Genius quotes.

Alexander Hamilton:

Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.

…dovetails very nicely with my reading lately, including Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

More of my favorite quotes

Not everyone has a marsupium.

HELP, I’M A WOODLOUSE – GET ME OUT OF HERE! (WOODLOUSE SHEDDING SKIN), originally uploaded by yeblit.

There are firewood rounds sitting on my driveway arranged around the basketball hoop.

A tree leaned its way across my driveway in a winter windstorm and the inexperienced handyman cut all of the rounds at an angle, so they are devilish to split, but I’m making progress, if only to make basketball less treacherous now that Robin has grown large enough to play.

Lifting one onto the chopping block, I disturbed dozens of tiny shelled creatures who had made their home in the decaying wood at the bottom.

Woodlice.

Sow bugs, these are called.

They’d be pillbugs, if they rolled that way. (or any number of other names)

Crustaceans, like lobsters and shrimp and such.

Woodlouse seems like a nasty name for a creature that come out of the wood looking so clean and does no harm in the world, really – mostly just helping already decaying things along their way.

Detrivores.

One of them was the largest I’d ever seen, as big as my fingernail, bigger than the biggest watermelon seeds from my childhood memories of gargantuan Hempstead, Texas watermelons. In Texas I was told that like armadillos, they could carry leprosy. This is a canard, but there is some size at which crawling things go from almost cute to almost creepy, and this one edged toward creepy. She was large enough that I after I coaxed her onto my hand, I could feel her individual feet as she ran along the back of my finger and eventually to my arm. I flipped her over to see the gills on her undersides, the 14 wiggling legs, and what I think was the white marsupium where she would store her eggs – or could have been storing them yet.

In this picture you can see one shedding its skin – they do one half at a time, for some unknown reason.

Melancholy

“What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?”

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

MUCH better version.

I wrote about Neil Gaiman’s poem, The Day the Saucers Came here some time ago (Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars)
Now, in a weird twist, some people who I work with are connected with it being an showcase of a potential new way to show web comics — you can check it out (should check it out) here:
The Day the Saucers Came by Neil Gaiman & Jouni Koponen…

Adios Script

Adios Script Specimen.jpg, originally uploaded by Ale Paul.

The jacket image on the previous post is from http://welovetypography.com/tag/book-jacket/ — I love typography as well!

I found a link to this beautiful font on that site.

Here’s something about the font, from the flickr page:

Inspired by designs in “how-to” commercial lettering guides of the 1940s, it has been refined and brought into the 21st century through a huge variety of ornate swash letterforms. The lowercase “h” alone offers 43 variants. Hundreds of ornamental ascenders and descenders allow a beautiful interplay of strokes and combinations, while avoiding overlaps or conflicts. Adios Script features a mind-boggling 1,470 characters in total, in OpenType format.

click through the image for more examples and info.

Wicked Plants

I have many books about edible plants, but none about the most poisonous plants.

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities looks like the kind of book I’ll see remaindered at ½ price books if I wait long enough, but if I work my way far enough down my book stack, I’ll seek out a copy regardless.

I found out about it from Bookslut, where you can find a review: http://www.bookslut.com/nonfiction/2009_05_014426.php

A solemn vow

The 1940s by Nick Yapp

Although the eclectic selection of photographs presents a view of the 1940s that is more piecemeal than comprehensive, this book still managed to impress, inform and even move me.

Although it feels more like a fairly random set of snapshots than a comprehensive picture of the 1940s, this book still managed to impress, inform and even move me.

For me, the most powerful image in the book (on page 154), is of a tray of wedding rings, stripped from prisoners at Buchenwald Camp before they were gassed.

The reproduction in the book was much better.

The Kids are Coming!

In a couple of hours, I’ll be off to pick the kids up from their late-night flight into town. There’s a lot that I hope we’ll pack into this summer, and they are coming in just the nick of time. They’ve missed the great hot weather we had last week – into the 90’s.

 

This moth hiding in the grass would have been fun to show the kids.

He was really calm in the cool of the evening when I took this shot on my finger.

I finally got out of the house around 7 today to walk around. Many of the flowers have faded, like this rhodey:

Others, like this lovely one covered in water droplets, have a few blooms left.

Others are going full throttle

Just like last year, in spring one of the plum trees was covered in blooms, while the other, knocked back by drought and deer, had only a handful. I picked those and tried a bit of my own pollen match-making – looks like it (or something) may have worked! Some of the plumlets are being shed, but a few are developing into hard green fruit.

This one, in particular, looks promising. Probably it will make a nice mouthful for a deer…

Every year, the leaves make a nice meal for various caterpillars. The ones that come later I can easily find – their protection, as far as I can tell, is to excrete all over themselves – they look evil and smell like rotten prunes. I think this early batch saves itself by dropping from the tree when I approach – I found a small caterpillar clinging to my arm last week when I visited the tree. When I tried to pick it off, it flung itself away on a strand of silk and then, after a moment, started climbing the strand again.

On my walk in the damp and cool, I also came across these mushrooms growing on a dried out dead tree, just behind a strand of gooseberry and a small salmonberry bush. They look good enough to eat, although I’m not going to attempt it!

Most importantly there are salmonberries.

Although a few have been snatched by the birds, the salmonberries are just getting started!

The yellow-orange ones are always the first to arrive, later we’ll also have the beautiful red ones. The Indians called them salmonberries because they thought the drupes looked like salmon eggs. Wikipedia says that it’s said “the name came about because of the First Nations’ fondness for eating the berries with half-dried salmon roe,” but that ain’t the way I heared it.

Drupes, by the way, are the small fruits that collect to make aggregate fruits like raspberries. Salmonberries are in the Rubus family, along with raspberries and blackberries.

This lovely one is not ripe at all! Plenty of time yet for the kids to get some!

the dirt resists you

Image and Imagination: Georgia O’Keeffe by John Loengard by John Loengard

I’ve been trying to pick up a few more art books — I often steer away from them because they seem pricy.

This book pairs evocative pictures of Georgia O’Keefe with some of her most enigmatic images, and a little text about her life. I enjoyed it; the art of the photographer brings insight into the artist and her art. I’ve always only really liked her flower paintings, (I have one on the wall in my living room.) but I enjoyed the motifs of skull and stone and desert house much more in this context than alone.

The pictures are beautiful, O’Keefe is fascinating to see in the life she has made for herself — at 80, one can fairly be held responsible for one’s surroundings.

Here’s a quote, from a book with little text, but still worth reading:

I’m a newcomer to Abiquiu, that’s one of the lower forms of life. The Spanish people have been here since the 18thcentury. The house was a pigpen when I got it in 1946. The roof was falling in, the doors were falling off. But it had a beautiful view.

I wanted to make it my house, but I’ll tell you the dirt resists you. It is very hard to make the earth your own. The ranch is really home to me. I’ve done much less to try to make it mine. All my association with it is a kind of freedom. Yet it’s hard to live at the ranch. When I first came here, I had to go 70 miles on a dirt road to get supplies. Nobody would go by in two weeks. I thought the ranch would be good for me because nothing can grow here and I wouldn’t be able to use up my time gardening. But I got tired of canned vegetables so now I grow everything I need for the year at Abiquiu. I like to get up when the dawn comes. The dogs start talking to me and I like to make a fire and maybe some tea and then sit in bed and watch the sun come up. The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.

View all my reviews.

Working hard

I unexpectedly had a moment before I left for the bus this morning.

I stopped to watch a robin working his way through the uncut part of the lawn. The tops of the unopened dandelion buds are just over his head. He moves with an eye cocked, rushing forward from time to time to snatch at something I cannot see. The sun is already pretty high when I’m heading out. (It was pretty far up when I woke up – the days are long!) He works all day long – sometimes I resent having to work, as though leisure was the natural state. I’m looking forward to a couple of weeks off soon, but when does he get time off? Sometimes animals do get leisure – often from human’s labor. Birds and baboons freed from having to work focus on social status (and, for baboons, grooming, which is all tied up with social status). Hmmm.

Written while taking a moment before giving a talk to a room full of strangers.