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.

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.

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.

Left to right, Stephen Sondheim, Edward Albee, Sally Field, Denzel Washington, and James Earl Jones answer questions from the audience. Some of my favorite short bits:

James Earl Jones: “Creating a performance requires going down inside yourself to find what is really there. Much of what you will need to find and use involves parts of yourself you wouldn’t normally want to display in public.”

Edward Albee: (In response to a student question on why people chose to spend their lives in theater) “I write plays because I am a playwright.”

Stephen Sondheim: “In theater, when you see your work, it’s constantly changing, alive. And that’s a delight, even when you’re embarassed by what they’re doing.”

Denzel Washington: “My advice to you is fail big. In some lines of work, that might not be a good thing. But I never understood people who want something to fall back on. If I’m going to fall, I want to fall forward!”

Sally Field: “My advice to all of you? Take an acting class, and take it seriously.”

Earlier in the day, Sally Field (one of this year’s award winners) gave a longer and quite nitty gritty short talk about the sequential career problems of a life spent in acting:

“I have been a professional actor for 41 years. I have survived in a profession where there is no tenure. [After a year of playing Gidget on TV] I was 19 years old and I did not want to play a flying nun. For three years of my life, everyone had a flying nun joke. The actress who played the Mother Superior took me to see Lee Strasberg, and I began taking acting lessons. I worked as a flying nun all day, and at night I was Sartre’s “respectful prostitute.”

How do I transition into being old? How do I survive in an industry that has no use for women of age?

Joseph Campbell said you must enter the forest where it is darkest, and where there is no path. As an actor you enter the forest where it is darkest again and again and again. Where there is no path, and especially not your own path.

If a song is playing and re-playing in your head, is it immoral to sing it for somebody else? Is it still immoral if you like the song replaying in your head?

OK, probably immoral, but here are my excuses for singing “Off to Massachusetts”* for Dave Winer’s podcast yesterday:

• Few people know so many rhymes for Massachusetts.
• When Dave’s winding road bends again toward Cambridge, this silly song could be a kind of anthem
• I got this CD as free blog-booty from the Little Women showfolk.
• It’s just the kind of song you feel like singing to serenade your scrambled eggs in any random hotel breakfast room.

Are songs contagious just from the lyrics alone? If you dare, read on for a small sample…

If you say “Come with me,
off to Massachusetts,”
Then to Massachusetts we will go
We will buy dishes there, maybe even two sets,
Buy the finest china then we’ll dine a while on Crepes Suzettes…

We will build model boats,
off in Massachusetts,
There in Massachusetts,
By the bay.
Put them together and
Wait until the glue sets
While we wait we’ll polka
For the folk along the parapets…

Action movie directors have a huge advantage over game designers on creating realistic wham, pow, boom, and splatter. That’s because Mother Nature pumps out free supplies of real physics all over the planet. You want earth’s gravity, blood’s viscosity, or Newton’s three laws? In the real world, you’ve got them!

But in a game world, no force pulls objects down toward the bottom of the screen unless somebody has programmed fake gravity in.

Even if you’re not a game designer there’s a lot of enjoyable physics in the free sample online chapter of
Physics for Game Programmers
(ISBN 1-59059-472-X)

• When two cars collide, what fraction of the collision is inelastic?
• How do you figure out a tire’s characteristics from the letters and numbers on its side?
• What’s the difference between tires rolling and skidding?
• How do you compute a car’s top speed from its “redline”?

Sadly, the top speed of the 2004 Porsche Boxster S is “only” 266 km/hr, almost 30 km/hr below its theoretical maximum, “because the car is also subject to the
decelerating forces of aerodynamic drag and rolling friction.” Ah well, real life is full of such disappointments.

If you have a physics maven on your gift list, Father’s Day is just around the corner….