Category Archives: Bohemian

Bagpipes, Bangers, and Beer!

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7 September, 2008, Estes Park, Colorado.  It is the last day of the Scottish Festival in Estes Park. Th’ Gaussling and family made way to this annual festival to hear bagpipe music and to see the spectacle.  There were several quite decent bands as well as a variety of highland games to watch. You could even lunch on haggis.

It was interesting to see a police officer dressed up in a kilt and scooting around on a Segway. Then there was the curious juxtaposition of holstered stun gun and a kilt.
Parade of the Clans

Parade of the Clans

These highland festivals seem to involve quite a bit of pomp and circumstance. The Marine Corp Marching band put on a show bobbing and weaving to the tuba playing a jazzy beat. Cannons were fired on the top of every hour and a collection of siege engines (wooden trebuchets) hurled stones towards an inflatable Nessie floating in Loch Estes. And at noon, a pair of WWII training aircraft did a formation flyover. Airplanes, beer & bangers, and bagpipes. It just doesn’t get any better than that!

 

 

Review: “Little Women” at the Lyceum

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August 30, 2008, Arrow Rock, Missouri.  Like most boys, I failed to read Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women.  Okay, to be fair, a slight elaboration is needed. I failed to summon the interest in reading it.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that we were going to drive 744 miles (one way) to see a musical based on the book. The musical production of this story was staged at the Lyceum Theatre in Arrow Rock, Missouri. The theatre is a refurbished church and sits on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River valley. Lewis & Clark stopped there according to the historical markers.

Arrow Rock is a charming though obscure tourist village configured with a handfull of antique shops, B & B’s, and minor eateries. The town was a mid-19th century river port. Numerous warehouses and transport operations were once in operation. Eventually, the town went into a prolonged quiescent phase with the coming of rail transport. As if to cement its extinction, the Missouri River later changed its course and moved a mile away.

The town is now part of the Arrow Rock State Historic Site. The historic site status of the area has brought some traffic into this sleepy little hamlet.

And then there is the Lyceum Theatre. What is notable about this Theatre is not so much the setting as the quality of the actors it attracts. The productions are Actors Equity operations and the casting calls are in New York City. The actors fly in and reside in a dormitory in Arrow Rock for the duration of the production.

The result is a musical talent pool of high quality. We found the production of Little Women to be cleanly energetic and very crisp.  The stagecraft was very professional and relied on a liberal use of scrims and lighting.

The vocal talent across the cast was superb. The actor playing sister and lead character “Jo” was Mallory Hawks. She captured considerable depth in the part and displayed a verve that never failed to charm. This actor’s voice was exceptionally strong and clear. She was cannily emotive and lead the audience through an emotional series of highs and lows during the performance. I wish her well in her career.

For accomodations I would recommend the Down Over Bed and Breakfast in Arrow Rock. It is run by a charming retired couple who present a fantastic breakfast spread. It is reasonably priced and provides a relaxing setting for chronically twittered city folk.

I have a dream too!

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I have a dream. I dream of a time when election crazed talking heads find some new metaphores. I dream of a time when networks lengthen the news sampling interval from 5 minutes to something greater. I dream of a time when microanalysis of the faintest political nuance is recognized for what it is- gossip. I dream of a time when broadcast news people understand the concept of signal to noise ratio.

Finally, I dream of a time when people focus on the core of MLK’s dream- nonviolence- rather than the attention deficit parroting of the 4 words for the sake of loftiness.

Climbus Maximus

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Th’ Gaussling just received this photo of his good friend Paul on the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. This is a real accomplishment and my hat is off to him.  Paul is a tenured perfesser of chemistry and is accustomed to slogging up endless slopes in the rarified air.  We overlap in our fascination with asymmetric lactam enolate alkylations and pyridazine chemistry.

Paul on Top of Africa

Paul on Top of Africa

Lead Couture

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In case any of my dear colleagues in the blogosphere are in the market for a lead brasserie or heavy metal codpiece, there is one supplier of goods meant to protect those delicate regions from radiation. By way of style, I’d put the design in the 19th century Amish or Mormon settler category. But, that is beside the point.  This habillement de mode de plumbum [thanks BabelFish!] is meant to protect the more tender regions from ionization.

Self-Imposed Complexity and the Ratchet Principle

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The portfolio of laws that American citizens are subject to seems to grow without bounds. Every year our congress drafts a new collection of laws to submit to the process of enactment. State legislatures, county and city governments all are able to add new rules and constraints on our degrees of freedom. As if that weren’t enough, people willingly move into convenant controlled communities where they sign away basic freedoms like the freedom to choose house paint or to leave the garage door open.

We are gradually fencing in all of the free space where conduct is unregulated. Our Nanny State leaders are scaring the bejeebers out of us through defense initiatives and dire warnings about what could happen if terrorists took an interest in disrupting industry and infrastructure.

Our town of 6,000 has to comply with Homeland Security requirements by fencing in the town water tank in a certain way.  Some terrorist could poison the water. In fact, that fiend would probably be a psychotic local citizen bent on retribution, not a Shiite saboteur in sandals. Collectively, we are at much more risk from fellow citizens than from foreign bad guys. Perhaps that is the hidden agenda.

Citizens are turning over priceless freedom artifacts in exchange for promissory notes claiming to protect the bearer. Once we give up degrees of freedom in the conduct of our lives, we can never get them back. Govennment will not refund units of control.  As we increase the complexity of our world through an ever increasing statutory web of control, we forfeit degrees of freedom. It is like a ratchet. You can click forward, but there is no going back.

New subject. Read Jim Kunstlers post “Reality Bites“.

Geriatric Body Art

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The number of young adults walking around with piercings, tatoos, and those curious discs in their ear lobes continues to grow. Whereas tatoos were once popular only among cannibals and sailors, todays suburban tatoo fashionistas come from all walks of life and sport technicolor displays of fantasy art that make a point of in-your-face incongruence. And with much of it on locations where the wearer can’t view it themselves.

I can’t help but imagine rest homes of the future where geezers and codgers will dodder in their twilight years, festoons of ear hair sprouting over gaping holes in their pendulous ear lobes like Amazonian witch doctors. The urine scented hallways will be populated with crones and the occasional geezer sporting once provocative tats, now blurred with age, protruding from private locations and shared only with the floor nurse.

It seems to me that the tatoo money would be better spent on a round of antibiotics after a trip to Phuket. At least it would have been a genuine experience of life on the edge rather than just an illustration of one.

Klaatu Berada Nicto

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Looks like I may have found the perfect fraternal organization from which I can express my need to contribute to society. E Clampus Vitus, or ECV, even has a chapter here in Colorado- Alferd Packer Chapter 100.

Somehow I managed to miss Imperial Week in San Francisco. I’m told the view of the Death Star above SF was specatular.

Th’ Gaussling was thrilled to discover that the Theremin was used for background music on the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of the greatest SciFi movies of all time. You can hear the Theremin in the scene where the robot Gort exits the saucer to rescue Michael Rennie. It has a menacing, other worldly sound. No word if the upcoming remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still with Keanu Reeves uses the Theremin. Seems doubtful.

Crime Scene in Gallup

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August 5, 2008, Gallup, NM. Woke up in a cheap motel in Gallup this morning to the sound of crime scene investigators working up a scene 2 doors down. Something serious happened. Detectives milling about while 3 fellows in rubber gloves were handling evidence on the hood of their car. They had some sort of kit and were busy running their procedure. Somebody had a bad day.

Update. According to the lady at the desk, somebody expired in their room. The police were doing their routine schtick looking for signs of foul play.

Today we drove north on Route 666 491 through the Navajo Nation to a geometric point of interest where 4 states collide.

The Navajo’s charge $3/head for access to this geopolitical point. It is a remote spot where imaginary lines intersect. You can buy fry bread and refrigerator magnets in the numerous kiosks.

Things overheard at 4-Corners: The Navajo lady in the information shack was explaining (rather proudly) to a tourist from Toledo that the Utes refer to the Navajo as “Head Bashers” and “Bloody Knives”.  Hmmm. Some bad blood there.

Aldrichimica Acta, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2008.

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The latest Aldrichimica Acta is out- No. 2 of volume 41. This publication was started by a friend, teaching colleague, mentor, and former boss who spent some of his best years working for Alfred Bader. He eventually retired as a VP of something or other at Aldrich. A truly great guy. For a while, the task of catalog publishing was his job. He bought paper by the rail car. Their job was to increase the size of the collection by 15 % per year.

He also invented the coffee pot kugelrohr system that Aldrich sold for a long time. It has now morphed out of recognition. But he showed me the prototype motor assembly. It consisted of a reciprocating air motor built for automotive windshield wipers wired onto some pegboard. The air motor used either air pressure or vacuum and had a metal tube that connected the vac line from one side of the motor axially to the other.  The reciprocating motor got around the need for a sealed vacuum bearing. To one side of the reciprocating tube was connected a vacuum line via flexible rubber hose, and to the other via hose and barbed connector, a series of bulb tubes and pot. 

The coffee pot came from a West Bend coffee pot plant down the road in Milwaukee. Aldrich bought the reject pots and paid a guy to refit them for kugelrohr duty in his garage. It was a very successful product. When I went to grad school we had a Buchi kugelrohr for bulb-to-bulb short path distillation. But I still remember with some fondness having to sit at the bench twiddling the Aldrich kugelrohr by hand while feeding dry ice onto the receiver. Sometimes we would drip dichloromethane in the receiver and let the evaporative cooling do the trick. We’d use the air motor for lengthy distillations.