The G-out Room

By: | January 17, 2014

nightclub hazeIt would start with tapping fingers on my bar, as the house music blared its inane, sometimes nonsensical, lyrics. The hands would be fidgety, the muscles straining for something to press against. Then his legs would start bopping and his face would start working and he’d launch into a violent dance. The shirt would come off, the sweat would pour, and a few minutes later came the overheating and the collapse. The rest went down off-stage, in the G-out room.

Oh, excuse me, the Green Room. Where the bands prepared on the rare occasions we had live bands. But mostly it was the room where patrons slept off the effects of a Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) overdose, watched over by the strangely sympathetic security staff. Perhaps “slept” is not quite the word, although they did lose consciousness for quite a while, and their breathing slowed. Most of the time, though, they were semi-conscious. Continue reading →

Naturalist Without a Notebook

By: | January 16, 2014

640px-Tagebücher,_die_Jakob_Unrau_während_des_Dienstes_als_Sanitäter_im_Ersten_Weltkrieg_geschrieben_hat.(sieh_Artikel_UNRAU).One of my New Year’s resolutions is not to write in a journal everyday. I’m terrible at it, even though I wished I loved to scribble daily. I can’t even keep up with my Planner Pad. (In fact, I’ve already lost my 2014 edition).

That’s not to say that I haven’t occasionally kept a notebook. I have one from the eighth grade that is sealed shut with duct tape and says DO NOT OPEN UNTIL YOU ARE VERY OLD. I am not sure when I plan on opening it. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Importance of Being Peculiar

By: | January 15, 2014

arp 2Halton Arp — “Chip” to his friends — died in Munich on December 28, 2013, and with him a cosmological banner has fallen to the ground. It’s a banner that younger astronomers may choose to take up. If they do, however, they should be cautious: it could mean the end of their careers. As a graduate adviser once remarked to me, “Any student or astronomer who pursues Arp’s work is asking for it.” Why? Because when it comes to standard cosmological theory, Arp is, or was, a renegade of the first order.

Quasars, he claimed, are not the highly energetic cores of very distant galaxies that astronomers declare them to be. They are actually fairly nearby, and ejected from active galactic nuclei. The big bang? Never happened. The universe, as his colleagues Geoffrey Burbidge and Fred Hoyle also contended when they were alive, has always been here in a steady state of existence. The cosmic microwave background radiation? That’s not the afterglow of the big bang fireball, it’s the limiting temperature of space heated by all the stars in all the galaxies in the universe. In the minds of conventional astronomers, these are the thoughts of an apostate, a heretic, a crank, and a crackpot, and Arp was called all these names and more. “Stay away from that lunatic,” an astronomer once pointedly warned me.

Continue reading →

Can’t We All Just … ?

By: | January 14, 2014

shutterstock_133354313 (1)Recently, based on the well-established if-Netflix-made-it-then-it-must-be-awesome principle, I have been watching the show Lillehammer. (This principle is firmly based in the orange-is-the-new-black correlate, the house-of-cards theorem, and the Derek postulate).

Like all the Netflix shows, it’s pretty good. But unlike some, it’s only pretty good. It’s about a New York wise guy who ends up in Norway playing fish-out-of-water and wolf-among-sheep. I mean, the acting’s bad, the script is weak, and the characters are a little flat. But there is still an undeniable charm about the show related to its simmering rage about Norwegian culture.

Continue reading →

The Golden Notebooks: An Awards Show for Us

By: | January 13, 2014
The AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards in 2015, perhaps?
The AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards in 2015, perhaps?

Dear TV Executives:

I hear you’re desperate to get people to watch your channels in real time these days. Apparently I’m not the only one who waits for everything to come out on Netflix. As a result, I heard on NPR yesterday, you’re televising more and more shows that people prefer to watch live, like award shows. It’s not just the Grammies and the Oscars anymore. NBC is reviving the American Comedy Awards. The Hallmark Channel has the Hero Dog Awards, of all things.

Let me propose to you an untapped source of live events: science writing awards. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 11, 2014

January 6 – 10

7279453194_a55d2cd46c_zThis week, Ann told the story of the first hero. She’s a girl, a Sumerian goddress, and she predates all the archetypes of what either heroes or girls should be.

The internet told Christie where home is.

Are you glad you don’t have to hear Christmas music for another year? Helen says you’ll change your mind when you hear the kind they sing in English pubs.

How did cavemen get comfortable: by sitting on logs or squatting? Marital spats at Cassie’s house sure are interesting.

And Roberta tries mushroom ice cream.

You Don’t Know Squat

By: | January 10, 2014

neanderthalThe argument began, like so many arguments do, at the dinner table. My husband and I had been away for the holidays, and a few nights on an unfamiliar mattress had thrown my back into paroxysms of pain. I found this fact troubling. How is that swapping one plush, spring-loaded mattress for another could cause me so much anguish? “How did cavemen, who lacked every modern comfort, survive?” I wondered. [A cavewoman my age would probably be thinking about dying. But let’s pretend we’re discussing a younger, spryer cavewoman.]

“They were probably just used to hard surfaces,” my husband said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And they were more physically active. They weren’t sitting all the time like we do. They did a lot of squatting.” Continue reading →

The Hidden Carols of England

By: | January 9, 2014

While Shepherds Watched

People have been singing Christmas carols in the pubs in villages around Sheffield, in the north of England, for hundreds of years. They sing week after week and year after year. Each pub has a season; in one, Christmas carols start on November 11 and continue until the first Sunday after Christmas. Every Sunday afternoon, people pack into a pub and sing together.

On Tuesday folklorist Ian Russell gave a lecture at the Library of Congress about his work on what he calls the “hidden” carols of northern England, particularly those Sheffield pubs. Russell is the director of the Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He’s been studying folk traditions in South Yorkshire—which includes Sheffield—and North Derbyshire for 40 years.

A pub carol sing isn’t a religious occasion. It’s secular caroling. There’s beer. Sure, they sing about the Messiah’s birth and Mary and so on, but the point of being there, Russell says, is the community. People go out of a sense of commitment to the group and to the tradition. You do it every year because you do it every year.

Continue reading →