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Mom's
My friend Olivia brought this magnet back to me from her trip to Australia, when she visited Monkey Mia and got to hand feed the dolphins. Household Hints from A Medieval
Home Companion: To remove water from wine: Put the watered wine in a cup. Place one end of a cotton thread at the bottom of the cup. Hang the other end of the thread over the edge, outside and below the cup, and you will see that the water will drip out colorless at this end. When the water has all dripped out, the wine will drip out red. It seems that one could do the same with a cask of wine. (There’s no indication of whether Jesus used this technique at the wedding feast at Canaan.) I am a theatre critic OK...so it's a new "career", but if you're interested in reading my reviews, go here Updated 2/11/01 WHAT I'M READING... also He, She and It (both books very slowly!) WHAT I WATCHED... Jackie,
Ethel, Joan That's it for today!
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USELESS INFORMATION 5 March 2001 I am a repository of useless information, most of which I’ve forgotten already. I’ve spent most of my working life typing for somebody or other. I worked four years for the Physics Department at UC Berkeley, and then after a gap of time when I did stuff like birthin’ babies, about 15-20 years working for typing services which did a lot of typing for university types--professors and students alike--or for doctors. You find that when you get intensely involved in so many varied topics, your interest occasionally gets piqued. I am also very suggestible and when I spend time with people who have strong interests, I find I want to bring myself up to speed on topics which interest them. Though I flunked Physics gloriously when I was a UC Berkeley student, my boss got me intrigued enough to read basic books about the history of physics. I also know about the "random walk problem," from having typed a textbook where that was one of the theories discussed, but I couldn’t understand the mechanics of it at all. (Anybody ever had to study from "Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics"? I typed that baby three times on a non-correcting IBM with exchangeable keys, not the Selectric ball that came later.) My bookshelves are a history in themselves of the kinds of projects with which I became intrigued when immersed in a project. Somewhere around here there is a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I spent weeks typing about Zelda Fitzgerald and their relationship. When the project ended, I wanted to know more about their strange and unusual relationship, how Scott stole her work and published it as his own, and the power he had over her. I never did get around to reading the book, but it’s here somewhere. There’s also a book called "Freedom Song," by Mary King which, along with the companion book to the TV Series, "Eyes on the Prize" which I bought during a long project where I transcribed interviews with women who had been involved with the Civil Rights movement. Specifically, these were the women of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). I became familiar with names like Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and when my project ended, I very much wanted to learn more about the movement. I did finish "Eyes on the Prize," though never did get through "Freedom Song." It gave me a look at the civil rights movement I had never had before. There are several books here about animation, which came from friendship with Gilbert, who was an avid animation fan, especially Disney animation. I learned a lot about the process of making cartoons (in the pre-computer animation days) while Gilbert was alive. Every year at one typing service for which I worked we would get a flurry of social anthropology papers in which the students had to compare and contrast two tribes of people. There was a time when I could almost pass that course myself because I knew so much about the !Kung and the Trobrianders. I even found the book "Nisa, the life and Words of a !Kung Woman" on a remainder table one day and couldn’t resist buying it. The !Kung are the gentle bushmen of the Kalahari (featured in The Gods Must Be Crazy), while the Trobrianders are the warlike tribes found in Papua New Guinea, in case you were interested! Various other anthropology or veterinary studies led me to be fascinated by the bonobo chimps, the most human-like and most sexually active of the apes (I’m not sure if those two characteristics are connected or not). I have a wonderful book about the bonobos, which I intend to read some day. (Though I did read "Gorillas in the Mist" long before it became a movie) I also at one point read a lot about the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915; studied the history of Hawaii and even attempted to learn a bit of the Hawaiian language, read a bit about the Titanic (long before James Cameron’s movie was even thought about), read up on the Ring of the Niebelung in an unsuccessful attempt to understand Wagner’s Ring Cycle. And I have a growing collection of books about gay rights issues, from the Stonewall riots through the AIDS crisis and the problems encountered by gay kids. It seems that I get very involved with subjects that interest those around me, people I work for, people I love. At the moment, I’m concentrating on more run of the mill novels but who knows what I’ll get a bee in my bonnet about next. Maybe I’ll buy a book on the history and rules of cricket. ~~
The Last Session ~~ |
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Created 3/05/01 by Bev Sykes |
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