I will really miss journalist extraordinaire Daniel Schorr, who died this morning in Washington.

In 1988, Mr. Schorr accepted an invitation from Frank Zappa to appear on stage and encourage audience members to vote. He then accepted an offer to sing, and chose a few numbers from Porgy and Bess.



(source here.     July 23 is evidently my day for posting NPR excerpts) Screenshot of a WaPo page from this afternoon. (the same stuff probably won't all be there if you follow the link now, though)

Note the text in the BofA ad. (Yes, I am easily amused.) California is the most populous state of the union, which has translated into (among other things) a propensity for making laws. There are more things you must or must not do in California than in, say, Colorado.

A business in California is obliged to post a sign in the event that the premises contain materials known to the state to cause cancer. The signs are ubiquitous and thus have little to no effect. That is to say, the essential result of that law is that lots of signs get posted.

California is on the brink of declaring serpentine to no longer be its state rock because, well, you can guess why.

The proliferation of state symbols reflects the general bizarreness of the USA. Other countries seem to divide themselves into states or provinces or what-have-you without having to declare an ever-growing array of state symbols: state bird, state tree, state rock, state reptile, state soil, state question, ... . (Not that every US state has all of those.)

The US Constitution calls for a census every ten years. I was moving at just the right moment to not be counted in the 2010 census, neither in California nor in Colorado. That felt consistent with the feeling I had of not quite knowing where I lived.

After almost four months here, I still feel like I only kind of live in Colorado. I don't know whether I'll be here for another month or another few years (depends on whether financing materializes for the project I'm working on). But before too long, there will be resolution. I'll know whether my work here has a future, I'll know where I'm living, and I'll know whether my state fossil is a stegosaurus or a saber-toothed cat. I usually bring a book when I eat at a restaurant by myself, as I did at lunch yesterday. A high-school-aged waitress saw me reading and asked me to recommend a book for her. "I'm going to the library later," she said.

I asked if she wanted fiction or non-fiction. She said non. Not knowing where to start with a recommendation, I asked her what she was interested in. "Make-up," she said.

from reuters.com:

The bicycle I brought with me to Colorado has a frame that I bought in 1979 and is outfitted with a hodgepodge of parts I've accumulated over the years, many of 1960s-70s vintage.

I rode it to lunch a couple weeks ago; a guy who'd come to eat at the same restaurant stopped to talk to me about it. The 60s-70s era was, so he felt, the high point of bicycle aesthetics. (He was about my age.)

I have a few Western Electric telephones from the 1970s: late enough to have Touch-Tone, but early enough to be built to last (and early enough to still have honest-to-goodness mechanical ringers). As long as we're on the subject, I wanna say that I miss the ringback tone of a Number Five Crossbar switch.

I like movies set in the cold war era. I watched one of my all-time favorites last night (not Dr. Strangelove, but one I like even better).

It's only human to have an affection for things that were current when one was a teenager. I know I'm biased that way, and I don't expect everyone to see the '60s and '70s as I do. Even so, I trust that some aspects of that era's character are obvious to anyone--as is the absence of anything similar in modern times.

This month, the USA and Russia are talking about trading spies somewhere in Vienna. You just know it won't be the stuff that exciting history is made of; it won't hold a candle to cold-war trades made at Glienecke Bridge. Each pic of so-called hedgehog cactus (Echinopsis) that has appeared on these pages (e.g., here and here) shows a cactus with ten ribs. My ten-ribbed cactus only made ten-ribbed offsets, which made me wonder if the rib count was genetically determined.

After some failed attempts, I finally had luck growing Echinopsis from seed last year. The progeny that I wrote about in December is now large enough to allow counting its ribs--and the count is not ten.

No offense to the Pythagoreans, but I don't find ten to be a particularly special number. I was happy to see the new generation of cactus march to a different drummer.

This calls for another guessing game (yes, a cheap ploy to encourage reader participation). How many ribs does the new Echinopsis have? Before I left for Colorado a few months ago, a neighbor asked if I'd be working in an office, on a (more or less) regular schedule, and shaving every morning. (In ten years of living next door to me, he hadn't seen me do any of those things.) I said yes, except that shaving would be optional.

It had been about 15 years since I last worked 5 days a week in an office. I had grown accustomed to working from home and then grown accustomed to not having paying work at all.

What happens when, after that, one goes back to having a job? I'll list the good stuff first.

It feels good to be doing work that someone wants and appreciates. It feels good to work together with intelligent, fun people. A regular work schedule and workplace automatically provide a structure; working from home requires more force of will. Spending less effort on disciplining oneself is an economy, a benefit.

The ungood stuff derives not so much from the circumstances of my work but rather from having moved to a city after 12 years of rural life. I am having a hard time imagining really liking living in this area. It's not a bad place, but rather that I don't feel in sync with it. For now, I leave the details to your imagination.