Geese gone wild

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When it rains, the geese take over the greenspace near the Providence River. There are usually at least a couple dozen of them – big fat waddlers, with beautiful light-and-dark markings. I took this photo yesterday morning:

Lots of good eatin’ there! But wild geese are tough. My sister and brother-in-law had some wild geese fly over their farm back in the 1970s, and shot a few, and Susan prepared one for Thanksgiving, and – well, we couldn’t even chew it. Wild geese get a lot of exercise.

And geese are rumored to be foul-tempered. I’m always a little timid when they’re standing in front of me on the sidewalk; I never know when I’m gonna get stampeded and squawked at. They’re smaller than me, individually, but they outnumber me. They could swarm me.

And then there are the poops. Kids, there is nothing in the world quite so vile-looking as a goose poop. It’s a big green slimy-looking thing about the size of a small cigar. And geese poop a lot. (My mother always used the expression “go like a goose.” Evidently she knew what she was talking about.)

But I like to watch them. The other day, I saw two of them pecking at one another, running around aimlessly in a circle and honking.

Get it? Wild goose chase.

Ha ha.

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I am a squid

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“What’s your spirit animal?” Apollonia asked me recently. (You have to understand that these kinds of queries are common, and even natural, between us.)

I considered briefly. “What’s yours?” I asked, to gain time.

“Wolf,” she said.

“She-wolf,” I said. “Appropriate.”

She shook her head. “Alpha wolf. Leader of the pack.”

I nodded. “I can see it. Okay. I’ve got mine. Squid.”

She grimaced, then nodded. “Okay. Reasons?”

“One,” I said. “It can swim, and I can’t. I’d like to be able to swim. Two: it can squirt ink at people with whom it’s pissed off. Three: it’s supposed to be very intelligent. Four: it’s delicious when fried with jalapenos.”

A few days later, I discovered why Apollonia asked this question: she was sending me an Amazon gift card for my birthday, and was trying to find an appropriate design (they offer quite a few). They don’t do squid, but they have a very cute octopus.

I still like squid better. They taste better, at any rate. Click here to see a video with Isabella Rosselini on the sex-life of the squid.

Except, maybe, after you see it, calamari won’t be so delicious anymore, even when fried with jalapenos.

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In memoriam: Cosmo "Gus" Allegretti

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You’ve seen me write about dead relatives, and the passing of friends, and even the passing of celebrities.

Well, a celebrity passed away a few weeks ago, though many of his fans didn’t even know his real name.

He was a puppeteer / actor / dancer named Cosmo Allegretti, known to his friends as Gus. He was a regular on the “Captain Kangaroo” program that ran from the 1950s into the 1980s. But you seldom saw him – during the first ten or fifteen years, anyway. He was always in disguise.

Sometimes he was Dancing Bear, who never spoke, but who communicated through clever little softshoe routines:

Sometimes he was fussy old Grandfather Clock, who had to be awakened very gently, and who told stories and recited poems:

Later in the show’s history, he was Dennis the Apprentice, always dressed in a painter’s whites, big and earnest and clumsy (though at least he didn’t have to hide his face anymore):

Best of all, he was Mister Moose and Bunny Rabbit. Bob Keeshan, writing about the show, said that “these two were surrogates for children, demonstrating their playful power over adults.” I loved them both: they were sneaky and dishonest without being really bad. The Captain was often frustrated with both of them, but you could tell that he loved them too, and they seemed to love him too.

Mister Moose was a practical joker. He was always tricking the Captain into saying things like “Let ‘er rip!”, at which point a couple hundred ping-pong balls would fall from the ceiling all over the Captain’s head. And then Mister Moose would go into raptures. (Personal note: whenever I do a puppet voice, it’s Mister Moose’s reedy falsetto. Why not?)

Bunny Rabbit was silent, like Dancing Bear. He was small and wore glasses. He’d get the Captain’s attention by rapping on the tabletop, and he always ended up stealing all of the Captain’s delicious carrots.

Here they are together, bamboozling the Captain one more time:

So many good memories.

Rest in peace, Gus.

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Moon globe

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Sometime around 1969 or 1970, after the first few moon landings, I bought myself a moon globe at the Fred Meyer on Fourth Plain in Vancouver, Washington.

It was nicely detailed, like a world globe, with all the lunar seas and oceans and craters labeled. It stood on a simple acrylic frame.

I loved it, and I can’t even tell you why. It was so simple: gray and stark and beautiful. It stood next to the world globe I’d received for my seventh birthday – it was the same size, but seemed somehow more modern, with its jazzy clear-plastic stand.

I think it sang to me, a little bit, about the future, and outer space, and the universe, and how all the science-fiction books I’d ever read were going to come true, and that we were going to be living in outer space any time now.

I left my moon-globe in my mother’s house when I left home in 1978. After her death, I didn’t collect it; I put it aside, and I left it in a big box in my brother’s garage back in Washington state.

Maybe it’s still there, and maybe not. Maybe it’s covered with mold. Maybe it’s been thrown away.

Oh, I think about it sometimes. I miss that stupid globe. It was so lovely.

Recently I went online and bought a little Replogle “Wonder Globe” of the moon. It’s small – only six inches across – but it’s lovely too. It serves to remind me of my original moon globe, and it sings to me (very softly) of the same dreams I had when I was a kid.

Softly it sings: someday we’ll live among the stars.

Well, maybe not me.

But, kids, maybe you will. If you want to.


And now, Benny Goodman:

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The monkey-puzzle tree

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When I was a kid, I rode the bus to school. I spent forty-five minutes on the bus every morning and every afternoon. I was the first kid on the bus in the morning, and the last kid off, because I lived farthest away from the school.

The bus route was very scenic, actually. It was mostly deep forest where I lived, alternating with pastures and farmland.

The halfway mark between home and school was a kind of double-turn in the road: if you were driving east from Battle Ground, you took a sharp right, then a sharp left. I don’t know why. Property lines?

It had a double name. The sharp right was “Johnson’s Corner”; the sharp left was “Gravel Point.” (Who knows about these things?) This is what it looks like on the map:

There was a big white house at Johnson’s Corner, or at least it seemed big to me as a kid. I passed it twice a day on the bus, so I should have a vivid memory of it. But – you know? – I just remember a big white house.

But I remember the monkey-puzzle tree.

It was huge – taller than the house, I think. It was the only monkey-puzzle tree in the whole area. Did the owners (whether or not they were named Johnson) plant it? Or was it already there? At any rate, it was awfully big when I was a kid.

There was an article in a recent Financial Times about the monkey-puzzle. It’s Araucaria araucana, from Chile / Argentina. I had no idea! I assumed it was a foreign import, but not from so far away!

But no wonder it grew so well, and felt so much at home, in warm wet Washington state. Its home country was volcanic and warm, like the coastal Pacific Northwest.

The monkey-puzzle tree at Johnson’s Corner was beautiful and strange. It always fascinated me.

And it whispered to me that the world was a big place, and that there was more to life than what I saw around me.

Smart tree. It was right.

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Canadian money

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I took a friend to my bank to exchange some dollars a while back, because my bank has better exchange rates than his. He turned 354 American dollars into 345 Canadian dollars, just like that.

And what beautiful currency they have in Canada these days!

The twenty-dollar Canadian bills have a little clear plastic window in them, along with the shiny metallic strips. Some of the bills have pictures of Helen Mirren, or possibly Elizabeth II. The five-dollar bills have images of a sport – either curling or hockey, I couldn’t tell which. (My friend tells me that it’s curling, but he’s not Canadian, so how can he be sure?)

These are far more entertaining than our dull old American greenbacks. I’ve folded a one-dollar bill into thirds and made George Washington’s head into a mushroom too often; it just ain’t fun anymore. And who cares what car’s represented on the ten-dollar bill? (I always thought it was a Duesenberg, but evidently I was wrong)

Why can’t we put Walt Whitman on our money, or Mark Twain, or Edward MacDowell, or Leonard Bernstein? What about Humphrey Bogart, or Artemus Ward? We put everything in creation on our postage stamps – flowers and dragons and cartoon characters and movie stars. Why not on our money too?

Most countries celebrate their culture on their currency, not just their political history. They put their writers and musicians on the money. We don’t. I don’t think Americans like to be reminded that we have a “culture.” We’re far too macho to have “culture.” On our money, we have only Founding Fathers, Male Presidents like Wilson and Grant, and Miscellaneous Political Figures, like Alexander Hamilton and Salmon Chase.

I vote for variety, and culture, and entertainment.

If the Canadians can do it, then surely we can do it too.

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For Sunday: Three Dog Night sings Laura Nyro's "Eli's Coming"

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Laura Nyro wrote some dynamite songs in the 1960s.

This is one of them.

This is a performance of one of them by Three Dog Night on a TV show in 1969, with the kinds of video blandishments we thought were neat in those days.

Eli’s coming!

Hide your heart, girl!

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The fragility of hardware

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We love our devices, don’t we? Our laptops, and smartphones, and tablets. I have all three, and I marvel at how well they work.

Also I marvel at how pretty they are. Every evening I plug my iPhone in to charge, and it lies there pulsing with green light like a fragment of kryptonite, and I think: how lovely!

But how fragile also.

A few weeks ago, I was taking pictures in a field of weeds with my iPhone. I leaned down for a closeup of some Japanese knotweed, and –

Oops! Flip! Crash!

I’ve dropped my phone at least a dozen times before, and I’ve always been lucky: it always landed on a soft surface. This time, it landed on a jagged-edged paving stone.

The phone itself was unfazed. The glass covering, however, was shattered into a million pieces.

They can be fixed. Mine was an iPhone5, so the repair was not cheap. Luckily it was a business phone, so the company paid for the repair. But – still!

Since then, I’ve ordered a nice smothery cover for my phone, which will enfold it like a mother’s love.

Why do companies make beautiful slim little phones that slip right out of your hand like baby eels? Everyone buys a rubber/plastic guard for his/her phone. I hate that – why have a beautiful thing and disguise it? – and kept mine in a kind of holster. The holster didn’t protect it from that damned paving stone.

Apple / Samsung / everyone else: stop making things ultra-thin, if it means we have to buy ultra-thick covers to protect them.

It’s just ridiculous.

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The wildflowers of downtown Providence, Rhode Island

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A local photographer has taken some lovely photos of plants and flowers that occupy the property formerly occupied by I-195 in Providence (which, for the past two years or so, has been a vast green space in the very middle of the city).

I walk through that green space every day. I rejoice in it. I love my friend Oma’s comment recently: “Here in England it's not so important to drive as over there [in the USA]. In your neighbourhood it looks similar. As long as you can get to the shops, you can walk along the sidewalks and look at the flowers or the weeds.”

Notice what she said: “the flowers or the weeds.”

She and I feel the same way: weeds are lovely too. She sent me a lovely book about weeds a while back, and it was after my own heart.

Here are some of my own photos of weeds / wildflowers in the neighborhood. They’re not as good as they might be, but oh well, I’m a terrible photographer, who cares?:

CHICORY (Cichorium intybus). Beautiful blue/purple flowers. This is a picture of a lovely stand of them very near the Point Street Bridge. The roots are roasted and ground and mixed with coffee; I’ve had coffee with chicory, and it’s delicious.

BUTTER AND EGGS (Linaria vulgaris). A beautiful roadside wildflower. Not useful for anything that I know of. Also called “toadflax.” I like the name “butter and eggs” better

MILKWEED (Asclepias sp.). I mistakenly told a coworker recently that this was “Joe Pye Weed,” which is horribly wrong. The flowers are very fragrant, and the plants are attractive, and the seeds are big cloudy masses of fluff.

RABBIT’S FOOT CLOVER (Trifolium arvense). I only identified this one a few weeks ago. It’s obviously a clover, but fuzzier, and very cute. This one was huge until it was cut down by the city, but it began to come back within days. You can’t kill clover.

BIRDSFOOT TREFOIL (Lotus corniculatus). Obviously a legume, with beautiful yellow pea-like blossoms. The whole field was golden with these, until they were cut down. They too came back within days.

JAPANESE KNOTWEED (Fallopia japonica). A terrible invasive species from Asia. But it has lovely foliage and nice flowers.

DEADLY NIGHTSHADE (Atropa belladonna). A relative of the tomato. Look at this pretty little lady, with pretty purple blossoms! But she’s terribly poisonous. Notice the cute little green mini-tomato berries; they’ll be a delicious-looking red later in the season. Just don’t eat them, okay?

QUEEN ANNE’S LACE (Daucus carota). The wild carrot. This is a sweet little flower that also grew very healthily where I was born, back in southwest Washington. This is a very small specimen, but nice; I’m always glad to see it.

These are all just as beautiful as any garden flowers. More so, really, because they don’t rely on gardeners to take care of them.

They take care of themselves.

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The decline and fall of CNN

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Ted Turner, a true visionary who’s also a true kook, founded the Cable News Network in 1980. People said he was crazy; there wasn’t enough news in the world to justify a 24/7 television news network.

CNN sputtered along through the 1980s. Finally, the first Gulf War in 1991 gave them a breakthrough. People sat hypnotized in front of their TVs and watched the live coverage from Iraq and Kuwait: Wolf Blitzer, Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett, Christiane Amanpour. I remember sitting mesmerized in front of a friend’s television myself (I didn’t have cable in those days).

Then cable became common. Then it became almost universal. Then it became almost necessary.

Then CNN found that it was competing with Fox and other news networks, which were using the formula CNN had itself created: reporting, reporting on the reporting, experts. It is hard to fill up twenty-four hours a day with news, so you come up with other stuff – let’s be charitable and call it “commentary” – and pretend that your "commentary" is news too.

Let’s fast forward to the present day, shall we?

On the morning of the fourth of July, Partner and I happened to be watching CNN, and I suddenly realized that they were running a promo for the return of “Crossfire.”

“Crossfire”! This was a point-counterpoint program with Tucker Carlson maybe ten years ago, which got shamed off the air by Jon Stewart, who pointed out that they were accomplishing nothing except filling time. 

Now they’re bringing it back.

Okay. Back to CNN. They’re doing a piece on the New England Patriots player, Aaron Hernandez, who killed some people. First, the anchor garbles the words “New England Patriots” into something incomprehensible, and stares silently into the camera for a long moment until she recovers control of her voice. Now we go to the story. CNN has a reporter on the scene in Attleboro, Massachusetts; a neighbor is leading her around the crime scene, explaining things to her. How the hell does this guy know anything? Best of all, the neighbor is introduced this way: “This is Jay. He asked that we not use his last name.”

Hi, Jay. We can see your face. If we really meant to do you harm, we probably wouldn’t need to know your last name.

But don’t blame poor Jay in Attleboro. Blame the CNN reporter who said, “Uh, sure, if you don’t want to use your last name, you don’t have to. But of course you can appear on camera.”

Isn’t CNN hiring anyone with any expertise in journalism?

Evidently not.

But journalism is no longer in demand.

You gotta fill up those twenty-four hours a day with something!

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