Huckleberrying

Huckleberries are a real thing, a completely nonfictional thing, and they are ripe now. When Smiley pointed them out I was very surprised. I mean, they are tiny, and bright red, and they don't look anything like the segmented raspberry and blackberry varieties proliferating in gardens and along roadsides. The small leaves remind me of those on rosebushes. The fruit is just smaller than a blueberry, and it has that same ruffle of a skirt on the flower end. They are juicy and not overly sweet. And the bushes have no thorns.
My daughter has unexpectedly gotten excited about berry picking. She came over and brought some that she'd collected. She got me to go across the street and pick some. After she left, she called to tell me she found a spot where she was able to pick a whole plastic water bottle full of them. -The pint sized water bottle choice is genius, berries fit through the neck easily, and if you drop the bottle they won't all spill out.
Berrying is just like a video game. In between slaying dragons and shooting at spaceships, you pause to pick up brightly colored trophies. These can be traded for ballistic missiles and fancy costumes, or just eaten to raise your health statistics. Each berry that I pick makes an imaginary PING sound as it separates from the bush and lands in the bucket.
This morning, Smiley and went out to get more, before the short season ends. At home, I used them to make a raw cobbler with an almond date crust. Yesterday,Maddy picked a water bottle full, and today, I filled up a hummus container.

  

Zing!

Dear Lady Gaga,
Now that you have re-done "Orange Colored Sky" I believe that looking toward an even earlier era would put you in good stead. The next, obvious hit, a song that is screaming to be re-interpreted, is none other than "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart".
Imagine the costumes!
Your fan,
Pr1ss

Occupy Seattle

Early Wednesday evening I got to see the Occupy Crowd in person. To change buses, I had to walk through Westlake Plaza and there they were, occupying cobblestone after cobblestone. Before I saw them, I saw parking enforcement trucks, and park maintenance trucks, and television news-mobiles with their swirly narwhal antennas parked bumper to bumper along the curb of Pine Street. As I rounded the corner, I could see private security guards lined up with their backs against the retail stores, and a crowd of easily 200 protestors. There were the usual ubiquitous Seattle drum circle sounds, but not any other discernible crowd activity. 4th Avenue isn't very wide, and cars were struggling to get around orange cones and safety fluorescent vested public employees and police on horseback. I could feel the tension in the air as I realized that the trucks, guards, and cops formed containment walls around the triangular space, and that they might press inward.
So I went up to the cavalry commandeering my transit stop, and asked about where to catch the bus. They directed me half a block away, where another safety vest guy flagged down my connecting bus.
According to local news, 25 people were arrested soon after.

Google+ Review

Scrolling isn't easy.
On most web pages, I hit the space bar to scroll down an entire page. On G+ that may or may not work. Usually it doesn't. So I use the touch pad or the mouse to click in the scroll bar area. It beats scrolling down one line at a time.

Open in new tab? Think again.
G+ does not want me to open links in other tabs to read later. It over-rides my browser settings and switches my view to the new tab. I get this, I really do. If I read the link now, I can comment to the person who linked. I haven't scrolled down (see above,) so after I read the article, or interpret the lol cat semaphore message, I'm still right on their post. Will this work, or will we all just stop clicking on links?

Circles
Sorting your contact list into categories is a powerful data-gathering technique. Not powerful for the users, powerful for Google. For the users, it could work as a method of disseminating information to an audience with specific interests. You can post about books, to your "book" circle, but unless something needs to be censored from an audience segment whom you know will not enjoy it, most posts tend to be marked as "public", or "all of my circles". Someone whom I didn't know was a book fan, might also enjoy the post, so shielding the post from them, doesn't make sense.

The real power of circles is how we categorize our contact lists. We take the information that we know about our contacts, and give it to Google for free. While I might be circumspect about how much personal information I share online, my contacts are free to sort me into circles of their choosing. Anything that they know, (or imagine,) about me could be used. Given the sense of humor that my friends have, I'm probably in a database somewhere, filed along with 8-foot tall Rosicrucians who have always been Communists. True or false, it is going into my file, and I will never even know what it says. No wonder my email box is full of advertisements for co-joined twin tailored clothing.

Name Nym Nom
Real names are encouraged. Real names are required. Names that don't look real enough, sometimes result in expulsion. So a disproportionate amount of posting space has been devoted to protests when someone's real, but unusual, name has gotten them booted from Google-ville. Some people want to use their long-term pseudonyms, but unless you are willing to list your legal name as well, the G-peeps say that you are failing to
comply. By this standard, Lady Gaga, Dear Abby, Ann Landers, and Marilyn Monroe would have all been exiled.

One of my contacts posted extensively about the name
policy. He wanted to use his DJ-fabulous nickname, and he wanted Google to like it. His friends replied with their support. One said that he didn't even know any other name for the guy. To me, this just indicates that they don't know each other very well.

By the way, DJ-fab is gone now. Nails that stand up, get ban-hammered down.

In all of this painfully drawn out reasoning and pleading by early-adopters to please, please let them use their true spiritual geek-names, I haven't seen one acknowledge that aside from data-mining, the Goog is trying to pre-empt potential armies of sock puppets. If someone advertises a dust-jacket-of-the-future to their "book" circle, and hundreds of grateful, loyal, fictional fictional fans post that they love it, this skews marketing statistics for the company. For me, as a reader, it just makes me less likely to ever expand a comment thread. Real commenters are long-winded enough. So have a pseudonym, have two. Just don't have dozens of them.

Let's be very clear: Google wants to know you very well. Not just what you share, but what you think. What recipe you looked up, which word you looked up the spelling for, AND NOW what your friends think about you.

In case you are wondering what I think about you, I will be open. I believe in glasnost, my dear Comrade. You have just been added to my circle of one-armed paper hangers who practice bee-keeping in their spare time. Your targeted sidebar ads should be along any minute.

Wrote a Little Song for a Friend's Going Away Party

(Borrowed a Bob Dylan Tune)

This is the last party at Aria's house
One of so many we've had
This is the last party at Aria's house
So, let our hearts all be glad
We could say that the end is sad
Along with the good, must come some bad
But think of all the great fun that we had
So goodbye Aria

We used to know her as Andrea
Before Aria she became
We used to know her as Andrea
But then she changed her name
Earlier on, she was Peggy Sue
Before that she was Sally Mae
Even if we have to call her Freddie Mac
We will still have her back

Soon there will be new adventures
And we must have no fear
Navigate on your journey
Steady hands as you steer
Before you bungee dive off that cliff sheer
Let's play the game we call "What If" here
Raise a glass of vegan non-alcoholic beer
And drink a toast to Aria

Purim Song

Born in the neighborhood of Shushan P
Studied at Cheder when I was only 3
Learned to play the lute and my ABC
And now I'm the Queen of the Persians and the Medes

Esther, Esther HaMalkah
Queen of the Persians and the Medes

I'm a champion at dreidel, naturally
My hula hoop is made out of hickory
I belly-dance and always dress modestly
And now I'm the Queen of the Persians and the Medes

Esther, Esther HaMalkah
Queen of the Persians and the Medes

Won a beauty contest easily
Answered all the questions on Jeopardy
In college I majored in diplomacy
And now I'm the Queen of the Persians and the Medes

Esther, Esther HaMalkah
Queen of the Persians and the Medes

Some day I'll have a daughter, or two or three
And pass on my statecraft recipe
We'll go on vacation to Hawaii
And now I'm the Queen of the Persians and the Medes

Esther, Esther HaMalkah
Queen of the Persians and the Medes

Third Amendment Imperiled!

The Wisconsin plan is to cut the pay and benefits of public employees except for that of police and firefighters. - Because crime and fire can be quite inconvenient, to a monied class, when there is a disgruntled peasantry. If this trend continues, we move further towards a police state. The ensuing military dictatorship would also be quite inconvenient. Yes, Homeland Security will need you to hand over all of your stuff for the duration. You wouldn't want to be perceived as hating freedom?

Smooth

Spring is in the air, and the mango-orange smoothie is in the blender. A few days away from the bagel peanut butter diet, and I can already see a difference in how my clothes are fitting. It is possible to stay vegetarian, or even vegan, and still take in way too many high fat calories.

My daughter introduced me to blues dancing. It's couples dancing with a lot of the swing dance moves, but most songs are slower and less bouncy. You do in your stocking feet. Except for the formless and ubiquitous slow dance, I've never done partner dancing before. I managed to exist in a world where people disco without touching unless they all join hands and form a circle. Fortunately, my guy has had a smattering of exposure to ballroom et al.

Oh yeah, my guy Smiley. We've been dating for almost two years. Ever since he drove me home from a Valentines party. (Awwwwww.)

Pink

On Sunday I went to my book discussion meeting. The Grapes of Wrath seems topical now. When I read it as a High School student, the 1930s seemed primitive and remote. It was akin to reading about feudalism or ancient Egypt. Since then, I've seen parallels to the depression, with displaced workers after factories have closed and refugees after the Katrina Hurricane. It was fun to recognize the heavy handed propaganda techniques Steinbeck used to make readers love the ordinary people characters and to hate the corporate big guys and their evil minions.
Then, as it started to snow, I dashed over to U Village shopping center in the annual quest for Chanukah candles. My neighborhood stores can never be relied on to carry any. A few days later, I've finally gotten curious enough to check out what colors they are. First of all, the two boxes I bought were taped shut. (Because, someone might try to eat them and they want to prevent tylenolesque tampering?) And more strangely, there are no blue and no green. The mix consists of red, orange, yellow, white, and pink. The pink is completely unexpected.

Ukulele Report

It is day three of my ukulele adventure. I can now play "Tom Dooley" and can sort of take a stab at "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz. Also I know how to tune the instrument, a pretty essential component of getting a song to sound recognizable.

PHEAR MY MAD UKE SKILLZ

Petrol in, petrol out

I'm sitting in the Wayward Coffee House. Just outside is the Greenwood car show. More than a thousand cars parked diagonally along sides of the road, spectators walking among them. Earlier today, Smiley and I caught the last few minutes of a MoveOn.org rally for safer oil drilling. One hundred people rebuking pollution at the beach, thousands a few miles inland celebrating an industry that demands the causes of that pollution. And I love cars too. I was especially drawn to the Jaguars,and a Chrysler similar to the 1956 model I remember that my dad used to have. So many models I remembered, like the station wagons that carpool moms used to drive. Some really strange things too, a car made by Messerschmitt. It was low like a go-cart, with two seats in single file. There were even a few electric cars, and one had a sign explaining about plans to convert it to battery.

Alejandro allay-allay-hand row

I love the Alejandro song by Lady Gaga. But I don't like the costumes and historical references in the new video. Pop culture has to try really hard to be fresh and challenging, you know, "edgy". I want my music to be fun, and not creepy. Obviously, anything that attracts comments is a success of a sort, so panning it here may be viewed as adding to the publicity.

Most of her fans are SO GAGA over everything that she's done, that they will love future product unconditionally. That would have described me up until now, I love all of her music.

To sum up:

Jackboots and nuns in red latex? Meh.

And if you escalate to evisceration and vivisection, I'm outta here.

Maddy Rations

Get me bagels. But not blueberry. Any kind of bagels but blueberry.

I think that you should make me a shopping list of what you would like to eat.

And it needs a graphic symbol. A picture of a bagel in a circle with a red line through it. And don't forget to draw little blue dots.

Post Game

I tried out game night at a Capital Hill store last night. The sign-up list showed 5 women were planning to attend, But only one other showed up, and she left before playing started. So it was me and 9 geeky guys. Not the worst thing in the world. Posting for posterity, because who knows when this will happen again: I won two games that I had never played before. They were called Tuvalu and Astro(something).

In raw food news, I have 25 pounds of tomatoes. I went shopping with mangoes in mind, but the ways of the Jedi Market are unpredictable. You never know what will be abundant and in good shape. Eating some now with cucumber and green onion.

Charoset

I have my daughter mincing apples. She keeps stopping to ask if the pieces are small enough yet. It takes a long time to mince the ingredients enough.

Will I have to do this again?

Yes, every year. Also tomorrow.

I have to do this tomorrow?

Don't worry, it will get easier after you learn to use the food processor.

I could have used the food processor??? Why didn't you tell me that?

You need to have the complete charoset-making experience, grasshopper.

Haven't you seen that show?

Is that from a show? What show is it from?

The Green Grasshopper Hour.

Portal to Heck!

I finished reading "Memoirs of Hecate County," by Edmund Wilson. Add a middle initial of "O" and you would have the name of a 20th century evolutionary biologist, but that would be an entirely different writer. I arrived at this book circuitously. The "Pet Shop Boys" have a song that includes the phrase "Finland Station" which google and wikipedia tell me is the name of a book about the precursors of the cold war. Without being clear on whether "Finland" was fiction or non fiction, I looked for it in a bookstore, and settled for "Hecate County", a collection of interconnected short stories, by the same author.

The writing style was very American. It reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. There is a first person narrator who alternates casual straightforward discussion of everyday life with concern that perilous supernatural forces may be at work, because what other reason could there be for the loneliness and ennui affecting everyone in his life. "Ellen Terhune" was the most Poe-like of the bunch. Our narrator stops by to see the title character and finds her sometimes his contemporary, sometimes herself at a younger age, and then, personifying one of her ancestors. The other stories don't rely on the fantastic, even the last one "Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home" where he meets someone who may well be the devil, leaves plenty of room to think that he imagined it after a few too many drinks.

I found a note online erroneously claiming that "Hecate County" contained whole passages in Russian. This seems to refer to the "Blackburn" story which has one word with the Russian suffix "ka" and then a footnote to discuss why. What it does have is extensive use of of French. This starts slowly, a word or a phrase dropped into the English sentences. I muddled through this, not really seeing that it added anything to the story. In between, he comments in English on what was said, or on whether the style of French was sophisticated or provincial or old fashioned. As the sentences stretched out into paragraphs and then multiple pages, I started flipping them over to see where it ended. An afterword written by the author John Updike confessed that he hadn't read all of the French either.

"The Milhollands" story discussed the publishing industry. It showed how publishers began to use book clubs and newsletters to promote their products, and bemoaned the fact that what gets printed, and even what sells, may have minimal content. Ironically, the plot kind of fell apart in this one. I was expecting a snappy ending that never materialized.

"The Princess With the Golden Hair" seems to have attracted the most attention of the critics. Our hero is infatuated with a delicate damsel who lives in a castle-like home in the country. She flirts and he fantasizes that she can't possibly love her husband. He reluctantly admits to himself that as a writer and an art critic, he can't afford the kind of estate where some of his fellow Hecaters entertain, and that this diminishes his marriage potential. While spending the winter in New York city, our hero meets a dance-hall hostess who becomes the unacknowledged princess in his life. Her accessibility at first doesn't seem romantic, and her family life is frightening, but he finds himself growing very attached. Their class differences scare him. He runs back to the original damsel in the story, to find that while lovely, she is hopelessly neurotic, and firmly in love with her husband.


The New York Times published a scathing review in 1946. http://www.nytimes.com/1946/03/07/books/wilson-hecate.html

In the Na'vi

Where can you ride dragons?
Drink out of crude flagons
Flick your ears and swish your tail?
Bare but for scant feathers figleafing your nethers
Scamper over hill and dale
Where can you talk to trees?
And learn to dodge banshees
Brush up on your archery?
Ride a pa'li horse
And find your inner source
When you're one of the Na'vi

In the Na'vi
Yes, you can live among the stars
First the lab phase
Scientists grow you in a jar
In the Na'vi
You're there, your body is afar
In the Na'vi In the Na'vi
YOU CAN BE AN AVATAR!
In the Na'vi
Use your dendrite ponytail
In the Na'vi
To communicate with quail
In the Na'vi
YOU CAN BE AN AVATAR!
In the Na'vi In the Na'vi In the Na'vi (In the Na'vi)


They are blue, they are blue
They are blue and you can be too!

Trade in your transformers
Flying tanks and robots
And smart alec milit'ry crew
For some body paint
Tree climbing 'til you're faint
And maybe some cliff diving too
Hear as evening falls
The distant caterwauls
Of Nantang wolves but have no fear
Gathered 'round the fire
A Na'vi spirit choir
Emanates notes of a seer


In the Na'vi
Yes, you can live among the stars
First the lab phase
Scientists grow you in a jar
In the Na'vi
you're there, your body is afar
In the Na'vi In the Na'vi
You can be an avatar!
In the Na'vi
Use your dendrite ponytail
In the Na'vi
To communicate with quail
In the Na'vi
You can be an avatar!
In the Na'vi In the Na'vi In the Na'vi (In the Na'vi)

Community Chest

Vampires at the Lake

I wore a cape. The sun was still up, and I wanted to wear a hat, but Maddy was certain that Vampires have uncovered, long flowing hair. Image google "vampire" - none were wearing hats. image google "vampire hat" they were in top hats or fedoras. Fully equipped, I sallied forth.

Aurora Avenue, there was something metal that could have been a shell casing in the gutter. A rehab computer store looked interesting, but the curtain was about to go up. Live performance at Green Lake with teenage actors playing whiny high schoolers, the undead, and reveling in playing pompous teachers and parents.

Vampire Story begins with two young women planning what they will say about their histories when they arrive in a new town. One will go to school, the other one, as her older sister will get a job as a cocktail waitress. The student tells her Drama class that she has been alive for 200 years, beginning life in a French orphanage. She later writes more about it in the form of a play, adding period costumes, a mother who ran a brothel, and hinting at how becoming vampires was the only way that they could have survived. Her classmates vacillate between believing her stories and wondering if she is crazy. Some begin to fear her, as other characters are found to be missing, or die unexpectedly. There was never a concrete resolution which which side the playwright wanted the audience to come down on. The story seemed to change with the retelling, was it an orphanage or boarding school, in France or in England? But that difference could have been due to tailoring the story to her audience. And what of the opening scene where names and ages are recited and memorized? That could have been the formation of a cover story, or it could have been the more responsible character preparing the confused younger one to appear sane, even if she had to fake it.

Hilarious ask the cast session afterwards with a little kid asking one of the actors if he felt uncomfortable with some of the physical closeness in one of the scenes. It mirrored a spot in the play, where the kids were asking the new students about their lives, and the teacher was ruling most of the questions inappropriate.

I stepped outside at intermission to see a huge crowd of bicyclists. They were Critical Mass, escorted by two police officers on bikes, and tailed by police cars, even though this was a trail and not a road. The director spoke to a few cyclers because if they stayed there when the play resumed, they would be heard inside the theater. Someone announced a street corner a block away where they would reconvene, and they mounted up.

Pepe's cousin


Close encounter with a skunk this morning. I was exploring a cul de sac and Sophie-Pup took an insistent run at a small cedar. Under it was a small, wide-tailed black and white creature. I'm positive that it wasn't a cat, because the Sophster regards cats neither as rivals as she does other dogs, nor as food as she does thrushes, ravens, and squirrels. We got surprisingly close, but fortunately the leash ran out before she could touch it. 

All parties left the scene in as sweet-smelling a state as they entered it.

Whew.