Moving Right Along

Mad Science Sunday: When Incubation Starts To Look Better Than Cultivation

I just want you to know that I drank an awful lot of root beer flavored, high fructose corn syrup sweetened soda this week, and all in the name of Mad Science.

Voilà!

Now, the problem is that the process that needs to happen before the next phase of our experiment can commence is taking its sweet time and may not happen at all.  Regard:

As you can see, though significantly smaller than last week, the severed limb test subject, which I am starting to think about in terms of Cinderella's never mentioned third ugly stepsister's misguided attempt to avoid trying to fit into the glass slipper at all in a messy and ill-fated "Well, it used to fit me, but that was before" scenario, has still not attained the slenderness necessary to make it through the opening at the top of the now clean and ready soda bottle.

Squeezing did not extract further discernible moisture.  Also, the limb overall now has an odd texture.  Though mostly dry and yet still slightly damp, with an appreciably hard core when squished between thumb and forefinger, the texture of the limb reminds me of worn out elastic, sort of foamy and saggy.  I just don't know how much further reduction in size is going to be possible.  I think I'm going to need a wider mouthed bottle to proceed to the next phase, perhaps a juice bottle or glass cider jug.  I shall wait until next Sunday to gauge progress and decide whether or not to go that route.

But we want mad science now!  And the bottle is all ready!  And my pancreas has gone through a lot this week to make it so!

No problem.  Santa to the rescue.

While in the West Concord 5 & 10 yesterday on just the tiniest little bit of a spree, I discovered these items.  I believe they are clone seeds developed from the epithelial cells of Santa himself.  I believe they are instant, just add water and mix.

(No, that's not what it says on the labels, but I can read between the lines.  This is the kind of nuanced thinking that grants me such potential in this field.)

I don't know what good it will do for amputees or the species in general, but can it really hurt to have fraternal twin Santa clones incubating in my kitchen/laboratory?  Can it?

I say we find out.

Ho ho ho.

And staying with that theme...

...since I've got a bad headache today, here's another shot from October 23 which you can look at, and again click to look at more closely:

Going Wordless Again

Once again I have busied myself with so many things today that I find myself without the time or mental energy to write something, so instead I am posting this photo which I took on October 23.  I was at Hutchins Farm, which was still open, but whose cutting garden was showing the effects of some exposure to a little frost here and there.

I know there's a point to be made looking at this dying flower gracefully sustaining a late bee, but I will leave it to more eloquent pens.  A lot of days lately, I find that all I've got is a pointing finger and one word:

Look.

You can click on the image if you want to look more closely.

So What the Heck Was That We Were Looking At, Anyway? Contest Results Revealed!

First of all, let me thank everyone who played my Second Annual NaBloPoMo Midway Contest.  You are all very, very smart!  Also, your answers made me realize that many people would be thrilled to have spouses who paid half as much attention to what they said as my readers pay to my blatherings here at this little blog.

Absolutely every single answer I received was at least partially correct, even the most outlandish.  You all rock!

To refresh:  The question asked was, "What the Heck Are We Looking At Here?"  (Click to enlarge, if you think you can bear it.)

Well, here's what.

This picture was taken during my Monday night jewelry making class at the DeCordova Museum's little art school, the class on Tiny Parts and Moving Mechanisms taught by the charming and very patient Alison Bruun.  It was taken using my crappy, traumatized little Optio E10, the one that has been dropped on its head a whole bunch of times and also ritually disemboweled and left for dead in a trash can so that now its color interpretations tend toward the creative, or at least in a direction more creative than we commonly expect of computerized and supposedly nonsentient low-end consumer devices.  To give you an idea how creative, while the above shot is the first, the next shot is the 16th that my psycho little light brick took in this series without my changing any of the settings:   (Click to enlarge.)

As you might imagine, I was truly torn which image to choose!  In the end, in the interest of keeping it fun and still being ever so slightly artistic, I chose the most clear and realistic of the series.  The colors are still inaccurate, but I don't think quite so maddeningly so.

Yes, it is my right, "Tupperware"-encased thigh (or what's left of the thigh and what I now have instead/in addition) inside faded black jeans, covered with gorgeous, glittering, sterling silver sawdust.  I am seated on a chair in this picture.  I did take the picture myself.

The table in front of me is part of a very long, not exactly new worktable.  This is what the same table looks like during my Tuesday morning class in beginning jewelry making taught by the kindly Yehudit Schorr (part of whose back can be seen at left):  (Click to enlarge.)

See that really messy station with the bright yellow travel mug full of life-endowing coffee and the torn and wadded up paper?  That's mine!

Incidentally, this is what my worktable in my home studio looks like, by contrast:  (Click to enlarge.)

But I digress.  Back to this.  (Click to enlarge, again, if you need to.)

You want to know what's really sneaky about this picture?  What you are looking at is not the table top.  What you are looking at is a wooden pull-out tray underneath my station.  It pulls out to catch, uh, sawdust and other bits and pieces so they don't go poinging off into the, yes, reddish brown carpet never to be seen again.  Or so they don't get embedded in your clothes.  As you can see, I only remembered that it slid out after I was done sawing.  Oopsie.

This tray has been painted kind of a gunmetal blue-black which is indeed chipping off to reveal wood underneath.  It is not lined with anything; what you're looking at is whatever material was used to form the tray bottom.  The items in it which can be seen here are a bench pin and fragments of a number 2 jewelry sawblade.  (You go through those things like a motherf-, uh, quite a bit when you saw through sheet metal.)  A bench pin is indeed something you clamp onto your worktable to help you shape pieces, and the number of ways it can be used depends largely on the ingenuity of the user.

Let's talk about the denim-clad leg.  Ha ha -- another trick!  Yes, it is both living and artificial.  It is my stump encased in its suction socket.  The knee, however -- mwa ha ha -- is not visible.

Here is a photo of my fabulously glamourous prosthetic leg when it's not clad in anything but a beautiful black leather boot moderately spattered with fresh muffin batter: (This one enlarges on a click also, if you're interested.)

See that circled red area?  That's my artificial knee.

Visually, my suction socket, which is molded to fit what's left of my right thigh (or it was; I need a new one, actually) is like a cliff you have to go over before you get to the bendy part of the prosthetic leg assembly.  So I have to lean pretty far forward to photograph the knee while I'm wearing it, like so:

The photo which you all had to identify in this contest was taken by me sitting up.  Consequently, the knee is not visible.  This is why the trapezoidal shape that is my encased thigh does not taper more dramatically toward the pull-out tray.

So you see what I mean?  Absolutely everyone who played this game said at least one correct thing.  Picking the winner, however, came down to details -- the number right and the number wrong in each answer.

Whenever somebody got a detail right, I gave her a point.  Whenever she got something wrong, I took a point away.  Whenever she said something I could neither deny nor verify, or something completely subjective such as whether the table was too low or not, no points were given and no points were taken away.  There were benefits to making me laugh; for example, Kay ended up with a positive score even though almost everything she said was ridiculously, purposefully wrong.  And I do not think this photo reveals the presence of oxygen or the fact that this photo was taken on earth; I do know there's no way you can tell it was taken in North America; however, her brazen point-loading made me laugh, so Elizabeth got some half-points which added up to whole points.

In the end, this is how it broke:

Laurie 1
TheAmpuT 6
Elizabeth 7
Alphabitch 7
Danielle Wegman 4
Jen 4
Kay 2
Jana 7
Sugared Harpy 1

As you see, we have a three-way tie!  How exciting!

As promised, I wrote the names of the tying contestants on tiny pieces of paper --

-- crumpled them up --

-- and threw them in a big bowl.

Then I mixed them up and pulled one out.

And the name I pulled was...

...insert drumroll here...

...Jana!

(Insert confetti here.)

Hurray!  Congratulations!

Please tell me whether you'd like a scarf or a dish towel, and what color(s), and I will get cracking on it tout de suite.

Thank you all for playing.  I hope you had as much fun as I did.  Of course, you're all winners as far as I'm concerned, and I hope I see you all here to play again next year.

__________

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!  Today and every day I am grateful for my true love, of course.

"Thanks for taking my picture.  Don't worry.  I'll crop out my underwear."

"I did assume as much."

"Yeah, it's not that kind of website."

"Damn straight -- not for free it's not!"

And I am grateful for Sam, who is also grateful for my true love, who is a dab hand with a brush.  (Click to enlarge.  Go on; you must.)

And of course I am also grateful for all of you, my esteemed correspondents.  Best wishes to you and yours.

Wordless Wednesday (For Once)

I am stealing the idea of "Wordless Wednesday" from esteemed correspondent Penny Richards.

One day when I was out walking for pleasure (speaking of stealing things), I spied this car parked near the local train depot.  It's a gas/electric hybrid Honda Civic which someone has decorated mosaic style with what look like bits of glued-on colored plastic sheeting of some sort, smooth vinyl maybe.  The mosaic goes all the way around the car and depicts much of the wildlife of this area, a fox, earthworms, ants, chipmunks, a blue heron, a snapping turtle, dragonflies, fish, a frog, a newt.

It is very beautiful and does not look like the work of a single afternoon.  Bravo to the artist, whoever you are.

Note that I have not marked or watermarked these images.  Even though I took them, they aren't of my own work, and I don't know whose work I've recorded.  If anyone knows, and if the artist has a website, I'll happily link to it.

Enough words.  Here are the pictures.