The water table

 This pedestrian tunnel beneath the train tracks is, apparently, below the level of the water table post-rainfall.

Huzzah for water pressure!

This post's theme word is spuddle (v intr), "to work feebly". Through gradual work, the water will spuddle until it is level.

Quotes, summer 2020

I jotted down many quotes in this time interval, because every. single. social. interaction. now feels deeply meaningful and like a carefully conserved resource. Plus they're all happening over video chat, so my notebook is always at-hand. Here is a selection (some quotes were expurgated for being too personal, or too crass when out-of-context); my apologies that my name-randomizing algorithm does only one letter/person, and so has a lot of collisions in the namespace.

M: "I'm super-enjoying not owning things."

Z: "I'm sure there's middle-management goats."

M: "I have the, like, the limping-along ovary."

Z: "Moving online is just an endless stream of apps that stink."

B: "We're DnD role-playing millennial fantasy: we all have stable jobs and healthy relationships with good communication."

B: "Climb the clocktower?"
K: "That's the kind of thing I should wait until AFTER I have tenure to do."

J: "Filibuster #4 has been my favorite"

I: "I am confident our future department chair can be nimble and flexible in the upcoming Battle Royale."

Z: "A lot of this makes no sense."

K: "We learned: everything is bad and nobody is happy."

K: "I can't wait to read your bestselling business novel about How Not to be a Craven Bootlicker." 

Q: "Basically everything the administration does is a giant fuck-you to student culture."

Y: "... not disappointed with the decision, more disappointed with reality."

Y: "You can't compress coding time."

I: "What happens in a COVID year stays in a COVID year."

Z: "I have to look up what is legal or not legal in Pennsylvania."
Q: "Most things are legal if you don't get caught."

N: "[name redacted] stepped on my glasses. I'm trying to fix them."
N': "With a pine cone?"

Z: "All KINDS of things can happen!"
Q: "Meteors?"
Z: "Hurricane season's just getting started."

M: "Oooh, all this talk of working out, I'm sweating."

Z (offhandedly): "high-functioning democracy here"

M: "In theory, anything can be ruined with any move."

N: "If you go by feel you'll know what to do."
Z: "You might be setting your expectations of [name redacted] a bit high."

N: "Winter is coming." (w.r.t. self-haircuts)

Z: "Koi are domesticated carp. They'll eat trash. They're aquatic goats."

Z: "We need to think about how to teach our classes. We can't spend all our time doing other people's jobs."

M: "I don't like shoreline poop."

D: "To Americans right now, euros are fantasy currency."

N: "When I began my homeowning episode..."

Z: "I got the email that Swarthmore ran out of electricity." (i.e., power outage)
Z': "I like that phrasing."

Z: "Postmodern algebra... it's like Bauhaus meets rings and groups."

C: "[name redacted]'s like, this is lovely, I love being so confused."

C: "I tried to write 'an exercise left to the reader' in my homework."
Z: "In physics you can totally just insert a random minus sign to make it work."

C: "I ended up playing with my tmix configuration for a day and a half."
Z: "Quarantine life! ... why do something in 4 keystrokes when you could do it in 3?"

N: "He had it apart several times this week, doing exploratory surgery." (re: the dryer)

N: "You're living the life! Tomorrow you'll be 90 and you found a secret medication that lets you eat salami!"

Z: "I snoozed the email and hoped it would go away in a week. It has not gone away."

K: "We had a really similar form that was much shorter but still as stupid as this one."

N: "The serger so ups the quality of your sewing."
F: "It doesn't if you don't use it."

F: "Bike doula."
K: "I think you mean 'sherpa'."

K: "You're very badly-behaved children." (re: some adults)
F (parent): "They could be worse."

Z: "For upper-level courses I have no problem offering both, and if one of them just dies a natural death, that's fine."

N: "The 38th is conventionally the bandsaw anniversary. ... the 39th is the home security system for birds."

I: "We don't get updates because the policy is changing, we get updates because the slogan is changing."

Z: "Thank god there's a deadly virus around so we don't have to focus on Brexit anymore."

I: "That crisis only affects teenagers, so we don't care."

Z (product pitch): "Each week you get a box of foods that people won't purchase even in an emergency."

Z: "Thank god for climate change and the death of the amphibian."

Z: "Could the Ottomans competently administer a test to teens? I say, welcome to our new Ottoman overlords."

Z: "Someone pored over the outline of the eagle thing. Gotta get paid somehow."

Z: "Everybody universally hates the robot, which is the appropriate response."

Q: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

Z: "I was uncomfortable because I'm an idealist."

N: "It's a circular saw at the end of a string trimmer."
M: "Wait, like... Mad Max?"

[D joins the video chat]
All others: "Good morning! Welcome to Vasectomy Talk."

Z: "I have walked less than 20 steps today & all of them were on this camera."

D: "Whoever is playing the video of my voice, can you mute it?"

Firstborn: "Everyone knows I'm the one who inherits the titles and lands."
Secondborn: "And I have the right to marry a divorcée."
Thirdborn: "And I'm supposed to go into the clergy?"
[laughter]
Parent: "I love my children! That was the best possible answer! Perfect!

Q: "They'll only hear your yowls of pain when you're shocked for typing on the keyboard wrong."

This post's theme word is lithophone (n), "a musical instrument which is sounded by striking pieces of stone." It's easy to fall down a quarantine video rabbit-hole and watch many modern and ancient lithophones played.

Crisp clear spring sky

When I walked to work this morning the sun had just risen and it was cold, so I wore my jacket and mittens. But it turned out to be a warm, clear spring day, and my outerwear is overdone.

Just look at this cleanly blue sky, framed by local spring-ready trees:

This post's theme song is Ben Platt's "Better", which has been on a loop in my head all day. It is sad and angry and an emotional wreck of a breakup song, but the self-echoing refrain scratches a mental itch and is immensely satisfying to hear. (Plus there are tons of repeated lyrics and they follow standard rhyme patterns, so it's quick to memorize.)

April Fool's?

These posters mysteriously appeared on April 1 across campus.

They are expressing ... something ... stridently.

It's just not entirely clear what.
And there's no call to action, or url, or reference to a student group... The posters are handwritten in marker, mostly all-caps, on scrap paper. (At least, the pages I read were unrelated middle pages of math or biology articles.)

Is this an April Fool's joke? If so, ... what is the joke?

[Update April 2: posters still up, so reduce the probability estimation of "this is an April fool's joke".]

[Update April 3: found a poster with slightly more context.

Updated my weight for "this is a protest or other political movement" with some connection to climate activism.]


This post's theme word is ekistics (n), "the study of human settlements, drawing on such disciplines as city planning, architecture, sociology, etc." Climate scientists of the future will focus on ekistics as a subdiscipline.

Living in a postcard

It's incredibly picturesque here.

And that's true even without the filters added!

This post's theme word is revet (v. tr.), "to cover a wall, embankment, etc., with masonry or other supporting material." Backyards and sidewalks revetted to follow streams and allow for trees and landscaping!

Snowfall!

It's been lovely getting some real snow that stays on the ground and accumulates. Idyllic!

I was amused to see that the artificial turf field gets plowed so that turf-field sports can continue.

This post's theme word is pogonip (n), "a dense winter fog having ice particles." Pennsylvania winter is mild with a minimum of pogonip and a maximum of palpitations over lightly-snowed roads.

What is the most interesting weather?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. The questions are informed by recent events, course material, and whatever else bubbles out of my mind. It's been raining here, so...

What is the most interesting weather?

This question turned out to be an interesting survey of basically "what is the most interesting weather you have witnessed?" for many people.

Among the actual-weather/climate answers, artisanally hand-sorted by semantic nearness:

• sunny
• sunny rain
• warm rain
• raining when I know I'm gonna be indoors
• pouring rain
• light snow
• snowing
• fluffy snow
• lake effect snow, i.e., a mile wide band of several feet of snow (with areas on either side getting nothing)
• falling ash / magnificent sunsets during fire season (the closest SoCal gets to snow)
• hail
• "wintery-mix"
• thunderstorms
• thunder
• fog in the daytime
• dense fog
• cloudy
• partly cloudy
• when there are wavy lines on the horizon
• the season of inverse monsoons
• hurricane season; sometimes you get hail
• tornado; -- sky turns green
• all weather's interesting
• lava

I am astonished to learn that there is something real called "fire season". It sounds straight out of fiction. I'm not sure if "inverse monsoons" are real, but on balance the term seems believable so I've grouped it there. (If it's a cultural reference I've missed then... oops.)

The non-literal answers were fun, too.

• when justice rains from above
• the day I find my dad (<-- a="" across="" answer="" attendance...="" cropped="" days="" enough="" feel="" frequently="" has="" i="" is="" li="" many="" narrative="" student="" tell="" that="" the="" this="" to="" trying="" up="">
• bees
• oobleck (ooblick?)
• the heat death of the universe
• cats & dogs
• raining cats and dogs
• blood
• whether or not P=NP (<-- 5="" another="" hand-annotated="" li="" on="" one="" stars="" student="" this="">
• the dying hurricane on Jupiter

Several of these elicited guffaws, in particular those which played on the expectation that weather falls from the sky: blood?! bees! lava?!?! 

The teacher's preference award is tied this time between the weather/whether-P=NP joke and lava.

Congrats, everyone! Come back later this week and the beginning of next for the final two rounds of our silly contest.

This post's theme word is inspissate (v. tr., intr.), "to thicken or condense." The fine droplets of lava were manageable weather until they began to inspissate and collate, at which point the danger escalated quickly.

February Paris

It's only nominally winter here. The February daffodils have arrived; I didn't even know such a thing existed.

Parc de l'Île Saint-Germain, this morning.

This post's theme word is dysthymia, "a mild depression." Got dysthmia? Try daffodils!

Rodin museum

The weather today was clear and cool, an invitation to emotionally open up, to start anticipating spring, to remember that not all shirts have long sleeves. I went to the Rodin Museum, which was plentifully supplied with gorgeous midafternoon light in its luxurious windows.

Behold: the real estate mere mortals will never inhabit.

It was beautiful. The art was pretty nice, too.

This post's theme word is septentrional, "northern." The septentrional prospect from Rodin's house is less impressive, as the gardins lie to the south.

Parisian winter, hot and cold

Let's take a moment to appreciate Parisian winter. It is mid-January, and currently raining. Paris is warm and tropical --- compare with the northeast habitable parts of North America, where winter certainly goes below freezing, and includes snow, blizzards, scraping ice off the car, shoveling the driveway, bundling up outside. This comparative heat has the side effect that Parisian residences are not properly insulated for cold weather. Those beautiful, wide-swinging windows have no storms, and are often just a single pane of glass.

The consequence? Paris winter feels cold.

Especially in my poverty garret, with no apartment to insulate me above, the heat escapes with a ferocity that can be felt on the skin: stand still, and the window side of your body will be noticeably colder. The thermometer registers 50-55F (10-12C) as the resting temperature, which is a little too cold to be really comfortable. The available heating option is electric, which is (1) not very efficient, and (2) expensive. Combine these with (3) it takes about 3 hours to heat up, and only 1 hour to lose the heat, and the result is what a positive attitude might term "a quaint return to historical realities". I read about radiant heating. I sometimes wear a hat indoors.

I have used insulating tape to firmly close the gaps around the window frames, and block the most egregious and palpable wind-whistling suspects. But there's only so much this stopgap measure can gain me. The walls are cold, about which I can't really do anything. I can see how thin they are, there's no air buffer in there, or any real insulation. They keep birds out.

This past week the temperature has dropped below freezing, unusual for Paris. I am thankful for whatever heat is being radiated through the walls and floor from my neighbors, and kept me this handful of degrees above the outdoor temperature. Cooking helps heat up the tiny space, too, as does simply inhabiting it. By far the cheapest way to heat the space is to purchase chemical energy stored in digestion-accessible calories, eat it, and generate the heat using my body.

But inhabiting the space has other side-effects. It adds both heat and humidity to the air, and when the temperature drops outside, this forms condensation.

Morning condensation.

I awake, I steel myself to emerge from my sleeping cocoon, and I squeegee my sleeping breath off the windows. This is Paris in January. Subjectively I am experiencing more cold than I ever did in North America. I remember fondly the days when I lived in a city which had a legal mandate for the minimum winter temperature landlords must provide. One day I'll look back on the bread and cheese paradise of my current life, and be nostalgic for window-squeegeeing.

This post's theme word is nesh, "afraid of the cold." Uninsulated attics are not for the nesh.

Austin dawn

The fact of living on a sphere, and gradually rotating to face a flaming ball of plasma and gas, is occasionally lovely and dramatic.

Just look at those early-morning colors, splattered across the bottom of the cloud layer. So neat. Plus, thematically appropriate: Austin orange, everywhere.


This post's theme word is purl, "to flow with a rippling motion," or "the sound or curling motion made by rippling water." The sunlight streams across the purling clouds.

An utterly perfect day

The day is clear and crisp, like an autumnal day, full of promise and energy.

The sky is full of clouds that are worthy of a fresco.

The light is diffuse, bright, soft, forgiving.

The weather, location, pressure, local cuisine --- it is all in wonderful synergy today. I feel ready to have my portrait painted, or to head an army and invade a neighboring country. I could levy a new tax, or break with the Pope. But probably this is a surfeit of reading historical novels.


This post's theme word is mondegreen, "a word or phrase resulting from mishearing a word or phrase, especially in song lyrics." Today is a perfect day to dance through the streets and belt pop mondegreens, leaving a wake of bemused locals.

Cue the pipe organ

The nighttime lighting on this church's gothic façade is dramatic. It nearly evokes lightning from the sky, except that it was cold and clear tonight, and simply pleasant all-around.

The Paroisse Saint-Eustache, near Les Halles.

I imagine the gargoyles frolicking in this junglegym long after all humans have gone to sleep.


This post's theme word is marmoreal, "resembling marble or a marble statue, as in smoothness, whiteness, hardness, coldness, or aloofness." The marmoreal rooftop inhabitants unfold their slow, alien lives just above our heads.

Seasonal juxtaposition

In my clime-of-origin, November is already blustery and cold. Snow is possible. So no matter how many times I experience it, the transition to "winter holiday" decorations feels premature and rushed in this tropical locale. Just look:

Yes, that is a snowflake-shaped electric lamp, suspended above a tree still green and flush with leaves. Very silly.


This post's theme word is amaranthine, "unfading, everlasting," or "of a deep purple-red color," or of course "of or relating to the amaranth." That is no amaranthine tree; it is merely an overzealous neighborhood decorating committee.

An idyllic afternoon in paradise

Whoops, typo, by "paradise" I mean "Paris". Look at those fluffy clouds. If you look long enough, you may see the cherubs poking around the edges of clouds, hedges, the ornate gate.

The Musée de l'Armée has a lovely front lawn and prospect down across the river.

This post's theme word is sprezzatura, "doing (or giving the appearance of doing) something effortlessly; effortless grace; nonchalance." Paris has a certain architectural sprezzatura.

Portland picturesque sunset

The Portland sunset was spectacular today, and I had a front-row seat on the waterfront.

There goes our favorite mass of incandescent gas miasma of incandescent plasma, vanishing over the edge of this oblate spheroid of note.

The nearby swarm of boats offered an interesting texture of surfaces to reflect the colored streams of light.

All of human settlement in Portland, Maine is simply a dark, low smudge obscuring the beautiful sunset.

Look at that incredible spectrum of colors, bouncing off and diffusing through the clouds.

The sky looks somehow soft and comfortable.

The pink is amazing. Pollution? Chemistry? Physics? Impossible to know.


This post's theme word is ylem, "the primordial matter of the universe." We sit on the patio, watch the sun set, and commune with ylem.

Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken is a pretty city, a lovely place to seek cool refuge from the sweltering sun and treelessness of denser and more tropical cities. It reminded me of Ithaca, featuring an expansive university nestled in hills and trees. The weather was pleasant. I took many photos.

Local church, directly out my window.

The streetcar's modernity nestled against the historical buildings.

This is art. Or a sundial? Or a postmodern playground.

The local language is Germany; proximity to France is completely ignored, and signs are not even bilingual (or, when they are, it is German/English). This combined with a forbidding, darkly gothic architecture, to make me think that I happened upon a vampire nest.

Gothic frontage, part 1.

Gothic frontage, part 2.

I visited an art exhibit in an abandoned chemical factory. It was very cool. The ambiance of abandoned rooms and stark pipes, walls, and windows, reminded me of post-apocalyptic video game settings. Some of the art blended with the setting, so that it was hard to distinguish art installations from decaying building.

I'm pretty sure this was just an empty room with abandoned freestanding plumbing features.

The paint flakes, mirrored windows to the next laboratories, and floor tiles was very cool. Unintentional art re: decay and order.

If this were a 1st-person video game, I would momentarily receive a parcour training session across these glassed roofs.

The weather was great, the university was nice, my talk went well, the research was interesting, the scenery was nice, and my ear was delighted to try to decipher German.


This post's theme word is esthesia, "the capacity for sensation." Travel titillates my esthesia.

Germany

I've been in Germany all week, living the exciting research life. The weather has been lovely, cool, clear, sunny, pleasant. Like a perfect autumn day. I gave a talk, I read some papers, I experienced the shock of immersion in a place where I speak zero of the local language; it made me miss my relative fluency in France. But of course everyone in the university setting speaks English, too, so it's a hollow complaint.

The church outside my window. Architectural features, a park, foot traffic, and in evenings there is often a live guitarist playing in the restaurant right downstairs. Relaxing and sophisticated. Contrast with the live music festival going on one block away, which was boisterous and loud.

Water reflected on the underside of a bridge. Great texture.

Placid ducks in the city center. I, too, hid in the shade here.

 The broad, bright sky expands over a charming square. Everything feels quaint and adorable to me, I think perhaps my brain is now permanently stuck in a "tourist" gear where every... single... thing... is unbearably whimsical. My fancy is perpetually tickled.

I'm pretty sure that vampires inhabit this building.

I ended up with no pictures of the river Saar, even though I ran along it several times for quite some distance. It was nice, too: water held, by gravity, to the bottom of a curving channel, occasionally buckled to the Earth by bridges. One side is the autobahn and the other is a park with pedestrian paths, shady trees, jungle gyms, beer gardens, and other sedate and pretty city-dressings. I liked it.


This post's theme word is calliopean, "piercingly loud." The Nauwieserviertelfest festivities spread their calliopean joy over several crowded blocks.

Summer park time

At the Parc des Buttes Chaumont.

 The hilliness and bridges and water features make me feel at home.

Near Rue des Rosiers, an interesting vehicle on the street. Various bits spun as the entire metal contraption got pedalled, laboriously, up the street.


This post's theme word is pavonine, "of or resembling a peacock; vain, showy." The pavonine tricycle is rather impractical.

Banal tourist photos

There's a reason many tourist photos come out so identically: there is simply one point from which the view is spectacular, serene, well-framed, with interesting visual aspects and a clear focus.

This is that view at the parks in front of the imperial palace. There's a cute little decorative pond with a tiny house (shrine? temple? landscapers' hut?) on an island in the center.

Then there's the Wes Anderson version: centered, dramatic, low on emotion but high on organizational satisfaction. Just some temple grounds I wandered through.

And of course the dramatic-sunlit corner of a roof.

Then the photos which look utterly unremarkable, but are quite memorable for the context and the memory that accompanies. Of course these are only interesting for the photographer. Thus, in the center of the city, when I turned and saw a single view with trees lushly carpeting the hill in the distance, I took a photo: because just outside the frame, there was a bustling cityscape. But this one view stood out as exceptional.

Of course this exceptional contrast is not evident in the picture, which only shows a boring roof and some trees.

This is the essence of tourist photography: interesting for the rememberer, and extremely mundane and poorly-executed scrolling for everyone else. Feel free to click over to that other tab that's making noise, now, I won't be offended.

Here's another roof, silhouetted against the sky.

Here are some prayer lanterns, next to a bamboo with wishes tied to its branches. This is what happens when I try to frame the photo to have a lot of interesting visual detail, without wasting space on the framing details.

This is The Photo. I'm standing in a place where thousands of people stand every year to take this exact photo. The photo looks calm, but only because the funnels for tourists corral them outside the frame of this exact viewpoint. The reflection is nice, too.

What this photo doesn't show is that it was in the high 90s F, with something like 90% humidity, and thus punishingly unpleasant weather. Serenity and peaceful contemplation were much further from my thoughts than shade and maybe icy beverages.

But it's a tourist photo, so you can't see that! It just looks peaceful. Look, how peaceful.


This post's theme word is animadversion, "the act of criticizing," or "an unfavorable comment." Widespread animadversion for vacation photo slideshows somehow does not stop their continued production.