Shoreline of Wonder

Yesterday on the Braes Bayou hike and bike trail, I was passed by a fellow on what looked like a cross between a skateboard and a Nordic Track.  He was making excellent headway – uphill.  Whatever it is, it’s ingenious. That reminded me of something I heard about at ArmadilloCon last weekend:  air jellies, which are lighter-than-air balloons with jellyfishlike appendages that hover around in interesting ways under radio control:  a video is on YouTube.

And that reminded me of something I read this summer in somebody else’s copy of White Trash Cooking.  (It is an actual cookbook with authentic recipes of which I recognize some from church socials from my youth.)  There was a pudding recipe that called for a double boiler “or else rig something up.”  Heh.  There’s been a lot of rigging in Southern kitchens over the years. Then this morning I composed an e-mail and shortly after I mentioned “attached” in the body of the e- mail but before I actually attached it, Thunderbird ingeniously asked me if I had forgotten something!  This could save a lot of us from the embarrassment of shooting blanks.

Homo Sapiens – Wise Man – is certainly a misnomer for our species.   Maybe Homo Ingenious.  I see courtesy of Google that the phrase has occurred to others, including radio essayist Richard handler in a 2007 piece about how the ingenious human mind wants to fix everything, including its own suffering;  but  meditative acceptance of suffering can be a better way.

Ingenuity can be stymied by politics, policies, the seven deadly sins, the Buddhist Three Cardinal Faults and on and on.  And in finding invention highly attractive we may give it more weight than it deserves in the annals of history.  I’m reading a book with that thesis:  The shock of the old : technology and global history since 1900 by David Edgerton. Perhaps we are truly (this is a widely occurring variant) Homo Fabricans – Man the Maker -  with the proviso that the making includes mischief and delusions, war and love, and all kinds of desires and devices, not just technological ones.  We would just like to be all Homo Ingenious all the time.

Seen at the red light at the corner of Kirby and North Braeswood:  A brightly painted closed trailer, with lettering that said something about a party clown for hire, being towed by a nondescript passenger car, which was driven by a clown in full face paint, wide grin, red ball nose, and frizzy red hair . . . talking on a cell phone.

Whimsical folk art often turns up in the workplace – in this case, the Circulation/Reserve Department at the Rice University Library.  This item is on top of one of our space dividers.  It’s only about 6 inches long but conspicuous w-a-y out of proportion to its dimensions.

It’s the season for summer camp.  I heard on NPR that a New York City bookstore is even sponsoring a Camp Half-Blood for young fans of the Percy Jackson books;  the kids were enjoying it, sword skirmishes and secret rescue missions and all. Sunday’s Houston Chronicle reported that a camp for mascots had been held in Houston’s Toyota Center.  As in team mascots.  The people in hot fuzzy animal suits who stoke the enthusiasm of fans. The Fantasy Mascot Camp was led by Rockets basketball mascot Robert Bourwin, a.k.a “Clutch.”  It was attended by mascots from middle and high schools, a couple of universities, minor and professional league teams, and the Chick-fil-A corporate mascot (should that be a.k.a “Cluck”-?)  The pictures on the Chron’s Web site are priceless. All these people in their fuzzy mascot costumes, all jazzed up-!

Unfortunately, the article did not escape the prosaic perils of typographical error.  These days there don’t seem to be many articles, stories or books that appear typo-free.  Clutch was quoted as saying that the camp focused on psychology, more than stunts.  “We’re not hitting any trampolines, repelling (sic) from the ceiling….”

Of course, depending on the gig, maybe there’s a mascot or two who do repel from the ceiling.

So with Sears you can go online, order an appliance, and request delivery without talking to a human being – and the night before delivery, a robot calls you.  It wants you to press “one” if there will be somebody 18 years old or older who is authorized to accept delivery;  it wants you to press “one” if the two-hour time slot it offers is OK. Also – the robot emphatically tells you to MEASURE the place in your home where the delivered appliance or furniture is to be put, and MEASURE all doorways, stairwells and corners the item will have to go through, and if you find out it won’t fit, CALL A CERTAIN NUMBER TO CANCEL THE DELIVERY.  It sounds like a number of hardworking Sears delivery people have found themselves with uninstallable appliances or stuck furniture….

It’s amazing how a long-winged sailplane gets tucked into a sleek trailer and ready to be towed away in less than an hour. Of course, the pilot/owner gets points for having a state of the art clamshell Cobra trailer with good tires ready to roll.  His spouse/crew/fellow club members appreciate that!

There’s quite a lot of trailering going on in the Northern hemisphere now – it’s the high summer season.  Pilots are rolling to contests; pilots are going cross-country for contests and contest practice; and landouts happen!  May they all be as uneventful as this one was.

Here are more photos of last Saturday’s visiting motorglider.

While it was parked at the Soaring Club of Houston, our Field Operations Officer of the day pondered it….

In fact it attracted a crowd. 

SCOH and the Greater Houston Soaring Association have a traveling trophy that can be collected from either club from by a pilot from the other club – presuming they arrive in a glider that made the trip as a glider.  The Pipistrel motorglider was flown from GHSA without use of the propeller.   Conditions were weakening, though, as attested by SCOH having two landouts later in the afternoon.  The GHSA pilot elected to extend the propeller for the purpose of getting home.

The takeoff  was remarkable.  Motorgliders with propellers in this position look improbable anyway, and this one leaped into the sky like the proverbial homesick angel.

Pipistrel is a light aircraft manufacturer in Slovenia.   This model of theirs is called a Taurus, and among other unusual features, it has side by side seating and a parachute for the whole aircraft in the event of emergency.

Pipistrel’s logo is a bat.  Pipistrel/pipistrelle is indeed a kind of bat.  Come to think of it, I saw a Western Pipistrelle last fall in Longhorn Cavern State park – a tiny bat that looked like nothing so much as a Chicken McNugget.  Pipistrel bats in Eastern Europe may be a little bigger and more dashing as bats go.  Anyway, as gliders go, the Pipistrel Taurus goes with style.

One of  the pilots in SCOH is married to the talented Judy Williams Beskow who just won the Hoffman Challenge for her latest quilt.   It’s gorgeous and clever.  The challenge fabric has a  swirly blue and green, impressionistic pattern that looks like flowers – but could be bubbly water. To depict carp at different depths in the pool, she layered mesh over them;  she  quilted each of the Red-Crested Crane’s feathers separately.  And she did the piece  in two  months, in a blaze of inspiration while navigating  through a couple of crises in the family.  Inspiration works like that sometimes – it becomes the flow you go to when life is hard.

It was a fine day yesterday at the Soaring Club of Houston – even for the crew who launched and retrieved gliders much of the day in broiling heat.  There were enough of us that nobody got worked to death.  And there were these interesting circumstances:

A very large, very well positioned spider has a magnificent web on the porch of the clubhouse.  She’s been there for several weeks.  She set up shop right in front of the knockout roses where nobody would accidentally walk into her and everybody could admire her.  Her admirers flick crickets into the web, whereupon she pounces on the offering with lightning reflexes.

A pilot came calling from the Greater Houston Soaring Association in a motorglider.  The pilot/owner (pink shirt) attracted a great deal of attention upon landing, while parked on the Field, and when making a takeoff  (a) without need of the tow plane, (b) with an impressive rate of climb.

Lastly there was a landout when a SCOH pilot flying cross-country (in a conventional, motorless sailplane) found himself in weakening conditions and landed at the residential airfield called Sport Flyers.  A couple of us got to go get him by hitching his glider trailer to his SUV and driving to Sport Flyers.  A very nice airport it is.

The landout pilot is the fellow in the bucket hat. 

Retrieves are fun when someone  has landed without a scratch on pilot or glider.  And a sailplane and a trailer as well engineered as these make for fast, satisfying work.

I just took part in a thought-provoking discussion about what SF published in the last ten years may turn out to be timelessly classic – and why. It’s posted at SF Signal’s Mind Meld, embellished with the covers of the books named.