Greer Gilman's Blog, page 29

Crabtree & Corvids

At Mount Auburn, the Sargent crab is in flower.










And look who's hanging about the graveyard...



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April March

I turned out in the piercing cold and wet—worthy of August in the other Cambridge—for the April March for Science.  gaudior   brought the little Fox, who wore the very best sign of all:  Test Tube Baby.  Sproglet and sign were universally, intensely admired and adored, which plaudits they wore lightly, until it all became too much and they crumpled.

Earlier, I'd dropped by the Harvard rally, which had some rousing speakers, and an acapella protest choir called Vocal Opposition.  They did a fine old job with "Big Yellow Taxi," and sang the Aristotelian elements ("There's earth and air and fire and water—") before launching on Lehrer.  They ended with "If I had a theory, I'd test it in the morning..." (Followed by "data ..run" and "paper ... publish.")  I didn't follow them to MIT for the gathering of the awesome, as I was meeting folks here.

Cool hats:

Double helices cabling in the knit.  The designer is ChemKnits.

Cool signs:

[The resistance zigzag.]

A lovely earth in the heavens saying "WTF?"

Eppur si muove.

Protest Our Planet, It's the Only One* with Chocolate.  (*we know for sure)

Beautiful chalk portrait of earth with arrow:  I'm With Her

There Is No Planet B.

What do we want?  Science funding and functional pockets in women's clothes!

Half-lives matter!

Alternative facts are [square root of -1].

Got polio/smallpox? Me neither.  Thanks, science.

Revolution! [with old-style graphic of the ascent of man getting to Trump and turning back in disgust]

[Gorgeous bee-patterned design]:  Science gives me quite a buzz!

Less invasions, more equations.

I was told to bring a sine.

[Disapproving white bear]:  Science shouldn't be polarizing.

Saw some awesome mad scientist outfits, and a treeful of people in white labcoats.

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commonplace book

Oh good. The Telegraph reports that the book is being transcribed. Meanwhile, for your puzzling pleasure:



















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Not an April Fool!

The notebook of a 17th-century scholar—with comments on Shakespeare— turned up on Antiques Roadshow. The appraiser's hands were trembling. Mine would be.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-39452558

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Tickled pink

As a librarian, I had the blissful privilege of access to the University's online treasure-house:  the OED, the Oxford DNB, the full Early English Books Online (what's open to the public is a pitiful shadow), the Ben Jonson archive, &c., &c.   For years now—ever since my late august employer cut me off—I've been getting up from my comfy chair, getting gloved and booted, and trudging off to the library at all hours to Look Things Up.  Great exercise, but the ruination of shoes.

The OED, thank heavens, is accessible to holders of a British library card number, which I've borrowed from kind friends.  But the lack of EEBO when I want it has been a perennial frustration.

Fortunately, I've just learned that a subscription to the excellent Renaissance Society of America (thoughtfully scaled to income) buys access to some fabulous online resources, EEBO and all.  Many of these are freely available to all (it's well worth clicking, just in case); but others are not.  And who could resist  such temptations as The First Book of Fashion? the Proceedings of Old Bailey, 1674-1913? the English Broadside Ballad Archive? the Database of Early English Playbooks?   I've been running around gleefully jingling my keys.

It's raining little shards of ice out there.  And I can sit at my own desk with a nice cup of tea, and read this stuff.  Bliss.

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"The fear that somehow, somewhere, a duck is watching you."

Young words geeks spell their favorites.  They get younger every year.

And the urban Renaissance, via movingfinger  .

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Cailleach

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Blunderbuss

I was hoping for a Hotspur of a blizzard; but no.  This one's Falstaff in the laundry basket, humped, heaped, and untidily bundled.  There's a large bluff wind, booming shapelessly.  The sky is sizzling with ice; the trees are hurling down clods, like a bombardment in a squirrels' war.  The snow is all pocky.  It's a bust.

On the up side, I don't think this will blight the fruit trees.  Last year, there were no peaches in New England—no stone fruit at all—and the apples were stunted.  Frost-kill.

I loved those small apples though—the perfect size, like pippins

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Lumbarkamer

Looking for something else, I stumbled (as one does) on a Latin Glossarium Zemblanum.

What isn't in the aether?

“Its gilt key turned reluctantly. All three shelves and the space beneath were stuffed with disparate objects: a palette with the dregs of many sunsets; a cupful of counters; an ivory backscratcher; a thirty-twomo edition of Timon of Athens translated into Zemblan by his uncle Conmal, the Queen’s brother; a seaside situla (toy pail); a sixty-five-carat blue diamond accidentally added in his childhood, from his late father’s knickknackatory, to the pebbles and shells in that pail; a finger of chalk; and a square board with a design of interlaced figures for some long-forgotten game.”

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A pair of jacks

Here's Michael Swanwick's tale of that tightrope-act we did at Boskone, and more:

Yet somehow Greer and I made it fly. Part of it is that we work well together. Part of it is that we respect each other. Part of it is that we're both deeply read in genre fiction. And part of it is that at least one of us (but I suspect two) has the gift of bullshit. People told us we were brilliant...

Make that a pair of jacks.

I like the snapsnot taken at my reading, an epitome of what the...?




"...nothing up my sleeve..."

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