Decrittering

So do I have mice? No. But I did. So why don't I now? Got rid of them.

How is an interesting story. When I'd had a few sightings I sent away for a non-lethal mousetrap. It was an Amazon order, and I never buy anything from them, so you can see how desperate I was. But I screwed up loading the thing, so it seems a mouse was able to sneak in, lick the peanut butter off the cracker, and skedaddle without being trapped.

So I followed the instructions more carefully, but still didn't catch anything. But by that point there was nothing to catch, I think? I got rid of some candy I'd foolishly left out wrapped only in its foil packaging, and cleaned some stuff out of the closets. With its food sources and hiding places gone, there was no point hanging around.

Mice are very good at adapting and hiding, suited well for survival that way. Their trouble, outside of natural predators like owls, arises when they come into contact with humans. Except for people who keep them as pets, no one wants them around. Well then there are people who keep snakes as pets, but that's not really better for the mice.

In Dougal Dixon's After Man he surveys speculative species that arise when we go extinct. A lot of niches are filled by rodents. Some mice get bigger and take the place of other herbivores. Predator rats actually evolve to take on predator functions, i.e. wolves and bears. This is all, again, speculation, and by definition none of us will be around to see what the world is really like if and when humans go extinct. Still, there's a certain logic to it.

Don't quote me

Parrots are an interesting case. The way they can talk like us, I mean. One wonders, at first blush, how that ability evolved in the wild. Of course it's not human speech that arose in parrots (or myna birds or ravens) but rather a talent at mimicking in general. Still, that mimicry when applied to us can be eerie. Are they onto us?

I met a parrot today. Hope to relate that story, here and/or elsewhere, in the near future.

The call

Phone calls and phone messages from the Providence Community Library, letting you know your requests are in, are one of life's little pleasures around here. These are, technically, robocalls. Which is to be expected. They have limited resources, and can't call everyone who requested a book or movie personally. Still, the voice is human, so someone spoke into the recorder. Someone with a distinct RI accent. I wonder if I've met them.

Wooden acting

Please enjoy this most cool overview of the African art of puppet making. Or rather the work of African artisans involved in puppetry. There's a level of craft here that seems to go back years, maybe generations, whether or not those generations are in the same family. Yet at the same time they remains flexible, open to outside influences and ideas.

Whole lotta shakin' goin' on

You know what they say about March coming in like a lion but going out like a lamb. Well, the lamb has not arrived yet. We're getting some epically windy nights.

Now the apartment building I live in has been around for a while. And as can happen with old houses, some things are loose. Windows, for example. I've been hearing them rattle when the wind picks up. One in the living room, especially, facing the buildings across the street. Also the window in the bathroom, that hovers over the shower. It's kind of like they're competing.

Generally this doesn't bother me when I'm in bed on the way to sleep. It might even be comforting. My mind sorts it into the way things ought to be.

Going, going (and going)

I just started reading Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World today. Got a fair ways through it, though. It's a post-apocalyptic novel, although the nature of the apocalypse is hard to define. Main characters are specialized truckers.

I'd characterize the prose as being very dense. The narrator, while not finding the time to introduce himself by name, is really chatty. This is not really the approach I'd take, but it has its moments.

This is Harkaway's first book, but it's got some high-profile cover blurbs (e.g. Len Deighton, Russell Hoban). Does that have anything to do with him being the son of John Le Carré? It just might.

Big and little

This short is by an artist who specializes in sculpture installations that play with visual perspective. Like, if two people are in one of her pieces and you look at them from the outsize, one will look like a giant compared to the other even if they're both the same size. So that seems to be a productive area of thought for her.

I like this dreamy little film. The end feels like it should have Sousa's "Liberty Bell March" playing over it.

Disconnect

Two days in a row the computers at my local library have gone offline. Really it seems to be the network that failed, not the computers themselves. It's all sort of held together with popsicle sticks and scotch tape.

For me it was just a little inconvenience. I can't speak for anyone else. Because the printers are connected to the computers via wi-fi no one could print either.

I feel bad for the reference librarians who run the computer lab on the side. When things like that happen they get hit with questions and complaints well outside of their wheelhouse. Ideally there should be an IT guy onsite, but there's no budget for that. IT is miles away, could just be one guy, only scheduled to work for six hours a week.

Box spring

Okay, so I'm given to understand that there are people who sleep in coffins. But that's a pretty major purchase. Like, the Walmart site lists their coffins as being almost $900, and if you're a coffin sleeper you'll probably go for something classy and bespoke. So will you use this same coffin for, you know, afterward? Or do you have to go ahead and purchase a second coffin for the more customary use? This level of gothness is not an option for everyone, obviously.

As George Carlin said, these are the thoughts that kept me out of the good schools.

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Frank Stella, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II (1959)

One book I've been lugging around with me is the Phaidon retrospective Minimalism, edited by James Meyer. Minimalism was a reaction to abstract expressionism in a lot of ways (or so they say.) The earlier movement's philosophical yearnings were suppressed, the physical objects—often factory-made or otherwise produced without the artist's hand—presented merely as physical things (again, or so they say.)

Looking at the pictures and also reading some descriptions, I'm struck by the leanings toward a monochrome look. Robert Ryman started his all-white paintings around this time, with Ad Reinhardt inevitably going all-black. A lot of Dan Flavin's fluorescent light pieces are essentially all glowing white, at least the parts you pay attention to.

Black and white seemed to be having a moment. Truman Capote, fatally wounded as a novelist, hosted his black and white ball in 1968. And while acid rock album covers did love their bright colors, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground put out albums with, respectively, plain white and almost plain black covers.

Of course 1966 was the year that pretty much all scripted television shows in the US started broadcasting in color. It wouldn't surprise me if there were some kind of perverse anti-color reaction going on because of that.

Not that I'm complaining. I like a good black and white picture.

 

"The Girls"

Carlos Guastavino is a composer I've very recently been introduced to. Well, not personally. That's possible (he lived until 2000), but if it ever happened I don't know about it. Argentinian, by the way.

This little tune is an ideal end-of-day lullaby. It's got up moments to it, and may not be a self-conscious ode to sleep. But it has got the right sense of head-clearing serenity.

Bundles of joy

What a ride.

Yesterday while riding the bus, I saw a woman get on with her toddler son. Young enough that she still had a stroller for him. The kid was a real handful. He wouldn't stop screaming, wouldn't stop squirming, and generally made everyone around them miserable.

This woman was sitting next to a much older lady. The older woman started off saying nice things and asking questions. Pretty soon she was not so nice, all but openly accusing the mother of kidnapping and saying that they had cameras on all the buses.

The older woman got off at the same stop as me. Afterward she told me, "I've been around children for 45 years [whatever that means] and I've never seen any of them carry on like that." Which, well, you know, I have. I don't even have kids, but between having a young father as a roommate and, well, just seeing other kids on public transportation, tantrums that size are nothing new to me. Plus the woman with the kid plainly had a routine down, not like she'd just snatched someone else's kid. Obviously if I found out the old lady was right I'd feel like an asshole. But I won't. She was a lunatic.

Later on I was reading a newspaper in the library. Another woman was escorting her son around the media section. She told him to pick out five DVDs to take out. He insisted on ten. In fact he got into a real fit, screaming "ten!" over and over, quiet rules be damned. Pretty sure he negotiated his way down to zero. Anyway, I felt vindicated in some way.

Re-introducing America's great Velcro-head

One thing that I've learned to appreciate despite once having had an inexplicable hostility towards it is Ernie Bushmiller's work on Nancy. Actually it's not inexplicable, just wrongheaded. I used to judge it by the same criteria as Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. But Bushmiller was nearly a generation older than Schulz, and was speaking an older visual language. It's more fulfilling if you give it time.

Nancy was revived for new installments a few years ago. And within the past year it's become surprisingly modish. That is, millennials and Generation Z people who have no particular loyalty to daily syndicated comics have started reading it, writing and meme-ing about it on various platforms.

Much of that is down to the new author Olivia Jaimes. "Olivia Jaimes" is a pseudonym, and I think she previously worked on a webcomic, but I'm not publicly speculating on who she really is now. In any case, she's created some weird juxtapositions. Nancy and Sluggo are screen addicts, constantly texting each other and playing video games, even though they still look like they stepped out of an Our Gang short.

If tech jokes were all Jaimes was bringing to the table they'd cloy pretty quickly. But she enjoys playing with the form too, breaking the fourth wall in clever ways, and in service to the characters. It's not Calvin & Hobbes, but again, it's its own thing. Something old and something new.

Getting to be a habit

Well, it happened again, only moreso.

The Friday night/Saturday snowstorm from my previous post was just a few inches. The Sunday night/Monday storm was more than that. Not a foot, I'd say, but a lot closer. It seems to have postponed garbage day. Or maybe just by a few hours. Whatever, I'm not taking anything back.

Despite all this the roads were pretty clear by mid-afternoon. That also might have been helped by the fact that it hit the high thirties/low forties today.

Open/close

We had snow starting last night and for a good part of today. Not exactly "snowmageddon" levels. They were predicting six inches, which seems about right.

Libraries, at least the ones we have around here, tend to have a low threshold for snow. Therefore, since I'd heard the weather forecast by yesterday, I had a feeling the library was going to be closed today. I made sure to swing by and pick up a couple of things I had ordered from other branches and was waiting to borrow. (One of them being a book called Vampire in Love which I'm pretty sure isn't a horror novel.) So the medium snow was only a minor disruption for me.