Antiques and losing a friend.

Our friend Marv died suddenly in May and I'm still sad and angry about it. He left behind not just a loving daughter, Dana, and a large group of close friends, but also a lot of scientific antique instruments. He was a well-known antique dealer, in both the US and Britain (maybe elsewhere?).

I told Dana, a working mother with a busy life, that I would try to help her sell some of these items. We don't really know what we're doing, but as a start one of Dana's friends took some pretty good pictures of everything. I've now loaded all the pictures on a blog, in no particular order (which would have driven Marv crazy if could see it--if you can see it Marv, I'm sorry). Next, the friend who took the pictures says he has, in his head (hard to believe but we'll see), details about what everything is and how old it is, and soon he'll pass along that information and I'll add it to the blog.

In the meantime, if anyone sees something they can identify (for example, what does "trans" stand for?) let me know. And if anyone either collects such things, or knows someone who does, keep an eye on this blog for further details. We'd like to find local (DC area / Baltimore / Annapolis) buyers for the barometers -- to avoid the complicated business of shipping something with mercury in it. But Marv shipped hundreds, maybe thousands of items over the years and I know there's a way to ship anything safely as long as you're willing to pay enough.

Commercial over!

A hawk on the front porch! I wonder if that's a bad omen?

Or if it's just because I left a bag of garbage on the front porch?

The bamboo curtain, phase 1. I'm very happy with it. And happy Doug did all the work.

See the tree stump in the lower left? The tree-removal man said he'd "be back" to do a better job on that stump. Yeah, well, that was a few months ago, and you know how it goes sometimes. So Doug's thinking of building something that will hide the stump. If left up to me, I would leave it alone and just let ground vines cover it up. But then I'm lazy and he's not.

Adding balls to the tree was too much for the kitties. They weren't tempted by the lights or the ribbon, but those balls were simply too tempting.

The video shuts off abruptly when they knock Marv's compass to the floor. Bad kitties!

You decide: real photos or photoshopped photos?

I found these pictures here. The blogger has a section of his blog called "No, They Didn't!" with examples of what he deems "bad" landscaping. This example has me mesmerized.* How could a car possibly get up that driveway? Or down?

*Yes, mesmerized. It's a common state for me to be in. I'm so easily entertained. (I'm still pondering peat moss. It's a soothing obsession and so much better than trying to figure out global warming.)

I hope no one is offended by this hilarious Christmas card sent by the always droll Mz. Margo from San Francisco.

I should have been prepared, but I wasn't (psychologically), for all the bee death I'd see during the winter.

I have to remind myself that finding bee bodies at the entrance to the hive is actually a good sign. It means that the undertaker bees are doing their job and dragging the dead bodies to the entrance so they can be tossed away. The metal grate is my improvised mouse guard. Mice like to take up residence in a hive during the winter. They are attracted to the honey and the warmth. No mouse shall enter my hive!

I was going to post about peat moss but then my cousin sent me this video and I thought better of it.

This non-believing, cynical skeptic found this video to be so uplifting. No matter what your religious beliefs, if any, how can you possibly not appreciate the beauty of this piece of music?

I can bitch about peat moss any day.

First attempt at a baby's hat. Think it will fit sweet grand-niece Norah's head? Not so sure.

Why do cats make these rug bumps??

The late beloved Gus did it too.

New Yorker cartoon competition.

I was too late to enter this caption.
"We'll have the baklava and can you bring it on 200 tiny little plates please?"

(The New Yorker website has an error! Two different deadline dates. Looks like the true deadline for submissions was last Sunday not this Sunday. Where are the editors?!?)

Oh the irony.Name of this lawn chemical company? Chesapeake Lawn Science. Yeah, science tells us that your damn lawn chemicals killed the Chesapeake.

Tip o' the hat to the Washington Post for this triptych.

Scott Applewhite (AP) took the top and bottom pictures; Jim Young (Reuters) took the middle picture. I love the middle picture especially. Check out Barry looking at this watch. Look at Bill's face.

Damn book. I said no more Larsson books. But there it was at the library, calling me. It's good. But evil lurks. The point I guess.

Mid-air mini chest bump.

Note: you can fast-forward ahead to about :39 min and skip over some slow business until the chest bump.

First snow today!

A documentary that was made for me. Can't wait to see it.

From the Sundance Film website:

Waste Land is a wonderfully resonant documentary that chronicles [Brazilian artist Vik] Muniz's journey to Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. He collaborates with an eclectic band of catadores, or self-designated pickers of recyclable materials, and photographs these inspiring characters as they recycle their lives and society’s garbage. Walker gains fantastic access to the entire process and, in doing so, offers stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the dignity that can be found in personal determination.

A new addition to the back yard. In need of a noun.

Doug built this bamboo screen in the area we've been fretting over for years, even before we lost one huge tree to the right of the red maple. The design ideas were done by both of us (in my opinion) but he ordered everything, and he definitely did 99.9% of the work. We had been considering bamboo for months (years?) but after we saw the bamboo exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum when we were there in September, we knew we could do it. We were mostly convinced by seeing how strong lashings can be; we are pretty certain that no wind will knock these things down. The bamboo will rot over time and we'll have to replace each piece probably. Another help in getting the project launched was hiring someone to buy some big 4 x 4s, bring them to our house, dig big (3 ft deep) holes, insert the 4 x 4s into the holes along with concrete, and stake them up until the concrete was set. We hired a young kid to do all that, and then Doug did all the other work of constructing the structure. It's a screen, really. Now, when we sit on our deck we won't have to look at all the miscellaneous yard stuff our neighbor keeps behind his house. [Which is his right, don't get me wrong.] Doug added a third panel on the left, just to the right of the red maple, and I have a feeling he's now addicted to making these things so there may be others here and there in the years to come. Our county only allows fences to be 6.5 feet tall (maybe only 6 feet actually). So these structures are definitely NOT fences. They're way taller than 6 feet. So far, I don't call them screens. I call them the bamboo things. I'm searching for a better noun.

Found in my yard: Fennel seeds, drone, and mica.

Yesterday I found this guy on the front porch of the beehive. The workers (girls) toss out the drones (boys) because they're just a drain on the hive over the winter (since they have no jobs, no skills, no responsibilities--other than the admittedly enormous job of passing along their Precious Bodily Fluids to any passing Queen). There will be plenty of drones available in the spring to mate with the Queens.


I also found a bit of mica. I save it (it's a slow process) but one day I hope to have enough to make something with it.

I'll crush the fennel seeds and toss them on a salad.

There are still a few colorful perky plants in my garden. Mullein (top) and euphorbia.

Julian Assange: One odd duck. Should we blame his mother? Thank his mother?

From a profile in the New Yorker, May 2010.

The name Assange is thought to derive from Ah Sang, or Mr. Sang, a Chinese émigré who settled on Thursday Island, off the coast of Australia, in the early eighteen-hundreds, and whose descendants later moved to the continent. Assange’s maternal ancestors came to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, from Scotland and Ireland, in search of farmland, and Assange suspects, only half in jest, that his proclivity for wandering is genetic. …

Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings. They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. “Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer,” Assange told me. “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned.

When Assange was eight, Claire left her husband and began seeing a musician, with whom she had another child, a boy. The relationship was tempestuous; the musician became abusive, she says, and they separated. A fight ensued over the custody of Assange’s half brother, and Claire felt threatened, fearing that the musician would take away her son. Assange recalled her saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts. In fact, Claire often told friends where she had gone, or hid in places where she had lived before.

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called “Underground,” which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture’s early Golden Rules: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

Around this time, Assange fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, and he briefly moved out of his mother’s home to stay with her. “A couple of days later, police turned up, and they carted off all my computer stuff,” he recalled. The raid, he said, was carried out by the state police, and “it involved some dodgy character who was alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from Citibank.” Assange wasn’t charged, and his equipment was returned. “At that point, I decided that it might be wise to be a bit more discreet,” he said. Assange and the girl joined a squatters’ union in Melbourne, until they learned she was pregnant, and moved to be near Claire. When Assange was eighteen, the two got married in an unofficial ceremony, and soon afterward they had a son.

Hacking remained a constant in his life, and the thrill of digital exploration was amplified by the growing knowledge, among the International Subversives, that the authorities were interested in their activities. The Australian Federal Police had set up an investigation into the group, called Operation Weather, which the hackers strove to monitor.

In September, 1991, when Assange was twenty, he hacked into the master terminal that Nortel, the Canadian telecom company, maintained in Melbourne, and began to poke around. The International Subversives had been visiting the master terminal frequently. Normally, Assange hacked into computer systems at night, when they were semi-dormant, but this time a Nortel administrator was signed on. Sensing that he might be caught, Assange approached him with humor. “I have taken control,” he wrote, without giving his name. “For years, I have been struggling in this grayness. But now I have finally seen the light.” The administrator did not reply, and Assange sent another message: “It’s been nice playing with your system. We didn’t do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don’t call the Australian Federal Police.”
The International Subversives’ incursions into Nortel turned out to be a critical development for Operation Weather. Federal investigators tapped phone lines to see which ones the hackers were using. “Julian was the most knowledgeable and the most secretive of the lot,” Ken Day, the lead investigator, told me. “He had some altruistic motive. I think he acted on the belief that everyone should have access to everything.”

“Underground” describes Assange’s growing fear of arrest: “Mendax dreamed of police raids all the time. He dreamed of footsteps crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at 5 am.” Assange could relax only when he hid his disks in an apiary that he kept. By October, he was in a terrible state. His wife had left him, taking with her their infant son. His home was a mess. He barely ate or slept. On the night the police came, the twenty-ninth, he wired his phone through his stereo and listened to the busy signal until eleven-thirty, when Ken Day knocked on his door, and told him, “I think you’ve been expecting me.”

Assange was charged with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. While awaiting trial, he fell into a depression, and briefly checked himself into a hospital. He tried to stay with his mother, but after a few days he took to sleeping in nearby parks. He lived and hiked among dense eucalyptus forests in the Dandenong Ranges National Park, which were thick with mosquitoes whose bites scarred his face. “Your inner voice quiets down,” he told me. “Internal dialogue is stimulated by a preparatory desire to speak, but it is not actually useful if there are no other people around.” He added, “I don’t want to sound too Buddhist. But your vision of yourself disappears.”

It took more than three years for the authorities to bring the case against Assange and the other International Subversives to court. Day told me, “We had just formed the computer-crimes team, and the government said, ‘Your charter is to establish a deterrent.’ Well, to get a deterrent you have to prosecute people, and we achieved that with Julian and his group.” A computer-security team working for Nortel in Canada drafted an incident report alleging that the hacking had caused damage that would cost more than a hundred thousand dollars to repair. The chief prosecutor, describing Assange’s near-limitless access, told the court, “It was God Almighty walking around doing what you like.”

Assange, facing a potential sentence of ten years in prison, found the state’s reaction confounding. He bought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” a novel about scientists and technicians forced into the Gulag, and read it three times. (“How close the parallels to my own adventures!” he later wrote.) He was convinced that “look/see” hacking was a victimless crime, and intended to fight the charges. But the other members of the group decided to coöperate. “When a judge says, ‘The prisoner shall now rise,’ and no one else in the room stands—that is a test of character,” he told me. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges and six were dropped. But at his final sentencing the judge said, “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.” Assange’s only penalty was to pay the Australian state a small sum in damages.

As the criminal case was unfolding, Assange and his mother were also waging a campaign to gain full custody of Assange’s son—a legal fight that was, in many ways, far more wrenching than his criminal defense. They were convinced that the boy’s mother and her new boyfriend posed a danger to the child, and they sought to restrict her rights. The state’s child-protection agency, Health and Community Services, disagreed. The specifics of the allegations are unclear; family-court records in Australia are kept anonymous. But in 1995 a parliamentary committee found that the agency maintained an “underlying philosophy of deflecting as many cases away from itself as possible.” When the agency decided that a child was living in a safe household, there was no way to immediately appeal its decision.

The custody battle evolved into a bitter fight with the state. “What we saw was a great bureaucracy that was squashing people,” Claire told me. She and Assange, along with another activist, formed an organization called Parent Inquiry Into Child Protection. “We used full-on activist methods,” Claire recalled. In meetings with Health and Community Services, “we would go in and tape-record them secretly.” The organization used the Australian Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents from Health and Community Services, and they distributed flyers to child-protection workers, encouraging them to come forward with inside information, for a “central databank” that they were creating. “You may remain anonymous if you wish,” one flyer stated. One protection worker leaked to the group an important internal manual. Assange told me, “We had moles who were inside dissidents.”

In 1999, after nearly three dozen legal hearings and appeals, Assange worked out a custody agreement with his wife. Claire told me, “We had experienced very high levels of adrenaline, and I think that after it all finished I ended up with P.T.S.D. It was like coming back from a war. You just can’t interact with normal people to the same degree, and I am sure that Jules has some P.T.S.D. that is untreated.” Not long after the court cases, she said, Assange’s hair, which had been dark brown, became drained of all color.

Assange was burned out. He motorcycled across Vietnam. He held various jobs, and even earned money as a computer-security consultant, supporting his son to the extent that he was able. He studied physics at the University of Melbourne. He thought that trying to decrypt the secret laws governing the universe would provide the intellectual stimulation and rush of hacking. It did not. In 2006, on a blog he had started, he wrote about a conference organized by the Australian Institute of Physics, “with 900 career physicists, the body of which were sniveling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character.”

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks. In 2006, Assange barricaded himself in a house near the university and began to work. In fits of creativity, he would write out flow diagrams for the system on the walls and doors, so as not to forget them. There was a bed in the kitchen, and he invited backpackers passing through campus to stay with him, in exchange for help building the site. “He wouldn’t sleep at all,” a person who was living in the house told me. “He wouldn’t eat.”


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian#ixzz17GQ53c00

Lucy on YouTube!

Note that she's ambidextrous (not the right word but I don't know how else to describe it). She can chase to the left and to the right, but she clearly prefers to chase to the right.

I knitted these socks for Anabelle (middle picture shows her sweet feet) and George. We'll see. I may be way off base in my estimated sizes.

My mother's petunias were still blooming as of 2 days ago. They've withered a bit since then but are still hanging on.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) has been removed from the latest DSM. A shame. It was such a useful label.

From the NYT.
The central requirement for N.P.D. is a special kind of self-absorption: a grandiose sense of self, a serious miscalculation of one’s abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness....

The second requirement for N.P.D.: since the narcissist is so convinced of his high station, he automatically expects that others will recognize his superior qualities and will tell him so. This is often referred to as “mirroring.” It’s not enough that he knows he’s great. Others must confirm it as well, and they must do so in the spirit of “vote early, and vote often.”

Finally, the narcissist, who longs for the approval and admiration of others, is often clueless about how things look from someone else’s perspective. Narcissists are very sensitive to being overlooked or slighted in the smallest fashion, but they often fail to recognize when they are doing it to others.


I think it's the last sentence that most succinctly captures the spirit of a true narcissist.

I wish I'd never started fooling around with my blog design. What a time-sink!!