A scathingly brilliant idea

Posted on by Dale

So today we were making up the bed in the guest room (the west one) and were bemoaning the fact once again that one has no clue which side of the sheet is the bottom and which the side.  The tag is on a corner, which is not helpful at all of course, and many the day we’ve had to take a sheet off and rotate it 90°.   This curse is especially strong on fitted sheets, as is widely acknowledged.

If only, we mused, the tag were in the middle of the bottom, then think how much easier it would be to put sheets on the bed.

Normally, after the idea of getting rich off such a scathingly brilliant idea passes, we sigh and go on about our dreary quotidian lives.

But not today.

No, today my lovely first wife said, “We could use a magic marker to mark the center of the bottom of the sheet.”

I will pause and let you bathe in the reflected effulgence of that idea.

And so, dear reader, we enter the glorious new world of sheet-marking.  Now we will be able to make a bed with no fear of getting the sheets wrong.  We will no longer dread having to remake the bed before we even get the comforter on.  We will march confidently from the linen closet to the bedroom with no misgivings, sure that we will get it right the first time.

The universe showers us with its love.

You are welcome.

A small project

Posted on by Dale

For some time now I have been wanted to get organized about my cocktail recipes.  I have several go-to books (Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails and The Ultimate Bar Book), but then I’m always inventing cocktails and downloading recipes from places like liquor.com, et al., and those especially were beginning to clutter up the kitchen in my “lab” space.

I have a notebook, of course:

It was given to me almost as a joke, but I immediately put it to use:

Now the joke was that the only recipes in it were in the Drinks section.

But I needed something better.  What I wanted was a Moleskine-type notebook with tabs in it so I could organize the drinks by name or by liquor, along with some indices in the back.

Of course, no such thing exists in any way.  Much web-searching plus visits to Barnes & Noble turned up nothing.

Finally I was struck with a brilliant idea: design stickers that would cover the tabs in my Patio Daddy-O book!  I did that thing, making about thirteen tabs for different liquors, plus two sections for “Dale’s favorites” and “Ginny’s favorites.”  But I was stopped dead in my tracks: the book didn’t have that many tabs.

Back to square one, i.e., nothing.

Finally, I went back to Barnes & Noble to see what was available and how I might make it work.  I ended up with this little beauty:

It’s about the size of a Moleskine notebook, leather-bound, nice paper, and a lot more pages than a Moleskine.  (That was a factor—who wants to run out of space and therefore cocktails?)  So it fits handily on the bar and in the hand.

I settled on numbering the pages, then reserving pages in the back for an alphabetical index by name, and an ingredient index by liquor plus the two “favorites” sections.  That way, I can add drinks willy-nilly as I go along, but always be able to find a specific drink when I need it:

The asterisks by the title indicate a cocktail that I invented.

One thing remained: a cover title.  Back in the day, I stamped students’ initials onto the back of their aluminum Accelerated Reader Point Club tags.  It made them more personal as well as sometimes coming in handy when a child lost one.  I still had the punch set; in fact, I had used it to stamp BOOK OF THE LABYRINTH on the cover of said book back in 2012.

One of the issues involved in doing this is keeping the letters in a straight line, a problem I solved—brilliantly, I thought—by using a rubber band:

Not only did it provide me with a straightedge, but it kept the book from slipping around as well.  (Notice the little black dot on the rubber band: I also could measure and mark the center of the cover.)

Clever little device, with the punch heads magnetically insertable/removable into the holder.  Each one has an engraved dot indicating the bottom of the letter, which is supposed to help you keep the letters aligned vertically.  I guess that’s the theory, because in practice I’ve never been able to keep them upright.

Still, wabi sabi and all that: it’s done, and it’s mine.

A rant: AP US History

Posted on by Dale

The conservative mind is a curious thing, divided against itself in so many ways.  On the one hand, you have the “business interests” portion of the mind insisting that the schools must—absolutely must—graduate students who are incredible critical thinkers and problem solvers.  On the other hand, you have the “god, guns, and gays” mindset that recoils at any suggestion that the ground on which they stand might not be as solid as they’d like to believe.

This conservative schizophrenia is now playing out in the Gwinnett County School System as the usual suspects pick up the screeching about the Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) curriculum, which was revised in part to challenge our top students to think critically about historical data.  But Noooooooooo! scream the howler monkeys, It’s all radical liberal communist propaganda my country tis of thee american exceptionalism no exceptions! 

::sigh::

Here’s the problem.  There are two ways to frame education.  One is that it’s a process of learning how to learn, of making sure the student is prepared to face the modern world with the proper skills and attitudes to be a productive member of our democratic society.

The other, alas, regards education as a set of facts and figures to be learned. And tested on.

I will now pause while you decide which framework is the one to which the GGG conservative mindset clings.

The problem is that the proponents of each framework will never agree on curriculum.  They can’t; they don’t even see the goals as the same.  One side envisions the best students as regurgitators of facts, essential facts, while the other sees them as problem-solvers who are able to evaluate data and propose solutions based on them.

Here’s why the GGG conservatives are wrong—and they are wrong—about the APUSH curriculum.  Their cry that important stuff has been left out of the curricullum is misguided, mainly because it’s not so much the factoids as the mythic filter of those factoids that concerns them.  “We’re teaching them that the U.S. has been wrong.”

Well, yes, we are because we were.  These students, the top of the top, have already gotten the mythos in the previous years of their education, assuming their school system hasn’t shortchanged history in order to slam the students with MATH AND SCIENCE WHY WOULD THEY EVEN DO THAT EVEN?

These students already know that the U.S. is the bestest ever.  By the time they enter APUSH, headed to college, they need to start examining more nuanced views of our history.  What have we done right?  What have we done wrong?  Where have we learned, and where have we not learned?  It’s questions like these that keep the policy makers in Washington up at night, and it’s a good thing, too.  As H.L. Mencken (PBUH) said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  We don’t want people in our government who are so sure of the facts that they can’t see significant alternatives.  Yes, I’m looking at you, Republicans.   Dickheads.

Here’s why the GGG mindset about facts—just the facts, ma’am—is not only wrong, but stupid.  Once you’ve decided that the curriculum is just going to be a Gradgrindian slog through all the essential facts, then you have to fight it out over which facts are essential enough to be slogged through.  In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article which prompted this post, the reporter slyly ended the article with a quote from a former Gwinnett teacher who is a lead howler monkey:

…Urbach, the former Gwinnett teacher, stuck to his claims about what not’s taught in the district.

“Over 200 years worth of European history is not taught,” he said.  “I taught the course for six years, and we never made it to the 1970s.  Only one, maybe two days teaching on the Holocaust.”

Such is the totality of the GGG’s un-self-awareness that Mr. Urbach cannot see what he’s just said: if all you teach is the facts, you cannot possibly teach all of them.  I used to tell teachers all the time, if you make my son love history so much that he will continue to learn about it the rest of his life, I don’t give a crap whether you cover Jacksonian democracy or not.  (Indeed, his APUSH history teacher was a Gradgrind of the worst kind, and not incoincidentally I think, was a conservative who brooked no discussion or opposition to the literally thousands of “facts” she required them to memorize.)

There is no solution.   The howler monkeys will never shut the hell up, while their own corporate masters bemoan the fact that there’s no one they can hire because schools are not giving them the problem-solvers they need.  No solution.

At least not until those FEMA camps get built.

O Christmas Tree

Posted on by Dale

I was unDecoratoring™ on Friday, and my main task was to take down and store the back tree.  (Yes, we have multiple trees—it’s the Decoratoring™ Way!)  I had successfully removed the top tier when I was struck with the image before me:

tree stump

(Pro tip: leave the tree plugged in and turned on as you disassemble it; as you unplug each section, the extinguished lights tell you exactly where the joint is between sections.)

There was something about this that was kind of creepy, even surreal: a Christmas tree, fully lit, that just stops two-thirds of the way up.  So I took a photo, and then I played with it in Pixelmator, which everyone says you should own instead of PhotoShop if you’re just a dilettante, and I agree.

tree stump


tree stump


tree stump



The Cold Labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

You may recall that at the westpoint of the labyrinth I have a bowl to contain water, the classical element of the West.  You may also recall that the glass bowl I had there for a while succumbed to the cold last January when I left it uncovered and the Great Storm split it in twain:

broken labyrinth bowl

So when I bought Brooks Barrow‘s limestone bowl last March at the American Crafts Council show, the first thing I asked him was how it would withstand the occasional ice storm.  He assured me that Wisconsin limestone is the hardest there is and it should be fine.

And so it has proven:

frozen limestone bowl

Normally I keep the bowl covered so that water doesn’t collect in it.  During the summer, of course, it would be a breeding ground for mosquitoes, but also the decaying plant matter that inevitably collects in bowls/birdbaths/fountains will leave stains.

Here’s a closer look:

frozen limestone bowl

It’s hard to see, but the center white ice is actually bulged up.  The water froze from the cold, cold limestone inward, pushing the last of the water up and stressing it white.

The poor little beetle in the lower right is dead, not resting.  Circle of life, etc.

The only other element in the labyrinth that was affected by this week’s freezing temperatures is this one:

frozen limestone bowl

This is a bottle of Crystal Head vodka, or at least it used to be. Crystal Head is Dan Aykroyd’s product, and the packaging/marketing is a hoot.  Beside the skull-shaped bottle, the box it comes in proudly proclaims that it is filtered through “crystals” on his upstate farm/distillery/whatever.

Despite all this, it’s actually a really good vodka, and it amused me to have a skull sitting out in the labyrinth, especially one that you could stop and take a swig from as you passed by.  (It’s at the northwest corner, on the bank overlooking the Dancing Faun.) I’ve also used it for pouring libations to the Universe over at the fire pit, and the Lichtenbergians passed it around during a memorial ritual for a member.

I used to store it and then put it back out for each session, but then I got lazy.  It’s not as if it were going to freeze, after all.  Then one day the large square top to the cork came off, as I supposed all glued-on items will eventually do if exposed to the elements long enough, and all was well till one night I was walking the labyrinth and decided to take a swig and OH MY GOD IT WAS MOSTLY RAINWATER INSTEAD OF VODKA.

All I could think was amoebic dysentery and immediately rinsed my mouth out with gin, as one does.  Blergh!

I left it out there as a purely decorative object, and now the water has frozen.  I like the frost on the interior of the top.

Someday soon I will need to buy another bottle so that we can continue to consume booze ritualize to our hearts’ content.

An interesting development

Posted on by Dale

Here’s an interesting twist to the story of my life: after years of not doing theatre—Spamalot notwithstanding—it seems I’m turning into an actor.

I’ve been cast as the Narrator/Mysterious Man and the Wolf in Newnan Theatre Company’s production of Into the Woods, which should be very interesting indeed.

The Wolf is usually played by the same actor as Cinderella’s Prince.  Indeed, the two share the same set of rhymes in “Hello, Little Girl” and “Any Moment,” i.e., exploring/boring/ignoring (at least in the original cast album; the printed score omits those lines from the Prince’s song in Act II).  The concept for this production, as far as I understand it, is that the Wolf will be a puppet manipulated by me.

I like that, actually, puppets being a longtime interest of mine.  I’m curious to see the design—I do hope it’s a full-size bunraku-style puppet.  I’m also curious whether I’ll be singing the role as the Narrator, or somehow as a different persona.  I’ll find out soon enough: first readthrough is Monday night.

I directed Into the Woods and played the Baker more than 20 years ago, in 1992, and it was a great show to work on.  We had a talented cast, and audiences enjoyed it even if they were taken aback by Act II.

Random memories from that show:

  • After auditions for that production, I was sitting in the breakfast nook trying to nail down the cast.  I seemed to be missing key pieces to the casting puzzle, and The Child, who would have been four years old at the time, asked what I was doing.  I told him, and he replied, “You should play the Baker.”  Click.  It still weirds me out that my four-year-old even understood what “casting” meant.
  • Losing my Jack to health issues and going to school in a quandary—young Ryan Vila was a member of the magazine staff there in the media center, and I asked him if he could sing.  Don’t know, he said, so I took him into the server room where I had a keyboard set up and tested him—he was a natural tenor!  Unfortunately, he had no sense of rhythm, so “Giants in the Sky” was always a bit of a muddle.  I would have conducted him, but I was asleep on the stage in front of him during that number alas.
  • One night, we had a celebrity in the audience (whose name escapes me—Braves player, etc., somebody help me out here…) and that was the night that during the final number, during all those infinitives—“To mind, To heed, To find, To think, To teach, To join”—every single cast member forgot the words.  All of us.  “To… buh buh buh buh… Into the woods!  Into the woods!”
  • Sitting atop a rolling tower, inches from the Fresnel lighting instrument (our ceiling was only 12 feet tall), singing “You Are Not Alone” with Ryan.
  • Cradling the Baker’s infant wrapped in The Child’s security blanket.  It smelled like him, and my tears were real.

Our Milky White was a cardboard cutout, but I don’t think it was as bad as any of these.  Warning: clicking on that link will confirm your status as an awful, awful person.

Into the Woods is a brilliant show, like almost everything Sondheim has ever done, but the thing I like most about it is the multiple layers of mythos: the Hero’s Journey (into the woods, and home before dark!); Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and its analysis of fairy tales as deep structures for empowering children; the reverse of that idea, that “happy ever after” is 1) contingent upon how you got there; and 2) not going to happen anyway; and the interconnectedness of all things.  Truly a beautiful show!

I’ll keep you posted.

dingbat

But wait—there’s more!

Into the Woods closes on March 29, just in time for spring break, during which we hope to travel maybe, and then, on April 14, I will decamp to Columbus where I will play the lawyer Ed Devery in the Springer Opera House production of Born Yesterday from April 30-May 16.

That’s right: at the age of 60 I am becoming a semi-professional actor.  When the opportunity was offered—you’ll forgive me if I spare you the details—I thought, “Well, this is interesting.  Sure, why not?”

It’s not really a paying gig—a room and a per diem, basically—but how exciting to be asked to join the State Theatre of Georgia!  Again, I have tons of questions about how this all works, but there’s time enough to ask, right?  At the moment, I’m just waiting for the contract/employment paperwork to arrive.

So that takes care of the first six months of 2015…

Technology: Bah.

Posted on by Dale

So one of my major projects for this week is to dig into InDesign CS 5.5 and relearn it from the ground up so that I can design/layout Marc Honea’s omnibus opus Another Farewell to the Theatre.  It’s a massive collection of essays, fictive works, aphorisms, and haiku, and I want it to look spiffy.  (That is a technical term.)

It must be understood that although I have used InDesign in the past with some success, my glory days with the program are all back when it was still PageMaker.  In fact, I have used PageMaker since version 1 and it was made by Aldus Corp and you had to switch out the disks on the Macintosh Classic to load the program into memory.

Mac classic
Yes, that’s how old I am.

 

As the years went by and I had less and less call to lay out multi-page documents—and those that I did have to do were easily handled by the page layout capabilities of Pages—I lost my grip on InDesign.  I kept it updated because that’s what I do, but all the changes in interface and attitude slipped right under my radar.

Therefore, when Pages proved unequal to the task of making AFT3 look spiffy, I decided to retrain myself in InDesign so that I would not pull out my hair before I got past the Introduction. I started yesterday, and all seemed to be going well.  I retrained my brain to understand the “frames” concept instead of the old flow technique, and I thought I was getting somewhere fast.

But then things started going widdershins.

(Argle bargle alert: skip this next paragraph)

At first I thought it was just my not having read every single word of Adobe InDesign CS5 Bible, because I’m a skimmer at heart, but the more I worked with the file this morning, the worse it got.  The text frame on the master page wouldn’t accept text on the layout itself, and then it started telling me it couldn’t communicate with some “Rule Book” and therefore was not going to apply whatever I had told it to do—only it did.  And then I clicked to flow the text of the Introduction and it automatically started adding pages to the individual spread rather than going to the next page, maxing out at ten pages after which it stopped and complained—and it didn’t actually flow the text into those new pages.

(/argle bargle)

So something is corrupt somewhere.  I’m running tests on the computer itself, and when those are done I’m deleting InDesign and reinstalling it.

Argh.  And also Bah.

A reflection

Posted on by Dale

During the month of November, I was doing mostly nothing for one reason or the other [spoiler alert: it was the elections], but one thing I did do was go back and re-read this blog from the very beginning.

You know what, guys?  I’m a good writer, and entertaining, and often very funny.  So I’ve decided that I will be pulling nuggets of pure gold from my posts in the coming year and redisplaying them.  Not often, but enough to make you appreciate my wit.

For example:

Snark: in which I look askance at a public official who is caught doing the ridiculous and invents an excuse that is entertaining if not plausible in the least.

What, you were expecting some year-end meditation?  Pfft.  And also tut tut.

Cocktails: the next level

Posted on by Dale

With the gift of an Amazon gift card, I was able to purchase two books I had on my wish list:

New cocktail books

Both are studies in cocktail construction/deconstruction, and just with a cursory glance I can see how I am going to have to convert most of the rest of the house into a cocktail research palace.

After all, I don’t really have a place to store my liquid nitrogen now, do I?  Or vats for macerating liqueurs, or fermenting bitters, or any of the other cool stuff promised by these books.

I may have to start slow, like using boiling water to make crystal clear ice cubes.  More work is required.