Wintry remix
I notice that almost exactly one year ago I had a similar urge to post about how miserable winter had become. Well, it just got miserabler.
It started OK. We’ve had a snowier January than I can remember in many years. Which makes the several days of bitter cold at least aesthetically pleasing.
“Daddy, my eyelids are frozen shut.”
“I know, son, but if you could open them you’d find the streetscape very beautiful.”
The other upside of this dose of winter is learning the seemingly endless forms that water can take. Snow, ice, liquid, of course. Add to that list the intermediate states of sleet, slush, sneet, and snush. (Can’t forget thundersnow either.)
Photo by santheo
This morning as I went for a run I witnessed — indeed experienced — the most diabolical form yet. It only occurs when the thermometer is all over the place, warm enough for liquid water to stick around close to the ground yet cold enough for the water to freeze when exposed to the air.
What happens on the sidewalks is that certain squares of concrete that are askew and lower than grade fill with near-freezing water. A very thin layer of ice non-uniformly covers this water and looks distressingly like the textured surface of the sidewalk itself. So you never quite know if what you are about to step in is solid or liquid and (here’s the kicker) how deep it all is. To make it a real gauntlet-run the edges of the sidewalk are piled high with snow. So you get shoes soaken with water that is trying desperately to become ice. And a bonus: windblown ice pellets that impact the face like a fragmenting comet hitting the moon.
The ultimate indignity comes only on the coldest runs though. I wear a little hat with ear flaps that fasten under my chin. Even on subzero days one sweats when running and the sweat from my head channels down the flap-straps ending at the fastener. Slowly this saline sweat freezes and, as more and more pours off my head, a little icicle comes to form. By the end of, say, a six mile run I have an icicle several inches long swinging from side to side from my chin. Quite comical, a cross between Frosty the Snowman and Fu Manchu.
Did I mention we’re expecting the heaviest snowfall today in nine years?
Mo-cap
Had my first dose of a live motion-capture shoot last week for the Forbidden City project. I don’t talk much about the project around these parts, but we’re in the final stretch — targeting a June 2008 launch — and this was just too cool not to document.
We’re working with a game development studio in the Chicago suburbs to help us tackle the substantial modeling challenges of the project. Beyond the sheer volume of buildings, spaces, and gardens to create are the challenges of animating traditional or complex human movements found in the palace complex. But using motion capture and two very capable actors, we were able to grab the data in one go rather than hand-model it.
Pictured above left is an actor who performed archery movements and above right an actress who walked precariously on custom-made Ming-era platform shoes up and down stairs and ramps. The glowing bulbs on the suits aren’t actually lit; that’s just from my camera’s flash. But the reflectors are constantly sending back infrared signals to a forest of transmitter/receiver units circling the acting space.
The data needs massaging, of course, but there’s a smoothness to it that would take far longer to model manually. Plus, certain things — like walking regally on platform shoes — is something an animator would have to guess at.
Best of all, a production team from The History Channel was with us for this session and subsequent shoots back at the IBM lair. I guess I’ve not mentioned it here before, but there’s a documentary in the works about the Forbidden City and our project figures prominently. (Exactly as they did with the Eternal Egypt project back in 2005.)
Exciting times.
Cities of stone
Been on a serious Lord of the Rings bender lately as my four-year-old has really taken to the film trilogy. (He can’t read yet. At least not Tolkien.)
The mythos is clearly penetrating my subconscious because the other night I woke up with a single, clear thought — so clear, in fact, that I had to write it down immediately. My insight? The city of Matera, Italy is a real world version of the vertiginous, stacked city of Minas Tirith, capital of Gondor in the Tolkien legendarium. Matera is one of the oldest cities in the world and was one stop on my Italian odyssey last year.
I imagine the two cities all but indistinguishable from street-level, but can you tell which of these is Matera and which Minas Tirith?
The fictional city was filmed from a very large model. Interestingly, there seems to be a at least a few complete miniatures of Matera.
Answers (highlight to reveal): Row 1: Minas Tirith, Matera; Row 2: Minas Tirith, Matera; Row 3: Matera, Minas Tirith; Row 4: Matera, Minas Tirith
Scapegoat
Though I am not the author of this particular graffito I do agree. Typically when anything goes wrong in my life I blame house music.
Cashew update!
Photo by Vic Lic
FLASH! There’s an urgent addendum to my previous post about the stupendous Blister Nut.
You may recall that the cashew is unique in a variety of ways. Here are some of those ways, as a refresher. (Pay attention for god’s sake!)
- There is only one nut per cashew fruit (also known as the apple) and it is outside the fruit.
- The nut itself is surrounded by a highly caustic oil that causes a rash when touched.
- The one-nut-per-fruit and dangerous nature of the cashew is what causes its price to be higher than other nuts.
This week I was with a colleague who served in the Peace Corps years ago as a farmer planting, yes, cashew trees in Ghana. Score! Here is what I learned.
The skin of the fruit is not caustic like the nut. In fact, many people use the fruit, which is high in sugar, to ferment into booze. (Seems like I have next year’s boutique homebrew!)
But there’s more. The skin around the nut is not caustic either (which I misunderstood initially). It is the oil inside the skin, between it and the nut, which is harmful. Thus animals are attracted to the fruit — mmm, juicy — and end up eating the nut too. The skin does not digest and the nut passes intact out of the animal with the rest of the poop. And here is the evolutionary awesomeness: the poop is almost certainly at some distance from the place of ingestion, thus ensuring wider and wider propagation of the cashew seed. Not unlike the way pollen spreads through the external agency of birds and bees.
Isn’t that fascinating?
Breakbeatbox
Got a new little project to share. A friend of mine out in Boston (loaner of the mythical monome) and I thought it might be fun to play a game where we create short musical compositions then post them for each other with a rule on how the next submission should proceed. A musical exquisite corpse, audio Layer Tennis. Whatever it is, it forces us to make time to make music, if for no other reason than not to be outdone.
By the way, start with “Doctored”. Jesse’s was the first track.
Another thing we could learn from the Chinese
I’ve been working with the Forbidden City in Beijing for the last three years. It’s been rewarding in many ways (and hopefully will reward you come June), but maybe my favorite thing is how things are named there. I’m not talking about poor English signage, though that always gets a chuckle. I’m referring to the historical practice of naming buildings in a style that is both humorously literal and exaggeratedly fantastic.
Consider the following.
Pavilion of the Three Friends – OK, but which three? You’re immediately interested in knowing what this place is about, aren’t you? The best kind of place name for a museum of similar-looking buildings.
Hall of Mental Cultivation – A center of learning, right? You got mentally cultivated just reading the name of the place.
Palace of Tranquil Longevity – Definitely a better name than Del Webb’s Sun City. When I get old and crotchety, please put me in a palace of tranquil longevity.
But those are just for beginners. Ratcheting it up a notch we have …
Palace for the Establishment of Happiness – In reality, part of Qianlong’s palace-within-a-palace retirement complex. In your mind, so many naughty things.
Pavilion of Literary Profundity – You think “library”, but you think wrong. It is a book repository. And one of my very favorites.
Pavilion of Auspicious Clarity – Here we move into the abstract, the philosophical. You don’t exactly know what the hell auspicious clarity is, but you want it.
The Palace for Gathering Excellence – And this is why the Chinese are unstoppable. They stockpile excellence.
But my hands-down favorite has got to be …
Hill of Piled Elegance – There’s such a surplus of elegance at the Forbidden City that it must be heaped into a garden mound, presumably for later sorting.
So, starting small, I’ve taken to renaming areas of my own home in this style. Here’s a handy chart.
| kitchen | Hall of Flourishing Sustenance | |
| living room | Palace of The Ceremony of Leisure | |
| basement | Pavilion for Fleeing the Inauspicious Children | |
| bedroom | Watchtower of Eternal Hope | |
| bathroom | Gate of Piled Excrement |
This is bound to pay off. Name important, be important!
Chess with verve
Over the holidays my six-year-old son discovered chess. He picked up the basic piece movements remarkably fast and soon became fixated on special moves like castling, en passant, and pawn promotion. So much so that in some early games performing those moves became his sole motivation.
But the best thing about playing chess with my kid is that it is an un-self-consciously emotional affair. He jumps around, screams at the board, and covers his eyes after he makes a questionable move. This is the way chess should be played. Forget about that computer and the four hour matches. Let’s spice it up with name-calling, body-checking, and post-game emotional meltdowns!
Reminds me of that classic SNL skit with Jim Belushi as a high school chess coach in the style of Bobby Knight. “You call that castling?! Come on! Why don’t you just give him the king?! Give it to him!” (Transcript.)
Isn’t there some sport that involves playing a few moves of chess then boxing or something?
End of the Ride?
We have a second car, a 1994 Honda Accord affectionately referred to as MySweetRide, which I’ve not taken great care of. It’s never seen the inside of a garage, braving the elements in the Deep South and the Fucking Cold North. I don’t drive it very much, but it comes in just handy enough to keep around. At least until we have to make any kind of serious outlay of cash for it. Which may be soon.
You can hear the car idling on the street from my basement. There’s a gaping maw in the dashboard where the stolen stereo once lived. A short in the driver-side door keeps the dome light on. Every hinge creaks like a drawbridge and there’s enough decomposing flora in the shelf where the trunk shuts to compost a medium-sized garden.
And yet, she is loved.
2AM Sunday morning. Awakened by a phone call from friend who had the car*. A screw had punctured a tire and put the trusty steed out of commission a few miles away. (Ironically, the car was being used to transport home a bike that had just gotten a flat tire.) We jacked her up, unlugged the nuts, and then … could not get the damn tire off. Like me, it just didn’t want to let go of the Ride.
We left her for the night.
In the cold light of day we lubed her up and still could not get the tire off. We were about to give up. Just then — and I swear it was quite honestly right then — the dirtiest tow truck I’d ever seen drove up and out leaned a similarly hygienic individual asking if we needed help.
Aw, hell, he’d seen this thing before. He got out of the truck, walked up to the tire and kicked it as hard as he could. Nothin’.
No problem. He reached back into the cab of the truck and pulled out a baseball bat that clearly had a few stories to tell. He scooted under the car and swung for the fences behind the tire. Voila! Off it came. And away he drove, our guardian angel Cooter of Hazzard County.
Of course, the spare was flat. Probably should have seen that coming.
It’s all good now, but it does have me wondering if 2008 is the year I need to put MySweetRide out of its misery.
* You may remember that MySweetRide is at the center of an informal car-sharing service and, as such, has its very own Twitter site.
Update: Due to an overwhelming number of requests to help out in some way (one comment so far) I’ve added a Donate button. The money is pouring in ($1 so far).
Resolved 2008
Last year was the first in a while where I set no specific goals for myself in the new year. Maybe it is because I was tired of batting slightly better than .500. Or maybe I wanted to see what a goal-less year would be like. (Answer: not great.)
In past years I laid them out (2005, 2006), reviewed them midway (2005), and then gave a final assessment (2005, 2006).
This year I’m getting back to it. Shall we place bets?
- Simplify.
Instead of doing ten things at once, do four. For all aspects of my life. - Moderate.
Related to above, but in quantity not complexity. - Start to write a book.
Been researching it for six months now (or is it all my life?). Time to get back to the word. - Make more music.
This one looks promising. There’ll be an announcement soon … - Get back into distance running.
Why? Because it is the simplest, cheapest way to exercise. - Not travel as much.
See point one. See also my family. See also my sanity. - Visit Tibet.
Wha?! I thought you said … Well, I know I’m going to China at least once this year, possibly for the last time in a while. Might as well make it worth it. (And by worth it, I mean riding the Permafrost Express to Lhasa!) - Figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
I’m open to suggestions. - Learn to be ok with doing nothing/being still.
OK, enough of that. Let’s move to the next thing, - Visit more of the neighborhoods of Chicago.
This requires more than just idly ambling around the city which would be inefficient and possibly dangerous. It requires a plan. I have a plan. - Read more books.
You know, books. Spine-bound, pulp-paged tomes. - Eat more slowly.
What occurred to me is that if you can’t recall what something tasted like five minutes after you’ve eaten it, it is time to eat slower. (Or find tastier food, I suppose.)
Begin.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
