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

“That all depends on what happens tomorrow and which direction we decide to ride.“

Yet another great story from TheZenOfMotorcycling…

Big snowflakes were still falling when Frank and I woke up.

We hiked up Broadway, past miniature Christmas trees for sale, each of them wafting the full-sized evergreen smell. A snow-muffled (and grumpy) stone lion greeted us on the Columbia campus.

Later, alone, I wandered down Fifth Avenue past Central Park, amazed by the fantasy opulence of the great storefronts. Earnestly, carefully, I snapped snow-photos of all the kinds of things that kids from NH go to New York to see.

But I bet all the people in this photo, who joined me in ogling the fairytale window at Lord and Taylor, were (at least some of them) big-city folks from Manhattan.

Would you believe, I got called to jury duty on Wednesday morning– talk about an un-American thing to do to a Thanksgiving-cooking mom! So this year we had store-bought pies, though I still home-made killer brownies and biscuit-crust veggies.

More racing around like a maniac in my real life means less time* for writing in my blog (as opposed to Thanksgiving in 2003 and 2004.) But I’m thankful for all the family and food and fun that has swirled through my life in the past 24 hours–and next year, I hope to do it all, all over again.

Except for the part where I burned the microwave popcorn, filling the entire house with stinky smoke. Next year, if I manage not to do that again, I’ll be extra thankful.

* At least I was helping to keep the Web clear for Niek Hockx…

We have two competing, antithetical missions for the Library of American Philosophical Society.

One is to make our truly remarkable collection available for study, just as freely and widely as possible. The other is to protect and conserve all its objects, to pass them on to the future in perfect condition.

Martin L. Leavitt, APS Librarian

I love this idea of two antithetical missions, which I suspect has a much broader applicability in political science, economics, family life, and you name it. I got to hear about it this morning in Philadelphia’s beautiful Library Hall because
Frank is a brand-new member this year at the APS.

Becoming an APS member doesn’t involve a propeller-hat or drinking games with older philosophers. Instead, it’s an opportunity for Frank and spouse to go to lots of amazing lectures on wide-ranging topics–for example, in this current meeting we’ll hear about Chinese poetry, Mayan hieroglyphics, and the courthouse iconography of justice.

I’m afraid we missed “Neuronal Replacement in the Adult Brain,” something I might need just to follow the rest of these lectures.

…with real nostalgia, by reading a few of the 300-plus list items in “You know you’ve been in Sweden too long when“:

• Your native language has seriously deteriorated, now you begin to “eat medicine”, “open the television”, “close the lights off”, “take a beer”, ”look upon everything” and tell someone to “follow with me” or “you needn’t to!” You start to say “for 2 years ago” and expressions like “Don’t panic” creep into your everyday language.
• The fact that all of the “v’s” and the “w’s” are together in the phone directory seems right.
• The first thing you do upon entering a bank/post office/chemist etc. is to look for the queue number machine.
• You accept that you will have to queue to take a queue number.
• You sing bawdy drinking songs instead of Christmas carols.
• As a student, you accept and even enjoy getting dressed in formal wear to go to a candle-lit 3 course dinner where you will alternately bang on your table and stand on your chair singing songs in praise of alcohol each and every time you attempt to raise your fork to your mouth.
• You are concerned when the picture on the front page of the paper is not of some completely random person watering their garden or of a child holding an animal.

Ewww! As bad as mixing up Hot Brown with Hoppin’ John!

(All of the above are classic Kentucky foodstuffs: meat stew, chocolate candy, ham-bacon-cheez-whiz sandwich, and bean stew over rice, respectively.

Frank and I are enjoying bluegrass friendliness and food this week in Lexington, Kentucky.

Taking a break from quantum chromodynamics, Frank and I spent a day in autumn’s multiple colors.

Frank spotted this tree with three colors as he returned from a few miles of country dirt-path running. I enjoyed the non-relativistic time-shift of the first morning of Daylight Savings Time. As the farmer who delivered animal breakfast explained to me, “Sheep don’t take an extra hour of sleep, the way we do.”

I’ve started Flickring those Kentucky photographs (e.g. hadron tree and happy sheep), if you feel like your own quantum-autumn excursion.

Hotel breakfast rooms–I’ve seen a million, but each new one can still surprise. A big plus-plus to Princeton’s Nassau Inn, which is supplementing its meager free Continental breakfast with three huge TV screens, tuned to three different channels, delivering silent news to us coffee drinkers.

Yes, Frank and I are on the road again, this time spending three days in our old hometown Princeton, NJ.

This morning’s surprise was even bigger than usual, as subtitles spelled out the news that Harriet Miers has withdrawn from contention for the Supreme Court. That ought to knock the potential indictments of Rove and Libby off the airwaves for maybe fifteen minutes.

Back upstairs in our hotel room, I told Frank something I then realized this brilliant guy didn’t already know. So, I am sharing this useful wisdom with all my blogreaders:

For the latest news, cnn.com is very good. But you want the latest *rumors*–that’s wonkette.com.

Sooo good to be home again. No, that’s not my house–it’s a sliver of ivy-covered autumnal tower from the Bavarian castle with wonderful wifi. And I don’t miss it, not one little bit. I’m back in the stolid brick Cambridge house that has all my own dear stuff inside it, including my very own bedroom and bookshelves and bathtub. Ahhhhhh! Which reminds me of one of my favorite stories about my somewhat-irascible Grandpa Devine.

Long, long ago, in the late fifties or early sixties, I happened to be visiting his stolid brick NH house when he got what was then a very unusual phone call.

I heard only one side of it–his side–which went something like this:”Yes….yes…yes…WHAT?”

“I beg your pardon?”….

“This house? Do I want to remodel this house?”…

“Madame, have you ever seen my house?”…

“No, I didn’t think so. If you had, you would never have made such a phone call. This house doesn’t need to be remodeled, any more than the TAJ MAHAL!”…

“Good DAY, Madame.”

I’m so glad to be home, in my very own Taj Mahal.