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January 29, 2003
Strangely Cosmopolitan
So, I had reason (I did! I swear!) to check out whether the New York Public Library had back issues of Cosmopolitan. And it turns out the NYPL (we pronounce it "nipple") does indeed have many periodical resources titled "Cosmopolitan." I'm now left to figure out whether this one is real, or whether some clever librarian is making commentary on menses and advertisement. (What the hell is Volapuk?!)
In other magazine news, I am trying to figure out when and how to share with my loyal readers the laff riot which is my participation in monthly Glamour Magazine polls (have I done it already?). The juxtaposition of questions they ask are alarmingly strange... probably not legal for me to say anything, but I probably will anyway, at some point.
Posted by me at 2:37 PM | Comments (1)
January 28, 2003
War Is Hell
I don't feel like there's anything I can do, at all. I have despaired of protesting and other forms of "activism." If we do go to war, or if we don't, I will not have made an impact even if I try. I couldn't organize a dolls' tea party.
I do remember the way I felt when I first went to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, before it got all interactive -- when it was only black and white pictures of the concentration camps. It was horrifying. It made me want to do something. (Nowadays what I want to do is plug every single motherfscking supporter of Israeli actions in Palestine, just to show people who kill people because people they know were killed that killing people is wrong.)
Anyway, by one person's reference or another I found these photo essays on Baghdad as it stands and the Gulf War as it was rarely seen on TV.
I don't even know why I'm bothering to post these. I don't believe that anyone reading this will affect the pending war, either. I don't think that even if we all got together we could stop it.
So just look. Look and feel bad. That's all I'm doing right now. Maybe it will prove to be more worthwhile than not looking. Probably it won't.
Posted by me at 10:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 26, 2003
Where It's At: I've Got Two Turntables And A Malfunctioning Copy Of HyperEngine
I've finally started a project I've intended to do since I moved into this house: I am converting the records in this house to MP3. I'm focusing on the brittle pre-vinyl ones, some of which are unlabelled or pressed only on one side.
This presents some technical difficulties. Keep in mind that I am the post-casette-tape-era kid who wondered, when playing one of them itty bitty records for the first time, how on earth the cousins who had cut this particular album had managed to modulate their voices to be so low in concert.
Today the issue was why my record player wouldn't play through the computer louder. I had the right adapter, a really neat little device which takes the old red-and-white fat plugs and channels them through an earphone jack... could it be that the grooves in the records had worn out? OK, even I'm not that stupid. Was there a bad wire someplace?
Then I remembered that the record player used to hook in through some other box I never could figure out a reason for... generally had a radio tuner or some such... so I hunted one down in the attic.
It had a bar antenna in the back and an eight-track. So I had a record player hooked to my iMac through an eight-track deck. one of those days when you feel like you're on the set of some low-budget sci-fi flick.
Unfortunately the music isn't proving as interesting as I might have hoped. Frequently the unlabeled stuff turns out to be Louis Armstrong or some such, something it would be pretty easy to get a CD of. One huge brittle disc with instructions scratched on its center says I need a red-shaft steel needle; presumably because I don't, it makes a migraine-inducing hiss.
One album has truly lived up to its packaging, though -- Pick In One Hand, Rifle In The Other. It's a Cold War-era recording of the Albanian army chorus, or some such, singing songs with titles like "To a Woman Guerrillla" and "All The Youth Of Our Village Have Gone To War." The jacket copy is predominantly in Chinese. The really militaristic stuff is creepy -- satisfyingly so -- but the rest of it reminds me of listening to the Robert Shaw Chorale at Christmas. Also, more logically, Giancarlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors.
So I've got the Albanian communists, I've got the Hunter College High School Class of 1966 Senior Sing (I love that my landlady, who ended up proving to be an economics whiz at MIT, is presumably on that album with her all-girl class singing a song whose lyrics amount to "math is hard"), I have some old O-Kehs and some unlabled brittle disks, some Rimsky-Korsakoff and a few popular songs, etc etc etc... who wants in on these goods?
Posted by me at 1:38 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 21, 2003
TempNYC
Every now and again I run across a complete stranger's page which is instantly so dear to my heart that I want to put up a permalink to them from this column. Today's winner is TempNYC, a resource for temps in the city. Message board, a beginner's guide, a Palm Pilot-accessible section, and more acknowledgement of the hideous pathos of the situation than anything I have ever seen, ever. A must-read for my little sister, Wade Stuckwisch, Benni Pierce and anyone else out there who is temping or considering it.
Posted by me at 1:06 PM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2003
Owls
There's an owl out in one of the eucalyptus by our house, hooting to break your heart. Placid.
The moon is so bright out there that everything is clear -- the cars bedded down in the driveway, the aloes, the ceramic frog in the garden. A full moon manages to do much more in the chaparral than in the city. Puts space between things, makes them look quieter and more alone.
... you know, sometimes it feels like there's almost nothing left I can write in this space now that I know who's reading it. always something one person or another shouldn't hear.
Owls. Not one owl -- two of them, up in that silver tree. Somehow that makes it even harder I'm leaving.
Posted by me at 5:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2003
Planting Cacti: A Photoessay/Lesson Plan Aid
While home in California I spent one Saturday working in the family cactus garden with my sisters and dad. While I was doing so, it occurred to me that (re)planting cactus is unusual in the world of gardening. It requires a number of tools and techniques unlike those used for plants in more water-rich areas. So I got out the digital camera, and we all took some pictures documenting the process.
The ways in which cacti and succulents, flowers and trees are alike and different are interesting. Like trees, some cacti change colors in cold weather, and others do not:
Some succulents are weird-looking all year long:
In the Andrews family garden we have both cacti and succulents. Well, that's redundant: cacti are succulents, so that's sort of like saying "the windows were shaped like squares and rectangles." You can tell cacti apart from other succulents by their small radial groups of spines. (More here.) Succulents as a group are just that: succulent, or juicy, because they store water to survive in hot dry climates. Some store water in their roots, some in their stems, and some in their leaves, like the one my dad is holding here:
Just because succulents store water, though, doesn't mean they don't need to be watered. Preparing the ground for a new cactus is much like doing it for any other plant: first you dig a hole,
then, to encourage the plant to put down roots in its new location, you add some water:
But like I said, the tools you use for working with cactus are sometimes different from "normal" plants. Some of them, like this one, look outright weird:
This little dinosaur-like nipper is used to grab leaves and other debris out from between a cactus's spikes. You'd get a lot of painful cuts and jabs without one, and if you were just wearing gloves you might just break the spines off and make the cactus look even worse (as well as damaging its defense against cactus-eating critters). Good thick gloves are still much more important in dealing with cactus than they are with regular plants, though. We all wore leather ones, and even then we got stabbed through them.
Another strange tool that came in surprisingly handy was an old rug:
When you're re-potting a "normal" plant, you can usually tip it over, grab it by the stem, and guide its rootball out of the pot. Obviously, that doesn't work so well with cacti. So we used the rug to catch the tipping cactus and gently lower it to the ground, then pulled off the pot:
Most of the cacti seemed to have pretty small rootballs (I love that word), so unpotting them wasn't hard to do. Then we'd use the rug to carry the cactus to the next location. Carrying the pots still wasn't easy, though. Cacti are HEAVY! Dad pointed out that while wood floats in water, because it's lighter than water, cacti are FULL of water, so they're as heavy as sloshing around a big old barrel of water (covered with pointy pointy nails, no less). So sometimes we used a dolly, like Dad did with this barrel cactus:
We replanted a lot of prickly pear cactus that day, specifically a large-leafed kind called "silver dollars." Silver dollars, like other cacti and succulents, don't need to have roots to be replanted. So when we decided we wanted another silver dollar in the back of the garden, we just cut off a part of the big one by the driveway with a big kitchen knife:
We caught it in the carpet like we did with the taller cactus:
The cutting left a fresh green scar which should dry and heal with time, though I don't know if the skinlike covering of the cactus will grow over it or not. Ariel said she found the scar fascinating because of her own scars from the surgery on her broken arm earlier this year. So she took a lot of pictures of it:
In the process of cutting the cactus, we knocked off one of its fruits. Like the prickly pear fruit you may be able to buy in the produce section of a fancy supermarket, these are kind of oval, about the size of a baseball, and dark red or purple in color. They are covered with spines like the rest of the cactus, only theirs are fine, yellowish and hard to see or remove (which can make cooking with them a real pain!) And as you can see, the fruit makes a violent-looking purple juice when cut -- cool!
We carried the cut piece to the top of the garden with the carpet, put the cut base in the hole, and poured dirt around it:
As you can see, the cut piece was buried pretty deeply. This apparently helps it take root better and keeps it stable.
In addition to silver dollars, we replanted a number of aloes. Aloes are great. What other plant will try to slice you up, then provide you with the medicine you need to heal the cut?! Plus, they they grow from little tiny plants
(My sister Arlo planting an aloe. To those of you joining us from the Boston area, these words may be indistinguishable.)
to great big honkers like the one Sylvie has out of the pot here:
I noticed something really neat on that last aloe: Aloe spines start their growth folded against the leaves, then eventually pop out. When they do, the grooves where they were pressed against the leaves remain. You can sort of see that in this picture:
We did not replant any fragile bougainvillea that day, but they are still my favorite plant:
Hope this was edifying. The one thing I feel like I can't convey adequately is what cactus skin feels like between the spines. It feels like dusty plastic, only plastic can feel like a lot of things. It feels like the skin of a dolphin, if dolphin skin was dry, but most of you probably haven't been feeling up dolphins. Cactus skin is powdery and firm and indescribable.
After we were done it was Sylvie's turn to clean up the limes. Our lime tree makes yellow-skinned limes with pale green insides which smell like roses before you cut them. There were tons of them, so I got this iconic picture of Sly with a boxful:
SunMaid, eat your heart out.
Posted by me at 3:02 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
January 15, 2003
Axiom #353
Editors are like boyfriends: you can't presume they aren't interested in you just because they never call.
Posted by me at 2:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 14, 2003
fruit activities
i hate everything except fruit and fruit-picking activitiesPosted by me at 8:16 PM
The Man Behind The Moogle
I just found Yoshitaka Amano's website. He's done art for a number of the Final Fantasy games and has a substantial repertoire outside video game art as well. Much of his stuff seems reminiscent of Arthur Rackham.
Posted by me at 1:27 AM | Comments (1)
January 9, 2003
Mr. Fancy Pants
No, he's *THE* Mr. Fancy Pants.Posted by me at 3:10 AM
If It Wasn't For Rigid Gender Roles, *They'd* Be Scoring On ESPN
Lincoln Avenue, Pasadena, CA
Lake Avenue, Pasadena, CA (near Eliot Middle School)
Covered word originally read "dancers." Big shout out to the sugar daddy who made this all possible. What a thoughtful Christmas present ;)
Posted by me at 2:06 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 7, 2003
That's Jillette, Not Like The Razor
"I said, 'Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it.'"
Penn Jillette (of the comedy/magic team Penn and Teller) is recording his experiences with increased flight security measures. Good on him.
Posted by me at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)