Can’t We All Just … ?

By: | January 14, 2014

shutterstock_133354313 (1)Recently, based on the well-established if-Netflix-made-it-then-it-must-be-awesome principle, I have been watching the show Lillehammer. (This principle is firmly based in the orange-is-the-new-black correlate, the house-of-cards theorem, and the Derek postulate).

Like all the Netflix shows, it’s pretty good. But unlike some, it’s only pretty good. It’s about a New York wise guy who ends up in Norway playing fish-out-of-water and wolf-among-sheep. I mean, the acting’s bad, the script is weak, and the characters are a little flat. But there is still an undeniable charm about the show related to its simmering rage about Norwegian culture.

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The Golden Notebooks: An Awards Show for Us

By: | January 13, 2014
The AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards in 2015, perhaps?
The AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards in 2015, perhaps?

Dear TV Executives:

I hear you’re desperate to get people to watch your channels in real time these days. Apparently I’m not the only one who waits for everything to come out on Netflix. As a result, I heard on NPR yesterday, you’re televising more and more shows that people prefer to watch live, like award shows. It’s not just the Grammies and the Oscars anymore. NBC is reviving the American Comedy Awards. The Hallmark Channel has the Hero Dog Awards, of all things.

Let me propose to you an untapped source of live events: science writing awards. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 11, 2014

January 6 – 10

7279453194_a55d2cd46c_zThis week, Ann told the story of the first hero. She’s a girl, a Sumerian goddress, and she predates all the archetypes of what either heroes or girls should be.

The internet told Christie where home is.

Are you glad you don’t have to hear Christmas music for another year? Helen says you’ll change your mind when you hear the kind they sing in English pubs.

How did cavemen get comfortable: by sitting on logs or squatting? Marital spats at Cassie’s house sure are interesting.

And Roberta tries mushroom ice cream.

You Don’t Know Squat

By: | January 10, 2014

neanderthalThe argument began, like so many arguments do, at the dinner table. My husband and I had been away for the holidays, and a few nights on an unfamiliar mattress had thrown my back into paroxysms of pain. I found this fact troubling. How is that swapping one plush, spring-loaded mattress for another could cause me so much anguish? “How did cavemen, who lacked every modern comfort, survive?” I wondered. [A cavewoman my age would probably be thinking about dying. But let’s pretend we’re discussing a younger, spryer cavewoman.]

“They were probably just used to hard surfaces,” my husband said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And they were more physically active. They weren’t sitting all the time like we do. They did a lot of squatting.” Continue reading →

The Hidden Carols of England

By: | January 9, 2014

While Shepherds Watched

People have been singing Christmas carols in the pubs in villages around Sheffield, in the north of England, for hundreds of years. They sing week after week and year after year. Each pub has a season; in one, Christmas carols start on November 11 and continue until the first Sunday after Christmas. Every Sunday afternoon, people pack into a pub and sing together.

On Tuesday folklorist Ian Russell gave a lecture at the Library of Congress about his work on what he calls the “hidden” carols of northern England, particularly those Sheffield pubs. Russell is the director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He’s been studying folk traditions in South Yorkshire—which includes Sheffield—and North Derbyshire for 40 years.

A pub carol sing isn’t a religious occasion. It’s secular caroling. There’s beer. Sure, they sing about the Messiah’s birth and Mary and so on, but the point of being there, Russell says, is the community. People go out of a sense of commitment to the group and to the tradition. You do it every year because you do it every year.

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A mushroom that smells like maple syrup

By: | January 8, 2014

Candy cap mushroomOn a Saturday afternoon visit to an ice cream parlour, I saw a flavour that looked absolutely disgusting: mushroom. Feeling unadventurous, I ordered chocolate instead. But my husband went for the mushroom, and it was delicious.

“It tastes like waffles,” the server told us. The ice cream was pale yellow, with a flavour more complex than vanilla and more mellow than butter pecan. I ended up stealing several bites from my husband.

The mushroom variety is the candy cap, renowned for its pungent maple syrup-like aroma when dried. Some people have compared the scent to butterscotch, fenugreek, or curry. One baker raved that it made her apartment smell like maple glazed donut bars and cinnamon. Continue reading →

How an internet quiz put me in my place

By: | January 7, 2014

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I am from nowhere.

Until my husband told me this — stated it as a fact, like “it’s raining” or “the sky is blue” — I’d never had a truthful answer to a question that has always given me pause: where are you from?

“You’re from nowhere,” Dave said. His words hit me like a punch in the gut. He’d meant it as a joke, a clever way of stating the obvious. To him, my lack of roots was a sterile fact. To me, it was a gnawing wound, a loneliness I could never shake.

As an Air Force brat, I moved every few years. Before settling in Colorado, I had lived in three countries and more than a dozen towns. I was born in Texas, but we moved on before I formed a single memory of the place. My earliest recollection is of landing at a military base in Greenland and wondering who would give that name to such an icy place. I remember the swing set outside my kindergarten classroom near the Air Force Academy and the blue swimming pool in Phoenix that summer before we moved overseas, but the first place that feels anything like mine is a tiny village in West Germany—a town where I’m now a stranger, in a country that no longer exists. Continue reading →

The First Hero: A Girl

By: | January 6, 2014

A couple of weeks ago, Michelle subverted the established cultural order by adopting her five-year old’s suggestion that Bilbo Baggins was a girl.  Most people applauded but some gnashed their teeth: don’t second-guess literature, they said, and if Bilbo is a hero and heroes are boys, then so be it.  But I have prior and inside knowledge of this very issue and will hereby share it.

7279453194_a55d2cd46c_zAshtoreth, Astarte, Ishtar, Inanna – a good first line for a poem.  They’re different names for the same ancient Near Eastern goddess.  Inanna is Sumerian and the oldest, five or six thousand years old, as old as writing itself when it was made by reeds in soft clay, and maybe older.  Inanna was the first of the great Campbellian heroes with a thousand faces – from Theseus and Orpheus, to Dante, to the hobbits Baggins and Luke Skywalker – who had a quest and went to the underworld, helped by divine and inhuman companions, and who returned.  In short, Michelle’s five-year old was right:  the first Bilbo Baggins was a girl. Continue reading →