Snow falls often where I live now. I love it, mostly. I do like to work, so I don’t love when it creates snow days. But I love its crisp delicacy, falling soft and softly falling. I love its silence and its brightness. I love the way it tattles on the deer and turkeys and bobcats and coyote and mountain lions and soon, the bears that walk by and around my house.
I especially love the way it falls upon the conifers. The sight of a snow-fattened tiny spruce, or a tall burdened ponderosa, were among the things I missed most during the years I didn’t live in Colorado.
I have always liked the word “foothill.” It evokes not only the low hills at the foot of a mountain, but the pleasure of footing over them. When the hills turn soft and green, I like to imagine placing a marble at the top of a hill and watching it roll. Last weekend, I followed the imaginary marble on a long, solo walk, intending to get at least a little bit lost. I followed a stream until I found a sunlit meadow, ate half my turkey sandwich, then fell asleep. When I woke up it was late, dusk coming on quickly. A pair of deer grazed a few feet from where I had been napping. All around me, a chorus of frogs sang wildly of spring, sex, and resurrection.
Frogs, I recently learned, can survive freezing temperatures because the sugar in their blood protects their vital organs from ice crystals. Their hearts may stop beating, they may stop breathing, but as soon as temperatures get warmer, the frogs wake up to mate and sing. Other frogs can survive long droughts by making themselves a dead skin cocoon, mummifying themselves until the rains return.
My first experience with automated transcription happened a decade ago. In 2010 I joined Google Voice and started getting transcripts of my voicemails. The results were, not surprisingly, underwhelming. Back then, most speech recognition software was underwhelming. Here’s my first transcript:
Hi Cassandra, this is Anna 10 calling to run. Thank you for the science now on a call if they were at. Just two little things that we were hoping you might be able to rephrase I’m gonna send you an email and let you know to see if it’s possible. I think both She She, Syria and, got the call, or felt a little bit. I’ve left out of the article so. I will send you an email. Thanks bye bye.
Thanks, Anna 10. Let’s loop in She She and Syria and circle back.
But oh how times have changed. AI got good. AI got astonishingly good. So good it is now, gasp!, useful. More than useful. For journalists, automated transcription tools have been a godsend. (You can find a comparison of various services here.)
These tools are good, but none of them are perfect. Some, in fact, are hilariously imperfect. Here I present a bevy of AI bloopers.* Enjoy. (And please add your own bloopers in the comments!)
The other day I hovered over the computer as the clock counted down. Was I on the right page? Refreshing, refreshing, refreshing. Was I logged in? At 7:00 p.m., the screen changed, and I zipped around with my cursor, checking the open slots, trying to check the right box.
It wasn’t a vaccine appointment. It was a lap lane.
I’ve always been an inconsistent swimmer. For many years, I moved so often that I never found a rhythm. It took me a while to get the lap swim schedule down—and then the snow would fall, or I’d start training for a long run, or move again. In the last few years, I only swam when I was pregnant or nursing an injury. Last year, I’d been thinking about getting in the pool again, and then you know what happened. Once the pool did reopen, it seemed too complicated to navigate the sign-up system, too strange to follow the many new rules.
The other day I was rifling through a drawer in search of a notebook — I have a filing system best described as “post-tornado” — when my hand touched an old external hard-drive. I plugged it into a USB port, and years of photos, many of which I’d assumed were lost forever, bloomed on my laptop. A couple of albums captured scuba-diving trips Elise and I took in the Before Times, back when the greatest risk of foreign travel was flygskam. We spent most of those dives hunting for nudibranchs, flamboyant sea slugs that hide among coral crevices like Easter eggs. Although we have been privileged to see many extraordinary things underwater — dolphin pods, mantis shrimp, turtles the size of coffee tables — nothing quite thrills me like finding one of these tiny gems, exposed gills waving kelpishly in the current. Their preposterous beauty and gentle panache have always sparked wonder in me; perhaps these unearthed pictures will do the same for you.
Material mirth: It has a nice ring to it. And there’s nothing wrong with buying new cork placemats or ridiculously overpriced hiking socks because new placemats or new socks make you smile. In fact, sometimes buying things you don’t really need is super rewarding. Like, if I could buy a tiny tropical white-sand island with a beach cottage and a friendly resident dolphin, I’d be happier than I am now, during this COVID-gray February in Maryland. Studies have shown that shopping actually can ease sadness–by giving us some control when we may feel we have none.
On the other hand, as a long-term strategy, shoving stuff you bought on a whim into the hole where dread and self-loathing dwell is bound to disappoint.
During the pandemic, I have not gone whole hog on online shopping to fill my own personal hole of discontent (okay, that’s a terrible way to put that), but I haven’t done none of it, either. So, to make it seem like I was shopping for scientific reasons, I thought I’d look for patterns in my purchases to try to explain my behavior–thus elucidating something essential about myself and about our species as a whole. *
What I found isn’t terribly surprising: Almost everything “extra” I’ve bought since lockdown began is related to beauty, to eating, or to cleaning, which makes sense for someone who is stuck at home with a Zoom camera, an inner hunger that only pasta can fill, and dog hair by the skein. (There’s also a smaller but still substantial “comfort” category that I’d submit needs no explanation.) It must be the sight of my pale, puffy face and tired eyes staring back at me daily, the messy desk flanked by stacked mail and laundry, the dog in the background giving off what can only be described as a “poopie” smell, that drives me to seek products that promise a healthy glow in the foreground and a sparkling clean setting (and dog) in the back.
That said, I’ve been known to fall into the ridiculous notion that having a certain thing will make everything that’s wrong suddenly okay. My pandemic purchases, then, have tried to serve two purposes–the one they were designed for and the anti-depressant, fix-what’s-broken, fill-all-voids one.
Some of the items are trying hard to at least fulfill that first part, with mixed results. The second part, not so much.
Here’s what I got:
Beauty/fashion-related:
Jade facial roller Phytopolleine scalp elixer
Full skin-care line by Mad Hippie Collagen supplements
Black cohosh supplements (for hot flashes, because nobody looks pretty during a hot flash)
**Nope.
Octopus tentacle earrings
Two sweaters I may never receive from a sketchy company advertising on FB (why, why do I do this??)
Overnight anti-wrinkle patches**
Tub of activated charcoal (for teeth plus)
This bag
(For the record: I did not purchase the cheek-lifting leggings that keep showing up in my “you might be interested in this” cue. And I take offense at Facebook’s suggestion, damn it.)
Food-related:
Two styles of garlic press, because it’s good to have a spare
Chef’s knife
Egg-bite mold, for Instant Pot
New rubber seal that doesn’t smell like aged chicken, for Instant Pot
Vat of tahini (pack of two) because of roasted cauliflower recipe seen on TikTok
Fancy pink Himalayan salt Case of red wine, through a friend who sells (gotta support my friends!)
Food processor (thankfully I already had a Vitamix and an Instant Pot or I would have bought those, too)
Actual old-timey silver plated silverware (in its own wooden box) to replace embarrassing hodgepodge from college, in case we ever have guests again
Cleaning-related:
Two different mop/bucket “systems” (when did mops reach the $50 mark?)
Magic Eraser (pack of six)for wall smears
Rug rake for loosening dog hairbefore vacuuming
Dog mouthwash
Cloths for dry dog “bath” (see a pattern here?)
“Green” laundry detergent pods, the subscription
Comfort-related:
Yup!
Eucalyptus sheets
The Comfy wearable blanket (which, actually, HAS been transformative)
A plant (mentally comforting, somehow)
Misc: Covid mask with Bob Ross silhouette and happy little trees
Gardening containers (they were thankfully free, left by the curb, and it’s too soon to tell…they may still be the keystone in the arc of my happiness, to borrow a phrase)
—
Okay, now it’s your turn. What have you bought on a whim since last March? Is it giving your life meaning? Is it at least making your hair curl or your rugs smell fresh? If yes, where can I get it?
I’ve reached the stage of pandemic isolation, anxiety, hope, despair, faith, exhaustion, general twitchiness and sheer endurance — as have we all — where a nice alternate reality might help. I don’t mean a fantasy. I mean a reality that exists somewhere else — but no, that won’t work, the pandemic is everywhere. So I mean a reality that existed at some other time. The picture up there is where Ballykilcline used to be. Before it vanished in the Famine, Ballykilcline and in general, the pre-Famine Irish lived in a way that was fairly dreadful and in another way, was so sweet and so fundamentally human. This post first ran June 20, 2016.
I’m having trouble with a story. First I went down one rabbit hole (the effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the Irish Potato Famine) until it branched into two (now-dead towns, one in Maryland, one in Ireland), and then I went down both. You can picture me heading down one, scrambling back up, heading down the other one, a happy little rabbit. My behavior so far is appropriate for a science writer.
Then the editor says, “Those two towns, the one in Maryland and the one in Ireland, they’re the wrong towns.” Given the story she assigned, she’s right. “But I’m already down here,” I say. She gives me a pitying look.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her the whole truth: one of those rabbit holes sprung a branch, and then that branch branched, and I’m now so deep I’ll never see the sky again. This is definitely not appropriate for a science writer. My trouble started when an archeologist told me about a man who had lived on both sides of the Atlantic in both towns.
The man was listed as “a middling farmer” in the Irish town of Ballykilcline, in the late 1840’s when the potato blight hit. When he couldn’t pay rent, he was evicted and with his family, put on a ship leaving Liverpool for New York City. A few years later, he shows up in Texas, Maryland as the owner of a manor house. Maybe he came over with more money than I thought? Rabbit hole! I found every mention of him in every piece of literature; I found his family tree. Back in Ballykilcline, he’d even helped lead a rebellion, a farmers’ rent strike. Ah. Why were Irish farmers on a rent strike? Didn’t they own their farms?
No, they didn’t — the middling farmer of Ballykilcline was a hungry rent-payer — and the people they paid rent to didn’t own them either, and the people those people paid rent to didn’t own them either, and it was non-owners all the way down. The English Crown owned the farms in Ireland and roughly a zillion layers of middlemen collected rents. Whole towns-worth of farms owned by another country altogether? If no one local had a stake in the farms and towns, then what held, say, Ballykilcline, together? Why was it a coherent town at all?
Rabbit hole! I found a book by a notable historian. Writing a feature, I never read books as background – they take too long for too small a return in current and useful information – so this rabbit hole is now at an unprecedented depth. Most Ballykilcline-type farmers lived in what the best travel writer of all time, Alexis de Tocqueville, said were “wretched” houses made of “sun-dried mud,” walls only the height of a person, some of them “semi-underground” with thatched roofs that melded with the grass surrounding, “giving the whole thing the look of a molehill on which a passer-by has trod.” The houses looked temporary, says the book, as though they could be left behind easily.
The houses were in small groups, called clachans; a clachan was surrounded by farmland arranged into fields, called rundales. The whole affair together was called a townland; Ballykilcline was a townland. The townlands weren’t like English villages or American small towns, says the book: no main street, no stores, no pubs, no churches (the priest used a house), no schools (the schoolteacher used a house too). Townlands were just clachans and rundales. Every year, the people of a townland got together and threw lots for individual fields in the rundale. A given farmer’s fields weren’t necessarily contiguous – one here, one there – and in any case, they’d be the farmer’s responsibility only for the year.
Towns with no centers? Houses that could be abandoned easily? Fields that you’d farm for only a year? All owned by an entity nobody saw? And Ballykilcline remained Ballykilcline because?
The book’s answer: over this incoherent infrastructure was a sort of human net. The townland was essentially the shared histories of the people who’d always lived in one place. People lived near each other, married each other, had kin in the next townland, told the same stories, had the same memories, were all trying to feed themselves with their farms. They identified with their own townlands and knew the names of the townlands nearby, knew the other townlands’ families and histories and who argued with whom.
Ballykilcline was held together by a web of history and memory. “It was an extremely fragile form of social organization,” says the book. And yes, between the famine and the mass evictions for nonpayment of rent, Ballykilcline pretty well cleared out for good. Google Maps shows no place there at all.
But a townland made mostly of minds and connections? a middling farmer going from famine to manor house? Down here in this rabbit hole, I’m in such lovely company.
____________
Photo courtesy of MacDermot.com: Ballykilcline is out there somewhere.
My mother is an artist, and when she was a kid in New Mexico she’d draw horses in a Southwestern style, jaunty spring in their step and delicately curved, a bit like the art of Navajo, Acoma, or Zuni, all of which could have influenced her. The other day, I came across a couple of her horses on a boulder. Or horses that look like hers. The style I’m sure seeped through, even from a great distance.
Two horses in a row facing left to right were Ute in origin, a couple centuries old at least. They had been meticulously chipped with bone or antler into a natural canvas of mud-red sandstone, the one farthest left given special attention, its lines sharp, form impeccable, as if rendered on a wall in Lascaux. On its rump and shoulder it bears what looks to represent a pair of brands or painted circles, moons of different phases perhaps, a pronouncement about the horse, its rider, or the people it represents. Art within art.
Near the foot of the San Juan Mountains in the Four Corners, territory of the Utes, there is little doubt as to the cultural origin of these horses. Form is a giveaway. They remind me of what my mother drew on what is now yellowed paper that she might still have at the bottom of a box somewhere, art of a schoolgirl born and raised in the Southwest, picking up styles and messages around her.
