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

Yellow alert!

This week, thousands of bleached and battered rubber duckies are expected to wash up on New England beaches. After a storm tossed them overboard in 1992, the duckies rode currents through the Arctic, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. To quote the BBC story of their odyssey:

After falling overboard near the 45th parallel 11 years ago, the ducks floated along the Alaskan coast, reaching the Bering Strait in 1995.

It is thought they were trapped by slow moving ice for several years – it took them until 2000 to reach Iceland. A year later, they were tracked in the area of the north Atlantic where the Titanic sank.

During their voyage, some of the ducks broke away – and headed for Europe – others have surfaced in Hawaii.

I’m glad Niek will also have the chance to find an adventurous yellow duckie–I sure will be looking out for one for myself! Meanwhile, up in heaven, Jim Henson is chuckling as he sings Ernie’s favorite song.

Thanks to Frank Paynter pointing out this duck tale!

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“Prague is the birthplace of Don Giovanni, Franz Kafka, and the General Theory of Relativity.”

Frank Wilczek, July 2003

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I loved Prague, which seems half imaginary even when you are there.

• This “City of 500 Spires” is a patchwork of Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau, and modern buildings.
• Comparing a narrow, tangled lane like Karlova to the brilliantly planned streets and markets of Nove Mesto–founded in 1348–I understood that “Medieval” covers a huge range of time and thought.
• When I bought some hand-made silver-and-shell jewelry, the craftswoman warmly added a small free card to each gift –“Look, it is a menstruation calendar!” she explained.
• Many delightfully Baroque buildings rest on thousand-year-old arch-vaulted, echoing Medieval cellars–one excellent reason to visit the restroom in every possible cafe.

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Once upon a time, the old story goes, a wise man created a man of clay and brought this “golem” to life to do his will. One day, however, the wise man lost control of his creation. Its enormous strength was unleashed in massive violence–until the wise man got control again and turned the golem back into lumps of clay.

Many versions of the story exist. Supposedly, it  inspired Mary Shelley to create her story about Frankenstein.

Most recent versions associate this story with a real and notably wise Rabbi living in Prague, Rabbi Loew. The oldest stories are simple wonder tales, where the golem is used for various household chores and goes wild by uprooting the local village fountain when asked to bring water.*

Later, the golem had a nobler purpose–to protect Prague’s Jews from Christian violence. Interestingly, as the golem’s purpose became nobler and more important, so too did his rampages become more violent and frightening.

Doesn’t this sound like the current debate about artificial intelligence? I mean, if your idea of a robot is a cute little mechanical vacuum cleaner, who cares if the darn thing goes out of control? But as our modern secular rabbis make ever-more-powerful servants for themselves, the more things the rest of us have to worry about….

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*The folk image of a fountain that, even uprooted, continues to pour out water seems strange to moderns who picture the pipe lying under the fountain. After World War II, many Soviet soldiers who occupied Eastern Europe came from very primitive Siberian villages. It was commonplace for such soldiers to steal faucets and stick them in trees because they imagined that water was somehow magically inside faucets.

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In light of the news of so-called human cloning, my friend Joel Cohen asks an important philosophical question:

If you pushed your naked clone off the top of a tall building, would it be:

A) murder
B) suicide
C) merely making an obscene clone fall

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Prague is lovely, cobbled underfoot and Baroque-d above, full of local fun things you can eat and drink outdoors for not much money.

The Golem hasn’t haunted me–nor have the ghosts of Franz Kafka (who lived here) and Tycho Brahe (who died here (Did you know that Brahe had a silver nose to hide his normal nose, mostly missing after a duel? (But I digress.) ) .)

This post is my complaint against Czech keyboards! They seem to have hidden their exclamation points–and when you are trying to send email from a smoke-filled Internet cafe, it is irksome to sit staring at an almost-familiar keyboard that is missing one thing I almost always need!!

Fortunately, my little sister responded to my cry for help with enough !!!!!!!!! so that I can copy and paste them all day long. What a good sister!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bless you, Marie, and thank you all for listening.

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I’m enjoying the heck out of Lonely Planet’s Czech phrasebook–can you tell that I really ought to be packing instead?

Here are two “found poems” based on their useful suggestions:

1. Glad (sort of) I’m not that young anymore

Kiss me.
Kiss me.
Take this off.
Kiss me.
That was amazing.
Will you marry me?
Would you like a cigarette?
Kiss me.
Do you feel like going for a run?

2. But, Officer….

What am I accused of?
You will be charged with no visa.
You will be charged with traffic violation.
You will be charged with murder.
Just joking!
Kiss me.

One set of phrases offered by Lonely Planet has really made me wonder:

• I’m sorry, it’s not the custom in my country.
• I’m sorry, it’s against my beliefs/culture/religion.
• I don’t mind watching, but I prefer not to participate.

What are these phrases used for–bear-baiting? cannibalism? ethnic jokes? I’ll let you all know if I ever find out. But for now, darn it, Betsy, will you go pack?!!!???

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In Czechoslovakia, the polite guest brings flowers–an odd number, please–with no wrapping paper around them. Shoes are left by the door. Don’t eat or drink before wishing the others good health.

The Lonely Planet phrasebook is full of good advice for travelers much more adventurous than I am. I hope I won’t need Czech phrases for “Do you have a condom?” or “I’m on methadone.”

I love to travel and I love to learn about places I visit, most especially their languages. You can do lots more stuff when you speak and/or read the native tongue–even in the Netherlands where everyone speaks English the train stations and museums are a lot more fun if you can read some Dutch. But we’ll be in Prague just a week, so I have merely stocked up my “Language Emergency Kit”–ten rock-bottom minimum sentences for any trip:

1. Where’s the bathroom? (gdeh yeh zah-khod?)
2. Thank you very much. (dyeh-kuh-yi mots-kraht)
3. Please. (pro-seem)
4. Yes. (ah-no, sometimes abbreviated “no”–nod head as you say it.)
5. No. (neh– shake head as you say it.)
6. No, thank you. (neh, dyeh-ku-yi)
7. I’m sorry. (yeh meh leeto).
8. My husband is vegetarian. (mooy man-zhel yeh ve-ge-ta-ri-ahn)
9. Does this dish have meat? (yeh ftom-hle yeed-le ma-so?)
10. Is there a local Internet cafe? (yeh tah-di in-ter-net ka-vah-na?)

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If you don’t have vegetarian husband, here are two different usefuls: “Do you have a non-smoking section?” (mah-te od-dye-le-nee pro nee-kur-zhah-ki?) and “It’s beautiful” (to yeh krahs-neh).

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…on July 3, 1973, I was a kid in my twenties about to get married for the second time, and boy was I nervous. Just about everything went wrong that day.

• Because we “eloped” with just 4 grad student pals as our witnesses, our families assumed a baby was coming. In fact, we were just too impatient with all the postponements due to “Aunt Agatha can’t come June 7, how about the next weekend–no, Uncle Ed can’t make the next weekend…” Well, a baby did come, about 15 months later.
• I baked us a chocolate wedding cake from a mix, but assumed I wouldn’t have to grease and flour my brand-new miracle cake pans lined with Teflon. Wrong! Our guests ate bowls of ice cream with huge hunks of scraped-from-the-pan cake on top.
• We got lost driving to Dutch Neck traffic court, so we missed the time of appointment with the judge. We and our pals had to sit through an hour of testimony about stop-sign violations and DUI before being called into the back room for our “ceremony.”

One thing went right–I married a wonderful man, who hasn’t once stopped surprising me in all the 30 years afterward.

Feel free to throw rice anytime.

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The new Harry Potter is still pretty good, but….

Fortunately, the magical buzz of goofy summer reading lives on in the new Christopher Moore I was lusting for.

Fluke : Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings turned to out be just as fast and funny and sexy as Moore’s earlier Bloodsucking Fiends and The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove.

A book by Christopher Moore is like a huge umbrella drink served with double fruit and extra vodka–it may not be quite what you ordered, but….Wow!

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