Lucky Pennies

A while back, June tagged me in a post asking about the name of my blog.  Because I’ve been really busy, I somehow missed the link and only realized it was there when a kind fellow blogger reminded me of it.   Most of the time, we never find out why things are named the way they are.  I was intrigued to learn the significance of the name of her blog, Spatter.

Mine took a while to come up with.  It’s hard to strike the right balance between something that’s intelligent and interesting that also makes at least some sense to your readers.  I finally came up with “Lucky Pennies,” which is based on a poem I’d written around that time.  I went through a spell where I’d find pennies everywhere you could think of, right down to the kitchen sink drain.  I started to wonder if it was a sign or something, and decided to write a poem about it.  The poem is about noticing and appreciating things that are small and insignificant to others, hence my subtitle, “sweepings off the floor of the world.”  All around us are gifts that have no monetary value, but that endure and stay with us in our minds longer than anything we could buy.  Lucky pennies get kicked around a lot before they’re noticed.  But the person that does finally notice them is more blessed than a rich man.  Here’s the poem:

Lucky Pennies

It all started with the pennies.
I’d see one in every parking lot,
glittering near the storm drain
where it’d been swept to
in the last rain, or in the road,
where it’d rolled from some rich lady’s
pocketbook and been scuffed and forgotten.
They’d skid up and down the aisle of the city bus
until I’d reach down to pick them up. 
I would hold up checkout lines, feeling
under the counter edge for the one I’d dropped
until someone waiting, impatient and gray,
would say something sharp.
Soon there was one wherever I looked.
I’d trowel them up, green and corroded,
from the roots of the garden, find them
kicked into the crack under my door,
in the drain when I’d wash dishes,
in the bottom of the washing machine,
in the sweepings off the floor.
Everyday I collected a small prize, worthless,
and yet I was so rich. 

Soon it wasn’t just the pennies. 
Soon I was collecting a prize every time
I blinked.  One day, it was an antique button,
intricate and woven, pounded into the dirt path.
Sometimes it was a rock, a quartz crystal,
or granite studded with mica.
Some days I couldn’t stick in my pocket.
Some days it was the pink glint of sunrise
on my hood as I crested a hill
into the suddenly sun-dazzled day.
It was the skeletal leaf, chewed by bugs
into thin brown lace, or the sight of a heron
soaring just feet over the roadway.
It was the old lady, out tending her poppies
every morning, who would wave at me,
and her poppies would wave too in the draft
of the passing car.  It was sound of rain,
the sound of wing beats.  Soon I was drunk on glory,
stumbling at the sight of sun-edged clouds
and trees, of hummingbirds and fog-filled valleys,
crazed, but yet so sane, empty,
but yet so full.

Friday Fact (late again, sorry!): A Bloomin’ Building

The past few weeks at work, I’ve been writing visual descriptions for pictures of India that are going into a online database for teachers to use.  Sometimes, this involves a little detective work, because the lady who took the pictures left us only cryptic slide notes in horrible handwriting.  So I was puzzled when I came to a picture of a strange-looking building with the title “Temple-Delhi.”  I looked up more photos and was astounded by what I found.

It was a temple that looked like a flower!  Not just vaguely resembling it, but definitively flower-like.  It’s called the Indian Bahai Temple, but the locals and most tourists call it the Lotus Temple.  It’s made of concrete petals supported by steel beams.  Just out of sight in the middle of the petals, there is a steel and glass dome to keep out the elements.  The flower is surrounded by nine huge pools over which there are walkways and bridges.

The petals are formed fairly simply: spheres of varying radii and with centers in different places.  The architect figured in deflection for wind and expansion and contraction, so the petals can move about 3mm for every meter.  There are neoprene layers where the beams meet to buffer changes in position.  Because Indian cement is evidently extremely variable, all the cement to make them was imported from Korea.  To get the color, the cement was then mixed with dolomite from near Delhi and with white silica sand from Jaipur, India.  And to make sure the concrete didn’t cure too quickly and therefore weaken, a sprinkler system was rigged at the top of the petals.  On hot days, the mix was regulated by mixing in ice. 

I tell you what…this building has gone on my list of things to see before I die. 

The caged bird sings!

So I promised a long time ago that I would post photos of my recent sculpture, and like the jerk I am, I’m only just now getting around to it.  But here they are.  I was to use the form of a box creatively and symbolically and somehow make it a self-portrait.  I interpreted “box” very creatively and decided to make a bird cage.  I’m not sure that it’s only a self-portrait now, because I feel that it could be interpreted in different ways.  I realize that this kind of metaphor is a little on the trite side, but I feel like my careful craftsmanship trumps triteness.   😀

The cage itself is all wood, and fortunately, I had an edge as far as wood is concerned since my dad is a carpenter and has taught me more or less all I know about carpentry.  It’s stained in PolyShades.  The chain is handmade from 19 gauge wire wrapped around a flat pen and cut and assembled into links. 

The birds are sculpted by hand out of Sculpey clay, which I fired in the oven and painted in acrylic.  The biggest bird has that beautiful sheen because I painted it with various glazes of what’s called interference paint over other colors.  Basically, it’s really shiny and expensive.  (One tube was 12 bucks!)  It looks one color in one direction and that color’s complement in the other direction.

I feel like this is the most poignant angle.  The lighting, too, really enhances the idea of the bird struggling against the owls, which represent darkness and the desire to remain in darkness and drag others into it.  But this bird will fly away soon!

A very overdue Friday Fact: Magnetohydrodynamics, or why the North Pole is getting away from us

I was talking to my brother the other day, and somehow we got to talking about an issue that would very much affect people in his field of study, computer science.  Evidently, some of his colleagues in the department are crying doomsday about Earth’s magnetic field doing a full somersault in 2012 so that North is South and vice versa.  And they should be concerned, because if this were the case, it would throw off most things electronic. 

But being my normally contradictory self, I told my brother, “That can’t be right,” and thus turned to my most reliable research tool: Google.  I found out that, as usual, I’m right. 

But as much as I hate to admit it, my brother’s a little bit right himself. 

What his misinformed colleagues had heard about was the sun’s magnetic reversal.  The sun indeed has a magnetic field flip roughly every eleven years, and it’s due to flip in 2012.  So no fear, the end is not near. 

It turns out, though, that the Earth’s magnetic field can also do a complete flip.  We’ve known for a long time that the magnetic pole (which isn’t synonymous with the geographical poles) moves a lot.  At the beginning of the century, it was moving about 10 km a year, and sped up to 40 km a year by the end of the century.  According to the NASA website, it’ll end up in Siberia in a few decades. 

The thing that’s got some people worried is the fact that field has weakened 10% since the 19th century.  A weakening could signal a field flip.  And since the last one was 780,000 years ago, some think we’re overdue.  Hence the cry of a collapsing magnetic field. 

But researchers say this isn’t so.  People who study Earth’s past magnetic field, paleomagnetists, explain that a weakening doesn’t necessarily signal a reversal.  The field has weakened in the past, and poles have shifted, and then reversed direction and headed back.  Besides, reversals take a few thousand years, and during that time, the field doesn’t disappear.  It just becomes tangled, with multiple magnetic poles. 

All of this is governed by something called magnetohydrodynamics.  In the middle of the earth, there is a solid iron core covered by metallic ocean.  This core rotates faster than the earth itself, and its surface has currents and even the equivalent of hurricanes that cause changes in Earth’s magnetic field. 

This is both fascinating and good news!  If you were worried about the magnetic poles, remember that you shouldn’t flip out until they flip out. 

For more information, look NASA’s explanation: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/29dec_magneticfield.html.