What I like best about the word sycophant

is that sycophant sounds enough like its poor relation, suck-up (you know, as in suck-up-phant) that even someone who doesn't know what it means might be able to guess. Also, the psycho part has kind of a nice ring to it.
Sorry, I'm not in a generous mood right now.

Now, I'm all for saving the environment

But what's with all the packaging??

Society, in general

You know how I am, always making fun of my and other peoples' understanding or pronunciation of words. My latest kick is hearing American and British media announcers struggle with Société Générale, much in the news lately. Now, granted, I don't speak a whole lotta French myself, but I do know it is not supposed to be pronounced: "sosee-eh-TAY generALie" or anything very close to that ;-)

Year in year out

Just about a year ago I was doing what I am doing today, preparing a very large (more or less 600-page) and complex application for grant funding from the National Institutes of Health. I'm still coming up for air as I did last year by peering periodically at Web cams pointed at my favorite landmarks in and around Yellowstone National Park. I've frequently captured shots from Coolworks' offices at Corwin Springs, Montana, pointed magnificent Electric Peak inside the borders of Yellowstone National Park. Here it is today in all its exquisite beauty. It's been a truly proper winter - appropriately cold and snowy - the first in years in the region. The thermometer on Coolworks' page says it's -17o F. LET IT SNOW!!!

Ize on the Prize for Worst Dressed

Wealth does not endow good taste or even a cheery face. Here's proof-positive. 'Nuf said.

Photo from today's e-Daily Mail, thank you very much.

The Universe, and everything

It was gratifying to listen to Janna Levin speak about her interpretation of the universe today on Chicago Public Radio. She and I share a belief system, although she expresses the ideas more beautifully and convincingly than I. For me, the miracle of the cosmos is that it can be described precisely in mathematical terms, and every day more of it is measured and understood in this way. The mystery and joy is in the why, especially if one is not inclined to attribute it to god.
Thinking back on it, this is how I have always felt, though I couldn't articulate my thoughts until I got the vocabulary by being married to a (non-religious) physicist. In spite of my interest in his work, I don't think I ever heard him talk about, maybe because he never actually felt, the beauty of mathematics in this particular way.
My parents were avowed atheists. My mother was mostly benign about it, and had not a spiritual bone in her body. My father was assertively anti-religion. He considered any kind of spirituality a symptom of religiosity and a serious character flaw. Perhaps if they had a greater understanding of mathematics (though unusually accomplished people, both were nincompoops even at arithmetic), their lives, and so also mine, would have been very different.

Good grief! Good Kharma!

Someone must have been very good in their last life. Or someones, as it turns out. This morning I headed out for my constitutional and not 50 yards from my front door found a credit card lying in the middle of the sidewalk. I put in my pocket and forgot about it until I was home and showered. I pulled it out of my jacket pocket and amazingly was able to make out the owner's name from his signature. Next miracle: his name and phone were listed, and accurately! in the directory. A sweet old man answered and it quickly was apparent he was unaware he had lost it. A few minutes later he came over to claim it. I recognized him as a pedestrian I often pass on my way to the bus. He's a nice Jewish gent who wears a tam-o-shanter with pompom on top. He gratefully took his card and put it back in his pants pocket, where no doubt it will easily fall out again one of these days, and departed with a "happy new year" and a friendly wave.
Not much later, on my way down to the laundry room I saw a bag of groceries somebody had left in the elevator. It was just a few cans of tomatoes, some onions, and potatoes: Sunday stew-makings. So I rescued the staples and put a sign in the elevator so the owner can find me and claim them. So far, no knocks.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

A sense of place

For Christmas I was given a lovely book, The Artists of Brown County, by Lyn Letsinger-Miller, with the introduction written by a childhood friend, Rachel Perry.
The book includes, in addition to nice reproductions of gorgeous, evocative oils and works in other media, numbers of photographs of the artists and of scenes from Brown County (Indiana), most from the first third of the 20^th century, long before I came along to notice and take in my surroundings. What strikes me above all about these images is how little Brown County, and much of neighboring Monroe County, Indiana, where I grew up, had changed even by the 1960s. Now, of course, the story is quite different. But when I was a teenager, and had my first wheels, I spent untold hours exploring and relishing what I found along the back roads there.
Back when I was consumed by the fires of adolescence, my friends and I thought Bloomington and Nashville and beyond to Martinsville and even Indianapolis (pronounced, locally, Innynaplis) were the most distant of provinces, the most forgotten of backwaters, as out of the mainstream as one could get. This, of course, was not truly the situation, but reflected only our interpretation of the old, old rural way of life we saw that has in fact now become a source of sentimentality for us.
It also inspired me to think about the places that have deepest meaning to me. They are: Bloomington, where I was born, and nearby Brown County, Indiana; Martha’s Vineyard, where I learned to treasure Nature’s glory; Puerto Rico, where my mother’s roots were; Chicago, where I have lived for very close to 40 years; and above all, my newest and possibly deepest connection, the Greater Yellowstone area. Nice to ruminate about on Christmas afternoon.
The photo is of a T.C. Steele painting that I took at the The House of the Singing Winds, T.C. Steele State Historic Site, Nashville, Indiana, in 2005.

Oh, that wild and whacky midwestern English!

When I was a small child, I thought the third line of the Pledge of Allegiance went as follows: "...and to the Replublic for Richard stands..." I never questioned who, exactly, Richard might be.
I often hear, on Chicago's classical radio station WFMT and elsewhere, references to snottas. As in, Wolfgang Amadaeus Mozart's Trio Snotta.
This morning I was surprised to hear a TV spot advertising treatment for reptile dysfunction. God knows, we can't abide dysfunctional reptiles!

Cultural revolution from South Africa

Last night I saw Gavin Hood's Tsotsi, an unusual cinematic telling of a hopeless individual's transformation to humanness. Although some aspects of the story are tried-and-true, the drama, the setting, and the acting and directing are far from ordinary. Putting this together with the 2004 Ravinia production of Mzilikazi Khumalo's Princess Magogo I realize what phenomenal artistic potential has been locked up in South Africa far away that has only been reaching our shores in the last few years. If these works are typical, let the flood gates open!

From Tsotsi, Presley Chweneyagae and Terry Pheto are actors to watch. Chweneyagae, though only 21 or 22 at the time the film was made, appears as the prematurely aged ganster-thug, Tsotsi. Pheto is stunningly lovely as the widow of bountiful breast, Miriam. And Hood deserves kudos perhaps most of all for knowing exactly when to stop.

Afterthought: Both Princess Magogo and Tsotsi are the fruits of black-white collaborations and cultural mixes. South Africa is a country to watch.

On the matter of naming babies

A colleague in Seoul, South Korea, and his wife recently had a baby girl. Here is the first message I received from him about her name:
"My wife and I have selected five names in Korean for our baby girl. After checking whether these names are matched well with appropriate Chinese characters, we will choose her name."
Today I received the following message about their decision:
"We have named her Na Yun. Na means an apple tree, and Yun means the sunlight. So, her full name means an apple tree under the sunlight."
Apple Tree under the Sunlight has to be one of the most beautiful, evocative names I've ever heard.

(Photo courtesy of her father, photographer unknown)

Waterways Wednesday

Flickr was in a bad mood yesterday so I couldn't upload Waterways Wednesday until Thursday. These are some of my favorite waterways, starting with an anonymous river on the Leelanau Peninsula, Michigan; the mighty Snake River below the Jackson Lake Dam, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming; the confluence of Hellroaring Creek and the Yellowstone River, Yellowstone National Park, Woming; the St. Lawrence River (Riviere Saint Laurent) from Quebec City, Quebec; the Mississippi River at the Quad Cities, looking from Iowa across to Illinois; the Chicago River, Chicago, Illinois; and La Mina River (Rio de la Mina), El Yunque, Puerto Rico.

Waterways Wednesday

Just a few - and definitely not all - of my favorite rivers.

Since we don't eat turkey on Thanksgiving day, I don't mind sharing this photo. I took it within a week of getting my digital camera, in April of 2004, Zion National Park, Utah. I was inordinately proud of it at the time; I'm happy to say, I've mastered the technique better of late. But the message works, does it not?

Another one of those days...

This is another one of those stretches of time when I have a lot I want to blog about and not enough time to compose my thoughts. This afternoon I'm going to Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of Handel's Julius Caesar, about which I will doubtless intend to post afterwards. I also have a lot of thoughts to share on the matter of widowhood: within the last six months, three friends of my generation lost their husbands, suddenly, to the kinds of things that take husbands suddenly at our age. And I still plan to eulogize the great Elizabeth Wacondo, who passed away this last July. In spite of all the losses, a co-worker and his wife were expecting the arrival of their first child this weekend. The continuity is well worth ruminating about.
And, as always, I want to comment on the changing seasons and wolfdom in Yellowstone, and on a DVD made by the Thermal Biology Institute at Montana State University...