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

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.

“Horses don’t like me, but wolves like me,” says Lulu* over dinner tonight.

“And rhinoceroses,” adds her husband.

“Oh, yes, Robby the Rhino liked me very much. But that was because he saw me with my friend Jane, the veterinarian who collected his specimen.” We then pester Lulu until she tells us this story:

Robby the Rhino was a very fine rhino. His sperm was in much demand, so for many years it was collected by a man who would sit in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle with an artificial vagina. Robby the Rhino would mount the Volkswagen, and produce his specimen.

But as time went on, poor Robby became arthritic. He could no longer mount the Volkswagen. So Jane used to collect his specimen, stimulating him while he walked and hobbled and limped around inside his enclosure.

I was visiting [the big US city] where Jane lived, and she invited me to come visit Robby at the zoo. She was wearing a white zip-up lab coat, and she gave me one also. As soon as Robby caught sight of Jane in her white coat, he got…very happy. We went into his cage, and Jane was working on collecting his specimen. Then she said to me, “Lulu, he likes to have his nose patted. Why don’t you pat his nose?”

Now, a rhinoceros has a very, very big nose. With a horn on the end of it. I’m thinking that if I get close enough to touch him that I could be mincemeat. And then I look out of the cage, and there is a five-year-old boy with his grandparents, all of them staring at what Jane is doing.

So while Jane is saying, “Just pat his nose, he likes it,” I’m thinking that when I do that, they’ll be staring at me. But then I remind myself that not one person in [big American city] knows me, so I get up my courage and I pat Robbie’s nose. And then he gives Jane his specimen. He really did like it.

Now Robby the Rhino is dead, but his sperm lives on. And I, for one, will never forget this story!

* All names have been changed, including the names of rhinos.

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.

While reading Liz (MamaMusings), I caught (kerchoo!) the latest funny search-meme. Search for your own name plus “needs” and blog some results.

Here’s some of what Google thinks a Betsy needs:

1. Betsy needs a family who will be understanding of her limitations
2. Betsy needs to develop an efficient method to find her information
3. Betsy needs to be trained before she can score essays
4. Betsy needs to be in a family where she can be watched pretty much 24-7
5. Betsy needs to understand that everyone believes that they act rationally according to their own worldview

At MSN Search, Betsy’s needs are more colorful :

1. Betsy needs a show name
2. Betsy needs to be switched to reserve on 200kms
3. Betsy needs a new title
4. Betsy needs a fenced yard
5. Betsy needs your help, support, and to hear from you!

Betsy’s needs at Yahoo add a touch of mystery:

1. Betsy needs to tell Amber some positive things about Kathy
2. Betsy needs to know asap
3. Betsy needs to see him when he’s green [????]
4. Betsy needs a break
5. Betsy needs extensive roof work done

Thanks to all you search gurus for helping us get in touch with our less-known needs–though I sure hope that “roof work” one is not prophetic, at least for this Betsy!

The scariest ghost you can meet on Halloween is your very own. Princeton was full of those ghosts, for the past three days.

Blue-jean clad students strolling past the Woodrow Wilson School–do these kids still call it “God’s bicycle rack”?
That’s what Frank and I called it, back in our grad student days, as we hiked past the very same fountain and magnolia trees, maybe at midnight, off to get coffee before going back to the lab.

Or are these laughing students the doppelgangers of later students, pre-meds of the early seventies, who worked so hard in the bio labs I TAed that I got in trouble when their median grade came out a B+. (And one student who got a B+ was close to tears at that terrible grade.)

Students lugging big ludicrous backpacks could also, in another era, have been friends of my children, headed off to some ultimate Frisbee occasion.

Or maybe some of those kids we just met this spring, when Frank joined in a Princeton student Frist filibuster.

As I morph these lively present-day students back through my multiple memories of Princeton, I feel myself shifting and sliding around in so many different past tenses. Halloween black and orange will stand for Princeton, this year.

p.s. It was great to revisit so many real live friends in Princeton too. In fact, that was more like an early Christmas!

p.p.s. We’re spending tonight in Harrodsberg, Kentucky. The Shaker Village hotel has restful charms but most likely not wifi.

The non-news of people waiting for Plamegate tidbits is getting sticky–e.g. this from Wonkette:

… the [FOX News] doughnuts had pre-arranged blanket immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony. Their hot, delicious testimony.

Breaking…Wonkette has now added a new category, “Politics/Doughnuts.

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.

Scooter Libby, who told prosecutors he learned about Valerie Plame’s CIA connection from “journalists,” in fact got the information from Dick Cheney.

Plamegate is giving some journalists a bad name, but….the name “Dick Cheney”? That’s going too far!