Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Our flight to Medford stopped in Portland, and on our descent we passed really close to Mt. St. Helens.  This picture looks into the caldera from the northeast - you can see the path of the blast from its eruption 25 years ago.

We’re flying off this morning to Ashland, Oregon for another dose of plays. We’re taking my Mom along, and staying through 7/3. Last year’s trip is chronicled in a category at the left. We’ll be seeing:

• • The Philanderer - George Bernard Shaw
  • Room Service - John Murry & Allen Boretz
  • Richard III - Shakesbeer
  • Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
  • Love’s Labor’s Lost
  • Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom - August Wilson
  • Twelfth Night
  • Napoli Milionaria! - Eduardo del Filipo

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs from February through November, but we have been going this last week of June for 12 years, and the weather has almost always been terrific. Our first exposure to the festival came when we accompanied a group from our son’s school, and we’ve been going every year since.
Our son is already down there with some friends, and we’ll hook up with him for some hiking and, probably, climbing. We’re hoping to make a trip to Crater Lake again this year, but we’ll check the snow level to make sure we can get around. There’s a lot of recreation to be had in the area.
My laptop’s poised, our lodging claims to have wireless broadband and I’ll report as often as I can.

Last month when I was visiting my mom, she was very much in a mode of dispossessing herself of stuff around the house, and we found ourselves one evening going through a bookcase upstairs.  We came across a musty-smelling, odd-sized tome entitled

The Dream City
A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition

This was the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 that served as the backdrop for Erik Larson’s The Devil in White City.  I started this book sometime last winter, but left it in the seat pocket of an airplane, and haven’t yet acquired a replacement.  It’s a selection of my online book club in the near future, though, so I’ll have to get back to it. 

In the meantime, I’ll get the flavor of the time, perhaps better than even Larson did, by immersion in this photographic tour of the Exposition.  The book has to have come to us from my great-grandparents, who lived in Waukegan during that era and surely would have attended at some point.  The pictures in the book disclose a history of a remarkable, opulent undertaking featuring incredible structures and idiosyncratic exhibits.  But most delightful in this book is the text accompanying the pictures, which, in its grandiose diction, whacked-out syntax and perhaps unintended candor, is incredibly entertaining.  I presume that this book is an official publication of the Fair, but the author of the text, confident that he won’t be edited, takes a blogger’s license in his prose.  I’ll just have to give you some examples.  The binding is fragile and disintegrating, but I’ll try to scan some representative pages.

THE WOMAN’S BUILDING - Great interest attached to the fact that Congress authorized a “Board of Lady Managers” and gave them a Woman’s Building.  The erection of this novel structure was entrusted to Miss Sophia Hayden, architect, of Boston.  It is considered noteworthy that the female sex, celebrated for its love of ornament, placed in Jackson Park the plainest of its buildings.

GRAND PLAZA ON CHICAGO DAY - Monday, October 9, 1893…We look southeast across the Plaza and Basin, and the reader is to know that all the buildings, all the plazas, the island, the boats, the restaurants, and Midway Plaisance were thus engorged with humanity.  The most terrifying music of China could this day be wreaked on the patrons of the Celestial Theatre, for there was nowhere to go to escape it.

THE GOLDEN DOORWAY OF THE TRANSPORTATION BUILDING - …It may be inferred that the architects, in producing these rich geometrical effects, were inspired by Wagner’s music.  But whether there be or be not any practical relation between music and decoration, the people gave the seal of approval to the “Golden Doorway” … and Wagnerians who spoke in riddles, and the masses, who used shorter words, alike admired and praised the work.

THE PERSIAN SWORD-DANCE - The engraving presents two public entertainers who, with saber and shield, and in the presence of a referee, pass, posture and belay each other to the music of drum and pipe.  … the civilized Caucasian finds but small satisfaction in the efforts of the Asian to be interesting and entertaining.  … the dances and music of the Far East went begging on Midway Plaisance.  The reason was easily found in the monotony and ear-piercing nature of the music to which all dancing must be done.  It may be admitted that there was a peculiar rhythm to the Turkish drums, and a certain minor roulade in the pipe-tunes;  but the unceasing repetition of these sounds, with the attendant misery to the hearer of an increasing tempo as the dance progressed, drove away the “Christian,” and kept him at a wise distance.

THE OSTRICHES - a learned lecturer, standing among a company of twenty-three full-grown Californian ostriches, expatiated on the habits of his great birds with undiminishing success.  His solemn statements concerning the high development of female rights in ostrich communities were a never-ending source of satisfaction to the ladies and a matter of profound astonishment to all husbands.  the self-forgetfulness of Ostrich, the pater familias, in building the nest, obtaining food, setting on the eggs a stretch of sixteenhours, while the mother sets but eight, and other subjugations of the male were recounted with a fidelity which was deemed to be dangerousy near to treachery by all prudent men. 

As noted, my mom flew in yesterday from Detroit (she lives near Toledo).  We’re spending a few days here in Seattle, then flying down to Ashland, Oregon (see category link on the left for details from last year’s trip) on Saturday for a week of play-watching, hiking and just not-working.  I booked her on a 9:30 am flight, so the poor thing had to get up at 4am in order to shuttle up to Detroit in time.  Consolation prize: I used miles and my influence with Northwest Airlines to upgrade her to first class both directions.  By the time I picked her up, she seemed pretty taken with that mode of travel.

In order to be sure to make the bell at 4, she set 2 alarm clocks and asked a neighbor to call her.  I was up at 1 Pacific anyway, so I called, as did my brother in Charleston a couple hours later.  As she said, if I’m not awake after all that, I’ve embarked on a different journey entirely and won’t need such earthly prodding.

So, instead of Camp Phil(2)bin, we’ve got the Phil(2)bin Arms Hotel.  Joining indigenous residents (me, Mrs. Perils, MIL Perils, and Perils, Jr.) were my mom and Mrs. Perils’ sister, who drove over from Idaho in order to catch a plane from SeaTac this morning.  Our neighbor across the street graciously allowed my mom to sleep in her basement apartment, which is temporarily vacant.  This left my sister-in-law to accommodate, on the sofa that I often inhabit when I wake irrevocably in the middle of the night and don’t care to risk Mrs. Perils’ wrath by turning on my reading light.

Things have thinned out here a bit - SIL is off to ATL, son is departing tomorrow morning for Ashland with one of his high school buds and his family (we’ll hook up over the weekend), and the sofa is mine to reclaim if and when marital peace mandates.  Life is good.

Off to the airport to pick up my Mom.  Details later.

You’re a so-so blogger in a slump, and you haven’t seen anything above the knees since April.  Then you’re sitting in a coffee shop and here comes something big, fat, and right in the wheelhouse:

Brain areas shut off during female orgasm

By EMMA ROSS
AP MEDICAL WRITER

Now I know why my questions about Proust are unwelcome during those climactic moments.  Timing might just be everything.

Apparently in-depth research was conducted prefatory to these conclusions.  There was a control group, and an out-of-control group.  Particularly cruel was this observation:

Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanner needs activities lasting at least two minutes and the men’s climaxes didn’t last that long.

That’s what the Proust is for, knucklehead.

Well, Camp Phil(2)bin’s reputation is taking a beating.  I picked my buds up at the Holland America dockside Sunday.  It never occurred to me what a logistical undertaking a cruise ship is.  You actually need an appointment to be able to walk off the damn things.

I played it pretty straight, tourist-wise.  I dragged them to the Pike Place Market, which they seemed not to have heard a lot about.  They loved all the vendors that were giving free tastes of stuff, and dug the flying fish vendor.

Next, they agreed that the Duck ride would give them the best concentrated tour, and off we went to the Seattle Center, where the Ducks depart from.  I prayed that no one would recognize me as we rolled through the streets.

We finished up at the Ballard locks, and the adjacent salmon ladder.

I’ve done my bit now for the low end of the tourist industry.  Pray for the next brace of visitors who ring me up in all innocence and ask what to do in Seattle.

Some old friends of mine from my Ohio State Marching Band days came through this way last week and left on a week’s cruise up to Alaska.  They arrive back in Seattle this morning, and I volunteered to give them a Seattle tour.  For as long as I’ve lived here, I really haven’t done any of the “normal” tourist things.  What I usually do is not-so-fondly referred to by my relatives as “Camp Phil(2)bin”, involving walks, hikes, kayaking and maybe some partying.

One of the people in today’s group has had hip replacement surgery recently, however, and her walking range is limited to about a quarter of a mile.  Suddenly, all the stuff I do and like to show people in Seattle is off the table, and I’m scrambling a little bit to find out what the “normal” tourists do.  I looked up brunch at the Space Needle ($38.50/person - gaak!), Argosy cruises ($25), a surf-and-turf tour on one of those whacked-out amphibious “duck” vehicles ($23 - that might be reasonable).  There’s always the Pike Place Market (flying fish, etc), but even that involves a bit of walking, and hill climbs.  Then I have a sort of wild card - since they’re flying out of Portland tomorrow and have to get there tonight anyway, it might be cool to just head for Mount Rainier.  The views today would be stunning.  I don’t know how I can go there, though and not hike.

I’ll let you know what transpired.  It’s gonna be a great day for picture-taking.

Over a year ago, I talked a little light-hearted smack about the Tyco guys and their antics and since yesterday, owing to their convictions for fraud and grand larceny, I’m getting boucoups hits.  Oddly, though, many seem to want photos of Karen Kozlowski, the wife of the disgraced CEO.  Perhaps they think she’ll be lonely soon.

I was so happy to see this conviction.  While I don’t really think they’ll do any time, it’s a moral victory.  While it was a state prosecution, I’m just waiting for our corrupt and venal justice department to find a way to intervene.  They’ve already helped the tobacco companies skate from a certain comeuppance, and I suspect them of punting the Scrushy/HealthSouth prosecution as well, not the least by allowing the trial to take place in Birmingham, where Scrushy has achieved icon status for garrulous televangelizing and, apparently, managing to transform himself from a rich white corporate criminal into an oppressed black man.  A jury of Alabamans is apparently at a standstill after a couple of weeks of deliberation.  Any bets for this Justice Department re-trying him?

Still, we have the Kozlowski/Schwartz conviction to savor for a few days.

I spent an hour or so tonight of frantic copying of my “categories” subdirectory from a couple of backup copies, and contriving a series of fake updates to try to kick Radio’s ass into upstreaming.  The process made a couple of ripples in the RSS ether, but, like those Twilight Zone episodes where a flying saucer lands and is only observed by a couple cranks and vagrants (you know who you are ), my thrashings in the digital soup will not be apparent by morning.  The best thing is that the categories all got restored - text, pictures and comments.  I don’t know how the fuck it happened, but look, you didn’t see anything, I didn’t see anything, let’s just let the government deal with it.