in the land of make believe

Today I met up with some childhood icons and a bit of American television history. I like to think I do this frequently, but today was different.

Mr. McFeely even had me say "speedy delivery" in Italian for our picture and told me of his visit to KUED some years ago. What a neighbor that man is!

denti di giudizio

in memory of my very first post, i repeat that fall is a nice time of year. this year i won't be enjoying the change of seasons three times over, but i'm finding plenty of pleasant things to do instead. i think it all began with a Labor Day visiting Niagara Falls, where i believed (falsely) that people had aching desires to enjoy nature's majesty and power

while in reality it's seems more connected desires for wax museums and haunted houses.

Annamaria and i held off until just recently for our halloween experience, which was masterfully brought to us in the form of Diamanda Galás gurgling razors and low-note piano keys for over an hour.

in efforts to balance our diet of this year's fall experience we took a little jaunt out to Hartwood Acres to tour the mansion there. i thought that was pretty worthwhile as well, and have a photograph to prove it.

the next addition to the parade of autumn delights would be nothing else but a wonder movie and concert by Califone. they played a cacophonous soundtrack to their kind of scary, kind of kooky, kind of silly film and topped everything of with a very enjoyable group of songs. i was so satisfied that i bought the new cd and a t-shirt!

one of the next adventures will be thanksgiving in phoenix. the last time we had thanksgiving there we had great napkin holders.

So every time I go down near Moab I try to stop by the T-Shirt Shop and pick out a design to remind me of the olden days when Grandma would buy a shirt for all us grandkids.

biking adventures with Gus pt II

kind of like sasquatch

So a dream came true for me on Wednesday when I was up mountian biking with my friend Gus in American Fork Canyon. We ran across one of these guys

about this color too. I've wanted to find a rubber boa for about the past 16 years or so, so I was pretty pleased when Gus managed to spot one on the trail without running it over. You can find some more info and more pictures of the boa featured above here.

making the river answer

Plastic in the water

As I've been reading Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us I've stopped several times to sit and wonder just what it is we think we're doing to the planet - most of what we're doing doesn't seem to be keeping within any kind of previously existing ecological balance. I stopped to question our behavior once again when I read about exfoliants.

"Can you believe it?" Richard Thompson demands of no one in particular, loud enough that faces bent over microscopes rise to look at him. "They're selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-sized pieces of plastic to be swallowed by sea creatures."

Weisman certainly plays on the theatricality of this experience, but I have to say that the issue might merit some dramatic emphasis. For the past year and a half I've been using and enjoying a particular body wash. Today I checked the ingredients and found near the top of the list "polyethylene." I don't know where that plastic is going now that I'm in the eastern United States, but I have to believe that when I was in Southeast Asia I was contributing to the island of plastic floating around in the North Pacific Gyre.



The question for me becomes "what do we now do with all this plastic that we have and how do we live without it?"

SEND BOOKS TO KIDS IN INDIA (please)

This morning my friend Taty in Sicily asked me if I wanted to help collect books to send to a children's school in India where a friend of hers is trying to assemble a library. I'm in the humanities and consequentially am really into books, so I emailed Fr. Sibi to get some more information about what he's after. This was his response

"I would like books on subjects like science, geography, history, stories, events, encyclopedias etc. Books that is meant for children and their mental growth."

If you can think of a book you read as a child or young adult that stimulated your mental growth, or a book that would have stimulated it, I think you should do what you can to get a copy to the school. Here are a couple of options

1. Find a copy of the book(s) you want to send, write a little message on the inside cover, go to the post office and send it. Just be aware that sending heavy things to India might be pricey so

2. I recommend buying your book(s) through an online bookstore that will ship it(them) for free. The best ones that I've seen so far are Rediff Books and flipcart. The prices are in rupee but you can check the dollar amount here, just select "Indian Ruppe" and you can figure out the rest. As for the message on the inside cover, you could simply email it either to me or directly to Sibi.

I'm waiting to here back from Sibi about where exactly we'll need to send the books.

My hope is that we can add at least 100 books to their library. Help me keep track of what gets sent (also so Sibi knows what to wait for in the mail) by sending me an email or even commenting here on the blog. Thanks for reading.

San Severo - la Madonna del soccorso

This is the annual run of the bulls for San Severo but instead of bulls they line the streets with strings of very mean firecrackers and occasional bits of what must be TNT (they even managed to make a small wall collapse this year) at the approximate hight of a human head. The hight is important when you add the fact that townsfolk are supposed to run en masse in front of the explosions in effort to not get burned or maimed. The fuochi, literally meaning "fires," are the main attraction of the celebrations and this fact has not settled well with the local bishop, who would like the attention to be refocused on the namesake of the events, that is the Virgin Mary. But when this fine gentleman began insisting a couple years ago that the city do away with the explosives the citizens responded with the an iron fist. For several days the bishop couldn't leave his house without getting beat up. So the explosives stayed and the bishop stayed quiet.



The fuochi featured in these videos were some of the first to be set off and consequently they were also some of the tamest. Nevertheless they still managed to shake us to our core and make our ears bleed slightly.