Where I Was From

Body by Balanchine

For two hours a week, I feel like somebody again.

posted by Leah @ 9:13 PM 4 comments

Our days are going to make pretty lame "olden days."

Here's another one to file under "things nobody besides myself could possibly be interested in." I was downtown with an hour to kill so I peeked into the Cultural Center gallery to see what was going on. If you haven't been inside, it's on the corner of Washington and Michigan in a gorgeous building that served as the city's original library. It's worth a visit just to see the huge Tiffany domed ceilings and mosaics - just wait til some relative comes to visit and you can take a break from showing yet another person around Millennium Park, go across the street, and enjoy the air conditioning.

The current exhibition is something with fairly limited appeal, like I said. How limited? Early 19th century needlepoint. I know, I know. Hear me out on this one.

What's on display is samplers that adolescent girls stitched between 1700 and the Civil War to work on their sewing skills, create a decorative genealogical table or picture for the wall, or simply use as a momentary distraction on the road to the grave. A lot of them feature an alphabet and a verse or prayer, all bordered by flowers and intricate designs. There were purely decorative pieces on display as well (my favorite being a U.S. map from 1809 where the country just fades away into the vast Louisiana territory in the west, just beyond regions tagged with signifiers like "Creek" and "Choctaw"), but the samplers caught my imagination. When you look at these dingy scraps of silk and burlap, you're essentially staring at somebody's homework or crossword puzzle from two hundred years ago. They created these handicrafts (as I occasionally do in Winter) to kill time, not to preserve the memory of their daily lives for the ages.

All of this leads me to wonder what sorts of artifacts will be left over from our own era. If most of our writing and photos and music is stored on a hard drive and immune to the mark of time, well, I'm glad we're still creatively productive but a PDF file is one lousy artifact. All in all, we live in an age of disposable, mass-produced objects, and I'm not going to go so far as to declare that a positive or negative thing (well, the factory smoke required to produce those disposable things is destroying the planet, but I digress). It just makes it difficult to guess what sort of everyday item will be on display in the Cultural Center two hundred years from now, when so few things are handmade and therefore so few things reveal something about the person who created and used them. Something will certainly remain of us. I just don't think I can guess what it will be.

Labels: Chicago

posted by Leah @ 10:03 PM 1 comments

This must be why you're not supposed to trust wolves.

We spotted this gem in a store window on the way home from dancing with some friends at Tuman's. Beyond the obvious dilemma of figuring out where the store was again (This fountain would kick Operation Tacky Bathroom up to another level. Beyond Thunderdome, even.), you've also got to wonder how that wolf got stuck inside a stump. Lupine tribute to the Danielson Family Band? Agoraphobic attack? Messed with Coyote or maybe Raven one too many times?

The only clear thing in this situation is that there's no way those other wolves are going to lift a damn paw to help him.

posted by Leah @ 12:03 PM 0 comments

Just another Monday

If your weekend was as epic as mine, you might need a little boost to get through Monday. Go ahead, don't be shy. Dress up in your best flying nun wimple or...goat. It's going to be a lovely week.

posted by Leah @ 12:58 PM 1 comments

Bloomsday

A short, feverish morning at home listening to the periodic crash and roll of the brusque voices of a dozen or so German shepherds next door coaxed me toward the street, cringing at the methodical cacophany, as measured as the tides. Wave after wave of dogs. No more time to waste reading work email when I was meant to roam the streets, an afternoon's urban odyssey.

We set our clearly-defined rules and obeyed them: all cell phones were left at home, boundaries were marked between Western, Shakespeare, the Kennedy, Ashland, and North, and we meandered forth into the muggy Bloomsday heat, wandering rocks, no guarantee of any of us coming across the others. The Puerto Rican festival raged somewhere around a corner and the neighborhood drifted west to join clad in red, white, and blue but I alone dressed in blank white and slouched east toward Western, a foreigner for a day, backwards against the current.

And on into the sunbaked, drizzling afternoon. Friends were found and misplaced, some equipped with packs full of books, umbrellas, and scotch, myself carrying little more than a wristwatch. The sun and rain tired of flirting with one another and called the thick night in to take their place as the tide of patrons shifted. Barstools were gradually draped with the colorful skirts of tidier women. A different neighborhood rushing in. Ineluctable modality of the visible.

Out again into the street and away from the group with a passing woman and her bear of a dog, northward, lost somewhere between conversation and Milwaukee Avenue and finally, alone, charted a weary course home.

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 1:19 PM 2 comments

It's not like the old days.

As someone who keeps up on the news about the news, I have to say I'm bored comatose by the whole debate on whether new media and blogging are destroying journalism and sinking the print industry, or merely changing the way people experience media. You know, the way the introduction of television was expected to destroy the film industry. Technological trends happen. The world continues to spin.

So you won't hear me waxing nostalgic for the glory days when journalists had to be trained professionals instead of anonymous internet hacks. Don't get me wrong: I would love it if it was still a viable option to hire full-time staff writers instead of relegating us writers to freelance bit work with no benefits and hardly any pay. Love. It. But my real beef with the state of media today stems from its content. We're better informed on the whereabouts of Lindsay Lohan than those of our military.

The perfect example that things have gone overboard: the photographer who won the Pulitzer for that famous shot of the Vietnamese girl covered in napalm in 1972 is now a common paparazzo. That photo of Paris Hilton crying in the police car? He shot it.

I have a question for anyone who was old enough to watch the news back when the former photo was taken. Was news coverage of Watergate and the Vietnam War ever eclipsed by pointless entertainment blitzes? Given a choice between serious news and fluff, did people tend to opt out like they do now? Would you catch more people reading People or the Times?

This month's Harper's says that the worldwide demand for newsprint has increased 18% since 1990, while the North American demand has decreased 27%. Something tells me that we aren't all merely switching to reading CNN online. If that was the cause of the change, then it would be a worldwide trend, not a North American one. Those castles and whatnot across the Atlantic are definitely wired for DSL.

So. What's in the headlines? Do you feel informed?

Labels: entertainment, politics

posted by Leah @ 1:16 PM 3 comments

Cephalopod Update

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water: it's the Cephalopod Update!



I wasn't instantly impressed when Kiarash started in about the fearsome Humboldt squid the other night, since it shares a name with the stoniest known county/university. (Stoned squid...wouldn't that make the be-all and end-all of Youtube videos...) But it turns out these things are pretty exciting. Quoth National Geographic,


"Known as aggressive predators, Humboldt squid have powerful arms and tentacles, excellent underwater vision and a razor-sharp beak that easily tears through the flesh of their prey. They can also rapidly change their skin color in what appears to be a complex communication system."

Their diet consists of the usual fish, but they also love to snack on fishermen - and each other. In turn, the squid are preyed upon by whales. Well, I think I know what my next tattoo will be.

They may lack the quiet grace of little guys like the nautilus and my personal favorite, the striped pajama squid (which is really just a fancy cuttlefish if you do your research), but for their sheer shock and awe factor, these guys are the quarterbacks of cephalopods. I'm sorry, I can't in good conscience use a football analogy. I don't know the first thing about football. Let's say they're the tenors, not quarterbacks: abundant, yet impressive, but not quite as high on the "how-is-that-even-possible" scale as the colossal squid, the coloratura of the cephalopods.

For instance:

"The squid are believed to live at depths of 660 to 2,300 feet (200 to 700 meters). They may be elusive in some parts, but they're not rare. [Stanford biologist William] Gilly estimates that 10 million squid may be living in a 25-square-mile (65-square-kilometer) area outside Santa Rosalia, Mexico." (National Geographic again)

You might be wondering, "that's nice, but how does it affect my life?" And that's the fun part. They're staging a massive invasion off the coast in Ventura County. So I have to to urge those of you in Southern California: hang around the docks. Befriend a fisherman and sweet-talk him into taking you out on his boat so you can see this for yourself. Do this for me.

Labels: cephalopod update, science, the life aquatic

posted by Leah @ 11:05 AM 0 comments

Quote of the Day?

I don't know which sound bite from last night was better: my mother calling to ask "what's the Midwest like? What's the real world like?" and then urging me to "stop dressing like an English nanny!"

Or was it the moment I said "I'm really into cephalopods!" in an unintended Valley Girl yawp. That reminds me: there hasn't been a Cephalopod Update on this blog in entirely too long. I'll have to check in on those wiggly, wiggly guys again soon.

posted by Leah @ 10:11 PM 3 comments

Where I Was From

I love that magical and completely illusory power the internet has to break down social barriers so that strangers can email each other on Myspace and somehow their presence in each other's personal space isn't as intrusive or patently impossible as the presence of offline strangers in one's private life can be. Someone wrote me out of the blue (since the wallpaper on my iBook is, after all, mostly blue) and asked if I ever miss California. His profile indicated that he'd left the Golden State behind this past year, as well.

Honestly, nobody had really asked before. Seven months isn't much time to cultivate longing for something as complex as a city. Or had no one been curious how I felt?

I hadn't allowed myself to dwell on the question much. Of course, I miss my friends something awful. But the place itself? Hadn't considered it. The whole peninsula seems imaginary when you're not there.

But something stirred in me and I wrote back, easily, instantly:


"I miss the strange feeling of security I derived from living on the edge of the world. And the ordinary things a person misses after moving far away: friends, familiarity, sushi. But San Francisco is so isolated, not geographically (at least until BART shuts down for the night) but philosophically. I don't miss that self-aggrandizing attitude folks cultivate in the Bay Area: I don't miss that way Emperor Norton seemed like a role model for everyone else to come to his town.

Do you miss it?"

Labels: memoir

posted by Leah @ 12:38 PM 2 comments

Quit messing with T. Rex!

Why do scientists have to keep deliberately digging up dirt on T. Rex and sullying its good name? Can't we let sleeping fossils lie? Everybody knows I'm a strictly Stego girl, but even I am tired of hearing this hurtful gossip.


- - -


T. rex was 'slow-turning plodder'

A Tyrannosaurus rex would have had great difficulty getting its jaws on fast, agile prey, a study confirms.
A US team has used detailed computer models to work out the weight of a typical "king of the dinosaurs", and determine how it ran and turned.

The results indicate a 6-8 tonne T. rex was unlikely to have topped 40km/h (25mph) and would have taken a couple of seconds to swivel 45 degrees.

The researchers report their findings in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

They build on previous work detailing the biomechanics of the famous dinosaur, but add in new refinements.

"We've now got a pretty good estimate of its weight - over which there's been some controversy," lead author Dr John Hutchinson explained.

"We've shown there's no way it could weigh 3-4 tonnes as some people have suggested. It had to have weighed 6-8 tonnes," the scientist, who undertook the work at Stanford University, California, told BBC News.

Slowcoach dino

The team's computer modelling system estimated the centre of mass position and the inertia (resistance to turning), which have ramifications for how T. rex would have stood and moved and what it would have looked like.

As well as predicting the dinosaur's likely body mass and top speed (25-40km/h or 15-25mph), the computer calculations gave the team an idea of the turning ability of a T. rex . This has never been done before.

The study indicates the animal would have changed direction incredibly slowly due to its massive inertia, taking one or two seconds to make a quarter-turn.

The species certainly could not have pirouetted rapidly on one leg, as popular illustrations have sometimes pictured it, and other large dinosaurs, doing.

More agile prey would have given the slip to a marauding T. rex quite easily, it seems.

The researchers believe their work will help palaeontologist build up a more realistic picture of how the large dinosaurs lived.

"These were big clunky things - T. rex and the animals it probably preyed on. We have to slow down our view of that ecosystem," said Dr Hutchinson, who is currently lecturing in biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK.

"It wasn't like the Serengeti today where everything is done at top speed."

Dr Paul Barrett, of London's Natural History Museum, commented: "This is another finding that undermines the kind of idea of T. rex as a super-predator.

"The main reason for that being it was a lot slower than we used to think it was; but it has this huge mouth filled with 60-odd, 30cm-long teeth, so it was still a formidable animal."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6720461.stm

Published: 2007/06/04 23:12:55 GMT

© BBC MMVII

Labels: science

posted by Leah @ 11:47 PM 0 comments