7 April 05
Chart of Stones
For those of you with an interest in barrows, henges, stone circles, and ancient trackways, or who, like Terry Pratchett, want to upgrade to a 33-megalith processor, there is now an interactive map of the megaliths of Europe at the Megalithic Portal.
6 April 05
Adem
The surname of a Mexican Cohomologist at the University of Wisconsin Mathematics Department.
The Department of Environmental Management in the State of Alabama: administers all major federal environmental laws, including the Clear Air, Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water acts and federal solid and hazardous…
A singer-songwriter with the Domino Recording Company and with a very cool website.
The Department of Emergency Management in the State of Arkansas.
Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis.
Administration of Employment in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
A microfilm company located in Britain.
The four letters that give uncial letters the characteristics that make them unmistakeable for anything else. I’m not sure any other hand can boast this, though I’d love to be proved wrong. Example below is written out with a Pilot Parallel Pen that arrived in the mail this morning…
5 April 05
Green Roofs
My officemate, continuing his jet-setting life, was up at Oregon State last week, and on the way back he stopped off at Powell’s in Portland — lucky him! He brought back a spectacularly designed new book entitled Green Roofs: Ecological Design and Construction. This book illustrates some forty case studies of green roof architecture around the world.
For a primer on green roof architecture see Greenroofs 101.
4 April 05
Of Deer and Popes
I saw you early at Wembley:
“Like as the Hart
Desireth the Waterbrook”—They rehearsed us to death,
Drunk with youth and hope
Till the chopper brought you into
Howls. Holy Hooligans, Batman!
Among us you were
Joy
Before your Inquisitors
Silenced Boff
A hint
Of times
To come
You’re gone, now
Facing Death standing up
No heroics
(Unlike the ones
They insisted on
For Terri)
I felt the tears
But is it you,
White Hart,
Or saccharine nostalgia,
Or just
This Is The End
The white light
Down the tunnel—Hollywood and faith
Caught in the headlights?
Leonardo Boff was a Brazilian Franciscan and a Liberation Theologian who advocated a Preferential Option for the Poor which ran him afoul of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and had him defrocked.
3 April 05
Here We Go Again
Happily, they broadcast the opening game of the baseball season on the radio so we got our Opening Day baseball fix in. Unhappily, the Yankees, who have been waiting all winter long after their playoff collapse to beat up on the Red Sox, did just that, winning 9-2 in the game at Yankee Stadium. Of the two 41-year-old starters, Randy Johnson was impressive, but David Wells most decidedly was not.
It wasn’t baseball weather here, though — a brief storm came through, dropping 0.46 inches of rain this afternoon over several hours. There was a wonderful rainbow just before sunset: the sun had descended just below the cloud deck covering the sky, and the resultant rainbow in the east was about as tall as you can get.
2 April 05
Cache Creek Outing
We got a late invitation from our landlord la to go for a hike today along a ridge over Bear Creek and Cache Creek in the upper northwest corner of Yolo County, crossing over into Colusa County. It was predicted to be a beautiful day so we said yes, the first time we’ve accepted one of his invitations like this. (We agree on almost no political, social, or environmental issues at all, though we could all agree that the poor Pope was probably best off being allowed to go quietly, no heroics.)
This didn’t leave much in the way of conversation topics over 3 hours of driving or 5.5 miles of hiking, but we seemed to manage. We saw five tule elk; a prairie falcon (possibly two, though it might have been the same bird); a perfectly splendid wildflower assortment including larkspur that was intoxicating in its purpleness, much yellow and white, and of course the green bursting through blue oaks and the hillsides.
I’m sore from this, being well out of shape for this kind of thing, with my usual crop of three or so blisters, so I rounded out my day by finishing the account of the Red Sox 2004 season, in plenty of time for Opening Day tomorrow.
1 April 05
Friday Troll Blogging
Here is a little painting of one of the two trolls our friend Jennifer sent us from Sweden several years back. I did this last night using watercolor over a water-soluble 4B sketching pencil drawing, a combination which seems to turn out better than I thought it should. So I’ll be trying more experiments with this choice of media.
31 March 05
Passing the Book Torch
Maria of Alembic has passed the stick along to me for this book meme.
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Since this involves memorizing an entire book and I’d have no hope ever of doing that for the 2005 Baseball Prospectus which would be my first choice, I’ll take Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes, lots. Sargeant Angua, the female werewolf on the Watch in Terry Pratchett’s Ankh Morpork, and Stephen Maturin of the O’Brian series come to mind as the most recent.
The last book you bought is?
The Zen of CSS Design and CSS Cookbook
What are you currently reading?
Faithful, an account by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan of the 2004 Boston Red Sox which I need to finish by Opening Day (Sunday); Enemies of Promise by Lindsay Waters; Behind the Curve, a sailing whodunit by Steven Chance, to whom I’m related and would otherwise not be reading it at all; The Zen of CSS Design; Queen Mother by Penelope Mortimer which I started at DocRoc’s and which is an astonishingly gripping account of the fall of an empire; Jingo by Terry Pratchett; and Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I may give up on the Chance pretty soon, though I’m told it contains a reference to my grandparents in a slightly salacious way. I just can’t plod my way through till I get there. Oh, there’s another one, it was at the bottom of the pile and never quite got finished: Starhawk’s Earth Path.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Since we’re all going to be on the desert island and everyone else already has the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the collected Shakespeare, I’ll bring a natural history of greater Oceania or whereever the island is, complete works of Chaucer, the Divine Comedy, Proust, and Cervantes.
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
DocRoc, because she reads widely and well; Chris R., because she does too; and Chris Clarke, because I know the answers are going to be so unlike mine and will, I hope, include paleontology and things. He seems awfully busy these days, though, exposing the tears in our civic fabric.
30 March 05
Resurrection of the World’s Ugliest Car
A mechanic in Dorset has spent the last twelve years restoring what is surely the world’s ugliest car. This vehicle was built by a New York priest 50 years ago who intended it to be the safest car ever made. It had more than its share of teething troubles, breaking down 15 times on the day of its official launch, and after a few years it ended up being abandoned in a field behind a body shop in Connecticut. The car deteriorated there for 30 years, but when mechanic Andy Saunders learned of its existence, he thought he had never seen anything so ugly and knew he had to have it.
29 March 05
More on Pens
We took over a new pen for Karen on Sunday for her birthday, a purple Sunrise Stypen-Up with purple ink. (The retractable fountain pen.) I was happy to see her using it in our kickoff meeting today for the Campus Community Book Project for next year (Kite Runner).
And then Numenius tells me about another pen fetishist out there (Scribbling Woman, nice Zapfino masthead). Safety in numbers. Good. I’m already having anxiety about what pens to take to our Artist’s Journal workshop at the San Francisco Center for the Book weekend after next…
Thanks to all who left notes of congratulation on our second blogday.