Are you the kind of person who reads superhero comics and thinks that they aren’t nearly influenced enough by Thai art?

Or are you the sort who, upon viewing the “Ramakien”:http://www.usmta.com/MYTHS%20&%20LEGENDS.htm murals at Wat Phra Kaew, really wishes that they had worked Spider Man in there somewhere?

Then you’ll want to buy a painting by “Jirapat Tasanasomboon”:http://www.picassomio.com/artist-portfolio/987/en/. My favorites are “Sita being Abducted by Superman” and “Darth Maul with Thai Headdress.”

A prank involving mercury has “caused quite a hubbub”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36989-2003Oct2.html at a local school. Here’s a health official’s advice:

Etter said that anyone who had touched the mercury should wash with cold water and soap, noting that cold water closes the pores, and then see a doctor. Anyone who finds mercury at home should call 911, he said. The school system said parents who believe their children’s clothes are contaminated should place the items in a plastic bag, take it outdoors and call the fire department.

Considering mercury’s “harmful effects”:http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/mercury/properties_health.html, none of this counts as overreaction. But, having just read the bits in _Quicksilver_ where members of the Royal Society routinely _drink_ the stuff, just to see what would happen, I’m reminded that people haven’t always been quite so sensible. They did it in the good ol’ spirit of scientific inquiry, but also because half of them were alchemists — mercury is one of the seven elements of alchemy.

It was a routine ingredient in cosmetics dating back to classical times. It was certainly in the stuff that “Queen Elizabeth”:http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/eliza3b.jpg famously wore on her face, hiding blemishes and keeping the skin nice and soft — by eating away at her pores like acid.

Of course, the most famous victim of mercury poisoning was the “Mad Hatter”:http://www.student.kun.nl/l.derooy/pics/hatter.jpg of Tea Party fame. Hatters “really did go mad”:http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmadhatter.html from their exposure to the element when curing felt.

What? “Man, it’s been awhile since I’ve read Alice in Wonderland,” you say? Have no fear! Just read on.

‘Your hair wants cutting,’ said the Hatter. He had been looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.

‘You should learn not to make personal remarks,’ Alice said with some severity; ‘it’s very rude.’

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, ‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’

‘Come, we shall have some fun now!’ thought Alice. ‘I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles.–I believe I can guess that,’ she added aloud.

‘Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?’ said the March Hare.

‘Exactly so,’ said Alice.

‘Then you should say what you mean,’ the March Hare went on.

‘I do,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.’

‘Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. ‘You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’

‘You might just as well say,’ added the March Hare, ‘that “I like what I get” is the same thing as “I get what I like”!’

‘You might just as well say,’ added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, ‘that “I breathe when I sleep” is the same thing as “I sleep when I breathe”!’

‘It is the same thing with you,’ said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

The Hatter was the first to break the silence. ‘What day of the month is it?’ he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

Alice considered a little, and then said ‘The fourth.’

‘Two days wrong!’ sighed the Hatter. ‘I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!’ . . .

‘What a funny watch!’ she remarked. ‘It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!’

‘Why should it?’ muttered the Hatter. ‘Does your watch tell you what year it is?’

‘Of course not,’ Alice replied very readily: ‘but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.’

‘Which is just the case with mine,’ said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.

(“keep reading”:http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext97/alice30h.htm, if you like)

As a relatively new blogger, I’m still in that phase where I pore over every stat in my server logs on a near-daily basis. (This goes away after a while, right? Right?) I quickly discovered that the “keyphrases used on search engines” section has incredible entertainment value. And while I’m certainly “not the”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000482.html “first”:http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_eve-tushnet_archive.html#106279472252715591 to do this, I thought I’d share some of the search strings that a person or persons entered into Google that led them, somehow, to Polytropos.

Obvious Which Entry It Came From Dept.

thom yorke tool
nate yoga instructor [someday . . .]
step by step levitation
fans of the 1979 chrysler lebaron [we like to stick together]
kate beckinsdale hair in underworld
did the cia put charles taylor in power?
get rid of jai [yesss!]
girls of gencon 2003
hidden connotation in Harry Potter
hermione and harry love stories sex kissing marriage

Probably Came From My “Thailand Travelogue”:http://www.polytropos.org/web/thailand.html Dept.

travelogue burma brothel
masseuses popped anything that could
tourists having servants in thailand

Dept. of WTF?

inlay back garfunkel across america
portugese sliver coins [sic]
bare club iranian
counteracted or frills or carved or divider or anthem
duel legal country dueling where banned
the history of any kind of catfish seen by professional divers several years ago diving at the smith mountain lake dam invirginia [yes, that’s all one phrase]

The Internet is a very big place. Some of those people could only have found Polytropos by looking on the fifth or sixth page of Google results (I checked). It’s also pretty clear that hardly anyone knows to use quotations marks in search field to set off a phrase — unless maybe those just don’t come up on the server logs.

So, I’m about halfway through “Quicksilver”:http://www.nealstephenson.com/, and the first thing I want to say is that —

Aargh! Must resist . . . temptation . . . to comment before . . . I’m . . . done . . . words would be . . . premature . . . must . . . have focus . . . discipline . . . fight it . . . fight . . . there . . . winning . . . inner battle . . .

Phew. Best to wait. I’ve been maintaining a blackout on other reviews and commentary. It’s not easy. But in another week or two I hope to have a proper review, followed by plenty of other notes and comments. Until then, I’ll just try to stay focused on _reading_ the dang thing, and reserve judgment until I turn the last page.

P.S. It’s really, really good.

“Josh Marshall interviews Wesley Clark”:http://talkingpointsmemo.com/oct0301.html#1001031244pm.

Josh doesn’t throw him any curveballs, and for the first few questions Clark sounds a bit too much like . . . well, like a campaigning politician. But once they get into foreign policy it gets good.

. . . in the odd kind of geopolitical chess board game this administration seemed to want to play, they seemed to assume that you could get your forces into Iraq, and, like a game of checkers, you could skip across the Middle East–plop, plop, plop–as though in some metaphysical sense, it was easier to come ashore up through the Euphrates and Tigris valleys into the heart of the Middle East and southwest Asia, and then cross into the mountains of Iraq–excuse me, of Iran–or pivot and go towards Syria. It was analytically, geometrically satisfying, even though those of us who understood the situation at the time said it made little sense. It was old-think. It was 19th century geostrategy . . . It was the Great Game with modern equipment, and hypermodern risks. And, in reality, the problems with Osama bin Laden were not problems of states. They were problems of a supranational organization which alighted in states, used states, manipulated elements of states, but wasn’t going to be contained and destroyed by attacking and replacing governments.

The whole thing’s worth a read.

I learned some more lessons at the “Virginia Backgammon Club”:http://www.polytropos.org/web/backgammon.html last night. I won one match and lost two, which is better than the previous couple of times, though my second-place win from a few months ago is starting to seem like a fluke. Over at the Grounds I’ve been on the mother of all losing streaks, which either means that Fortuna has it in for me or my game is off for some reason.

I think I know what’s wrong, and ironically it was the match that I _won_ that made it clear. I was ahead 2-0 in a three point match, and was bearing off with two checkers on each of my inner table points except the four point. My opponent, Constantine, hadn’t taken anyone off yet and had a guy on the bar. Pretty sweet position, right? I roll a 4-1. And what do I do? 5-off. Not 6-5 6-2, the only sensible move, I leave him a blot to hit, which of course he does, leading to a nailbiting finish instead of a straightforward win or maybe even a gammon.

It wasn’t that I considered the right move and made the wrong choice. It’s that I overlooked the obvious. And this was in a tournament, where I was making a point of being both careful and observant. If I can miss something so blatant, who knows how many other opportunities to make the best move that I’ve missed, in situations where it’s not quite as clear cut? My problem isn’t strategy; it’s focus. I take pride on playing a quick game, but it’s time to slow down.

In other backgammon news: I won’t say that “this”:http://www.lotrfanclub.com/Catalog/ProductDetails.aspx?itemID=5320&CategoryID=none&keyword=Our%20Recommendations is the coolest board ever, because I’ve seen some very cool boards. But it’s still pretty cool.

So I’m sitting here in Common Grounds, and a song comes on that sounds strangely familiar. After a moment I place it, and walk up to Aaron, who’s working the espresso machine.

“What is this?” I say.

“It’s the Beta Band,” he replies.

I stand there, grooving to it for a moment. “It’s cool,” I say.

Aaron smiles. “I know.”

Ah, the joys of recycled pop culture.

“Cool trailer”:http://www.lordoftherings.net/index_400_hv_presell.html. Favorite moment: the slightest hint of a grin on Gandalf’s face in response to Aragorn’s question. That’s hope in Tolkien in a nutshell. Minas Tirith looks great. But what’s up with Galadriel reaching down a hand to help Frodo? Hopefully not a cheesy dream sequence. I’d be fine with a post-dunking reunion scene, though. That would actually fit the structure of the films quite nicely.

The more imminent question, though, is how much the 40 minutes of extra footage in the extended-edition DVD can do for Two Towers. No way they’re going to redeem that film’s offending scenes, but the FOTR extra footage worked far more magic than I would have guessed possible, so I’m optimistic.

Around St. Michaels, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore, you can’t spit without hitting a bed & breakfast. It’s a perfect place for a weekend getaway only if your perfect weekend getaway involves lots and lots of shopping. For knick-knacks. If that’s not your thing, then you’ll be better off a few miles further south on Tilghman Island. There, at least, you can sail with Captain Wade Murphy.

Wade is an old oysterman now making a living running charter tours of the Chesapeake Bay. His boat, the Rebecca T. Ruark, is an official national historic landmark, and (he never hesitates to boast), the oldest skipjack on the Bay. Wade is well past sixty but nowhere near seventy, strong, witty, leather-skinned, and sharp-eyed. All of the decomposition that normally comes with age seems to have concentrated itself in his hearing. He sails out of Dogwood Harbor, where the Rebecca is the only ship with a mast amid a flock of yachts and powerboats.

Suanna and I were the only ones who showed up for his two-hour tour this past Sunday afternoon. “I don’t mind,” he said, “As long as you can help with the sails.”

Though I didn’t actually utter the words “goody goody goody,” he may have read them in my eyes. I’m an inveterate landlubber who has harbored a lifetime fascination with boats and all things maritime. I hadn’t dared to dream that I might actually get a chance to hoist a sail on this jaunt. At first it seemed like a guy named Ray would be going along with us, but he disembarked just as we were shoving off. He may have been Wade’s homonculous—he had the same tanned skin, and looked a little bit older, but didn’t weigh more than ninety pounds and boasted no more than three teeth. He waddled around in boats a couple sizes too big for him, making them look like waders.

We puttered out of the harbor under the power of a motored dinghy trailing behind the Rebecca. I got off on just the right start by actually fumbling with one of the slipknots around the sail, before Wade patiently showed me that you just had to pull on the trailing end. We hoisted the sail, Wade stacked up a bunch of multicolored binders filled with pictures, and he launched into the first of his stories. All the while he left the wheel to me, only occasionally muttering something like “aim over yonder” or “full right” to keep us going where he wanted. It wasn’t all that hard, once I got the hang of it, but what was so refreshing was that Wade didn’t treat either of us like customers/walking potential lawsuits, but assumed that, as a reasonably intelligent person, I could probably handle steering a boat.

Wade’s first story was a roundabout defense of the fact that he referred to the Rebecca as “the oldest sailing skipjack.” (A skipjack, by Wade’s definition, has one mast, two sails, and is mainly used as an oyster-shucker. It also happens to be a kind of tuna, not to mention the name of an encryption algorithm created by the NSA.) Since it was built with two masts in 1886, before skipjacks were ever built, and only later became one, this is apparently a sore point for some folks. Mainly for one guy in particular—a 74-year-old retired oysterman who has been, for the past three years, stealing all the advertising brochures for the Rebecca from local brochure-holders and throwing them away. Wade had only recently managed to catch the guy on tape; his trial is actually today. Apparently he had been stalking Wade for quite some time, treating him as a Danger to Society because of his loose use of the phrase “oldest skipjack” among other vague reasons summed up by Wade as “jealousy.” Wade observed that this gentleman had been a “poor waterman,” which, from the way he said it, amounted to the ultimate sort of indictment, accounting for both his lack of success on the water and his lapses of character on land.

After this first story, I had Wade pegged as the kind of person who takes a dim view of what my friend Steve Brown is fond of referring to as “gummint bidness.” The moral of the tale of the brochure-stealer was certainly that, while this guy was clearly nuts in the eyes of the community, he was still able to cause all sorts of trouble for Wade by calling in fabricated complaints about him to distant federal bureaucracies like the DNR and EPA.

Wade’s next story had a different take, though. It began with the sinking of the Rebecca in a big storm in ‘99 or ‘00, and his attempts to get it out of the water before there was nothing left to get. The private contractors he hired brought a puny little crane and charged him thousands of dollars while utterly failing to rescue his boat. At that point “the guvnor” took notice, and (in light of the boat’s historical significance) provided some sort of State of Maryland super-crane, gratis, that saved the Rebecca in half the time it had taken those other twerps to figure out that they couldn’t. This is the first and only story I’ve heard in which Parris Glendening’s stars as a wise and noble super-governor.

Wade’s third story, and running theme, was the systematically stupid ways that humans had behaved in order to eradicate the oyster bays of the Chesapeake. It started with rampant overharvesting starting in the 50’s, coupled with insensitivity to the ecology of the Eastern Seaboard that led in turn to increased salt content in the waters of the Bay. This, in turn, messed up the one defense the oysters had against the nasty diseases that threatened to do them in: the reliable freezing-over of the Bay during the winter months. The end result: no more oysters. Most of the old skipjacks are now running charter cruises for tourists from D.C. We actually hauled up a crateful of oysters during our sail, and Wade demonstrated, with no small amount of bitterness in his voice, that ninety percent of them were dead.

Ironically, if anyone has weathered the death of the industry, it’s Wade. In rebuilding Rebecca after it sank, Wade had to replace the mast; he gave the old one to a guy who makes duck decoys. The world of collectible duck decoys is just another minor point in the the larger lesson: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I had no idea, but apparently duck decoys made from certifiably historic wood can fetch quite a price. Wade has been selling the ones made from his mast on eBay: $5000 minimum bid. He has a whole passel of them that he’s auctioning off, one per year. In the meantime he does charter cruises, taking a dim view of the newer, snazzier, altogether less-classy boats plying the same trade. (“Newer,” in this context, means “anything built in the 20th century.”)

As we sailed back in toward the harbor, I wondered just how long Wade was going to let me keep driving. We took down the sails, he turned on the motor in the dinghy, and then he took a long and involved cell phone call. All the while we approached the multicolored posts that were clearly meant to signal, in some way, our route of approach, which involved at least two surprisingly narrow right-angle turns. It got to the point where I needed to know quite badly whether we were supposed to go on the right side or the left side of the thingee in front of us, but, since I hadn’t made a total fool of myself thus far, Wade made the dangerous assumption that I actually knew what I was doing. He was sufficiently hard of hearing that it was pointless to ask him, especially when his attention was focused elsewhere. Fortunately he noticed my dilemma just in time and casually muttered “to the right,” which was good enough to get us up to the first right-angle turn. At that point he said “turn right.” What he should have said was “Turn right, which will involve a subtle interplay of steering the craft both right and left, anticipating its movement, which is slightly non-intuitive unless you’re used to it, taking into account both the wind and our current speed.” Thankfully, he detected my internal flailing just in time, and relieved me of the wheel.

Far from feeding my boat-fix, our little trip has only made me hungry for more—for a jaunt where we pick up proper speed, unfurling both sails, dodging the boom as it swings around like a freed guillotine, saying “avast!” and meaning it. It’ll have to be another day.

Here’s a couple recommended reads, with nothing in common other than that they share “Scott McCloud”:http://www.scottmccloud.com/ as a starting point.

“Ed Heil”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001268.html jumps from “infinite canvas” comics to a broader discussion of vector vs. raster graphics and the cruft in computer desktop design.

Lore Sjoberg of “The Slumbering Lungfish”:http://slumbering.lungfish.com/ “weighs in”:http://slumbering.lungfish.com/index.php?p=chargingpeople.1064271013 on the whole issue of micropayments, with very funny results. This is the guy who used to maintain The Brunching Shuttlecocks and still maintains “The Book of Ratings”:http://www.bookofratings.com/.