On the Menu

By: | June 5, 2014

4766947609_a36bd98aaa_zA local restaurant reviewer has a monthly feature in which he lists openings and closings of eateries around town. The list only contains the restaurants’ names and addresses, which always seems especially stark when it comes to the places that have shut their doors.

It’s the culinary equivalent of a gravestone. There’s nothing about the buckwheat crepe with fava beans and goat cheese, or the martini with habanero-infused vodka, or the truffle-stuffed chicken—or the people you remember sharing these things with you. Continue reading →

Why I Won’t Watch California Chrome Race on Saturday

By: | June 4, 2014
The author’s former horse, Dancing Plume, nicknamed “Natalie”

We haven’t had a Triple Crown winner in 36 years, since a horse named Affirmed won in 1978.  This year, there’s a lot of buzz around a chestnut colt named California Chrome. He’s already won the Kentucky Derby and The Preakness, and word is he has a good chance to win Saturday’s mile-and-one-half Belmont Stakes, one of 12 horses slated to run.

I know that the horses are gorgeous; I’ve loved horses all of my life. The pageantry of thoroughbred racing at this level is hard to resist, and California Chrome is already getting rock star treatment, with video of his arrival at Belmont Park in New York, journalists in tow. The gleaming horses, the racing silks, the landscaped  racetracks varnish over a sport with an ugly underbelly that’s been lost in the pre-race excitement.

I bought my first horse, named Hank, not long after college, when I finally had an income. I wanted to learn to jump and eventually go to horse shows (which are another abusive environment because owners and trainers of show horses can be just as abusive as the owners and trainers of racehorses). At the time, I couldn’t afford anything fancy, but Hank and I did well together. My second horse was a chestnut thoroughbred mare that I bought “off the track,” an expression for horses that don’t succeed in a racing career. Her registered name was Dancing Plume (she was nicknamed Natalie) and she had good bloodlines: She was the great granddaughter of Native Dancer, perhaps not a household name outside of horse racing but a talented horse who only lost one race, the Kentucky Derby in 1953. He was also a prolific sire whose offspring were top racehorses.

Continue reading →

Exoplanet Oliver, Oh Please?

By: | June 3, 2014

kep16edgewise-full_0I was interviewing an astronomer for a story about planets outside our solar system, extrasolar planets. Exoplanets have names like Kepler-11 e, or HD 106906 b, or HAT-P-54b. (Googling those names will get you some satisfyingly weird planets and in fact, most exoplanets are satisfyingly weird.  I mean, 51 Peg b is 150 times more massive than Earth and is so close to its star, its year is four days.)  Anyway, I found I needed to ask the astronomer whether he had trouble keeping all those names straight. “Sometimes I do,” he said, “not always.”

“Shouldn’t those exoplanets have real names?” I said.

“There’s a fuddy-duddy International Astronomical Union that gets worked up and forms committees to name things,” he said.

And well they might.  Left to their own devices, astronomers just name things up one side and down the other:  51 Peg b is also called TYC 1717-02193-1 b, IRAS 22550+2030 b, BD+19 5036 b, HIP 113357 b, HR 8729 b, GJ 882 b, HD 217014 b, 2MASS J22572795+2046077 b, and SAO 90896 b.

Wouldn’t it be easier if they just called it, say, Lucille?  When we care about something, don’t we name it? Continue reading →

Astronaut, Heal Thyself

By: | June 2, 2014

Nutrition4The manned craft negotiates entry into the thin Martian atmosphere and lands in some sort of ingenious fashion in the three-eighths gravity. This is it. My generation’s very own “One small step for a human” moment. Real live people are inside, ready to hop out and get to work. The fifteen-minutes-delayed camera feed zooms in on the door, which opens,

…the door opens, I said.

…hang on, where is she?

Oh there she is, lying like a useless lump in her seat, smiling weakly.

“Recovery, anecdotally, it’s day for day,” says former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who spent 215 straight days on the ISS. “So for a seven-month mission, it takes the same amount of time to feel normal.”

When you first return to gravity, your blood volume is 10% lower than normal, and your vestibular system has become uncoupled from gravity, so you walk around like a drunk person for a day or two. You might be able to drive again after about two weeks, but pervasive fatigue lasts a long time — months. When the first humans arrive in the partial gravity of Mars, they won’t be bursting out of their spacecraft ready to explore. It may require months of recovery before they are able to work. We’ve learned a lot about health in space, but there remain some major unknowns for a manned mission to Mars. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 31, 2014

DSC_0062 May 26-30, 2014

I have been in the back of a London taxicab in the small hours with Sally, and after what seemed like days of nausea-inducing back-alley turns I loudly suggested we might be faster just taking a main road. This was met with scorn and derision from said co-blogger. Now I know why.

When Craig goes artifact hunting he takes only photos and leaves only footprints. No digging. No holding. No taking. Tell no one. Having attached our affections to an indigenous seed jar, he leaves us on a cruel, cruel cliffhanger.

Also this week, Christie honors the American holiday of Memorial Day and Abstruse Goose points out that aliens whose home star is Vega are currently watching Seinfeld.  And finally, Cassie discovers her parenting style through the experience of crate training a puppy, using an ingenious stuffed toy with an artificial heartbeat.

Snuggle Puppy’s Tell-Tale Heart

By: | May 30, 2014

 

DSC_0017In late March, my husband and I decided to adopt a puppy. We had our hearts set on a black lab mutt, and I had found the perfect one. All puppies make me go weak in the knees. But this one was a real looker — speckled paws, cockeyed ears, and seal-pup eyes.  As she snuggled into my lap on the long car ride home, I looked over at my husband and sighed. I was in puppy heaven.

A week later we were in puppy hell. The dog hadn’t taken to being in a kennel the way we hoped she would. At night she made ear-shattering noises that sounded like human screams. And then she would howl, and then yowl, and then cry, and then bark. She tried every noise in her puppy arsenal. Even earplugs couldn’t muffle the sounds of her discontent. So we suffered . . . sleepless night after sleepless night. Continue reading →

Redux: The Knowledge

By: | May 29, 2014

 This first ran on Nov. 18, 2011, before Sally took indefinite leave.  We just know you’re missing her so here’s the next best, the redux Sally.

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A transatlantic phone call ended badly the other day. “You can just turn left at the next light,” I heard my friend tell the New York cab driver over a crackly 3500-mile connection from London. After some muffled but dramatic escalation, she was back. “Can I call you back?” she said. “I just got kicked out of a taxi.”

The trouble was that the driver wasn’t familiar with the destination (“even though it’s the middle of Brooklyn!” she yells) and refused her street-by-street directions. “No, no, just get out,” he mumbled, refusing to make eye contact or budge the car.

I had just found out about The Knowledge, so it was hard for me to resist being sanctimonious: this would never happen in London. Continue reading →

Confessions of an Artifact Hunter

By: | May 28, 2014

Maze-Walker

I once found a beautiful pot, an ancient red seed jar tucked beneath a boulder in the desert. By ancient, I mean pre-Columbian, probably 800 years old. It was hidden along the rubble-choked slope of a canyon in Southeast Utah. The way it was placed, seated in shade and red blow-sand next to a once hand-polished metate, you could tell someone put it there to keep it safe, not to be seen or worn away by the weather, probably planning to return for it. The return never happened.

I used to walk for weeks at a time looking for things like this, diamonds in the deep country, what is left of archaeology after more than a century of the general pillaging of artifacts, culprits ranging from museum expeditions to black market pothunters. My solution is leaving objects where I find them. It’s certainly not everyone’s solution, but it is mine. I wrote a book on the dilemma, “Finders Keepers.”

Upon finding this seed jar, I spent hours peering into the shadowed underside of its tilted, protective boulder. I reached out from time to time to touch the slowly decaying ceramic finish, as did my friend who was with me for the discovery.

My friend wanted it moved, not to take it home, but to get it into an even more protected space. I said no, insisting it remain exactly where we found it. The debate continued intractably into the next day. We’ve got rules about this kind of thing. Continue reading →