Category: Life

Oh, you know, the usual…

The Labyrinth ::sigh::

Posted on by Dale

I was all prepared to rant about that idiot Gregg Phillips, who has been the source of the fable that “3 million illegals voted”[1] in the last election.  I was going to advise Chris Cuomo and other denizens of cable news to confront him, call him a charlatan—A CHARLATAN, SIRRAH— and eject him from the studio.

But I’ve decided to blog about my labyrinth instead.  I’m going to eschew the righteous bitterness of our time and instead radiate hope and light.[2]

Last night, I and several people I like had the chance to sit by the fire in the labyrinth, and we took it.  Since the new iPhone is supposed to be able to take better low-light photos, I put it to work.

This is my favorite place in the worlds.

Isn’t this beautiful?

The new corner (above) is shaping up very nicely.  I have a new stone slab that will be a bench there; stay tuned for updates.

The bowl at the west point.

Either your daily reminder of your mortality or your daily swig of vodka.  It’s all about choices, innit?

My friend Dionysus was in fine fettle last night, broken arm and all.

There, don’t you feel better?  I do.

—————

[1] And yet, somehow, failed to swing the election to Hillary Clinton, for whom they all voted.

[2] Shut up, I am too.

A new cocktail: The Viola Nouveau

Posted on by Dale

I’ve already blogged about the creation of this drink over at Lichtenbergianism.com, but for the sake of completeness I’m adding it here.

The Viola Nouveau

Stir with ice, pour into coupe, twist lemon peel and toss it in, and finish with 3–4 drops more of the bitters.

Violette Syrup (Regarding Cocktails, p. 20)

  • 2 oz gin
  • 1 oz violet syrup, such as Monin Violet Syrup
  • 1 oz simple syrup

It is quite tasty, with a lovely floral/citrus bouquet finishing with the slight bitterness of the gentian in the Suze.

—————

[1] The owners of 18•21 Bitters suggested (via Twitter) naming it The Morning After because it starts sweet and ends in bitter regret or something, but then admitted they weren’t good at naming cocktails.

A meditation on the locker room

Posted on by Dale

You should know that last week I joined the gym.  Ugh.  But especially during the winter months I become more and more sedentary, and it’s just not healthy.

The problem is that the only—and I mean the only—form of exercise I can stand for more than five minutes is swimming.  Yes, I can walk around my lovely neighborhood and downtown (risking that I’ll become the next ‘character’ out there), and yes, we have an elliptical downstairs, but OH MY GOD THE TEDIUM.

Why swimming is any less tedious is just one of those weird mental glitches, I suppose.

So I joined up out at OneLife Fitness, gaining a student rate because of my steely-eyed insistence that I would never, not once, use any machine, take any class, and in general not even look at any part of the facility other than the pool.  Which is both saline and heated, thank you.

I used to swim regularly back when the old Racquetball Club was open on Bullsboro Drive. I would leave school and go straight there every day.  But then it closed and I just never got back into the habit, possibly because the alternative gyms were not on my way home.

It is important to understand that I was never an athletic child.  On the contrary, I was a stick-thin weakling.  Super thin.  Starvation-level thin.  All the other boys grew chests and biceps; I never did, so that’s been a point of envy for a very long time here.

Also, because I was not athletic I was not a habitué of the locker room.  I vividly remember the first time I entered the locker room at Stegeman Hall at UGA for a required PE course.  Merciful heavens, all these creatures walking around stark naked, all bigger and burlier and sleeker than I would ever be.  I was daunted, if that’s the word I’m looking for.

So when I joined the Racquetball Club, I was surprised at how quickly I got over all that.  Trotting from the locker to the sauna to the shower without bothering with a towel just became second nature.  I was not even abashed when one day a member of the church choir I directed at the time inquired about a tattoo that otherwise he would have never seen. Part of that was being 40-something instead of 16, of course, but part of it also was coming to terms with my own body and what it was.

I was therefore not concerned about this new venture, other than the usual uncertainty about the culture therein.  (For the record, out-and-out nudity doesn’t seem to be the thing there.)  It’s a very nice locker room, all wood and tile and luxurious appointments.  There’s a flatscreen TV. Tuned to Fox.

So why am I writing about this at all?  This gym is a much bigger, much busier place than the Racquetball Club, and fitness culture has likewise ballooned since the last time I swam, so there are a lot more men in the locker room than the old place, and more than a few of those men are beautifully put together, prime examples of young manhood.  It’s kind of thing that you would be lying if you said you didn’t notice.

And I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me aware of my now-60-something body in comparison.  But you know what?  Because of what I’ve done in thinking through, planning for, and participating in 3 Old Men—my theme camp for burns—all that happens when I see a nicely built younger man is that I think, “Yep.  My body doesn’t look like that, because I am an Old Man.  I have the body I have because of who I am, of what I’ve lived through and experienced. Cool.”

Plus the godawful amount of work they have to put into maintaining that physique.  OH MY GOD THE TEDIUM.  Ugh.

To see what my thinking was that led to 3 Old Men, at least about the physicality of our bodies, see here and here.

New toys!

Posted on by Dale

So I did a thing.  In an effort to reduce costs around here, we went to the AT&T place to see about getting all our devices onto one account.  In the process, we ended up with new phones, of course.

We were overdue.  Both of us had iPhone 4’s, and that’s pretty antique.  Both were completely functional, but it’s always a matter of time before Apple leaves us behind and we can no longer update the phone or the apps on it.  Better to make the jump to a phone that behaves completely differently than the one you’ve carried for years.

That’s what happened to the Lovely First Wife’s laptop: a little MacBook from years ago, it was still running Mountain Lion or some such as the operating system, and she could no longer update the browser, which threw monkey wrenches into her online payments.  So she got a MacBook Air last month and is humming along.

Meanwhile, upstairs, my old 2012 MacBook Pro was beginning to hiccup.  The battery has been corrupt for a couple of years now; the trackpad no longer allowed me to click and drag; the hard drive was uncomfortably full.

And then last week, I was working on a blog post for lichtenbergianism.com, and suddenly the screen went black, and I found myself looking at the log in screen.  The computer had logged me out without warning.

This has never happened to me, not once in over 30 years of Mac ownership, so I knew it was time to start shopping.

I am now the owner of a brand new MacBook Pro, the spiffy one with the new Touch Bar and Touch ID, which is going to take some getting used to.

I haven’t transferred All The Things from my old laptop yet; the cable I needed to do that was not the cable that ended up in my shopping bag yesterday.  (I’m not going to say that the helpful young salesperson grabbed the wrong box, but the helpful young salesperson grabbed the wrong box.). I know I could do it via wifi, but I can’t imagine how slow and painful that would be.

So after the store opens in another 30 minutes, I’ll be off to correct that error, and then I’ll probably be stuck shepherding my apps and documents onto this new machine.

Light a candle for me.

Irrefutable!

Posted on by Dale

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Here, have a video:

(The actual, irrefutable [!] proof is at 2:38 in the video.)

Those who have been around here for a while may remember my take on the flat earth theory, both the book Flat Earth and my own musings about the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter two years ago.  I mean, bless they hearts.

To recap for those of you too lazy to watch this nice man’s video:

Here we see the set up: the god-fearing flat earth Person, standing on the Actual Earth, with his Globe* and his Airplane.

If you fly a plane from the north pole to the south pole, he says, look what happens.  First…

… you have to start tilting your Airplane down in order to keep your plane level with the Earth.  LEVEL WITH THE EARTH, KENNETH!  This continues without let until…

…you are forced to fly your Airplane upside down before you can even land.  This is clearly unpossible, and therefore it is irrefutable proof that the earth cannot be a sphere.

Okay.  Let’s rewind the tape and insert a play by play here.

First we start at the north pole.

Pay attention to the little arrows.  The little blue one shows the tiny Airplane in relation to the Globe*.  The longer green one shows the Airplane in relation to the Actual Earth, which is where our irrefutable Person is, in fact, actually standing.  The blue and green lines are in agreement about which way is up and which way is down.

Roll tape.

… something seems to be happening here…

Hm.  The blue and green lines are no longer in agreement about which way is up and which way is down.  In fact, they are diametrically opposed.  So why is our Person so convinced that the Airplane must be upside down if it flies to the south pole?  Let’s remove the Globe* from the picture.

Why, look, he’s right!  The Airplane is upside down!  In relation to the Actual Earth, it is in fact, irrefutably, upside down.

But that’s not what is happening in real life, is it?  Let’s zoom in on his model and change it into the Actual Earth:

Oh.  The Airplane, in circumnavigating the Actual Earth, would find itself rightside up the entire trip, even when it passes over our now-Australian Person.  Hm.

Let me be very clear: my little demonstration here did not in any way prove that the Actual Earth is a sphere.  But it sure as shootin’ refuted Mr. Hall’s simplest, irrefutable proof that it isn’t.

In other words, this is not the proof you’re looking for, Kenneth.

Thank you.

Meditation

Posted on by Dale

Every fair from fair sometime declines.

This is my favorite sentence of all time. It is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, and for me it encapsulates the bitter truth of life: entropy rules over all. Nothing gold can stay.[1]

Every fair from fair sometime declines.

The phrase kept coming to me as I worked to prepare the labyrinth for the Tour of Homes. Because of the nature of the Tour—everything is supposed to be pretty—I was reseeding the labyrinth with a “contractor’s blend” of grass, i.e., a mixture of regular fescue seed and winter rye, which grows quickly and provides you with a vividly green carpet at any time of the year.

Rye is extremely temporary. It grows and, after a month or two, dies. That’s fine. I only needed the labyrinth to look “pretty” for Dec 3. After that, nature could resume its cycle.

Because normally I do not try to maintain a green labyrinth through the winter months. It is pretty, but part of having this meditative space is learning to see the beauty in all phases of its life. Bare branches, brown ferns, dead grass—all are part of the way life goes. It is best if you can love that.

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Yes, the tired old metaphors of our human lives winding down apply. Shakespeare as usual says it best, this time in Sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold…

Part of our sadness about the entropy of our lives is our consciousness that while nature’s course will cycle back around—the leaves will grow again, the ferns will push up through the humus, the grass will sprout as green as before—with us the decline is permanent. We don’t get to be young again. We won’t, as the sun shifts back to the north, find ourselves regaining our muscle tone or youthful skin or mental acuity.

This of course is our ego’s perception. It is not reality. The leaf falls from the tree, but the tree is still alive. So it is with us. “We” may die, but the universe is still alive. Thinking that somehow our ego will continue to exist after our death is essentially planting rye grass: shoring up a false hope that will not, can not last.

Every fair from fair sometime declines: words to live by.

—————

[1] This is why, in my setting of Sonnet 18 for men’s chorus and two cellos, that line is the musical climax.

A fun coincidence

Posted on by Dale

My life has been full of neat-o coincidences, like the time I used my favorite book from my childhood (The Color Kittens) as the palette for the set design for Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and discovered when it arrived in the mail that it was illustrated by the illustrators of William Blake’s Inn, Alice and Martin Provensen.

Another: recently, I whiled away my time in the lighting booth of Christmas Carol by doing crossword puzzles from an old daily calendar I had on my desk, and ended up at the December 10 puzzle… on December 10.  Not only that, but the next day’s puzzle, December 11, was the final performance of CC, AND the puzzle was originally published on May 12, 2005… my birthday.

So this morning I received two children’s picture books I had ordered after encountering them at Brain Pickings (a highly recommended read).   The first, Du Iz Tak?, by Carson Ellis, is a total delight:

In it, a variety of little bugs encounter a plant.  None of them knows exactly what it might be (Ma nazoot, one says) and as the seedling continues to grow, so does the activity around it along with our understanding of their bug language.  The climax is scrivadelly indeed.

The second is What Can I Be?, by Ann Rand and Ingrid Fiksdahl King, and it is also a delight:

Shapes and colors for the young nonreader, and imaginative use of red circles, blue squares, etc., is the point of the book.  Looking, seeing, creating.

Here’s the coincidence: the back flap of the dust jacket tells me that

Ingrid Fiksdahl King is a painter and professor emeritus of architecture at NTNU Norway.  She is a coauthor, with Christopher Alexander, of A Pattern Language, one of the most influential books on architecture and planning.

You mean this A Pattern Language?  This one, right here?  The one I used to do this?  “Influential” doesn’t begin to describe it.

A new cocktail: The Smoky Topaz

Posted on by Dale

Riffing off the Bijou cocktail, specifically my favorite variation using barrel-aged gin, I now have the Smoky Topaz!

updated, 12/12/16: I’ve made a small adjustment to the original, upping the gin and going for a balance between the yellow and green Chartreuse

The Smoky Topaz

  • 1.5 oz barrel-aged gin (Tom Cat preferred)
  • .75 oz yellow Chartreuse
  • .25 oz green Chartreuse
  • .75 oz Averna Amaro

No orange bitters in this one; maybe the next one.  Or cranberry bitters.  But definitely an orange peel for garnish.

Unclean! Unclean!

Posted on by Dale

With A Christmas Carol and the Tour of Homes in the books (albeit with one more weekend of CC performances to go), it’s time to excavate the study.

—click to embiggen—

That may not look so bad to you, but trust me—it’s a mess: the detritus of three months of shedding as I move from one project to another.  It will be therapeutic to get everything tidied up/stored/tossed.

And then it’s on to… TBD.

updated:

Et voilá!

—click to embiggen—
—click to embiggen—

Notice not only the clear floor and desks, but the addition of the Assistive Feline™.

The GLRP, 11/22/16

Posted on by Dale

Have a look at this:

This was a thing we picked up in Virginia when cleaning out the family homestead.  Besides the loop on the right, the end on the left is flattened.  We have no idea what it is/was; if I had to guess, I’d say it was a spring kind of thing from some large machine, perhaps a train.  Comments are welcome.

Whatever its original use, I decided it would be a lovely thing from which to hang a light, and so today’s task in the Great Labyrinth Reclamation Project was installing it over the new nook in the southwest corner.

Simple project, actually: 1) saw off some copper tubing I had around; 2) screw it to one of the uprights on the fence with brackets.

3) Stick the flat end in the pipe.

Now it can swing out to any position you need.

Serving suggestion.  Clearly I want to find something cooler and larger.  For the time being I can use one of my solar lights.

Technically-speaking-wise, I don’t suppose I needed the copper tubing.  I could have just used brackets small enough to contain the iron thing.  But I like the effect, and the tubing keeps the end of the iron thing from digging into the fence itself.