I miss my own little white dog Marianne.
But now that I’m in Florida visiting my little sis, at least I get to play with her little white dog.
Palm trees — blue skies — feeding pelicans on the St. Petersburg pier — these are all spiffy.
But spending a week with my sister is even more so.
Tags: My Back Pages · Sister Age · Wide wonderful world
This is André Weil’s Law of Faculties — a theorem propounded by the mathematician André Weil (1906 – 1998), which appears on page 10 of Absolute Zero Gravity, a collection of science jokes I once coauthored.
Weil’s Law also gives insight into the problems inside our White House and Justice Department–which one former Reagan US Attorney analyzed rather cynically for the LA Times:
“The incompetence has been amazing … There are too many Stepford husbands in this administration: young men who are perfectly coiffed and have great clothes, but very few of them have ever been in a courtroom.”
Weil’s Law explains so much about the progression from young Karl Rove pushing George W Bush into politics because Bush looked so good in cowboy boots, down and around to George W Bush agreeing to turn Federal Emergency Management over to the inexperienced Michael Brown, an old college roommate of his pal Joe Allbaugh.
Lift a rock, and see Stepford husbands, all the way down.
…….
(thanks to Talkingpointsmemo for pointing to the Stepford quote.
……..
Not to disappoint any Bourbaki fans, I had the pleasure of spending many hours with Andre Weil for a 1990s project at the IAS, collecting an oral history from four retired mathematicians there. You can find transcripts in the IAS library–my only surviving mention from that era now on the web is a footnote in a memoir by Armand Borel.
About those Bourbaki meetings, Weil recalled with delight the way participants would meet to dispute mathematics with screams of rage, then emerge from the meeting room in perfect amity to enjoy an excellent dinner. One evening, Weil himself emerged from the meeting room a bit earlier than the others and encountered the hotel concierge standing outside the door. “Oh Monsieur,” she said with great anxiety, “I have been standing here for half an hour trying to decide whether I should perhaps call the police to make sure that nobody in there is being harmed.”
This memory gave Professor Weil enormous pleasure–and, remembering his pleasure now, I’m smiling too.
Tags: Editorial · My Back Pages · Science
In my blog, I tend to write about:
I grew up in NH, my nose in a book when I wasn’t building treehouses (summer) or giant snow forts (winter). We lived in a real neighborhood–I don’t think many families owned a house key. There were about 10 elderly* women in the 5-block radius I roamed who would offer me orange juice, bathroom privileges, and a comfy chair to sit reading kids books from the 1920s. I’d like to say thank you here to Miss Alice Colgan, who lived with a sister she hadn’t spoken to in 20 years. Both of them were delighted to see me or my siblings knock on the door.
The blogging world takes me back to those days of roaming. I like knocking at the door of your blog and finding out what’s on your mind today. Better than orange juice!
I am a nerd, and even bigger fan of nerds than I am a nerd myself. I used to spend a lot more time programming than I do now. I’ve coauthored a couple of books, both now out of print, but if you look up “Betsy Devine” at Amazon you can read some really nice reader reviews.
When I started blogging, back in 2003, my husband Frank Wilczek and I were living in Cambridge MA, as were our two 20-something daughters–one college, one grad school–a big part of our lives but already out on their own. A whole pile of things have happened since then–not least that in 2004 Frank won the Nobel Prize in Physics. We thought that our lives were complex and filled up with travel in 2003–little did we know!
Right now, I’m typing this into my blog from Sweden, where we’ll be living until almost Christmas, 2007. I’d like to re-organize this little essay and talk more about the non-fiction book I’m writing now, called Meta-Physics: Lives With, About, and Sometimes After the Cosmos. But about 87 other things are in front of this on my to-do list right now, not least getting ready for this year’s IgNobel Prize ceremony. Maybe next week?
Until then–really, thanks for reading my blog!
* The word “elderly” was one my grandmother liked–and one that the women I’m talking about would have liked. I thought of people as “elderly” once they got past 30 or so. I looked forward to getting there myself, and now–woo hoo–I surely have!
Tags: My Back Pages
Mary Parfitt (left) was my best friend for years. You can see just how glad I was to be with her. (Also, most likely, my dad (the photographer) had just said something that made me laugh.)
Just around this time in our lives, we started to play a Monopoly game that lasted 2 years, with about 200 new rules we made up ourselves. We both got so rich in this game that we had to create our own $1000 bills, later $10,000 bills. I made mine small so that I could carry them inside of a gold pinky ring that I’m not wearing in this photo.
How did we play for so long without going bankrupt? We created a third and fourth player, whose “bank” was… the bank. These silly players kept landing on both of our properties and getting hit for enormous rents. We beefed up our rents by putting TV antennas on all our hotels–which were made of wood then; we used bright red thumbtacks for TV antennas.
Who won? I don’t remember. I hope it was Mary.
Tags: My Back Pages
Congrats to Harvard for doing something so smart as as president-ifying Drew Gilpin Faust, once aka Drewdie Gilpin, with whom I shared fourth-year math classes (just the two of us) way back when Concord Academy was an all-girls school.
Drew was then smart and serious and kindly (yes, I know those are funny words to describe a 16 year-old girl). With a little baby powder all over her hair, she made a perfect Southern Colonel for our senior class musical.
Now she has grown up even smarter but still warm-hearted and not so deadpan.
Drew moved to Cambridge just a few years ago as the dean of Radcliffe, which like Harvard has many brilliant and outspoken stakeholders–but unlike Harvard has less-than-infinite money. Hard to imagine how someone could survive that job–and some called her “Chainsaw Drew“? Ouch! But others (most) praised her low-key leadership, leading while listening, building consensus, to quote Newsweek, “without wielding sharp elbows.”
She will do a great job as the new head of Harvard!
Tags: My Back Pages
Betsy to Frank: Do you know who Jerry Rice is? I think he’s a football player?
Frank to Betsy: Yes, of course. He’s probably the greatest wide receiver of all time. Why?
Betsy to Frank: Huh–well, I just saw him at the gym. He seemed like a very sweet person.
Frank to Betsy: No, I don’t think you saw Jerry Rice, the world’s greatest wide receiver. Maybe somebody else whose name was Jerry Rice.
Betsy to Frank: Why couldn’t I have seen the real, famous Jerry Rice? Why would I have him mixed up with somebody else.
Frank to Betsy: Because I don’t think Jerry Rice works out at your gym.
Betsy to Frank: [Pause, as the penny drops.] Oh. What I meant was that I saw the real Jerry Rice today when I was at the gym. I was at the gym, and he was cooking something on a TV show.
Tags: My Back Pages
Captain White Socks (1984 – 1996) entered our lives as a small, mostly-tiger kitten that Amity heard about from her camp-bus driver. Such was Cappy’s charm that it smote us all at once, even as we gasped at the giant fleas crawling out of his ears and over his tiny tummy.
Quick veterinarian action intervened.
Years passed, during which Cappy grew large and bold, treating our family with a courtly affection but expecting to be the alpha (neutered) male in his interactions with any outsiders. He was lordly (not to say a bit aggressive) and he may well have been chasing a car when he met his end. I had imagined that he (like our other cat Sylvester) always stayed in our back yard but kept away from the street.
It wasn’t so. There was a slight drizzle falling from the sky when I was summoned by the doorbell, and a very contrite driver, to look at Cappy’s now limp but still beautiful corpse, spangled with fog drops.
To my dismay taxidermists turned me down flat when I asked about getting Cappy “preserved” so that he could lie curled up on some mantel or windowsill. My children were baffled. We had been to Chincoteague and seen the body of Misty “mounted” (they don’t call it “stuffed”) for eternal memory. We had stayed in New Zealand with people whose parlors displayed even (now somewhat motheaten) dogs they had loved in their childhood.
But even though we were by then in Princeton, NJ, so that I was able to pester taxidermists all the way from NYC to Philadelphia, nobody wanted to “mount” our old Cappy so that we could keep him. “We don’t do pets,” more than one surly old-timer told me. Meanwhile, in our freezer, Cappy lay curled up in a giant plastic bag surrounded by frozen peas and fudge-ripple ice cream.
Frank, of course, had a truly unique suggestion: “Don’t say it’s a pet. Tell them I shot it.” Somehow, I hadn’t the chutzpah to try his method.
In the end, finally, I bought some beautiful cloth that was black and golden, like Cappy, to wrap him up in. We buried him in the back yard. Einstein’s back yard, which was our back yard way back then.
But if there’s a resurrection, Einstein can’t have him because we want Cappy back!
Tags: Frank Wilczek · My Back Pages
 View from the backseat, ca 1989 Originally uploaded by betsythedevine. |
This old car was one of two giant, brown, well-used station wagons we owned between 1983 and 1990. Frank was at Santa Barbara’s ITP–each summer, I’d drive both girls cross-country to see family in NH.
They were memorable trips, full of moonshine by night, the heat of each day leavened by dish towels dipped in icewater. (We didn’t get air-conditioned cars until years after the rest of the US was driving them.) Amity and I both loved Little House on the Prairie. It seemed, then, like a normal decision to protect both girls from the sunlight with enormous poke bonnets. It seemed normal to outfit the backseat with two little slates, two pieces of chalk, and the full six-volume set of McGuffey’s Readers, to see if my ten-year-old might teach my three-year-old how to read. (She did.) Many years later, Amity was a young lady learning about photography. One of the first pictures she took, and one that I cherish, shows the back seat of our old car, harshly sunlit, from the point of view of the little girl that she once was. |
Tags: My Back Pages
Email from Judy starts out (wouldn’t it be nice if all email did?) with “I LOVE your blog!” Then, with her permission I’m sharing this, she continues…
About jewel weed though: rub it on your skin after being exposed to poison ivy and it takes away the itch! I grew up in upstate New York, and didn’t know about this cure, even though my skin was bubbled up with poison ivy rash throughout most of my young life (in the summer). Once, I read that an antidote plant often grows in proximity to an irritant plant. Nature rocks.
One other New England antidote, from my own past…
It must have been fifteen years ago when, just past sunset, our dog Marianne raced into the house and dive-bombed my lap, bringing with her all the fresh fragrance of angry skunk.
Whew!
Fortunately, I was fully prepared, with
We escorted Marianne down to the lake beach, waded her out hip-deep (her hips, not ours), and massaged her from nose to toes with squishy tomatoes–one tomato per small massager.
At the end of this process, Marianne smelled enough like herself (plus tomatoes) that we could all manage to sleep in the same house with her. And, at the end of the summer, “the day Marianne met a skunk” was voted the best day by several of those small participants.
I feel very confident recommending this method as a skunk antidote.
You can even use a big bathtub instead of a lake–but try not to omit small children, they’re part of the magic.
Tags: My Back Pages
Tags: My Back Pages
