19 November 05
Long Before GIS
People were still making maps. News of the discovery of the oldest map in the Western world was just announced. This map is on a bit of a terracotta vase found in an archeological dig about two years ago in southern Italy. The fragment depicts the region of Apulia, and dates from about 500 BC. The script on it is ancient Greek, and it is the first ancient Greek map predating the Romans that has ever been found.
18 November 05
So Frail a Thing
I heard a scream from my office this morning. A bird had flown into our building. It’s been unseasonably warm and we work with the doors open despite the flies…
I don’t know why some people scream when there is a bird indoors: I think more people have bird phobias than you’d imagine. The screamer was hiding under the desk.
I moved over to the window and easily caught the yellow-rumped warbler (Audubon’s) in my hands; took it out; released it. It flew up in to the pine, scolding loudly.
My hands throbbed, remembering that frenzied frail heartbeat.
17 November 05
Feline Drinking Songs
This sounds intriguing—a CD of Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers. It just came out and is available now through CD Baby.
16 November 05
A Different Boston
I spent Sunday in Boston with my sister. She is making a career switch from pediatric occupational therapist, a wonderful one who is quite positive she’s never ever going to write one more report about a child, to an interior designer. She’s taking an online course from KLC in London. I saw the course materials and was quite impressed: it looks like fun, too. It seems in the US the options were either 4-year degree or “interior decorator,” neither of which quite matched her means or aptitude, so she’s a British student. Again. Brava, say I.
Since one of her ongoing assignments is to visit houses from earlier eras, sketch them, and compare period decoration, we visited the Paul Revere House in the North End (late Tudor, sparse but not spartan furnishings); the Pierce house next door (early Georgian, fascinating black line running from the fireplace to border sections of the room), and the Otis house just across Cambridge Street from Beacon Hill, plush Federal.
I lived in Boston for eight years and never went in any of these places. It was interesting to return and see them through this new lens, sketching fireplaces and chairs and wondering how they managed to keep warm through all those freezing winters.
Mostly it was such a treat to spend a WHOLE DAY with my sister, just the two of us. This happens so rarely nowadays. I always return to Davis after having seen her thinking about ways to reinvent ourselves so we could move to some hilltop ramshackle farmstead in the frozen north…
15 November 05
Kater Murr
I’ve been listening to the one CD of Schumann I have, Artur Rubenstein performing the Kreisleriana and the Fantasia Op. 17. Maybe this means it’s time to reread E.T.A. Hoffmann’s wild circa 1820 novel The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr, which was the inspiration for the Kreisleriana.
From the opening bits:
Well the editor promised to do his best for his literary colleague. It did rather surprise him when his friend confessed that the manuscript was the work of a tomcat called Murr, and contained an account of the cat’s life and opinions; however, he had given his word, and since the style of the opening struck him as quite good he went straight off, with the manuscript in his pocket to Herr Dümmler in Unter den Linden and offered him the right to publish the tomcat’s book.
Herr Dümmler said that although he had never numbered a cat among his authors before, nor did he know that any of his esteemed colleagues had taken on a man of that stamp, he was willing to make the attempt.
So printing began, and the editor saw the first clean proofs. Imagine his alarm, however, when he discovered that now and then Murr’s story breaks off, and there are interpolations of a different nature, which belong to another book, containing the biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler!
E.T.A. Hoffmann did actually have a cat named Murr.
14 November 05
Tired but Home
I got back from the East Coast today. I’m tired. And I got to see Mars below a nearly-full moon before I collapse into bed…
13 November 05
Multivariate Fun
Every several years the Pew Research Center publishes a political typology study in which they divide up the American electorate into nine different groups based on values, political beliefs, and party affiliation. I like these sorts of cluster analyses. It’s even better if you get to play with the original data. The Pew folks are very good about releasing the original datasets: you just have wait six months after the report was published. The typology dataset came out last Thursday, and I’ve been having fun today going through their analyses. I’ve reached no conclusions yet, though.
12 November 05
Horses! Horses! Horses!
Today my niece (7) and nephew (5, just) both participated in a horse show involving equitation, pleasure, games (egg-and-spoon, the equestrian equivalent of musical chairs, and other fun delights, culminating in the fancy dress show, horse and rider both).
Simon was done after his morning stint; Tesla carried on throughout the day. So did her dogged aunt. It was FREEZING, though not as bad as yesteray.
It’s a very long time since I’ve spent an entire day around horses, though I used to do it a lot. Through the energy and giggles of preadolescent girls I got some hardwiring back to days spent around jukeboxes in jodphurs. The smell of a stable/barn: it throws me back to a time when I wasn’t remotely concerned about who I was, but was desperate to know what a horse was thinking. The stable was a place where I really felt in control; I saw that countless times today.
There were lots of ragged lives around this show. A girl whose father was killed in a car crash two years ago in front of her, whose mother just remarried two weeks ago; a triad of sisters who are all homeschooled, impeccably mannered, with almost no money for clothes; the horse who can’t move for arthritis and other ailments but who seems too happy to put down. The woman who runs the whole show, Beth, has lost in the last three months three relatives including her mother, a cat, a dog, two horses, and almost her sanity. This is a partial list.
It was like witnessing a communal healing-gymkhana. Such a notion shouldn’t surprise me…
11 November 05
Cali Fuschia
Pica is away in Maine visiting her sister this long weekend. I did a few sketches in the Arboretum today after going to hear a morning talk on campus despite the holiday by Bruce Babbitt. The California fuschias (Epilobum canum) were very much in bloom.
10 November 05
A Cartographic Font
Since I am both a map geek and a font geek, I am glad to learn about Cisalpin, which is a font recently designed by Swiss typographer Felix Arnold specifically for use in cartography. It is a linear sans serif face that is intended to be extremely legible at small sizes and also runs slightly narrow to avoid long line lengths.