WhimsyLand

Fine art with party hats.

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"Deep in the mine, within a pocket of salt water trapped in a 250 million-year-old salt crystal, two biologists and a geologist discovered the 2-9-3 virgibacillus bacteria. This would be unremarkable save for the fact that this bacteria was 100 million years older than the dinosaurs... and it was still alive."
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Buried as I am in this and that, I couldn't let the day go by without mentioning the fabulous July/August issue of The Gray Lady of Poetry ("All The Poetry That's Fit To Print").  For starters, the back page is three full columns of poets and reviewers including many of my favorites, near-favorites, and reliably interesting:  Tony Hoagland, Jane Hirshfield, Charles Simic, Sandra Beasley, John Poch, Philip Levine, Ange Mlinko, Bob Hicok, W. S. Merwin, Albert Goldbarth, Jordan Davis (!), Sharon Mesmer (!), K. Silem Mohammad (!), Nada Gordon (!), Gary Sullivan (!), Christian Bök, Donald Revell, Drew Gardner (!), and Yvor Winters, not to mention a quote by Daisy Fried:  "The Milton problem reminds me of pregnancy and the Nipple Nazi of Northampton".

And another 15 to 20 names I'm too lazy to type in.  It makes you think "what's up with this issue?"  The Flarf contingent got their own section (Flarf and Conceptual Writing), and the rest of the poetry section was relatively star-studded.  Ange even mentioned saffron ("Sings from the pot, a little tomatoey, / a little stigma (not stamen) of crocus sativus"). Some work I liked:

Tony Hoagland, "Personal":  "The government reminded me of my father, / with its deafness and its laws".

Amy Beeder, "Captain Haddock vs. the PTA":  "Unfurl your thick invective, show your bullet head / Whiskey-pickled, weathered & pupilless, sweating / In a bantam rage, your sad-fish face a fist".

John Hodgen, "for the man with the erection lasting more than four hours":  "He's supposed to call his doctor, but for now he's the May King / with his own Maypole."

Jordan Davis, "Pictures of Bugs Bunny Dressed As A Thug":  "What drove me to draw this picture / Of Bugs Bunny dressed as a thug?"

K. Silem Mohammad, "Poems About Trees":  "I write crappy poems and eat babies".

Vanessa Place, "Miss Scarlett": "Miss Scalett, effen we kain git de doctah / w'en Miss Melly's time come, doan you bodder / Ah kin manage.  Ah knows all 'bout birthin."

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You'll be happy to know that the ACELP decoder started working on our Gen 2.25 player about 5 minutes ago.  That only took 5 days.  Don't know why, except that everything in this damnable SDK is overly complicated and when it works, who cares?  But when it doesn't, finding what little thing you did wrong is like finding a quark in a hay silo.  This particular software ensemble is combative, game-theoretic actually.  It knows that I don't know how it works, so it doesn't work until I prove that it has to.  Just today, I had an ACELP decoder that wasn't decoding.  After hours and hours and hours and hours of putting in debugging output to prove that one step or another was, in fact, doing what it should do, I got to the point where I could print out the number of bytes of decoded output that was going to the DAC.  It was the correct amount, but I was still getting fuzz out of the ear buds.  Then, I captured the decoder output onto a file that I wrote to the flash-based FAT, looked at it with Sony Sound Forge, and it looked good and played just fine.  Having gotten caught trying to mess with me, and having been proven to be actually working, the software then threw in the towel and started working. 

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I was chatting with Steve, one of my regular baristas at Brewing Market, and he mentioned that he as taking Astronomy this summer to get a leg up on his studies that begin next fall in a college in Durango.   I mentioned that I had taken Astro 40 years ago, and that a truly amazing number of things were now known that weren't known then.  In my Astro 101 class, there was no mention of black holes, quasars were mysterious objects with no explanation, and the prof never mentioned gravitational lensing.  Sweet Junie gave me a book for Father's Day all about gravitional lensing, and quite a few other things, too.  Turns out that Einstein, in one of his famous short papers, mentioned that one of the results of General Relativity was the likelihood that massive objects (such as galaxies) could actually bend time-space enough that the light from objects behind said massive object would bend just as a lens might accomplish.  He also said that such a thing would probably never be observable, but they're finding more and more examples, including one galaxy that is just the right distance from a quasar (about half-way) so that it actually creates a double image.  For decades, everyone thought that these were two separate bodies, until they analyzed the spectra of each.  Anyway, back to Steve.  I really like this kid, not sure why.  He works hard and knew Junie and my normal orders on our second or third visit on his shift.  I like Scott, too, who occasionally works shifts with Steve, but usually on different ones.  I kid him that I can't remember his name, and since Brewing Market is too cheap to buy name tags for their baristas, I would just call him George in the future, as well as all the other baristas.  I figure if it works for Foreman, it would work for me.  I need to get on the Internet and upload the Brewing Market logo and have a bunch of "George" name plates made, how much could that cost?  They'll get a kick out of it, and maybe they will make sure the crema is perfect on my afternoon latte in the future. 

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Sweet Junie is back in Wisconsin, where the humidity is already higher than what it is here in CO when it rains.  I know that because she told me a couple of hours ago, along with news about our newly installed dishwasher, the first one in the house since it was built in 1936.  We hired a handyman that our neighbor recommended, and the operation was a success.  Of course, that (and liberal amounts of HGTV-watching) makes us want to double down and put up some new kitchen cabinets.  I'm pretty sure that the 17 layers of paint is all that holds the current ones together.  On the other hand, the cabinets may be the only thing holding the house together.  You never know with a 73 year old house.