Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Usually we get to paint our own portraits in these pages of ours, and to post photos that are at least somewhat flattering. For example, if I think about what I look like, I might think of these recent but still very flattering photos.

Anyway, I love the email interview Frank Paynter did of me–he is a brilliant question-devizer–and he was kind enough to take down a photo I didn’t like and replace it with one I sent him. So now this is what I look like, not just according to me but also in Frank Paynter’s interview.

But as for what I am like–that nerdy, ditzy persona in the interview? Frank got that perfectly right.

Wow! I woke up Friday morning to discover that Frank Paynter has published our email interview! I quickly dashed off this mini-response, then raced out the door to catch my flight to Colorado without noticing I never posted it to the home page.

Now I’m sitting in a Kinko’s in Boulder…expect mile-high blogging when I return, and jet-lagged garble at this very moment.

Thanks to Frank for being so interested–and so interesting himself.

There’s a great big biosphere outside our blogosphere, and you can see some its strangest features in Amity Wilczek‘s Harvard blog “Nature Is Profligate.”

Aside from the fact that Amity is my daughter–I love the surprising stuff she blogs about and the even-more-surprising things she says about that stuff. To quote Amity on the subject of
two-headed snakes:

“Watching a movie of a two-headed snake is like watching a tug of war with a very short rope — one head says “Up!” while the other says “Down!”…Snakes have a keen sense of smell, which is very important in their prey location response. If one head smells like a recent meal, the other head may try to eat it!

(BTW, following Amity’s two-headed-snake-links, I discovered a
cute little duck with a 17-inch corkscrew for a penis. Did he evolve for two-thirds of “wine, women, and song”?)

Before I answer–speaking of the surreal–do you ever wonder how people find your weblog? I have been looking at my blog’s “referer stats“–the searches that found me. I now feel honored, and spooked, and very puzzled.

I’m both honored and spooked that people come here from searches for “E.B. White” or “Once More to the Lake.” Honored, because I love E.B. White–his honesty, insight, and crafty craftsmanship. (Check out his biography for more.) Spooked, to picture White’s admirers reading my prose. Wooooohhh, scary.

I first started blogging about Republican “Astroturf”–PR push-pieces sent out to small-town papers by the RNC, disguised as local “letters to the editor.” Now, six months later, people end up at my blog after searches for things like “where to buy astroturf”, “astroturf colors”, even “astroturf snow.”

Some searches that end up here are even more puzzling. “Charlotte’s+Web+sexist”? I never said that! “Custodial parents+are+evil”? I said the opposite! “Why+is+my+cat+timid”? Errrrr–huh?

Is this the fault of search engines or misshaped queries? Nahhhh, let’s join Andrew Orlowski and blame sneaky bloggers!

That’s right, folks! I confess–I wanted readers who had (sob) no interest in my blog. I set my sneaky net to capture people looking for something that I don’t offer. Okay, I’m no alpha-blogger–but we epsilon-bloggers are evil in our own way.

Coming next week: how custodial parents and colored astroturf create semiotic heuristic synergy–and that’s why your cat is timid!

The good:

Cape Cod’s North Shore is full of

• quaking bogs
• anadromous fish runs
• salt marshes
• other places known as “critical habitats“

Cape Cod’s South Shore is full of

• fried-clam-shacks
• taffy shops
• miniature golf
• other places known as “tourist traps.”

I absolutely love both kinds of places.

The bad:

Little-bitty teentsy-beentsy roads, filled up with stop-and-go traffic. Amazingly (to this veteran Boston driver) other cars stop to let you into their lane!

The ugly (do you really want to know?):

In all of the mid-Cape region where I was staying, the only Web-connection was one (1) Kinko’s in Hyannis–with exactly three (3) computers. Of these, one (1) was busy. One (1) was a Mac, still using OS 9 (nine).

The third (3rd)–a nice young man warned me–had a “problem” with printing. I soon found out why–it was completely offline–no printer, no server–and no (zip, zero, 0, also zilch) Internet connection!

God bless the old Mac, where I slowly emptied my totally full hotmail mailbox, and even posted Gollum to this blog.

What does it mean to the digital-body debate when Gollum receives a major film award and then makes an acceptance speech? I think this is somehow a win for David Weinberger, at least I hope so.

You Live in California when…
1. You make $250,000 a year and can’t afford to buy a four-bedroom house.
2. The high school quarterback calls time-out to answer his cell phone.
3. You drive a rented Mercedes to your neighborhood block party.
4. When someone asks you how far something is, you tell them how long it will take to get there rather than how many miles away it is.
5. The fastest part of your daily commute is backing down your driveway.

You Live in New York City when…
1. You say “the city” and expect everyone to know you mean Manhattan.
2. You have never been to the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.
3. You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Columbus Circle to Battery Park, but can’t find Wisconsin on a map.
4. You think Central Park is “nature,”
5. You know eye contact is an act of aggression.

You Live in Maine when…
1. You have only four spices: salt, pepper, ketchup, and Tabasco.
2. Halloween costumes fit over parkas.
3. You have more than one recipe for moose.
4. Sexy lingerie is anything flannel with less than eight buttons.
5. The four seasons are: winter, still winter, almost winter, and construction.

You Live in the Deep South when…
1. You can rent a movie and buy bait in the same store.
2. You know “y’all” is singular–“all y’all” is the plural.
3. After five years you still hear, “You ain’t from ’round here, are Ya?”
4. All the people you know have 2 first names: Billy Bob, Jimmy Bob, Mary Sue, Betty Jean, etc.
5. “He needed killin’ ” is a valid defense.

You Live in Colorado when…
1. You carry your $3,000 mountain bike atop your $500 car.
2. You tell your husband to pick up Granola on his way home and he stops at the day care center.
3. A pass does not involve a football or dating.
4. The top of your head may be bald, but you have a pony tail.
5. Your hometown bus lines are named “Hop”, “Skip” and “Jump.”

You Live in the Midwest when…
1. You’ve never met any celebrities, but the mayor knows your name.
2. Your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor.
3. You have had to switch from “heat” to “A/C” on the same day.
4. You end sentences with a preposition: “Where’s my coat at?”
5. When asked how your trip was to any exotic place, you say, “It was different!”

You Live in Florida when…
1. You eat dinner at 3:15 in the afternoon.
2. All purchases include a coupon of some kind — even houses and cars.
3. Everyone can recommend an excellent dermatologist.
4. Road construction never ends anywhere in the state.

You Live in Blog-world when…
1. You can’t understand how anyone could mix up Dave Winer with David Weinberger.
2. You check on friends while drinking your morning coffee–and hope none of them make you spit coffee on the keyboard.
3. You type html tags so fast it’s not worth the trouble to copy and paste them.
4. You know just why Andrew Orlowski is wrong.
5. You would love to meet Halley, or you did meet Halley, or you would love to meet some other blogger who has met Halley.

Blame it on Shutterclog Niek: I just spent an hour I didn’t have absorbed in the photographs of Ari Versluis. Versluis works with stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek exploring the “dress codes” of wildly differing groups.

At first glance, the images look like proofsheets–12 shots of a recognizably “goth” young girl, for example. A closer look reveals 12 quite different young girls, each in her own unique version of a very goth dress.

Men in jackets and ties. Teenage boys in jackets and ties. Women with headscarves carrying babies. Cute guys in tiny Euro bathing suits. (See the site contact page for an animated display of those cute guys.)

The images don’t leave you snickering at their subjects–they leave you with a deepened awareness about the ways those people are just like you, and not just like one another.

We long to be seen, we long to be understood–and no clothing on earth could do the many jobs we want our clothing to do for us. We want to say “I’m unique”, and we also want to say “I’m this kind of person.”

Okay, I’m off to express my individuality by putting on one of my all-black “I’m a writer who lives in a big city” outfits.

If a man says ‘yes’ he means maybe.
If he says ‘maybe’ he means no.
If he says ‘no’–he is no gentleman.

If a woman says ‘no’ she means maybe.
If she says ‘maybe’ she means yes.
If she says ‘yes’–she is no lady.

This was a favorite joke of Paul Dirac (1902-1984), a brilliant physicist so shy that his Cambridge colleagues coined a unit, the dirac, to stand for the smallest measurable quantum of speech. Dirac was what I call an Aleph male–distracted from Alpha ambitions by his private obsessions.

I met Dirac and his wonderful wife Moncie the summer before his 80th birthday. There is a famous summer school for physics in the little hilltown of Sicily known as Erice. I was a young physics wife, quite visibly pregnant. (Just one year before, my bottom was pinched black-and-blue by Sicilian men, but my little round belly got me treated me like a queen.)

I have a nerdy fondness for learning languages, so I served as an amateur guide to physicists who didn’t speak any Italian. I was delighted to be the chosen companion of a Nobel laureate for an hour or two, even if our mutual goal was to buy him some shoes. Professor Dirac was courteous but shy–and when he smiled, he had a wonderfully naughty twinkle in his eye.

I thought Moncie was a very lucky woman.

Frank Paynter When asked how he had discovered the law of universal gravitation, he said: “ By thinking on it continually.”

xxx