Goth goth goth, POSE, aaaand chili half-smoke

Summarizing the weekend has rarely been easier, but it does look a little odd.

I've gotten onto a major gothic kick in the reading department and am midway through both The Castle of Otranto and The Monk, having polished off the somewhat less ridiculous Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard. All I can say about The Monk is that it's either one of the best future-oriented jokes—something Lewis was hoping would cause neverending laughter a hundred years or so along—or a perfectly horrifying ball o' cheese. Not only are there bleeding nun-ghosts who demand marriage and/or laying (heh) of their spectres, unholy fiends who pose as the models for pr0n unusually well-venerated icons, dark rites conducted in moldering crypts, and dirty dirty incest, there's a perverted pet bird who shows up solely to titillate a voyeur. I've lost track of the number of times people have met by coincidence and sat down to tell long involved "so I was walking through the woods and met this [bandit/distressed maiden/bleeding ghost/bandit dressed as a distressed sanguinous ghost-chickie]" stories that purely beggar description. No doubt English classes go right to town on this book, but on its own merits it walks a beautiful line between insultingly intricate and downright hee-larious. What little I've seen in Otranto promises much the same. No wonder people of Jane Austen's era worried about what reading this stuff would do to their kids' minds and morals. Good times!

Because woman does not live by goth alone, Teal and I made the traffic-clogged drive out to the National Arboretum on Sunday to frolic and take silly pictures, which I will upload soonest [ETA: Flickr link]. Jeans are not conducive to yoga poses, and my Crow is not yet consistent enough that I wanted to try it on the flagstoned verge of a scummy lily pond, but at least we were out in the air and enjoying ourselves. The Arboretum is home to an enormous collection of Glenn Dale azaleas, only a few of which were in bloom; we mostly amused ourselves by peering at their names ("Glenn Dale Bacchante. Presumably you don't let guys stray off the path here, euan oi oi oi oi?" "Glenn Dale Shameless. Goodness!") and trying to figure out what the principles of organization were.

Lest all that healthy trekkin' and triangle-posin' have accidentally conferred any healthful benefits upon us, we went back into downtown and joined several hundred other people who had decided to close out the weekend by standing in line at Ben's Chili Bowl. You can kinda sorta tell that President Obama had visited there, what with the stickers of the Presidential seal featuring his face, the wall-size poster of him with Mayor Fenty, and the ball-point addendum under the "Who Eats Free at Ben's: Bill Cosby and the Obama Family" note that reads, "BUT HE PAID." So did we, for chili-cheese half-smokes, fries, and chocolate shakes. My God, you know you're in for indigestion after a meal at Ben's. But it is so so worth it.

Allons-y

Here's an elegant bit of elegaic geekdom wot I am posting not just because David Tennant is pretty but also because he's been a fantastic Doctor. Christopher Eccleston left some big shoes to fill, but Tennant made it look easy.




I will post photos from last night's Halloween entertainment later, though I regret in advance not having been able to get reaction shots of the two guys in front of us in line at Giant. Apparently in the Dominican Republic you don't often see a giant Tigger and a witch in green scrubs buying booze and talking stats. It seems a shame that that would be the case, but no doubt they've got their own expected times and places for becostumed wonkerie.

She saved the world. A lot.

There are still fine geekly people in my life who have never watched "Buffy," and while I love them dearly I cannot pretend to understand this one thing about them. The show kicked so many shapes and forms of ass: It had snarkiness and real story, foreshadowings and haunting consequences, sneaky little moments that incrementally changed how we see the world (back then, nobody but Joss would have made the show's first girl-on-girl kiss part of the background noise), and a lot of really fantastic writing delivered by a cast who clearly loved the job. Once I got past my first "ew, her name is Buffy?" twitch and the memory of the cinematic debacle of the same name, I was hooked but good. "The Body," "Hush," and, of course, "Once More With Feeling" rank as some of the best TV out there.

In NPR's innovative twist on the "Top 100 Importantest Wankers"-type lists, Iraq reporter Jamie Tarabay talks about how BtVS helped her handle life in a war zone. Giles' lie about how adulthood gets easier—"Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after"—has rarely seemed so apt.

Inspired by the story, I have taken up the dark arts for fun and profit. Anya would be very proud.

Thanks to GirlCuz for the pic.

Le singe n'est pas dans le chambre

Vacation planning! A summery week of galloping about the Francophone north, hurrah! It'll be interesting to see how well someone whose knowledge of French is drawn mainly from Eddie Izzard routines will negotiate Quebec City and the associated transit network. I anticipate many moments of amusement, bewilderment, and mutual incomprehension, as was the case in Argentina (where I knew the language but not the cultural subtext). Still, if someone's grandmother catches fire while I'm there, I'll be ready.

Between now and then lie the traditional weeks of preemptive worriting, scrambling for equipage, interwebular researching, and packing. Excitement nonetheless. Je vais au Canada!

Desultory review: "The Screwtape Letters" live

I wasn't entirely thrilled with the adaptation of "The Screwtape Letters," partly because the format's a bit limiting—Screwtape gets a letter, he responds to it, his scuttling secretary sends the response, lather rinse repeat—and partly because I quibbled with bits of the production. On balance, though, it was a great if chilly way to spend an evening (the Lansburgh was so cold that the ushers offered blankets; never have I been so glad to have large seatmates).

The set was fantastic: a wedge of distorted tile flooring, a comfortable easy chair and ottoman, and a serpentine ladder leading up into the flies, with a black safe-like mailbox hanging next to it. As the lights changed throughout the production, the back wall gradually became visible, allowing the audience to see that it was tiled like a catacomb's, skulls and the stacked ridges of femurs poking out to echo the tiling of the study's floor. Slowly morbid and creepifyin, nicely done.

Screwtape was impressive; the actor basically carries the dialogue (monologue?) for 90 minutes with very little break. They had an actress in a funky body suit acting as Toadpipe and periodically stepping in to illustrate Screwtape's points (the fierce catwalk she did when Screwtape talked about fashion skewing toward an unrealistically boyish body got the biggest laugh of the night), but I really regretted the director's choice to have her gibber wordlessly at the audience; it seemed like reaching too hard for a laugh. To my immense disappointment, they didn't do the part of the books where Screwtape, in a fit of irritation at his nephew's incompetence, turns into a giant bug. Probably for the best, especially considering that by the end of the night the poor actor was sweating copiously anyway. The first few rows also got the benefit of his plosives. Ick.

The death of Wormwood's patient was done very effectively: a flash of sharp white light, a rumbling noise of walls falling, and then, dead clear, the sound of a single piper playing "Amazing Grace." Dammit, Scotsmen, that's such a cliched piece. So how come every single time it's played I start to sniffle?

Who wants to wangst forever

It cannot be that long ago that I was a melodramatic teenling, can it? I mean, the earth's crust wasn't warm, as I recall, although granted back then we had actual winters, winters like today's youth don't get, winters with snow and ice and wind, winters where we had to go to school on sleds drawn by huskies and devil take the hindmost. (As if. Fairfax County's proud heritage of flipping shit and closing at any hint of precip can be connected directly to its one attempt to take weather forecasts with a grain of salt back in 1987, and the resulting Great Veterans Day Afternoon Snowshower Farrago of Infamy is still bright in memory.)

Still and all, back in those dim days of mine and yore, I do know that the teen angst "our love can never be, phewWOE" market was served by solidly cheesy programs like "Dark Shadows" and the Linda Hamilton/Ron Perlman "Beauty and the Beast," a show that I can totally think of without getting kind of red in the face and wanting to go back in time just to smack some taste into my 12-year-old self, who had enough to deal with anyway what with a demented civics teacher, "The Day After," and stirrup pants. Oh God, down this route lies post-'80s PTSD that ends with me in the fetal position humming Martika. Let's avoid the discussion, because that is not my point here.

My point is that, by virtue of being an agéd hag, I have totally missed the post-Buffy generation's vampire smolder fodder: the Twilight series. Fortunately, others have taken the bullet and I can critique from behind a cozy protective wall of second-hand pain. It looks like the books are truly hideous tripe, possibly worse prose than that found in my now-regretted collection of early Mercedes Lackey novels. Second, the introduction of a genus of vampires unwilling to go out in the sunlight not for the traditional "I will burst into flame and do a Savini dissolve" reasons but because sunlight makes them glitter is hilariously unforgivable, even if the resulting movie (hahaha, of course there's gonna be a movie) stars the cutie who played Cedric Diggory to such tasty effect. Third, there's a weird stalker/possessive vibe between the nominal protagonist (her name is BELLA SWANN, do you begin to see the problem here?) and the aggravatingly pretty vampire/objet d'crush that is hyped up to a point that is freaky even for adolescent-bait cheese lit.

On the other hand, but, and however, there has been a commendable resurgence of Sparkle Motion references and at least one kick-ass comments thread beginning, "And they unlived in sparkly flowery goodness forever and ever, or until he said 'Fuck it' and drained her like a jug of Thunderbird." To paraphrase Spider Robinson, shared pain is halved, shared snark increased, and thus do we refute entropy.

Singer

While my body grumblingly deals with the aftereffects of my overestimation of my yogic skillz yesterday, one of my favorite Old English-inspired poems has come to mind. Robert Pinsky, writing for the Post's Poet's Choice a few years ago, introduced me to Steven Cramer's excellent "Singer," a modern interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon "Deor." The poet's resignation and freedom from bitterness are striking. Aches and pains from too much exercise are a flimsy but sufficient excuse for posting it.

Singer

I knew trouble and endured it,
grief and desire my companions.
In winter my enemy attacked.
The better of the two, I was bound
in rope made from my own sinew.
All that has passed, and so may this.

There was a man condemned to live
outside the city he loved—even death
meant less in exile—and a woman
who dreaded the child inside her.
Her dreams were dreams of drowning.
All that has passed, and so may this.

If the mind becomes a wolf’s mind,
it will force misery on misery,
make cowards heroes. If courtiers
want the kingdom overthrown, yet fail
to speak, they will remain courtiers.
All that has passed, and so may this.

At first doom sees, wherever it turns,
more doom. Then, in time: joy.
I’ll say this about myself: my name
was a name you knew, and I sang
until another singer took my place.
All that has passed, and so will this.

Earn your spurs

Although he wouldn't have been my pick to play Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies, ain't no denyin' that Viggo Mortensen is a horseman through and through, that rare modern actor who can ride well. It was just a tiny bit distracting that he was the only rider in the Rohirrim scenes whose horse was collected into a classical frame. There have been plenty of equine glitches in modern movies, like the final scene of "Hidalgo" (itself a terribly cheesy flick) in which the title pony is released to join his wild brethren and takes off after them, showing his...ach, damn, showing his neatly shod heels, the moral equivalent of showing Queen Elizabeth I with braces, but you can't fault Mortensen's work in the saddle.

The fact that he is in a position to grant wishes for his fellow fanatics behind the scenes is really just icing on the cake.

Con su flor en la boca and my 10 blade in his trachea

Gala Theater's "Blood Wedding" was such a fun trip back to halcyon days of minoring in la bella lengua. You absolutely cannot accuse Federico of ever having been too subtle, what with Leonardo riding his great big sweating horse hither and yon in search of stolen moments with La Novia, while the chilly Luna keens about how she wishes she were able to warm her hands in the hot blood of a human heart, and Gala didn't try to minimize any of the fantasy in the interests of realism. The flamenco trio who performed in the first half almost overshadowed the rest of the production—bring back the guitarist! more stamping!—but were balanced out by a great arrangement of the woodcutters' song in the second act, where three peripheral characters sing a lament to the moon, asking her to leave some shadows where the lovers can hide. She doesn't. It ends badly.

Continuing the cantata in the key of goooooore, this week's mini-med course was on non-cardiac thoracic surgery. I've always heard that surgeons are the fighter pilots of the medical world, all ego and strut and absolutely bugger-all in terms of personal skills, and mostly I haven't been able to argue. This week's presenter clearly loved, oh but I mean LOVED, her job, but she was also weirdly charismatic (and gorgeous and raising twins on her own and a fine arts grad and able to do plumbing work on her 1865 house during her residency and oh God I've wasted my life). She explained how open-chest surgery became possible with the development of the ventilator, then she kind of took a sharp left turn and from then on we were all sitting in stunned silence as she ran us through at least five different major operations, including tracheal reductions, bronchial lobectomies, arterial reconstructions, esophageal reconstructions, and tumor excisions, complete with CT scans (which she made comprehensible, a neat trick), graphic photos, a couple of videos. I especially liked one video—an esophageal operation, maybe—where she could clearly be heard snapping, "I don't care, I don't care." She looked a bit embarrassed and said, "I only care about important things when I'm doing surgery." Other memorable lines included, "The aorta is tough, like kevlar. The pulmonary artery, though, it's like American cheese. Rips if you look at it," and of course, "Wow, I wish I could go on Letterman for this one. I can sever a trachea at the neck, extract it from below, and reach up to wave at you through the hiatal space." Surgeon humor.

The biggest surprise for me personally was that I could watch the slides at all. Blood and lymph and exposed innards, no thanks, usually, but she had the gift of showing all the squishy bits as structures. I was fascinated by the engineering of certain neat surgical tricks, like how to remove a giant tumor during a laparoscopic operation: You detach it from the surrounding structures, put it in a ziplocky bag inside the body cavity, then snip the mass into bits, seal the bag, and ooze the whole thing out like a sausage. How sneaky! How clever! How I hope I never need that myself! And oh sweet God that teratoma is going to eat my dreams. She wrapped up with a look at the seriously dire fall in the number of cardiothoracic fellows; it's one of the few specialties that's experiencing negative growth, and part of the problem is the hours and the difficulty of training people in such potentially serious areas. She's working with the med students to use her ingenious plaster/bovine/banana-prophylactic models to introduce basic surgeries, but since they won't be fully grown surgeons for 10 (!) more years, there are going to be some very lean years. We may've come out of the class starry-eyed and thinking that surgery looks like, OMG, super fun, but I doubt anyone really wants me trying to figure out how to use a rib spreader.

Certainties

Death, taxes,...and Eurovision. There is no escape from the power of this fully armed and operational festival of continental WTF. Ayyyyy!

Also, Neil Gaiman is twelve.

Another knight of the Golden Age

RIP Arthur C. Clarke. I didn't read much of his stuff when I was hoovering up SF stories with the usual preadolescent enthusiasm, and I never cracked 2001, but damn if "The Nine Billion Names of God" doesn't have one of the most elegant closes of any short story ever. It was the kind of story that stuck in your mind, rousing echoes years later—"Hey, do you remember a story where, like, monks are trying to recite the names of God? And they hire a pair of engineers? Or am I making that up?" "No, yeah. It was next to 'Nightfall' in an anthology I had." "Oh right, the one about the planet with all the suns?" "And the fire? Right!" Then of course the corrupt president of Earth in "Babylon 5" was named Arthur Clarke, as part of Harlan Ellison's not-at-all-subtle series of references to classic authors (the evil leader of the telepaths was named Alfred Bester, and there was at least one other name dropped with the grace of a neon-green anvil). Dying at 90 in your tropical paradise doesn't sound like a bad way to go. [ETA from comments: Serialkarma's father called her last night to say, "I thought you would want to know that Arthur C. Clarke died tomorrow." Which, like Making Light's contribution, is a fine and proper epitaph.]

Dang, with all the excitement about Pi Day and going to see the National Geographic's amazing frog exhibit (waxy monkey frogs! Chinese gliding frogs! frogs by Leonardo, frogs from Mars!), I missed writing up the one event I wish I'd stayed in Texas to see: Bandera's Wild Hog Explosion. Hogs are an invasive species and do all kinds of damage, so there's very little love lost for them among country people, but the creatures are smart and dangerous enough that hunters treat them with a certain respect. None of which, it must be admitted, is evident in the idea of wrassling a squirming pig into a burlap bag, but at a guess the ensuing hijinks would be worth the visit. Add a beer and a Frito pie, and that right there is a good date.

The wind cries, "Mush, you huskies!"

I'm a big fan of the gratuitous weirdification of the world, so when someone pointed out that the DC Idiotarod was being run this weekend, there was naught to do but haul ass down to the Krispy Kreme for sugar and photo ops.

Quite a few of the photos came out, but I'm sad that I didn't get pics of Team Suri You Jest (runners dressed as different Tom Cruise characters), Team Bluth (all Arrested Development characters, obvy), Team Flavor of Love (the cart included a stripper pole, and one of the runners did the entire route in stilletos, which is fookin' hard core), Team Walk of Shame, Team Naughty Nurses (free Brach's lollipops! only for boys, aw), or Team Nameless But Known as Those Guys Hauling an Actual Bar (arriving at checkpoints late but to riotous cheers). I did get shots of the Smurfs, the Zombie Marters, the Pirate Amino Acids, the Jamaican Cool Runners, Devo, and the Recycled Bridesmaids, all of whom were sweet about posing (Team Gore, above, were very photogenic). We must've been following the Leisure route, because even at a walk we were able to more or less keep up with the teams, always with an ear out for the sound of a rattling cart hurtling up behind us at speed. We saw a lot of drivers pull over to yell variations on the theme of WTF, and generally it seemed like passersby thought it was good fun.

As at Punkin Chunkin, people had put a lot of thought and effort into participating in a fundamentally silly event. With 364 days to go before the next one, it seems like we should be able to come up with something, because I really want to do this next year. Someone else will have to acquire the cart, though; I lack the steely nerve for such a life of crime.

We get signal

Main screen turn on! How are you gentlemen.January 15. Until then, "I'm a Vampire" and "Washington, D.C." on constant repeat.

The Magnetic Fields came to the Birchmere a few year years ago. Stephin Merritt has an anti-presence on stage, and after a particularly robust cheer early in the set he also winced and asked that nobody whoop in the higher registers, because it hurt his ears. Deep-voiced and ridiculous woos punctuated the rest of the show. Merritt didn't seem to be enjoying himself much until he and Claudia Gonson teamed up for "Yeah, Oh Yeah." She sang the verses while he twisted slowly around on his rotating stool, orbiting by the mike to deliver the three-word chorus and then spinning on, getting cheerier as the song got darker and the threat of violence more explicit. The most spontaneous reaction from the audience came during "Papa Was a Rodeo," when Merritt demonstrated his ability to sing one of his most romantic and well-loved songs while using an uncooperative lighter to get his cigarette going. "I like your twisted point of view, Mike," flick flick flick, "I like your questioning eyebrow," flickflickflickflick, "You've made it pretty clear what you like," flickflickflick success! "It's only fair to tell you now," inhale, audience applause, "That I leave early in the morning/ And I won't be back till next year/ I see that kiss-me pucker forming/ But maybe you should plug it with a beer."

[ETA: There are no concert dates scheduled in the DC area. Two of the three February shows at NYC's Town Hall are already sold out, and the remaining show is a Thursday night. Le forlorn sigh.]

But does it have a pointe?

Teal and I are trying to wrangle our schedules and budgets to allow for another hit of Mariinsky ballet goodness. A couple of summers ago, I ended up with tickets to their production of "Le Corsaire," one of the story ballets I didn't know well. I did know that one of the male dancers traditionally spends the show shirtless, which is how I sold it to Teal, who is not a big dance buff but who will try anything once. It's in the name of the arts, we agreed.

We were lucky enough to see the lineup with young Leonid Sarafanov dancing as Ali. Sarafanov is slimmer than the average male dancer, with long lines like a Balanchine girl, and the contrast between his form and that of the chunkier lead dancer was striking. Also striking was the fact that the stagehands apparently hadn't prepped the stage correctly: The ballerina dancing Medora came gliding out en pointe in a beautiful pas de bourée couru, but just as she reached center stage, she slipped entirely off her toes and fell onto her hip with a thud that the whole theater could hear. The audience gasped, she got back up and finished the scene, to firm applause, and the curtain came down. It stayed down for a long few minutes, too, but nobody in the audience muttered; we were all picturing stagehands being chivvied across the floor, driven by Russian invective, trying to get the surface fixed properly. The rest of the show wasn't marred with anything so bad, but once or twice it was possible to see a dancer's foot skid when it was meant to be planted, and some of the dancers were just visibly conservative. It must've been nerve-wracking for them.

But you couldn't have told that from Sarafanov's performance. Ali is a supporting role, but like Mercutio it gets some of the best solo bits. The Kirov's Ali has a solo in the second act, reassuring the captured princess or something, and Sarafanov came bounding out like a kid on Christmas. He had long clean lines, a sharp point, and beautiful ease in his leaps, not so much defying gravity as treating it as a quaint convention. There came a point where he did a series of three spinning kicking jumps, and when he went into the first his body was so far off the vertical that it looked as though he was bound to fall as hard as Medora had. No; he spun like a cat and landed cleanly, then rose and jumped again, body again angled out in space. The audience gasped; he was doing it on purpose. He landed again, the audience started to applaud, and he did it a third time, still looking cheerful and easy in the air. Ballet crowds are pretty quiet most of the time, like golf fans in foundation garments and industrial hairspray, and so when I say that I heard actual screaming believe me it came as a shock. Sarafanov finished his solo still looking unruffled and happy, which is more than can be said for the lead cavalier, who stalked out glaring at the applause for a secondary character. The Post's reviewer made a snippy remark about the jumps being more fit for martial arts than ballet, but if the Mariinsky is willing to allow it, who am I to judge?

This time it's "La Bayadère," which is another ballet for abs fans (man, these things must seem weird to actual Indian and Turkish dancers: "Is that supposed to be us?"), and he's dancing the lead. I've got my fingers crossed for lots of jumps; it does the Kennedy Center's chandeliers good to get the dust shaken out of them by the whooping and hollering.

Tis the season

moar funny pictures

On Monday night, the last full night of our association's annual meeting and the night of the traditional huge party for all attendees, Rock Ninja and I had a lot of fun wandering around the cold-water exhibit in the Atlanta aquarium and making this smoochy face at various creatures, including the sea lions, the belugas, and of course the sea otters, who even at sleepy time were federally controllable levels of cute. The Georgia facility is more open than the Baltimore aquarium, so despite the 2000 guests and associated gate-crashers, there was plenty of room to walk around once we'd gotten through the scrum around the bars. I particularly liked the petting tanks, trying some gingerly contact with a sea anemone, some skittish shrimp ("It doesn't matter how much you've had to drink, we are still not appetizers"), a small shark, a manta ray, some horseshoe crabs, and a sea star. Verdict: Generally slimy and occasionally chitinous in the extreme.

Making Light's links to the online Anglo-Saxon Christmas carol quizzes are live and delicious. One of my few regrets from college was that archaeology classes got in the way of my taking the English department's two-semester class on Old English and Beowulf, but since then I've worked on picking up some of the language here and there. The rhythm and flow of Anglo-Saxon English get me right in the dantian. Not long after the LotR movies came out, quite a few philology texts by and about Tolkien became widely available; Il Padre and I accidentally bought each other copies of the exact same book for Christmas. I don't keep up with the New Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as often as I should (reporting on the weather in 2006: "In þissum wucum heard forst ond great cyle fór west of Siberiam ond Russiam ofer Easteuropam, ond her snaw feoll in Athenai in Greclande"), but I'm impressed by the people who keep it up.

Chaucer nedeth a newe payre of shoes!

Reason 2,583,899,024 to love the internets: Because someone is rewriting a Flight of the Conchords song in Middle English. "And ich haue soore nede of thy merchaundise. Aw yea. And ich am yn my red hose, the which aren cleped busynesse hose." Aw yea indeed.

*Frantic dance of disgust*

DO. NOT. WANT.

Fortuitous accidents

The joys of geekly conversation include being able to mention a possible head injury to one friend and end up with the links to a couple of free iUniversity lectures by a fascinating scientist studying the relationship between chronic stress and disease. I've had mixed luck with iUniversity before: It's easy to fantasize that I'll spend the endless Metro delays learning about Russian novels or basic anatomy, but in too many cases the lectures don't live up to my hopes. Boring speakers, poor sound quality, material that's out of my league...for one reason or another, a lot of the lectures fall short. Robert Sapolsky's "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" and "Stress and Coping: What Baboons Can Teach Us," however, are completely fascinating, like classes with that one professor who made you consider switching majors halfway through college. He's good at boiling down reams of data into clear descriptions of physiological reactions and consequences, then giving advice on how to be one of the "good" responders. Of course, there's a risk that you'll come away with a neurotic desire to check your various hormone levels multiple times each day to make sure that you're not so stressed that you're prone to disease, and that will both increase your baseline stress and probably cut down on your number of friends, further diminishing your coping mechanisms aiee. Caveat lector. Also, the nonendocrinologically educated among us will get the major wiggins about the Peter Pan story he tells, so if it's important to you to keep a sense of childlike sparkling wonder about the book, (a) you're beyond my help and (b) for pity's sake don't learn anything about J. M. Barrie's early life.

Alas Millsboro

Herewith a brief review of the 2007 Punkin Chunkin expedition, pending photos and video from various parties involved. The configuration of the new location allows the crowd to stand directly behind even the big air cannons and monster trebuchets, including the much-admired Yankee Siege ("Now that," sighed one woman new to the event, "is a sexy bit of engineering"). The behind-the-pit vantage point made it a little easier to see the pumpkins on the rise, a definite plus, but stiff breezes from Hurricane Noel's passage directed the lighter frag from demolished pumpkins back toward the crowd. Ewwww. Weebat took to hiding behind Iosif in a bid to avoid the fluttering innards, but the rest of us were reduced to picking bits of slimy stuff off one another's jackets. Which, I should also mention, were heavy and layered, because it was damn cold for most of the early part of the event. Still, fun was had, squash was flung, beta carotene-olicious funnel cake was consumed. Full marks.

The Great Pumpkin dreams of flight

Given that it's 90 degrees and humid in DC right now, it's a little hard to believe that it's almost time for the annual pilgrimage to Millsboro, Delaware. Not to dispute the importance of sitting around the groaning board and disassembling a turkey and its accoutrements, but come on, that's hardly the most important thing about the coming month. Did you forget? Did you fail to mark your appointment book? Is it not written in letters of fire upon your lids?

Knave, know thou well that the first weekend of November, as has been ordained from time immemorial, we honor the understanding that squash do not wish to live after the feast of All Saints. They dream of catching air. They dream of glorious death. They dream, in short, of Punkin Chunkin.

Punkin Chunkin, which is usually held on a particularly isolated bit of Delaware cornfield encircled by pines, feels like a cross between a medieval miracle fair, a county fair, and an air show, heavily salted with rural Americana. You’ll see GOP stickers on the Harleys and NASA technology in the competing engines, little kids learning to calculate trajectories, historians trying to pin a date on the different catapults, and amateur movie critics wondering whether "Pirates of the Punkin Chunkin" is actually a better choice than, say, "The Return of the Killer Cucurbit."

The machines are arrayed in a rough L shape on the field, with the big guns along the bottom edge of the field and the smaller machines running along the upright, facing away from the audience. The basic rules vary only slightly for the different age- and machinery type-based categories: The pumpkin, which should weigh between 8 and 10 pounds, must be intact during flight; ignominious disintegration is scored as pie. Scoring in all categories except Costume/Theatrical is based on distance, so teams have up to 3 hours to find their shots, dispatching helmeted riders on ATVs head toward the treeline after many shots (for the more powerful engines, which can send a pumpkin about a mile, laser triangulation—of course, what else?—is used to give the riders an idea of where to look). Air cannons cannot be made out of PVC, for reasons that became spectacularly although nonfatally clear two years ago, and explosives are also illegal.

Each group of machines competes separately, roughly in order of size: First there is the spectacularly loud firing of the giant guns, whose shots are usually heralded by an air horn and crackly loudspeaker announcements of "fire in the hole"; then there is the terrifying thrum of the giant centrifuges; and then homemade catapults, trebuchets, glorified slingshots, and human-powered machines of varying levels of ingenuity take turns going for distance. Once the smaller engines take over, you’ve actually got a better chance of seeing the pumpkins en l’aire for the full arc; shots by the larger machines go up so fast that you probably won’t see the squash until it reaches the crest and starts heading back to earth. The day ends with a flinging free-for-all, pumpkins crashing everywhere on the field as the sun sinks into the west.

For the audience, the competition is definitely the main attraction, especially with devices like the trebuchet that require slow, suspense-building preparation as they are winched into position. (Nota bene: The machines are built by amateurs. Misfires are possible, especially among the smaller machines, and the audience is only about 30 feet back, so keep a sharp eye out. Ten pounds at 32 feet per second squared is funny until it looks like it’s right overhead, 200 feet up, and heading your way with all the dispatch gravity can muster.) But there are also carnival rides, bands, beer and fried-food booths, charity raffles, a recipe contest, and a wondrous array of pumpkin-laced foods for sale. The pumpkin funnel cake is a perennial favorite, but the pumpkin cake with cream cheese icing is also worth a couple of bucks.

Finally, at the end of the day, and after numerous warnings to teams that it’s time for a cease-fire, the audience is invited into the pit to chat with the engineers and support staff. Take the time (and possibly a flashlight) and clomp across the deeply rutted cornfield to see Yankee Siege’s 4.5-ton counterweight, and let your own dreams take wing.