Ceci n'est pas un pont

Rowyn and I went to the Portola Redwoods State Park yesterday and had some lovely hikes around the little network of trails there. However, Pescadero Creek wends its way through there as well, crossing the trails at numerous points, and it turns out that most of the footpath bridges are only temporary, and are still dismantled from the winter.

The first time we came to a supposed crossing, we found the metal frame of the bridge hauled up on shore, along with a number of planks that probably had provided the solid footing for it. There was no other easy way to cross that we could see, nor could we spot a continuation of the trail on the other side, so we figured it wasn't worth wading. (There was a good picnic spot on a mossy rock, though, from which we watched other folks attempt to navigate the crossing.)

We backed up and came at the creek twice more with the same result: no bridge (at least not over the water), no handy rocks or logs, and no visible path on the other side anyway. We also tried options that weren't on the map (purely by accident, as the map was quite unclear about the [non]existence of various paths). Eventually we found a crossing with a thin, bouncy, fallen tree trunk stretched across it, and that did the job.

This let us make our way to the only specific scenic location we knew of and therefore our nominal goal: Tiptoe Falls. They're called "tiptoe" because they're just baby falls, and you never know when they might be napping, so you need to sneak up quietly on them. From a dizzying height of, oh, about 5 feet, they plunge thunderously into ankle deep water. Scenic in its own small way, though.

After that, we figured the easiest way back would be to find our way to the bridge on the service road, since the map didn't just show it as a dotted line crossing the creek, but three solid lines clearly indicating "solid, permanent, honest-to-goodness bridge on a road." When we got there, after several more inaccurate paths and some forging through the woods, here's what we found to get us across:

1. A concrete block, as if from an extinct dam.
2. A narrow, wobbly plank over the water.
3. A nearly vertical, muddy bank with no path or steps.
4. A fire hose tied around a stump at the top and dangling down the slope so you could haul yourself up.

Hacky, but it worked.

Anyway, it was a lovely hike overall, and all the map and bridge silliness just gave us more mileage out of the little trails. We also saw newts (one of which dropped out of a tree at us), slugs (of the banana variety), and fairy doors in trees.

[p.s. here's the the title reference.]

Things Everybody Knows

Mom is behind on the Harry Potter reading, so I was reading some of it out loud to her, and we had stopped to discuss names at one point.

Mom: ...and of course, "Dumbledore" is Anglo-Saxon for "Bumblebee."
Me: [blank look] really...?
Mom: Oh, sorry, I thought everyone knew that.

She evidently reads different books than the rest of us. :-)

Try to Find Me

Inspired by Lara's post on the same subject, I thought I'd list some of the more amusing searches that have led folks to my blog recently.

help i have too many books
Do you want a support group or someone to take them off your hands? I could probably go for either option.

a spell to ask for a particular thing
First step: decide which particular thing it is that you want.

paranormal monee
My grandmother is not paranormal. (At least, I think not.) Though on further Googling, I learned that Monee is actually a town in Illinois.

mandolin noises
I sound better than that, really.

today is my last day
And you're spending it reading my blog? Go out and tell your family you love them or something.

screwing at the contra dance
You, too. Go away. It's not that kind of a dance.

a sentence with the word iconoclast in it
"'Hello,' said I. 'Hello,' replied the iconoclast." (Courtesy of Rhymes with Orange, though I can no longer find the link to the exact strip.)

enunciation work on
Grammar fix you should first, Yoda.

they might be giants lindy hop
Off the top of my head, all I can think of is Too Cool Girls with the Velcro Horns. Any other ideas? (Miriam?)

concentrate on being good
I don't know if surfing the web will help with this. Though my blog is probably a safe place to land, amid all the smut and evil out there.

c.s. lewis terrarium
Really? He's in a terrarium? I don't actually know what to make of this.

cleopatra actual replica
Is "actual replica" an oxymoron or a tautology?

what is good for your false vocal chords
Singing songs about lies?

Two Halves of One Plant

A month or two ago, Mom and I each got an Amaryllis bulb. While they appeared to be separate bulbs, and were even sold in separate boxes with separate pots, we're beginning to suspect that they are, in fact, only one plant.

After planting, mine almost immediately sent a stalk shooting straight up into the air. It reached probably 20 inches in height, then opened up at the top into four equally spaced flowers radiating out from the top of the pole. One or two leaves remained at the bottom, barely poking their tips out from the bulb, not daring to go any farther.

Mom's Amaryllis just sat around for a couple weeks, then started working on the leaves. She now has several leaves almost two feet tall, and suspects it will basically just turn into an Amaryllis bush, sans flowers. Amaryllis disappointicus, we call it. She got the leaves and I got the flowers.

However, now that my plant is done flowering, the leaves are starting to grow. So maybe they just take turns, and Mom's leaves will die off in a bit, making way for some flowers. This page claims I can get mine to flower again, though I don't know if that would sabotage the poor little leaves trying to get their turn in the sun. We shall see.

The Funniest

I can blame Jen for leading me to my newest source of continual amusement. TheFunniest.info is a web-based voting project to find the funniest image in the world. The more you vote, the more of the pictures you get to see, and some of them have gotten me laughing pretty hard (some favorites include the monorail cat, the pirate keyboard and "receive bacon"). You can see the current top winners here.

(And by the way, this project is run by the guy who does xkcd, which is itself full of wonderfully funny things.)

Seattle

So far this weekend I've had at least three separate people come up and express to me how sad they are that I'm moving to Seattle. Unfortunately, no one has yet been able to tell me when I'm moving, which is a bit worrisome, since I haven't started packing. I'm still trying to track down a decent "why," as well as the "when," but all we really seem to have so far is the "who" and the "where." If anyone has any further details, please let me know. Luckily, Tracey has offered to put the entire dancing population of the bay area in a bus and haul everyone up to Seattle with me if I move there, which is nice, since I don't really want to leave here anyway.

Note: If anyone wants to help spread the alternative rumor, the story is that I married a biker chick, moved to Seattle to practice underwater welding, opened a motorcycle repair shop that went bust, and now am actually moving back to the bay area. Thanks to Lisa for helping sort this all out.

Anagrahams

Alright, just because I haven't posted for a while. Did you know that my full name can be rearranged to spell "slosh a warm dragon"? Or "oh, worms as garland." Or, perhaps best of all, "world has an orgasm." Wow. I knew I was put here on Earth to do big things, but... gee golly.

Punxatawny Graham

I poked my nose outside my apartment this weekend, saw my shadow, and decided it was springtime. And you know what that means. Yep. Short hair again.

Here leezard, leezard, leezard....

Here's a funny drawing of mine I found, from back in high school. Lacey and I were working at Moss Landing Marine Labs at the time, on a big project involving legless lizards. One of the ladies at the lab had a pet chihuahua named (I think) Sergio, who was sort of a little mascot for us. We wanted to train him to be a lizard hound and help us track and catch the little critters, but no luck. I did, however, have fun drawing him as such. The lizards weren't really quite that big, but some of them could probably still have put up a good fight against little Sergio.

Washington with a Mustache

After a recent spate of Marx-Brothers-movie-watching, I went and found Monkey Business, by Simon Louvish to read more about them. Fascinating. I had never even realized there was a fifth brother, Gummo Marx, who never went so far in show biz with the others. The most fun bit, though, may be reading bits of scripts that never made it into movies. I especially loved this quote, from a show called "On the Balcony" in the '20's, before their movie days. Groucho is trying to get some musicians to stand in for his unmusical sons, for reasons hopefully relevant to the plot:

Groucho (on the telephone): Hello, Gumchewer, give me two wrong numbers, then give me the Musicians' Union. "Union," u-n-u-n. Hello Une. Say, have you got a couple of men who are out of work? Oh, they're all out of work? Oh, it's a union. Well, send me a couple of men who look like me. What do I look like? Did you ever see Lincoln without a beard? Well, I look like Washington with a mustache.

(Quoted in Monkey Business, pg. 126)

Good stuff.

April Fool's Roundup

Some of my favorites from the April Fool's Day amusements so far:

• BoringBoring, a hilarious parody of BoingBoing, even down to the ads.
• GoogleGulp, an okay concept but the FAQ was what really made it funny.
• A new set of "life hacks" from 43 Folders.
• Yahoo! Slacker, "unless [they] don't finish it in time...."
• Scientific American gives up and goes with creationism.
• This wrench I found hiding under my windshield wipers. Probably not an April Fool's prank (more likely left behind accidentally after the last time in the shop) but randomly amusing just the same. You could only see it if you looked in at just the right angle, which is why I hadn't noticed it before.

Tonight is Friday Night Waltz, which will supposedly have many silly songs to be danced to. That should be fun.

Funny Gym

Dani was at the library tonight, so I was playing with her in between doing things like reinstalling OS 9 on ancient iMacs. Somehow or other, the subject of my weight came up, so I was joking that I only weigh one gram (since I'm exactly one Graham). Dani started to ask me if I exercise, and then seemed to have a bright idea about something.

Dani: Do you go to the Funny Gym?
Me: I don't think so. What's the Funny Gym?
Dani: You know. That's where they teach you to be funny and to be a good friend to kids and stuff.
Me: No, it sounds like fun, but I'm afraid I've never been there.
Dani (very insistent): But you have! That's why you're so good at it!

Awwww.

Some day I expect Dani will be a teenager and discover all the cute stories I've written about her here and be absolutely mortified. Oh well. She'll live. :-)

My Yahoo! My Yahee!

This video made me laugh harder than anything I've seen recently. Who knew lip syncing in front of a web cam could be so entertaining? The eyebrow was what just completely did me in, though.
(Found via the Yahoo! Search Blog.)

Goats

Kimmy was the mastermind behind our costumes for the Halloween party today. That means she got to be the goatherd and Goldman and I got to be the goats. Fun. Check out some of the other pictures from today, too. And Happy Blog-o-ween!

Use This in a Sentence

I got to see Dani at the library tonight, for the first time in a very long while. Unsurprisingly, I also got to help her with her homework. For a fairly bright little girl, she goes to great lengths sometimes in order to have trouble on her homework. One thing she was working on tonight was using vocabulary words in sentences. One of her sentences was: "I really really really don't know what shot means." While this managed to exceed the minimum length, it happened to be false, and I suggested that she change it. Once we got that worked out, we went on to the next one, where she had written "I have no idea what crop means." This was at least true, but we still managed to fix it up a bit. Things went uphill from there, thankfully.

It reminds me, though, of one of my favorite Rhymes With Orange cartoons. A student is taking a similar test, and hits the word iconoclast. "'Hello,' said I. 'Hello,' replied the iconoclast."

Harry and the Potters

I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. Harry and the Potters is a group formed by two brothers who dress up as Harry Potter and sing bad rock songs recounting the events of the various books. It's the sort of thing that's bad enough to be funny, though, so go to their website and check out some of their sample mp3s. (Warning: there will be spoilers here if you haven't read all the books. Yes, there are still some silly people out there who haven't read them all.)

You really do have to listen to them to get the full effect, but here are some of the lyrics that particularly made me laugh. First of all, for sheer simplicity, we have the chorus to "Stick it to Dolores":

Oh my god, you look like a frog [4x]
Umbridge, you're going down [4x]

Then the awkwardly-unmusical-lyrics award goes to "Wizard Chess", which is about Christmas activities and presents:

I got a mysterious gift from my dead dad
It was an invisibility cloak -- how rad
Oh, oh, oh-oh-oh
We'll spend our Christmas being invisible
Oh, oh, oh-oh-oh
We'll be invisible this Christmas

"The Human Hosepipe" was probably the one that made me laugh the most, though. Selected excerpts:

So we sat there with all the couples kissing
and soon things began deteriorating
and you began turning into the human hosepipe
...
[chorus:]
Cho Chang, what have I done?
I don't care where you and Cedric were snogging
Cho Chang, what have I done?
I just want to replay this Valentine's day.
...
Well, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned Hermione
And maybe you shouldn't have brought up Cedric Diggory
Because I'd rather not talk about your dead ex-boyfriends over coffee

My goodness, that was hilarious. Musical quality regardless, props to these guys for starting the band and making me laugh.

Clearly a Nuthatch

I was talking with Susanna about associations the other day. We each have colors that we associate in our minds with certain letters or numbers, and interestingly enough, a lot of them match. I have a similar thing where I pair certain colors with musical keys, and I also associate particular keys and colors with people. Susanna's version of that, as a bird watcher, is to have particular species of birds that she associates with different people. She gave a couple examples, and then, naturally, I asked what kind of bird I would be. Without a pause, she said "Oh, you're clearly a nuthatch." That completely cracked me up.

Collective Nouns

"Crows. Family Corvidae. Collective noun," intoned Mr. Croup, relishing the sound of the word, "a murder."
- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

Collective nouns can be kind of cool. I'd heard of a murder of crows before (along with an unkindness of ravens) but I liked the way it appeared in this book. There are plenty of other interesting ones to be found out there, too. This page has a nice, categorized list, while this one actually included references for all the ones she could verify as "authentic" (that is, existing somewhere other than in the mind of the person who suggested it). Here are some of my favorites:

a blessing of unicorns
a book of Mormons
a buffoonery of orangutans
a charlotte of webpages
a mass of priests
a parliament of owls
a siege of herons

And here are some of the more amusing, made-up examples. (Though really, the only way they're more "made-up" than the others is that fewer people so far have made them up. Funny how that works.)

a balance of accountants
a brace of dentists
a babble of linguists
a virtue of patients
a fraid of ghosts

Anybody else have any good ones? How about... a google of bloggers?

Automotive Sonata in H Major

I saw an ad for the 2004 Hyundai Sonata the other day. At first glance, it appears to be a fairly standard machine, but further inspection shows that it is really a highly unusual interpretation of a classic form.

While maintaining the three parts of the standard Sonata form, Hyundai's new model displays a very peculiar distribution of material throughout these parts. The exposition shows considerable folk music influence, being based on an astounding number of hornpipes. (It is advertised as "138 hp" but I have not attempted to identify each tune.) Though this is supposedly the driving force behind the Sonata, it is entirely absent from the development. Described as "roomy," this middle section contains a much lower density of material. However, it introduces an interesting new harmonic component with a chord progression notated AM/FM/CD, which I interpret to mean A major - F major - C diminished. The recapitulation is brief, and even sparser than the development. In fact, it can hardly even be said to be a recapitulation of anything. The majority of it has been left un-scored, perhaps indicating that the space should be filled in an improvisational manner by the performer. These peculiarities of form hardly seem to justify the title of Sonata applied to this vehicle, even allowing for large amounts of innovation.

Among the work's strong points, however, is the five-speed transmission, which indicates that it supports a wide range of tempos. This is comparable to much of Bach's work, such as "Ach, mein Sinn" from St. John's Passion, which has been recorded by various artists at tempos ranging from 77 to 115 beats per minute.

At $15,999 the cost of this Sonata may be prohibitive for some musicians, who may be more accustomed to paying $15-$30 for a book containing a large number of well-known compositions. However, it is far more affordable than some original manuscripts, which have been known to sell for as much as $2 million. The 5-10 year warranty should also be taken into account, though, and compared with the work of Beethoven and other masters of the past, which can safely be guaranteed for generations.

Apparently, I Look Vegan

It was nice to go shape note singing again today, after having missed it since November or so (not counting Camp Harmony). Jeanette was kind enough to host it, and she even made a lovely dinner for us afterwards. But the poor dear was somehow convinced that I was vegan and had gone to great pains to make sure that she made enough vegan food. At first I just didn't know why she was so carefully describing the all food to me in particular, but then I figured it out, thanked her for her consideration, and ate a bit of everything.