…and then, a heartbeat later…

A friend agreed that the cheetah sculpture is ALL wrong (the body is in motion but the tail? Not so much.) and kindly illustrated what would happen next were this a real cheetah. I think this should be a lesson to us all.

Updated to add that comment by said friend and creator of image: I am moved by the plight of the cheetah depicted in the sculpture. The problem is obvious. This art object visually represents a cheetah in full flight–except for its tail! While the great cat is moving forward at 60 miles per hour, its tail is clearly in the stationary or at-rest attitude. A fraction of a second from this moment frozen in time, this enormous inertial difference is going to hurt badly and the cheetah knows it. The anxiety in its face is understandable. This is going to be a very bad day.
Ogre

More catalog ridicule

A colleague and I are bringing to work the catalogs we get and I have to say that we are neck in neck for the title of one who receives the weirdest catalogs ever. Today, I had the pleasure of leafing through a catalog from a company called Scully & Scully.

Some of the more interesting items include the following:

[1] Porcelain Cheetah Sculpture: I know where they were headed with this trying to capture the cheetah in mid-stride …but this cheetah? Looks frustrated and possibly in pain. It looks, in fact, like it should be in a gymnast leotard swinging around the uneven bars heading toward a dismount.

[2] Assorted Faux Fur Throws: These are insanely expensive to be made of faux fur. My favorite is the Faux Caramel and Chinchilla Throw, which is, in the catalog (but not online interestingly), referred to as “Foxy Caramel.” Note to self: If I were in another profession (ahem) I might want to use that as my name.

[3] Pug Cufflinks: These are some saaaaaaaaaaaaad red-eyed little dog heads. If I had these on my sleeves (or even in my home) I would be depressed all the time.

[4] Panda Figurine: This comes in colors other than black but they’re all crazy angry looking. Again, not something I would want in my home.

As with my assault on resin objects, this is just my opinion. Judy? Don’t even thing about getting me any of this crap for Christmas.

Apparently, I am not a southerner (or, how I learned about the turducken)

Or so an annoying young lady informed me Tuesday afternoon mercifully near the end of an insanely long trip from BWI airport to – last stop of course – my home.

Jess was looking at the October 2005 issue of National Geographic Magazine in which there is a feature on the turducken. When I commented that I didn’t know what a turducken was, this … uh, person, said “Oh then you’re not from the south. It’s a southern thing.” What? WHAT?!?

Excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me for not being up on all of the southern approaches to poultry preparation and ingestion. I am clearly a discredit to my heritage. [insert disgusted sigh RIGHT here]

She’s lucky to be alive. Particularly since she went on to inform me that Virginia is not a southern state. Hooooooo-boy, I was hot. But … she was clearly ignorant, she was probably addled by jetlag, and we were minutes from her home. So I let her live.

But she’d better not run into me in a dark alley.

In the event that there is some fellow southerner out there who doesn’t know what a turducken is, it is – are you sitting down? – a boneless chicken stuffed inside a boneless duck stuffed inside a boneless turkey. I like protein but that’s a bit too much for me to contemplate. And it has the word “turd” in the name. I’m just saying.

One man’s story of the turducken experience.

North Carolina memories

A few weeks ago I stumbled across something wonderful: Blue Ridge Blog. The author is hilarious and — bonus! — a photographer, so she posts many fantastic images of the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina.

I lived in western North Carolina for about a decade and had a mixed experience. The landscape is undeniably and breathtakingly beautiful. The particular area we lived in was populated by some really hateful unfortunate people who seemed to need to not only be miserable themselves but make sure you were too. Not everyone was that way of course but suffice it to say that I would not ever willingly move back to that particular county. Lest you think this is the whining of an outsider, know that my Dad’s people are also from western North Carolina and have been there for many generations. I’ve got as many relatives spread out all over western North Carolina and I have over southwestern Virginia, maybe more.

I was still a child when we moved to North Carolina and remember well the trips in the summer back to Virginia with my grandparents. We took the Parkway as much as possible and it was lovely. If only I had known about a little thing called Dramamine back then…. What a horrible irony to spend your whole life in the mountains with severe motion sickness. Before the Linn Cove Viaduct was built, we had to jump off of the Parkway and onto a little winding mountain road (FROM HELL) to cover the gap between North Carolina and Virginia. [shudder]

As is typical of people who don’t know any better, places like western North Carolina are too often dismissed as rural backwaters with nothing to offer except a few weeks of pretty fall foliage to passing tourists. There’s much more there. There are interesting, funny, smart, creative people, beautiful landscapes, remarkable flora and fauna, terrific food and music and lots of other good stuff.

And seriously, it is really beautiful.

Wonder, whipping, and sweet, sweet music

As I reported in my previous entry, I attended a funeral in Mississippi a couple of days ago. These events involve lots of family in close quarters and the occasional pistol-whipping.

As is always the case at least in the south, everyone’s got pets. There were many, many dogs and cats (including the three-legged cat and the cat with no bottom teeth to stop its tongue from hanging out of its mouth at all times) but none of them had the star power of one dog. There was a dog so moved by either [a] the music in its head or [b] an itchy butt that he rocked and twisted on said butt for what seemed like an entire afternoon on the pea gravel patio, swinging from side to side a little bit like Stevie Wonder at the piano. Okay, the gyrations were EXACTLY like Stevie Wonder’s. And yeah, it was hilarious and we all laughed and sang Stevie Wonder songs to the confused creature. Boogie on sir dog.

Children are …violent. Well, they aren’t inhibited by the “this might hurt if I do it” gene so sometimes, they hurt themselves and others. For instance, a three-year-old might hit an eleven-year-old on the forehead really hard with the butt of a toy pistol. It happens. All out warfare was averted when a toy revolver was discovered tucked away by the eleven-year-old for later retribution. You know what they say, toy guns don’t pistol whip people, people do. The three-year-old had earlier been told to say “Does your momma sew?” when he pointed the gun at, inevitably, all of us, so for a while he would just utter a deep “So?” and then ramped it up to a more menacing and confusing “Momma sew?” I have no idea if he uttered either of these to his cousin before assaulting him.

Out on a back patio, under the crystal chandelier, a bunch of us sat around for hours as darkness fell listening to all sorts of music for a while until someone whipped out the crazy music. Any sense of decorum anyone might have had vanished as we listened to lounge versions (courtesy of Richard Cheese) of Welcome to the Jungle, Creep, and the that classic romantic standard Nookie, among others. Even when the temperature dropped about 25 degrees and a decidedly cold wind nearly froze all of us to death, we sat outside laughing and singing. Now that‘s what I call a good time.

So here’s the thing… you never know what’s going to happen when a bunch of people and animals get together but you can be sure it will be interesting and funny. And involve a little light violence.

Pilgrimage to the Delta

I just returned from a trip to Mississippi to attend the funeral of a dear friend’s mother. Funerals themselves are not necessarily fun. They are fraught with sadness, awkwardness, and, well, death. They are also prone to become stern rituals that make people stifle yawns and cringes of embarrassment.

Not so, this funeral.

This family is remarkable. They’re funny, loving, accepting, playful, open-minded (but not so much that their brains fall right out), sarcastic, opinionated, creative, assertive, intelligent, generous, kind, and tolerant. They’re also – every single one of them – alphas, so visitors have to be on their toes lest they vanish into the background. Not that they’ll be there for very long of course as one relative or another will find them and bring them back into the fold, worried that they haven’t had enough to eat.

The woman being buried would have turned 100 in December. As I sat near the back of the First United Methodist Church of Indianola and observed the vast family (not all of them even there I imagine) and friends who turned out to celebrate her life, I was deeply moved by the genuine affection that saturated the air and filled the sanctuary.

I never had the honor of meeting the remarkable woman buried on Monday but I feel like I know her through interaction with her many descendants, and I am fairly certain I am a better person for it.

More snot (sorry Judy)

I present the Bone Eating Snot Flower*, a new species of marine worm that lives off whale bones on the sea floor.

“The part of the animal that is exposed to the seawater is covered in a ball of mucus, so they are quite snotty. That is probably a defence mechanism.”

You think?

(A literal translation of the species name Osedax mucofloris)

Snot (this one’s for you Judy)

My recent entry about snot, albeit only an indirect reference to the material itself grossed out my friend Judy. I can appreciate that since [a] I am no fan of snot myownself and [b] I suspect that guy’s snot wasn’t jasmine scented.

Let me explain.

This same Judy didn’t hesitate to recently give me “the gift of precious fluids from heaven’s messengers” otherwise known as Angel Snot. My friend Andrea and I decided to liberate said meaningful mucus from its packaging confines yesterday afternoon and it is … special. Seriously, what’s not to love about a plastic egg filled with pearlescent, viscous, jasmine-scented … uh, slime?

I love it. I love explaining to people what it is. They never, ever see the “why, it’s Angel Snot of course” explanation coming. I love the reactions.

Judy, you are a true friend indeed.

A tiger in your tank (HR Part I)

Just got back form the Henry Rollins show at the Birchmere in Alexandria and have to say that I LOVED IT.

I will do my best to refrain from describing it or him using words such as juggernaut, fierce, intense and angry … but, uh …

…the man is a fierce, intense, angry juggernaut.

And? He’s really, really funny and articulate and he cares deeply about truth, justice, and the American way. Seriously. Go see him on his spoken word tour(s). It’s worth it.

The Sun!

Finally the Sun is back and it’s pissed! Not really but it is intense, especially after days and days of rain and gloom. We needed the rain no doubt, but all that grayness can bring a girl down. The cats are delighted of course and battling each other for prime windowsill space. Right now, Figaro is the winner and is basking while Abby is studiously ignoring him from across the room in the chair. She is acting like she never wanted to be in that stupid window to begin with. The very idea…!

The maintenance folks apparently came to investigate my kitchen ceiling leak and decided to cut out a bigger hole… and then leave it completely alone for going on a week now. I assume they’ll be back to fix it. Or make it worse.

Tonight Andrea and I are going to see Henry Rollins at the Birchmere. I’m typically unable to stomach spoken word concerts, def poetry jams, and the like, but I find Rollins compelling in snippets so perhaps I can withstand a few hours of him. We shall see.

If nothing else, the audience will make for interesting people watching.