Might Oughta Should

Chickens for the Cure seek new cause

2012-02-01T18:47:00.005-05:00

The runs were fun, but Desdemona, Roxanne, and Brunhilde are sorely disappointed that Komen for the Cure has cut off grant funding to Planned Parenthood. They're clucking about finding a new cause where they can set up egg production. Suggestions?

A life well lived

2012-01-30T16:11:00.005-05:00

I gave up figuring out how to embed audio files in blog posts, and instead just videotaped my telephone. This phone message is remarkable because (1) I've managed to save it for an entire year without accidentally deleting it, and (2) my parents phoned me on my actual birthday last year, as opposed to confidently calling me on the 29th (Frederick Delius's birthday, not mine, but you can understand how someone--even my own parents--could confuse me with Delius, right?).

After living with carcinoid cancer for 25 years, my father passed away three weeks ago, on January 9. Although I suspected it, I didn't realize a year ago that the phone message would be the last time he would sing "happy birthday" to me. I saved the message for remarkable reason #2 above, and also because he sounded so cute ~0:35-0:42. (My mom sounds pretty cute too.)

You think of parents as, you know, just your parents, without always realizing they're amazing people beyond your own corner of the universe. My dad was a math professor, politician, and artist. The summer after I graduated from high school, he taught me how to do triple integrals so I could successfully test out of third semester calculus at the University of Illinois. That was good bonding time, especially after all those tear-filled elementary and secondary school hours of help, with me just wanting to know how to do the problems and him wanting me to actually understand the math. You know how it is. When I thanked him last October for that long ago summer math help, he didn't have any recollection of it--probably because he had been so busy defending civil liberties, taking photographs, and dealing with cancer. In addition to math, my dad also taught me how to stand up for what's right, how to make amazing, crusty, dark pumpernickel bread, and how to write a darn good letter to the editor. I miss him.

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/people/2012-01-10/life-remembered-hiram-paley-was-leading-progressive-urbana.html

http://www.aclu-il.org/hiram-paley-a-life-well-lived/

http://www.news-gazette.com/opinions/editorials/2012-01-12/hiram-paley.html

http://www.news-gazette.com/obituaries/2012-01-11/hiram-paley.html

http://www.champaigncountycameraclub.org/HP-gallery.htm

It must be February

2011-12-17T14:03:00.004-05:00

It must be February--the camellias are in bloom. Oh dear, really?

And then a miracle occurred

2011-12-14T22:01:00.010-05:00

My blogging pace has certainly slowed down. That is mostly because my tongue-in-cheek blogging attitude doesn't mesh well with the things that have been happening around me this fall--mainly, other people's stories that aren't really mine to tell.

Happily, one of the things I've been working on is now public: Claymakers is becoming a nonprofit. If you value chickarinas and twinkly votive holders, if you value Klein Bottles and spheres within spheres and anything else wheel-thrown and altered, if you value stories about wood firings and gas firings and oxidation firings, then you should also value Claymakers, as I wouldn't have been able to do or blog about any of those things without the fantastic community and creative incubator that Claymakers is. Consider making a donation today (and hey, check out this spiffy gift card!).

Positive change at Claymakers aside, this fall has been pretty tough, largely due to other people's stories. Elias's story has included hours of physical and occupational therapy, the legacy of his doubly-broken elbow. My dad's story has included a hospitalization and increasing discomfort; I wish him glorious weather and no ice or snow for his walks.

Then there are the extra-familial stories. As a professional church musician, I play for a modest number of funerals every year, and usually the deceased are acquaintances more than friends. But this fall we lost two former choir members within a few weeks of one another. One lived far away and had an unexpected death following a long and rich life; the other was close to home, a long expected death following too short a life. The latter friend was part of the inspiration for chickens for the cure. Consider making a donation today (designation "breast cancer").

In the midst of people deaths, there have been kitty deaths. Sweet Miss Maggie B developed idiopathic chylothorax and began wasting away until we made the difficult decision to euthanize her, yet she remained purrful, affectionate, and loyal to the very end. Shortly before Maggie's death, a friend's beloved cat was mauled by her neighbor's dogs. Both Maggie and Ralphie were a credit to their species and are greatly missed.

I was briefly tempted during all of this to blog about my persistent allergies and consequent lingering cough, and how a Hall's cough drop wrapper that advised "Be resilient!" made me want to throttle the wrapper designers for trying to thrust their oblivious chipperness into situations about which they know nothing, but I went to bed instead. However, the gods of suckiness never sleep.

This past Friday, the dogs came back for my friend's pet chickens. If I believed in Hell, I'd believe a special place is reserved for dog owners who think leash laws only apply to other people's dogs. Five chickens, mauled; only four survivors found, all seriously injured. My friend cleaned and dressed their awful gaping wounds and kept watch to see whether the chickens would survive past the weekend.

Or maybe the gods of suckiness do sleep. So far, the chickens are holding their own, and today, in the midst of all of this fall's illness and death, a miracle occurred--the great Week-Before-Solstice Miracle: the missing fifth chicken suddenly reappeared in the coop, mauled but not infected. Naturally, my friend is rededicating the coop this week; I quite expect that any food or straw that's down to a one-day supply will, incredibly, last the eight days between tonight and Solstice. May this season of distress end on the 21st with the return of the Sun's light.

More ooh ahh

2011-11-11T21:56:00.001-05:00

Introducing the Chickarina

2011-11-09T10:48:00.006-05:00

Elias learned how to play this tune on his trumpet earlier this fall, and he struggled mightily with the syncopations. Attempting it on the chickarina gives me a new appreciation for its rhythmic challenges.

This is the first chickarina I've gotten around to glazing. Hey, it's been a busy fall. The instrument has seven finger holes. It has an octave range with a little wiggle room at the top and bottom if you over- or under-blow. I've been playing mostly diatonic pieces with occasional chromatic inflections; I'm pretty sure I could get a complete 12-tone (and then some) chromatic scale out of it, but I haven't figured out the fingering yet. This suggests that far fewer finger holes are necessary to produce a diatonic octave. A project for this winter, perhaps.

If you too would like to make an ocarina but don't have access to clay or kilns, try the handy method demonstrated in the video below. Once you have your materials assembled, you'll need only about 15 minutes to make your ocarina from start to finish. Yum!

Ooh ahh

2011-11-08T23:25:00.004-05:00

Artists' statements

2011-10-23T18:39:00.005-04:00

I am visiting my parents in Urbana, Illinois, where, this afternoon, I spent some time reading through writings by my brilliant grandmother, Lorraine Passovoy, a.k.a.. Woozy. An accomplished artist (among other things), Woozy had a keen understanding of the international arts scene, as demonstrated by her prose in the two biographical artists' statements transcribed below. For all of you artists who think modern artists' statements have become too academic, think again: Woozy penned these two in 1964.

Alas, the only evidence we have of A. Pauling Walter's expansive canvasses is their depiction on the cover of a New Yorker magazine; however, my family owns the original oil painting (also depicted on the cover) by Finessa Foosy.

VILLKOR-MACH II*

A. Pauling Walter

This major work symbolizing the internal nature of the external, is typical of the eternal yet transitory divarication of limited infinity. The limited palette of black and brown subtly suggests the total range of tonality from infra-red through x-rays.

The artist is well known as the folk hero whom Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch.

[*"Villkor" is Swedish for "Conditions." Woozy was a polyglot before the days of Google Translate. --Ed.]

L'IMAGE
Finessa Foosy

Miss Foosy, or Miz Finesse, as she is known to her kinfolk in Langerhans County, is famous throughout her native state for having won 185 consecutive blue ribbons for her fancy work at the highly competetive Beaver's Pancreas township fair. Since her eyesight began to fail, she has taken up painting and, as her mother says, "she shore do mess up the kitchen."

Bailing

2011-09-20T14:53:00.004-04:00

Hey y'all. It's been awhile. I could try to explain how, during my long absence, I've been wrangling with my convictions about the Greater Good and the Rightness of participating in the public education system, and about how putting kids in private schools doesn't do anything to improve public schools (indeed, probably makes them worse); and then about how, with much distress, we bailed at the last minute on our local public school system in order to see whether $10K can buy a more stimulating and well-rounded education for our child. I could write about the good (if not good enough) job his former school was doing, given the circumstances of a state legislature that has screwed children and teachers by slashing the education budget year after year, and of state and federally mandated testing that has made adequacy the new standard of excellence, and of the flawed philosophies of No Child Left Behind. I could try to unpack my expectations about what constitutes an "education" in the first place, and ask how the government expects children to get good ones when classrooms are ridiculously overcrowded. But goodness, I'm just all wrangled out.

So instead, I'll show you some photos of a bunch of greenware full-octave chickarinas waiting to be bisque fired. They seem a little trivial in the context of a school crisis, but life must go on, and nothing soothes the nerves quite like music and anthropomorphizing. This is a flock interrupted, as chicken whistles take waaaay more time to make than chicken rattles (have you ever tried tuning a chicken?), and lately every time I've gotten started on a subflock, some unrelated event has destroyed the momentum.

When these birds are done, I expect they will sound something like this green polka dot ocarina, but more in tune and without all the white noise.

Name that composer

2011-08-05T00:03:00.006-04:00

My dad emailed me a nudge last week, noting I've been a slacker blogger of late. It's been 100^oF in the shade here the past few weeks, which diminishes blogging energy. But here's a lovely tidbit that motivates getting back into the swing of things.

Last week during Elias's trumpet lesson, Stefan and I went across the parking lot and browsed the clearance shelf at a local crafts store. There we found some spiffy card stock intended for printing wedding programs. Having recently blogged about the unfortunate ubiquity of a certain canon, I was hardly surprised that the sample text showing through the plastic wrapper--the sample text that lets you imagine how fabulous your own wedding program could be--listed Pachelbel Canon in D as a processional.

The manufacturers of this wonderful item appreciate that even thrifty couples who roll up their sleeves and print their own programs at home might still want their weddings to be elegant occasions--and what better way to say "elegant" than to be fussy about including not only composition titles but also composer names? This raises some issues for layout, because it would look a little odd to write "Pachelbel Canon in D by Johann Pachelbel." Perhaps "Canon in D / Johann Pachelbel" or "Pachelbel, Canon in D"? So many choices! Fortunately, the authoritative sample text solves the conundrum for us*:

*If I were advising the happy couple about musical selections, I would suggest that if they really wanted it, Pachelbel's Pachelbel Canon in D is way better than Mozart's Pachelbel Canon in D; and also that a wedding march by the antisemitic Wagner is maybe not the best choice for a Jewish wedding. Just saying.

Epic battles

2011-07-14T14:44:00.008-04:00

On Tuesday, He Who Shall Not Be Named says "your husband and son may not board their airplane." Dumbledore says "in these dark days, we must remain ever vigilant against international child abduction."

Darth says "your husband and son shall be trapped in Germany." Obi-wan says "they avoided Newark--the Force is with them."

Sauron says "that'll be $560 to rebook the flights." Aragorn says "no price is too high to bring the halfling safely home."

Arawn says "stay away from the airport lest flames rise from your vehicle's air conditioning belt." Gwydion says "the Sons of Don shall lend you a car."

Thor says "humidity shall swell thy 1992 Walker organ and 1982 Kawai grand and make the pipes cipher and the hammers stick." Brünnhilde says "neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor the winds of change, nor a nation challenged, will stay her from the swift completion of her appointed practicing."

What next, what next?

How to jubilate with propriety

2011-07-11T12:34:00.004-04:00

Cultural differences: http://wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-jubilate-with-propriety.html

Home again

2011-07-09T13:37:00.004-04:00

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Newark anymore...

Postscript

2011-07-09T08:50:00.003-04:00

Oh wait, here's a redeeming thing about the Newark airport: you get to feed toxic muffin crumbs to pigeons at the gate. Lucky pigeon didn't even have to take off its shoes to go through security.

A blogger in the armpit of airports

2011-07-09T07:55:00.007-04:00

I have given Newark International multiple opportunities to offer me something redeeming to write about it, but I fear it is the armpit of airports. That's being generous. Even the helpful airport employees agree this is an awful place. "Oh no, ma'am, not in July, nuh-uh. You don't want to fly through Newark in July."

Want to check your bag? Stand in that line over there. Once you reach the front of the line, you'll be told you need to go to that other line, over there. From there, you will be sent to another line in a different terminal, where they will pull you out of your next-in-line spot and tell you to sign in at the kiosk, over there. When the machine tells you your data is invalid, the cranky people-mover will tell you to stand in this other line, over here. No, not that one for our elite customers, the one to the left for the plebes. When you finally reach the front of that line, and they say, "oh, I don't know why they keep doing this, they shouldn't be sending you over here, you need to go back over to the other terminal," and you burst into tears and say you can't take it anymore [sob], you've been back and forth between both terminals multiple times [sob] over the past 12 hours and [sob] you can't stand in any more lines because [sob] no one in this airport knows what they're talking about--why, then you will be sent to another line.

But now, having cried, you know how to work the system. You skip the other line, walk to the front of the elite counter and burst into tears again. When the bored employee (totally unfazed by your outburst because she sees people crying in the Newark Airport all the time) says she doesn't need to see your boarding pass, she just needs $25 for the suitcase, and you sob that you f*cking aren't going to pay for the suitcase that was supposed to be checked in for free, she will say, "well, I didn't know you were coming from somewhere else. Let me see your boarding pass." Then, rather than doing things properly, she will pretend your 51-pound suitcase is an infant car seat so she can print a free sticker for it, which doesn't exactly make you feel confident about airport security.

Speaking of airport security, plan to be shocked when a male TSA guard makes an offensive joke to his female coworker because she will shortly be asked to feel up an overweight elderly woman ("look at that bulge," he mouths, smiling, raising his eyebrows, and pretending to wipe his hands across imaginary love handles). Instead of calling him on it (because surely you will just burst into tears again, plus you don't want him to decide to interrogate you), you ponder how much money this man managed to bring in when he sold his soul to Satan.

Ah, now you have made it through to the gate. You are hungry because you haven't had any breakfast. Look at all of the overpriced, plastic-wrapped, preservative-infused muffins and bagels for sale at the "Whole Grains" shop, and pine for the fresh baked Semmel you recently mocked Germans for loving so much. Settle on a scone, then burst into tears when the cashier asks, "may I help you?" When she says, "I hope the rest of your day is better," realize you've finally found something to appreciate in Newark.

Curse you, Continental Airlines, curse you!

A blogger abroad

2011-06-21T06:30:00.004-04:00

A combination of business and pleasure has brought us to Spain and Germany for the next few weeks, so I'm returning briefly to my old blog stomping grounds, wadlstrumpf.blogspot.com.

Simple Gifts

2011-06-11T23:25:00.004-04:00

I'm learning a great deal about clay whistling technique by watching myself play. I'm pretty sure it's poor form to cross one's ring fingers over one's pinkies, and that double-jointed bit with the bird finger on my right hand needs some straightening out. Fortunately for me, no one has composed any Hanon or Czerny-esque finger exercises for chicken whistles yet (and I'm not going to fill that gap).

On the to-do list: a whistle with an octave range, and a whistle with two resonance cavities to allow playing in harmony (say, a simple tonic/dominant egg coupled with a five-note chicken). A potter-musician can dream, anyway. And I think it's time to finally set up that extruder and try my hand at making some penny whistles...

Freude, schöner Hühnerfunken

2011-06-11T22:11:00.002-04:00

Race for the Cure 2011

2011-06-11T20:09:00.007-04:00

Here are Jena and I in our sweaty post-race glory. On our team of 20, we were the sole competitive 5Kers this morning at the Raleigh Race for the Cure. Other Team Amazing Us members did the recreational 5K or the Sleep-In-for-the-Cure. Janice didn't beat her personal best, but she did manage to sleep until a respectable 9:30am, while Leslie stayed in bed until an impressive 10:30am.

The advantage of doing the competitive 5K is the same as the disadvantage: it starts at 7am. Starting early means cooler temps, no lines for parking, no lines for the shuttle bus, and being surrounded by a sea of runners rather than walkers; but it also means leaving Durham around 5:45am.

Next year, I plan to organize an environmentally-friendly Durham satellite team: rather than getting up pre-dawn and converting gasoline into exhaust by driving all the way to Raleigh, we'll get up with the sun and go for a 5K run/walk on a local trail. Alas, we won't bond with 25,000 other runners/walkers, but we'll bond with one another. And planning a year in advance to stay local, as opposed to wearily suggesting it the night before, will mean we're being intentional about it rather than bailing at the last minute.

Our team raised $2,700 this year, thanks to numerous generous donors, and 33 chickens found new homes.

Unfortunately, the list of friends for whom I run grows longer every year. This morning's run was in honor of CB, BC, TS, LF, JM, JK, FO, CL, LC, and JF.

Radiolarians

2011-06-09T21:06:00.010-04:00

I belatedly learned about diatoms over a year ago, but it wasn't until just the other week that I learned about radiolarians. I was leafing through some junk mail--the Dover catalog of children's books--when I came across Haeckel's Art Forms from the Ocean.* Thank you, junk mail! The Dover blurb states, "The tiny single-celled organisms known as radiolarians (or radiolaria) develop beautiful, intricate mineral skeletons that cover ocean floors throughout the world." Radiolarians? Spherical skeletons with lacy holes and spikes? Whoowee! Diatoms gone wild!

Naturally, I googled "radolaria[ns]" and found a wealth of swell images (most of which are copyrighted, of course, so, ya know, click on the ones below to see the original sources):

I also googled Haeckel and learned that he faked illustrations of embryos in order to support his ideas about evolution, and that those fake illustrations have made their way into assorted contemporary biology textbooks. Perhaps he faked a few radiolarians as well; indeed, it's hard to believe he had real life sources for such fantastic microscopic skeletal remains as these:

Anyway, you know what I gushed about on the last day of Pottery for Geeks.**

While much radiolarian art on the interwebs is created using 3D printing (which, I dunno, kinda seems like cheating), one Bavarian ceramicist, Gerhard Lutz, hand builds exquisitely delicate porcelain radiolarians that put my wheel-thrown ones to shame:

*I'm not quite sure how a CD-ROM of an 1862 atlas of microscopic oceanic lifeforms got mixed in with Dover's At the Beach Fun Kit and Something's Fishy! Undersea Designs to Color, but I'm glad it did.

**I also gushed about the Pythagorean Cup, a.k.a. the Cup of Tantalus, a classical Greek wine goblet that punishes gluttony by siphoning out its entire contents when overfilled. It turned out no one in the class felt a need for an anti-gluttony cup, so we didn't try making any.

The Tooth Fairy corresponds again

2011-05-31T16:40:00.004-04:00

tooth fairy,

i've Lost another tooth the topmolar
and I broke my arm
Please send me something usefull

Elias

------------

5/30/11
Dear Elias,

goodness gracious, what do you mean, you broke your arm? I hope it did not hurt too much and that you are on the mend. I myself have never broken any bones, although as you can imagine, I encounter chipped teeth more often than I would like. Fortunately, the tooth under your pillow tonight appears to be in excellent shape--just the sort of deciduous first molar we tooth fairies like to see.

You requested something useful (what a practical boy you are!). I looked in my bag and found all sorts of useful things: rubberbands, shoelaces, sponges, a field guide to reptilian teeth, floss, nail clippers, emergency flares, fruit bat homing beacons, staples, washcloths, spare buttons, band-aids, noodles (no, no, silly, not the kind you swim with, but the kind you eat!), clean underwear, soap, calculators, an abacus, paperclips, plastic monkeys (sometimes my friend the fruit bat needs to relax after a stressful night at work), inflatable rubber raft, shooting stars, pixie dust, etc. etc. Oh, and this 10 euro bill. If I know you, you're likely to find yourself in Germany this year. Spend it well. It's a little more than the going rate for a molar, but given your broken arm, you can probably use some extra TLC.

Keep on brushing, and don't forget to FLOSS!

Love,
The Tooth Fairy
XOXOXO

Melodious chickens

2011-05-23T00:16:00.009-04:00

What with Elias's broken arm, there hasn't been much time to experiment this week. Pottery for Geeks has already covered nesting spheres, interlocking torus boxes, double-walled bowls, and two different Klein bottle strategies (the simple "double torus" and the elegant "Klein bottle bottle"). We might could* discuss Borromean rings, but there really isn't much point to making wheel-thrown ones. I'm running out of ideas, and we still have two classes left.

So after I tucked my plucky but tender boy into bed tonight, I brainstormed and decided to figure out how to make an ocarina that actually whistles. I've attempted ocarinas before, but they've been airy duds, and I figure there's abundant topical material here to keep geeks happy: air flow, turbulence, the sorry consequences of sloppy 45^o angles, resonance cavities, frequency, pitch, sine waves, and, of course, chickens.** After a little reading, popsicle-stick collecting, and poking and prodding--eureka!

Because safety in the ~~dining room~~ lab is a priority, my research was accompanied by a cup of full-bodied Spanish Montebuena Rioja (2009). Testing whistles means blowing into chicken butts. While the chickens themselves are vigilant about personal hygiene, the wet clay with which they are made can host nasty microorganisms (something to discuss with the professional biologists in my class). After getting clay in my mouth more than once, I figured swishing with 13.5% alcohol might not be a bad idea.

*Note the proper colloquial usage of the Southern American English double modal.

**This is a joke. We're the science type of geek, not the type that bites heads off chickens (I hope). For the record, no chickens were harmed during the creation of these whistles.

Dang

2011-05-22T23:29:00.006-04:00

No, no, no. This is not what an arm should look like. This arm is wrapped in a splint from the armpit to the palm because the ulna broke on Thursday during an improper alignment of the stars at the bottom of a slide on a school playground immediately following three long, mind-numbingly boring mornings of End-of-Grade exams (boo, evil consequences of No Child Left Behind, I say, boo!). The human to whom this arm belongs is understandably not a happy camper, but is doing better with each day and looks forward to trading the splint for a cast.

Clay B.S. grinder

2011-05-10T16:20:00.009-04:00

When I was a kid, my mom's parents had a toy they called a bullshit grinder. I just assumed my grandfather made up the name, but it turns out the term "bullshit grinder" is as classic as the toy itself.

If you search Wikipedia for "bullshit grinder," you will be redirected to the much more sanitary and academic "Trammel of Archimedes." The Trammel of Archimedes is noteworthy because its handle traces out an ellipse. Indeed, that appears to be the sole purpose of the Trammel of Archimedes, other than grinding bullshit.

Why do I bring this up? I recently made a petite model of the kitty geek toy. The whole toy fits neatly in the palm of one [human] hand, just like the Trammel of Archimedes, and with a slight flick of the wrist, it's easy to keep the inside ball in motion. The ball traces a circular rather than elliptical path, but the mind-numblingly pleasing yet useless repetitiveness of the non-goal-oriented process echoes the functionality of the bullshit grinder. While I have not tested the grinding efficacy of the Trammel of Archimedes, I have empirical evidence that the petite kitty geek toy is remarkably good at grinding wayward gnats.

All in a day's work, filling gaps the world never knew it had.

Variations, take 2

2011-05-01T21:22:00.003-04:00

My dad recently sent me this photo of the Flentrop manuals at Duke Chapel, in an email with the subject header "reminder." So amidst all the clay geek toys (and extra Holy Week and Easter services), I should report that I've been reasonably diligent about practicing the Dupré Variations. I took them for a test spin in a lesson with David A. on the Aeolian organ at Duke Chapel last week, and they didn't sound anywhere near as maliciously capricious as they did when I first started avoiding them. Indeed, it was amazingly informative and liberating to play them on such an expansive instrument. I'd even go so far as to say quite enjoyable. There's hope for me yet.

Kitty geek toy

2011-05-01T20:40:00.008-04:00

It seems that my latest geek toys are inspired by my inner cat. It also seems that I'm predisposed to photograph works in progress rather than completed pieces. In any case, I've been having fun cutting into tori. The torus here has a ball inside, for one's inner cat to play with through the spiral gap. Please note the restraint with which I'm piercing holes these days: a little goes a long way.

I spent a few nights this week dreaming about more elaborate spirals: although three is a magic number, a threefold spiral does make a torus look a little like a nuclear radiation warning symbol. My dreaming subconscious thought perhaps a twelve-fold spiral would look cool. It turns out that that number of twists makes a torus look like a cinnamon cruller, a so-called food I have detested since my earliest youth. Very unappetizing. It took me by surprise that cutting a torus into a spiral turns it into a spring: the spring will actually expand, contract, sag, wobble, and distort, at least until it sets up beyond the cuttable side of leather-hard. It was no great loss, then, that with all that wiggling, my twelve-fold cruller torus broke into several pieces today. Good riddance.

Ethereal love

2011-05-01T16:17:00.007-04:00

Someone is currently attempting to auction off a heart-shaped potato on eBay for one million dollars. The header declares, "PERFECT Heart Shaped Potato! One Of A Kind! Unique!" Scroll further down, and the ad insists "This is not a joke! Its really a heart shaped potato!"

Aside from the warning signs (the capitalized preposition Of and article A in the header, the confusion between its and it's), not to mention the apparent overpricing (there's also an "old heart-shaped potato chip" up for auction, with slightly better punctuation, a starting bid of only $29.99 plus $5.50 shipping, and a fine classic scam text claiming proceeds will go toward a tank of gas to enable a tornado-relief volunteer to drive to Pulaski, Virginia)--aside from all that, the seller is lying. How do I know?

Heart-shaped potatoes are not unique. I have my own heart-shaped potato. Well, had. To celebrate Will and Kate's nuptials, and because I was hungry, I diced it and pan fried it this afternoon. May the young royals' love last longer than my potato. Stefan and I bought the potato together in March, but he was out this afternoon, and as I already said, I was hungry, so I ate it myself; I trust our love is strong enough to carry us through this lapse in judgment.

For the record, I wasn't searching heart-shaped potato listings on eBay because I wanted to auction my own potato--I just wanted to know the going rate for my lunch.

Chickens for the Cure, 2011

2011-04-27T15:33:00.003-04:00

Oh so fine! These photogenic chickens are part of a team that has been doing a few hours a week on the elliptical trainers at the Y in preparation for the 2011 Komen Triangle affiliate Race for the Cure on June 11. While you're unlikely to encounter Desdemona, Roxanne, or Brunhilde on the race course (after all, the Raleigh event draws 23,000+ participants, and small birds do get lost in a big crowd), you can encounter a chicken in your very own living room. Repeating last year's offer, for every $50 that you donate to the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure on behalf of me or my team, I'll make sure a unique, handmade, wheel-thrown and altered, wood-fired, North Carolina chicken with an authentic clay pretend egg inside wings its way to you.*

That's right, one chicken for $50, two for $100. What the heck, if you donate $150, I'll persuade four of these gals to move in with you. Sure, it would be cheaper just to buy chickens directly from the artist, but then you wouldn't have the satisfaction of supporting the quest for a cure for breast cancer or helping to fund early-detection, education, screening, and treatment programs for under-served women. And with clay chickens, you don't have to build a coop, fend off raccoons, or eat a dozen eggs a week (although they won't get in your way of doing those things, if that's what turns you on).

If you would like to run, walk, or sleep in for the cure on June 11, feel free to join Team Amazing Us. If your race fee plus additional donation totals $50, there's a chicken in your future.

*Offer good until supplies run out, which should be a while. I'm currently cohabiting with dozens of chickens.

Borromean rings, take two

2011-04-22T21:28:00.006-04:00

I'm getting closer to decent wheel-thrown Borromean rings, though I'm still pretty sure coils are a better way to go. I could probably crank out a few hundred coil Borromean rings in the time it takes to make one set on the wheel. Nonetheless, efficiency isn't everything, and the process has reminded me of some useful tidbits. Listen up, class: (1) wet tori squish more easily than firm tori, so trim and squish them when they're as wet as possible; and (2) nothing disguises unsightly bulges better than hundreds of hand-cut holes.

To address my desire to access the insides of the rings (why make hollow rings if you can't tell they're hollow?), I cut holes into two of the rings to let light show through. Then I wrapped a small pile of hole detritus into a piece of paper towel and stuffed it inside the solid torus during ring-locking assembly. (You can see the access point at the top right of the photo; once the clay is stiffer, I'll smooth over the bulge). Thus, even though people won't be able to see through the solid ring, they'll be able to hear that it's hollow when all those clay bits rattle around inside it--because what's a person going to do with a quarter of a cubic foot of Borromean rings other than shake them up and down?

Variations

2011-04-20T22:22:00.008-04:00

I've been meaning for a while to write about a set of organ variations by Marcel Dupré: Variations sur un noël op. 20 (1922). I've been meaning to write about how I've been dragging my feet studying them this past year, and how I finally decided to buckle down and really learn them because ~~I ran out of Schumann and~~ my organ teacher thinks the variations are ~~a necessary evil~~ good for me at this point in my musical development, and how I agree with him in theory but nonetheless find a bazillion creative ways to avoid practicing them. The variations are like diminutive exercises in learning to pat your head, rub your tummy, and chew gum all at the same time while standing on your head with your arms superglued together. You'd think blogging about avoiding them would be a good avoidance strategy, yet every time I sat down to blog, I'd think, "no, no, instead of writing about them, go practice them."*

Thus it is that today I introduce my latest pottery geek experiment: wheel-thrown and altered Borromean Rings. They're made from three tori stretched and nudged into ellipses. It's a little disappointing that there's no way to get inside any of the tori, the way there is with a Klein Bottle or a Moebius diatom box. Why throw and alter hollow tori when you can roll out some coils much more easily? Clearly, further experimentation is necessary.

*Despite all my kicking and screaming, I'm going to conquer this beast. I've dutifully started a practice log, in order to generate evidence that I've actually been practicing (or not) and to focus on how I practice. I've started memorizing individual variations, which makes it a smidge easier squeeze some musicality from these mechanical pieces. A light is finally emerging at the end of the tunnel.

Geek ball

2011-04-07T22:24:00.007-04:00

I thought about putting a chicken inside the outer ball, but decided it would be better to use something that wouldn't look anthropomorphically forlorn in a spherical cage. Enter the clay wiffle ball, form of 10,000 uses!

As I've already had to kluge one of the outer-ball spokes back together, I have serious doubts that this geek toy is going to survive intact into bisquehood. Ah, ethereal art!

Eureka!

2011-04-01T22:43:00.006-04:00

"Pottery for Geeks" is coming up in a few weeks at Claymakers, so I'm doing a little prototyping.* From the how-did-the-world-ever-manage-without-this department, I proudly introduce the clay wiffle ball. Imagine how these babies will fly when hit with a clay bat. No, not that kind of bat; this kind of bat. I just need to figure out how to throw one on the wheel.

Truthfully, the balls aren't meant for wiffle anything; they're merely a first step en route to a multiple sphere geek toy. I'll post photos eventually if everything works out as planned.

*Verbifying "prototype" reminds me that this morning, I heard a guest on the Diane Rehm show on NPR use "offshore" as a verb--as in "companies are offshoring labor." Way to turn an adjective/adverb into a verb, eh?

Things you should avoid if you don't have opposable thumbs

2011-03-16T21:21:00.010-04:00

The chickens were aggressive bettors. My dad gave them false confidence the first night by letting them win. The next evening, he mopped the floor with them. Honest Abe looked on disapprovingly. "Chickens," he probably never once said, "should not play poker."

Vacation Days 2-3: Engineering Open House

2011-03-13T13:48:00.021-04:00

When we rescheduled our trip to Illinois, we planned dates so that we could attend the University of Illinois' way cool Engineering Open House. The UIUC College of Engineering is one of the largest and finest engineering schools in the nation, and every spring the different departments open their doors for two days of posters, demos, and hands-on displays. We learned about charge and electric current, magnetic levitation, fluid dynamics, inertia, high-resolution imaging, 3D printing, plenaria flat worm regeneration, clown fish sexuality, air pressure and the Bernoulli effect, liquid nitrogen and ice cream, electric cars, fruit batteries, CAT-scans and computer modeling, flotation and boat design, bubbles, tempering, mechano- and photo-sensitive polymers, vehicle simulators, induction, gears, levers, pulleys, magnetic accelerators, conservation of energy, gravity, molecular fluorescence, glue-and-borax goop, high-speed imaging, infrared imaging, lithography, copper electroplating, Prince Rupert's drops, vacuums, air pressure, optical illusions, angular momentum, and a bunch of other stuff. I also learned, with some nostalgia, that the Physics Geek uniform has not changed since I proudly wore it as an Illinois undergrad (corduroys + flannel shirt); and that the university still has lovingly crafted wooden models of intersecting geometric forms squirreled away in the most unexpected places.

For Elias, two topics stood out: the egg drop and non-Newtonian fluids.

The egg drop involved designing a structure to protect an egg from breaking on impact following a drop from a second-story window. All participants received an egg, a paper cup, two feet of masking tape, and ten xeroxed dollars with which to buy assorted materials (rubber bands, yarn, balloons, cotton balls, popsicle sticks, newspaper). Elias made a blanket of cotton balls to cushion his egg inside the cup.

Stefan--a German engineer, after all--rigged up an elegant but time-consumingly detailed suspension network of rubber bands inside his cup.

I, the practical potter, spent most of my engineering dollars on quick and easy packing material--wads of newspaper.

The carnage below the window did not bode well for our cargo.

The egg in the plush cotton ball blanket turned out to be our sacrificial lamb, paving the way for our two survivors. We figured two out of three wasn't bad (litotes!).

Although we spent a lot of time with the eggs, the exhibits that occupied us the most were those on non-Newtonian fluids. A Newtonian fluid is one whose shear stress and shear rate are related linearly by a constant known as viscosity. A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that deviates from that relation in any way. The most common non-Newtonian fluids have viscosities that decrease with increasing shear rate. The non-Newtonian fluids we saw at EOH were unusual, however, in that their viscosity dramatically increased with increasing shear rate. They were so much fun to play with that we've decided to have a non-Newtonian fluids fest for Elias's next birthday party.

To make your own non-Newtonian fluid at home, mix cornstarch with water in appropriate proportions (a little water goes a long way). Punch the mixture, and it behaves like a solid; hold it gently in your hand, and it trickles through your fingers. We're told that water, 150 pounds of cornstarch, and a kiddie pool are the necessary ingredients for running barefoot across a non-Newtonian fluid. If you keep things moving quickly, you can also play catch with cornstarch suspensions.

Vacation Day 1: Chicago

2011-03-12T23:17:00.007-05:00

Because it snowed in Durham on Dec. 26, 2010, all transportation ground to a halt that day, and we had to postpone a trip to visit my parents in Illinois. Temps have thawed since then, and on Thursday, we embarked on our rescheduled trip and flew to Chicago.

After landing, we drove downtown and had brunch at a Chicago institution, Lou Mitchell's, where (as is their claim to fame) they give "donut holes to all and boxes of milk duds to the ladies and children."

Desdemona and Roxanne were a little dubious about the breakfast options, while the waitstaff were a little dubious about our photo shoot. You'd think the restaurant had never served chickens before.

Following brunch, we walked east toward Lake Michigan, admiring Chicago's architecture. One building had such stunning gargoylish statuary perched on top that we decided to go inside, whereupon we discovered the Chicago Public Library.

After a restful pause to read magazines in the children's section, we continued on to the exquisite Art Institute. A guard outside told Elias to stay off the bronze lions, but no one challenged the chickens.

That wasn't the case inside the museum, however. Although the Art Institute permits the use of cameras without flash, one guard seemed nervous about our photographic activities. I explained that we were tourists on vacation from North Carolina, which apparently satisfied him. We spent several hours enjoying the art, and were particularly impressed by the bright airiness of the Modern Wing, which had been under construction the last time we visited.

Post-firing debriefing

2011-03-04T23:01:00.033-05:00

As always, I need time to come to terms with my pots post-firing. For example, what I considered yesterday to be disturbing crusty bubbly purple stuff, I now consider (just one good night's sleep later) merely befuddling crusty bubbly purple stuff. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Good news first:

The Moebius Diatom Boxes experienced minimal warpage, and none of the parts stuck together. The photos make them look toastier and bagelier than they are in reality. I expect future MDBs will end up electric or gas fired, maybe with some stains for color, to reduce preparatory exasperation.

My four favorite pieces are square boxes (wheel thrown and altered!) that I glazed top to bottom. They responded beautifully to the soda. The tallest box is about 5" high.

There are two fine pitchers, an excellent bottle, some lush double-walled bowls, a confident teapot, and a juicy green pear (looking artificially green in the photo; it's a little bluer in real life). I consider it a bonus that only one of the pitchers seeps, because--like every other pot I've produced in the past two years that has seeped--they're both made from Loafer's Glory clay. No more Loafer's Glory clay for me (regrettably; it's a lovely clay to work with when it's wet). I have a can of very dangerous highly toxic spray that's supposed to help seal pots, unless the can explodes or the spray poisons you in the process; I haven't tried it out yet, however, because I value functioning lungs, skin, and eyeballs more than I value my seeping pots, but maybe this spring I'll get out the goggles, gloves, and respirator and give it a whirl.

Here are some chickens mugging for the camera:

I will concede that the bubbly crusty purple stuff looks pretty good on chickens. Here's a close up of the crusty stuff on some cups, where it's less appealing (dry crusty stuff and lips don't go well together):

Upon pieces that are strictly objets d'art, the purple stuff is fine. The objet on the left is actually a vase form on its side, though I very much like the spherical look in the photo. I was planning to give up holes for a while, but I think I'm going to have to try making some hole-filled spheres.

On the Double Torus-Multiple Size Hole/Total Coverage Klein Bottle that's been patiently waiting to be fired since last summer, the purple is a little garish against the green glaze. What am I saying, the [w]hole thing is garish anyway:

I will try sanding the crusty bubbles off of pots that should be functional, such as this bowl and colander, as no one wants little bits of heavy-metal-laden glass to chip off into their noodles:

Also in the category of Pots-That-Have-Been-Waiting-Since-Last-Summer are several wheel thrown and altered oval boxes. Alas, instead of using my purple alumina hydrate wax on the lids, I wadded the lids--with the somewhat predictable result that most of the lids warped. Dang. From here on out, it's alumina hydrate wax for me.

In the Total Fail category are several pieces made from a highly recommended ^5-^8 porcelain that I purchased online. I'm used to porcelain being finicky and S-cracking in the bottoms of bowls and cups, but these pieces split in some very odd places. Several tumblers had vertical cracks down the side, often beginning well below the rim and ending well above the foot. In the photo below of the two tumblers, a long vertical crack cuts through the cup on the left, while some beads of water are leaking through a crack in the cup on the right. The salt-rock pear has a horizontal crack across the top that is, as far as I can tell, completely unrelated to the form. Homer Cat doesn't mind the cracks in the tumblers, since all he sees are People Cups, but these pieces are headed for the trash can. I bisqued all of my porcelain pots well before the outside temperatures dropped below freezing, so I'm at a loss to explain the defects. Schade.

To end on a more positive note, here are some non-crusty, lid-fitting oval jars (does that count as litotes?), and a picture of a flattery* penguin chatting it up with a chicken at an office party (penguin and penguin photo by Bob F.).

*as in, "imitation is the sincerest form of..."

Unloading

2011-03-03T21:47:00.014-05:00

We unloaded the kiln today. Serene Wadding Buddha got a hefty dusting of black soot plus some disturbingly green mystery powder, yet still he sits contentedly on his mat with his wee bird companion and cup of tea (which is not 3/4 full of unmelted glaze). Nothing fazes him.

Here are photos of the front and back stack:

What's that, you say? It looks like something is amiss with the far end of the bag wall*? Why, you're right! It collapsed during the firing. Fortunately, it slumped sideways into the kiln wall rather than tumbling onto the loaded shelves. Casualties included just two bowls, a cup, and a chicken, none of which fell from the wall. Thanks, Serene Wadding Buddha (and to you too, Chipper Dog, of whom I have no post-firing photo)!

The pots were a little dry this time, with a bubbly purple crustiness I've never seen before. If you are less uptight than I am, or if crusty bubbly purple stuff is your thing, or if you are able to squint in just the right way, or if you are one of fifty or so clay chickens, you might be able to find such random and non-replicable surface treatments not entirely displeasing.** I'm working on it. Cedar Creek potter T.T. wondered whether the kiln might have been fuming copper or tin left over from a previous firing ("A.B. sometimes puts pretty wacky stuff in the kiln..."). Indeed, Serene Wadding Buddha's dusting of green looks suspiciously like copper carbonate. Fortunately, a few glazed gems are mixed in with the crustiness. I'll post some photos soon.

*I don't know why a kiln's bag wall is called a bag wall--OED, how could you fail me so?--other than that the bag wall protects the pots by creating a bag of air between the pots and the burning fuel. OED does offer a definition for bag from 18th-century coal-mining lingo that seems to make sense here--"a cavity filled with gas or water."

**I recently learned from a friend that the rhetorical term for these backhanded compliments is litotes.

Sneak peek

2011-03-01T14:47:00.008-05:00

I went over to Cedar Creek and took photos through the peeps. No puddles of melted clay, no sand-papery unmelted glaze: I shall sleep well tonight.

It's hard to see in the first photo, but I can tell you that the chicken sure has some fine ash on her...

Instruction:

2011-02-28T23:52:00.010-05:00

Instruction:: A Found Poem from the Tag of Stefan's New Bike Saddle

Instruction:

The saddle makes different conditions
that depend on the weather and ridders
weight by using

The new saddle will be quite stiff,
after ridding 500-800 kms, it will
become more supple and as like your hip

The leather saddle should be
maintained by leather grease
when it be exposed to the sunshine
and rain

Or it is advised to regular
application leather grease about
once a month after ridding so
that can extend saddle's life

please use a waterproof cover to
protect it when the saddle is not using

Cone 6 Wood Firing

2011-02-28T12:32:00.007-05:00

This weekend, a group of friends and I loaded and fired the wood kiln at Cedar Creek. For past firings, we've fired to ~cone 9 (^9, ~2300°F). This time, we decided for several reasons to fire to ^6 (~2240°F). First, wood firing is strenuous work: we stoke the kiln and stir the coals pretty steadily for several hours. Past firings have generally taken 12-17 hours, with the kiln typically stalling out around ^7 or 8. We figured it should be relatively easy and significantly faster to make it to ^6. Second, the lower we fire, the less fuel we use. Burning old pine pallets is one way to recycle, but it isn't exactly environmentally friendly. We hoped that skipping the long stall before ^9 would make a positive dent in the total amount of wood needed. Finally, this past year, Claymakers shifted their reduction firing option from ^9 to ^6. Thus many of the folks in our wood firing group were already using ^6 clay bodies and had easy access to reliable ^6 reduction glazes.

Wood firing is thrilling, but it brings out assorted anxieties in me because, well, I'm generally an anxious person.

Pre-firing organizational anxiety. Is everyone making pots? Will we have too few pots to fill the kiln? Too many pots? Too few? Too many? Waffle waffle, nudge nudge.

Glazing anxiety. So much blank bisqueware, so many decorative decisions. I thank my glazing support group, Rob & Di, for putting up with my anxious chatter during our glazing fest on Friday.

Packing anxiety. All participants are gathered around the kiln, with all pots wadded: do we have too many pots? Too few? Too many short pots, not enough tall? Too many wide pots, not enough narrow? How will we get all those pots into the kiln?

Despite the anxieties, there are few projects I enjoy more than wood firing. We wadded pots Saturday morning (thanks, Charlie, Blanka, Jo, Jessie, & Bob, for the extra wadding help!), and started loading around noon. There's something pleasurably artful about packing a kiln efficiently, fitting all the puzzle pieces together neatly. That pleasure, combined with a dose of packing anxiety, leads to a tendency to pack the back of the kiln tightly (when we're concerned about fitting everything in efficiently) and to pack the front loosely (when we start running out of pots because we packed the back so beautifully). I think we found a good balance this time.

Despite early projections, it turned out we had room to spare. We were short on tall pots, so we had to leave some gaps toward the top of the kiln. Still, it was the most elegantly loaded kiln I've ever had the pleasure of sharing, with a lovely assortment of pots. Two wadding kiln gods went into the kiln for good luck (thanks, Charlie & Di!). Serene Wadding Buddha and Chipper Dog remind me to chill.

We fired on Sunday. Rob and Blanka started the kiln at 7am. By 1pm, we still had some 1200 degrees left to go. Stoke, stir, stoke, stir. A smaller amount of clay requires less time to heat than a larger amount of clay, and we had twice as many pots on the bottom of the kiln as on the top, so we had a hard time heating the bottom of the kiln. The back stack also heated more slowly than the front. Consequently, as the pyrometric cones at the front middle and top of the kiln started arriving at ^6 and ^7, the ^5 cones at the bottom and back of the kiln remained stalwartly upright.

Had we been firing to ^9, we could have plowed right through that unevenness. Instead, just as we would have with a ^9 firing, we spent the final couple of firing hours trying to even out the temperature throughout the kiln, attempting to hold the top of the kiln at ^6 while heating the bottom and back. Thus Zeno's dichotomy paradox applies during firings! (If Zeno wants to buy a peach, he knows that he can't just walk to the farmer's market: he needs to walk a block further than the farmer's market and stop at the peach stand en route. Silly us, we though we could get away with just walking to the farmer's market.)

Eventually, we got the cool parts of the kiln up to a passable ^5-^6, with the middle and top of the kiln at ^7, and we sprayed in the soda ash. Because soda acts as a flux, it makes the pyrometric cones melt more; by the time we were done spraying (~8pm), all of the ^7 cones were totally obliterated.

The last anxiety mode is until-we-unload anxiety, which I didn't realize was on my list until I started dreaming last night:

Some of us (I'm not sure who) sneak over to Cedar Creek to open the kiln--too soon, too soon!--in the pale pink-blue-gold-gray light of early dawn. Other faceless people--strangers--are present on the roof, but we don't want them to see us because we're not really supposed to be there before the gallery opens (liability concerns), plus they'll see us opening the kiln too soon. They don't appear interested in us, however, because they are busy watching the festive fireworks going off over the distant horizon. In a rustic barn, where we bring the surreptitiously unloaded pots (we know we may look at the pots in the kiln, but we aren't supposed to move them until the whole group is gathered on Thursday; but it's always so hard to resist!), we see that everything is underfired; somehow, even the pots that are overfired are underfired. The sand-papery glazed surfaces have rectangular bits of some unmelted glaze chemical all over them. I forget to check how the slipped surfaces have fared because I am so distracted by the glaze defects. Apparently we also forgot to empty some of the pots when we put in the liner glazes: some of the cups are 3/4 full of unmelted glaze. We can tell, looking down at the pots from our vantage point near the kiln roof (we don't want to climb all the way up onto the roof, lest the fireworks-gazers get suspicious), that the whole load is like that, but because of the cups full of glaze, refiring isn't an option, even though we know no one else will be using the kiln this coming weekend. I am foggily aware that there are a logical inconsistencies in all of this, which causes me to wake up.

I might just have to go pull a peep brick on Tuesday to make sure everything looks OK. We unload the kiln on Thursday.

Lessons learned

2011-02-25T01:14:00.005-05:00

Friends and I are firing pots in the wood kiln at Cedar Creek this weekend, which means I'm up late tonight organizing and prepping pots. Near the end of the firing, we will spray into the kiln a solution of soda ash that has been dissolved in boiling water. The sodium in the soda ash will react with silica in the clay bodies, creating sodium silicate (glass), effectively glazing the pots. Soda ash is a flux, so it will also lower the melting point of any glazes that we might use to decorate the pots, hopefully creating beautiful glaze effects.

To prevent the pots from glass-fusing to the kiln shelves, we will glue little balls of wadding under the pots. Wadding is a mixture of kaolin (clay), alumina hydrate, and grog (ground bisqued clay); it doesn't react to soda ash. We also use wadding to keep lids from fusing to pots--and depending on how we stack things, also to keep pots from fusing to pots.

Enter my four prototype Moebius Diatom Boxes. I can't separate the two Moebius strips with wadding because there's no way to prop either up on wadding without impractical and precarious balancing acts. Moreover, if the two strips end up touching one another, they'll likely fuse together at the contact point.

So I surfed the internets and found a strategy: coat the edges of the two Moebius strips with wax that has alumina hydrate dissolved in it. After the wax burns off, the remaining thin layer of alumina hydrate will protect the clay from the soda ash. I found assorted recipes for this special wax, most of which can be summarized as follows: "use, oh, a spoonful or so alumina hydrate in, oh, half a pint or so of thinned wax."

So I bought a little container of wax and added some red food coloring to distinguish it from my unadultered wax, and then I added two teaspoons of alumina hydrate. Turns out alumina hydrate doesn't dissolve in cold un-thinned wax, so I had to give the container a nice warm bath this evening. Also turns out that pink wax is next to impossible to see on pink bisque ware. I subsequently added some blue food coloring, but it turns out that purple wax is also next to impossible to see. It also turns out that it's next to impossible for one person alone to wax the rims of two clay Moebius strips without the patient assistance of a Moebius-Strip Bearer (a.k.a. Stefan), for if the wet wax on one strip touches the surface of the other strip, it will (in theory) leave a deposit of alumina hydrate on the pot, preventing soda from reacting with the clay in that spot.

Anyway, it was a pain in the patootie to wax the things, which suggests they will remain very rare items indeed. Now I'm going to bed.

Avoid Nominalizations

2011-02-17T15:14:00.007-05:00

My series of writing workshops for engineering students ended this afternoon. If the enthusiastic writers who attended remember just one tidbit of information from our time together (other than how much fun we had, of course), I hope it is this: avoid nominalizations. Because it is such a great tidbit, I'm proselytizing to you too, gentle reader(s).

Avoid nominalizations.

Perhaps additional repetition will help you remember to avoid nominalizations.

I didn't learn the word nominalizations until 2004, some six years after I finished my doctoral dissertation, so it's not as though a person can't get through written life without avoiding them. (Another helpful writing tidbit is avoid double negatives; see the previous sentence if you need proof. But on an egregiousness scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is least egregious and 10 is most egregious, double negatives hover around 0.5, while excessive nominalizations score a hefty 11.6.)

A nominalization is an action that resides in a word other than a verb. Nominalization, for example, is a nominalization (a noun-ification) of the verb to nominalize (to noun-ify). Most (but not all) -tion and -sion words are nominalizations. Remediation, infatuation, solicitation, elucidation, radiation, multiplication--these are all actions that could be expressed as verbs (remediate, infatuate, solicit, elucidate, radiate, multiply) but are instead nouns. (Words like nation and sedition are a little trickier. They were perhaps verbs at one point, before settling into permanent English noundom. At the root of nation is the past participle of nāscī, "to be born"; and sedition comes from seditio, which combines the prefix se- [apart] with the verb ire [to go]. But I digress.) Many nominalizations skip happily past -tion/-sion suffixes altogether: the influence, the score, the report, the failure...you get the idea.

In English, we like our actions in verbs. We like verbs so much that when they are delayed by intervening words, we get antsy. That's why languages like German can throw native English speakers for a loop: German lets you postpone verbs for miles and miles. (For remarkable examples, see Mark Twain's essay, The Awful German Language.)

So we English speakers like actions in verbs, and we like our verbs up front. When an excessive number of actions appear in nouns, we get confused, annoyed, or both. Consider:

The cause of the impartment of obfuscation on meaning is the unnecessary placement of actions in nouns.

(Translation: We obscure meaning when we unnecessarily place actions in nouns.)

Hey, I hear all of you out there in internet space, saying to yourselves, "sure, the understanding of the cause of challenges from the putting of actions into nouns is important, but what about the influence of the ordering of words on the meaning of a sentence?" To which I would simply reply, "verbs and cohesion walk hand in hand. Put your actions into verbs, and you shall not regret it."

Cat is toilet trained, sorta

2011-02-02T13:28:00.006-05:00

I've been meaning to follow up on the Litter Kwitter toilet-training thing, in part because my mom was so smugly confident that it wouldn't work. At the same time, I wasn't sure going into detail about constipated cats was the best material for my music-, clay-, and grammar-centric blog. But as you've observed, I've been low on material lately, and what is kitty litter if not clay, and what is a caterwauling geriatric cat if not atonal? So here goes.

12-year-old Homer is a sprightly domestic-short-hair lap cat with silky black fur that has recently started going gray. Homer is constipated 24/7. According to the vet, that makes pooping painful for him, and because Homer has the brain of a cat, he draws a logical cat conclusion: "it hurts when I poop, therefore the litter box is biting me in the butt. It is safe to pee in the litter box, but pooping should be conducted elsewhere."

"Elsewhere" previously meant sneaking around the house and finding a spot on any carpet, so long as humans weren't looking. Pooping was still no fun, but it was better than going in the biting box. When done, Homer would tidily stroke the carpet a few times with his paws. This stroking is a coarse and primitive instinct: in his 12 years, Homer has never once realized that the purpose of the paw sweep is to cover his waste, and he has always stroked the vertical side of the litter box instead of the litter itself.

To coax him back into the box, we tried kitty laxatives, new litter boxes, extra litter boxes, cleaner litter boxes, and different litters, and none of it worked. Then we discovered the Litter Kwitter.

Here's the thing about the Litter Kwitter, though: you have to follow through. After your cat achieves success with Stage 1 (pan on the floor), you begin Stage 2 (pan clipped to the toilet seat). If you interrupt Stage 2 to use the toilet yourself, you must remember to put the pan back on the toilet seat instead of leaving it on the floor. That is how we failed, and it's too late now to take a step back and try again, because Homer has moved on.

But don't gloat yet, mom! Here is what Homer learned: "The toilet is tall, and I am too stupid to figure out how to jump up there tail-first (head-first is fine, and good for an occasional drink, yum!, but I am too stupid to figure out how to jump head-first and then turn around); yet my humans do not like it when I poop on the rug. I must page them when I need help."

Homer now has two routines to choose from, which I have translated from his Feline description into English:

"(1) I shall imitate the humans. When humans sit on the toilet to poop, I shall join them and Get Into Position on the bathmat."

"(2) in case no humans are pooping when I have to go, I shall meow plaintively, like this: 'meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow.' When a human answers my call, I shall Get Into Position."

If you pick up Homer and put him on the toilet before he is In Position, he will jump down and go find a new spot on the rug or bathmat. But if you wait until he's In Position--poised with muscles tensed, on the verge of pooping (see photo)--well, then he's kind of stuck that way, so you can pick him up, carry him through the house, and put him on the toilet seat, and he'll stay there until he has finished his business.

After he uses the toilet, I praise him with an effusive "good kitty, goooooood kitty!", which makes him proud and reinforces the desired notify-the-humans behavior. Then he rewards himself by going upstairs to the bathtub for a drink of water from his People Cup, which is another story altogether.

Busy busy

2011-02-01T20:52:00.010-05:00

The Chichester Psalms concert went very well. Apparently no one heard the horrifying errors I made about 10 measures in because (1) when you are a well-practiced musician-in-motion with adrenaline coursing through your veins, you experience a time dilation that an audience remaining at rest does not, so that what you perceive as a slow motion crash and burn, your audience perceives as a sonic blip lasting a mere fraction of a second; and (2) the electronic organ speakers were aimed at my knees rather than at the audience, so folks could barely hear the organ anyway. It was a pleasure working with a top notch vocal ensemble, and since they were mostly at rest at that one spot when I was in motion, there's a possibility I'll get to work with them again.

Following the concert, my attention went directly to another musical event. This past Sunday, a colleague and I had the nerve-wracking pleasure of assisting at a virtuosic organ concert given by the inestimable David A. "Assisting" means pulling stops out, pushing stops in, turning pages, and in this particular case, depressing three keys during a slow movement that had too much else going on for David to hold the keys down himself. Three notes is not a lot of notes, especially in the context of the five hundred thousand or so that David was tearing through, but playing them did provide me with an extra chance to mess things up, in the unlikely event that I didn't mess up pulling stops. For this musical roller-coaster ride, the three of us had seven hours of rehearsals together, every minute of it necessary for us stop-pullers, and none of it involving spraying the organ with fire retardants (a job the organ tuner/curator claimed for himself). The program included tours de force by Liszt, Alain, and Dupre, as well as two of Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues (so you know I was a happy Schumannophile).

Miscellanea

2011-01-18T15:56:00.015-05:00

I've been busy this month. On January 23, I'll be accompanying the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Durham in a performance of Leonard Bernstein's fabulous Chichester Psalms. The concert will be at Judea Reform Synagogue, as part of the synagogue's 50th anniversary celebrations. In addition to spending extra time practicing, I've also been teaching some writing workshops for grad students in the Engineering School. Thus, dear reader(s), I trust you will understand the recent lack of blog posts. Today, however, I bring you two exciting tidbits that I hope you'll find were worth the wait.

Tidbit 1

The writing workshops have made me refreshingly more attuned to things like this Tom's of Maine toothpaste tube:

In case you can't read the blurry photo, the text says (in part):

"Embrace the Power of Mother Nature! At Tom's of Maine that means we use authentic and effective natural ingredients.^[1] We use zinc citrate sourced from zinc--a naturally occurring mineral and xylitol, a natural ingredient derived from birch bark or corn.^[2]"

^[1] Did you catch the missing comma after the introductory element? Tolkien left those commas out all the time, which I'm told is common in British English. Since Tom's of Maine is located in Maine, U.S.A., I hold the company to American English standards for comma usage. Aside from that, can anyone tell me what an "inauthentic" ingredient would be?

^[2]I think they meant "We use zinc citrate (synthesized from naturally-occurring zinc ore) and xylitol (a natural ingredient derived from birch bark or corn)," but hey, I'm not a chemist. By the way, isn't saying "we use zinc citrate sourced from naturally-occurring zinc" kind of like saying "we use water sourced from naturally-occurring hydrogen and oxygen"?

Tidbit 2

While driving home the other day, I happened to observe that if the sum of the digits in a number is a multiple of 9, the number itself is evenly divisible by 9 (an extension of the similar tidbit about numbers being divisible by 3 if the sum of their digits is divisible by 3). This is old news to mathematicians, but brand new news to me. I don't know about you, but I feel empowered knowing, without doing any long division, that one trillion four billion seven hundred thousand five hundred one is divisible by 9.

My mathematician dad would want me to understand why this works, as opposed to simply knowing it works. I never appreciated that attitude when I was a kid bumming help from him on my math homework--in fact, I distinctly resented it--but I appreciate it now. So here you go, dad:

One trillion four billion seven hundred thousand five hundred one
= 1,004,700,501
= 1*(1+999,999,999) + 4*(1+999,999) + 7*(1+99,999) + 5*(1+99) + 1
= 1 + 4 + 7 + 5 + 1 + (a bunch of numbers divisible by 9).
Thus, if 1 + 4 + 7 + 5 + 1 is divisible by 9 (it is) then 1,004,700,501 is too.

In case you're wondering, I was thinking about nines because I've been doing a lot of Ken-Ken recently, a habit that started as a way to procrastinate finishing the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which, incidentally, I finished on Dec. 31, 2010).

Prototype

2011-01-03T13:32:00.014-05:00

Announcing another breakthrough from the Non-Orientable Manifold Lab!

I said I was going to call it a "Bagel Box," but that's so 2010. It's a new year, and "Möbius Diatom Box" has a better ring to it (so to speak).

I took advantage of Saturday's warm weather to throw some tori.

Then it rained for two days, so I moved the tori inside to dry; and then winter returned, so after I trimmed the tori outside in the subfreezing night air (brrr), I moved production into the dining room.

I carefully marked and cut the first torus, going for an angular look.

Silly me. Those 90^o angles locked the two rings together with impressive efficiency. I had to smoosh the clay to get the torus open, and both rings ripped a bit.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

I carefully marked and cut the second torus. No sharp angles this time.

Incidentally, in preparation for this experiment, this weekend I tried (and failed) to slice four bagels into interlocked Möbius strips; the near-lack of bagel holes left no room to maneuver the knife. I can now say it's significantly easier to cut a clay torus this way than a bagel, but the rough edges stand out more in the clay than on the bagel, mainly because a Möbius-sliced bagel is almost entirely rough edges, whereas a hollow clay torus has the potential to be lovely and smooth all over.

Despite some jagged lines, the slicing achieved the desired outcome.

It turns out that this kind of box is a two-person job. My beloved engineer patiently held each ring in succession while I tidied up the other ring's rough edges.

Of course, no clay math toy is complete without holes.

As you've just seen, if you sew two Möbius strips of the same handedness together, you get a torus. And of course, you recall that if you sew two Möbius strips of the opposite handedness together, you get--yes, that's right--a Klein Bottle! (In 4D, at any rate...)

Top Ass

2010-12-29T10:53:00.012-05:00

I'm cleaning out our games cabinet this morning, which is why I have Top Ass playing cards on my mind. For some reason, I always forget to buy more copies of this popular children's game when we're in Germany, even though I think they'd make great gifts for our U.S. friends. We have Top Ass Space Travel and Top Ass Special Transport, but I'd kind of like to see some Top Ass Marine Animals and Top Ass Horses.

I suppose I should mention that Top Ass in German ("tohp ahss") means Top Ace in English. And ASS is an abbreviation for Altenburger und Stralsunder Spielkartenfabrik ("The Altenburg and Stralsund playing card factory"). As Stefan explains, "they named themselves ASS." What linguistic fortuity!

Incidentally, if you're interested in the game--known generically as Quartett, it's actually rather boring to play--you'd be far wiser to search amazon.de than google.com.

Inspiration

2010-12-28T21:24:00.006-05:00

The east coast was brought to its knees by snow this past weekend. In a flippant twist, Durham is supposed to enjoys temps in the 60s this coming Saturday. That should be warm enough to melt the hunk of ice in my pottery water bucket out on the porch, and maybe even warm enough to allow me to wear short sleeves as I throw my next clay geeksperiment: the Bagel Box.

The Bagel Box probably has a tidy mathematical name, but since it's inspired by George Hart's nifty website on how to cut a bagel into two interlocking halves, it's going to be "the Bagel Box." In the absence of a tangible clay torus, my brain is unable to decide whether I'll need to devise some sort of key to hold the two halves together--a box is no good if the lid won't stay on--which is why it's so urgent that I get outside and on the wheel. (I've been contemplating setting the wheel up in our living room for the next month or so, but I'm happy to hold off if it's going to be 60 on Saturday. Let's add "devise a more practical winter studio" to the list of New Year's resolutions.)

If the Bagel Box is a success, I'll attempt a trefoil knot Bagel Box.

"Success" here means "aesthetically and intellectually pleasing." It's hard to imagine this will be a practical box, given that part of the container will be the lid, part of the lid will be the container, and parts of both lid and container will be bottomless and lidless sides. Indeed, it isn't as though you see Bagel Boxes everywhere--although that might be less a function of function as of a gaping void (or box) waiting to be filled. Or not.

I found the bagel-slicing page via Vi Hart's brilliant mathemagical website, another fantastic fount of inspiration.

Resolutions

2010-12-27T13:55:00.006-05:00

I need to start an Etsy store. That will go on my list of New Year's resolutions, along with coming up with a way to take decent photos of my work, building a gas or soda kiln in the back yard, and learning to repair plaster walls. Can you tell which of the Klein Bottles below were photographed by a professional photographer and which were photographed by me using a low-tech piece of white poster board propped on a chair as a backdrop?

I didn't make any specific New Year's resolutions on January 1, 2010, but some goals did crop up along the way. I'm pleased to report that I have successfully renewed my devotion to Robert Schumann (to whom, incidentally, I dedicated my Master's thesis in Astronomy way back in 1989) by learning the six B-A-C-H fugues for organ. For those who question the absolute brilliance of the fugues, might I recommend several months of worshipful practice and analysis?

By comparison, I've been resisting my way through The Lord of the Rings, but with December 31 looming, I've bumped things up a notch and am now a mere 200 pages away from finishing The Return of the King (not counting the hundreds of pages of appendices). By New Year's Eve, I hope to call my cultural literacy oath to Tolkien fulfilled.

Thankful for the little things

2010-12-26T14:02:00.008-05:00

<-- Look what the Solstice Elk brought Stefan!

I spent the last week pretending I had winter allergies, eventually acknowledging I had a nasty cold, and getting out of bed only long enough to play for multiple Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services. Being sick always makes me appreciate the little things, like having a husband who makes the world's best matzo ball soup, and a son who enjoys playing nurse; like dwelling with a silky, easy-purring black cat who curls up with me all day in bed; and like experiencing sickness-induced spontaneous Christmas Day nosebleeds that begin during the spoken creed rather than during the accompanied liturgy (and like having sufficient tissues on hand, thanks to the cold; oh, and like not getting blood all over my face or having to sneeze; and like having a nice big grand piano to hide behind until it's all over).

Annual North Carolina standstill

2010-12-26T12:34:00.008-05:00

It snowed.

Men in Lederhosen

2010-12-26T12:28:00.003-05:00

Correspondences with the Tooth Fairy

2010-12-16T12:55:00.011-05:00

I'm not a terribly tidy person, but when I get it into my head that I'm going to clean the house, I go whole hog, starting with drawers so that no one but I can tell I'm cleaning. Thus it was that I uncovered collected correspondences with the Tooth Fairy.

When Elias was getting ready to lose his first tooth, he asked me who the Tooth Fairy was. The obvious answer was that my mother was the Tooth Fairy. We called her to confirm.

"Yes," said my mom, "but I've been out of the business for years. And I wasn't the Tooth Fairy. I was a subcontractor. The Tooth Fairy has lots of subcontractors; all those teeth are just too much work for one fairy to handle. I'm sure you have subcontractors in your neck of the woods."

Indeed.

-----------------

1/1/07
Dear Elias,

At long last! Goodness, I was beginning to think that tooth would never fall out. What a great way to begin the New Year!

My colleague, the Mexican Tooth Mouse, notified me as soon as your frontal incisor fell into your mouth. Since your parents had been saving this beaded bookmark for this auspicious occasion (saving it for months, I might add), I asked one of my friends, a fruit bat, to fly it down to Mexico City for me. A first tooth warrants a little extra effort, don’t you think? Señor Mouse took over from there, so I believe you have him to thank for the pesos. We both thought you might want to save the tooth—they are so fascinating to look at! Did you know you mother saved most of her baby teeth? Perhaps you will follow in her footsteps.

Do keep up with the good brushing habits. You can be proud that you don't have a single cavity!

With much love,
--The Tooth Fairy (e el Ratón)

--------------

1/18/07
Dear Elias,

my, that was quick--your first tooth fell out January 1st, and already you've lost another just a few short weeks later. Señor Ratón says "Hola" and informs me that if you're ever in Mexico again, and if you lose a tooth while you're there, he'll look forward to visiting your pillow again. It is a delight to have colleagues around the world! I myself appreciate that you lost this one in the U.S., as things have been busy for me and my fruit bat lately, making it hard to get down to the border.

Enjoy the nippy January weather. Maybe we'll have some snow this year!

Keep up the good brushing habits!

Love,
--The Tooth Fairy

----------------

Dear toothfairy
I wold like to have a pre
esent insteadof
mouey. love Elias
PS my toth is inttHe bag
ifyou wnat to Pot mony instud.

8/23/07
Dear Mom,

you should know that most of Elias's friends know you once subcontracted for the Tooth Fairy. Isaac's dad told me today that Isaac said you also used to be the Easter Bunny. You never told me!

Love,
--Liz

8/23/07
Dear Elias,

Congratulations again, dear precocious child, on losing another tooth. Your mouth is maturing quite beautifully. Once again, you deserve praise for having no cavities.

The top central incisor you lost this time appears to have been chipped earlier in your youth. Try not to chip your adult teeth, as they are far more difficult to replace than the baby ones.

You might wonder why I am typing this letter rather than corresponding by hand, as I did previously. Believe it or not, I injured my left elbow last week when I attempted to leave a trinket under the pillow of a loudly snoring crocodile. I won’t go into detail, but my doctor says I should be back up to speed by the end of this month. In the meantime, my ever helpful fruit bat is typing my letters for me. Where would the world be without fruit bats?

I suspect I will discover another one of your teeth under your pillow in the not-too-distant future. Until then, I remain affectionately yours,

--The Tooth Fairy
P.S. Don't forget to brush at least twice a day!

--------------

Dear tooth fary
I lost anothertooth
cI would likeap praesint
thankYou
tooth Luosr Elias

10/25/07
Dear Elias,

me oh my, another top incisor! And a handwritten letter too. You are certainly growing up.

I had to check the Tooth Fairy By-Laws. Did you know non-union Tooth Fairy subcontractors may only leave cash under pillows? Lucky for you, I'm a paid-in-full member of UFFG (the Union of Fairies and Fairy Godmothers), which entitles me to leave the occasional gift or two under your head. I hope you enjoy these [ceramic sea lions]. Did you know the incisors of California sea lions have two cusps? The wonders of nature never cease to amaze me.

Keep up the good brushing habits!

Love,
The Tooth Fairy

-----------------

11/25/07
Dear. tooth Fairy.
Thank You for the seals.
and I losta anothr tooth!
I would like a presint. Ples
Elias

11/26/07
Dear Elias,

Well this was an unexpected visit! Your tooth had barely registered on our scanning equipment when my fruit bat notified me that it had actually fallen out. Never fear, we are always able to fit in these last-minute visits. (I think back to the days when we tried to do all of our scheduling without the help of computers, and I'm grateful for the wonders of modern technology.) It is, of course, always a pleasure to visit your pillow, and to find your notes, as well as your cavity-free teeth.

Brush well!

Affectionately yours,
--The Tooth Fairy

--------------

8/18/08
Dear tooth fairy
its early!
my tooth got
knoktout
Love Elias

8/18/08
Dear Elias,

Goodness gracious, yes indeed this lateral incisor came out sooner than I expected! Please try to avoid getting your teeth knocked out in the future. Thankfully, this one was a baby tooth. If you ever lose a permanent tooth, put it back in its socket and get thee to a dentist or emergency room pronto!

I figure the trauma of getting a tooth knocked out warrants a little something extra. I gather you're a fan of this particular mammal [cats]. Did you know I have some of [your cat] Homer's baby teeth in my stash somewhere?

Love,
--The Tooth Fairy

--------------

12/03/08
Lieber Elias,

Viele Gruesse auf Deutsch! Ich weiss, dass dein Papa Deutsch spricht, und dass du auch ein bischen Deutsch sprechen kannst. Weil ich viele Sprachen fuer meinen Beruf koennen muss, habe ich mir gedacht, mein Deutsch mit diesem Brief an dich zu ueben. Kannst du meinen Brief lesen?

Ich gratuliere dir zum Ausfall deines sechsten Milchzahn's! Prima, immer noch keine Loecher in den Zaehnen. Putze weiter hin gut die Zaehne, und vergesse nicht, zweimal im Jahr zum Zahnarzt zu gehen.

Die Fruchtfledermaus schickt liebe Gruesse.

Deine Zahnfee,
--The Tooth Fairy

----------------

1/23/09
Dear tooth fairy
I lost another.
how are you Doing?
I would like money if you have it.
Love
Elias

1/23/09
Dear Elias,

Well, it's about time! I've been expecting you to lose this tooth for months now. My fruit bat and I both cheered when the tooth finally showed up in our database this evening.

I'm running low on cash in the current economy, but I'm leaving you this fairy coin. Perhaps you know a bank that will exchange it for you.

Brush well.
Love,
T.F.

----------------

Selected letters from the 1970s archives:

Dear Liz, Ha ha! I certainly fooled you this time. I understand that you have lost another deciduous tooth. (Look it up in the dictionary.) Did you know some trees are deciduous? Guess what that means. Love, as ever, The Tooth Fairy

Hoo Boy--I thought I'd never make it. I, the tooth fairy, was so tired, I was dropping quarters under pillows of people with dentures and partial plates. You should have seen what I almost left with a great white shark. It could have opened a bank account. I know I only have a few more visits to make to your pillow before we both retire from the tooth business, so there is one thing I'd like to say. Do you realize that there hasn't been a single cavity in all the teeth I've gotten from you! There are only a few other children, most of whom are named Paley, who can boast of that. Terrific. Love, Mom the Tooth Fairy

Dear Elizabeth, I'll wager you thought the old T.F. forgot you again. Hah! You see, I cut my finger and I was going to get a Band-aid, when I cut my finger, so I needed a Band-Aid...so I'm late. By the end of 1978 we won't be doing business anymore. Isn't that unbelievable! Funny how the time flies when you are having fun. Keep them molars and canines coming in, folks. See you soon, xxxxxx, Y.M. the T.F.

Dear Liz, another? Wow! Only a few more. Seasle's Greetings. YMTTF

1/28/79
Dearest Liz,

Dear me, it has been ages since I last wrote to you. Your mother, a very close friend of mine, suggested that you might enjoy a note from me on the occasion of your 12th birthday. I am only too happy to be of service, of course, as I always enjoy keeping in touch with my old friends, especially ones with memorable teeth.

This last year was busy and interesting for me. After my last visit to you (remember, for those monster teeth with the enormous roots) I spent the summer trying to outsmart a little kid who kept trying to collect on the teeth from his comb. I've dealt with rakes and gears (all having teeth), toothache grass and toothache trees! I have not ever given away fortunes to sharks, however, my dear, because sharks don't really have teeth and are thus--thank goodness--not my responsibility. (The outsides of sharks' skins are covered by little sharp pointy placoid scales. Their jaws are also covered with placoid scales, only these are bigger. When a shark eats Cleveland and loses a few teeth in the process, he just grows a few more to replace them. You can't do that with genuine teeth, you understand.)

I understand from some of my friends that you now have braces on your teeth. What a smile you'll have when they are all straight! How do you feel with all those wires and bands in your mouth?

As you may know, so few children these days have nice teeth with no cavities that we tooth fairies have an honor list and guess what--you are on it! Yes indeedy, right up there. Congratulations!

Again, happy birthday! And don't worry, I still believe in you--very much.

Extremely sincerely and with best wishes for a splendid year,
Your friend, the Tooth Fairy

Correction

2010-12-13T22:21:00.005-05:00

A while back, I wrote about the number of possible stop combinations on the mighty Aeolian organ in Duke Chapel, calculating a total of 2⁽¹²⁰⁾-1, or ~1.3 x 10⁽³⁶⁾. It turns out there are only 114 stops, not 120, which brings the total down to 2⁽¹¹⁴⁾-1, or ~2.1 x 10⁽³⁴⁾, a difference of two orders of magnitude. Two orders of magnitude are significant if you're talking about the velocity of a Porsche on the Autobahn (200 km/hr vs. 20,000 km/hr) or the distance to Vega (25 lightyears vs. 2,500 lightyears), but it doesn't make much practical difference when you have a mere 10 decillion combinations rather than an undecillion.* Apologies, regardless, for any confusion this error may have caused.

*Europeans would call 10 decillion "10,000 quintillion," and an undecillion "a sextillion." A European sextillion has six times more zeros than has a million. How logical! A European billion has twice as many zeros as has a million--see the pattern?--although in the U.S., we call a European billion "a trillion." How...sequential. A U.S. sextillion is a measly 10⁽²¹⁾.

Condensation versus spit

2010-12-09T14:05:00.006-05:00

In grad school, I had several friends who played French horn. As they drained the liquid contents of assorted valves onto the floors of assorted performance venues, they would insist, "it's not spit, it's condensation." As their accompanist, I learned to say it with them: "I know, it's not spit, it's condensation."

I was thus surprised to learn that there's a special valve on a trumpet called a "spit valve." When the instrument starts gurgling, the player presses the valve and blows a good gust of air into the mouthpiece, forcing a dribble of liquid out through the valve.

Now, it turns out you're supposed to give your trumpet a bath once a month or so. We finally learned this four months into Elias's trumpet education, so last weekend I set up my laptop on the bathroom scale (the horizontal surface farthest from water without also being the cover of a kitty-litter box) and carefully followed the step-by-step instructions offered in a well-reviewed youtube video on trumpet bathing. There's a whole genre of such videos. Some (like the ones that show you how to pry sticking parts apart with pliers, or that insist the idea that trumpets need cleaning is a conspiracy promulgated by trumpet cleaning supply manufacturers and music stores) are worse than others.

I carefully disassembled the instrument, placed the appropriate parts on a towel in the bathtub, soaked them in warm water, inserted the correct pipe cleaners and snakes into the tubes for which they were designed, rinsed and gently patted each piece dry, and finally lubed and oiled and reassembled the parts. Lo, Elias's trumpet looks and sounds significantly better post-bath.

In the process, I learned that trumpet players are happy to call a spade a spade. Judging by the four months worth of bacterial goo left behind in the water? It's not condensation. It's spit.

Compound cookies

2010-12-04T13:37:00.010-05:00

Want to make Lebkuchen (a traditional German Christmas cookie*)? You need look no further for a recipe than in the classic Bayerisches Kochbuch (Bavarian Cookbook).

We have two copies: to the right, the 18th edition, published in 1938 in Fraktur (the same font as the cover text). The font, coupled with hindsight, makes the pre-war national pride in the introduction rather chilling: to paraphrase, "at the frontline stands the German Woman from the countryside and from the town, securing the national diet and health of the Volk."

Our other copy is the 54th edition, published in 1992 in assorted Courier-ish fonts. National pride has been replaced with more practical advice on the nutritive content and chemical behavior of common ingredients.

You might observe the stylish celebration of white-colored foods on the cover of the 1992 edition: white pork roast, white Knoedel (dumplings), white sauer Kraut (cabbage), and off-white beer foam. It's permissible to spruce up white food with the occasional ornamental vegetable, but unless you want people to eat the decorations, keep the color to a minimum with only a few parsley leaves and a single tomato wedge. Radishes, by the way, are especially useful, because they're white on the inside, so they match the rest of the food after you bite past the ornamental red skin.

But back to Lebkuchen.

When you look up a recipe in the index, you must draw on all your knowledge of the precise German language. Under Lebkuchen, you will find a mere three recipes: Lebkuchen --feine (fine), --mit Kunsthonig (with artificial syrup), and --Weisse (white). Looking for hazelnut Lebkuchen? Well, that's a compound noun, so you have to look under H for Haselnusslebkuchen. Look under E for Elisenlebkuchen, under G for Gewuertzlebkuchen, and under S for Schokoladenlebkuchen. What the heck, scan the whole index lest you miss some other variety.

I made Elisenlebkuchen I. Art (Elisenlebkuchen, version I). They're pretty tasty and would be even better if they could age in a closed container with some dried apples for a month or two. I messed up some of the measurements, so the Lebkuchen dough ran off the Bakoblaten (communion wafer-like rice-flour disks that keep the dough from cementing itself to the baking sheet). Fortunately, I had a silicone baking sheet, so I didn't need to chisel anything off the pan.

For more information on German baking, see this previous discussion on my Wadlstrumpf blog. Here, I'll simply point out the irony of recipes that tell you to weigh out ingredients in grams (a system supposedly more precise than American cup measures) and then to "bake slowly at, oh, I dunno, 150-160^oC, until done."

The Elisenlebkuchen I. Art recipe follows the footnote.

*At dinner last night, as I was talking about the cookies still in the oven, Elias kept asking excitedly, "what cookies? What cookies are you talking about?" And I kept saying, "what cookies do you think I'm talking about? Think." And Elias would say again, "you made cookies? What kind of cookies did you make?"--even though he was with me when I was making the Lebkuchen. "Dude: think!" I said. Stefan kindly intervened and explained to Elias, "Mama calls Lebkuchen 'cookies.'" "Ohh!," said my son with sudden wise understanding. That just goes to show how much better Elias has internalized German than I have. The -kuchen part of Lebkuchen literally means cake, although no American would ever conceive of Lebkuchen that way. Once again, the perennial issue of cultural concepts for assorted foods rears its head: just as Germans have no mental file cabinet for concepts like pie, Americans have no data storage space that allows a Lebkuchen to be anything but a cookie.

To confirm this claim, I nonchalantly said to Stefan, as he walked by just now, "so would you call Lebkuchen 'cookies'?" and he frowned and said unequivocally, "no. Cookies are Plaetzchen; Lebkuchen are Lebkuchen." There ya go.

Elisenlebkuchen, version I

Beat together until thick and foamy:

5 eggs
500 g sugar

Add:

2 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp ground cloves
1 knife tip ground cardamom
1 knife tip ground mace (I didn't use any)
Peel from 2 lemons, juice from 1/2 lemon

Whap up in food processor:

100 g candied lemon peel (I used a 113 g container)
100 g candied orange peel (ditto)

Add to batter. Shell and then whap up in food processor:

500 (650) unshelled almonds or half almonds, half nuts. (Seriously? Like I'm going to count and shell 500-650 almonds? The authors provided no explanation of the parenthetical 650. I assumed they meant 500 g--not enough, which is probably why the dough spread off the Oblaten--and used 454 g toasted almonds and guesstimated an additional 150 g toasted hazelnuts.)

Add nuts to batter. Spoon onto Oblaten (you can skip this if you have a silicone baking sheet. Trust me, butter alone on a baking sheet will not do the job. The dough is like cement.) In theory, let sit for a hour. (I skipped that.) Bake slowly at, oh, I dunno, 150-160^oC, until done. (How about we say 325^oF for 20-30 minutes.)

New horizons in hole appreciation

2010-11-23T15:24:00.007-05:00

I thought I'd give myself a break and make some smaller votive candle holders that load from underneath and therefore don't require copper hangers. Plus, I figured the smaller size would improve my chances of avoiding clay goobers, because I could fit my fingers into the pots to provide counter-pressure against the hole-cutting tools. So I threw a couple of little saucers to hold candles, and a couple fist-sized bottomless closed forms to go over the saucers; and when the hemispheres were leather hard, I commenced making holes.

Making holes takes a long time, even with small pots. Despite the reduced size, it still took over an hour to cut the first MSH/TC luminaria by hand. So, long overdue, I finally broke out the big gun:

Like the hand tools, the DeWalt DW972K-2 leaves sizable clay goobers on the inside of the pot, but they're easier to brush off, and the interior cut is cleaner overall. The exterior cut is messier, but the mess is nothing a little sponging can't fix. After experimenting a bit, I came up with a reasonably satisfying process: drill holes, brush off crud, rout holes with hand tools, brush off crud, sponge, then clear remaining crud from holes with a needle tool. A little complicated, perhaps, but it took only 23 minutes and 14 seconds to drill, clean, and sponge a SSH/TC model, and only twice that long to make a MSH/TC model (not counting the time I had to wait to recharge the drill battery), which makes drilling way speedier than hand cutting. As an added bonus, drilling doesn't make my thumb sore, and it doesn't leave metal oxides on my fingertips; and it lets me make a greater variety of hole sizes and get the holes closer together.

I could probably overcome the goober problem if I waited until the clay was bone dry before drilling. I read in Ceramics Monthly that Simon van der Ven drills bone dry clay using dental drills, so I know it can be done (with dental drills, at any rate, if not with a DeWalt DW972K-2). As I don't want to wear a respirator mask while I'm drilling--especially when I'm using porcelain, which has an amazing capacity to spread itself on anything that comes within its event horizon--I'll be sticking to leather-hard clay for now.

They don't look like much now, but when they have candles inside, they'll cast pretty light dots all over the ceiling, like that toy star projector my brother had when he was a kid. Not that this little project has anything to do with overcoming my childhood jealousy. Of course. But now that I've brought it up, I need to add constellation luminarias to my To Do list.

Hole hero 3

2010-11-23T15:14:00.004-05:00

Louis Sachar knows holes. His excellent book suggests that when the whole world seems to be against you, it's probably not your imagination but rather an Old World cosmic curse. Deep down, don't we all suspect that's the case?

Hole hero 2

2010-11-23T15:10:00.002-05:00

Simon van der Ven knows holes.

Artogerioeriogavbvby

2010-11-16T19:42:00.017-05:00

If a story is told in a forest and only one child is there to recognize its greatness, can it become a classic?

Simple or complex, brief or elaborately told, a good story traverses generations. My mother's mother, Lorraine, whom we always called Woozy (oo as in wood rather than wooed), left a legacy of good stories, a treasure trove of family and cultural histories documented in artfully illustrated bound notebooks, in little handmade booklets, and on loose leaf paper.

My grandmother died in 1990, over a decade before my son was born. Surely Woozy would have enjoyed knowing that her great grandson would spend hours poring over her stories, reading and rereading them, absorbing the family legacy. Although few outside our immediate family have ever seen the texts, Elias recognizes and appreciates them as classics.

Elias recently quoted one such classic for a Word and Grammar Study assignment at school. His teacher, understandably unfamiliar with the collected Woozy Works, signaled her mystification by circling Elias's answer:

It's kind of hard to see, but you might note that Elias even cited his source (Woozy Works). We consider this progress, as his teacher has asked him to think more about what kinds of information he needs to convey to his readers so that they'll understand what he's writing about.

For the sake of clarification, here's the original text:

Incidentally, I believe the little black dog in Woozy's picture was named Willis, as in Willis is barkin'. The name comes from a line describing the marital interests of a character in David Copperfield, wherein Barkis is willin'. Maybe someday, Elias will get around to reading that other classic.

The golden hairy toe

2010-11-11T19:41:00.005-05:00

I posted recently about my friend Janice, who had needed to make party favors for her neighborhood Halloween festivities and thus decided to make plaster toes by casting her own pedidactyls.* If that act alone isn't sufficient evidence that she takes community responsibility seriously, check out this amazing end product (which, interestingly, is now in the private collection of The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, who attended the party with her four children):

*My gift to the English language. Use the word freely.

A quick visit to our nation's capitol, day 2

2010-11-07T21:33:00.022-05:00

On October 30, the day after going to the Air and Space Museum out by Dulles, we thought we'd continue our trip to D.C. by heading to the Mall. Our party of seven left our hotel in Falls Church at 9:30am and walked the half mile to the Metro stop, where we encountered this:

I took this photo about two hours after we got in line. The line started to the left of the overpass, continued a block to the right, wrapped around about a fourth of a block and then continued another half block into the Metro station.

By the time we had tickets and were on the platform, it was 12:10pm. All of the trains heading into D.C. were so crammed full of people, there was no way for anyone else to squeeze in. We finally got seats by squeezing into a train heading in the wrong direction and riding one stop to the end of the line. More folks squeezed on there, and we changed direction and headed into D.C.

The trip would have been more pleasant if it hadn't been over three hours and a nice big glass of OJ since I'd last peed. Instead of joining in the general conviviality of the singing crowd (yes, when happy people who share common goals are crammed on trains like sardines, spontaneous singing may erupt), I hunkered down and tried not to think about Tycho Brahe's dismal death. By 1pm, still a few stops from the Smithsonian, there was no alternative but to escape--"coming through! coming through!"--and Stefan, Elias, and I dashed up to the restrooms in the George Washington University Hospital cafeteria.

It turns out that holding your bladder in a cramped public space for that long makes you a little jittery and tense even post-restroom, so that when a seemingly innocuous woman asks you what that sign you're holding is supposed to mean, and you offer a friendly explanation even though you think the sign seems straightforward enough, and she calmly goes on and on about how you you've got it all wrong and politicians are just doing what they're supposed to do and why do you think things should be any different and how people who attend rallies always think they're being useful but they're really not and what makes you think politicians shouldn't be obfuscatory and so on and so forth, somehow eventually making her way to what was apparently her goal all along about "all those evangelicals and pro-Israel people" in your part of the country who have gotten us into the mess we're in, all the while claiming she's just trying to understand your sign...and because she won't shut up even after you tell her you're done talking with her about this, and because you're still super edgy and irritable from the whole peeing thing...well, that's when, instead of walking away like a mature adult, you might instead ironically find yourself shouting "leave me alone or I'll call security" and then stuffing your fingers in your ears and shouting "I don't want to listen to you so I'm going to cover my ears and talk over you because I really don't want to listen to you, blah blah blah I can't heeeear you" while holding the homemade Rally to Restore Sanity signs in the photo below:

We walked from the hospital to the Mall, finally arriving at about 2pm. We couldn't get close enough to see or hear much of the Rally program, but we did see a bunch of fine signs (see below) and dozens of Waldos.

By 3pm, we had managed, through intermittent cell-phone connections, to meet up again with Janice and Martin and their kids, whom we had abandoned when we bailed on the Metro. Since the rally had ended, we headed to Chinatown with a quarter of a million other people for an early dinner. Our small group didn't even attempt to find a table anywhere and instead headed (noooooooooo!) into the stuffy underground darkness of the Metro to play another hour of Sardines with a thousand like-minded folks. Since none of our party had remembered to eat lunch, saying we were all a little cranky is an understatement. In desperation, we eventually got on the only train that had any room and rode it to Rosslyn, where we got out, had some dinner at a restaurant where we waited in line for a table and waited in line to use the restroom, and finally caught a packed connecting train back to Falls Church.

The drive home was uneventful and quick and involved no lines at all.

Luminarias

2010-11-07T00:42:00.002-04:00

Stefan thought coat hanger wire was too inelegant, so he bought some shiny new copper wire and made candle hangers (thanks for the tip, Rachel!) for two of my impractical hole-filled pots, just in time for the Art Walk tomorrow. Not only do the candle hangers make it much easier to get a lit candle inside the pots, they also make these previously non-functional hole-filled Objets d'Art--poof!--functional. Of course, sitting on a shelf looking interesting while collecting dust is a function of sorts, but there is some urge to "be of use" (as Wilbur Larch would say). I can thus make hole-filled narrow-necked pots to my heart's content, knowing that potential buyers will appreciate them a smidge more because they shine prettily in the dark ("oh, that's what they're for!"). I just have to remember to keep the pot necks wide enough to accommodate a tea light.

My friend Adrian finished taking photos of my pots last week, and he's put together a snazzy slide show. It's a little shocking (in a good way) to see professional photos of my work, since the images I usually see are the cheapo snapshots I take using a piece of white posterboard as a backdrop, which doesn't exactly flatter the pots. Check out Adrian's slide show here.

Where's Waldo?

2010-11-04T08:57:00.004-04:00

If you don't want to get lost in a crowd of 250,000, dressing up like Waldo might seem like a good solution--unless a hundred other people have the same idea. In contrast, we only saw one Beaker, and no Dr. Bunsen Honeydews. Judging from his sign, Beaker had an unequivocal message for Washington insiders.

Found poem

2010-11-04T00:23:00.005-04:00

I just realized the Labels tag cloud on this blog makes a pretty swell found poem. I particularly like the phrases atmospheric firing attitude, camping cats, cursing dialects, downtown dreams, energy fish, heavy machinery holidays, möbius strips neighbors newspapers, obscene heat obsession, and the elision of spring style therapy things with things you blow in tolkien--plus that the poem ends with y'all. Here's the current iteration; parse it as you will.

L A B E L S

acrophobia airport security assumptions atmospheric firing attitude adjustment backseat conversations bats beach bedding beloved child beloved engineer bifocals blogging breathing bugs camping cats chickens church colloquialisms common cold consumer culture creative nonfiction cultural differences cursing dialects diatomaceous earth disappointments don't try this at home downtown dreams education energy fish flowers food friends geekitude gender germany good causes grammar heavy machinery holidays homework house houseplants hyperbole intentional homophonic misspellings jury service kiln klein bottles large numbers maintenance math mendelssohn mental hygiene mice modal auxiliary verbs museums music möbius strips neighbors newspapers northern obscene heat obsession opera organ overreacting pedal piano poetry plastic pollen pottery preparing pronouns punctuation recycling religion roadtrip safety in the pottery studio schumann sentence fragments shoes signs size sleep soccer southern southern insults spring style therapy things you blow in tolkien town gown relations trash untapped potential USA weather y'all

A quick visit to our nation's capitol, day 1

2010-11-01T23:46:00.013-04:00

Last Friday, Stefan and I and our friends Martin and Janice took our kids out of school and drove 4.5 hours north to the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is located next to Dulles airport and complements the Air and Space Museum on the D.C. Mall. It houses the Enterprise space shuttle and the Enola Gay, among other icons of national and international air and space history.

Martin had seen a lot of airplanes recently, having just returned from a business trip to Liberia that involved an unplanned day-long stop-over in Newfoundland due to a smoking first-class seat, and a runway diversion in Belgium to deboard a disruptive shouting passenger; the trip was capped with a drunk Liberian police officer who set up a roadblock somewhere between the airport and Monrovia at 4am in order to coerce bribes from drivers.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Janice had needed to make a bajillion party favors for kids at her neighborhood's Halloween shindig, where the grownups were unveiling "The Legend of the Golden Hairy Toe"; so she made plaster necklace charms cast from her very own feet. How's that for thinking on your toes?

Anyway, the airplanes 'n' stuff at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center were pretty neat, but for me, the greatest thrill was showing my inner acrophobe who's boss by walking the entire upper catwalk All By Myself. (OK, so my inner acrophobe and I walked it together). I regret to report that no one else was particularly impressed by this accomplishment, but it's a far cry from where I was pre-Germany. (I don't want to boast here, but I've also been over the suspension bridge at Eno River State Park not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times this fall--a task that was previously so nerve-wracking that I'd avoided the Few's Ford branch of the park for a whopping five years.)

Gee whiz

2010-10-27T11:04:00.019-04:00

"Aging Reader" tells me I've been lax about posting lately, and he's right. So to keep him entertained, here are some updates about my exciting life.

The lot with the geo-thermal tubing balls now has a giant gaping hole surrounded by immense piles of North Carolina red clay. The first day of digging was pretty much the best digger action I've ever witnessed and made me want to borrow a toddler to share the joy.

Beamer and Leo now have three additional harlequin rasbora companions, named Leo 2, Leo 3, and Leo 4. We haven't bonded with the new guys yet, as they don't seem to have much personality (I'm sure the sentiment is mutual), but perhaps we'll grow on one another over time.

I'll be selling pottery in the Watts Hospital Hillandale Art Walk on Nov. 7. This will be my first sale since returning from our Germany hiatus last December, so I've started pulling pots off shelves and assessing my inventory. It's quite the eclectic mix, between the one-of-a-kind class demo pots and the intentional self-improvement pots. Self-improvement phases have apparently included Round Things, Tall Things, Oval Things, Stretched Things, Darted Things, Miniature Things (a phase that lasted about 30 minutes), Chickens, and--most impressively and somewhat disturbingly, when you put them all next to one another--things with holes in them. Lots and lots of holes. Wow.

It's especially nice to discover that pots I once felt ambivalent about--pots that, when removed from the kiln, looked nothing like I hoped they would when I put them in--actually look quite good thanks to several months' separation from my initial expectations.

My friend Adrian came over this morning to pick up a bunch of pieces to photograph for me, so I should have some quality pictures to post soon. In the meantime, here's some of the stuff he didn't take, looking oranger than in real life:

Because I like kitchen gadgets, I'll mention that the pots on the bottom right were made by zesting straight cylinders with a lemon zester, then stretching the cylinders from the inside, yielding the globe shapes with spiraled zest lines.

I've been working with clay for about eight years. I've been competent for perhaps the last five of those, meaning I've generally been the boss of the clay rather than vice versa--that is, I usually manage to turn the blob of clay I start with on the wheel into what I intend for it to become. I'm still waiting for some personal style to emerge, some characteristic detail or gesture that connects most of my work. Looking at the mish mash of pots in the photo is probably not the best way to find that connection, although the combination of zested pots, tall things, holes, and the isolated chicken has me leaning toward the "gee whiz" factor.

A lifetime ago when I was a grad student in astronomy, the grad student cubicle room would occasionally get telephone questions from inquisitive members of the public. The questions usually dealt with what my peers called "gee whiz" astronomy--delectable popular astronomy tidbits that emerged from stunning satellite or telescope photographs, the sorts of images and ideas that make people say "gee whiz!" (as in, "gee whiz, that's where stars are born?" [Omega Nebula image credit: European Space Agency, NASA, and J. Hester (Arizona State University)]). Gee whizness is what led me into a master's thesis on interstellar gas and dust--which, frankly, is not as exciting as you might think once you take away the pretty pictures and the Vangelis soundtrack from Cosmos.

When I later became a music theorist, I noticed I was drawn to what I called "gee whiz" theory: bring to the fore previously unnoticed details and discuss them in engaging and artful narratives that make people say "gee whiz!" (as in "gee whiz, even though the ghost of Manfred's deceased beloved doesn't ever sing, I actually hear her generating pitches inside my head in that single measure of silence in the third act!").

Gee whizness doesn't answer big questions: it resides in snapshots and unexpected convergences, in flashes of forest seen amidst lots of trees. It's nifty, but not particularly useful or utilitarian in the grand scheme of things. It's like using a Van de Graaff generator to make your hair stand up rather than to produce extremely high voltages for accelerating sub-atomic particles.

I hope I'm not just flattering myself to think my pots are leaning toward a certain gee-whizness, built into the making if not apparent in the final result. The Klein Bottles are pretty obviously gee-whizzy, as are the double-walled bowls and (I think) the chickens (wheel-thrown chickens!). And personally, I think lemon zested oblate spheroids are pretty gee whiz too.

It's possible that I'm simply confusing gee whizness with nerdiness. I recently submitted a proposal to Claymakers for a new class I've dubbed "Pottery for Geeks." I sure hope they let me teach it.

In other news, the auto repair shop just called and we need a new front axle.

Here's wishing all the best to "Aging Reader," "Aging Breeder," and the rest of you in Pixel-land. Leave a comment sometime so I know you're out there!

Goodness gracious

2010-10-07T17:29:00.010-04:00

Great balls of wire!^*
^*Actually, it's tubing for a geo-thermal heating system, but Jerry Lee Lewis never sang about that. I guess he never sang about great balls of wire either.

Our "La Bohème" moment

2010-10-05T20:38:00.015-04:00

Elias didn't have school on Monday, so on Sunday our family drove to Hanging Rock State Park for a quick overnight camping trip. As darkness fell that evening, we discovered ourselves reenacting the opening scene of Puccini's "La Bohème."

Night time: a chill hovers in the air. The wind blows; droplets of water from an earlier rain shower drizzle down from the canopy of trees above. Gloveless fingers are cold; our child shivers. In a desperate effort to light a pile of damp wood, Stefano makes a sacrifice, crumpling up three precious pieces of paper and tossing them on the struggling flame. "My review," he says: "let my burning review warm us." Thought bursts into flame; the paper dissolves into ashes, and academic prose ascends to the skies. What a cheerful spark! But it doesn't last long. (Is brevity a virtue?) In that languid blue flickering, a title page and cover letter go up in smoke. Thus are the ideas of brilliant men integrated, beautiful, to vanish in a joyous flash.

And then--success--the wood lights, without our having to burn any chairs or picnic tables. Now enter children: friends who coincidentally happen to have a tent pitched four campsites up the one-way loop, there celebrating the brief and festive days between the oldest son's hard-core soccer league practices.

Marshmallows! Graham crackers! Chocolate! We eat and devour--S'mores! We sit in the collapsible camping chairs (they wouldn't have burned well anyway) by the fire and share a glass--nay, a dented aluminum cook pan--of cherry tea. (Alas, Bordeaux isn't allowed in NC State Parks.) Hark, is that a cough? Relief: it's not tuberculosis, just dense smoke.

So much merriment is had by our protagonists that, the next morning, Elias declares "this was actually way more fun than I thought it would be." Maybe we should take him to see "Tosca" at the NC Opera this fall.

Embouchure

2010-10-01T00:08:00.012-04:00

From modest beginnings...

come great things.

Honest concert notes

2010-09-29T12:50:00.007-04:00

In 1845, the year he wrote his six fugues on the four-note theme B-A-C-H (Op. 60), Robert Schumann was renting a spiffy Louis Schone pedal piano with a 29-note pedal board. According to Schumann's contemporary and biographer, Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, Schumann wrote the fugues specifically for organ, amidst a sea of other contrapuntal pieces written that year specifically for pedal piano.¹ B-A-C-H, like Bach, belongs on the king of instruments.

But if you don't happen to have a king in your living room, you could compose sitting at your right swell rented prince^* instead, which is maybe kind of close enough to an organ that no one will notice the difference, unless you do things like (dang) double octaves to mimic pulling out stops, forget that tones decay when you hold down a piano key but that they don't when you hold down an organ key, or stick in subito piano and sforzando and crescendo indications that are trivially easy on a piano but make an organist wonder "what the *&$# were you thinking?"

A non-organist, Schumann had enough experience with the instrument to understand its challenges. As he advised in his "House Rules and Maxims for Young Musicians" (1849), "Lose no opportunity of practicing on the organ; there is no instrument that so quickly revenges itself on anything unclear or impure in composition or playing as the organ." How ironically perceptive!

Schumann considered the B-A-C-H fugues to be among his finest compositions, writing to his publisher in 1846 that "I worked on this set for the whole of last year in order to make it somewhat worthy of the exalted name it bears; [it is] a work that will, I believe, long outlive my other works."² Of course, any Schumannophile who's read any Schumann biography will know that Schumann regularly wrote with effusive enthusiasm about whatever next great "entirely new!" composition he was working on at the time, so his opinion of Op. 60 (sincere though it may have been) should be taken with a grain of salt.

Although Schumann's contemporaries heard much to praise in the composer's fugues, posterity has viewed his contrapuntal pieces less kindly. Ah, fickle fashion. To illustrate this point, compare one modern critic's review ("you sure are a glutton for punishment") to Wasielewski's glowing assessment^**:

"Of the two sets of fugues (Ops. 72 and 60), the latter, consisting of six fugues on the name of Bach, is of extraordinary merit. The first five fugues especially display so firm and masterly a treatment of the most difficult forms of art, that Schumann might from these alone lay claim to the title of a profound contrapuntist. They show variety of plastic power with four notes only. The tone of feeling varies in all six pieces, and is always poetic, which, in connection with a command of form, is the main point in composition. These are serious character-pieces. The sixth fugue offers a difficult problem as to execution, since the mingling of even and uneven movement renders it very difficult to perform it properly upon an organ."³

And now, for your aural edification, here is Op. 60 #2 on organ and on pedal piano, performed by Martin Luecker and Silvio Celeghin respectively.

^*I'm not sure king:prince properly describes organ:pedal piano. It should probably be something more like king:king's second cousin.

^**Indeed, Wasielewski, whom we might consider the chief booster of the first-generation ardent Schumannophile club, found it nearly impossible to write about Schumann in anything but glowing terms.

1. Wasielewski, Life of Robert Schumann (1871), 149.
2. John Daverio, Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age" (1997), 308.
3. Wasielewski, 149.

Schumann update

2010-09-21T22:14:00.010-04:00

Back in August on my Wadlstrumpf blog, I wrote about hearing two of Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues performed live at the Baroque church in St. Peter im Schwarzwald, and about how I nonetheless remained certain that these pieces could be performed convincingly, and about how I was giving myself until the end of this year--until the end of Schumann's 200th Jubelaeumsjahr--to work toward that goal myself. To quote:

Johannes Götz played Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues numbers 5 and 2 and the canon in A-flat, and I learned that I am not the only organist baffled by certain aspects of these pieces. It's no wonder Clara Schumann was able to build an entire career out of being the only person who could properly interpret her husband's musical genius. I'm certain that despite their bizarreness, these pieces can be played convincingly, and I'm giving myself the rest of 2010 to figure out how to play the B-A-C-H fugues in a way that, short of leaving me satisfied, at least doesn't make me irritated.

Now that I've been back on the bench for a month, I've made good progress refining fugue 2 and getting fugues 3-6 under my fingers and feet, and I'm beginning to find satisfying registrations for all six on the Flentrop. It's time to play them for my organ teacher, David A., with whom I haven't had a lesson since early July. I happened to run into him today, and told him, with the devout fervor of a born-again Schumannophile, that I was working on all six fugues. It says something of the challenging not-quite-rightness of these pieces that David replied, "you sure are a glutton for punishment."

(Ironically, I initially dove into the Schumann fugues in part to hide from the piece David wanted me to work on this summer, Marcel Dupré's "Variations on a Noël." Talk about punishment. The Variations are like the two-semester senior quantum mechanics sequence I took in 1986-87: amazing and awe-inspiring, surely, but the ratio between effort to learn and consequent intellectual pleasure makes you think maybe you don't want to spend the rest of your life as a physicist after all, nor, 24 years later, spend the summer slowly and methodically practicing all those notes.)

Fish health and the great cat experiment

2010-09-19T19:20:00.016-04:00

Following the fish tank catastrophe, Beamer the angel fish has been thriving in the tiny hospital tank in the kitchen. At feeding time, s/he hovers with tail fin wagging and agape mouth aimed upward toward the surface of the water, waiting for those dry, colorful little fish'n'shrimp chips to fall from the hand of the life-giving deity (me). Beamer grows visibly larger daily and is strong, radiantly healthy, and about as cuddly as a cold-blooded angel fish can be.

Alas, Leo the harlequin rasbora, being a schooling fish, is not so happy. Indeed, Leo spends the daylight hours hiding behind the filter pump, waiting morosely for his/her aquarium glass reflection to come out and play. The profound loneliness isn't aided by the fact that Stefan repeatedly forgets Leo's name and calls him/her "Alex."

In other pet news, I have decided to toilet train Homer, our lithe and schmusig geriatric passive-aggressive cat. NB Homer: this is what you get when you pee all over the bath mat for three weeks when your humans are on vacation, even if (just guessing) the housesitter never bothered to change the litterbox until the night before we came home.

The device I am using for Homer's re-education is known as the Litter Kwitter. I did a little comparison shopping and, based on 165 thoughtful and compelling customer reviews from around the globe, chose the Litter Kwitter over a cheaper, flimsier system. We are placing our confidence in the award-winning system despite the tacky "Kw-."

Homer responded to Stage 1--the appearance, on the floor next to the downstairs toilet, of the red litter-filled tray within the white imitation toilet bowl rim--with general disinterest. We recently began Stage 2, stationing the red litter-filled tray again within the imitation toilet bowl rim, but now clipping the imitation rim onto the actual toilet bowl rim. See how this works? Homer responded to Stage 2 with initial disinterest, after which a human needed to use the downstairs toilet and inadvertently returned the system to Stage 1. As you might observe, this is not the most convenient system, but four to six patience-filled weeks from now, when Homer is completely, unerringly, Litter Kwitter affirmingly toilet trained and no longer expressing his wrath by peeing on towels, we'll be laughing all the way to the litter-free bank.

Reminiscence roadtrip, part II

2010-09-05T21:07:00.003-04:00

They say you can never go home again, but you sure can revisit a lot of places you used to live.

I've caught up at last with the reminiscence roadtrip on Wadlstrumpf. Might Oughta Should will return to its regular programming shortly.

Reminiscence roadtrip, part I

2010-09-01T23:25:00.005-04:00

Thanks to the gift of jetlag, I have rediscovered the art of falling asleep at a sensible hour. As a result, I am comfortably spending my late nights sleeping rather than blogging. Tonight, however, I am coming off the adrenaline high of running a choir rehearsal--choir season at work commenced this evening--so I am channeling my energy and finally catching up on the tail end of our Germany trip.

A sad way to go

2010-08-28T12:02:00.008-04:00

We returned from Germany a week ago Friday to a sorry state of animal affairs. To make a long story short, about fifteen fish in our 45-gallon tank lost their lives to an overfeeding-fueled, oxygen-depriving, algae-bloom calamity that somehow went unnoticed by our determinedly oblivious housesitter until it was too late. Thankfully, the two surviving fish, Leo and Beamer (survivors of a disaster like this deserve names), seem to be holding up well in their little hospital tank on the kitchen counter.

In an expression of solidarity and disdain, our cat Homer occupied himself during our 3.5-week absence by peeing exclusively on the downstairs bathmat.

Putting the best possible spin on all of this, I can only express amazement at our housesitter's superpower: Nose of Steel.

The Two Towers: a recitation on females therein

2010-08-09T13:31:00.009-04:00

The dramatic midpoint have I reached: the end of Tolkien's The Two Towers; through the myriad preparations and battles of Book 3, wherein was saved Helm's Deep, and then southward through Book 4 to Minas Morgul. En route encountered I yet two more females with names, and learned much of race (the discussion of which must wait), and of the need for slow plebes to attach themselves to hereditary leaders of great strength, wisdom, and handsome boldness (which also must wait), and of the ancient linguistic origins of Yoda's subject-verb reversals. Now eagerly up stand I, clasping my hands behind my back (as is my charming rustic habit whenever I am about to "talk Tolkien"), and recite thus:

Ladies? Few. All pale, of course, in Galadriel's radiant light.
Up next we meet fair Éowyn, who trembles within sight
of virile Aragorn. Perhaps new sexual tension's nigh?
We'll have to wait until Book 5 to find out if, how, why.

She does not say much, Éowyn; grave, thoughtful is her glance;
Hair like gold, and dressed in white, she later puts on pants:
Fearless and high-hearted, she will lead in Théoden's lieu.
Alas, ten pages text, no more: her Book 3 role is through.

In Book 4 enters one more lass, less stunning than the rest;
and yet she stuns: her will's her own: to sunder is her quest.
Antithesis could be her name, for ('tis an ancient view)
a woman's either beautiful or evil through and through.

Bloated, fat, she feasts upon whatever happens by:
she spins her web, snares Men, Elves, Orcs in lair up near the sky.
Shelob would like to suck the blood of swooning Frodo too,
but Samwise stabs her underside, releasing yucky goo.

Old stomping grounds

2010-07-29T18:25:00.004-04:00

Meine Damen und Herren, we're on vacation....

Wheel thrown and altered in obscene heat

2010-07-25T15:37:00.008-04:00

During the past unseasonably moderate and delightfully long spring, I had a delusional idea that I would make and bisque pots on the screened-in porch all summer long. Given the heat, however, I've abandoned hope of being productive. Right now, six greenware wheel-thrown-and-altered (see below) oval boxes--my total home output since the DT-MSH/TC--are slowly warping as they half dry/half bake in the 100+^oF temps outside.* I could work in the basement, where it's cooler, but it's kind of gross having ten thousand camel crickets looking over my shoulder while I'm at the wheel. Someday I'll build a four-season studio in the back yard.

Incidentally, "wheel thrown and altered" is one of my favorite pottery catch phrases. Look for it in photograph captions in select pottery books and magazines. Under an image of an elaborate pot in the shape of, say, a perfectly proportioned nautilus shell or a sassy teapot or a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the accompanying explanatory text might read (simply, mysteriously, and uselessly) "wheel thrown and altered."

I'll come clean: the boxes above were each made with three thrown components--an ovaled wall, a ribbed lid insert (all six inserts were harvested from one thrown piece), and a flange to hold the lid in place--plus a tossed slab for the bottom. Voila: wheel thrown and altered.

*It could be worse. I was at Claymakers yesterday, where the gas kiln was running and the air conditioner was broken. When I left, the 99^oF outside air actually felt refreshingly cool.

Time flies

2010-07-21T21:43:00.008-04:00

Elias and K. have been chasing each other in circles for over seven years, and judging by their smiles, it's still as much fun today as it was in 2003. We'll call them back for another photo shoot in 2017.

Victory is mine!

2010-07-21T14:16:00.010-04:00

It's been a long slog, and I interrupted it to read Jon Krakauer's Eiger Dreams, but I am pleased to report that, only a few decades late, I have finally finished The Fellowship of the Ring.

The Fellowship of the Ring scores points for its contrasting heroic archetypes. First there's diminutive Frodo, a kind and good hobbit. When fate thrusts the terrifying role of Ring Bearer upon him, he finds solace in duty, friendship, and perseverance. He suffers without complaint both physically and emotionally, trudging on despite wounds or weather, although--because he's a tender, sensitive type--he is likely to swoon, shiver uncontrollably, sleep fitfully, or faint before the day or night is out.

Frodo's heroic foil is Aragorn. Aragorn has a lineal suffix surname ("son of Arathorn"), but he prefers to go by "Strider" and assorted other one-word nicknames when he is out and about because he finds the accompanying anonymity useful. He bathes in invigorating streams of testosterone every morning so that he always smells of virility even when he's travel worn. He is tall, handsome, wise, knowledgeable, trained in herbal healing arts, capable of carrying hobbits through head-high snow drifts, poetic, musical, contemplative, vigilant, efficient, and modest. He looks just as good in rustic earth tones as in shimmering green elvenwear. Protector and guide, he inspires trust and is (literally) a born leader. He doesn't faint.

There are three semi-prominent female characters in the book, and all of them have names, so that's some improvement over The Hobbit. The first is the river spirit Goldberry, wife of Tom Bombadil, whose job it is to look inspiringly pretty and to laugh with a sonorous tinkle. She and Tom appear early on in the book, when Tolkien was still writing a children's story instead of a profound fantasy epic for adults. The second female is the elf Arwen, whose job it is to sit still and quietly in Rivendell and be breathtakingly beautiful. As the only quiet, unmarried, breathtakingly beautiful female in the book, she is a suitable beloved for Aragorn, who is so strong and silent that he can mention her only obliquely and only to elves. The third female is the wise elf ruler, the Lady Galadriel. She's poised, elegant, wise, and magical, not to mention inspiringly beautiful.

As for the story's action, my favorite part of the book was when arrogant Boromir tried to persuade Frodo to yield the ring; the charged dialog and plot twist were very dramatic, and they occurred only a few pages from the end of the book, which made the reading all the more rewarding. Thereafter, I immediately commenced The Two Towers and was impressed with the speed with which Tolkien dispatched Boromir. Nowhere else, not even in tragic opera, has a character so promptly kicked the bucket in payment for his sins.

DT-MSH/TC

2010-07-10T14:58:00.003-04:00

Holes accomplished. Classic Koosh Ball included for scale only; will not be bisqued with Klein Bottle.

Hole hero

2010-07-09T14:41:00.002-04:00

Tony Marsh knows how to drill holes.

Cutting edge

2010-07-08T20:43:00.008-04:00

I told myself "No More Holes." But then another voice in my head said "Aww, for old time's sake." Thus I find myself immersed in making a Double-Torus Klein Bottle with Total Hole Coverage.

Last time around, I made several Single Sized Hole/Total Coverage models (item number DT-SSH/TC in my as-yet-unwritten mail-order Klein Bottle catalog), and several Multiple Sized Hole/Partial Coverage models (DT-MSH/PC). This one's going to be the first--and I swear, the last (although really, who am I kidding?)--DT-MSH/TC model. It is going to be the 3D Klein Bottle model to end all Klein Bottle models.

Unless, of course, the weight of the in-progress bottle starts to weaken and then crush one of the toruses along its seam. In an ideal world, my clay toruses wouldn't have seams. As I make them on real-world pottery wheels, however, there's no way to avoid the join.

I know how to successfully repair cracks in leather hard clay, but I have zero experience repairing cracked and dented hole-filled toruses, particularly when I can't access the weak seam because it's on the inside surface. I did my best, levering out the dent with a wooden skewer, scoring and slipping and filling in the cracks, and re-piercing the holes, after which I turned to the internet for technical and moral support.

Cliff Stoll's company, ACME Klein Bottle, is the best online reference for anyone considering Klein Bottle manufactury, but it focuses almost exclusively on Pyrex and woolens, and the only references to repairs are for 50-year-old Friden calculators.

When it comes to repairing leather-hard clay Klein Bottles, Google's search engine failed me.

And that's when it hit me: what I'm doing isn't just a bizarre, pitiful waste of time, it's also cutting edge ceramic topological research. No one else on the planet is doing this sort of work--or if they are, they aren't blogging about it. So I shouldn't be surprised that I'm hitting the occasional bump in this never-before-traversed road (although how the road got there in the first place, if no one has ever traversed it, is an interesting question). I guess that makes my work pretty special.

It occurs to me that I haven't posted any photos from the wood firing back in June. Below are two shots of a DT-MSH/PC, a bottle now in a private collection in Wisconsin. It also occurs to me that maybe a bent paperclip is the right tool for accessing that inner seam of my wounded torus, so it's back to the grindstone for me.

I'm not making this up

2010-07-04T20:21:00.009-04:00

"Mama?" says Elias during a quiet moment, "Did you know some kids try to not do what their parents say?"

--"Yeah?" I reply.

"Yeah. But I don't think that's good. I think it's better to listen to parents."

--"Really? How come?"

"Because parents are smarter than kids. Well, not smarter, but parents know more."

I will keep journalistic distance and let this conversation speak for itself, as the gods of Mt. Parenthood frown upon hubris and will toss a thunderbolt at me if I gloat.

Fourth of July hybrid cousin cake

2010-07-04T12:59:00.005-04:00

Today is the Fourth of July, which of course means we're celebrating Stefan's birthday. Germany doesn't give much attention to the occasion, so Stefan appreciates the effort the U.S. puts forth every year.

No birthday would be complete without birthday cake. For Stefan, I usually make a hybrid of assorted cakes, yielding what you might call a cousin to the Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cherry Cake). But while the respectably admirable Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte probably gets picked no later than third for the dodgeball team during recess, and usually lands a solid supporting role in the school musical every spring, the handsome Hybrid Cousin Cake is both team captain and the musical's protagonist, and still manages to get straight As and be so wittily gracious about it all that you have to like him even if you're a little jealous.

Today, the Hybrid Cousin is manifested as a four-layer toasted-almond sponge cake, each layer doused in rum, with raspberry jam and rum-soaked Ranier cherries atop the first and third layers, and Helen's whipped chocolate ganache atop the second layer and frosting the whole cake.

Helen is Stefan's mom. I couldn't remember what proportions to use for the ganache, so I thought, "I'll just call Helen and ask." Of course, there's no better way to flatter and please your mother-in-law than to inquire about a recipe you want to replicate for her golden son.

My own mom did the same thing a few decades back, when she called my dad's mom, Zelda, to ask for her recipe for tongue. Personally, I think one reaps more direct benefit asking about chocolate ganache, but dietary habits have changed since the 1960s. Anyway, family lore says Bubbie Zelda's recipe was to "just put it in a pot with the ingredients" and cook it until it was done.

Helen said basically the same thing about the chocolate ganache: you just put the chocolate and the cream in a pot together and--

"How much chocolate?" I interrupted. "One of the big Milka bars, or one of the small ones?"--(the standard units of chocolate measurement in Germany)--"And how much cream?"

"Oh, I don't remember. Half a liter of cream, and then add the chocolate. Don't use chocolate with anything in it," she added, deftly evading the quantity question, "no nuts or anything like that."

So I winged the proportions: a pint and a half of heavy whipping cream from Maple View Farm in Chapel Hill, and one Swiss dark chocolate bar and two Swiss milk chocolate bars from Whole Foods. Melt, chill, whip.

Incidentally, another way to score points with your German mother-in-law is to make an impressively tall sponge torte. "My cakes never rise that much," she said a few years back, when we were visiting and I made three tortes for a party she was hosting. She nodded with approval at my egg-white-whipping-and-subsequent-gentle-folding abilities. Of course, the wise daughter-in-law knows to simply smile politely and not mention the two extra egg whites she snuck in as backup.

Speaking of uninvited guests...

2010-06-29T09:47:00.003-04:00

Animal Control takes rabies seriously enough that they'll send an officer to your house to pick up the take-out container of bats you've collected. They still haven't notified us about how our own little guy tested, so we're assuming the results were negative, but if we start behaving aggressively and biting people next month, you'll know why.

Seasonal guests

2010-06-29T08:30:00.015-04:00

"Palmetto" is such a pretty word--"palm" so tropical, "etto" so diminutive. Surely it's a lovely thing to sit under the fan-shaped leaves of a palmetto on a warm summer's eve, sipping an ice-cold freshly-squeezed limeade.

By extension, "palmetto bug" sounds pretty too. So genteel, so southern. Nowhere near as disgusting as, say, "common American cockroach." No one would mind a palmetto bug or two dropping by during limeade time, whereas the common American cockroach would be most unwelcome.

In North Carolina, after temps have been in the humid upper 90s for a few weeks, the palmetto bugs come out from wherever they hide during the rest of the year. They come out at night with their friends--the hideously ugly, high-jumping, brown-gray camel crickets, who have proliferated so extensively that their population no longer fits in the crawl space under the house--and they hang out, uninvited, all over the expansive southern front porch, enjoying the relative coolth.

Because we call them "palmetto bugs" and not "foot-long common American cockroaches," when we cross paths outside I stoically sigh, avert my eyes, and pretend they aren't there. But when they come inside and rummage around in our silverware drawer--well, that's just rude. That's when I call for backup.

It turns out palmetto bugs hold the record for "Fastest Running Insect on the Planet," so about half the time, they get away (usually with no more than a spoon or two) before the sole of Stefan's shoe can squash their guts out. When they escape under the microwave oven or clothes dryer, there is little we can do other than move on and hope they close the door behind them when they return to their native habitat. (North Carolinians will tell you palmetto bugs live alone outside, rather than between the walls with hundreds of cousins. Thank goodness.)

The cat earns his keep

2010-06-24T06:10:00.008-04:00

I'm sitting with a clearly proud Homer Wells, purring black cat extraordinaire. In the wee hours, while we were obliviously sleeping, Homer was busy hunting down a bat.

"I got up and saw Homer next to what looked like a large turd, and then the turd moved," explains one witness. "Then Homer tried to pounce on it."

Our cats, fortunately, have had rabies shots. Unfortunately for the bat, the humans in our house have not. Stefan trapped the bat in a plastic container, and I'll drive the ill-fated intruder to Animal Control later this morning to be tested.

Magnolias

2010-06-23T17:32:00.005-04:00

I've been remiss by not including magnolias in my chronicle of North Carolina spring blossoms. Here is a picture of my friend Di with a magnolia grandiflora flower that, when fully open, will be almost as big as her head.

Magnolia blossoms are so big, in fact, and the trees so tall, that one gets the sense that they were around when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Indeed, a little googling suggests roughly 30 million years of prehistoric overlap.

Lilies

2010-06-23T12:26:00.006-04:00

About five years ago, I traded a friend a large soda-fired porcelain pear for some flowers. He was living out in the country and said he had access to an abundance of wild heirloom day lilies. He came over one afternoon, dug some holes in the ledge along our driveway, and put in about eight leafy plants, all to my brown-thumbed awe.

The lilies have gradually filled in the empty spaces, and the entire ledge is now bursting at the seams with their green foliage and (as of yesterday) bright orange blossoms. Last summer the plants apparently decided they needed even more room: we're finding lilies in assorted random places this year--along the front stoop, in the weeds on the west side of the house, amidst the tiny violets in the back yard--the fiery southern cousins of Miss Rumphius's purple, blue, and rose-colored lupines.

Stefan's brain

2010-06-22T22:41:00.006-04:00

Stefan had an MRI this morning. His doctor wanted to make sure the ringing Stefan was hearing in his ears last month was due to having slammed into a lake while wind surfing rather than due to anything neurological. The final diagnosis: a damaged (now healing) ear drum.

We're out a few hundred bucks, but we have some swell images of the inside of Stefan's head. I always knew he had a beautiful brain, but it's nice to have some visual proof, since people always tell me I'm biased when I say my husband is gorgeous. There are some pretty creepy images in the mix too. In all, I think it was a wise evolutionary choice to cover all this stuff up with skin and fur.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2010-06-22T17:43:00.014-04:00

Happy birthday to Elias, our sunny summer solstice boy.

Before Elias was born, Stefan and I made a list of potential boy and girl names. We compared each name's English and German pronunciations. Stefan, for example, liked Leonhard (LEH-n-hardt), but I wasn't a fan of Leonard (LEN-rrd). We had settled on the name Daniel (DAHN-i-el/DaaN-yul) until the night before Elias's due date, when we realized whatever name we chose would be his forever. We revisited our list and returned the very first name we had written down: Elias, chosen for Mendelssohn's oratorio, Elijah (a piece that was written in German but premiered in English). In our frenzied state, we forgot that while the entire rest of the planet pronounces the name as Eh-LEE-us, in the United States, it's Eh-LYE-us. Or (in the post Elian Gonzales age) EH-lee-us. Oh well. It was so difficult for the adults at Elias's first daycare to pronounce his name that they dubbed him E-man, a nickname that has stuck to this day.

Our midsummer lad is proud to know his name derives from that of the Greek sun god, Helios. Indeed, there's a narrative connection between Helios and Elias--the prophet Elijah--as both traversed the heavens in flaming chariots.

This morning, Elias stuck Abbey Road into his CD player and soon started singing along: "I'd like to be [dooh-dooh-dooh] under the sea, in an octopus's garden in the shade." There are few things cuter than overhearing your nine-year-old getting down with the classics. Then he sang along with "Here Comes the Sun"--a good song for an Elias, that's for sure.

Senators and grammars

2010-06-22T17:13:00.008-04:00

When Elias was born, nine years and one day ago today, we called my parents and told my mother she was a senator again. She first became a senator when my brother became a father. He had asked her what she wanted his children to call her. She was thinking of words like grandmom, grandma, granny, etc. and said she didn't really care, so he decided to call her senator.

For better or for worse, senator didn't stick when Elias came along. For us, she became Grammar Jean.

Grammar Jean and Gramper (by extension) Hiram are visiting us this week. Thus it is that we get to hear poetry from Walt Kelly's Pogo, which my mother committed to memory in her earliest youth and is inspired to recite as occasions demand.

"Do you herd sheep?" my gra[mmar] said;
My grandpa leapt in fright.
"That grammar's wrong to me!" he cried.
"'Have you heard sheep?' is right."

Lots o' pots

2010-06-17T20:26:00.005-04:00

We unloaded the wood kiln this afternoon, and the results were among the best I've ever experienced at Cedar Creek, with excellent flashing and carbon trapping and good soda distribution throughout. One likes to imagine that the extreme heat, humidity, and rain helped. Even the pots in the bottom front (persistently the coolest spot of the kiln) and on and in the bag wall (which had collapsed during the firing preceding ours and had to be rebuilt last week) turned out nicely.

And yet...the time has come to start fantasizing about building a plain old soda kiln closer to home--something smaller, cleaner, and less labor-intensive than wood. Of course, at the rate I fantasize, it could take a while...

Möbius strip joke

2010-06-16T21:21:00.020-04:00

I was at Claymakers last week, gently chiseling bisqued clay goobers out of the holes of one of my Klein bottles before glazing it, when a gentleman asked me what a Klein bottle was. I explained that it is basically what you get when you sew two Möbius strips together.

After we talked topology, he said:

"Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?"*

I thought the best answer was "KABLOOIE!" (the sound of a brain self-destructing when faced with the oxymoronic contradiction of anything getting to the other side of a Möbius strip), but he said "to get to the same side," which is almost as good.

Other interesting questions are why a chicken is on a Möbius strip in the first place, and what happens to it once it reaches the same side. According to Frederick Winsor, author of The Space Child's Mother Goose, animals don't necessarily do well in Möbius environments:

Flappity, Floppity, Flip!
The Mouse on the Möbius Strip.
The Strip revolved,
The Mouse dissolved
In a chronodimensional skip.**

Incidentally, in Winsor's world, my high flying chicken*** might have enjoyed a happier ending:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
At three o'clock, he had his great fall.
The King set the Time Machine back to two.
Now Humpty's unscrambled and good as new.**

*And to think that we hadn't talked about chickens at all!

**The Space Child's Mother Goose, verses by Frederick Winsor, illustrations by Marian Parry (1958; first paperback edition, 1963).

***Consider the amazing power of punctuation: compare a high, flying chicken to a high-flying one. You won't find this example in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss (2004).

Hotter than hot

2010-06-14T16:12:00.014-04:00

Here's what the wood kiln at Cedar Creek looked like on Saturday before we bricked the door. Remarkably (though not unusually), we got all but one of our pots into the kiln.

Laura and Lisa started firing at 5am Sunday morning. By the time I arrived at 12:30pm, Teresa, Di, and Rob were also there, cranking up the heat. Lisa and Laura headed home, Deb arrived shortly thereafter, and we fired until 6:30pm--13.5 hours total to get the kiln up to cone 9, +/-.

Di and I started planning this firing on a cold, rainy day in February, considering possible weekends in April, May, and June. It's hard to remember, in February, quite how stinking hot and humid it can be in North Carolina in June. Sunday was about 97^oF in the shade, and we added wood and raked coals until the kiln was ~2300^oF. We all wore long pants, long-sleeved shirts, leather welder's gloves, and closed shoes to protect our skin from the heat.

Thus it was that I learned about the powerful magic of otherwise cloying sports drinks. We all became liquid processing plants, converting a steady intake of water and Gatorade into several gallons of sweat. We froze wet towels to wrap around our necks, and found occasional brief respite in front of an AC unit in a nearby studio workspace. I know I have a tendency to exaggerate, but I think we were lucky that no one keeled over.

Around 4pm, a thunderstorm suddenly blew in. Never has a change in the weather been more welcome in the entire history of humankind.

Despite the heat, it was still mostly fun, as hard work with industrious goal-oriented friends tends to be. Plus the misery of excessive temperatures fades in the cool air-conditioned comfort of the next day.

Stay tuned: we unload the kiln on Thursday.

Mental Hygiene Anti-Drug Movies: A Reminiscence

2010-06-12T18:47:00.017-04:00

Back in the days when I was an impressionable young teenager who watched tons of television, I saw a show starring Helen Hunt and Doug McKeon called Desperate Lives (1982). "Who's killing young kids with drugs and crime?" asks the tagline. You know these teens are headed for a bad ending when Helen Hunt jumps through the second-story glass window of her high school right after her boyfriend successfully pressures her to try LSD. You can't trust drugs--not even once--and you can't trust boys either.

Desperate Lives was one of several mental hygiene made-for-television films that came out before and during the "just-say-no" era. Who could forget Scott Baio as high school hockey star Buff Sanders in The Boy Who Drank Too Much (1980)? "He's 15. A star athlete. And an alcoholic." Or Robbie Benson as a sensitive and confused teenager who turns to drugs in The Death of Richie (1977). You didn't even have to watch the whole thing to know he was doomed. Both of these films also starred Lance Kerwin, who had a successful run playing a string of blond "The Good Boy" characters. You could trust Lance Kerwin.

I thought of Desperate Lives this afternoon because, as we were loading the wood kiln, one of my Loafer's Glory chickens fell from a ware board and crashed onto the bricks below. It broke into pieces, and its eggs fell out. Always the optimist, my friend Dianne said, "well, she had a good life, and then she decided she would fly!" Di did a joyful little balletic leap to illustrate her point. But I know that when clay chickens think they're flying, they're really just high, like Doug McKeon and his girlfriend at the end of Desperate Lives. The wayward teens are driving and smooching (no! no! Don't take your eyes off the road! Rule #1 in Drivers' Ed!) while high (no! no! Don't do drugs and drive! Never mentioned explicitly in my Drivers' Ed class, but it's surely a stupid thing to do!), and they go flying off a rocky California cliff. "Wheeee!" they shout happily, thinking it's way cool to sail above the scrub, but then gravity kicks in, and when Doug McKeon, in his hospital bed, learns that his girlfriend died, he goes insane and has to be tied down. So I prefer to think the chicken just fell.

Race for the Cure

2010-06-12T18:12:00.003-04:00

This morning I got up pre-dawn and drove down to Raleigh with a friend for the 7am Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure competitive 5K. I learned that it's much easier to run with a few thousand people who are mostly running than with 20,000 people who are mostly walking, so even though I'm not really a pre-dawn person, I will probably stick with the competitive 5K next year rather than going back to the recreational 5K.

Celebrating BC, CB, TS, and LF, and missing LC and JF.

That's more like it...

2010-06-09T16:24:00.004-04:00

...other than the middle cone tipping over.