It was another very warm day today. Nice stroll with Anya this morning, followed by a walk to work. Then I was in the office until dark.
What a lousy season for the winter sports world. They cancelled the John Beargrease sled dog race up on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Ski areas are struggling to stay ahead of the melt, if they have snow-making equipment. Here's an animation of our snowcover this season. It's not that there's no snow out there; it's just spotty and pathetic.
I think a lot of us, in out daily lives, don't especially miss it. I certainly have plenty of friends who are missing the things they love to do in a winter with sustained deep freeze and deep (or even deep-ish) snow. But our daily lives of commuting on the freeway, and putting out the trash, and walking the dog are frankly simpler when it's 40°F than when it's -10°F. I can comfortably walk to work, which is good for me.
There was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend arguing that climate change was still being legitimately debated. This in turn was roundly rebutted in Skeptical Science and by a larger and broader cross-section of science in, well, Science.
What the alarmism, most all of it legitimate, about climate change fails to take into account is that some of us would prefer, for our own selfish concerns, to have a warmer climate. Not the folks in Dallas and Las Vegas and Miami necessarily, but just from an everyday standpoint, there are worse things in the world than warmer Januaries.
But there's a particular kind of short-sightedness to this knee-jerk reaction, which the alarmists have been trying to point us to. It's like the consequences of giving up having a car: it may sound like a noble thing to do, but there are real ramaifications in what you are going to be able to do wtih your life. If we gave up dependence on private motor vehicles, we (an urban couple, even) would have to rethink where our son went to school, where we shop for food, what social and entertainment activities we did, and how much flexibility we have in our schedules.
Likewise, you can joke about enjoying warmer Januaries, but there are real consequences on a local level: less meltwater in the spring for crops, an end to skiing except as an occasional treat, like it is where I grew up in New Jersey, new plant diseases, and (maybe) hotter summers, which in the middle of the continent is not a trivial thing, even this far north.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Stinky hair - January 30, 2012
It was a lovely March day in January. I took Anya out for a brief walk this morning, and then a quick lope around the park when I picked up Daniel from school. Things are melting all over the place.
I'm writing this as Daniel is getting ready for bed. He washed his hair, as we have him do every couple of days. Hair-washing is a very modern habit. For centuries, hair was maintained largely through brushing, oiling and perfuming. It was only at the turn of the century that "shampooing" became a regular habit... advised by experts to be performed every few weeks. According to this article, it was the gradual innovations of people like Dr Schwartzkopf of Berlin (whose hygeine products company continues to be a worldwide empire), and John Breck of New England, that made shampoo a regular part of daily life after World War II.
Part of what made washing hair so unusual in earlier times was that harsh soaps were the norm, and they tended to leave dull film behind. In fact, washing as much as is the norm in America now (daily) does tend to dry out the skin and hair... dry shampoos are apparently making a comeback, absorbing oil and dirt using powders like cornstarch or Baking soda and then brushing it out of your hair.
I've always hated having wet hair in winter, and never been a huge fan of blow-dryers. So I was the stinky kid in high school, with the greasy hair (I also hated gang showers, but that's another story).
How much of our idea of cleanliness is shaped by the tools at our disposal? Didn't people 200 years ago notice the stinky hair (and pits) of their friends? Did people just accept that people smell like people? Do we notice people-stink in enclosed places as we've eliminated other indoor smells like smoke from cookfires?
And what about all those perfumes that lace most personal hygiene products? Is this just leftover cultural habit from the days where covering up the smell of people was more common than washing it our? Do we just get used to it, like I became habituated to the smell of Dial soap as a kid? Now I can't walk down the supermarket aisle with all the laundry soaps without getting a little queasy.
What would it have been like to visit this house in January 1911? What would the house and the people in it have smelled like?
I'm writing this as Daniel is getting ready for bed. He washed his hair, as we have him do every couple of days. Hair-washing is a very modern habit. For centuries, hair was maintained largely through brushing, oiling and perfuming. It was only at the turn of the century that "shampooing" became a regular habit... advised by experts to be performed every few weeks. According to this article, it was the gradual innovations of people like Dr Schwartzkopf of Berlin (whose hygeine products company continues to be a worldwide empire), and John Breck of New England, that made shampoo a regular part of daily life after World War II.
Part of what made washing hair so unusual in earlier times was that harsh soaps were the norm, and they tended to leave dull film behind. In fact, washing as much as is the norm in America now (daily) does tend to dry out the skin and hair... dry shampoos are apparently making a comeback, absorbing oil and dirt using powders like cornstarch or Baking soda and then brushing it out of your hair.
I've always hated having wet hair in winter, and never been a huge fan of blow-dryers. So I was the stinky kid in high school, with the greasy hair (I also hated gang showers, but that's another story).
How much of our idea of cleanliness is shaped by the tools at our disposal? Didn't people 200 years ago notice the stinky hair (and pits) of their friends? Did people just accept that people smell like people? Do we notice people-stink in enclosed places as we've eliminated other indoor smells like smoke from cookfires?
And what about all those perfumes that lace most personal hygiene products? Is this just leftover cultural habit from the days where covering up the smell of people was more common than washing it our? Do we just get used to it, like I became habituated to the smell of Dial soap as a kid? Now I can't walk down the supermarket aisle with all the laundry soaps without getting a little queasy.
What would it have been like to visit this house in January 1911? What would the house and the people in it have smelled like?
Outhouses on the Island - January 29, 2012
It was a lovely day at the dog park. We slept in, all of the mammals in the house. I'd been out dancing until 1:30 am, so I at least had an excuse. Anyway, as I said it was picture-perfect at the dog park, and it was crawling with canines.
I talked about plumbing with my dad on Friday. He grew up, from the summer he was eight until the family moved to Dallas in 1942, when he was fifteen, in a house with an outhouse. I think by the time they moved back, two years later, the house was at least on a septic system. I'm not sure when the neighborhood got hooked up to city sewer.
And he said it was just a matter-of-fact part of life. When it was fearsomely cold, there were chamber pots you could do your business in and then take yourself and your goods out to dump them in the outhouse. And of course it smelled. You dumped lime in and it smelled less bad, but still.
One thing I wondered was if it was kind of a mark of class to have an outhouse, and he said he didn't have that sense as a child—everyone had an outhouse. Oddly, his earliest years were spent as the caretaker's family at a church retreat center not far away, and there he is pretty sure they had indoor plumbing with a septic field.
I think maybe at the time (1930's and 1940's) it was more of a city-country thing than the rich/poor thing I think outhouses have come to be. I wonder about the growth of flush septic systems, what the timing was on them, and how they represented a kind of class line out in the countryside.
Island Park, Minnesota, where Dad grew up, was not really out in the country; it was a village, made up of summer homes and all-year residents like my grandparents. Grandpa worked all kinds of jobs in the 1930's, both out in the area and in Minneapolis, and elsewhere around the state, until he got a civil service job in 1942 (that's what took them to Dallas). My dad went to the Spring Park Elementary and then the Mound Public schools by school bus, but this was not farm country. The farm kids were from Minnetrista.
Back to sewers. An interesting teaser in the form of a PowerPoint slide set from North Carolina suggests a couple things: (1) Septic tanks developed in the 1860's, (2) World War I-era efforts to regulate privies, based in part on the fact that hookworms can travel 300 feet from privy to any water supply, (3) some sort of campaign to improve privies as part of the WPA in the 1930's, (4) post-WWII marketing of indoor plumbing to rural families as part of rural electrification.
By contrast, Minneapolis had a city sewer system well in place by the 1890's. Even up on the edges of development like our house in Northeast, I'm pretty sure there was a hookup within a decade of the house's construction in 1890. I'd like to see a history of where the city sewer extended. It would make an interesting time-sequence map.
The dramatic shift I can report was the consolidation of local sewer systems around 1970. Apparently there were a lot of smaller local systems in the Twin Cities suburbs, and many of these were failing, and a lot of untreated or undertreated sewage ended up in the Mississippi. So the current set up where most of the Twin Cities' sewage goes to Pig's Eye Island on the other side of St Paul, dates from that era. This map shows how the regional consolidation of sewage treatment has covered most of the metro area.
I talked about plumbing with my dad on Friday. He grew up, from the summer he was eight until the family moved to Dallas in 1942, when he was fifteen, in a house with an outhouse. I think by the time they moved back, two years later, the house was at least on a septic system. I'm not sure when the neighborhood got hooked up to city sewer.
And he said it was just a matter-of-fact part of life. When it was fearsomely cold, there were chamber pots you could do your business in and then take yourself and your goods out to dump them in the outhouse. And of course it smelled. You dumped lime in and it smelled less bad, but still.
One thing I wondered was if it was kind of a mark of class to have an outhouse, and he said he didn't have that sense as a child—everyone had an outhouse. Oddly, his earliest years were spent as the caretaker's family at a church retreat center not far away, and there he is pretty sure they had indoor plumbing with a septic field.
I think maybe at the time (1930's and 1940's) it was more of a city-country thing than the rich/poor thing I think outhouses have come to be. I wonder about the growth of flush septic systems, what the timing was on them, and how they represented a kind of class line out in the countryside.
Island Park, Minnesota, where Dad grew up, was not really out in the country; it was a village, made up of summer homes and all-year residents like my grandparents. Grandpa worked all kinds of jobs in the 1930's, both out in the area and in Minneapolis, and elsewhere around the state, until he got a civil service job in 1942 (that's what took them to Dallas). My dad went to the Spring Park Elementary and then the Mound Public schools by school bus, but this was not farm country. The farm kids were from Minnetrista.
Back to sewers. An interesting teaser in the form of a PowerPoint slide set from North Carolina suggests a couple things: (1) Septic tanks developed in the 1860's, (2) World War I-era efforts to regulate privies, based in part on the fact that hookworms can travel 300 feet from privy to any water supply, (3) some sort of campaign to improve privies as part of the WPA in the 1930's, (4) post-WWII marketing of indoor plumbing to rural families as part of rural electrification.
By contrast, Minneapolis had a city sewer system well in place by the 1890's. Even up on the edges of development like our house in Northeast, I'm pretty sure there was a hookup within a decade of the house's construction in 1890. I'd like to see a history of where the city sewer extended. It would make an interesting time-sequence map.
The dramatic shift I can report was the consolidation of local sewer systems around 1970. Apparently there were a lot of smaller local systems in the Twin Cities suburbs, and many of these were failing, and a lot of untreated or undertreated sewage ended up in the Mississippi. So the current set up where most of the Twin Cities' sewage goes to Pig's Eye Island on the other side of St Paul, dates from that era. This map shows how the regional consolidation of sewage treatment has covered most of the metro area.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Cathedral - January 28, 2012
I walked Anya around the St Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota this morning, while Daniel was working on math with a friend. It wasn't all that cold, but there was a stiff wind. Anya enjoyed it, and I got the chance to walk around a space which, twenty years ago, I had worked on a proposal for a public art piece. I wasn't able to see whatever the art was they ended up picking.
The proposal was for a mound, shaped like a hand, with a tree (a burr oak in my proposal) growing out of the palm. I still think it's a cool image.
Our idea of public worship, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world, involves entering a building set aside for the purpose. It's not that you can't pray outside, and there are certainly deeply important things in the traditions that involve outdoor spaces: processions and pilgrimages, burnt offerings and miraculous appearances. But the core ritual, the weekly religious acts, are indoor affairs.
One of the things that indigenous religious traditions have brought to western consciousness, at least in the Americas and the Australia/Pacific arenas, is the idea of outdoor sacred spaces. Early American environmentalists cottoned on to the idea of sacred outdoors pretty early:
Pagan revivalists, especially Druids with their "groves," have also done a lot to bring the idea of the outdoors as a formal religious space into the public consciousness. Of course, it could be argued that by placing themselves in opposition to Abrahamic churches, and their worship spaces as out of doors, they were making sure more conservative Christians especially would become more opposed to worshiping out of doors as somehow "pagan"...
Last winter I went on some Saturday morning that Daniel had a class or something, and spent about an hour in the Como Park Conservatory, a wonderfully moist, green space in the bleak Minnesota winter. I ended up just sitting and letting the green be around me, closing my eyes. Just being still. It was wonderful. But it was not being outdoors; in fact, it was a highly artificial natural experience. Does this matter? Does "connecting with nature" entail sitting in the out-of-doors regardless of how hospitable those out-of-doors are?
The proposal was for a mound, shaped like a hand, with a tree (a burr oak in my proposal) growing out of the palm. I still think it's a cool image.
Our idea of public worship, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world, involves entering a building set aside for the purpose. It's not that you can't pray outside, and there are certainly deeply important things in the traditions that involve outdoor spaces: processions and pilgrimages, burnt offerings and miraculous appearances. But the core ritual, the weekly religious acts, are indoor affairs.
One of the things that indigenous religious traditions have brought to western consciousness, at least in the Americas and the Australia/Pacific arenas, is the idea of outdoor sacred spaces. Early American environmentalists cottoned on to the idea of sacred outdoors pretty early:
Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.But even here, to make the argument to a Euro-American audience, it had to fall back on analogies to indoor religious spaces.
- John Muir
Pagan revivalists, especially Druids with their "groves," have also done a lot to bring the idea of the outdoors as a formal religious space into the public consciousness. Of course, it could be argued that by placing themselves in opposition to Abrahamic churches, and their worship spaces as out of doors, they were making sure more conservative Christians especially would become more opposed to worshiping out of doors as somehow "pagan"...
Last winter I went on some Saturday morning that Daniel had a class or something, and spent about an hour in the Como Park Conservatory, a wonderfully moist, green space in the bleak Minnesota winter. I ended up just sitting and letting the green be around me, closing my eyes. Just being still. It was wonderful. But it was not being outdoors; in fact, it was a highly artificial natural experience. Does this matter? Does "connecting with nature" entail sitting in the out-of-doors regardless of how hospitable those out-of-doors are?
Friday, January 27, 2012
candles - January 27, 2012
I missed a blog entry about yesterday. Oh well, I figure missing one in over a month isn't too terrible.
Fact is, I haven't been out much. Apparently it was snowing pretty hard for a little while this afternoon, but it took Ingrid calling me in my map cave for me to know anything about it.
I've been putting in a little extra time at work, working on a little bit of a bottleneck of multiple projects all with a certain amount of rush to them. Nothing desperate, and nothing enormous, but every so often the planets align and there we are with a late night or two. Luckily, Ingrid's been able to take some slack this week.
Working late used to be a lot more trouble for desk workers. Candles don't shed nearly as much light— a "standard candle" gives off about 1/120 as much light as a 100-watt incandescent lightbulb (reference). And until the 20-century development of the self-trimming wick, it required nearly-constant work to keep candles trimmed and burning efficiently.
So imagine the extra labor required to do office work in the northern European winter: maintaining the fire for heating, styaing bundled up against the draft, and keeping en eye on the candle wick to keep in trim. Makes Bob Cratcit's clerkly life in A Christmas Carol that much more grim...
Fact is, I haven't been out much. Apparently it was snowing pretty hard for a little while this afternoon, but it took Ingrid calling me in my map cave for me to know anything about it.
I've been putting in a little extra time at work, working on a little bit of a bottleneck of multiple projects all with a certain amount of rush to them. Nothing desperate, and nothing enormous, but every so often the planets align and there we are with a late night or two. Luckily, Ingrid's been able to take some slack this week.
Working late used to be a lot more trouble for desk workers. Candles don't shed nearly as much light— a "standard candle" gives off about 1/120 as much light as a 100-watt incandescent lightbulb (reference). And until the 20-century development of the self-trimming wick, it required nearly-constant work to keep candles trimmed and burning efficiently.
So imagine the extra labor required to do office work in the northern European winter: maintaining the fire for heating, styaing bundled up against the draft, and keeping en eye on the candle wick to keep in trim. Makes Bob Cratcit's clerkly life in A Christmas Carol that much more grim...
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Boots - January 25, 2012
It was warmer yesterday, getting above freezing. Walked Anya in the park at Daniel's school, and my shoes got wet. Hazards of warmer winter days.
That poor novice in the Yukon died in part because he stepped into a hidden spring and got wet. Likewise a lot of those hypothermia victims dies not from "being outside in the cold," but as a result of immersion in water... Getting wet in winter is the hazard that doesn't occur to us necessarily immediately, because after all water is warmer than ice.
When cities began street snow clearing, one of the obvious methods was spreading salt. There was a lot of objection to this, in part from people who got salt stains on clothing and equipment, or whose metal parts were clogged and corroded by salt. But also people objected to having to wade through slush. And they had a point.
How did people waterproof things 100 years ago? There's an interesting recipe here about a soaking method... pretty involved:
The style of calf-high boot known as the "Wellington" was, in fact, popularized by the Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo. He was modifying the Hessian boot. These were not shoes for farmers or common laborers, who commonly wore wooden clogs. It was not until Hiram Hutchinson adopted Charles Goodyear's rubber vulcanization process to make footwear that the modern rubber wellies were born in 1853, manufactured by Aigle (which is still one of their prime manufacturers—see a company history)
I wear Sorels when I need warm feet. They've been around since 1962—pipsqueaks by comparison. But their trademark lined boots were designed for tromping around the tundra, and they really do work. My old pair lasted me from 1986 (I think, or maybe 1987) until 2010. Not bad. The only problem is, they are really heavy. All that rubber and insulation weighs you down.
Sorels are predated by the now-100-year-old Bean Boot: the Maine Hunting Shoe. If you read the 1914 flyer, though, you'll notice the boot is recommended as ideal for both "bare ground and snow hunting." Not slush. Because really, who in their right mind would go out hunting in slush?
That poor novice in the Yukon died in part because he stepped into a hidden spring and got wet. Likewise a lot of those hypothermia victims dies not from "being outside in the cold," but as a result of immersion in water... Getting wet in winter is the hazard that doesn't occur to us necessarily immediately, because after all water is warmer than ice.
When cities began street snow clearing, one of the obvious methods was spreading salt. There was a lot of objection to this, in part from people who got salt stains on clothing and equipment, or whose metal parts were clogged and corroded by salt. But also people objected to having to wade through slush. And they had a point.
How did people waterproof things 100 years ago? There's an interesting recipe here about a soaking method... pretty involved:
To Render Leather Boots Waterproof.—Melt over a slow fire, one q jar of boiled linseed oil; one pound of mutton suet; three-quarters of a pound of yellow beeswax; and half a pound of common resin; or smaller quantities, in these proportions. With this mixture saturate the leather of new boots and shoes, having previously made them rather warm.
The style of calf-high boot known as the "Wellington" was, in fact, popularized by the Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo. He was modifying the Hessian boot. These were not shoes for farmers or common laborers, who commonly wore wooden clogs. It was not until Hiram Hutchinson adopted Charles Goodyear's rubber vulcanization process to make footwear that the modern rubber wellies were born in 1853, manufactured by Aigle (which is still one of their prime manufacturers—see a company history)
I wear Sorels when I need warm feet. They've been around since 1962—pipsqueaks by comparison. But their trademark lined boots were designed for tromping around the tundra, and they really do work. My old pair lasted me from 1986 (I think, or maybe 1987) until 2010. Not bad. The only problem is, they are really heavy. All that rubber and insulation weighs you down.
Sorels are predated by the now-100-year-old Bean Boot: the Maine Hunting Shoe. If you read the 1914 flyer, though, you'll notice the boot is recommended as ideal for both "bare ground and snow hunting." Not slush. Because really, who in their right mind would go out hunting in slush?
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Matches - January 24, 2012
Quick walks down the block this morning and again this evening, and much to-ing and fro-ing in the interim... it was one of those days where there was a lot scheduled and not much time to sit and breathe.
I remember a lot more written in to Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Little Match Girl." It is surprisingly short, actually. In this it works better than some of its more florid peers; Dickens comes to mind. Not that Dickens "doesn't work," but in his over-sentimental mood he gets maudlin.
No, Andersen's story is actually matter-of-fact. Oh, and it's set on New Year's Eve, not Christmas.
The thing is, people do still freeze to death. Not many—I'm looking for statistics; I know someone keeps track of cause of death for accidents, but death from hypothermia is rare enough to be hard to find in national statistics as to be hard to find. A CDC report says 2622 people died from "Exposure to natural cold" from 1999 through 2002. Preumably the rate has historically been higher, but since the time that disease has been tracked scientifically at least, that is what the statisticians have paid attention to (see this data from 19th century Britain, for example).
And yet, the vision of the little match girl haunts us. The implication that we could welcome the poor inside with us, that it is our selfishness that keeps them outside, is an accusation hard to argue against.
I remember a lot more written in to Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Little Match Girl." It is surprisingly short, actually. In this it works better than some of its more florid peers; Dickens comes to mind. Not that Dickens "doesn't work," but in his over-sentimental mood he gets maudlin.
No, Andersen's story is actually matter-of-fact. Oh, and it's set on New Year's Eve, not Christmas.
The thing is, people do still freeze to death. Not many—I'm looking for statistics; I know someone keeps track of cause of death for accidents, but death from hypothermia is rare enough to be hard to find in national statistics as to be hard to find. A CDC report says 2622 people died from "Exposure to natural cold" from 1999 through 2002. Preumably the rate has historically been higher, but since the time that disease has been tracked scientifically at least, that is what the statisticians have paid attention to (see this data from 19th century Britain, for example).
And yet, the vision of the little match girl haunts us. The implication that we could welcome the poor inside with us, that it is our selfishness that keeps them outside, is an accusation hard to argue against.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Bus - January 23, 2012
I took Anya out for a quick walk this morning, then chiseled ice off the car for Ingrid and made the half-hour walk to work in my heavy Sorel boots. It sleeted and then snowed last night... should have put the car in the garage. This evening after a meeting in the North Loop area of Minneapolis, I walked up to Nicollet Mall, another 20 minute trudge, to catch the bus.
When I talk about inside and outside, I'm speaking from a particular kind of privilege: car-ownership. Those who don't drive have to work with the much less flexible public transit system, and so end up spending more time outside: walking from their door to the bus stop, standing waiting for the bus, walking from the bus to the destination. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There's a reason people were so willing to fork out for a car back when they had the chance. It really does increase the number of things you can do in a day, and gives you slack where none existed before. That slack fills up with new to-do lists, but it's a different rhythm of life, living with the bus.
It's a different rhythm and it's a different inside. If the automobile is an extension of the home as a private space, then the bus is an extension of the sidewalk, close-quartered, anonymous public space. That's another reason people switched to cars: In a car, they were, in a sense, master of their own personal mobile space. In a bus, you have to negotiate socially with strangers. It's more work if it's not what your used to.
When I talk about inside and outside, I'm speaking from a particular kind of privilege: car-ownership. Those who don't drive have to work with the much less flexible public transit system, and so end up spending more time outside: walking from their door to the bus stop, standing waiting for the bus, walking from the bus to the destination. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There's a reason people were so willing to fork out for a car back when they had the chance. It really does increase the number of things you can do in a day, and gives you slack where none existed before. That slack fills up with new to-do lists, but it's a different rhythm of life, living with the bus.
It's a different rhythm and it's a different inside. If the automobile is an extension of the home as a private space, then the bus is an extension of the sidewalk, close-quartered, anonymous public space. That's another reason people switched to cars: In a car, they were, in a sense, master of their own personal mobile space. In a bus, you have to negotiate socially with strangers. It's more work if it's not what your used to.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Killing two pigs with one bird - January 22, 2012
A quick walk this morning, in the thin snow over wood chips on the playground. Ingrid took Anya to the dog park, and I spent a bunch of the day doing work... and killing electronic pigs with birds hurled from slingshots.
I'm not what you would call a "gamer." But I do every so often get hooked on a game,usually on the computer. In college, it was Marble Madness on my roommate's Amiga. In Vermont, it was Tetris. I've had two separate rounds of online Scrabble, at least. This winter it's Angry Birds.
Like entertainment, playing games has a long disreputable history—it's frivolous, a waste of time, and prone to be habit forming. I wonder if, like stories, it's grounded in a less-obvious basic human need. Competing with games does seem pretty universal.
There is a clear distinction between "outdoors" and "indoors" games. Outdoors, play generally involves whole-body movement through a controlled physical environment. What makes sport a game is rule-following, the formal structure that controls how one may or may not act in the contest.
Indoors, most games are removed from whole-body competition. People have made large-room competitions that are specifically about playing the room, and more recently arenas have become so large we can play outdoor games in an indoor space. But the oldest indoor games are all variations on card, board, dice and word games.
Outdoor games have little story-telling embedded in them. The narrative is in the physical actions on the playing field. By contrast, indoor board games often parallel some more physical content: chess and checkers are like a formalized battle, cribbage like a horse race. Not all indoor games do this: most word, card and dice games are utterly abstract.
Games, in fact, move fluidly with need, in and outside. Bowling was an outdoor game first, before it came indoors in North American winters. Dice and cards were historically as much the pastime of soldiers and travelers on the road as of casinos and gambling halls, their appeal in large part that they could be played almost anywhere.
I'm not what you would call a "gamer." But I do every so often get hooked on a game,usually on the computer. In college, it was Marble Madness on my roommate's Amiga. In Vermont, it was Tetris. I've had two separate rounds of online Scrabble, at least. This winter it's Angry Birds.
Like entertainment, playing games has a long disreputable history—it's frivolous, a waste of time, and prone to be habit forming. I wonder if, like stories, it's grounded in a less-obvious basic human need. Competing with games does seem pretty universal.
There is a clear distinction between "outdoors" and "indoors" games. Outdoors, play generally involves whole-body movement through a controlled physical environment. What makes sport a game is rule-following, the formal structure that controls how one may or may not act in the contest.
Indoors, most games are removed from whole-body competition. People have made large-room competitions that are specifically about playing the room, and more recently arenas have become so large we can play outdoor games in an indoor space. But the oldest indoor games are all variations on card, board, dice and word games.
Outdoor games have little story-telling embedded in them. The narrative is in the physical actions on the playing field. By contrast, indoor board games often parallel some more physical content: chess and checkers are like a formalized battle, cribbage like a horse race. Not all indoor games do this: most word, card and dice games are utterly abstract.
Games, in fact, move fluidly with need, in and outside. Bowling was an outdoor game first, before it came indoors in North American winters. Dice and cards were historically as much the pastime of soldiers and travelers on the road as of casinos and gambling halls, their appeal in large part that they could be played almost anywhere.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Keep moving - January 21, 2012
It was good we had snow yesterday. The dance performance was really helped by the white blanket... barely enough to sled on, but definitely enough to roll on, and jump on, and skid on your heels down the hill on. It was a fun performance, and at 15 minutes in 16°F temperatures with a bit of a breeze, it was not a minute too short.
Ingrid and I went to the dog park with Anya first. She bounded around in the woods and had a good time. We probably would have been happier temperaturewise if we had been bounding around like Anya, or dancing like Daniel. As it was, we started to lose feeling in our extremities.
The chechaquo in Jack London's story knew about keeping moving. Maybe that's one of the things we fail to take into account when we think of how people lived in an era before central heating and heated seats: They were doing more physical labor, even just to get around, than we are used to today. They did not stay especially still, if they could help it. Not in winter, outdoors.
It would be different if my walks with Anya were runs, real exertion on my part. Ingrid runs in most weathers, and she's comfortable enough even in the single digits (as long as there isn't much wind).
So one of the key ways we have become an indoor-oriented society, is in making our lives less and less about movement and physical work. We sit at desks or move relatively slowly through the aisles of a store. We rarely break a sweat unless we are exercising. We live longer lives, because manual labor breaks down the body through wear and tear more slowly, but those lives make us into less of an energy-producing furnace than our great-grandparents would have guessed.
The less wood we chop, the colder it feels outside.
Ingrid and I went to the dog park with Anya first. She bounded around in the woods and had a good time. We probably would have been happier temperaturewise if we had been bounding around like Anya, or dancing like Daniel. As it was, we started to lose feeling in our extremities.
The chechaquo in Jack London's story knew about keeping moving. Maybe that's one of the things we fail to take into account when we think of how people lived in an era before central heating and heated seats: They were doing more physical labor, even just to get around, than we are used to today. They did not stay especially still, if they could help it. Not in winter, outdoors.
It would be different if my walks with Anya were runs, real exertion on my part. Ingrid runs in most weathers, and she's comfortable enough even in the single digits (as long as there isn't much wind).
So one of the key ways we have become an indoor-oriented society, is in making our lives less and less about movement and physical work. We sit at desks or move relatively slowly through the aisles of a store. We rarely break a sweat unless we are exercising. We live longer lives, because manual labor breaks down the body through wear and tear more slowly, but those lives make us into less of an energy-producing furnace than our great-grandparents would have guessed.
The less wood we chop, the colder it feels outside.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Frost Fairs - January 20, 2012
There was a fresh coat of snow on the ground, and more falling. The news when we wakened warned of lots of spinouts and other accidents, and indeed it took twice as much time as usual to get Daniel to school. The good news was I woke up from a full night of sleep feeling much better. The bad news is, Ingrid got the cold I had yesterday.
Anya enjoyed the snow. It's still cold, getting up around 10°F today. Should be warmer tomorrow, when Daniel is part of a dance performance in a park.
People get so cooped up in winter, it's fun to have a festival outside. When the Thames froze over, which it did some forty times between William the Conqueror's time and the present, people erected Frost Fairs on the ice, with entertainments (including bonfires). Virginia Woolf's Orlando has an early scene set at the Frost Fair of 1607, which Seymour Chwast made this wonderful animation for:
The St Paul Winter Carnival, founded in 1885, and the Quebec Winter Carnival both feel a bit like this, but also draw specifically from the traditional feasting before Lent, culminating on Mardis Gras, or Carne vale (farewell to meat). Which in warmer climes looks much different:
We'll see how much of that spirit comes through tomorrow. The next Saturday is a Sled Art rally in Powderhorn Park, with the dance performed again.
Part of what this kind of thing does is emphasize what one can do indoors vs outdoors. Until recently, with the advent of covered stadiums, you could have a feast or a party indoors, but a parade, you had to hold that in the street, in appropriate weather. So to have a carnival, a fair of any kind, in the out of doors on the frozen ice, was like thumbing your nose at the regular order of things. It was a glorious upside-down idea.
The St Paul Winter Carnival isn't such a big deal in this way. It's fun, sure, but people go outside for fun all the time. There are skating rinks with warminghouses, ski areas with aprés ski and bonfires. We are so confident of our ease in an out-of-doors we can get out of when we need to, and of an indoors we know is safe, that it seems a little pointless. People don't freeze to death the same random way they still did in the 1880's.
Or do they?
Anya enjoyed the snow. It's still cold, getting up around 10°F today. Should be warmer tomorrow, when Daniel is part of a dance performance in a park.
People get so cooped up in winter, it's fun to have a festival outside. When the Thames froze over, which it did some forty times between William the Conqueror's time and the present, people erected Frost Fairs on the ice, with entertainments (including bonfires). Virginia Woolf's Orlando has an early scene set at the Frost Fair of 1607, which Seymour Chwast made this wonderful animation for:
The St Paul Winter Carnival, founded in 1885, and the Quebec Winter Carnival both feel a bit like this, but also draw specifically from the traditional feasting before Lent, culminating on Mardis Gras, or Carne vale (farewell to meat). Which in warmer climes looks much different:
We'll see how much of that spirit comes through tomorrow. The next Saturday is a Sled Art rally in Powderhorn Park, with the dance performed again.
Part of what this kind of thing does is emphasize what one can do indoors vs outdoors. Until recently, with the advent of covered stadiums, you could have a feast or a party indoors, but a parade, you had to hold that in the street, in appropriate weather. So to have a carnival, a fair of any kind, in the out of doors on the frozen ice, was like thumbing your nose at the regular order of things. It was a glorious upside-down idea.
The St Paul Winter Carnival isn't such a big deal in this way. It's fun, sure, but people go outside for fun all the time. There are skating rinks with warminghouses, ski areas with aprés ski and bonfires. We are so confident of our ease in an out-of-doors we can get out of when we need to, and of an indoors we know is safe, that it seems a little pointless. People don't freeze to death the same random way they still did in the 1880's.
Or do they?
Thursday, January 19, 2012
The snowplow never sleeps - January 19, 2012
It was truly bloody cold this morning. -11°F, according to the car thermometer. And a pretty stiff breeze. MPR reported a wind chill of -40°F.
Let me just say, the dog has way more patience for this kind of nonsense than I do. She was all "sniff sniff sniff WAIT! what's that! it's a PERSON! I must stand stock still and watch this person...." Meanwhile, I am losing sensation the fingertips that are covered in the nice new gloves I got for Christmas.
She never pooped. We went back to the car, and we tried again for a few minutes at home, and she just sniffed and snuffled. Then I went to bed, having not been able to sleep since 3:30 am. When I woke up, Ingrid took me to the office after another futile but brisk walk down the block and back. The wind had died down, but it was still definitely below zero.
I spent part of my sleepless morning reading about the history of snow plowing (cf my earlier post). Snow in the Cities is slow going, mostly a compendium of how different cities did their thing over the course of decades of stop-and-start innovation. There was a phrase that struck me though, that the author glossed over:
No, I think it's just that people stopped accepting whatever the weather dealt out. There was a kind of stoicism to the Ingalls' endurance of the Long Winter, which New York was now unwilling to keep up. And as new technologies appeared, and as the city adopted them they also adopted the need to keep them operating: New York's elevated railways were partly built to keep traffic moving in winter. Likewise subways (increasing the flow of traffic year-round was the obvious other reason). But once running, they fueled a demand that the rest of the infrastructure be kept clear. Motor vehicles made better snow-clearing possible, but also fueled demand for more complete plowing, not just of the main throoughfares but the side streets as well.
But with all that, there was a growing just-in-time quality to an ever-wider network of trade. That is, as has been documented elsewhere, more and more of our fuel and food came from further and further away. Now? Well, read Michael Pollan on the subject.
This is the "increased volume of trade" Mr McKelvery is talking about. It's not just how much stuff passed through New York, but how important it was. This is the basis for our modern system of making the city streets and major highways as close to clear of frozen water as possible.
Let me just say, the dog has way more patience for this kind of nonsense than I do. She was all "sniff sniff sniff WAIT! what's that! it's a PERSON! I must stand stock still and watch this person...." Meanwhile, I am losing sensation the fingertips that are covered in the nice new gloves I got for Christmas.
She never pooped. We went back to the car, and we tried again for a few minutes at home, and she just sniffed and snuffled. Then I went to bed, having not been able to sleep since 3:30 am. When I woke up, Ingrid took me to the office after another futile but brisk walk down the block and back. The wind had died down, but it was still definitely below zero.
I spent part of my sleepless morning reading about the history of snow plowing (cf my earlier post). Snow in the Cities is slow going, mostly a compendium of how different cities did their thing over the course of decades of stop-and-start innovation. There was a phrase that struck me though, that the author glossed over:
As the expanding cities switched in the early [1890's] from horse cars to electric trolleys and from messenger boys to telephones, urban residents in the northern states encountered new wintertime hazards. The increased volume of trade made all interruptions costly, and when a heavy snow not only stalled traffic but felled wires and disrupted communications, small as well as great cities discovered the need for forthright actions. (p. 67)Now, why would commerce not be affected this way previously? What made the new larger city somehow more desperate for uninterrupted, 24/7 commerce? "The increased volume of trade made all interruptions costly," as if snow and sleet and freezing rain wasn't costly before.
No, I think it's just that people stopped accepting whatever the weather dealt out. There was a kind of stoicism to the Ingalls' endurance of the Long Winter, which New York was now unwilling to keep up. And as new technologies appeared, and as the city adopted them they also adopted the need to keep them operating: New York's elevated railways were partly built to keep traffic moving in winter. Likewise subways (increasing the flow of traffic year-round was the obvious other reason). But once running, they fueled a demand that the rest of the infrastructure be kept clear. Motor vehicles made better snow-clearing possible, but also fueled demand for more complete plowing, not just of the main throoughfares but the side streets as well.
But with all that, there was a growing just-in-time quality to an ever-wider network of trade. That is, as has been documented elsewhere, more and more of our fuel and food came from further and further away. Now? Well, read Michael Pollan on the subject.
This is the "increased volume of trade" Mr McKelvery is talking about. It's not just how much stuff passed through New York, but how important it was. This is the basis for our modern system of making the city streets and major highways as close to clear of frozen water as possible.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Bug - January 18, 2012
I took Anya out to the park by Daniel's school this morning, and then at lunch. It was winter. there was a light dusting of snow. She romped and did her business. Not much else to report.
Kaff kaff.
It's a really mild bug. Scratchy throat, and if I don't take Sudafed (the real stuff) every 6 hours or so, I start getting a congestion headache. That's about it. I thought it was a sore throat from singing too hard Monday night, when I woke up Tuesday, but it's not. It's a bug.
It's going to be a lousy couple days not to be close to 100%: the low tonight will be -5°F, with high winds. Calmer tomorrow, but it's not going to break 10°F until the weekend.
We are such wimps this winter.
I do need to be a little careful, though. My 45°N project from a couple years ago ended up sidelined after a bout of pneumonia. Ingrid's had pneumonia too, and my dad has had a few run-ins with it. It's nothing to laugh at.
Ingrid was a little surprised when we started living together at how much I take care to be all bundled up against chilly drafts, not just for comfort (she gets that) but for health. As she says, she was raised on the germ theory of infection, and not the "catching a chill" theory. I was raised in getting all wrapped up, especially the neck, when I got sick.
Well, there is some basis for this. Mechanically, of course, colds are caused by viral infections, not going out and "catching your death of cold." But if you really do get chilled, your body doesn't have as much energy to fight off infection. World War I soldiers were a lot more likely to get sick in the cold, wet trenches than they were in the back lines, even though they were exposed to the same infected fellow soldiers. Chilled muscles tend to cramp up (that's one of my personal bugaboos). And there's that study I cited a couple weeks ago, that says people in uninsulated houses tend to miss more school and more work than the equivalent population in an insulated house.
But other recent studies show that chilled people exposed to infections are just as likely to catch a cold virus as warmer subjects. Or that getting chilled will prolong infection.
So, maybe it has no effect on infection. At least it keeps us comfortable. Here's my guess: does the cold stress you? Because stress absolutely has an effect on susceptibility to the common cold. It suppresses immune reactions generally. So: do you enjoy going out in the cold? Does sleeping with the window open in January make you wake up fresh and energized? Bully for you. But if being cold makes you miserable, if it weighs you down and causes you stress... well there you are, sneezing.
Kaff kaff.
It's a really mild bug. Scratchy throat, and if I don't take Sudafed (the real stuff) every 6 hours or so, I start getting a congestion headache. That's about it. I thought it was a sore throat from singing too hard Monday night, when I woke up Tuesday, but it's not. It's a bug.
It's going to be a lousy couple days not to be close to 100%: the low tonight will be -5°F, with high winds. Calmer tomorrow, but it's not going to break 10°F until the weekend.
We are such wimps this winter.
I do need to be a little careful, though. My 45°N project from a couple years ago ended up sidelined after a bout of pneumonia. Ingrid's had pneumonia too, and my dad has had a few run-ins with it. It's nothing to laugh at.
Ingrid was a little surprised when we started living together at how much I take care to be all bundled up against chilly drafts, not just for comfort (she gets that) but for health. As she says, she was raised on the germ theory of infection, and not the "catching a chill" theory. I was raised in getting all wrapped up, especially the neck, when I got sick.
Well, there is some basis for this. Mechanically, of course, colds are caused by viral infections, not going out and "catching your death of cold." But if you really do get chilled, your body doesn't have as much energy to fight off infection. World War I soldiers were a lot more likely to get sick in the cold, wet trenches than they were in the back lines, even though they were exposed to the same infected fellow soldiers. Chilled muscles tend to cramp up (that's one of my personal bugaboos). And there's that study I cited a couple weeks ago, that says people in uninsulated houses tend to miss more school and more work than the equivalent population in an insulated house.
But other recent studies show that chilled people exposed to infections are just as likely to catch a cold virus as warmer subjects. Or that getting chilled will prolong infection.
So, maybe it has no effect on infection. At least it keeps us comfortable. Here's my guess: does the cold stress you? Because stress absolutely has an effect on susceptibility to the common cold. It suppresses immune reactions generally. So: do you enjoy going out in the cold? Does sleeping with the window open in January make you wake up fresh and energized? Bully for you. But if being cold makes you miserable, if it weighs you down and causes you stress... well there you are, sneezing.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Alaska - January 17, 2012
Cold in the morning, cold and bitterly windy in the early afternoon, and still cold tonight. It'll be a little warmer tomorrow, and then WHOMP! it'll get down to or below zero tomorrow night, accompanied by howling winds, and stay in the single digits for a few days.
Alaska is having one hell of a winter, meanwhile. Not cold so much as staggering amounts of snow and storms. A whopper of a storm in November kept Nome from getting its last fuel shipment, and was saved from emergency measures by a coast-guard icebreaker making a path for a Russian tanker. Cordova and Valdez are practically buried in snow. No, not "practically". They are buried. That's the coast. Fairbanks has dense ice fog and has almost hit -50°F. I'm not even going to ask what's going on up in Prudhoe Bay.
There's something about stories of extreme weather survival that grip us. Even the grinding misery of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Long Winter keeps us interested. I think part of it is a kind of horrified fascination at a life suddenly cut off: when the snow is so deep you simply can't get through, it's like being buried alive in a landslide... except that the landslide is white and soft and beautiful and silent, when it isn't about to suffocate you.
A lot of the horrified fascination with extreme weather is how it shows how unprotected we really are, when it comes right down to it. Or how limited that protection is. We trust our houses to stand, and when we see someone else's crushed or blown apart or washed away, it's like watching a trusted authority figure resign in disgrace. Oops, guess we didn't plan on every contingency after all...
Alaska is having one hell of a winter, meanwhile. Not cold so much as staggering amounts of snow and storms. A whopper of a storm in November kept Nome from getting its last fuel shipment, and was saved from emergency measures by a coast-guard icebreaker making a path for a Russian tanker. Cordova and Valdez are practically buried in snow. No, not "practically". They are buried. That's the coast. Fairbanks has dense ice fog and has almost hit -50°F. I'm not even going to ask what's going on up in Prudhoe Bay.
There's something about stories of extreme weather survival that grip us. Even the grinding misery of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Long Winter keeps us interested. I think part of it is a kind of horrified fascination at a life suddenly cut off: when the snow is so deep you simply can't get through, it's like being buried alive in a landslide... except that the landslide is white and soft and beautiful and silent, when it isn't about to suffocate you.
A lot of the horrified fascination with extreme weather is how it shows how unprotected we really are, when it comes right down to it. Or how limited that protection is. We trust our houses to stand, and when we see someone else's crushed or blown apart or washed away, it's like watching a trusted authority figure resign in disgrace. Oops, guess we didn't plan on every contingency after all...
Monday, January 16, 2012
Sacred Space - January 16, 2012
It was perfectly pleasant this morning when Anya and I went out for a quick walk. It was still warm (around 30°F) at 1 pm, when I took her to the dog park, but you could definitely feel the wind. The sun was shining, but there's only so much radiant heat can do against a steady, cold breeze.
Tonight was the pub sing I started a little over a year ago, at Merlin's Rest, a pub in south Minneapolis. As usual, it was a good time. Merlin's is pretty loud, especially as the evening begins. But it's very welcoming and friendly to us... the owners seem to think we're a good thing, not an annoyance to the paying patrons. So we regularly get 100 people crammed into the performing side of the bar.
What we're basing this monthly sing on, is an old tradition of local performers having a good time down at the local, throughout the British Isles. In our case, it's singing, but a usual pattern is more like the wonderful recording Music at Matt Molloy's. Molloy is the flautist for the Chieftans, and he owns a pub in the west of Ireland that's become a gathering place for musicians, and kind of a pilgrimage for fans of Irish music. The recording is made up of performances, of varying quality but unvarying sincerity, and of the ambient sound of the pub: clinking glasses, foot traffic, and conversation. Because pub singing, and indeed most music in the real world, does not stop the world around it.
Sometimes it does. I tear up a little at the section in A Cricket in Times Square where Chester the Cricket's playing his final tune stops the city in its tracks to listen. Sometimes everyone stops, and that happens some of the time at the pub. But mostly some people are listening, and others are doing something else.
Does this have anything to do with the running theme of this blog? Well, I'd say this: people often assume that a space is somehow sacred, in and of itself. Others find this sacredness in the outdoors. But while it's really tempting to place this sense of silent attention and even reverence in some specific physical context, it's really a collective decision to make this moment or that space sacred. Neither the outdoors or any indoor space is inherently sacred in and of itself. All is context and the respect we are willing to give to that context.
Tonight was the pub sing I started a little over a year ago, at Merlin's Rest, a pub in south Minneapolis. As usual, it was a good time. Merlin's is pretty loud, especially as the evening begins. But it's very welcoming and friendly to us... the owners seem to think we're a good thing, not an annoyance to the paying patrons. So we regularly get 100 people crammed into the performing side of the bar.
What we're basing this monthly sing on, is an old tradition of local performers having a good time down at the local, throughout the British Isles. In our case, it's singing, but a usual pattern is more like the wonderful recording Music at Matt Molloy's. Molloy is the flautist for the Chieftans, and he owns a pub in the west of Ireland that's become a gathering place for musicians, and kind of a pilgrimage for fans of Irish music. The recording is made up of performances, of varying quality but unvarying sincerity, and of the ambient sound of the pub: clinking glasses, foot traffic, and conversation. Because pub singing, and indeed most music in the real world, does not stop the world around it.
Sometimes it does. I tear up a little at the section in A Cricket in Times Square where Chester the Cricket's playing his final tune stops the city in its tracks to listen. Sometimes everyone stops, and that happens some of the time at the pub. But mostly some people are listening, and others are doing something else.
Does this have anything to do with the running theme of this blog? Well, I'd say this: people often assume that a space is somehow sacred, in and of itself. Others find this sacredness in the outdoors. But while it's really tempting to place this sense of silent attention and even reverence in some specific physical context, it's really a collective decision to make this moment or that space sacred. Neither the outdoors or any indoor space is inherently sacred in and of itself. All is context and the respect we are willing to give to that context.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Home on the Road - January 15, 2012
It was warmer but blustery this morning, when we went out for a quick morning walk. The snow had settled into place, but by the time we went to the dog park about 2 pm, it was early spring again, in the mid-30s, and almost all the snow had melted in the dog park. The wind died down by mid-day as well. Another day of this and the bulk of the already pretty modest snowfall will be gone.
I don't live in my car, but I think sometimes about long car trips. We're going out east for spring break, and as I looked at airfares, I once again realized that for three of us, driving was getting to be more and more an economical consideration, the main mitigating factors against being the time factor (do I really want to spend that much time off work just driving) and the where-do-we-sleep-when-we're-on-the-road factor. In the end, we found fabulous fares to DC, so we'll visit a friend there for a couple days on the way to visit my folks in New Jersey.
Since overnight rail cars came into common usage, it's become easier to think of vehicles as little extensions of private space. No, wait, go back further, to the cabins of sailing ships. Most of the sailors (and passengers) until recently shared common quarters for their voyages. But then the captain, and later better-off passengers, got their own private quarters. I'd be curious to know the fittings of sleeper cars in railroads and the cabins of ocean liners played off against each other in the 19th century. That was the era where private-quarters travel really emerged into its own. Before then, people would travel in carriages or boats with relatively public quarters (Of course there were closed carriages, but these were privately maintained, while most hired coaches were shared by paying passengers).
Private space and public space in vehicles was a kind of constant negotiation, and it still is. On one end, you have gypsy caravans and modern motor homes: actual little houses on wheels. On the other, you have carts and most modern cars, which are open to the world to see inside.
I've long loved the video to REM's "Everybody Hurts". Think about private space and public space as you look at it again. It's lovely in yet another aspect.
When we look at how people live in their cars when they become homeless, one of the challenges they face is that the vehicles aren't designed for privacy, however much we may want them to be private space. Being able to close your windows, being able to visually keep the outside out, is crucial.
I don't live in my car, but I think sometimes about long car trips. We're going out east for spring break, and as I looked at airfares, I once again realized that for three of us, driving was getting to be more and more an economical consideration, the main mitigating factors against being the time factor (do I really want to spend that much time off work just driving) and the where-do-we-sleep-when-we're-on-the-road factor. In the end, we found fabulous fares to DC, so we'll visit a friend there for a couple days on the way to visit my folks in New Jersey.
Since overnight rail cars came into common usage, it's become easier to think of vehicles as little extensions of private space. No, wait, go back further, to the cabins of sailing ships. Most of the sailors (and passengers) until recently shared common quarters for their voyages. But then the captain, and later better-off passengers, got their own private quarters. I'd be curious to know the fittings of sleeper cars in railroads and the cabins of ocean liners played off against each other in the 19th century. That was the era where private-quarters travel really emerged into its own. Before then, people would travel in carriages or boats with relatively public quarters (Of course there were closed carriages, but these were privately maintained, while most hired coaches were shared by paying passengers).
Private space and public space in vehicles was a kind of constant negotiation, and it still is. On one end, you have gypsy caravans and modern motor homes: actual little houses on wheels. On the other, you have carts and most modern cars, which are open to the world to see inside.
I've long loved the video to REM's "Everybody Hurts". Think about private space and public space as you look at it again. It's lovely in yet another aspect.
When we look at how people live in their cars when they become homeless, one of the challenges they face is that the vehicles aren't designed for privacy, however much we may want them to be private space. Being able to close your windows, being able to visually keep the outside out, is crucial.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
icy sidewalks - January 14, 2012
I did walk Anya, but then did most of my outside walking today coming home from a sing at Logan Park, about a mile and a half from my house. It was snowing, and we ended up with a really slippery coating of maybe an inch. Still, it's nice to have the frosting on our winter back again, even if it's only for a day. Highs back in the 30s tomorrow...
We also had a bad scare when we realized none of us had brought Anya inside from the car. She could have run away, gotten hit by a car, or been dognapped. But she was just hanging around, sniffing at things, waiting for us. What a great dog.
A friend was going to come over for dinner tonight, but when I went out about an hour before she was supposed to arrive, I found the roads really slick. She decided to try again tomorrow.
When we think of snow-clearing, the first thing that comes to mind is the snow-plow pushing the drifts aside. But for modern drivers, the iciness of the road is at least as important. Losing traction on the roads is in someways scarier than being stuck. The couple of times I've hit black ice and totally lost control are among the most terrifying moments of my driving career, only really breached by the actual collisions with deer and other cars. Yes, collisions. I've only been at fault once, I think, but I've had more than my share of run-ins with other drivers who happened to be having lapses right at that moment.
Winter is a bad time to have a lapse, and especially winter with a coating of frozen water on the road. I notice a little extra focus kicking in, as driving a car becomes just a little more like steering a boat. Response time suddenly lengthens, and whatever move you make with steering wheel or brakes loses the suddenness you've become used to.
No wonder we use so much salt on our roads. And it's only been since automotive traffic began to dominate after World War I that we've tried to keep city streets clear down to the surface. Well, that's not totally fair. The real start to to-the-ground snowclearing was the street car (horse-driven), which had to keep the rails clear. There were some lines that experimented with putting sleigh tracks on horse-cars in winter, but by and large it was individuals who used sleighs, while the bigger public cars remained resolutely on rails, in whatever weather got thrown at them.
But salting... salting is another story. It's only when we began to depend on traction between rubber tires and pavement that people really went to town with combinations of salt, sand and cinders. It's a combination cities continue to negotiate: salt pollutes, sand and cinders create a mess to clean up after things melt, and whatever happens it's the city that gets blamed.
Ice is dangerous for everyone, wheeled or no. I've know a bunch of people who have suffered really serious injuries from falling on the ice: fractures, major muscle tears, sprains that needed crutches... tailbones, legs, arms all are at risk. Even with a mild snowfall on mostly-cleared sidewalks, the less than an inch of snow this afternoon concealed some slippery bits that almost took me down in that mile and a half to get home.
But why is that anyone's fault but my own? If I had the right shoes, with spikes or ice grabby things, like what my wife wears to go running on ice, I'd be fine. If we had cars with treads and ice brakes, like snowmobiles, we'd be fine too, not plowing down to pavement. It's that our technology has been built on one kind of pavement, and we've decided to depend on that kind of pavement being maintained, rather than adapting ourselves and our technology to what happens every dang winter.
Time to put on the boots. Then again, this will probably all melt tomorrow. So never mind.
We also had a bad scare when we realized none of us had brought Anya inside from the car. She could have run away, gotten hit by a car, or been dognapped. But she was just hanging around, sniffing at things, waiting for us. What a great dog.
A friend was going to come over for dinner tonight, but when I went out about an hour before she was supposed to arrive, I found the roads really slick. She decided to try again tomorrow.
When we think of snow-clearing, the first thing that comes to mind is the snow-plow pushing the drifts aside. But for modern drivers, the iciness of the road is at least as important. Losing traction on the roads is in someways scarier than being stuck. The couple of times I've hit black ice and totally lost control are among the most terrifying moments of my driving career, only really breached by the actual collisions with deer and other cars. Yes, collisions. I've only been at fault once, I think, but I've had more than my share of run-ins with other drivers who happened to be having lapses right at that moment.
Winter is a bad time to have a lapse, and especially winter with a coating of frozen water on the road. I notice a little extra focus kicking in, as driving a car becomes just a little more like steering a boat. Response time suddenly lengthens, and whatever move you make with steering wheel or brakes loses the suddenness you've become used to.
No wonder we use so much salt on our roads. And it's only been since automotive traffic began to dominate after World War I that we've tried to keep city streets clear down to the surface. Well, that's not totally fair. The real start to to-the-ground snowclearing was the street car (horse-driven), which had to keep the rails clear. There were some lines that experimented with putting sleigh tracks on horse-cars in winter, but by and large it was individuals who used sleighs, while the bigger public cars remained resolutely on rails, in whatever weather got thrown at them.
But salting... salting is another story. It's only when we began to depend on traction between rubber tires and pavement that people really went to town with combinations of salt, sand and cinders. It's a combination cities continue to negotiate: salt pollutes, sand and cinders create a mess to clean up after things melt, and whatever happens it's the city that gets blamed.
Ice is dangerous for everyone, wheeled or no. I've know a bunch of people who have suffered really serious injuries from falling on the ice: fractures, major muscle tears, sprains that needed crutches... tailbones, legs, arms all are at risk. Even with a mild snowfall on mostly-cleared sidewalks, the less than an inch of snow this afternoon concealed some slippery bits that almost took me down in that mile and a half to get home.
But why is that anyone's fault but my own? If I had the right shoes, with spikes or ice grabby things, like what my wife wears to go running on ice, I'd be fine. If we had cars with treads and ice brakes, like snowmobiles, we'd be fine too, not plowing down to pavement. It's that our technology has been built on one kind of pavement, and we've decided to depend on that kind of pavement being maintained, rather than adapting ourselves and our technology to what happens every dang winter.
Time to put on the boots. Then again, this will probably all melt tomorrow. So never mind.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Sleep - January 13, 2012
I'm up late again. I walked Anya early, so we could all go and see Daniel's school Martin Luther King Day performance. It's cold, about the same as the last few days, maybe less windier.
It's harder to get us up in the mornings; we've adapted to the late darkness, even as it slowly begins to lighten. It's tempting to say something trite about natural rhythms, but we've been pushing the bounds of darkness=sleep for millennia. Dairy farmers, for example, have to go out and milk their cows long before it feels like a good idea.
And so getting up early is promoted as a virtue. So I guess I'm a wicked individual, blogging at 1 am. But I have the tool, my electric lightbulb, to work just fine until my body finally gives in, right about now. And it's not just the lightbulb; we've had kerosene, gaslight, candelight, hearthlight, and the urge to stay up late and tell stories and sing songs and chat and not go to sleep, for a long, long time. The urge has always been there. We just have better tools to enable that urge.
I wonder if some of my friends who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (the winter blues), are really better adapted to the real annual cycle: why not shut down for a long winter's nap in winter? Why not just hibernate for the winter? I imagine that's a lot of what went on in isolated farms in snowbound climates, back before electricity and snowplows and internet connections. Why fight it, except for the fact that we humans always want to fight it.
It's harder to get us up in the mornings; we've adapted to the late darkness, even as it slowly begins to lighten. It's tempting to say something trite about natural rhythms, but we've been pushing the bounds of darkness=sleep for millennia. Dairy farmers, for example, have to go out and milk their cows long before it feels like a good idea.
Elsie Marley's grown so fine
She wont get up to feed the swine
But lies abed 'til eight or nine
Lazy Elsie Marley!
Early to bed, early to rise,
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
And so getting up early is promoted as a virtue. So I guess I'm a wicked individual, blogging at 1 am. But I have the tool, my electric lightbulb, to work just fine until my body finally gives in, right about now. And it's not just the lightbulb; we've had kerosene, gaslight, candelight, hearthlight, and the urge to stay up late and tell stories and sing songs and chat and not go to sleep, for a long, long time. The urge has always been there. We just have better tools to enable that urge.
I wonder if some of my friends who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (the winter blues), are really better adapted to the real annual cycle: why not shut down for a long winter's nap in winter? Why not just hibernate for the winter? I imagine that's a lot of what went on in isolated farms in snowbound climates, back before electricity and snowplows and internet connections. Why fight it, except for the fact that we humans always want to fight it.
Lost Days - January 12, 2012
[written late at night, January 13]
I missed yesterday's blog post, from working until very late at the office. And now, a day later, I can't remember what to write. It was cold and windy, and Ingrid took Anya to the dog park. She was there an hour or so, and came back chilled.
They say sometimes "the days all run together," but that's only really true in retrospect. You may forget what day of the week it is, but it's never in any doubt that it's now, and that you need to do the next thing that's needed, even if it's something you do day in, day out. It's the fact of habit that makes the days run together, so I have to think hard, even half-a-day later, about what made walking the dog this morning different form yesterday morning.
We have an infestation of fruit flies this week. That makes this week distinctive, I suppose. If I lived outside more, it would be the week real January weather came back. Is there a difference between weather or fruit flies? Does the comparative unchangingness of the shape and color of our kitchen make the distinctiveness of fruit flies stand out more than variations in an always-varying outdoors landscape?
I missed yesterday's blog post, from working until very late at the office. And now, a day later, I can't remember what to write. It was cold and windy, and Ingrid took Anya to the dog park. She was there an hour or so, and came back chilled.
They say sometimes "the days all run together," but that's only really true in retrospect. You may forget what day of the week it is, but it's never in any doubt that it's now, and that you need to do the next thing that's needed, even if it's something you do day in, day out. It's the fact of habit that makes the days run together, so I have to think hard, even half-a-day later, about what made walking the dog this morning different form yesterday morning.
We have an infestation of fruit flies this week. That makes this week distinctive, I suppose. If I lived outside more, it would be the week real January weather came back. Is there a difference between weather or fruit flies? Does the comparative unchangingness of the shape and color of our kitchen make the distinctiveness of fruit flies stand out more than variations in an always-varying outdoors landscape?
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Wind Chill - Januay 11, 2012
How cold was it out at the dog park at 6pm? My car Thermometer said 18°F, but my only-somewhat-exposed skin said it was much colder. We did not stay long.
How do they calculate wind chill, anyway? The earliest attempt to quantify the effect of wind on perceived temperature was made by Paul Allman Siple and Charles Passel, of the United States Antarctic Service Expedition of 1939–1941. They put water in a plastic tube near an anemometer (wind speed gauge) and measured freeze time. The first wind chill formula was in terms of watts per square meter as a unit of atmospheric cooling: how many watts of energy are transferred to the atmosphere per square meter of surface at a given temperature and wind speed. (Watts per square meter is also the measurement unit for insolation, which is the measure of solar energy available at any given location).
So how did we get to the modern “equivalent degrees” thing (temperature of 18°F, wind chill of [monstrously cold-sounding number here]°F)? This is something of a controversial thing, because of course level of activity, type of clothing, and effect of solar heating, all affect how cold it feels. So sticklers for accuracy prefer the old watts/square meter measurement, where (for example) a heat loss of 400 W/m2is the equivalent of a still temperature of -4°F or -20°C. Which is easier for you to understand? (cf article from the Canadian Encyclopedia)
And yet Ingrid went running in the same windchill for an hour just before I took Anya, and in the same general location, and her physical activity and insulating clothing meant it was uncomfortable only on her exposed cheeks, nearly as unpleasant as my sauntering along with Anya. So pish posh on the windchill table.
And yet... windchill itself is real. We experience wind as adding to our experience of cold. We want to measure cold as an absolute, but our experience of it is much more personal. Not even "subjective" in the sense of it being a matter of personal attitude; I mean each of us has our own metabolism, body shape, level of activity, expectation, and so on, and all these physiological factors affect how our bodies move and generate heat.
Our experience of the cold outdoors is individual, even if the outdoors itself is the same temperature for all of us.
How do they calculate wind chill, anyway? The earliest attempt to quantify the effect of wind on perceived temperature was made by Paul Allman Siple and Charles Passel, of the United States Antarctic Service Expedition of 1939–1941. They put water in a plastic tube near an anemometer (wind speed gauge) and measured freeze time. The first wind chill formula was in terms of watts per square meter as a unit of atmospheric cooling: how many watts of energy are transferred to the atmosphere per square meter of surface at a given temperature and wind speed. (Watts per square meter is also the measurement unit for insolation, which is the measure of solar energy available at any given location).
So how did we get to the modern “equivalent degrees” thing (temperature of 18°F, wind chill of [monstrously cold-sounding number here]°F)? This is something of a controversial thing, because of course level of activity, type of clothing, and effect of solar heating, all affect how cold it feels. So sticklers for accuracy prefer the old watts/square meter measurement, where (for example) a heat loss of 400 W/m2is the equivalent of a still temperature of -4°F or -20°C. Which is easier for you to understand? (cf article from the Canadian Encyclopedia)
And yet Ingrid went running in the same windchill for an hour just before I took Anya, and in the same general location, and her physical activity and insulating clothing meant it was uncomfortable only on her exposed cheeks, nearly as unpleasant as my sauntering along with Anya. So pish posh on the windchill table.
And yet... windchill itself is real. We experience wind as adding to our experience of cold. We want to measure cold as an absolute, but our experience of it is much more personal. Not even "subjective" in the sense of it being a matter of personal attitude; I mean each of us has our own metabolism, body shape, level of activity, expectation, and so on, and all these physiological factors affect how our bodies move and generate heat.
Our experience of the cold outdoors is individual, even if the outdoors itself is the same temperature for all of us.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Ant paths - Janury 10, 2012
Another remarkably unremarkable day of dog walking: apparently we set a record for the day's high, someone told me. The old record was 37°F and today was 52°F. Whatever, it was positively tropical for January. Apparently we're in for a return to something approaching normal tomorrow, with snow, and Thursday will have a high of 15°F. So that's all right then.
I walked back to the office after lunch with Tom at the house, and then home from the office after dark. I have only a few regular routes, really only six variants I regularly use. Maybe seven. But there are probably a hundred possible variants I could take in the three blocks over, 10 blocks down grid I need to cross to get from work to here.
Something similar is true for getting Daniel to school. That one I do experiment with a lot, with maybe ten different variables... but some of them I just never use, for not other reason than force of habit.
If you want to snare a rabbit, or really almost any animal, you find its little, regular track in the fields or forest. Probably every land animal that isn't migratory has them: formed originally as the easiest way around obstacles, and eventually forming their own little network of paths. They say Boston's original street grid was formed by cow paths. Probably apocryphal, but believable.
Isn't it odd, though: even when we live within a semi-rational, orthogonal street grid (I say semi-rational, because I cross 18 1/2 Street on the way to the office...), we still form our own cattle paths on top of that grid.
I walked back to the office after lunch with Tom at the house, and then home from the office after dark. I have only a few regular routes, really only six variants I regularly use. Maybe seven. But there are probably a hundred possible variants I could take in the three blocks over, 10 blocks down grid I need to cross to get from work to here.
Something similar is true for getting Daniel to school. That one I do experiment with a lot, with maybe ten different variables... but some of them I just never use, for not other reason than force of habit.
If you want to snare a rabbit, or really almost any animal, you find its little, regular track in the fields or forest. Probably every land animal that isn't migratory has them: formed originally as the easiest way around obstacles, and eventually forming their own little network of paths. They say Boston's original street grid was formed by cow paths. Probably apocryphal, but believable.
Isn't it odd, though: even when we live within a semi-rational, orthogonal street grid (I say semi-rational, because I cross 18 1/2 Street on the way to the office...), we still form our own cattle paths on top of that grid.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Eat In Your Car - January 9, 2012
Another April day in January. Apparently it will turn cold with some chance of actual snow in a couple of days, but in the meantime, these sunny days with highs in the 40s are just kind of surreal. Or like winter in much of the rest of the country.
Me and my son and Anya ended up eating Subway sandwiches in the car for supper. We were parked in the lot at HarMar Mall in Roseville, while Ingrid got some swimming in. Next to us was a minivan with a family doing the same thing, while the kids in the back seat watched something on the TV.
It used to be quite a thing to have a TV in the back of your limousine, along with the fridge and wet bar. Well, actually the last part is still quite a thing, because you need to have a hard separation between the driver and an open bottle... but the creep of stuff into the driving life hasn't come from the luxury end of things, I expect, as much as from the needs of both families with children, and professionals, who end up in the car for much of their day.
In the Wikipedia article on carputers, it notes their prevalence in police vehicles, and this makes sense: emergency vehicles in general benefit from having more robust information systems available both en route to an emergency, and once on the scene. I remember early episodes of Emergency!, the 1970's show about paramedics, were greatly concerned with how to make medicine by radio work: what do you do when you're out of range? Now, more and more, it's not the communication that's the issue, it's the formatting and organization of the huge amount of information you can both deliver and access remotely that are the issue...
Fifty years ago, it was a novelty to take the car to a drive-in and watch a movie, listening to the soundtrack on a tinny speaker that hung on your window. Now, well...
Does where we watch entertainment matter? People tend to talk about mass media vs individual or local expression, but does the scale of audience experience maybe matter as least as much as how big a net total audience any given production has? This is one of the features of television as opposed to theatrical cinema or live theater: while the entertainment product is distributed to an enormous audience, each of those audiences is quite small, and tends to duplicate existing, mostly comfortable social networks: the family, the buddies watching the game, the kids watching Sesame Street.
One question I'd like to address as this year goes on is, when we take our place-to-place movement out of the public sphere—when we watch TV while we eat dinner in a car with people we know, instead if in a restaurant surrounded by strangers, for instance—how does that affect our view of the wider world. Do we end up with a smaller world, even as the amount of world we can access remotely, increases?
Me and my son and Anya ended up eating Subway sandwiches in the car for supper. We were parked in the lot at HarMar Mall in Roseville, while Ingrid got some swimming in. Next to us was a minivan with a family doing the same thing, while the kids in the back seat watched something on the TV.
It used to be quite a thing to have a TV in the back of your limousine, along with the fridge and wet bar. Well, actually the last part is still quite a thing, because you need to have a hard separation between the driver and an open bottle... but the creep of stuff into the driving life hasn't come from the luxury end of things, I expect, as much as from the needs of both families with children, and professionals, who end up in the car for much of their day.
In the Wikipedia article on carputers, it notes their prevalence in police vehicles, and this makes sense: emergency vehicles in general benefit from having more robust information systems available both en route to an emergency, and once on the scene. I remember early episodes of Emergency!, the 1970's show about paramedics, were greatly concerned with how to make medicine by radio work: what do you do when you're out of range? Now, more and more, it's not the communication that's the issue, it's the formatting and organization of the huge amount of information you can both deliver and access remotely that are the issue...
Fifty years ago, it was a novelty to take the car to a drive-in and watch a movie, listening to the soundtrack on a tinny speaker that hung on your window. Now, well...
Does where we watch entertainment matter? People tend to talk about mass media vs individual or local expression, but does the scale of audience experience maybe matter as least as much as how big a net total audience any given production has? This is one of the features of television as opposed to theatrical cinema or live theater: while the entertainment product is distributed to an enormous audience, each of those audiences is quite small, and tends to duplicate existing, mostly comfortable social networks: the family, the buddies watching the game, the kids watching Sesame Street.
One question I'd like to address as this year goes on is, when we take our place-to-place movement out of the public sphere—when we watch TV while we eat dinner in a car with people we know, instead if in a restaurant surrounded by strangers, for instance—how does that affect our view of the wider world. Do we end up with a smaller world, even as the amount of world we can access remotely, increases?
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Seasons - January 8, 2012
It was another day up in the low 40s °F. I took Anya to the dog park and for a couple walks. It was beautiful, so of course I spent the day doing a little deep cleaning...
Why do we call this a season? Why is this winter? I've gotten so used to thinking of seasons as beginning on the Equinoxes and Solstices, that I was happy to discover that there are alternate seasons used by other groups: there's meteorological seasons, which (since Roman times) have been declared as beginning on the first of December, March, June and September. These make more sense. So does the Celtic and East Asian traditional seasons, which are reckoned (approximately) from the cross quarter days, halfway between the solstices and equinoxes: Samhain, around November 1, is the beginning of winter; Imholc, around February 1, is the beginning of spring; Beltane, around May 1, is the beginning of summer; and Lughnasa, around August 1, is the beginning of fall.
But these don't really reflect Minnesota's "typical" weather, at least how I think of it. The first snowfall that really sticks, it seems to me, falls close to Thanksgiving, and snowcover is the real mark of winter. OK, maybe not this year, but usually. Historically. Then, it doesn't really feel like spring until you see buds and growing things. So somewhere around the first of April. Summer is when you're done planting, which really should be around Memorial Day. Autumn is harder: Labor Day is such a marker in terms of summer vacation, it's hard to resist as a marker, but seeing the leaves start to turn, somewhere around mid-September is maybe a more appropriate point. So, we have uneven seasons: two-month springs, three-and-a-half month summers, two-and-a-half month falls, and winters so long you just want to die.
I was interested to see the idea of ecological seasons, based on broad growing patterns in temperate regions (in the northern hemisphere, of course):
And in Minnesota there are of course only two seasons: winter and road-construction season.
Why do we call this a season? Why is this winter? I've gotten so used to thinking of seasons as beginning on the Equinoxes and Solstices, that I was happy to discover that there are alternate seasons used by other groups: there's meteorological seasons, which (since Roman times) have been declared as beginning on the first of December, March, June and September. These make more sense. So does the Celtic and East Asian traditional seasons, which are reckoned (approximately) from the cross quarter days, halfway between the solstices and equinoxes: Samhain, around November 1, is the beginning of winter; Imholc, around February 1, is the beginning of spring; Beltane, around May 1, is the beginning of summer; and Lughnasa, around August 1, is the beginning of fall.
But these don't really reflect Minnesota's "typical" weather, at least how I think of it. The first snowfall that really sticks, it seems to me, falls close to Thanksgiving, and snowcover is the real mark of winter. OK, maybe not this year, but usually. Historically. Then, it doesn't really feel like spring until you see buds and growing things. So somewhere around the first of April. Summer is when you're done planting, which really should be around Memorial Day. Autumn is harder: Labor Day is such a marker in terms of summer vacation, it's hard to resist as a marker, but seeing the leaves start to turn, somewhere around mid-September is maybe a more appropriate point. So, we have uneven seasons: two-month springs, three-and-a-half month summers, two-and-a-half month falls, and winters so long you just want to die.
I was interested to see the idea of ecological seasons, based on broad growing patterns in temperate regions (in the northern hemisphere, of course):
- Prevernal (ca.1 March–1 May)
- Vernal (ca.1 May–15 June)
- Estival (ca.15 June–15 August)
- Serotinal (ca.15 August–15 September)
- Autumnal (ca.15 September–1 November)
- Hibernal (ca.1 November–1 March
And in Minnesota there are of course only two seasons: winter and road-construction season.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
The Terror Time - January 7, 2012
I actually didn't walk Anya at all today; Ingrid took her to doggie day care, which she loves, at 9 this morning, and we picked her up at 7 this evening, and in the meantime we went out and did a bunch of fun things, pretty much all indoors. Well, all except Daniel's dance rehearsal, getting ready for a performance at Matthews Park in the Seward neighborhood in a couple weeks, outdoors in the middle of winter.
People have been making art in the winter outdoors for a long time; when snow is a novelty, we make snowmen and forts and snow sculpture. In the show of Japanese woodblock prints I saw this afternoon, there are pictures of tourists coming out to enjoy the snowy views in scenic spots near Edo or Kyoto, 200 years ago.
These days, Minnesota has Art Shanties (icehouses out on lakes with art), art-sled races, ice luminaries. We've had ice palaces, and there's ice sculpture... all to encourage us not to do what is so tempting when it actually does turn bone-chilling: stay huddled indoors.
And this really points to a change we've gone through over the last few centuries: By and large, people aren't really afraid of winter in the cities. Our fear is either immediate (of crashing into that snowplow with the patch of glare ice), or rooted in an old sense of danger, akin to the fear of wolves in the forest that was entirely legitimate 1000 years ago, but hasn't been an issue for centuries now... and yet, there it is embedded in our fairy tales, and unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
I'm struck by the shift in weather reports quoted in Snow in the Cities, which I'm reading now. Colonial-era narratives spend a lot of time equating bad weather with God's wrath, calling on repentence in the face of blizzards (though it turns out "blizzard" was a new word as of about 1880... who knew?). By the nineteenth century, though, weather was a natural menace, and a scientific approach was more widely accepted.
I want to know more about this balance between fear and enjoyment of inclement weather. I suspect it has as much to do with economics as anything. Ewan Macoll's song, "The Terror Time," about the part of late winter when food begins to run out, isn't about ancient times; it's about the traveling people of mid-20th century Scotland. Poor folk. And it will be true of anyone homeless today and without recourse: the cold brings misery and fear.
People have been making art in the winter outdoors for a long time; when snow is a novelty, we make snowmen and forts and snow sculpture. In the show of Japanese woodblock prints I saw this afternoon, there are pictures of tourists coming out to enjoy the snowy views in scenic spots near Edo or Kyoto, 200 years ago.
These days, Minnesota has Art Shanties (icehouses out on lakes with art), art-sled races, ice luminaries. We've had ice palaces, and there's ice sculpture... all to encourage us not to do what is so tempting when it actually does turn bone-chilling: stay huddled indoors.
And this really points to a change we've gone through over the last few centuries: By and large, people aren't really afraid of winter in the cities. Our fear is either immediate (of crashing into that snowplow with the patch of glare ice), or rooted in an old sense of danger, akin to the fear of wolves in the forest that was entirely legitimate 1000 years ago, but hasn't been an issue for centuries now... and yet, there it is embedded in our fairy tales, and unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
I'm struck by the shift in weather reports quoted in Snow in the Cities, which I'm reading now. Colonial-era narratives spend a lot of time equating bad weather with God's wrath, calling on repentence in the face of blizzards (though it turns out "blizzard" was a new word as of about 1880... who knew?). By the nineteenth century, though, weather was a natural menace, and a scientific approach was more widely accepted.
I want to know more about this balance between fear and enjoyment of inclement weather. I suspect it has as much to do with economics as anything. Ewan Macoll's song, "The Terror Time," about the part of late winter when food begins to run out, isn't about ancient times; it's about the traveling people of mid-20th century Scotland. Poor folk. And it will be true of anyone homeless today and without recourse: the cold brings misery and fear.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Unnatural - January 6, 2012
Anya romped in what remains of the snow at the park near my son's school. There was a golden retriever there named Jake, whom we've met before. I also took Anya to the dog park in the early afternoon. It was unnaturally warm for January, yet again, and will be for some time to come.
Why unnatural? We use that word to mean "not normal," as if nature should conform itself to norms we decide upon. I mean, yes, humans have begun seriously pushing the global temperature up, and so we will have more above "average" temeratures in our winters. But the actual weather, the warm-this-week-and-snow-on-Wednesday stuff, is a process we cannot do much of anything about, except get out of its way. It is the ultimate "natural" phenomenon — it does what it does because... that is what weather does by its nature.
What we humans do, when we get our act together, is try and see patterns. We identify seasons—I'm organizing this writing around those seasons. We detect fronts traveling across the landscape and expect precipitation. We figure out what is "normal" and make our plans accordingly. For example, in Minnesota, we plan to learn to ski in January—it's a pretty safe bet that that will be a good month for learning to ski. We get out our warm clothes.
And then it's freakishly warm. How dare the weather break its pattern! we mutter, as if that isn't exactly what the weather does most of the time.
In winter, our bodies want to slide off into a long hibernatory mode. Maybe this is the root of Seasonal Affective Disorder... When its dark, we don't want to just turn the lights on and behave the same. Yet, here I am at 1 am, writing a blog.
We create normal, and then we want to enforce it back on ourselves. We get up and go to school at the same time by the clock, not by the sun. We try and keep our houses at the same temperature year-round. This desire for an even keel is perhaps why we keep trying to make ourselves an inside world—we like to be able to return to "normal" at will.
But maybe a reliance on normal blinds us to when the underlying "natural" has changed...
Why unnatural? We use that word to mean "not normal," as if nature should conform itself to norms we decide upon. I mean, yes, humans have begun seriously pushing the global temperature up, and so we will have more above "average" temeratures in our winters. But the actual weather, the warm-this-week-and-snow-on-Wednesday stuff, is a process we cannot do much of anything about, except get out of its way. It is the ultimate "natural" phenomenon — it does what it does because... that is what weather does by its nature.
What we humans do, when we get our act together, is try and see patterns. We identify seasons—I'm organizing this writing around those seasons. We detect fronts traveling across the landscape and expect precipitation. We figure out what is "normal" and make our plans accordingly. For example, in Minnesota, we plan to learn to ski in January—it's a pretty safe bet that that will be a good month for learning to ski. We get out our warm clothes.
And then it's freakishly warm. How dare the weather break its pattern! we mutter, as if that isn't exactly what the weather does most of the time.
In winter, our bodies want to slide off into a long hibernatory mode. Maybe this is the root of Seasonal Affective Disorder... When its dark, we don't want to just turn the lights on and behave the same. Yet, here I am at 1 am, writing a blog.
We create normal, and then we want to enforce it back on ourselves. We get up and go to school at the same time by the clock, not by the sun. We try and keep our houses at the same temperature year-round. This desire for an even keel is perhaps why we keep trying to make ourselves an inside world—we like to be able to return to "normal" at will.
But maybe a reliance on normal blinds us to when the underlying "natural" has changed...
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Outhouses - January 5, 2012
It was no more than an hour and a half after I put down the computer and went to sleep. To be precise, it was 2:12 in the morning, according the alarm clock. And Anya needed to go out. Boy did she need to go out. It was an explosive event. Three rounds of ever-increasing liquidity.
Happily, whatever it was, it was over after one episode. I ended up walking Anya twice and taking her to the dog park, and it was a pleasant, high-30's kind of day: some sun, mostly hazy clouds. Perfectly pleasant to hang out at the park for half an hour.
It's not that long ago that most folks would have had to do what Anya did: go outside, even in the dead of winter, to relieve themselves. Outhouses were the norm in the USA until World War I. My dad grew up with one. My mom grew up in New York. For a time, they became a symbol of divides between city slickers and country hicks, or between posh and poverty. Now? they're a mildly-off-color source of humor. Unless you live with one.
I was involved about 15 years ago with renovations at the old Eclipse Grange in Thetford, Vermont, now the home of the Parish Players theater company. It had two attached pit toilets, and boy were opinions divided when it came time to decide what to do with them. For some, they were the symbol of all that was real and earthy about the theater out in the country. For others, they stank even with liberal applications of lime. And in midwinter, the draft went right up... well, it was uncomfortable.
I think they ended up with composting toilets. Or maybe they hooked up with the limited septic system available to them behind the theater. I don't remember.
So indoor plumbing was one of the last pieces of our Great Indoors to fall into place, most of all because we really don't want the smell of feces in our house. Heck, we don't even want it in our trash... I make a point of putting the bags of poop Anya deposits in the park trash barrel instead of our covered trashcan. Whether it's through the technology of diaper pails, the tight seal and ventilation that keeps sewer gases from rising back into our toilets, or all the various chemicals and additives people put into their toilet (whether that toilet is pit or flush), we are willing to put out a lot of effort, and to take ourselves out back if necessary, to not live with the stench.
Happily, whatever it was, it was over after one episode. I ended up walking Anya twice and taking her to the dog park, and it was a pleasant, high-30's kind of day: some sun, mostly hazy clouds. Perfectly pleasant to hang out at the park for half an hour.
It's not that long ago that most folks would have had to do what Anya did: go outside, even in the dead of winter, to relieve themselves. Outhouses were the norm in the USA until World War I. My dad grew up with one. My mom grew up in New York. For a time, they became a symbol of divides between city slickers and country hicks, or between posh and poverty. Now? they're a mildly-off-color source of humor. Unless you live with one.
I was involved about 15 years ago with renovations at the old Eclipse Grange in Thetford, Vermont, now the home of the Parish Players theater company. It had two attached pit toilets, and boy were opinions divided when it came time to decide what to do with them. For some, they were the symbol of all that was real and earthy about the theater out in the country. For others, they stank even with liberal applications of lime. And in midwinter, the draft went right up... well, it was uncomfortable.
I think they ended up with composting toilets. Or maybe they hooked up with the limited septic system available to them behind the theater. I don't remember.
So indoor plumbing was one of the last pieces of our Great Indoors to fall into place, most of all because we really don't want the smell of feces in our house. Heck, we don't even want it in our trash... I make a point of putting the bags of poop Anya deposits in the park trash barrel instead of our covered trashcan. Whether it's through the technology of diaper pails, the tight seal and ventilation that keeps sewer gases from rising back into our toilets, or all the various chemicals and additives people put into their toilet (whether that toilet is pit or flush), we are willing to put out a lot of effort, and to take ourselves out back if necessary, to not live with the stench.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Animal logic - January 4, 2012
It was pleasant enough, a little warmer this morning. It got back above freezing late afternoon. I walked to work along Central Avenue, which his loud and not especially pleasant, but has the advantage in winter of being more regularly clceared of snow and ice. A lot of residential sidewalks on the side-streets way I like to go, are hazardous. Anya pulls hard when she wants to go somewhere, and I've almoat lost my balance a few times on icy streets and sidwalks trying to keep her under control.
Like the dog cares about any of this. Our animals, pet or livestock, respond to weather so as to maximize their comfort and increase the likelihood of their survival. That's it. If they're sociall animals and are bonded with another animal, they may try and help him or her. But climate change? It gets hotter, you deal. Or you die, depending on how well youu deal. Weather is what there is, and you deal with it in the here and now.
Is thisrally anadvatage for us humans who see cycles and patterns and try and planfor them? I some sense, of course, it means we can plan and strategize on a much longer time frame than any other animal. But it also means we can paralyze ourselves with the horrible scenarios we can imagine.
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People living in the cold north often used to sleep above their livesock. It was more fragrant, but it used the free heat the cows and horses and sheep and goats gave off. The livestock were happy of a warm shelter.
People talk about dogs evolving as companioins and guards, and about humans domesticating cattle as an easier way of getting protein than hunting. But what abut winter? Is it possible we domesticated aimals to keep us warm? Our cat thinks so. She also doesn't care, because she's asleep on my wife's foot.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Commuting - January 3, 2012
I didn't walk the dog today, or take her to the dog park. Ingrid took the whole shebang. I just did the kid logistics (mostly) and went to work.
I said when I started this project that walking the dog has made me really pay attention to the weather... but then so did walking to work. I live about 1.5 miles from the office, and walk there pretty often. Less often in the dead of winter, if I'm honest about it.
This used to be the way of it for almost everyone. Only the wealthiest could afford a coach and pair, and few could afford even to find a place for their horse to graze during the workday.
Our house, in fact, was built to house the railroad workers in the railyards behind us, who to a man walked to work every day. The whole row of houses down our street was built for railroad employees; the superintendent and his assistant have the nice houses a couple blocks down; ours were more utilitarian, a row of plain frame houses set close together.
The streetcar, which came this far north certainly changed a lot of the geography of work vs home—it also allowed the kind of physical separation of work areas we take for granted now. It's kind of a novelty these days to find a family living upstairs from a family business in an American city. Less so in the country, but even there, the old model of living in the house out back of the service station/diner/bar is fading. We are pretty thoroughly accustomed to commuting.
It's this kind of accustomizing I think may lie at the heart of what this project is about. We've become used to a life indoors, whether those doors open onto our house, our car, our work, or the stores where we do our shopping. Walking on a daily rounds, without any real alternative, is generally uncommon.
I snag rides home, and I drive to work as part of our calculus of getting things done—tt takes me half an hour to walk to work and 5 minutes to drive there. If I'm feeling pressured on time, that 25 minutes each way makes a difference.
But the time I spend walking is seldom wasted. It's a great place to sift thoughts and ideas, touch base with my neighborhood, and, as with dog-walking, remember I live in a world bigger than the walls I spend most of my time inside of.
I said when I started this project that walking the dog has made me really pay attention to the weather... but then so did walking to work. I live about 1.5 miles from the office, and walk there pretty often. Less often in the dead of winter, if I'm honest about it.
This used to be the way of it for almost everyone. Only the wealthiest could afford a coach and pair, and few could afford even to find a place for their horse to graze during the workday.
Our house, in fact, was built to house the railroad workers in the railyards behind us, who to a man walked to work every day. The whole row of houses down our street was built for railroad employees; the superintendent and his assistant have the nice houses a couple blocks down; ours were more utilitarian, a row of plain frame houses set close together.
The streetcar, which came this far north certainly changed a lot of the geography of work vs home—it also allowed the kind of physical separation of work areas we take for granted now. It's kind of a novelty these days to find a family living upstairs from a family business in an American city. Less so in the country, but even there, the old model of living in the house out back of the service station/diner/bar is fading. We are pretty thoroughly accustomed to commuting.
It's this kind of accustomizing I think may lie at the heart of what this project is about. We've become used to a life indoors, whether those doors open onto our house, our car, our work, or the stores where we do our shopping. Walking on a daily rounds, without any real alternative, is generally uncommon.
I snag rides home, and I drive to work as part of our calculus of getting things done—tt takes me half an hour to walk to work and 5 minutes to drive there. If I'm feeling pressured on time, that 25 minutes each way makes a difference.
But the time I spend walking is seldom wasted. It's a great place to sift thoughts and ideas, touch base with my neighborhood, and, as with dog-walking, remember I live in a world bigger than the walls I spend most of my time inside of.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Snowplows - January 2, 2012
It was coooold today. First time it's been really properly cold for a long while. It was 15°F this morning when I woke up, and 15°F at 3:30 when I left Sandstone MN to come back home after a day up there. The hound absolutely loved it: romping and bouncing and just ecstatic. It's a little sad we couldn't get her to the dogpark today, but we couldn't quite manage it.
The side streets are all sheets of ice. The snow that fell the night before last, fell on above-freezing surfaces, and was the leading edge of a cold front that froze all the resulting meltwater solid. It's treacherous out there. Even walking across the street with Anya I need to be careful she doesn't bounce be right onto my behind.
People haven't been clearing roads with snowplows forever. The National Snow and Ice Data Center wrote an interesting piece about plowing's history in the US in 1997: The first snowplow patent was 1840, and for a long time the main function of snow plows was to smooth lanes for sleighs, or clear the way for trolleys.
It wasn't until the 1920's and the growing dominance of the automobile that cities began to seriously salt and plow streets. But once they started, that quickly became the norm. In Katy and the Big Snow, for example—written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton in 1943 and based on the Gloucester, MA snowplows—the semi-personified plow feels like an old friend, though it was probably not much more than a decade old when the book was published. (There's a video of the book's illustrations with an original score here)
Now? Now we just assume everything will get plowed out, after all but the most trivial snows, and quickly after all but the most monstrous blizzards.
I am fascinated by what I've heard anecdotally about Houghton, Michigan, home to Michigan Tech. I understand a lot of people snowmobile into work in the winter, enough so they have a dedicated snowmobile lot. Do they do this in Murmansk, I wonder? Helsinki? What's the biggest city that just gives up and puts chains on everyone's wheels?
The side streets are all sheets of ice. The snow that fell the night before last, fell on above-freezing surfaces, and was the leading edge of a cold front that froze all the resulting meltwater solid. It's treacherous out there. Even walking across the street with Anya I need to be careful she doesn't bounce be right onto my behind.
People haven't been clearing roads with snowplows forever. The National Snow and Ice Data Center wrote an interesting piece about plowing's history in the US in 1997: The first snowplow patent was 1840, and for a long time the main function of snow plows was to smooth lanes for sleighs, or clear the way for trolleys.
It wasn't until the 1920's and the growing dominance of the automobile that cities began to seriously salt and plow streets. But once they started, that quickly became the norm. In Katy and the Big Snow, for example—written and illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton in 1943 and based on the Gloucester, MA snowplows—the semi-personified plow feels like an old friend, though it was probably not much more than a decade old when the book was published. (There's a video of the book's illustrations with an original score here)
Now? Now we just assume everything will get plowed out, after all but the most trivial snows, and quickly after all but the most monstrous blizzards.
I am fascinated by what I've heard anecdotally about Houghton, Michigan, home to Michigan Tech. I understand a lot of people snowmobile into work in the winter, enough so they have a dedicated snowmobile lot. Do they do this in Murmansk, I wonder? Helsinki? What's the biggest city that just gives up and puts chains on everyone's wheels?
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Drafty castles - January 1, 2012
It was cold today: down in the 20°s with a fierce wind from the north. Anya and I snuck out for a walk this morning, and then we went over to the dog park. Both times, she ran around like a maniac. Clearly this is her weather...
It really was the wind that made it miserable today. At the dog park, standing in the lee of anything was tolerable, but walking west-northwest was downright painful. It really showed how much of a component wind is when we're thinking about the experience of cold.
When we bought this house in 2001, it was uninsulated. After a couple winters, we had new windows put in (just the inside portion, not the storm windows) and blew cellulose insulation into the walls. Even more than the general improvement of warmth, we noticed the sudden lack of a draft in the room when the wind blew outside in winter.
It's a cliché (but one based on truth) that old stone houses in Europe, especially stone castles, are "cold and drafty," which is partly why tapestries were such an essential part of premodern castle life. But those drafts were also necessary given that the heating was entirely through burnt wood and peat—not in a single remote furnace like we use now, but in a fireplace in each room that needed heat (and imagine life before the fireplace and chimney became common in the sixteenth century).
So that legendary draftiness, which some of it may have been a byproduct of the construction materials, was also part of the design. When we had our new gas boiler put in a few years ago, we had to install an external vent... which now makes the basement significantly colder than it used to be.
The whole way we act and dress indoors changes when we can be snug and cozy. Draftiness affects basic health. Forget what your great-uncle said about being tough and just wearing more sweaters; a recent study shows residents of uninsulated houses missed work and school twice as much as residents of similar houses that were retrofitted with basic insulation, and had lower rates of respiratory conditions.
Why did it take so long, then, for insulation to become commonplace?
It really was the wind that made it miserable today. At the dog park, standing in the lee of anything was tolerable, but walking west-northwest was downright painful. It really showed how much of a component wind is when we're thinking about the experience of cold.
When we bought this house in 2001, it was uninsulated. After a couple winters, we had new windows put in (just the inside portion, not the storm windows) and blew cellulose insulation into the walls. Even more than the general improvement of warmth, we noticed the sudden lack of a draft in the room when the wind blew outside in winter.
It's a cliché (but one based on truth) that old stone houses in Europe, especially stone castles, are "cold and drafty," which is partly why tapestries were such an essential part of premodern castle life. But those drafts were also necessary given that the heating was entirely through burnt wood and peat—not in a single remote furnace like we use now, but in a fireplace in each room that needed heat (and imagine life before the fireplace and chimney became common in the sixteenth century).
So that legendary draftiness, which some of it may have been a byproduct of the construction materials, was also part of the design. When we had our new gas boiler put in a few years ago, we had to install an external vent... which now makes the basement significantly colder than it used to be.
The whole way we act and dress indoors changes when we can be snug and cozy. Draftiness affects basic health. Forget what your great-uncle said about being tough and just wearing more sweaters; a recent study shows residents of uninsulated houses missed work and school twice as much as residents of similar houses that were retrofitted with basic insulation, and had lower rates of respiratory conditions.
Why did it take so long, then, for insulation to become commonplace?
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