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

Wonderful Tshirt hand-painted for Frank

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

what the back of this Tshirt says?

Thanks to Luis and Cinzia for Frank’s new favorite Tshirt.

Bloglines and Twitter underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
With good wifi, ’tis Paradise enow!

??
No, Omar, I don’t think so!

Originally uploaded by Orange Cremecicle

Susan Mernit astutely diagnoses her own reading shift to (more and more) on the internet. The New York Times and (more recently) Newsweek now look like problems in paper disposal rather than information–but Susan finds one very interesting exception:

“I am still a huge fan of monthly magazines–the womens/shelter/travel magazines that I get–Country Living, Oprah, Domino, Lucky, Sunset, Food & Wine, Blueprint–are tremendous fun and I enjoy browsing through them and savoring the photos, travel ideas, and things I like but will never buy.

So where’s the paradigm shift? Information versus entertainment.

Very astute, but let me shift her shift some more. I see the difference as more like fast food drive-through versus gourmet picnic basket.

Paper can’t compete with pixels on serving up small bites of information to people hungry for information that’s new–now!

Text on a computer screen can’t compete with printed take-anywhere pages that you savor slowly anywhere you want them–from deep in your favorite chair or on a beach blanket.

Mmmmm! Which not to say I don’t love RSS!

I was born just a couple of months before she died. My godmother and namesake, Elizabeth Jordan–a tiny woman, well-known in her long-ago day for her writing and editing, for her ostrich-plume hats and theatrical gestures. (Rumor claims she inspired the outspoken Henrietta Stackpole in Portrait of a Lady.)

By late 1946, when I was born, Aunt Jean (as our family mysteriously called her) had long outlived many, many admirers–for example Mark Twain (1835 -1910), Henry James (once rumored to be her fiancé(!)), and Frances Hodgson Burnet (1849-1924).
But when was Aunt Jean born? That was a family mystery, my mother told me, a deepest secret. My mother’s first clue to the mystery came when she brought her new baby, recently christened Elizabeth Jordan Devine, down from Massachusetts (where my father, post-World-War-II was finishing up at Harvard Law School) to New York City, where “the aunts” lived on Gramercy Park.
Aunt Jean was in bed, very sick, when we arrived–I was slid into the bed with her. She looked at me with great pleasure and whispered–though my mother heard–“Who would have imagined that this little baby is 83 years old?”
Even then, as so often before, my Aunt Jean was exaggerating. Because she herself was a mere 81 years old, having been born on May 19, 1865.

Toni Morrison

Originally uploaded by Careliu

From an amazing short talk I heard today by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, about the humanities in general and her writing in particular:

• “Standing on the outside looking in was a big advantage for me as a writer.”
• “We have all spent a lot of time and thought at the boundary, the border–at the edge. It’s a place the rich have to police. Those outside study the edge and plot to break through it. Those inside fight to maintain belonging or to belong someplace else.”
• “Literature is full of writers who betrayed their class (Harriet Beecher Stowe or Mark Twain) — who ran away from it to live in exile (Henry James) — who stood at the border so they could critique it (Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville)”
• “A ruthless gaze at the center, whether from within or without the circle–that is the strength of the humanities. It has been my way to be at home in the world.”

Many thanks to Al and Bethellen for inviting me, as their guest, to today’s ceremony to see and hear Drew Gilpin Faust awarding the 2007 Radcliffe Medal to Toni Morrison.

p.s. And my sincere apologies to Ms. Morrison that my reconstruction of notes scribbled onto my program fail to do justice to her own Nobel-quality eloquence.

Well, maybe not totally Polish, but now I’m *in* Polish, and so is Frank (who was half-Polish to start with) in a new translation of our book Longing for the Harmonies. More on my newly discovered Polish attributes: Betsy Devine Z wykształcenia jest informatykiem, studia ukończyła w Princeton. Regularnie prowadzi w Internecie blog „Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar” poświęcony różnym zagadnieniom z pogranicza nauki, polityki i humoru. Od 1973 roku jest żoną Franka Wilczka.

Thanks–I think! What a handsome cover design–I hope we get one of these. Thanks to Ewa L. Łokas and Bogumił Bieniok [sic] for this translation and to the busy bots of Technorati for letting me know the book is now out on the Internet.

This could have been avoided if Segways weren’t so darn annoying:

Wild turkeys went after Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory technician recently as he rode his Segway to the office.
They chased him and pecked at him according to a local television reporter who witnessed the entire incident.

You have to admire how Burson-Marsteller or somebody very like them has kept this from being a Segway story and turned it instead into a local LBL story.

ThinkGeek’s Annoy-a-tron might sound funny or cute–but what do you think of this email they quote from a “satisfied customer” who planted one on a co-worker?

I have watched this simple device transform an (until-now) mild-mannered colleague into a spitting, cussing, paranoid lunatic.
He has ordered all of the staff he supervises (not a small number) to locate the source of the dread beeping before doing anything else (but since they are in on the prank, they haven’t been much help). So he waits, white-knuckles gripping the edge of his desk, anticipating the next beep…nearly bursting that vein on his temple as he shouted it: “That beep has been F***ING with me for HOURS now.”
He has called the facilities department to schedule a maintenance worker to investigate. He speculates that “they” might be doing air-quality testing in the building. This beep must be some device in the ducts detecting dangerous levels of asbestos in the air. Or worse. Radon? Aerosolized mercury? Legionella spores?
The beep means something. What does the beep mean? Is it a warning? It sounds urgent, doesn’t it? It’s telling us to do something. But what? … I imagine that soon he will begin to take things apart. He will methodically dismantle all of the electrical devices in his office, creating an unusually precise metaphor for what is happening in his psyche.
I am reminded what a thin and fragile thread keeps us attached to sanity. Today, this tiny little device helped me break a co-worker’s mind, and I thank you for the sinfully pleasurable schadenfreude.

Sinful pleasure in other people’s pain is increasingly marketed to young men. Marketers vie for some bad-boy demographic that gets a charge out of guys insulting their girlfriends or a bunch of guys teaming up for hours of sport humiliating some coworker.
OK, let me be really old here and give some advice. Marketers want to sell stuff, not to make your life better. Making your life better requires teaming up with other people, some of whom sometimes will really annoy you. When you hurt people who thought you were on their team, you risk turning friends into enemies or at least skeptics. You damage the team, which was your team.
I’m a fan of ThinkGeek, but this time I don’t like what they’re selling.

Cary Tennis, you might think, writes advice columns for Salon–not poetry.

But some of his writing–all it needs to be blank verse is chopping a few line breaks into its punctuation:

You take your place at the table and you do your part.
You do your part in the ancient chain of being and history and fathering,
of war and redemption and wounding,
of burdens too heavy to carry and roofs too old to keep the rain out,
of hardy shrubs aspiring to be trees and old warriors wandering lost among their medals.
You take your place at the table and you do your part.

That fragment was part of Cary’s advice to an adult son unsure how to help his increasingly troubled Vietnam-veteran father.

Only part of what makes Cary Tennis “poetic” is his use of wording and cadence. His work runs in the old (Old-Testament old) tradition of poet as prophet and healer, poet as expositor of the Big Picture.

• A young couple kvetches about their nightmare cat–Cary says that the really big issue here isn’t a cat but “whether you cringe with shame or beam with pride when you think of this years from now.”
• An anxious mother wonders how to explain to her already-troubled eight-year daughter that Dad plans a sex change? Stop with the verbal reassurance and throw a party, says Cory–let the family celebrate that Dad can be happier being who he really is.
• A young woman agonizes over being guilt-tripped toward inviting difficult but pushy friends to her in-laws’ lake house. Cory’s advice helps her figure out how to say no “..in the traditional sense of its meaning no. Or, as Albert Einstein replied when asked if he wanted some coffee: no.”

If some of the problems above seem a bit exotic, not to say borderline twee, here is Cory’s response (expurgating one word you won’t find in my blog) to the modern but heart-breaking question “How long will it take me to get over my divorce?” Cory says healing arrives, but not on schedule, only…

… in due time,
and you will receive it as a gift;
you will see that this was not
some .. accident on the way to an appointment with life
but life itself,
your life, your fate,
with bloody scratches from your own fingernails dragged heavily across its back.

Frank and Betsy and a bit of CMS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This giant particle detector being built at CERN represents much more than a giant step for physics.

Scientific groups building it came from India and Pakistan –from the US and Iran — from China and Taiwan — in a collaboration of 37 countries and 2,000 scientists, including about 400 students.

The world could learn a lot more than physics here.

…though I was a cheap date at Harvard Square’s Border Cafe, drinking nothing stronger than Diet Coke.

Yes, 24 hours travel from Geneva hotel to Cambridge, MA hotspot will give anybody a three-Margarita buzz–

with no alcohol–

and no next-morning hangover!

We are home. We are home! I love my dear old bed! My very own pillow! My washing machine!

OK, not that informative, but I thought at least some of you might want to know.