More Friday Hooky

Edible art

We took the day off and traveled North to San Francisco again last Friday, this time to visit a trendy little restaurant with our friend Lucile. The restaurant is the café in the de Young museum of fine art in Golden Gate Park.

Last April we took a similar weekday trek, documented in the blog entry you can see by clicking here. On that trip we visited the de Young’s sister museum, the Legion of Honor. The de Young is a larger and more modern institution. It re-opened in 2005 after its old building had been torn down in 2000 and a new, stunning architectural marvel built on its old footprint. Our visit was on a densely-foggy day, so I have no external views of the building (but you can see one on the museum’s website by clicking here.) Its interior and surrounding grounds are every bit as much works of art as any item they contain.

Please click on any image to see a much larger, better version.

There are airy spaces…

The Piazzoni Murals Room

… passageways that lead the eyes and then the body to follow them…

… startling things in lofty places…

… odd creatures in exterior spaces…

Zhan Wang’s “Artificial Rock” appears to lumber toward a museum entrance.

… and exterior gathering places whose attraction isn’t hard to pin down.

Like the Legion of Honor, the de Young has a vast permanent collection of classical and historic works.

Visitors contemplate Frederic Edwin Church’s “Rainy Season in the Tropics” (1866)

However, possibly because of the innovative nature of the physical place itself, the de Young’s permanent collection seems to have a greater presence of works of whimsy, or experiment, or current social impact than the Legion of Honor:

Who hasn’t felt like this once in a while? (I didn’t record the sculptor’s name or the title of this piece, but will make a point to do so on our next visit.)

“Rover’s Garden Grows” (1991) by Dale Chihuly and Italo Scanga

“Cod Tureen” (1997) by David Regan. Modeled after Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Large Fishes Devouring the Small Fishes,” this is a working tureen. I doubt very much that I would have the stomach to eat anything that came out of it, though.

Perhaps it was a vestige of a dark mood, but the most moving things to me that I saw that afternoon were two works directly adjacent to one another, made of the most mundane materials: concrete, old furniture, and burned wood.

Detail in Cornelia Parker’s “Anti-Mass” (2005)

The plaque on the wall next to this free-hanging cube of pieces of burned wood reads, in part: “This sculpture is constructed from the charred remains of a Southern Black Baptist church that was destroyed by arsonists. […] Parker’s cube appears to defy gravity, providing a monumental object for quiet meditation and reflection."

Church and chair.

The above photo shows the entire work, but by necessity only in two dimensional projection, which diminishes its impact by several orders of magnitude. The little object on the floor to the right of the cube is this item:

Untitled sculpture by Doris Salcedo (1998)

The plaque for Salcedo’s piece reads, “Colombian-born sculptor Doris Salcedo uses a common household artifact to register the loss of human life to political violence in her native country. Encasing a side chair […] in rebar and cement, she transforms a familiar object into [a] disturbing record of the people who have disappeared, a haunting reminder of those citizens who have suffered the effects of civil war and government corruption. Although she has eliminated references to blood and corpses in her work, Salcedo registers her protest just as vividly through her juxtaposition of humble, domestic artifacts and brutal building materials.”

These are just a few of the 108 photos we saved from the visit, and we have at least tenfold more images in our minds’ eyes. If you are ever in San Francisco and have half a day to spare, you could do much worse than spend it at the de Young or the Legion of Honor. Of course, you don’t have to physically visit San Francisco to enjoy their web presence.

Mrs. Fort (in red) and Lucile on the lower floor of the museum’s store.

We visited with Lucile for a while both before and after our museum adventure. More precisely, we visited with Lucile and…

… with Terri, and…

… with Shady, and…

… with DP. Three more stunning works of fine art.

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Laughter Won

In the previous post, I waffled about whether today's family gathering on the anniversary of Doug's death would be one of tears or laughter.

It was a celebration, and I think we all in our own ways feel a little (or a lot) liberated by it.

The presence of very young children helped keep us focused on the future, and the positive, and the love, and the joy. Without that focus, whatcha got left but poopy diapers, anyway?

Parris snaps Adrianne and his granddaughter (Adrianne's niece) Kiana.

Instant gratification.

There were only 16 people at this little gathering. Here, the bunch gathers for a group portrait or two.

Table in the lower-left corner of the previous photo.

This table was the "workbench": a place where Adrianne had laid out tools for us all to add pictures and other memories to a scrapbook, and she had invited us all to bring whatever we wanted to add to it. The intent was to construct a tangible collection of words and pictures and memories of Grace's dad for her to keep close as she grows up and grows away from Doug. That will certainly be the lasting product of the effort, but its immediate product was a focussing of stories and joy and, yes, laughter from all of us about Doug. The scrapbook project provided a place of exuberance. I think we all felt a liberation from grief, and a permission to laugh. And we did. And we did. And we did.

Detail from the "workbench."

The man in the picture will be known to SherWords regulars; it is Grace's 12-th great grandfather. Well, one of the 4,096 of them, but the one through whom the Harrington name comes.

At the end of the gathering, we posed for group photos. (In a perhaps futile effort to not put too much personal information out there in so public a place as a blog, I'm going to not use last names in the identifications.) I took the first one:

CLICK THE PICTURE TO ENLARGE IT. REALLY.
Front and center: Adrianne
Arc behind Adrianne, left to right: Kathy (Adrianne's mom), Lynda (Adam's SO), Dierdre (Parris's wife), Parris (Doug's stepdad, his mother's second husband), Andrew (Lynda's son)
Third row, left to right: David (Reva's SO), Reva (Doug's half-sister, Parris's daughter), Kiana (David and Reva's daughter), Mike (bassist in Doug's band, Defiance), Mike's daughter Angelina, Mike's wife Toni, Adam (Sherwood's son), Diane ("Mrs. Fort," Sherwood's spouse & keeper)
Toppermost of the Poppermost on Uncle Adam's shoulders: Grace the Magnificent.

There will be a quiz. Just be thankful that Doug's uncles and their progeny were too far away to participate.


... and one last group photo by Andrew, which proves that I was actually there. It will be left as an exercise for the reader to figure out which one I am. (Hint: many, many years ago, when Adam was a small boy, a friend of his once described a suspicious character in the neighborhood as being "real white, you know, like your dad.")

The T-shirts we're all wearing were Adam's inspired idea and gift to us all. He showed up with a big cardboard box full of them, all correctly sized (except for Diane's, for which he earned many, many positive points from her). They bear reproductions of a flyer for an early headline performance in a San Francisco club of Doug's band, Defiance, in the 80's.

Adam, Andrew, and Defiance tees.

Doug at Boulder Creek

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An Anniversary

Doug, Grace, 2005.

So, it has been a year.

To celebrate and grieve, to support and be supported, to laugh and to cry, to eat and clean up afterwards...

The Harrington Clan will gather on November 14th in Doug's home to support one another in whatever way seems appropriate. Grace will be the initial focus, but who knows where the tone will eventually focus. My bet is on laughter and tears, probably in about equal amounts. Well, no, probably more on the laughter side.

Definitely on the laughter side. That was always the way with Doug: laugh with him or... laugh at him. Pretty much.

Adrianne and Grace will persevere. Adam will recover and hold the man. I will go on.

There will be some changes on sharrington.net, there will be some changes on this blog, there will be some changes between my ears.

There will be no changes in who Doug is.

[Click here for a short account of the gathering.]

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We're Number One!

… for Number One! Or Number Two!

Before reading this blog post, please read the header bar, the red-background thing at the top of the page. Carefully. It will enhance your appreciation of this post.

The new DeAnza Planetarium is close to being complete. Without stretching things too much, I can safely say that it, as it exists right now, has the highest and broadest arsenal of planetarium technology that exists in any dome anywhere in the world. It has the most recent optical-mechanical projection system for realism (the Konica-Minolta Infinium-S) and a mind-blowing full-hemisphere digital projection system for audience- immersion sensation that renders I-Max quaint. Really. Visualize a movie projected on your entire sky. We do that now.

All that’s left until the Planetarium is finished (for this staggering round of improvements) is the installation of a hyped-up immersive sound system, for which the College District Board of Trustees just approved $100,000-plus at its meeting last Monday. That takes the total investment by the District in the new Planetarium to well over four million dollars. Even given the recent trashing of the dollar compared to the Euro, the Canadian dollar, and the Gallon of Gasoline, that’s a pretty big investment for a little astronomy department! (Of course, it's also about what Alex Rodriguez gets paid for playing baseball for a month.)

The official "ribbon-cutting", with dignitaries from the high-tech firms involved in the project will be on December 1st.

Before going elsewhere with this, and even though I don’t speak for my employer and vice versa, I need and want and am joyfully happy to say this:

Thank you! Thank you so DAMN much to the voters in the Foothill-DeAnza Community College District! You have voted, over and over again, to support us via bond measures and self-taxation. You’ve done that for the generation since “Propositon 13” pulled traditional modes of local funding away from us. Your most recent bestowals in this decade, more than a billion dollars, has re-assured Foothill and DeAnza Colleges’ place as the pre-eminent Community College system in the nation. We will try to make you not only satisfied, but proud. And we will succeed in doing that, as we have always done.

Anyway.

The DeAnza student newspaper, La Voz, has published several good stories about the Planetarium renovation project, all very appropriately enthusiastic. But the most recent issue of the weekly fishwrap bestowed the one most treasured blessing -- way, way beyond any mere scientific or technological kudos -- for this descendant of Sir John Harrington (click on an image to make it legible):

... zooming in: ...

I think I’ll put up a little print of this picture:

on the wall of each restroom. It’s ol’ John. He’d be pleased, I think.

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More from the HamCam

I seem to have the blogger's blahs now -- nothing has struck me as particularly post-worthy for a while, and I haven't even had the excitement and triumph that replacing a fuse can provide.

So, to reward SherWords' regular clickers, I'll go back to an old standby: some images from the webcam at Lick Observatory, introduced very early in this blog's history. The eight images below were captured in real time (not via the HamCam's daily archive, which probably would have produced a more spectacular collection, but that seemed to be "cheating" in some way), and are my favorites since last February.

The view is toward the northwest, and takes in much of "Silicon Valley" at the south end of San Francisco Bay. Clicking on any image will take you to a much larger (1280 x 960 pixels) view, and each is worth that effort.

Sunset on March 4th.

An April afternoon.

Dusk on April 4th.

Dawn, April 24th.

Sun through smoke, September 6th. The smoke seen here is mostly from a large wildfire in far northeastern California, wafted here from its source down the great central valley and through the San Joachin Delta to the Bay.

First showers of the season, September 19th.

A dramatic October afternoon.

An ominous October evening.

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That's M'Boy!

If you've been on the fence about whether or not to get one of those spiffy new Binder carbon dioxide incubators, clicking here will finally convince you.

Adam does all of the voices in this ad.

Auld Acquaintance, Not Forgot

I stumbled across a picture of an old friend today while wasting some time on Technorati. She showed up in an Irish-Canadian woman's knitting blog. Click here for Diane-the-knitter's blog.

Here's the picture that snapped my attention thereto:



Some of you will recognize her right away; others will need this introduction.

Poor Kelsey...

... he finally gets his own blog entry, and he doesn't get to keep it.

This blog's previous entry, "Unmentioned Dog," gathered some very interesting commentary that deserves more space in thanks than adding another comment to the stream would afford. Meanwhile, I'll sprinkle unrelated pictures of Kelsey here and there because (a) we hijacked his only blogpost for something completely unrelated to him and (b) Chris wants to see more of them, anyway.

The material I edited out of "Unmentioned Dog" was a list of people near and dear to those who are on my blogroll and about whom we seldom hear anything on the blogs. I deleted that part because, as the post-editing addendum says, I didn't want to come across as critical in any way, and (probably more important), since the bloggers themselves seldom mention their closely-held, then it sure as hell wasn't my place to do so.

Looking back over the past several years' vet records, it seems that Kelsey might better have been named "Heinz." He always weighs 57 pounds -- never 56 or 58, but always 57.

As of this typing, everyone who has commented on "Unmentioned Dog" was mentioned on the elided material and has pretty much expressed what I said and, in a couple of cases, expanded well beyond what I said. I am led to believe that this blog could write itself better than I do: all I'd have to do, it seems, is toss out a couple of key terms, say I'd written a post that I didn't much like and so deleted it, and a far better post on the topics would compose itself in the comments.

Kelsey maintaining a dedicated vigil against whatever outside evil must have been responsible for the chicken poops on the picnic table.

A few direct replies to some comments:

O'Ronnie, I am flattered that you read this thing and thankful that you offer your insights and support in one particular area where we share a sad experience.

Mike, your comment is incisive and thoughtful, as usual, but you really know how to crush a guy's dreams. You really think "All Things Considered" wouldn't find Buffy and Goldie's tale irresistable?

"I see that you have something that might be tasty. If I plaster my ears all the way back along my neck, would you give me a little morsel?"

Dann, never say "never," right? Now you know.

Brian, Diane thought your opening was hilarious ("Diane must be thrilled by the comparison [to a dog] -- though I have a feeling she's not surprised.") No, not surprised at all, but I can't get away with anything, anyway. After reading your comment and the post itself (in that order), she said that what y'all didn't pick up on was that all those words around the picture were just an excuse to show a picture of something looking up at me with unquestioning adoration, and that picture sure wasn't going to be one of her. She then tried to manage just such an expression and couldn't hold it for as long as three seconds before we both almost injured ourselves laughing.

I have no idea how Nancy Reagan managed it.

Grin time, ride time.

What we show and what we don't in this medium was also a hot topic over at Chris's place last week. There it took the form of thoughts about comment moderation; if anyone reading this doesn't read Creek Running North on a regular basis, you might want to browse through that discussion.

If you do, please come back here once in a while, anyway.

San Lorenzo River dog.

Unmentioned Dog

Looking back over this blog's short history, it strikes me that I have not posted much about those who mean the most to me and have also had the good grace to remain alive. (Looking back over others' blogs for the same time period, I see that I am not alone in that.)

What I want to do here is fix one of those omissions.

Ft. Harrington has many animals; regular readers of this blog not only know that, but it's probably the reason why most read the damn thing. I post pictures of chickens, little spaniels, and kitties.

But I don't post much of this:

Kelsey and my knees, this evening.

Kelsey is so much a part of my heart that I hold him in the same reserve that I do Diane, or Adam, or that you hold those who are too precious for exposure to the net at large. He is who he is, and that is as integral to me as my heartbeat. He is the only four-foot in the Fort who has a job -- he is a watchdog, and a gurard dog, and a protector, and he takes that job seriously, and does it well, and has done so for ten years.

He also loves me with the unquestioning, ultimately forgiving, devoted dedication that folklore ascribes to all dogs. Maybe. This one has it true, though.

And that's probably all I'll post here about him until something transpires to make another post necessary.

[This post was edited from its original form to remove references to others' blogs that might have been interpreted to be criticisms, but weren't meant to be.]

A Birthday

Douglas M. Harrington
October 1, 1966 - November 14, 2006

Doug and my Dad, his Granddad, 1969.

When I talk to Doug today, I will tell him that this first of his birthdays without him is still a day of joy and thanks.

Some family will gather at the bench today, and do their best to make that true.

Animeme

Oh, crud.There really isn't any good reason to put this picture here. I just like using Brian Fies's stuff to decorate my blog.

You know how you hate internet chain letters? You know how you delete them as soon as their scent hits your monitor?

Well, I missed one until it was too late, until it had already burrowed its way through my eyeballs and on back into my brain. It disguised itself as a message from Chris Clarke, so I should have known better.

And if he doesn't add me to his Blogroll after this, well then, I'll, I'll, I'll... well I'll just spit, you know, and shuffle on over to Theriomorph's blog, hands clasped behind the small of my back and lower lip protruded far enough to support the OED. Grumbling something about "young jack of all asses" all the way.

It's a meme. And, after I'm done, I have to tag nine people in public to propagate the damn' thing. No fair scrolling down to the bottom to see if your name is there before you read what's in between. HEY! I SAID NO FAIR DOING THAT!

Okay, here goes:

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An interesting animal I had

Animals (plural), actually, and still have (not just had): chickens. Interesting not for any kind of rarity, of course (they may be the most numerous domestic critters, after all), but interesting because they are, actually, interesting. When Mrs. Fort first suggested six years ago that we should have some chickens clucking around the compound, I thought they would be, fundamentally, ambulatory vegetables. Some of them are, but many have proven to have actual personalities. Some are talkative, some are silent. Some are smart (for chickens), others are dumb as compost. Some are tough, some are wimpy. None are in any way intimidated by our dogs and cats, because they have sharp beaks and bigger claws. Look here and here and here for more detailed looks at our girls.

An interesting animal I ate

A yellowjacket. Unintentionally. In 1963 while riding my bike into town for a baseball game that I never arrived at. Heartburn does not faze me now.

An interesting animal in the Museum

Me (if we can accept "boneheaded" as a legitimate subset of "interesting").

It was probably about 1977 or '78. I was shepherding my boys, then age 7 and 11 or thereabouts, around the California Academy of Sciences. It was probably a weekend, since I remember the place being jammed.

At that time, the glass enclosures for the snakes were between the stuffed-animal dioramas and the aquarium. We paused to admire a pair of rattlesnakes, who, less than pleased with all the attention, were backed up against the rear of their enclosure, tails a-vibrating. The glass was too thick (and the crowd noise too loud) for their rattle to be audible, though.

I had never heard a rattlesnake's rattle, and really wanted to hear it. So I did what any idiot would do: I bent down, put my ear to the glass, and...

BLAM-BLAM!!!!!


... both snakes struck like lightning at the glass. An eighth of an inch from my right ear.

I must have jumped -- I can't imagine any other transport mechanism, but I can't testify to it -- eight feet away from the wall of cages in that instant. It took a good three days for the adrenaline to flush completely out of my system. I'd say that it diminished me in my sons' eyes, but, jeez, they had plenty of other things to do that for them, anyway.

As unnerving and embarrassing as it was for me, it must have been worse for the snakes. Pounding your teeth at high velocity against unyielding glass can't be a wonderful experience.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

Chickens, again. I now know how to inject chickens with medication via hypodermic needles, not something I ever thought I'd know how to do. Sadly, I also know now that it's generally futile: once a pet chicken shows signs of disease or disability, it's usually too late to do anything about it. As the most prey-like of prey animals, they can't afford to show any hint of vulnerability, so once they do so, they're pretty much done. One of our chickens just absolutely, literally stopped just before she died; she was apparently fully functional one second and immobile the next.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

A black widow spider in my potting shed, two summers ago. It bit me.

But that's not the interesting part. What's interesting is the response of my HMO, Kaiser, to my call after I'd been bitten. I had the 'phone on my shoulder while consulting the web about black widow bites (I'd never been bitten before). As I talked to the "advice nurse" on the 'phone line, I was simultaneously getting actual, useful information from Google. Not so from the "advice nurse." She wanted to know if my address had changed in the past six months. Google told me that any adverse effects of the bite might not show up for three hours. She wanted to know if I had any drug allergies. Google told me not to elevate the bite site above my heart. She wanted to know what my Kaiser record number was. Google told me that a significant fraction of black widow bites are "dry": no venom. She wanted to know, again, if I had any drug allergies.

I hung up. But I stayed online.

Turned out to be a dry bite.

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And the people I "tag" are these: (you can respond on your own blog -- if any -- or on the comments thread here, but, in either case, you should link back to Chris's blog just because he deserves it.)

Adam Harrington
Brian Fies
Dann Todd
Lucile Taber
Lyndell Blankenship
Mike Peterson
Carolina Ruth
The inimitable ronniecat
Ronnie Peterson

Marking Time

While we wait for this bloggist to shake loose time to blog more or less seriously again, I offer the following for my half-dozen readers' amusement and bemusement: there's a world of difference between the two nearly-identical words, childlike and childish.

Which one is this?

Sherwood (front) and Diane (second seat) on Disneyland's Splash Mountain, September 20, 2007.

Eyewitness Testimony: the Milky Way

"A Dark Sky over Death Valley" by Dan Duriscoe, U.S. National Park Service, which appeared on theAstronomy Picture of the Day site in May. I had somehow missed this image until it was linked by Creek Running North reader "embee" in Chris Clarke's Milky Way post comments.

Gifted and talented Chris Clarke runs Creek Running North, a blog mostly about what we oldsters used to call "natural history." CRN has a very large readership; it's not unusual for his posts to have a dozen comments from different people -- most of whom appear to be very smart, indeed -- within just two or three hours of an article's appearance.

As you might imagine, I was tickled, flattered, and honored when a quote from yours truly started this recent post on CRN about the Milky Way and its place in the readership's memories. Several dozen readers have already left their reminiscences (which make great reading), and I think each and every one of SherWord's seven readers could add valuable memories to the comments stream as well.

Please do!

Guinness-the-Kitten

Oh... "hai," as they say.
Click on any image to see a larger, higher-resolution one.

More than ten years ago, I was active in campus "governance" (read: political) activity at DeAnza. In 1994 - 95 I was President of the faculty Senate (Diane has threatened -- no, promised -- to divorce me if I ever go back to that sort of thing, but that's another story.) During my time in the Senate, I grew to appreciate and enjoy the company of a Senator from the History Department who is a Burmese cat breeder by avocation.

At that time, our beloved, tiny Max (who was a non-show-quality tossoff from a breeder in Southern California) was little more than a kitten, and this History prof was one of the very few faculty members I could freely and happily talk to about this incredibly cute thing that my little cat did yesterday! The three of you who are cat people know what I mean by that; the other four may want to skip this blog entry entirely.

Yes, SherWords readership appears to be up to seven.

Anyway.

Whatcha got?

Fast forward a decade and more:

When Max died after his long battle with renal failure earlier this year, I told my colleague about it, just because she knew Max vicariously. Soon thereafter, a little miracle appeared in one of her litters: a sable (very dark-brown) tiny guy afflicted with pectus excavatum, or "flat-chested kitten defect." While severe at first (my friend said they weren't sure for several weeks whether he would survive or not), he grew out of it well, and the only continuing setback seems to have been that he was about a month behind his litter-mates in development -- but stayed just that far behind, as though he had just gotten a late start and then charged along at a normal pace. (Subsequent meticulous examination by the Ft. Harrington vet shows nothing of concern -- his heart and lungs have developed normally, and the only slight remaining manifestation is that his chest is a little flatter than a normal kitten's... which serves to make his little round Buddha-belly even more comical.)

I like this big ape's chair. A lot.

When she was sure that the little guy was going to survive -- and pretty sure that he would be a normal, healthy cat -- she gave Ft. Harrington a call. Clearly, she couldn't breed, show, or sell the kitten, but she wanted to place him someplace she felt comfortable with. She asked us to take him.

We had to think about it for a long time. Thirteen, maybe even fifteen seconds later, we said "yes." His name is "Guinness," because of his color and to continue the Irish theme of his orange mate-in-newness here at the Fort, Finn McCool.

Unlike Finn, Guinness had absolutely zero trouble melding in with the menagerie. His obvious baby-ness probably helped him a lot, even with the dogs, but the rapidity with which he became comfortable with everyone was just astounding. We did the same preps we did for Finn -- isolation, introducing the other animals one at a time after he felt comfortable in his room, etc. etc. -- but trashed that routine after about two days. There was no point; he was just confident and accepted by everyone within 48 hours.

Two days after Guinness arrived (left to right: Cooper, Guinness, Alnitak).

He took a quick, special affinity to the Maine Coons, Al and Cooper. Comical at first because of the crazy difference in size, it sort of makes sense in hindsight: he's a kitten, and those two huge, gentle, fluffy cats may have had (and continue to have) a mom-like attraction for him.

Al, Guinness, and Cooper.

He even tries to nurse them sometimes. When that happens, they just gently push him away, but not very far.

My, what big... oh, to hell with the teeth. Your mouth is bigger than my head!

Breakfast with the bookends (Alnitak, Guinness, Copernicus.)

Even Oolie, the Black Freighter, grudgingly thinks he's ok, maybe.


But his special friend is turning out to be Finn McCool. Finn is still young enough (at about 15 months, but nobody's really sure about that) that having somebody to play with in a kitten way is a fun thing -- and it's helping Finn's long adjustment.

Buddies in a cat tree.

Not that Finn is having a bad time -- he's not; it's just taken him a while. Finally figuring out that the 'Coons are too tough to be messed with probably helped a lot:

On my command... unleash heck!

... but we're still not particularly happy that he likes to ambush poor Jax:

Why doesn't that orange cat like me? Everybody likes me!

But, for now, Guinness and Finn are the best of buddies, and that's going to be good for...

... everybody.

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