Sunny New Year

Yesterday was one of my favorite days in Philadelphia: the day of the Mummer's New Year Parade. The parade is great, but the aftermath is even better. The mummers apparently drink their way through the parade, and when it's over they take to the streets in ones and twos, wobbling along in their costumes with "Whatchew looking at?" expressions on their faces. To which you may answer, in your mind only, "You, in your little baby dress, dollink."




It's seventy degrees outside in Philadelphia, and the stores have switched their displays from Christmas festivity to January guilt. You can't walk into a bookstore without being assaulted by guides to help you lose weight, build muscle, and clean out your mental and physical closets.

Astronomical diagrams offer a certain restorative perspective. Imagine the size of your midsection in light of this diagram.




Since it's unseasonably warm, it seems like a good idea to keep an eye on the sun. You can do that on this site , which has live satellite photos of the sun in infra red, blue and green.







There's information about the sun here, as well as links to these movies, which show the last 48 hours of the sun and the activity in the center of the solar body.

Vindication

A while ago I listened to this lecture by Lyndall Gordon, who wrote Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. The podcast is fantastic: it's not something I would have sought out, but it came into my ipod on the WGBH Forum network podcast, and I've had good luck with them before.*

Wollstonecraft thought of herself as a "new genus" of woman. She lived during the time of the French revolution, and while the French were defining new notions of the value of mankind in relation to the state, she seems to have been quietly reinventing herself. She went to France when every other sane Englishman was leaving it and saw Louis XVI being taken to his trial, and went on to write this.




I'm not finished reading her biography yet, but I'm really enjoying it. The New York Times Book Review named it as one of their top 100 books of 2005, and it's out in paperback now. If you're interested, there's a review here.

One of the most interesting things about the podcast is the way that Lyndall Gordon talks about how Wollstonecraft has been mythologized. Gordon views the book as a vindication of the complexity of Gordon's life, and as a response to the previous ways that we've constructed narratives of feminine heroines.


Lyndall Gordon


(*The WGBH Forum Series is great. I especially like this lecture, Impassioned Experience: Artwork in a 4h Grade Classroom, in which a hilariously sweet, earnest man talks very seriously about children's photographs and writing. "And as Suzy says about her pink bunny, it is soft, and it is nice..." )

The Angel Gabriel Got Drunk at the Christmas Party

There's a pregnant virgin who is going to give birth to septuplets just in time for the holiday season. Her name is Flora, and she has never, to anyone's knowledge, been touched by a male. The virgin births are expected later this month, and for about $20, visitors will be able to see seven flesh eating, poisonous little messiahs from 10 to 3pm.

Her name is Flora, and she lives at the Chester Zoo in Northern England.



Here's the NY Times article about her, and if you'd like more information, this BBC story is very informative, and even includes a helpful video clip that features gratuitous humping komodo dragons. Which, considering Flora's situation, is rather tactless.

A Redeeming Lump of Crap

Is this woman holding a carved jade representation of the problems of the Iraqi prison system?

No. The woman's name is Dorothy, and you can read about her in an article in today's New York Times called "Please Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk". Which might cheer you up if you happen to have read about the way we're bringing democracy to Iraq.