The Desert Mermaid

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.

For some years now the administrators at the hospital where Dad works have been boldly leading the way to the future, except that the future they're envisioning appears to be of the corporate-run bottom-line-obsessed 80s-movie dystopia variety. It's been rather rough on any of the doctors who, like Dad, believe that the point of medicine is healing.

So Dad, who has also spent a decade studying an awesome state-of-the-edge cutting-art method of surgery that uses better equipment, makes smaller incisions, and offers faster healing times, is underappreciated and shunned because he feels that surgery is supposed to help optimize a patient's healing, rather than to make piles of money for him and all the hospital people around him. It's made for a pretty oppressive atmosphere, and Dad was getting to the point where he wasn't sure how he could keep this up--but he wasn't sure how he could quit, either, because there wasn't much in the retirement jar.

And then in August his best buddy from way back in residency called him and was all, "Hey, wanna job?"

Good GOD, y'all. THIS JOB. The hospital is GREAT and all the doctors like Dad a lot and he wouldn't be running his own business and maybe now we can pay off our loans and they actually are excited about his amazing Jetsonian Spacefuture surgery techniques. I mean, like, REALLY excited. He went out to kind of look things over and every time he blinked they'd throw more perks at him. He was about half an hour away from owning everyone's firstborn child.

It looks almost perfect. There's only one downside.

It's in Illinois.

Yeah, we're Westerners. It's difficult to imagine living anywhere else than Out West somewhere. But hey, everything else is awesome, and the hospital here is sinking fast, so by god, Dad's taking the job. He and Mom are moving to Illinois in the spring. They'll be there anywhere from two to ten years.

And I'm staying here.

So this is gonna be extremely weird. We're keeping the house, and I'm staying in it. Probably my brother will be moving in with me, too, since he's trying to get a job out thisaway.* And it's especially weird to think that I'll be emerging from my Bat Cave to become the one running the house. Fun, but weird.

We've been putting off announcing it until everything was all put together, but we've been preparing since August. Mom's gone all manic about moving, and Dad's kind of in a daze, and our employees are figuring out their next steps, and all the patients are wailing and moaning. (Dad is not popular with the administration, but god damn his patients love him. And the hospital staff all go to him if they have problems, so there's that.) And I'm plotting to steal the master bedroom (to Dad's horror) and wondering how I'll buy groceries with the twelve pennies or so I make a week at the Space Place.

Life, man. You never know what it's gonna throw at you next. We'll see where this takes us.


*Which is going to be interesting when he brings his silly cat with him. Harley is a lot like the late sister of our current old geezer cat, Fern, and though said sister Charlotte got ate by a mountain lion a while back, Fern still seems paranoid that she will return someday. If Harley shows up, it'll only confirm that she was right all along.

We're a little heavy on the animation this quarter. For reasons!

What I Learned Since The Autumn Equinox

• Groucho Marx had some excellent writing, but his delivery needed work. You could say they were "rapid-fire" jokes, but I say he didn't give you time to get them.


• Looking up where to buy a simple pepper sprayer in case the stupid asshole pit bull next door breaks through the neighbors' poorly-maintained fence will lead you into an internet rabbit hole of super-paranoid home security products.


• Amtrak bunks are fun to use, but don't really help one sleep too well.


• You are required to sit with others on train dining cars.


• Sea Salt Caramel Cocoa is the New Thing.


• Birds are a very good indicator of the exact instant your fruit should be harvested. And you are on your own if you miss that instant.


• Sherlock is a pretty awesome show.


• Wine presses are fun to operate!


• Lauren MacMullan was the first woman to direct a Disney animated theatrical film. Good thing it was the unbelievably awesome "Get a Horse"!


• I was missing the concept of sisterly love as true love in Disney movies. And I didn't even know it.


• Twitter is a site capable of both great beauty and great horror. Social justice and mob rule both abound.


• Before being a full silent cinematic movie, Gertie the Dinosaur was meant as a Vaudeville act in which its creator, Winsor McKay, would play the part of her trainer.


• Some cats do play fetch.


• Studio Ghibli, in its previous incarnations, was responsible for the animation on those godawfully animated Rankin/Bass specials, including The Hobbit. Ghibli has come a long way.


• People with spinal cord injuries have to be careful not to scoot when transferring, since they can't feel if they catch on something or tear their skin.


• Pumpkins will ripen on your counter if it gets too cold to leave them outside.


• Columbus Day can be celebrated as the much less annoying Indigenous Peoples Day.


• And not all 15th- and 16th-Century Spaniards were mass-murdering fuckheads. That's nice to know.


• Selfies could be as old as art itself.


• When trying to create Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the big concerns in selling it was whether audiences could actually become emotionally invested in cartoon characters. Oh, if only they knew.


• Another concern was that they had never actually made realistic cartoon characters--until this point they were all rubber-hose stretch-and-squash little funny animals. One of the reasons The Prince doesn't make much of an appearance was that they were still not entirely sure how to animate men without making them look stupid. (The Dwarfs don't count; they were squashy cartoon characters.)*


• Last thing about Snow White: the artists (or, as they're referred to in this interesting old-timey How A Cartoon Is Made short, "pretty girls") responsible for cel coloration decided that Snow White needed makeup--and so they simply applied their own blush to the cels. Disney reportedly worried that they might not know how to apply it correctly, which got him the Are You Fucking Kidding Me stare it deserved.

*I can see why Tolkien resented Disney. Here he's trying to make unVictorian, respectable Dwarves, and just a year later out come these goddamn doofuses. Singing about the washing-up, no less!** IT'S NOT LIKE THE DWARVES IN THE HOBBIT EVER SANG ABOUT THE WASHING-UP, RIGHT?! ... Oh, right.

**By the way, according to my DVD chapter menu, that song is entitled "Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum." You're welcome.

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice

• Dyslexia can cause difficulty in word retrieval in speech as well as in writing.


• The original edition of The Hobbit mentioned policemen. For some reason, I find this far weirder than the business I already knew about the Riddles in the Dark scene being so much less awesome at first.


• Lisa Frank is still around, but she's gotten rather weird.


• Retired AG items are on eBay for reasonable prices, and apparently inside I am still ten years old and WANTING them.


• Yuri Gagarin's flight into space was even more awesome than I thought, because it turns out his reentry strategy was basically to jump back to Earth.


• Fi, from Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, apparently does have real arms under her wings/cape.


• Netting requires its own special knots.


• The history of matches is long and crazy, and features poison, disintegrating jaws, and explosions. Which is kind of awesome.


• I don't have astigmatism; I just have myopia. This means I do not have football-shaped eyeballs; they are simply oblate spheroids.


• It is possible to get completely absorbed just classifying the hell out of images of distant galaxies. For SCIENCE!


• Snow can smash up your roof pretty impressively.


• You can totally make yourself a fluffernutter on the International Space Station.


• Prescription sunglasses are the bomb.


• MRI chambers act as Faraday cages to keep out external radio forces.


• Speaking of MRIs, apparently dybbuks show up on them.


• Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is the most adorable plushie ever made.


• The term for delicious potato chips and cream puffs and other such things is "supernormal releaser," which is a fancy way of saying "too much of a good thing," since back in Ye Olden Times it was really difficult to come across fat and salt and sugar, so your body is still convinced it should stuff them into your face whenever you come across them. That I knew, but I didn't know the term for them.


• Writing on a deadline, even a self-imposed one, is rough.


• Horror movies in theaters are a very different experience from horror movies alone in your room in the dark.


• Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major is an impressive bit of music to watch being performed.*


• Cats and toy trains are natural enemies.


• My confusion regarding a certain specific idiom in Irish accents is a direct result of David Eddings' confusion regarding the same.  When I learned that the phrase "I'm after [verb]ing" meant "I've just been [verb]ing," I thought for some reason it was counter-intuitive--it seemed like it should mean "I'm gonna [verb]"--but I didn't know why.  It's only after rereading The Belgariad and Malloreon that I realized that it's because Eddings uses the expression in his "Wacite brogue" accent, where it does mean "I'm gonna [verb]."  I picked up that meaning in junior high and it stuck with me after I'd forgotten the source.**


• In Tolkien's mythos, Fëanor was the one who came up with the Tengwar. Yet another addition to the list of atrocities he perpetrated on the Firstborn of Ilúvatar.


• Popes can retire.


• Mister Rogers answered every single letter he got. Which is a gargantuan task, because by god he was MISTER ROGERS.

*I've always rather wanted to see that one. It gets mentioned on an episode of M*A*S*H and I was always intrigued by the idea of writing a concerto for someone who had lost their right hand. So when my friend invited me to the symphony, I was not disappointed when they changed the program due to the pianist's having an injury on his right hand because hey, that meant I finally got to hear the left-handed piece.

**Even back then I knew that Eddings had some fanciful ideas about linguistics, but I did not notice that one specifically.

A day late, but gimme a break—yesterday was as bonkers as Monday. Anyway, here’s …

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice

• Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had lupus.
• In other WTF music deaths, Melvin Franklin, the awesome bass singer from my favorite band, died of necrotizing fasciitis—the FLESH-EATING VIRUS.
• The platypus’s bill is electrosensitive.
• Quinoa comes in all the colors!
• Friendship bracelets work on the same knot-tying principles as macramé, except for some reason they’re a lot more fun.
• Gliese 436b is an ice planet with a surface temperature of 800˚F. Yes, that means it’s a planet of hot ice.
• Gallbladder surgery can be avoided with magic purple stuff!
• If you watch enough of them, it’s possible to date old western movies to within three years of their release.
• Scientists have spliced spider genes into goats, making spidergoats whose milk can be processed into spider silk. And the spiders aren’t even radioactive.
• Even turning into a skid won’t always save your car from blunt force trauma.
• Wearing a seatbelt can save you from a lot of injury, but it may give you a purple boob if your car has a front-end impact.
• There are three timelines in the Zelda universe, splitting with Ocarina of Time. In one, Ganon got the Triforce and was defeated by grown-ass Link. In another, little Link tipped everyone off to Ganon’s shenanigans (shenaniganons?) and Ganon didn’t get to become the King of Evil. In the third, Link failed and the sages had to seal Ganon into the Sacred Realm.
• The receptionist from Monsters, Inc. has a MEAN older brother.
• The brain-eating amoebas are IN YOUR TAPWATER RIGHT NOW. RUN.
• Contadina sauce is the best for pizza.
• Writing a synopsis for your own book is never easy.
• Bomber jackets can be amazingly warm.
• People seriously believe that monitoring the state of my reproductive system is a serious job requiring lots of government resources.
• THERE IS A SPACE OPERA VERSION OF THE HOBBIT.

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice:

• The favorite architect I never knew I had is the awesomely named Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser. This is what the buildings inside my head look like.
• So one of the latest theories on the proliferation of autoimmune disorders is that in a sanitary ablutomaniacal society, there are not enough germs to keep our immune systems occupied, so they start attacking us. That’s right: they think we have allergies because our immune systems are fucking BORED.
• Which means that a (gross) experimental treatment for everything from hayfever to goddamn Crohn’s disease is to infect the sufferer with hookworms.
• There are two main types of sail plans in ships: square rig and fore-and-aft rig.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy is as awesome as I have always heard.*
• Team-building is a scam.
• Those obnoxious self-righteous hippies are right: things do taste better straight from the garden.
• Especially strawberries. I finally understand what all the damn fuss is about.
• Pumpkin vines are really prickly, yo.
• Gourd leaves, however, can be like velvet.
• You should always check the labels on the tomatoes you buy. Or maybe not, since what I grabbed thinking it was a cherry tomato plant turned out to be the most amazingly crazy heirloom tomatoes I’ve ever seen.
• That stupidly accented “Oh, hi, ___” people keep referencing is an impression of Tommy Wiseau in The Room.
• The Room is worse than hyperbolic people are making out to be. AND NOT IN AN ENTERTAINING WAY.
• The Crazy Pit of politics does not appear to have a bottom.
• Great horned owls are surprisingly adorable.
• The X-Files is a really boring show.
• But its not!spinoff, Millennium, is pretty good.
• I am not the only grownup in the world who still fails to see the value of homework.
• Peasant blouses are a blast to make.
• The constellation Aquila is right where my uncle swears it is not.
• Sometimes your gallbladder can act up even if there are no gallstones anywhere near you, because your body hates you.
• Apparently Science can predict whether you will shop in a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern in a store—and it seems to correlate with which side of the road your country’s traffic rules say you drive on.
• The subject of "You're So Vain" is apparently a big old secret.  Seriously, knowing it is apparently worth $50,000.
• Dead laptop screens can actually be replaced!

*Somehow I missed the glorious age of Bill Nye, despite being smack in the middle of it. I was too busy watching Ghostwriter, and dammit with the advent of the information superhighway pretty much everything I learned on that show is now about as useful as knowing how to juggle.

Vocabulary I Learned From Six-Year-Olds

Boss Princess

When playing Princesses in a group, it is important that the leader distinguish herself. Obviously if everyone is a princess nobody outranks anyone, so the Boss Princess title helps eliminate confusion about just who is in charge of this playtime.

If I’d only known this term as a kid. I would have owned my power-grubbing princess pals.