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

Ancient Rome arising from Italian spring landscape

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I spent hours today walking through the Forum Romanum and the Colosseum.

I love the way this picture captures some of the ambitious grandeur of the monuments left by ancient Rome–even after they had been plundered by time and their stones "recycled" by two millennia of later builders.

My feet are tired but my imagination is ready to run and run and run all night.

This is my idea of a hotel lobby full of superstars–John Nash, Freeman Dyson, Shelley Glashow, and David Mumford have all turned up in “The Duke Hotel”, not far from Rome’s huge Festival della Matematica, which starts this morning.

Wow.

Tonight, Umberto Eco is giving a talk about “Perverse Uses of Mathematics” — in Italian, which I speak badly but understand well. (This is in contrast to Spanish, where I can easily make myself understood but have to keep asking my children what other people just said. Very mysterious.)

The Duke seems an unlikely name for a hotel in Rome–then again, it seems like an unlikely nickname for a movie star born in Winterset, Iowa. But The Duke is indeed a very Roman hotel–big beautiful bathtub, bidet, and balcony.

My plan for today is to sit in the Piazza Navona drinking coffee and writing about Sidney Coleman. There’s a whole chapter in the book I’m writing that swirls around Sidney and the Erice physics summer schools. Black Italian espresso is the perfect inspiration!

Advice from The (John Wayne) Duke that I should work harder on following: “Talk low, talk slow, and don’t talk too much.”

Dock of the bay
Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Is it 11 hours or 13 … the time difference between New Zealand, and Oxford, England? We got to Oxford pretty late Friday night, and I’m still too jet-lagged for such complex mathematics.

This morning I’m resting my sleepy spirit with New Zealand memories, most especially of our peaceful week in Ferry Landing Lodge, overlooking this bay. This small B & B is top-rated in TripAdvisor because so many of Pam and Rob’s guests take the time to write rave reviews.

It’s not exactly the format for TripAdvisor, but Frank even wrote a sonnet for Pam and Rob’s guest book.

We took a transcontinental flight
And the transoceanic overnight
Then drove through scenic Coromandel,
To reach Ferry’s Landing, whose tale I tell.

It’s been our base for six fine days
We soaked up lots of UV rays
Hiked, swam, and slept as we pleased
Life is sweet with times like these.

Breakfast was fine and fresh and merry
At dinnertime we took the ferry
Bones got carved, glow-worms sighted
The snarls of workaday life got righted.

Thanks for everything, Pam and Rob
From the grateful Wilczek mob.

So does that or does it not qualify as a sonnet by a Nobel-Prize-winning poet? Once again, I’m just too jet-lagged to know.

From today’s NY Times, here you see mother and daughter jaunting and laughing through summertime in side-by-side bus seats, because “My daughter and I wanted to see the Swedish countryside, and a bus is a good way to do it.”

I always love visiting Mary in her lovely and welcoming small-town NH library. I’m glad NY Times photographer Jacob Silberberg captured her and Kerstin in such a lovely but truly typical moment. I’m also glad he mentions that Mary is 60.

It seems to me that the natural active fun for a person at any age is whatever stuff that exact person has real fun doing.

My Time Goes By friend Ronni Bennett pushes back when older people talk about being active or happy as feeling young. I know why she does–for the same reason I once wrote about “I’m too bleeargingledly for my shirt.” But I think what most people mean by “feeling young” is just that we don’t feel some (bad) way society told us we’d feel when we got “old.”

My mom when she was 80 liked gardening and doing crosswords and reading Colette, and far be it from anyone to say that she should have been out riding back roads on a giant Harley while clad in black leather. Though that’s an image that would have made her smile…

And far be it from anyone to say she shouldn’t have ridden those roads and that Harley if she wanted to.

Fellowship of the rings Part 1

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Beneath Shakespeare Cliff, all over Lonely Bay’s really quite lonely beach, lie broken and sea-smoothed bits of gastropod shell.

We’d seen such rough shell circles in New Zealand restaurants, used as napkin rings. That’s why we quickly had rings on our fingers (though no bells on toes.)

There’s something about New Zealand that makes people smile. How about this sign from coffeeshop Mariposa in Port Wells?

UNATTENDED CHILDREN
WILL BE GIVEN AN ESPRESSO
AND A FREE PUPPY.

We formed many hypotheses about Shakespeare Cliff. Mine was that William Shakespeare jumped off after some bad reviews. Frank says that it wasn’t William Shakespeare at all, just his boyfriend Cliff. So, which of them really wrote all those wonderful plays?

Kauri trees are huge!

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The kauri tree is Mother Nature’s perfect tree. It goes up and up and out and out with no branches for quite a long way (no knots in the wood) and very little taper.

If you are looking for timber to make giant masts without splices or even fancy furniture, you probably want to do what early New Zealand settlers did, which is to chop down huge virgin forests of kauri trees.

Now just a few of the oldest trees are still left standing.

My children, seen here, are poised to defend this one.

Wave riding in New Zealand

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

January in New England is lovely but cold.

In New Zealand, where Christmas is a summertime holiday, January is just one more fine time for catching a wave along many sand beaches. (Bring lots of sunscreen.)

Both sharks and Johnny Depp are said to be lurking around Coromandel Peninsula now, but I think you have to swim much deeper than we do to see the former and run with a much faster crowd to catch sight of the latter.

Nobel and Ig Nobel together at last

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Here you see Frank with New Zealand’s own James Watson–no, not the infamous James Watson biology Nobel but the deservedly honored (with a 2005 Ig Nobel Prize) author of a paper on Mr. Richard Buckley’s exploding trousers.

New Zealand is a lovely land full of surprises, whose only non-good surprise has been just how hard it is to get internet access even from hotels that advertise “broadband internet.”

Item: Palmerston North Coachman Hotel, where we paid for “broadband wifi” and then discovered that the signal didn’t reach as far as our room.

Item: Albany Executive Inn, just north of Auckland, which charges $4 for your first 20 Meg per day and $.15 more for every Meg on top of that level. Heck, 20 Meg hardly covers my uploads to Flickr!

Item: Jet Park Airport Hotel south of Auckland, which offers broadband in only “deluxe” rooms, and charges an extra $26 per day if you use it.

New Zealand is not alone in the problem, of course. Our worst “yes, we have internet” story was near Poitiers in France, in a lovely chateau (it was not our nickel) where the “internet” was one computer behind the front desk, the very computer where all the chateau’s daily business was done. But if you wanted to check email, the clerk would kindly let you sit in her chair a few minutes and try to access your email through her very slow telephone modem.

Tomorrow, however, we move on to even less internet. Our hotel on the Coromandel Peninsula has “internet” in the sense that you get 20 minutes each day to check up on your email. That’s 5 minutes per Wilczek, since all four of us will be together, something I’m incredibly happy about.

So if my blog goes a bit silent next week, don’t assume that sharks got me–I’ll have lots more to tell you about once we get back online.

Toto, I don’t think…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…we’re in NH any more!

This is what a pet food display looks like, in at least one large Auckland supermarket.

It is a big refrigerator case, in case you can’t tell, showcasing meat that people will cook and feed to their pets.

Actually, my mother also liked to cook her own dogs’ food but no local groceries offered any dog meat that wasn’t canned or dried and kibbled. Her dogs got the people food, cooked without salt or butter but often with garlic.

I bet she would enjoy the New Zealand section of heaven.

Uplifting (or maybe "no uplifting) message

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

You’ve heard of homing pigeons, but how about re-homing chickens?

I bet you never realized–I surely never did–that this could become an issue of public concern, with its own official signage and Actionline phone.

Last night, this warning in a small (one block) green space just north of Auckland, New Zealand, gave us yet more evidence, just in case we needed any, that the world is indeed very different in different places.