Towse: views from the hill

Miss Snark is opening up the Crapometer for the fourth time in history today.

Today’s grist to be analyzed for crap-or-not (hence the exercise’s name: Crapometer) is 250-wd hooks for your latest agnum mopus.

Miss Snark will critique all submitted 250-wd-or-less hooks on the blog in upcoming days. If she likes your hook, she’ll ask for a 750-wd pitch, which she will also critique on the blog.

Rules and regs

MUY IMPORTANTE: The Crapometer opens today (Friday) at 8 pm EST. You have twelve hours to send in your hook. Crapometer closes promptly at 8 am EST Saturday.

NOTE ALSO MUY IMPORTANTE: Miss Snark is verrrry particular about word count. She doesn’t mind you sending in 10 words if the max allowed is 250, but if you send in 260, you won’t get a critique. Miss Snark uses Word to count the words.

Have at it.

Even if you don’t submit a hook for critique, read the blog in the upcoming days for an education in how-to-write-hooks.

If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do …

What would I do?

– R. Buckminster Fuller

[found at The Buckminster Fuller Institute]

Today’s Chronicle chronicles the strange mystery of the Beanie Baby bandit of Piedmont.

Beanie Babies! Kitties! If only there’d been cupcakes with buttercream frosting in the story, the bluebirds would’ve been singing in the peppermint trees!

(Too bad the crimes didn’t occur in Bakersfield or Barstow for even more maximo alliteration!)

Took the bus down to Market Street and caught the N-Judah over to the de Young today to see the Ruth Asawa retrospective.

Lovely. The wire work is fascinating, peaceful, mesmerizing. The museum had the lights set so the shadows through the wires fell on the floor and bent and danced across the walls as the air moved the sculptures.

Some of her ink drawings are amazing. The one of her son is pattern on pattern on pattern with very little actual drawing of hand or foot or head, just pattern and lack of pattern and the emptiness between.

Asawa’s retrospective consists not just of her wire sculptures (both crocheted and tied and bundled) but also her notes from her time at Black Mountain College (NC), a documentary film, a collection of her paper works and photographs taken of her and her work by her longtime friend photographer Imogen Cunningham.

We discovered, watching the documentary, that the fountain at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Union Square, which we’d ridden by on the bus earlier in the day, was one of her public commissions. (an in-process view of its construction)

We’d seen some of her wire sculptures in the elevator lobby of the museum tower back a couple months ago and were excited to hear there’d be an entire exhibit.

The exhibit runs through 28 January 2007.

Update: Asawa is a sculptor, an artist, an honored arts activist and the mother of six. I’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to lately. No time to do what needs doing? Where was Asawa’s time?

Rabbi gets hate mail over airport Christmas trees
Mon Dec 11, 2006 8:18pm ET

News article from Reuters today

SEATTLE (Reuters) – A local rabbi is receiving hate mail and angry phone calls after Seattle airport officials took down its Christmas trees in response to his request to include a giant Menorah in the airport’s holiday decorations, his lawyer said on Monday.

The removal of the trees sparked a public outcry over what some say was political correctness run amok and part of a trend to adopt a secular tone toward Christmas.

[...]

Update: Trees return. Whatever … How traditional. Plastic trees.

Do you agree with Christmas?

Not?

Do you believe that Christian signs of the season are better set up somewhere other than taxpayers’ property with taxpayers’ money in the face of taxpayers who are not Christian and will never be?

I do.

Political correctness gone amuck?

How hard is it to realize that there are an increasing number of Americans who are not Christian and, perhaps, all the fa-la-la-la-la just grates on their nerves?

Sure, put up those little trees at the Frontier check-in counter. That’s a private display.

Should our tax dollars be used to put up Christmas displays?

I don’t believe Christmas displays should be foisted on the non-believers (and paid for by believers and non-believers) just because the majority of people here believe.

We are not a Christian nation. Our bills, mind you, say something about “in God we trust” but, even so, they don’t say “Jesus died for our sins.”

Are you Jain? Are you Buddhist? Are you … anything but a Christmas-tree Christian? How many of us-you-them are there?

Ditch the trees.

OK?

I have a tree in my house. I don’t need a tree at City Hall to reconfirm whatever religious leanings I may have.

… but hate mail?!??!

That’s weird.

Judging from dealings I’ve had with people claiming hate mail and judging from dealings I’ve had with people claiming brutality and other weirdnesses, who have turned out to be perhaps not the world’s most honest folk, I’d love to see what sort of “hate mail” our rabbi has had.

n.b. I’m not saying he didn’t have hate mail, mind you, but maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.

My days back in the days tell me that people fib … sometimes.

It’s all grist, eh?

from news@nature.com

Published online: 11 December 2006
Arctic clear for summer sailing by 2040: Models predict rapid decline of sea ice
by: Amanda Leigh Haag

New climate simulations offer a dire forecast for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice, predicting that by the year 2040, the Arctic Ocean will be almost free of ice during late summer.

Some projections from climate centres worldwide have suggested previously that Arctic sea ice could vanish in September, at the end of the summer melt, by as early as 2050. But the most recent calculations, performed on the Community Climate System Model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, predict the most rapid and imminent decline yet.

article continues

Dinner last night with friends celebrating a friend. Old friends. Geeky friends.

One friend, Ann, does not want to even talk about the purchase of YouTube by Google.

“$1.65 billion … B … billion?” she sputters.

… for what? There’s nothing there!

Sure, there is, Ann.

Stuff like this.

Ann, though, was talking about what’s behind the content on YouTube, the inner workings, the database, the uploading, the hosting. What exactly was Google buying and why did they think it was worth that much? What sort of IP was there? What sort of patent applications are pending? What is there that’s worth $1.65 billion (B) billion?

Those folks at Google are pretty sharp folks. I’m sure they have plans and will have more plans about what to do with the concept.

Here’s an article from money.CNN about Google and its non-existent (or at least not headline-worthy yet) copyright woes. Check out Google’s deal with CBS and the effect on Letterman during sweeps.

More research and information (Economist) now available re HIV/AIDS co-infection with malaria. Co-infection with tuberculosis and the implications and impact (especially in some prison systems and in sub-Saharan Africa) has been known and documented for a longer time.

Sub-saharan Africa triple whammy.

EurekAlert

Science magazine abstract

Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (HQ: Geneva)

Jane Yolen reads Miss Snark!

(As evidence by a comment in the comments tail of this post. Read her comment for some background trivia about James Thurber …)

Laura Lippman had a recent post about memorization. She asked for memories of memorization.

Instead of memories, I provided a list of things I’ve memorized and still remember for which there is no real use:

(1) pi to twenty-two places which seven-years-older brother Skip taught me when I was in fourth grade — age eight — not because there was any purpose to it but because he was fifteen and thought it’d be fun to see how far my memory could stretch. I’ve never added on to that limit because what need is there for that sort of stuff except to win bar bets?

(2) “If” by Rudyard Kipling, extra credit in fifth grade.

(3) kingdom-phylum-order-class-family-genus-species // Bio 1 test prep c. 1969.

(4) chlordane, lindane, pentachlorophenol — three top legal organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) used as termiticides // Ent101 test prep c. 1971. Dr. J. Gordon Edwards (Janey Edwards’ dad) was the sort of professor who ate DDT in class just to show you that it wasn’t all that poisonous. And he didn’t think much of Rachel Carson either.

(5) The three vowels immediately after the “h” in “Weyerhaeuser” are in alpha order. // software control project to set saws for the sawmill in Raymond WA using lasers to scan the logs and some sophisticated algorithms. c1981

(6) The worst memory waste, though, is “Brent and Joanne, Vic and Pam, Jerry, Michelle and Sharon” — the names of the folks who shared a house down near San Jose State where I was allegedly going to hang out after class — instead of heading home to the family manse — and stay until after dinner when, actually, I was going somewhere I shouldn’t’ve been. Knowing their names was supposed to add verisimilitude to the story. c1971

I can remember their names but not where I shouldn’t’ve been going.

Do you have any memory tricks? Bar bet worthy? “There are strange things done in the midnight sun” Robert Service poems? “Four score and seven…” ” By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea” (by Sinatra, of course. …) or “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

… and things of that sort?