How to cure da dredded SWAHN FLUE

"Produced during that brief moment in American history when heroin, chloroform, alcohol, and North Carolina pine tar pretty much took care of anything that ailed you. That, and radium."

Jack Womack needs his own blog like whoa, but I spose having him as an occasional house guest over at William Gibson's place must be sufficient unto the day.

This pump primes backward

I'm going to rat out Gee-Clef here, because sweet lord, whenever I start to think that I'm the biggest geek in the world, he's there to put it in perspective.

As part of his choir's general bonhomie, they make unconventional bets on whatever the basketball NCAA madness thingy is. Stuff like giving money to charity if someone waxes Duke early, nothing too crazy (at least not that he would admit). So Gee, being who he is, offered to donate $10 to the group for each game that ended with a prime number in the score. Now, he does lose geek points for not having done research on the stats in past tournaments, because he figured prime scores would be pretty rare.

He's $200 in the hole two days into the tournament, "And sometimes both teams are ending on a prime, what the hell is that about?" I may start reading the sports pages to see how much further into hock he'll have to go.

[ETA: None of this is meant disparagingly. Gee-Clef's view of the world is refreshing and fun, and the teasing is affectionate. I'm in no position to throw stones.]

Culture without agarvation

One of the hardest things about visiting other cities is remembering that free admission is not the default at 99% of the world's museums. DC's got the Air and Space, the Hirschhorn, the Smithsonian castle, the Museum of National History, the Museum of Natural History (those two are right next to each other; speak clearly when making plans), the Museum of the American Indian, the National Botanical Gardens, and the National Gallery of Art, which is in fact twin museums connected by an underground tunnel. It's a feast of yummy free culture goodness within walking distance of my office.

I go maybe twice a year. Ridic!

Here we are, flirting with spring, temps in the 70s: perfect weather for going inside to peer at art. The current exhibit of Pompeiian artifacts is leaving at the end of the month, so when a friend suggested a get-together this weekend I shanghaied him into coming to the show. We took the long way around, starting in the west building and only eventually getting to the building where the exhibit per se was; this was less a plan than a result of my propensity to get lost and meander. Lots of good stuff before we got to the east gallery: Degas' equine bronzes (the legs are perfect; the bodies are squidged together like rough drafts), a bunch of Paul Manship sculptures (surely Europa shouldn't look so smug?), Herbert Adams' lovely Girl with Water Lilies fountain (water drips from the flowers in her hand into the pool below her feet), Leo Villareal's hypnotic lightwork Multiverse (we smirked a bit at first at its disco fabulosity...and five minutes later were still gawping at it), and a bunch of nautical paintings that inevitably brought Jack Aubrey to mind.

The Pompeii exhibit, which against all odds we eventually reached, was well curated, though a few of the bowls and kraters could've done with rotating stands. I was unreasonably tickled by Cato's criticism that senators were spending more time tending their mullets than their statecraft, and by the little kid who peered at a mosaic of sea beasties and proclaimed, "I see a eew." Oh tempora, oh morays! The great section about the Roman fad for Greek culture included a beautiful bust of Homer, paired with a Pliny the Elder quote about how we long for images of those whose faces have been lost to remembrance (I mangle), and the exhibit wrapped up with pieces showing modern reactions to the Vesuvian eruption. It'll be a cold day in hell when I pick up Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days in Pompeii, if the saccharine goop of The Blind Flower-Seller and Faithful Unto Death is any indication. And despite the museum's best efforts, I still can't name all nine muses ("Clio, Urania, Erato, Terpsichore, and, uh, Scary?") or all of Hercules' labors. Do not pick me as your Trivial Pursuit buddy.

Now that it's finally warm enough that I don't die a little whenever I go out, I'm recommitting to trekking down to local exhibits. Next up: either the butterfly garden or "Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th-Century Chesapeake," depending on how ghoulish I'm feeling. A certain anthro 201 prof took excessive glee in describing causes of death in early Colonial-era settlers in Maryland, and now I kind of want to see the bones.

A final word on one of my many crushes

Nate Silver is one of the wonkiest dudes ever to be claimed as everyone's internet boyfriend. I wasn't going to say anything else about him, but, well, there's another resolution down the pipes. Damn, way to quote appropriately.

For the organizers, the volunteers, every damn brave last one of you:

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

-- William Shakespeare, Henry the DXXXVIII

All hail the expendable crew!

Abney Park, official soundtrack providers to the neo-Vicky steampunk generation movement wossname, are offering a Halloween zeppelin ride for the low low price of $785. I can't justify flying cross-country just to drop that kind of coin and miss the next day's Punkin Chunkin. But if you can, by all means, follow your bliss. Just please please please take pictures.

To my Shadow and Claw co-obsessives

There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead....Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?

Allow me to greet you on the day of the martyr Thecla (steady reppin' Old Calendar style). Reports of her life bear little resemblance to that of the Chatelaine's, which is a bit of a surprise considering that Wolfe used a very recognizable Catherine as the Guild's patron, but then the conventional St. Severian was a bishop and never climbed the Andes either, so maybe I should quit while I'm ahead.

Zelda looks lonely

Short notice, but for anyone who's free and interested tonight: Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and A Primate's Memoir, will be speaking at the National Geographic tonight, the better to introduce a film called "Killer Stress." Tickets are $18 for nonmembers, show starts at 7:30, and if his iTunes U podcasts are any indication, it'll be worth the price of admission.

[ETA: ALERT ALERT ALERT: The Magnetic Fields at the Lisner on October 28. I have neeped before about how Stephin Merritt's sad mean angry awkward funny regretful ugly beautiful love songs rock my socks, and it goes without saying that ticketing for this show is already in the works.]

[ETA2: The ETA-ening: Neil Gaiman will be chatting on the Post's website from noon to 1:00 PM today. Ask about the bees.]

Linkgeek

Two bits of fun geekly times. First, via Boing Boing, cometh the news that Warp Graphics are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary by posting the entire Elfquest corpus online. Elfquest was the series that got me into comic books, and the only thing to regret about the current project is that digital pages don't give off the smell of comic books fresh out of their "agh you opened it, so much for the resale value" prophylactic baggies. A whiff of that bitter papery smell flips me right back to Christmas 1986, lying in my new sleeping bag and going through 20 back issues that Santa had found in some strip-mall comics joint. Thanks for all the fun times, Pinis!

And then, via Making Light, points of common consensus.

Do you hear the people quote

Gaiman fans get animated for Obama.

A well-regulated militia

Come the alien invasion, Seattle will be locked and loaded. At $600 a pop, Jeff Burnette's spectacular blown-glass Raygunz must remain mere objects of desire, as opposed to stylishly collecting dust chez moi. But my God do I want one.

Late-breaking Venn diagrams

Am I the last one to the Indexed party? For lo, it is full brilliant. I always use a Venn diagram metaphor to explain Punkin Chunkin (circle A = rednecks, circle B = engineers, intersection C = airborne cucurbit mayhem).

H/T Light Reading.

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.