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

Way back in the 1950s, my mom and dad packed 4 kids into a car and drove from NH to Florida. Our route south was studded with stoplights, paneled with billboards.

Eisenhower’s interstate network and Lady Bird’s highway beautification came much later. Credit cards also came later. On the way home, a blizzard stranded us in Dover, Delaware. My grandfather had to wire us money (Western Union) to buy the gas to get us home.

Years later, I still remember the alligator “farm” in St. Augustine–and, lucky me, I got to go there once again with Frank on Saturday.

People had warned us it was now a tourist trap–now, what do you think a “tourist trap” really means?

• The adult entry fee was $15, though we got discounts. Was it a tourist trap? Would it have been a tourist trap if it had been located in South America and we had paid thousands of dollars for airplane tickets, personal tourguides, and an authentically Hemingwayan canvas tent?
• The other people visiting the farm were mostly parents and children oohing and aahing. Was it a tourist trap? Would it have been a tourist trap if we had been the only visitors that day? Would it have been a tourist trap if we had been surrounded by PhDs tut-tutting about global warming?
• Alligators, crocodiles, caimans, and gavials–every species of crocodilian on the planet was peacefully floating, sunbathing, or grunting somewhere on the grounds. Was it a tourist trap? Would it have been a tourist trap if two or three of the global species were missing?

I have to admit, the families who shared our enjoyment were probably not totally postmodern.

Child: Do I smell alligator poop?
Dad: Do I hear someone talking dirty talk?
Another child, from another family: Mom, something stinks.
Mom: We are not going to talk about that.

Past the entrance, the gator smell melted away. And, tourist trap or not, I had a great time.

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I’m in Gainesville, Florida this week, “helping” my husband give some
lectures here. This is the northern, chilly, inland part of Florida
rather than the sunny, beachy, Margarita part.

Even so, it’s lovely in its own way–loblolly pines, palmetto, Spanish
moss. Even more lovely to me, because I remember my dad’s pleasure in
these exotic words long ago, on a family car trip (never repeated) to
Florida.

The university has about 50,000 students. That’s a college bigger than
the town I grew up in. It stretches over acres and acres of ground,
with a lot of agricultural and veterinary specialties–including a race
horse clinic. There are multiple lakes and ponds on campus, most of
them full of egrets and alligators.

worship (the campus team and mascot) is intense. In the small
downtown area, half the stores are named Gator-Something. Most have
Gator shirts or stickers for sale.

On the two hour drive south from Jacksonville’s airport, we drove
through what I think of as traditional southland. Nascar races in
Daytona had just let out, and everyone at the Waffle House was just
thrilled.

“That was so amazing, what happened with Number Four,” said the
waitress who took our order. “And I guess I don’t have to tell you who
Number Four is.” I tried to look friendly and knowledgeable, eating my
grits and wondering if I was supposed to add salt or sugar, and if a
fork or a  spoon was the right utensil.

The highways south were speckled with little churches. Some typical signs
on roadside businesses: “God bless our
soldiers.” “God bless the USA.” “God bless you.” 

I don’t understand this public concept of God, though I do understand
that it doesn’t seem strange to somebody who grew up with it. And I
might once have had a cynical sense that the signs’ secret message was
“Agnostic Yankee, go home!” But the Waffle House waitresses were so
darn nice, I’m rethinking that.

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Ayers Rock with guitar and pandas–these are the ingredients for another wild Flash animation from RatherGood.com, the team who also gave us Gay Bar kittens.

Email has started trickling up from down under, where Mickey is enjoying green Tasmania before heading north to the wide Australian mainland. I was eager to post some of her wild wildlife stories (platypus ponds!) Then I realized–she might want to blog them herself when she gets back.

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Email! I love it!

Where was email in 1973? The day after our wedding, Frank left for a three-week summer school in Sicily–and the first paleblue air letter didn’t arrive until he’d been gone a whole week.

Let me spell that out for you:

But I still have all Frank’s low-tech letters, thirty years later. Meanwhile, our high-tech early memories, Super8 film of Mickey learning to walk and talk, have been declared obsolete over and over again. First, we were supposed to get them converted to VHS tape. Then, we were supposed to get the VHS converted to DVDs. Now HDTV is in the offing and who knows what the next format will be.

Email. I love it not least because I can print it out and then it is *mine*.

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….is headed off to nature-guide around Australia for the next 3 weeks?

Watch out for those giant ghost cane toads, Micks! We’ll miss you.

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What if you could visit any spot on the globe by paying exactly $1?

In that case, the book I just fell in love with–1,000 Places to See Before You Die–would cost a mere $1020.

The author, veteran travel writer Patricia Schwartz, is a lot more excited than I am by famous restaurants and chic hotels. I’ll save money and time by skipping places like those.

In Massachusetts, she picked only three must-sees: the Freedom Trail, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Legal Seafood. The first two are excellent choices, but the third is just–a restaurant. And how could she leave out Orchard House in Concord, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women?

So I’m entitled to take her other advice with a grain of salt. Scuba-diving with manatees in Florida or a polar bear safari in Manitoba? Oh sure, they sound like fun, but….

(Sticking my fingers in my ears) I can’t hear you, Patricia! La la la…..

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Blistex

xxx

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(Thanks to Metafilter for the link.)

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Picture this–on my first day in Sweden, I try to get Swedish cash from a bank machine. No, absolutely nothing, forget it, zero–the bank machine ignores my ATM card. Hmmm–I picture two weeks in a foreign country, with only the few US dollars left in my wallet.

Then I found out–Swedish ATMs expect bank cards to have their magnetic strips facing up. Of course, this is completely upside down from what every ATM in the US expects.

Because guidebooks are written by people who don’t remember the dumb mistakes newcomers make, here are a few more tips about life in Sweden:

Ask someone “How far?” and they answer, “100 meters.”

Anything Swedes think is within walking distance is described as “Only 100 meters.” Of course, anything within a couple of miles of where you stand is considered to be in walking distance, so “100 meters” is very, very elastic.

Unless you teetotal, bring wine or beer with you to Sweden.

The cheapest bottle of rot-gut red in a restaurant costs $30. OTOH, you can get nice lasagne-and-salad for $7 in student dives.

You have to learn less Swedish than you expected.

Just about everyone speaks English very, very well.

You have to learn more Swedish than you expected.

If you want to get off your train at Uppsala, you’ll hear the announcer pronouncing it “oop-SAW-LAW.” “Gevle” is pronounced “Yev-lay.” “Dj” is pronounced like the y in yes. “Rs” is pronounced like the sh in ship.

Zen bike riders inhabit quantum space.

Swedish bike riders share the streets in a way kamikaze Dutch bikers surely could not. Oop-SAW-LAW has many bike riders and few bike lanes. Bike riders move through space with peaceful expressions, looking as if they are pondering higher truth. I often saw bike riders on apparent collision courses, idling toward the same bit of an intersection–then, with no fuss and no hurry, they don’t collide. I never could figure out how the heck they did it. If we could run foreign policy as they ride bikes…. sigh.

There you have it, the very few bad bits of Sweden, from A to Z. The best bits, much more important, I blogged yesterday.

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There’s more to Sweden than Legolas and Linnaeus.** For example:

Swedish cakes

The cake itself plays only supporting parts–the star of the show is Swedish marzipan frosting. Don’t be put off by pale greens and purples evoking a witch’s tricky sticky gingerbread–it’s really MMMMMmmmmmarzipan.

Swedish road signs

Sweden marks major highways with simple, clear signs. Even better, when you’re lost in a city and longing to find a highway, clear simple signs are there to show you the way.

Swedish design in general

Elegant, minimal, clever ways to solve ordinary problems. For example, about 9 million ways to lock a restroom door–and make sure you figure out which kind each restroom uses, unless you feel like showing off your bare bottom.

Swedish pedestrians

Outside of Sweden, I’ve seen two kinds of pedestrians. One kind waits robotically for a “Walk” sign–even at 2 a.m. on an empty street. The other kind mostly plays chicken with passing cars. Swedish pedestrians will cross at “Don’t Walk” sign–but they try hard not to inconvenience drivers. Just try not to faint when you see them doing it. And that’s just one small example of how nice the Swedes are…

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*But do look in your guidebook for the Falun copper mine, the Vasa Museum, the Nobel Museum, and Linnaeus’s summer house at Hammarby.

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** Linnaeus’s theories about plant sexuality stunned his contemporaries.
“Who would have thought that bluebells and lillies and onions could be up to such immorality?” demanded one of Linnaeus’s critics, who went on to claim that such “loathsome harlotry as several males with one female would not be permitted in the vegetable kingdom by the Creator!”

Another critic protested: “A literal translation of the first principles of Linnaean botany is enough to shock female modesty. It is possible that many virtuous students might not be able to make out the similitude of Clitoria.”

Linnaeus himself was incredibly interesting–I loved Wilfrid Blunt’s charming biography of him.

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According to the pundits who write zoo labels, seals feed their babies a milk that is “very rich”.

Yesterday, I explored the Falun Copper Mine–miles of cold and dimly-lit tunnels where the Swedes started tunneling and exploring more than 1000 years ago. Our tour guide looked just like Legolas. Instead of noble faraway look, he had a chuckle and a sense of humor, but I think that is a definite improvement.

I’ve been spending time here in the footsteps of Carolus Linnaeus–http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html–a Swede who created the double-barreled scientific naming system that Home sapiens has been using ever since. He did other good stuff too–for example, the original Centigrade temperature system had water freezing at 100 degrees and boiling at 0 degrees. Linnaeus had the sense to turn that scale upside down.  

Now, I’m not digressing, but do you have a big table for people to eat around–even a room or a big area of the kitchen devoted to housing that great big dinner table you need only when you’ve decided to feed a bunch of guests? Well, I do, but Linnaeus was smarter than that.

Linnaeus had a bunch of little tables around the edges of his dining room. Only when dinner time rolled around did he move just as many tables as he needed that very night into the middle of the dining room. He would stick together a bunch of little tables to make a big table exactly the right size that night.

Okay, forbid me for harping on this but the idea makes so much sense, I can’t believe Linnaeus thought of it 250 years ago and nobody bothered to tell me about it! A big dinner table that takes up a big fat space spends all its spare time bumping people who try to walk through said space. Furthermore, if you have 4 little tables instead of one honking big one, you can make 3 little separate messes–errr, I mean “work areas”–on the separate tables you don’t need that night.

So I’m not spending all my time gazing at Legolas and Galadriel lookalikes–although that would be tempting. I’m computing how much money Peter Jackson could have saved on blue contact lenses and platinum hair dye if he he’d come to Sweden….