Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Sweltering in 92-degree heat.  Since a couple of days earlier this week had me scrambling for turtlenecks, my internal thermometer and I are confused.

Erin

Our friends, David and Lisa, just announced their pregnancy on their blog.  In addition to my happiness for them, I have to say, I’ve been walking around just a bit happier all day long . . .

Erin

Sydney begins TAing tomorrow, and I start teaching on Monday.  It’s official: school’s here.  And we’re not ready for it.  We haven’t been to the garden in ages, I don’t have enough of my syllabus mapped out, we intended to read approximately 50 more books (each), and, oh yeah, we haven’t spent nearly enough time in the hammock for school to really be here.

On a different note, I’ve discovered (during my teaching prep) that Eudora Welty’s really cool.  When I first read some of her stories, I though, “Meh,” but now I’m completely wound up over her stuff.  If any of you are interested, I’ve got lectures and analyses and cool stuff to share, and Sydney and the cat don’t seem interested.  🙂

Erin

Here and here you can find some rather amusing (and utterly appalling) stories of encounters with innumeracy. And here‘s a post expressing surprise at how widespread the inability to handle numbers is, even among those who really do need to be able to handle them.

I’ve encountered this problem often enough that I’m not much surprised by it anymore. Some people just don’t seem to be able to get really abstract things like math. And fortunately much of life can be lived quite nicely without having to get too involved with numbers (though I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to function well without mathematical abilities). What I do find surprising, though, is how often innumerates will adamantly insist they are right in a dispute that clearly relies on mathematical abilities. I’ve encountered this sort of thing a number of times (and the first post linked to above provides several anecdotes of such misplaced obstinacy). I’ll have a dispute with someone that relies on some arithmetic and it will be perfectly clear that my disputant does not know how to work with numbers and that I do, yet my disputant will insist that he or she is right. I find this bizarre. I take it that if I disagreed with someone who was illiterate about what an author said on a given page, the illiterate person would usually be smart enough to concede. Why not innumerates? Is it that illiterates feel stupid, given the high value placed on literacy in our culture, and so they are less confident and more used to giving way?

Sydney

I’m doing lots of preparation for the class I’ll be teaching.  The following passage is one of those I’ll be using on the first day to make clear to my students that “women” in “the South” is anything but simple in literature:

“. . . she emanated an outrageous and immune perversity like a blooded and contrary filly too young yet to be particularly valuable, though which in another year or so would be, and for which reason its raging and harried owner does not dare whip it.” —  William Faulkner, The Hamlet

Erin

Our deep freeze is frighteningly full for this early in the harvest season, so Sydney’s been exploring the world of canning recently.  In addition to the massive time commitment, he’s been having some problems because our well has run dry occasionally, thus making the fill-gigantic-pot-with-water part of the process a bit more difficult.  There are now, however, lovely rows of peaches, chutney, pickles and relish lined up on our shelves by this point . . . and bottled water at the ready.

We also had our friends Jared and Laura over for dinner last night.  It’s the last week before school really begins, so we had major motivation to mark out quality time before we all stick our noses into books for months at a time.  So nice to swap stories for an evening!

Erin

These are some seriously cool lizards:

Researchers have suspected for decades that some desert lizards can harvest rainwater through their skin. The Australian thorny devil (Moloch horridus), for example, rubs its belly into the wet sand after a rain. In the 1920s, inquisitive researchers put this lizard in a shallow bowl of water and noticed that its entire body soon looked wet. “The initial thought was that they just took the water in directly through their skin,” says Wade Sherbrooke, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History’s Southwestern Research Station in Portal, Arizona. But that turned out to be wrong. Unlike amphibian skin, which lets water through, reptile skin keeps precious water inside the body, Sherbrooke says. So how were the lizards transporting water?

Later research suggested that water somehow traveled along the “scale hinges” in between the lizards’ scales. In the new study, Sherbrooke and colleagues at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, used light and electron microscopes to examine the scale hinges in detail. They discovered that the hinges contain tubelike channels about the width of one or two human hairs, a good size for harnessing capillary forces to draw in water. In thorny devils, the network of hinges covers the entire body and appears to funnel water to an area near the corner of the lizards’ mouth, the researchers report in this month’s issue of Zoomorphology. They found a similar plumbing system in another rain-harvesting lizard, the Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum), but not in seven related lizard species that don’t transport water (from ScienceNOW Daily News, August 17, 2007).

They’re also really cute. See here.

We spent Wednesday afternoon at Letchworth Park in upstate New York. It’s called “The Grand Canyon of the East,” and it definitely feels like it. Bigger than the parks around Ithaca, and with much deeper canyons, it really does having some beautifully dramatic views. Sydney and I hiked for a couple of hours and climbed back into the car with our legs all tingly from the stair- and hill-climbing. Sydney was wise to burn off some of the energy I’d been building up over the past week when I was sick. He was curiously quiet for awhile during our walk, but we managed to find something to argue about on the way back that carried us back up the trail to our car in half the time it took us to hike in!

He then took me to a really lovely B&B where the lady overwhelmed us with 10 minutes of non-stop talking that included mention of the inn’s history, Ghirardelli-chocolate-chip cookies, several lovely sitting rooms, tea, coffee, water, six acres of loveliness, and details about the new deck attached to our room. By the end Sydney was overwhelmed and I was ecstatic. So nice! Our stay also included a hearty breakfast, which we appreciated, and she made reservations for us for dinner at a local place that we really liked.  I loved staying at a place where you actually talk to people and enjoy the comforts of a really lovely home. Sydney loved staying where there was a really comfortable bed. We were both quite happy.

This morning after breakfast we waddled out to the car (seriously, breakfast was filling), and headed up to Rochester to check out their public market. That was really interesting. Unlike Ithaca, vendors yell and chant, produce often has stickers showing it’s from California, and everything’s dirt-cheap. As one who can easily walk out of our farmer’s market having shelled out some cash, the idea of buying a basket of tomatoes for a dollar was overwhelming. Sydney and I really can’t figure out how they can afford to sell stuff that cheaply. We also don’t know why you’d buy Hamburger Helper at a public market. But anyway . . .

We then headed to the Kodak house in Rochester to look at an Ansel Adams exhibit there. Sydney’s been a long-time fan of his photography, and we have one of his prints hanging in our house. We haven’t been to any art exhibit in a long time, and in addition the house itself (mansion, beautiful grounds) is worth seeing. I think our plans for “a small house” were, ahem, modified by sights of the Kodak founder’s sweeping staircase, 11-foot ceilings, and amazing woodwork. Oops.

Rather than do more hiking, we decided to top things off with a hefty dinner at our favorite place in Ithaca: Thai Cuisine. It’s really great Thai food, and it’s something that we somehow can’t seem to replicate at home. Now we’re full, happy, and home. So lovely to have two days away, two days of exploration, and two days of great food!

Erin

http://www.slate.com/id/2171940

Having already made my case for why August is a lovely month for me, let me offer a brief rejoinder to the writer of the article, courtesy Wikipedia:

Apparently the first Monday of August is a holiday in Ireland, so there is a holiday in August, just not for us!

“In Finnish, the month is called elokuu, meaning “month of reaping.” I agree with that: August is month when our garden bursts forth. It’s the pivot between green July and crackling September. August is when we lug home loot nearly every day. I happen to find the loot a bit scary (hmm, what shall I do with 50 cucumbers today?), but most people would agree it’s quite wonderful overall.

Although the author of the article points out that August 1945 marks the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 15th of that year also marks Emperor Hirohito’s surrender and the end (finally) of the fighting in the Pacific theater during WWII.

India became an independent country (1947), as did a whole host of other countries in Augusts of other years.

Notably, “In many European countries, August is the holiday month for most workers.” See, apparently we’re just misusing our August in the U.S. We really should become more globally aware and take some August vacation ourselves! Speaking of which, we’re off to ours.

Erin

P.S. The article starts off with a reference to T. S. Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month,” making a case for August’s cruelty instead.  But it might be worth noting that in that line of The Waste Land Eliot is himself making a reference to the opening lines of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, of which a rough translation might be: “When April with its sweet showers hath pierced the drought of March”  Not so bad after all, eh?

made and froze 9 cups of basil pesto.  Today I am a rock star.

Sydney is currently doing the tricky trade of canning peaches and peach chutney.  Soon he, too, will feel like a rock star.

Erin