Long in the 'tooth

Since hands-free became required, I have been struggling with my cell phone in the car - putting it on speaker phone seemed to require more handling than just holding it up - I had to balance it on my lap, grabbing it when it started to slide down to the floor - find the speaker button, etc. Also, the people I was talking to never seemed to be able to hear me very well, and I found myself YELLING at the damn thing and .. well, forget it. I tried some bluetooth earpieces but my ear is quite floppy and nothing seemed to stay in place.

I was thinking, why doesn't my phone just have a clip on it, so I can clip it to my visor and use it that way?

At Costco last weekend, I found the perfect thing! for $40! which is way less than the darn earpieces. A visor-shaped bluetooth device that finds my phone, is easy to operate, and uses my phone's voice recognition. I turn it on, it says "say a command". Then I say "call Barb". It says, "did you say, call Martha?" I say "no". It says "did you say, call Barb?" I say "yes!" It seems to be getting a bit smarter each time. Only one button needs to be pushed, and it never falls down to the floor.

Smartness

In Europe, we were taken with the tiny Smart cars. I heard Smart Cars were coming the US, and I signed up for one. It finally arrived, and the dealer people started calling me up. Tax week is not the week that you really want to buy a car. We might even wait a while, as our current cars are paid off and we don't really feel like starting up another monthly payment. But we really wanted to test-drive it, so we went down there today at lunchtime.



The car was great, but the folks that worked there weren't so smart. Despite the fact that I had spoken with them three or four times on the phone before showing up, they didn't remember that I was non-committal about buying. They couldn't believe I didn't want to go into the backroom and discuss "financing" (I think I'd rather get all my teeth pulled out).

They had put my name on the very car I had ordered. However, I didn't get to test drive MY car. They had told me on the phone that I had to wait until MY car came in before I came down to test-drive it. Again, not so smart.



We were surprised that it didn't feel as little as it looks. Of course, it was a lot bigger than those tiny little European models. There was plenty of room for the dog in the back.

Strange toys

We took the boys to the Haight last Monday and went to a couple of stores with "Robot" in their name that sell these limited-edition toys. The kids are crazy for these figurines, some of which look like little cigarettes smoking little cigarettes, and some which have faces and some that don't. They seem to be manga-inspired.

Elder housing

Last night, my quartet sang at an "senior community", for some performance practice, in anticipation of a contest coming up this spring. We had a tour of the place and we were all very impressed with how nice it was. This place, like many of the newer facilities for the aging, has a variety of activities and things going on, and a lovely communal dining room. It seemed kind of like a cruise ship, with a movie theater, a computer lab, art studio and so forth.

The social director took us around and told us how expensive it was to get in there, and how, despite that, there is a waiting list. It made me think about what kinds of people would enjoy that kind of retirement.. do people want to go back to "dorm" living, with a built in community of strangers who could become friends? Wouldn't it be better if we could build our own familial groups and move in together in a shared home? But how many elders can afford to do that? Our society makes it much easier to move in with strangers than to find shared housing with those we know.

What's up, doc?

I really meant to begin regular posting here in February, but here I am, a week behind! what's up with that? The other funny thing is that my counter shows that people hitting this site have doubled in number recently... just goes to show you that the writer's strike is giving bloggers new audiences! Now if only I can generate some content.

There are day-to-day topics, like going to the dentist (yesterday) and then stumbling to the polling place, still a bit high on nitrous. You can make your own guesses as to whether the gas had any effect on my vote. The remodelling drags on, this is supposed to be the "final" week. The punch list is getting very short. We'll be very glad to have our second bathroom done. My quartet is preparing for contest the first week of April and is rehearsing more regularly.

There are more cerebral topics, like politics or what to do about an email inbox that is bursting at its seams (actually a topic at a workshop here at my office today), but others seem to be more informed than I am on stuff like this.

For entertainment lately, we discovered that the game show network is showing "I've Got A Secret", hosted by Gary Moore. It's odd to see the grainy black & white past in contrast with the current commercials. Gary is constantly smoking on screen, and we googled to confirm that he later died from emphysema. In fact, all the men on that show died from smoking related illnesses. It's strange when the men stand to greet women coming onstage, and the other women stay seated. It's strange to see how dressed up they are, and how slow the show's pace is. It's strange to think about how this era seems so long ago, and yet it's the era that made up my formative years. I was ACTUALLY ALIVE when all this was going on. It seems impossible.

Jane Rule

I read today that the writer Jane Rule passed away. She is probably most famous for writing the lesbian novel "Desert of the Heart", but my favorite book of hers was "Memory Board". I remember first reading her works from the bookshelves at the Women's Center in Oswego, NY, in 1976. This center was my home away from home during my last year and a half of college. It was a very active Center, with birth control classes and consciousness-raising groups. The library had a very complete collection of feminist literature. I had read (and proudly carried around) some feminist books as early as high school, but I had never before read any novels with women and lesbians as the main characters. I devoured all those books.

The cover art for these books was quite different from the mainstream books at the time. The colors were not as bright and the binding was sometimes quite poorly done - obviously the budgets for printing them were very low. But reading them was revelatory to me, opening up another world, allowing me to imagine some future where I could be partnered with a woman for more than 25 years, where we could be integrated into a community. But I must say, nothing in those books prepared me for a kitchen remodel!

Temples Underground

Check out the amazing Temples of Damanhur. 300,000 square feet of underground rooms - full of mosaics, carvings and stained glass windows. Dug into a mountain by a group of Italian artisans, led by a guy who had a vision of the whole thing when he was 10 years old.

Bee Calendar

Since my last name starts with B, and for the first 20 years of my life, so did my nickname (Betsy) - until I switched it out for a more lyrical and logical name that resembled my actual given name (Eleanore)- which is another story - I have a certain interest in Bees. I'm not sure if that's why my brother Bob at one time was a beekeeper. He may have had his own reasons. But I do enjoy reading about and seeing bees. Today I happened across an amazing website with a virtual tour of the Prokopovych Beekeeping Museum in the Ukraine. Among the photos was this queen-rearing calendar. The caption says, "The tan-colored inner circle turns, so the development of queens can be predicted."

I also have a fascination with calendars and this is a fabulous one. The Druids used circular calendars with each month represented by a type of tree.


The Mayans and the Egyptians also used cyclic calendars:

The language of mathematics

I was reading this morning about Garret Lisi (the article dubbed him a "surfer dude"), who has come up with a theory that explains "everything" - a rival to the commonly discussed string theory. He was inspired by the 57-dimensional E8 mandala. Although I don't claim to understand higher mathematics, the idea that the universe is all the same shape as this model feels right to me. Lisi says, "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

I looked up E8 on wikipedia, and was struck by the complexity of the mathematical language used to describe this thing. Here's one excerpt:

"This algebra has a 120-dimensional subalgebra so generated by Jij as well as 128 new generators Qa that transform as a Weyl-Majorana spinor of spin(16)...."

If you get into mathematics at school in order to avoid English, you are out of luck when you hit the higher levels.

Speaking of school, I had a dream last night that I was just starting college. I had arrived at a campus in a very small town in Kansas, of all places! I couldn't remember at all what my major was going to be. A professor came by and asked me if I would play in the school orchestra. I said, I do play the flute, but I really don't enjoy it. He said, you can play any instrument you'd like. I said, how about the trumpet? Or better yet, could I just stand in front of the orchestra and sing?

Online shopping

I love to shop online, and today I found this shopping site that takes a Rube Goldberg type approach to the presentation of their products!