Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 13

temporary versus permanent

Elsewhere on the interwebs, I follow Glenn Shepherd, an ethnobotanist who works in ... guess where? (If you guessed the Amazon, you (a) are correct and (b) have been reading this blog for more than two entries.) He wrote about an ergot-related fungus on a certain sedge which is used medicinally by the Matsigenka people.

One time when Shepherd had a headache, he was treated with some of this sedge. The headache disappeared almost instantly ... and he gained a temporary ability to juggle. He write...

"Alphabet Soup: How Picture Books Are Made, from A to Z"

"Alphabet Soup: How Picture Books Are Made, from A to Z" is an exhibition running currently at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, one of my favorite museums that I happen to live right near. MAN that place has great exhibitions.

This particular exhibition draws on the museum's permanent collection to illustrate all the stages of picture-book creation, with each letter of the alphabet standing for something--B is for book dummy, E is for endpapers, I is for india ink, etc., followed by ill...

Tikuna update: genders

The Tikuna language has five genders (these aren't genders like people having genders; these are just linguistic genders--like how French and Spanish have two and German has three. Speaking of, it's fascinating to me when Spanish and Portuguese genders don't agree, like for "computer," which is masculine in Portuguese but feminine in Spanish. And "tree" is the opposite: masculine in Spanish but feminine in Portuguese.)

Anyway, Ticuna's five genders are feminine, masculine, neuter, salient, and no...

Amazonian cacao for your Valentine's Day

Apparently I never shared these pictures here! But what better day than Valentine's Day, when people give chocolate to one another.

As you no doubt know, a lot of chocolate is produced using cacao that's obtained and grown in ways that are exploitative and bad for the environment. What I saw, though, was small family production--probably just for local consumption.

Like coffee, cacao *can* be a very beneficial crop to cultivate because it can grow in the shade of larger trees. It can be a forest-p...

Snow Hachiko

Many people know the story of faithful Hachiko, the dog who always went to Shibuya station in Tokyo to greet his master after work, and who continued to go there every day to wait for him for nine years after the man died. There's a bronze statue of Hachiko by Shibuya station now.

Well, on February 5, Tokyo got snow that--unusually for Tokyo--stuck. And in Shibuya station, someone made a friend for Hachiko:

Photo by Tokyo photographer 清水哲朗; gobiguma on Twitter (original tweet here )
[image error]

This photo cour...

dark moments, falling action

I read a novella and a short story recently, and I've been thinking about them and about stories and how we tell them, what we tell, etc. The novella was Iona Datt Sharma's Division Bells; super highly recommended. Love develops between two bureaucrats who are working for a minister in the UK's House of Lords. They're working on legislation, and the minutiae of that and of trying to work for good things in real life, within flawed systems, weaves together perfectly with their personal stories. I...

showing not telling in Betsy-Tacy and Tib

Thanks to osprey_archer , I've been (very leisurely) reading the first few Betsy-Tacy books. They are a real delight, and I laughed at this scene from the second, Betsy-Tacy and Tib. The girls are eight years old, and they're each looking after a younger sibling, and Betsy, the inventive one, has hit upon learning to fly as an activity. They will jump off progressively taller things, flapping their arms, until they master flight. At the point of this excerpt, they've already jumped off a hitchin...

tiny snowman

Yesterday some wet snow fell, and also yesterday, we got a delivery of propane. Afterward, when I went outside to check my tanks, I found that the delivery person had left us a tiny snowman on a metal saddle that's supposed, in the summer months, to hold a hose (we don't actually use it for that).

It's a charming snowman!

The delivery person was doing their rounds, filled up the tank, and then took the time to make three wet snowballs and stack them--voila, snowman.

I have no way of thanking them--...

oops, let's try again

Elsewhere on the interwebs, I've been doing microfiction, a tiny story a day, based on single-word prompts. Three of us create prompt words for the month. We intend to keep it up for a whole year! So far I've only missed one day.

I posted an entry here featuring one I wrote, then lost confidence and deleted the entry. The thing about microfiction--especially, maybe, mine, is it's VERY slight! Not much to see! ... But I deleted the entry more because I feared it might read as saccharine. I like t...

Mr. Medium and Hot Mama

I saw these fun salsa labels last time I was at my dad's. They were in a little corner deli in his town. I would read a graphic novel illustrated by whoever did the designs, a graphic novel about Hot Mama, Mr. Medium, Mild Child, and Auntie Verde. Hot Mama is a single mom, an artist and adventurer. Mild Child is her kid. Auntie Verde works for a big company and is always getting her sister and nephew out of fixes, but she's not really a corporate type: she loves to garden and knows the names of ...