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

Frank’s Polish grandmother, aka Grandma Wilczek, compressed a powerful primal force somewhere in her 5-foot-tall frame. Her wedding portrait, lugging an armful of lilies as long as her arm, dominates one corner of our diningroom.

At 19, in Poland’s disastrous post-World-War-I years, she fled her home town, Galician Babice. On Long Island, she met Frank’s Polish grandfather–a six-foot-tall blacksmith from Warsaw, who gave us all the last name that means “little wolf.”

I’ve enjoyed watching Frank get in touch with his Polish roots (and vice versa), but today’s
PIASA party takes the cake (or at least it takes the chrusciki and/or paczki).

“PIASA” stands for “Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America,” emigre scholars who maintain a wonderful archive of Polish lore here in NYC.

A good time was had by all–and I flickred some photos.

David Sedaris (to pick one up-to-date essayist at random) tapdances across the page, pitching out spangles of detailed irony to a hip audience. And the backdrop for this display is some fine-looking tapestry of a topical and recognizable theme–Santaland at the mall! Country houses near Paris! High schoolers dreaming about the Ivy League!

But happy endings and hip ones don’t work together. The finale must always be close-up peeks through the tapestry–ooo, there’s a flaw in the weave!–so you see:

• melancholy!
• loneliness!
• rootless lives!
• futile unattainable aspirations to glory!!!!!!

Surprise! (Or at least, a surprise the first ten times you see this done.)

My goal as a writer is different. I want you, dear reader, to enjoy whatever cross-quilted oddball tapestry I’m working on so much that you smile forgivingly over its obvious flaws.

And my obvious flaws.

And even (I really hope this for each reader) your own.

Steven Pinker calls it “uptalk.”

Young
Californians’ uptalk (sentences that sound like questions)
is no more pusillanimous or noncommittal than Canadians’
habitual “eh?”

Carcharodontosaurus saharicus
Middle Cretaceous- 100 million years old!
Kem Kem Valley, (Tafilalt) area near Taouz, Morocco

Maxilla and Mandible, Columbus Ave between 81st and 82nd Streets.

Would your living room look better with a six-foot long one-hundred-toothed replica crocodilian skull on display? Sure it would…and for a mere $5,900, BoneClones.com will make that dream come true:

Sarcosuchus imperator (flesh eating crocodile), nicknamed Supercroc, lived during the Cretaceous period (65 – 144 MYA). With an estimated body length of 40 feet, and a skull over 5 1/2 feet long, Supercroc is one of the largest crocodiles that ever walked the Earth.

It is believed that Sarcosuchus was an ambush predator capable of killing large dinosaurs that wandered too close to the water’s edge. The Sarcosuchus’s unusual bulbous snout is thought to have given it a greater ability to smell prey and make louder sounds… Shown here with a human skull for comparison. Individual tooth also available, KO-156. Please see our Dinosaurs and Fossils, and Reptiles catagories.

They also make lots of fake skulls for forensic classrooms… Ewww-factor very high, but fascinating. Thanks to Amity for the jaw-dropping linkage.

…four or five days later, you’re hungry again!”

(I’m quoting a hand-printed signs from Mimmo’s Italian restaurant on Ocean Avenue in York, ME, which serves exactly that kind of Italian food. Mimmo, the owner and chef, walks around when the kitchen is quiet, greeting newcomers and schmoozing with neighborhood friends.

Another Mimmo-ism: “What’s special tonight? Everything on my menu, that’s what’s special.?

I’m up in Maine, taking a moment to stop and smell the lilacs, here with my lilac-growing little sister. I asked Marie if she had a word of wisdom to share with my blog readers and she said, incredulously “A word? Just one?” Which just goes to show you how wise my sister is.

In fact, Kevin’s insight applies to many fun things.

But not, so far as I know, to smelling the lilacs.

At the American Academy for Achievement’s 2005 International Achievement Summit, prizewinners each give a short speech to student delegates–about 200 Rhodes Scholars, etc. from 50 countries. So we all heard some darn good speeches but of course the best was given by Frank Wilczek–short, pithy, informative, and very funny.

I especially like his illustration of how to choose problems wisely:

It’s easy to give vague advice, but I will break new ground, and give you an algorithm. Many of you are probably thinking about getting married, and naturally you would like to maximize your chance of finding the best possible mate. I’ll give you an algorithm for that….

Wait, I hope this doesn’t mean I’m a problem…

If you want Frank’s algorithm, and to understand why my new nickname is “N over e plus one”, here’s Frank’s 5-minute talk including as a bonus Einstein’s favorite joke.

At the American Academy for Achievement’s 2005 International Achievement Summit, prizewinners each give a short speech to the student delegates–about 200 Rhodes Scholars, etc. from 50 countries. So we all heard some darn good speeches but of course my favorite was given by Frank Wilczek–short, pithy, informative, and very funny. And I quote:

In preparing my advice for you I asked myself “What would Einstein say?” And it occurred to me that Einstein, being an intelligent fellow, would probably start with a joke. Fortunately I happen to know Einstein’s favorite joke. It turns out to be quite relevant. Here goes.

A man is having trouble with his car; it frequently stalls. So he goes to a garage, and asks them to fix it. They replace the transmission and put in new spark plugs. But his car still doesn’t run right, so he takes it to another garage. At this second garage, the mechanic pokes around for ten minutes, then pulls a screwdriver out of his belt and tightens a screw. And now the car runs perfectly.

But the man is irate when he gets a bill in the mail for $200. He storms back to the mechanic, and says, “This is outrageous! All you did was tighten a screw, and you ask for $200! I want an itemized bill!” So the mechanic takes out a pad and pencil, and writes down an itemized bill, as follows:

Labor: turning screw $5
Knowing which screw to turn: $195

My first piece of advice is to consider very carefully the possibilities for what you can do, before choosing. This principle works on several levels. You should consider many different possibilities for what general sort of work you want to do, before settling into one. And when you have finished one project, you should think about many different possibilities for what to do next. And when you encounter a problem, you should consider various possible approaches, before investing heavily in any one.

It’s easy to give vague advice, but I will break new ground, and give you an algorithm. Many of you are probably thinking about getting married, and naturally you would like to maximize your chance of finding the best possible mate. I’ll give you an algorithm for that.

You have to estimate the number N of suitors that you can expect to deal with over your career in courtship. We’ll assume that you evaluate them one at a time, and that once you’ve broken up with one, then that one is gone forever. Then what you should do is this. Evaluate, but do not accept, each of the first N/e suitors. Here e is a number, the base of natural logarithms, approximately 2.7. Then accept the first subsequent suitor who is better than all the earlier ones. That is how to maximize your chance of getting the best possible mate.

For example, if N is 10, then you should evaluate but reject each of the first 4 suitors, and accept to first one after that who is better than them. In my own case, I estimated N=3. I dutifully broke up with my first serious girlfriend, but the second was better, and I married her. It worked out fine.

Of course the precise assumptions that underlie this particular algorithm might not always be appropriate, but the underlying lesson is much more general. You should put considerable effort into gathering information before choosing what to invest in. The great mathematician Henri Poincare, when asked how he came up with such good creative ideas, responded, “I generate a lot of ideas, and discard most of them.” This is also Nature’s trick, in natural selection.

My second piece of advice is to learn about the history of your endeavor. This has many advantages. By reading masterworks you come in contact with great minds, and get to feel how they operate. Often the original works are well expressed, and you can learn valuable lessons about how to express yourself. Most important, you can begin to see yourself and your work as part of a continuing narrative, that started before you entered, and that will continue after you leave. That is a beautiful thing to realize.

What an incredible party.

So
here we all were, riding on a bus to Golden Plate Banquet. Frank and I
turned around in our seats to ask George Lucas and Dorothy Hamill, who
were sitting behind us, if there were any tricky parts to the gold
medal ceremony. (They told us there weren’t.) Then we started talking
about the different things that go wrong at Oscar and Nobel ceremonies.

At the banquet, we sat with Frank’s Nobel littermates Aaron Ciechanover, Linda Buck, and David Gross–and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Flashback to 1970 or so when I was struggling to convince a
classical music fan that there was really good music in rock and roll.
Mrs. Krasner challenged  me to play her something convincing.
Because she loved Beethoven (crash, jangle, thump!)  I picked
Creedence Clearwater’s “Proud Mary.” I don’t think I really convinced
her to switch from Beethoven based on that playing, but I really enjoyed
telling John Fogerty the story.  He’s redhot on stage (and touring now!) but very sweet in person.

So why is this blogger laughing so hard? Just as Linda Buck got
ready to snap the picture, Sam Donaldson popped up behind her and
started giving her devil’s horns.

 
Isaac Asimov told Marvin Minsky, “Don’t ask any questions, just go.

That was good advice.

Thanks to my fidgety nature, I take notes, even on something as eloquent as the talk by Wynton Marsalis last night. So, by popular request, here’s my best record of some of what he said:

Music is the most abstract of all the arts. There’s nothing to see there. Music is nothing but an arrangement of somethings strung out along timelines.

The arts were born as entertainment….

Somebody in a cave telling the story of catching a fish *this* big.

The arts mature as education….

Words and paintings that describe the thing they’re about.

The arts are reborn as reenactment….

In a spirit of reverence, re-creating the work of artists you admire.

There are two kinds of music America gave the world. The blues. And swing. And each of these enfolds its own special kind of gift.

The gift of the blues is…optimism that is not naive. What’s the first thing that happens to a baby when it comes into the world? Smack! But then you go on from there. The gift of the blues is a vaccination against life’s pain.

The gift of swing is…embracing a mutual time. When you are playing and swinging, I can tell you the last thing you want is to hold back and think about what rhythms everyone else is playing with you. But you have to do it. The gift of swing is creating a shared time instead of insisting on your own time.

What you see behind Wynton Marsalis and his jazz band is not a backdrop. Those are huge floor-to-ceiling windows looking our over Columbus Circle and Central Park, as night slowly darkens the sky–in the Allen Room at Lincoln Center.

[In my old blog, this was post 2333, created 2005/06/03; I had to recreate it here due to XML problems.]