Chicken Little and Curious George

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve the ridiculozillion dollar bailout package today. Ah, yes. Again the fools rush in where angels fear to spend.

"They didn't know it was GEORGE. They thought it was a real fire." This line from the classic picture book, Curious George, has been lurking on the edge of my mind the last week or so.

Maybe there really is a crisis. Still, it seems we, and our elected representatives, should be getting a bit more suspicious when the Bush Administration declares another Impending Destruction of All Life As We Know It Unless We Act NOW. This time around it's Wall Streets of Mass Destruction. Colin Powell has been replaced, but the Administration has proven intelligence to know exactly where the WSMDs are hidden.

Maybe I've just been hanging out with preschoolers too long. If you tell a preschooler to hurry up and wash his hands, he will drag out the process as long as possible, annoying his classmates, and watching his reflection and your reaction in the mirror to see if you will flinch.

I wish Congress would have dilly-dallied a bit to see if Dubya and his crew would flinch. I'm afraid the new administration will be sworn in, and Curious George and his cronies will be riding off with their golden gazillion $ balloons.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

The Preschool Zone

Working with preschoolers involves a lot of time spent bending. When John Cusack got off the elevator on floor seven-and-a-half in Being John Malkovich, his back entered The Preschool Zone. We seem to work in the same building.

Working with preschoolers also involves bending time. While I've never read that Einstein taught preschool, I'm sure that's where he first formulated his theory of general relativity.

Space and time bend and curve in Einstein's theories. Space and time bend and curve when you enter a preschool. Gravitation and acceleration spice up both. The closer the student is to the ground, the slower time goes. It is impossible to accelerate the process of six three-year-olds going potty and washing up for snacktime.

Did you ever jump up and race down the stairs in the dark at the end of Act I at the Dallas Opera's Carmen, risking life and limb in your fancy high heels in a vain attempt to beat the line at the ladies' restroom? And the line was how long when you got there? LONG. VERY LONG.

Did you ever attempt to use the womens' restrooms between innings at the old Texas Rangers Stadium in Arlington? Or maybe at half-time of a sub-freezing Cornhuskers football game when everyone's wearing multiple layers? SLOW PROGRESS. SLOW.

Remember enclosing yourself in the reflective triangle made by tri-fold fitting room mirrors? Imagine the entire Rangers restroom line trapped, bent, refracted, multiplied, and snowflaked inside that triangle of mirrors. That's the experience of washing up for preschool snack! Don't even contemplate glancing at the clock!

• The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock.


• Clocks tick more slowly the closer they are to a gravitational mass like the sun.


• Einstein was thinking of gravity as equivalent to acceleration, as a geometrical phenomenon, as a bending of time and space.

Further decelerating the process is the preschoolers' limited understanding of the flush capacitor. That is almost, but not quite, the same as the flux capacitor Dr. Emmett Brown and Marty McFly used to time travel in the "Back To the Future" movies. When you ask a preschooler, "Did you flush?," you get the same look and speed of reply as when you ask Dick Cheney if he orchestrated blowing Valerie Plame's CIA cover.

In The Preschool Zone each and every weekend is a disruption of the space-time continuum. There's always a disconnect from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. Rose Mary Woods once again erased 18 1/2 minutes of Nixon's White House Watergate tapes. Dubya is back to sounding out the words in his goat picture book.

Small children have to rediscover how to work the soap and paper towel dispensers. The lower you are, the longer it takes!

"May I go to the restroom?," a preschooler asks. "Yes," I say. Dinosaurs have evolved into birds when that student comes back to report a problem.

• Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
• I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
• What's the problem?
• I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

She's afraid, she can't do that. What's the problem? One toilet hasn't been flushed. Can she use the other toilet? No, somebody left the seat up on that one. That Einstein! He always forgets to flush!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

No Worms Left Behind

I'd almost forgotten about the Maxwell House Home For Wayward Worms in the coffee can on the bathroom counter. It's been a rough week for me, but how have my twenty-four intrepid volunteer vermicolonists fared?

Dumped the contents of the miniature bin out onto a tray to take vermiattendance. Of the two dozen original worms, I accounted for twenty-three. Found a few worm cocoons, too, so some worms have been staying out past curfew!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Culture Shock

It is wonderful to have two sons back "home" with me. The first week hasn't been totally smooth, but we are getting used to togetherness and coordinating mass transportation by DART rail.

The refrigerator is in shock because it is filled with food again--roast beast, fresh fruits and veggies, Feta cheese, and gallons of milk. The dishwasher is stunned at its new workload. I pulled an inch-thick deposit of Transatlantic dryer lint out of the trap, and gave it to the worms to make feather boas. The Buick is asking for time-and-a-half overtime pay.

The Woolly Mammoth has the biggest time change to make, coming home from Italy to a place with orange cheese. He needs a haircut, a job, and a diet with lots more fresh fruits to fight a nasty cough. I can help with the fresh fruits, but not the job.

His need for a haircut is sufficiently pronounced that his brother and I both had ours cut. Danger Baby is talking Woolly Mammoth through some of his post-Italy depression issues. I never had a junior year abroad, but I'm sure most of real life is not quite as wonderful, scenic, exciting, empowering, or impoverishing.

Fortunately, we are still allowed to diagnose returning students with Post Junior Year Abroad Syndrome (PJYAS) and Haircut Disorder. Our returning vets may not be treated as kindly with their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Just another day opening the newspaper and being embarrassed to be an American living in Texas in the Bush Era!

Much of the old high school Lunch Bunch showed up to sit on the patio on a perfect late spring evening, drink beer, and recount their various junior year adventures. It was fun to hear them chatting out back, but I need even more beauty sleep than before. When this CollageMama invites all the gang to look in her wormbin, it's probably a hint to move the reunion to another venue! Vermicompost is not vermicelli.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Country pickin' fingers

Don't park your double-wide in the Rose Garden, Bill. You weren't a horrible President, especially compared with Dubya. Nothing you and Monica did under the desk was any worse than what millions of good old boys and girls do in offices, Ford F-150s, and tacky motels every day. I just don't want another Tag Team Clinton mud-wrestling administration.

Should Hillary become the Democratic nominee by some weird twist of soap operatic amnesia fate, I will root for her greased pig in the 4-H grandstand against McCain's Hundred Years' War hog. But even then, Bill, please don't set your trailer up on cement blocks out there by that reflector pool!

I'll fix your flat tire Merle
Don't ya get your sweet country pickin' fingers all covered with erl
Cause you're a honky, I know, but Merle you got soul
And I'll fix your flat tire Merle

So, Bill, just set your Lazy Boy recliner out there on the lawn of your library and amp up the Pure Prairie League song. Leave the busted out washing machine on the porch. Don't make me cross state lines to explain it any clearer!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Worming Its Way Into Snack?

Fresh vegetables were a tiny fraction of our diet back in Lincoln in the early Sixties. Except for carrot sticks and corn-on-the-cob, I thought the Jolly Green Giant and Del Monte put all veggies into tin cans. I willingly ate canned green beans, wax beans, niblets, cream-style corn, sauerkraut, and diced beets. Under duress I ate the minimum amount of canned peas. Sometimes Fritzi would serve canned lima beans or butter beans. Those were always suppers that led prematurely to bedtime. At Christmas and Thanksgiving we ate fresh celery sticks.

Nearly all my little students eat a wide range of fresh vegetables on a regular basis. Lunchboxes often hold sliced peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, edamame, broccoli, cauliflower, bean sprouts, sugar snap peas, and jicama.

In the upper elementary grades after 1964, I learned to eat chopped iceberg lettuce with Kraft Italian salad dressing, stewed tomatoes, and canned spinach with lemon or vinegar. It was high school before I ate baked squash. In college I pushed the limits trying fresh spinach, asparagus and mushrooms in some quiche/crepe fern-decor restaurant downtown. It was a wild and crazy time!

Sometime after I got married, but before I had kids I encountered eggplant and avocado. The charms of eggplant still escape me.

Tomorrow will be a challenge. My little students harvested the garden broccoli heads today. I've expended much attention removing the green caterpillars known as Imported Cabbage Worms from the broccoli plants over the past few weeks. The caterpillars are fiendishly camouflaged. When the broccoli florets are served with a dip of Ranch dressing, I will want to holler to the caterpillars, "I know you're in there! Come out with your hands up!"

Barbara Damrosch writing in the Washington Post, 7/5/07, calls those green larvae of the cabbage butterfly, "unintended garnish" and says they are harmless if accidentally consumed:

The green worms hide so well in the broccoli heads that you rarely see them until they are cooked, at which point they turn a conspicuous, incriminating white .... But there will always be a moment when you've just served an honored visitor a beautiful plate of homegrown broccoli and there's that little extra ingredient. Proper etiquette requires a guest to move it inconspicuously to the side of the plate and exclaim "Good protein!" if caught in the act .... Soaking produce in a sink full of salt water before cooking will send most worms flocking to the bottom.

Fritzi told me over the phone long distance that a salt water soak brought all the little creepies crawling out of a broccoli head. I can't recall why she actually began to use fresh broccoli in her kitchen. I was already married and living in Omaha, but we still had to live through Reaganomics before the first President Bush would proclaim his dislike of broccoli. By then my dad had decreed that he would not eat any salad that didn't have at least two ingredients besides the iceberg lettuce. That would be not counting the cabbage butterfly larvae.

"I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli." George Bush, U.S. President (1990)

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Floyd on fiscal policy fashions

Thought wandering through Kohl's might help my attitude after a long week at work, but it made things worse. Found a pair of desperately-needed basic Lee Plain Front slacks for $21.99, but everything else in the Misses Dept. was hideous, slimy, and insulting to my intelligence. When did aliens from the Planet Acetate take over the brains of department store buyers? The store is jam-packed with ugly faux-retro pseudo-maternity fashions for lifesize Bratz and MyScene Juicy-Bling Dolls by Mattel. I would rather suck a Sucrets than spend five more minutes in the store!

Checking out is as bad as browsing. A magenta-haired kid with giant pierced ear barbells was manning the register. Yikes! He used to be on my son's soccer team.

Maybe there's a good reason why a huge demographic of consumers is not shopping in a patriotic manner. Maybe it's not "the economy, stupid" ala the '92 Clinton campaign, but the repulsive merchandise of '08 that keeps us from spending! Maybe a better economic stimulus incentive would be stores stocked with items designed for real adults.

Jacquielynn Floyd, columnist for the Dallas Morning News, is staging a similar rant, but with broader readership. She has quickly found a large and angry group of female readers, aged 25-80, who are all disgusted with retail choices. Read my lips! Our purse$ stay zipped!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

ESL by Avodart

I rarely turn on my television, so visiting my dad is like learning a foreign language by the total immersion method. If a family arrived in the United States and wanted to learn English by watching television, the first phrase they would master would be, "ask your doctor about." Soon they would be able to recite "in the rare event of an erection lasting more than four hours, seek immediate medical attention to avoid long-term injury."

True, Dad's viewing tends toward ESPN, the Golf Channel, the Weather Channel, CNN Headline News,and MSNBC, with some local news broadcasts thrown in. The ads on those stations repeat ad nauseum. I'm somewhat embarrassed to report that the most effective ads for holding my attention (although not longer than four hours) are the Avodart museum miniature model ads.

When I grow up, I would love to work in a museum creating exhibits. Museums always feel like home to me. So even though the actor has to make frequent trips to the restroom, I think he's got a cool job.

My small sons loved the army miniatures at the 45th Infantry Museum, and the great model railroad layouts at the Omniplex in Oklahoma City and the Union Pacific museum in downtown Omaha. Their all-time greatest hit was the huge miniature model at the Alamo. When will the Avodart guy remember the Alamo??? Maybe the next ads will feature the prostrate actor creating a miniature Iraq for the Bush Library!

Just what is the tag line for the commercial? Our hypothetical language-learning family and I can never decide if the man has a going problem, a growing problem, or a groin problem. Learning English on t.v. is going to be grueling.


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Nehi to a grasshopper OR the boy who cried barf

It is fitting on this day, my brother's fiftieth birthday, that I should spend a moment in contemplation of queasy stomachs. These musings have nothing whatsoever to do with the grown-up person my brother became, but more to do with the way life imitates and aggravates Aesop.

One of my young students tells me often that his tummy hurts. His tummy hurts a lot when he doesn't want to do something. I understand that ploy, having used a similar tactic, "the faked nosebleed" to exit third year Spanish class rather more often than believable, it is embarrassing to admit. An actress I wasn't.

As a young boy my brother told us often that his tummy was upset. Because we almost always saw the proof of this queasiness, and then tried to get the stain out of the rug, my brother had credibility. Orange soda pop is a very persevering stain.

"Credibility Gap" was a phrase of the Viet Nam Era. It indicated "public skepticism about the truth of official claims and pronouncements", according to my dictionary. My brother had no such gap, but my student does. He has been the shepherd boy calling the warning of "wolf" far too often. He is Weapons of Mass Destruction without the orange Nehi.

That is why we were surprised when he suddenly went chalk-white and blew chunks all over the sidewalk. In Aesop, the villagers just ignore the boy's warnings, and the wolf eats all the sheep. In real life, the teachers ignore the warnings, and get it on their shoes. In the Bush Era we forgot the Credibility Gap, and never will get that orange soda out of the rug!

Happy birthday, Rog.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Scarpia ponders waterboarding

The current Dallas Opera production of "Tosca" is excellent. The soprano is outstanding; the sets and costumes are lavish; the orchestra sound is rich; the men are handsome. Scarpia, the despicable chief of police, is portrayed as a vile cross between Snidely Whiplash and our own "Decider".

Scarpia uses the torture of Magdalene painter Cavaradossi to compel sexual favors from the artist's love, the diva Floria Tosca. How sad on this gorgeous nearly-spring day at a fabulous performance of Puccini's opera of love, faith, art, and corrupt absolute power, I'm thinking of Bush's veto. I'm pretty sure Scarpia sang an aria with these lyrics:

The bill Congress sent me
would take away one
of the most valuable tools
in the war on terror

So today I vetoed it
So today I vetoed it
So today I vetoed it

This is no time
for Congress to abandon practices
that have a proven track record
of keeping America safe

So today I vetoed it
So today I vetoed it
So today I vetoed it


By JENNIFER LOVEN – 1 day ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Bush said Saturday he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hNORmRm4JahUoi8tBwl8CvvliqygD8V9BH28K

Then Scarpia told Spoletta to fake Cavaradossi's execution as was done for Count Palmieri. Nothing goes well for any character after that. Nothing will go well for our so-called civilized nation, either. Our moral standing in the circle of nations is at an all-time low.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Potato Ostrich: Details at Ten P.M.

Just dozed off the other evening during a primary election victory speech. I'd been wrapped up in an afghan on the sofa wondering how Hillary could wear those pointy-heeled shoes on the campaign trail, how Dubya could keep his head so buried in the sand, and why birds' knees bend backwards.



And so, a week after making tiny hummingbird art, we switch to large flightless art. Ostriches have long legs and long eyelashes. I asked the preschoolers to touch their knees, and then to bat their eyelashes. Several of the kids tried to wiggle their eyebrows instead. Can you say "mah-mah-mah-Maybelline?"




Ostrich feet look like ugly, uncomfortable taupe high heels. Worse, ostriches run across the desert in those shoes! Haven't they heard of Nikes?



When I was really little, my dad was so skinny he could hide behind a telephone pole. When he would do his knee-swapping version of the Charleston, I really believed he was moving his knees from one leg to the other.




© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Unplant a Bush

Enjoyed a quick trip to the Texas Discovery Garden at Fair Park this afternoon to just take in the butterfly action. Such variety of species in a small plot of butterfly favorite plants had me feeling I'd stepped into a popcorn popper of butterflies. Most of them did not cooperate with my amateur photo attempts. I do like this photo showing the long proboscis of a cloudless sulphur. I love when the camera can get in close and with far more detail than my eyes can see. Seeing butterflies slurp up nectar at the Garden made me drive ASAP to Sonic for a limeade!

"Save the Earth, Unplant a Bush" was on a bumper sticker in the TDG parking lot.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Dropping like flies

(Flies are on my mind, but this blog is still rated PG.)

Many of my little students are doing work related to insects using larger-than-life plastic figures. Bee, butterfly, spider, beetle, termite, scorpion, ladybug, praying mantis, dragonfly, ant, grasshopper, and house fly are represented. The house fly has creepy red eyes, and the model is even larger than the horse flies that scared me on my first horse ride in Estes Park, Colorado when I was about ten.

There's a stomach bug going around--nausea, chills, low-grade fever. Students were "dropping like flies" yesterday. Many of our students and their parents do not speak English as their first language. They probably wouldn't understand the idiomatic expression.

Idiom Meaning - Falling down ill and in large numbers, often associated with a highly contageous illness. One possible origin is the Grimm Brothers' story of "Brave Little Tailor". The little hero strikes seven flies dead with one whip of his belt.

Speaking of flies and belts reminds me of raising my preschool sons. Seems like I spent most of 1984-1990 toilet-training the three of them. After a day asking, "Did you flush and wash?," it was difficult relating to my spouse's adventures in the outside working world of finance and law, business travel and Embassy Suites.

Small boys seemed to lack Early Warning Systems for restroom emergencies. I told my kids, "__________, you're doing a heckuva job!," any time they made it to the toilet, so basically, Dubya was quoting me after Katrina. Cute as they looked in overalls or little Levis, they just couldn't manage the buckles, belts, snaps, and zippers in what we might call a "timely fashion" when the need arose.

Living in Oklahoma in the late Eighties, I was able to buy sweatpants and other elastic-waist pants for the guys at the Anthony's store. In the early Nineties in Texas, the Mervyns Cheetah brand sweatpants made fly-less operations simple and swift, and probably saved my sanity.

I love this example of the idiom:

The words were so difficult that the spelling bee contestants were dropping like flies.

For my tenth birthday I received a dragonfly-blue fishing rod all my own. There is something transcendant in casting a line in a perfect arc and dropping the fly on the surface of a pond.

An even better gift was when my sons all managed their own flies and cast perfect arcs in a timely fashion for my thirty-fifth birthday. They even washed their hands with soap!

Perhaps our next preschool language exploration will be "dropping our drawers".

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Oh, Gorsh!

My youngest student, when reminded to flush and wash, says, "Oh, Gorsh!," with his hands on his face. He mutters, "Goll durn it," while he tries to straighten out his jeans that got turned sideways in the stall, then marches back in to push the handle that causes that loud, scary flushing noise.



Oh, gorsh! I remember the coin-operated bucking bronco at the Hinky Dinky gorshrey store. Occasionally Mom would give us money to ride the horse while she pushed her shopping cart around getting the Campbell's cream of mushroom, Weaver's potato chips, Sorry Charlie tuna, charcoal bricquets, and shattered wheat cereal for my Dad. Usually we just rode on the metal railings between the checkout lines near the display of mittens, ice-scrapers, and accordian-folded clear plastic rain "bonnets" in their handy carrying cases.

Mom got the huge round cartons of All detergent for the worshing machine. We used the cartons as horses when we played cowboys in the basement while Mom sewed and ironed. We slapped the backs of our pretend horses because the Father of Our Country had a "slapping stallion". It was very embarrassing when I learned to spell and found out George was Washington, not Warshington. And so, spelling became a civilizing force in This Great Country of Ours.

Of course a horse is a horse. Maybe Mr. Ed should run for president, and corral that bunch up in Warshington:

Go right to the source and ask the horse
He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse.
He’s always on a steady course.
Talk to Mister Ed.


There was Captain Washington
Upon a slapping stallion
A-giving orders to his men
I guess there was a million.

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy. *

For decades I've been confused thinking the Marx Toy spring-action riding Mustang was "Marvo". The Sixties were a groovy, marvy time. The mangled ad jingle pops into my mind whenever I watch Dubya down at the Crawford ranch:

Marvo the Mustang; he's almost For Real!

I'm set straight now. It was "Marvel the Mustang". Marvel has his own virtual online museum. The current retro remakes don't get very good reviews from toy-buying grandparents. Seems things get less "for real" all the time. Oh, gorsh!

* (Sounds like a Viagra ad!)

Chia Korea and Animal Rummy

Spring has sprung.
The grass has ris.
I wonder where de birdies is.


Tome Toles' editorial cartoon for the Washington Post made me think if Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez were a Chia Pet, he would grow to become Kim Jung-Il.




Played Rummikub with the afterschool four-year-olds. The game is similar to rummy, but I've next to no memory of ever playing rummy or animal rummy. The little kids have a better grasp on the game, so they are teaching me.

Animal Rummy was one of the childrens' card games made by Whitman Publishing Company. To the best of my recollection, the others were Go Fish, Snap, Crazy Eights, and Authors. I loved playing Authors and saying the names of the books aloud. Do you have "The Courtship of Miles Standish"? Do you have "The Charge of the Light Brigade"? Do you have "The House of the Seven Gables"?

Boys always preferred the interminable card game "War". They still do. Just ask Bush's own Rummy. Tole's cartoon accompanied an op ed suggesting Alberto Gonzalez may not have any more job security than Rumsfeld did. If need be, he could always get a new job selling Chia Pets on infomercials. Now then, do you have "The Prince and the Pauper"?


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Can you email me now?

I've just wasted another hour trying to track down the early Sixties Yogi Bear episode when a mad scientist visits Jellystone in a small trailer and switches Yogi's brain with a chicken's. Metal colanders always make me think of the Yogi brain trade. This is the only Yogi cartoon that made any impact on me, although I vaguely remember the picnic baskets.

I must have been six or seven at the time, so about the age when kids started hearing lectures about not getting into cars with strangers. We had an incredibly secure childhood in a neighborhood where we couldn't make much of a move without being in view of a mommy looking out her kitchen window, so we were able to run and play all over the block, and ride bikes all around the neighborhood. We kids made our own entertainment most of the time, and participated in far fewer adult-organized activities than kids do now.

I somehow equated the warnings about strangers in cars with the Yogi cartoon. Get in a car with a stranger, and that mad little scientist will put a colander on your head, hook up some wires, and swap your brain! Come to think of it, maybe that cartoon is where our president got all his ideas about scientists!




I don't really believe Al Gore invented the internet, of course, but a bit of Yankee ingenuity has improved my son's access to email. Son Two is spending the summer doing an internship in a sweltering foreign country without air conditioning (and I don't mean St. Louis). Al Gore is probably doing his global warming slide shows somewhere in a/c comfort.

The sweltering summer interns have rigged up wires from a USB port through a metal sieve which they dangle out the window of their apartment. This soup-cans-and-string contraption somehow sucks internet vibes out of thin air, or at least picks up signals from WiFi or routers in other apartments in the building.

Communication sure has come a long way since I used to sit in the treehouse writing notes and lowering them in a bucket on a rope to my siblings. There was a nice breeze up there most of the time, and the wood was satisfyingly warm. It was very safe, and I never clucked.

If only Dubya were more like the Cat in the Hat

One of the greatest joys of my job is reading my favorite picture books aloud to students. Lately I've been able to read both Chris van Allsburg's, Jumanji, and The Cat in the Hat to students aged three to ten. It is funny when I realize that I am also reading the books aloud to myself!

Remember how The Cat always picked up all his playthings and so ...? The beauty of both Jumanji and The Cat in the Hat is that their scary, but instructive outrageous experiences are completely tidied before Mother returns. Thing One and Thing Two are back in the big red wood box, all shut with a hook, which is exactly where Darth Cheney and Rummy should be. The python and the monkeys disappear once Judy yells, "Jumanji," and Peter is wiser by far for playing Van Allsburg's board game.


And so,
so,
so,
so...

shouldn't Bush be able to pick up the mess his blue-haired Things have created in Iraq? Shouldn't the steam from the volcano blow out the open window, leaving Staff Sgt. Christian Bagge with two whole legs? The fish in the pot tried to warn us about The Cat. Is there any chance Dubya will clean up his own mess????

Transparent Society

Seems like just yesterday I was writing about glass houses and privacy. Well, maybe just last weekend! Now the President has announced that we live in a "transparent society". Maybe there's no point to either drapes or vertical blinds in the impending condo-pocalypse.

My day began with transparent glass, and will probably end the same way. No, I haven't been out on the street picking up the shards of broken auto windshields for mosaics. Haven't done that since my oldest finished his mosaic of the Alamo for middle school Texas History class ten years ago.

The right way to begin a day is with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice at the Frontier Restaurant in Albuquerque, but that wasn't the start for this day. I was actually reading about Dale Chihuly suing two former glass-blowers from his studio. He accuses them of imitating his glass designs inspired by the sea. Timothy Egan, writing for the New York Times, reports:

The glass blowers say that Mr. Chihuly is trying to control entire forms, shapes and colors and that his brand does not extend to ancient and evolving techniques derived from the natural world... Andrew Page, editor of Glass: The Urban Glass Art Quarterly, which is published in New York, said that Mr. Chihuly deserved a high place in the pantheon of glass artists, but that the suit could hurt his reputation by igniting countercharges and opening a window into how a celebrity artist works on a mass scale. "I think Dale Chihuly is a pure original," Mr. Page said. "He has a tremendous sense of color and composition. And he has done a tremendous amount for the field. But this lawsuit may have been the worst thing he could have done."

Egan reports that Chihuly, Inc. has ninety-three employees, and that Dale Chihuly has not actually blown glass himself for twenty-seven years. "Still, Mr. Chihuly said, he works with sketches, faxes and through exhortation. Nothing with his name on it ever came from anyone but himself, he said." I don't know how many employees another famous glass artist had. Louis Comfort Tiffany is the subject of the current exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Together with his studios of artists, glassmakers, stonemasons, mosaicists, modelers, metalworkers, wood-carvers, potters, and textileworkers, Tiffany heralded in America the notion of continuity of design, orchestrating pattern, texture, color, and light to produce a single aesthetic expression.

The Tiffany exhibit is much more varied than I expected. The DMA has done a nice job of arranging it with lots of room for visitors to move around the display cases. Changed viewpoints let light reveal new aspects of each piece. It didn't take long for me to overcome my notion of Tiffany as lamps over pool tables in rec rooms of the Seventies. I was particularly impressed with the natural forms in the glass and ceramic pieces--lily pad, milkweed pod, morning glory, pansies, ferns, shells, and seaweed. Tiffany was combining a reverence, or at least an appreciation, of the natural world with numerous chemical processes to create his signature effects. I wouldn't want to sit on the chairs he designed, but his fireplace screens and stair balustrades are very groovy.



Many of my favorites in the Tiffany show were inspired by the sea. The same sea that inspired Chihuly. Nature's influences are beyond counting. We artists must bring our own ideas and skills to a project. I am fond of the Chihuly works at the DMA and at the Joslyn in Omaha even though I know they were created by a studio of craftspersons. A Metropolitan Museum online source is useful for learning about Louis Comfort Tiffany:

Tiffany combined his talents as a colorist, naturalist, and designer with the technology that he had developed for his windows to produce blown glass with surfaces, hues, and forms that were totally new. After manipulating the varicolored glass, the final form was often fumed with metallic oxides to achieve rainbow iridescence.

I get bogged down wondering if Jacqueline du Pre performing Elgar's composition is an artist interpreting an artist, or the musical equivalent of a glass-blower working from sketches, faxes and exhortations. Is the actor an artist, or only the playwright's gaffer?

Thank heaven and His Vader Darthness Dick Cheney that real life is such a dewy iridescent spectrum. Bush's label, "transparent society", doesn't refer to the Saran Wrap over the rainbow marshmallow Jello salad at a church social. "Transparent Society" refers to the choice between privacy and freedom created by new technology. The NSA wants to know if you happen to call Domino's for a sausage/green pepper/black olive. Bushie's lips were moving today, so it's a safe bet varicolored glass, smoke, and mirrors were used to create a utopian over-the-rainbow bubble over our critical thinking skills. I'm sure this administration will see a clear explanation for Haditha:

President Bush reiterated his pledge today that the results of the inquiries would be disclosed. "One of the things that happens in a transparent society like ours is that there will be a full a complete investigation," he said. "The world will see the full and complete investigation."

Ah, yes. That would be opening a window into how a celebrity con artist works on a mass scale.

The Birds and the Bees

Welcome to seventh grade Home Economics class at Millard Lefler Junior High School. This is the talk you've all been dreading and anticipating. I'm sorry to say the film strip projector is broken, so we won't have much in the way of audio-visual enhancements for this lecture.

Ahem. I trust I have received signed permission slips from all your parents and adult guardians. Well, then...

It is time you knew the whole, unvarnished truth about cross-Swiffernation. Don't do it! Don't even think about it! Go wash your hands!

You can't successfully substitute Pledge Grab-It Wet orange sheets for Swiffer Wet sheets. The Grab-Its keep detaching from the Swiffer mop, and trailing off impotently somewhere between the laundry room and the kitchen floor. A higher power is letting us know that cross-Swiffernating is an abomination and an anathema, and won't get that spilled juice off the linoleum.

Thank heaven we've got Dubya in charge on the bridge of the Enterprise! He won't deviate from his course due to a few minor cobwebs in the sunbeams. He knows the sacred institution of Swifferage is at stake in these murky cultural floor wars. Swiffering is only for the union of one Swiffer mop and one Swifferette (or Swiffer Wet):

To encourage right choices, we must be willing to confront the dangers young people face -- even when they're difficult to talk about. Each year, about 3 million teenagers get expensive Nike shoes stuck on their cross-Swiffergenated kitchen floors... In my budget, I propose a grassroots campaign to help inform families ...Decisions children now make can affect their health and character for the rest of their lives. All of us -- parents and schools and government -- must work together to counter the negative influence of the culture, and to send the right messages to our children. A strong America must also value the institution of Swifferage defined under federal law as a union of a Swiffer mop and a Swiffer Wet (Registered Trademark)...

"Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Let's do it, let's fall in love." Cole Porter

Elvis Avocado

This week's Thursday word comes from a preschooler who knows how to have a good time, so put on your poodle skirt and saddle shoes and drop a 45 on the spindle!

Rockaroly!

Take a ripe avocado and cut it in half very carefully. Remove the seed to grow a plant. Scoop out the yummy soft inside. Put it in a bowl and mash it up. Preschoolers aren't interested in garlic or onions, so skip those and just squeeze in some lemon juice. Serve with triangle chips. And there you have it.



Rockaroly!

If you are headed to McKinney, Texas this weekend, check out the Elvis art at Carrie Garner's Galleria d' Arte. The gallery is at 100 E. Louisiana. That's the southwest corner of the old Collin County courthouse square. Roger Nitz has some entertaining artistic thoughts about Elvis on display. The one that gave me the greatest chuckle was a painting of a chicken with Elvis hair. I instantly grasped the connection between Elvis impersonators, poultry, Warner Bros. cartoon character, Foghorn Leghorn, and the old radio character, Senator Beauregard Claghorn on Fred Allen's Radio Show back way before I was born.


I wonder how it would sound on the radio if Fred Allen strolled up "Allen's Alley" to have a little chat with The Decider aka Dubya:

I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense. That's a joke... I say, that's a joke, son.

I might need to get out my green suede shoes to Guac Around the Clock. Preschoolers, you're doing a heckuva job.