At the Library

Looking at items from the NY public library image collection

World Radio Day

I can't imagine my life without radio.

Earliest memory of radio: Our local station, WNWI (call letters stand for Northwest Indiana) in Valparaiso, Indiana, broadcast during daylight hours when I was small. My parents often played the radio before dinner back then. We lived in a new development on the very edge of town, with few trees and few lights. I could always see the radio transmitter tower's red blinking light at night. I remember feeling scared when they would play the sign off music around 6pm (I'm remembering two tunes: "Sunrise, Sunset" and a somber piano version of "Mack the Knife") because if no one turned off the radio, the music would end and then there would be... silence. How do little children know to be afraid of the void like that?
One of the programs was "Swap Shop" where people would call in to the host, "Gidget", and advertise items they wanted to buy or sell.

Pop music finds me: When I was 9, I began taking the school bus and our driver would listen to WLS 89 AM from Chicago (call letters stood for "World's Largest Store," i.e., Sears). They had a phenomenally strong signal (I've caught them as far west as South Dakota). This was after the Barn Dance days and they played the top pop music all day and night. There was a lot of Elton John (meh, even though those were his best days), and lots of other things. We didn't listen to radio at home or in the car (could our parents have wanted peace and quiet?) I set up a tape recorder in front of a transistor radio and put a sign on my bedroom door so I could record my favorite songs when they came on the air. (I think this counts as piracy, but the sound quality was truly awful, especially when the 9V battery in the radio wore down.)

Country lovin': For a while in junior high, I listened to a lot of country music, always on Valparaiso's WLJE (the call letters stood for the station's owner, Leonard J. Ellis). "Uncle Len" was the morning DJ and did the show live, playing his "scratchy old records" and saying things like, "It's a brass monkey morning!" on really cold days. I learned that country music followed predictable formulas of rhyme and and melody, and discovered that I could harmonize along with it on my violin. That's when I first began to value being able to play music by ear.

NPR - I find love. In high school, I discovered National Public Radio in the form of WBEZ in Chicago. (Call letters stand for Board of Education, and it was still owned by them then. Started life as an educational service to children kept home from school with polio. Honest.) There are three programs I remember:
- Présences Françaises was my first exposure to big swathes of French, which I'd just begun learning. Awesome. I taped all I could.
- A radio dramatization of Star Wars with most of the original cast.
- A funky new series from Britain: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I was besotted.

What else?
- Finally being old enough to have my own money and pledge to NPR
- Shortwave radio
- Radio Canada
- Canadian Armed Forces radio from Baden-Baden
- Auditioning for a job as a student announcer at the radio station at college
- The Archers
- Producing my own weekly radio show about Celtic music (in French) for a volunteer radio station in Villefranche-sur-Saône
- Old-time radio like Jack Benny and The Shadow
- Getting interviewed (in Irish) for Raidió na Gaeltachta
- Having a radio in every room of the house.

Happy World Radio Day!

Day 3 of no electricity

A brief but powerful storm on Monday morning brought down trees and power lines all around Chicago and its suburbs. It's the first time we've lost power for more than a few hours. Now it's Wednesday and still no power.

Here's how it stacks up for me:

Doing without:

1. electricity (most obvious)
2. car (it's at the shop)
3. internet at home
4. air conditioning (or even fans)
5. hot water (our water heater is actively vented; if the fan can't blow, then it won't run)
6. food from the fridge (after 48 hours, it's not even cool in there anymore, and most of the food must be thrown out)
7. one of the bathrooms (it requires use of an ejector pump, which can't run with no electricity)

On the other hand, I have:

1. electricity at the public library
2. shanks mare (as my grandma used to say)
3. internet at the public library
4. air conditioning at the public library (also the weather has cooled off, so we opened the windows)
5. bracing showers, a good reason to conserve water, and an excuse for not taking a bath
6. an excuse to eat out :^)
7. the other bathroom

Still, I hope they can restore power soon. This is getting boring.

Live tweeting Super Bowl XLV

I'm not much of a sports fan, but I seem to have a special block where (American) football is concerned. Even my ever-patient husband has thrown up his hands and pointed out that although I ask questions, I don't really seem like I want to learn that badly. He's right.

But that didn't stop me from live tweeting the Super Bowl on Sunday evening. I figured my fresh perspective might be just what people need.

17:37

I never did choose a team.

18:07

Apparently they're not called goals. Then why do they call them goalposts, huh? :^p


18:12

The most enjoyable part for me was the tight uniforms until I was told it's nearly all padding.

18:24

18:47

18:53

It's 3 or 6 or 7 points. I think the seventh point is judged on the dance performance.

19:23

20:17

I'm a little disappointed that I haven't received any offers to be a color commentator yet. :^/

Back to Grandma's yard

Once we moved into our house, I unconsciously began reassembling my favorite elements of my grandma's house. It was built around the same time as ours, about seventy miles away.

I planted the lilacs I remembered, and purple iris, four o'clocks with their small round seeds like little cartoon bombs, peonies and black-eyed susans and mint. I've had tomatoes some years, and chives, and geraniums that were her favorite shade of coral pink.

Now that we have storm windows with screens, we can open the windows on days when it's not too hot and get a very satisfying and soothing breeze.

I even found Sweetheart Soap, the smell of which takes me back to being four years old again.

And now I have a clothesline (I suppose we have a clothesline, but it's mostly mine), an umbrella style clothesline that you take down when you're not using it. When I was little, we could hang a sheet from each of the four sides and I would have the best garden house (girl equivalent of a fort) you could ask for. I tried it out today for the first time, and yes, everything dried just fine and blew picturesquely in the breeze especially for my benefit.

About to be enGulfed

On Monday I'll start a new job (a detail for six months) and I'll be working on communications about our agency's work on the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The scope of this disaster is hard for me to comprehend. I found a widget from the Public Broadcasting System that shows how much oil has leaked since the incident began April 20. You can adjust the rate based on the various estimates available.



If It Was My Home uses Google Maps to show you the surface area of the spill superimposed on your part of the world. This is oddly effective, since you have probably visited places at different distances from your home and have a personal grasp of how far the spill reaches.

Links for St. Patrick's Day

Corned Beef and Cabbage is not Irish. It is Irish-American, though.

Spell it right: P-A-D-D-Y

Patrick's Day in Blarney "This is probably the few times in the year that you’ll see this many locals near Blarney Castle!"

Celebrations in Dublin - photos from Darragh Doyle

And too many good things to mention from Irish KC. Here are just a few:
Frequently Asked Irish Questions
Ireland-USA differences
Alternative Irish National Anthem

7-layer St. Patrick's Day cake!

Cake Wrecks has some fine items on display today as well.
oh, but look at the clovers!

Please leave...

I was walking past one of the bridge houses along the Chicago River this morning, and I noticed that I could see right into it, and there was a sign on the wall. (You may have to look at the larger image to read it.)

Maps of France - chain of thought

This illustration is from a great blog I don't read often enough, Strange Maps: Squaring the Hexagon.

Which leads me to some other thoughts:

• I have never been able to see how the map of France suggests a hexagon. Maybe a kind of a star, the kind a little kid would draw, but not a hexagon.
• When I was in college, I found a wonderful stained glass window in an antique store. I was told it had been pulled from an old building in Indianapolis. It was about four feet on a side, square, and it was a fine map of France, divided up into its old regions, not the modern départements. Its borders were small squares with the blasons of, well, I suppose dukedoms or something. It was the unimaginable sum of $400. Don't I wish I could go back and buy it now!
• (That same antique store had a priest's kit for administering the last rites and a stuffed mongoose engaged in combat with a stuffed snake. Mercy!)
• I also wish I'd gotten the ring I saw once that had a ruby flanked by two Indian heads back to back wearing feather headdresses. I would have been just as taken with it when I was seven.
• And I can't omit (though I should) the idiomatic meaning of faire une carte de France...

Uh huh.

That's a fine new hat you have!

I have loved hats for as long as I can remember. When I entered my eccentric phase in ninth grade (not sure if that phase has passed), I would wear different hats to school on different days. My favorite was the red corduroy baseball cap.

The Naked Cowboy

With apologies to Pitti-Sing and W.S. Gilbert:

When the day is cold
A cowboy bold
Is a cheering sight to see;
And it's oh, I'm glad
He was barely clad
And right within sight of me!

Saw the Naked Cowboy in front of the train station this morning. He gets a lot of credit; it's only 23F/-4C out there.

Is this Mentschlekhkeyt?

Smoky-voiced cat lady caregivers
Kvetching about people
Kvelling about pets

Debunking the 2012 Mayan apocalypse

The other day I read a great column by Jean-François Cliche, a science writer for the Canadian newspaper Le Soleil. It does a neat job of debunking the 2012 Mayan apocalpyse. Since I've heard this debated by well-educated colleagues in the scientific agency where I work, I'm offering a translation of this excellent article in hopes of clearing away some of the silly mystique around this hoax.

Original article: L'Halloween en décembre... 2012 | La science au quotidien

Halloween in December...2012
Jean-François Cliche
Le Soleil

(Quebec) “I'm writing to you because I've got questions about the date December 21, 2012. We know that the planets of our solar system will be aligned on that date. Some people say that the poles will change position. Others say that storms will be much more frequent and more violent, and a number of others speculate that it will even be the end of the world. As far as I know, this kind of alignment already occurred 5000 or 6000 years ago, and we're still here. From a purely scientific standpoint, what can we expect?” writes Michel Gagnon.

With last week's release of the film 2012, which paints an apocalyptic portrait, it's certainly a question people are asking. What's more, a plethora of New Age websites are predicting all sorts of spectacular events for this so-called special date. In itself, this isn't terribly surprising, because humankind has been seeing omens in astronomic phenomena for millennia, according to the physicist and popularizer Sébastien Gauthier, of the scientific communication firm Cosmagora. He recently gave a lecture titled “2012: how to survive the pseudo-scientific discourse” at the Collège F.-X.-Garneau.


But the thing that's particularly astonishing in this case, says M. Gauthier, is that there will be no alignment of the planets on that date! Absolutely none, as you can see on this map of the solar system which shows the position of the planets (calculated by a NASA simulator) at high noon, universal time, on December 21, 2012. http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ Unfortunately, this doesn't stop false rumors from circulating on the Web...

(Anyway, even if all the planets did align, there wouldn't be the slightest consequence. A few small calculations show that the combined gravitational effect upon Earth of the seven other planets is 61 times weaker than the pull of the moon. So as far as this author is concerned, they can go ahead and align as much as they want.)

According to M. Gauthier, the “popularity” of this date 12/21/2012 stems from the recent craze in New Age circles and other more or less esoteric groups for the history of the Mayans, that great pre-Columbian Central American civilization. In one of their calendars (the Mayans had more than one way to measure the passing of time), called the “long count,” this exact date will mark the end of a baktun, which is a 394-year period in this calendar that corresponds roughly to our millennia.

Since the Mayans used a vigesimal (base 20) counting system instead of a decimal (base 10) system like ours, their calendar counted days in groups of 20, called uinal, which served as months, after a fashion. The next largest unit was the tun, equivalent to 18 uinal instead of twenty so that it would correspond roughly to a solar year – 18 x 20 days = 360 days. In turn, a group of 20 tun made a katun (which is 7200 days, or about 20 years), and the longest unit of time was the baktun, equal to 20 katuns, or 394 years.

According to certain calculations, says M. Gauthier, this “long count” is supposed to have begun on August 11, 3114 B.C., which means that December 21, 2012 would mark the end of the 13th baktun. But remember that this date calculation exercise is subject to errors, and certain experts suggest instead the date of December 23, 2012, which is unfortunately too late for the end of the world to save us from last minute Christmas shopping.

And anyway, what would that change? For the industry of all things esoteric, every temporal milestone is a business opportunity – let's remember the year 2000 – and its gurus are certainly delighted to have a new one at hand.

Finally, let's point out that there's a Mayan monument in Mexico that refers to the end of the 13th baktun. The “catastrophists” refer to it abundantly, saying that its inscriptions foretell a catastrophe, but serious experts describe its inscriptions as “vague” at best.

Weighty matters

"What is making my purse so darn heavy?" I wondered. "I know what I'll do. I've got that dandy electronic kitchen scale. I'm gonna weigh every last thing in my purse to find out the answer."

So I did. Here's what I found:

The purse, laden, weighed 4 lb. 11 oz. (2.13 kg). Okay, so I wasn't imagining things; that's kinda heavy.

camera	11 oz.	310 g
purse itself	8.5 oz.	240 g
Blackberry	7 oz.	200 g
iPod	5.5 oz.	160 g
moleskine notebook	5 oz.	140 g
wallet	4.25 oz.	125 g
medicine/makeup bag	4.25 oz.	120 g
agenda book	3.75 oz.	105 g
special red “ideas” notebook	3 oz.	90 g
keys	2.5 oz.	75 g
phone	2.5 oz.	75 g
Weight Watchers member book	2.25 oz.	65 g
loose change	2 oz.	55 g
2 fountain pens + case	1.75 oz.	50 g
ID badge & lanyard	1.5 oz.	40 g
loyalty cards on keyring	1.5 oz.	45 g
hairbrush	1.25 oz.	35 g
earphones in a tin	1.25 oz.	35 g
gum	0.75 oz.	20 g
packet of tissue	0.75 oz.	20 g
lip balm #1	0.5 oz.	15 g
lucky bauble	0.5 oz.	15 g
exercise band	0.5 oz.	20 g
tube of hand lotion	0.5 oz.	15 g
ballpoint pen	0.25 oz.	10 g
lip balm #2	0 oz.	5 g
2nd pair of earplugs	0 oz.	0 g

I can see a few things that I can do without, at least for everyday commuting (hello, two fountain pens?). And I can certainly choose lighter versions of other things. But can I use this as an argument to get a different small camera? And if I got a smartphone, could I really bring myself to leave out the camera and the agenda book and the iPod? 

It makes me think of Steve Martin in "The Jerk":

"Well I'm gonna to go then. And I don't need any of this. I don't need this stuff, and I don't need you. I don't need anything except this. [picks up an ashtray] And that's it and that's the only thing I need, is this. I don't need this or this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game, the ashtray and the paddle game and that's all I need. And this remote control. The ashtray, the paddle game, and the remote control, and that's all I need. And these matches. The ashtray, and these matches, and the remote control and the paddle ball. And this lamp. The ashtray, this paddle game and the remote control and the lamp and that's all I need. And that's all I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one - I need this. The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote control, and the matches, for sure. And this. And that's all I need. The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair."

Man struck down in crosswalk

I saw him for the first time this summer, in a crosswalk in Chicago. I wasn't sure if he was friendly, so I walked by without speaking to him.

But when I saw him after they repaved the streets, he just wasn't the same man.

It's a tough life on the streets. (I think this is some sort of meme.)

What would you tell 6% of all men?

It started as an email discussion at work. We've encountered a user who has red-green colorblindness. Some of the colors associated with links in our website aren't distinguishable to him.

M: User L is color-blind, red-green (which occurs in 6% of males). L cannot distinguish between the "visited" state of links and regular text. The purple visited link is gray for him. While looking at a page with a bunch of visited links, he wasn't even aware they were links. Should we do something to indicate the visited state more clearly?

C: It seems that the default for all PCs and all browsers, unless you customize, is blue for unvisited and purple for visited. Why doesn't L just customize his browser?

M: I know about the default blue and purple. (...) And what, are we going to tell 6% of all men to "customize your browser, dude"? :D

S: Listen, if I could tell 6% of all men something, it surely wouldn't be that! :^)

---

So if you could tell 6% of all men something, what would it be? (Keep it clean, please!)

Favorite tools: Snagit screen capture utility

I don't intend to make a habit of endorsing products, but I do have a few favorites. Remember how Douglas Adams described the Babel Fish as "mindbogglingly useful"? Well, Snagit is like that for me. It does a simple thing better than any other utility I've tried: take a screen capture. (If you haven't heard the term before, it just means taking a picture of what's on your computer screen.)

Yes, I know that my computer comes with that inscrutable PrtSc key (Print Screen), which I can use to copy a picture of my entire desktop onto the Clipboard (more info here). But Snagit is better.

1. Snagit has a simple interface, even after countless versions (please heed this, Techsmith!)
2. You can easily choose what you want to take a picture of (the whole screen, just one window, a region that you draw with your mouse)
3. You can do the things you're most likely to want to do with the image you've captured: paste it into an email, save it as a file, print it.
4. You can even add stuff to your snapshot, like highlighter yellow or big fat red circles and the words "click THIS BIT RIGHT HERE"
5. There are some nice bells and whistles, too:
   - capture a scrolling window all at once, rather than screenful by screenful;
   - magnify or shrink what you're capturing
   - choose what file format you want to save the image as
   - automatically name a series of captures
   

Although I don't use it every day, it is exactly the right tool for some things.

• Illustrating instructions for some process on the computer (e.g. saving Word documents without the prior edits available in them)
• Documenting problems (error messages) or odd behavior of my computer ("See? My monitor has this line of schmutz running across it. That's not right!")
• Printing a web page exactly as it appears, so that I can do a paper-based usability test) or mark it up with edits
  
• Putting a picture of your website or software in a newsletter or promotional materials

There are just enough post-production editing tools that you could get away without a fancier image editor. I've used Snagit for maybe ten years. The colleagues I've recommended it to are now acolytes.

As of this writing, it costs $50, with discounts for education, nonprofit, and government. There's a free trial (fully functional, 30 days), so you can see if it becomes one of your favorite tools, too.

Cupcakes: WTF?

Okay, I'm going to spoil a few minutes of my lovely Saturday morning (first honest to goodness warm sunny day of the year) and open the cranky gates. It's not so much dislike as honest puzzlement.

What's up with cupcakes? I just don't get it. There are so many things that are nicer than cupcakes. They're not actively bad; they're just aggressively over-promoted. A few quick Google searches reveal the wrongness:

• Results 1 - 10 of about 8,780,000 for cupcakes
• Results 1 - 10 of about 5,730,000 for apple pie
  
• Results 1 - 10 of about 1,310,000 for creme brulée
  
• Results 1 - 10 of about 1,050,000 for chocolate mousse.
• Results 1 - 10 of about 657,000 for chocolate fondue.
• Results 1 - 10 of about 307,000 for Baked Alaska.
• Results 1 - 10 of about 170,000 for Bûche de Noël
  
• Results 1 - 10 of about 99,200 for French silk pie.

Ditto vampires. I missed this whole bit: Buffy, Anne Rice, and now True Blood. I read Dracula as a teenager and I was very nervous going into our basement for weeks afterward. Is that nice?

Bringing the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. All I can say is: É a vez de Rio!

Reality TV of any stripe. Real Housewives Dancing with your Big Brother to American Idol on Tempatation Island. One exception: I dig Deadliest Catch. (Maybe this is the reason why.) And if you've never seen any of the Up documentaries (7 Up, 21 Up...), they're interesting.

Miracle Whip. Give me the Hellman's every time.

My Cranial Jukebox needs a refresh!

Okay, this is getting serious. I usually have one or two songs that get stuck in my head for a few minutes or hours, and then they're either replaced by something else or fade away altogether. If I'm desperate, I can tell someone else what's playing, thereby infecting them instead (not very nice), or I can ask my husband for a replacement song without telling him what I so desperately want to replace.

But I have been plagued by a small playlist of songs I don't care for the last few days and it shows no signs of going away.

• Little Old Lady from Pasadena (Beach Boys)
• I Get Around (Beach Boys)
• Barbara Ann (Beach Boys)
• Witchy Woman (Eagles)
• I'm Gonna Tell You How It's Gonna Be (Buddy Holly)

It could be worse, but it ain't great.

So please, if you have something better to suggest, give me a new song to play in my head!