Night, sleep, death and the stairs

Mostly a roundup of things tumbl'd.

1. Advice for Japanese tourists in Scotland:

Not all the advice in the Insider's Guide to Scotland is prohibitive, however. It recommends Mackie's honeycomb ice-cream and ginger marmalade, as well as Irn Bru. Lorne sausage, though – which is sliced and flat, and also known as square sausage – is best avoided.

The Japanese-language book, published by the Edinburgh-based Luath Press, notes the attraction of pub crawls, even urging visitors to get "merrily drunk" on whisky. 

2. Snouts:

A solenodon is "one of the few mammals with truly venomous saliva, and is also one of the rarest extant animals on earth."

3. Sarah Manguso's advice to young writers. Two bits that ring particularly true:

Don’t go to events; go to the receptions after the events. If possible, skip the receptions and go to the afterparties, where you can have a real conversation with someone. [...] Recognize those who would help you, and let them know who you are. Assemble a coterie of influence that will protect and serve you.

4. This Mary Ruefle piece is worth reading in full. I shall merely pull out a reminiscence about Yeats:

at the beginning of one class Mr. Moore asked us if we would like to see a picture of Yeats. We nodded, and he held up a photograph of Yeats taken when he was six months old, a baby dressed in a long white gown. Maybe he was even younger, maybe he was an infant. I thought it was the funniest thing anyone had ever done, the strangest, most ridiculous, absurd thing to have done. But nobody laughed and if Mr. Moore thought it was funny, you couldn’t tell by his face. I always liked him for that. The poems we were reading in class were not written by a baby. And yet whenever I think of Yeats, I see him as a tiny baby wearing a dress—that photograph is part of my conception of the great Irish poet. And I love that it is so. We are all so small.

"Nine foot long, and seven foot broad"

From Shakespeare's England (formerly Dainty Ballerina), the uses of polar bears (in a post that begins with a tangential remark about Jonson):

Then we rip'd up her belly, and taking out her guttes, drew her home to the House where we flayed her, and took at least one hundred pounds of fat out of her belly, which wee molt'd and burned in our Lampe. This Grease did us great good service, for by that meanes we still kept a Lampe burning all night long, which before wee could not doe, for want of Grease, and eery man had meanes to burned a Lampe in his Cabbin, for such necessaries as he had to doe. The Beares skin was nine foot long, and seven foot broad.

(Calista  (who provided the Jonson quote below) and I have lately been collecting references to grease, boars, bears, do(ugh!)nuts, etc. under the unofficial rubric of A Child's Larder of Verse.) See also: "I've measured it from side to side / 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide." The linked bear story includes the wonderfully anticlimactic end of an Arctic explorer:

In 1611, [Jonas] Poole suffered a broken skull and collar bone on Cherry Island while handling his cargo of walrus ivory and whale fat. He was brought home by a rival whaler and recovered sufficiently from his injuries to return to the arctic the following year. However, Poole's career as a whaler was cut short in September 1612 when he was murdered in Wapping in August, having returned home from what became his final voyage.

Also bear- and grease-related: from Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, a description of the character Ursula ("Urs." / "Urse"):

From Dallas with Dyspepsia

I am coming around to the view that these APS meetings are generally awful. Some people insist that they're great if treated correctly, but I don't see it, I have been exhausted and irritated ever since we arrived and immediately found out that physicists had overwhelmed all the restaurants near the convention center. The coffee-shop lines have been consistently dire. The meeting itself has been wearying -- I had signed up, unwisely, to give two talks, neither of which I put together until the very last minute -- and there are far fewer talks this year than in prev. years that I feel compelled to go to.

We're staying at the Magnolia, an enormous hotel in downtown Dallas that's notable primarily for its lurching turn-of-the-20th-cent elevators. (They're also really slow.) There are three Englishwomen here who seem to spend most of their time riding the elevators and repeating a few obvious jokes about them. (I wonder if this is a successful pick-up strategy?) As convention centers go this one is exceptionally ugly, and abuts a graveyard with a huge Confederate memorial (Jefferson Davis's marble neck-beard is like a wrinkled goiter), but is otherwise OK. It is adequately provided with restrooms, and the wireless internet is a LOT better than one expects at these things. If only my laptop had a functioning battery... but one is forced to hang out in corners w/ power outlets.

I wonder what the etiquette is re gawking at people's name-tags. Personally I can't help it.