The Week in Entertainment

Film: The Ghost Writer. Wow. This was a fabulous movie - tense and well-plotted, with excellent acting. The location was excellent, like another character...

DVD: The Black Guardian Trilogy (Mawdryn Undead, Terminus, Enlightenment) - Peter Davidson's Dr Who, when Turlough joined and Nyssa left. The last of Leverage Season One - so good, and the DVD has nice special features with good commentaries (unlike some).

TV: Ordinary People (yes, sort of a Tim Hutton week - he's in Ghost Writer, too, coincidentally) - which I had never seen before. This is one hell of a powerful film. Tim Hutton definitely earned his Oscar, and the other main actors (Judd Hirsch, Mary Tyler Moore, and especially Donald Sutherland) were terrific. Psych - Shawn in the think tank scenes was priceless.

Read: Started Robert Sapolsky's A Primate's Memoir, which is very funny, and insightful, too. The Chinese Parrot, a Charlie Chan mystery, nicely written.

Happy Birthday, Paul

Paul Krugman was born today in 1953. He's a recent Nobel Laureate in economics, and you can find his blog, the Conscience of a Liberal, right here.

Happy Birthday, Adam

Today in 1980 1962 Adam Baldwin was born. The Whedonverse is certainly richer for it (not only Jayne Cobb, his masterwork, but also Marcus Hamilton) which means we all are, but he's also great in My Bodyguard and (though I don't like the show) Chuck. Many happy returns of the day, Adam!

It would never happen now

TCM is playing Thoroughly Modern Millie - and the first five minutes of the movie is a still shot of the poster and the overture.

You'd never get five minutes of music now - even before the production logo.

Tolstovo, Alex

Noooooooooooooooo!

Alex Trebek just pronounced the genitive of Tolstoy as "Tols-toh-goh". Yes, it's spelled with a G, but it's pronounced "V": tols-toh-vo.*

Sure, most people probably would. But Alex is so snotty about his ability to pronounce French (and Latin, for that matter), that it pleases me to point out when he screws up. After all, how hard would it be to get an intern to look it up?

* Yes, Russian's fairly phonetically spelled - especially compared with English. But it has well-known exceptions, and Толстого shows two of them, this standard masculine/neuter adjectival genitive ending and the other being that an unstressed O is pronounced like Ah.

Sky Watch: Dawn, with snow

Thursday morning the sun dawned gold in a darkly clouded sky. Snow on the ground gleamed blue under the dawn, and a pond of melt shone molten and brilliant...







more Sky Watchers here

They did what to us?

Zinjanthropus over at A Primate of Modern Aspect mentioned Robert Sapolsky's book A Primate's Memoir in a post last month. It sounded great ("one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, and I really don’t think it’s because I am a primate geek. I think it’s one of the rare science books that would be enjoyable for anyone, or maybe everyone, to read.") so I picked it up (on the Kindle, yay!) and have been reading it this week. It is great - it's exciting and funny and, yes, beautiful.

But here's a usage that throws me. He's talking about how the baboons he's studying occasionally head off into "the Great Impenetrable Thicket", where they can't be followed. The grad students he took over from said that "inventing the wheel" must be

what the baboons must be up to when they thicketed us.

That's impenetrable on its own. Without the explicit context of the paragraph, I'd take "to thicket us" as meaning "to put us in a thicket", not "to hide from us by going into a thicket". I'd have had to use the adjunct of disadvantage structure here, and said "when they thicketed on us".

Happy Birthday, Johnny

	Born today in 1932, one of the greatest American musicians of the 20th century, the Man in Black, Johnny Cash. Grammys crowned his career in its twilight and they were well earned. I've said this before but it bears repeating: if you haven't listened to these albums, you must. They're an astounding collection of songs from gospel to rock to Nine Inch Nails, and they're all Cash. They're all great. Some of them will make you laugh, and some will break your heart. And the sixth one is coming out next month! I've preordered it.

Happy Christening, Kit!

We don't know what day Christopher Marlowe was born - but he was christened on this day in 1564, in Canterbury, England. A poet, dramatist, and spy, Marlowe is well-known today, eclipsed by that other author born that year, that William Shakespeare fellow. He died at 29, stabbed through the eye in what might have been a bar-room brawl or might have been a hired killing...

Izaak Walton, in The Compleat Angler mentioned "that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago" and Shakespeare quoted it in "The Merry Wives of Windsor":

Come live with me, and be my love;
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy-buds,
With coral clasps and amber-studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

Find all Marlowe on line at the Perseus Project.

A new one on me

Today's Final Jeopardy clue:

"Kings play chess on finely grained sand" is a mnemonic for a system devised by this scientist.

It's Linnaeus, because the system is taxonomy (kingdom phylum class order family genus species).

What's odd is that I never heard that mnemonic before. Staring at it, I figured out what it had to be in about 15 seconds, so I got the answer right. But it's a new one to me - absolutely new. There are only 19 ghits for it, and some of them don't count (they're just a "kings" page in some listing of words).

We were there, too

What is it with politicians (and celebrities) that they think we can't remember a year or so ago? Seriously. What is it?

Latest example: John McCain:

"[Bush] didn't ask me to suspend my campaign," said McCain. "I suspended my campaign -- as did Senator Obama -- to come back to Washington because the President had told me that we were in a world financial collapse. That's why I did what I did. I always said that consistently."

Obama suspended his campaign? ORLY?

You know, John - we were there.

Happy Birthday, George

George Harrison was born today. I always liked him best (I screamed "George!", or would have had I ever gone to a concert) and post-Beatles, I found him the most engaging, talented, and consistent of them all. His later albums are good - his very last one I reviewed like this when it came out

Brainwashed I always liked George best, and this album is probably the best one. It's pure George, the man who couldn't tell the difference between a hit song and a metaphysical speculation. Marwa Blues showcases his guitar playing, and his voice rarely sounded better than it does on Any Road and I'll Never Get Over You. And he and Dhani chanting the Naamah Parvati at the end of the album -- the perfect way to say 'goodbye, George...'

I have a double cd of Live in Japan (which is an energetic performance) and Beware of ABKCO!, (which is an engaging and sometimes odd compilation of acoustic backing and demo tracks, different looks at old favorites) put out in Russia. Live in Japan has 19 tracks, and ABKCO has 15. But the first cd has 21 tracks - all of ABKCO and six tracks from Live in Japan, and the second finishes up Japan. On an mp3 player that doesn't matter, but it's weird nonetheless.

I have quite a bit of his stuff, including the wonderful Concert for George ... He went too young, and I miss him. But thanks to technology, we'll always have his music.

Yay!!!!

Yay!

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D) said Wednesday that effective immediately, and until challenged in court, the state recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere and that Maryland agencies should begin affording out-of-state gay couples all the rights they have been awarded in other places.

And

"It's not that foreign of a concept, I mean, it's just people, it's just like any other heterosexual couples," Gansler said. "However a heterosexual couple is treated that was validly married in Maryland or elsewhere, [a same-sex couple] will be treated like that here in Maryland, unless and until a court or the legislature decides differently."

I like him. I like him a lot.

Wonderful

It rained yesterday, which sped up the snowmelt. Sure, there are still deep drifts, and shallower fall lies in lots of places still, but huge swaths of grass are now visible, and this morning they were covered in birds. Robins in dozens and dozens, sparrows and juncos and finches mixed in, even a few grackles (and of course starlings) hunting. I heard the redwing but didn't see him, and a few mockingbirds flew past. There was a drake mallard on the no-longer-ice-covered pond, quacking away, and several pairs of mourning doves.

And - because I'm going to my other office this afternoon and don't have any electronics with me, no camera, not even a cell phone - there were two magnificent hawks on the dead tree, the one that usually has nothing more exciting than a redwing or a sapsucker on it. They sat there quietly as I walked up, and then one of them launched into the air and soared away toward the river half a mile off. The other stayed where she was (she was much larger than the one who flew off) as I walked under her tree, looking at her and grinning like an idiot. She moved her head to look back at me, but clearly I didn't mean much if anything to her and she went back to watching the trees around her. She was still there when I had to head across the road to get to work. Man, were they beautiful!

I hope they come back when I have my camera with me.

Happy Birthday, W.E.B.

Born today in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, W.E.B. DuBois. He went to Fisk University in Nashville and then to Harvard, where he was the first African-American to get a Ph.D. He taught sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and he carried out the first serious sociological study of African-Americans, which showed that poverty and crime in black communities were a result of racial barriers in education and employment. In 1909, he founded NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."

Happy Birthday, Sam

Today in 1633 Samuel Pepys was born. Well known for his diary, Pepys was a Londoner to the bone, rarely leaving the city, and a civil servant who helped shape England's navy. His diary, covering only six years of his life, was abandoned by him when he began to fear the loss of his sight - the work of keeping it up threatened blindness, and so he stopped and gave it to his college - Magdalen at Cambridge, where it remains to this day (and where I got to see it a couple of years ago!). As the College says,

Pepys's diary is not so much a record of events as a re-creation of them. Not all the passages are as picturesque as the famous set pieces in which he describes Charles II's coronation or the Great Fire of London, but there is no entry which does not, in some degree, display the same power of summoning back to life the events it relates.

Pepys's skill lay in his close observation and total recall of detail. It is the small touches that achieve the effect. Another is the freshness and flexibility of the language. Pepys writes quickly in shorthand and for himself alone. The words, often piled on top of each other without much respect for formal grammar, exactly reflect the impressions of the moment. Yet the most important explanation is, perhaps, that throughout the diary Pepys writes mainly as an observer of people. It is this that makes him the most human and accessible of diarists, and that gives the diary its special quality as a historical record.

Here's a sample (his first tweet for today):

This day I am, by the blessing of God, 34 years old, in condition of estate beyond whatever my friends could expect of a child of theirs.

And here's the entry for 22 Feb in the "current" year of the diary (a hypertext, annotated version is here) (note on the date - if you follow the link you'll see it says 1666/1667 - this is because until 1752 the new year began on March 25 in England, slow to adopt the new calendar, so for Sam himself it was still 1666):

Up, and to the office, where I awhile, and then home with Sir H. Cholmly to give him some tallies upon the business of the Mole at Tangier, and then out with him by coach to the Excise Office, there to enter them, and so back again with him to the Exchange, and there I took another coach, and home to the office, and to my business till dinner, the rest of our officers having been this morning upon the Victuallers’ accounts. At dinner all of us, that is to say, Lord Bruncker, [Sir] J. Minnes, [Sir] W. Batten, [Sir] T. Harvy, and myself, to Sir W. Pen’s house, where some other company. It is instead of a wedding dinner for his daughter, whom I saw in palterly clothes, nothing new but a bracelet that her servant had given her, and ugly she is, as heart can wish. A sorry dinner, not any thing handsome or clean, but some silver plates they borrowed of me. My wife was here too. So a great deal of talk, and I seemingly merry, but took no pleasure at all. We had favours given us all, and we put them in our hats, I against my will, but that my Lord and the rest did, I being displeased that he did carry Sir W. Coventry’s himself several days ago, and the people up and down the town long since, and we must have them but to-day. After dinner to talk a little, and then I away to my office, to draw up a letter of the state of the Office and Navy for the Duke of York against Sunday next, and at it late, and then home to supper and to bed, talking with my wife of the poorness and meanness of all that Sir W. Pen and the people about us do, compared with what we do.

Find the whole of Pepys' diary, day by day with hyperlinked annotations here, and in plain text here at Project Gutenberg (also downloadable).

It's Time

And this:

If Obama thinks he’s going to get a single Republican vote at this stage of the game, he’s fooling himself (or the American people). Many months ago, you may recall, the White House and Dem leaders in the Senate threatened to pass health care with 51 votes – using a process called “reconciliation” that allows tax and spending bills to be enacted without filibuster – unless Republicans came on board. It’s time to pull the trigger.

This

This:

To say that the one legitimate way to pass bills is to get a lot of Republicans to vote for them is to insist that election results don't matter and that only conservative legislation will ever get through Congress.

Word.

Happy Birthday, Vincent

In 1911 a slim, red-headed, 19-year-old Maine girl got up and read her contest-winning poem, Renasence (find it here), in Camden, Maine. She couldn't afford college, but the poem inspired a woman in the audience to pay her way to Vassar. That girl was Edna St Vincent Millay, born this day in 1892. An icon of the Jazz Age and a rock-star poet, Vincent (as she preferred to be called, hating the name 'Edna' - she was named for the hospital where her uncle escaped death just before her birth) lived in Greenwich Village and Paris, and reveled in the Bohemian life style (perhaps you could say she truly was a Mainiac). After her marriage she lived in Austerlitz, New York, until her death in 1950; the farm, Steepletop, is now a writers colony. She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer, and the second to win the Frost prize.

Probably her best known poem is "First Fig", not least because it's short enough to memorize easily:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light!

And here are two more:

Three Songs of Shattering
        I

THE first rose on my rose-tree
    Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
        Nothing mattered.

Grief of grief has drained me clean;
    Still it seems a pity
No one saw, -- it must have been
        Very pretty.

        II

Let the little birds sing;
    Let the little lambs play;
Spring is here; and so 'tis spring; --
    But not in the old way!

I recall a place
    Where a plum-tree grew;
There you lifted up your face,
    And blossoms covered you.

If the little birds sing,
    And the little lambs play,
Spring is here; and so 'tis spring --
    But not in the old way!

        III

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree!
    Ere spring was going -- ah, spring is gone!
And there comes no summer to the like of you and me, --
    Blossom time is early, but no fruit sets on.

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree,
    Browned at the edges, turned in a day;
And I would with all my heart they trimmed a mound for me,
    And weeds were tall on all the paths that led that way!


Afternoon on a Hill

I will be the gladdest thing
    Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
    And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
    With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
    And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
    Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
    And then start down!

(More Millay is here)

Happy Birthday, Edward

Born today in 1925, in Chicago, Edward Gorey, master of the disturbingly macabre illustration and story.
I definitely recommend you read his three Amphigorey collections.



The "life is sweet" sweatshirt gets a lot of grins and compliments.


And by all means, take this quiz: Which Horrible (Edward) Gorey Death will you die?

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• At Starts with a Bang, Ethan celebrates photos of Saturn (and shows us some gorgeous ones): Looking at one picture like this, what strikes me is just how much we can learn about our giant, ringed neighbor just by looking at this shot. First off, the rings of Saturn are seen edge-on, and you can learn -- almost immediately -- that they are incredibly thin. Saturn's rings, as you're probably familiar with them, are huge and expansive, stretching out to be well over 200,000 km in diameter!


• At The Loom, Carl Zimmer muses on the tiny ever-surprising swine flu: Last March a new kind of flu came on the scene–the 2009 H1N1 flu, a k a swine flu. Hatched from an eldritch mingling of viruses infecting humans, birds, and pigs, it swept across the world. Here in the United States, the CDC estimates that between 41 and 84 million people came down with swine flu between April and January. Of those infected, between 8,330 and 17,160 are estimated to have died. This flu strain has been nothing if not surprising. It was lurking around in humans for several months, undetected, before becoming a planetary infection. And before that, the ancestor of the virus was circulating among pigs for a decade, again unknown. And while the new swine flu has killed some 10,000 people in the United States alone and many more abroad, it has proven to be relatively low key–as flu goes. Some 30,000 people die in the United States every year from seasonal flu, the cocktail of flu strains that show up year in and year out. Now the swine flu is surprising us once more.


• At Tetrapod Zoology, Darren runs a series on babirusas - those pigs with the giant curling teeth: So... what's with the bizarre curving tusks? Present only in males (females lack canines entirely), they grow continuously throughout life, and their growth, anatomy and function are all odd. The lower canine is normal in position and anatomy, it's just that it becomes particularly long during growth, overlapping the outside edge of the snout as it grows. The upper canine is another story. Initially growing downwards - like any normal mammalian upper canine - it is then rotated as the alveolus itself turns to force the tooth upwards, and it eventually emerges from the dorsal surface of the snout. The most anterior part of the spiral parallels the long lower canines. As mentioned earlier, we're mostly familiar with those babirusas where the upper canines curl in a circle as they grow, forming a spiral over the animal's forehead.


• Bec at Save Your Breath For Running, Ponies looks at ants who go off to die: Now while this might seem like an unusually selfless act, I’m willing to bet those dying ants won’t budge until they’ve milked every ounce of sympathy, gratitude, extra helpings of discarded milkshake and so on from the colony first. Or they’ll sulk like mad until they realise no one will miss them and then eventually clear off. But either way, it kind of renders any claim to altruism pretty much void in my books. Like, they’d all be happily marching towards some three-day-old chicken wing, playing whatever the new politically-correct name for Chinese Whispers is, “I have light bulbs made of dirt in my underpants and this email smells like a purple fax machine… LOL!!!!!1!” when one of them suddenly clutches his side all like, “Erm, you guys go ahead, I’ll just be a minute.


• And Matt at Built on Facts looks at the physics of curling: Unfortunately it's rarely on TV more than once every four years, but I have to say I've really gotten to curling. Not only is it interesting to watch, it looks like it's actually a sport that could be played for fun at the beginning level. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of curling in Texas for some reason, so I have to content myself with watching. And thinking about the physics.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: A couple more UFO episodes. Also of Leverage, which has great commentary, by the way.

TV: Little Giants - predictable but amusing anyway. Psych - stakes a bit higher, but Shawn and Gus rise to the occasion. Leverage - I can't believe their season is already over! But Sophie's back - yay! - and Tara's gone, and Elliot had some great moments. I especially like him counting down the guys with guns till he reached zero. Past Life - I did not care for it. I don't like the concept, and I wasn't fond of the regulars. I did think it was funny that not a single person so much as raised an eyebrow over the diagnosis of reincarnation.

Read: Dancing on the Head of a Pin. Well, it improved a bit, but I doubt I'll read the obviously-upcoming sequel. Don't care. Also a couple of YAs: The Fallen - by the same author (Sniegoski), which is not bad, but not great. I may try the next one, but it will have to overcome this origin story's defects, plus definitely improve the theology, or I won't read any more. Two by Rebecca Stead - When You Reach Me and First Light. The former was excellent - well, it did win the Newbery! - and the latter (her first) pretty good. She seems to be improving - can't wait for her next one. Started The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell's brilliant study of the Puritans who founded Boston. I'm only half-way through, but I am more than willing to say "brilliant" based on her previous books and the first half of this one...

A word without meaning

Glenn Greenwald on the definition of "terrorism":

In sum: a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army, are Terrorists. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a Real Terrorist with a capital T -- not the kind who should be tortured and thrown in a cage with no charges and assassinated with no due process. Nor are Christians who stand outside abortion clinics and murder doctors and clinic workers. Nor are acts undertaken by us or our favored allies designed to kill large numbers of civilians or which will recklessly cause such deaths as a means of terrorizing the population into desired behavioral change -- the Glorious Shock and Awe campaign and the pummeling of Gaza. Except as a means for demonizing Muslims, the word is used so inconsistently and manipulatively that it is impoverished of any discernible meaning.

Omming and Nomming

Squirrels don't hibernate, but sometimes I bet they wish they did. Of course, that would just mean their frantic search for food would have to accelerate, and that might not be possible... Any way, 2 feet plus of snow, and this little guy has resorted to eating an Osage orange - fruit that sits on the ground all autumn untouched by anything. When he scampered off at my approach, he grabbed it and took it with him.

Happy Birthday, Wystan

Born today in York, England, in 1907, W.H. Auden. Here are two of his poems - most are too long for posting here. The first is short and pithy, the second explores in three different styles the death of Yeats; from the first part comes this line that has always stuck in my mind: "What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day."

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

And this triple verse In Memory of W. B. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Find more Auden at Poetry.org

Birds in the Snow

Well, not in the snow. But although the day was bright and sunny, it was cold and there was a lot of snow on the ground. That evening, as we drove went along Kenilworth Avenue and then through the Ag Station on Powdermill, we could see patches of grass, particularly under trees and on the roadside. And wherever there was grass, there were birds: a score of robins with a few starlings, lots of geese, dozens of crows. But I got these shots in the morning.

First, appropriately, a snowbird - a dark-eyed junco.

Chick-chick-chickadee!


A couple of robins - there were ten or twelve, all told.




Two of the fifteen or so gulls


A blackbird - grackle - at the top of a tree


And the crow one step higher up. (This isn't my best picture of him, but for some reason Blogger insists on flipping the other one. I have tried flipping the picture, but then Blogger shows it correctly. You got me...)

Oh, dear

Comcast's "On Demand" listings describer Jurassic Park 3 thus:

Dr. Grant and his team are persuaded to return to abandoned Jurassic Park to see how the vicious velociraptors have evolved their intelligence - he gets an up close look when a helicopter crash plunges them all onto the deadly island!

There are at least four major errors there!

Now I'm going to have to re-evaluate all the movies I've decided not to watch...

Happy Birthday, Ansel

Ansel Adams was born today in San Francisco in 1902. This photograph, The Tetons and the Snake River, is one of the 116 images recorded on the Voyager Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. These images were selected to convey information about humans, plants and animals, and geological features of the Earth to a possible alien civilization.

What the?

Look who's back! You know he's got to be looking at 24" of snow still on the ground and wondering just what the heck happened.

Sky Watch: Metro Morning

Here's a rather spectacular dawn caught on Wednesday at the Greenbelt Metro Station.




more Sky Watchers here

Behind the walls

I'm reading a book called The Fallen. It's not bad, but the author does have some interesting language choices - things I wouldn't say. One that I really noticed was his protagonist (it's a YA, so he's 18) reflecting that his high school has become a haven from the craziness of his real life.

Once behind its walls

things make sense.

"Behind" is so not the preposition I would use. "Inside" or even "within", but you're not "behind" the walls of a building unless you're outside of it...

Hapy Birthday, Nicolaus

Born today in 1473, the originator of the theory which bears his name - the Copernican, or heliocentric, system, which challenged and then (for most people) replaced the geocentric system, which held that the earth was the center and everything revolves around it. Nicolaus Copernicus was a brilliant polymath who merely dabbled in astronomy, and yet he removed the geocentered (and anthrocentered) universe from the realm of science.

He died in 1543, apparently, of a stroke, and legend has it that he regained consciousness in time for the first printed copy of his, if you'll pardon the pun, revolutionary work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) to be placed into his hands, allowing him to see his life's work before he died. It's only a legend, but it's a nice one, isn't it?

(painting by Jan Matejko, displayed in the Nicholaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork)

And let's not forget to teach the controversy!

Happy Birthday, Amy

Today is Amy Tan's birthday; she was born in 1952 in Oakland. She's written several books, all good - The Kitchen God's Wife is one of my favorite novels.

Happy BIrthday, Audre

Audre Lorde was born today in New York City in 1924. She worked in a series of low-paying jobs between high-school and her eventual attendance at college, earning a BA in literature and philosophy from Hunter in 1959 and an MLS from Columbia University in 1960. Being gay, she was unable to find a home in the Harlem Writers Guild - being gay and black and a woman, she was an outsider in many ways, and her collection of essays "Sister Outsider" is widely acclaimed and taught. Here are two of her poems.

The Electric Slide Boogie

New Year's Day 1:16 AM
and my body is weary beyond
time to withdraw and rest
ample room allowed me in everyone's head
but community calls
right over the threshold
drums beating through the walls
children playing their truck dramas
under the collapsible coatrack
in the narrow hallway outside my room

The TV lounge next door is wide open
it is midnight in Idaho
and the throb easy subtle spin
of the electric slide boogie
step-stepping
around the corner of the parlor
past the sweet clink
of dining room glasses
and the edged aroma of slightly overdone
dutch-apple pie
all laced together
with the rich dark laughter
of Gloria
and her higher-octave sisters

How hard it is to sleep
in the middle of life.


Making Love to Concrete

An upright abutment in the mouth
of the Willis Avenue bridge
a beige Honda leaps the divider
like a steel gazelle inescapable
sleek leather boots on the pavement
rat-a-tat-tat best intentions
going down for the third time
stuck in the particular

You cannot make love to concrete
if you care about being
non-essential wrong or worn thin
if you fear ever becoming
diamonds or lard
you cannot make love to concrete
if you cannot pretend
concrete needs your loving

To make love to concrete
you need an indelible feather
white dresses before you are ten
a confirmation lace veil milk-large bones
and air raid drills in your nightmares
no stars till you go to the country
and one summer when you are twelve
Con Edison pulls the plug
on the street-corner moons Walpurgisnacht
and there are sudden new lights in the sky
stone chips that forget you need
to become a light rope a hammer
a repeatable bridge
garden-fresh broccoli two dozen dropped eggs
and a hint of you
caught up between my fingers
the lesson of a wooden beam
propped up on barrels
across a mined terrain

between forgiving too easily
and never giving at all.

(more poems and info on Audre Lorde here)

Post-Christian? Possibly so ...

Man. They were in trouble tonight. Final Jeopardy clue:

Surprisingly, this word appears only twice in the New Testament, once in Acts 3 & once in the first epistle of Peter.

Now, I don't know that I'd have gotten it - particularly in 30 seconds. But one contestant guessed "faith"... and one "Jesus".

Jesus? Really? Jesus?

(ps - it's "Christian", which is really not all that surprising, which would have made it harder...)

Happy Birthday, Andre (Alice Mary)

And one more birthday: Alice Mary Norton, who wrote as Andre Norton and also Andrew North, was born today in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1912. Norton wrote more than 130 novels (and I think I've read them all) in her 70 years as a writer, as well as nearly a hundred short stories. She was the first woman to receive the Grand Master Award from the World Science Fiction Society. A month before her death in March 2005 at age 93, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America created the Andre Norton Award for an outstanding work of science fiction or fantasy for young adults. Her books were among the first science fiction I ever read as child, and I still like them - especially the Solar Queen novels and the Beast Master books (no real relation to the movies no matter what they say). Her books were the first ones I remember featuring non-white and non-male protagonists, too.

Happy Birthday, Ruth

Ruth Rendell, who also writes as Barbara Vine, and is called The Queen of Crime, was born today in London, England, in 1930. I adore her Wexford novels.

Happy Birthday, Banjo

Today Andrew Barton Paterson, known as Banjo to his readers, was born in Narrambla, New South Wales, 1864. I expect most Americans only know "The Man from Snowy River", but he also wrote the words to "Waltzing Matilda". For a time this prolific poet was one of the most popular in the English-speaking world. And look - the Australians even put him on their money! Many of his works are here, and here are a couple of my favorites:

The Wind's Message

There came a whisper down the Bland between the dawn and dark,
Above the tossing of the pines, above the river's flow;
It stirred the boughs of giant gums and stalwart ironbark;
It drifted where the wild ducks played amid the swamps below;
It brought a breath of mountain air from off the hills of pine,
A scent of eucalyptus trees in honey-laden bloom;
And drifting, drifting far away along the southern line
It caught from leaf and grass and fern a subtle strange perfume.

It reached the toiling city folk, but few there were that heard --
The rattle of their busy life had choked the whisper down;
And some but caught a fresh-blown breeze with scent of pine that stirred
A thought of blue hills far away beyond the smoky town;
And others heard the whisper pass, but could not understand
The magic of the breeze's breath that set their hearts aglow,
Nor how the roving wind could bring across the Overland
A sound of voices silent now and songs of long ago.

But some that heard the whisper clear were filled with vague unrest;
The breeze had brought its message home, they could not fixed abide;
Their fancies wandered all the day towards the blue hills' breast,
Towards the sunny slopes that lie along the riverside.
The mighty rolling western plains are very fair to see,
Where waving to the passing breeze the silver myalls stand,
But fairer are the giant hills, all rugged though they be,
From which the two great rivers rise that run along the Bland.

Oh, rocky range, and rugged spur, and river running clear
That swings around the sudden bends with swirl of snow-white foam,
Though we, your sons, are far away, we sometimes seem to hear
The message that the breezes bring to call the wanderers home.
The mountain peaks are white with snow that feeds a thousand rills,
Along the river-banks the maize grows tall on virgin land,
And we shall live to see once more those sunny southern hills,
And strike once more the bridle-track that leads along the Bland.

Clancy of the Overflow

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just on spec, addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow"

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
"Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are."

* * * * * * * * *

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.

* * * * * * * * *

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal --
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.

Happy Birthday, Susan

Susan B. Anthony was born today in Adams, Massachusetts in 1820.

This speech was given by Anthony after her arrest for casting an illegal vote in the presidential election of 1872. She was tried and then fined $100 but refused to pay.


Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny.

The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:
"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government - the ballot.

For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of attainder, or, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity.

To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters, of every household - which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every home of the nation.

Webster, Worcester, and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several states is today null and void, precisely as is every one against Negroes.

Oh yay

It's snowing again...

A Break in the Monotony

A fire alarm went off about an hour ago. Gwen hightailed it to her hiding place, but since it's the same one every time it wasn't hard to get her and put her in her carrier, then pull on my boots, grab my laptop and kindle and head downstairs. Turned out to be a gas stove on with pilot light out on the third floor. The firefighters had it taken care of in about a half hour or forty minutes.

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science tells us how bees tell each other not to go dangerous places: Bees can communicate with each other using the famous "waggle dance". With special figure-of-eight gyrations, they can accurately tell other hive-mates about the location of nectar sources. Karl von Frisch translated the waggle dance decades ago but it's just a small part of bee communication. As well as signals that tell their sisters where to find food, bees have a stop signal that silences dancers who are advertising dangerous locations.


• Martin at Aardvarchaeology is fascinated by Maori wetlands archaeology: I'm studying sacrificial deposits made by people of a lo-tech culture in Sweden 3000 years ago, largely in wetlands. This was long before any word relevant to the area was written. The objects were mainly recovered during the decades to either side of 1900. Yesterday while trawling through back issues of the Journal of Wetland Archaeology I came across a really cool paper on a similar theme. It's about wetland deposits made by lo-tech people and excavated during the 20th century. But in this case the stuff was still being deposited in the 19th century AD, the objects are perfectly preserved, and the ethnic group in question is still around with an unbroken oral tradition.


• Bee at Backreaction looks at funny physics names: I'm currently reading Sean Carroll's book "From Eternity to Here" and stumbled over this remark: "In Newtonian mechanics, the space of states is called "phase space" for reasons that are pretty mysterious." A mystery that hadn't occurred to me before, probably because the German word "Zustandsraum" means literally "state space," so no mystery there. Stefan and I were guessing Gibbs, who introduced the word, might have generalized the terminology from the harmonic oscillator where the location in phase space does indeed tell you the phase of the oscillation. In any case, this caused me to ponder what other words with funny origin physicists like to use. (Both funny ha-ha, and funny peculiar.)


• Jessica at Magma Cum Laude offers us a meditation on winter and lots of shots of Niagara and other watery spots in winter's ice: Of course, local for me means Niagara Falls. I took a trip up on Saturday to get myself outdoors for a little while, and while I'm pretty sure no important parts of me were permanently frozen, it was effing cold up there. (Not very snowy, though. It's pretty ironic that I moved away from the Washington DC area, and they're now poised to get more snow than Buffalo this year. I think Buffalo's at about 60 inches, and if DC gets another foot or so with today's storm, they'll have us beat. Not that Buffalo is the snowiest place in New York by any means - that's Syracuse. But I digress.) One interesting thing I found out about Niagara Falls in the winter is not only is it cold, it's damp. This is a direct result of all the spray from the Canadian and American Falls. It looks like the US gets the worst the spray off Horseshoe Falls, since the prevailing winds blow from west to east. Anyway, it makes for a somewhat hazardous visit, because everything is covered with ice.


• And at Bad Astronomy, Phil shows us the birth of a star: Oooo, pretty! Sharpless 2-106 is about 2000 light years away, located in a region of the galaxy known for birthing stars. The nebula is only about two light years across — small for a star-forming region, but still over 2,000 times bigger than our entire solar system. Deep in the middle of the cloud is a star struggling to be born.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Some more of UFO - my goodness. They're on the moon and they don't have alarms?? Something can put a hole in a window and they don't have alarms??? Also, Foster's dragging himself along the surface of the moon - heck, he ought to be bouncing. Even with a bad leg. Goodness ... Straker just said "Racial prejudice burned itself out five years ago!" Wow... The Andersons were optimists, weren't they? And I love the episode where he makes free-lance reporting sound so ... dirty: "Who do you work for?" "Myself." "And sell whatever you get to the highest bidder, eh?" he sneers. Also some BBC Sherlock Holmes with Peter Cushing in the title role, and - omg - Nick Tate and Gary Raymond, two of my ancient tv crushes, in starring roles (James McCarthy in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" and Sir Henry in "The Hound of the Baskervilles". Wow.) Cushing's not bad at all, if way too short.

TV: Psych, a good episode, with the best Shawn "I've heard it both ways" ever - in response to Gus's "You didn't find it - I found it!" Leverage - great job taking down the fake psychic. And some nice character moments from everyone in response to Parker's distress, particularly Elliott. Nice Valentine's shows on Modern Family and The Middle. I can't quite believe we're already at the end of the season for Leverage - it seems like only a few weeks. Sheesh. But this season ender looks good - I'm not sure what they're going to do to get out of this mess. And The Mentalist was pretty good; I didn't think that Rigsby would help Cho as much as they were making out, plus Jane's "You're out of control" line was a give-away, but I quite enjoyed it the look at what seethes beneath Cho's icy facade.

Read: Finished The City & The City, which ended up being quite complex and engrossing. I recommend it if you have the patience to tease out the logic of a weird urban science-fiction plot. Percy Jackson and the Olympians - a rather well-written, exciting YA series with a distinctive and appealing narrative voice (I am appalled to hear that Ares and Clarisse have been cut from the movie; for one thing, that's going to make the last book very different!). A Kiss Before the Apocalypse was very good, but I'm not enjoying the sequel quite as much; maybe I'm cold, but Remy's grief over Madeline is becoming whiny and obnoxious. Still, I'm only five chapters into it.

Unknown Definition

I love that they left this in: In the UFO episode "Confetti Check A-OK" Straker is teasing his new bride by pretending he can't read the plane tickets for their surprise-destination honeymoon. He says

London, England to ... No, I just can't make out that definition. Could be anywhere.

Great Backyard Bird Count 2010

It's not too late to participate in this year's Great Backyard Bird Count! Around here we're hip deep in snow, but that's bringing birds to the feeders, and others are to be seen out of apartment windows (see below), even if you don't feel like slogging through the snow. Elsewhere, it's probably easier to find them. But all the reports count. As of Friday, Canada geese and goldfinches were among the top species.

At the site, you can see what's been spotted in your locality or state - how many, how few, the numerous and the rarities. Then sit by your window for fifteen minutes and join in.



Submit your lists here!







My exciting list includes starlings and house finches.

I ♥ my readers

(from here, and more (deeply dorky) are here. Spread sciency love for Valentines Day.)

Sky Watch: Sunset over the Kenai

Sunset over the Kenai last week




more Sky Watchers here

Anchorage Corvids

I could have called this 'Birds in Anchorage' but you know what? Except for a few pigeons and one owl (or maybe hawk, it was twilight and he was sitting far off), the only birds I saw I saw in Alaska that weren't in a cage were ravens and magpies. The ravens were everywhere, and paid people little heed - even people in pickups driving right at them - but the magpies were few and definitely didn't want to stay still long enough for their pictures to be taken. The only ones I got any shot at were at the Wildlife Conservation Center, hence the wire fence.

Ravens, by the way, have the coolest voices - they sound nothing like crows - and seemed slightly wacky; not only did they tumble in flight, but they were always jumping on each other and I even, once, saw one dropping ice from a light pole onto other ravens walking around underneath him...