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

Dutch dentist

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This Dutch dentist’s window is full of no-nonsense examples of what a dentist can actually do for you. I love this, and this is so Dutch. Teeth that human beings might have or might want to have or might need to get help with.

No glossy photos of impossibly retouched glamor teeth.

Real teeth.

This is just one example of why I love the Netherlands and the people who live here.

Bird nest hidden in maze

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Hortus Haren, just south of Groningen, is the largest botanical garden in the Netherlands, but flowers were not the main attraction yesterday.

Just beyond its greenhouses is the insectarium, a small one that specializes in really big creepy things, e.g. tarantulas, a scorpion, stick insects, and cockroaches the size of dinner plates. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating on that last point. Cockroaches big enough to make Sarah Palin reach for the gun she uses when she’s hunting moose.

I learned a bit of Dutch when we lived here ten years ago, and one of the Dutch words I think is much better than its English equivalent is “kakkerlak,” which means “cockroach.” Another word where Dutch is better is “kikker,” for “frog.”

The “mystic” time tunnel, the Celtic tree horoscope, the rescued parrots, and the traditional Chinese teahouse that serves delicious traditional Dutch sandwiches are also fine features of the Hortus Haren. I recommend it! (But go with a Dutch friend or at least a Dutch dictionary–signs are all in Dutch.

Dave Winer has an excellent suggestion for the current bank crisis:

So let’s see the Republicans do a little of that famous Country First stuff.

Bush and Cheney must resign immediately. No immunity, no pardons. Nancy Pelosi will become President, promising not to run for re-election on November 4. Her term will be one of the shortest in US history, just long enough to enact the provisions of the bill being proposed by the Republican administration. If it really is the best thing for the country and not a trick, then the Republicans, being impressed by the seriousness of it, would have to insist that Bush step aside and let the Democrats execute the plan. The entire Bush cabinet stays in office through January 20, but reports, of course to Pelosi. And that includes Paulson.

It’s pretty simple. If they won’t do it, we know they’re bluffing.

I don’t think they’re bluffing, but I don’t think their plan for “solving” the current crisis is to save homes and jobs and retirement for small-town America. There are a lot of big smart guys who know Bush much better than we do who have very big hands out to snitch any government hand out.

Warning signs

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Danger, danger, danger! Our country is in trouble, so let’s give George W Bush a big blank check — no strings, no accountability — so that he can make everything right again.

Blank check? America gave Bush a blank check after 9/11. So we ended up with government-sponsored torture and invasion of privacy on a massive scale. What we didn’t end up with was catching Osama Bin Laden.

Blank check? Congress gave Bush a blank check to go into Iraq if all else failed. Wow that was fast. How many of his cronies are multi-billionaires now on the fat profits they are making there on his watch? What we didn’t end up with was finding weapon of mass destruction.

Somebody is going to have to help clean up the mess that the unregulated excesses of Wall Street have made. But if we give Bush a blank check on that, who is to say that he’ll spend the money wisely? Who’s to say the next president won’t have to ask for another huge amount of money to get things fixed up?

Even Bush should agree, based on the old Texas saying, “Fool me, can’t get fooled again.” Any big bailout needs to have big strings attached.

Henry James

Originally uploaded by jadc01

I’ve been spending some time in the NYPL, reading old letters written to my godmother and namesake, author/editor/suffragist/ball-of-fire Elizabeth Garver Jordan.

Quite a few of these are from Henry James (1848 – 1913), whose books could not have been more different from her cheerful fictions. I transcribed for you, dear readers, one typed example (his penmanship is appalling) from Box 3, folder 14, labeled “James, Henry 1904 – 1905.”

I break it up here to give your eye some blessed white space, but his actual letter is one long breathless paragraph. James was on a lecture tour, and she had straightened out for him some problem about his reading at a convent school. I do not know the identity of Miss E. L. Cary, though an earlier letter from James thanks Elizabeth Jordan for introducing them. And “the whilom Parker”? Your guess is as good as mine.

95 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass., March 2, 1905

Dear Miss Jordan,

Forgive my again flying to you, in gratitude, on the wings of the great Remington. [Remington is a brand of typewriter.]

Your kind activity of yesterday, culminating in your second telegram, has given me the peace that passeth understanding. Tuesday fourteenth will beautifully do; by this I shall solemnly abide, and I am now writing to Sister M. Rita to this comfortable effect. I might have wired her directly yesterday — that came over me, to my confusion, ten minutes after I had wired you; but I lost, in my anguish and shame, all presence of mind, and just instinctively clutched at you. May the peace I just spoke of have been now completely brought to you! — with my renewed liveliest thanks.

Your letter is luminosity itself, and everything, I am sure, will go merrily forward. I don’t quite imagine what all those sequestered young souls will make of my profane lucubration; but that is their own affair, and I am fortunately not afraid of their being, as who should say, shocked or scandalized.

It interests me much to hear of your pleasant impression of the whilom Parker — so pathetic a figure as he had, these last months, appeared to the mind’s eye. If I had known you were to meet him, I would have asked you to kindly mention that I would have voted for him could I have voted for anyone — instead of being, through long absence, a poor practically disfranchised creature. But even that crumb of comfort I gather he doesn’t affect you as missing.

You must show me Mrs. Spencer Trask* on the first opportunity — for my curiosity is insatiable. Let me add, for your reassurance, that I have edged away from the “Pen and Brush” quite as gracefully, I think, as I have, with a fine discrimination, sunk into the arms (as it were) of Miss E. L. Cary — for a performance in Brooklyn, on the basis of the proper equivalent, on May tenth p.m.; so you see into what excellent “form” you have got me.
Yours most truly, Henry James.

*Footnote: Katrina Trask, author and wife of “millionaire banker” Spencer Trask. They created (much later) the artist colony Yaddo. Her writing is said to fit “easily with that of other society people with high literary talent.”

Elizabeth Jordan (1865 – 1947)

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Frank is on book tour for The Lightness of Being, but oh boy — he is much better off than poor Jack London!

How do I know? I’ve been reading Elizabeth Jordan’s boxes of letters, mostly from the years she was editor of Harper’s Bazaar (1900 – 1913). One of these came from Jack London, who was sadly following his Call of the Wild on a three-month lecture tour around the US, most recently landing him in a commercial hotel in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

In her own day, people speculated that she had a romance going with Henry James*:

The story runs that when Henry James proposed marriage to Elizabeth Jordan, he wrote a letter couched in so involved and complicated a style that she could not possibly understand it. She answered it in a note so illegible that he could not possibly read it.

Not bloody likely, says Ms. Jordan’s goddaughter (me) — not least because her penmanship was much better than Henry James’s. His 30-plus letters to her over twenty-some years are breathless and surprisingly flirty, when I can read them. I did transcribe one long one, blessedly typewritten.

I wish I had transcribed a long very sad letter from Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) on black-bordered stationery about how much he missed his wife, who had recently died. But I ordered a photocopy, which the NYPL says they will send me about one month from now. I’ll share it with you then.

* How times change — recent speculation is that she had a romance with Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy!

Lay of the land

Originally uploaded by Elmazz

Funny but sad, banks are now foreclosing on “The Shire,” a housing development inspired by visions of hobbits who want to buy quirky thatched houses with modern conveniences. Dang, I would have liked to spend time in one of those houses (though maybe not if it meant moving my family out to Bend, Oregon.)

For example, the 3,200-square-foot Butterfly Cottage (says the Bend Bulletin) ,

overlooks an amphitheater, has 26-foot-high ceilings and interior finishes that include bamboo flooring, a Japanese soaking tub and granite countertops. The house has a “hobbit hole” in the backyard for storing garden supplies.

If Gandalf’s not liquid, maybe the Googles could buy this? It would make one heckuva great mega-yurt for group meetings!

****
Where credit is due: I read about this in the latest edition of Dave Langford’s scifi fanzine Ansible. Bonus quote therefrom, from his long-ongoing saga of fun bits from bad writing:

Tripodal Stability Dept. ‘She crouched on a three-legged stool as if warming herself before the fire, but Will knew her chill would take more melting than that. He knelt down before her. The stool wobbled under her when he took her hands, the one leg shorter than the other that his father hadn’t mended in fifteen years gone past.’ (Elizabeth Bear, Ink and Steel, 2008)

The joy of an old, forgotten photo

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The dog of physics blogger Chad Orzel has a lot more to say about science than my little dog ever bothered to let me know about.

Chad Orzel’s dog on classical mechanics: “Classical mechanics is like a good bone. You can chew it, and chew it, and you think it’s all used up, but then you come back, and you can still chew it some more.”

My dog Marianne on classical mechanics: “Wow, I fell off the couch — again!”

Marianne would have loved virtual bunnies made of cheese.

Baby delivered this morning by UPS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

On our doorstep before 8 a.m. this morning — Frank’s brand new book, The Lightness of Being!

I decided that our family cradle, now repurposed to stuffed toy storage, would be an excellent place to take this newborn’s photo.

A thoroughly modern baby, this book even has its own website, “LightnessOfBeingBook.com, and its own Flash animation there. Some early reviewers call it lively and cheeky — others describe it as masterful and deep. Eh — it’s a particle, it’s a wave — it’s quite a book.

And what a great way for new babies to get delivered!

Our kitchen has been the scene of many a vinegar-powered volcano, but here via Boing Boing is something even more wet, wild, and bewildering.

Cornstarch mixed with water has very spooky properties. It is a suspension that seems to transition back and forth between liquid and solid, depending on kinds of forces applied to it. If you try this at home, do not, do not, do NOT pour the mess down a sink or toilet once you have finished playing. The cornstarch will in time settle out of the liquid water, becoming a solid and very expensive mass in the pipes for your plumber to deal with.