We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress....

If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you know not to expect very much in the way of actual day to day narrative (or very much of a coherent narrative at all, for that matter). Still, from time to time, I do feel that it's my duty to say that, yes, life is fairly ordinary and settled here, yes, I'm actually working and teaching, and yes, mom, your grandkids still do exist...


For those of you that have been following the regular cast of characters, Zekey, for starters is now at the half dozen mark:



(and no, he's not in pain - just being goofy for the camera)



Jane and Zekey made an airplane cake for the party. (Note the carefully crafted Air China logo made of carefully sliced imported red licorice by yours truly, though Zekey swears that it looks more like China Southern...)



Xander and Zekey are often way too cool for their own good, often spouting off in Sichuan Chinese, starting their very own motorcycle gang and generally off on their own getting in trouble...



Just because Ysa has figured out this cute little smile, she thinks she can get away with anything:



Oh wait. She DOES get away with anything.

Jane has many involvements, including this stint as a professional custard taster...



And me? The duties of parenting weigh heavily on me - sometimes it's almost too much to bear the overwhelming weight of it all.

Oh, and speaking of Endangered Species...

I always used to like to look at bugs under glass. You know, the little shadow boxes that you can see at the State Fair with the way cool iridescent beetles that are as big as your fist? (Okay, they were at the Wisconsin State Fair about ten years ago, anyway...)

Then I ran into this booth in the Chatuchak Market in Bangkok...



The booth was about twenty by twenty feet, and was piled floor to ceiling with bugs in plastic. Framed bugs, encased bugs, mounted bugs, you name it. And underneath the display shelves, more and more stacks of boxes. Full of bugs.





Now, I'm no expert in the beetle keychain industry, but I've got to wonder - how sustainable is this, exactly...? And for what purpose? (Besides still looking cool in a creepy kind of State Fair science geek Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of way, that is.) And what will the archaeologists think a couple of thousand years from now? Ah, the dilemmas of our modern rain forest-straight-to-WalMart existence...

Fortunately, there will always be pictures of lenticular puppies once the beetles go extinct:

Scary stuff in my home town...

This photo, a randomly posted link off on the side of some web site or other, really caught my attention, even given all of the disasters and upheavals that have been going down in most of the world. I was even more surprised to see that it was taken in my home town of Chicago, and is apparently part of the filming of the new Transformers 3 movie.

So let me get this straight: basically, there are hundreds if not thousands of people that got together and spent untold millions of dollars to create the appearance of a disaster of epic proportions in an otherwise peaceful and prosperous city, in order to film it and show the results to millions more people worldwide, most of whom, I'm guessing, are boys between the ages of seven to sixteen. Dang, even when people are making stuff up, you can't make this kind of stuff up...

The Lost Thing

A cool story from Australia (or anywhere, I suppose) about a Lost Thing, finding Things, and... well, a great metaphor for many other Things as well. Oh, and lots of cool Things to look at in the meantime. Won the Oscar for best animated short, and totally deserves it...

American stories, from StoryCorps

The Icing on the Cake from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Worth checking out if you haven't already - StoryCorps, from National Public Radio in the US. If you don't know about them, they have been traveling around the country gathering stories from anyone that wants to record them for the last ten years or so. Their web site has lots of really great interviews of ordinary people talking about important moments in their lives.

The story above, about, among other things, a mom making a sacrifice so that her daughter could get an education, really resonates with my students, as many of them are in college only because their parents have migrated to the big cities in the east of China to find jobs to support their families. I'll probably be showing more of these, as they are a pretty good window into American culture, and what connects us as humans in general...

The stories we miss

Don't know if I've mentioned it, but this semester, I've been teaching the theme of telling stories, with the aim of getting a web site with my students' stories, and others, on it up and running. We're on our way to making... well, something anyway, and I'll put up a link to what we've got in the next month or two. In the meantime, you may start to see a few disjointed ramblings about stories in general...

Rambling number one, which is quite obvious, but bears repeating - We often have no clue whatsoever about the stories that surround us. Take this guy for example:



We were crossing a bridge over one of the many canals and small rivers in Bangkok, and the first thing I saw when looking down was a huge monitor lizard sunning itself on a couple of pieces of bamboo floating in the water. The second thing that we saw was this guy on an embankment opposite, doing more or less the same thing. Homeless? A traveling monk? Or (more likely, now that I look) just a homeowner out catching the breeze on a cool stretch of river? There are clues in the picture, but I don't think I know enough about Bangkok or Thai culture in general to read them.

In the picture, he seems to have just noticed our family's presence on the bridge, and is smiling shyly at us, but that may simply be a coincidence of a camera shutter opening at one millisecond and not another. Maybe he nodded to us and we waved back to him? Or maybe he saw us staring, at got up to go? In reality, I have no memory of him noticing us at all. Just a hot hot afternoon, a guy in a purple sarong, and a big lizard on a raft of bamboo in a river.

Three teas

Some nice bits of graphic design from Indonesia...