The Roomba/Scooba squadron

A fleet of Roombas.

I've switched to the new Blogger interface; one thing I really like is how it handles labels in a sidebar. Here are the a's, which I think vividly conjure up the Light Reading lifestyle:

"it", -iads, a sense of proportion, A. L. Kennedy, abbreviations, ABCs of the novel, abecedarianism, ablutions, abundant recompense, abuse, academia, accommodations, accomplishment, acronyms, acting, activity levels, Adam Phillips, adaptation, addiction, addled things, adolescence, adulteration, advance notice, advances, adverbs, advertising, aeronautics, Agatha Christie, air safety, airports, Alan Bennett, Alan Hollinghurst, Alan Warner, alarms, Alasdair Gray, alcohol, alcohol abuse, Alexander Pope, Alexander technique, Alfred Jarry, Alfred Nobel, aliases, Alice, Alice Boone, Alison Bechdel, alliteration, allusion, alphabets, altered states, alternate histories, alternate universes, Alzheimer's, Amazon, American punctuation, amphibians, anachronism, anagrams and acrostics, analogies, anatomy, anchovies, Andre Aciman, Andrew Gelman, Andrew O'Hagan, Andrew Solomon, Andy Warhol, anecdotes, animal welfare, animals, animatronics, Anne McCaffrey, annotation, announcements, Antarctica, antediluvianism, Anthony Burgess, Anthony Grafton, Anthony Powell, anthropomorphic cannibalism, anthropomorphism, ants, apartment life, aphorisms, apocalypso, appearances can be misleading, appendages, apps, archaeology, archeology, archery, architecture, archives, Arctic unicorns, armadillos, arms and armor, art, art of the transaction, artificial insemination, artificial kangaroo pouches, astringency, asylums, Athanasius Kircher, Athol Fugard, atomic toys, attention spans, auctions, austerity, authenticity, autism, autobiography, autographs, automata, autopsy, Ayn Rand

Character analysis

On my list of undisputably great novels of the last decade (the last century!): Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. Really it must be read to be believed, but here is an early passage I like quite a bit:

Leo was certainly quite an egotist — Catherine’s graphological analysis had been spot on. But he didn’t expound his inner feelings. He did something Nick couldn’t imagine doing himself, which was to make statements about the sort of person he was. “I’m the sort of guy who needs a lot of sex,” he said, and, “I’m like that, I always say what I think.” Nick wondered for a moment if he’d inadvertently contradicted him. “I don’t bear grudges,” Leo said sternly: “I’m not that kind of person.” “I’m sure you’re not,” Nick said, with a quick discountenancing shudder. And perhaps this was a useful skill, or tactic, in the blind-date world, even if Nick’s modesty and natural fastidiousness kept him from replying in the same style (“I’m the sort of guy who likes Pope more than Wordsworth,” “I’m crazy about sex but I haven’t had it yet”).

Professional development

From Oscar Wilde, "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young":

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

The gathering

Bats! (Via BoingBoing.)

Tufts and tuft-hunters

The etymology of "toffee-nosed."

Self plucking

From the Telegraph's gallery of peculiar signs....

Fact-checking

Correct 'alternateness' can involve making things up or finding obscure 'true' things: the Dewar bulb is what Sophie and Mikael have instead of a Thermos when they drink tea en route from Helsingborg to Stockholm!

Stubby

After some pencil frustration abroad, I got two excellent pencils at the local stationery store in mid-January and have superstitiously clung to them, sharpening them frequently with a tiny children's pencil sharpener - but now I have written them down into stubs! I thought they would just about do me for this book, but I have a few more days' worth of story left to tell, so I took the plunge this morning and bought a new pair...

When I was little, I was often writing with a very short stubby pencil - I like the feel and look of a very soft dark pencil [ED. And stubbiness is the price one pays for this preference!].

More generally, in adulthood, I prefer to write with something whose physical substance can be strikingly perceived as it transfers from the writing implement to the page: the Gelly Roll pens are very good, they leave a lovely thick glistening three-dimensional trail like a snail's!

Lords of the flies

Twelfth Night at the Pearl was very enjoyable. That is a play that is particularly close to my heart (it has been ever since I played Malvolio in sixth grade - in a shortened version adapted by me for the class to put on at school!), and I would have to say that this isn't how I would direct it myself: they were playing very broadly for laughs, and though the audience was still clearly moved at points, the production is mostly just very funny and not quite stylized and patterned and magical enough for my taste.

This comes with some upside, though. There was a fly very conspicuously buzzing round the actors' heads in the first half, and they were able to get some good mileage out of it: enough so, anyway, that I had a sudden distracting realization that when I got home I would have to go upstairs, get my camera and then take the elevator back downstairs to document this rather hilarious thing that caught my eye earlier in the day!

Dinnerwas just as good as the play. G. ordered the Sancerre, and when the waitress came back out, she said very apologetically that they only had the half-bottle. "Then we'll have two of them!" G. said - and we did! He had the trout and I had the bouillabaisse (delicious!) and then tarte tatin for dessert, since I still had room!

Snarge

The Feather Identification Lab.

Tiny living

Chirac poodle mauling? (It is not a happy story, but an irresistible string of three words - link via Nico.)

On a happier note:

Coding one's books by color. (Courtesy of Becca.)

And adorable pygmy animals! (Via Brent.)

E di tutto questo mare, cosa faccio?

From Andre Aciman, "In Search of Blue," in False Papers:

Thinking - as any bookish man is always reminded when confronted by the hard-and-fast business of life, of the body, of pleasure - comes after, not before, and certainly not during. To the question "What am I to do with all this water?" the answer should have been "Swim."

Love's blind spots

At the TLS, Angus Trumble on Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez's Perfumes (a book I have dipped into with considerable enjoyment - thanks, Gautam!).

Also, this piece is not really within my central field of interest but includes several coinages I must have for the labels!

The Longitudes Examin'd

At the TLS, Pat Rogers considers a hoax pamphlet that has taken in countless scholars of the eighteenth-century attempt to develop a method for ascertaining longitude. One of the genuine schemes Rogers also discusses

involved the use of strategically placed ships which would fire off a number of shells programmed to explode at a set time. Even during foggy weather the explosions would be audible, and, just in time for the project, a reasonably accurate estimate (very slightly on the high side) had been made for the speed of sound, using gunshot reports. The findings came from the Revd William Derham, himself a man well versed in clockmaking, and they were published by the Royal Society in 1709. The committee had already looked at the Whiston–Ditton proposal, and the pair optimistically drafted an advertisement to launch a heavy press campaign, declaring that their method had been “so far approved by this present Parliament, that they have passed an Act, ordering a reward of 20000£. for such a Discovery”. In the event, the flying bombs turned out to be unworkable and did not get into contention for the prize. If Whiston had restrained himself on the subject of the early Church and the need for a reformed liturgy, he might have sat in judgement on his own idea. Nothing daunted, he arranged a display to prove his theory in July 1715: this involved letting off rockets at intervals across an area of thirty-six square miles centred on Hampstead.

Surrogates

"Perhaps he'll hop into a pouch." (Courtesy of Wendy.)

Prime ministers in bathing suits

Not available online, but I share this comical tidbit from Alexander Stille's New Yorker piece about the Italian prime ministerial sex troubles:

It's difficult not to be charmed by Deputy Umberto Scapagnini, Berlusconi's personal physician, whose theories of longevity drew him into Berlusconi's circle. He keeps the Prime Minister on a special regimen of diet, exercise, amino acids, vitamins, and antioxidants. "Berlusconi is the most extraordinary psychophysical subject I have ever examined," Scapagnini told me. "And I am not saying this because I'm a brownnoser. I am an internationally respect scientist - I don't need to curry favor." Scapagnini, who has travelled the Silk Road and studied the dietary habits of the residents of Okinawa looking for the secrets of long life, has helped develop a method for measuring what he calls a person's true biological age (the measurement of certain hormones and an examination of fifty strands of DNA as well as the person's immune system), which can vary considerably from one's actual age. "Berlusconi is fifteen years younger than his chronological age," Scapagnini continued. "He has an amazing immune system and powers of resistance. He has a magnetic personality and an exceptional capacity to communicate. He is perhaps the patient I've examined who has the capacity to live the longest. If you see him in a bathing suit, he has the musculature and tone of a much, much younger man." Scapagnini hopes to keep the P.M. alive until the age of a hundred and twenty, which he considers within the natural life span of a human being.

As for women, Scapagnini said, "Certainly, he has a strong sexual personality, and they are highly attracted to him, Naturally, for his part, as with any of us, this is not unpleasant."

"All by floppers"

The doomed straddle and the Fosbury Flop (FT site registration required).

"I too am Vermeer!"

In the latest NYRB (subscriber-only), James Fenton on Vermeermania and forgery (that link should work for Columbia-affiliated readers). Concerning Dutch museum director Dirk Hannema, condemned for collaborating with the Nazis, Fenton writes:

Born in 1895, Hannema had been a very young man when he became director of the Boymans in 1921, and in 1945 he still had almost forty years to live with his disgrace. He was numbered among the fout, the people on the wrong side. Throughout the rest of his life he was routinely ostracized. And yet he was accommodated successively in two castles or manor houses by the province of Overijssel, where he housed his own private collection and made it available to the public.

I visited the second of these, Het Nijenhuis, not long ago, and on the way was able to buy a copy of one of the strangest products of Vermeermania, Hannema's booklet publishing his own collection of "Vermeers."[5] These were not Van Meegeren forgeries. They were Netherlandish paintings from Hannema's own collection which, in his isolation and disgrace, he began to attribute to the master. It seems that, like the slaves in the film shouting "I am Spartacus! I am Spartacus!," the paintings on Hannema's walls called out to him, one by one, in the lonely winter nights, "I am Vermeer! I too am Vermeer!"

They don't look at all like Vermeers, but nor, for that matter, do all Vermeers. The Edinburgh Christ in the House of Martha and Mary doesn't look like a Vermeer, although its signature has been accepted as genuine. The Diana and Her Companions in The Hague doesn't look like the other two Vermeers in the same room, and it is noticeable, if you wait and watch what the Mauritshuis visitors actually do, that, for ten people who spend time looking at the Girl with a Pearl Earring, about one turns around to examine the View of Delft ; and for every ten who examine the View of Delft, about one goes on to look at Diana and Her Companions.

Certainly the Girl with a Pearl Earring is currently the most famous Vermeer, but when it appeared at auction in early 1882 it was attributed to an unknown master. The man who recognized it as a Vermeer was Victor de Stuers, a prominent cultural official, the brains behind the Rijksmuseum. He urged a friend, A.A. des Tombe, to bid for it, trusting that he would be the sort of man to leave it to the state, which indeed he did. He had been able to buy it for two florins and thirty stuivers (about $200 in today's dollars), largely, no doubt, because it didn't in those days look like a Vermeer.

Hannema's Vermeers include The Penitent and Impenitent Thieves Being Led to Golgotha, a vigorous study in men's back muscles and buttocks (now hanging in Zwolle, attributed to a Flemish painter, Abraham Janssens van Nuyssen); Belisarius Begging (depicting a man on a chair or throne, certainly no beggar, gesticulating for some reason); a group portrait supposed to show Vermeer with his wife and two children on a balcony (more likely an aristocratic couple on a country estate, with a peacock); and A Fish on a Brown Earthenware Platter. This last painting, admirable in its way, so enchanted Hannema that he couldn't at first decide whether it was by Goya, or Rembrandt, or Carel Fabritius, or Vermeer—four of his favorite painters.

He was mad when it came to the subject of Vermeer. He was one of a small group of doomed believers who kept alive a campaign on behalf of Van Meegeren's forgeries long after the forger himself had denounced them. But on other subjects he was capable of perfectly sane judgments. Perhaps his madness whispered to him that he could redeem his reputation by offering to Holland so many rediscovered masterpieces. And so he sat the decades out, surrounded by photographs of the royal family (proof of his loyalty and devotion to the Crown), among his works of art, in a baroque moated castle, amid tall, rare trees and ancient fishponds, shrieked at by his peacocks and whispered to by his Vermeers—an internal exile, doomed to his beauty spot at the end of its pavé-cobbled drive.

Hot dog

Food so good it eats itself. (Via BoingBoing.)