False advertising

I hereby confess that I do not much resemble the gal in the picture on my blog "mast-head".  I chose the picture because I thought it was cute  and I like the floating musical notes. I don't really have a pink iPod, and I'm too old for off-the shoulder tops (at least in public), and my dog doesn't wear a pink sweater.   But there's a dermatologist in my town (and she's a very good doctor) who does use someone else's picture on her website.  If I thought this cute redhead were the doctor, and made an appointment to see her for eczema or blotchy skin or folliculitis, I'd be awfully surprised when I got to the office and found that the real doctor is someone else entirely.   Is this weirdly misleading, or am I just being cranky?

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Prestige inflation

One of our commercial farms on the edge of town is having a contest, and the winners will receive free VIP passes to the "Haunted Nights" corn maze.  What kinds of advantages do Very Important People get at a Halloween corn maze?  Taller corn? Scarier witches? Creepier ghosts?  
     Of course, you don't have to win a contest to become a VIP these days.  You can pay money and become one instantly!   At the Glass Cactus Club in Grapevine, Texas, you can buy a VIP membership and get 'exclusive privileges'.  At many concerts, you can get VIP seating.  (We used to just call that "buying expensive, good seats" -- like the time my mother splurged on tickets to an Artur Rubinstein recital in Houston.  But we didn't become Very Important when we bought them.)  You can pay for VIP memberships in some online gaming club that will "allow you to buy more Builders, more training slots for Heroes, more Rare tokens and more MCUs" -- whatever that means.  .    

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"What we fear of death"

Just got back from a wonderful 2-night vacation in Ashland, Oregon, where Plosswood and I saw three plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ate yummy food at a downtown restaurant situated near a babbling brook, and fell blissfully asleep on a wooden bench at a Japanese bath garden (the place is said to  "create deep relaxation and rejuvenation" -- well, that's true).  
So why am I thinking about Death and Loss?  Maybe because autumn is arriving here.  Maybe because my mom, who loves Ashland and used to attend the festival with us (we were such a happy little threesome!) just can't go anymore -- she's too feeble and she's too confused.  Maybe it's because one of her long-time friends just died in Austin.  Maybe because, at my age (I'm 57) so many of my peers' parents are dying, and own dad died in January.  A childhood pal just lost her father-in-law, after having buried her mother about a year ago.  "Isn't this a sad time of life?" she asked me.   Yes, it is.

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The Scream

I've been working very long hours on a research project about a Scandanavian ballet of 1836, La Silfide.  Do you suppose that's why my poached egg this morning looked so much like the Norwegian painting by Edvard Munch, "The Scream"?

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Remarkable names of real people

For many years I have collected remarkable names of real people.  The highlight of my name-loving life came one day while I was sitting in a doctor's office:  the nurse emerged from the inner sanctum to call in the next two patients, Florence Dorence and Tilly Dilly.
Here are some more names:
Ole Roley
Forest Green
W. C. Dampier-Whetham
Hatherly Cumberbatch
Dr. Barney Softness
Betty Moist

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Supernatural occurence in the kitchen

The other day my husband Plosswood summoned me to the kitchen:  he'd been washing a few bits of cottage cheese off a plate, and then he had a vision. Some people see the Virgin Mary in a potato chip; he saw something very special on the scrubber.  I saw the vision too, and took a picture of it.  Taa daa!
[Incidentally, Plosswood has been busy in the kitchen lately; I wanted him to make a found-it-on-the-web Swiffer-jailbreak homemade cleaning solution with water and vinegar but he used wine vinegar instead. Now, every time we mop, our kitchen smells like salad dressing.]

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Life with a Puppy

Everyone loves puppies.  So it will come as no surprise when I tell you I'm am nuts about our new puppy, a long-haired miniature dachshund.  But I never knew that a dog can chew on a floor!  Yes, it can be done.
Nor did I expect him to reduce me to stomping desperately around the kitchen looking for urine puddles and saying things through clenched teeth like "why is your penis wet?"  Nor did I anticipate his believing that my big blue exercise ball is a terrifying foe.

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Does this ass make my truck look big?

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Don't Embarrass me again, Texas!

I so agree with the fabulous blogger "In the Pink", who notes that Rick Perry is a terrible candidate for president. Yes, he is.  I beg your pity.  For though my Oregon-born friends up here in the not-hot-enough Pacific Northwest could EVER understand my pain and suffering, it is TERRIBLE to be a Texan and be deprived of my birthright, Texas Pride. (I'm not talking about the beer. Incidentally, I once gave a can of Texas Pride to Tom Wolfe, who was a visiting speaker at my college in Minnesota, and whose tailor's son was my boyfriend at the time. So I had lunch with the two of them and gave Tom Wolfe the beer -- since he was a sort of a sociologist, I knew he'd think it was hilarious.)  Anyway, when you grow up in Austin and you make regular visits to the Capitol to view the magnificent gigantic paintings of battles, and you color maps of Texas, and your brother plays the role of Stephen F. Austin in the third-grade Texas pageant, and you make drawings of "Come and Take it", and you sing "Texas Our Texas", and "Beautiful, Beautiful Texas" and you lie down in bluebonnet fields every spring, and you've actually seen (well, from a distance) Molly Ivins and Ann Richards and Gonzalo Barrientos around town, and your daddy hunts, and you call him your daddy instead of your "dad", and your legislature is funnier than anyone else's, and you get to eat the best BBQ in the world and the best Mexican food and when you're gone you always want to come home to the Armadillo -- well, you have Texas Pride.

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Academic Freedom

As a fifty-something scholar I'm continually amazed by the vast amount of info available at my fingertips, through the wonderful world of the internets.  But sometimes there's TMI -- tonight I was looking for a 1931 book by the costume historian Carlos Fischer but was first confronted by a list of six-hundred eight-three publications by people named  Carlos Fischer, and the first on this list was about BARN-OWL PELLETS!
A contribution from Barn Owl pellets analysis to known micromammalian distributions in Buenos Aires province, Argentina

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Not Hot Enough

Call me crazy, but I miss the Texas heat.  Yes, my home state is in the midst of a terrible drought and heat wave. My uncle writes:
The next time you get those nostalgic yearnings for Texas, I want you to picture us now: hot, hot, mercilessly hot and dry, dry, mercilessly dry.  The outside is like an oven and my heart bleeds for the poor postman. I rarely venture out-of-doors and few people are seen on the street.  Everyone seems to be cowering inside with their air condititioners. I try to remember what Archie said, "If you don't like the weather, remember that it probably doesn't like you either", so I try not to complain.

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