How Could I Leave This Behind?

Last night, as part of our continuing effort to educate our children into the classics, we watched This Is Spinal Tap.

We ordered pizza and ate it off of paper plates while watching, too, because it seemed fitting.  You really can’t watch that film with anything remotely healthy in your bloodstream.  The conceptual whiplash would kill you faster than the salt and cholesterol ever will.

It would be more dangerous than getting a job as their drummer.

I first saw this film when I was in college, not too long after it came out.  The TLA, down on South Street in Philadelphia, was a repertory cinema at the time and every month they came out with a schedule of the various films that would appear, usually for a day, and then be gone.  It wedged itself into my brain almost instantly, and among my circle of friends it was required viewing.  If you didn’t love that movie, we really didn’t have any idea how to treat you.

It’s surprising how well that film has held up, really.  Other than some technological advances – nobody worries about cover art on albums anymore as it is difficult to put a cover on a download, for example, and some of the humor does rest on miscommunications that would be fairly easy to get past if everyone had a cell phone (though what new miscommunications that would create is a whole other issue) – the jokes are pretty much just as funny as they were.

It helps if you understand the musical references from the 60s and 70s, of course, and being able to identify the cameos of actors who were famous thirty years ago is a plus.  But neither of those are really necessary to the story or the humor.

It’s a story about some decently talented guys who aren’t nearly bright enough to see just how far in over their heads they actually are but who know, somewhere in the back of their minds, that there is something more to their situation than they can see at that moment, and that never gets old. 

The contrast between the seriousness with which they take their craft (the scene were Nigel Tufnel stops scraping a violin across his guitar strings in order to tune the violin springs to mind) and the sheer cluelessness with which they approach the rest of their world (“Hello, Cleveland!”) is the backbone of all sorts of modern comedy.  You find yourself repelled by their inability to understand how much they lack and simultaneously cheering for them for pretty much the same reason.

Plus, the movie is a quote machine.

The girls made it all the way through and they seemed to enjoy it.  They certainly have a better handle on some of the standard family lines around here than they did beforehand (“it goes up to eleven”).

Parenting: for the win.

Carving Out a Good Time

It should not rain on Halloween.

It can rain on Thanksgiving because mostly you’re indoors eating and hanging out with your family, although whether this makes the holiday more or less interesting depends in large part on how you feel about hanging out with your family.  It can rain on Christmas for much the same reason, though snow would be nicer.  But Halloween is one of those holidays that require you to be out and about.

Or, more importantly, kids need to be out and about. 

Whatever the original point of Halloween was – and you can get a pretty good argument started any time you want to simply by asserting in a public place any one of the theories behind that point – it has become an exercise in having the neighborhood kids go from door to door collecting candy.  There are precious few occasions for this kind of random sociability in our current age of Stand Your Ground laws, so anything that puts a damper on it is by definition a bad thing.

Plus Halloween is a fun holiday.

The girls have gotten old enough now that we leave most of the prep work to them, and this essentially boils down to getting them to carve the pumpkins.  Kim and Lauren came back from a shopping expedition a week or so ago with two pumpkins that had clearly served as carriages in someone else’s fairy tale, and upon such broad canvases is art made.

Behold!

For those of you not up on your Doctor Who references, that’s a Dalek on the left (carved by Tabitha) and the TARDIS on the right (carved by Lauren).

Tabitha has reached the age where she would just as soon stay home and hand out candy, but Lauren still wants to go trick-or-treating.  Lauren has, however, reached the age where trick-or-treating with a parent is just Not Cool.  Given that most of her friends were either going out of town for trick-or-treating or staying at home and planning to use their time scaring the little kids who came by jumping out at them from behind things, this caused a momentary panic.  Fortunately she found a friend who was willing to go with her, and they are out somewhere even now shaking down the neighbors for candy.

Life is good.

Even when it rains.

Of Balloons and Scarcity

One of the things that arrived during Lauren’s birthday party was a mylar balloon filled with helium. 

It’s bright and shiny, in the way that such balloons are, and the cats are just fascinated.  It skitters around the house carried by the air currents from the furnace in a random Coriolis pattern, trailing felines and making just the sort of scraping noise that something out of a low-budget horror film would make if it were trapped in your attic, which is why we try to anchor it at night.

For a while I thought it was losing its lift, since it had settled to an altitude of about knee-height, but it turned out that Tabitha had weighted it down to make it easier for the cats to prey on it.   Lauren apparently figured that out too, and now it cruises around the ceilings once again.

It is a very nice balloon.

You don’t see them very much anymore, oddly enough.  It was only a few years ago that these helium-filled mylar balloons were everywhere – you’d go to the supermarket and they’d fill up as many as you wanted, and they were so much nicer than the old latex ones that lost their helium overnight.

But there’s a helium shortage, don’t you know.  They don’t make the stuff, being an element and all, and there are important industrial uses for it that tend to trump balloons.

It’s kind of odd, really.

We live in an age of unprecedented abundance.  By any historical standard, the modern world – particularly the industrialized part of it – is awash in goods and resources to an extent that previous generations would have found inconceivable.

We are surrounded by stuff.

We expect there to be food.

We don’t worry too much about survival.

Oh, some people do.  Poverty exists, and in some places it exists good and hard.  In those places there isn’t much stuff, and there can be even less food.  Survival is in fact something to worry about there. 

But we regard those places as exceptions, as places that have somehow missed out on the larger prosperity and abundance that defines the modern world, places that could be brought into that prosperity and abundance if only we refined our politics, our economics, our technology, our distribution networks, our ethical standards – as if it were simply a matter of choice on our part that scarcity continues to exist amid all this plenty.

It can be shocking to come face to face with the fact that those aren’t the exceptions, even in something as trivial as a helium-filled mylar balloon.

The fact is that there is only so much stuff that can be made.

That while we may have raised the Malthusian limit on food production, we have not eliminated it. 

And that any age of abundance will invariably be followed by an age of scarcity that will reach even those areas where scarcity is regarded as a problem for other people.

Humans evolved in scarcity.  We’re good at it.  Not in the numbers we have now – those, unfortunately, are not sustainable in the long run, and the faces behind those numbers are not anything you want to think about too hard if you want to sleep at night.

Such thoughts are a lot of weight for a balloon to carry.

She Goes Up to Eleven

If you are one of the few people on this earth who like Banana Split Oreos, you pretty much have it made.  They’re all yours. 

We discovered this over the weekend, during Lauren’s birthday party.

Lauren is almost 11 now – the official date is not until Halloween, but you can’t really have a birthday party on Halloween when you’re a kid because it interferes with the serious business of shaking down the neighbors for candy.  When you’re older you can have all sorts of parties with this combination of holidays, though, and when Lauren reaches that age we trust that she will let us know how they go, as we will likely have been asleep since tea time.  Thus passes the circle of life.  At the present, though, parties must be scheduled around the candy, so that leaves either the weekend before or the weekend after.  And before is always best.

So there.

The nice thing about birthday parties when kids get older is that the honoree and guests really just want you to feed them and leave them alone – they can handle the fun on their own.  So when four fifth-grade girls showed up at 3pm on Friday trailing sleeping bags and presents, we just got out of the way.

Some of us got further than others.  Tabitha did some quick math and bailed, spending the night over at a friend’s house.  This is the prerogative of the older sister.

Everyone had a grand time here.  Lauren and her friends disappeared in a cloud of giggles and assorted noises – by which we could track them, should we be so inclined – and they kept themselves entertained.  They wrote their own murder mystery and filmed it on Lauren’s iPod.  They rampaged up and down the driveway on the old PLASMA car.  They entertained the rabbits, or vice verse.  And so on.  They pretty much kept themselves going all afternoon.

Dinner was – by special request – waffles and bacon.  And since the cake was not scheduled for the next day, dinner was followed by the First And Probably Last Grand Oreo Taste Test Competition.

Do you know how many flavors of Oreos there are?  HUNDREDS. 

We settled on five.

By popular vote, the favorite was Mint Creme Oreos, which are essentially Thin Mints with an extra layer of white Oreo creme on top and how could you not love them is what I want to know.  Chocolate Oreos came next, followed by Berry Blast and Peanut Butter, which was kind of dry.  Only Lauren and I liked the Banana Split Oreos – nobody else could even stand them.  So win for us, I guess.

The next morning was more of the same until it was time to go roller skating.

There isn’t a roller rink in Our Little Town anymore.  It’s a convention center now, although they did keep the hardwood floors so they could always convert it back if they wanted to.  You have to go to the next town down to go skating these days, so that’s where we went. 

And it was a good time.

They went around and around in the regulation counter-clockwise direction.  They played roller-skate limbo (one of Lauren’s friends won and received as her prize a pile of cotton candy that was nearly as big as she was). 

There was, of course, cake.  As befits her new status as a Doctor Who fan, Lauren requested a TARDIS cake.  And Kim delivered:

Is that not the best cake ever?  Of course it is! 

Having filled them up with sugar we then turned them loose on their parents and sunk back into our own now-quiet home, ready to go for another year.

Happy Birthday, Lauren.

The Tescopolis Jacket

There is a brief window of opportunity in the fall to wear the Tescopolis jacket.

It’s not a particularly distinctive coat.  It’s a navy blue windbreaker of some comfortably smooth manmade fiber, perhaps a size and a half too large.  We didn’t have much time when we were shopping for it.

We spent a couple of weeks in England two summers ago, visiting friends.  We had a grand time – we saw a good chunk of the southwest corner of the country, for example, and I posted stories and photos of our trip (as well as the time we spent in Sweden visiting other friends) here on the blog.  It was chilly for summer – back home the temperatures hovered just slightly north of 100 degrees Fahrenheit for much of the time we were gone (brutally hot for Wisconsin), but in Sweden it got into the 70s a couple of times and in England it never topped 64.

We were glad we brought our jackets.

One of our side trips while we were there was to take a train to London, and that was the last time Kim saw her jacket.  A new jacket was needed, in a hurry.

So Julia took us over to the nearby Tesco, which is a giant supermarket chain in the UK.  I love going to grocery stores in foreign countries, just to see how different they are and what people like to eat on normal days.  You can get hard cider in 3-liter bottles at Tesco. 

This particular Tesco was huge, even by American standards – Julia referred to it as Tescopolis, since it was roughly the same size as many of the surrounding villages.  It had two floors.  On the top floor they sold clothing, and eventually Kim located a jacket that fit, more or less, and she wore it for the rest of the trip.

When we got home she forcibly removed my jacket and made me dispose of it.  I’m not sure why, except that words like “ratty,” “threadbare,” “embarrassing,” and “homeless” entered into that conversation somewhere.

So I inherited the Tescopolis jacket.

It’s very comfortable, and it’s good down to about 35F in its unlined state.  There is no felt lining in the sleeves to grab at my shirt, which puts it one up on a different successor to my old jacket that went by the wayside a couple of years ago.  I have a different new jacket to wear when it gets colder, one that is also very comfortable, but as long as the weather is autumnal I'll wear the blue one.

Mostly though I like it because it reminds me of a time and a place – a market in a foreign land, a stone house filled with friends, a rainy cool summer far away.

It only looks nondescript if you don’t know the story.

History at the Movies

This happens every time.

At some point in my World History Prior to 1500 class (a class I teach because I have a degree in History, which makes me an expert in all eras and locations in much the same way that the Professor in Gilligan’s Island had a degree in Science and could therefore make a radio out of two coconuts and a bicycle even if he couldn’t figure out how to build a boat) we discuss Han China.

Han China was one of the high points of Chinese civilization – an era of stability, prosperity, and expansion.  Oh, it had its problems – notably an entire usurping dynasty stuck approximately in the middle that lasted all of fourteen years before collapsing – but it was a generally positive time as far as most Chinese historians will tell you. 

One of the things that the Han did was push the nomadic peoples away from their borders in order to get them to stop harassing the Empire.  There were a bunch of those nomads, including one particular group known as the Xiong-nu (SHONG-new).  The Xiong-nu will head to the west and eventually bump into the Romans, who will call them Huns.  Making that connection is an important thing in a class like this, as it reinforces the idea that these civilizations did not exist in a vacuum – that they interacted with each other in ways both expected (trade, war) and unexpected (long chain reactions of dealing with nomadic threats, for example).

Of course, as soon as you mention “Chinese” and “Hun” in the same sentence these days, the first question that comes up from the class is “Isn’t this what Mulan was based on?”

Every time.

Now, there was a time when I could have answered that question fairly easily.  I once had two very young daughters.  I must have seen Mulan three or four dozen times in the early years of this century and at one point could have sung the entire score.  In order.  But my daughters have grown bigger and have moved on to other things (Doctor Who!) and it has been quite some time since we saw Mulan.

So I have to bluff.

“Yes,” I say, full of pedagogical certainty.  “To the extent that there is any actual history in Mulan, this is where it comes from.”

This answer has the dual function of being more or less accurate, as far as I am aware, and sufficiently vague that it can’t actually be proven wrong.  I also make a point of noting that if you can get an entire army trained in one song, you’re doing pretty well.  This, I feel, is indisputably true.

Somehow this conversation inevitably segues into other Disney and Pixar films, upon which ground I feel more assured.  Yes, Monsters, Inc. is the greatest animated film ever made – sorry, your candidate doesn’t measure up to it.  And if you can get through the opening ten or fifteen minutes of Up without tears in your eyes there is something wrong with you – a quarter hour with essentially no dialogue and still a better love story than Twilight, a book that cost me two days of my life that I will never get back and no, vampires DO NOT SPARKLE, thank you very Nosferatu-loving much. 

Next question!

How Not to Be a Scientist

I was never going to be a scientist.

I thought I might be, once upon a time.  I managed to survive high school chemistry despite never really cottoning on to the whole notion of precisely measuring anything.  At one point during my senior year I thought I’d major in physics when I got to college, an illusion that a) caused me to apply to at least one university best known for its engineering program, and b) was quickly dispelled by second-semester AP physics, the first class I ever dropped.

All of that was mere fantasy.  Seventh grade should have told me that.

My seventh-grade science teacher was a nice man who really didn’t deserve to have all of us hormonal idiots bouncing around in his room for 47 minutes every weekday.  Eventually he ended up in administration, where at least his frustrations were with adults.  Sometimes I think we did that to him, but mostly I know that we were just one class of many over the years and I suspect it was more of a cumulative thing than anything else.  The constant drip-drip-drip across his psyche of seventh-graders ricocheting seamlessly off educational activities without a single mark upon them no doubt took its toll. 

You have no idea how much respect I have for junior high teachers now, looking back.

He persevered, though.  He came up with all sorts of activities designed to ram science into our skulls, many of which succeeded.  He was a good teacher. 

One day he decided to have us learn how to use microscopes.

These were the big old microscopes that you had in science classrooms during the Carter administration – heavy steel and glass instruments about a foot high, solid enough to serve as murder weapons should we have been so inclined.  They built stuff heavier then.  This was the age of the manual typewriter, after all.  We were a fairly affluent suburban school district, so there were enough to go around – we each got our own microscope that sat, brooding, on our desks for the better part of a fortnight.

Our surface mission was to find some small sort of something that could be placed under the lens and examined in detail, after which we would write an essay detailing the things we saw.

For some reason I chose to examine a quarter, probably because I had one in my pocket when the assignment was made and it was easier than trying to find something else.  And, in fairness, it turned out that when you examine a quarter under a microscope it is, in fact, fairly interesting.

Fairly. 


But there were more interesting sights in that classroom.

I suppose in one sense I was doing what he asked of us – learning how to use a microscope.  I got pretty good at manipulating it to get it to do what I wanted, actually.  Except that mostly what I learned was that if I took the quarter out of the way and just fiddled with the little mirror underneath – the one that bounced the ambient light up into the lens so you could do your scientific work without need of electricity – I could, with care and precision, turn the microscope into a periscope.

And once I figured out the height at which the mirror had to sit in order to create this periscope, I could then rotate the mirror and scope out pretty much the entire room, notably one young lady in the back, upon whom I had perhaps the most hopeless crush in the history of junior highs across America ever.

She was much more interesting than that quarter.

So I whiled away a good week or so with my newly discovered periscope, happily not looking at my quarter, until it dawned on me about a day or so before the essay was due that perhaps I ought to change my focus and actually get some work done.

I got pretty much the grade you would expect I would get.  I still think it was worth it, even if it did indicate that perhaps a lab science career was not in my future. 

Eventually I married a scientist.