the past is another country
Sunday, March 31, 2002
Soon it will be April 1st, and madcap prankery will be the order of the day. The tradition of the April fool is a relatively recent one, an artifact of calendar reform. The Julian calendar, devised at the orders of Julius Caesar after his conquest of Egypt, was 365.25 days long, slightly longer than the real, solar year as judged by the equinoxes. As the centuries progressed, the Julian calendar slowly slipped out of true. In the sixteenth century, disturbed by the slow progression of holidays into the wrong seasons, Pope Paul III set several astronomers on the question of calendar reform, and in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII chose the plan proposed by Christopher Clavius, a steadfast defender of the Ptolemaic system. A papal bull was issued, the calendar was minutely shortened, the year was decided to begin on January 1 rather than April 1, and twelve days were lopped off to put the holidays back where they belonged. Whether called April fools, April fish, or April gawks, some people failed to acknowledge that the calendar had changed and were, human nature being what it is, soon made the butt of their neighbors' jokes. Perhaps England is lucky that it was not the target of pranks from the rest of the content, as the backwards folks in England didn't switch from the Julian calendar until 1752. The event provides a crucial plot point for Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and is memorialized in cal, the Unix calendar application. From such small beginnings are traditions born; tomorrow will feature pranks (from the limply satiric to the jaw-droppingly elaborate to the viciously entertaining) the nation over, except, perhaps, at the prank-free zone of MIT.
7:06 pm 
Thursday, March 28, 2002
The Musée Mécanique has been saved! I heard from Judith that the Park Service has been convinced by the outpouring of support to find a temporary home for my favorite place in San Francisco. The Musée is a collection of old penny arcade machines -- love testers, fortune-telling gypsies, purportedly risqué moving pictures, hand-crafted minitatures dancing the minuet. Some photos are available online, including ones of the remarkable Laughing Sal, which surely terrified generations of San Francisco's children. (more...)
11:03 pm
Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Now that spring has sprung, we can spend another thankful year safe from deadly avalanches. Dry slab avalanches (the deadliest kind) are the result of stratification of snow on mountainsides due to temperature changes or wind-blown snow deposits; when the top strata all slides down the mountainside in a clump, you've got an avalanche. This demonstration for grade-school science students replicates the effect using burlap, flour, sugar, and potato flakes. The Westwide Avalanche Network (run by the American Avalanche Professionals Association) can answer all your avalanche questions. (more...)
8:50 am
Sunday, March 24, 2002
In the 1940s, a young cook in Eagle Pass, Texas, faced a dilemma. The head chef had left, they were running low on ingredients, and people were hungry; he threw cheese and jalapenos on top of tostada chips, and Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya introduced his nickname to the English language. It may well have been a brave man who first ate an oyster, but that event is lost in the mists of history. Oysters Rockefeller, on the other hand, have a definite parentage; they were invented at Antoine's in New Orleans and named after Franklin Roosevelt, to whom they were served. The recipe remains a guarded secret, although Chuck of the Gumbo Pages has taken a crack at reproducing it. Being a chef or bartender is one of the few professions I can think of -- the others are biologist and astronomer -- where you have a credible shot of naming something after yourself, your loved ones, or your patrons and having that name stick for generations. (more...)
11:33 pm
Thursday, March 21, 2002
I recently read (over on Ethel, and to my great sadness) that science fiction writer R. A. Lafferty has passed away after a long bout with Alzheimer's Disease. He was 87 years old. I've written about my enthusiasm for Lafferty before; his work was a joyous muddle, both simple and deceptively complex. (See, for instance, his take on the fountain of youth trope in "Nine Hundred Grandmothers", collected in his short story anthology of the same name.) When I wrote before, I said that I had never read anything Lafferty wrote about the craft of science fiction; that is no longer the case. (more...)
11:28 pm
Tuesday, March 19, 2002
9:22 pm
Sunday, March 17, 2002
You can draw a line from the glistening cobblestones of Vienna in Carol Reed's The Third Man through the neon-reflecting puddles of Blade Runner. But you can draw a line backwards, as well; the noir vision of the city as rain-dappled menace has (by way of numerous mediocre Jack the Ripper movies, I'm sure) colored my vision of Victorian and Edwardian London, the stomping grounds of Springheel Jack and Crippen, as well as more literary monsters. (more...)
11:28 pm
Thursday, March 14, 2002
One of the great things about the Internet is the plethora of free things. Some are offered to draw an audience for which advertising can be sold; some are offered as advertisements themselves; some are offered out of pure missionary zeal. Most of these free things are digital -- text files, software, music files, even short films and ISPs. And there are a number of illicit (tapes of the Goon Show, featuring Spike Mulligan and Peter Sellers) and semilicit (Plunderphonics songs not commercially available due to American copyright law) distribution efforts that coordinate on the Internet and make things available for a nominal fee. There are collaborative mail art projects run over the Internet, such as 20 Things and Nervousness, in which you contribute art and get different art back. But I am unaware of anything exactly like Booklend, the lending library run by Mark Anderson. Mark sends real, physical books to complete strangers for free. He doesn't assign due dates or charge late fees. He pays return postage. He's got over a hundred books in his library, and he relies on nothing more than people's innate goodness, honesty, and fear of public shamings at the hands of a stranger to make them return the offerings. It's a fabulous, generous project, and I'm thrilled to have been able to help make it happen.
8:57 pm
Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Six months later, twin beams of light shine into the New York sky where the Twin Towers once stood. I think it's a wonderful memorial (memories of Leni Riefenstahl films notwithstanding): the lights suggest both memorial candles and photographic negatives or ghosts of the buildings that stood there. I confess that I was not a fan of the World Trade Center; I never managed to get around to going up to the observation deck to take advantage of the view, which in my mind was the saving grace of what I found to be disproportionately large International Style buildings that didn't really mesh with the rest of New York's skyscraper-heavy skyline. (more...)
8:11 pm
Saturday, March 9, 2002
Yesterday at work I found myself listening to some blues songs recorded in 1941 and 1943, a record of a folk festival at a college in Georgia. A number are gospel songs; a number deal with topical subjects (Roosevelt, Hitler, Joe Louis, Pearl Harbor). I haven't listened to them all yet, but they are wonderful, and they are all available on the web (free, in MP3 format) through the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, along with an essay providing some historical context. I sometimes forget just how much wonderful stuff memory.loc.gov has to offer: animation, beautiful color photos of imperial Russia, old advertising circulars, photojournalism both cheering and chilling, this scan of Amelia Earhart's handprint that Judith uses as a desktop image. It's a testament to the diversity of the American artistry (high art and low art both) and craftsmanship, the breadth of public domain works, the hard work of the people at the LOC to make this work available, and the sheer packratdom that is part of the American character, Walden notwithstanding. They call the Smithsonian "America's attic", but the Smithsonian collects things like Enron ethics manuals and Archie Bunker's chair. Compare the Smithsonian's ruby slippers to the LOC's Oz manuscripts. They're both recording the American experience, but the Smithsonian takes souvenirs where the Library of Congress takes mementos.
6:45 pm
Wednesday, March 6, 2002
I was a teenage nerd. I played roleplaying games. I liked comic books. I read dozens of science fiction books. For a brief, shining period, I ran the high school math club. I did science projects: painfully simplistic cryptography systems. But hard science was never my thing; I could talk your ear off about Galois theory, four-word definitions of, say, the Krebs cycle or tribolumiscence ("how cells digest glucose" and "why Wintergreen lifesavers spark", respectively) are probably the most I could muster. But catalogs like American Science & Surplus, Fisher Scientific, and Einstein's Garage stir some sort of residual Tom Swift fantasy. They're like the Archie McPhee catalog with fewer action figures and more possibilities for explosions. Strange things can happen when you merge an adult budget with a childlike inability to follow simple, sensible directions; I should probably keep these catalogs far away from me and stick with safer catalogs, like Penzey's. But even though I doubt I would ever use it, the idea of putting together a chemistry set is somehow terribly appealing to me. I'm apparently not the only one. Maybe I'll just get some Pyrex labware to drink whisky out of. Things go boom!
11:29 pm
Sunday, March 3, 2002
William Shakespeare, the greatest playwright in the history of the English language, was born around April 23, 1564, the son of an alderman from Straford-upon-Avon. He married (in a hurry) in 1582 and moved to London around 1587, working for a theater company. Eventually he became a writer of some reknown; he retired a wealthy man in 1611 and died in 1616. His works ring through history; as his colleague Ben Jonson wrote, they are "not of an age, but for all time!" That is, unless the above is a lie and "Shaxpere" is not "Shakespeare". (more...)
9:55 pm
