Teeny Little Surfer Guys

Sesame Street debuted in 1969, when I was in my teen babysitting career mode. I made between thirty-five cents and a dollar per hour babysitting. My young charges were sometimes allowed to watch Sesame Street or Mister Roger's Neighborhood. My own kids watched Sesame Street sometimes, but they preferred Reading Rainbow. I did too, since it encouraged development of a longer attention span.

There are three songs* from Sesame Street that pop into my brain uninvited. One is the Teeny Little Super Guy. Had to confer with colleagues of similar age to come up with the visual memory of the Guy when my class started work on their teeny little surfer guys for our Surf City art project. Our Surf City is also inspired by last year's movie Riding Giants, which should have been on my list of cool movies this week, and by Gloria and Ted Rand's picture book, Aloha, Salty. That's why you'll see some surfing puppies if you look real close.



Female Singers: Teeny Little Super Guy
Pops right up before your eye
He's no bigger than your thumb
Teeny Little Super Guy: Snap your fingers, here I come
Now stop me if you've heard this one...



*The other two Sesame Street song flashbacks:

Takes a lot of little nuts
To make a jar of peanut butter
'Cause one peanut in a jar
Really doesn't go too far
Gotta crack and shell and mix 'em
There's no other way to fix 'em
Takes a lot of little nuts to do the job

and

I'm a dog
I'm a workin' dog
I'm a hard workin' dog
Hard workin' dog

Jan & Dean
Surf City
(Brian Wilson/Jan Berry)

I bought a pretty cool wagon and we call it a woody
(Surf City, here we come)
You know, it's not very cherry, it's an oldie but a goody
(Surf City, here we come)
Well, it ain't got a backseat or a rear window
But it still gets me where I wanna go
Chorus:
And we're goin' Surf City, 'cause it's two to one
You know we're goin' Surf City, gonna have some fun
Yeah we're goin' Surf City, 'cause it's two to one
You know we're goin' Surf City, gonna have some fun, now

When it rains it pours

Few things rival the chills, spills, and excitement of teaching a preschool class during a dramatic thunderstorm. The change in barometric pressure before the storm already has the kids in a loud and hyper mode, then during the actual lightning and thunder there's a full spectrum of panic, mild fears, whimpering, orating, yelling, and bladder control issues. I was just glad the electricity didn't go off during this morning's storm.

Sometimes the best course for a preschooler is to draw pictures about the storm. Grab a handful of crayons, and color scribble-scrabble with them all at once as forceful as the thunder while making sound effects! Drawing can help get you through the tough days when your goldfish dies, there's a big spider in the bathtub, or when you have flashbacks to Bambi in the forest fire. It's best if your favorite grown-up sits with you very patiently while you draw circles for Bambi, Bambi's mother, and everything else that is bothering you, with extra tornadoes thrown in for good measure.



Just home from making a presentation at the condo association meeting. Nothing on "Seinfeld" about condo associations was exaggerated! Our meetings would be great Jerry Springer material. I had to get my special blanket and my special bunny to rub against my cheek until I felt calm enough to start scribbling with a handful of crayons!

My oldest son was the crisis response man aka grad student supervisor on the scene last Saturday at seven a.m. EST when a berserk wounded deer found its way into the dorm quadrangle courtyard. The deer had become injured crashing into plate glass windows. While it had descended stairs to get into the courtyard, it wouldn't go back up the stairs to leave. When campus police arrived, they wanted to shoot the deer, but were afraid of ricocheting bullets around the enclosed quad. My son also wanted to avoid traumatizing the ten year-olds staying in the dorm for a summer basketball camp--it's that Bambi's mother thing. The police finally herded the deer up the stairs, and it took off running for the Alumni Center.

High on a hill was a lonely goatherd
Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo
Loud was the voice of the lonely goatherd
Lay ee odl lay ee odl-oo

Folks in a town that was quite remote heard
Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo
Lusty and clear from the goatherd's throat heard
Lay ee odl lay ee odl-oo

O ho lay dee odl lee o, o ho lay dee odl ay
O ho lay dee odl lee o, lay dee odl lee o lay

Imitating Penguins

I've always believed that a really cold movie is just the antidote for the Texas summer. It can't be a cool movie with action heroes and special effects. I'm talking about COLD.

My old cold favorites include the Russian dacha parts of Dr. Zhivago. I'm always annoyed that Omar Sharif's Yuri prefers the blonde Julie Christie's Lara to the brunette Geraldine Chaplin's Tonya, but the ice encrusted dacha is so beautiful, so magical, he can be forgiven! Just writing about it can ward off a hot flash.


My new cold favorite is March of the Penguins. This documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman, in his cool voice, is just mind-boggling in its true-life-real nature strangeness. The cinematography is gorgeous, and more chilling than standing in front of your open refrigerator all day. And then there are the penguins! Emperor penguins live such harsh, bizarre, and beautiful lives that you can't help going slack-jawed watching. Your struggle to find a parking place is nothing. Your long wait at the grocery deli counter to get the sliced ham and provolone--nothing. Troubles balancing family and career? Phooph! Can't find comfortable walking shoes? Thphthph! Need a Milky Way to tide you over until lunch? You are soooo pathetic! Someone else controls the office thermostat??? Try seventy below zero with winds over one hundred miles per hour, and you've got to balance an egg the size of a mango on your feet, preventing it from touching the ice while you keep moving so you don't freeze to death---FOR WEEKS AT A TIME WITH NO MEALS! It's so weird the Surgeon General has warned that it causes Brain Freeze.

If the movie isn't coming soon to a theater near you, go to the website to see the trailers and still photos. There are some great shots to use as your computer desktop background. The movie is probably appropriate for kids over ten.

Trying to explain the movie and the lifestyle of the penguins is very difficult. If you see someone at the office watercooler waddling on his heels, with arms tight to his side and hands flared out, and moving his neck in odd arcing motions, you will know he has been to the penguin movie! If he regurgitates a full belly of krill on your wingtips, or tries to demonstrate the choreography for passing off the newly-hatched chick from the dad's feet to the mom's feet in that tight space behind your desk, he's gone way over the edge. He can't help imitating the penguins, but do suggest he practice in the privacy of his own home!



What of the other favorite cold and golden oldies? I always feel refreshed after watching Sean Connery and all the submarines off Greenland in The Hunt for Red October.


I usually want to go off on a trip to Lithuania in the winter, after Ramius tells about growing up in Vilnius and going fishing with his grandfather. I can feel the snow against my cheeks even though it's over one hundred degrees outside.


Still, a woman of my years can feel overly warm at times, especially on an Ozone Action Day. That's when it's time to play a video of Jeremiah Johnson with Robert Redford and Will Geer fur-trapping and inviting bears into their cabin. Are you wearing a fur hat and snowshoes yet?

Shivery Honorable Mentions go to:

--the 1940 Disney "Fantasia" for the animation of the fairies changing the seasons with the "Dance of the Flowers" music from the Nutcracker Suite.

--the scenes just before the massacre on the Washita in Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman and Chief Dan George.

--the winter scenes in the 1969 version of Jean Craighead George's book, My Side of the Mountain.

Please submit your own personal cold movie favorites. The National Weather Service is predicting a steamy summer for my zip code. Thanks, and chill out!

Eggplant

Technology is either the hero or the goat tonight, as Charlie Brown would say. I'm looking at the marvelous images of Tempel1, the pickle/potato/eggplant comet, on NASA t.v. over the internet, and hearing the Mission Control communications for the impactor maneuvers. It's worth staying up past my bedtime.

There are some things technology couldn't handle today. Efforts to rendezvous at Kaboom Town, Addison's large fireworks display and festival, with several other parties failed. We were all trying to communicate by cell phone to find each other in the crowd, same as thousands of other folks. The network overloaded, and we never managed to rendezvousie-vousie with my friends or my guys' college friends. Smoke signals would have been more effective. We did have a great time watching the vintage aircraft from the Cavanaugh Flight Museum flying in formation in the lovely sunset sky. The fireworks were impressive, too.

Once we managed to find our car, we were trapped in parking garage gridlock for a full hour. Only my youngest's trusty iPod full of music kept us from going stir crazy! Not the same as being marooned on a desert isle, but frustrating all the same.

My gosh! I hope you are watching these images from NASA!

What a fun month this has been!

Deep Throat revealed, and now Deep Impact. At about one a.m. CDT today NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully released its impactor into the path of the pickle-shaped comet Tempel 1. That was just about the time the tiles on the wall surrounding the upstairs bathtub fell off. When I did the major clean of the bathroom Friday, I noticed that the tiles were pulling away from the wall, so it was probably all damp behind them. Swell. That tile wall has been a source of periodic headaches starting when the ceramic soap/washcloth holder fell off three summers ago.

I would like to hurl an 820 lb. washing machine at the tile wall, but it probably wouldn't tell us much about the origin of the solar system. According to NASA's website, the Deep Impact spacecraft is about the size of a VW Beetle. The impactor has been described as the size of a washing machine, or a coffee table. With an impact velocity of 23,000 m.p.h., it could take out a lot of bathroom tile. Scientists expect the crater caused by the impact will be the size of a football field.



In case you think this is the work of Bill Watterson's "Spaceman Spiff", there's really a lot of valuable information to be gained by this mission. David Grinspoon, planetary scientist and author of "Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life," has written a helpful op-ed in today's New York Times:

We stand to learn a lot about impact cratering - one of the major forces that has shaped all the worlds of our solar system. We will also have the chance to peer into the newly formed crater and observe the ice and vapor blasted back into space, thereby learning what lies within this frigid little world. .. Deep Impact will simply make one more small hole in an object that, like all planets large and small, has been repeatedly dinged by colliding space debris since our solar system's origin 4.6 billion years ago. ..It is those dusky beginnings that this experiment can illuminate. Beneath the dirty ice crust of a comet like Tempel 1 is material that has been in deep freeze since the birth of our solar system. Mixed into this timeless frozen treat are organic molecules like those that seeded the young Earth with raw materials for making life. This ice may hold some buried chapters of the story of our origin.

And maybe, just maybe, scientists will discover a material to keep the tiles stuck on the bathroom wall. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Tonight, just as fireworks displays are in full bloom in Dallas, the VW Beetle will be at its closest approach to the pickle.

http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/press/050703jpl.html

On Beyond Swiffer

Last January my sister did her best to brainwash me into joining the cult of Swiffervangelism to which she belongs. Like the causes and creeds of many who have try to bring me into their chosen fold, Swiffervangelism sort of grazed me and bounced off. It's been almost six months, and already I'm on my second package of Wet Swiffer amazing disposable mop cloths. I'll have to buy my second Dry Swiffer on my next trip to the store. At twelve Swiffs per package... six months... I'm up to cleaning the kitchen floor twice a month. Bet that wasn't what either my sister or HomeMadeSimple had in mind.


You could say I just go to church for the music. This is the
Top Three Dry Swiffer Countdown:


This Week's Newcomer to the Charts
Dry Swiffer Hit Number Three

Got a good reason for taking the easy way out
Got a good reason for taking the easy way out now

She was a Dry Swiffer, a one way ticket yea
It took me so long to find out, and I found out

She’s a degreaser, she took me half the way there
She’s a degreaser, she took me half the way there now...

Dry Swiffer, yea
Dry Swiffer, yea



Dry Swiffer Hit Number Two

I told you ’bout living in the u.s. of a.
Don’t you know that I’m a Swiffer of rooms
Let me tell you people that I found a new way
And I’m tired of all this talk about brooms
And the same old story with a new set of words
About the dirt and the lint on the floor
And the times keep on changin’
So I’m keepin’ on top
Of every cat who tracks dirt through my door

I'm a DrySwiffer
Bet you weren't ready for that
I'm a DrySwiffer
I'm sure you know where it's at
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah



Dry Swiffer Top Tune of All Time


DrySwiffer, he's the mop, the mop with the Midas touch
A spider's touch
Such a SlySwiffer beckons you to enter his web of dust
But don't you trust

Golden words he will pour in your ear
The white glove test you needn't fear,
But a mother-in-law proves that she's the SpySwiffer
It's the swiff of death for Mister DrySwiffer


[Having a cleaner kitchen floor still hasn't earned me a ride in 007's Aston Martin.]



So far, Wet Swiffering only has one song, and it is kind of a downer:


WetSwiffer, WetSwiffer,
Mop up that splash,
Dissolve that old chunk
Of congealed goulash.
WetSwiffer, WetSwiffer
Erase that ew-yuk,
And make me a perfect cook (while you're at it)


WetSwiffer, WetSwiffer,
You won't need a pail
To get rid of black heel marks
And sticky spilled ale.
Shine up my floor for I'm longing to be,
The envy of all I see.


What would Dr. Seuss think about Swiffer?
After all, Mr. Sneelock is one of my friends. He'll probably help out doing small odds and ends. Little odd jobs he can do with such ease. Would he do the darn Swiffering if I say, "Please"?

The fine print:

Goldfinger - Artist: Shirley Bassey - peak Billboard position # 8 in 1965 - title song from the James Bond movie starring Sean Connery, Gert Frobe as Goldfinger, Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore, and Harold Sakata as Odd Job - Words and Music by Lesley Bricusse, Anthony Newley and John Barry.

"Space Cowboy" from Brave New World, Steve Miller Band, released June 1969 by Capital Records.

1965 1971

Mr. Carey's Garden

My milkweed plant fell over and could not get up. It was time for a bigger pot. Staring out the window at the milkweed, I gradually noticed a very fuzzy black caterpillar doing a lovely, slow dance on the underside of a canna leaf. Not a woollybear, no middle band of fuzzy brown. No leafroller this one; no, those marching band holes were made before. A caterpillar so lovely as this does not need to take orderly synchronized bites. It can get by on looks alone.

QUESTION:
Can you suggest something to control the caterpillars that cause the leaves to roll on cannas? I am an organic gardener and need something environmentally friendly.

ANSWER:
The leafroller caterpillar secretes a sticky substance which glues the leaf roll, preventing it from opening. The caterpillar happily feeds away inside, protected from the frustrated gardener.

The solution is to make slits in the rolled leaf, then spray with an insecticide such as Orthene, or, for organic gardeners, with a product that contains the biological control Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis). Bt is a bacteria which can be used to control insects such as mosquitoes, caterpillars, cutworms and leafrollers.

That unappealing leafroller will become a large brown skipper butterfly with a 2" wingspan and white spots on its upper and lower wings.

I've finished repotting the milkweed on the patio before I think to get the camera. Was the caterpillar camera-shy? Or was it a bird's mid-afternoon tea and cookies? I can't find it, even though I'm crouching down in the myrtle and peering up from underneath the canna leaves. It danced its number, but did not come out for a curtain call.



I see things in a different light... Bright sun bleaches and blurs the fence boards seen through the shadowed rows of leaf portholes. My eyes bug out, and it seems as if Roswell aliens are shining their laser eyes at me.



"I see things in a different light," Mr. Carey tells his neighbors in Jane Cutler's book about snails in a garden. Mr. Carey's Garden reminds readers to notice the other inhabitants of our little patio gardens and our larger world.



"Tiny of body but brave of heart, we will finish what we start!" How splendid are the courageous doodlebugs of William Joyce's, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs. How dashing his Leaf Men in costumes part Errol Flynn and part cocoon couture. This book has been made into a musical, but it really needs to be a modern dance, I tell my choreographer sister. I can tie-dye the leotards.


That groovy black caterpillar will probably be a leopard moth someday. It may star in the screen adaptation of Robert Bly's poem, "A Caterpillar on the Desk" from The Morning Glory, published by Harper & Row, and featured by The Writer's Almanac last Tuesday.

Common Name: Great leopard moth
Scientific Name: Hypercompe scribonia (Stoll)
Order: Lepidoptera
Description: The great leopard moth, Hypercompe scribonia (Stoll) (Lepidoptera: Arctiidae), with a 3-inch wingspan, is white with black open-circular spots on the forewings and a metallic blue abdomen with orange markings. Caterpillars grow to about 2 inches. The caterpillars are fuzzy black caterpillars with the underlying body color of red to orange.

Life Cycle: Caterpillars can be abundant in the spring time. They can sometimes be seen crossing roads so commonly that motorists notice them. The adult moths are common under lights at night later in the season to mid summer. There may be a second generation later in the year.

Habitat and Food Source(s): Caterpillars feed on a variety of broad leaved plants that seem to be mostly weeds.

Pest Status, Damage: They are not considered pests except a bit in pastures. They are abundant enough for many people to notice them.

For additional information, contact your local Texas Cooperative Extension agent or search for other state Extension offices.

These are some of my other favorite garden books for teaching art:

*Because this is one of my favorite poems, fond as I am of both caterpillars and postage stamps, I am going to reprint it here. The original link to The Writer's Almanac is no longer viable. Air mail stamps haven't been ten cents for a very long time, either:

"A Caterpillar on the Desk" by Robert Bly from The Morning Glory. © Harper & Row.

A Caterpillar on the Desk

Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion, like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy's hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily-or perhaps summer's insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.