Monthly Archives: November 2007

Doubt and confusion

Usually by the end of the work day, I’m eager for a walk, but not today. I managed to walk over to Fish Island, to Carol’s new office there, but that’s as far as I got. I’ve been fighting off a cold for a couple of weeks, and it seems to have gotten worse over the past two days. I have little energy, and my thinking has gotten fuzzy:– I’m not capable of sustained thought without a real effort. Or maybe it’s not a cold — knowing me, it could be simple exhaustion stemming from overwork. What is interesting is how physical factors affect one’s thought processes. A cold or exhaustion can slow down your thinking; worse diseases can do worse than that….

I think I was headed towards an interesting point, but I suddenly lost my train of thought. When doubt and confusion set in, it’s time for a nap.

Word games

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Thurber: A Biography by Burton Bernstein. I had known that James Thurber was one of the finest American humorists of the 20th C., but I did not realize that he was very good at word games. Once, Peter De Vries and Berton Roueche challenged Thurber to come up with single words that contain all five vowels — “sequoia” was the example they gave him. Thurber: A Biography quotes from two of Thurber’s letters to De Vries and Roueche, in which he gives them twelve other such words. He extended the game to come up with five-vowel names of real people, such as Benjamin Clough.

I read too fast, and had already read Thurber’s twelve five-vowel words before I realized that it would have been far more fun to try to find them myself. Now I’m trying to think if there are any more beyond those twelve. I don’t want to spoil your fun, so I’ll just leave this question hanging:– how many five-vowel words can you come up with? — and how many five-vowel names (of real people)?

From my cell phone, 2007-11-17

  • Late, no traffic on Rindge Ave. I’m reading a biography of James Thurber, my mother’s favorite author. Now all is silent. [1 am]
  • I was reading Thurber’s biography again, but had to stop for a while: his drinking, his impending blindness. [10 am]
  • Dusk. I leave extra food for the cat and start the long drive back home. #

Apparently, Twitter isn’t entirely reliable about receiving and posting text messages via cell phone. From a couple of scrawled notes from my pocket, I have added now Twitter posts that didn’t get posted 11-15 through 11-17.

From my cell phone, 2007-11-16

  • Cat mews querously. She wants to be petted as much as she wants to be fed. At last she settles down to eat. #
  • A man stops me: Do you think I’m pahked all right? pointing. I don’t know. I don’t know how strict Cambridge cops are. He asks someone else. [pm]
  • Mall: woman in a black burka, only her eyes visible; it is disconcerting, when you’re used to seeing facial expressions #

From my cell phone, 2007-11-15

  • Highway service area: Bright cold lights, dark warm rain, thirteen semi trailers parked. I buy gas. [7 pm]
  • rain spitting. grey low clouds. carol walked down to state pier to say goodbye to captain john who leaves for haiti tomorrow #
  • videotaping rush hour traffic, streetlights and headlights and taillights shining on rainslicked asphalt #

On the road again

My laptop is still being repaired, and I’m about to head up to Cambridge for a couple of days where I won’t have access to my computer. Instead of the usual blog posts, I’ll post micro-blog entries to Twitter using my cell phone, and these will magically appear (if everything works as promised) as daily digest posts. Or you can follow along in real time under “Micro-blogging” in the sidebar.

New moon

A tiny sliver of the new moon shone overhead. I stood at the end of State Pier not watching the sunset. Instead I watched a barge loaded down with gravel, well out in the middle of the harbor. The gray gravel on the barge shone faintly pink.

The barge was dead in the water, the tow rope between it and the tugboat slack. I could see someone at the stern of the tug doing something to the rope; then the faint sound of a big diesel engine growling, the water between the tug and the barge churned with prop wash, the barge slowly started to move forward; the person standing at the stern of the tug waved madly at the pilot house, the sound of the tug’s engine dropped, the rope went slack, the barge slowed and stopped. Some kind of readjustment of the rope. The tug’s engine rose into an audible growl again, the water churned between the barge and the tug, slowly the barge began to move behind the tug, gradually they got up to speed and headed towards the hurricane barrier.

I watched for several minutes. The pink light on the gravel got fainter, the tug’s running lights grew brighter in the gathering darkness, tug and barge grew smaller. I got bored watching them, and turned to head home. Overhead the sliver of moon shone bright silver, the sunset nothing more than a red glow on the horizon.

Citizen science for urban dwellers

I just discovered the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Urban Bird Studies program. Urban Bird Studies consists of a number of interesting citizen science projects observing birds and bird behaviors in cities: Pigeon Watch, Crows Count, Dove Detectives, and Gulls Galore. As you might have guessed from the names of the individual projects, the target audience for these projects appears to be kids, and they have lots of photos of school groups full of cute kids with clipboards.

Nonetheless, it looks like there’s some pretty interesting science underlying each of these projects. For example, the Gulls Galore project aims to gather data to help ornithologists understand when and in what ways adult gulls relate to subadults and juveniles. And just looking at the tally sheets and the study site habitat form help me better understand what ornithologists do.

Better yet, Cornell Lab of Ornithology understands that it’s a Good Idea to help us urban dwellers to observe and understand our urban ecosystems, through careful observations of selected species. Now I’m trying to decide if I have the time to work on the gull project — it sounds like fun.

Micro-blogging

Most of you won’t care, even though you probably should, but I’ve just linked to Twitter on the sidebar.

I’ve become facinated with the phenomenon of “micro-blogging” — Twitter allows posts of up to 140 characters, meaning you can read or post Twitter messages (called, rather unfortunately, “Tweets”) on your cell phone using text messaging — begging for haiku-like posts….