Feets don't freeze me now

This time of year don't discount the benefits of wearing socks over your socks. Generally my own socks are the kind that are comfortable in the summer, or whenever. Which means they might not be adequate when it gets noticeably below freezing. So I double up, sometimes, or maybe  just bring along a second pair in case. And I recently got a nice thick pair as a thoughtful gift, so that's a lifesaver.

Like cats & dogs

In current taxonomy, the order carnivora is divided into two suborders: caniformia, or doglike carnivores; and feliformia, or catlike carnivores. There are more kinds of caniforms, which include bears and weasels, as well as pinnipeds (seals and walruses.) But hyenas are feliform. They look a little canine, but they're more closely related to cats. You just never know about people.

In the street

Mark Jenkins: Go Figure! from gestalten on Vimeo.

This short film shows the process and the thought processes of an artist.  Not sure where I come down on him. Jenkins is perceptive when he says the reactions of people walking by are the key thing. The guy walking by with a giant floor lamp in his hand? An unplanned bit that makes the whole thing work.

Squeaky New Year

Chinese New Year is about now. We're heading out of the Year of the Pig and into the Year of the Rat. So far, so Charlotte's Web. I do like the idea, and these can inspire very colorful themed parades. What I'm not clear on is where this pig and this rat came from. Like, where did celebrants first see them. I don't think they're constellations that can be seen for an entire year but only for one year in twelve. So how'd they decide?

Two things about this week

1. Okay, Monday? I was on a bus that crashed. Specifically it ran into an SUV. The driver of the smaller vehicle apparently wanted to pull into a driveway, but they just kind of came out of nowhere.

By way of explanation, I wasn't being coy or secretive on Monday. I was genuinely too beat to go into it.

Don't know for sure, but the driver might have been distracted by this couple sitting in the back. She was drunk and hysterical. He was less drunk but an asshole. Like, I think at the ER they might find a bunch of injuries he's given her. Just a hunch. I told the fire department to keep an eye out but I don't know if they heard me and anyway they're not cops.

Anyway, the rescue workers went up the aisle asking people if they were hurt. They let the half of the passengers who didn't have any injuries go. I was in that lucky 50%.

2. Today I got the news that Terry Jones, the charming Welshman from Monty Python, had passed on. This doesn't come out of the blue, but it's a bit melancholy. I have to hand it to the local library. By the time I went there this afternoon they had a display by the entrance of all the Flying Circus episodes and at least one movie (Meaning of Life.)

Ah

I had the day off, and thank you Dr. Martin Luther King. But it's still been something of a day. I'll have to tell you about it soon. Only reason I'm not doing it now is that I'd have to stay up longer and that's not an acceptable result.

Cleanup crew

Just recently found out about Caroline Walker. She's a Scottish artist who's shown in London and New York. The image above is part of a series she did on women who work in housekeeping at a hotel. The pictures aren't grimy or miserabilist. Colors are few, at least in most of the pictures, but make a stronger statement because of it. Walker speaks a visual language of modernist realism, and in that language she takes time to acknowledge a group of female laborers who tend to go unseen.

Anyway, her website is here if you're curious.

Soap opera

Grafting an old, shrinking bar of soap to a new bar of soap sounds like something a stand-up comic would make fun of. In fact I'm pretty sure I've heard one (Jerry Seinfeld?) doing just that. Nonetheless, it's something I do. It's not just a cheapness thing either. The knowledge that the old soap is somehow being cycled back into its purpose rather than just breaking up and going down the drain gives me a peaceful feeling. That's just how I roll.

Seeing the light

Seeing new traffic lights around the city. They dispense with the red-yellow-green distinctions. Instead it's shapes that light up. One of them (go?) is a minus sign or dash. Another is a triangle. The weird thing is that they're in at least experimental use in Providence, a decently-sized city. Probably they're being tested out somewhere else too. But on this big wide internet I can't find any reference to these lights. I mean, this describes something a little like them, except that while shapes are being used to distinguish the lights for colorblind drivers, the lights are still colored, while these are strictly white LEDs, with more articulated shapes. I'm kind of impressed at the information blackout.

All this has nothing to do with the video of Elvis Costello singing Abba, but I just discovered it and felt like sharing.

Annals of climate change

Saturday morning I was in the shower and heard the wind howling. This was a huge, intense wind. And it's January, so I figured the weather would be more than a little raw. Thus I dressed for winter, even putting on long underwear.

Well, it turned out to be 70+ outside. And when you're bundled up like that a warm day doesn't feel "nice" or "beautiful", no matter how many people tell you it is.

Embiggened

Mircea Eliade, who covered similar ground to Carl Jung, was somewhat drier as a writer. This passage from The Myth of the Eternal Return is well worth the price of admission though.

Just before the last war, the Romanian folklorist Constantin Braillou had occasion to record an admirable ballad in a village in Maramures. Its subject was a tragedy of love: the young suitor had been bewitched by a mountain fairy, and a few days before he was to be married, the fairy, driven by jealousy, had flung him from a cliff. The next day, shepherds found his body and, caught in a tree, his had. They carried the body back to the village and his fiancée came to meet them; upon seeing her lover dead, she poured out a funeral lament, full of mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty. Such was the content of the ballad. In the course of recording the variants that he was able to collect, the folklorist tried to learn the period when the tragedy had occurred, but he was told that it was a very old story, which had happened "long ago." Pursuing his inquiries, however, he learned that the event had taken place not quite forty years earlier. He finally even discovered that the heroine was still alive. He went to see her and heard the story from her own lips. It was a quite commonplace tragedy: one evening her lover had slipped and fallen over a cliff; he had not died instantly; his cries had been heard by mountaineers; he had been carried to the village, where he had died soon after. At the funeral, his fiancée, with the other women of the village, had repeated the customary ritual lamentations, without the slightest allusion to the mountain fairy.

As a species we seem to have a hunger for grandeur, which may be an innate part of our existence. So real events don't take too long to become mythic ones. There's no doubt that this can make life more exciting. Still, it also makes it easy for many people to be led astray. 

Little joys

The fitted sheet I bought some time ago and just put on my bed again yesterday is a good one. Smooth texture, and perhaps even more important, fits on the mattress without too much of a struggle. I think it might help me sleep better.

It's a cold, windy night, so the mind naturally drifts to small luxuries like that.

Crypto

Finding out that cryptograms are both harder and easier than crosswords. Like, it would probably be a mess if I tried solving one in pen. Yet once they give you those three key letter substitutions, it's just a few minutes to solving, usually.

Anyway, it's through a cryptogram I rediscovered this Steven Wright joke.

"I put a skylight in my apartment. The people who live above me are furious."

And that does make life better.

In passing

Ever get a chill that just doesn't feel right? Like, you feel bitterly cold, but you know objectively the place you're in can't be that cold? If you're indoors in a heated room, that's something of a giveaway.

Last night I felt like that. And when I got home I also had a few waves of nausea, although nothing came up. But dinner wasn't much more than saltine crackers, because anything that had been cooked or had a bunch of ingredients I would have, best case scenario, just picked at.

Today I felt much better. Whatever it was, it was fleeting. But CVS offers free flu shots, and I'm kinda kicking myself that I haven't yet taken advantage of that this season.

Thrupple?

Commuting by bus through the non-yuppie parts of an urban area, you hear things. Today, for example, I heard a lady angrily yelling, "I'm in a committed relationship with my boyfriend AND Jesus!" I'm not entirely sure what anyone else was supposed to do with that information. Anyway, I took the liberty of passing it on.