big wide world – Page 12

December 2, 2007

first snow

Went to the Peabody Essex Museum today. If you are in the Boston area and have a chance to visit Salem, I highly recommend the Yin Yu Tang exhibit, centered around a 200-year-old Chinese house taken apart brick by brick, transported over to the States and meticulously put back together. Watch the movies, too; just be prepared for the extreme misogyny of two centuries’ worth of a rural Chinese family. It was fascinating and alien, and somehow strangely familiar in some of its Communist elements.

Then we sat and read in a coffee shop, not far from a man with not one but two four-squares-to-a-row Rubik’s cubes and diagrammatic notes in a notebook. And then we came outside, and it’s dark and it’s snowing and everything’s white. The same streetlight-lit white of the evening sled rides of my childhood’s winters, with mom or dad or brother pulling the aluminum sled and laughing, and laughing.

December 1, 2007

Ask the internets: blank wooden pieces?

I’d like to purchase a few dozen blank wooden pieces. Ideally, they’d be rectangular pieces with rounded edges, maybe an inch on the long side and .5-.75 inch on the short side.

There are plenty of places to get wooden nickels, but I don’t want them round. A local crafts-supplies store has sticks that can be cut into pieces, but I’d rather not to that myself.

Anyone reading this have any idea where I might find what I’m looking for?

November 30, 2007

global warming and daredevilry

Newsbit: Evel Knievel is dead. Not from a stunt, either. I’ve never been hugely into him, but the guy had some guts, and was entertaining. May he rest, etc.

And a video, in which a science teacher proposes a pretty decent way to think about the global warming debate (and where you personally might stand regarding the issue) by approaching it as a risk-management problem. At the end of the video there’s reference to an “expansion pack” – a video cataloguing sources for finding out more about the issues involved. I haven’t watched that one yet, but the one below is worth even the ten long minutes it runs. Especially since the decision-making process this guy describes is applicable to many other areas of life.

November 27, 2007

Blue Man Group on global warming.

What an excellent way to spend two minutes:

Hat tip to Greg Laden.

November 23, 2007

Jellyfish, they gotta eat too.

A, no, the salmon farm in Northern Ireland, raising some 100,000 head of salmon, got decimated by “billions of jellyfish.” The jellies were said to be “a dense pack of about 10 square miles and 35 feet deep.” I’m not sure I can imagine that, quite.

There’s got to be a horror movie in there somewhere. It helps that the jellyfish in question were mauve stingers. Seas turning red, indeed.

October 4, 2007

[geek] Oh, excellent!

Via a wee goddess:

Astronomers rename asteroid to honor George Takei.

I am, sad to say, not a fan of the original Trek, so didn’t know Takei from his Sulu days. But he’s been an impressive presence on Heroes, my favorite currently-running geeky TV show.

But, dude. How much of an impression do you have to make to get an asteroid named after you? Takei is beyond cool. And modest, of course:

“I am now a heavenly body,” Takei, 70, said Tuesday, laughing. “I found out about it yesterday. … I was blown away. It came out of the clear, blue sky – just like an asteroid.”

September 21, 2007

Again with the devices.

MIT student arrested for wearing art that lights up from a 9-volt battery.

Truly appalling is this, by Major Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police:

“Thankfully because she followed our instructions, she ended up in our cell instead of a morgue.”

Beg pardon? Because she followed your instructions she didn’t end up dead for wearing a shirt with lights on it? Thank you, officer. That’s awful kind of you.

[Edit: Oh, it’s worse than that apparently. Nick points to the AP release, which has Pare saying this:

Simpson was “extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used,” Pare said. “She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.”

Lucky! She should thank her lucky stars.]

Boston has learned nothing from the LED-art scare of a few months past – that one, by the way, ended anti-climactically, with the press forgetting all about it, and the two young men in question doing community service in return for having bogus charges against them dropped.

I hate scare-mongering. And I’m inexplicably terrified of what happens if my husband ever wears a particular present I gave him in the wrong place. (Going back to the Star Simpson incident, the argument that she should’ve known better, wearing something like this to an airport, holds no water. She should not be held responsible for the overreaction of others: first let’s talk about how much damage any device powered by nine volts is capable of making.)

Hat-tip to Dr. Memory.

September 16, 2007

Cheesemas, and directional

Today was cheesemas. Cheeses were bought and brought – drunken goat, mozzarella, robiola, explorateur (?! – hokey name, but most excellent cheese), some other alcohol- (port-)laced semisoft cheese, Valdeon (a Spanish blue), raclette and half a dozen others. Someone even brought raclette ice cream which, really, was much milder than it had any right to be. Add to that fruit, bread, fig-and-vidalia jam, wine, beer, sprakly non-alc cider, fifteen folk or more and two mostly happy and social toddlers, and it’s cheesemas in the neighborhood. My undying gratitude and love to my cheesemas-elf conspirator.

Unrelatedly, I thought some this evening, and wrote down the following:

north is triangular, steady, monument-al

east is rounded, exotic, otherworldly

south is light, scintillating, hot

west is radio, diagonal, big

the center is small, sensitive, reactive

September 16, 2007

Purple Blurb

This coming Tuesday, September 18th, come to MIT for the first in the Purple Blurb digital reading series. “The readings will start at 6pm at MIT in 14N–233 (second floor of building 14, in the wing that is across the courtyard from the Hayden Library),” says organizer Nick Montfort in the announcement.

The first reader will be Robert Kendall, and I’m very sorry to miss it due to a prior obligation: Rob’s words tend to transport me somewhere familiar I’ve never been before. At the next event on October 18th, I’ll be reading from Roland^HT and talking a bit about narrative threads running through it. The other two readings this semester will take place on November 13th (Barbara Barry) and December 4th (Andrew Plotkin).

For a good time, call on Purple Blurb.

September 15, 2007

Turnabout.

Once again I keep getting these flashes of “should really blog that!” and then immediately “but there’s so much unsaid over there.” So, in short:

I defended and graduated.* To paraphrase my landlady, I’m Vika Zafrin, Ph.uckin’ D. That paraphrase involved changing fewer letters than you might imagine. For the first time in my adult life I am not a student pursuing a degree full-time at an institution. Mostly there’s a giant feeling of relief, but I already miss research. Although that balances out, because I sure don’t miss the constant insecurity, the “not good enough”ness, the 24/7 feeling like I have to be working.

OK, I still mostly feel like I should be working. But it’s getting easier to compartmentalize, and you know what? There’s a whole big life out there, with books and spiritual practice and cooking and friends and friends’ children and visits with mom, who lives in driving distance for the first time in thirteen years. Who knew?

Ethan and I have moved up to Boston. Best move we could’ve made. Wanderlust is tugging at my pants leg already, but I could be happy living in Boston for a long while. Given that wanderlust is my muse and near-constant companion, that’s a hefty statement to make.

The house we live in has seven human residents, five cats, a dog and (temporarily) a bird. Gods bless the marvel that is modern allergy medicine. Our two cats have established relationships with the three who have lived here for long. Nochka the tiny black cat has a hissy fit any time DJ Spooky, the black boycat thrice her size, comes into our bedroom seeking food. And there’s the impossibly beautiful lynx-y Winter, who is afraid of almost everyone. Other than that, feline people are chill. Humans are also mostly chill, and really, how bad can it get when you live with geeks and musicians (and a funny man who inexplicably deals with insurance all day)? A circus band occasionally practices in my living room. Beat that with a stick.

The past three months have been spent largely acclimating to the new house, the new life rhythms, the big questions like where to go from here and how to plan out the long term. I’m working outside of academe now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to stay away?

So much is changing. Mostly I like it. Some of it is hard growth, but on the whole I feel like I’m stretching after a long sleep.

*Oh, and my work? Here, in its entirety. Get yourself Firefox and enjoy. It’ll take half a minute or so to load, but is thereafter very fast.