Sounds of Summer

By: | September 1, 2014

washington national cathedral (with earthquake damage)After my voice lesson Sunday afternoon, I heard bells. Eight bells, ringing on and on. My voice lessons are in the bowels of Washington National Cathedral – a real live Gothic cathedral, hand-carved over the last 107 years by bearded Englishmen, or at least the group included one bearded Englishman who lives in my neighborhood. The cathedral’s tallest tower holds 10 bells known as peal bells, because they’re for playing peals like this one.

Peal bells are used for mathematical playing, not melodic; as the website of the North American Guild of Change Ringers explains, a peal goes through the bells by number, switching the order each time, so a four-bell “method” – apparently the little bits of music are called “methods” – might start like this, where each number is a bell: Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 30, 2014

Groucho_glasses

August 25 – 29, 2014

The week began with a flight of fancy from Richard. Or was it his lived reality? Only YOU can know the truth.

If you never saw a toy robot shape-shifting into a toy vehicle, you might think a movie called Transformers was about this.

Cameron follows her nose up to the International Space Station and down into the ocean in an exploration of smell.

As Nature releases a global map of roadless areas, Michelle celebrates the role of the Wilderness Act in protecting American landscapes from the American automobile.

I recount a key episode in aboriginal history, the 1976 Berger Inquiry about a proposed Mackenzie Valley Gas Pipeline.

The Roads Not Traveled

By: | August 28, 2014

5989809789_6f2f87cb24_zOn September 3, the U.S. Wilderness Act turns 50 years old. The law’s call to protect places “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man” has always been poignant, and our enthusiasm for trammeling seems greater every year. So the Wilderness Act’s half-century mark has occasioned a great deal of handwringing. Does wilderness still exist in any meaningful way? Does it matter?

Yeah, it does. And yeah, of course it does.

Despite the beauty of the law’s language, the Wilderness Act wasn’t conceived by woolly-headed nature fantasists. The people who created and sold the notion of wilderness to the nation in the 1930s knew very well that, in the strictest sense, there was no such thing. Even then, before anyone had discerned the global fingerprints of PCBs or climate change, the founders of the Wilderness Society realized that most places had some history of human habitation; most places had experienced some sort of trammeling. Historian Paul Sutter writes: Continue reading →

Things that Smell

By: | August 27, 2014

640px-Phytoplankton_-_the_foundation_of_the_oceanic_food_chainMy nose has been extra-sensitive lately. I can catch dog food at a hundred paces, both the kitchen and my still-diaper-wearing kids’ bedroom feel like odor minefields, and I have to walk along the lineup of barbecues at the nearby park with my shirt over my face.

It’s a good thing I’m not an astronaut. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Transformers v. 3

By: | August 26, 2014

decepticons_attackI’m pretty sure that a Transformers™ movie came out a few years back, and I’m dead certain that the neighborhood kids regularly call on me to admire their transformable Transformers™ toys.  And I think a Transformers™ movie came out just recently but I don’t know anything about it.  It’s probably all explosive and apocalyptic.  I’m too old for these things, and anyway, if you’ve ever been in the middle of an east coast voltage drop, that’s apocalypse enough for anybody

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http://abstrusegoose.com/309

 

Only I

By: | August 25, 2014

smokey picSmokey Bear Celebrates 70th Birthday and Reminds Americans … “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires”                                 —  Ad Council press release, August 7, 2014

Why me? Why am I the only one who can prevent wildfires?

Forest fires were burden enough. I’ve never even lived near a forest. Yet all my life, there he’s been: “Only you….Only you….Only you.” When I watched those public service commercials as a child, I remember thinking, What’s wrong with my parents, raising someone with my powers in a big city like Chicago? I was Superboy in Smallville, only in reverse. Superboy was killing time until he was old enough to move to Metropolis; I was waiting to relocate to Yosemite. I had to ask myself: What if Superboy had “forgotten” he could stop a speeding locomotive before it reached the crossing where Ma and Pa Kent’s car had stalled? Couldn’t I forget to prevent myself from leaving the stove on and tossing a match through the kitchen window?

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 23, 2014

mint leavesAugust 18 – 22

We reduxed a post by our beloved ex-LWONian, Tom Hayden, about all the shiny new multiplexing gadgets he’s bought and broken.  Turns out the old stupid crap technology? it never breaks, it always works, it stays your friend.

Helen bought an ice cream maker as a present but the recipient of the present moved out and took the ice cream maker along.  Helen does the only possible thing: first makes one last batch of mint-chocolate chip ice cream with real mint that tastes like summer.  Then she considers, Shall I just buy my own ice cream maker?

Guest Adam Ganz, a playwright, wrote a play about the Nobel chemist, Dorothy Hodgkin, and her student, the politician Margaret Thatcher.  The two remained friends; they both saw patterns but opposite ones, and Ganz sees a pattern in their patterns.

Jessa’s grandfather made oil-burning furnaces.  His granddaughter worries about peak oil, fracking, price crashes, economics, and human nature.  She’s not excessively hopeful about any of them, particularly the latter.

Cameron’s California ocean is warm this year, warm enough for unusual ocean life to come close to shore, warm enough for Cameron herself to join them, floating between the salt waves like a sunfish.

 

 

In Warm Water

By: | August 22, 2014

Demont-Breton-la-plageRight now the ocean is glorious. In the evenings, even if the day hasn’t been too hot, you can throw yourself into the saltwater and float between the waves for a while without your teeth chattering.

This is not normal. Continue reading →