A Hedge of Watermelon

Watermelon farmer player it safe, warned me that my seedless watermelon might be seeded. I'm happy to report it delivered on seedlessness as promised (and deliciousness!!)...

Seedless Watermelon: It may contain seeds

Words Worth 1,000 Pictures

Now (following Pictures Worth 1,000 Words Parts 1 and 2), something slightly different: Through the tastefully curated Show Us Your Clips video curation website I came across a beautiful and infectious short film, Words.  It features a series of interlocked short clips which focus around an theme - pay attention, and you'll get it.  WNYC’s Radiolab seems to have had a hand in its development - it's definitely their type of thing.

Cheers!


WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

Pictures Worth 1,000 Words - Part Two

Writing yesterday's posting featuring a static image so able to portray a complete (humorous) story, I recalled another favorite: Elliot Erwitt's photo featuring a lone woman viewing Francisco Goya's La Maja Vestida aside a group of men viewing La Meja Desnuda.  So great.

Prado Museum, Madrid. 1995.

Pictures Worth 1,000 Words - Part One

A posting in today's New York Times's Lens Blog discussed "Protecting the Right to Photograph, or Not to Be Photographed".  It's an interesting issue, that I myself have struggled with.  When I take photos while traveling in urban locations, I prefer my shots to not look post-apocalyptic.  I think they're more vibrant and better capture the true experience of the setting with people filling them, preferably locals and not my staged friends.  But this means strangers.  Is it rude to use people's images without their permission?  The didn't consent to being extras to enhance my photos.  Will natives think I'm stealing their souls?  In the U.S., I believe anyone out in public is fair game to photographed, but being legal doesn't mean not jerkish.  Abroad, our on-board pro camera man during Semester at Sea us told us that he always asked permission before he shot photos of other people (though it pretty quickly became clear that wasn't the case).  I try to snap quickly and rush away; I rationalize it by rarely sharing the photos I take with anyone but me.

The blog post included an photo taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson of two women seated at the Brasserie Lipp in 1960's Paris, a clash of generations.  I loved the photo - it's amazing how in just one static image Cartier-Bresson was able to tell a whole story.  To have asked for permission, the moment would have been lost.  I'm glad he snapped the camera, and gladder still he was able to share the picture.

Brasserie Lipp, Saint-Germain des Près, Paris. 1969

When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder

After skipping the past several Sundays, I was guilted enough to attend mass today.  A guest priest was filling in.  He gave his homily (Something about the bombings and how the rest of us are, on a lesser level, also hurtful to those around us.  We shouldn't do that).  Then, and I never saw this before, he mentioned that he passed out lyrics to a hymn, then sang a rousing essentially solo of "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder".  The man had a terrific singing voice.

I'd never heard this song  before, but it really stuck with me today, and I found a recording through the Library of Congress's National Jukebox.

Will you be there?

Always Our Parents' Children

Yesterday during the lockdown I finished Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep - one of The New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2005 - which I enjoyed.  While I couldn't relate with the boarding school high school experience, much of the high school experience is universal.   Sittenfeld captured teenage insecurity in a deeply familiar voice, until...  The novel's final chapter took, um, a change of tone...a Judy Blume's Forever-esque change of tone...

Page 291 in the paperback edition of Prep: Bow-chika-wow-wow!

I blushed!!  The novel's back-matter included "A Conversion with Curtis Sittenfeld", the transcript of Katie Bacon's interview of Sittenfeld for The Atlantic Monthly.  I'd pass on that kind of thing, but being lockdown-bored, I skimmed it.  At one point Sittenfeld divulged that both her parents thought the novel would have been better without the last chapter, which they felt was unnecessarily graphic.  Bacon follows up:

Bacon:  The sex scenes are fairly explicit.  It must have been a hard thing to know that your parents were going to read them. 

Sittenfeld:  I think it's one of those things that as you're writing you can't think about.  It would just be paralyzing.  There are plenty of cases where if I had known the level of scrutiny the book would receive I might have done things differently.  As I was writing the book, I knew people would wonder, Is this true?  But I didn't want that to determine how I wrote it.  And I didn't want to write the book in sch a way that I hoped it would reflect flatteringly on me.  I didn't want to write a book where my main goal was to make people think that I, that author, was a charming person. I wanted to do what I felt was in the book's interest, not in my own best interest.

The question touched a subject I've long semi-obsessed:  Do others consider what their parents' reactions when releasing adult-themed material?  I wouldn't think of anything else, not escape that existential dread.  The, actors that do love scenes, teenage actresses that do topless scenes, can they take their parents to the premier with pride? (Those are my daughter's #$%@!!)  Numerous social scientists, even friends in my cohort, wrote dissertations on teenagers' sexual activity.  For me, that topic was clearly off-limits to me.  How could I have answered my mom when she asked what I was doing my PhD in?  She might think, "my son the pervert?!"  I always imagined certain career-paths were reserved for orphans.

Sittenfeld is the mature artist I am not, I'm also an extreme case.  So shy am I, I feared being able to kiss my own bride at our wedding (All those people looking at me, and "turn around, Mom!!").  I anticipate the embarrassment accompanying that announcement that my wife and I are expecting our first child.  This statement equivocally announces, "several months ago, we had sex".  Given how little has changed in the past fifteen years, I wouldn't expect too much from the next five.  The Mrs. might need to handle that announcement.  I'll stand by her, eyes to the ground.

Notes from a Lockdown

NYTimes Interactive Map of Watertown Manhunt Developments

Today was a payday and before I left for work I opened my computer to transfer funds.  Glancing at my Facebook timeline, I saw that there had been dramatic developments overnight in the marathon bombings story.  Yesterday afternoon, footage and photos of the bombers had been released yesterday afternoon.  Last night, the two bombers, since identified as Dzkokhar Tsarnaev and his brother Tamerlan (both of Cambridge) may have robbed a convenience store, then definitely shot dead an MIT police officer, stole a car (all in Cambridge), drove to Watertown, and engaged in a gunfight with the police in which Tamerlan was killed and another police officer was wounded.  Dzkokhar escaped (allegedly driving over his brother's body in the process) and remains at large. From MIT to Watertown the two must have driven in the vicinity of my apartment, and honestly I was uneasy about the thought of having to walk to work (the area skirts the Watertown border).  I woke Roberta to watch the news and she saw on her phone that Lesley was closed.  Hopeful, I checked my company's hotline and was relieved to learn that our Cambridge office was closed for the day.

Cambridge and Watertown, as well as Newton, Brighton, Allston, Belmont, and eventually Boston have been in lockdown since this morning - approximately one million people affected by this manhunt.  Some Watertown residents were evacuated, and the rest of us were told to remain indoors with doors locked.  All businesses were ordered closed (Dunkin' Donuts was - and this is true - asked to stay open to serve police working).  The MBTA is closed as is Amtrak lines running through the area, the line as far down as New York.  At least two license plates alerts were issued by Connecticut state police.

Our own neighborhood has been really quiet except for the sirens sounding continuously throughout the day.  Practically, "lockdown" has entailed sitting around to monitor news by television and internet.  Between 8-9am, police in Watertown had surrounded one particular house and tactical people were called in.  I thought it was all going to wrap up and I wondered whether I would be going into the office after all.  Clearly, Tsarnaev wasn't found, and this was the last time police allowed media to show their movements.

The news has been filling much of the airtime with interviews of the boys' local interactions.  The mechanic where they took their car, their fellow classmates from Cambridge Rindge and Latin (where Dzokhar was apparently a wrestling star).  Even Dzkokhar's prom photo circulated this morning:

Dzkokhar Tsarnaev, as normal teenager

I wonder what his date is thinking this morning...

Not to be pessimistic, but I'm suspicious Tsarnaev escaped Watertown, and increasingly so as the time passes.  I can't believe the firepower from the images and footages - most police officers in eastern Massachusetts and beyond were here by mid-morning, and they brought out the big guns.  But, I remember  the 2003 D.C. sniper attacks; the police literally shut-down the highway and went car-to-car, yet even then the snipers evaded the dragnet.  That Tsarnaev's campus was evacuated (UMass Dartmouth) and with the issued vehicle alerts (in Connecticut!), I suspect police are giving serious weight to the possibility he escaped.

Oddly, this morning Norwalk developed a connection to the story. Suspicious that Tsarnaev may have escaped on train, police stopped an Amtrak train at the East Norwalk train station.  It was oddly comforting to see my hometown mentioned on local news while watching developments in my current home [space] town.

Police respond to a terror suspect report aboard an Amtrak train which was stopped in Norwalk. Hour photo / Erik Trautman

My own emotions have gone from surprise about these developments to concern about having to venture out for work to joy about a surprise day off to interest in the news to (increasingly), impatience at being cooped-up.  I wanted to go to the gym.  If Tsarnaev escaped, how will long can they keep the Boston metropolitan area on lockdown?  How embarrassing would that be to call off the lockdown with Tsarnaev still as large?  Would anyone feel completely safe?  I doubt he would be able to remain hiding for long, but even a few days on edge could feel like a very long time.  This may not resolve today, and a rain storm is fast approaching.  Additional developments may have to wait until tomorrow morning.

The Boston Marathon Bombings, Observed from Cambridge

Twelve and a half years after 9/11, I was again in a city during a terrorist attack.  About quarter to 3pm on Monday, two explosions went off at the Boston Marathon's finish line, killing at least three and injuring upwards of 170+.

At that time far north in Cambridge, I was working in my office on the computer when I slowly became aware that the bubbly girl across the hall was sobbing.  At the instant my brain processed this realization my cell phone rang with Roberta's number: "Hey, I just saw on the news that there were explosions at the marathon..."  I suddenly connected the dots with my across-the-hall neighbor.  What bad news might she have received?  On 9/11 a student we ran into was concerned about a cousin working at the World Trade Center - I didn't know her and she left our vicinity before the towers collapsed, but she's who I thought of when we heard the news report.  I imaged her reaction would be similar to my neighbor's apparent emotional state.

I checked on my neighbor after Roberta's call.  She said she had been tracking her friend's marathon progress online, and her friend crossed the finish line just around the time of the explosions.  Luckily, as Roberta was calling me, my neighbor also received word that her friend was safe.  Still, she was teary and clearly shaken.

I read online news and twitter reports the remainder of the afternoon.  Several grisly photos circulated showing injured crowds over blood-pooled sidewalks, and even an amputated man being rush away.  My Uncle Jim called to ask if I was OK, and if Roberta was OK.  I felt embarrassed by the concern given how far-away safe I was, but I believe he thought we are in Boston, and anyway I appreciated the call.

Monday afternoon was noisy with police sirens (even in Cambridge) and walking home I heard the helicopters. National Guard inspected bags yesterday on the T (I got a female guardsman, and when she asked to look in my backpack, semi-flirtatiously I said I was sorry I had so many pouches.  "Just let me see what's in the big middle one," she replied dead-pan).  Since Monday the TV's have looped the moment of detonation.

Compared to 9/11, this was a fairly easy experience - I didn't feel the same personal danger as I did that day.  I don't really go out, but truthfully there's currently a bomber at large and maybe emboldened by having gotten away with it.

Cambridge is kind of its own thing, everything I want or need is here, and so I've rarely crossed the Charles in the year since I've moved here.  Boston seems a distant presence, just forming the skyline on Somerville Avenue.  Ironically, the incident has prompted me to visit to Boston soon and more often.  It reminded me how close Boston is, and how little I take advantage.

Dancing at 80˚

Spring approaches Cambridge.  In my New England youth, I looked forward to these refreshing, reinvigorating months, when brown and gray burst green and blossoms' color.  This year, I already dread the sticky summer soon to follow.  That's how it is when you have to wear dress clothes each workday.

It's still hot in cold places.  From my Google Reader archive I'm cleaning before the service's deactivation,  I'm copying here Dancing at 80˚, featuring Temujin Doran getting funky in Svalbard to an accapella groove.  I like his unrestraint contrased to the isolation of his surroundings.  At 1:21 distant people appear in the background and I imagine an ironic shift to their perspective, with Doran dancing alone to Arctic silence...

Dancing at 80˚ from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

The boogie went down on the Erikbreek glacier, here:

View Larger Map

...Scripta Manet

Since around 2006 the greeting on my cellphone's main screen has read Verba Volant.. ("words fly away)".  I put this to remind myself that whatever is said through the phone is temporal, to be lost in the ether of time and fiber optics.

I'd like to eventually obtain tasteful stationary which on its bottom includes the second phrase which completes the Latin expression: ...Scripta Manet ("words remain/are forever").  At the time I updated my phone greeting I considered making ...Scripta Manet my Gmail signature (I decided against e-mail signatures in general).  I created my Gmail account in 2005 - the service was a dream realized for archivist like myself.  Google advertised Gmail then as allowing you to never have to delete another message - to be able to save everything.  This now standard feature was revolutionary for those using AOL or our college e-mail servers.  I think then Gmail allotted each account 1GB in storage, which at that time was essentially infinity (Gmail was the everyman's first cloud storage system - when my fellow master's students asked how they were supposed to be able to move or store large quantitative data files around for their theses, our professor simply remarked, "Well, Gmail accounts are free...")

"Verba Volant..." reminder on my flip-phones home screen.  Note the 2013 dumb phone usage...

One of the more popular mobile apps today is Snapchat, which allows you to message self-destructing photos.  There are also analogous text versions (OneShar.es or PrivNote).  I can't even fathom this.  The only reason I could imagine would be, as some have suggested, is to send dirty pictures.  Otherwise these services are in direct contrast to what I perceive the point of a photo or purposefully writing a letter would be: you want to remember an image, a person or place or event.  I've never found an old photo, handwritten letter, or even e-mail that I don't consider priceless.  I wonder if twenty years from now there might be slight pangs of collective regret for at least some of the destroyed images.

I've used e-mail regularly since the late 1990s.  Our first inboxes were confined by small storage spaces.  Typically, old messages would self-delete after 30 days.  It's gut-retching to imagine how much loss occurred.  I probably used AOL, AIM, and GW's e-mail almost every single day from 1998 through 2003.  These messages would have formed an accidental diary, and what a treasure-trove it would be: a time capsule of our thoughts on daily life, our turn-of-the-century routines, clues to memories we've forgotten, and perhaps most preciously, words from friends and family no longer with us.  AOL or GW could literally name their price if they were able to sell my recovered e-mails.

I think I'm among the last generation that will ever have large parts of their lives undocumented.  Between permanent e-mail and especially social media, with ubiquitous photo and imaging hardware, I can't image how anyone growing up today won't have detailed depictions of their daily lives recorded.  It's almost too much information, and the appeal of Snapchat or checking-out of more permanent communication methods is that the past won't return to haunt you one day.  I'm curious what will happen when the children of this generation eventually grow up to comb their parents' whiny Facebook posts.  Some friends' children will lose as much respect for them as I have.

I know in someone's dusty photo album in some closet somewhere there are dancing photos of myself I'd turn beet-red to see.  I'm also sure that, many of my old e-mail or instant messenger conversations would be cringe-worthy if I were ever to read them.  How lame, how corny I'd seem!  I know for a fact many of my high school friends never want to look back at those years, and would rather pretend those years never happened.  But,  they did happen, and this is the only life we're given, the only awkward period we're given.  They're unique stories - our stories - and for that reason, even only privately, it's worth it to embrace them.


What I'm eating these days

Although I try to eat a varied diet, two out of three meals every weekday are fairly fixed.  Breakfast and lunch have a largely fixed format, with the sole variety introduced through the rotation of side fruits.  When I really stop to think about it, variety is in my diet almost exclusively comes in through the dinners I eat each night.  Even then, dinners are predominantly selected from a short list of go-to weeknight meals (pasta, meat w/potatoes, or beans and rice, and tacos).

These days for breakfast,

• Yogurt, preferably Chobani's passion fruit flavor, if the grocery had them stocked that w
• A buttered bagel, usually from Bruegger's (local) or even better one of a frozen stockpile brought home from Stew Leonard's
• Oatmeal, usually Market Basket's generic raisin and spice
• Fruit, usually grapes, grapefuit, or papaya.  This morning I had blackberries and a prickly pear.
• Although it's getting a bit too warm for it, a winter staple is definitely a cup of Ghiardelli's Double Chocolate Hot Chocolate, topped off with whipped cream and dusted with Penzy's pumpkin pie spice

These days for lunch,

• A sandwich, typically cheese (Swiss or Muenster, 1-2 slices) and meat (ham or chicken, sometimes Trader Joe's pastrami, 4-6 slices)
• 2-3 pieces of fruit (oranges, in winter, apples of figs in fall, peaches or watermelon in summer, today an orange and a pear)
• These days, dessert has been two Quaker's Chocolate Crunch Rice Cakes

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The Timid Lover

Always on the lookout for a good coffee table book, several months ago I was thumbing through art books at the Cambridge Library. By change I took from the shelf a collection of the works of Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose name I did not recognize.  Opening randomly to the middle, however, I found a painting depicting a scene very much recognizable as one lifted near-exactly from several instances throughout my life...

The Timid Lover (1719) by Jean-Antoine Watteau

It was deeply comforting to see the shyness I've experienced played out in a scene three hundred years old.  In an entirely seperate book, Alain de Botton wrote about the consoling power of art to normalize our experiences:  "There are fewer stories than there are people on earth, the plots repeated ceaselessly while the names and backdrops alter."  He ends the passage, which I love, by quoting Schopenhauer:

'The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands'

James Bond Loses His Car Keys

The Bugle podcast's John Oliver does Sir Sean Connery's 007 beseeching Miss Moneypenny to help him locate his lost car keys...



(via Episode 168, "Streets of Rage"; released October 14th 2011)

The GIFs I've loved lately

Wednesday and Lurch

1. Can you get that for me? from (Rocco's Modern Life)
2. Duck season!  Rabbit season! from (Looney Tunes)
3. Wednesday gettin' down... from (The Adams Family)

-----------------The GIF I've Loved Always-----------------

R.I.P. "The Dancing  T" (1999-2004), which adorned by AIM profile for as long as I had it