I'm having a hard time sitting down to blog the vacation just completed. It's just too expansive, too many, too much. I think I'm better off just chipping away.
Let's start here. That's, left to right, Nora, Tom, Lisa and Lissa on the beach at Chatham, on Cape Cod. As a kid from the beaches of L.A., I didn't really grasp the Cape Cod beach thing until this trip. I've only been once before, in the dead of winter, and it was beautiful but not beachie somehow.
My sister's husband, Tom, spent much of his adult life on Cape Cod, and he did a great job of showing us around, explaining the infrastructure of the tourist world there (he's made his living in that infrastructure since he was a teenager), and then we sat a lot on the beach. Waves. The sound of waves. The smell of sea air. Nothin' like it.
That's my sister Lisa on the left, and daughter Nora, kicking at the cold Atlantic water. It was colder than the Pacific beach water of my youth, and the macho men would dive in to show off for their gals before jumping out with a shiver and shake. But the kids, they are tougher, and the kids splashed and played, body-surfing the slivers of waves and having that great goodness that is a beach as a child.
Much work went into this, my opus on climate variability, drought, and life in the southwest. I hope it does not sound immodest if I say I am more than a little proud of the results.
L allowed as how she thinks it's the best thing I've ever done, and who am I to argue with her expert opinion?
(P.S. If the link doesn't work, please let me know. I think it's in the free area of the site, but I might just have a cookie set.)
Bad Dad wouldn't let Nora go to the Harry Potter party Friday night, as we needed to get up at the crack of dawn Saturday morning to get on an airplane. So she and Lissa conspired to hit the 24-hour Wal-Mart before we left. 5 a.m., they bought the second one they sold (no long lines or kids in outrageous costumes at Wal-Mart, one guesses).
By the time we hit the security checkpoint at the airport, Nora was already on page 109. She read straight through the flight, and would be done if not for the necessities of our vacation intervening. But she pronounces it good.
No giveaways, though. We're waiting in line.
Geez, it seems like I've been travelling a lot lately. I'm sort of a homebody, but I'm really looking forward to this next trip, a week back east visiting sister Lisa and her husband Tom in Connecticut, with a couple of days down to Pennsylvania to see my Uncle Kelly and a couple of days with Tom and Lisa up on Cape Cod.
See y'all whenever....
I received electronic mail today from an old acquaintance. He had seen my picture on the Journal's web page, looked at it again and again, day after day, until it dawned on him:
I see your face every day, which is no problem, except it is an excellent representation of infamous NM lawman Elfego Baca.
Ah yes, the tale of Elfego Baca. They say he shot 10 men, or was it twelve, and this is New Mexico, so they say the men he shot were Texans. I once, in my youth, won a Franz Kafka look-alike contest. And it has long been obvious how much I resemble the late Frank Zappa. But he was the ugliest of rock stars. Ah, now I have, to cling to, the legend of Elfego Baca.
Thomas Vander Stichele gives voice to why we Gnomesters do this. He's at GUADEC, looking around, and sees all the people who do all this great work:
it just dawned on me that GNOME really IS a community and there are real people hidden behind the About box that write the software I have come to use every day....
That, as much as anything, is why we do it.
Copts, the Christian descendants of ancient Egyptians, celebrate today as the day the Nile rises with the tears of Isis. It's a great example of the linkage between religion and ancient science, as ritual codified and helped retain knowledge - in this case the vital calendrical information about the river's flow across the farmland, brining the vital rich soils that sustained Egypt for millennia.
Of course the gift of the Nile has been reposessed by the Aswan High Dam, though the conventional wisdom about the disaster of that project neglects the several floods and droughts that have been mitigated by its presence.
Aaron Weber has a brilliant idea:
Here's my current theory: gay marriage can save the economy.The average wedding in the US is well into the $20k range, before you start counting the gifts. If spending is good for the economy, weddings are good for the economy, and we should have more of them.
I picked up The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn again a couple of weeks ago, and remembered anew what a ripping good read it is, all freedom and action and honest clever morality. And then I stumbled on into the last chapter, which invariably disappoints.
It's a slyly revolutionary book, using Huck's apparent naivete again and again to mock the conventions of its day, most importantly slavery. Huck, after all, knows it's wrong, but just can't help himself in aiding Jim's escape.
And it's full of the most absolutely graceful writing, all the tricks of the craft on display.
And then Twain absolutely blows the whole thing with the last section, when Huck hooks up, via embarassingly unwriterly coincidence, with Tom Sawyer at his Aunt Sally's. I love the book so much that I sort of forget how disappointing is the end, and then every time I read it I feel sucker-punched. Ah well, still a most rewarding book.
In addition to Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, there is one thing that is always guaranteed to make me smile with deep humor. It's young Emmeline Grangerfords ode to the late Stephen Dowling Botts. Emmeline wrote words for the deceased - "Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her `tribute' before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker."
ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'DAnd did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?No; such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
'Twas not from sickness' shots.No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly
By falling down a well.They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.
Says Huck, "If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by." (The whole chapter - heck the whole book - is here. That's what people mean when they talk about the intellectual commons.)
I was about to launch another "I don't wanna be a hacker rant," about the evils of the auto tools etc., when I realized I was just a doofus. If one actually reads the error messages pkg-config so helpfully offers, rather than rants....
So now gedit builds, on account of because gtk-sourceview builds, and i can get on with things.
(Updated moments later: I take it all back. It still won't build. Consider this now ranted.)
William Shatner has a blog. It's really boring. (Thanks to Leanne Potts for the link. I think.)
A neighbor walking by this morning, Lissa: "We're seeing your cactus all over the neighborhood. Everybody's got a box on their front porch."
Saw a delightful piece earlier this week in Velonews about the Centrum Ronde van Vlaanderen, a Belgian cycling museum. The author, Jed Schneider, a young American racing in Belgium this season, described with some delight and relish and difficulty of explaining bike racing to those unfamiliar with the sport. He tipped his hat to John Nash and game theory (when was the last time you saw Nash on your sports page) and the power of the draft. And the smell:
So, yes, bicycle racing is an experience. I don't know how much the average European knows about the intricacies of racing strategy. But, when your car gets pulled over by a motorcycle cop and a group of 200 racers comes screaming by your car lined out one-by-one so fast all you see is blurred color and hear the breath, and humming of wheels, and smell the repugnant odor of riders "on-form," at the same time praying that your Mercedes comes out with no dents and a drivers side mirror; well I bet that is an experience.
I realized I'd read something of his earlier in the year, a vivid explanation of the problems of being far back in the peleton when it slows down for a tight turn. I loved it, and kept repeating my explanation to riding buddies as we'd go through the left-right-soft-S curve along the bike path under the freeway.
I tracked down his email address and wrote him a note saying how much I appreciated the piece. He wrote back, saying when he was in town in the fall we must go riding. Turns out he's from here. Nancy, one of my bike riding buddies, remembered him from when he was a teen tyke winning the mountain bike races. Small word.
We definitely must ride.
How cool is this:
Sinvula said hippopotami were not a threat to students as the mammals do not like the shallow, swampy waters across which the students have to paddle each day.
Just once I'd like to use the word "hippopotami" for real. I'd die a happy man.
That's a blue bowling ball on the left, a thrift store finial for Lissa's free stuff sign post.
She's been on a garden thinning tear, and as she trims cactus or thins the iris bed, she puts out a sign that says "Free Cactus" or "Free Iris" beneath the bowling ball and sets the plants out on cardboard flats by the curb.
They go. They go fast.
She's been doing this for years, and we now see our distinctive purple iris all over the neighborhood. This year she's been seriously whacking back the cactus, and she's become sort of a Lissa Cactusseed for the neighborhood. As I pulled in last night, a guy from up the street followed me up the driveway, his back of groceries in one hand and a flat of prickly pear paddles in the other. "So you just stick these in the ground?" he asked. "Yup," I said. "Just stick that bottom end in and they'll grow like crazy."
I hadn't met him, but Lissa recognized him. He lives a block up, the guy who last year had this perfectly charming fountain made of a euphonium (or was it a baritone?). Seems the perfect home for our cactus.
Today being Howlin' Wolf's birthday, I am led to remember the first album of my youth that doesn't embarass me now. It was The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions, which my friend Roger Innes had. We'd sit up in his living room and play it. I knew who Clapton was, but I remember Roger having to explain who this Wolf guy was. It was one of those albums where a bunch of the British blues rockers got together with their
genuine blues heroes and made respectful noise, and it was a revelation for this little white boy from the suburbs of L.A. It would be too rhetorically effusive to say it changed my life, so I won't, but I still love that kind of noise today.