Saturday, April 18, 2009

Poem for Saturday

From "The Permanent Collection"
By W.S. Merwin


In a rich provincial city there is a museum as imposing and quite as large as any in the capital. The façade is immense and the portico dwarfs the visitor, seeming to fill the space between his usual size and his shrunken self with an echo. . . . The entrance to the museum is guarded by wardens in plain dark uniforms without metal buttons or insignia of any kind. Inside the main portal is a vast hall, with another marble pedestal in the center, catching the light. It is empty, like those outside. In the walls on either side are tall niches, also containing nothing. Guards in the same featureless uniforms stand in pairs at each doorway, and at intervals along the corridors and in the arcades. There is a prescribed order for visiting the rooms, and the guards point the way. And in each room there are more of the large pedestals, without statues or names. In some, besides, there are glass display cases, of different shapes and sizes, empty, and picture frames containing blank canvas on the walls. All along the arcades there are empty niches and pedestals, alternating, and in each of the courtyards there is an empty fountain. No one talks. It takes well over an hour to make the tour of the rooms.

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The invitations are in the mail! As is the photo that we realized on Thursday night that we needed to mail on Friday or it wouldn't get to the temple by Monday so it can be printed in the temple bulletin, which required that I find an appropriate photo (Adam at Longwood Garden in "Peace, Love & Penguins" shirt from the Central Park Zoo -- he still had long hair in his school photo), upload it to CVS, retrieve it from CVS despite county idiots repainting crosswalk at 2 p.m. across both lanes of major intersection, requiring much hold-up of traffic, and take it to the post office with the invitations. Go me!

In the afternoon I wrote a review of "The Host" -- someone complained last week that I had pretty much the opposite opinion from popular Trek reviewer Jammer, and I looked this week and guess what, we have pretty much opposite opinions again. I fail as a fanboy! Adam was invited to a sleepover birthday party so we had to get a gift for the birthday boy, then we dropped him off on the way to dinner with my parents. In the evening we put on The Handmaid's Tale which I'd been meaning to rewatch since Natasha Richardson died...it isn't nearly as powerful as the book, but it's oddly less dated in some ways, too. Daniel likes dystopian fiction so I thought he might appreciate it.

This week's TheFridayFive: What is your favorite food from each food group?
1. Bread (Grain) Group:
Couscous
2. Meat (Protein) Group: Pistachios
3. Vegetable Group: Chick peas
4. Fruit Group: Blackberries
5. Sugars, Fats and Oils: Chocolate

This week's Fannish5: Five reasons you only get into one fandom at a time - or - five reasons you are multi-fannish. I'm going to go with mono-fannish, though I have always been known to cheat a bit, because I have...
1. Too little time.
2. Too little concentration.
3. Too little patience with fannish politics.
4. Too little interest in fandom for its own sake.
5. Too little forgiveness for bad writing/acting/producing.

Last week's Fannish5: Name 5 characters you think really need a hug. I am sure there are women who need a hug too, but unsurprisingly, women seem more likely to get a hug when they need one.
1. Alan Shore, Boston Legal
2. Derek Reese, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
3. Noah Bennet, Heroes
4. Davey Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean
5. The Phantom of the Opera


Longwood Gardens has an exhibit now called Nature's Castles, which are enormous treehouses.


Here is Dementordelta kissing a dragon on the steps of the Canopy Cathedral, inspired by a Norwegian church.


And here are Paul and the kids on the balcony of that two-story treehouse.


You can see Longwood's beautiful pond out its windows.


The trees in the Lookout Loft go right through the building, which was designed to surround them.


The Birdhouse is high in the trees of the Brandywine Valley woods.


Pierce du Pont's house is visible from these windows...


...while another window set in the floor provides views of the trees and plants from above.

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