Ten Years of Winter
I always very much enjoy the start of winter in the midwest. Back at the end of high school, whenever I told anyone that I was considering attending college in Iowa, the first word out of their mouth would always be either “Why?” or “Cold!” It became pretty hyped up in my mind, and I had some trepidation that first year…would I be able to handle the Iowa winter?
Well it worked out fine. I loved the snow, the cold did not bother me, and I grew to like it more over time. It also became somewhat symbolic each year, as the weather turned from the familiar to something I had never encountered back in Austin, of moving away from home or even growing up. The temperature drops and I am reminded that I’m kind of an adult now, on my own in a new, or at least after these years different, place, and it’s in a way reassuring.
And I still have to go outside to see the first snowfall of the season, each year.
Pals
So the other day Erica and I were walking out of the apartment, when she paused to look through the mailbox. I stood on the steps, heard a noise from the tree directly in front of me. I turned to look just in time to see a bird of prey (hawk?� our guess..) come flying out of the tree towards me, holding a dead pigeon. It veered off, landed on an suv half a block away, and dropped the bird. We investigated, the hawk flew up to a building top, and we had a quick look at the pigeon. All of its neck feathers were removed, leaving a strange skinny bit between shoulders and head. We moved off quickly, and when we returned later in the evening, pigeon and hawk were gone. A bit of wildlife in the city…it colored my whole day…
So about two years ago I decided that I wanted to write palindromes. Off and on I work on it..rarely making much progress. I haven’t been able to make any long ones that make sense. Here are my best so far. If you’ve heard them already, let me know. sigh.
Drowsy sword
No parts strap on
Amoral aroma
God for evil onsets at ten; net tastes no liver of dog
Something of an Anthem
So Weird Al has a new cd coming out in two days.. I’ve been enjoying and sharing his latest music video as I wait to rush out and make my purchase…it’s great! An excellent parody of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty” song…. Enjoy!
In fact..September seems to be a big media month for me.. Scott Mccloud has a new book out, Making Comics. I already picked it up and am in the middle of my second reading. Excellent stuff.. A comic about the craft and techniques involved in making sequential art.
And then, there’s the new Jet Li movie, Fearless. I’m hoping to catch it either this afternoon or tomorrow evening. Very excited..whenever Jet Li works with Yuen Wo Ping for fight choreography, I rest assured that the results will be very impressive.
Breaking my silence on Chris Bliss, and not writing anything myself
So I’ve gone back and forth a number of times, trying to decide if I should post anything about the Chris Bliss video. When my upper elementary school teacher sent it to me, the first person to do so, I thought, that’s a nice little video, and forgot about it. When other family members and friends started sending it to me I thought, that’s odd, this plain little video is really getting around the internet. When I started coming across it on my favorite blogs and it continued to arrive in my e-mail, I started getting annoyed. I considered writing a crotchety post about why this video’s success annoyed me…but the idea seemed too sour. Besides, as a certain young lady I happen to live with kept half-jokingly pointing out, I was probably just jealous and would love to have a juggling video of MINE suddenly explode like that, regardless of the quality. There may be some truth to that, so I decided not to write anything. I vented a little to friends, a little to family, and that was that.
Then a friend of mine from college, someone I hadn’t heard from in five years, found me on myspace, and sent me a video. It was Chris Bliss juggling, this time to a Fatboy Slim song. Seemed like a music video. I sighed. She had sent it as a comment, so it would show up on my myspace profile. I just couldn’t bring myself to approve it.
Now, my friend Mark comes along with a nice explanation of why many jugglers have felt some inner exasperation at that video. I present to you Mark Hayward with some thoughts, and two new videos. Apparently, there is now a contest to make a juggling video to that Fatboy Slim song. Vova Galchenko made one, with Mark Bakalor. Mark Hayward links to both the original with Chris Bliss and the Vova version.
I like the Vova one a lot. Technical juggling at astronomical levels. My favorite bits, though, are the neat little three club, and five ball tricks scattered throughout, particularly in the second half, that create interesting visual patterns and body shapes.. I mean, it’s amazing that Vova can do those under the leg combos, but they’re not so visually interesting to me after a while…same thing with the pirouettes. But check out what Mark Hayward has to say on this for a non-crotchety response to the Chris Bliss explosion. I agree with him..and I really do wish that it was a better example of juggling that had exploded..a video with truly great juggling, both technical and artistic. I’ve seen so many phenomenal juggling acts at festivals and the like…I know it’s out there..
Geologic Timescale
Here is one of the best illustrations of Geologic Time I’ve seen in a while, and certainly the best I’ve seen online. Most of them, inadvertently or not, end up magnifying our time at least a little, so that it is somehow disproportionate to the rest. This one seems much better about that. Check it out, and have fun scrolling along!
(Saw this on Pharyngula)
Leadership
I meant to blog about this in March, and never got around to it. Now I’m all nervous after my last post! Anyway.. A couple of months ago I was trucking along as usual, when I came a cross a link on one of my favorite blogs to a story about this. The link goes to a current story, but I only heard one kernel of it back in March..It’s about the South Dakota abortion ban that’s coming through the works now. The chief of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota said that if the abortion ban goes into effect, she will have an abortion clinic opened on tribal land. In the state boundaries, but outside state jurisdiction. I was in awe..here, finally, was a leader taking a strong and brave stand on something important! She was in a unique position, and used it to stand up for women’s reproductive rights while thumbing her nose at the state government. This was no photo-op-based maverick macho posturing, but the real thing..
Now, there are movements fighting the abortion ban every step of the way, and maybe the challenges will work, and/or maybe a court will strike the ban down… But I remember what it felt like to read her words..and to see someone with the power and the capability to stand up to the anti-choice movement actually doing so, straightforward and unabashedly saying NO. And I think I had a taste of what an actual leader does.
Frightening about my hometown
So it turns out that the Chtorr really are attacking. This mystery disease eerily reminds me of parts from that sci fi saga about aliens invading the earth first with their ecology… slowly turning the planet hospitable to them and in the process giving us horrible plagues and true ecological warfare. Yikes.
And Austin is a city with one of the highest rates of infection. Double yikes.
*Update*
So my mother took it upon herself to fact check this fantastical little story, and it seems, indeed, too out there to be true. Sorry y’all..I just wasn’t skeptical enough… Most likely delusions on the part of people involved, with maybe a little hoax mixed in on someone’s part. She sent a link to this discussion board with some relevant comments..scroll through..halfway down or so some medical research folk pop in.. As an added bonus, we now know that I have a crack fact checking team backing this website up- my mom and, um, whoever else helps out!
Garfield, Made Good Again
When I was ten I thought Garfield was a great comic strip. Then, over the years, I watched it slowly degenerate around the same two jokes it always told.. (Or maybe as I grew older I simply noticed this. Exept I remember old Garfield strips that carried a storyline over a series of days..strips that actually involved changes of setting, pace, and activity.) Well I recently came across this forum where someone had taken old Garfield strips and removed all of the cat’s dialogue, creating a series of strips about a rather sad man talking to his cat.. It even becomes almost poignant at times! Well, apparently this has been done before with Garfield, and was taken down after some litiginous correspondence from PAWS inc. So check these out before they disappear..the manage to add quality to an otherwise soulless strip…
Amazing Decorations
Check out this video of some amazing Christmas decorations. (Make sure you have sound). Again, I wish my life were more like this. Meanwhile, we have a nice little snowstorm in Chicago tonight..supposed to be getting seven inches of snow.. It was very pretty as I left work, although just windy enough to really get into your face too.
Erica and I saw Murderball last night. I really really enjoyed it. A movie that manages to be inspirational without being sappy.. For anyone unfamiliar with it..it’s about quadriplegic rugby. These guys in custom armored wheelchairs tearing around a basketball court, crashing into each other and knocking each other over, talking trash and all that other contact sport stuff…it’s amazing. These folks are tough, not delicate, and it was really interesting noting my own reactions as I saw that in the movie.
Why I Hate Archeology, and moving beyond it
Don’t get me wrong..I’m sure archeologists are, on the whole, wonderful and intelligent people, doing some fantastic science. I didn’t always hate archeology either. When I was quite young, I simply didn’t care about it. Sure, we occasionally spent an inordinate amount of time on ancient Egypt in my elementary school, but this was simply a mild annoyance, learning about something for which I truly felt not the slightest spark of interest.
Things began to change once my interest in dinosaurs turned into an interest in paleontology. Or, perhaps, once I learned/decided that paleontology is what people who love dinosaurs do. Regardless, archeology began to intrude into my life and conversations with disturbing frequency. Whenever I told anyone of my interest in paleontology, they somehow must have heard ‘archeology’ because they would immediately talk about it: “Oh, I like archeology too!” or “So you like dinosaurs and stuff? Yeah, well I think those pyramids in Egypt are great.” or “Did you hear about that recent archeological find in _____?” The last one was far and away the most common, putting me in the awkward position of either pretending to care about ancient human history or trying to find a polite way of explaining that, no, I really do not care about that particular find in the least, and it’s nothing against that discovery, just that I find the whole enterprise entirely devoid of interest. As these conversations repeated over and over, every time I tried to tell someone new about my passion for dinosaurs and other long-dead animals, I became increasingly frustrated, and resentful of archeology. It came to symbolize for me humanity’s obsession with itself, our focus on studying ouselves instead of the world around us. I mean, how could anyone interested in ancient life not be primarily interested in ancient human civilizations??
In college I met an archeology major at a party once.. She went to a different school, and I’ve never seen her since. It was an eye-opening experience for me because she had the same problem! Whenever she told anyone about her archeology studies, they would immediately begin talking to her about dinosaurs! I began to feel sympathy for the archeologists, always being forced to talk about the spotlight-stealing, movie-grubbing dinosaurs instead of their true passion.
I just recently finished reading the Best American Science and Nature Writing for 2004. An archeology piece stood out for me. Written by Garrett G. Fagan, it was about pseudoscience and television. He lamented the preponderance of pseudoscience showing up in archeology shows, even on channels like Discovery or The Learning Channel. He delved a little bit into some reasons behind this… TV shows have to sell a story, and even documentary ones must do this. A common and successful formula is that of what I will call the vindicated visionary, (called The Vindicated Thinker in Fagan’s piece, but I like alliteration), a scientist with the courage to go against the mainstream and follow the evidence, who faces ridicule at first, but is, of course, eventually proven right as the evidence mounts and the mainstream comes around. The problem arises because this format is particularly easy to fit to pseudoscientists. Pseudoscientists almost always see themselves in this light. Indeed, someone comparing him or her self to Galileo or Newton as a misunderstood or suppressed scientific revolutionary is a dead giveaway that they are really off their rocker. The Baez Crackpot Index might be useful here. Check it out, particularly the later ones. Then, if you haven’t already, go read some pseudoscience and see how well the Index works. Anyhow, with pseudoscientists already telling their own, autobiographical, vindicated visionary stories, TV producers have an easy time buying into it, or at least, making a show out of it. And tadaa! we get pseudoscience in some prominent TV spots. Fagan goes on to suggest some ways to make exciting, but still accurate, archeology television.
After reading that piece, I found myself suddenly feeling some kinship with the archeologists. They’re facing the same attacks on good science that the paleontologists, geologists, and especially biologists are facing. That’s plenty reason for me to get over my own personal feelings about archeology.
