First Radio Piece

A very exciting day for me--I just completed my first radio piece. It is a bit amateur because my interview tapes were not clean and I am not very good with sound level editing. However, I am pleased with it. I’m not sure if this is the usual pace of audio file production or if I am just suffering from beginner’s pokiness, but it took me probably 11 hours of taping, logging, writing, and sound editing to produce a whopping 2 minutes of sound!

Click on this mp3 link to hear the radio piece.

Rest in Peace, Sweet Otto-Spot

Dearest Otto,

We’ll miss you sweet pup. I haven’t gotten to spend much time with you in the last half of your life, but I have some very fond memories of the first half. You were the cutest little teddy bear of a puppy. It must have been the chow in you, but I remember thinking that it was impossible for you to be any cuter. And when you were older, you were the best guard dog a scaredy-cat girl could ever have. I never felt afraid of the murder-rapists with you in the house. You were a very special dog and will always claim a sacred place in the dog-loving parts of my heart (which grow bigger every day).

love,
your old roomie

P.S. to my readers:

I’ve had many a run-in with my own dogs in which I’ve thought, “Why couldn’t you be more like Otto, who doesn’t chew up my things and doesn’t chase cats and is very tidy about his poo habits!?” I know, it’s bad to say that to a little innocent animal, but hopefully dogs don’t understand English and therefore are not traumatized by this kind of out-loud thinking. As dog owners, we get to choose which habits we work on and which we let slide, so really, I know that it’s my fault my dogs are cat-terrorists. Cosmo, my fat orange cat, got along better with Otto than any other dog I have known--in particular my own.

I do remember that once, when I was living with Otto, we had a strange homeless girl living on our couch, I can’t remember why, and Otto got into her stash of chocolate bars, cigarettes, and marijuana. (Apparently, though residentially challenged, her life wasn’t so bad.) Despite the rumor that chocolate kills canines, Otto just seemed a little out of it that evening, thank goodness, and the whole incident turned out to be humorous. In fact, I remember that this feat of gastric strength always seemed to impress college guys who heard the story, I don’t know why. I wish I could think of a more-flattering and less-bizarre vignette from Otto’s little doggie life, but alas, only the extraordinary comes to mind at the moment. I hope that Otto forgives my weakness in the memory department.

This is not Otto, but it reminds of him as a puppy:

[Image from: http://community.webshots.com/photo/81561892/1090212776033696810zfVgrb]

Good Vibrations

Another unusual day of good weather led to my sitting with the dogs on a street bench in Cambridge, while Scott shopped for art supplies. I felt a subtle rumbling under my seat, which at first I thought was an earthquake. Do we get seismic activity up here?! But then I realized that it must be the subway. How funny it is to live in a large city and experience such sensations, which are so quotidian to everyone else but novel to me. The same thing is still true of snow. Every once in a while I will be walking down the street, laboring through mountainous snowdrifts and accidentally skating on slick patches of black ice, and I’ll think, “I live here--in a city where snow is boring and people don’t think that the subway is an exotic urban adventure!” How long before it is no longer unfamiliar?

[Image from: http://www.hibblenradio.com/transportation.html]

The Digital Trojan Horse--Revealed!

My latest assignment for my Science Magazine class will be on the infamous Sony rootkit, an evil piece of digital rights management software that Sony has snuck into many CDs to keep consumers from making and sharing mp3s of the music they just legally bought. It’s basically a newfangled pirate catcher. An unfortunate side effect of this music industry giant infecting your computer is that this tricky piece of code cannot be removed from your machine without permanently damaging the security of your computer. I’m excited because I found out accidentally through my daily trawling on boingboing.net that some respectable academic types, two computer scientists from Princeton, are writing an intellectual paper on the whole debacle. I will hopefully be able to interview them and write a pretty compelling piece on the whole controversy. It’s nice to get some technical expertise to backup one’s conspiratorial paranoiac fantasies. Plus, because there seems to be very little high-profile reporting on this topic, as far as I can tell, I might be getting to do some real-world investigating--very exciting!

[Image from: http://www.albany.edu/cetl/about/studios.html]

Ambience

As part of my Advanced Public Radio class…Wait, I have to stop and tell you about this awesome class! It is like a dream come true that such a class exists and I get to take it. My weekly homework assignment is to listen to at least 7 hours of public radio each week, including Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, Science Friday, This American Life, Marketplace, and BBC World. I also add Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk, just because they are quality shows. Then, we talk about these shows and how to produce them. I have to write and produce five mini stories over the semester. This is exactly what I want to do! It is quite difficult getting to know the equipment and software alone. But, it is also a whole new world of thinking about things from a sound perspective and retraining your ear (and mouth) for radio interviewing. So, getting back to what this blog entry is about…For class, I had to make a recording of ambient noise in some setting and then produce a 2 minute radio piece that immerses the listener in that scene.

I chose as my scene an exhibit at the Museum of Science that includes this crazy Rube-Goldberg-device-like audio-kinetic sculpture. The title of the sculpture is Archimedean Excogitation and it was done by an artist named George Rhodes. I think I’ve seen his work at an airport somewhere, but I’m not sure. Basically, it is a bunch of billiard balls racing around on metal tracks and bonking into things that make noise or cause gears and doodads to move. It was quite captivating. Children seemed to be especially fascinated with it. Parents would sit down next to the sculpture to take a break from a long day of museum exploration and let their children run around and look at the sculpture. But, then when mom and dad thought the break should be over, they’d find that their kids did not want to leave! They were completely transfixed by the sculpture and did not want to go see any of the other exhibits. We’re talking exhibits that include dinosaur bones, live hatchings of baby chicks, monkeys swinging on vines, and robots doing all sorts of things--all of these exhibits were as dull as dirt compared to this 20-year-old sculpture. How funny is that? As soon as I get the radio piece made, I’ll see if I can’t post an mp3 of it on this site.

Here are some pics I snagged from the artist’s site and a fan’s site:

[Image from: http://www.georgerhoads.com/Monumental.html]

[Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/troybthompson/tags/ma/page4/]

Prophet Feynman

I had a spiritual moment while watching a documentary about Richard Feynman, a physicist and mathematician who won the Nobel prize for something called quantum electrodynamics. Quantum electrodynamics is some sort of fancy math that allows you to describe the behavior of anything with an electric charge or electromagnetic force (atomic particles, light waves, etc.). Anyway, it appears that Feynman was a bit of a dirty old man, if my interpretation of the documentary is correct. He spent a lot of time in topless bars, covering cardboard coasters, paper napkins, placemats, and other scraps of paper with schizophrenic-like pencil scrawls: mathematics equations, physics diagrams, and “fine art” sketches of the nude women who worked there and the male patrons who were entertained by them. In spite of his iffy personal habits, it is clear that he was truly a genius.

The above-mentioned spiritual moment occurred when one of his students and close friends described his take on the afterlife. He said that Feynman didn’t believe in an afterlife, except in the idea that you live on in people’s memories of you. Thus, if you do good or important things, you leave a piece of yourself with your survivors, and you shape their lives in good or important ways. The same is true with bad things, except, of course, these bad acts leave an evil legacy. I’ve always held this very belief, and there was something very relieving about having a genius confirm one’s personal theories about spirituality and life philosophy. Also, it was very moving and beautiful to hear this straight from the mouth of a weeping physics nerd.

Richard P. Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)
[Image from: http://www.improbable.com/projects/hair/hair-club002.html]

Cold Snap

Alas, the real winter is back. I woke up this morning to the chill of a northeastern January in my poorly insulated apartment. This last week in Boston, we had a bit of an Indian summer. Upon returning from the gorgeous Austin weather, I was expecting the harsh Boston winter I had left but, in fact, was treated to a bit of a warm spell here. I mean, I could actually go outside in just a sweater or maybe even one of my autumn jackets--oh joy! To think that only six months ago, I would have found even that kind of 60-degree weather miserably cold. Little did I know what I was in for. I hate winter! The only thing that will take some of the edge off is that I finally bought some winter clothes: several cute sweaters and some snuggly snow boots. These delights will probably get me through next week and then it will be back to my new vice: moping and shivering.

[Image from: www.hillsrain.com/Weather_Station/Events/2005/01-feb/]

New Life Dream

The weird part about moving is when you go back and visit your old town. The new town seems like some sort of dream, less real. You can’t remember the names of people you spent every day with, and you keep thinking that you will soon wake up to staring at your old light fixtures. Every time I go back to Austin, I want to go to my old house. I keep thinking that I should be able to go through my old garden and pick my tomatoes. It’s not my house anymore, but it feels more like home than my new apartment. Posted below is the last basket of veggies and herbs that I picked from my old garden. [Sigh.] The growing season and Boston doesn’t start for some time.

Potty Training

Speaking of nieces, mine is getting potty trained. So cute! She gets a single Skittle as a reward for every time she goes pee and washes her hands. Apparently, this is a doctor-prescribed incentive plan, and boy does it work. Each time she earns a Skittle, she cherishes it for over ten minutes, clutching it, running around with it, presenting it to everyone periodically, and shouting with glee, “My candy!” It is quite darling to see happiness in its purest form. In fact, it’s infectious. I kind of wanted a Skittle myself after watching her go to the bathroom, receive her rewards, and perform her victory lap four times in the course of two hours.

Her mother, my sister, says that a side effect of the potty training process is that she is also learning fraud. After the Skittle has been eaten and its inebriating effects have worn off, she states, “I need to go potty,” and then for clarity, “I want candy.” Then, she insists that she go to the bathroom alone. Her wily parents are not fooled and say that she must have a witness to her feat, which frustrates the budding con artist. Yet, she usually manages to squeeze out some proof. She’s pretty talented, my niece!

[Image from: www.shopping3000.com/toys2/?product=2667979]

How Exactly Do You Know My Dad?

My little sister, who is six years old, asked me today, “Are you my daddy’s sister?” My dad and I assured her no, but she didn’t stick around for the explanation. No doubt, after a flurry of family functions this holiday, in which aunts, grandparents, and half-siblings were visiting my dad, she can now recognize when an adult has a familiar and familial relationship with my dad. She’s just trying to figure out which kind. Later, she also asked if I was a teenager, and then still later, she asked my dad if brothers and sisters could marry. These are all excellent questions! I mean, even I have trouble sorting out my relationship with her because, in many important ways, we are not very sisterly. Yes, we share the same father, which means genetically we are half siblings. Also, as adults with the same father having raised us, albeit during very different eras in his life, we will likely have some things in common in our backgrounds. But, other than that, she really is more like a niece to me.

[Image from: www.shempcompany.com/ll_scrapbook.html]

Sperm Shopping

Two friends of mine, a gay couple, have decided to get pregnant. I am so excited! I love it when my friends have babies. For one thing, I am too chicken to have one myself right now, so getting a bit of vicarious motherhood from my friends’ and sister’s experience is truly precious. Of course, with family members, it makes sense to get a bit parental with a newborn that is not your own. But, even with a friend’s baby I feel keenly a sense of community ownership of the child, which hopefully is some sort of universal evolutionary programming, because otherwise it is just grounds for a restraining order. These ladies have opted for using a sperm donor--a fascinating process! They get to pick the biological father of their child by looking at height, weight, family health records, personal essays, staff impressions, SAT scores, job resume, and even a toddler picture. Looking through the 3-ring binder of their final picks of potential bio-pops, it’s hard not to get caught up in the shopping frenzy. And, they chose well. All these gents seem smart, healthy, cute, and friendly--all characteristics you’d hope for in a genetic parent. However, every so often, while pouring over the donor profiles with an obsession similar to that of a swooning teenager reading her high-school yearbook, you get a niggling sense of how, no matter which donor is chosen, you will love the resulting baby and “Aren’t all these things superficial, anyway?” But then, you think, “Well, this is the only choosing the moms get to do at this stage, so the most responsible thing is to make the best decisions they can.” Once the baby is here, there will be significantly less emphasis on the sperm donor issue, but at this stage it is hard not to be engrossed by it.

As if preparing for a baby wasn’t pricy enough, purchasing “shots” of sperm is quite expensive, further justifying the idea of being overly picky. As a straight woman who hasn’t yet explored fertility issues, I can perhaps get away with being this naïve, but who knew that sperm were such a hot commodity?! I mean, an aliquot less than a quarter teaspoon costs hundreds of dollars. Considering many people have access to significantly more than that on a regular basis (I need not go into the naughty details), it shocks me that these sperm banks can charge so much. I hope that this seemingly exorbitant price is explained by the services that accompany the costly sperm samples, such as quality screening of donors, effective insurance, legal safety nets, and health counseling for the potential parents, because otherwise, it is a racket!

[Image from: www.crystalinks.com/spermdonor.html]

Lube Job / Day Care

I went to get an oil change for my car yesterday at Jiffy Lube. I was sitting in the waiting room which has giant windows on two sides to let you monitor the lube situation as you wait in air-conditioned comfort. (By the way, Texas is currently experiencing a glorious mid-winter heat wave with highs in the upper 70s--Oh joy!) Oddly, there was a toddler who was also waiting with me. He had no adult escort as far as I could tell, but there were no other cars in the bay, so I could assume only that he was the son of one of the employees. This assumption was confirmed by the dark oil stains on the bottom of his pudgy feet, which could only have obtained that hue from toddling through the lube station all day. He was a real cutie and alternated giving me shy, flirty smiles and coyly playing with a cell phone (his cell phone?). Soon, his father, who was in fact one of the mechanics, came and retrieved the little tyke and proceeded to play with him near my car.

I was making a few calls when suddenly I heard a baby crying. This wailing seemed a little too young for the toddler, who I hadn’t heard reenter the waiting room anyway. How mysterious. It took me about 30 seconds to discover the source of the distress--an infant in her little car carrier, precariously balanced on top of a printer, on top of a shelf, on top of the desk, behind the counter! I’d been there for 20 minutes, in a room that was no larger than 10 feet by 10 feet and did not previously detect her presence. Mr. LubeGuyDaddyDaycare did not notice that the babe was in distress, but I didn’t want to upset her further by going behind the counter and trying to calmer her. I mean, I was both a customer and a stranger, so my being behind the counter would be considered inappropriate. But, then so would gabbing on a cell phone and not attending to a wee baby’s cries. What does one do in that situation? As weird as it is to keep your kid on your work desk like a discarded three-ring binder, I decided the dad would be the best source of comfort, so I stuck my head out of the door and let out a loud “ahem.” Mr. LGDD came running to quiet her and took her out to the bay to finish my Subaru. What an odd juxtaposition: a clean, pink-cheeked 3-month-old in the oily hands of a mechanic who dangled her over my car’s engine while tightening the radiator cap. I couldn’t help but wonder what horrible circumstances led this poor man to opt to take care of two children while finishing up his work shift. And was it safe? It’s such a weird idea, babies at the lube station, that I can’t imagine that whatever board of health or better business bureau or child protective services would even have a rule against it. Plus, he seemed to have everything under control so I certainly couldn’t judge him. And, my Subaru now purrs like a kitten.

[Image from: http://bongo.www8.50megs.com/oil_change.htm]

Football Fever Has Infected My Mom

I got to Texas today, where I am visiting my family and some friends. I had heard that last night there was some big football game, and I think I knew that Texas was involved, but today, I have discovered that this was a VERY BIG DEAL to Texans, particularly Austinites. There is a great hullabaloo here. It’s funny, when I lived here, I would keep track of the UT games and made a point of attending one or two every season, but I guess it wasn’t a true interest of mine, because once I left Texas I forgot all about football. My mom picked me up from the airport wearing an orange spirit pin celebrating UT’s victory at the Rose Bowl. She informed me that it was a very close and exciting game with many Heisman winners and hopefuls displaying their athletic prowess. And, of course, we won.

My mother hinted a couple of times that she would like to go take pictures of the UT tower, which this week is lit up in burnt orange glory with a number 1 in honor of the team’s victory. I decided that a little nighttime walk on UT campus with my mom wouldn’t be such a bad way to spend the evening even if I didn’t fully understand the need to document this not uncommon architectural illumination event. I mean, it seems they are lighting up this tower at least once a month for something.

When we got to campus, I was shocked to find that there were hundreds of people with my mother’s same exact goal of taking pictures of the tower. There were three TV news vans to cover the occasion and hordes of families taking turns getting their picture taken, all wearing burnt orange t-shirts and looking pleased at their success. My mother (and everyone else) had to take a couple of shots of the tower from at least three different angles. The only things missing were cotton candy and t-shirt salesman, but I found out later when we went to the grocery store that HEB had the latter covered.

Shmolder Pads

My sister and I went shopping at our favorite 2nd-run and cheap clothing stores the other day. We noticed that the 80's look has finally hit H&M, Old Navy, and the like. I thought it was weird when the 70's came back in style, but at least youngsters like myself had never really worn those kinds of clothes during the actual 70's. (Well actually, I had worn the bell bottoms and double-striped knee socks when I was a kid, but they were hand-me-downs by the time I got them. By then, it was the 80's, and they were horribly out of style once my older sister and brother were through with them.) Anyway, we were trying to figure out why anyone would want to bring back the 80's. I mean, these stores are actually selling balloon dresses! Do you remember balloon dresses?! They were ridiculous--but now they are back on the racks. I have yet to see it, but we'll know they've really sunk when they start bringing out the superfluous shoulder pad. I will laugh the day that I again see knit shirts with shoulder pads sewn into them. Shoulder pads were just wrong. It's one thing to give a little form to your blazer with some spiffy pads, but it's another thing entirely to walk around looking as if a missing pair of socks have static clung to the inside of your favorite t-shirt. I *never* wore shoulder pads. I always cut them out of my shirts. In fact, until this evening, I had forgotten what it was like to occasionally ruin a shirt by accident because the shoulder pads you were trying desperately to remove were sewn in too well. What were these people thinking?! Can't we learn from the past? Many solid casuals were destroyed in the name of making women look like mini line backers. It was not worth it. Mr. and Mrs. Gap-Express-Banana-Republic, puh-lease, I beg you. Do not bring back the women's wear shoulder pad!

[Image from: www.fiftiesweb.com/fashion/fashion-we.htm]

Great X-mas Deflations

Scott asked the other day whether I thought that Christmas is a depressing holiday because people just have too many expectations, and they can’t help but get disappointed by something. There seems to be some unfortunate truth to this theory. As a fan of Christmas, I regret to admit this to Scott, who is only annoyed by the behemoth holiday. I think that Christmas is a problem for me because the traditions and rituals that I expect rely on the coordination of too many people and rely on me having a solid week of vacation for making things. Even when I try to condense Christmas into a few manageable factors, I still have a lengthy list. The bare minimum Christmas for me is the following:

1. Buying about four gifts and receiving at least one--keeping it to just a few means you can actually enjoy the brainstorming process of finding the perfect thing for someone.
2. Exchanging stockings with at least one person--it’s fun because this includes buying weird/cheap items, which one never gets to do because it is wasteful (e. g. yucky sushi-shaped hard candy, fake eyelashes, novelty pens), and it involves buying a variety of candies and gorging on half of them. (What else am I supposed to do with them? The stockings are never large enough.)
3. Making refrigerator cookies--this is my absolute favorite part of the holiday, especially deciding which new flavor to make this year.
4. Making a Christmas ornament--when else are hastily glued-together glitter and construction paper crafts admired by anyone after you graduate from 3rd grade?
5. Having a Christmas tree--they smell great and I love watching a sappy movie while stringing up yards and yards of popcorn and cranberry garlands.
6. Cooking something that is overly complicated, like a turkey or a stew that needs multiple hours to simmer
7. Eating a large dinner and feeling physical discomfort
8. Hanging out with family members--especially ones you don’t see very often
9. Getting a little tipsy to take the edge off of being around said family members--essential! I wish I could convince my in-laws of how important this tradition is. Sadly, they are practically tea-totelers.
10. Overindulging on eggnog with brandy--why isn’t this delightful concoction available year round?
11. Seeing multiple movies at crowded movie theaters--okay, I’ll admit that I like doing this any time of year, but Christmas is when most people will agree to do it with me.
12. Singing a couple of Christmas carols--I’ll admit that I like some of them, and I also don’t think that there are enough musical traditions for non-musicians in modern America.

Which of these did I accomplish this year? 1, 2, 6, 7, and 8. Ergo, this year was not a complete failure, but I am feeling a slight aftertaste of dissatisfaction. I might have to let some of these rituals bleed over into my New Year’s festivities to fix the problem.

[Image from: www.polymerclayexpress.com/nov2001.html]

Spatially Challenged

I got totally lost today on the way to the hair salon. The only people who read this blog are people who know me well enough to know that this is NOT NEWS! I get lost all the time. This time was particularly pitiful, because I left the house a full hour ahead of time, printed out two (no fewer!) maps, and had consulted them multiple times the day before, the morning of, and about every 5 minutes during the trip. A lot hinged on this outing, because I needed a haircut badly, I have been looking particularly wooly for at least a month, I was feeling a bit down because of some negative feedback on my schoolwork, and my previous haircut with a new and incompetent stylist was a complete failure. (Those of you who do not allow your hair to rule your psychological and emotional stability may think that last sentence was irrational and unnecessarily wordy, but the rest of us know that it summed up all of my problems quite succinctly and with a tight and fluid line of logical reasoning.) I HAD to get that haircut in order for the month of December to turn out right. However, I was 30 minutes late to the appointment, had to cancel and reschedule, and was forced to waste a couple of hours until the next moment the stylist had available. The cascade of disappointment included getting a blister from walking two extra miles, failing to meet a deadline for work that day, wasting an additional 20 bucks on lunch in a shee-shee shopping district near the salon, discovering that there were items of clothing that I could never afford (such as $23 pairs of badass socks), and sobbing hysterically on a stump while passersby and people in parked cars looked away politely.

Was it worth it? Yes, I love my haircut.

Now that I no longer live in Austin, I am discovering how bizarre of a handicap this is--my incredibly bad sense of direction. I really can read a map. But, for some reason, when I look at a map with the intention of going from one point on the map to another, I lose the ability to make connections between the symbolic representation of space and real-time geometry. Also, to make matters worse, I can’t tell my right from my left, I have to use a mnemonic device to remember which direction is east or west, and I have a poor memory for business names. For example, I can remember that there is a fast food restaurant that sells burgers on a corner near my apartment, but I can’t remember whether it is McDonalds or Burger King. Also, my spatial memory is shoddy.

The only fun part of living in a new city for me, is making friends who don’t know that I am completely unreliable when it comes to getting from place to place. They start rattling off directions and saying, “Great, we’ll meet at this place at such and such time, right?” completely confident that I am a normal person who will have little trouble following their directions. Little do they know that I am a complete imbecile. I wonder how long I can keep up this charade.

[Image from: www.biblehelp.org/whatsay.htm]

Verbosity

It's official. I use too many words when I write. This semester, we had a 700 word limit on our weekly science newswriting papers, and I would always spend only 2 or 3 hours writing them and then at least 1 hour trying to shave them down from 786 to exactly 700 words. Last night, I turned in my final for my science magazine class and the word count was supposed to be 1200-1800 words. I wrote 1950. I couldn't trim it down, because I ran out of time. It's a damn fine paper on planetary science and the struggle between scientists and lay people over the importance to classifying solar system objects as planets, but hey, I'm a failure because I can't be succinct.

Next semester, my goal will be to be brief. Maybe I'll read some Hemmingway in preparation. Maybe I'll write what I should have written for this blog:

I write too much.

Go see King Kong.

Molly like.

[Image from: http://nutter.net/dana/humor/joke.asp?r=605&lang=en]

Bread Baggage

It snowed today, a few inches. Scott asked me if I had any boots. The moment that I replied "no," a long-forgotten childhood memory suddenly log jammed my brain. When I was little and we visited my grandma's in Indiana for Christmas, we never had snow boots. It didn't make sense for us to have them for just one trip up north each year. So, my mom used to have us double up on the socks and then wear bread bags over the socks and then our usual tennis shoes over the bags. I think there might have been some rubber bands around the ankles, too, but I'm not so sure about that detail. It was the 80s, so of course, to cover up the bizarre practice of wearing bread bags on our feet, we wore leg warmers. This noisy solution to the problem of lacking snow boots kept our toes warm and dry while we went sledding, though I can't imagine what the neighbors and my cousins thought. (Probably thought, gee, how many sandwiches did this family of five kids have to eat to get ten bread bags?)

Then, I remembered another thing about bread bags. (How many traumatizing memories about bread bags can I dig up from one childhood? The answer, my friend, is many!) My parents also used to save the bread bags because they were so handy for lunches and leftovers. But for some reason, my dad wasn't satisfied with reusing them just once. No, he had to breathe more life into each square foot of that plastic than was ever inhaled by the original organisms that decayed to form the petroleum byproduct that makes up the bag. He would reuse the bread bag and then, if they were still remotely clean, he'd put them back in a drawer, which we called The Bag Drawer. This drawer was stuffed full of years' worth of bread bags, so that you had to do a quick little stuff-slam-yank-your-hand-away maneuver to close the thing without bags exploding out like a jack in the box. He'd reuse these bags so many times, that the plastic or maybe the printing on the bags would start to disintegrate. They were all sticky, and I think that their stickiness was infectious, so a new bag would get sticky from residing in such close proximity with the ancient bags. I also think he might have put them in the washing machine, but perhaps this is only an exaggeration that my mind has accepted as real. I remember that I hated those sticky bags so much that I would hide new bags around the house for my own personal use. That way, I could pack my lunch in a brand new reused bread bag.

By the way, my family ate only Roman Meal brand wheat bread. This is exactly what the bags looked like:

[Image from: http://www.romanmeal.com/]

Volcanoes and Planets

This past week I have been interviewing dozens of volcanologists and astronomers for my two final papers in my science journalism classes. One paper is on an Antarctic volcano that is injecting burning hot lava underneath a frozen ice sheet. The other paper is on the red-hot debate over the classification of newly discovered celestial objects—that is, how astronomers are having to redefine the word “planet” to keep tiny oddball Pluto in with the Big Nine and exclude all these massive new guys that they keep finding.

With these two seemingly opposite topics juxtaposed artificially through a hectic school schedule, I hadn’t anticipated that I would discover two important ways that volcanology and astronomy are related. I mean, in addition to the fact that they are both Earth/planetary sciences.

For one, astronomers and volcanologists both like to hang out on or near volcanoes. That’s right, most every one of these guys and gals are located in Hawaii. Volcanologists like to work within an easy distance of a volcano for obvious reasons. However, astronomers also dig volcanoes as sights for their observatories. Apparently, the telescopes get better images when located at higher altitudes, which have a thinner atmosphere and therefore have fewer pesky air molecules blocking and scattering the light from distant stars. Higher altitudes can be achieved on, you guessed it, pointy volcano summits.

The other commonality is less of a coincidence: Some astronomers study volcanoes on other planets. Why is this so cool? I can’t tell you for certain. Perhaps it has something to do with the sisterly feeling I get from knowing that another alien planet has similar blemishes on its surface. One guy I spoke with uses heat-detecting satellites to study both Earthly and Martian volcanoes. Awesome!

[Image from http://www.digitalmedia.cz/3dsoftware/show.asp?nid=128]

True Love

I saw the new Pride and Prejudice flick the other day with some ladies from my department. Actually, I'll go ahead and out myself. First we watched the 5 hour and ten minute BBC version and then made a mad dash to the movie theater (It was like a scene out of Burn Out 3!) to see the Keira Knightly version that just came out. The new movie was pretty good, though I was a bit Jane Austen'ed out by the end of the 8 hour affair.

One scene in particular moved me more than any other. In this scene, Elizabeth Bennett is in bed with her sister Jane. The warm lamplight illuminates the cozy tent they've made with the sheets. They are giggling and whispering about the dance they had just attended, in which Jane had met her new crush Mr. Bingley, a handsome man of good fortune and potential husband. (I know, I know, this description is perhaps putting a final nail in the coffin for any hipster persona I could have glued together from bits of coolness in my life. Hey, I'm a sucker for 18th and 19th century literature.) Anyway, my point is that this scene was so authentic I wanted to cry. It captured perfectly the pure delight and bathing warmth you feel when you love your sister and the two of you are completely in agreement over the importance and loveliness of some trivial event. I have two sisters and many times have we played out this very scene.

I think that you can achieve this kind of love with people who are not your siblings, but the physical comfort is hard to attain with a non-family-member. Even lovers and partners, who probably find themselves in bed together more often and more naturally than siblings, have an entire dimension of complicating emotions (good and bad) that would ruin or preclude this kind of intimate moment.