Forever

So, here's a story:

The year 1964 saw the arrival of the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The centerpiece was the Unisphere, the physical manifestation of the theme "Peace through Understanding". The Vatican sent Michelangelo's Pieta for its pavilion; people slid by on a moving sidewalk and viewed it behind glass. Walt Disney debuted It's a Small World at the fair; there was a monorail from AMF and ferris wheel that looked like a giant tire from Uniroyal and picture phones from Bell Telephone. I know; I was there, in wide-eyed wonder and amazement a this optimistic view of a shiny new future. I even got my hands on the souvenir camera, a Kodak instamatic branded with the fair's blue-and-orange logo, that I used a few months later to take pictures at my sister's wedding.

Not the actual camera we had, but one just like it.

But the camera wasn't really my souvenir; my prized takeaway was a dinosaur: specifically, the Sinclair Brontosaurus.

Sinclair Oil had a pavilion at the fair. Their logo was a  brontosaurus, I guess in recognition of the now-debunked idea that petroleum was formed from dead dinosaurs, so naturally their exhibit was the wonderful Dinoland.

After touring the life-size diorama, it was possible, in a miraculous display of modern manufacturing technology, to purchase at Dinoland a model dinosaur, vacuum-formed out of plastic right before your very eyes, in an automated machine with a clear viewing panel so the purchaser (or the purchaser's six-year-old child) could view the entire process - I think for all of twenty-five cents. With all the yearning of an overstimulated young boy, I just had to have one, and my mother relented and dropped the coin the mechanism. I would have my brontosaurus.

Now, although the Sinclair dinosaur logo did not follow the convention, it was the tradition when I was young that a brontosaurus was always depicted in illustrations with neck craned, looking backwards past their tail, usually standing in shallow water and sometimes with half-chewed vegetation dripping out of their mouth. It is an iconic image of my youth. Although lacking in detail, the souvenir dinosaur stuck to this standard.

Not the actual dinosaur I had, but one just like it

I was thrilled when I my still-warm thunder lizard dropped into the chute and played with it immediately and after we got home. Of course, there was one minor issue: even in the world of make-believe, it was hard for me to imagine a dinosaur striding forward majestically but looking backward all the time. It just didn't make sense for the brontosaurus to be interacting with my other toys but constantly looking away. So, perhaps remembering the lingering plasticity of the dinosaur when it came out of the machine, I thought I might, if I worked gently and steadily enough, just twiiiist the head around so it was facing forward.

Of course, cool by then, the neck just snapped, and I was left with a headless dinosaur. Elation crashed to despair, but there was nothing to be done. It's not like we were going back to the fair.

Which brings us to a coincidentally intersecting story:

The Brontosaurus - the Thunder Lizard - was discovered as a fossil and named in 1879, beginning its long reign as a fan favorite dinosaur, regardless of which direction it was looking. However, it was later determined that a dinosaur skeleton discovered in 1877, and called the Apatosaurus - the Deceptive Lizard - was in fact the same animal, and in scientific convention, the earlier name was the official name. Such was the power of  dinomania that the brontosaurus name still held sway for most uses in 1964, but scientific writings and later on even material for children and popular consumption used the "correct" apatosaurus designation. This transition caught the attention and raised the ire of brontosaurus purists, and is one of those touchstone issues that can polarize a room (and don't get me started on whether Pluto is a planet).

The reason for the confusion of the two creatures: the apatosaurus skeleton had no head.

All of which brings us to yesterday. In commemoration of the spectacle of world's fairs, my mother's love, the misguided optimism of youth, and the joy of dinosaurs, here's my latest tattoo:

Thanks, Tarah Pennington at Two Birds Tattoo for this wonderful  depiction of  a multilayered collection of memories and emotions.

Epilogue I:

Apparently I was not the only child who wanted the brontosaurus to be looking forward; a little research revealed that in the second year of the fair, Sinclair had the mold changed:

I might not have busted this one.

Epilogue II:

Ongoing research in the paleontology world has recently re-established Brontosaurus as a distinct genus and species. Vindication! Now, regarding Pluto...

Coda:

The full image: me and Uncle Ernie

100 Days

So, the whole pandemic business hit home on March 17, when we closed my campus for what we thought was going to be a sanitizing and regrouping event, but which turned into a whole new way of doing business. That means that we have just passed 100 days of Coronavirus. Here's what it looked like for me:

As everybody knows, I love me some spreadsheets.

• The columns on the right show activity outside the house: a few trips to the closed campus, grocery shopping and picking up prescriptions, some takeaway from local restaurants, and a few miscellaneous outings, mostly for cat veterinary issues (and one BLM rally). The (C) marks show when Coco took care of business and I stayed home.

• That dark purple on the far right represents almost-daily walks on the neighborhood, usually with Coco, sometimes alone, always well away from any other humans - I mean, seriously, we cross to the other side of the street when people are about.

• On the left, we have social zooming - those online meetings for personal reasons beyond the seven or so hours a day I spend zooming for work - and the joy of grocery delivery, which became available to us in May.

• Gray days are those days I left the house only to take a walk. On solid black days I never left the house at all.

This is how it has been for 100 days, and for Coco and me, that's likely how it's going to remain for some time. Whatcom County has moved into Phase 2 of the state reopening plan, but since then has seen an uptick in cases and will not be eligible to move to Phase 3 until that changes. We have not flattened the curve in our state yet, and it's not that we're at the cusp of the second wave: we're still just in the first wave.

The recent relaxation of restrictions has seen more social activity, and not always with proper precautions -  as Apoorva Mandavilli, a New York Times science reporter, says: “There are ways to be responsible and socialize, but people don’t seem to be able to draw the line between what’s OK and what is not. For too many people, it seems to be binary — they are either on lockdown or taking no precautions.” Perhaps that's why as of tomorrow it will be a misdemeanor in Washington to be in public without a mask.  It is certainly why Coco and I are not going back to anything near normal any time soon.

• We already don't leave the house without a mask; we even wear them walking if we're going through the village instead of into the wide streets of Edgemoor and never enter a building without one on.

• We're not going to be socializing any time soon. We love all our friends, but you can zoom us. I'm not going to sit on a deck trying to figure out how to have a beer with a mask on, with my friends ten feet away, either at their place or ours.

• We're not going out to eat. We'll still do takeaway, because we want to support our local businesses, but an hour or more in a dining room, even with 50% capacity, is not in the cards for us.

• I'm in no hurry to get back to campus. I will come back to support our Summer Quarter start, but I am staying pretty well connected with my team virtually, and I don't need to add one more body to the crowd without a specific reason.

In short, we'll be managing our "exposure budget", as some observers are calling it, pretty tightly for some time to come. I guess I am technically in a higher-risk category, but even without that, we seem to have done okay so far and see no need to change.

I can do another hundred days easy.

Earlier pandemic musings:

Day 27

Day 13

Day 6

New adventure...

So, this happened yesterday:

Yeah, as crazy as it might sound, I am going to go to law school. St. Francis is an all-online law school, accredited by the State Bar of California, awarding a J.D. degree which meets the legal education requirement to apply for admission to the California Bar to practice law.

I have been kicking this idea around for a while, and almost did it last year, but opted instead to enter a post-master's certificate program - a program I dropped after one class. That class, in higher ed law, was a lot of fun, but the syllabi for the next two courses convinced me that the core of the program would have been pretty old hat for someone with over twenty years' experience in higher ed - a conclusion supported by the fact that most of my classmates were much earlier in their higher ed careers.

I had chosen the certificate partly because is seemed a lot more doable than another full graduate-level degree, given my, ahem, not-inconsiderable years, but then I was inspired by this:

credit to Michelle Rial

I thought what the heck - and I'm all in now. I began the application process several months ago and just got the official word. There's an orientation that starts in a month, and then the term starts the middle of August, kicking off something between 192 and 208 weeks of year-round synchronous and asynchronous online instruction - and one trip down to California for the "Baby Bar" after the first year of instruction is complete. It'll be a heavy lift, but the program is specifically designed for working professionals, and since Coco is immersed in her grad program in counseling, we'll just be a household of bookworms for a few years. Then, maybe admission to the California Bar.

In any event, I anticipate the legal education will serve me in good stead for the rest of my active career as well as in any post-retirement consulting. And who knows? Maybe when Coco and I retire to Palm Springs, I'll even hang out a shingle.

James Caan in Poodle Springs

alignment

So, I have a copy of the  Tao Te Ching on my nightstand - the new annotated translation by Derek Lin - and I have been reading a single-page chapter each night before I go to sleep. Well, maybe three nights a week is a good average on how often I actually do it, considering how often sleep starts upstairs on the couch, snuggling with Coco and the kitty. I think Lin's translation is more accurate and instructive than it is poetic, and perhaps that was his intent. It's a nice little ritual of contemplation, at any rate.

Last night I read chapter 14. The first stanza goes like this:

Look at it, it cannot be seen
It is called colorless
Listen to it, it cannot be heard
It is called noiseless
Reach for it, it cannot be held
It is called formless
These three cannot be completely unraveled
So they are combined into one

As I read that, an almost fifty-year old memory immediately came to mind. A few minutes Googling confirmed my uncannily accurate memory of this:



Now, I have no way of knowing whether Herman Miller, who wrote the pilot for Kung Fu, ever read the Tao, although Wikipedia says that many Tao-based aphorism were used in the series. There is a connection between the Shaolin tradition and Taoism, and although Zen Buddhism plays a primary role in the order, it's quite possible that Lao Tzu might be quoted by way of illustrating a point. In any case, it was a remarkable late-night convergence that brought me back to sense of wonder than only a youth can have and lines that I quoted oh so many times without knowing their true source.