Musings

No lie. That’s the name of that firework. It was the biggest one of the series, and of course the last one MV fired off last night. Some kids were spellbound; others, not so much.

Posted at 11:43 AM | Comments Off on Hit Man

…the cupola of an octagon barn in west-central Georgia.

The first octagon structure I remember exploring was a house in Ord, Nebraska (a bit of googling suggests it’s for sale, in fact, if you’re interested…). I was working up the road near Burwell, but that’s another story from long before there were digital cameras.

Today’s vocabulary—apotropaic

supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck

In a sentence: We need a drawerful of effective, proven, apotropaic goodies these days, or perhaps just a cupola….

Posted at 2:49 PM | 4 Comments »

I forgot to mention this particular excitement from our Michigan adventure. Honey bees that had quietly colonized a gap between the chimney and the siding several years ago decided to swarm. Right by the garage door. Fortunately, our kindly neighbor is a beekeeper. He brought over a hive loaded with a comb to make it attractive to the scout bees, and we hoped they would find it and move in. They did! Unfortunately, he says only half of the original bunch will move to the new residence, so they aren’t gone from the house.

Like many people, I have a “junque” email address that I use when I’m forced to give one to an entity I never want to receive emails from. Today when I checked one of them (yeah, I have several*; yahoo gives them out for free!), I learned that Delta is trying to entice me aboard with the following:

You can now enjoy Leinenkugel’s award-winning Sunset Wheat beer onboard Delta flights.

I can remember when Leinies had a very local distribution. And I suspect that in the bad old days they didn’t make a Sunset Wheat flavor! Actually, I’d be far more tempted by decent food, but not enough to buy a ticket.

* The name of one riffs on the word basura, Spanish for garbage….

Posted at 5:34 PM | 3 Comments »

It’s a fact of life: the body will die.

Yeah, I heard someone say that entirely without irony on the (streaming) radio….

Posted at 8:08 AM | Comments Off on Quote w/o comment (almost)

As I understand it, tepalcate is the Mexican-icized version of the Nahuatl word (perhaps tepalcatl) for broken ceramic…. I’ve seen a lot of them, and even washed quite a few….

Thursday, we strolled to a nearby restaurant*; it’s billed as Mexican, but I would describe it as Mexican-influenced, rather nouvelle, and generally Latin. I neglected to ask where the chef is from. They’ve had a few. One was of Puerto Rican descent and from NYC, so you can tell the “Mexican” part is loosely interpreted.

One wall is textured, and painted a lovely deep red. It’s ornamented with small broken prehispanic ceramic shards on wire spikes. As near as I could tell, they’re real. No reason not to be. Many, many fields have lots of these, broken by generations of plowing….

* Their web page fails to open, so why name them and why provide a link?

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

I was perhaps a wee bit boasting over the weekend when I said that I knew what this tree is called. Then I doubted myself (quietly, in private), so I thought I’d better look it up.

Common (English) name: monkey puzzle tree. Scientific name: Araucaria araucana. New common name: pehuén (from Mapuche). Native of the south-central Andes, both east and west slopes (says the web).

Turns out I had the name right, but didn’t know the coolest data-bit: this specimen is a male!

Ancillary data-bit: these trees are cousins (relatively speaking) of some of the trees fossilized in the Petrified Forest in Arizona.

For more info, here’s the wikipedia entry….

Posted at 8:25 PM | Comments Off on Boy-o-boy-tree

All the bees* buzzing around this tree made it an audio-arbol [arbol = tree (Span.)].

For this first time, this afternoon felt like marginal-summer. Hot. Fresh-mown grass smells with a powdery dry backnote.

I’m not quite ready yet….

* Our bumble bees are called humble bees in Britain. Apparently, humble is a corruption of the German hummel, meaning buzzing. Webster’s online says this bee is also sometimes called a dumble-dor. Ah, she’s not so original, that JK Rowling….

Posted at 5:34 PM | Comments Off on Spring superseded?

I know this plant as bedstraw, but without much confidence in that ID. A quick google suggests I’m right; there are a bunch of bedstraws, however, and I don’t know which this is. The genus is Galium, which this web site says is Greek for “milk”, and sometime in history the juice of the plant was used to curdle milk. Yum.

Just finished Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero (2007)*. Recommended. Some of his descriptions of the countryside struck me viscerally as do those of Cormac McCarthy. Somewhat tortured characters are also similar. Many are orphaned young. Ondaatje’s stories are entirely different from McCarthy’s, however.

* I didn’t read The English Patient (1993) or see the movie (1996), so I can’t make any comparisons.

Household victory: 2007 taxes completed, signed, mailed today.

Posted at 5:12 PM | Comments Off on Victories

For unknown reasons (unexercised and unverbalized desire to wander exacerbated by fine spring weather?), I’ve been distracted for a time both yesterday and today looking closely at the Isle of Skye in Google Earth. I even downloaded a 1905 text from archive.org called The Misty Isle of Skye: Its Scenery, Its People, Its Story, and examined places noted therein.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered that those crazy Brits (or Scots) decided that if a Munro is any Scottish mountain more than 3K feet tall, then a somewhat smaller landform, at least 150 meters tall (just under 500 feet for you metric-challenged types), shall be referred to as a Marilyn (get it?), or, roughly, a hill. Or, and I suppose this is entirely possible, those Wikipedia wackos are totally pulling my leg!

Posted at 6:24 PM | Comments Off on Screen-based wander

This time of the year, I always stop and admire the jasmine vines covering the fence in front of a neighbors’ house. The blooms are so glorious in the sun (yesterday, not today, I admit).

Most people from around here call this yellow or Carolina jasmine, and sometimes pronounce the latter jess-ah-min, so it has the alternate spelling jessamine. I did not know how toxic the plant is until I read that Wikipedia entry….

* Pitiful reference to the line: Why is the sky Carolina blue?

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »