LaurieWrites

The Lord God Bird

So, there is much ado in the media about the discovery of a single, remaining, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in Arkansas. It's not known whether this is the only one, or whether there are more. Let's hope there are, because it's a pretty sassy looking bird.

I don't know much about birds, but this is a big deal, from what I hear. Phillip Hoose was on Morning Edition today. He wrote a book called "The Lord God Bird", which is one of the woodpecker's 18 nicknames, and is very excited about this discovery to say the least. Could this be the resurgence of an extinct species? What do we need more, in these crazy, death-fixated times, than rebirth of any sort?

Renee Montagne asks Hoose - who is just bouncing off the walls with excitement about this bird in the sweetest ornithological way - if this might not be just a sick joke for humanity - a sighting of one bird that will thrill everyone and then subsequently bum them out because it's about to become extinct again. Is a taste of honey worse than none at all, Renee? Sometimes I despise commentators. A lot.

You could almost hear Hoose smiling through the radio during this interview, and he wouldn't let his hopes be dashed. Sure, it could, he said. There have been sightings before, in an ash tree in a New Orleans parish some years ago, to be precise. But then again, it might not. It might be the real deal. And that's enough for him.

It's enough for me, too, non-birder but nature lover that I am. And just hearing Hoose's last statement made me pull for it to be real more than anything.

"My wild, beating heart just won't stop," he said. "This is just wonderful. What a chance."

And even though I've never heard of this woodpecker, I've heard too little of this kind of genuine excitement lately. God bless the Lord God bird.

And Glinda Probably Made Fun of Her in School....

Quote of the Day, so far:

"Poor Wicked Witch of the West ... I mean honestly, she had green skin, her wardrobe consisted of black, black and more black, her transportation was a broom crammed between her legs, and her only friends were flying monkeys! No wonder she wanted the shoes."

Get a Life

Anna Quindlen is often invited to speak at graduations, because she's so damned good at it. There's no other way to describe it. She has the gift of the columnist's punch-to-the-gut line, along with just enough perspective and way with words to make it work.

This is her commencement speech at Villanova University several years ago. I found a printout of it when I was cleaning out my "files" (that's a cardbox box to you...). Here it is, electronically. I enjoyed reading it. I think you will too.

"People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to  write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten  back the test results and they're not so good."

Get a Life

Headline of the Day

GM Eaten by its Own Free Lunch
The automaker is in trouble because of pension and health care commitments made decades ago.

It's from the Washington Post home page.

I'm just sayin'.

Einstein's Brain

This was the second Morning Edition story that I dug. And no, it had nothing to do with black smoke and words that start with c, end with e, and contain the letters "onclav". I've heard more of the Latin mass on the radio and television in the past couple weeks than I did in my whole post-Vatican 2 childhood. Anyway...This is the book:

Postcards From the Brain Museum

Today was the 50th anniversary of Albert Einstein's death. This book is about his brain. Dr. Thomas Harvey, who was on staff at the hospital where he died, somehow snagged it post-autopsy, and with some kind of weird approval from Einstein's family, promised to research it but in actuality just carried it around for 40 years after. No kidding. He wanted to study it to know what made Einstein so smart. My guess is that a nurse or two tried to tell him it was the fact that he did NOT carry someone else's brain around for decades, but he probably was on the way to get coffee and ignored them.

His wife left him because of his brain obsession. At one point, he had it stored in a beer cooler in Kansas. He talked smack about it over beers on his porch with beat poet William Burroughs, who (in what I think is a very bizarre twist) was his neighbor, and then he finally drove it to California in the trunk of his Buick Skylark.

Brian Burrell writes about other brains in his book: Lenin, Walt Whitman - but there's nothing to indicate that either of these guys had a medulla oblongata with as many miles on it as Einstein's by the time this Harvey character was done with him. I can't believe no one has made a movie about this. Or maybe they have. At any rate, it's an intriguing story.

If you're in a bad mood does everything go black?

Morning Edition was good today. It must have been my karmic reward for having to drive to Fairfax on 495 in the morning rush hour.

The first story I heard was about Synesthesia. I'd never heard of this before. It might be described as "thinking in colors," which is a beautiful concept, really. It means that in some people, neurological functioning is such that the stimulation of one sense produces the sensation of another.

The pianist they interviewed played and described the color she "sees" or associates with each note. She associates colors with letters and numbers too. It all sounded kind of cool to me but not particularly compelling. Now you see periwinkle. Now you see a deep red. "Nice. Can I do that?" I thought. "Can I? Please?" The announcer said that composers are often "synesthetes", as well, specifically Liszt, Scriabin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. Unfortunately, I only know the last two names because I shelved their cds once upon a time at Borders. I could leave them there and let you think they just rolled off my fingers, but I won't.

Then, the announcer alluded to how this condition has screwed up her life at times. "Finally," my 2005 hindbrain buzzed. "The dirt. The good stuff." Freaks. We're all disaster-grubbing freaks. Anyway, the great trauma occurred when her family picked a couch in a color that messed with the colors she saw in her mind. Also, she really doesn't like to play "orange" on the piano. It's too jarring. And because I'm a cynical you know what these days, I allowed myself to think, "Honey, you don't know from trouble." Then I referred to myself as "grandma", and shut up.

Memes. A new word. A new world. I need to find out what it means - its true etymology, not the fact that it's a little informational-type ditty that inhabits the blog world. That part I am figuring out from context. I'm so smart. Astounding.

I like this one, I should have been to more states by now:

bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Photoshop

I'm currently taking a Photoshop class. This is an image of my first finished collage. I'm shyly proud of it, although it's truly nothing extravagant. This is a great program and although it's not easy to learn (intuitive it is NOT) I think it's one of the more valuable skills I've acquired in recent years. I should point out that I cannot draw at all, although I've got a great appreciation for art and photography.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This is a great book. Read the first chapter here:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer. He also wrote Everything is Illuminated last year, which I haven't read yet. My friend lent me a copy of the new book after I read so many great reviews (including one from my friend Vicky who I trust with all things literary...) that I had to jump on the bandwagon. I got through the first 200 pages yesterday and found myself stopping to copy quotes from the text. Foer has an amazing mind.

His protagonist is a little boy whose father died in the World Trade Center. He finds a key in his dad's closet and spends the next year visiting everyone named "Black" in the NYC phonebook, trying to figure out what the key means.

If you're a fan of consistent punctuation and prose that always seems to know where it's going, this might not be your thing. But if you're into language with a life of its own, and can deal with ambiguity in a big way, read this book.

Cope

Citizen Cope and a granola bagel on a spring Sunday morning. Praise the Lord.

Sometimes I wish I felt the pull to go back to church, but so far, it works for me to stay home and listen to music and get myself in the right headspace to finish out the weekend and get ready for another work week.

Ever since I saw Cope perform last year, I've been a fan, and have yet to tire of listening to his records or seeing his band live. What RCA calls his "urban sensibility" in press releases is in no way that easy to sum up. They also call him a "sonic auteur", which, if a bit over the top, sent me to the RCA website to see if they were hiring writers. Don't get me wrong - I love that they're promoting him so well, because he's touring like crazy and that means more people are hearing good music. And it's not just him. Although he's clearly in charge of the operation - that press release should just say "CHARISMA" in bold at the top - his band is one of the best I've ever heard live, and I've been going to shows and calling it like I hear it for more than 20 years.

The new album is called the Clarence Greenwood Recordings, and I love it, but I'm still partial to his first, self-titled release, Citizen Cope. The single from that record, "Contact", used to play on the in-store play when I worked at Borders, and I didn't appreciate it then - to tell the truth, we were like, "Who is this guy and will someone please give him some contact?" - but heard in context it's all good.