Wait – I don’t believe that a Shmoo even HAS a skeleton. Isn’t it entirely cytoplasmic? Or am I thinking of yeast?
I do like the little vestigial arms – kind of like the rudimentary, internal “hindlimbs” of whales and pythons. How did the Shmoo evolve, anyway? Did the proto-shmoo have opposable thumbs? How could evolution possibly select for the bizarrely self-destructive altruism of a Shmoo?
Uh oh. This is not a productive line of thought. Stopping now.
Praying mantises are cool. If you don’t have them around already, consider buying an egg case – hundreds of ghostly miniature mantises hatch out and, if not dispersed soon enough, voraciously eat each other. The surviving siblings grow to remarkable size over the course of the summer. I got a mantis case for my mom last spring, and she loved it (you can see that I inherited some of my weirdness).
We handle the mantises in our yard, and let them walk on us, all the time. That is, until I came across this gratuitous scene of violence via Bird Watcher’s Digest:
Photos by Richard Walkup, PA
Source: Bird Watcher’s Digest
Apparently when mantises get large enough, they can skewer a hummingbird right out of the air! Ack! I am NOT letting a mantis walk on my face ever again.
Once, years ago, I tore a photo of Grace Paley out of a magazine. The photo was something like this one, from the cover of her Collected Poems. I had no idea who she was at the time, but something about the way she glowed out of her winter bundling, looking amused, curious, kind, simply happy, made me think: that is how I want to look in five decades. I want to look out on the world with that expression.
Sadly, Grace Paley died this week at the age of 84.
Although her oeuvre was small, I never made a point of reading all Paley’s work, and have read none of the short stories for which she is so well known. But now and then I’d run across a poem in the New Yorker and see her name at the bottom with some pleasure. When I heard of her death, the poem below is the one that came to me: it reminds me how I experienced time when very young, in a fractured mosaic of wonder and connections. Confusing, perhaps, yet not scary: continually surprising. Is that also how the very old experience the world? If so, I don’t think I would mind.
“On Occasion”
I forget the names of my friends
and the names of the flowers in
my garden my friends remind me
Grace     it’s us     the flowers just
stand there stunned by the mid-
summer dayA long time ago my mother said
darling     there are also wild flowers
but look     these I plantedmy flowers are pink and rose and
orange     they’re sturdy     they make
new petals everyday to fill in
their fat round facessuddenly before thought I
called out ZINNIA Â Â Â Â ZINNIA
ZINNIA Â Â Â Â along came a sunny
summer breeze they swayed and
lightly bowed so I said Mother
Grace Paley interview at The Paris Review
Obituary at the Washington Post
Stephen King’s column in the 8/10/07 Entertainment Weekly charmed me. Struck by a silly YouTube video, he launches into a paean to entertainment that, without regard for artistic integrity or prestige, purely entertains:
I sat there amazed and full of happiness, thinking: ”Yeah. This is exactly what I wanted today.” I feel it every time I listen to ”Jump” by Van Halen or ”You’ve Got Another Thing Comin”’ by Judas Priest. I feel it every time I put on my club mix of Lou Bega’s ”Mambo No. 5.” I’m sure some of you think that’s silly, but you probably have your own personal joy buzzers (for a very hip friend of mine who shall go unnamed in this piece, it’s the Dolly Parton version of ”I Will Always Love You”).
It’s easy — maybe too easy — to get caught up in serious discussions of good and bad, or to grade entertainment the way teachers grade school papers (as EW does, in case you missed it). Those discussions have their place, even though we know in our hearts that all such judgments — even of the humble art produced by the pop culture — are purely subjective. And as a veteran grade-grind in my youth, I have no problem with awarding A’s, B’s, and the occasional F to movies, books, and CDs (which is not to say I don’t also have reservations about such drive-by critiques). But artsy/intellectual discussions have little to do with how I felt when I saw Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. This movie made virtually no one’s top 10 list except mine, but I’ll never forget some exuberant (and possibly drunk) moviegoer in the front row shouting: ”This movie KICKS ASS!” I felt the same way. Because it did. (Stephen King: The Pop of King (EW))
King is talking about guilty pleasures, of course, although he claims that the phrase “is meaningless, an elitist concept invented by smarmy intellectuals with nothing better to do.” Perhaps as a writer of guilty pleasures, he’s sensitive to the strange fact that our personal joy buzzers usuallydo make us feel guilty or embarassed. I bubble over with elation at the first strings of “Come on Eileen,” and can’t help skipping to the electronic staccato of Fatboy Slim’s “Magic Carpet Ride” remix. Yet I remain completely indifferent to Beethoven. I’m horrified that I respond this way, but I can’t help it. Guilty pleasures, like crushes, are intense and irrational.
This is a good idea, but in practice it isn’t terribly accurate. The idea is to tell you whether the area in which you live is walker-friendly – how many stores, restaurants, bars, etc. are close to you? Unfortunately, Google’s database, the basis of the Walkscore algorithm, seems deficient. I live amidst a veritable explosion of eateries here in DC – plus, I’m within easy walking distance of the National Zoo. Lions and tigers! Pandas and elephants! A flippin’ baby giant anteater! That’s gotta be a triple walk score right there. Yet my score is only 82/100 – a B. Why?
So then I looked at the sleepy town where I used to live. My old house had a score of 60. WHAT? There was nothing to do there! That’s why I left!
A quick check of the destinations listed explained it all. I used to live very close to, yet inexplicably did not visit, the Young Marines, Municipal Building Maintenance, Municipal Park Maintenance, the Department of Fisheries, several long-defunct libraries and cafes, a catering establishment, and eight schools. And then there’s the slight problem of the RIVER between my house and half the proposed destinations. It’s hard to carry groceries while snorkeling. (These are all known issues with Walkscore.)
No algorithm is perfect, but Walkscore will not tell you if you live in a “good†neighborhood. Only visiting can tell you that. And I’m going to go visit the giant baby anteater.
 
I found this bizarre critter right outside my new DC apartment. I guess my entomological skills will have to expand, along with my tolerance for exuberant tree growth, because I have absolutely no idea what it might be. It was almost as long as my hand. Any ideas? (this is its ventral side)
Square A is exactly the same color as square B. No kidding.
Our visual systems are old pros at tricking our consciousness. What’s going on here is a simple case of lightness constancy: our visual system is designed to feed us not merely raw data, but a useful interpretation of what we see. This process is what allows the pages of a book to appear “white” in both bright sunlight and leafy shade, despite the change in the amount of light reflected from the pages.
For an explanation of this illusion, created about ten years ago by Edward H. Adelson, refer to this page at MIT. The illusion also has its own Wikipedia page. Adelson’s Lightness Perception and Lightness Illusions (Chapter 24 from M. Gazzaniga’s The New Cognitive Neurosciences) is a fairly technical treatment of lightness constancy. Meredith Talusan and Janice Chen have created Flash animations of the illusions in Adelson’s chapter, so if you don’t particularly care about Metelli’s episcotister model, you can go straight to the pretty pictures.
I’ve seen this principle illustrated before, but can usually force my brain to accept “reality.” On this one, I just couldn’t make myself accept that the squares are the same color, until I took off my glasses. When the sharp grid of the checkerboard and the letters “A” and “B” are too blurry to be visible, suddenly the two squares do appear the same color! Try taking off your glasses (and/or squinting to distort your vision) and see if it works for you, too.
Thanks to Parseval for suggesting this checkerboard illusion in a comment.
I just finished driving from Seattle to Washington, DC, which explains my neglect of the blog. I’ve been more concerned with straightening out last-minute snafus via cell phone, than with posting here. And sadly, I was traveling alone, so I couldn’t spare the time to pull over at each tempting vista and take photos, and I have no pictures.
Before Monday, I had never driven past Idaho. So as I left on my journey, I was naively hoping to “see the country” in some sort of enlightening, trans-generational, road-trip-through-Americana way. That didn’t happen. Cruising I-90 might allow one to view the panoramic vistas of the West, but those vistas look pretty identical until Minnesota. And in the Midwest, the tollways become downright boring. I could hardly see anything, even in Chicago. Chicago was two horrific hours of my life that I will never have back, for which I paid some $13 in tolls. Gah.
Photo 51
Rosalind Franklin, 1952
Rosalind Franklin: Photo 51
Denise Wyllie & Clare O Hagan, 2007
Wyllie and O Hagan first became interested in Franklin when they discovered her story while doing an art residency at a laboratory that researched DNA. Wyllie explains: “We were talking to a fellow artist about our project and she said, ‘Oh you know about Rosalind Franklin, of course’, but of course, we didn’t.†Intrigued, the artists researched Franklin’s story and were shocked by what they found. O Hagan says: “We were fuelled by anger that we knew nothing about Franklin’s work and that her work wasn’t recognised.”
I appreciate the sentiment, but is Rosalind Franklin really all that obscure and unrecognized? Watson and Crick sure got the glory fifty years ago, but Franklin’s reputation has undergone a renaissance. She is now better known than other important figures in the history of genetics, like Griffith, Chargaff, Meselson & Stahl, Hershey & Chase, or Barbara McClintock, and in order to “research Franklin’s story” you need go no further than NPR or PBS. Still, interesting art, and always a good thing to see Franklin’s contribution recognized. . .
