The Life Experience ~ Summer '15

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice

• Kinesthetic Astronomy lessons are great for some people, but they only serve to make me dizzy.


• Longhair cats do have more chance of having litterbox mishaps.


• There was a fascinating woman in New Orleans in the early 19th Century named Marie Laveau, who was a spiritual and community leader, and this is the first time I've really been interested in New Orleans history.


• Managing to find the sun on a helioscope is a surprisingly satisfying experience.


• Pluto is reddish, and it also has a surface made mostly of nitrogen ice.


• The dwarf planet Eris was given the informal designation "Xena" before it got its official name. But even when it was renamed, its discoverer, Mike Brown, named its moon "Dysnomia," which is a lesser entity associated with Eris. It also doesn't hurt that "dysnomia" means "lawless," so he still managed to slide a Xena reference in there.


• Kittens are expensive.


• Saturn's moon Phoebe is constantly spraying another moon, Iapetus, with particles, accounting for Iapetus's weird coloration.


• Sourdough bread needs a starter, which you can make with flour, a tiny bit of sugar, water, and either wild or bread yeast.


• Doing the Super Jump 100 times in a row in Super Mario RPG unlocks a badass bit of armor called the Super Suit. Also, I HAVE A SUPER SUIT NOW.


• The Martian totally lives up to the hype.


• When making fireballs for science demos, don't test your spritz bottle on the carpet because you might wind up having to stomp out some green fire.


• Gnomes have a gestational period of 12 months. For some reason I always thought it was 11.


• Training a parrot to wear a flight harness is not easy.


• Navajo really is that difficult a language.


• There is a theory, put forth by a researcher named Kazunori Asada, that Vincent Van Gogh was color blind, and his unusual pallettes were a result of his inability to distinguish certain colors. Comparing paintings with and without a color blind filter reveals a lot about his work, but I also just like this theory because I kind of love Theories About Artists' Perception.*


• There is a reason the fabric store I go to always looks a bit run-down.


• Jupiter's moons of Europa, Io, and Ganymede have a 1:2:4 resonance, so for every one orbit Europa completes around Jupiter, Io goes around twice and Ganymede four times. Neat!


• Being a grownup is busy.

*Partly this is due to a running gag between me and my siblings about pioneering artists who think they're being realistic. Favorite examples include Claude Monet Was Just Painting What He Saw and Philip K. Dick Was Writing A Memoir.

Comments

[fractalwolf.livejournal.com]

I got the chance to see some Van Gogh paintings in person a couple of years ago, and nothing odd struck me about the palette, but what did strike me is that they looked nearsighted. If you were literally painting up close what you saw at a distance, and everything at a distance was a little smudged because you were nearsighted... *shrug* They just made a whole lot more coherent sense to me when I took off my glasses.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Heh. If I took off my glasses I'd see nothing but maybe the dominant color.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Marie Laveau was totally awesome.

Managing to keep a Xena reference in the official astronomical naming is also awesome :)

Lapetus: "DAAAAAAD! Phoebe keeps spraying me with particles, even tho I asked her to stop!"

I bounce around between three different opinions on Phillip K. Dick. Sometimes I think he was just a SF writer, sometimes I think he was genuinely writing from his own personal experience, and sometimes I think he was just trolling the hell out of everyone.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, he was schizophrenic, wasn't he? Probably why so many of his stories contain the "Is this real life?" theme.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I can't find any concrete references to him being diagnosed, tho informal references to him and mental illness of multiple kinds are common. He certainly had something odd going on, biochemically, since he was in the habit of taking amphetamines to help him relax and get to sleep.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Those of us with long haired cats refer to those incidents as "Klingons". They have no idea they are leaving with something stuck to their fur, only to have it fall off later.

Phoebe sounds like kind of an asshole.

Now you've got to tell me how to make fireballs, because FIREBALLS

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Or they do know and they try to use the carpet to get it off ...

Our fireball formula is ostensibly a SECRET, and we certainly don't tell kids that it can be found in most medicine cabinets. But we have to have safety equipment--mitts and goggles and so forth. You spritz the secret formula into the flame of a butane lighter and voila!--easy fireball.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Damn. Now I'll be forced to use Google on everything I can think of that could be in a medicine cabinet. I WILL figure it out! (I have no intention of setting myself on fire; I am fond of my skin and hair)

[cougarfang.livejournal.com]

Rubbing alcohol?

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

I think this is the first time I have ever read a description of the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans as a "spiritual and community leader." But it works!

You might be interested in reading Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mystery series. It's set in 1830s New Orleans. The first book is A FREE MAN OF COLOR, and I highly recommend them all.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* Sometimes I like using understatement.

That could be cool. I like Barbara Hambly, but my experience of her work is mostly from Star Wars tie-in novels.

[badgermirlacca.livejournal.com]

I first started reading Hambly with her Star Trek tie-in, Ishmael, which is a clear case of author-gets-away-with-murder-publishing-fanfic-and-getting-paid-for-it: she took advantage of the fact that Mark Lenard had roles in both Star Trek and Here Come the Brides, a short-lived takeoff on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and did a crossover book which included guest appearances from every Western TV series airing in the 1960s. It is brilliant. At the time, no one at Paramount was paying any attention to media tie-ins, and the folks at Brides were not too happy about it. That led to people being assigned to oversee the novels program. Which was really too bad....

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

Yeah I had hoped I wouldn't need to shave Guaraha's butt, but he gets hitchhikers back there just often enough that I decided I'd rather shave him than clean my apartment after one of his poop-on-butt freakouts.

Unfortunately for me (and everyone else at work), having his butt shaved is The Thing He Hates Most. I mean, he's bad for just about everything, but butt-shaves are a whole 'nother level of hate.

My mom and I were going to see The Martian, but then she had to go get a basically full-time substitute teaching job for the foreseeable future, and we refuse to go to theaters on the weekends, so I guess we'll just have to wait until it comes out on dvd.

I read that article about Van Gogh, and it's pretty darn reasonable to me. One more interesting thing about the dude, if it's indeed true.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Midna HATES having her butt washed, or wiped, or looked at in any way. I pick her up to examine it and she pulls her magnificent fluffly tail* up between her legs and hugs it to cover herself--which only adds to the mess, of course. (She was also dismayed to discover that, after a shampooing, I had somehow stolen the fluffly tail and a ratty wet snake had attached itself to her butt where it used to be. I swear she spent 20 minutes turning in circles. Fortunately her tail came back later.)

I should clarify that I meant The Martian book. I have yet to see the movie. BUT I WANNNNNNA


*She treats her tail like her blankie. It's such an entity that it has its own name now: Hobbes.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

My mom's cat Sophie has a tail so majestically fluffy and expressive that we should probably name it in its own right. She's better about not having litterbox issues tho.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's only happened a couple of times at this point. But I am now aware of it, so I check her butt sometimes when she's walking funny and she HATES it.

[diegocrusius.livejournal.com]

liked this 'semi random facts' form of post.