bathroom is. He is also reunited with his sister, whom he hadn’t seen since she moved to Norway some twenty-five years earlier. It’s all very nice, which is why you shouldn’t read the introduction, because Oliver Sacks spoils everything by telling you he died of a stroke a year later.

I wouldn’t like to say something as insipid as, “It was all worth it because this is such a remarkable book,” but I do feel that way a little, and I think Karinthy would be tempted toward that interpretation as well, seeing as he spends entire sections talking about how “every life-history is at the same time a novel of a life” and his sustaining “self-dramatizing instinct.” My favorite part of the book is when he tries to impress Olivecrona, and demand his respect for the arts, by putting an unusual spin on the whole tumor business: “Perhaps this mysterious tumor, despite its apparent work of destruction, wanted to become something which would turn out eventually to man’s advantage, but for the present wished its purpose to remain unknown. . . . These tumors might be the first rudimentary attempt, whether conscious or unconscious, at supplying man with some new organ which would direct his evolution on lines as yet unsuspected. . . . Perhaps, acting on secret orders from the pituitary region, it had devised a plan for a new human sense. Perhaps it was preparing an organic electroscope, an organic antenna, or I know not what device . . .”

Olivecrona nods politely and gets away from him as quickly as possible. I, on the other hand, wish there were more.

Disease Week: Like Shark Week, but Horribler

Friends, it has been too long since we talked about really horrible diseases.

Sure, the plague comes up every once in a while, but as a dread disease it's kind of lost its novelty. We do talk about schistosomiasis statistically more often than probably any non-medical blog on the internet, but it's been two years since that was really a theme here. And there was that botfly scare Ivan had last April, but it turned out to be poison oak, which doesn't count.

I propose the following. First, I shall post a book review of Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull, which is a memoir of the famous Hungarian writer's experience of having a brain tumor in 1936. (I say "famous" because I am told he is.) Believe it or not, it is pretty funny. I particularly like the part where Karinthy sticks it to a friend who doesn't believe he has a brain tumor by producing the exact evidence the friend demands. And the friend, seeing the evidence, is like, "OH." And Karinthy is like, "Somehow winning this argument does not lift my spirits." Don't worry, he lives. Otherwise it would be less funny. Anyway, I shall post this on Wednesday or Friday, depending on how quickly I finish it.

Second (or first as the case may be) I shall announce Simon & Ivan's Disease of the Year, chosen from that delightful tome: Plague, Pox, and Pestilence: Diseases in History. (Side note: I recently had occasion to use a wonderful etymology site to look up words with a Greek root of temnein, "to cut." These words tend to have -tom- in them, like anatomy, lobotomy, tracheotomy, phlebotomy, tonsillectomy. I learned three things. (1) "atom" basically means "unsplittable." Oops! (2) "tome" is the least alarming word coming from this root, and (3) you should not just Google any old word that has a Greek root meaning "to slice and dice the human body" because while curiosity may not kill the cat, it may make the cat want to hurl. I have since diagnosed myself with tomophobia, a fear of surgical operations.) So after a consideration of the candidates and consultation with Ivan, you can look forward to learning something new and disgusting that, if all goes well, will make you regret reading this blog. Hopefully this does not include Ivan, to whom I have not yet divulged my plans. Surprise, Ivan! She is always diagnosing people with brain lesions, so I think she'll be up for it.

Note to self.

By "fill two-thirds full" what they really meant was "fill half full; two-thirds for monster cupcakes."

Simon vs. Seasonal Fluctuations in Temperature and Humidity

I have two bottles of allergy-relief eyedrops, 60 Mucinex, and 500 Ibuprofen. Bring it, Spring.

Dude!

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

Last night I was innocently watching McLeod's Daughters and saying things to myself like "I must have a dairy cow," and "Wait, that's disgusting, I must never have a dairy cow," and "I want to live on a farm," and "Wait, that's disgusting, I don't ever want to live on a farm," when I was suddenly startled out of my indecisive internal monologue by an unpleasant BOOM. And then another unpleasant BOOM.

Away to the window I flew like a flash, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a large vehicle across the street, on the sidewalk, having just taken out a parked car and a column of the Masonic Temple. The large vehicle then veered around in the road, which fortunately had no traffic in it (we shut down at nine o'clock in this town) and went out of sight.

It turned out he only made it about three yards before pulling over on the wrong side of the road. I strongly suspect drunkenness, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he's epileptic. Since the firehouse is next door, the street was soon full of firefighters, and then all kinds of other people came, and there were lots of flashing lights. Then some guys stood around for a while looking at the column. I can only imagine they were repeatedly saying, "Dude!" to each other because what else is there to do in such a situation? Then it started snowing. Weird night.

At some point between then and now, someone thought the best way of dealing with the column was to remove the middle part (which was lying pathetically on the ground like part of a Greek ruin), put the base back in place, and pretend that the Masonic Temple now possesses the mysterious ability to be partly invisible. If only it also had a forcefield like the USS Enterprise, this whole thing could have been avoided.

Traditionally?

Had reason to Google beard growth today. Came upon this gem: "Growing a beard has been traditionally viewed as a masculine activity."

The Quest for Loquat: Update!

My year-long quest has finally been realized. The Italian supermarket carries Loquats.

Pasta from scratch . . .

. . . is much easier to make than it seems like it should be. But it is exactly as time-consuming as it seems like it should be.

Helpful hint: when you do it, you should always invite six other people over, or you will not have enough hands. I think there was one point where we needed everybody. Of course, if you were practical you could just cut the dough into shorter strips and it would be easier. But then it wouldn't  be the exercise in team-building that it has so much potential for.

Another helpful hint: own a lot of large bowls for hanging the pasta while it dries. Also apparently useful: clothes racks and the backs of chairs. Another option would be to not quadruple the recipe. But then you wouldn't be able to feed your workers, and they might revolt, and there goes all the progress you made on team-building.

chiave

Someone once told me that the number of keys on your key ring was directly proportionate to the amount of bs in your life. Since one of these is a bottle opener, one of them looks exactly like the bottle opener (bonus points for opening an actual door), one of them is a key straight out of Batman, and the 8GB titanium thumb drive doesn't count as bs ever, I'm counting actual keys here as one... and life as pretty much awesome.

In Which Simon's English Degree Proves Dangerous

Sometimes if all of my tv shows are reruns, I go on Hulu and watch things that intrigue me in some way despite being really bad shows. One was NY-LON. I initially started it for the LON part, hated it from the second episode on, but kept watching it anyway. No one is more grateful than I am that it only lasted seven episodes. I also watched quite a bit of What About Brian before I realized . . . what about Brian? My most recent choice was Crusoe. Crusoe lasted twelve episodes, some of which were very nearly entertaining!

Probably because NBC sunk a lot of money into it, Crusoe was not simply cancelled, but brought to a close and labeled a miniseries. The amount of money they must have spent is obvious from the set. In fact, the most horrifying thing about the cancelling of Crusoe is the amount of effort the production people clearly put into building the treehouse.

It's basically the coolest thing ever in the history of mankind. To explore it in more detail, visit this Entertainment Weekly article. In the web extras, all the men kept saying that it was every five-year-old boy's dream, but there's no need to put qualifiers on it. Does anyone not dream of bringing human civilization to the trees and residing there in a sylvan paradise? Crusoe has a splendid view, a copy of Milton, a juicer, and a super hot roommate. Weighing that life against the life of a merchant in early eighteenth-century England, I'm not sure the treehouse doesn't win out.

The point is, a lot of people worked really hard to make the set for this show exceptionally awesome, and then it got cancelled. SPOILER ALERT! In all stories, whatever impressive object the hero makes with his own hands must eventually be destroyed by his nemesis to underscore the moral gulf between them. That's just the way it goes. But when it happens in Crusoe, there's a distinct sense that not only are the villains wretchedly evil, they have poor taste. One of them looks at the treehouse -- which is essentially land art -- and remarks that Crusoe lives like an ape. Inevitably, they burn the whole place down and the viewer is subjected to many lingering shots of consuming flames. The viewer can't help thinking every person who worked on that show must have equated the torching of the treehouse with the rejection of their creative vision. On other shows you might have to dismantle a house or a hangout and sell off the furniture, but the Crusoe crew had to take apart something ingenious and beautiful.

Possibly the worst part of it all is that I can't argue that the show shouldn't have been cancelled. In spite of a great set and actors who were quite decent in addition to being blindingly good-looking, it seems to have gone off-track somewhere in the conceptual stages. It didn't know whether it was goofy, sentimental, or philosophical. Consequently, the writing never got where it was trying to go because it didn't know where it was going in the first place. In short, the show itself never earned the work that went into the treehouse.

I was thinking about this because on Saturday it will be a year that I have been working full-time on this damn novel. A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of what I see now was clearly madness, I spent a few days making a huge spreadsheet detailing all the threads of the plot, in an attempt to make sure they were weaving together properly. It took up twenty-four sheets of paper. I laid it out on the floor and stared at it for a while and thought, why does this seem familiar? Then I realized it was reminding me of the treehouse. So I burned it. No, just kidding, it was totally helpful and I've made good use of it. But that was a scary moment, and I blame Crusoe for providing me with the metaphor.

Cheat Sheet

When starting a new show the post production staff usually gets a casting "cheat sheet" with photos of major characters-- for my MTV show, it meant a sheet of paper with 24 blond headshots, for my last reality gig it was a print out of murder suspects and cops, for the new show... they just handed me a 750 page book called "Tombs, Treasures, and Mummies".

I think I'm gonna like it here.

Thanks For Clearing That Up

Thank you Google translate-- it is now perfectly clear what my cellphone is trying to tell me.

Fun With Paper and Glue

About once a year or so I am inspired to make an elaborate card with cut paper. The process goes like this:

1. Lightbulb goes off above head, illuminating theoretical card so amazing it requires a power source and an operatic choir
2. Ten minutes later I realize I am lacking twenty-five of the twenty-eight colors of paper I need, wiring, and an operatic choir
3. Three hours later I am surrounded in an explosion of tiny bits of paper that look like deformed confetti
4. An hour after that I've glued myself to my desk
5. Following much thinking, rethinking, scaling-down, and acceptance of my limited array of tools and skills, I have a card that weighs about a pound because of all the stuff I've glued to it

One of these days I should document this process, but by the time it gets interesting, I usually have too much glue on my hands. Anyway, here are some finished products.

This is the one I just made, for my sister, to alert her that her birthday present (a season of The X-Files) is on its way. Those black lines had to be dragged through a pool of glue, it was a glorious mess.

This was for a friend who was living in Edinburgh at the time. It is an approximation of Edinburgh Castle, maybe 60% accurate.

A birthday card for Ivan. The 'hogs are drinking fermented apple juice probably because they're distressed that they live in a world with no sun.

And a card for a friend I met in England, who was present at the purchasing of Heslington. In fact, I think she was the one who assured me that spending fifteen pounds on a sheep-shaped doorstop was a really good idea. How right she was.

There are a few others in existence, but I forgot to take pictures before I mailed them. I've nearly exhausted my supply of decent paper (all that's left in any quantity is orange, yellow, and green), and should probably invest in some glue original to this decade, and maybe an X-acto knife, but I will probably leave it for next year. At eleven o'clock at night. Which everybody knows is the best and indeed only time to start projects.

Simon and Ivan Launches Internationally

I have verified the safe arrival of Ivan in Rome. So far, information indicates a case of jet lag, a dissatisfaction with Egyptian airline food, and the existence of an apartment the landlords of which Ivan may or may not have somehow offended? The motivation behind their perceived dislike for Ivan was unclear. I repeat, jet lag was involved. Also unclear is the exact nature of Ivan's work in Rome. It has something to do with mummies. Raising them from the dead, battling them, teaching them how to plant gardenias -- these are all possibilities I have considered and have no reason to outright reject. All I know is that Ivan will be VERY FAR AWAY for six months and that I may be forced to sell personal possessions in order to fund a visit. Does anyone want a copy of 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (with a foreword by Max Harris!)? Proceeds will cover a visit to the gelato shop.

The Light

I'm quite smitten with the light that comes through our kitchen window. Makes me think of this poem.

But is the Atmosphere Coated, Uncoated, or Matte?

You know you have been spending too much time working with Pantone blues when you go out to spend an hour cloud watching and catch yourself thinking the shade of the sky looks pretty close to 2718.

Semi-Stranded

Eyjafjallajökull canceled my flight to Rome. They opened all the airports today. I suppose I will feel vindicated when planes start dropping from the sky, but for now I'm just bitter and semi-stranded in Brooklyn.

And looking for new flights had me stress eating my way through a variety of processed cheese products-- it was to the point where my brain was so addled by the existance of $2,000 one way tickets through Spain that I ate a bag of cheddar kettle corn, took a nap, took a walk, ate some Kraft and then finally settled down to drink a Magic Hat #9 and book my damn flight. And if Magic Hat isn't the best thing for a tired brain, I don't know what is, because I cracked one open and the bottle cap was like a hug:

Thank you for the pep talk, beer bottle. I'll be flying to Rome via Cairo on Sunday. Eff you Volcano. In other news, it's kumquat season! Stop by south slope if you'd like to try a fruit that feels exactly like being punched in the face!

Best Night Ever!

Last night I made brownies, and then I went over to the institution known as "MAMA's house," where they had strawberry rhubarb pie. I was offered some pie, but, thinking of my cooling brownies at home, and my fat gut, I declined. Trying to explain this bizarre behavior, I started off saying, "Two desserts in one night would be..." and the end of this sentence was kindly supplied for me: "...the best night ever!" They know me too well at MAMA's house.

I never did try the brownies because it was too late by the time I got home to be consuming five hundred calories in one go. Also, I made SEVERAL errors in the recipe, so I was not wholeheartedly eager to try what I can only refer to as a culinary experiment.

However, if the brownies end up all right, I have a second chance at The Best Night Ever, because today a freelance client brought me an apple pie. Please, witness the miracle of the apple pie:

Looking at this pie objectively I'm inclined to believe that it is probably the most delicious-looking apple pie I have -- nay, anyone! has -- ever encountered. I've already been spoiled for all future freelance projects. Now I fear I am spoiled for all future pie.

chats with small brother

Ivan's away message: Eyjafjallajökull, i love you but you're bringing me down.

two days later: Small Brother: lol i just realized that Eyjafjallajokull is the volcano

Ivan: seriously?

Small Brother: i just thought you were hitting random keys

Small Brother: i'm smart, i swear.

meanwhile: I think "foiled by volcanic ash" is the best excuse for missing work EVER.

Salvatore

"Ivan! I've found him! Your new Italian boyfriend!"
Thanks, Luke.

One More Thing Regarding Auden

You know that poem John Hannah reads in Four Weddings and a Funeral that turns you into a bawling mess every time you get to the funeral? Or am I the only one that still happens to? I also cry when Beth dies in Little Women. It gets sadder with repeat viewings. Anyway, that poem is called "Funeral Blues," and it's by our very own Wystan Hugh Auden. It's actually the third in a set of four poems entitled, "Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson." (The poem I quoted from earlier was the second in that set.)

In spite of all the weeping, I have always been slightly suspicious of this poem as an expression of grief, because it's so melodramatic:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog barking with a juicy bone

The juicy bone is the first note that's off-key. In the following stanzas, everything is silenced but drums, a skywriter writes "He Is Dead" in the sky, ribbons are tied around the necks of doves, and traffic cops are made to wear black gloves. Eventually the planet, solar system, and entire universe are done away with. It is very sad and beautiful. It is a little bit funny. Do doves really require crêpe bows? Really?

It turns out the first two stanzas were written for a play Auden wrote with Isherwood called The Ascent of F6. F6 is a fictional mountain. (Not a bomber jet, as I was inclined to think.) Its name is presumably meant to evoke K2, which Auden's brother once climbed. He was a geologist. Fun fact! (Another fun fact: K2 is the second-highest and second-deadliest mountain in the world. You would think the deadliest would be Everest, but no! Annapurna has the highest fatality rate. On a related note, I happened to be the second of two K's at work and signed my e-mails as K2 for the duration of my employment. Every time someone died on K2 while I worked there, I felt responsible. But I digress.) In this play, the British government cajoles some climber to go up F6 and he gets killed from a surfeit of glory or something. I haven't actually read it. Point is, the poem that his distressed lover sings about this begins with the first two stanzas of "Funeral Blues."

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

And then it takes a turn:

Hold up your umbrellas to keep off the rain
From Doctor Williams while he opens a vein;
Life, he pronounces, it is finally extinct.
Sergeant, arrest that man who said he winked!

Shawcross will say a few words sad and kind
To the weeping crowds about the Master-mind,
While Lamp with a powerful microscope
Searches their faces for a sign of hope.

And Gunn, of course, will drive a motor-hearse:
None could drive it better, most would drive it worse.
He’ll open up the throttle to its fullest power
And drive him to the grave at ninety miles an hour.
 
So, basically, the moving performance that Matthew gives over Gareth's coffin starts out as a parody of a state funeral. But Auden evidently decided that the poem really ought to take another direction, and replaced the last three stanzas with the two that everyone now knows:
 
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
 
To be honest, I'm not totally sure this part isn't slightly ironic, too -- all that changes is that is becomes more personal, less public. The drama is so extreme, it starts to sound like a parody of grief. I don't know what kind of jerk would write a poem like that, but I think you could argue that Auden might. Anyway, I find all of this terribly interesting and it serves as proof of two things I have long suspected:  (1) to the author, no work is ever finished, and (2) everything sounds deadly serious when read in a Scottish accent.

Pictures from a Lazy Photographer

A few days ago there were probably great photos to be had, if I had possessed the following:

1. A better camera

2. Big portable spotlights

3. A willingness to leave my apartment at one in the morning to go out into the foggy darkness

I'm sure National Geographic will be calling any day now.

W. H. Auden

So when I said Auden was a swell guy and you'd like him, what I really meant was that he's a weird guy and I like him. This is a man who said of himself that he looked like an unmade bed (regrettably accurate), and liked to replace the pronouns in famous lines with "your mother." In a discussion on capital punishment he apparently said he would like to carry out such a sentence on Bertolt Brecht. Personally. He proposed marriage to Hannah Arendt, but she declined, maybe because he was gay, maybe because he looked like an unmade bed. Who can say. Anyway, I like Auden because he does not have the distancing aura of wisdom about him that makes other poets seem to belong to some other plane of existence. Auden definitely lived on the same earth as everyone else.

He was born in York in 1907, and for maybe a year lived in a house right down the street from the bed and breakfast I stayed in last June.

He moved around a lot as a child, and eventually ended up going away to school when his father went into the military during World War I. He met Christopher Isherwood at school. Isherwood, you may recall, wrote the novel on which the movie A Single Man is based. Reading any biography of Auden gives you the impression that the world is very small. Auden seems to have known everyone of any importance. For Pete's sake, he was even friends with Daniel Day-Lewis's father, Cecil, which seems like a very strange fact until you discover that Cecil went on to become the British Poet Laureate at the end of his life.

Anyway, Auden continued to move around and travel throughout his life. He lived in Berlin for a bit in his twenties, then decided to become a soldier and got mixed up in the Spanish Civil War for a few weeks, then went to observe the Sino-Japanese war with Isherwood (on which they wrote a book together), and then, when he was 32, moved to America. He lived in Brooklyn, then taught at Swarthmore, then taught at the University of Michigan. In 1945 he went to Germany to do an absurd job for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. He said, "We asked them if they minded being bombed. We went to a city which lay in ruins and asked if it had been hit. We got no answers that we didn’t expect." After that he split his time between New York and an island in Italy called Ischia.

Although Auden initially moved to America more or less with Isherwood, he met Chester Kallman not long after, and ended up in a long, strange sort of marriage (obviously unofficial) with him. The relationship was somewhat marred (to understate it) by the fact that Auden was, or wanted to be, monogamous by nature, and that didn't appeal to Kallman. They continued to live together on and off and remained friends and creative collaborators until Auden's death. Sometimes people try to make something of that fact that Kallman did not live long after Auden's death, but the unromantic fact is, Kallman was in very bad health already. He started drinking at breakfast long before Auden died, and it was because a boyfriend of his had been killed in a car accident. I personally find all this really depressing. Auden wanted so much to be in some kind of marriage that he actually proposed to four or five women over the course of his life. He did actually marry Erika Mann (Thomas Mann's daughter), but it was only to get her out of pre-war Germany.

In 1972, Auden moved back to England to teach at Oxford. He died of a heart attack less than two years later, after giving a poetry reading in Vienna. He wrote an intimidating amount of poetry, some plays and essays, a couple of travel books, and various libretti (the libretti being mostly collaborations with Kallman). By the end, he was drinking too much, taking a lot of sleeping pills and amphetamines, and wearing slippers in the street. At some point during this time he wrote possibly the only poem I can always remember in its entirety:

He still loves life
but O O O O how he wishes
the Good Lord would take him.

Some are of the opinion that Auden is sort of great but not really that great. I get the feeling certain critics would prefer him to be T. S. Eliot. This is plain foolish. We already have a T. S. Eliot. Why can't we have an Auden, too? I suppose I take offense to the very idea that comparing the worth of two different poets is useful. To say that Auden is especially not to verse what Einstein is to physics seems to suggest that he would have done better not to write at all, so as not to have publicly fallen short. That's nonsense. And anyway, Auden's enduring ability to fall short is what I like about him. His work isn't perfect and his life didn't turn out entirely to his satisfaction. He was kind of a slob. But he's a slob who wrote "O Tell Me the Truth About Love":

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

. . .

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

What Auden has that Eliot doesn't, and what Eliot has that Auden doesn't, and what everyone has that everyone else does not, is a unique and incomparable way of seeing things. What can I say? I like Auden's way. Even if he does look like an unmade bed.
 

Translation

This is Colin's Fancy Temperature-Telling DooDad (our wall clock is a sun dial). Allow me to translate for the doodad: "It is lovely and sunny out and you should drink your coffee on the roof".

Ten Thousand Things I've Forgotten to Post About (and by ten thousand I mean roughly six)

I have been shamelessly blog-dodging lately, so here's a long, multi-subject post to make up for my having missed a whole week. First, now that Blogger is working again, I can show you the tragic plight of my imprisoned amaryllis.

Look at how it yearns to be outside in the fresh air and sunshine. It is helpless even to move the curtain aside so that it can see out the window. It hangs its head dolorously and wishes it could speak. Sigh.

Fortunately its short life is now over and it has less to worry about. On to other things.

Ivan's post about her message in a bottle reminded me that I meant to blog about two things she gave me for my birthday which I think I've already shown everyone I know, but as we know nothing is real until it happens on the internet, so please allow me to re-introduce you to two prized possessions: my one-gallon can of omnipotence and my Viking odorant.

  

Ignoring the can's directions, and explicit warnings not to open it, I popped off the top and began storing mittens in it. I haven't noticed any increase in my ability to coerce the universe into doing my bidding, but after having been immersed in the can for some time, my mittens do seem to have grown strangely powerful . . .

The Viking odorant offers these benefits: "provides long-lasting odor," "dank, authentic stench," glides on smooth without flaking." It also cautions you not to apply to broken skin or axe wounds, and warns that it "may attract bears." Simon P., this is not the odorant for you. Unfortunately it is not the odorant for me, either. It smells a lot like Canadian Man Soap. I think I've had enough of smelling like a man for a while, but a Viking could do worse.

More recently, Ivan sent me a marvelous set of handwarmers, with a bonus neckwarmer, which is very impressive because she knitted them herself. Out of alpaca yarn. Let's compare Ivan's knitting abilities to my own.

Ivan's work. Note the delicate pattern and tasteful buttons.

And here is the scarf that took me so long to knit they stopped making that kind of yarn, hence the fact that it is half the length of a normal scarf. Like Cordelia, it is poorly made. It's full of mistakes, tight in some places, loose in others, and, it must be said, the color is definitely a shade that a thirteen-year-old girl would choose.

Let's not talk about it anymore. Next! I've been meaning to post about this item that my sister got me for Christmas. Prepare yourself. It's so adorable you might fall down.

Unbearable, is it not? It is the latest addition to a growing collection, of few more of which live here, next to my desk, fiercly guarding the Ivan's knitting and a postcard of which I am fond:

This postcard was left to me by my favorite former boss. Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? is the title of a book published in the UK by Little, Brown. I haven't read it, but the postcard got me through the end of the Bush administration and many a rough day at work. I have so much to thank the British for. Even if they were the root cause of a significant number of those rough days at work.

This has been a highly materialistic post. I plan to make up for this next time by writing at length about that noble art form called POETRY. That's right. It's National Poetry Month. More than a year ago I threatened to do a detailed post about W. H. Auden, and this seems like an appropriate time to follow through. Auden was a swell guy. I think you'll like him.

reasoning

Ivan:

i didn't eat the food i brought

which is bad

because it was a hard boiled egg

and now i won't eat it

because that's gross

or do they not need to be refrigerated?

Caro:

I think hard boiled eggs are ok for awhile

they're like classic school lunch items

in the 1950s

american girl dolls eat them.

It Is Good to Have Goals

I desperately need to weed out my inbox so "RE: Drunk Man Tries to Resuscitate Roadkill with CPR" can live next to "Fwd: NZ Man 'used hedgehog as weapon'".

Lovely Things on My Bookshelf