Sucking-stones

neige neige neige (25 things)

2009-02-01T10:33:00.003+01:00

1. I collect pigeon feathers, but usually only under the following conditions: 1) I am in a good mood, 2) I see a feather and 3) I feel like picking it up.
2. However, now my daughter runs ahead and picks them up for me
3. My name means "lively little dancer (earth - oat-fodder)"
4. Noema's name means, among other things "profound thought adventurer (oat-fodder - guy from Jaro)"
5. Anoushka's name means "grace reborn (oat-fodder - guy from Jaro)"
6. Mark and I seriously considered making up a new last name, "Jarova", which would have meant absolutely nothing (maybe), but would have spared our future descendents from the coming hyphenation explosion.
7. I wanted to give the girls Mark's last name. Mark wanted to give them my last name. I did not cut off my hair and Mark did not sell his watch.
8. Noema and I were both born on Thursday.
9. On Thursday I celebrate by doing things I want to do but consider ill-advised.
10. Right now I take a dance class that involves a lot of "vogueing" with women 10 years my junior.
11. I rarely regret anything I do on a Thursday.
12. I make art type things which 1) involves BabyBel cheese wax and 2) are inspired by lines from Eliot's Ash-Wednesday. They often involve pigeon feathers.
13 For Lent I always give up 3 things: 1) Civ (the video game), 2) buying new books, 3) buying new clothes. Of course, it's kind of cheating since I don't really play video games anymore.
14. Every day I play SET for a minute or few.
15. When I was pregnant with Anoushka I started looking at celebrity pictures. As an antidote for loneliness and fear it is moderately effective. But highly embarrassing.
16. Maybe I will give up the celebrity pictures this year and get the new Civ. (Of course, it only takes about 3 minutes to look at the pics, and I can play civ until my hand stops working.)
17. I love soundtracks - my favorites are 1) Kung Fu Hustle, 2) Empire of the Sun, 3) Strictly Ballroom and 4) Mr. Jealousy.
18. I clip my finger-nails in public.
19. When I smoked I would put the butts in my pocket because I didn't want to litter.
20. I take great comfort from the knowledge that I can always carry gum and earplugs in my pocket.
21. My life has been greatly improved by taking my coat off first and putting it on last.
22. Most days I kickbox with ankle weights, hand weights, and patching my strong eye. I put Anoushka in her playpen and say "Arrrr" a lot.
23. I have a plan to make a weight vest out of baggies of sand and duct tape.
24. I do know efficiency can go too far.
25. Today is not Thursday.

Tendance orageuse le soir

2008-05-19T23:45:00.002+01:00

The snow has ceased. And the air has filled itself with itself.

"Trap," says the wolf, "why am I trapped?"

"Trap," says the wolf, "why won't you let me go?"

The field stretches between the mountains and the downs.

"I love to run across the snow," says the wolf. "I gaze upon the path I've left behind me and rejoice."

The tall grass bends patiently.

"I love the snow too," says the trap.

"And the winter. Everything tastes better when you are hungry."

"Yes," says the trap. "I love the winter too."

"Trap, should I despise myself for not chewing off my own paw?"

"You are too busy talking to me."

"I could uproot you and carry you with me."

"You wouldn't last long."

"Trap, maybe I'm not really a wolf. I could be a bear. Why wasn't I sleeping."

"I sang to you through my teeth. It was easy. I have no tongue. I knew your dream. I was surprised I was surprised."

"Ok. I lied. I'm not really a bear. I'm a dexterous child. I could examine you and take you apart. I've made a thousand paper cranes out of gum wrappers. I am hungry."

"Wish your wish."

"I will wait for the trapper and ask him to let me go."

"He's not coming back."

"What if I were a fox? Small and swift and silent. My pelt would be so red. I could pull myself free."

"If you shrink, I will tighten."

"I'll be a rabbit. Yes, I was digging through the snow to reach the grass. There. I have abased myself. Relent."

"Silly rabbit, all you have to do is cut off your own paw. Another will grow in its place, spotless and clear as glass."*

* * *

"Trap," says something formless, "they didn't grow back. But my teeth are sharpening themselves within my mouth."

"Quick," says the trap. "Take them back. Soon you will be unable to speak without cutting your own tongue."

"Don't be afraid trap. I am just examining you. I am turning you over in my hands. Feel how small they are."

"Trap. Trap. Trap? Is that my blood.?"

*Something by Kafka (like, "a little fairy-tale"), The Dirty Hand by Mark Strand, and, of course, Trix are for Kids.

----

Sorry for the rough draft. Haven't had the urge to write for a long long while, and thought I would just go with it.

Execution, theory

2007-11-30T16:31:00.001+01:00

cookieexecution2
Originally uploaded by <Allegra>

Frosting: one part butter, two parts powdered sugar. How little one needs to know to know too much.

This is not (quite) a completely lame blog post

2007-06-13T22:48:00.000+01:00

So I only have enough time to bitch a bit about the time I don't have. If I had had more than the little more time I have, I would have blogged about:

Deuce ex machina: a few interesting pieces on brain development and the sex chromosomes. This one in the NYT, and another that I should find because it was more interesting, about how the X, compensating for the Y, doubles its output, and so, when two copies are present, one or the other goes dormant. Female cats calico. X central to brain development. Female geniuses or lack thereof. Einstein's mom. Fathers and sons. I firmly believe in your ability to connect the dots.

Land of the lost: the new creation museum. We were sort of close a few weeks back and I sort of didn't consider going. I just not that into it. But I visited their website and came across "How can we see distant stars in a young universe?", which I think would make a lovely title for a poem. I could just have meaning envy.

Anyway, I am going to go back to learning hand-clap rhymes.

Down down baby
I can do karate
Down down baby
I can shake my body
Down down baby
I can phone my mommy
Down down baby
((lightly) tap each other on forehead)
Oops! I'm sorry.

Free at last, free at last, (relatively) free at last

2007-03-15T15:26:00.000+01:00

Anoushka Renée Jaroski-Biava was born on 10 March 2007 at 8:54 am. She was 52 cm long and weighed 4.35 kg. And, of course, she's very cute:

and also:

(Noe took that picture of Anoushka. See more of her work (and her) at http://www.flickr.com/photos/a_big_big_world/)

Happy saddest day

2007-01-24T22:33:00.000+01:00

So most people go with "blue Monday" being the saddest day of the year, but when I read about it, I remembered the "24" instead of "around Jan. 24" and I've decided to go ahead and designate today as the downest day of my year. Heck, it was a piece in the IHT, and ended with this fine proverb, "You can't stop birds of sadness flying over you, but don't let them nest in your hair," which inspired the first doodle I've done in years -- some girl with feathers in her hair. (The two obvious critical interpretations being: 1) the birds flew on, and 2) I can't draw birds.) And I liked that my year's hump day fell on a Wednesday.

No, the curve isn't completely smooth. Yesterday afternoon the first snow of the year began, and when I went out for a walk that evening the flakes became large and slow -- no longer racing for the ground, not quite still in the air. And I thought, if it would only snow every day, I wouldn't mind never smoking another cigarette. Tomorrow I am going to Paris.

I was expecting bad news today and didn't get it. This can still be the saddest day. While I waited I decided to try to draw birds like Tomie dePaola. I don't quite have the hang of it.

Options

2007-01-14T22:56:00.000+01:00

So you still can't find it?

No, not only is the invisible potion invisible, it also turns whatever it touches invisible. I don't know why I didn't put the bottle inside of a second container. Never thought I would want to take it again.

And you're still having that problem?

Yeah, I just can't get used to being visible. Any time I notice someone noticing me, I think there's something stuck in my teeth or that my face is dirty. I've started carrying around a little mirror so I can check. Then I notice that my face is really lopsided. Then I start to worry that people think I'm being vain.

Did you have this problem before?

No, not when I was a kid at least. But now being seen just seems abnormal, and abnormal, for some reason, equals bad.

If I were you, I would just imagine that people were staring at me because I looked like the Hoff in a leather speedo. And forgo the mirror.

Grab bag

2007-01-11T00:02:00.000+01:00

In my late adolescence I acquired this rather repulsive but endearing habit (if one can find oneself endearing): when cooking I would collect the various bits of vegetable debris in a plastic bag, spit in it (sometimes add a little hair), tie the bag, toss it in the trash, and say to myself, in a billion years, that'll be something.

Paper or plastic

Anyway, according to the BBC, the One Laptop per Child Project may allow the general public to buy their own XO, but only if you sponsor a second for the developing world.

Everybody's talking about the new iPhone.

Divvying up household chores is such a pain. What about having a simple rule: if you see the other person cleaning, you clean too. No nagging. No lists. No "let me do that for you later" BS. And, of course, you could be exempt if you were doing something else to maintain the house, like fixing the computer that is also the television, the stereo, and the DVD player. Of course, if both people are slobs, this rule might not work. Wait. Nevermind, it would work.

And in a billion years you might have something.

Up in the air, but not upsidedown yet

2007-01-08T22:02:00.000+01:00

Something about this short item in the local free paper (Le Matin Bleu) caught my eye this morning. Probably the man flying through the air, but possibly the Icarus mention.

Anyway, roughly translated:

A Vaudois achieves the dream of Icarus

Prototype: At 46 years, Yves Rossy, a pilot with Swiss, has succeeded in constructing a true individual flying wing, propelled by four engines. The pilot has obtained authorization from the federal air authorities, that at first accused him of violating air space, to do testing, revealed "Le Matin dimanche". His dream is to take one or two years off to perfect his prototype, which he has been working on for seven years.

It's hard to make out in the picture here, but he advertises his website on the back of the wings. If you go there, you will be asked for money, and learn about his weird thing for Batman. You will also see that he has done a lot of crazy stuff (like "Planes have handles at the end of their wings... Why not hold on to them between 2 planes whilst they are flying..."), and had other slightly less insane people make videos of said crazy stunts.

At the end of the his (long) flight video (set to horrible music) he claims to be working on a model that can take off.

Dare I guess? Detachable wheels? A very long runway? With a near infinite number of pillows at the end?

1. "Stick out your lower lip"

2007-01-06T23:52:00.000+01:00

2. "Raise your eyebrows and shoulders simultaneously"

You're doing the Bof like a born Parisian! Now you can say "I don't know," or "I disagree with your idiotic opinion," or "not my fault," without resorting a single solitary French word.

Tourism officials have issued a guide to Parisian gestures as part of a recent ad campaign to convince potential visitors that Paris isn't just a city of museums; it's also a place where you can go and be rude to the locals in order to be like the locals.

My personal favorite? Has to be Les boules:

1. "Hold an imaginary pair of tennis balls, one in each hand"

2. "Put your hands in front of your neck, as if you were holding your lymph nodes"

Now, I've never held my lymph nodes, so I might not get it right the first few times, but I'm going to have to try this one out the next time I go. Les boules, I'm sick of all this art. Les boules, if I have to walk through this beautiful city any longer, I'm just going to puke. Les boules, les boules.

Quite honestly, I've never had any one be rude to me in Paris. Every guy I've ever spoken to has been incredibly tolerant of my horrible broken French. And what's wrong with museums?

I know it's not the case, but I harbor a secret (or not so) hope that this is just a sneaky way to get the obnoxious to keep their mouths shut and blend.

Or Camembert.

To learn more, go here

The next (not so) big thing (and email from the dead)

2007-01-04T21:43:00.000+01:00

So, for whatever reason, I was lying on the couch, trying to imagine what the next big internet thing could be. In the last few years services tied to cheap storage on a massive scale (and more recently tagging and the like) have been on the rise -- chock full of your mail and photos and keeping you in contact with your friends and hosting your blog and yada etc yada.

Now, if I had even the foggiest idea what the next big hardware breakthrough would be I might not be writing this right now.

But one thing that could be nifty is a service that would offer "person-alerts", like Google does with the news. Some grand clearing-house attached to Friendster and MySpace and tribe and the rest where you could enter in the details for your lost people and specify a matching threshold and get notified when someone who matched appeared. Hey, what about "Stalkr!" for a name? (Sure sure, people could opt out at the site or it could be part of the user agreement with the networking site or whatever. You say "privacy" and I say, just this once, very softly, "details.")

Okay, catchy name aside, it seems a little skeletal so far as internet ventures go. But then I remembered an idea I had way back when -- Email from the Dead.

"Finally, the last in last words." The premise is the obvious. You sign up with the service and write up your missives to be fired off at the appropriate people when the trigger event (your death) occurs. Why not tie it in to the whole "Stalkr!" thing, so that you can say goodbye, or perhaps piss-off, or, hey, I turned out just fine and then I died, to that first boy/girl/couple who broke your heart, but who you never managed to google and were too cheap to hire a PI to track down. Or, you know, you were just chicken.

The real beauty begins to appear when you imagine the accidents. Because they're going to happen. You won't be there to review the information and say, yeah, that's him/her/them.

So, imagine the accidents are the point. You create a recipient profile, write what you want to say, and then people ten and twenty and twenty-two and 33.3 years (and further) later get this weird message.

But I don't think "Stalkr!" quite works. "Hauntr!"?

Only $100 and a crank battery? I'll take 4!

2007-01-03T22:47:00.000+01:00

I'm a sucker for things that fold and/or have wheels (and a crank is a folding wheel), so it was easy for me to find a soft spot for the One Laptop Per Child project. And, if I could buy four, I would of course donate 3 to children who need them. However, "Can I buy one" (for myself or to finance a few machines for a developing country) does not seem to be included in their FAQ. (Well, perhaps obliquely. They plan to sell the machines in bulk directly to governments.)

They are hoping to launch the project in the first half of 2007 and have created a specialized OS, "Sugar," that is supposed to be more child oriented than the standard desktop paradigm. Some of it just seems like calling a garbanzo bean a chickpea, but one interesting change is that they will have a journal instead of the usual system of folders and such. I imagine it's sort of like searching though email for the latest version of that god awful huge word document you were working on (not that I would ever do that), but I could be wrong. Those who are interested in trying it out for themselves can download a copy here.

One small irritant for me, though I'm not sure if I'm irritated with myself or Mr. Negroponte, is when he said it was "criminal" that children be trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now, I agree PowerPoint

rots your brain
rots your brain
and rots your brain

and that kids should be kids, but I'm afraid that for a lot of the kids in question, knowing stupid office programs could make a big difference in their lives. But I'm still pretty sure I'm irritated with myself. Pragmatism is so dingy sometimes, and for good reason.

Anyway, here's a big XOXOXO for the XO. And maybe we can donate our used USB keychain drives, even if we can't buy one of the laptops.

Read the BBC's article here

Tomato Soup

2007-01-01T12:30:00.001+01:00

Tomato Soup
Originally uploaded by Mark and Allegra.

Mark took this picture of several round things at Mövenpick. Little did we know that the rest of our meal wouldn't show up for another hour.

The (other) French paradox

2006-12-31T21:03:00.000+01:00

A researcher in Australia has recently discovered that Toxoplasma gondii infection alters people's behavior. Infected men have lower IQs, take more risks, are more anti-social, and are generally less attractive to women. Women tend to take more risks (are more outgoing, more promiscuous), and are more attractive to men. No word on their IQs.

Okay, so I find the fact that they focused on the "wowzer! men and women react differently!" to the infection aspect (the case could be made that men and women react differently to the same behavior in the opposite sex) a little annoying.

But could this be behind that certain je ne sais quoi of French women?

Eating raw meat, a main transmission route, is very common in France, and about 85% of the population are have been infected with the disease. Of course, French men are supposed to be all seductive. And, so far as I know, cat ladies and gardeners are not known for their sexual magnetism.

So anyway, read the article here