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.

Killing two gee whiz pots with one stone

On Thursday, in the middle of an otherwise mundane afternoon, as I was walking from Point A to Point B, my potter's mind was struck by a sudden flash of inspiration. I'm hoping that by stating my idea in a public forum, witnessed by you five or so regular readers and the occasional visiting spammer who leaves comments of an inappropriate nature in Chinese hanzi that I subsequently have to delete, I will be more likely to make it a reality.

But first, some necessary background information. The photo above shows a small portion of "Dr. Lizardo's Museum of Gee Whiz Pots (being various works of a functional, semi-functional, impractical, or nonsensical nature)."

Exhibit 1 is a model of a Möbius strip--relatively mundane. The items in Exhibit 2 are more exotic: "We're 3-dimensional models of Klein Bottles—representations of 4-dimensional non-orientable manifolds," reads the Museum Guidebook. "We’re what you get when you sew the edges of two mirror-image Möbius Strips together. You can get from our outsides to our insides without crossing any edges—meaning our outside and inside are on the same surface. If we were actually 4-D, we’d have zero-volume; being 3-D, we have volume and make handy m&m and red-hots holders."

The Museum exhibit is scattered at present: all of the Klein Bottles have been dispersed to good homes, and all of the red hots and m&ms, if not already consumed, are inedibly stale by now. So it is clearly time for me to make some new Klein Bottles, even though they're labor intensive and relatively useless.

At the same time, as I have written previously, I am somewhat obsessed with the impractical habit of drilling holes in pots whenever the opportunity presents itself. I have some lovely, very large (9 pounds untrimmed) bowls in the works over at Claymakers right now. They're made from Loafer's Glory clay--a silky smooth white clay that's more forgiving than porcelain--and I'm fantasizing about bringing them home and staying up all night poking holes in them. But then they'd no longer make good mixing bowls, which is what they were born to be. And while the hole punching usually yields interesting results, interesting isn't always a good thing. Consider, for example, the bizarre could-have-been-a-vase thing shown here. We use it occasionally for votive candles, but since I wasn't thinking of candles when I made it, I didn't provide any easy way to get a match inside. Plus, who really needs a giant glowing first-trimester votive candle holder?

So my stroke of genius is this: why not kill two impractical birds with one stone? That is, why not make a Klein Bottle that's full of holes? Imagine being able to see the m&ms on the inside (which is also the outside) from the outside (which is also the inside). I don't know about you, but I find this idea pretty thrilling. I anticipate the hole punching will be easiest if I make a Klein Bottle of the less complicated double torus variety, as seen in the Hitchhiker's Guide model above. I plan to document my progress--if such a thing as "progress" can conceivably be associated with a project like this--in future installments of this blog, so stay tuned.

Therapy

There is something bizarrely gratifying about poking holes in leather-hard pots. The process is meditative, requires little thought, and rewards the poker with clear evidence of progress. But it's addictive. You can't "stop anytime."

Your inner Freud nods and writes copious notes about you in his little book as you pierce the virgin surface of the clay. Now you're committed for the long haul. You want more: a single hole is not enough; it requires companion holes.

You used to want to stop before going all the way. You used to say "just one more hole, the next hole will be the last." But it never worked: you always kept going, finding catharsis in the repetition, in the light that begins to shine through the wall, in the weight the pot is shedding. So you don't pretend this time. The passing minutes pile up: half an hour; an hour; an hour and a half. Poof. Gone.

And then, suddenly, it's over: there's no more space to poke.

Now you have a pot that is (if such a thing is possible) filled with holes. It used to be a bowl or a vase, but now it will never hold water. What were you thinking?

I have lots of hole-filled pots, so this time I planned ahead and made a double-walled bowl. It is half full (or half empty) of holes and it will still hold water. Or maybe guacamole, because I decided the bowl needed tilting in addition to having holes, and guac is less likely to slosh out onto the table than water.

For a sense of scale, compare the bowl to the annoying bifocals resting on the table.