Musings

Lake Clara Meer’s levels are nearly two feet below normal full. That’s low.

So we have a Pres-Elect (already with his first press conference successfully conducted), and he’s already announcing appointments/hirings (or at least Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff). Since he’s not in office, how do they get paid and out of what budget? I assume there’s some mechanism for this, but I haven’t heard mention thereof.

BTW, have you noticed that the more formal media is now calling him Mr. Obama? Even though he’s a Senator. Protocol JCB & I assume….

Posted at 4:14 PM | 8 Comments »

That’s 349 for Obama (the funky question mark)….

Points to the media for impressive graphics showing an impressive win at the top of the ticket, and some close races downticket. The above table is from the New York TImes, and the headline/blurb that I stuck on top of it is from the Washington Post, and was up early this morning. Our country is facing economic nastiness, to say the least. The Pres is our leader, yes, but then there’s Congress. And there’s only so much $$ in the budget (which has also shrunk with the lastest “turmoil”), and it can only go so far.

I couldn’t resist a couple of calculations…. States with 10% difference between the total vote counts for the two candidates controlled 383 electoral votes, meaning most state contests were not that close. They went either for one candidate or the other—STATEwide; locally is another story. Also, the states Obama won had an average of 12.1 electoral votes, while the ones McCain won had an average of only 7.5 votes, and only four of his had 10 or more votes. Note that these states had total-vote differences of less than 5%: Ohio, Florida, Montana, Indiana, North Carolina, and Missouri; they controlled 87 electoral votes.

For more wonderful spatial graphics, visit maps and tables on the webpages of CNN, New York Times, or the Washington Post.

Posted at 12:13 PM | 3 Comments »

Glyph from stone set in wall of closed patio next to the tower, Palenque, Chiapas.

I love it when archaeologists get creative in inserting the past into the present.

David Stuart, a well-known Maya epigrapher, has composed “Obama” in glyphs (it’s “o-ba-ma-a”*), and you can buy t-shirts, cloth bags, or ball caps imprinted with it….

* Oh, you’re asking about the duplicate “a”? That’s explained here. Those crazy Mayas!

Posted at 5:27 PM | Comments Off on Past meets present

Sometimes what’s ordinary in your home landscape sounds rather odd to those passing through*…. I’m not singling out West Virginia here; after all, my home state has both a Hell (with a Baptist church I once watched a wedding party emerge from) and a Paradise (I once ate a fish sandwich there)….

* A quick google-check shows I’m not the only person to note the Big Ugly name…. Here’s a map of one stretch of the river used in Lenore McComas Coberly’s novel, Sarah’s Girls: A Chronicle of Big Ugly Creek (2007)….

Posted at 5:47 PM | 4 Comments »

Sorry, I have no Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf pictures….

Pomfret went to a combination tantalus and electric refrigerator and procured necessities. Fox, glancing around, saw a Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf perched on a cabinet in a corner, and a large deep peach bloom on a table against the wall.

Tecumseh Fox is a lesser-known detective created by Rex Stout, and portrayed in three novels published in 1939–41. This is from the final volume, The Broken Vase. I know it’s a minor concern, but what the heck’s a tantalus?

Answer: lockable stand for liquor decanters, in which they remain visible (same root as tantalize).

And: Lang Yao sang-de-boeuf. This refers to a particular shade of deep oxblood red, produced in Chinese ceramic glazes by additions of copper oxide. The term melds the Chinese and French terms.

Later, Fox is told that this precious vessel is “a Hsuan Te.” This apparently means that it dates to the Ming dynasty, ca. 1426–1435. BTW, the “peach bloom” is another contemporaneous decoration style (I gather).

Bow down to the power of the internet…and consider whether your domicile needs a tantalus….

Posted at 8:58 AM | Comments Off on Stand back!

After our late morning shopping expedition (miscellaneous hardware supplies), we took the long way back from Curtis, thereby circumnavigating* the lake. We stopped to photograph a field of near-harvest-ready sunflowers, and a pair of Sandhill cranes rose up from the far side of the field and flew over the sunflowers and our heads, vocalizing all the way! Exciting! [But mediocre photos.]

Our last photo stop was at the boat ramp/public access on a lovely curve of the Manistique River, where I greatly enjoyed capturing vegetative reflections in the relatively quiet river-surface.

Diary note: cleaned ashes out of wood stove (five trays) and outhouse bucket is now reloaded.

Late afternoon addendum: RIP Aunt NTM.

* Circumnavigate in the dictionary refers to travel aboard (a sailing) ship. Circumambulate means to circle something on foot. I don’t know of a word for traveling around something in a land vehicle.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 3 Comments »

Bot Garden conservatory, some years ago.

Although Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) is a slim volume (as the phrase goes), I have not yet finished it. Already, I have encountered some lovely imagery.

I am particularly taken, at this moment, with the phrase “self-dramatizing rhetoric” (p. 58). McEwan uses it to describe the tenor of activist meetings in Britain in the late 1950s, pairing it with “mournful rectitude” to describe the span of interaction modes. Still, I’m taken with the first characterization, and can say that I find distasteful the overwhelming trend toward self-dramatizing rhetoric that pervade many discussions regarding issues surrounding our upcoming presidential election.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Reining in rhetoric

An AIG ad that’s less than two weeks old….

Eee-yah.

I have little confidence in fiscal decision-making at the top of our elected national management team*. If I ran my household finances the way the gov’t has run our national checkbook lately, well, I’m afraid I’d be living under a bridge and eating at a soup kitchen….

* And Barton Gellman’s new book reveals The Angler to be even more terrifying than we had previously thought (shot a friend in the face—we knew that; lied to the Pres and worked against him behind his back—like I say, terrifying…).

Posted at 4:55 PM | Comments Off on AIG: “Put your mind at ease.”

Yeah, this is a regular 4-way corner, but there is a roundabout not far away.

Aha. Traffic circles have stop lights controlling entering traffic. Roundabouts do not.**

I have heard multiple times that both save petrol and are safer; however, I was sure annoyed to discover the fancy ones in the neighborhood above are too narrow for delivery trucks and other long vehicles to negotiate without bumping over the curb and crushing the herbage.

* Word invented for this headline….

** Clarification from Time mag, discussing the trend toward adding roundabouts to our roadways.

Posted at 11:11 AM | 2 Comments »

This is Carol’s picture from several weeks back; The Botanist reports eating perhaps this very melon earlier this week….

You may have heard that the term “maverick” originated with the practice of a Texas rancher named Samuel Maverick, who wouldn’t brand his cattle, saying that it hurt them too much. This meant he exercised dibs on any unbranded cattle in his area. So, now we use maverick for unbranded range cattle, and for someone who’s independent-minded and refuses to conform to group mores.

What you may not have heard is that his grandson, Maury Maverick, originated the term “gobbledygook” to refer to nonsense language or deliberately obscure wording.

I heard about Maury from The Botanist, who heard Maury speak in the late 1930s, when he was a US House member from Texas; I got the etymological detail from, where else, Wikipedia….

Posted at 4:44 PM | Comments Off on Avoiding gobbledygook?