Unsolicited Advice

The beginning of cherry blossom season in Boston. Many varieties of cherry have flowers that conveniently color-coordinate with common allergy medications. (Not pictured: Sunshine.) It took me an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots in re: cherry trees. I was aware that cherry wood was a popular option for New England furniture, and that American cherry trees did in fact produce the fruit that you eat. But being as the Japanese make a very big deal of sakura petals and New Englanders don't, I was unaware that all varieties of cherry bloom copiously in early spring, even the North American ones, until I got up one morning a few years ago and noticed that it had snowed flowers while I wasn't looking. The drifts accumulate through early-mid May. Cherry trees must grow well out here and need little maintenance, as they seem to be the default choice for things like road medians and sidewalk planters. Weeping willows also bloom during 'mud season', as the l...

Let leftover season begin! The critters have been enjoying such traditional rat holiday recipes as, "stuffing mix crumbs drizzled with last of eggnog," "wilted vegetable salad," "bowl of turkey parts (misc)," and the coveted dessert item, "food-paper from chocolate cupcake." They are filled with scavenger-ly joy. And sleep. Mainly sleep. They spend most of the day snoozing in an amorphous wad of rat fur, with the occasional tail poking out. But when they're awake, they're thrilled. I have been faring less well. I haven't posted much because I've spent the past couple of months cycling between being in a phlegmy coma and being in a state I can only describe as "annoyingly high". I caught some kind of respiratory something in early October, and every time I start to get over it, I catch another thing. Or relapse, I'm not sure. I keep wobbling between able to medicate myself back to stupid but otherwise normal, and ha...

I seem to have purchased some more critters. See, I was out at a gig in Allston, and it turns out there's a PetCo between where I was and the nearest T stop. One thing led to another and somehow I walked out of there with a box of itty-bitty rats. I was worried that they'd get uncomfortably cold on the walk back to Harvard, but no. Apparently it's never too chilly to jam your nose into the leading corner of the box and try to smell where you're going. This batch is a trio of ruby-eyed albino girls. Notoriously, red-eyed rats have eyesight even worse than the normal ones. As far as I can tell, they can see blotches of light and dark and that's about it. They can't track my hand if I wave at them from outside the cage, although they'll happily chase my fingers if I make some kind of noise for them to follow. They've been named Bianca, Yuki, and Edelweiß, although this is largely for my convenience. If history is any indication, what I'm actually ...

Since I still haven't gotten the go-ahead from the other humans I want to show off, today I am going to brag about costuming rodents. When I lived in Flagstaff, we had a cage of three rats. Well, we -- the tool-making symbolic language-using humans -- thought we had a cage of three rats. They were of the opinion that we had one rat, one rat, and one rat. Rats have a very toddler-esque, self-centered view of the world, which often leads to things like me knitting a hammock sized for one rat and hanging it in the cage, only to come back later and find all three of them piled into it. Each one had found it and thought, "Well, I'm  only one rat, surely  I will fit!" because of course the other two rats don't count. (The same principle allows you to fit about a kilo of rat into a standard rectangular Kleenex box, but only if they like each other. Found that out in the vet's waiting room. The density of rat, if you're interested, is about 1.05g/cm 3 at thei...

It's that time of year again, when I brag about my costuming exploits. I was in Flagstaff for about a decade, and in that time, I ended up sort of the de factor  designer for Halloween outfits -- various and sundry people helped with the manufacturing, but since for some reason I can apparently think in floppy wireframe, I was almost always the one who headed the charge around JoAnn Fabrics for patterns and textiles and notions. One of my really terrible urges that I probably shouldn't confess to in public is the one where I keep wanting to use other people as walking dressforms. Moggie puts up with it, from time to time; she's fun to design for because she's built almost exactly like Agatha Heterodyne and gets happier and happier the more buttons and zippers and pockets you add. She also has endless patience for the part where we sit around drinking and talking about stupid things, and she wanders back and forth to the sewing machine whenever I finish pinning someth...

I've gotten a skosh paranoid, since unexpectedly losing a rat a little while ago. I refuse to worry that my pets are going to die one by one of a mysterious disease whose only symptom is "rat presents as completely normal" -- that way lieth only madness -- but I am keeping an eye out for distress. If you aren't used to rats, it's a little difficult to tell the difference between imminent death and sheer indolence. Rats spend most of their day in a sort of torpor, for much the same reason you used to when you got the summer off from school, except that they can't really watch The Price Is Right while they're lying around. They're prey animals, even if domesticated rats don't really have a conscious recollection of that, so the more they stay still and hidden during the day when other critters can see them, the longer they can get away with playing Call of Duty on the Xbox scuttling around looking for food all night, and not get caught out at it...

One of the things that really throws people about very, very old films is that there is something 'off' about the shading. Everybody knows what black and white photos look like, but Nosferatu (1922) , for example, has a very different contrast and gray-balance than Casablanca (1942) . The sky in old silents is always diffuse and cloudy, faces are always white, lips either invisible or nearly black. Guessing hair and clothing color is nearly impossible. This is not actually a problem with the quality of the film stock, believe it or not. Film is film; the sharpness issues you run into with analog TV (405/525/625 lines of resolution) or digital (SD vs HD, and the various kinds of encoding) do not exist with old stock versus new stock. Many of the transfers you've seen are appalling, but this is because the film is generally filthy, sometimes in poor condition, and the material often in the public domain. Unless someone is making a historic collector's edition, they gen...

I am sincerely embarrassed to report that I just paid money for a pair of formal shorts. In my defense, I only gave the Goodwill like $5 for them, and I need them for a casting call. The call sheet lists "blazer/shorts" as a required audition outfit, and the only blazer-like thing I own is a black satin number that I got from Charlotte Russe years ago, which my friend Moggie, never one to mince words, described as "some sort of pirate lingerie". (Followed immediately by, "Not that that means I don't want one.") Observe: [Man, sorry for the crappy camera and camerawork. I totally do not belong on that side of the lens. Also: Apparently I am mostly legs. I don't really see that when I'm just looking in the mirror. Huh. That probably explains a lot of the honking.] I'm also supposed to show up with a party dress and fancy underwear. Oh, and closed-toe stilettos, 4"+. It's the end of July. Do you have any idea how difficult it ...

I like this photo. The photographic process involves exposing a sheet of nitrocellulose coated in silver halide crystals to light. Where light strikes, the crystals convert to metallic silver. During the developing process, unconverted crystals are washed away, giving a photonegative image. This is then laid atop a sheet of paper treated in the same fashion and exposed to illumination again to produce a positive print. A black and white photo is literally a picture etched onto the page in grains of silver. People say photos are precious, but rarely do we think of them being elementally so. Early photography required lengthy exposure times, to the point where a brace to hold the subject steady was standard equipment in a photographic studio. At the dawn of the 20th century, Eastman Kodak ushered in the era of the snapshot by releasing the Brownie box camera, which required only that one pointed it at the subject and pressed the shutter button. Candid and mock-candid photography q...

When people ask what I've been doing lately, I tell them I've been making rat costumes out of socks. First, they say, "Wait, you're making rat costumes out of SOCKS?" Then, they say, "Wait, you're making rat COSTUMES out of socks?" Finally, they get to, "Wait, you're making RAT costumes out of socks?" Nobody ever questions the Avengers part, oddly enough. Since apparently I am just talking to myself with the Chaplin stuff, I jammed the rats into their superhero socks and took photos instead. Behold, the Rat-Vengers, Earth's Mightiest Rodents:

For anyone who's life is short on photos of furry things, I started a tumblr full of pet pictures. I fed it a bunch of photos and told it to post from the queue of pictures on a regular basis, so there should be a steady stream of wiggly little rats, should you ever need one.

My landlady has disallowed dogs and cats -- for excellent reasons; I live in a converted Edwardian house, with beautiful restored wooden floors -- so, because I can't live without small furry things to talk to, I have acquired a number of domesticated rats. Specifically, the number is four. I attempted to only have two rats, but the Fates intervened. The lady I got them from kept only female rats -- keeping only one sex or the other is a good way to make sure you don't unexpectedly have a lot more rats than you intended -- and accidentally got one who turned out to be pregnant. One of the other adopters backed out and she had two extra boys on her hands, and I had a very large cage, and... well. Now I have a matched set of four fancy-colored brothers, white with black hoods. Have you ever tried to get four small animals into one cage with only two hands? Perhaps if you're running a seedy warehouse on the docks, four rats is not a lot of rats. When you are trying to stuf...