Wonderful maths

For 3 months next year, I will be twice the age of my older son, and he will be twice the age of my younger son. That is so cool. :)

Parsons Dance Company

We saw Parsons Dance Company tonight - they did the most amazine piece, Caught, with music by Robert Fripp. It was all one dancer - they used strobe lights to catch moments of the dance, perfectly timed - he would be here, then there, then there - beautiful leaps, bouncing around the stage, with the lights catching him so he looked like he was moving around the whole stage in mid-air, never touching the ground. Amazing timing, amazing music.

Another paper fetishist

http://www.jenstark.com/sculpture_01.html

really amazing work

Happy Valentine's Day

Amazon has a list of Bad Valentine's Day gifts, but I covet many of them. Bad is obviously in the eye of the beholder.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/gift-central/gift-guides/rc/R1I2DZ5AIZKU9C/ref=amb_link_4290972_5/102-7283051-9595332

Praying mantid egg cases? Zombie fangs??? *swoons*

small acoustic cat

http://www.ravenswingstudio.com/docs/cats.html

Wonderfully disturbing

http://www.martin-munoz.com/recent/index.html

Recycling - Wicked

I’ve been re-reading Wicked, by Gregory Maguire. He recently wrote a sequel. I do have to confess to a book addiction – I’d rather read than do just about anything else. I’m not much of a shopper or a clothes horse, but I have to be careful in the bookstore or on Amazon. I really wish I could figure out how to read and knit at the same time – but I can only knit and watch TV, not read. And sometimes only knit, if it’s complicated. Can’t listen to music and work, which is horrifying.

Anyway, Wicked. I read it years ago, and wanted to remind myself of the original story before I read the sequel. Maguire has retold a number of old tales, and I’m so charmed by his writing. Wicked is the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. He has a totally different take on the story than the movie does – he imagined a real world, not a light fantasy. It’s really a dense book, with politics, tyranny, revolution, class issues, parenting, good and evil, self-doubt, beauty, corruption, ambition, prejudice, religious fundamentalism, sin, forgiveness. There is a sad feeling throughout the whole thing because, of course, we know how it will all end. I think Maguire must have read a lot of the Oz books and created a whole concordance for himself before he wrote this one – it’s very rich and wonderful. Not a light read, really, but you can get lost in it. He’s one of my favorite writers – he’s written some really delightful books for kids, too.

Recycling - Teflon

I'm going to throw up a couple of my old posts that have held up, just to keep myself amused.

I just read something about Dale Hauk yarn. I find the idea of it mystifying. Not even addressing the idea of calling a yarn by a name that sounds like that when you attempt to pronounce it, why would someone put Teflon on yarn??? Has anyone ever felt this stuff? What does it feel like? I imagine it to be kind of weirdly greasy feeling – not the lanolin greasy feeling, but – just ew. Why Teflon on yarn? Why not Gore-Tex? Oh! Guess what! Gore-Tex IS Teflon.

The really weird synchronicity (there’s an ear worm for you) part of this, is that Kidlet and I just got a book called They All Laughed . . ., by Ira Flatow, lately of NPR fame. You might remember him from a PBS show called Newton’s Apple. This book is about inventions, and the first section we read was about – yep, Teflon. Teflon was one of those lucky accident type of inventions – in 1938, Roy Plunkett and Jack Rebok (aren’t those great names?) were trying to come up with a non-toxic refrigerant. They had mixed up a batch of Freon gas, and when they opened the canister, nothing came out. But the canister still weighed the same as it would if it were full of Freon. When they cut open the canister, it contained a white powder – after they messed with it for a while, they figured out it was the slipperiest stuff on earth. It was a military secret until 1948 – they used it to make gaskets for nuclear bombs. The name came from the chemists’ nickname for tetrafluoroethyline (Freon), which was tef, combined with Du Pont’s favorite suffix, lon. (Ny-lon, Or-lon – if it’s something totally unnatural that ends in lon, it’s probably made by Du Pont) It was used for lots of stuff, but fast-forwarding to 1957, Du Pont lost interest in it, and Wilbert Gore, with his son Bill, figured out how to make a fabric out of it, and Gore-Tex was born. So there’s your science for the day.