Reminiscents
I hadn't thought about this object for quite some time.
The other I day I was teaching my class while walking about the room with a long, wooden pointer that I sometimes use to highlight important information but mostly enjoy twirling as a prop. There's something about giving it a few spins that seems to relax any physical tension while simultaneously enabling me to focus my thoughts. On this occasion, I was giving some routine instructions, thinking ahead to how I might best manage the next activity, and absentmindedly spinning my pointer. After a few rotations, I held the long stick still, and in doing so I unwittingly brought the small metal ring fixed to its blunt end to within a centimeter of my nostrils.
For an instant I was suddenly transported from my classroom to another place. It was not so much a detailed location as it was a sort of vague, cerebral space, and dominating this mental plane was the vivid apparition of a gyroscope. I recognized it at once as the cherished childhood possession that my sister had given me, one of a number of gifts that were thoughtfully chosen to improve my overall development. Alas, her attempts to increase my physical activity were unsuccessful, as I never quite got the knack of shooting the basketball, and I simply could not advance more than several bounces on the pogo stick before careening dangerously askew. But the gyroscope occupied my attention for many hours. I would moisten the end of a string on my tongue, delicately thread and load the axle, then set it going with all my strength. I loved watching it stay upright no matter how precarious its perch. The sturdy device had a peculiar smell, a dank and earthy metallic odor, a sort of dull acridity that smelled just like...just like...well, just like the little metal ring on the blunt end of my classroom pointer. I hadn't thought about my old gyroscope in years, but everything from its shape to its heft in my hand suffused my mind in an instant.
Such is the power of our sense of smell to resurrect latent memories.
Organization Man
First by artist, then by original release date. An island of control in a sea of chaos.
I am not an obsessively organized person, but I will acknowledge a few quirks that, to some, may represent an unnecessary attention to detail, if not a hint of madness. Although many facets of general housekeeping escape my devoted attention (just ask my wife), there are certain areas in which I am particular. None of them are of great importance, but they are distinct preferences nonetheless.
For example, I usually take care to sort the money in my wallet by denomination, from smallest to largest. While I'm at it, I would prefer that all bills face the same way. Never would I intentionally insert any currency into my wallet "head-first," as I should not like to encounter an upside-down image when fishing for cash. Not that I couldn't deal with it, but I simply would rather not, and I don't mind taking the few seconds to put a buck in the right way. Okay, once I did further organize my ones by serial number, but that was when I was saddled with a few minutes of unoccupied tedium, and though it did provide me a tiny amount of mental satisfaction, trust me that you could take a peek inside my wallet right now, and I guarantee that if there's any money in there at all, the serial numbers are all mixed up. Not that it matters.
Art For Hoi Polloi: Salvador Dali
Lowbrow meets lowbrow: Rocky emulators sprint up the visage of Salvador Dali.
Recently I came across a live webcam of a construction site in St. Petersburg, Florida. I was surprised to find not only active workers but fairly interesting activities going on, and I zoomed in to watch a pair of laborers installing triangular glass panes into a large, metallic lattice that bulged from a concrete edifice. The structure looked somewhat odd for a conventional building but rather conservative for its intended purpose: the next home of the Salvador Dali Museum. Given the famous surrealist's iconic imagery of melting watches and drooping appendages propped up by crutches, one might have expected a design that abandoned recognizable geometric forms altogether.
The new facility, slated to open in 2011, is only a few blocks from the current museum, but it will offer fifty percent more gallery space and more than twice the overall area. More importantly, it will provide robust shelter from violent storms for its collection in a way that the present building does not; so vulnerable is the existing museum to damage that its exhibits must be removed and stored during severe weather warnings. Constructing a more secure home for these treasures sounds sensible to me, because I would hate for the world to lose the original work of such an incredibly talented and imaginative artist. I have been captivated by Dali's art all of my life, and obviously many people feel the same way. Why, then, do I have the nagging sense that serious critics would dismiss his oeuvre as pandering to the lowest common denominator?
Perhaps because it does.

Take Me To Your Liter
Let's see: 1 inch equals 2.54 centimeters, so 1 centimeter equals...hmm...
Whatever happened to that great push to fully implement the metric system of measurement in the United States? I was only an elementary school student in the Seventies, yet I was not immune to the controversy surrounding some contemporary educational issues. There was the backlash against New Math, for example, as parents questioned the relevance of learning abstract mathematical concepts to the computational competency of their children. The use of phonics instruction still annoyed those who remembered becoming perfectly good readers without repeatedly breaking down words into their phonetic components. I was dimly aware of these debates, but the hot issue that really got my attention was the impending rise and dominance of the metric system.
As a child, this major societal shift was presented to me as an inevitability, and I perceived a menacing future. There would be no use resisting, it was implied. It wouldn't matter if you expressed a preference for the customary system or voiced an objection. Well, you better learn to like it, because it's coming! By the time we were adults, we could expect grocery store shelves filled with canned goods packaged by the gram, gas stations selling liters of gas, and car speedometers indicating kilometers per hour. I was apprehensive. Just the sight of the fraction 5/9 in the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion formula made me uneasy.
Unfortunately, performing cumbersome system conversions seemed to be the extent of the educational effort to make the metric system relevant to our everyday lives. No wonder so many of us developed a prejudice against a measurement method that is preferred by nearly everyone else in the world.