Chikuru

A very quick summary of our Halloween Party:

Three-year-old Owen in a lion costume won most adorable. Who can resist someone who says, "Tickle me faster!"? And I was the clear winner for most creepy. I was going for goth and ended up looking like Ozzie Osborne.

The fake tattoos worked well. I hope the eyeliner comes off before work on Monday.

I flew to Portland this morning, sleeping from Austin to SLC, breakfasting at the American Bandstand restaurant, and doing crossword puzzles from SLC to PDX. I had purchased a copy of Will Shortz's Greatest Hits: 150 Crossword Puzzles Personally Picked by the Puzzlemaster yesterday for the trip. I started with the first crossword in the book, a Monday puzzle, and am still stuck on part of it. I thought, "Wow, these are much harder than the ones in the Statesman." But then I did a few other Monday puzzles and they've all proved to be easy peasy. When I finish the Mondays, I go on to the Tuesdays. I've only started doing crosswords recently have have some catching up to do.

This evening I discovered that doing a crossword puzzle with family can be a lot of fun and a good way to remind people of stories. I did two puzzles this evening with Mom, Dad, Joy, and Bill A. I'd read out a clue and we'd work on the answer together.

Do try this at home.

This evening I heard a story I'd never heard before. Once, during the depression, 1934 I think it was, Uncle Bud killed a bear in the woods. From the experience my dad learned two things. 1) Bear meat tastes good. 2) Bear fat makes great doughnuts.

A final foodnote: Supper was tilapia ("samaki" in Swahili), potato salad, canteloupe, watermelon, banana bread with cream cheese, and tomatoes.

I spent the day with Sheena and her friends Rob & Cheryl at The Hundred Acre Wood (99.6, actually) building a yurt. Most of the work had already been done: drilling eight holes in a bunch of 9-foot 2x4s, ripping them into 1.5x0.3s (for the wall), ripping 8-foot 2x4s into 3.5x0.75s (for the rafters--I'm guessing on the dimensions), preparing a canvas wall and canvas roof, and mostly preparing a compression ring for the roof, made of two rings of plywood separated by thin blocks of wood to hold the rafters in place. The pictures below should make all of this clear.

We bolted together 66 1.5x0.3s into a lattice, stretched the lattice so that the slats met at 90-degree angles, pulled it around into a cylinder, connected the ends of the lattice to a simple door frame with dry-wall screws, tied three nylon ropes around the cylinder for strength (using a bowline at one end and a taught-line hitch at the other), built the roof by inserting the rafters into the compression ring (temporarily held up by two guys with 4x4 poles), and finally added the canvas wall and roof.

These folks at the Hundred Acre Wood are hoping to develop a self-sustaining community on the property over the next few years. It's an ambitious goal and I wish them the best of luck. They are building the yurts for some of the people who will be living on the property. The idea is that by living in a yurt rather than a house with electricity and running water, they will have to live "off the grid" in a more sustainable fashion.

Highlights from the Blue Lapis Light Impermanence performance:

Hanging out in the LBJ suite before the rehearsals and performances, doing a little yoga and watching Jason come up with new ways to balance people on his body (If you've seen the dance troupe Pilobolus, you know what I'm talking about.)

Rappelling off the 10-story, 140-foot J.J. "Jake" Pickle Federal building. That never gets old, though going over the edge has lost its scariness. I was able to capture a bit of the old fear by standing up on one of the columns that juts out from the windows. At the very top of the building, it's possible to stand on top of the column so that you are no longer suspended by the rope. If you fell, it would only be a few feet, but it's enough to kick the ol' reptile brain into gear, saying, "Hey, there's nothing between you and a concrete plaza besides 140 feet of air." Thanks to Lynn H. for getting me to try that.

The climb. Halfway through the performance, Frank and I get to climb four floors, which puts us halfway up the building. We use a technique called "stemming" to ascend between the columns that separate the windows and another technique called "mantling" to climb from one level to the next. Mantling is what you do to get out of a swimming pool that doesn't have steps or a ladder. After three floors, I was always pretty well winded (as was Frank, by his reports) and wondered whether it wouldn't have sufficed to just do three floors. But there was the satisfying sense of accomplishment that came with making it to the fourth floor, after which we turned upside down and let our belayers slowly lower us to the ground while we tried to avoid scrapes from the very sharp quartz aggregate of which the building was made.

The climb was the one part of the show that was able to give me a case of nerves. One reason for this was that it was possible to slip while climbing, which is disconcerting even though there is a rope to catch you (this happened to me once). By the end of the show, most of the fear went away, but even then, I really enjoyed being finished and then going over the side one last time to watch the dancers on the wall before joining them for the finale.

Talking to friends and others after the show. By the way, if you ever go to a show where a friend is performing, please take time to talk to them afterwards, even if you didn't enjoy the show. It will mean a lot to them that you came.

Pretending to be dancers during the last two pre-show practices. The last two days of performance, after rehearsing our first descent, we rappellers decided to try some of the moves the dancers were making--forward and backward flips, runs, and so forth. The feeling is (I assume) like being in close-to-zero gravity. We discovered that it isn't that hard to avoid crashing into the wall after jumping out. You have time to maneuver to get either a hand or foot into position to connect with the wall (rather than a head or a back). It was great fun and I hope to get the opportunity to try it again. While we were playing, I asked Amber, one of the dancers, if watching us made her think of monkeys trying to ride bicycles.She said no, but did suggest that we'd look more graceful if we pointed our toes.

A note on the latest Blue Lapis Light show, Impermanence: If you're thinking you've seen it all before because you've seen Requiem or Constellation, you'll be happy to know that this show features some completely new material, including

• Five cloth performers at once
• Four performers on two cloths (two per cloth) in a piece that impresses me every time I see it and gives some people the willies (for fear the performers will lose their grip and splat on the concrete 20 feet below)
• A duet on the ropes that is incorporates a lot of new moves, some of which make me think of kittens playing in zero gravity
  
• Actual climbing. Another climber and yours truly climb about half way up the building (using a technique called "stemming") before being lowered down.
  

The show continues through Sunday night. If you come, please say "Hi" after the show.

This is tech week for Blue Lapis Light's Impermanence, which means we'll be rehearsing or performing every night this week starting Monday. This show is in the same location as Constellation, but is a different show (and will have quite a few new elements). I recommend it.

Below are the details (Notice that this Thursday night's show (June 18) is a fundraiser and thus much more expensive than the other nights).

I share a birthday with Bob Hope, JFK, and (thanks fraeuleinchen for pointing this out) Danny Elfman (he did the theme to the Simpsons, has done movie scores, and used to be with the band Oingo Boingo). And chidorho. And John Hinckley, Jr.

I celebrated by taking the day off and doing a little 4.5-mile walkabout down Barton Creek after which I met raaga123 for hearty breakfast at La Madeleine. During the walk, I listened to John Aielli's program Eklektikos on KUT. This was a treat because I used to listen to it all the time and don't now because it distracts from concentrating on work. His love of music is infectious.

Because of a cold, I spent a fair bit of the day napping. I wouldn't have been much good at work today. We did fit in a viewing of The Brothers Bloom. Fun, but flawed in my opinion. I think it could have been a much stronger ending with a different ending.

We also fit in a little rappelling down the Federal building. Our show is coming up starting June 18th. It was a beautiful day for it. I never get tired of hanging from a rope 130 feet off the ground and enjoying the Austin skyline.

Every year we go to the Adult Spelling Bee (thanks fraeuleinchen for keeping us apprised of the schedule) and every year I learn a new word whose spelling will be forever etched in my brain. Words like feuilleton and syllepsis.

In the first-round written test I made 19 out of 20 (having been inoculated as many times as I have, you'd think I'd know how to spell "inoculate" by now). This was enough to advance to the second round. In the second-round written test, I also made 19 out of 20 (misspelling "scleroderma"). This was enough to make it onto the stage with 22 others, including Lyn.

In the on-stage competition, unless you know most of the words in the dictionary (as perennial winner Geoff seems to), there is a lot of luck involved. If I'd been given "aficionado", I'm sorry to admit that I would have overdone it with the effs. My first word was "spongiform" (as in "bovine spongiform encephalopathy") and I doubt there was anyone on the stage who would have missed it. My next word was "zori". Having grown up in a house where we called sandals zoris, this was another gimme.

On my next round, the word was the name of a type of music indigenous to Congo (sounds like "Sue coose"). Of all the people at Threadgill's that night, it seems like more than concidence that this word should have gone to probably the only person there born in the Congo. Another gimme, right? Alas, while I had heard the word many times, I hadn't seen it spelled out (at least not often enough). My answer was close, but wrong.

I was happy to take fifth place--that's the best I've done at these things. (raaga123 has placed 4th and 3rd in past competitions.)

We dropped by the the Town Lake Animal Center when they first opened (11:30 AM) and found a lovely pair of litter mates, tabbies, one silver and one gold. Their assigned names were Molly and Erica, but I don't think those are going to stick. Suggestions? What we are considering so far:

• Cat One and Cat Two
• Kitty and Kitty Kitty
• Yin and Yang
• Penny and Nickel (Nicky or Nicole for short)
• Lisa and Maggie
• Sasha and Malia
  
• Laura and Nicole
• Felicia and Dolores (Lecia and Dolly)
  
• Ginger and Adele
• Kathy and Katie

Okay, when I say "we" are considering these names, I may be exaggerating. Lyn has already nixed several of these.

They are proving to be as cute as kittens and to have fine personalities. I think we'll keep them.

We had an hour to kill before the animal shelter opened so I consulted YPMobile on my iPhone, asking it for nearby vendors of "breakfast". Flip Happy Crêpes showed up in the list, just 0.6 miles away. And so here we are. It's an Airstream trailer with picnic tables in front of it. Open for brunch/lunch Wednesday through Saturday. They have both sweet and savory crêpes. I don't know what they taste like but they look good. (The service isn't super fast.)

This just in--they taste good.

The latest Star Trek movie may well be one of the best action movies I've ever seen.

Or is that just the Imax talking?

I spent a very pleasant day in at Eeyore's Birthday Party yesterday, hanging out (literally, in a hammock), reading a book, and watching people pretend to be hippies for a day. If you haven't been, I recommend the experience. Highlights:

• Running into friends (fraeuleinchen and siodhe, sheenaqotj and Brian, Jack and Sandy, Gillian and family)
• Many dogs, one cat, one burro, and one pig (others reported a snake or two)
• Many drums
• Exotic and unauthorized smells
• Having half a dozen people tell me how comfortable I looked. (It is a very nice hammock, hand imported from Honduras, and one of my prized possessions and I hope that sheenaqotj returns it soon.)
• Triplets in a triple-wide perambulator
• A few Waldos. These were harder to find than I'd expected. I think they were hoping for a bigger turnout.

Next year's is scheduled for the last Saturday in April.

Saturday is Eeyore's Birthday Party at Pease Park here in Austin. I'm planning to show up near the beginning and see if I can find a place to set up a hammock. Don't know if I'll dress up. There are supposed to be a bunch of Waldos there, so if you come and want to blend in, dress up like this guy.

This week's puzzler from Will Shortz on NPR (Sunday morning at 7:40 on KUT in these parts) was, "Rearrange the letters in MORE CORRUPTNESS to produce the name of a popular magazine".

This puzzle has proven to be remarkably viral at work and I've been impressed at how much harder it can be to unscramble 15 letters than the 5 or 6 you get in the daily jumble. I did figure out the answer today (finally!) while staring at the fifteen Scrabble tiles I'd taken in to work. The answer jumped out at me while I was on a teleconference call. (raaga123, by the way, figured this one out in ten minutes.)

Anyway, the answer is...

(drum roll, please)

...not as interesting as the following non-answers:

Computer Snorers
Errs on Computers
Mo's Current Prose
Corner Post Muser
Me Proust Scorner
No R.E.M. Procrustes

and my personal favorite:

U R Corpse Monster

HBO has just started a new series, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. If you haven't read the books, you should. The HBO series seems, so far at least, to be faithful to the books (or at least to the spirit of the books), has beautiful images from Botswana, and has great African music to boot. Lots of thumb piano.

Check it out.

Here's a picture of Lyn holding three golf-ball-sized-hail-sized hailstones. We picked these off the ground about an hour after they landed so there may have been some shrinkage.

Our cars were both safely at work when the storm hit. I saw several on the ride home that weren't as lucky. At the library there were several cars with rear windows completely crashed in. The rear window of one of the cars of one of our neighbors had three holes punched in it.

Our plants and cat seemed to have survived nicely.

I'll take a look at our roof tomorrow.

One cool thing about performing in an aerial dance troupe is getting to see the tops of buildings. I'm not saying it's the best part, but it is part of the experience. This is the first building I've seen that has eye hooks built in for anchoring window washers' platforms. These eye hooks are just the thing for suspending aerial dancers. Each of the three ropes we're using in this piece are connected to two hooks.

There performance is Wednesday evening (weather permitting) as part of the Hyatt's Grand Reopening Gala to celebrate its recent renovations. We'll be performing on the side facing the parking lot and the Palmer auditorium.

I went with raaga123 to the Dionysium this evening. It's hard to explain what this is, so you may as well just check out their web site.

There was a short lecture on the history of spam. There was a debate on gun control. There was a short lecture on Darwin. There was a short film, Muto, by Blu--very cool. It's a stop-motion animation made completely out of grafitti.

The lectures and debate were teases--you could tell that they could have been really good if the "performers" had had the time to prepare them as proper performances. Since they have one of these each month, I'm guessing that the performances/lectures are often thrown together at the last minute. But that's part of the fun.

The reason we went was to see Bill Meadows's "Loose Atoms". This was definitely a proper performance and one that Bill had carefully prepared and has performed before. He uses a Wacom tablet connected to his Macbook to turn a sketchbook into a synthesizer. It looks like he's writing, but he's doing much more--using the many degrees of freedom of the stylus (position, angle, pressure, etc.) to control the audio so that you hear words of a poem or music or percussion. Very hard to describe (without staying up past my bedtime)--you'll just have to hope to get the chance to see it for yourself. And you're in luck. He'll be performing as part of Fuse Box '09. In addition to "Loose Atoms", he is working up something that uses Wii controllers.

Another place you can witness Bill's wizardry is at Blue Lapis Light performances.