Updates: politics, penguins, pets, and personae

Were he still living, "Aged Reader" would be sending me the occasional nudge to blog. Alas, he is not and does not, so I have been negligent about keeping things current. Some updates are in order, and I believe Aged Reader would be appalled by some and proud of others.

Generally, I try to keep this space apolitical, because I have three different professional personas to project/protect (musician, potter, writing teacher), and sometimes people actually read what I write here. Today I throw caution to the wind. As I type, I am listening the News & Observer's live-stream video of protesters at the NCGA, where state Republicans are showing the world that they believe in neither democracy nor due process. Shame on these power-hungry connivers for their years of self-interested sneak attacks and subterfuge, and for this particularly egregious disregard for the people of this state. The ends do not justify the means; appearances and process matter. Shame. Shame. Shame. We'll see you in court.

How does one shift topics from appalling political transformations to more mundane things like pottery and pets? Well. You can see why it has been hard to blog this year. Stepping up to the plate to aid in the switch: a community-building environmental-activism local-to-international art project.

Much of what could have been blogging energy this year was redirected to The Potters' Penguin Project, with updates posted semi-regularly at www.facebook.com/potterspenguinproject. I've inventoried 1,627 of 1,700+ birds to date--each one different, each one with its own personality (penguinality?), each one made by hand by one (or sometimes two or three) of 250+ makers. Most of our penguins originated in the NC Triangle area, but we've received birds from as far west as Arizona and as far east as Spain and Germany. The generosity of the makers--kids and adults, amateurs and professionals, friends and strangers, teachers and students--has been stunning and heart-warming, and it's been pretty spectacular seeing each penguin up close.

This would be a logical point to insert an image of the Far Side cartoon with the sea of black-and-white penguins, where one penguin in the distance is exuberantly singing "I gotta be me, oh I just gotta be me!!"--except that Gary Larson posted an online letter in 2008 asking people not to re-post his cartoons. That letter is reproduced here; the original source is no longer available, which is evidence either of an expired site or that the request was for an obviously losing battle. The penguin strip is all over the interwebs, of course, as a Google search demonstrates. In any case, my point is that while Gary Larson mocked that singing penguin's sense of special snowflakeness, every penguin in the Potters' Penguin Project colony truly is unique. (Note the placement of the adverb: "truly is unique," not "is truly unique." As I tell students in my writing workshops, unique means "one of a kind," and it doesn't make sense to say something is truly one of a kind, as opposed to only sort of one of a kind. Thus is every penguin, truly, unique.)

Yesterday was the official deadline for penguins to join the colony, so counting incoming birds will be high on my to-do list as 2016 winds to a close. The project will exhibit at Claymakers between January 10 and February 11, 2017, and in April/May, a contingent of penguins will represent the colony at the Greensboro Science Center (where one can see real live endangered African penguins up close).

From penguins to pets....Patient readers might recall that we adopted a new cat in April following the death of Homer Wells. FindusBabyCatBiteyBeauDrJekyllandMrHyde has become a little less bitey than he was in April, but he remains edgy and vigilant--vigilant not in the protective way of Miss Maggie B., nor the professional on-duty way of Schroeder, but rather in a psychotic way that suggests he knows the world cannot be trusted, no matter how much kibble you feed him or how many times you let him in or out or in or out or in or out the back door onto the porch. He doesn't like being touched unless he initiates the contact, but he's an expert at sucking up to strangers--the talent that suckered us into adopting him. Last week, he destroyed three handmade mugs and tried climbing inside the piano twice. Here is a video of him in jail, followed by some photos of him at his finest.

Schroeder, meanwhile, has given up playing fetch. We lost Preferred Carrot shortly after Homer died. Schroeder will gift us with other finger puppets, but he has no interest in retrieving them if we throw them down the stairs. Instead, he has turned his attention to a life-sized stuffed kitty toy that he carries by its neck up and down the stairs. When we go to bed at night, he brings it into bed with us and humps it. When we wake up in the morning, he humps it again, and when we go downstairs, he brings it downstairs. Occasionally, he tries feeding it by dropping it next to--or in--his food dish. In the evening, when we sit on the sofa in front of the fireplace, he retrieves his plush toy, jumps onto the sofa with it, and humps it. His obsession is all the more remarkable because the plush toy is big enough to obscure his line of sight: Schroeder jumps from floor to bed/sofa without seeing where he's going, and he has yet to miss his mark (although sometimes he'll land on FindusBabyCatBiteyBeauDrJekyllandMrHyde). He purrs a lot, seems happy, is a genius, and is neutered, so we set aside our prudishness and let him have at it.

In other news, alter ego Robo Revenger has returned. Robo Revenger responds to spam callers so they have less time to call you, dear readers. This fall, Robo Revenger spent a good ten minutes talking with pseudo-Mikrosofft scammers phishing from the Indian subcontinent. I managed to capture most of the conversation in a video recording (see below). The first 1.5 minutes are excellent; my high school classmates might enjoy the reference to Four Square just past 1:00. I'm also partial to the two minutes starting ~3:10. The first "f*&% you" is ~5:22. The stuff about how to count desktop icons ~5:35-7:03 is fabulous, yielding a nice stream of "f*&%-yous" ~7:04. The part from 7:00 to the end demonstrates how to remain chipper and polite in the face of adversity. Really, the whole thing is a Robo Revenger tour-de-force.

A week later, the Mikrosofft phishers phoned back. Robo Revenger had barely gotten out the video camera and started misleading the callers when a real live human knocked on the door. Robo Revenger asked the spammers to please call back in ten minutes--and they did! Add that to your toolbox, people, and remember to always use your superpowers for good. (And if you really care about preventing spam calls, add your voice to the chorus at the Consumers Union.)

Green Dinosaur Taquito

When Schroeder first moved in with us in 2012, it didn't take him long to fall in love with Hand-Knit Green Dinosaur Finger Puppet. His affair is documented here, here, and here.

That summer, Schroeder lost Green Dinosaur. After an appropriate period of consternation, his affections turned to Hand-Knit Carrot--tentatively at first, and then with growing devotion.

When Carrot subsequently disappeared, Schroeder was again agitated. We learned that you can't just replace one carrot with another; cats have standards. My mom knitted us two new carrots, and after holding out for the return of First Carrot for a few weeks, Schroeder finally gave up and latched onto one of the new ones.

Having suffered through two lost kitty cozies, we now know to search the house when Preferred Carrot disappears; we've successfully kept track of it for over a year. We thank my mom for knitting a supply of spares to keep on hand, and we always keep at least two carrots in the kitty-toy cycle--Preferred Carrot and Carrot-In-Training. We've tried other finger puppets, but Schroeder will not play fetch with them (although we'll sometimes wake up to a collection of puppet rejects--Blue Dolphin, Green Frog, and Unfavored Carrot--scattered around S's shoes in our bedroom).

In February, following the Great Purge, as we were prepping the study walls for painting, S found Green Dinosaur behind a radiator, covered with dust bunnies. Schroeder was in heaven. Preferred Carrot had been fine, but Green Dinosaur was his first love.

It did not take Schroeder long to love Green Dinosaur nearly to death, pulling stuffing out of a growing hole in its belly and unknotting the yellow stripe of yarn on its back.

I pushed the stuffing back in and sewed the hole closed with a piece of green thread. The surgery gave Green Dinosaur a curled up fetal look, but Schroeder didn't care.

The repair job held up through another month of loving, during which Schroeder ripped open two more large holes. Green Dinosaur was a few strands of yarn away from decapitation and needed more than my limited skills could offer. I called on my friend N, a knitter, for aid.

Two days later, N had worked her magic. She said she couldn't knit Green Dinosaur back together, so she made it a tiny tube of a sweater instead: Green Dinosaur Taquito. Schroeder sniffed Taquito's head and tail, puzzled but intrigued, as though recalling sweet memories of a distant dinosaur dream. We have high hopes that the love affair will continue.

Green Dinosaur died,

Came back as a taquito:

New life through knitting.

Cat lessons

Blazing amber 

kitty eyes-- 

behind them, 

sentiments so wise: 

"The sun has set, 

the crickets chirp, 

now is the time 

to get to work! 

You humans need 

to learn a lesson 

beyond this

legislative session. 

There are still 

bigger fish to fry, 

more important 

things to try!" 

If Schroeder could 

but English speak, 

he'd say to us, 

"Let go your pique! 

Stop surfing 

NC politics! 

Forget th' impending 

'pocalypse! 

The situation 

may seem dire, 

but focus, focus: 

aspire higher!" 

He drops a fuzzwad 

at our feet, 

meows forcefully, 

"get off your seat! 

Now learn a skill 

with real merit: 

I'll teach you how 

to fetch a carrot!"

Morning routine

Four exciting minutes of Schroeder playing fetch with the carrot my mom knitted for him.

Tracking prey

According to Wikipedia, "Persistence hunting is a hunting technique in which hunters use a combination of running and tracking to pursue prey to the point of exhaustion. While humans can sweat to reduce body heat, their quadrupedal prey would need to slow from a gallop in order to pant....Persistence hunting requires endurance running–running many miles for extended periods of time. Among primates, endurance running is only seen in humans, and persistence hunting is thought to have been one of the earliest forms of human hunting, having evolved 2 million years ago."

In his bestselling book, Born to Run, Christopher McDougall argues that human feet evolved to support this type of endurance running. Forget those fancy over-engineered supportive sneakers: people can run longer and farther and with fewer injuries if they run barefoot. S and I have both bought into this reasoning; we've ditched our Asics and spend most of our travel time in minimalist Merrills and Stems.

I was thinking about this last night, as I listened to Schroeder pant. Perhaps prehistoric Man persistence-hunted Felis silvestris lybica into domestication; or perhaps prehistoric Woman simply tossed a few hand-knit carrot finger puppets into the Savannah, and Felis silvestris catus was born.

Unbridled talent

Proof that if you practice long enough with a hand-knit green dinosaur finger puppet, you can achieve great things. Note that Schroeder displays an artistic eye and an appreciation of parallel lines. Good kitty.

The new bedtime routine

I thought curiosity was going to kill the cat, but instead it looks like curiosity is just going to break a lot of my pottery. Suffice it to say that I have never before heard a crash like the one young Schroeder produced in the kitchen yesterday. Farewell, nearly perfect green cereal bowl; alas, we hardly knew thee.

Fortunately, the finger puppet dinosaur is a good distraction for all of us. If we can't keep Schroeder out of trouble, maybe at least we can tucker him out playing fetch. We suspect he might have been a dog in a former life, but the jury is out on whether he was a very very good dog or a very very naughty dog, and on whether coming back as a cat is a step up or a step down.

Introducing Schroeder

After sweet Miss Maggie B died on December 2, Homer Wells became very needy. He started following us everywhere: into the bathroom to brush our teeth, into the bedroom to get dressed, downstairs for breakfast, upstairs to find a jacket, back downstairs to look for keys, into the kitchen to unload the dishwasher, to the front door to zip up a backpack, to the computer to check email, and on and on. Thus, after an appropriate period of mourning, we decided to alleviate Homer's neediness, and we brought home Schroeder, a 10-month-old pound cat who spent most of his formative kitten-brain-development months in a cage. It turns out that when you release a cooped up adolescent cat with ear mites into a 1850-square-foot house, he does a lot of frenetic, wild-eyed bouncing off the walls, 24/7. Needless to say, Homer is no longer needy; "resigned" is more like it (to his mature and patient credit).

Schroeder was so bouncy--and bitey--that for awhile, I thought we'd chosen the wrong cat. Two events this week helped him finally calm down: a second round of ear-mite pesticide at the vet's, and the discovery, high up on that dresser he finally managed to bounce onto, of a green and yellow hand-knit mama-and-baby-dinosaur finger puppet. Schroeder has spent the last three days killing that finger puppet over and over again, and when it comes back to life, day or night, he's ready to do whatever it takes to kill it once more. Half an hour after we go to bed, he leaps from the floor, lands half an inch from the only two precious eyeballs I possess, and proudly dumps the finger puppet on my cheek. Over and over again. "You've made the right choice," says his heroic and self-assured posture, as he impatiently awaits our praise.

Miss Maggie B was a dutiful cat. For the nine and a half years she lived with us, she guarded E every night as he fell asleep, after which she'd come back downstairs, relax with a glass of red wine, and get back to the hard work of looking ravishingly beautiful and begging for canned food. It turns out Schroeder has taken on some household responsibilities as well. In addition to boldly killing finger puppets, he routinely knocks the cover off the shower drain, snakes a paw down as far as he can reach, and ruffles around a bit, until he retrieves all the hair and accumulated gunk we hadn't known we were missing. Thankfully, he doesn't leap into bed with it and drop it on my face. Homer, now that I think about it, hasn't ever had a regular job, unless you count training us to carry him into the bathroom when he needs to poop (at which he has been quite successful--but then, we're pretty motivated students). Perhaps the right of Top Cat, which Maggie was and Schroeder now is, is the consequence of a solid work ethic.

Clay B.S. grinder

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.

Kitty geek toy

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.