Monsy's Zen Garden

My high school English/Journalism teacher, Montserrat Fontes, used to keep a zen garden on her desk in her classroom where she kept a rolled up dollar, out in the open. I guess it was one way she showed her students that she trusted them. I was playing with the idea of doing something similar in the public library where I work to build a feeling of trust with the kids. Then, I remembered, all the kids know where are cars are parked. Good enough.

Evilkins

One nickname for my cat, Inkblot, is Miss Evilkins because she likes to attack my other peace-loving cat, Milo. TK tells me that Inkblot only does this when I'm in the apartment, so I think the fighting must be associated with territoriality over me. (Inkblot is extremely attached to me.) I woke up this morning with an aphorism in my head -

The love of Mun Mun is the root of all evilkins.

Jack T. Chick

My huzzband has a film in the LA Film Festival. He and his chums adapted nine comic book-style religious tracts by Jack T. Chick and put 'em together to make "Hot Chicks." Read all about it at www.316now.com

Scary Monsters

Yesterday I helped my Kindergartener nephew write a book he called "Vampires and other Scary Monsters." One of the monsters he came up with was called Haunted Balloon.

My nephew posed an interesting question: What if a boy gets bitten by both a werewolf AND a vampire? I proposed that the vampire curse would trump the werewolf curse most of the time, but on full moons, the vampire would become a werewolf. TK suggested the boy would turn into a bat with a wolf head. Margaret believes that the vampire and werewolf are immune to each other (see Dracula Meets the Wolfman), so whoever bit the boy first would trump the other. Or since becoming a vampire is a process, whichever curse took first, would win out.

I don't believe I've seen this problem addressed on Buffy.

Weighty decision

Hmmm. Should I wear my Chicken hat or my Dr. Seuss hat for the class visit today?

"Seeing machine" helps the blind surf the web

There was a pretty amazing post in Science Blog the other day stating, "An MIT poet has developed a small, relatively inexpensive 'seeing machine' that can allow people who are blind, or visually challenged like her, to access the Internet, view the face of a friend, 'previsit' unfamiliar buildings and more." For those with healthy retinas, but other eye problems, the device projects an image directly onto the retina of the eye "past the hemorrhages within the eye." The device is based on the technology of a "scanning laser opthalmoscope, or SLO." It costs $4000 bucks.

Mun Mun digs assistive technology.

Bad Omen

The other day TK and I wished on a wishbone. Neither of us won because each of our ends broke off before the middle. I guess my wish for a successful summer reading program won't come true.

Growing up, my sister and I would wish on a wishbone soon after it had been cooked. However, TK alerted me to the practice of drying the wishbone out before wishing on it. It makes it so the person with the fatter end doesn't always win.

My Famous Last Words Will Be:

"I dunno, press the button and find out."

What Will Your Famous Last Words Be?

Arboreteum, damnit!

I was sure that the L.A. County Arboretum in Arcadia was spelled a-r-b-o-r-e-t-e-u-m. I consulted several dictionaries and could not find arboretum with that other spelling. Yet if one Googles "arboreteum," one can find many examples of places that use the extra "E" in the spelling. I have a feeling that the L.A. Arboretum used that other spelling when I was growing up and that's why it's imprinted on me. However, I can't find evidence that this is the case. How very vexing.

Herc! Herc!

Speaking of schoolyard songs, in second grade, a boy named Balty taught me a spoof song that he sang to the tune of the theme song to the animated show from the 1960's or 1970's about Hercules.

Hercules, you're a real big phony,
Hercules, eating cheese and baloney,
Fighting for his life, with a rubber knife
With the strength of ten (?)
'Fraid of army men
That's the pride of Hercules!

I don't quite remember how it goes unfortunately. The real theme song had the line "With the strength of ten ordinary men."

Amusingly, years later in an animation class at UCLA, our professor, Dan McLaughlin held the Hercules cartoon up as one of the worst of examples of cheap animation. For instance, it's challenging to animate the act of walking, so in Hercules, all the characters would always walk behind bushes or low walls.(You can also see this shortcut technique used sometimes in the Peanuts specials; Think of Charlie Brown and Linus walking across a bridge) Also, the animators would animate a movement and simply repeat the movement, using the same cells, over and over to fill time. It truly was a terrible cartoon. Of course I watched it in repeats every day before school in 6th grade.