Monthly Archives: April 2014

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Tom(‘s) Thumb

1 Comment

Spring                                                             Bee Hive Moon

Tom’s thumb will be done tomorrow, a nifty operation, done often, same day.  Then, no using that opposable thumb (and what are we, after all, without our opposable thumbs) for three full months.  This post is for Tom.

Talk about a great attitude.  Tom’s going to take this opportunity to use his non-dominant hand and thereby increase the flexibility of his brain.  Making lemonade out of hand surgery. Or something.

Doesn’t sound like much, three months, in the abstract, but when you begin to add up the things we do so easily with our dominant hand, especially after 60+ years of practice and habit, well, then three months sounds like a very long time.  Buttoning shirts.  Using table utensils.  Opening doors.  Driving.  Typing. On this one Tom’s going to try to learn Dragonspeak.  I hope he does, maybe it’ll spur me to finally learn it.

We’ll be thinking about you tomorrow morning, Tom.  8 am.

P.T. Barnum and Charles Sherwood Stratton (Tom Thumb)

General
Aside Leave a comment

Spring                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Weather station says 65.  It’s sunny and warm.

After working this morning on my query letter, altering my hook to a young-adult emphasis, I continued editing Artemis in Minnesota.  This is a long story and one I can’t find on my computer right now.

It’s somewhere on one of these machines (I have two desktops in use and two older machines plus the laptop.)  Makes me wonder what else is hiding on other hard-drives. I’ll have to check.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Wound

Leave a comment

Spring                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

There.  Got out and did my first garden task of the new season.  Cut down all the raspberry canes.  That means no harvest mid-summer, but a more bountiful one in the early fall. Getting out there, just standing in the garden, healed a part of me that gets wounded in early winter.  It’s the part of me that’s glad the garden is done for the season.

And that’s true.  I am glad when the last berry is frozen and the last tomato is canned.  At the same time the finish of the garden closes up a part of my soul, starves it for nourishment and that becomes a wound, often unnoticed until its healing can be accomplished.  With the least good garden pruners, an early brand purchased before I discovered Felco, I cut into the canes, cut them all down to the ground. Now that wound has suddenly healed and I am again the Greenman.

Next I’ll plant those cool season crops before we leave for Denver.

Dogs, Garden, Weather +Climate

The Wolf Came Out

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

The sun is as high in the sky now as it is at Labor Day.  That means warmth is coming. Today we’re supposed to hit 70.  Then, maybe get some snow on Sunday.  Back and forth. With the sun high, the snow from winter will be gone by then, except for those heroic dirty mountains that rose up in large parking lots.  I remember a few years back when they hung on until well into May.

The dogs heard something this morning around 2:30.  And set to howling and barking to get at it.  Kate finally got up and let them out.  She later heard a high pitched scream and a while after that the dogs retching.  Whatever it was, they caught it.  She also said the owl was in fact hooting last night.  It was, however, quiet when I wrote the post below this one.

Not often these days, but on occasion, we get reminded that these gentle loving creatures remain red in tooth and claw.  Underneath that indoor sweetness lie genes borne of wolves, most often not aroused, but last night.  The wolf came out.

Our Land and Home

A Night

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                    Bee Hiving Moon

As I wrote a week or so ago, motel rooms are noisy:  the fans, the heaters, the coolers, television from other rooms, showers and toilets, even, at the Residence Inn, people playing basketball until 10 pm.  I’m sure if you stay at places better constructed than the ones I frequent, this may not be a problem, but for me it has made returning home to the exurban night a real blessing.

After 11:00 pm, 10 pm most nights, the silence here is noticeable.  No cars.  No motorcycles.  No loud music.  The dogs might snore a bit, but that’s a soothing sound.

I remember reading about a silent room in someone’s studio here in the Twin Cities, a place so quiet that it’s used for testing acoustical equipment.  The guy who runs the room said people couldn’t stand to be in the room for very long.  Apparently some level of ambient sound is necessary for us, or at least so expected that its absence suggests something’s gone wrong.  I wouldn’t mind spending time in that room, just to see.

Right now there is no thunder.  No wind.  No hail.  No arcosanti bell ringing in the storm. No Great Gray Owl hooting or wolf howling.  No lightning.  No fireworks from the neighbors across the street.  Only the sounds, what are they?, that fill the ear during times of silence.  A faint buzzing, a not unpleasant attempt by the ear to hear even when the stimulus is close to non-existent.  Silence.

 

Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

An Afternoon

Leave a comment

Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Moving deeper into Book I of the Metamorphoses.  Next week I’ll set a schedule for translating, so many verses a day.  Plus I plan to set a schedule for certain additional research that will go along with this task, things like comparing Ovid’s stories with other accounts of the same myth, investigating key grammatical or etymological points and, the big one, getting deep into Roman history of the late Republic and early Imperial era, Ovid’s time.  Over the last couple of years I have purchased books about Ovid and his poetry, Roman poetry and comparative literature between and among Ovid and his peers.

(Deucalião_e_Pirra   Giovanni_Maria_Bottalla)

I’ve not been too willing to get into these areas in any depth until I felt the translating had reached some point, though I didn’t know what that was.  Well, now I’ve reached it.  And I’m ready to go the next step.

I spent a half an hour today and translated 5 verses, so my speed is picking up, though to be fair the difficulty varies, usually with regard to the length of a sentence.

Also in the mail today.  The nitrogen for the vegetable garden and my new Lenovo laptop. This replaces my old Hewlett-Packard, a sturdy and reliable machine that has been outstripped by cheaper processors and memory and the retirement of Microsoft XP.  It doesn’t have enough juice to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Tomorrow I plan to start it up and see what’s what.

General

The Big Fountain

Leave a comment

Spring                                                            Bee Hiving Moon

When old men gather, you expect what one friend calls “the organ recital.”  We had that last night.  Frank’s back.  Tom’s thumb. Even those with no organ about which to recite checked in as ok.  For now.

You might not expect these topics though.  Flash trading, now in the news a lot, showed up in Woolly conversation several years ago thanks to Scott Simpson’s attention to investing. He id’ed this algorithm driven, high-speed cable actuated technique as unfair.  Now many agree with him.

On computer assisted travel, aka the Garmin and other similar devices.  I found her ability to know right where I was and tell me 400 feet ahead of time that I needed to “Turn left at Old Knob Road” most amazing.  The two true geeks in the room, Tom and Bill, identified as much more impressive the Garmin’s ability to measure on the fly either the fastest or the shortest route to your destination.  This is, after I listened, a continuous solution to the traveling salesman problem:  “The travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard* problem in combinatorial optimization…” Wikipedia

*A problem is NP-hard if an algorithm for solving it can be translated into one for solving any NP-problem (nondeterministic polynomial time) problem. NP-hard therefore means “at least as hard as any NP-problem,” although it might, in fact, be harder.  Wolfram  (I added this just to clear things up.)

A movie review on Particle Fever, now at Lagoon Cinemas, from Tom (positively valenced), got us into the most interesting topic of the evening from my perspective, the recent publication of empirical support for the 30-year + old inflationary theory of the universe.  I won’t go into an explanation because this excellent NYT article does a wonderful job using a coffee press as an easy to grasp metaphor.

What I want to add to this astonishing discovery is my own metaphor concerning what it might mean.  If I grasp the implications of this inflationary theory correctly, it proposes that the big bang, rather than a one and done event (see NCAA basketball), is a forever red-shirted freshman, a player that can just keep on playing.  No, that’s not the metaphor.

Here’s the metaphor:  the big (or in Monty Python language, really huge, very enormous, most gargantuan) fountain.  Again, if I get it, the moment just after the big bang, just 380,000 years after (incredible precision for an event well over 13 billion years old), produced and continues to produce a fountain of universes, ever increasing.  I imagine them as large fireworks display, sending off into the darkness of whatever it is, a constant flow of brightly lit, unbelievably rapidly expanding-faster than the speed of light-universes.  A fountain of metaphysics, each spark a new reality, each with its own laws of physics, many of which will develop sentient life forms who, as in our anthropic universe, will look back in wonder at the moment of their creation, their universe becoming aware of itself.

And here’s one more interesting piece.  There is no looking behind the big fountain.  The power of its engine prevents any data surviving from before it began.  So, any speculation about the trigger:  God, the cookie monster, pure whimsy is both in bounds and never to be answered.  Now we look there darkly; later we will look there darkly, too.

 

 

Woolly Mammoths

Lucky Birthday

1 Comment

Spring                                                            Bee Hiving Moon

The Woollies met tonight at Christos, a Frank B. treat.  He’s in the O.R. on Monday at 7:30 and Tom goes into UofM hospital this Thursday at 6am for an 8am procedure.  Tom will be out the same day, but recovering for three months; while Frank will be in the O.R. for several hours, but perhaps require recovery of only 2-3 weeks.

We also celebrated Bill Schmidt’s lucky birthday (his observation), 77.  He had a candle stuck in some baklava.  Tom, Warren and Bill enjoyed some retsina which was on special.  Frank, Scott and I enjoyed the water.

We had some good laughs at my peccadillo in west Texas with the gas and even more about my surprise at ending up in Kansas.

At these times we bring 25 plus years of shared history so the sharing is deep without needing always to be verbalized.  I’m glad and proud to know these men, to love them and to have them in my life.

Best wishes to Tom and Frank during and after their respective visits to the temple.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate

Solar Lighting

Leave a comment

Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

sun calendarThe days are getting longer.  The large calendar I have with the yellow egg-yolk like mass in the center and the months around it in a circle grows closer to the calendar’s inner circle day-by-day. The yellow mass represents hours of sunlight, thicker and closer to the calendar as we grow close to the summer solstice, then gently beginning to pull away until a large gap exists by December 21st, the winter solstice.  It’s a clever way to visualize a prime seasonal driver, hours of sunlight per day.

My order for nitrogen is on the way and I’m hoping the soil will at least be workable enough to plant the cool season crops before we leave for Denver.  Kate and I look forward to the gardening time, though we’re also glad for the break during the winter.

I moved further into Book I of the Metamorphoses today.  Deucalion, the son of Epithemus, the sole male survivor of the deluge, says, “Earth is the great mother (and)…the bones in the earth’s body are stones.”  He and Pyrrha, daughter of Prometheus, and the sole remaining female after the flood, will repopulate the earth by throwing stones behind themselves as they walk and the stones will become humans.

[Deucalion and Pyrrha Repeople the World by Throwing Stones Behind Them, c.1636 (oil on canvas)  by Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640)]

Her bones are still turning into people today.

 

General
Aside Leave a comment

Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

Back to work.  On the to do pad for this week:  ten more agent queries for Missing, regular Latin translation at 6-8 verses a day, edit short stories, a lecture or so a day in the Teaching Company Course:  Masterpieces of the National Gallery, London, cut back raspberry canes, keep using Journal. Plus the usual this and that.  Appts.  Workouts.