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Rabbit Hole Day 2010 has nearly been and gone without my doing anything to recognize it.  Too many distractions this year.  But this seems a fine time to collect in one place the Twitter and Facebook messages I churned out a year ago today.

MICROBLOGGING RABBIT HOLE DAY 2009

Jan. 26, 11:42 pm: Oh hell. Less than half an hour to go until Rabbit Hole Day, and I turn into a jellyfish.

Jan. 27, 11:31 am: Tentacles got too tangled up in the bed, so I slept in the toilet tank. Woke up wet on the bathroom floor, rust stains on my arms and legs.

1:18 pm: Rust stains were actually steampunk spores. All sorts of little dials and whistles budding up now. Will see if body trimmer can work me in.

2:05 pm: Made it to body trimmer, but had to wait 20 minutes listening to a jackhammer outside before I got in his chair and he sliced off the brass.

2:08 pm: Jackhammer reminded me of the aerial shots my dad took of Siberia during the war. Fields of frozen compressors made to steal the atmosphere.

2:26 pm: I think my generation takes the air for granted. I’ve turned off neutral buoyancy for the day. Time to remember what weight feels like.

2:58 pm: Fuck! Weight feels like horrible bending pain in shins, cracking sounds in my knees, and empty cherub husks poking painfully into my feet!

3:17 pm: Non-Texans: Seasons are weird here. Cherubs emerge from ground and molt in Jan rather than Nov. Cat ate so many husks, it needed an enema.

3:33 pm: Uh oh, I’m in trouble. Just got an angry text message from the cat, who is upset I told the internet about its enema. This won’t end well.

4:07 pm: Cat is now threatening to join the neighborhood gestalt. It knows how poorly I handled things when my dog did that where I used to live.

4:11 pm: After my dog sublimed, birds in branches, and the neighbors’ fish would ask me probing questions about my personal life. Total freakout.

4:28 pm: Of course, if the cat does sublime, things won’t be as bad this time. I’ve never let it into the bedroom. ClawBot meets my needs these days.

5:18 pm: Managed to patch things up with cat on phone. Now need to head home before things get angry. Emoteorologist says an affront is blowing in.

6:50 pm: Yeah, I made it home okay, but everything still sucks. I’m SO ANGRY! I just want to go outside and bash people’s thoughts in with a stick!

7:02 pm: Oh god, I’m so ashamed of myself. I actually did go out and pop some kid’s thought balloon with a mop handle. I couldn’t stop myself.

7:06 pm: It wasn’t until that little cloud over his head had burst that I realized what I was doing. I hadn’t even read it! I just didn’t care!

7:08 pm: I don’t usually let angry weather effect me like this. I’d better apologize to his parents tomorrow. I wonder if they like cherub pie.

8:37 pm: Caught enough cherubs. They are always distracted during their mating flights. An even mix of male and female helps the pie taste better.

9:30 pm: Guess the pie in the oven is for me now. The kid’s dad just tattooed an obscenity on the skin of my house. I think that makes us even.

9:49 pm: Brought up the house’s bios to tell it to start breaking down the tattoo, and noticed it is mounting a huge immune response. No idea why.

10:02 pm: OH NO! It’s the steampunk spores! The whole bathroom is infected and overgrown with pipes and stuff! It didn’t even occur to me before!

10:16 pm: Oh my god, there is so much wrench and hacksaw work to be done to get down to the floor before I can even APPLY the genrecidal medication.

11:11 pm: And while working on the bathroom, I forget about the pie in the oven until the delightful smell of tiny burning limbs fills the house. Ugh.

11:21 pm: The spores got into ClawBot. My night is well and truly ruined. Would have been better today to have just stayed a jellyfish. Going to bed.

Tags: Rabbit Hole Day, Repost

There’s a neat video going around of a neat hunting strategy pursued by bottle-nosed dolphins in shallow waters.  They swim in tightening circles and use their tails to make fences of cloudy water to trap schools of fish:

Very cool.  But at the end of it good Mr. Attenborough pronounces that dolphins are the only known species to pursue this fishing technique.  Yet right there in the related videos panel is an even more dramatic video of humpback whales using air bubbles to do essentially the same thing in deep water.

I wonder how widely known the “schooling fish are afraid to swim through churned up water” behavior is among ocean mammals.

Tags: animal behavior, dolphins, whales

There’s currently a thread on io9 about the best comic book covers of the past decade. There’s a ton of beautiful work on that list, but one cover that was immediately notable to me by its absence was the cover to LOSERS #26, by Jock. Maybe it was the timeliness — it was practically a political cartoon — but I don’t think any cover has stood out in my memory as strongly in the last decade as this one.

EDIT: Closer reading reveals that io9 specifically excluded LOSERS for not being SF enough.

Tags: Jock

Days 32 through 34 of my grandmother’s 1936 trip to Europe, covering a portion of her travels through Normandy. (Previously: Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.)

Paris to Rouen Sat. July 25 [1936]

At 9:30 this morning we said our farewells to Kay & Charlotte & the Nicholsons and started on our way to Rouen.  It’s surprising how bad we all felt leaving the party that we had really known such a short time.  We arrived in Rouen about noon & after hurry around [sic] for a porter found the train only stopped about 2 minutes; so with the help of a couple of Frenchmen we threw our baggage out of the windows of the train & went scurrying around for the man from the hotel who was to meet us.  To our dismay there was none & so we managed in our very bad French to get a cab & get to our destination which proved to be a very dismal place.  Our rooms were on the 4th floor to which we had to walk as there were no lifts.  After lunch we started out to see the town.  We visited the Cathedral where some man kindly offered to guide us thru & then charged us 90¢ a piece.  This is the town where Joan d’Arc was burned.  Rain drove us back to the hotel but after dinner we started out again to see the Palace of Justice, the famous clock & a statue of Joan d’Arc.  Our method of sightseeing was quite rare.  Marie with the travel book reading about the things, Bert with a map of the city to see that we were looking at the right things, Jo with a French-English dictionary & me looking the part of a typical tourist with my mouth wide open just gaping.  Next to the Select Theatre to see the “Gay Divorcee” with French dialogue.  The theatre was smelly & crowded & we couldn’t make out head or tail of the picture so during the intermission we left unable to stay another minute.  How we longed for a good old fashion American movie.

For an older but more comprehensive view of Rouen, Project Gutenberg has an 1840 text Rouen: Its History and Monuments by Théodore Licquet.  And of course there’s the Wikipedia page for the modern view.  The Gay Divorcee starred Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, their second on-screen pairing, and was nominated for Best Picture.

Ruen to Caen, Sunday, July 26, 1936

We started out at about 8:30 A.M. by motor coach for Caen, after quite a mix up at the station about our luggage a part of which they finally had to ship ahead to St. Malo.  Our first stop was Jumièges, the ruins of an old abbey, with just the walls of the 3 churches which composed it.  Very interesting sight which would have been much more so if we had been able to understand the French guides.  The man who was with us was supposed to translate but he did a very poor job.  Our next stop was the Abbey of St. Wandrille where we heard the Sunday morning services and then were shown around the outdoor restaurant at Caudebec-en-Caux where we dined with a woman from California who later in the day became our interpreter.   Deauville for a afternoon tea which cost us 10 francs (70¢).  We were all very disappointed in the place after all we had heard about it.  It looked just like Oak Street Beach.  At dinner time we arrived at Caen where we were to spend the night.  After dinner we had our usual walk around the town and then to bed early.

Places: Jumièges, Abbey of St. Wandrille (Fontenelle Abbey), Caudebec-en-Caux, Deauville, and Caen.  And, for comparison, Oak Street Beach, which I believe was visible from the window of my grandmother’s apartment in Chicago when I knew her. UPDATE: I was wrong, this was not the beach visible from her window.  That was a Yacht Club.  Why have I heard of Oak Street Beach?

Caen – St. Malo, July 27, Mon. [1936]

Left Caen about 8 en route for Bayeux where the famous tapestry of Matilda is.  We walked about the town saw the cathedral and then spent about an hour looking at the tapestry.  We didn’t stay until the guide finished lecturing as we couldn’t understand a word & decided the air would do us much more good.  From here we traveled for about 3 hours seeing some of the very beautiful country of Normandy, had lunch in Granville and then on to Mont St. Michel the high spot of the day.  On our way there we passed thru Le Havre & saw the Normandie docked there.  About a half hour before we reached Mont St. Michel we saw it in the distance, a very beautiful sight.  Upon arriving we were told to follow the little crooked street, lined with souvenir shops and restaurants, until we reached the church.  We kept walking and climbing & steps until we reached the top simply exhausted.  Here we were conducted thru and saw the rooms used by the monks in the early days & later during the Revolution used as prisons.  The whole church was built by the monks who carried each piece of stone from the nearby quarries up to the top of the mount.  It is a beautiful piece of gothic structure.  After 2 hours of wandering around we again started on our way passing thru many small towns until we reached our destination St. Malo.  This is an old 11th century town completely surrounded by walls from the old fort.  It is a terribly dirty place with streets so narrow by walking down the middle you can almost touch the buildings on either side.  After dinner we went out into the square where they were showing movies.  We sat at a sidewalk cafe for a while had a drink & then went up to bed just before the movie was over.  The hotel was rather miserable but clean.

Bayeux (and its tapestry), Granville, Mont St. Michel, Le Havre, St. Malo.  Le Havre was the home port of the S.S. Normandie, which at the time was the largest passenger ship in the world.  Four years after my grandmother saw it the ship was seized by the U.S. for use in WWII after the fall of France and renamed the USS Lafayette, but it never saw service as it caught fire in New York harbor while being converted into a troopship and capsized.  The Wikipedia article has some amazing photographs.  My favorite is this one, of the capsized ship still in the harbor:

Tags: Doris Stein, family, grandma's travel journal

For months now this ad has been reliably showing up on my Facebook profile.

Who is that supposed to be a cartoon of?  It looks to me vaguely like Edgar Allen Poe.

There is an interesting article on The Language Log about a particular type of misnegation that, until it was presented to me in a context that said, “this is wrong,” I was unable to see the problem with.  It has to do with phrases of the type No NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB.  For example, “No detail is too small to escape notice.”  My brain naturally parses this to mean that everything will be noticed, but it actually says that nothing will be noticed.  Reading this article makes me want to scrape the rust off my knowledge of regular expressions and see if I’ve written any stories that have this mistake.

A more general note about linguistics: I like reading The Language Log and linguistic analyses in general, but every time I’ve tried to actually study linguistics I’ve bounced off the surface of the subject.  Something about the foundational knowledge of the study bores me to tears, for no reason I can satisfactorily explain.  This is useful to me, though, when people tell me that they don’t like physics because it has too much math.  I can think to myself, “crazy as that sounds, it is probably analogous to how I feel about linguistics.”  (I still try periodically.  I secretly hold out hope that some day I will stumble upon a book that makes the foundational ideas of linguistics accessible to me.  And then I will be able to tell people who don’t like physics that they are objectively wrong. Huzzah!)

Tags: linguistics

Because I miss her, I wish I’d learned of her work years earlier than I did, and because Molly Ivins’s insights in 2004 are still more relevant than what most commentators who are actually alive have to say.

(Video is about half prepared talk, half Q&A, and filled with both the brilliantly funny and the stunningly prescient.  Her comments about how the internet will change the political system speak directly to the events of the 2008 election.)

Tags: Molly Ivins

So way back in 2005 the Texas legislature, in its alarmingly finite wisdom, passed an amendment to the state constitution to outlaw gay marriage.  So eager were our elected representatives to protect us from the loathsome evil of same sex unions, it seems they may have overshot the mark somewhat and protected us from all marriage. The Democratic candidate for attorney general, Barbara Ann Radnofsky, has pointed out that a clause in the amendment seems to ban marriage entirely.

This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

This sentence is now a part of the state’s constitution.  So it is to be supposed that, for any existing marriages to be legal under Texas law, one must somehow make the argument that traditional marriage is neither similar nor identical to itself.

How I dearly wish Molly Ivins was around for this one.

EDITED TO ADD: For a sense of who Molly Ivins was, and for how absurd things sometimes get on the floor of the Texas House of Representatives, I recommend this nine minute excerpt from the documentary Dildo Diaries about the bizarre doublethink nonsense that underlies our state’s sex toy laws.  Which actually seem comparatively sane in light of this marriage thing. (Probably NSFW.)

Tags: Barbara Ann Radnofsky, gay marriage, Molly Ivins, stupid, Texas

“A man is he who pisses against a wall!”

“That’s where we’re heading in this country, my friends…. We got a buncha pastors who pee sitting down.  We got a president of the United States who probably pees sitting down.  We got a buncha preachers and leaders who don’t stand up and piss against a wall like a man!”

I particularly enjoy the Hunting-of-the-Snark-esque numerology subtext.  5 = death.  6 = man.  7 = completion.  He doesn’t mention it, but I think 8 = effeminate democrats who let their dicks dangle and elect Nancy Pelosi; 9 = homosexuality is a sin;  10 = good old-fashioned god-fearing MEN who hold their penises firmly in strong calloused hands as they piss against the goshdarned wall! Yes!

Tags: crazy, definitions, numerology, religion, Steven L. Anderson

Days 28 through 31 of my grandmother’s 1936 trip to Europe, covering her time spent in Paris. (Previously: Introduction, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.)

Paris, Tuesday July 21, 1936

We left Brussels this morning at eight for a short train ride to Paris.  Our first view of Paris was the Eiffel Tower which we saw while we were still some miles out.  After we were settled in our hotel we started on a sight seeing tour of the city.  Our first stop was Madeline church which is quite unusual because instead of being built in the shape of a cross it was built in a square.  It was originally a victory hall.  From here we passed the Opera House, the Place de la Concorde, the Bois de Bologne, the Louvre and some of the famous streets.  We stopped to visit Notre Dame Cathedral which certainly is a beautiful place.  The rose windows and the famous alter where so many of the kings have prayed for victory were very interesting to us all.  Our next stop was Napoleon’s tomb.  It is a perfectly beautiful place.  The light is all a pale blue which comes from the plain blue stain glass windows.  To look at the tomb you go to a railing and look over the side and below is this huge marble coffin that rises about 20ft from the ground.  It is from this tomb that John Paul Jones’s is copied.  In a little chapel just to the side of the coffin are placed his hat and sword.  From here we drove around to where the Trocadero used to be and on this sight they are now building the buildings for the fair of 1937.  Then over to the left bank to get a glance at the book and picture stalls and then back to the hotel for dinner.  This evening we started out for the Cafe de la Paix and after going in the wrong direction for some time we finally were aided by a kind Englishman and arrived there a little bit soaked but anxious to see all the sights that pass by there.

All the really famous stuff of Paris is, of course, still there, and can be easily researched.  Plugging proper nouns into Google, the most interesting new thing I learned was that restaurant,Cafe de la Paix, was designed by Charles Garnier.

Paris, Wednesday July 22nd [1936]

Spent most of the morning getting my hair washed and a manicure then to the American Express office for some money and I again felt ready to conquer the world.  This afternoon we went to Versailles, which is a very beautiful place surrounded by lovely artificial gardens, beautiful statues and fountains.  The palace itself is very ornately decorated inside & although there is no furniture left at all one gets a grand idea of the luxury and grandeur that the kings of France lived in.  We saw the famous mirrored galleries where the Versailles treaty was signed and the room from which Marie Antoinette escaped during the Revolution.  This evening we went on a tour of the night clubs of Paris.  We left our hotel about nine and went to Montmartre where we got a beautiful view of the city of Paris with all of its lights.  Montmartre itself was very interesting with old houses and many outdoor cafes.  From here we went to an African mosque where we had after dinner coffee, then to an Apache cafe which was most interesting.  Here we had wine and watched the street bums dancing.  Our next stop was the Bal Tabarin where we had champagne and watched a very good real French nude floor show.  Some of the Annapolis boys were there and so we had an opportunity to dance.  Although this wasn’t much of a thrill as the floors were just as crowded as those at home.  Home at 2 A.M. & finally to bed about 3.

“Have you transcribed any more of grandma’s journal?” my mother asks me.  “I haven’t seen anything new go up on your website in a while.”

“A little more,” I say.

“What is she up to next?”

“Well, in the last one I transcribed, grandma went to a nudie show and danced with some Navy boys.”

“….”

Paris, Thursday July 23rd 1936

After an early breakfast we went shopping in the Galeries Lafayette one of the large department stores of Paris.  It was anything but an impressive place and we found the prices terrifically high.  From here we took a cab to the Louvre and then as it was too early to go in on one of the tours we walked up and down the Rue de Rivoli and finally ended up at Rumplemeyers for lunch.  We were really in search of a cheap restaurant but as we had heard so much about this place decided to go in regardless & we paid plenty to.  Afterwards we went thru the Louvre & then back to the hotel just about ready to die we were so tired.  This evening Jo & Kay & Charlotte decided to go to see the town & the did by ending up in a place some taxi driver took them.  They got a bill for over 200 francs ($20) for drinks; but as they didn’t have the money they talked the proprietors into a much lower price.

Paris Friday July 24th [1936]

We left for Fontainebleau at 10:00 an interesting drive thru the poorer districts of Paris.  It was really lots of fun seeing the children running around the streets all dressed in aprons, boys and girls alike & the people carrying loaves of bread unwrapped under their arms.  The forest near the hotel is supposed to be the most beautiful in France & from what we’ve seen I agree with the critics.  It has the appearance of a beautiful piece of green lace.  The castle itself is furnished just as it was during the times of Frances 2 and Napoleon.  It is very ornate but has beautiful tapestries, hangings, pictures & exquisite pieces of Stone China.  By using your imagination you can really see the type of people that occupied this place.  We started back in the same old bus which broke down half way home.  We were transferred to another and arrived just a few minutes later than we had expected.  This noon we had a terrible lunch of what we decided afterwards was horse meat.  Out first & I hope last.  After an evening of packin we started out about 11 o’clock for Mont Parnasse the artists’ quarter of Paris.  Sylvia Sopolitz a new acquaintance who spoke French very well took charge of the party.  We rode 5 metros before we reached our destination champagne at the “Dome” amidst artists, tourists, Arabs selling furs and other vendors.  Pastry and coffee at the “Cupole” a nearby cafe.  Then home 7 in a cab having first bargained with the cab driver for a fare we were willing to pay.

My best guess, from minimal research, is that the “Dome” refers to Le Dome Cafe. 

Tags: Doris Stein, family, grandma's travel journal