Poetic litter? Making a statement? OR fact-checking my graffiti with punctuation

Wasting away again in blogger fact-check land.  Searching for my lost file of art shows.  I could have sworn I saw Millais' "Ophelia" at the National Gallery of Art on my very first trip to D.C. in 1986. This is not a Jimmy Buffett problem.  But it's my own damn fault.  Maybe it was the 1997 trip. I know I walked out of the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit and sat in the East Garden Court stunned at the beauty of the art.

My first reaction to the white flowers at the water line  of the Oak Point lake was not awe at the beauty.  It looked like litter to me.  The long-stemmed roses, lilies, hydrangeas, daisies, and spider mums were evenly spaced, not a bouquet that had floated away.  Placed, not strewn. Wedding?  Funeral?  Pledging ceremony?

A fisherman pondering the flowers asked me, "Do you think someone was making a statement?"  It dawned on me that the couple walking up the trail to the parking lot as I was starting down had seemed very relieved to tell each other, "Well, that's done."  It was done.  But what was it? The rest of the park visitors were left to wonder. Ophelia didn't mention these particular flowers, but they seem to be for remembrance.

Driving out to Oak Point Nature Preserve for my desperately-needed mental health walk, I heard  an NPR review of the new movie, "Contagion" on the radio:


When Elliott Gould, in a cameo as a lone-wolf scientist, launches a zinger at Law -- "Blogging isn't journalism! It's graffiti with punctuation!"


Maybe, but I do try to fact-check!


© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Dirt and taxes

Ben said it so well:

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

I was uncertain if I could find my crumbling 1966 copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations when my internet connection was balking, but there it was on the shelf chuckling about technology and dust into dust.

My worms would gladly consume my Bartlett's, but they are just one arm of my research this evening.  The other is Dad's taxes.  The left worm doesn't know what the right worm is doing.  Nobody seems to remember that there was no exit plan for Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bushy years, just as there's no exit plan for Libya.  But that is a "whole 'nother" puddle of mud.
 

Mr. Franklin was writing a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy  on November 13, 1789.  However wacky our government and judicial system seem on any given day, the Constitution is an amazing gift from some clear-thinking folks.  I'm adding Andrea Wulf's Founding Gardeners:  The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation to my Hopefully Someday Reading List.

I'm still working out the overall points for the summer reading club worm presentation.  I'll need to address the concept of dirt vs. dirty for the 6-12 year olds, so I was interested to read about a filthy museum exhibit in London.

We can't live with it, and we can't live without it.  Dirt is essential.  We can improve dirt with worm composting.  We might need dirt to get through childhood strong and healthy.  We definitely need dirt to grow vegetables.  Without veggies we wouldn't have the strength to deal with Dad's income taxes.

And so the circle of life continues.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Snakes On a Plain

Sometime in the mid-1980's, about the time "Entertainment Tonight", Regis Philbin, Mary Hart, and John Tesh took over the airwaves, I got disgusted with network television. Cable became one long commercial, and PBS became a perpetual pledge drive occasionally interrupted by quality broadcasts. Beta lost the battle with VHS, and the trip to rent videos rarely recouped the aggravation. Finally, the remote husband/channel-surfer became a bad Twin Peaks episode. We won't discuss Howard Stern today, as I'm already feeling as sluggish as a rattler after a prairie dog all-you-can-eat buffet. I tuned out and dropped in, or vice versa.*

Instead of coming home from work and flipping on the tv, I usually take off my shoes, start a load of laundry, check my phone messages and emails. Then I click on a few blog bookmarks. Today I checked in on Prairie Bluestem, and read all about sand adders and other snakes of the Nebraska Sandhills. "Sand adders" calls up an image of an ancient toga-clad mathematician walking down the beach writing geometric proofs with a long stick.

Much as I would like to dilly-dally wondering if Peabody, Sherman, and Captain Peachfuzz ever met this particular sand adder back when tv was worth watching, I must find out about the Chaldean astrologers. A Chaldean was a member of an ancient Semitic people who ruled in Babylonia ... a person versed in occult learning; an astrologer, soothsayer, or sorcerer, according to my precious American Heritage Dictionary. The root word may have a relation to the word caldron, mentally brewing, bubbling and burping during our Wizard camp. Nebuchadnezzar lurks just off stage, too, because of the upcoming Dallas Opera production of Verdi's Nabucco. Dallas artists Tom Orr and Frances Bagley are designing the set and costumes for this new production in honor of Dallas Opera's fiftieth anniversary.



A Washington Post story informs me that most Iraqi Christians are Chaldeans, Eastern-rite Catholics whose church is autonomous from Rome, with its own liturgy and leadership, but recognizes the authority of the pope. Chaldeans trace their lineage to the Babylonian-Mesopotamian nation of Chaldees, where the patriarch Abraham was born. Did you know that? I didn't!

But then, there is the problem of chalcedony. Chalcedony is much more ancient than any mathematician, even my high school pre-Cal teacher. According to the U.S. Geologic Survey:

Chalcedony is a catch all term that includes many well known varieties of cryptocrystalline quartz gemstones. They are found in all 50 States, in many colors and color combinations, and in sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks. Chalcedony includes carnelian, sard, plasma, prase, bloodstone, onyx, sardonyx, chrysoprase, thundereggs, agate, flint, chert, jasper, petrified wood, and petrified dinosaur bone just to name a few of the better known varieties.

Because of its abundance, durability, and beauty, chalcedony was, except for sticks, animal skins, bones, plain rocks, and possibly obsidian, the earliest raw material used by humankind. The earliest recorded use of chalcedony was for projectile points, knives, tools, and containers such as cups and bowls. Early man made weapons and tools from many varieties of chalcedony including agate, agatized coral, flint, jasper, and petrified wood.

*Turn on, tune in and drop out.
Timothy Leary
(1920 - 1996)

Losing my marbles in the cow

A memory can be a dangerous thing to let loose in a parking lot or grocery store to run around unsupervised. This is not the same as a mind being a terrible thing to waste*, nor is it like your toddler climbing out of the grocery cart. It is more like losing your marbles in a cast iron skillet.

I woke up from an afternoon nap remembering attending a Health Expo in Lincoln's Pershing Auditorium with my grade school class or Camp Fire Girls group in about 1965. The highlight of the expo was the cow with the porthole in it's side. Kids would dare each other to go look in the cow's stomach(s), and then go racing down the aisle of human body system plastic models and past the normally popular Resusci Annie. The auditorium was warm and crowded. The grass in a cow's stomach smelled funny. I expected it to be agitating like a load of laundry. A housefly traveled in and out through the window. A nursery song played in my head:

Go in and out the window,
Go in and out the window,
Go in and out the window,
As we have done before.

Go round and round the village,
Go round and round the village,
Go round and round the village,
As we have done before.

Stand and face your partner,
Stand and face your partner,
Stand and face your partner,
As we have done before.

Now shake his hand and leave him,
Now shake his hand and leave him,
Now shake his hand and leave him,
As we have done before.

Given my knack for locking my knees and fainting in the mid-1960s, I'm surprised I stayed upright. Must have been the peer pressure.

Neda Ulaby's report on Friday's "All Things Considered" probably set me off on this tack. It was difficult to ponder the ethical questions surrounding current science museum exhibits of plastinated human cadavers. The Dallas Morning News prints ads for the Houston Museum of Science engagement of Gunter Von Hagen's Body Worlds, the Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. And I thought seeing the Dead Sea Squirrels at Omaha's Joslyn was scary! I admit I had to look up the definitions of flay and flail to get them straight. This kind of info checking takes up my time--time that normal people would spend watching "Dancing With the Stars," I guess.

Yes, dead bodies have been exhibited throughout history. I'm well acquainted with the photo of the shot-up Dalton gang after the Coffeyville raid. I was as fascinated with Egyptian mummies as most kids. I've been haunted this week by a print image I saw in some newspaper of large and small caskets draped with the Lebanese flag, lined up awaiting a mass burial. We are allowed to see these images, but not those of coffins arriving from Iraq draped with the U.S. flag.

Most of us can't hold onto all these images and current events around the clock. It's just too sad and infuriating. We have our everyday lives to lead, whether the fly goes in and out the window or not. If we didn't keep chewing our cud, we'd go crazy. The rhythm of the agitating washer drowns out the ethical questions and moral outrage.

About the same year as the bovine with the ruminal fistula, as cow portholes are known in the agricultural research world, I attended the Cub Scout Expo, also in Pershing Auditorium. My brother's scout den was exhibiting and selling the jewelry it made by frying marbles.

Fried Marbles
NOTE: This is a project that an adult should do FOR the child. The child should watch at a safe distance. This is an old-time activity.

Heat a single layer of marbles in a cast iron skillet on the stove until hot and then drop them in cold water. When you put them in water, you might want to try just a couple at a time in varying degrees of room temperature water to ice cold water.

What Happens
The glass inside the marbles shatters into shards and looks like shimmering crystal.
Why It Works
When glass goes from extreme heat to extreme cold, it cracks from the inside out.

I feel a bit like one of those marbles today, slightly cracked from the inside out. I hope no fifth grade boy picks up a marble and then races across the auditorium to drop it through the cow window. Boys can be like that. They put worms in Resusci Annie's mouth, you know. Then they grow up to be in a Yale secret society, doing pretend rituals with Geronimo's skull.

A 1966 marble is a terrible thing to fry. This is your 1986 brain on decongestants! This is a wasted afternoon in 2006.



*"A mind is a terrible thing to waste" was the excellent public awareness campaign for the United Negro College Fund beginning in 1971. The phrase was mangled by then Vice President Dan Quayle in May of 1989:

What a waste it is to lose one's mind.
Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.
How true that is.

Hansel and Griddish

I've been brainstorming and writing lesson plans related to the theme of maps, so it was funny that I got lost Sunday afternoon. I was driving to the Dallas Arboretum, a place I've been several times over the fifteen years I've lived in Plano. This time, though, I was taking a different route from a different starting point. I was following posted directional signs instead of trusting my gut directional guidance instincts (the low tech GDGI system in my Buick). A sign to turn right from N. Buckner Blvd. onto Garland Rd. was missing, so I went on straight ahead into the unknown territory of East Dallas.

Hoping to get back to where I should have turned, I hung a Ralph on Ferguson Road, the first street name I recognized. Then I hung another Ralph onto East R. L. Thornton Expressway. I've listened to traffic update folks in helicopters for fifteen years without ever linking a place to the highway names.

My goal was to hang another Ralph from R. L. Thornton onto the N. Central Expressway a.k.a. "75" so that I could hang yet another Ralph onto Mockingbird Lane to eventually find the Arboretum on Garland Road. I wasn't thinking at that point about the one hundred thousand plus people headed to the immigration reform rally in downtown Dallas via R. L. Thornton or 75. Big oops!

It was impressive to look down from the elevated interchange and see all the cars and all the gathering marchers dressed in white shirts. Immigration policy is extremely complicated, so I worry that it is being tackled by the current Congress and administration. No amount of grids, maps, and bread crumbs can magically solve this human and economic problem. Maybe I should loan out my Buick's GDGI system.

Dallas freeways frequently have two names, and some have more. It makes those radio morning commute reports slightly poetic and quite distracting. It's a rare traffic update when I can stay focused long enough to hear the conditions on the southbound North Central. When I hear "C. F. Hawn," I think Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In. "Julius Schepps Freeway" always registers as Julia Child's Freeway. "Westbound LBJ" provokes If congested I will not move. If irritated I will not merge. Loop 12's multiple monikers (Northwest Highway, Buckner, Walton Walker Blvd., Ledbetter) are like mental Yahtzee dice spilling out in different combinations, made worse when mixed with Woodall Rodgers , R. L. Thornton, Stemmons, Marvin D. Love, George Bush, Tom Landry, The Tollway, and The Canyon.


You think the High Five is a complicated interchange? Try untangling Marvin Gaye**, Roy Rodgers, Will Rogers, Keebler elves, billy goats, Bear Bryant*, GHWB ralphing on the Japanese prime minister, Thornton Wilder's "Our Town", Hitchcock's "North By Northwest", stamens and pistols, and the untethered punchline to a long forgotten joke, "Would I? Would I?" Julia Childs would add a little more wine to the sauce at this point.

If the radio helicopter lady tells me that traffic is moving slowly through The Canyon, I'll drift into Joni Mitchell memories about big yellow taxis and "Ladies of the Canyon." Thank heaven for the Arboretum in this paved paradise!



Remember, four Ralphs do make one right.

*I get Bear and Tom Landry mixed up. Didn't one of them wear a hat?
**Okay, I get Barry White, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Al Green mixed up when the helicopter lady reports on traffic on 121 in Grapevine.

Teaching

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

Mark van Doren, American writer and educator, 1894-1972

What are we teachers up to? What role are we playing on our best day?

Art provides preschoolers the laboratory for developing essential fine-motor, thinking, and social skills needed in elementary school. It enhances visual awareness and appreciation, individual expression, and creative problem-solving. Through art we have the chance to inspire connections with our world. Preschoolers develop the capacity to observe and wonder at our rich and varied world, and enjoy life in it.

I Meant to Do My Work Today

but Al Gore's Web got in my way...

I've got a song in my head, but the tune in my mind is "I've Got the World On a String". It only took me two searches to figure out that "I've got a song in my head" is not one of the verses to that song. Not bad, really. Under three minutes.

Another two searches to find the poem that doesn't go, "I didn't do my work today..." Another five minutes.

The reason I didn't do my work today was that the song in my head was the theme from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". Admit it. Can't you already hear the opening strings and the vague grunting chant? What is it they are grunting? There must be lyrics somewhere. There must be lyrics, and I must find them, if only to save other poor unfortunates from having this song stuck in their head with no relief. I will spare no effort, leave no Google unchurned!

I first heard the theme in 1967 over the earphone of my transistor radio tuned to the Top Forty-Nine countdown on KLMS. Then a skinny kid named Randy brought his 45 to church, and we played it on the Sunday School gray institutional phonograph. Eventually it became one of the two unofficial theme songs of my junior high youth group, the other being Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love". I know, I know. Not exactly "Onward Christian Soldiers", but there you have it.

I remember being confused in 1967, and thinking that Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66 had something to do with "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". We were just learning about South America, and the music sounds strange enough to derive from some lost tribe up the Amazon. But why were they singing, "Uh wonko, Waco"? What did it mean in their language? Why didn't Sergio Mendes change the name to Brasil 67? Why didn't he spell it with a "z"? And why was the movie in the Sergio Leone Mountains in California?

In 1967 we had the World Almanac, a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and the encyclopedia set from the Safeway grocery store. All other research involved going to a public library. Enquiring minds did not feel it was a black mark on their Googling skills if they couldn't find the lyrics to the song, if the grunts could actually be called lyrics. Enquiring minds needed to finish their math homework so they could go babysit the neighbor kids for thirty-five cents an hour. If they survived three hours of that they could walk to the mall on Saturday to buy a 45 rpm record after they finished digging dandelions and listening to the KLMS countdown.

The Webster's was useful when Mom told us we were being "obnoxious and belligerent". We shaped up a bit, but knew she really loved us. It was vacuuming my brother's room that shortened her patience with us.

Sometime between "obnoxious" and "obstinate", my research obsession got out of control. The subject matter was never a cure for cancer or world peace. It was usually identifying butterflies, locating word derivations, or finding pop culture trivia. What exactly did Al Haig say when Reagan was shot?*

When my spouse told me I was being "obstinate and recalcitrant" on a vacation, I knew he didn't really love me, and I wasn't crazy about him anymore, either. No vacuuming was involved. The vacation was already hitting bottom with one son needing stitches, and now I didn't even have a dictionary. It's probably best I didn't have one, or I would have bonked him over the head with it and said, "Uh wonka, Waco!"

And so, I meant to do my work today, but I spent over an hour on an unsuccessful search for the meaning and correct spelling of "Uh wonka, Waco!" I learned that Ennio Morricone composed the soundtracks for Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns. As far as the lyrics, I did not pass Go, and I did not collect a fistful of dollars.

I Meant to Do My Work Today
by Richard LeGalliene
I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree
And a rainbow held out its shiny hand—
So what could I do, but laugh and go?

I never did see the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns. Mom wouldn't have approved, vacuuming or not. I did see one really strange Sam Peckinpah movie in college about bringing the pasta Alfredo or something. And what was the name of that boyfriend???

I'm exhausted, and the condo is still a mess. I feel like I've been trapped in Tom Robbin's Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. You're just going to have to track that down by yourself!

*This is a freebie: "As of now, I am in control here in the White House." (3/30/81)

Vocabulary

Today's vocabulary word is extrude--to shape by thrusting through a die.

The preschoolers are poking drinking straws into white modeling clay as we attempt to form the analytic shapes to make dinosaurs. Naturally, they are fascinated with the coprolites left in the straws, and work to force out the core samples. The dinosaurs are turning out pretty well. One little girl told me that choosing which dinosaur to make was like going to a "cafetherium" for lunch.

There's a theory that "Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous." The quote may come from Doris Lessing, or even from Anonymous Herself. Whatever the source, life is weird.
Nearly everyone I know is involved in the care for an elderly parent. It's a physical and emotional task way beyond my expectations.

Donna Anna in Act I of Don Giovanni has been playing in my head all day. Also, I recommend turkey sandwiches. My coworkers decided I was a hormonal stress mess and picked up lunch from Corner Bakery. Those Thanksgiving tripto-thingies in the turkey got me all calmed out and groggy this afternoon. I'm feeling more integrated/cohesive/dried-out pink Play-dough than I have in days. I hate that soft moist weepy modeling clay kind of day, especially when the different colors get mixed together and it's all stuck in the cookie cutters.

Houston, we have a problem or two

I grew up in the Space Age with the Friendship Seven, and JFK challenging us, "Before this decade is out..." The Space Age seemed to promise that if I drank Tang like the astronauts, learned fractions and decimals, and did fifty sit-ups for the President's Physical Fitness Test each year, that the technological benefits of Our Race To The Moon would belong to me and my generation. We went to sleep each night secure in the belief that by the time we were old enough to work at Spaceley Sprockets, flying cars would be ready to get us there. Like his boy Elroy, we would have robot maids to make beds, and taking care of our homes would be as easy as pi.

Yes, some Space Age Technology did trickle down to those of us still earthbound. We got Teflon and no-wax floors, frost-free refrigerators (as long as our spouses didn't leave six-packs of diet Coke in the freezer overnight), microwave popcorn, fiber-optic Christmas trees, Velcro shoes that light up, 24-Hour fitness centers and titanium golf clubs, Stain Defender pants, Thanksgiving turkeys with pop-up thermometers, and self-cleaning ovens. We got computers, which I appreciate. We got MTV, Talk Radio, and grocery self-checkout lanes, and whose fault is that??? Okay, maybe not NASA's. But did we get the flying cars?

Through Space Age Bureaucratic Oversights we also didn't get:

1. Self-degreasing mini-blinds
2. Self-returning library books
3. A universal sizing system for clothes so if you wear a 10-12 in one brand at Foley's you wear a 10-12 in all brands at Mervyn's
4. Clean air in our cities
5. Leaf-blowers and weed-whackers that operate on Silent Drive
6. Dog poop atom-blasters so you don't have to take Spike for a walk and carry around a ziplock baggie of hot ....
7. Outfits like Jane and Judy Jetson's
8. Everlasting elastic in boxer shorts
9. Steerable grocery carts
10. An understanding of that view of Earth from the moon that we are all on the same small planet and need to be respectful of each other and our Mother.