It's back

* image from here

Tastespotting is rebirthed. It's not part of NOTCOT.com anymore, but seems to be serving the same purpose. Sure wish the archives were still somewhere, because I wasn't through them all, but let me join the rest of the universe in welcoming it back to the land of work time-wasters.

Two silos, dusk, Mebane-Oaks Road

Em says she hates dusk, but I am crazy about it. I love this moment in particular, when the sun is almost completely gone but there are still a few pinks on the other side of the horizon. And in the summer, it's close to 9 pm so you have had many hours of (hot) sun and now you can see lightning bugs.

I just bought this marvelous thing on etsy

from a shop called Bird & Banner and I'm going to frame it and hang it in my bathroom. Whee!

(I do have the teeniest bit of advice for B&B, though, and that is to not photograph their things in front of a be-tank-topped girl. It's odd.)

"I have a dollar. That's all I have. I have a dollar."

I was at the Dollar Tree in Hillsborough yesterday, which is not among the busiest of shopping centers since the Wal-Mart moved out. (Donnie once tried to sell me the idea of opening a drink-vending business out of that still-empty space. It was born of the trouble of not always finding all the rarer sodas like Dr. Brown's Black Cherry and Cheerwine at Sam's or Costco, and my general inability to keep us stocked with any kind of consistency. I'm glad that idea died a quick death along with the one of me becoming a used-car dealer.) Anyway, there's only ever one person working because it is usually pretty slow. But there was this family in line two people in front of me, comprised of a grandma, a dad, and 3 kids. The youngest little girl - maybe 4ish - was holding up the line because she couldn't find anything she wanted. I gathered, once she came running up with her older sister, who shouted, "Wait! Campbell found something she wants!" that Granny was buying them all a present at Dollar Tree. There was no mom around, so obviously I don't know exactly the nucleosity of the family, but Dads generally have a higher tolerance for the kind of cheap Chinese crap that Granny will buy you at Dollar Tree, even if it is quickly discarded behind the couch once the extremely short novelty wears off. I didn't see what the boy or the older girl got, but Campbell got a sad little clear plastic case with a couple of sad hairbrushes inside, maybe a mirror. Everything was purple. (P.S. Older girl endeared herself to me forever by removing the purple brushes from the plastic bag and telling the confused dude, "We don't need a bag" in that semi-haughty voice tween girls are best at.)

As for me, I had this wonderful flashback of trips to Kmart on 13th East or thereabouts with Grandma M, because she did the same thing when she watched us for the afternoon. In some ways, it seems crazy that she subjected herself to 3 or 4 of us, all pretty young, hopping in her blue '72 Pontiac LeMans with domed hubcaps (a car that became mine in college - awww, Betty), where I doubt there was a carseat or a seatbelt in use, and schlepping us up to Kmart to buy us a little present. I don't know if she steered us away from toys and into the school supplies aisle or if we were just naturally nerdy enough to go there first, but Bean and I at least were complete novelty eraser junkies, like I remember a whole collection, unused as erasers, that I would carry around in a clear vinyl bag. They were shaped and smelled like fruits or chocolate or contained glitter; my prized one was an ice cream cone whose white eraser looked like soft serve and rested in a plastic pointed cone.

This one afternoon I remember Grandma M buying for me a white eraser that smelled like a Tootsie Roll (ew) and was encased in some kind of cardboard sleeve that made it look like a giant Tootsie Roll and it was my favorite eraser by a lot for a long time. Somehow I don't think that little Miss Campell will be saying the same thing about her purple brush.

Graphalicious

This is, like, super-nerd humor, but maybe you've gotten that forward recently with all the graph representations of songs. Apparently it's a trend. I will admit to laughing out loud a lot of times, though some are really stupid and boring. Something about The Princess Bride and Star Wars seems to be inviting a lot of submissions.

It's the little things, really.

The first web editor

In the years I have known my friend Bunny, she has chosen for herself many, many nerd boyfriends. Alas, they have eluded her for myriad reasons, sometimes being that they were engaged to other people or went off to far countries, or they were on TV or they were Michael Stipe.

But I think we should be officially the saddest about this one that got away: Paul Otlet, born in 1868 in Belgium, who, with his other laywer friend, invented the internet. The New York Times ran a piece on the museum which exhibits his works, called the Mundaneum, which unsurprisingly doesn't see quite as much traffic as the Louvre. In this, the year of its 10th anniversary, its curators are planning to publish what remains of Otlet's papers and ideas on the web, in hopes of giving him due credit in the evolution of the internet. Though he is not well-known for his influence, some give him the credit for inventing the hyperlink. From the article:

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. . .Otlet. . .described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s
Web. . .Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links.

Eventually, he was given money to pursue his project, and set about creating a massive card catalog to house the world's information. People could send in requests, but eventually the project began to drown in its paperwork, and in 1934, he imagined a “'mechanical, collective brain' that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network."

Not much later, the Nazis invaded Belgium and destroyed much of his work, and his space was cleared out in favor of Nazi propaganda. He died with his ideas in a shambles in 1944.

In terms of nerd-factor, Paul was Bunny's ideal. His father didn't permit him to attend school until he was 12, operating under the theory that it would squelch imagination, so he spent his early years doing little but reading. “I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle.” But the museum's current curators know what they're up against:

"The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum," said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. "People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?"

I know Bunny's answer.

Boo

My new (and now former) favorite food blog, Tastespotting, is no more. The "legal complications" reference begs the question: most of what I read (and, well, blog about, frankly) is borrowed from somewhere else on the internet. So is the internet just one big wormhole of recycled ideas? Sometimes it seems that way.

Its end is sad, but not as sad as poor Tim Russert dying from a heart attack at age 58 while he was at work, may he rest in peace. Like Jon said, "How can we have an election now?" Indeed.

Filling Station

Highway 87, Chatham County

I drive by this empty gas station regularly; the signs always make me think of this marvelous poem.

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color-
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--SO--SO--SO

to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Elizabeth Bishop

Earth hath no sorrow that heaven cannot heal*

I took this at the Barbecue Presbyterian Church Cemetery, Harnett County, NC with Donnie's trash-kicking SLR camera. She is the only statue in a cemetery full of traditional headstones; she is holding a bouquet of carved daisies.

* Thomas Moore

I am so lucky!

I've said it before, but it bears (heh) repeating: I really have the most wonderful sister-in-law.

Look at the happy friends who came in my mailbox today! I donated one to my North Carolinian co-worker, who had never even heard of them, and he could barely finish it. For shame.

Thank you JessieGalua! What a happy Friday treat.

Pahdon?

Hey puppy!

That is a hair hat, and it's a real thing.

I am a lone reed

I think there are two kinds of girls in the world: those whose $9.75 made up a portion of the 57 million bucks Sex and the City collected this weekend, and people who love Nora Ephron movies. I mean You've Got Mail, specifically, but Sleepless in Seattle is in 2nd place, and While You Were Sleeping, while not an actual Ephron extravaganza, gets honorable mention for its embodiment of important lessons.

There are a gaggle of girls going looney tunes over the Sex and the City movie, and, like, crying in their heels outside Radio City when their premiere tickets were a big fat PR stunt. Those girls say that their lives are just like S&tC, to which I say, knock yourselves out with your new movie. I like when someone's mom says "Fiddledeedee" and they drop it. And of course, not all S&tC girls wear Manolos, nor do all YGM girls wear sweater sets. The one thing both of our types have in common, though, is that we both get tricked that we are actually like Carrie Bradshaw or Kathleen Kelly, but we'll pretend for argument's sake that it's not pathological for either of us.

Around the middle of YGM, Kathleen Kelly has to shut her little store and she eats some soup next to Eloise and wonders to NY152, "Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life. Well, not small, but valuable. And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave?" It's all very existential, Nora Ephron-style and I think of it often when I consider where I have positioned myself in my life. Sometimes I feel like the hugest impostor, like I am out of my body hearing things I say and watching my facial expressions and incessant hair-sniffing and -twirling and wondering how on earth I ever tricked all these people that I am competent, in charge, and anything but a completely ridiculous, not-brave person with unending opinions and a need to be funny. Not unlike a Nora Ephron heroine, who loves books and daisies, who is having a minor/major personal crisis whilst falling in love with her sworn enemy. At least, it seems that's what ought to be happening. What use is a personal crisis without all the kissing in Riverside Park?

I want me some Wellies

Just because.