Same city, different day

How do I love thee, Manhattan? Well, to be frank I love thee a little less when it's warm and humid, because your perfume, she is not so fabulous. The fougere of hot dog water with a base of fermenting trash and exhaust, touched with pungent notes of exotic dried seafood...it's bold, don't get me wrong, but it's maybe a bit much, yes?

But olfactory issues aside, NYC remains my favorite place to meander around, finding things strange and wonderful (Munchies Paradise, Edge*nyNOHO), strange and disturbing (9/11 commemorative socks? bu yao), familiar and caloric (hail, Via Brasil, to your inky black beans and their symbiotic partner, a vicious caipirinha), and, of course, expensive and alluring. Oh, Tom SoHung's full-skirted black cashmere coat with the wicked vampy collar and zebra-print lining, ours is a forbidden love. We musn't, darling, it would be so wrong.

Perhaps the oddest thing we saw was a tour group being led into (and just as quickly out of) Rocco's Pastry. The place has been there since 1974, which you wouldn't think qualified it as a historical landmark, but it's evidently enough of a neighborhood institution to have made the bus lists. As La Mère, Seesterperson, and I were resting our tired feets and recharging with some of Rocco's finest on Sunday, we spotted a guide hectoring his ducklings just outside the door. He then brought them in, led them up and down the pastry counter, herded them away from the tables, handed each a miniature cannoli, and briskly fussed them out again. What the hell? What kind of fun is that? You take me into a famous bakery, just you git out the way and let me ogle the options before I pick summat my own self. Obviously not all of us can hack the tour.

Now that the temperature is dropping in DC, we're all breathing a sigh of relief. The speed with which it's falling makes me a little nervous, on account of Doc acts like a Sugar Smacked toddler when it gets cool, and while frisking around all colt-like is very fine in its place, he's a 1200-pound beast and his gambols carry some weight. We will have to talk about restraint, and, probably, will do some extra running around to let him feel his oats. It's nice to know what to expect, at least. Last night when I went in for dressage, he was being tacked up for a different lesson; his manners are too good for him to walk off while he's being groomed, but his head came up and his nostrils widened, so I patted him and promised him an apple after he got done. His affections can't necessarily be bought, but they can certainly be swayed.

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.

A short thought

I have all sorts of trivial fun intel about my last-minute trip to NYC, where I did the usual eat-walk-spend routine and which has caused me to wonder whether I can live without a Tom SoHung wool coat or some of Coko Jewelry's Pattern Recognition-esque photos. But for now, two short love notes.

First, Paul Krugman on why conservatives shouldn't be fooling themselves that Bush is deviating even a step from the right's historical path.

And second, Viggo Mortensen, showing up on Colbert. Mortensen doesn't ring my chimes, but I love watching him ride (which he does much better than most actors), and clearly he doesn't take himself too seriously.

Succumb to the meme

Bolding those you've read, italicizing those you've read a bit of, leaving the rest alone. I put comments in parens, because fish gotta swim and I gotta natter.
Ganked from Pharyngula.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
  
• Anna Karenina
  
• Crime and Punishment
  
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (Stone me if you must.)
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi: a novel (An odd book to become a bestseller.)
• The Name of the Rose
  
• Don Quixote (I took introductory Japanese instead of reading this. Chotto matte kudasai; I'll get to it.)
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary (I was talking about this one just the other night. Death by arsenic is apparently no fun.)
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler's Wife
  
• The Iliad (Endless futzing about. Fight the war, ice your tragic heroes, and go home already.)
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods ("Hey, you...Thought, Memory, whichever one you are: say 'nevermore.'")
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged (At a certain point in late adolescence, most of us take either Hermann Hesse or Ayn Rand very seriously. I went with Hesse.)
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver (Ten pages in I developed a debilitating attack of the eye-rolls.)
• Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian: a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault's Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein (Assigned as a high school penalty when I trespassed by reading two books in as many nights and was a smart-ass about it.)
• The Count of Monte Cristo
  
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King ("He'm verminous, but he'm honest." Aw.)
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
  
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles (One Hardy novel per lifetime is more than enough.)
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver's Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela's Ashes: a memoir
• The God of Small Things (Not the same as Small Gods.)
• A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
• Cryptonomicon ("Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea/ Silver buckles on his knee/ He'll come back and marry me/ Bonny Bobby Shaftoe." The rest of us will plan tourist visits to Bletchley Park.)
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces (People who like this book often hate the books I enjoy, so it's a useful litmus test.)
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
  
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Hee.)
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake: a novel
  
• Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey ("You must not imagine that I am the sort of person who reads novels.")
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity's Rainbow
• The Hobbit (Do not try to read this for the first time as an adult unless it is your fondest wish to die from cringe.)
• In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield ("Donkeys, Janet!" Fantastic.)
• The Three Musketeers ("Athos is a mountain." Also hee.)

It's easy, there's a trick to it

I am pleased to report that Cappi did not have a jumping fit about boogers in the woods during last night's dressage lesson. He did, however, strongly object to being told to stay on one side of the ring, doing spirals at the trot, while the rest of the horses stayed on the other side of the ring. After his initial arguments met with failure but seemed likely to be repeated on appeal, Pat put up some low poles to remind him of where to work. Confident that he would get the message, what with seat and leg and rein and fences, we began again, Pat coaching from the center and me riding from the top.

Which is approximately when we all learned that (a) Cappi loves to jump, (b) Cappi is quite good at jumping, and (c) Cappi believes that the safest place to end up is about 2 inches from the butt of the barn's most ill-tempered horse, whither he will run at speed. Sweetie, you're supposed to be smarter than poor young Edmund; chasing death at Grayson's heels with a shell-shocked rider on your back is no way to go about proving that the years have made you wiser.

On the plus side, I'm told that I looked less spastic than might have been expected, given that I don't do much jump work. It turns out that Pat really has improved my seat; now we've just got to work on learning to control the horse.

Why marrying kinfolk ain't all it's cracked up to be

Recently the barn acquired a young horse, about 5 or 6 years old, from someone who bought him off the track. Former racers can be great riding partners once they're taught that not everything means "go fast now" or "stop dead," and since many are sold at a loss by barns hoping to make room for the next great hope, they can be good investments for riders looking for project horses.

One of the women who rides our new boy, whom I will call Edmund for reasons amusing to myself alone, took the trouble of running his lip tattoo against the Jockey Club's records. Holy shit, y'all, he's royalty: Seattle Slew on one side and War Admiral on the other. Those are some hellishly impressive names to have in a pedigree. Whenever a horse runs well, the owners hope to make real money from the breeding—witness all the effort put into keeping poor Barbaro alive (Jockey Club rules forbid artificial insemination)—and many horses are bred back to the big Triple Crown names of the past, but it's still impressive to actually see that a horse is the grandson of a legend.

So, was Edmund a boy wonder? Turns out, he ran only twice, finishing well out of the money both times. He is somewhat goony-looking, with a scraggly long neck, and he can't seem to keep track of his feet. He's still coltishly flexible, able to scratch his ear with a hind hoof even with a rider on his back, and he'll probably grow up into a lovely hunter/jumper or dressage horse if his trainers are patient enough. But still. Seeing him try to balance himself in a turn, and knowing about all those big names gleaming like stars in his family tree, is like watching a Hapsburg try to do calculus: You start to wonder whether breeding out might not have helped a little.

Oh, sodding hell and death

It looks like Terry Pratchett and the rest of the serious SF fans in DC were at Mandalay on Saturday night. You know, Mandalay, that funky Burmese place that is approximately ten minutes' walk from my apartment, next to the gun shop, tattoo parlor, santeria supply joint, and used bookstore of fame. Son of a bitch, what a meal to miss.

Let us not linger overlong on my grumpiness, though; here's a fan's very good write-up, which neatly explains the shirt I wasn't close enough to make out, and she was also kind enough to link to the webcast of his speech.

Desultory review: Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton

An insatiable reading appetite combined with dilettante-ism means coming across information in odd ways. Thanks to a note in a review for Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, I found out about Mrs. Beeton's book(s) of household management and cooking. What the Joy of Cooking used to be for young American brides faced with the unenviable task of cooking a bear paw, raw porcupine, or sponge cake, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management was for young Victorian women starting out in married life. Everything but sex seems to have found its way into the thousand-plus page tome (sex is quite literally covered in the NOC, however, apparently because the publishers objected to having books burst into flames). Despite the temporal incongruity, Mrs. B seems to have continued without a break for over 100 years, advising modern readers on the wonders of the microwave, Caribbean cooking, and how to pick a blender. Quite an accomplishment.

And, according to Kathryn Hughes's slightly uneven but engaging book, she did it with almost no experience of her own. Isabella Beeton was only 21, married less than two years, when she started to help her husband in his publishing ventures, first by writing up fashion and then by lifting enormous chunks of other extant household manuals and compiling them into a monster book. She died only eight years later, probably of puerperal fever, leaving behind two boys. Two other sons died before the age of three, likely infected with syphilis passed from their father to their mother; the same disease is suspected in her multiple miscarriages. (In the age of penicillin, most of us are cheerfully ignorant of the mechanics and side effects of chronic syphilis infection, and long may we remain so. Parts of the book are very grim.) Hughes has done extensive research to show which parts of BOHM are lifted from various sources, showing clips side by side, and she teases out the code used to refer to unpleasant events in Victorian life. Some of her conclusions could probably be argued by someone with more knowledge of the period than I have, but the overall picture of social change, women's roles in the economy and the home, and how one relatively inexperienced young woman became the voice of household authority, bring a period we often think of as dour to vivid life. Good stuff.

Weekend rundown

We need the rain, but I can't bring myself to lament gorgeous clear autumn skies too sincerely. It's been ridiculously beautiful all weekend, and for once there have been things to do. Metro did its best to make sure that nobody made it to anything on time, but lo, we would not be thwarted.

• The LOC book festival was reedonkulously crowded, which is how it should be. I skidded in just in time to hear Michael Dirda's intro to Terry Pratchett (summary: You know who he is, I think he's as good as Chaucer, without further ado etc.), who was his usual engaging self. The news that Christopher Lee will be voicing Death in the next movie sent me scrambling for my phone to call Weebat as soon as the speech was done. Also the story about how the ALA's Carnegie medal is just the same size and shape as a chocolate coin, and fun to be had with that information, was a classic.
• Magical Montgomery, conveniently close to home, was full of dancers, volunteer coordinators, and local artists, some quite good. I picked up a triptych of photos from one booth, each showing a different path through woods or boulders. The Joy of Motion tribal-fusion belly dancers were very impressive, smiling faintly while they demonstrated first-rate (from my uneducated perspective) torso work and hand precision, and it was hard not to be charmed by the tiny and distinctly non-Celtic moppets performing soft-shoe Irish dance with a ceilidh band.
• Watching a dress rehearsal of La Mère's tai chi group at the Lisner, I boggled again at the coaches' daughters, who are hyperflexible and strong and look far too sweet to be the kind of martial artists they clearly are.
  
• Crafty Bastards was worth the trip, but a leetle too insanely packed with the city's entire hipster population (I ran into Rockninja and the Object, who agreed that it looked like some of Brooklyn's population might've been bused in). I give some negative marks for overuse of felt and Bob Ross as self-consciously ironic jokes, but there were still things worth checking out.
• Fiesta DC 2007, up in Mount Pleasant, featured a lot of great demos by local dance groups, including a Bolivian troupe who soldiered along despite wearing clothing not at all suited to the 80-degree weather. It takes guts to pay tribute to Pachamama when you're in a swampy Indian summer day and wearing three layers of nylon and corduroy. I especially liked Batala, a DC-based all-female samba drum band, and the various groups wearing huge frame-and-feather sequined costumes.
  

The only problem with a weekend like that is that it's hard to get motivated to do actual exercise. I felt triple guilt: One friend rode a century race on Sunday (clearly not the act of a mentally balanced individual, but there it is), the DC triathlon meant that the streets near the book festival were fill of tasty sinewed folks in spandex (reason enough to make that a regular event), and my masseuse on Friday pointed out that my lack of flexibility is putting further strain on my back and hips. Damn, there really aren't any good excuses for dodging exercise, are there?

We only look sweet

I dunno what the context of this picture is, but it makes me twenty kinds of happy.

H/T Making Light's Particles.