Is this too hard to read? I finally learned how to do a background image and thought it would be amusing to have a picture of a window - you know: looking out at the world and all. But I'm so immersed in it by now that I can't tell if it's lovely or impossible or somewhere in between. Comments welcome (but keep them polite, please!).

Labels: blogs (mine), ideas

It's starting to feel as if it's been raining every day since the beginning of recorded history. Sure I'm exaggerating. But it just doesn't stop and it's starting to be annoying. It hasn't been real summer here on the east coast, and I admit I like that it hasn't been ninety or above, but this every single day of thunder and rain, rain and thunder is just getting tiresome. Humidity in the eight or nine hundred percent range. Dark dark afternoons and evenings. Needing two or three umbrellas at home and at the office because they take so long to dry off, clammy furniture, hair never quite dry after the morning shower, damp laundry even out of the dryer, a feeling of heaviness in the air so you can't breathe all that well except early in the morning, a few strange insects and bugs coming inside because even they want to dry off (who's anthropmorphizing, who?). Couldn't the rain rain go away and come again another day in about two weeks after we all dry off and have some nice normal sunny summer weather? Just a few days. To weed our gardens and mow our lawns and sit on the porch and get some vitamin d from the air instead of supplements. Wouldn't that be nice? (What do the plinth sitters do when/if it rains like this??)

Labels: weather

Happy 111th birthday - which somehow is a visually fitting number for Calder.
Wouldn't this look great and make you smile every time you saw it - if it were in your house?!

Labels: anniversaries, art, people of note

Last week Starbucks announced an awesome promotion - a free pastry with the purchase of any drink before 10:30 in the morning. They sent email to people and posted notices on FaceBook and Twitter. Cool, right? All those salivary glands, mine included, anticipating the lovely morning treat that was maybe partly a "thank you" for spending foolish amounts of money for coffee. So my friend and I got off the train and went to Starbucks, all happy and excited. But, aha, you had to bring a coupon which, in fairness, was mentioned in the email that some people got and it did specify that you had to show the coupon or email, but it wasn't in boldface and judging by the comments on FB there were zillions of us (yes, us) who didn't know about the coupon having to accompany us. And there was no waiving it. And apparently some Starbucks said they'd run out of pastries for the giveaway even though the announcement specifically said the promotion included all the pastries. And the Hawaiian Starbucks were excluded from the whole thing, for some reason, again mentioned in the small print but without any boldface or colored text to make it really clear. Alas, so many sad coffee drinkers, so many disappointed Starbucks fans.

Labels: celebrations

Everyone wrote and talked and showed pictures about the Apollo 11 anniversary, yesterday. But several different websites put the moment when Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface (land previously only seen as a big man with a lot of cheese, and later visited by Wallace and Grommit for that very reason (ha ha)), was somewhere bewteen 2:56 a.m. and 3:39 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time today, July 21, 1969. Yes, on the east coast of America that was nine-ish p.m. on July 20th which is the common wisdom moment that gets all the hoopla - but it's amazing and a bit disappointing, I have to admit, to realize that even something seemingly factual like the time of the occurrence of a historical event is American-northeast-centric.

Labels: anniversaries, madness, modern times

A friend mentioned to me this morning that there is a tv show called Little Miss Perfect on WEtv. Its description says it "takes you on a journey into the world of children's pageants." As I wrote Sunday, reflecting on the Jon Benet Ramsey movie/story (here), I know there are many ways to grow up healthy and I'm truly sure that it's impossible to identify with any certainty which interests will or will not help develop healthy, wealthy and wise adulthood. On the other hand, it does seem creepy and feel wrong for little girls to hold all kids of sexy poses and get all dolled up . I very much hope and want to believe that girls who do pagents and become engrossed in these activities as post-toddlers really can and do grow into emotionally and intellectually strong women.

Labels: children, modern times

I hope people who live in California appreciate their proximity to fantastic beaches. I'm going through my annual pining away for time spent on a pounding-surf beach. The air, the smell, the sound . . . they all simply knock me out and make me rejoice and feel blissfully happy. But it's at least three or four hours from me to any such public beach (I don't know anyone well enough who has a home near a private one) and the accommodations are never inexpensive so I continually put off taking the money and time. Rhode Island has a couple of perfect beaches but you really have to spend the night there at this time of year because people line up very early for the (limited) available spots. Northern Maine has fantastic spots (Bar Harbor wondrously chief among them) but it's an 8-10 hour drive from me. Southern Maine has a couple of nice beaches (Ogunquit, for example) but in mid-summer the hotels are almost priced like New York hotels - entirely understandably from their point of view but sad from mine.

When I visited San Francisco in September of 2004 I was particularly amazed by (and jealous of) Stinson Beach and Point Reyes, both within an easy drive and both public and yet not overrun by people - meaning that I could walk and sit and wander to my heart's content without feeling I was intruding or being intruded upon. And Carmel is not far from SF and is simply lovely, including two beaches at the foot of its main street, neither crowded and both places where many people gather briefly each evening to watch the sunset.

Labels: beaches, travel

Happy 40th anniversary!

Labels: anniversaries, science

Little girls are innocent, open, interested, eager. They are often adorable and gorgeous. They are tons of fun to be with and play with. They're even fun to play with as if they're real live dolls that you can dress up and do their hair. Unfortunately there is a flip and ghastly side to all that in that they are also sometimes the targets of very sick, cruel, evil people.

While rearranging some furniture and doing some cleaning, I put the tv on for background noise and got lured into watching a movie on Jon Benet Ramsey. The actors are an impressive line-up and quite good (Kris Kristoffersen, Marg Helgenberger (far more appealing onscreen than Patsy herself was), Ronny Cox, Ken Howard, John Heard, Dennis Boutsikaris, Jane Powell (yes, that Jane Powell - she plays JB's dance instructor), Ann-Margaret (she plays Mrs Ramsey's mother), among others). And although the movie is uneven from a critical point of view, it effectively depicts the all-too-human errors of the investigation, some unavoidable and some due to odd quirks of the people involved. It has been bizarrely impossible to solve the case partly because many of the police and detectives were so convinced that the Ramsey's had murdered their daughter, despite how unlikely it was from all kinds of points of view, so that they refused to pursue any alternative evidentiary leads. Even after nearly thirteen years, the story remains both oddly fascinating and very disturbing.

I found the story even creepier than I remembered, perhaps because t2cgitw arrived during the intervening years. Probably because of them, what struck me now is how much Jon Benet and her mother were/are like other little girls and their mothers. All the dressing up and make-up and playing at being ten or more years older than they are and caring so much about being fairy tale/cliché cutesy/pretty/sexy is so familiar and so ordinary.

On the one hand, one has to wonder if there is something at all damaging or wrong with so much emphasis and focus on external and superficial frill. On the other hand, maybe not because maybe fantasy play of all kinds is good for the imagination - and goodness knows that a healthy imagination is vital for self-aware and contented growth and development. It's hard - perhaps impossible - to know where the line between healthy and sick is - or even if there is such a line. There are so many ways to get from birth to death and who are any of us to be sure we know which are valid and which are not?

But whatever else is not entirely evident (pun intended), it is certain that this is a sad and awful story. I only wish there were clear lessons to take to heart, learn and pass on.

Labels: children, modern times, movies, today's movie

It was a really nice day today in my part of the northeast. It was an actual summer day - warm, sunny and perfectly, not humidly, hot.

Labels: weather

I did not realize that John Glenn's birthday was two days before he landed and walked on the moon. Forty years ago, having just turned 48, he must have had quite the gravity-less party. This year, I hope today is a reminiscent and celebritory pleasure, two days short of the fortieth anniversary of the very first moonwalk (Michael Jackson's allusions then and now to the contrary definitely withstanding).

Labels: anniversaries, science

It seems that the (perhaps foolish or trivializing) references to Nancy Drew during Sotomayor's confirmation hearings struck a chord with many of us. As I have mentioned before in this space, my own reading of the series was relegated to undercover work (literally) because my father viewed them as "trash," an appellation he later regretted and for which he apologized. And legions of women of many generations have read at least some of them, beginning with The Secret of the Old Clock and going on until interest or patience ran out. Today the NYT published the musings on the subject of various real women from Nancy Pelosi to Mary Jo White (article here). For me, they were an early and treasured part of decades cherishing story-telling that somehow seems just for me and that takes hold and does not let go.

Labels: books, women, writing

It's Bastille Day, France's all-important day like our July 4th. In honor, we could strut knitting needles and pretend to be Madame LaFarge or we could just say oo-la-la a lot. Google has nothing French adorning their logo, oddly, though they often add whimsical artwork on such occasions but Bing is sporting a gorgeous picture of the Louvre's I.M.Pei glass triangle and part of the museum reflected in water. Bonne anniversaire!

Labels: anniversaries

I'm getting weary of the amount of money I pay for utilities. The utility company says my usage is lower each year than the year before but that rates have been increasing. And one cannot do without light or heat but I yearn for a place where utilities are more reasonable. I leave my house at 6:45 in the morning and rarely get home before 9 at night and yet I pay over two hundred dollars a month for gas and electricity. I don't run machinery or anything else power-thirsty.. In the summer, I keep the temperature around 72 and turn the thermostat to 75 when I'm out; in the winter, I keep the temperature around 66-67 and turn the thermostat to 62-63 when I'm out (having been warned that 60 is risky and indeed having had periphery pipes freeze twice in the last ten years). A wider variation seems pointless because of the work/energy the power/gas has to expend in getting back to snuff when I get home. My utility company does not (yet?) offer alternative power choices, fwiw. Frustrating.

Labels: expenses, weather

For a hundred days, beginning on July 6, and running 24 hours a day, a different person will sit atop the 168-year-old Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square for one hour and talk, read or do whatever by way of making a living portrait of the UK. Since the feed is live, one assumes that the 2400 people will cover a whole gamut from enthralling to boring to offensive to who-knows-what. It's a brainchild of sculptor Antony Gormley, by the way. It may sound goofy and pointless but it's absolutely mesmerizing, as pointed out by Sarah Brown and Emma Freud on Twitter. Of course people are asking whether it's art or not, but who cares? Like the diaries of that guy in the midwest U.S., it's a real record of real life at this moment in the universe's time.

The camera moves around now and then so you also get a look at T.Square and the people milling around. It's right down a bit from St. Martin's in the Fields and the National Gallery and 10 Downing Street - so many fascinating places in the heart of one of the great cities of the world. The website puts up a headshot of the current plinth-occupier along with a short bio and one assumes they've screened the applicants (nearly 25,000 as of this writing).

The website has many features including the ability to look people up after they've spent their hour atop the plinth. And a "plinth postcard" that lets you digitially put yourself or someone else or even your cat up there, and send the card.

Twitterers can follow the project (@oneandother) and the plinth itself (@Plinthwatch). (You can also read stories on it in the Guardian , the Times and the Independent.) The live feed is at "One & Other." And let me include a warning/proviso that you may find this utterly ridiculous and/or boring but far more likely addicting and mesmerizing.

Labels: amazements, u.k.

Grrrr.  How utterly annoying.  I really do not understand why scurrilous individuals with misleadingly innocuous names like spammers and hackers exist.  Seriously.  Like terrorists, these people obviously get off on knowing they're startling and maybe even scaring people.  They really need to get lives.  I mean, if they're so all-fired up and dying to intrude on everyone's life, and since they're demonstrably clever and creative, why the heck don't they put their intelligence and energy to good use like, oh I don't know, solving the mysteries of the universe or at least eliminating hunger and war.

Anyway, if you're still being held hostage, this post won't help and you are still seeing a great big black message from "the anti-sec movement." And if you were, you've already solved it if you're reading this. For me, after rebooting and clearing all kinds of caches, to no avail, I spent a (perhaps dangerous) moment reading the apparently harmless message in the big back blob.  Then I went to Bing and was grateful for its accurate short list results and mouse-hovering summary trick because I quickly found out that the problem was an ImageShack hack and that one needed to remove whatever was hosted by them.  Puzzled because I did not knowingly know what ImageShack was, I went to the Blogger forum in Google Groups' - a resource that's answered questions and rescued me several times - whence I learned that I should copy my template into WordPad, find the offending image, and delete it.  Indeed there was an up-arrow image there hosted by them although I don't think I ever used an up-arrow.  I deleted it, saved the template back into blogger and, voila!  Since all my other images are hosted by PhotoBucket, it seems unlikely that I would have one random image hosted by someone else, especially an image I don't use.  Plus, these brilliant idiots (that is not an oxymoron) clearly could have hack-dropped an image along with the black blob, right?  Who knows.  Anyway, the nasty business is over, it seems, and I hope very few or maybe no rare readers got snagged by these ridiculous people.

While I was at it, I downloaded Opera.  I remember liking its interface years ago although I found the features limited at the time, but that was when it was a new and somewhat outsider kid on the browser block.  Now it has serious fans and tons of interesting and slick features and choices.  It has a reputation as much less hackable, too.  We shall see.

Labels: blogs (mine), web tools

Today is Calvin's 500th birthday. John. Not Hobbes's pal. I wish I could think of an appropriate way to commemorate the occasion or at least something intense and disapproving to say.

Labels: anniversaries, ideas, people of note

What a fantastic project - Project Night Night - catchy name and a super way to do something for children in homeless shelters, the entirely inadvertent sufferers of some of the worst consequences of some of the worst difficulties of modern life.

The idea is to fill tote bags (theirs) with a security blanket, age appropriate books, and a stuffed animal. Knowing how much my children and T3CCITW loved/love all things stuffed and readable, I think this is a beyond-wonderful idea. Plus, what a great way to begin to open children's eyes to the world around them and to gently encourage empathy as they collect things for the bags. It's probably wise to refrain from discussing homelessness with very young children since they are can be good at worrying themselves into a tither without letting their adults in on it, but, done carefully, this could be a good way to start teaching about compassion, understanding, kindness and even the importance of offering thoughtful assistance.

Specific shelters involved with Project Night Night are in California, Florida, Michigan and Ohio but they encourage us to buy totes and fill them appropriately (read the website guidelines) and take them to shelters in our own areas. PNN will gladly provide guidance and, of course, gladly accept donations of funds or cuddly things and books if that feels more comfortable than doing the delivery ourselves.

Labels: children, daily life, ideas

Posting this at 12:34:56 7/8/9. Enjoy the sublime moment, however fleeting. And, if you are so inclined, watch this clip.

Update: As my brother points out, using global practices of stating dates "m/d/y" as opposed to our statement order of "d/m/y," we get another moment of timely charm in four weeks and two days, on August 7th! That's 8/7/9 to us but the all-important 7/8/9 to much of the rest of the world. That morning I will remind rare readers to raise a toast at yet another 12:34:56 7/8/9.

Labels: amazements

This seems like a joke. But it's not a joke. It's a new airline. Hard to imagine but true. (As to whether it's advisable to send your pet all by him- or herself, on an airplane, that's a different although good question.) Okay, now here's my imagination at work: picture telling someone from, say, the early 1800s, all about what we have now. Tell them about cars, television, celebrity, personal computers, cellphones, trampolines, working out, airplanes, supermarkets, organic food, on and on. All astonishing, right? but explainable. Now tell them about Pet Airways. The sky is now truly the limit.

Labels: amazements

Interesting to note that when my blog is viewed in Firefox, the most recent post has the colors I have chosen for date, title and body text but all older posts have slightly subdued versions of the colors. The line spacing is a little different, too, but I've known that. I wonder (a) why and (b) how this happens.

Labels: blogs (mine), firefox

Any ideas of how to get a copy of the daily New York Times crossword puzzles? The Times offers, for free, all their daily news (which is certainly not to be confused with The Daily News by any stretch of anyone's imagination even people who loathe the Times). But they do not offer the puzzles for free. I love doing the puzzle every day and sometimes manage to snag an Arts section on the train or from a friend but it's not reliable. Or fair, when you think about it. And buying the paper these days is way way way over my budget even though it's a pursuit that stimulates all the myriad intricate corridors and synapses of my brain. The daily NYT costs $2 x 6 days x 52 weeks = $642 and if you get Sundays it adds $5 x 52 which is $260 so it's $902 a year and that's just plain silly. And in case you're wondering, yes, you can buy just the puzzles for $40 a year but you also have to download proprietary software and that always makes me nervous. So I want another source until such time as they decide to be nice to all the people who love the puzzles and would think ever so well of them....

Labels: puzzles

To the country and to the six seven nine — yes, six seven nine: A, T, A, A, P, S, V, L and A — people I know with birthdays on July 4th, 5th and 6th, I hope you all enjoy the foll-dee-rol and fireworks in honor of you!! Many wishes to the country and you to all have very happy birthdays!!!!!!

If any rare reader would like something fun — and relevant — to do, go here and see how much you know about the states of the union. Myself, I'll listen to Kate Smith sing at least once today and will eat something red (strawberries), something white (cheese or cream) and something blue (is there anything besides blueberries?), if not necessarily together.

Update: Monday, July 6 is the day of another friend's birthday, this time one of my blogfriends, whom I would love to name but will only do so if I receive permission (realizing that some people don't want the world to know). Quite the three day celebration!

Labels: anniversaries, celebrations

My jewelry mentor-teacher yesterday said we were going to work with precious metal clay (an amazing medium, by the way) to start drafing a template for a piece with a cut-out area for a gemstone. Since we know that pmc shrinks about 8-10% when it's fired, we needed to figure out what size to make the hole and that led to an interesting question: would the hole become larger or smaller when the piece was fired? We realized variations of depth and density might change the answer a bit but we also thought there would be a basic principle as to whether the hole would enlarge or shrink.

We've made and/or been around plenty of pmc toggle clasps getting made where one side has an opening for a bar that goes through the other. All was well after firing, considering that we've never had toggles that didn't work from a size point of view. But then, again, we'd never paid specific attention to changes in the holes' dimensions. So we discussed and thought about it, and decided we anticipated one of these possibilities would turn out to be the case: (1) the hole would become larger as the solid areas around the hole shrank, or (2) the hole would shrink along with the whole piece. As it happened, she had a small piece on hand with a hole cut out of the middle, so we traced the outside and inside edges and fired it. Our results — well, what do you think?? — Spoiler alert! — do not read the next paragraph until you want to know the answer.

The first answer was as expected in that the whole piece did shrink about 9 or 10%. But what about the hole? Well, it turned out that the hole shrank just barely perceptibly, almost not at all, not even the width of a .05mm pencil line. Amazing. Neither of our pre-suppositions were right or, putting it another way, they both were! Perhaps the surface tension around the space, which I expected to be pulled at and therefore enlarged by the surrounding material as it heated and shrank, is trumped by the surface tension on the entire unit, to the effect that the space in fact resists the shrinkage. Anyway, we were fascinated, pleased and educated by our experiment and I promised I would write about it here. Now any rare readers know, too.

Labels: jewelry, science

At last it's a beautiful day in the northeast. Sunny, warm, breezy but not too hot. Enjoy!!!

Labels: weather

I LOVE CNN's weekly news quiz. Take this week's here.

Labels: news, questions

It seems that Karl Malden and Mollie Sugden have both died. I feel bad for their families in their losses, although I hope they know how much they both enriched many people's lives. The last few days have been a sadly low point in the removal from among us of people with enormous charm and imagination.

Labels: passings, people of note

Have you tried Bing, Microsoft's new search tool? Its purportedly superior accuracy and usefulness remain to be seen but I like it at first glance and use. Other considerations aside, its daily photos are lovely, complete with descriptions (little button on the lower right) and factoids (hover over different parts of the photos) and the ability to look back at previous days' pictures (arrows on lower right). I'm not sure what's technologically or substantively different from Google or other search engines, or at least the differences are not immediately apparent, but it's a nice new toy on the shelf.

Labels: curiosities, technology