Author: Laura Conrad

The Year of the Flood

This
book by Margaret Atwood is a post-apocalyptic novel set in
the same world as her 2003 Oryx
and Crake. I read that at the time it came out,
and don’t remember it well enough to comment on the
relationships, but I’m sure it illuminates two of the main
characters in that book. As well as providing several new
interesting characters.

One particularly well-written aspect of the book is the
description of the way the different locales (fast food
restaurant, religious commune, corporate enclave…) smell. For
instance, here’s Ren, one of the two main point of view
characters, shortly after she’s moved from the HealthWyzer
compound to the Gardeners’ community:

Rose-scented soap was the best. Bernice and me would take some home, and IÂ’d keep mine in my pillowcase, to drown out the mildew smell of my damp quilt.

(The quilt was mildewed because the Gardeners didn’t use
dryers.)

I recommended the book to a Vegan friend because it’s one of
the few works of literature I’ve run into where there are
vegetarian characters who really think about the relationship
between food and morality.

I enjoyed this one a lot. I don’t know whether it will replace
The
Handmaid’s Tale as my favorite, but I can certainly see
rereading it. And it made me want to reread Oryx and
Crake, too.

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Repulsion

I think this
movie was Roman
Polanski’s first movie in English. I’d say it’s a good one to
start with if you like arty European movies and don’t want to
bother with subtitles. And if you don’t mind movies about mental illness.

The most artful aspect of the movie is the urban sounds. The
beginning of the movie is largely the interaction of Carol, the
main character, played by Catherine deNeuve, who is going mad, and her sister and a
coworker, who have their problems but are dealing with them. The
sister is clearly irritated by the trolley bell which is very loud
in the apartment she and Carol share, but after it passes, she
forgets about it. Carol tenses when it stops, and remains tense,
and then tenses more when the next irritation comes.

Another aspect that’s well done is the way the apartment
looks. One of Carol’s hallucinations is that giant cracks are
opening up in the walls. Of course, there are cracks that should
be fixed; there are ornate plaster ceiling medallions that might well come
down…

Another very well done piece of acting is the smells. Of
course, even people like me who’ve just installed the latest in
home theater equipment don’t have smell-o-vision yet, but one of
the things that happens in this movie is that after her sister
leaves, Carol isn’t coping with anything at all. So she takes a
rabbit out of the refrigerator, and puts it down to answer the
phone, and never gets the ability to put it away. So of course it
attracts flies, which adds to the jangle of annoying sounds. But
after a while, everyone who comes into the apartment wrinkles
their nose in increasing horror, so you really do know how it smells.

If you don’t think too hard about the plot, this is a
remarkably good movie. Of course, someone who can’t put the
rabbit back in the refrigerator couldn’t really murder two
ordinarily fit men on the first try. So of course one of the
things to wonder about is whether that really happened, but if
not, why did the sister scream like that when she got home?

What version to watch

I put this on my Netflix list when the New York Times reviewed
the recent release of the Criterion edition. I have linked to the
blu-ray version, because that’s the one I watched, but I doubt
that this is a movie that particularly needs blu-ray. The extra
dots were probably good for watching plaster cracking, but the
sound (apparently originally in mono), was only mixed to stereo. So if you
don’t bother with director’s commentary (I didn’t), you may well be just as
well off with the $10
older transfer.

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Working the polls

Yesterday’s post was by time delay — I was actually working as
a Warden at a polling place.

There were two new issues the poll workers had to deal with.
One was that there was a sticker campaign by a popular incumbant
City Councillor. Some of her opponents were particularly anxious
that the rules about no electioneering within 150 feet of the
polling place entrance and no election materials within the
polling place be enforced. The rules about what happens outside
are really the responsibility of the police officer assigned to
the polling place, so that didn’t really affect me much,
although I did hear several reports of the rule being violated.
But I did have to be especially diligent about checking the voting
booths from time to time to see if anyone had left flyers or,
worse, stickers, in the voting booths. And we did get a number
of questions from voters who wanted to know the name of the
person running the writein campaign, which of course we weren’t
able to tell them. The election commission had decided that the
ballots with writeins should go in an auxilliary ballot box,
rather than being counted by the scanner, so there were
questions about why a ballot is going into the funny looking
box, too.

The other issue was that the Election Commissioner who
supervises my polling place had decided not to rehire two
women who have worked there for a number of years. There’s an
article about it in the Cambridge Chronicle.

The statement by one of the workers that there had never been
any problems wasn’t strictly true — she was someone who gets
crabby when she’s tired and makes unilateral (and
idiosyncratic) decisions about how
to do her job, and there had been complaints to this
commissioner both from the other workers and from voters. I
hadn’t been one of the people who complained, and my initial reaction
when the commissioner told me she hadn’t sent this person a card
was that I bet it was going to be more trouble not hiring her than
hiring her.

I didn’t see the person quoted in the article, but the other
worker does vote at my polling place, so when she came in to
vote on her lunch hour (both workers had ended up being hired at other polling places), we all told her we missed her. It was
true — this decision meant that there were two new people
working the checkin table, who had never worked a proportional
representation election before. I’m sure we had at least
twice as many spoiled ballots as we used to when these two women
were working the checkin table, because they had worked out a
short explanation that at least warned people they had to think
about how to fill in the ballot and not just put X’s next to the
names of the people they wanted to vote for.

But the new people were both fun, and caught on pretty fast,
and the fact that we didn’t have to count the writeins meant
that the closing paperwork was much easier than usual.

Bonnie’s keepsakes

In the course of cleaning out Bonnie’s house, of course I threw
out all kinds of stuff that would have been necessary if someone
wanted to write a biography of her.

Of course, if someone did want to do that they should have come
and taken all the stuff off my hands, and they didn’t.

I did take a small cedar box with some things she must have
wanted to save, mostly from college or before. I scanned three
letters from that box, so I’m posting them here mostly for her
friends. As far as I know, they’re from before any of her friends
that I ever met knew her.

I apologize for the orientations in the PDF,
and also for its size. Transcribing them was interesting for the
number of errors even highly literate people put up with in a
handwritten note.

Summer job

The last letter was from a woman who had hired her to cook for
her family for the summer of 1963. I think Bonnie did recall this
job fondly; I remember her mentioning the rowboat. She was 20
that year.

Bayberry Bluff
South Orleans, Mass.

July 20, 1963

Dear Mrs. Rogers,

Forgive me for not writing to you long before this to give
you word about Bonny. She is doing a most satisfactory job for
us, unfazed by the size of the family, a refrigerator too small
for the present situation and a gas oven whose regulator is
ailing and irreplacable [sic]. I gave her ample warning on all
these points, but she has handled the situation with composure
and always with a smile, which is a joy to me. And her meals
are so good always!

I hope she is enjoying her summer. We take her in the
sailboat which she seems to enjoy particularly and she takes
many shorter expeditions in the row boat and has one or more
daily swims. We are very glad that she wanted to come to
us.

With kind regards to you and your husband. I am yours
Sincerely,

Susan M. Brooks

Microbiology research

The other two are from Mary
Bunting, who was President of Radcliffe College when
Bonnie was there, but from these letters must also have been
teaching a microbiology course. I had no idea Bonnie was at
all interested in microbiology.

Both letters are postmarked 1962, so Bonnie would have been 18
in the Spring, and turned 19 in June.

PS. — I guess I’ll send you the actual data too.

Radcliffe College
Cambridge 38, Mass

Office of the President

Sunday 4/1

Dear Bonnie:

Your plates were beautiful! The VI series ran approx [table
omitted from transcription]
but there were no variants that I would wish to differentiate on any
plate. There weren’t even any that I would question — ie some
like the ones you showed me before. I gues [sic] they are
pretty rare except in old stock or other aging cultures.

There were some odd differences in size — ie — plates VI
9-12 had small colonies whereas VI 13 — 16 had very large
colonies.

Now What?

Have a good vacation! M.I.B.

Radcliffe College
Cambridge 38, Mass

Office of the President

5/31

Dear Bonni:

Thanks for the excellent report!

You’ve developed a great deal of scientific insight in one
year. It would mean a lot of study but you could do this stuff
if you wanted. In any event I think you have an appreciation of
the demands of investigation which will stand you in good
stead.

Its been nice to have you in class.

Sincerely
Mary I. Bunting

Overheard conversation

My next door neighbor has a 10 year old son, and they were
walking by my door the other day.

The son said, “I can’t wait to be grown up.”

The father asked, “Why’s that?”

The son said, “I want to be able to boss a kid around.”

I don’t think I ever would have put it that way, but I’m pretty
sure that’s exactly the way I felt at his age.

Plans for the month

I have the major pieces of what I’ve been meaning to do on the
websites done, although I’d still like to have better searching
for pieces on SerpentPublications.org
and better graphic design both places.

But the big thing that happens in the near future is a lot of
more “formal” entertaining than I do the rest of the year.
There’s the family Thanksgiving dinner, which happens at my place
and includes some friends who like having a family dinner but
their families are too far away. Then there’s the Christmas
party, which this year will probably be December 20, which is
usually the largest number of people in my apartment at one time.
And two months later, some time around February 25, is my birthday
party.

Because I have the band over every week, and we sit around
eating and drinking and socializing after the rehearsal, my public
rooms stay superficially more combobulated than they would
otherwise, but it’s still a good thing to get some real
housecleaning done this time of year.

So that’s what I’m planning to spend some of my copious spare
time on this month. There’s a woman who claims to do
environmentally friendly carpet cleaning that I might call, and I
could try to hang the handmade quilts I inherited from Bonnie, and
recover the chairs with stains or rips in their covers, and maybe
do something about the sofa cushions.

This is not to mention the upstairs cleaning. If I got rid of
all the obsolete or non-working computer junk, there might be room
to unfold the futon in the computer room. And I’d feel more like
brewing if the room the brewing stuff is stored in had the stuff
decreased or arranged better so that I could get to the stuff more
than 4 feet from the door.

Of course, housecleaning of any kind would be less difficult to
contemplate if my lungs weren’t still in reactive mode after that
cold I had a month ago. So maybe it will be the website
improvements that happen after all.

Carboy pictures

I thought I should have taken pictures to illustrate the cyser
making post a couple of days ago, so here they are.

[cyser carboy]

This is the cyser carboy, while I’m adding the extra honey.
This is two days after adding honey, and probably 5 days after
the cider was pressed.

[cider carboy]

This is the one-ingredient cider 5 days after pressing. The
bubbles are coming through the fermentation lock every 5 seconds or so.

Borrowed another ebook

This one’s even worse than the
first one from a usability standpoint.

The problem is that this one’s a PDF file, but instead of
reading it with one of the many excellent PDF readers in the
world (including Adobe’s), I still have to read it with Adobe
Digital Editions.

Adobe Digital Editions, instead of having menus across the top
with helpful items like “rotate screen”, and “go to full screen for
the text”, has buttons scattered around the part of the screen
that isn’t text. With the epub format, two of the buttons
enlarged and reduced the font size, but the PDF’s don’t reflow,
so all you can do is change the size of the text window. The
largest size I managed to get on my 14 inch laptop is readable,
but if I had an “enlarge font” button, I would still push it.
Especially if I were trying to read in bed, which I haven’t
bothered to do with this one.

On reading the epub book last week, I found myself wishing I
had a netbook, but with this one, I doubt that I would be able
to get a readable size of text, so this book would probably be
even less readable with a netbook.

It isn’t clear what the rationale for having some books in epub
format and some in PDF, but they seem to be about half and half,
so if there are only 108 books and half of them are unreadable,
that gives me even less incentive to buy another gadget.

I should mention that my eyes are a lot better than those of
most people my age. When I was younger I was unusually good at
reading fine print. Until I turned 40, I could read the
condensed Oxford English Dictionary without the magnifying
glass. Now I still don’t carry reading glasses
around with me, although in my home, I usually do have a pair
within reach. So if I can’t get a good font, there are a
lot of people in the world who can’t read the book even by squinting.

I think this is our tax dollars at work. It’s sad that people
whose job is to serve the public have so little concept of
how to implement technology to do that.

Cyser making

I don’t seem to have blogged about making cyser since 2006, but
I do still do it every year.

Last year I experimented and made three beverages from the
cider I bought at the ciderfest
and fermented them all on the wild yeasts from the Carlson Orchards
apples. It was reasonably successful, although none of them is
really ready to drink yet. (A year is a pretty short time for a
cyser, and should be OK for a cider, but it really tastes like the
slightly sulfurous quality in the one-ingredient cider is that
kind that goes away with age.)

So this year I’m making 3 gallons of the one-ingredient cider
(simplest recipe in the world — put the cider in a carboy and put
on a fermentation lock and forget about it for a few months, then
bottle) and 5 gallons of the cyser (almost as simple except that
you add between two and three pounds of honey for each gallon of
cider).

I still had about 8 pounds of the 20 pounds of honey I bought last year
from an apiary in Lowell in a Wort
Processors group buy. The hard part about making cyser if you
don’t buy the honey and the cider at the same time is that the
honey has crystalized, so you have to heat it gently to convince
it to turn back into a liquid so you can pour it intoyour
carboy.

Last year I skipped that step, and used a brewing bucket
instead of a carboy, and missed watching the liquid clear as the
yeas flocculates out. So this year I swore I was going to do it
right, so I spent half an hour or so this morning watching honey crystals
reliquify, and pushing the ones that hadn’t through the funnel
with a skewer.

I also have 10 pounds of honey that I bought yesterday from Mike Graney, which
would have been easier to use but I thought I should use the older
stuff first. I’ll add some of Mike’s honey when the krausen
(a thick layer of bubbles from actively fermenting yeast, which
usually disappears after a day or two) has gone down, but right
now I’m closer to the top of the carboy than I like to be.

How I like the surround sound

I promised to stop talking about the setup, so I won’t tell you
about the set of cables I just ordered from monoprice.com. Except to
mention that the solution to not having enough TOSLink sockets
is to get a TOSLink
switch. And that I’m still insecure on round 4 of ordering
cables whether I have enough of the right kind.

But I have had a chance to listen to a fair number of different
programs in surround sound, so I’ll tell you about what I’m
getting for the several hundred dollars I spent.

For just music recorded in stereo, it doesn’t really get you
much. The music still comes out of the stereo speakers, which
are still in the same place and the same quality.

For programs like movies and TV shows, it really does
make a difference, though, because the dialog is coming out of
the center channel, and the background music is coming out of
the other speakers, so it really does come through as
background, and doesn’t make the dialog hard to understand.

The FM radio is by default pushed through all the speakers, and
that’s a bit of a disadvantage for the way I use the radio,
because I have the volume down in the living room because of 5
speakers instead of two, but then when I go into the kitchen it
isn’t loud enough to hear.

And the sports programs really are a bit more exciting when you
feel surrounded by the crowd noise. I thought that was a bit
hokey when I first heard it, but now I miss it if I hit a
program like that which isn’t in surround.

I still haven’t listened to a real music DVD that’s been mixed
for surround sound. I moved the Werner Herzog Lohengrin up on
my Netflix queue, so I’ll let you know how that worked out.
There’s also a blu-ray Lohengrin, but I want to see what Herzog
does with it. I’ll tell you some time about the live production I saw
once — it’s an opera that needs a stage director.