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

Does travel broaden the mind?

Or does it just expand other bits of you, during the timeless flow of meals in restaurants?

I like the way travel shakes up my preconceptions–the smalltown illusion that my country, my town, my neighborhood, and my Mom do things just the right way and those who do otherwise are stupid, barbaric, lazy, or just plain rude.

It’s easy to spot someone else’s intolerance–like the English acquaintance who sneers at American overuse of salt as she pours a teaspoon of sugar on her tomato.

Wandering through the streets of Geneva, I wonder how the world looks through local eyes. How does it change the boss-employee relationship when you greet each other with good-morning kisses? How does it affect the day of a sales clerk when a polite greeting and a cheerful farewell form part of each transaction?  What must it be like to live in a small city where clean, fast, reliable trams run every seven minutes and nobody ‘needs’ a car to get to work?

I like the way travel disrupts my usual habits by making hard things easy and easy things hard. Somebody else cooks my meals and washes my sheets–but figuring out how to get from A to B can take half an hour.

Time I might spend at home on chores gets spent in museums or reading guide books, a perspective that takes in centuries of time, and looks at the world with a focus that doesn’t center on any of my normal preoccupations. For example, the most important part of World War II is the activity of Charles DeGaulle–when you look at the war from a Parisian perspective.

I don’t want to shed my own skin and wear someone else’s. I think my own country, my hometown, and my Mom have many virtues as well as some limitations. And I’ll be glad to get home, hopefully not too broadened by French sauces and Swiss cheeses…

Rousseau was born here but left. Voltaire lived here by choice. The first baptism under the seven golden domes of the Russian church was Dostoevsky’s daughter.

Caesar paused in his Gallic wars to stop by Geneva and burn down its only bridge-it got a whole paragraph when he wrote his memoirs. Napoleon dropped by to steal all the city’s cannons.

Geneva has it all, including one, count it one, Internet cafe. More of a video game cafe, or a smoking parlor cafe, or an echo chamber for loud rock music cafe, with 10 extremely slow Internet connections. One of them, at this moment, is me.

If the International Red Cross–headquartered in Geneva–knew how I suffer from Internet deprivation, they’d surely do something about this.

“Paris is worth a Mass,” said Henri of Navarre, who became France’s Henri IV at the cost of converting to Catholicism. Well, that’s what the translators claim, but I prefer my own translation of  his “Paris vaut une Messe.”

Even the hotel coffee is delicious. Even the coffee at the conference where Frank is speaking is delicious. Even the 80 plus degree sunshine is delicious. Even the six-hour time difference that means that my body thinks I’m typing these remarks at 5:30 a.m. is delicious.

No, wait, maybe I mean that I’m delirious. I’m going back to bed now, see you later…

According to the RAC Foundation,
listening to classical music while you drive is no safer than listening
to rock. What drives up your blood pressure and your heartbeat (and
makes you go sailing through stoplights) is music that’s fast and loud.

Their top list of music to avoid includes Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and Verdi’s Dies Irae.

Well, I won’t be listening to those–Frank and I are addicted to Teaching Company courses, and we got about halfway through the Enlightenment on our way down here. Yes, this is what happens when nerds marry nerds. See you at Bloggercon!

Or, for that matter, “Which Shakespeare character killed the most chickens and ducks?”

Many hotels keep a random supply of books–but the
Nittany Lion Inn has a whole roomful. Most were probably left behind by
guests–the usual case.  But some are mysterious.

Several years of scholarly journals on programming, from the early
seventies? Shelf after shelf of Readers Digest  books? Tall,
multivolume picturebook series with titles like Our Fair Land or This Is History?
Did somebody come to Penn State carrying this stuff, in hugely overpacked
luggage? And then, suddenly converted to Zen Buddhism, leave them all
behind and depart as a barefoot pilgrim?

The Shakespeare jokes come from a funny collection of vintage puzzles by Gyles Brandeth, The Puzzle Mountain (1981). Some of the jokes are really very old. For example:

Others reflect an older sensibility. A couple of famous naughty
limericks are here, metamorphosed to clean ones–the man whose balls were of
different sizes is, in Brandeth’s book, a girl with mismatched ears. (Or maybe the man just has drag on?)

OTOH, Brandeth includes jokes that might jar a modern PC sensibility.
The punchline for Othello: “Because he was a tawny
general of Venice.” OK, I’ve kept you waiting long enough for the
PETA-unfriendly joke about who killed the most ducks and chickens.

It was Hamlet’s uncle, because he did murder most foul.

One of the great sights of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is Rembrandt’s huge painting “Night Watch.” Local gentry signed up to be painted in a big group and got into the foreground (or background) depending on how much they paid.

But where was Rembrandt last week, at sxsw? I got to meet so many people I knew from online, but photos show only groupings of two here, three there.

Therefore, by the power vested in me (to steal from online images) I have refurbished the great Rembrandt “Night Watch” to include friends from #joiito I met in Austin.

Joi Ito himself is showing something to Tantek Çelik, a Microsoft diplomat and CSS guru. Then Liz Lawley, aka mamamusings–sharing only one dinner with her was not enough. Finally Sam Ruby, who saved me from losing my cell phone and has a very sweet smile.

In other news, I’d like to thank Jonas for the mechanical hand buzzer, and Tantek and Sam Ruby for letting me buzz them with it. Can’t imagine why Rembrandt somehow left this out….

This is a teentsy thumbnail of my virtual image of the cowboy aka Joi Ito–about 50 K, which is why it’s not right on my front page.

Thanks to Jon Lebkowsky for the original photo.

I’m inside that tiny, peaceful moment of just-before-a-journey.

I have printed three copies of my itinerary–there’s nothing now I want to re-plan or re-do. The stuff I’ll be packing tomorrow is lying piled up on my suitcase, trying to stay unwrinkled.

The kitchen clock ticks, and the fridge softly hums. I will miss this kitchen, my dear old kitchen computer, my pots of grape hyacinth next to the sink.

Last night, I saw my little winter mouse run across the floor when the kitchen was quiet like this. He is my winter mouse because I have shared the house with him for the cold weather. Now that spring is arriving, his days of eating my ramen and tacos are numbered.

Some lovely spring day, soon, I will lure him with peanut butter into my little havaheart trap, and drive him two miles to some trees near a BurgerKing dumpster.

But that won’t happen tonight, or even tomorrow. My sense of responsibility is already riding a plane headed south to Austin.

Bzzzt–oh, there goes the dryer. Time to fold clothes. So much for my moment to stop and smell the grape hyacinth!

Talk about a geeky event–sxsw Interactive has two different blogs–an unofficial one and now an official one too–and its own Orkut community.

It’s funny, considering how introverted I was as a teen–and how many hours I spend each day alone with my computer–that I’m looking forward to meeting so many new bloggers.

At least I don’t have to learn a new language, except for kickball…..