Today was my weekly trip to my dad's in upstate NY, and I stopped at a small supermarket to pick up some things for lunch.

The guy ahead of me in the checkout line--tall, bearded, father of a young-teen daughter who was bagging for him--had a tattoo on his skull, curving around his left ear, that said "WORK HARDER."

What the--? Is it an admonition for the rest of us? A reminder or motivation for himself ... that he can only see if he looks in a mirror? In the alternate reality I conjured up to explain this mysterious tattoo, some of us are perpetually indentured out for hard labor--okay, that part's already with us, but the alternate part is that the Company or the Institution or the Unit or whatever tattoos "WORK HARDER" on people as a punishment for not meeting quota. Late-stage capitalism's scarlet letter(s).

But in our reality, that guy most probably *chose* that tattoo, so ...

He paid for $230 worth of groceries with 50-dollar bills (the cashier checked each one) and his daughter had a sweatshirt that said "Lourdes Camp,"*** so ~those~ details sent my mind winging in a different direction: They are a Latin-Mass-attending Catholic family that want to keep their purchases out of the eyes of Big Corporations and who furthermore believe good works mean snap to it! Stop slacking! The girl was wearing a surgical mask, though (the dad wasn't), which somewhat confounded the profile I was developing.

I am willing and eager to hear ~your~ speculations.

***Turns out to be a summer camp for underprivileged children, which keeps its Catholic affiliation hidden until you get to the "about" page (although with that name...)

At the dentist having my teeth scraped clean this morning, I was thinking about how staining material (like tea, which I drink a lot of) tends to linger in grooves, and I was wondering if the scraping doesn't just create such grooves... and then I got to thinking about making grooves deliberately. About etching designs. You could brush ink over them, and then wipe the ink away, like scrimshaw. I wondered if that's ever been done anywhere. A lazy-quick internet search didn't turn anything up.

And then I wondered if any culture ever carved the teeth of the living. The closest I could find was that the Vikings filed horizontal indentations into their teeth. (Many cultures have sharpened or flattened teeth, but I'm not so much thinking of sharpening as of bas-relief carvings.) Trying to carve teeth without modern technology would have been difficult and time consuming and probably painful, and I don't imagine you could get very detailed ... And it probably wouldn't be so great for the usefulness of the teeth, and then there's hygiene...

Yes, upon reflection, scrimshaw is the better option. Tattoos for your teeth.

Today's Advent calendar picture is a wreath:



And the state of the overall calendar is...



Now for something completely different and unexpected.

The wonderful poet Virginia Molhere tweeted a video of a musician playing a bagpipe he'd made with a rubber glove (viewable here.) I said it would be fun to try to make one, and she found this Youtube video (by someone else, for a much more basic rubber-glove bagpipe) that gives a method.

I tried it (tweet w/19-second video here), and while it's not what you'd call a runaway success, it does make some noise! And the process of making it was a lot of fun. I'll try some refinements--mmmmaybe ;-)

Last week mallorys_camera and I visited Mike's Maze, and I purloined an ear of corn from the walls of the maze. This corn is obviously not sweet corn for eating boiled or grilled--it's long in the tooth and deep yellow and gives the impression of being the sort of corn you might grow for milling into cornflour, or some other use like that. I don't have a picture of it still on the cob, but here it is as kernels in a bowl:



I was wondering what it would be like to try to pop it. I know that nowadays corn for popcorn is bred specially for that purpose--but what would this corn do? (Here is a picture of kernels of popping corn, for comparison)



I also know that you're supposed to dry popping corn before popping it, if you get it on the ear. (If you get it in a bag, it's already been done for you.) I wanted to speed that process up, so I put my kernels in a warm oven for a while. Was it enough time? Who knows! An uncontrolled variable creeps in.

I do my popcorn in a frying pan on the stovetop, so that's what I did this time. It sizzled for a long time, but eventually I heard some pops! Not that many, but some. I took the lid off the frying pan...



You can see that some of them started to bust open, but couldn't quite free themselves. Here's another picture:



For comparison, here's what my ordinary popping corn popped up to:



Here's the amazing thing, though: those not-quite-free popped kernels of maze corn (maze maize; I love it) taste ~wonderful~. They have a real tortilla-y, corn-chip-y flavor, whereas ordinary popcorn, let's face it, is not the most flavorful food in the world. My maze maize popcorn I happily ate just as it was, whereas I'm hard pressed to eat ordinary popcorn without sprinkling melted butter, salt, or herbs on it (or, if I'm in England, sugar). Furthermore, with the maze maize popcorn, even the kernels that looked just semi-swollen, with no hint of the white cloud on the inside showing through, were light and crispy when I bit into them--no risk of cracking a tooth!

Overall, I'd say it was less like eating popcorn and more like, I don't know, a sort of fluffy nut? But very satisfying! Very flavorful. I feel empowered with secret knowledge. I CAN POP ALL THE CORNS.

I was so proud of myself yesterday when I jumped at the signal from the Massachusetts Twitter bot that lets you know when vaccines come available. I got one for me! And then one for Wakanomori, for today .... But his was in Great Barrington and mine was in North Adams... which are both about 90 minutes away. Self, if you are going to jump on vaccines, maybe jump on ones that are just a little bit closer?

But what was done was done, so we both gamely set aside pressing work and drove into the Berkshires--him to the south, me to the north. I saw many interesting sights** on my way, but pressed ahead, not stopping for photos, as I was on a mission, and in this manner got to my destination. And! the doors! were! locked! No one was about!

I looked at the reservation again. It was for THURSDAY. Ninety minutes for nothing, and now another 90 minutes back. At that moment my phone rang. It was Wakanomori. His appointment wasn't until Saturday.

Friends, pay attention when you fling yourself into booking a vaccine.

I canceled the Thursday booking. I don't feel like another three-hour round trip drive, especially as tomorrow is supposed to be chilly rain. I will fling myself at more proximate vaccine opportunities.

**However, on the ride back I was able to photograph almost all the wondrous sights I had seen on the way over. They included:

-- A quite large rock, contemplating its field. If you've read Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower, it looks like how I imagine the protagonist.



--Some very fine cattle, with magnificent horns, chilling:



--A rocket ship, because why the hell not, I guess? Don't look too closely at the message on the rocket.



Best of all, though, was a sandhill crane who sauntered across the road in front of me, elegant as you please with his handsome red mask and his fine legs. Sadly he did not wait around for my return journey to be photographed, but I found this photo, taken by Steve Heaslip for the Cape Cod Times, showing essentially what my crane looked like, though mine was walking in the opposite direction:



Here's the pond he came from:



A cool thing I saw but didn't photograph:

--a massive tractor-trailer that had splashed across its length: TRIBE EXPRESS: A NATIVE AMERICAN WOMAN OWNED BUSINESS. So that's pretty cool.

Something I learned: Susan B. Anthony was born in Adams, MA. Not North Adams, but Adams. But you want to know who was born in North Adams? Me!

It was a pretty blissy day, really, considering that it included three wasted hours and no vaccine.

The Diocese of Springfield, MA, has a new bishop, and bishops apparently get ecclesiastical coats of arms. ("They are princes of the church," Wakanomori said. "Their residences are called palaces." I wonder if that's even true in Springfield...)

The new bishop's coat of arms, as best as we could tell, seeing it via a televised Mass, looked like it was designed by a very imaginative child.

"Is that a rocket ship on the right?" I asked Wakanomori.

"Maybe it's a very thin castle?" he suggested in return.

"The stuff on the side looks like a genealogy--only a parthenogenic genealogy, because everyone descends from a single person instead of a couple.

"I think there's a flying saucer up top," Waka said.

We really, really needed to see the coat of arms up close, so we did some digging, and the interwebs came to our aid.

Behold! A flying saucer hovers above a shield, the left side of which shows a single-person skull rowing on a river and the right side of which shows a rocket to the moon. On either side of the shield are parthenogenic octopus genealogies, whose ultimate origins are The Flying Saucer



And my interpretation:

Okay, so I am interested in entertaining theories, from the realistic to the far-fetched, for the origins of the gold on the shores of the Venezuelan fishing village in the last entry. Other details you should know are that

the jagged coastline around Guaca, on Venezuela’s Paria peninsula, is punctuated with bays and islands that have long given refuge to adventurers.

It was on this peninsula, in 1498, that Christopher Columbus became the first European to set foot on the South American continent, thinking he’d found the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Later, this sparsely defended coastline was regularly raided by Dutch and French buccaneers. Today, it is a haven for drug and fuel smugglers and modern-day pirates who prey on fishermen.

Also, possibly, this:

Once the first photo of the discovery was posted on Facebook, the news spread around Venezuela. But the area’s remoteness, the widespread shortage of gasoline and the coronavirus quarantines prevented a national gold rush

Okay, go for it!

Yesterday we went to visit the healing angel, who lives in an apartment nestled up against a steep hill topped by impressive towers of rock in which are ... the Sunderland Caves. We didn't actually know there would be cave-caves. We thought it would be mainly things like this overhang:



But then we rounded a corner and felt a sudden breath of cold air ("Wow, this is ... very Lovecraftian," said the healing angel). With a little exploring, we found an entrance.

Here the healing angel looks into the cave:



It was very dark within. We had to use the lights on our phones. Here's a look back at the entrance:



Light from a chimney shone in:



Here's the chimney from above--don't fall in there (*shudder*)




There was a drop of about ten or fifteen feet, into the dark. There was a fairly easy way down, but see previous: (a) huge drop and (b) dark. Eventually I managed to slither down and join the healing angel and wakanomori. There were some cute pseudo cave paintings:



Back on the outside, the healing angel posed on this stone formation:



She then started to walk round it...



But at just the point where I took the photo, we all heard a sharp hiss. Like a snake, or like air being released from a tire. But we couldn't see evidence of anything making the noise; everything was still. "Mmmm, I'm just not going to walk this way," the healing angel said, and she came back around, and we continued on our way. On our return journey we came across the spot from the other direction. Again Valerie looked in. Again we heard a sharp hiss. Again we could see *absolutely nothing*, nor was there any scurrying or anything.

Most Odd.

On our way down the hillside, the light was magnificent.

I was talking to my neighbor on her front lawn, and an unknown-to-us guy, White guy in his 50s, maybe, or maybe 60s, short silvery hair and sunglasses on, drives up. He rolls down the window and...

Him: Hey, hey, I need to ask you something.

Us: .... Yes?

Him: My daughter is thinking of moving into this neighborhood, is looking to move into this neighborhood, but I need to know: are there a lot of Trump supporters here?

Us: .... There are ... some. You'll see a few signs if you drive around.

(I would guess my neighborhood is 80% anti-Trump or neutral and 20% pro-Trump.)

Him: But it's mainly anti-Trump, right? She's coming from Texas and doesn't want to live with a whole bunch of Trump supporters.

(I can't speak for my neighbor, but at this point I was feeling very uncomfortable about this guy.)

Us: Well, yes, there are probably more anti-Trump people than pro-Trump people, but you'll find both.

Him: Okay, thanks. *Drives off with a vroom along a quiet residential road.*

Me: That felt fake. I don't think that guy was really asking for his daughter.

Her: He drove off like a Trump supporter.

It was very strange

I saw this odd little scene two days running, a very tiny makeshift stand by the side of the road, a rainbow umbrella, a sign, a cinderblock (and probably a moneybox somewhere, but I didn't notice--I was in a car), so I made a cartoon (?) about it:





Flowers: a flexible term!