Trivia Master

I am quite the trivial fellow, apparently.

Sometime in November, a friend of mine called me up to ask if I would form a team to compete in the local orchestra's fundraising trivia contest, which was held on Thursday evening. And like an idiot, I said, "Sure!"

Actually, it was fun.

My duties as Team Captain were not all that extensive:

• I had to find seven other people to join me on the team, which went quite well (though one person had to drop out at the last minute, forcing me to find a substitute, which took, well, not much effort at all really). It ended up as the Campus Team, representing the university where Kim and I teach. If you want trivia head straight for academia, I always say - we live for this stuff.
• I had to front the application fee (it's a fundraiser, after all). On the one hand, this required me to budget the fee into our monthly expenses, but on the other hand it meant that when everyone did pay me back, it was like found money. Which I promptly blew on groceries. I am such a wastrel.
• I had to get the paperwork in on time. Actually I failed at this one, but as noted it is a fundraiser and the orchestra was not about to turn anyone down who was going to give them money. They were very nice about it when I called.
• And I had to go up front to collect the trophy when we won. Because you know we won.

Actually, the only charge that the campus dean laid on us was to beat the team from Local Tech, and if possible from Nearby Private College. And we did. NPC came in second - they closed the gap in the last two rounds, but we had built enough of a lead in the first three that we were safe. Local Tech placed fifth, behind the Daily Blab and another team from a bank or somewhere. No, we didn't do too bad, not by half.

We. Kicked. Butt.

We are the greatest of the least, the undisputed masters of that which is probably not worth mastering, and it feels pretty good I have to say. We ended up with all sorts of goodies, including some surprisingly nice individual trophies to go with the behemoth that I'm holding in that photo. That trophy is every bit as heavy as it looks, by the way.

Most importantly, though, we had a good time. The orchestra got a fair amount of money. And we beat NPU and Local Tech. It was a good night.

Bouncing Daisies

The Daisies went sledding yesterday, out by the river.

It was a cold and blustery day, as the days have been this winter. There has been no January thaw in our part of Wisconsin. We haven't seen the up side of freezing since Christmas, when it rained for two days before it all froze again. The winds were blowing the trees sideways, the mercury was visibly falling toward the single digits in the thermometers, and the ground was covered with a layer of snow so thick and impermeable that it might just last until the Fourth of July. So naturally under those conditions the Wisconsinite thinks: Let's play outside! With small children!

It's a Darwinian place, Wisconsin.

Kim was teaching during the appointed sledding hour, which meant that a) I was on my own for this one, and b) Tabitha was coming along as well, which was just fine by her. We piled into the Vibe, stuffed it full of our sleds, and headed off in search of the hill.

This, it turned out, was something of a trick.

You would not think it difficult to locate a hill, especially one big enough to be used for sledding, but then you would be wrong. We circled through the park a couple of times before finally settling on an appropriate candidate through my clever interrogation techniques.

"Hey Lauren," I called. "Do you recognize any of those people on that hill?"

"No, dad, those are BOYS."

"How about those people?"

"Which people?"

"Those ones, over there."

"There?"

"Yes, there. Do they look like Daisies?"

"YES! YES! YES!"

And there we were. Simple.

So we got out, gathered up our stuff, and trudged off to the hill, along with a herd of children and parents that had come to the same conclusion at roughly the same time as we did. We crossed the ditch, skirted the surprisingly large number of trees, and started up the hill.

It was another one of those Mel Allen "Ooooh! That's gotta hurt!" hills, one that was nearly vertical at the top before flattening out slightly about a quarter of the way down. Though flattening out is somewhat misleading, as there were all sorts of gullies and moguls, and if you went down more to the right there was, at the bottom, a ski-jump that some previous sledder had painstakingly constructed. Hitting it was a feat of random aim, but that didn't stop people from trying.



The girls had a wonderful time, racing up and down. Tabitha scooted and zipped. Lauren enjoyed herself for a while before doing a faceplant at the bottom and coming up looking like the wrong end of a lightweight sparring match. I suppose it says something about The Times We Live In that we actually wondered if someone would call Child Protective Services today at school, when she showed up looking like that. Then again, it says something about living in Wisconsin that "rocketing down a vertical hill in the sub-Arctic cold" would have been a perfectly acceptable response to any inquiry. Regardless, after the faceplant Lauren tended to go down on her snowpants rather than the sleds. "I want to go fast, but I want to be safe," she said when I asked her what she was trying to do. "Pick one," I told her.

We were only there for about half an hour before the cold and wind got too much, especially at the top of the hill. We headed home, and gathered round the kettle for some cocoa, and life was good.

News and Updates

News from the home front.

• This employment thing is really cramping my blogging style, particularly since all of my various jobs involve a fair amount of at-home prep time. On the one hand, I'm glad to have employment in these parlous times, especially employment that I like and am qualified for. On the other hand, well, for every silver lining there must, by definition, be a cloud. But I like cloudy days.
• The Rohirrim have arrived at the Fields of Pelannor, and all hell is breaking loose in Gondor. Tabitha and I continue to creep forward in The Lord of the Rings, a chapter here, a chapter there, and at this rate we might be done by Easter.
• It has not snowed in measurable amounts for over a week, and I am getting nervous about that. On the other hand, I have come to consider 13 degrees as fairly warm.
• The cats are going stir crazy. Tria keeps dashing outside, screeching to a halt as if she were on an Invisible Leash that was shorter than she remembered it being, and then rebounding back inside. Mithra just stares mournfully out the door.
• I am really liking the new windows. The house is much less drafty.

That is all.

Tae A Poet

I went to college with a lot of foreigners. It made the experience a lot more interesting.

For instance, during my freshman year I had a roommate from Trinidad and another from Boston, and I have to say I had just the worst time trying to understand what the guy from Boston was saying. It sounded like English, but the words never really made sense in the particular order that he used them. Trinidadian slang, on the other hand, is pointedly and often graphically clear. When Gervase wanted you to know something, it got known.

Also, he made the world's most evil coffee. Even I, who to this day still don't drink the stuff, knew that his coffee was something to behold. When Gervase was making his Mean Brew, the more timid souls at the university were well advised to hide behind their ottomans, for there would be caffeine-fueled revelry in the streets for days.

If six tablespoons of sugar dissolve into a twelve-ounce mug without leaving sediment, you know you've got powerful coffee.

But it was my last three years in college where the fact that I was local - the fact that I had, indeed, been born at the very hospital attached to that university - was most vividly shown to be odd.

The Van Pelt College House at the University of Pennsylvania held about 170 students and an assortment of faculty members that Penn spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get rid of, occasionally for very good reasons. We were an eclectic group, with a well-deserved and proudly held reputation as "4-F House" - Freaks, Fags, Foreigners, and Freshmen who didn't know any better, which, by process of elimination, made me a Freak. It is an eye-opening thing to share a suite with people who share precious little else with you. You find out just how much you do share, after a while.

One year we counted and discovered that there were students from 27 countries and 36 states at Van Pelt. That included my three roommates that year, who hailed from Israel, Greece and the Philippines and ranged in age from 16 to 22. Tom's dad used to call on his lunch break from Athens. Do you have any idea what time it is in Philadelphia when it is noon in Athens? About half an hour after Tom rolled in, that's what time it is. We had students from India. We had students from northern Africa. There was one suite that held three Greeks and a Turk, who got along just fine. Ed had a cat he named Bonjuk, which to this day is the only word I know in Turkish (even if I have no idea how to spell it). It means "pearl."

But the largest contingent of foreigners was from Britain - and the majority of those were from Scotland. Penn had an exchange program with the University of Edinburgh, and for some reason most of them ended up at Van Pelt. And where there is a certain density of Scotsmen, you will invariably have a Burns Supper.

Robert Burns is the national poet of Scotland. He was born on January 25, 1759, making this the 250th anniversary of his birth, and is probably best known today for being the guy who wrote the words to "Auld Lang Syne," though I don't know if he wrote the tune. Naturally, we had to celebrate this guy.

If you have never been to a Burns Supper, well, you should, at least once. It is probably the only regularly occurring event in the world dedicated to the dubious proposition that haggis and scotch are good for you in large quantities, a proposition we did our best to test every year.

The Society of Saint Andrew, which sponsored this event for us, was a curiously amnesiac body whose institutional memory only stretched back one year. This explains why every other year our scotch allotment would be rigorously limited, and when that worked out fine (the main scotch consumption would be moved off-site those years) they would remove the restrictions, only to rediscover why those restrictions were there in the first place, and then the cycle would begin again. You could set your watch by it.

We would get dressed up in our finery and head off to the dining hall (one year it was in a hotel, and they never made that mistake again). We'd gather 'round, waiting, and then there would be The Piping In Of The Haggis. Someone would appear with the haggis - a type of sausage made from everything you would not ordinarily eat out of a sheep, ground up, mixed with oatmeal and boiled in the sheep's stomach; it was tasty if you didn't think about it too much - and parade it around for us to inspect, all the while being trailed by someone playing the bagpipes.

Now, understand - our dining hall was built in the 1970s. It was a low-ceilinged room with bare concrete walls and large plate glass windows. It was not designed with The Piping In Of The Haggis in mind. Bagpipes, played under those conditions, make your innards vibrate and your ears bleed, which might also be part of why the Saint Andrew people relented on the scotch every other year. It was an experience, I can tell you that.

There would then be a dramatic reading of Burns' poem, "Tae A Haggis," which nobody could understand no matter how much scotch they had consumed, and when it eventually became clear that the poem was over, we could then eat. There would be a first course of haggis, neeps and tatties, (haggis, turnips and potatoes, in non-Scots English), after which they would bring out food that people would actually eat and the party would start.

It's the cultural opportunities that make college so special.

The Home-Grown Orchestra Performs Tonight

We now have two aspiring musicians in the house.

Lauren has been taking piano lessons for a year now, and enjoying them from all appearances. She especially loves the songs that require her to use the sustenato pedal or to play more than one note at a time, and I can understand why. They sound better, for one thing. And they're more fun.

Every week she goes over to Miss Carol's house for her lesson, and she has even been known to favor us with a concert or two when she gets a song she really likes. This week she had two such songs - a minorish sort of ditty about Frankenstein dancing (she liked the creepiness of it, and the fact that it called for chords), and Yankee Doodle, which had an introduction that needed the pedal. I don't think the colonists had that introduction, since it had a distinct "Barbershop Quartet" feel to it, but there you go. They would have had it, had they known.

Last April Lauren even had her first recital, at which she played Old MacDonald Had a Song for a fairly large crowd. We cheered like we were at Carnegie Hall. Actually, we cheered better than Carnegie Hall, since those crowds are always so decorous and polite, and we were cheering, by gum.



And now Tabitha has decided to join in. Not on the piano, but on the violin.


On the one hand, this is pretty cool. The violin can be a marvelous instrument, and she seems very excited by the prospect of playing it. Her first lesson (also with Miss Carol) was today, and she just ate it up. Now she knows how to stand and hold the instrument, and how to put resin on the bow. She hasn't actually gotten it to make noise yet, at least not with the bow - the violin is not like a piano, where you just press down on the keys and produce notes. You have to work your way up to that.

Which is where the other hand comes in.

I play piano, sort of. At least I took lessons for a while, way back when, and I still remember where the notes are and how to play them. And if I play it more like a guitar than an actual piano - give me the tablature above the staff and the time signature and I can fake my way through just about anything - well, that's okay. I can still be of some service to Lauren. Every day we practice together, and we have a good time.

I am completely flummoxed by the violin.

So we'll be learning together, Tabitha and I.

So That's Why They Do That...

Tabitha has this theory.

Cats are a puzzle, even to the most educated and intelligent minds. They are, in many ways, a standing refutation of the Darwinian maxim of survival of the fittest. They look at you with those big round eyes and their neurons slowly fizzing like ginger ale going flat in the noonday sun and you think to yourself, this creature - the same creature that annually eats tinsel off the Christmas tree and then wanders around the house with a shiny silver antenna trailing behind it as if to provide better FM reception - THIS is the end result of millennia of natural selection?

I. Don't. Think. So.


Tabitha loves cats. Loves them with ever fiber of her being. Her first word was "keee!" which we took to mean "kitty!" She has checked out every book on cats that the local library has, and read most of them. She draws cats. She plays with cats. She will end up with a house full of them someday, no doubt. But even she understands that if brains were dynamite the average housecat couldn't blow its own nose.

Her theory is that cats' brains are charged up during the night, when they run around and do feline things that we mere humans can never know about or understand. This is because of all the intelligence particles that people aren't using at night. They fly out of our brains, apparently - we "veto" them right out of our heads, a verb choice that Kim just adores - and get absorbed by those of our cats. This means, as Tabitha puts it, that when you wake up and see your cat first thing in the morning, "that's as smart as that cat is going to be all day."

This, it must be admitted, cannot be argued with, though I'm not sure what I have in mind by that statement is precisely what Tabitha has in mind by that statement. We shall let that pass.

Tabitha's theory goes on to state that as the day wears on, the intelligence particles fly out of the "airy" heads of our cats, lowering their intelligence by the minute until by nightfall what you are left with is a creature only minimally capable of brain function at all. It eats, it poops, it charges mindlessly after illusions, but it really isn't all that bright.

At this point I suppose I ought to insert a political joke, but that's just too easy even for me. Go ahead if you want to, though. Opportunities like that don't come by very often, and somebody should take advantage of it.

And then the cycle starts again, as we slough off intelligence in our sleep for the cats to absorb. I suppose the question that this theory raises is what happens to all those free-floating intelligence particles if there are no cats around to absorb them. Do they just bounce around the house, waiting for us to wake up and take them back in again? Do they fly out into space? Do they fall to the carpet and - via vacuums, trash bags and garbage pickup - end up in landfills somewhere?

I shall have to ask her about that.

Bring Me the Head of Conan the Librarian (or at least his collection of crafts books)

The girls and I ransacked the local library this afternoon - Rollo the Viking and his conquering hordes looting and pillaging the Easy Readers and the sections on cats, dragons and crafts. This is one of our favorite pass-times.

I actually worked there, once upon a time, but the pull of finishing my dissertation and the push of working for supervisors who were actively psychotic were enough to end my days checking in and shelving books. I enjoyed the job when not dealing with my supervisors - there is a certain satisfaction to making the shelves orderly, even the romance novels that I was exiled to for most of my tenure there in an attempt to get me to stop browsing through the books as I put them back, and there is no better way to discover new and interesting books that you would probably never have found than to check in the randomly jumbled carts of books that line the backstage area of a library.

Also, when I left I found that my supervisors had provided me with two inestimably valuable things to take with me - a set of stories to make people's heads shake in wonder, and an unerring negative example of how to manage people that I found supremely useful when I went on to run the museum. "How would they have done this down at the library?" I would ask myself when confronted by this or that managerial situation, and then I knew precisely what must be avoided at all costs. It never failed. I suppose I should go back and thank them for that.

The library itself is wonderful, though. The people are friendly and helpful, even when it isn't in their job description to be so and they end up reprimanded for it. And the collection is superb. This isn't a large city, at least by the standards of where I grew up, but if you can't find it at our local library you probably aren't looking hard enough.

Both Tabitha and Lauren have had their own library cards since they were using them to teethe. We go there a lot, especially when the weather is as cold as it is these days. We return a backpack full of old books and remove a backpack full of new books, pay off the fines from the old books (hey - not working there every day has its disadvantages), and head home intoxicated by the thought of new things to read.


I love the fact that the girls think this is a treat.