Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

Busy as...well...busy is all, I guess.

Enjoying animals in winter is like reading instead of watching a play. It takes practice, and visualization, and work, but the reward can be rich and different because of your own involvement in the interpretation. (I was never any good at reading plays, mind you, but in my late 30s I am finally getting good at walking in the winter.)

Today, I walked at Broad Meadow Brook and the old snow from last week was full of sign. Lots of rodent tracks were to be seen, the little zipper marks in the snow with tail lines between the footprints (if I had a tail, I think I would raise it out of the snow when I ran, but that's just me). I would like very much to know what the rodents are, but let's be realistic here. I'm not getting past "rodent" for a while, and I'm OK with that. I walked along the beaver pond, and I am here to tell you that beavers can schlep. It's winter, OK? And the beavers are hauling themselves hundreds of feet away from their ponds through the birch woods in search of something out of my sight (I was in a hurry and unable to play Leatherstocking.)

Along that same path, right out in the middle of the path, there was furry poo. Now, I am not typically devoted to discussing poo, furry or otherwise, but in the winter a strategically placed poo is really worth considering. We're talking, basically about a %^%^-you poo, a poo that says "I walk this path and I am a bad ^%&^^&. I have big, shiny pointed teeth, and if you come over hear to my beaver pond I will show them to you and you will forget all about your weak little puppy teeth." Herewith I show you the poo, which was filled with the fur of creatures who were not fortunate and met this coyote -- for a coyote was what I suspect it was -- on the wrong day of their little animal weeks. 

The finest and most wonderful part about any winter walk, though, is the ice patterns. After straying off the path, and crunching through a weedy field, and finding my way pack to the path, I found a stream with the luminous lace that just defines cold winter days that stack on each other for weeks on end. To see the picture and others, drop my my new Broad Meadow Brook photo album here.

Cold Dish of Tongue

Sitting in the third row seared pretty deeply onto my retina the image of Kathleen Turner shoving her tongue out of her mouth repeatedly like a dog tasting something bitter. They may find the image there, like ghost text on one of those old amber CRTs from before there were flying toasters, when I die.

This is not intended to mock Turner for her fierce, loud, grinding portrayal of the unsympathetic Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" that Carol and I caught in Boston last week. It's a mean part, narrow in its expressions, which run the gamut from bullying to hateful with not enough distance in between. Turner's bit with her tongue, repeated periodically, is her sort of signature on the role. This production's noisiest predecessor is a movie whose viewership was sufficiently great to generate a memorable wave in the play's brief history, and Turner's thankless task is to follow in Elizabeth Taylor's choppy wake. Taylor did OK with it, and Turner did better than OK the night we saw her, but the part is only half a role. The full role is that of George and Martha together, a biliously and incisively unhappy couple whose sparring is shocking in its fulsome cruelty and frequent wit. George in this production is played by Bill Irwin, a clown and dancer and undersung actor who here excelled in his half of the thankless chore of bringing George and Martha to life.

I write this knowing that search engines will bring the curious New York theatregoer (or not) who wants to know whether the production is worth its hefty pricetag. The answer is that the ticket is absolutely worth it. Turner is her own Martha, a brassy, tasteless failure. Irwin, perhaps best unknown as Sesame Street's Mister Noodle (not Mister Noodle's brother, the sadly late Mister Noodle), is -- as Carol noted -- brilliantly pent in this role, a fluid dancer forbidden his grace, a sweet comedian forbidden to charm. The supporting actors support fine, but steal few bits of scenes. Albee's script is what it has always been, devastating in its frank revelation of hatred and grudging tenderness. (I saw it first in high school, the Burton-Taylor thing, and passed years have polished its edge so that I barely feel the slice now compared to my horror then.)

My mother told me when i was little that if I didn't care for the end of a book I could imagine as many chapters as I wanted to follow it, to repair sad endings or build new happier ones. I've spent more than a little imagined time with George and Martha when they wake up the next afternoon, hungover and pitiful. I hope I've been right. I'd hate the sequel simply to be the play's revival.

albee kathleen turner bill irwin

OK, Not Spring.

I got a good long walk today, with snow still falling in tiny mean little dry flakes. I walked along the same in the headwaters of the local pond; I've gotten to know the trails in the waste land under the high-voltage wires that cross the town. You don't see much most days, which is OK, because when you do it's worth the trip. (In the spring, one day, I saw a blue-winged warbler and very nearly came unhinged. Another day Joe and I found a beaver's trail and a stick it had gnawed the good park off of.)

Today I didn't see much that was alive, but got good new pictures of the scenery, which still seems too good to be true, in its Frostian/Thoreauvian/Lowellian glory. And I only fell down so hard it hurt once. If I had fallen slower I would have had time to get a hand under me and splinter my wrist, so I'm OK with the way it happened.

Robins. Springtime?

Up there in the trees. Click the image to make the dots bigger.

Always a new riff on alienation

Smart piece at Cat and Girl today.

Breakfast

Dad: Do not kerplunk the apple on the table.

Joe: I am only kerplunking the apple in my hand.

Make It Stop

I am so not feeling wintry.

My Funny Valentine: Scott Adams

I corresponded with a friend today about the particularly sharp Dilbert today. He noted that it has been apocryphally said of Adams:

I remember someone saying the scary thing about Scott Adams was that he clearly must work in the same office but he had never met him. How true! How is it he seems to be inside every office?

How does he seem to get it right so often, my friend mused.

I responded:

People email him what they experience ever day by the hundreds. I have sent him at least five stories over the years, and in the early days -- 1995 -- he actually responded thoughtfully and wisely to an interview list of questions I sent him for a listserv where I was a frequent contributor.

I emailed him when I got a job at Internet World and then again the job at Gartner to tell him that his openness and willingness to respond had really moved me and given me the confidence to enter the industry on my own merits instead of fearing it. Each time, he responded with good wishes. I think he's a truly sympathetic person, and just seems to grasp universality in work environments. Pattern recognition in the cube farm.

I Sucked Without Knowing It

Was looking for something from the Old Days today and can't find it. But look what I stumbled across! I never even knew they loved me enough to print me on this Ur-Blog.

Massively Distributed Humor Generation Infrastructure

TopFive begets the new Bad Cupid.