Spirograph, Fat Shoppers, and Urban Myth--I believe in intelligent design

With the blood-curdling vision of two very fat shoppers careening around a corner of the produce section, I woke up last night, on the hottest night yet of the summer, to a freezing cold breeze blowing through the window. Heart hammering, brow in a cold sweat, I kept repeating over and over, "I believe in intelligent design...I believe in intelligent design."

Last night my daughter dragged me onto the back patio to look at the moon, one side going flat like a car tire in a construction zone, and told me, "They say that tonight Mars will be the size the of the moon when it rises!" And she was adamant. "Tonight is the closest Mars will ever be to the earth in centuries, and if you don't see it, you'll miss it!"

And so I, like all good mothers and well-rounded women of science should do, stayed up waiting to see this phenomenon that would never be witnessed again by even my grandchildren. I pictured them sitting at the foot of my rocking chair as I described the red planet, rising in the east like a giant rubber dodge ball, the god of war riding his majestic chariot beneath the glowing moon, two twin orbs of light and fire...

Am I just stupid? "They say" should have been my first tip-off, as if I wasn't smart enough to pick up on the likelihood of a planet the same size as the moon. And the faint voice ringing in my head, "Didn't somebody say this like...five years ago?" wasn't that enough, or the fact that she got this info from a friend on....email???

Please tell me I wasn't the only one duped again by an urban myth. Please tell me I'm not the only one who still shudders when I think of all the spare change slots I've reached into and narrowly escaped without being infected with AIDS from the hypodermic needle. Reassure me that I'm not alone at Walmart doing shallow chest breathing, looking for the tell-tale bottle of red hair dye in the bathroom trash can when I can't find my daughters in electronics like they said they'd be. Calm me by telling me that the car that just flashed its lights isn't really going to pull out an AKA-some-number and open fire in a drive-by shooting...that the man asking if I lost the $10 bill by the gas pump isn't going to slap duct-tape on my mouth, stuff me in my trunk and drive away...that I haven't contracted breast cancer from all the frozen water bottles I've drunk from, and the ones I've discarded aren't really bombs left in the neighbor's yard.

T

Turns out, according to Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer for Space.com,

 that Mars and the earth are always this close (about 34 million miles close) together about every 26 months. It's just the way the orbits work out. It's like a Spirograph--you know, that cool plastic toy from your childhood that created cosmic looking geographical designs sure to make Sputnik and the Russians sick with envy. It's the off-centeredness of the spinning orbs that makes the converging and diverging lines.

But that's when I realized we are all doomed. DOOMED! Because, I don't know about you...but I remember Spirograph being one of THEEE most frustrating toys I ever owned as a child. (Okay, it was my big brother's..I never got anything cool). My designs, not one, ever turned out like the examples in the little book. Spirograph designs like the one above are as big an urban myth as the bride that cooked to death in a tanning bed. You know it's true. Every single time, just when you thought it was all going so swimmingly, little teeth in little gears humming around the inside of an ellipse, plastic ballpoint working in harmony with God and nature...

BOOM!

The pen would glitch, the gear would jump, the ellipse would slip, and with a noise like grinding teeth, your perfect poly-dex-hedron-lypsy would look like Phyllis Diller's hair.

34 million miles away..................sounds like a lot, huh? Well, think again. Imagine that the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles, or about 8 light minutes) is compressed to the thickness of a typical sheet of paper. The diameter of the Milky Way (100,000 light years) would require a 310 mile high stack of paper, while the distance to the Andromeda galaxy (at 2 million light years one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye) would require a stack of paper more than 6000 miles high! (That's not me talking, that's William P. Blair of Johns Hopkins University)


But that means (this is me talking now) that in Bill's terms...the space between Earth and Mars last night was less than the thickness of a piece of paper.


Get me a paper sack, I think I'm going to faint! The only other time I have ever felt this vagal was when Mr. Wright, my 8th grade science teacher, told us that if the earth ever stopped spinning we would all fly off into outer space at 1,000 miles per hour. I spent months chaining my ankle to the bed leg at night in case the cessation of rotation occurred during my sleep.


34 million miles.....what in the world keeps Earth and Mars from colliding like two fat old ladies wheeling through the produce department with only 30 minutes left before their respective dinner parties? ...................LUCK?


Last night I went to bed, after Mars--the size of a pea to the moon's giant beach ball--finally rose. But I went to bed wondering why people who worry about hair dye and hypodermic needles and drinking bottles are even able to sleep knowing that the earth is revolving around the sun at...oh...approximately 64 THOUSAND miles per hour.


Hmmmmm. Maybe they can't. Maybe like me, when the cold breeze hits on a hot summer night, they too sit bolt upright in bed and realize that in all this cosmic design there has to be a larger hand at work. A creator that can function in terms of light seconds and half-widths of paper.


An exterior designer who chuckles as we chain ourselves to the bed leg even as we hurtle through space, several directions at once, at thousands of miles per hour without a second thought. 

Brain Stem Exhaustion--A Little Thing Called Teacher Inservice

Inservice (see in-service): a hyphenated, compound adjective pertaining to training a group of professionals who are already in said profession: in-service training.


If you, as I am, are in said teaching profession, inservice (and its plural form: inservii) is (are) a noun…a thing...and a severe reality of education. Somewhere back in the 1980's, an administrator named Louie Livermore needed a kitschy word to call the first-of-year mandatory meetings concerning such nail-biting items as proper dress protocol for females (absolutely no more than three pairs of colored slouch socks), and drug enforcement (yes, Mrs. Stucky, that white ring on the boys' back pockets is formed from a chew can) as well as mandatory state assessment (such as the revolutionary do the work or fail theory). But Louie knew that teachers had begun to grumble about having far, far too many meetings, so he created inservice.

Administrators for the last 30 years have followed suit until inservice has become the catch-word for the mandatory yearly adjustment that must be performed on teachers who have been outofservice for over ten weeks on summer vacation, requiring them to return to school a minimum of three days ahead of students.

Unfortunately, Livermore, a star football center who failed sophomore English three times, went on to instruct at the college level, specializing in a pedagogical course called "Training Content Teachers." In this course, Livermore fell victim to another popular theory of the 1980's called euphamasia (a technique attributed to the Regan Administration in which a large word is given an odd ending which creates a new, non-existant word in order to confuse listeners.) To put it simply, Livermore, like most people involved in education at the highest levels, mistook CONTENT the noun for CONTENT the adjective. CONtent teachers deliver a specific classroom curriculum. ConTENT teachers do not drool in meetings.


What a horrible disappointment it has proven to be for graduate after graduate who have succomed to the Livermore pedagogical philosophy: Inservice creates content teachers. Alas, it seems that yet another set-back in the entire educational system could be solved with a simple grammar lesson.

To the Grandest Lake of All! Set me as a seal upon your heart

A motif? A theme? I feel one coming on...I'm stuck on lakes. This weekend we were on the bottom leg of Trail Ridge Road, having just cleared the Rocky Mt. National Park Ranger station (ah...remember when an annual pass was $15 and you could get a weekender for $7...gone, it's all gone) and gathering speed every second (28 mph...37...45 mph...) when a new brown sign caught my eye. "Stop! Stop!" I yelled. "Turn around! Turn around now!" (since "stop" didn't work!)
And like a child I begin bouncing in my seat "It's open! It's open. The Lodge is open!"

For those of you who know not of which I speak (who talks like that anyway? Oh, wait, me!) at the bottom of one of the most beautiful glaciated valleys on earth, the Kawaneechee Valley, sits the headwaters of the Colorado River--Grand Lake. And on the hillside above Grand Lake sits one of the most darling, most intriguing, most amazing travel destinations on earth...The Grand Lake Lodge, a giant log structure with a green metal roof, and a front porch as long as a football stadium. And from this porch one can view two, almost three, of the most beautiful lakes on earth--Grand Lake, Shadow Mountain, and Lake Granby--all three of which are, this year,  filled to capacity with ice cold mountain runoff.

The Lodge has been closed for the last three seasons, which truthfully has made Grand Lake just...well, not seem like Grand Lake. The James family, the owners since 1953, have been trying to sell this grand old queen of summer lodges, and I guess somebody thought it would show better empty.

But Grand Lake Lodge was never meant to be empty. It's one of those places from a time past when people actually gathered in a communal house to eat meals, sit around a fireplace or swing on the front porch trading stories and anecdotes or just quietly taking in the view. The fireplace inside the lodge is a six-foot diameter wood-burner, and the sweet smell of pine smoke faintly lingers in the air. It's surrounded by 16 rocking chairs and two swings, and when the weather grows too cold outside, the wind off the lake drives the rain in under the porch eaves like cold mist, you can prop your feet up on the brass foot rail and watch the flames.

And it's not unlikely for the weather to grow cold, even in early August, in Grand Lake. A morning that starts out in the 70's can fall to the 50's by 3 p.m. when an afternoon shower thunders through the valley, rocking the walls of Mount Baldy and the giant logs of the Lodge as well. In fact, one time my friend Joe Owens (new to the area) thought he could take a leisurely bike ride (right, my lungs just collapsed at the thought) up  Trail Ridge Road and he nearly froze to death.

But by 5:00 the sun was back out, the front doors of wood and beveled lead glass were flung open again (you just never have to worry about flies...I'm sure somebody could tell you why, but there just aren't any) and the kids were swimming in the 80-degree pool. (Thank you Reed, they had the time of their lives!)

I love Grand Lake Lodge. I was married on a knoll there in 1991, and now that my own daughters are beginning to marry I realize how much, and how quickly, time has passed. I know I'm sentimental, and I know I often wax nostalgic, but you could never re-create a place like this...even if you copied it wood beam for wood beam, duplicated it stuffed mountain goat by stuffed moose, little brown guest cabin by pine-wood deck. When you enter the lodge you step back in time and sit on the ghostly laps of the tourists in the black-and-white photos who made the first bus trips from Estes Park to see this natural wonder, dressed in their long skirts and white blouses, fancy hats and fine habedashery.

If I had 15 million dollars just sitting around, Grand Lake Lodge would be mine. But I don't, so I share it with you. It is part of my heart, and I daresay part of the heart of Grand Lake (as witnessed by scores of people who flock in each day).

Samantha and Brian, happy wedding day to you. May your love last and grow old as this lodge; may it be a place of wonder where you can sit and soak up the breathtaking scenery, feel the heat of the fires and survive the cold of the storms.

"Set me as a seal over your heart, for love is as strong as death, Jealousy is as severe as flashes of fire, The very flame of the LORD. Many waters cannot quench love, Nor will rivers overflow it." Song of Songs 8:7

Once More Home From the Lake--an ode to the good old white t-shirt

With my deepest apologies to E.B. White who wrote the world's most lovely Once More to the Lake.

Well, the suits are on the line, my incisors have been ground down .05 mm from silica-hot-dog- abrasion, and I've had the rare opportunity to see what I would look like with dred-locks. I'd call it a successful weekend at the lake.
But now...could we talk double entendre? The double entendre, sophisticated as it may sound, is the juvenile marketing method for selling t-shirts to males between the ages of 12 to 17 1/2...and forgive me for saying it, but I'm talking mental age. (conjure image of Will Ferral whose picture I would post but please...) For instance picture this scene: A 50-something male, graying hair and beard, behind cash register, large gray t-shirt bulging over larger beer belly in a t-shirt that says, "Big Mac Hookers." Am I supposed to laugh at this? How can I not? Of COURSE there are two large fish hooks ensconced intersectent on yon laurel wreath bedecking ye said belly. But really, should Mr. French be allowed to wear such a shirt, and what is Mr. French doing at Big Mac anyway? And for you youngsters who don't know who Mr. French is, I included a photo (take that Will!) I guess it just seems there should be an age when wearing a t-shirt with a sexual double entendre should be illegal and there should definitely be an age at which it shouldn't make you titter like a 6th grade boy.
But then again, how would Hooters survive? I mean, think about it. The entire restaurant chain has made itself famous on the strength of double entendre and the lack thereof (strength, that is) of the male mind. Seriously, would anybody stop in and eat at a chow house called Large Mammary Glands? I think not.
I can't tell you how many times I've asked boys to inside-out t-shirts bearing such clever captions as: (Squirrel holding baseball bat) "protect your nuts." Or the famous "I'll treat you like a princess...want to play with my jewels?" (Who lets them out of the house wearing these in the first place? Oh...another blog, another time.)
It has been said (John Dryden? Samuel Johnson?) that the pun is the lowest form of wit, but is this true? To understand one of these t-shirts one must have passed from the mental stage of literal thinking to some form of abstract thinking. I mean, who doesn't like a good pun every now and then? But it was a sad day when I had to stop my eight year old child from buying a t-shirt at American Eagle (for cryin' out loud!) for father's day and I really, really didn't want to explain why. She, literally, saw nothing wrong with it.
But I guess my plea to all young men (and women too, for that matter) who think Porky's is a classic and Step Brothers is the climax of humor (see...they're giggling right now) is...why stop there? Go ahead and climb the next few rungs on the ladder of cognitive development, take a look at the guy behind the counter, and just say no this time to the Master Baiter and the Mine's This Big, fisherman t-shirts on the silver display rack in Sportsman Lodge. Ah, E.B., I love your plain old, plaid button down.