iPhone Mirabile Dictu

Today, I learned that my old cell phone had
not survived it's night in the driveway (oops). I ran to Burlington and after an hour
in the AT&T store with handsome young Kendal
I had this miracle of modern technology in my bag,
a bit more debt, and a commitment to AT&T that is
likely to last longer than a Hollywood marriage.

WHusband was not happy... He called on a surviving cell phone while I was
talking to Kendal and made me feel like Lucy to his Desi.
The agreement is to test drive it this weekend and research other
deals. Annulment is a possibility. (Between me and At&t - Whusband and I are in it for the duration).

What do you think?

Kids are rooting for the iPhone. The Understudy took this snap of Maisy and
Shackleton to demonstrate it's powers.

It's A Wonderful World, Part 1

I was flipping through the Peterson Field Guide for Mushrooms today. I wound up, naturally, at the colored plates in the middle. There I learned that these are actual names of mushrooms:

Soldier Grainy Club

Black Earthtongue

Scarlet Elf Cup

Dead Man's Fingers

Pink Hairy Goblet

Devil's Urn

Winter Slippery Cap

That was on one page.


Shall we pause for a moment to consider who came up with these names? What English peasant in the 12th century nibbled one for his aunt, the town midwife/witch? How these names were recorded and spread? A marvel of nature and the accretion of human knowledge, right here.

Let Me Do You a Favor

It's give, give, give here at the Last House.

I have been meaning to recommend the documentary, Young@Heart, which aired on PBS last week. A documentary? On PBS? She calls that a favor? Maybe for insomniacs.

No, really, it was so much fun - my kids asked to be allowed to stay up and watch it. All of us were glued to it from beginning to end. Here's a snippet from a review on the website:

Time revises every taste and closes every gap. To observe the Young@Heart Chorus, a fluctuating group of about two dozen singers whose average age is 80, perform "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees in Stephen Walker's documentary "Young@Heart" is to be uplifted, if slightly unsettled.

Sung by people approaching the end of their lives, the song is no longer about strutting through the urban jungle with your elbows out; it is a blunt survival anthem. These singers, most of them well- rehearsed amateurs, refuse to go gently into that good night. For them music is oxygen.

When they perform punk classics like "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by the Clash or "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones, the notion of a generation gap begins to crumble. Apart from the rebellious attitude behind the songs' creation, these are elementary meat-and-potatoes tunes: "Sing Along With Mitch" material but with a hip credential.

The movie concentrates on the rigorous two-month preparations for a 2006 concert at the Academy Theater in Northampton. Guided by the chorus's demanding longtime director, Bob Cilman, the members are learning new material, including "Yes We Can Can," the Allen Toussaint hit for the Pointer Sisters, whose lyrics repeat "can" 71 times in intricate, staccato patterns; Sonic Youth's enigmatic, equally demanding "Schizophrenia"; and the Coldplay ballad "Fix You." [...]

— By STEPHEN HOLDEN, New York Times

I cried for about half of the film and laughed during the other half. Today, driving to the grocery store and alone in the car, "Fix You" came on the radio. It is sung during the Young@Heart Performance in the film by a charismatic man with an oxygen tank and a death sentence. I started crying again. I am crying now remembering it. There is a scene in the film where the chorus is singing for prisoners at a Massachusetts correctional facility. The cuts between the convicts, many of whom are clearly deeply moved by what they are seeing, and good, old singers (emphasis on "good") was unexpected and brilliant. Maybe it is not the beginning, or even the middle of life where we really get right down to the heart of things...



(Alice Image courtesy: public-domain.zorger.com

Twelve --- And Thinking About Twenty

The Understudy turned twelve this week. She has already turned out way better than we could have hoped or expected, given her parentage. Good hearted, sensible, bright and good looking to boot. But she is sailing out of the harbor of childhood headed for the waters around that Tierra del Fuego that lie ahead. This weekend included, along with a 12th birthday party, her first school dance. Oh, the Friday and Saturday nights to come!

This dance, of course, had its charms for all of us parents. The Understudy had invited a friend from her former school (a girl, of course) and the two of them spent a happy half hour combing their hair and putting on nail polish and dressing up. I dropped them off just before the party got going. The lights in the cafeteria had been dimmed, but the music hadn't started and the school lobby and hallways were in their full fluorescent glory. The few early arrivals still looked, charmingly, very much like elementary school students. Donations of canned goods brought a dollar off the price of admission. The friend was introduced,as required, to the teacher in charge of the dance and the school principal. A boy with a buzz cut and a baleful expression studied us without speaking.

I returned an hour and half later to pick them up. The Understudy and her friend were in the middle of mass of middle school students, all of them hopping like pistons to a deafening beat. The hopping, and the drama, various dramas that I heard a little about as we made our way back home, had been a good experience. The Understudy's cheeks were flushed. She had danced like a maniac she said. It was great! Well. A good first night out. May it ever be thus.

On the day before the dance I was at the gym getting some of that promised 2010 exercise. I stayed longer than I intended (OK, just walking on the treadmill) because I couldn't cut off my iPod before I got to the end of a fascinating report on This American Life called "Party School" Ira Glass and his people went to Penn State, 2009's number one party school according to The Princeton Review, and talked to representatives from every group of people who either make Penn State number one or who suffer from the fact that it is number one.

Listen for yourself if you have the time. It had me thinking about drinking as a way of undergraduate life. I never actually found it very fun, looking back, although I seem to recall feeling like it was supposed to be fun and wondering when it would deliver said fun. That would be, basically, never in my experience. Not surprisingly, I found it hard to believe that all the whooping drunk kids they interviewed for "Party School" actually liked drinking as much as they said they did. Isn't it really kind of sad by the end of the evening, or the next day, even at 21? I'd love to hear what you think.

Understudy, are you listening?

While we're talking about This American Life, I'll throw in that I think Ira Glass should get one of those Macarthur genius awards. That show has been slowly growing on my for years and now I am ready to worship at its altar.

Plenty Snow, Plenty Cold and Bad Manners

Well, the Christmas break is nearly over and not nearly so many things accomplished as planned. The tree is staying until MLK Day at least. We have been invited to dinner this evening with some of our favorite human beings, visiting English people with a cabin high up on a dirt road in a neighboring town. I said yes immediately when they called yesterday morning, and then got thinking about the forecast. (See above).

Oh dear.

And they don't have a phone. We've tried emailing but to no avail. I even tried emailing one of their relatives in England. The problem is that I accepted without fully registering that today was the last day of the Christmas break and kids and I have to go back to school and work tomorrow! We would normally depart the Last House (now a weekend only abode) for our new weekday residence in Stowe, an hour away, while there was still plenty of light. Dinner, however, is set for six - when the frozen roads will be dark as midnight in a coal mine, with swirling snow lit only by the high-beams from oncoming, speeding pickup trucks.

Query - to be a horrible boor and just send Whusband to dinner or to brave the backroads with two kids and a dog and then to drive another hour through the dark to get home?

I should mention I have something like PTSD as a result of all the winter driving I have had to do over the last couple years...

Tell me what you think and I'll come back later and tell you what we did.

In other news, today's banner actually is, for once, a view from the house, as advertised. I stood at the the front door and took it on the one day last week when we saw the sun here.

The forecast right now is for five solid days of snow and snow showers. I have been known in the past to be trifle, hmmm, "superior" to southerners who are undone by a couple of inches of snow or temperatures that make barbecuing uncomfortable. Seeing a solid week of those little cloud icons on the Weather Channel just now, many with snowflake icons as well, makes me humble.

Maybe those southerners are onto something... Of course, it's freezing in Florida now too, and that is some comfort in a schadenfreude sort of way.

Going, Going...

The last two hours of 2009 are twirling away and I thought I would spend them as I spent so much of the year: here, in the old wing chair with my warm laptop in place, taking me where I want to go around the Internet and compensating somewhat for the draft that creeps in from the ugly 1970s bay window on my right.

Lately,I know, I been one poor correspondent and I been too, too hard to find but that doesn't mean you ain't been on my mind.

(These things get into your head and then you are helpless. I sometimes wonder if the last thought that flits through my dying brain will be the jingle for the Frito Bandito).

But I am back and in a discursive mood, though, as ever, stone cold sober. (More on that in a minute). To catch you up on recent events in our small round, Christmas was nice. Above: the Understudy opening her iPod Touch on Christmas morning. Above that (in today's banner), a picture of silver fox I borrowed to decorate a T-shirt for Shackleton who has an Internet avatar called "Shiftyfox", a name that I kind of love. Plenty of snow and cold here on the Vermont/Quebec border. Two days of skiing, about as many of working.

The nuclear Woolfoot family and I are spending a very quiet New Year's Eve, as per our usual. Whusband is on hour fourteen of his phone call with Bangalore trying to remove a 2004 version of an antivirus program from his computer, which has some kind of virus that can't be cured til the 2004 antivirus program goes. O Paradox! Shackleton is turning circles around the living room, flying his Matchbox blimp and Matchbox Delta wing fighter, along with a model John Deere tractor and telling himself a story about them. I can't quite hear it. A train whistle is blowing. The usual Woolfoot glitz and glamor.

Whusband bought a bottle of plonk for Christmas - "Ellenbogen" something or other. It came in a big bottle and had a small price. (A friend pointed out that this should have been a tip to him that as to its quality). Most of it is still available, waiting on the table. And as it's the only semi-potable alcohol in the house and I am planning to tip a glass a little later, a toast to the family and to you all, my bloggy friends. Here's to you! Farewell 2009 and best wishes for 2010. I wish I had something more sparkly.

This puts me in mind of R. Burns and Auld Lang Syne and so provides a segue to this little review of a holiday performance the kids and I attended just before Christmas.

Hap Hap Happy New Year to you.

Till a' the seats gang dry...

Two weeks ago, I won seats for four at the pending "Christmas Revel/Solstice festival" being staged at Dartmouth College the following weekend. The announcer said something about "a mixture of professional and community performers" and "a Scottish Celebration of the winter solstice."

I realized after the fact that there was some code in this that I failed to decipher.

One missed clue: the Scots stopped celebrating the Solstice around the time they stopped painting their rear-ends blue and harassing the Roman legionnaires who had the bad luck to be posted along the Humber to keep them out of England. Modern day "Solstice" celebrations are the province of unhappy goth teenagers and doughy superannuated hippies. I normally avoid that province. And, duh, this was billed as a "revel," which meant, from my point of view, that something of the opposite would likely occur.

The Scots bit got me though. Many of us north Americans have a kind of Scottish sweet tooth - albeit one that relies on a kind of theme-park image Scots during the age of Robert Burns. I for one, am willing to allow the Scots to advance at least to the era of the Bay City Rollers, but, and here's a tip for anyone arranging an entertainment for American families with "Scotland" on the bill, there must be lots of drums and pipes- and they need to be loud! ("Stirring" being the minimum requirement for Scots-themed entertainment).

I checked the Revels website before we left the Last House for the hour and half journey south to Hanover and saw that two of the four shows had sold out. That was reassuring. Of course, I failed to take into account that we were headed to a university town on the northern end of the Connecticut River. (I.e., with a built-in audience of people who can be counted on to send checks to PBS, buy recordings of Garrison Keillor and generally support any highish [white] brow culture).

A stout gray-haired lady with a bit of tartan thrown over her shoulder kindly showed us, after a bit of confusion, to our free seats said, with obvious loyalty to the organization, "it's a good show." Volunteerism is lovely of course, but it signals that one is the realm of "Community Theater". We make allowances for Community Theater because our friends and neighbors are performing, but I was an hour and half away from home and expecting something that (other) people paid for because it was, well, professional.

I won't go on too much more. There were knee socks a plenty, two teenagers who somehow were persuaded to do Morris Dancing (cavort, cavort, PRESENT, cavort, cavort, PRESENT). A man came out and read Burns' poems in Scots dialect (the kid in front of us kept asking, "what did he say?" I am sure no one in the audience could have answered him). The professional performers, I am guessing, were a pair of women fiddlers and a drummer who rendered a few of those tuneless Gaelic fiddling screes. It was very skillfully done, but a little of this goes a long way. I am guessing that the Scots in the era of Burns found it entertaining because they were drunk or about to be.

We must have been about an hour into all of this when we got to a number called "The Lord of the Dance" (thank you Michael Flatley - never mind about the distinction between Ireland and Scotland - it is not much recognized in North America). This involved the performers coming off the stage and dancing through the aisles, inviting all the non-drunk white people (the entire audience) to join them. I stole a glance at the program and saw we had an hour and some left to go, so the kids and I danced (well, not actually, we walked) up and out of the theater and ran (literally, it was cold) to the parking lot.

The Understudy summed it up well when she called Whusband from the minivan to tell him we were on our way home. (Whusband had a ticket but begged off). "Well, we left early," she said, "'cause it was kind of dorky."

Julian Fellowes, Zadie Smith; Clever Kiwis

No time for a proper post this weekend, what with Christmas looming and all. I have not even had a chance to photograph that fascinating vinyl toilet seat I so cleverly wrote about last week, much less to unravel the cultural signifiers of the rest of the bathroom. Sorry for any disappointment. I'll have to get back around to that one of these days.

Before I Forget: Recent Reading

Right now, I have Zadie Smith's book of essays Changing My Mind rattling around in my mind next to Julian Fellowes' novel Past Imperfect. I read Smith's book during a couple of insomniac nights last week. I was intrigued with her life story as I was by her talent and (for the literary world) rocket ride to fame. (For some reason I couldn't get a link to the Wikipedia article about her to work, but you can read about her there and in a hundred other places). Fellowes is a wonderful writer, chronicler really, of the current dilemmas of what remains of the former ruling class of Britain. (Did you read Snobs? Or see Gosford Park? If so, you know him already, if not, run and acquire them). Past Imperfect came in the mail yesterday and I was fighting sleep last night so I could keep reading. It's one of those books you are grateful to have on your nightstand. Better than having a cake in a box on the table.

Smith's credentials, as a very young writer and the daughter of a Jamaican woman and working-class English father are, from a prestige standpoint every bit as good as Fellowes', whose origins and social milieu are at the polar opposite of English society. In fact, Smith's cultural credentials are almost certainly better than Fellowes' in this Obama-age. Both are brilliant, of course, and I think they have Cambridge in common. I am guessing they would like each other - probably they have met as the world of genius writers, especially in England, is not so terribly large. I would also venture to guess that they are both too polite to acknowledge that the aristocracy in the mode of Fellowes has given way to the aristocracy in the mode of Smith. They are English after all...


Proof that Human Beings Are Worth the Trouble

I saw this video over at The Shopping Sherpa (see the link on my blog roll). The Sherpa is down under, in Australia, and she finds and shares Internet gems from time to time, like this unbelievable little video from the New Zealand Book Council. Watch to the end (just a bit over 2 minutes) to get the full benefit. It staggers me that someone could think of this and execute it. Bye for now.