Michaela Sue

I have not been making much music lately, and have not been to many of the local house filks, either.  That's partly because I'm often busy with something else, partly because now that I don't have my traveling companion around I don't feel like going anywhere on a Saturday night.  I did go to filkart's gathering last night, though, and I had a great time.  It was nice to be back among the music friends again.

Also, what was basically the first thing that happened?  I was asked to sing something I hadn't practiced in probably two years.  In German.  Sure, why not!  Actually, I practiced the German language songs a whole heck of a lot when I was first learning them, so, fortunately, it was pretty well lodged in the brain.  aryana_filker, you get your songs requested in Wisconsin. 

Recently I've been seeing little rabbits while out cycling. I'm pretty sure these are not members of a species of small rabbits, but rather regular rabbits who are still young. I say this partly because I don't see any little rabbits in winter, mostly because these little rabbits have no escape-savvy whatsoever.

Big bunnies, when they see me coming, immediately disappear into the tall grass. These little guys, they run directly down the center of the paved trail in the exact same direction I am traveling. It turns out, the top speed of a small rabbit is right around 22km/hr, plus or minus a few. After a few tens of meters, they realize that this is not working and veer off into the tall grass and vanish. In a few months, bigger rabbits will just vanish off to the side right away. I think those are the exact same bunnies, a few months older, bigger, and having finally learned something that seems obvious but evidently isn't.

Before you think, wow, rabbits are dumb, think back to the things you did in high school. You were really stupid, weren't you! I know I was! My classmates will all remember "I came here to work with the best kids in the state, and here you are burning holes in the floor!" That was us! Now that we're all 42 or 43 or so, it never enters our minds to burn an anarchy symbol into a carpet, but back then we were apparently as dumb as juvenile rabbits.

I was looking through the vacuum pump section of the Scientific Instrument Services catalog and saw the solution to two very different problems you might have.  Do you need a very inert fluorinated vacuum pump fluid for use when pumping highly reactive gases?  Are you writing a story with a character like a James Bond villain and you need a suitable name for that character?  Either way, the answer might be Fomblin!  Or alternatively, the competing brand Krytox!

Some years back I visited my mother when she lived in a house in Green Valley, Arizona.  From the back yard you could see the MMT Telescope up on the top of Mount Hopkins.  The MMT was originally the Multiple Mirror Telescope, with six mirrors that, uh, happened to be available, combined into one telescope.  Since then the art of making Really Big Mirrors advanced and the six 1.8 meter mirrors have been replaced by a single 6.5 meter mirror, but they were unable to replace the name with a new one, so it's still the MMT.  (I understand that they tried, but astronomers aren't very good at naming telescopes, as evidenced by names like "very large array" or "overwhelmingly large telescope.") It's DARK there.  Even down in the town.  Really, really, dark.  I grew up in Cook County, Illinois.  Chicago, famously, is in Cook County.  I thought Milwaukee was dark.  Cook County is like standing on the daytime side of Mercury compared to Green Valley.

Anyway, I saw the very obvious Milky Way, the bazillion stars in the plain of our own galaxy.  Back when I was younger, I thought of the Milky Way as something you could detect using binoculars, a region of many faint stars.  I didn't realize until later how obvious it is in the dark.  More interesting than that, I found and pointed out to Mom something just a bit harder to see, M31, the great galaxy in Andromeda.  From 2.5 million light years away, you'd think it would be very faint, but the combined light of a trillion stars adds up to a lot of light.  From such a distance, you'd think anything would look like a point, but galaxies are very, very big, and it appears even to the naked eye as an extended smear of light even though you can only see the brightest part.  There weren't even really humans as we know ourselves when light from those trillion stars left there.  And, of course, it's headed right at us.  In three or four billion years the galaxies will pass through each other and stars will be thrown out in vast bands and eventually the two supermassive black holes will merge, an event that I assume would be best observed from a Safe Distance.  I'm pretty sure in the case of supermassive black holes a safe distance is a very long distance indeed.

And, you know, Andromeda is part of the Local Group.  You can see it just by looking (if you get the hell away from Chicago).  It's not like it's far away or anything, as these things go.

(That photo of me with a Nikon film camera reflected in the 10 meter array of mirrors was taken up at the Whipple observatory.)

At Capricon I tried something new to me, trying to dress up in some sort of recognizably fancied-up manner.  As you may know, it's not like I have some keenly tuned sense of fashion, or even the vaguest sense of color coordination (even though the actual color-sensitive receptors in my eyes work just fine).  So, you know, adventure!  The new wardrobe components consisted of a pair of black just-below-the-knee boots from Minnetonka Moccasins and a kilt from Alt.Kilt.

One thing that surprised me was the reaction to the boots.  I expected the kilt to attract attention (duh), but I also wore the boots with just plain black jeans and a shirt from Patagonia and I actually got a number of comments out of the blue from people - both friends and also total strangers - about how they liked the boots.  Honestly, I'd have expected it to take more, you know, effort to get dressed up enough to actually get comments on it.

I'm basically speculating here, but I suspect that playing dress-up works a bit like an athletic competition in which you are competing against your age group or your weight class.  You don't get compared to the best-dressed human being on the premises, you get compared to whatever group people group you into.  If you look like a man (I have a beard, it cements the look), you'll get compared to the median man.  I'll pause while you imagine the straight cis dudes you've seen recently.  Right!  It's not really going to be that hard to look more dressed up than that.  And indeed, apparently not!

While it was really quite fun to be complimented on the good-looking boots, the kilt did attract even more attention.  Fellow men: If you have been wondering if wearing a kilt will tend to attract extra attention from women, the answer is yes.  Yes it does.  Which, obviously, tends to be fun, especially if you have a thing for women.  I have a number of friends who are sort-of known for appreciating a man in a kilt, and their reactions were very entertaining.

(Here is where I launch into an extended string of thoughts:)

You also get some possibly excessive attention.  Possibly a tiny taste, you know, a few tenths of a percent, of the sort of thing women get subjected to all the damn time.

There is a very very well-known line of thinking, joking, teasing, story-telling, song-writing, etc. about the age-old question of what is worn underneath the kilt.  (Nothing is worn, it's all in perfect working order!  Har!)  I'm not sure I'd really thought about whether women would actually ask me about my underwear.

In the culture around here there is an expectation that all men are always up for anything sexual anytime, anywhere, with anyone of a gender they fancy.  This is a harmful notion in all sorts of ways, but I think that one of them is in the area of just thinking about how some things might actually feel.  How would I like it if random women I don't even know asked me if I'm wearing underwear?  Well, I don't know, but I do know that I'm supposed to say that it sounds like fun.  Right?

Well, in fact, I did get asked about my underwear.  Repeatedly.  Yes, it's all just in fun, it's in fact a well-known stereotypical joke, and, yeah, it's not a big deal.  It's one thing with actual friends, but honestly, when someone I don't know asks if I'm wearing underwear, it really does feel kind of weird, with the added weirdness that while I don't necessarily have to actually answer the question I do have to think up something to say.  (I settled on a standard answer of "I don't ask you about your underwear, do I?")  And the other thought I had just after "this is weird" was to wonder what things I've said to women over the years that were intended to just be playful jokes of the standard sort that actually came off as weird or creepy.  I'd imagined that I'd been trying not to be weird or creepy, but now I think I should try harder, just to be sure.  Because honestly I'm pretty sure I wasn't trying hard enough.

By the time a woman who had reasonable standing to ask me about my underwear got to ask - given a history we have that's left her with some specific knowledge of what might be seen under there - well, she was about the fourth woman in thirty minutes to ask and really, by then, the joke just didn't feel as amusing as it had sounded like it might be.

None of which is to say that I didn't have a fun time.  I think most men get told they look good from time to time, but normally only by certain people under certain circumstances.  Never, for example, by whoever happens to in the elevator when they step in.  So, given that I did go well out of my way to attract attention to myself, it was indeed fun to have succeeded.  Of course, the way that works for men is if I got tired of it I could always put pants and normal shoes on and resume being an invisible default dude, with no worry that people might tell me I look too plain, should do something about my hair, and should smile dammit.  Aside from fun, I do suspect that being on the receiving end of that sort of thing for a while is likely to leave one more skilled at giving out compliments in a pleasing manner at appropriate times and places, as opposed to awkwardly or creepily.  There's no other education that's quite the same as experiencing something yourself, even just a very tiny bit of experience.

After breaking my ankle in a speed skating fall at the beginning of November, I'm finally just about nearly almost able to walk again. At any rate, I can walk awkwardly wearing a rigid plastic boot, or with just a bit of help from crutches, and I can drive a car since my right foot works plenty well enough to operate the pedals (though of course I have to change into a normal shoe from the Aircast boot, and then back again at my destination).

I ended up spending 26 days without leaving home, so it's been awesome to get out. I went 48 days without driving a car myself, though I got some rides during part of that interval. So now I notice that I'm a bit out of practice. Now, I'm 7 weeks out of practice, not 7 years, so it's not that bad. I did seem to forget the amazing laziness of the modern car-driving experience. Anything that could require some sort of physical effort (and did back in the day) has been motorized for your convenience. I actually had this moment of thinking that maybe the steering wheel had broken free of the steering mechanism and I was going to inevitably sail off the road into a crash until I remembered that it's not supposed to take any real effort to turn, there's a motor in there to help out. (I actually get that feeling when I'm quite in car-driving practice, after doing something arm-intensive like kayaking or skiing and suddenly I'm holding this tiny steering wheel and applying very minimal forces to it as the motor helps out with any actual work that might be needed).

The thing I really noticed while sailing down the highway at 88km/hr today is that I'm not so much out of practice at actually operating the motorized metal box as that I'm out of practice at that car-driver mental state of thinking, hey, I'm just operating a powerful multi-ton high-speed vehicle in close proximity to other people and objects, it's not like anything could go wrong or anyone could get hurt. No need to worry!

Clearly, a lot of people don't worry at all. You can tell by the stupid things they do! I've never been that unconcerned and I don't want to be, but I was extra worried today. You could get hurt doing this! I just spent two months sort of disabled after hitting a protective safety pad after falling without the aid of any motor, just pure human power.  I was going at best a hair over 40km/hr when I fell and slower by the time of impact after sliding some distance, and it wasn't by any means the worst possible body position for the impact, either.  (Turned the other way, I'd have needed neurology instead of orthopedics, right?)  You could get seriously mangled at 90km/hr, and take out a bunch of other people with you using that big heavy metal box on wheels!

Oxycodone is in the news from time to time due to people having addiction problems and illicit recreational use. Well, I used it for about four days last month after surgery, and I guess that's a different scenario from long-term use, and I assume the recreational users don't stick to the officially prescribed dose, but anyway, I'll tell you my experience. I assume it helped with the pain, but in accordance with the advice I got from all the medical people, I started taking it before the nerve block wore off and didn't reduce the dosage until two days after the surgery, so I assume that uncomfortable day after the block wore off and before things got more healed would have been a lot more uncomfortable without it, but I didn't try the alternative. It indeed may cause drowsiness. And constipation. But by far the most notable side-effect, which I see listed as a "less common side effect," was hiccups. In me, it does that. It's basically a hiccup pill for me. Beats pain, I guess.

I promised I was going to rant about this, so here goes:

As someone who spends a good bit of time doing athletic stuff while wearing colorful lycra clothing, I also spend a good bit of time washing colorful lycra clothing. It turns out, yes, there is special detergent sold to this market. I just bought a different brand (it was what the running store happened to have) and I noticed something similar in both: Both labels feature a photo of a woman running, apparently on a warm summer day judged by what she's wearing (photo below the cut). Now, sure, I'm a straight dude—as I guess the label designers seem to be—I get it, I like looking at women (I could look at a woman's body all day! Ask my girlfriend!) but it's not obviously sensible to sell laundry detergent by showing a skinny woman displaying the highest possible ratio of uncovered skin to actual clothing that might need detergent.  Penguin brand has their logo over her bellybutton, 2Toms goes for a bigger photo and the full 'her bellybutton, let us shows it to you' look.

It seems like when you see a generic-athlete photo of a women, she's usually a runner.  A man, he usually looks like some sort of bodybuilder.  Because runners tend toward the teensy-weensy, which I guess is officially what women are supposed to look like.  Men, apparently, are supposed to be incredibly skinny too, but also super-muscular.  You only see teensy-weensy marathon-running men when they are selling running-specific stuff.  If you put me in charge of selling sport-detergent, I'd probably suggest you need photos of speed skaters in our full-body-coverage skin suits.  Now, there's a bunch of fabric that needs detergent!


( photo )

I got another message the other day from the assisted-living home where my mother is living, informing me that she had another extremely minor non-event sort of fall.  I'm sort of used to that now, but the first time they called me and the woman described, at length and in detail, a very very minor fall that if it happened to me would almost not register as an event at all, I was waiting nervously for the actual news about what happened in the end.  I mean, in my life, I have speed skating crashes involving fairly violent impacts into the pads after sliding across the path of some other guy with sharp blades on his feet, or tumbles down the hill in the snow while cross-country skiing, or occasional bike crashes (I've had a fall on ice that was much like the speed skating crashes, a long slide with no injury from the sliding because ice is slippery, but instead of other people on skates I was at risk of being hit by someone in a pickup truck) and trail running stumbles and even road running trips (probably the worst injury I've had in years was a trip while running on the road, which aside from the risk of being hit by someone making a left turn while eating a sandwich while on the phone, doesn't seem like an activity with a lot of crash hazard, but I tripped and fell at roughly 12km/hr and on pavement that can tear up the skin.  I was actually bleeding a bit.  But, again, not a real injury.  Healed totally in weeks, at this point I couldn't even tell you which hand was scraped up, there's no hint left of any damage.)  No one called my mother or my girlfriend to tell them what happened, because, hey, not a real injury (that speed skating crash above actually didn't even hurt at all, not even a minor bruise).  The standards for what constitutes an incident than should be reported are evidently different at an assisted-living center than at an Olympic training facility, which I suppose is as it ought to be, but it's an adjustment.  (At the oval we joke about the falls that look cool but don't hurt:  "Only a physicist could fall like that!") 

I went to the beach today, and found myself pondering various things.  Among them, clothing fashion as exhibited by beach-goers.  Now, first off, if some people want to wear a lot of fabric, that's fine and they should feel free to do so.  It is interesting, though, that women will wear everything from full-coverage to teeny-weeny-bikini, but men seem to range from baggy shorts to stupendously baggy shorts.  Plus me wearing something in a style that, as women's bottoms in a two-piece, would be well over on the more-modest end of that category.  But not so much compared to the other men.

Like, you might imagine "boy shorts" would be popular with "boys" given the name, but no!  Not at all!  The boys prefer "tarps."  Pants that come down well past the knee but stop well above the ankle are capris, right?  Previously, at least around here, it's a style I've seen nearly exclusively worn by women, but now evidently it's the latest thing for the boys on the beach.  On the one hand, it's good to see new flexibility in what's considered acceptable for men or women to wear, but on the other, it's downright amazing that the trend toward ever-bigger, longer, baggier bathing suits for men has actually reached the point where some of them are not even technically shorts anymore.  Mark my words,  the next logical step in the trend to baggier men's bathing suits is the bell-bottom bathing suit.  You just wait.