I love this stuff...

To counteract some of my bile of recent days, here is a happy post.

One of the things I love is that there are people out there interested in keeping alive/recreating past musical traditions. I happened - via a chain of YouTube searching - to stumble across the Bratislava (!) Hot Serenaders, doing a song most of us know better from Tiny Tim (or, perhaps, SpongeBob SquarePants):



Hah! I love the monocle on the singer. (I have to admit, though I still love Tiny Tim's version, I like this one better. I could never quite get used to the falsetto).

I LIKE that semi-corny old dance band stuff. It sounds kind of Jeeves-and-Wooster to me, or perhaps like something that Albert Campion would listen to. (From the "classical" world - I love Shostakovich's Jazz Suites, which are somewhat in the same style, but more complex)

Here's more (an unknown, 1920s ("pre Nazi" as they are clear to point out) German tune):



And from a bit later in time (or in "recreated time"), there are the awesome Puppini Sisters, which Ken posted about a while back:



They also do Mr. Sandman:



(If I have any quibbles, it is that they sing just a bit too fast. But otherwise: that kind of close harmony stuff blows me away, partly because I cannot do it.)

Hah - they even do "I Will Survive":



(I don't like this version as well, but that might be partly because it's a live version and the audio is not so good, and they're obviously hamming for the audience).

Ironing

This is another one of those "little slice of my life" posts.

I was ironing off some quilt fabric today. And I realized why I enjoy it - for one thing, ironing "simple" stuff (where there aren't collars or buttons you have to worry about) is easy and, on a cool day, kind of pleasant. Meditative.

I also realized that it reminds me a bit of ironing my dad's handkerchiefs when I was a kid. This is how a lot of girls first "learned" to iron - maybe that's not done any more, I don't know. I've read references to having little girls iron handkerchiefs in books from the 30s through the 50s and I wonder sometimes if this is just another way that I was sort of a generation to a generation-and-a-half behind some of my friends - a lot of the things I was into, a lot of the things I learned to do, seemed to be stuff that my friends and their families seemed to regard as obsolete. (Of course, it also might have been a function of being an academic family in a town full of, mostly, executives and small-business owners, and of having parents who, if they hadn't exactly KNOWN poverty growing up, had certainly heard it rattling the doorknob.)

I also had friends who, when they expressed a desire to learn to sew or crochet or something, their moms were like, "Why do you want to do THAT?" as if they were wasting their time, or setting the women's movement back 30 years (and that's not just my imagination; I've read other people who have said that some of the more feministy moms in the 70s didn't want their daughters to learn to cook or sew, thinking that somehow made them more "independent." Well, I can cook - and cook darn well, if I say so myself - and I can say I'm "independent." I'm certainly "independent" of having to depend on carry-out or frozen dinners...)

But I do think my being a little out-of-step with my generation cohort may be a function of the fact that the three generations of my mom's family (me, her, and her mother) span back over 100 years - my grandmother was born in 1897, "during the Spanish-American War" as she used to say. She grew up on a farm and married to get off the farm - her husband was an accountant in the lumber camps and from what my mom's said, there was never a whole lot of money, but they made do.

My mom was a late-in-life baby. She was born in...well, heck, she doesn't read this and I don't think she'd be offended if I reveal it, but she was born in 1936.

Yup, my mom is the same age as "too old to run" McCain. (Which is why I give a pretty hostile stare to anyone who makes old jokes about McCain. Say what you will about the man's policies, or temper, or whatever - but don't dismiss him solely because he's the age he is. My mom could run the country (though I know she would never WANT to) without her age being a factor (and she could probably do a damn sight better at running it than some folks who have tried for the office, and possibly a damn sight better than some folks who've actually HELD the office).)

And I was a late-in-life baby (well, not by today's standards, for sure. My mom once remarked, I think, that she was irritated by one of the doctors branding her a "geriatric mother" because she was over 30 when she had her first baby).

So sometimes I think the reason I'm less technologically plugged-in than some of my peers, the reason I like swing music and doo-wop more than most of what passed for Top 40 when I was a teen* may be because of my family background. (I also adore classical music - and am enough of an aficionado to want to say "classical sensu lato there - because my parents always had Mozart or Beethoven records playing in the house, and I used to listen to "Adventures in Good Music" with my dad).

(*though that might just be because I have better taste. [joking, not dissing anyone who likes mid-80s pop...])

Anyway. Back to the quilting. One thing I'm wanting to do this fall is go through some of my fabric "stash." (and wow, do I have a LOT of fabric. I've been buying it for nearly 20 years - I've been a "for reals" quilter since 1990 or so, and even as an impoverished grad student would by a half yard now and then just because I liked it and it made me happy). And I want to organize a lot of the fabric I have into groups based on fabrics I want to use together.

I have lots and lots of different color combinations. One of the reasons I enjoy quilting is the opportunity to play with color and pattern. It's my artistic outlet. I have a colleague who writes short stories and poetry (I think he's even had a few published) and who is working on a novel...I've told him the quilts are like my poems; I just need to express myself some way that is non-verbal.

I have fabric from a lot of different "lines." For people who aren't quilters - there are a number of different fabric companies out there (Moda is one of my personal favorites). They have different "lines" that are made by designers - for example, Mary Engelbreit will design a "line" based on her illustrations - they will all go together, will all have similar colors and be of a similar style.

The good thing about using fabric from the same "line" is you know it will all work together well. The not-so-good thing, in some cases, is that it's very "matchy" (it can make a quilt look almost too "commercially made") and sometimes the fabric colors don't contrast well. So I usually use fabric from a couple different "lines" in a quilt, it makes it more interesting to me. And sometimes I will find two fabrics I bought at different times and realize they look really good together, and that I want to use them together - which is part of the purpose of the sorting and stacking this weekend; I want to line up some projects where the fabric's all washed and ironed and ready and I can just start cutting when I figure out what pattern I want to use.

So I've been ironing off fabric and stacking it up. The part that made me think of ironing my dad's handkerchiefs is ironing the fat quarters. (For non-quilters: fabric comes by the yard. You can buy any increment; a yard would be 36" long by [typically] 40 to 44 inches wide. A half-yard then would be 18" by 42", a quarter-yard would be 9" by 42". Except quarter yards cut that way are long and skinny and hard to work with and they tangle up when you pre-wash them before sewing with them and they're just generally not as fun as fat quarters. A fat quarter is half of a half-yard - that is, 18" by 20" to 22". There are dozens of patterns and a good number of books out there with patterns specifically designed for fat quarters. Most quilt shops have stacks and stacks of them - so you can buy fabric without having to wait to have it cut, if you just want little pieces for a scrap quilt or a fat quarter quilt).

So a fat quarter is not that different in size from the big handkerchiefs my dad used to carry (and still does, in fact). I used to iron them and fold them when I was a kid and was "helping" (under my mom's watchful eye and with the iron not set TOO high). I fold the fat quarters the same way today, which is what made me think of it.

Yeah, my dad carried handkerchiefs. The big plain white kind, some kind of fine fabric (lawn, I think) with a rolled hem and those little stripes that were worked in a heavier thread. (If you've seen the type I'm talking about, you know what I mean). He always had one. When I was a kid, if I had a sneezing fit or a crying jag, he'd quietly pull out the handkerchief and hand it to me. If I found a neat rock and I wanted to take it home, he'd wrap it up in his handkerchief for me. A few times as a young teenager, when I had little money for birthday or Christmas presents and couldn't think what to get him, I got him new handkerchiefs, and he used them, and I felt good about it, because I had picked a gift he actually could use.

So I smile as I iron and fold my fat quarters and think about that. And I'm grateful that I was a kid with a "good dad." And a "good mom," for that matter. (And I'm also grateful that I still have both my dad and mom.)

G-U-E-R-D-O-N

Congratulations to Sameer Mishra for winning the National Spelling Bee. .

Every year they televise this, I say, "I'm going to sit down and watch" but I never do.

I think part of it was that I was a spelling bee kid myself - I only got as far as the regionals (and didn't go very far at that) - and I remember that horrible, heart-pounding, sweaty-palmed moment that you stand at the microphone, waiting for your word.

Is it going to be one you know in a snap? Is it going to be one you studied? Is it going to be one you can visualize perfectly in your mind and get all the letters in the right order, no problem? Or is it going to be one of THOSE words, the ones with the funny vowel combinations, or with the funky not-from-any-Indo-European-language diphthong that you always screw up?

Or, worst of all, is it going to be a word you've never even heard of before?

So I think part of the reason I don't watch is that my stomach tends to knot up in sympathy for the kids.

But I have watched a bit of the news coverage - noted the words used. And the winning word, if I may boast a bit, is not completely unfamiliar to me - I am sure I've seen it in some of my books dealing with Ancient Rome. (It means something like a prize that a person has earned).

There was one bit of a news clip that I saw that just made me chuckle. Mishra was up for his turn, the "pronouncer" told him the word.

The word was "Numnah," which is some kind of sheepskin product (I had to look it up myself and I couldn't remember the correct spelling without looking at the AP story)

Confusion crossed the young boy's face.

"Numbnut?" he asked.

The pronouncer, not wanting to risk violating the rules, couldn't just say, "No, that's not it." So he said instead, gently, "How about I say it again and you say it after me?"

And then he pronounced it more clearly.

And the look of relief that suffused Sameer's face, when he realized what the word really was (and presumably, he knew how to spell it) was priceless. (I can imagine he was thinking something like, "Wow....that was almost the most epic of epic fails ever." Can you imagine how awful it would be to be the kid who lost the national spelling bee because you thought your word was "numbnut"?)

I have to admit that I kind of love the spelling bee kids. It gets back to the fact that I always appreciate it when someone has that passion, that interest - when they will spend large amounts of time doing a thing mostly for its own sake. I know there are people who would argue (because I've had some in my classes) that spelling in these days of Spell-Check is unimportant, that you should just slap any old spelling down there and let the computer correct it. Or, more insidiously, there are the "language evolves, dammit!" people who sometimes argue that any spelling that people can interpret should be regarded as a "correct" spelling. (Some of these are the same people who would like to make text-speech acceptable for all written communications).

And to that I say no. There is a certain amount of pride, I think, that one can take in doing things RIGHT. In going to the effort to make sure everything is correct. In not being sloppy. (I think I said before that one of the things that irritates me is intellectual laziness - ESPECIALLY coming from people who should know better).

I know there are also people who would argue that being a good speller is kind of a useless skill - that it is not something that will pave the way to a good job, or to fame or glory or anything like that. That it's not like being, say, an excellent hockey player.

And yet - I think there is a certain value to it. It shows that these kids have the ability to focus. That they have discipline - discipline to sit indoors and look at lists of roots and suffixes and prefixes when other kids are out playing. That they care about something and will take the time to learn it and to be excellent at it.

There was an author - I think it was Mark Bauerlein- who was talking on some radio show about how the claims some people make that "The Internet is our collective memory now" (in the sense that learning and education should be "transformed" and changed into something happy and fun where there is never any drilling on times-tables or state capitols or things like that) are false, that having a superficial knowledge of something (or assuming you can look it up on Wikipedia) is very different from KNOWING something, from taking a lot of time with it, from looking at it from a lot of different angles. He used the example of Abraham Lincoln. "Internet era" knowledge, he suggested, would give you the dates that Lincoln served in office and maybe the text of his speeches, or pieces of legislation he passed. But someone who STUDIED Lincoln, who tried to fit him into the larger American picture, who looked at his character, the things he did before he got into office - they would have a much more complete view and in some sense, their characters would be built by learning about the characters of the people they studied. (He said it a lot better than I can).

And I guess that's part of it for me. I am always cheered when someone cares so deeply about a topic that they want to look at it from all sides - they want to LIVE that topic, they want to be able to talk intelligently about it at length.

That may be because that's how I tend to learn about things - when something grabs my interest, I want to read all that I can about it, look at the pros and cons, try to figure out how and why it is important to the other things I know.

And prepping for the spelling bee is kind of like that. I have a little first-hand information - as I said, I was a spelling-bee kid (only for two years, though, 7th and 8th grade) and I didn't get all that far.

I don't remember particularly how people were chosen - it may have been that we had a school spelling bee (with no beforehand preparation) but I kind of remember it as being that we were recommended by our "Language Arts" teachers. (Yeah, "Language Arts." Not "English" or "Grammar" or "Literature.")

Anyway. Those of us who were chosen, and who chose to do the spelling bee thing, would stay after school one or two days a week to train. I still remember my "coach" - she was also my 7th grade math teacher, Mrs. Turnblacer.

We would sit in her classroom and go over long lists of words. She'd talk to us about the various roots (Latin and Greek) that many words had, and talk of prefixes and suffixes. We also had "homework" - lists of words to familiarize ourselves with.

In some cases, you can break a word down by its component parts and get the spelling that way. But a lot of words - especially words brought in from non-Indo-European languages, especially words that have had to have been transliterated from something like Hebrew or Sanskrit - you can't do that. You just have to learn them. So learn them we did.

I wonder now if that was part of what lead to my having an "enhanced" vocabulary - in that I am the person that people ask, "Hey, what does this word mean?" (And I almost always know it). Then again - I always loved the vocabulary-building and spelling (which tended to be "hard" words and so was more vocabulary-building) exercises in school. And I read a lot. And my mom claims that I used to read the dictionary when I was a kid, though I don't remember that.

At any rate - I enjoyed doing the spelling bee prep. I actually enjoyed the study sessions more than the actual bee, which was pretty nerve-wracking. I think I liked learning all those words because it was orderly, it was precise, it was something that required careful detail work, and I was good at that.

I think I also liked it because - as a non-athletic kid, as someone who wasn't all that good at art, who didn't sing - it was one way of my being able to be recognized for something I was good at. It didn't matter that the other kids thought it was dorky; it was important to me.

I'm not quite as careful about spelling as I used to be - there are certain words I always have to look up these days, and certain words I often misspell. But I do think there was some sort of intellectual or character-building value in having been in the spelling bee, of having taken the time to prepare and study for it. If nothing else, it emphasized my belief (instilled by my parents) that working hard at something is the best way to get what you want in life. (And no, I don't mind that I never got to go to the National bee. I don't know how well I would have handled it; I was a pretty tightly-wound kid and the regional bee was about all the stress I could take).

Da Probm

(That's my mom's impersonation of how some of the - shall we say, more backwoodsy girls from where she lived pronounced it. "I'm goin' to Da Probm!")

I happened to be a bit late leaving the house this morning - normally I'm over here and at my desk by 7, but I had some bills I wanted to get paid and out, so as I was writing them, the local news I had on switched over to one of those morning shows (I think it was CBS.)

The morning network shows - like the current incarnation of "Today" and such - make my head want to explode. They set themselves up as SO IMPORTANT. They do Very Special Stories on things (like "the rising rates of autism....what does it mean?") and then follow it up with some kind of super-idiotic fluff piece. Or they barely scratch the surface of some story that might be important if it was actually, you know, investigated, and then it's "And next - see what's hot in shoes for spring!"

Well, today, they doing a series on Reliving Their Proms.

Flippin' heck? Reliving your prom? Who does that?

(Wait, wait - don't tell me: "People whose lives peaked in high school.")

Anyway, apparently the anchors (and when I think of Today I think of Brokaw and Pauley; that's how long it's been since I actually watched the thing. I don't know who's running the show now) are reliving their proms.

Except, instead of doing like any other person in this country and sitting around and TALKING about what happened at Prom, they are having the extra-special Rich Kid Birthday Party version of it - one guy got to play baseball with some members of some national baseball team the year he went to Prom (yeah, that's real prom-my), one guy got to dance with the stars of A Chorus Line (I am withholding ALL the horrible un-PC jokes I could make about that), and one woman - and I actually looked up for this, because it said she went to prom in 1987, which would have been the Prom Year for me - got "made over" to look like she did at Prom.

In an eye-searingly electric blue dress and that horrible spiral-perm hair girls used to get.

Now, yeah - I know, I'm being cynical here. But I do think this kind of thing merits a bit of ridicule - they call themselves a "news" show and they are playing "dress up like we did when we were 18." And they're trying to be the Voice of the People and yet they are "reminiscing" in ways that the average person wouldn't be able to afford, if they even COULD get their foot in the door to talk to the people from A Chorus Line or somesuch.

And I'm probably a bit cynical as I didn't go to my own prom. I really had no interest. I wasn't "going with" anyone at that time, and the one guy I would have been interested in asking, by the time I had screwed up enough courage to consider going to ask him myself, I heard the gossip..."Did you hear that Mimi asked Jay to the prom?"

As for going alone - which would have been an option - I didn't want to. For three reasons:

1. I couldn't see paying that kind of money to go alone (And I think they also had a sort of "single supplement" charge, where you paid more to go stag than you would as half of a couple. Which is unfair, but then life is unfair.)

2. Of my two best friends, one had recently been dumped and was very anti-prom, and the other was going with a male friend from another school - and going to HIS prom. So I wouldn't even have had the two most important members of my team to back me up and to joke about the horrible dresses the popular girls were wearing.

3. I figured it looked less pathetic to stay home than to go to the prom by myself. I was very self-conscious in those days.

Honestly? I probably would not have enjoyed myself. I don't like the "music of my generation" (probably a lot of INXS and Depeche Mode got played at that prom - as I remember, they had a DJ instead of a band). I don't like crowds, especially when there are people I sense as being hostile to me in that crowd (i.e., the popular kids). I'm sure a lot of drinking went on both before and after the prom, and I wasn't into that. (Nor was I into the groping and feeling that probably took place, even DURING prom.)

But it does kind of baffle me, someone wanting to relive their prom 20 years or more from the time it happened.

Am I just being churlish, or does it seem that someone who's all down with the heavy-duty reliving (and I don't mean just reminiscing about "remember how we thought Tom and Andrea were going to love each other forever?" or "Do you remember how Max tripped and fell into the punchbowl) is someone whose life hasn't had anything really very INTERESTING happen since they were 18?

I mean, if I were into reliving a part of my life, it would be other parts of it. Like successfully defending my dissertation. Or getting the phone call to let me know I had a job. Or the time period right after I found out I had tenure. Or even just sitting around the lab in graduate school with my lab-mates, shooting the s*** until our adviser came in and told us we needed to get back to work. But high school? Something I'm just as glad is behind me.

retreats

I find myself, these past few days, craving reading.

Now, normally, reading is a good-sized part of my life - I read at work. I read work-type stuff at home. I read for fun. I read because I want to learn stuff.

But right now - and this often happens when I'm under a lot of stress - it's almost a physical need. Like how you need to sleep when you're sick.

I've kind of put aside fiction for now - oh, I'll come back to Pickwick Papers in a couple days, I'm sure. But when I'm really distressed, I sort of like FACT. I like not having to deal with drama (even the very minor and usually comic drama of something like Pickwick Papers). I'm reading Thomas Cahill's book on Ancient Greece (and now I'm wanting to pull out the copy of Plato's "Republic" that I saved from Great Books - mainly because I liked the pretense of having Plato on my bookshelf - but now I do want to re-read it. And I want to read the copy of The Peloponnesian War that I bought in a "new exciting translation" five years ago and haven't gotten 'round to yet).

There's something oddly comforting to me about reading about events that took place thousands of years ago. And yet, kind of not.

In a way, it's kind of like reading the Pauline letters. Part of me is relieved that whatever problems my church is facing, whatever's screwed up in society, people nearly 2000 years ago faced the same problems and saw the same screwed-upped-ness. But on the other hand - it's kind of aggravating, like "We've put a man on the moon and invented flush toilets and we still treat each other in the same way that we did when we were crapping out on the street and thought the moon had rabbits in it?"

There's a quotation - I don't remember it exactly - from The Once and Future King that goes something like "the cure for sadness is to learn something." And I've found that to be true - if I can keep my mind busy trying to differentiate between the beliefs of the pre-Socratics and the Socratics and the Pythagoreans (and you wanna hear about a freaky bunch? Read about the practices of the Pythagoreans - they were this weird silence-loving non-bean-eating commune of early math geeks), I'm less likely to focus on what's happening to people around me and to ask that horrible question What's going to become of us?, which seems to crop up in my head too often these days.

I think it also helps that the last time I really thought about ancient Greece - at least in terms of the philosophers and literature - was Great Books in college, 20 years ago now. Twenty years ago my life was different, and while it was not necessarily better, there were things I worry about now that I didn't worry about then. I still believed in true love then, I still thought I would, in fact, meet my Soul Mate and live happily ever after. I thought I'd take a particular class and a dove would descend from Heaven and sit on my shoulder and I'd know that subject was what I was supposed to study for the rest of my life. I still believed that if I hit on the right combination of foods, I'd magically become slim, or at least smaller than a size 10. I was pretty naive.

But somehow, reopening that part of my mind again comforts me.

I also want to start reading a bunch of other books. I want to find the Thursday Next sequels I bought over a year ago, and re-read the original book and then the sequels. And I want to (finally) read all of the Harry Potter oeuvre.

It's funny, but I do tend to retreat into non-fiction and fantasy when I need a retreat.

Right after September 11, 2001, the only thing I could read - don't laugh - was a set of Mary Norton's "Borrowers" novels. I had recently bought the set - I belonged to a book club called "Bookspan" in those days; they had fairly reasonably priced hardbacks and it was an opt-in club, meaning you didn't have to send back some darn card or risk getting the Selection of the Month. And they reprinted a lot of the classic children's novels: I bought all the Mary Poppins books from them as well.

But anyway. The last time I had read "The Borrowers," I had been about nine. And opening those books again - not unlike learning about ancient Greece again - sort of re-opened a door in my mind, or maybe a gate, that led down a path, to who I used to be when I was nine.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I didn't regress or anything - I didn't wind up sitting on the floor with a bunch of My Little Ponies or develop a strong desire to eat Spaghetti-os while watching the Smurfs - but it was almost like I could have a glimpse, again, of who I used to be when I was nine.

(Even though I had all the same problems, all the same sadnesses, of other children, I pretty much liked who I was as a kid. I was pretty genuine, and creative, and funny, and smart. So getting to "see" that kid again comforted me).

It reminded me, I guess, that things were not always thus: that I didn't always live in a world where horrible and unexpected things could happen between your first and second class of the day.

And I guess that's what this kind-of regressive reading is doing for me - it's reminding me of a time when I, maybe, had more hope that my life was going to turn out the way I wanted it to, instead of my having to adapt myself to how it, in fact, is turning out. Where I hadn't yet seen the full panoply of crap that people do to each other. When I wasn't quite so tired and worn, before I had gray in my hair and lines around my eyes. A time back before my problems with insomnia started (I can trace my first attack of insomnia back to 1991. April 1991 to be exact). A time when I lived in a big city and it was still exciting and fun and full of possibilities and I could kind of overlook the fact that I was getting panhandled on nearly every corner and there were men who would go and pee against the wall of a CHURCH that my apartment faced (and yes, I was pretty scandalized the first time I saw that).

The thing is - it is kind of like looking at that time over a garden gate. I remember what it felt like, I remember what it was like thinking the world was just opening up and any wonderful thing could happen. But I can't quite cross that gate again; I can't quite get back there. And so my reading - even though I'm happy when I'm doing it, because my mind is diverted, when I'm thinking about it (like now, between classes), it makes me a little sad, because it's indicative of a time I won't get back.

"it's for SCIENCE"

I thought I wasn't going to have any inspiration to post about today (trying to talk about happy positive things rather than go into the Slough of Despond that some people about me seem to be doing).

Then I started writing what promised to be a hugacious comment on Ken's Mythbusters post, so I moved it over here.

Ken was talking about the MacGuyver episode of Mythbusters. My particular favorite out of that episode was the sodium bomb. I was thinking about that and I just had an intro-college-chem flashback. The prof we had (well, for that four weeks of the class - I hate team-taught classes with a passion, always have, always will) was the most awesome guy. I had the biggest teacher-crush on him ever. He was not a very big guy, blond, kind of unassuming looking (not unlike Peter Davison - from "All Creatures Great and Small" and he was also one of the iterations of Dr. Who).

But this quiet, unassuming guy was nuts for blowing stuff up. One day he walked into class (it was one of those big lecture halls with high ceilings and a bit of distance between prof and students) with a balloon and a long stick with a splint on one end. He let the balloon go, it floated up to the ceiling above him. He talked a bit about lighter-than-air gases, about helium and hydrogen and all that.

Then he lit the splint.

Taking the long stick in his hands, he lifted the burning splint up to the balloon.

LOUD explosion, considering it was just a small balloon. He had filled it with hydrogen and was showing us the explosive power of H2. He talked about how blimps are no longer filled with hydrogen. He talked about what the reaction was that had just taken place and why it happened.

He smiled out at us (he had certainly awakened all the football players in the back row) and said, quietly, "Any day I can blow something up for science is a good day."

He also did the sodium reaction with water. He came in with small jars of lithium and sodium, put on rubber gloves, carefully (under mineral oil) cut off a chunk of each, and (separately) placed each in water. The lithium fizzed and sparked a little; the sodium skated on the surface of the water and made a nice little orange flame.

"I'd like to show you potassium, too," he said regretfully, "But they won't let me have it."

Okay, maybe he was a little crazy. But I totally had the teacher-love for him - because he was so funny and self-effacing and because he went to the effort to bring in all this crazy crap to show us.

I know there were other demonstrations - I think he did the so-called "clock" or "Halloween" reaction, where a solution changes between black and orange in regular cycles. (I want to say there was also one that changed between blue and yellow, which were the school colors, but maybe I dreamed that.)

I can't even remember the guy's name (It's 20 years ago, now, and I don't think he got tenure - he was gone the next year, may have just been a one-year fill in), but I loved that class with him, loved going to class to see what I was going to learn that day (and to see what he was going to blow up). And I was sad when he finished up and was replaced by a (seriously) nearly senile guy who read from crumbling yellow notes (that were probably older than I was) and spent an entire class period talking about how he found a book in Russian on the periodic table while he was in Russia. (I remember particularly him talking about how "Hess" was transliterated in Cyrillic. Of course, I can't remember who the "Hess" was he was talking about....)

Daring

So I bought a copy of "The Daring Book for Girls." I kind of wanted to see what all the fuss was about - I remember when the boy-version (which is by different authors; this one is actually sort of an "inspired-by") came out, it was alternately praised and excoriated. And some people just kind of scratched their heads.

These are great big compendium books (in case you totally ignore the "children-and-teen" section of the bookstore or live under a rock). The Girl's book - the only one I've looked at - has a lot of rules-of-games (basketball, something called netball, softball, tetherball, even hopscotch. But not Badminton, which is one of my favorite easy-for-even-kind-of-lazy-people games of all times. You can even play Badminton in a dress - I have. I knew Indian ladies who played it in their saris - there was a large Indian community in the town where I used to live, and they used to get together a lot, and for some reason Badminton was a very popular game. But I digress)

It also tells you how to build a scooter, and how to change a car tire, and how to make ivy crowns. And how to whistle with two fingers in your mouth, which I really really want to learn to do (it would be extremely useful in the field, if I needed to call all my students together quickly) but have not yet managed, despite a number of trials.

It also has the typical you-go-girl stuff about women scientists and inventors and famous queens.

(Did you know Hedy Lamarr - yes, that Hedy Lamarr - helped invent some kind of code-breaking thing that was used against the Germans in World War II? I didn't.)

All proto-feminism aside, I like the book a lot. I look at it, and I go, "I wish this had been around 25 or 30 years ago, when I was a girl." It is exactly the kind of book I loved - packed with information, lots of odd little things, skills you can perfect, stuff to learn that's cool. And the you-go-girl stuff would have impressed me, too. I remember doing a lot of book reports on Famous Women (two memorable ones being Maria Mitchell - who, oddly, is not mentioned among the women scientists and inventors - and Annie Oakley.)

Actually, another digression: when I was a kid, a lot of times when we did "book reports" on biographies we read, or historical reports on a person, we were required to dress up as that person and present the life as if that person were speaking. I loved that. (My mom, who I would have to hit up at least once a year for "a floor-length dark skirt and dark shawl" (for Mitchell, who was a Quaker) or some kind of ethnic costume for some woman from Europe, probably didn't love it so much). I suppose schools still do this - I hope they do, because I loved doing it. It was a lot of fun. (And part of the fun was seeing the other students going through the day in their getups. I learned fairly early on to pick people like Mitchell who dressed plainly and comfortably enough).

Anyway. A few people commenting on the books noted they didn't like the title "Daring," that "why do Boys get to be Dangerous but Girls are only Daring?"

But you know? I personally like Daring better than Dangerous. For two reasons: first of all, Daring has the connotation of doing something good, something useful - for example, Josephine Baker working for the French Resistance during WWII. That's useful but it's also dangerous. And it takes considerable daring.

It seems to me that it's entirely possible to be Dangerous and also stupid, but it is far less likely to be Daring and stupid.

I also like Daring better than Dangerous because to me, it seems to have more elan - James Bond (at least the "classic," Moore or Connery Bonds) was Daring, but his enemies were merely Dangerous. Daring, to me, seems to have a sense of style to it - a little smirk in the face of real danger, the ability to do things smoothly and well to get out of it.

I would much rather be a Daring Girl (well, the ship probably sailed on "girl" 10 or more years ago, at least in the chronological sense) than a Dangerous Girl. Unfortunately, in this life, my lot seems to be less to be Daring than to be Responsible.

(If I were writing my own parody or "answer" to this series {and yes, there are parodies - there is now the Dangerous Book for Dogs}, I would probably title it

The Responsible Book for Adults.)

And I would talk about things like balancing checkbooks, and leaving notes on people's windshields if you ding their car door with theirs in a parking lot, and being on time to meetings, especially if you are the one who called the meeting. Of course the book wouldn't sell because that kind of stuff is boring and the people who would read it already live it, and probably most of the people who need to read it, wouldn't. But I have to admit a certain longing for a "Handbook for Adulthood" - I really and truly (when I was like 8 or so) believed that there was a handbook you were given, probably on your 18th birthday or so, that explained all the stuff adults were supposed to do and know. Of course no such handbook exists and we are all essentially making it up as we go along, but frankly, I WOULD like to have a handbook. Oh, I have Emily Post and some kind of book about Investing for the Fiscal Idiot and another one about not getting one's feelings hurt, but none of these books has quite the encyclopedic completeness, or the secret knowledge, that I assumed this mythical Handbook for Adulthood would hold.

But at any rate - while one's on the way - I suppose something like a Daring or a Dangerous book makes the journey more fun, and perhaps more remembered once one is an adult.

Homesick

This is going to be sad and maybe a little whiny. You've been warned. Skip if you want to.

I'm going through the last bits of some data related to my dissertation project - mostly, looking up some information about the different research sites. This is in hopes of getting the second paper out of my dissertation and maybe someday getting it published. (I defended the thing in 1999. The first paper came out last year. Academic publishing is Hell.)

But it makes me horribly homesick, which seems strange to me. I mean, I've lived HERE for eight years now, almost as long as I lived in the place I'm homesick for.

I suppose part of it was, like youth being wasted on the young, I didn't realize how carefree my grad-school days were until now. Now, when I'm responsible for teaching 13 credit-hours, and getting research done, and guiding students through their research, and running the Youth Group (and we had some minor vandalism last week, caused by a child who WILL NOT BE COMING BACK until he can prove he's mature enough to handle it, but I still got in trouble for his actions), and serving on committees, and and and. It's like there's always someone "needing" me for something.

And it wasn't that way in grad school. Oh, I taught - I was a TA. But I had a wonderful (I realized it then but appreciate it even more now) professor I worked for - any crap from the students, his blanket policy was, "If they don't want to listen to you, send them to me and I will back you up." (I think I've shared here the story of how a student basically TOLD me I was going to accept a paper of his 3 weeks late, I sent him over to the prof's office to see what the prof said, and I had the delight of hearing the prof's "HELL NO!" echo down the hall).

I mean, not like it's any great insight or anything but: being a responsible person is hard. And it's tiring. And it's also often thankless. But, God help me, I cannot do otherwise.

And part of it is just the weather. I remember the first year I was here, about this time, I looked at the calendar and calculated how long it was likely to be before it cooled down, and then I just closed my office door, put my head down on my desk, and had a little cry. It's so HOT here. And so HUMID. And it doesn't seem to change. It's kind of like the movie Groundhog Day, but without being about to drink 37 milkshakes without suffering any ill effects, and without the eventual redemption scene.

And it's ragweed season. One thing I've discovered about allergies - Claritin and the desensitization shots help with most of the physical symptoms, but they don't touch the exhaustion and dysphoria I feel when the pollen's thick. It's just something that has to be lived through, but it makes me miserable every August. (I've also been waking up at 3 am and not being able to back to sleep. Even if I go to bed at 9 pm and fall asleep right away - unlikely for me - that's only 6 hours of sleep, which is not enough.)

So I'm sure part of this is kind of out of my control. But knowing WHY I'm sad doesn't help much to undo it.

But anyway: I was relatively carefree. I didn't have as many ugly confrontations with the entitled side of human nature. I was also living with my parents, so instead of having to keep a whole house and yard, I only had a comparatively few things I had to do, pitching-in-wise. It's a lot easier to clean house when you have one or two other people working alongside you. So there were a lot of good things I probably didn't fully appreciate at the time that are now gone forever.

But, the other thing is just the whole idea of the locations - most of these sites I had visited myself or at least knew where they were. The names are familiar to me. I can picture being out there, in the field, on a nice summer day (to think, in those days I complained about 80 degrees being "hot." It didn't even get down below 80 for the low last night here). I knew what I was doing, I was pretty good at it, I could just go and work and get stuff done. And it was satisfying. I had one goal, one directive: complete the research and finish the dissertation.

I miss having single big goals.

I also miss the people I worked with. I called in just about every favor I was owed that summer to get field hands - I promised to teach people the different plants, if they just would come and help carry equipment for me. I took people out to lunch (which I loved doing ANYWAY) in return for help. All of my officemates helped me on various occasions. My advisor's wife went out and helped me. The guy I was dating went out and helped me.

(And right now, that's what's hardest - I'm working through the sites he and I visited together. And I remember that time - how I honestly and seriously and naively thought that I was going to marry him. It was the one time in my life when I can truly say I was in love. He made me feel like I was beautiful and it was endlessly interesting to talk to him - we could talk for four hours about "nothing."

Needless to say, since I am still single now, it did not work out between us. But I think of the hope I had that summer, how the future seemed golden, how I'd get my Ph.D. and marry this guy and we'd find jobs together at some little college and we'd buy a house together and and and....)

Being a grown-up is very different from how I envisioned it when I was a child. And being out in the work-force, being a "full grown-up" is very different from how I envisioned it would be that summer.

Oh, don't get me wrong - I'm not dissatisfied. Most of the time I'm pretty happy. I'm grateful to have the job I do, I'm grateful to live somewhere where I can afford a house as a single woman. But reading the old names of the towns and the preserves where I worked brings up the old pictures from that summer in my head and it kind of makes me wish I had enjoyed it more while it was happening. And it kind of makes me wish I could go back to those places - and this time take the time to stop at that little cafe for a piece of pie, or bring a change of clothes so that when fieldwork was done, I wouldn't think I was too grubby to go into that bookstore. And most of all, to be able to bask in what would turn out to be my last summer before the yoke of responsibility dropped onto my neck.

"My good people, enjoy being 20 years old; you have it but once in your life." - Edith Piaf

Back to School

I'm making my syllabi today for the fall.

And I'm thinking about Back to School. When I was a kid, much more than any day in January, Back to School symbolized the start of a New Year.

(And, interestingly - just like January being named for Janus, the two-faced god that looks ahead and looks back - the Back to School new year was a time of mixed feelings. On one hand, I was eager to get back into a schedule, to start learning again, to have the fresh slate symbolized by new school supplies. But on the other hand, it was HARD to leave behind the freedom of summer for the regimentation of school. Even for a kid that, like me, enjoyed school).

The back-to-school ads usually started (IIRC) in August (in the district I was in growing up, we didn't start back to school until after Labor Day - which seems like a sane practice to me. Where I live now, the kids started back to school TODAY. Yes, the schools are air-conditioned and all, but it doesn't feel right to me for school to start in August. Especially so early in August).

There were a couple of back-to-school shopping trips: one, to the mall (this would have been Chapel Hill mall in - I guess it would have been Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio? Somewhere like that. All I know was in that day, "the mall" meant Chapel Hill.) We'd go to Penneys (or somewhere like that) for clothes, and Miller's for shoes.

I remember getting a new pair of jeans and a new pair of cords and maybe a new top. Sometimes, some years (especially when I was younger and less conformist), my parents would buy me a dress or jumper to wear. (And some years my mom made my back-to-school dress. I appreciated that when I was a kid, but once I got older - conformism again - I didn't appreciate it so much any more. And it wasn't that it was badly made or anything - my mom is an expert seamstress - it's just, it wasn't what the other kids were wearing).

And then it was time for the shoes.

It's funny, but I don't remember having worn tennis shoes (which is what we mostly called them) to school much as a kid. I usually had some kind of lace-up or loafer type shoe - I don't remember now if it was because my doctor warned my parents that my "flat feet" needed more support, or if the schools didn't allow tennis shoes outside of gym, or if it just wasn't the fashion (this was fifteen years before Air Jordans....Keds were about the only brand out there, except for Adidas, which were 'rich kid' shoes).

Buying shoes seemed like kind of a ritualized process. First, there was the Brannock device, to measure how much my feet had grown. Then there was a lot of debate - with some input from me - on "what shoes should she have." Finally, the young man got the shoes out, put them on me, had me stand up, and then he began an arcane process of poking the toes and feeling the fit. (I was a difficult-to-fit kid - I had very narrow heels and frequently the process of "breaking in" shoes for me included getting massive blisters on my heels). I was made to walk around the store while the grown-ups debated on whether my feet were "slipping" or not.

Finally, when the right size was found, they were paid for, and we got to go home. No trip by the toy store, no movie, but once in a while a stop for ice cream or some other treat. (I don't think I'm alone in remembering that pretty much the only times I got toys as a kid were Christmas, my birthday, and if I saved up my allowance long enough to buy what I wanted...I'm always amazed at how for some of my friends, every trip out with their kid ends in them buying a toy.)

The second trip was for school supplies. I guess we bought these at the local Acme-Click, or maybe the Gold Circle. One of those kinds of stores - kind of a proto-Wal-Mart, with cheap stuff stacked deep.

I don't think the school-supplies lists were quite as detailed when I was a kid as they are now - I've seen lists lately that even specify BRANDS. (I do remember, however, being told how many crayons - what size package - to get. I guess they didn't want some kids lording it over others, with their 96 crayons to the other kids' 16.)

There were the infamous Trapper Keepers (I think those came in when I was about 10). Pencils, erasers, those weird plasticky zippered pouches to keep them in.

Folders. I remember when I was 9 and 10, the only kind of folders I wanted were the plain, solid-colored kind: they were made out of a heavy cardstock, kind of like oaktag, with a matte finish. I had found - sort of by accident - that these folders were great for drawing on with pencils. So I made my OWN decorated folders. (Again - when I got older, not so cool, and I got the plain red-and-white or blue-and-white Trapper Keeper folders like everyone else). But when I was a kid, still, I loved being able to design my own folders. See, I had a series of humanized animals I used to draw - a couple of them (Mimi the rabbit and Cleo the cat) were like animal versions of fashion models - so I drew them on my folders, wearing fabulous outfits I designed for them. (And I thought I had the coolest folders in the school. Fortunately, none of the kids in my class that year had yet reached the point where they thought it would be cool to point out to me that they thought I was wrong.)

I also remember saving the Sunday funnies to make book covers. Except they didn't last as well as the book covers made out of grocery bags, which my parents used for book covers also. (I drew on those, too.)

The best part was buying the supplies for Art class - I used to kind of vibrate with excitement as I read the list, thinking about all the fun things we'd do in Art that year. (And - needing a big old shirt of my dad's for the class - well, that could ONLY mean we were going to get to work with clay.)

And then there was going to school to find out your homeroom and your teacher - the suspense. Were you going to get the "cool teacher" or the "mean teacher"? Which of your friends would be in your class? (I found out, much later, that one year my parents and my best friend's parents colluded to go to the principal and ask that we not be placed in the same homeroom - the same teaching team even - they were afraid we'd talk in class and get in trouble. They were probably right, but I was mad at them for that.)

The first day of school was a big day - oh, kids complained about it, but secretly I was excited. I always dressed up - when I was "little" it was in my new dress or jumper, with ribbons in my hair. When I was in junior high, it was in my most acceptable pair of jeans (this was the first wave of designer jeans and so you had to be very careful about brands: Lee or Levis were acceptable, Jordache or Gloria Vanderbilts were exceptionally good, store brands or Wranglers or some other "cheap" brand was basically a "kick me" sign*) and my coolest t-shirt.

(*It strikes me, that in supposedly class-unconscious Middle America, we had VERY rigid codes - almost a U and non-U sort of situation. Unfortunately, those of us with frugal parents were pretty much doomed to be non-U, because the whole class issue hinged on how you dressed.)

It was exciting - even despite worries about having the right jeans or whether you got the "mean" teacher or whether you wound up in something other than the top reading group...it was the start of a new year, with new books, and new, unchewed pencils, and new, unwritten-in notebooks.

I still feel a little bit of that now, even though I really don't do back-to-school shopping (I don't need any new jeans - I didn't grow any this last year [thank goodness]), and I still have pens and notepads left over from last year, and I reuse the "instructor copies" of texts until they fall apart or until the publisher revises and sends out new copies.

I just hope I'm not seen as the "mean teacher." (Or worse, the "dumb teacher.")

SSR

...which stands for "Sustained Silent Reading." Which is one of the happier memories of my grade-school days.

When I was a grade-schooler, I think up to about 6th grade, they'd do that at the end of the day - the last 15 or 20 minutes of class time, before the buses came, was Sustained Silent Reading time. The idea was - you just sat and read. You weren't expected to write a report on it, you weren't expected to get up and tell the class about it - it was just "free reading." (Which I think was one of the other names it went by.)

In the primary grades in particular - I think it was second grade - the teacher let us sit whereever or however we wanted. You could sit AT your desk, or you could sit ON your desk (we had desks that year that were kind of like little individual tables with four legs and separate chairs. There was a small shelf under the desktop where you could keep your textbooks). Or, as I most often chose, you could sit UNDER your desk. I liked the little cave that the desk formed - the privacy of it. (And the dimness, though perhaps that contributed to my needing glasses later on. I still prefer lower light levels). You could read however you wanted provided you weren't disturbing any of the other students (And you know? That's kind of my political philosophy in a lot of ways, today, figuratively speaking: read however you want as long as you don't disturb any of the other students.)

The books could be pretty much anything, also. I think some of the kids brought comic books (which normally were frowned upon) but the teacher didn't say anything. You could bring a book from home (and, coming from a book-filled house, that's what I normally did). Or you could check one out from the school library. Or you could pick one off the shelves of books the teacher had in the classroom - and the deal was, if you were reading a "classroom book," no one else could cop it for SSR until you were done (which seemed eminently fair to me, as a child - I'd have hated to start a long "chapter book" and then find that someone else grabbed it for the next day.)

"Chapter books." Heh. I hadn't thought of that term in a while.

I'm thinking of some of the things I read during that time. I think I had my mom's old copy of "The Red Fairy Book" and read from that. And I read "No Flying in the House" during SSR. And I think, in later grades, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Harriet the Spy, and some of the Oz books....and Summer of my German Soldier, and Where the Red Fern Grows, and all of the "dog" and "horse" books that girls read...

It was a nice end to the day. (Oh, maybe not all the kids liked it. Probably not all of them did.) But I liked it - it was sort of taking a breath at the end of the day, being able to spend a little time in something quiet and private (even as a child I was an introvert - in fact, I was probably more pronouncedly introverted and withdrawing as a child than I am now). It was a nice transition - in a way, the fact that I usually read before going to sleep at night is a similar type of transition. It's sort of a quietening-down, a being-still, after the activity of the day.

And with a good "chapter book," there was always something to look forward to - the next bit, especially if you were forced to stop (by the arrival of the buses and the ringing of the end-of-the-day bell) at an exciting part. (Of course, if it was a book from home - you took it home with you, and I often continued reading after I got home [the bus was far too chaotic to even try to read on.])

I'm sure schools still do this. (Or at least, I hope they do). I can picture legions of kids, sitting at, on, or under their desks, reading Harry Potter. (I would have loved the Harry Potter books as a child. I also would have loved the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books. And I marvel that no one suggested I read the "Dark is Rising" sequence - the early books were published shortly before I was born, and reading it as an adult, I realize I would have loved that series as well).

Another thing I thought of, that's tangentially related - not quite 150 years ago, crowds were meeting ships bound in from Britain with the question, "Is Little Nell dead?" ("The Old Curiosity Shop" was being serialized, and I guess the latest installment had not made it to the U.S.). Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of people were wondering, "Is Harry Potter alive?" (Although they probably, or many of them at least, would have stopped any potential informant with "No, don't tell me, I want to read it myself!") The power of good stories.

(I just love the mental image of thousands upon thousands of people reading Harry Potter. I'm not a big fan - actually, haven't read beyond the second book - but it makes me happy that so many people are entranced by it.)

rockin' random

*Mr W.'s funeral is Wednesday afternoon. It's right at the start of my lab but I have a very good lab TA that I can turn loose on the students for the day (and she already agreed to do it, so I'm good there).

*Classes started today. Too early to make an assessment yet but the fact that I had several students apologize for being late (they couldn't find the building, which I do understand - we're kind of hard to find if you're not super familiar with campus) and also had students laughing at some of the droll/funny things I said, so that's a good sign.

*It TOTALLY makes my day to be referred to as "lovely Ricki" on Ken's blog. Even if it's just because I know more about the Coasters than probably any member of Gen X should know. (And less about Modern English and INXS, and the other bands I "should" know to be a right-thinking member of the New Wave Generation)

* Actually, I should comment more on that - I got obsessed by early R and B and doo-wop and rock when I was in high school. I mean, I used to STUDY the recordings - play them over and over, try to catch every word, try to figure out how the instrumentations worked (and I am not at all musical. I used to play the clarinet but I had such a sourpuss of an orchestra teacher when I was a freshman in high school that I totally gave it up). I LOVED them. They amused me greatly, and I was awed by the vocal harmonizations (I still love the Everly Brothers - their stuff is just so beautiful, when you listen to the harmony.)

I used to save up my meager (seriously: I got like $3 a week when I was in HIGH SCHOOL. I could add another $2.50 to that a week if I mowed my parents' lawn in the summer. And their lawn was like almost an acre) allowance and used it to buy tapes of the different bands and artists I liked. (And I used to buy the really cheap-ass tapes that you could get at like Gold Circle. And a lot of times they were "original artists" tapes (but NOT "original recordings"), so it was like some horrible recording that three of the original Platters made in like 1972 at some supper club. I always got mad about that and eventually became much more knowing as a consumer.

I did buy the first four volumes of the wonderful Atlantic R and B compilation when it came out (I can't remember if there were more than 4 volumes but I tend to lose interest in rock after about 1967). I used to listen to those almost obsessively.

You have to understand - this was the mid to late 80s, which was actually a pretty conformist time, at least, a pretty conformist time to be a teenager (or so I found - yes, there were the various cliques of the jocks and the burnouts and the weird New Wave people but within a clique, the rules were as strict as any cloistered monastery's). I didn't fit in with any of the cliques - I guess the closest I fit in with (not that I wanted to) was the Nerds, because I was a good student and was generally a "good girl" and I listened to classical music (at least, when I wasn't listening to Ben E. King or the Crickets)

I had given up a few years prior on "fitting in." But for a brief and miserable period, I had tried to be, more-or-less, a "normal" pre-teen. One of the things I did (which makes me squirm with embarrassment now to think of it) was that I used to force myself to listen to the local top 40 station ('Member Top 40?) because it was what "normal" kids liked and I needed to listen to it to be something more "normal."

Never mind that I thought most Top 40 was drek. (Yes, at one time I knew all the words to "Angel in the Centerfold." Ugh. That's some brain real-estate I'd like to "flip")

I finally gave it up when three things coincided:

1. I realized I'd never be "really" popular because I neither had the money for, nor were my parents willing to buy for me, the Jordache jeans ('Member Jordache jeans?) and Lacoste shirts that were the necessary trappings of popularhood at my junior high. (I had one pair of Lee jeans, which were on the fringes of "normal" and I was very careful with them - didn't want them to wear out too fast. I also had, among the other off-brand pairs, a pair of Wrangler jeans. When I wore them to school, the kids started calling me - oh, so imaginatively - "Wrangler" as a way of teasing me.

holy crap, kids at my school were as cruel as they were uncreative. And it makes me both angry and sad to think that I cried over them calling me that.)

2. I finally said something along the lines of "forget this mess" and changed the dial on my radio over to WCLV instead of the lame top-40 station, which I have since forgotten (WGLC, maybe? Not WMMS; even I respected WMMS even if I didn't like their music)

3. My parents enrolled me in a private high school where most of the kids were "boarding students" from other communities. This meant that I was essentially starting over with a new group of kids - many of whom had been subject to the same shunning as I was at their junior high schools.

I won't say I was POPULAR, but at least I was no longer tormented. And I did make some good friends, including a girl who was crazy into swing jazz the way I was crazy into early rock and r-n-b. And it's always easier to be an oddball if there's someone else who's willing to be an oddball with you.

But anyway. I never dreamed that 20 years later my knowledge of rock bands of the 50s and 60s would earn me the respect of someone I've never actually met in person. The internet is a strange and wonderful thing.

*It may backfire (because too many of them may be hipped to the scheme), but I'm doing that "Should dihydrogen monoxide be banned" bit with the general bio kids tomorrow, as sort of a critical-thinking exercise - you know, list some of the dangers of "dihydrogen monoxide":

* Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
* Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
* Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
* DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
* Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
* Contributes to soil erosion.
* Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
* Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
* Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
* Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
* Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
* Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.


...and then ask them whether they think the chemical should be banned or not.

(For those of you playing along at home who may have forgotten your basic chemistry, dihydrogen monoxide is 2 hydrogens and one oxygen....H2O....)

I do have a backup ice-breaker exercise in case too many of them have been exposed.

I like doing these little things at the start of class - finding some kind of "gee whiz" thing that's related to the day's topic and using that as a starting point. (I'm also going to make the simple pH indicator from red cabbage juice and also do the acid-base reactions with vinegar and baking soda and water and baking powder (and point out that in baking powder, you have both an acid and a base and the water just activates the reaction).

Often when I bring in cooking things it gets a few people "hooked" that might not be otherwise.

Saturday mornings

Nightfly's quotation from "Rufus Xavier Sarsparilla" reminded me.

Schoolhouse Rock - which was, I think, one of the BEST things on Saturday morning tv when I was a kid. As I remember, there were three "Rocks" - "America Rock," "Grammar Rock," and then the one with math. (There might have been science ones too? I don't remember.)

America Rock is the one I remember best - there was one about inventions, and about women's suffrage (and yes, if some Napoleon Dynamite look-alike came up to me with a "petition to end women's suffrage" I'd give him the stink-eye and tell him out...and his cameraman, too). There was one called "No More Kings" that I think had the Boston Tea Party?

And the two most memorable: "I'm only a Bill" and the one about the Preamble of the Constitution. Thanks to Schoolhouse Rock, I can recite the Preamble to this day (and yes, there's one tiny inaccuracy in the SHR version, but I'm aware of that too).

Grammar Rock had Blossom Dearie (a "legitimate" jazz singer - I wonder today how many "real" performers - other than maybe They Might Be Giants - would be up for doing educational spots for kids) singing about unpacking your adjectives. And there was Conjuntion Junction (which, I suspect, I will now be singing in my head the rest of the day, now that I've thought of it).

Oh, hahahahah. And "Verb! That's what's happenin'!" Shaft for the under-12 set.

That's one of the things I love about the shows when I happen to see them again - or even think of them. How much of their time they were...so much of the music was that kind of poppy folk-rock (especially the America Rocks) stuff that was so earnest and so early-70s.

For the numbers ones, I remembered the "Three is a Magic Number" (which, IIRC, actually referenced the Trinity...wonder if that could happen today?). And the one about Lucky Number Seven with the rabbit. And the figure-skating one for eight

(The line:

"Figure eight as double four,
Figure four as half of eight.
If you skate, you would be great,
If you could make a figure eight.
That's a circle that turns 'round upon itself.

Place it on its side and it's a symbol meaning
Infinity...

seemed very deep to me when I was a child. (And there's Blossom Dearie singing again).

I also remembered the one for 12, because it introduced the idea that there could be bases other than 10 - kind of a mind-blowing concept when you're 8.

And I see that they all basically taught the times tables for the number featured.

(I had to look the rest up. I figured they probably had shows for each number but I don't really remember the ones for 2 or 4. I remember the one for 5 now that I see the title - yeah, it was about counting by fives, in the context of playing hide and seek.)

I enjoyed those mini-programs. I think most other kids did, too, considering the level of nostalgia that Gen-Xers seem to have for it.

Saturday mornings were a different time when I was a kid - I remember getting up at 6 am, plunking down in front of the tv with a bowl of cereal (the only time of the week I was allowed to eat away from the table) and watching the tail end of the Farm Report just so I wouldn't miss any of the cartoons. (Cartoons started at 6:30 am or so when I was a kid - no more). We also had only a few channels - first there were five, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) plus PBS and an indie station (channel 43 from Cleveland - I think it's a Fox affiliate now but when I was a kid it was pure indie). Later, channel 19 (I think it was) joined the lineup as another indie.

Before the "network" cartoons (Scooby-Doo, Bugs Bunny, and the like), the channels showed whatever they had on hand, or whatever they brought in. I remember watching "Barbapoppa" and "Dr. Snuggles" and other strange European-import cartoons that the local tv channels had bought to fill the time before the network stuff started.

I also remember cartoons being on for LONGER in the morning when I was a kid - they started around 6:30, as I said, and it seems they lasted until noon, when Wide World of Sports and things like that came on. (IIRC, the Krofft shows - like Land of the Lost - were the ones on towards the end of the morning. It seemed that "littler kids'" shows were on earlier. I supposed the programmers knew that it was mostly the under-12 set who were getting up at 6 to sit in their jammies with their bowls of Cocoa Puffs and wait for the cartoons, and the teens were the ones who slept until 10 or so)

Now, most of the early morning is taken up with stuff like "Saturday Today" (ack, pfui) and other adults-oriented news shows. There just aren't as many cartoons on. And they seem crappier, or maybe I was less discerning as a child - with the exception of the "Qubo" shows that run on NBC (including "Veggie Tales," which I openly admit I watch as an adult), most of the programs are either extremely infantile or they're just stupid. It seems that the network (well, CBS - I don't think ABC shows cartoons any more) has the infantile programs, mostly stuff imported from Nick, Jr. (and that's another thing - the whole somewhat-incestuous relationship between the networks and the cable channels - it's like there's only so much programming out there, so it's going to be re-run endlessly). The Fox affiliate and the WB affiliates run the stupid programs - stuff like Xiaolin Showdown, which I've tried to watch (I'm a cartoon fan) and just cannot work up any kind of interest for (and it makes me sad: you'd think Warner Brothers would try to live up to its illustrious cartoon history of Looney Tunes, and later, Animaniacs). And Cartoon Network, pretty much any more, shows their own stuff - most of which is kind of blah.

I also have to admit that when the trend to live-action shows began (stuff like a teen version of Survivor), I figured no good could come of it. I expect in another year or two, the "children's" programming will be mostly reality-type shows: ugh.

I also remember that the new fall lineup of Saturday morning cartoons was a big thing when I was a kid - sometimes the networks even did a "special! preview! show!" usually on a Friday night a week or two before the new lineup premiered. (I remember sitting there, fingers crossed, hoping my favorites were back but also hoping the shows I didn't like were replaced by something good). I think they've since stopped doing that; the networks seem to acknowledge that people don't care about Saturday morning cartoons any more.

(I wonder if it could be partly budget-cutting, but also partly changes in family dynamics: many of my friends who have kids are up and out the door early Saturday morning for soccer or swimming or drama class or what have you).

I know, I know, that the farther you get from childhood, it looks better and better, even if there were a lot of things you weren't totally happy about as a child. I know I'm probably being overly nostalgic over cartoons (and frankly, other than the Looney Tunes - many of which were butchered by the censors) and Scooby Doo (which I stopped liking after I turned 6) and Pink Panther, I don't really REMEMBER any of the cartoons of my childhood (ok, there was the Smurfs, but I was a preteen by the time they came around and really, my little brother was the Smurfs fan; I just watched them to keep him company). But when I was a kid, there was something special about Saturday mornings - it was like, it was the one time of the week when tv programming time was carved out for the kids, and stuff that specifically appealed to kids was shown. It's different now, with whole networks of allegedly child-friendly (I say allegedly because have you seen some of the stuff that shows on "The N" in the evenings? Good grief. It's like soap opera, junior) programming.

I tend to think that scarcity makes things more precious and abundance makes you take them for granted. I wonder if kids will look back with the same nostalgia that we generation-xers (and the baby boomers, before us) have about Saturday morning cartoons?

I also wonder what will become of cartoons. Will they be pushed aside as part of the Stamp! Out! Obesity! campaign - a push to get kids off the couch? Will they be phased out as "too expensive" in a world of "reality" tv where gomers will happily expose their foolishness on tv, for free, for the world to see? Will they be phased out as "too juvenile" as kids endlessly "age up" - where 6 year olds aspire to be 14, where 14 year olds dress like they're 21 (and have no taste in clothing)?

I don't know. I have to think there are still some kids out there - kids over the age of 3 or so - who like cartoons and still happily watch them. And who like cartoons that are just funny and silly and that aren't full of car chases or are somehow aping the movies that "grown ups" watch.

Or at least I hope. Because sometimes a good cartoon is a simple escape from life, 20 minutes or so (and yes, 20 minutes, darn you, advertisers) where you can kind of step back from what's bothering you.