Memo to Arlo Guthrie

The dump still closes on Thanksgiving.

A thousand years ago, I persuaded my homeroom at high school #2 to nominate “Alice’s Restaurant” for our class song. It inevitably lost out to “The Impossible Dream,” which was the song every class picked during that historical period, but it’s pleasant to imagine my classmates sashaying into the auditorium singing “You can get anything you want / at Alice’s Restaurant, excepting Alice.”

Alice Brock, who ran the restaurant in the song (which restaurant, as Guthrie notes in the song, was not actually named “Alice’s Restaurant”) died a week ago. It sounds like she was an interesting person, though we probably would have agreed on very little.

Musical miscellany

When I revisit my ancient posts I find that most of the links are dead. (Has anyone determined what the half-life is for internet links? I would guess that it’s around three years.) Some of them still do work, though, such as this one to free recordings of all of Bach’s organ works, performed by James Kibbie. I recommend that you don’t listen to them all in one sitting; one or two pieces at a time is probably enough. Turn it up; this is music that needs to be played so that the loud sections are thunderous.

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With equal temperament, each key sounds like every other key, only a bit higher or lower. However, equal temperament didn’t become the standard tuning for pianos until about a century ago. Before then each key had its own particular set of intervals and its own character. For instance, according to Christian Schubart’s 1806 Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst,

E♭ Major
The key of love, of devotion, of intimate conversation with God.

D# Minor
Feelings of the anxiety of the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depresssion, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of horrible D# minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.

E Major
Noisy shouts of joy, laughing pleasure and not yet complete, full delight lies in E Major.

E minor
Naïve, womanly innocent declaration of love, lament without grumbling; sighs accompanied by few tears; this key speaks of the imminent hope of resolving in the pure happiness of C major.

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I’m interested in the Japanese pianist Yui Morishita. He specializes in Alkan, and has recorded five albums of Alkan’s works so far. He has an alter-ego, the “Duke of Pianeet,” who plays virtuosic arrangements of anime and video game music. He is perhaps best-known for his “Gunbuster Fantasy.”1 I recently came across a playlist of Morishita performing music from Square Enix games, including many from Final Fantasy. You can listen here.

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Feeling kawaii? You might like a Hello Kitty Stratocaster, with its matching pink fuzz pedal.

Visit from a dirty snowball

The skies this weekend were mostly clear after sunset, with just a few clouds at the west horizon. Those clouds were perfectly positioned to hide Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, currently visiting our neighborhood, and I couldn’t see it, even though Venus and Arcturus were perfectly visible. Last night the sky was completely clear, and I finally could set up the tripod and get a few pictures. These were taken 45 minutes to an hour after sunset.

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is no Hale-Bopp. It was barely visible to my bespectacled eye as a faint smudge, and I would not have noticed it if I hadn’t known where to look. In a place far from city lights someone with sharp eyes might possibly spot it, but most people will need binoculars or telescopes to see it.

The comet is halfway between Venus (lower left) and Arcturus (right)

Right-click and open the images in a new window to see them at maximum size.

Botanical links

Most horticultural writers live in places where the climate is temperate and gardening is easy. This is understandable; if you are obsessive about plants, you would probably choose to live in a place where many plants grow well. The books they write are for readers in similar areas, where the same plants flourish. Such books are of little use to gardeners in Kansas, where it is either too hot or too cold, usually too dry and always too windy. I have yet to find one I can recommend. However, I discovered a downloadable pamphlet that actually is of use to people in Flatland: Garden Design with Native Prairie Plants.

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Nero Wolfe, the great and large detective, grew orchids. Here’s a list of the genera mentioned in the books, and Archie Goodwin’s account of Wolfe’s activities as an orchid grower.

Incidentally, if you are as much a fan of the FBI as I am, you might enjoy the Wolfe mystery The Doorbell Rang.

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Talon Buchholz, who for many years ran a nursery in Oregon, maintained the Flora Wonder Blog. In it he discussed various horticultural matters such as evergreens, nomenclature, plant explorers, gardens elsewhere, propagation, and much more, all with lots of pictures. And maples, a particular interest of Buchholz. If you want to see the variety within the genus Acer, browse through Flora Wonder. Buchholz recently retired from blogging, but the blog remains and is worth perusing.

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Out-of-seasonal note: Walmart has already replaced gardening supplies with Santa crap. This is unfair.

Today’s quote: books for children

Madeleine L’Engle:

Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it’s perfectly true. Children still haven’t closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth.

October skies and heavy weather

NASA Astronaut Matthew Dominick: “Comet rises up over the horizon just before orbital sunrise with aurora streaking by.”

When the weather is clear, you have a good chance of seeing a bright, possibly naked-eye comet this month.

Update (10/11/24): Where to look. Some hints for finding it.

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Weather websites such as Weather Underground (a distasteful name for a useful site) extensively cover Atlantic hurricanes but rarely notice when anything happens elsewhere on the planet. I find Zoom Earth helpful to track storms around the world, such as Typhoon Krathon, which is currently inundating Taiwan.

Dungeon maintenance

Where do the monsters in RPG dungeons come from? Who restocks the treasure chests? Who makes the treasures? What happens to the dead bodies? Who operates the dungeons? How do they fit in the regional economy? Clay, a young woman and formidable adventurer, finds out in the anime Dungeon People3.

When Clay fights a minotaur on the ninth of the ten levels of the Antomurg dungeon, a wall collapses, revealing an ordinary bedroom. The dungeon’s administrator comes to assess the damage.

That administrator, Beilleheila Langdass, a.k.a. “Belle,” the puissant final boss of the climactic tenth level, is a little girl, perhaps eleven years old, with soft pink robes and baby blue hair. She’s been looking for help with the dungeon, and Clay is exactly what she wants. After a bit of sparring, Clay accepts the job.

Clay spends much of Dungeon People learning the operations of the dungeon, and working with Belle and with Rangard, the dwarf who makes the treasures and other items associated with the dungeon. The odd-numbered episodes usually feature some combat, such as when Belle and Clay terminate the occasional psychopath or renegotiate a contract with the local king. However, the show mostly focuses on the practical side of running a dungeon: replenishing treasure chests, interviewing potential monster employees, propagating goblins, replacing magical hardware, etc., as Clay learns to be Belle’s friend. The art is like illustrations in a children’s book, appropriate to the pleasant, occasionally bloody story, and the animation is adequate. “Warm and fuzzy with a side of murder” is how J Greely sums it up.

The twelve episodes leave many questions unanswered. There’s little information on the fate of Clay’s father, who entered the Antomurg dungeon some years back and hasn’t been seen since. Belle looks and acts like a little girl, but who, or what, is she really? Where do dungeons come from? Few people watched Dungeon People — aside from me, the only ones I know of are J Greely and Peter S, plus a handful at the AnimeSuki forum4 — and I don’t expect a second season with answers.

More screenshots beneath the fold.

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I cancelled Crunchyroll, as I mentioned earlier, and I haven’t seen any more of The Elusive Samurai. I have no great desire to pick it up again, though it does seem very popular if the amount of fan art at Pixiv is an indication. I hope to see the Mononoke movie sometime soon, and I might consider paying for Crunchyroll again when the next seasons of Frieren at the Funeral and The Apothecary’s Diary are out. Otherwise I have little interest in current anime.

Continue reading “Dungeon maintenance”

Additional garden notes

Grasshoppers have been a plague, as usual. The only control I have found that works at all is the orb weaver spider. I observed one in my garden wrap up two grasshoppers almost as large as itself in five minutes.

Roundup is no longer Roundup. It used to contain glyphosate, and it was the best chemical solution for most weeds, particularly invasive, difficult-to-dig-out grasses like bermuda.5 However, it’s been reformulated without glyphosate, and it no longer reliably kills weeds. I sprayed the above plant above three weeks before I took the picture. With the old Roundup it would have been completely dead and ready to scrape off the pavement. With the new, disimproved formula, it looks uglier than it did before but is still vigorously growing. I checked every herbicide at Home Despot; not one of them contains glyphosate any more.

Sleep, creep, leap: the conventional wisdom is that growing perennials from seed to bloom takes three years. The first year they produce just a few leaves and concentrate on developing their roots; the second year there is more top growth but most of the action still takes place underground; the third year they’re ready to put on a show. I find that this may be true of some, but most are quicker. I’m still waiting for the Baptisias, Asclepias and the rest of the Silphiums that I started last year, but all the Penstemons bloomed this year. Quite a few bloomed well their first year, e.g. Helianthus, Aster Symphyotrichum, Dianthus, Rudbeckia, Echinacea.

I spotted the above while reviewing Monty Python recently. The yellow flowers look like Mentzelia, possibly M. lindleyi — a plant of the American west, and not something I would have expected from a bunch of silly Brits (and an expatriate American).